The Better Mousetrap

THE NEW GAME

 

 

Daniel Schorr (on TV): There's a tiny camera looking at you right now.
Nicholas van Orton: That's impossible.
Daniel Schorr: You're right, impossible. You're having a conversation with your television.

The Game (1997)

 

In David Fincher's 'The Game', Michael Douglas' over-achieving but bored-with-life banker, Nicholas van Orton, is either the centre of an insanely elaborate role play fantasy or he's the mark in an equally byzantine con designed to liberate him of his fortune and potentially his life. While we're left guessing right to the end, what's clear is that Nicholas can't even sit down and watch TV without it talking back at him.

 

Beyond being a 129 minute slice of fine entertainment, I think the campaign architects among us can learn something from 'The Game' - something about how to design better advertising, where campaigns are more akin to episodic, multi-layered and sensory 'real life' experiences that place the consumer in circumstances not so dissimilar to those of Mr Nicholas van Orton.

 

But let me back up a bit and start with what we first understood by the term 'consumer-centric'. The late 90s new breed Comms Planners cried, "Put the Consumer first!". It was a measured jab in the side of account planning, as born of the Stephen King/JWT School.

 

Account planning is too brand-centric declared the comms planners, meaning the brand shows too much ego and the manifestation is too likely a self-flattering TV ad, beamed intrusively into everyone's sitting rooms during those regulated bursts of interruption in between the actual TV shows we all chose and tuned in to watch.

 

This, you can appreciate, was all back in our analogue past when media channels were few, little more than delivery mechanisms - figurative postmen delivering the messages of the mad men - and when (in fairness) 'As seen on TV' still carried real cachet and clout.

 

But comms planning (circa. 1998) gave credence to the notion that everything communicates, every brand act, gesture and touch point. There may be a media channel hierarchy, but everything communicates a message to the consumer, from a bumper sticker to a TV ad break.

 

But why the potted ad-land history lesson of which so many of us are au fait? To steal a line from American author Bret Easton Ellis, because ours "is the game that turns as you play".

 

All that shake-up-the-system talk of becoming more consumer-centric now feels very consumer-centric 1.0. While the notion of an end game campaign that was channel agnostic and built on audience insight still makes cast-iron sense, it drops to its knees like a fallen warrior when the outcome remains a set of creative assets exhibited across a range of static media channels - the message still pushed and media's only charge, that of reaching eyeballs.

 

And yet perhaps this was the fated inevitability of a noble sentiment in an analogue world, where people were talking consumer-centric before the world became a digital one?

 

Now we're after, we're anno digital, meaning consumer-centric 2.0 (binary-assisted, with CES-style upgrades) is a very different box of delights with a very different set of implications.

 

Consider how technology has changed the nature of media; how it's made and will continue to make media consumer-centric and evermore social. Think: social TV (EPG meets Facebook), and social outdoor (digital posters as Twitter feeds).

 

At a $4 billion valuation, Spotify has shown music's worth in our digital age. I'd argue Spotify's success-formula is born of putting its listeners in the centre of its digital system, in allowing the creating and sharing of playlists.

 

Is Spotify a tech? Or a kind of app? A product or a piece of media? A brand, or a consumer-centric blend of all the above? From Nike+ to cycling apps like Strava, technology is allowing us to 'game-ify' our lives. Our pavements, cycle lanes and roads are being augmented, being re-imagined as bio and chrono-metric performance route maps that allow us to turn every A-to-B into a kind of personal hero's journey.

 

Media continues to probe the fuzzy borders between delivering content and encouraging it. Next generation press formats are emerging where magazines become a live-feed blend of editorial comment and reader response. Where magazines once claimed to know their audience and write for them, tomorrow's magazines will see their readers contributing increasingly more than just a letter to a reader's page. Culture and media have never been more symbiotic and co-authored.

 

Technology is reshaping culture. We've not only all become technophiles, but we've all become tech-empowered. In an age where we've all now become so accustomed to having a voice, so accustomed to liking and tweeting and blogging and sharing, brand-centric campaigns are being humbled... but brand builders can slipstream the examples and fast apply the proof of concept.

 

Consumer-centric 2.0 is all about the consumer being the very human and beating heart of a brand campaign, where we each feel like we're being given centre stage, role and deed.

 

Because who wants to feel inert, a mere aggregate-adding member of the couch-bound majority? Who wants to be viewed as passively receiving the contents of a flickering screen, that chewing gum for the eyes that asks little of the mind?

 

Alternatively, who wants to feel like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts or Michael Douglas? Who wants to be the hero or heroine of the piece, in the middle of it all, senses alive? It's flattering to feel like the main attraction, being the one getting to roll the dice, with every suspicion that the entire game might be designed just for us.

 

Where the TV ad was once a brand's main event, it's now more akin to a movie trailer - the buzz-bomb prior to the feature-length campaign. And today's main campaign event - the big feature-length presentation - is not all about consumers watching the brand equivalent of Tom Cruise or Michael Douglas.

 

In our binary world, the TV ad sets the tone and possible theme, and then the campaign puts the audience front and centre. It casts the consumer as the hero and main protagonist. The consumer is no longer just the human insight trigger-pull to the subsequent brand campaigns we create.

 

21st century ad campaigns can crash first-person story-telling into digital media. A brand becomes the calling card that knocks at our door - a call to arms and action.

 

By extension of putting consumers in control, the new consideration should become how campaigns can put them in character. Beyond us asking, "What is the role for the brand?", we need to establish, "What is the heroic role we are giving the consumer?" A hero-in-waiting needs to be called upon to do more than just watch telly.

 

Unlike Nicholas van Orton, we can't yet have a conversation with our TV sets, but in building brands, we are playing a very new game.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, Business 2 Consumer, The Wall and MediaTel Newsline.

CONSPICUOUS COMMUNICATION: How we’re choosing life & no longer being defined by our khakis

  

Tyler Durden.

Renton.

Remember those guys? One looked a lot like Brad Pitt, the other like Ewan McGregor. Two charismatic anti-heroes of the 90’s: poets, philosophers, one a pugilist, the other a heroin addict, and both occupants of society’s fringe.

Irvine Welsh’s Renton advised us (with thick irony) to “choose life” by choosing a career, washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and “a fucking big television.”

Chuck Palahniuk’s Durden was more direct. “You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.”

Different accents, different flavours of candour, though neither wearing khakis, Durden and Renton shared the same world view, the same derision of a capitalist age greased by feverish, never-satiated consumerism.

In the decade before everything went digital and everyone became connected, Fight Club and Trainspotting were time-capsule reflections of young angry men who weren’t apathetic but articulate and planned on beating the system their own way. Because if sucking on the marrow of life amounted to no more than browsing IKEA catalogues illuminated by the flicker of a super-sized TV screen, then chasing a few dragons and letting off a truck load of Semtex maybe seemed like a border-line medicinal way of letting off steam?

But if Durden and Renton were commenting on their moment in time, what of today? In a world since gone digital, assuming we’re still not our fucking khakis, how do we define ourselves and just how are we choosing life?

 

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION & HAPPY HOUSEWIVES

To define our Now, it’s worth first appreciating that shown a suitable time-tunnel, Tyler Durden would have gleefully hunted down and beaten the shit out of Don Draper. Durden would have reversed that Semtex-laden van right into Sterling Cooper’s reception.

Because Durden’s 90’s angst was a long-shadow reaction to ‘Conspicuous Consumption', that overt and defining socio-economic signature of the 50's and 60s. In particular, think retro-cool images of glossy brochure lifestyles, of “happy housewives” being bought “the latest modern appliances” so their stay-home would remain a happy one, where everyone flew Pan Am, and life was in primary colours and swaggered to a lounge bar beat. That was the world, at least, once the Mad Men-glam had been applied.

Of course, not everyone had it so good and got the same lounge bar backing track. There was arguably as much post-War austerity as prosperity in many corners of the Western hemisphere, and it wasn’t the real life Sterling Cooper’s of that time who were the root cause. But the underlying point is, Conspicuous Consumption emerged as the very conspicuous post-War trend, as born of economic necessity, and where (culturally) purchase and possession decoupled from vulgarity. 

“Buying, owning, possessing”: back then, as today, it remains ad-fuelled and feverishly encouraged, seen as crucial to a well-greased manufacturing base, from which economic health is much diagnosed. The cogs must keep turning. So long as everyone keeps buying, everything will be ok. Money circulates, confidence stays high, people keep their jobs making more stuff. All of it: a very simple equation. Consumerism works so long as everyone continues consuming.

Today, the laws of consumerism broadly hold the same sway as they did back in the 50’s and 60’s, when the likes of Vance Packard first coined and chronicled it. So too today, economic health still requires that people buy, and buy with frequency; that they buy often and happily so. And the social settings are still dialled to "buying" as something that is wholly desirable and approved of. Overt trappings, the cars, the goods both white and brown and luxury, these still carry serious social status and standing. As Renton observed with mockery, our stuff defines us, reflects our tastes, how much we can afford, how successful we must be, who we are.

Only... what has changed, and what continues to change, is that our relationship and reliance on “things” is less than it formerly was. Our stuff has been demoted. The things we own no longer stand as the only yard sticks of achievement. They’re not the same gestures of self-expression. Technology has changed our relationship with materialism. We’re not quite so dependent on our “physical things”. Because we’re now Logging On and Signing In.

 

CONSPICUOUS COMMUNICATION

We've moved from Conspicuous Consumption... to Conspicuous Communication. We live in the ‘Age of the Share’.

While we haven't abandoned our material wants, while we still find "owning & buying” khakis and cars a short-buzz narcotic to which we still need frequent fix (and to which social status and standing may be derived), the "goods” are no longer the only data points that build the picture. Self-definition is no longer just the suit or watch we wear, or the places we choose and can afford to holiday.

Today, more than ever before, we are defining ourselves (and everyone else) by what we "share".

Society now holds “sharing” in the highest esteem. "Thanks for sharing" has gone from eye-rolling Valley Girl-speak sarcasm and become amongst the highest forms of sincere flattery.

Our online social standing falls and rises daily by the quality and quantity of the information we push and peddle. The links, the lists, the top 5 principles for this and the 3 things highly effective people do before they eat their shreddies. The lists and sound-bites and headline ideas are the pounds, dollars and nuggets of our social currency, so feeding our on-the-quarter-hour Scooby snacking.

Technology has changed the nature and flow of information. “Information” has undergone a revolution and devolution. “Information” has gone social; non-hierarchical; informal; assumed the scale of one. “Up-to-the-minute” is most likely through your twitter feed than Sky News or the BBC World service. “Texting” has asserted global scale, become tweeting, reflecting how the one-to-many yesteryear brand-to-consumer model has mutated - because our online social interactions and sharing has become one-to-many. We have all become the One and the Many. All of us: conspicuously communicating. Everyone: creating, commenting, searching out, sharing, craving... “great content”. 

If Monopoly was invented today, the winner would not come down to who has three hotels on Pall Mall, but instead who has built the largest Twitter following, generated the greatest number of “friends” and likes, and created the largest subscription-based Multichannel network. You land on my YouTube brand channel, and it’s Game Over for you.

And of course, it’s hard not to judge these times a little darkly. It’s hard not to say that we’re becoming slaves to content, that beast with a bottomless stomach. It’s hard not to suggest that having a voice and “followers” gives us the illusion of celebrity, and that all those tweets and posts and “shares” are in fact feeding that other insatiable beast we’re held hostage to, the fame monster.

But every coin has two sides and every judgement should be a balanced one. And old friend of mine Faris Yakob recently described himself as “a techno-meliorist”. He believes “things usually get better, thanks to technology.” I’d like to believe the same, and unlike Renton, but like Faris, I choose to look positively on this digital life of ours and what it’s encouraging. In the spirit of the times, here are 4 very good reasons:

(1) Voice: Technology has given everyone a voice. Technology has given us all independent low-cost means. This is a wonderful thing - because most everyone wants to have a voice. Even if it’s just at the level of logging a “like”, self-expression is an expression of our need to be individuals and our need to feel free.

(2) Talent outs: Curators have never been held in higher regard. People are turning themselves into one-man Reuters news feeds and on-the-money Zeitgeist barometers. There’s real skill in it, and it’s an appreciated and valued skill, as reflected in the followers many generate. Nobody wants to be a nobody, and now everyone has invitation to ripple the Zeitgeist, to tweet until they trend, to not only have a voice but to potentially be heard.
 
(3) “Sharing” breeds generosity and inclusivity: Hard-wired into Conspicuous Communication is a revived cultural onus on paying it forward. Sharing is good, is by its nature inclusive, generous, caring.
 
(4) Belonging: And then there’s the very interconnectedness of it all, the way you can watch a twitter trend and it’s like watching a murmuration of starlings - “in form and moving express and admirable” - with more than a murmur on its collective mind. And you can not only watch but be part of those murmurings. You can be and belong to the trend.  

Earlier this year, I sat in front of my TV and watched Andy Murray win Wimbledon, while tweeting and following the tweets of Caitlin Moran and Irvine Welsh. And I’ll be honest, the multi-screen experience “added”. Reading what Moran and Welsh said was fun and funny and in some small way made my Murray moment ‘more’, and made me feel more part of that bigger moment.

F.Scott Fitzgerald once said that part of the beauty of literature is that “You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

Social media is not replacing but certainly mimicking the beauty of literature.

*

I find it fascinating the way Milgram’s 6-degrees of separation has exploded, imploded, become something else, a permanently morphing 3-D lacework of light points, the kind of thing you see in sci-fi movies, with each of us our own Sun, a galaxy of contacts and connections orbiting, near and far, each in their own ellipse. I find it compelling that by simply following @kevinbacon... everyone can be one degree separated from the man himself. I won’t hazard a guess at how Kevin Bacon feels about that.

But I’d safely suggest Tyler Durden would be less than thrilled to hear that, by degree, we still try and part-define through the medium of our khakis; that we still like spending; still enjoy buying, and that today’s Sterling Cooper’s are still doing all they can to encourage us.

Only, we need our materialism per se just that little bit. And we need our mobile devices oh-so-much more. And even if we are to indulge Tyler Durden and Renton for a moment and assume we are neither defined by our fucking khakis or our fucking big televisions - it is clear that we’re fast becoming the sum total of our shares, in this ‘Age of the Share’. We are the people we follow and the people who follow us. We are that which we post and blog. We are that which we retweet and like.

Choose life. Choose to ‘Like’. Choose Wordpress or Typepad or Blogger or Tumblr. Choose Twitter. Choose your followers, high speed internet and a damn sexy-looking tablet in a choice of vibrant colours. 

Welcome to the Digital State.

 

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, Business 2 Community , The Wall, Medium and MediaTel Newsline.