The Better Mousetrap

BRANDS AS TRANSMEDIA PORTALS -

WHERE ENTERTAINMENT MEETS MARKETING

 (Picture: The DB10, on location in Rome.)

 

None of us should be satisfied with what we believe brands to be capable of.

Whatever we believe that capability, it can be more.

When Henry Jenkins first introduced Transmedia in his treatise, Convergence Culture (2006), he spoke of ‘media formats’ as ‘entrypoints into a story world’.

Jenkins talked not of brands but of ‘media’ as a story-telling tool.

On April 6^th, 2010, the Producers Guild of America announced the addition of ‘Transmedia Producer’ to the Producers Code of Credits. A big deal (that some termed ‘unprecedented’), it marked the first time in the guild’s 60-year history that a new credit had been added to the list.

At the time, no one was thinking of a Transmedia Producer as anything other than a person - and certainly no one was thinking about brands.

Five years on... and it is high-time we consider the greater potential for brands as ‘story-world entrypoints’ and transmedia producers.

Simply, we need to think differently - more ambitiously - about what can happen when you bring together the worlds of entertainment and marketing.

We need to shrug off near-ancient, limiting definitions like “product placement” and “commercial interruption”, because these definitions hinder new ways of approaching the creation and funding of entertainment.

We’ve come a long from Mike Myers in Wayne’s World, mugging ironically as he flips the lid on a delivery from Pizza Hut.

Rather than brands as jarring interlopers within a story, we must explore how they can facilitate the creation of entertainment, and even enhance the content being made.

When director James Cameron wanted to explore the Mariana Trench (and document the expedition as an independent movie), he turned to Rolex.

In Deepsea Challenge 3D (2014), Rolex effectively serves as co-producer in the film’s funding, with logo presence on the final theatrical poster, side by side with National Geographic and Disruptive LA.

Rolex subsequently released the Rolex Deepsea with D-Blue dial. Watch buffs could barely find words to express how radical an act this was for Rolex, suggesting the luxury brand paragon to be breaking and beginning a very different commercial and creative direction to its past.

When director Sam Mendes took to the Pinewood stage on December 4^th last year, announcing the 24^th Bond movie to be Spectre, he also lifted the veil on the new Aston Martin DB10. No one groaned. No one derided the moment as gratuitous product placement. Rather, flashbulbs popped and a delighted Andy Palmer, CEO of Aston Martin, emphasised:

“In the same year that we celebrate our 50-year relationship with 007, it seems doubly fitting that we unveil this wonderful new sports car created especially for James Bond.”

In reality, Aston Martin will use Spectre as the platform for what will not be a one-off sports car, but the design direction of their remodelled Vantage. In 2017, anticipate straplines to the effect, “Built for James Bond. And now for you.”

Land Rover/Jaguar are also keenly in on the act, Spectre becoming the latest instalment in their ongoing brand renaissance. The Range Rover Sport SVR and Defender Big Foot will grab precious screen time, while Jaguar’s web site proudly spoiler-alerts, “The C-X75 will feature in a spectacular car chase sequence through Rome alongside the Aston Martin DB10”.

To label Aston Martin and Jaguar as mere product placements in Spectre is to miss the bigger picture. These are partnerships: brand integrations that add further layers upon the narrative world.

This year’s Kingsman, from 20^th Century Fox, is a positive roll call of Cool Britannia brands. Think: Turnbull & Asser, Deakin & Francis, Drake, George Cleverley, Cutler & Gross, Smythson, and Bremont.

Under the banner of ‘Curated British Luxury’, men’s style destination MR PORTER invites us to dress like a Kingsman, offering a 60 piece collection.

Across their own digital and social graphs, 8 eight brands (9 when you include Mr Porter) all excitedly promote Kingman (and their “hand-picked collaboration” with the movie), so driving trailer views and product purchase.

Once upon a time, this might have been called merchandising - but it surely becomes something far more sophisticated when it loops in director Matthew Vaughn and costume designer Arianne Phillips at the pre-production stage.

Kingsman effectively presents retail brands as Transmedia entrypoints, fuelling movie anticipation, but more interestingly offering us the physical and mental props to get us in-character and wish-fulfilling.

It is clear that the entertainment business is learning the language of brands (and marketing) - and it will arguably do so faster than the agency world can learn how to make legitimate and singularly entertaining content.

Directors like James Cameron, Sam Mendes and Matthew Vaughn are showing us what the intersection of entertainment and marketing can look like: where brands can become buzz builders and movie co-producers, where they can become wish-fulfilment props and Transmedia portals.

I’m reminded of a scene from Robert Altman’s The Player (1992).

Griffin Mill: It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.

June: What elements?

Griffin Mill: Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.

June: What about reality?

Reality notwithstanding, to Griffin’s list I wonder, can we add ‘brands’?

SP.

Article as also appears in BrandRepublic, The Huffington Post and Business 2 Community.

RETAIL REINVENTION: Lessons from the digital rag trade

 

The meeting point of RETAIL and EDITORIAL was traditionally ‘THE MAGAZINE’. A style bible like Vogue or Harper’s, for example, would carry glossy colour ads of beautiful things, commercial messages betwixt a sacrosanct and inviolable editorial. I say ‘would carry’ when, of course, this practice still exists. Yet while it remains a present tense model, it is now so very far from being the only model.

Mr Porter, Net-a-Porter, Matchesfashion.com, ASOS: these are retail businesses. They may have physical form, a flagship store here, an occasional pop-up there, but they are ostensibly on-line retail businesses, a digital shop front to the world, looking to build fame and finger-clicking footfall. And what is so fascinating and instructive is how they approach their fame-building and business of selling.

Their approach is to not behave like a yesteryear retail business.

To sustain their business model, they seldom (if ever) resort to buying media to showcase and pump out their sales messages. To sell as loudly as possible, the aforementioned on-line businesses sell, by appearing not to sell.

Net-a-Porter single-mindedly describes itself as “The world’s premier on-line luxury fashion destination.” No mention of retail or buying. Net-a-Porter wish to be the embodiment of ‘fashion’. Vogue.com rather modestly by comparison headlines itself as simply offering “The latest fashion news, beauty coverage, celebrity style, fashion week updates, culture reviews, and videos”.

Figuratively, that once very clear and paginated line between full page glossy ad and editorial is today considerably more opaque. And the consequence is no longer, mercifully, some transparently disgraceful and badly merged ugly duckling ‘advertorial’. The consequence is that on-line retailers in particular consider themselves bona fide editorial engines. And in considering themselves as such, they are very legitimately becoming so. In written word and filmed footage, the growing multitude of Mr Porter’s are a fascinating hybrid of retail business AND editorial brand. Where the role of the latter is to suggestively, sexily, shrewdly sell us the former.

Where Revlon founder Charles Revson “sold hope” and not cosmetics, Mr Porter and its kind sell style and swagger, not merely shoes and belts and scarves. Which is why Mr Porter’s You Tube brand channel has 69k subscribers, and makes short videos of how people pack and get dressed that generate views in the hundreds of thousands.

This digitally empowering and line blurring world of ours is why Net-a-Porter is a weekly magazine (The Edit), a monthly magazine (Porter), an on-line TV channel (Edit TV/#NAPTV), and yes, “The world’s premier on-line luxury fashion destination”… where you can also buy shoes and belts and scarves.

Net-a-Porter is becoming a media empire. Net-a-Porter is becoming Vogue quicker than Vogue can become Net-a-Porter. And I applaud the fact that pioneering retail brands are no longer beholden to traditional media brands and channels to feature their “ads”.

I toast the fact that retail brands have their own voice, a seemingly bottomless well of opinions and advice, and are digitally creating their own communication channels through which to draw us in.

What is perhaps most insightful of all is how we - ‘The Once Distrusting Consumer’ - now show willingness to embrace (retail) brands as trusted and legitimate style aficionado’s and commentators. Retail is expertly and swiftly recreating itself in the image of media, while so much traditional media still struggles and scratches around for ways to evolve and monetise.

Once upon a time, we simply expected retailers to try and sell to us, and for editorial to be published and printed in a manner little different to when Johannes (Gensfleisch zur Laden zum) Gutenberg first introduced the benefits of movable type to the world, back in 1450.

“Once upon” is now starting to feel like “long, long ago”, because online retailers refuse to be limited by former definitions of what retail is and does.

Being progressive is about progressing into uncharted waters, driven by self-definition rather than the constraints of existing definitions.

Progressive is a small independent fashion label in LA making one of the most popular YouTube films of all time (Wren Studio’s; First Kiss for Fall 14; more than 90 million views).

Progressive is a coffee capsule company publishing ‘collectible’ lifestyle quarterlies and making consumption feel like elite club membership (Nespresso).

Progressive is a men’s retail website writing branded style guides that sit proudly on the most prominent shelves of Foyles and (almost) feel like a mere snip at £50 (The Mr Porter Paperback Slipcased edition).

Karl Lagerfeld once advised, “Buy only because something excites you”. It is clear that on-line retail is innovating hard to excite and encourage us like never before.

SP.

Article as also appears on The Wall, The Huffington Post and Business 2 Community.

WHILE IT MIGHT LOOK A LITTLE LIKE A DUCK

The ad model changed. An unintended consequence of Tim Berners-Lee sending an html missive, and the butterfly effect of digital revolution that followed.

 

Technology evolved ‘media’, and turned a portable telephone into a pocket-able, indispensable screen and ‘Reality Augmenter’. The list of consequences doesn’t end there, of course, but the long-short: old ways are being replaced by new necessities. Former ‘proven conventions’ have become broken records, so many ‘established paradigms’ sinking like heavy-weight dinosaurs in an unforgiving bath of tar.

 

Specifically, for the world of brands and agencies, this Star Date 2014 of ours is a bright and shiny frontier – bold new ways to do things, exciting places for brands to explore – but with more than a few frisky and fast-moving meteor fields to also contend.

 

Back in the analogue days of happy dinosaurs and no meteor fields, ad agency swagger could write the kind of cheques its ego could indeed cash. You had Maurice and Charles Saatchi, drunk on ‘Nothing is Impossible’ Thatcherism even try and buy a bank, the Midland Bank. Has balls-out hubris ever soared to greater heights than an ad agency wanting to offer banking loans to its clients, so that they might then be able to cover the costs of the fees they’re being charged?

 

In 1987, Saatchi’s attempts to buy Britain’s fourth largest bank (with assets to the tune of $77bn) failed dismally, but the money in making ads remained for a good 15 or so more years. Right up to the early noughties, the Saatchi employee car park still looked like a Park Lane dealership, chock full of high-end autos of Italian, German and British persuasion. Walk around that same car park today and it’s a ghostly affair, a kind of paradise (make that: prestige marque) lost - and I paint the picture because it’s so very telling of a very simple truth: you can’t make ads the same way anymore.

 

In our here and now, few brand-builders would dispute the new manifesto theory of advertising – where PUSH messaging and audience INTRUSION is replaced with PULL messages and the call to create content of inherent audience appeal. It’s sense of the wonderfully common kind. Sensible in a way we can all prefix with ‘infinitely’. It’s just, while very few brands (or their builders) would dispute the challenge to make ‘content’ that’s inherently appealing, fewer still have found their way into this new blue ocean.

 

It’s misguided to simply drop the word ‘advert’ from the marketing lexicon, replace it with ‘content’, and then progress in just the same way, producing something that’s as much a brand-centric message as it ever was. The undisputable, game-a-changing fact is this: all brands are now in the entertainment business.

 

And the step-up-to-mike response is not to apply old world thinking and create an open pipeline of ‘brand films’ that (a) don’t entertain, (b) come across like a social bore and (c) do nothing to earn or reward their audience’s attention. The role of a ‘brand film’ is not to simply bang on about the brand with all the same yesteryear car salesman hustle of a slightly longer TV ad.

 

The role of a brand film is to offer a ‘content gift’, something that charms or rewards, and in some small or more significant way, makes the viewer’s world that little bit better and more satisfying. Even if only for a moment. I still come back to the genius of Forsman & Bodenfors combining JCVD, Enya, and a desert sunset to illustrate “the precision and directional stability of Volvo Dynamic Steering.”

 

Brands are at their best when they are patrons and benefactors and investors in culture and creativity. They are at their best when their participation is self-evident but near silent. Brands become more appealing by saying less, and doing so with subtly and sincerity. Where brands are loud and brash, heavy-handed and charmless in their communications, and sincere in an estate agent kind of way, then they deserve all the derision and negative buzz they get, and all the views and likes they don’t.

 

I like what the Folio Society are up to. Their content gifts are arguably of niche appeal, but the Folio Society know their audience and reward accordingly, offering human narratives that complement the beautiful books they make and stories they sell. Three examples, niche as said, but still very nice: Ben Jones discussing his illustrations for A Clockwork Orange, The Art of Letterpress and The Art of Marbling.

 

Often curious how fine a line it can be between something working… and simply not working. The same tone and ‘human interest’ angle as used by the Folio Society is applied by M&S here in their Best of British SS14 Collection – and yet, as a viewer it leaves me cold and bored. I just don’t care. And I wager that very few ever would. It’s a sorry example of ticking off the needs of a client brief (we want to talk about provenance and quality and craftsmanship) with a painfully literal, brand-centric solution. In contrast, consider the content delight of M&S Food’s ‘Adventures in Imagination’. Because of course, really great ads are actually just great content. Though this thought is one Chivas appear to be wrestling with, ‘uploading and hoping’ with a diverse range of output that misses more than it hits.

 

First, a modest hit: Chivas’s ‘Story of Craftsmanship’ (honouring a partnership with British watchmaker Bremont) is a simple idea. Mostly split screens uniting lots of circles, it’s very nicely executed, though not a patch on what I suspect was its inspiration - the very brilliant ‘Symmetry’ short.

 

In contrast, Chivas’ content output struggles to know what it is when you then consider it’s ‘Win the right way’ platform, recruiting Hollywood high-brow-and-hot talent like Oscar Issac and Chiwetel Ejiofor to misapply stylised gloss to a CSR message. While start-ups able to generate social as well as commercial capital is a big-idea-into-ideal worthy of loud applause, I’m not buying into Chivas as its sincere champion. The Issac and Ejiofor executions feel like ads striving to be something else, when they’d have been better off just being better ads.

 

If Chivas had absolute commitment to the cause, taking ‘Win the right way’ truly to their DNA, they’d stop feeling a need to still make the kind of throw-back work (check out: Charles Dance as bar man and brand archetype) reminiscent of a time where the epitome of cool was regarded by some as Crockett and Tubbs cruising South Beach in a white Testarossa.

 

It’s not that I mean to pick on Chivas. It’s just their content output illustrates the blue oceans and meteor fields all brands presently face. Brands have permission like never before, to make ‘content’ that is sincere and that audiences have always naturally craved. While on the downside, ‘bad advertising’ is arguably more found out than it ever was, its underlying urge to sell laid wholly bare.

 

The entertainment business is fundamentally about entertaining, about making money by being very good at entertaining, at rewarding and satisfying audiences. The lesson for brands is that pseudo imitation of the bona fide entertainment industry can lead to content-sins worthy of a Dr Frankenstein. It’s all well and good casting Hollywood talent, but making something that looks a little like a duck and walks a little like a duck is no guarantee of a winning quack or waddle. And while a masquerading platypus with a knack for impersonation might be rather entertaining, anything less literal and similarly false is likely to falter.

SP.

Article as also appears on BrandRepublic, The Huffington Post, Medium and Business 2 Community.

Back Through the Looking Glass: The Lessons of Gravity

 

 

“Lowry … stood across the road from his subjects and observed. Often enough there are a number of individuals in a crowd peering back at him. They invite us momentarily into their world, like characters on a stage sometimes do, breaking the fourth-wall illusion.”

‘Sir Ian McKellen: My lifelong passion for LS Lowry’ (The Telegraph, 21 April 2011)

 

Breaking the fourth wall is always a bold decision. To explicitly acknowledge the audience is to deliberately break the illusion, an act as liable to pull an audience out of the moment as draw them conspiratorially in.

It worked for Alfie, it worked for Ferris Bueller, and considering Sir Ian McKellen’s remarks, it worked rather well for Northern artist LS Lowry.

Of course, art and movies and story-telling at their best have always used their magic to invite audiences into their world.

When Alice stepped through the looking glass, she broke through the fourth wall, crossed the divide and entered a land different to her own. This is why we love books and movies and plays. Because we are transported. We are exposed to a place other than our own. We become someone other than who we are, potentially are provoked into experiencing a set of feelings that are far from commonplace. And as you read this (yes, that was me breaking the fourth wall) you may fairly think, “this is all true, but nothing new.”

Where novelty always returns to the fray is when technological progress marries with creative vision, allowing story-tellers to keep challenging “the imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience.” (Wikpedia)

Consider Irmin Roberts’ reverse (dolly) zoom in Vertigo (1958) and Spielberg’s genius-stealing of it for Jaws (1975), in both cases evoking for audiences that “falling-away-from-oneself feeling”.

Consider the way Steadicam inventor Garret Brown tracked Danny’s Big Wheel tricycle tours through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick acknowledged the invaluable contribution Brown made to The Shining, using the Steadicam “as it was intended to be used – as a tool which can help get the lens where it’s wanted in space and time without the classic limitations”.

Consider the genius of Welles, Altman and De Palma and where they respectively placed their lenses to create the opening tracking shots for Touch of Evil (3 mins 20), The Player (8 mins 5) and Bonfire of the Vanities (4 mins 50).

Movies have always provided escapism, for audiences the suspension of everyday proceedings, where we suddenly stop disbelieving, forget who we are, and begin to vicariously experience something else.

In 1978, the marketing of Richard Donner’s Superman promised, “You’ll believe a man can fly”. In 2013, Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel treated us to Superman-cam, of not just watching a 21st C-GI Superman, but being part of scenes as if we could fly as him.

As ‘The Audience’ we have always inclined to step (like Alice) through the fourth wall and project ourselves into the scene – and the latest film-making technologies are making that natural inclination a more immersive, deeply felt experience. The success of Gravity, and particularly the success of the Gravity trailers, provide perfect illustration.

Gravity’s official trailer is close to 11m views on YouTube. It was the highest viewed trailer of all the movies nominated for an Oscar in 2013. Warner Bros produced a total of 41 official videos for the film, generating over 26m views. In consequence they have also re-written the rules for the role of promotional content in a movie’s marketing mix – because the trailers weren’t just serving to tease. They weren’t merely keyhole views of the main event – but visual spectacles in their own right. The official trailer is a 2 min 20 sensation of the very proposition that would have got Gravity the green light in the first place. Just imagine being lost in space, not in the “Danger Will Robinson” sense, but in the trapped in a vacuum, the ultimate bigness of nothing creating the most absolute sense of claustrophobia and despair? You get that experience from the trailer.

The trailer has the potential to become an event on its own merit, to be content that works standalone in its ability to mesmerise and hypnotise.

In the ‘All About Me’ age of social media documentation, first person chronicling and Go Pro capturing, Gravity’s trailer is the perfect content fix. Tellingly, the theatrical poster for Gravity also eschewed famous face exhibiting conventions. Like the image of Jaws ascending on an unsuspecting swimmer, Gravity’s poster shows its own ‘ultimate oh-no moment’, the image of a space man, safety line suddenly broken.

Gravity further evidences that it is a fascinating time for the marketing of movies, and indeed, for movie-making.

Second-generation 3-D is more effectively immersing audiences within ‘The Moment’. 3-D is at last evolving from the gimmickry of shooting arrows at us. With Avatar, Cameron created a very green and vividly rendered world, which started the 3-D ball rolling once again. Certain scenes in Prometheus were better for being seen with depth perception, the technology evoking a viewing experience that paralleled that felt by the characters. And then Alfonso Cuarón came along and changed the game again, making a movie that felt like you were watching from inside a gyroscope.

Whether watching Gravity in 2D or 3D, the experience is captivating, dizzying, disorienting. The audience is afforded 91 minutes of what it must feel like to attend space camp, and then have disaster strike. (Cuarón described his opening tracking shot as “a pain in the ass” – but then, maybe all great art is?)

I suspect Gravity might just be the dawning sun of a new genre in movie making: the ‘super-immersive’ movie concept. It will influence the movies that get produced and how they are later marketed.

While there has always been a connecting thread, a kind of umbilical cord between screen and audience, in where the lens is so remarkably placed, Gravity newly considers ‘the viewing sensation’. Cuarón is re-acknowledging that all the world really is a stage, upon which we have concurrent roles, where we serve as both audience and look to fashion ourselves as protagonist.

The Best Director oscar is gloriously deserving for a movie (and movie concept) that sucks us through the fourth wall and into the illusion of story and space. While we know that we’ll make it out of the movie theatre, our empathy with Sandra Bullock is such that there are moments when we feel it could be touch and go.

Watching Gravity isn’t life threatening, but to steal a line from Robert Redford at the end of The Sting, a tale of illusion and deception, “it sure is close”.

SP.

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

THAT FIRST KISS

 

“That first kiss, that pause, just before, that pause spilling with expectation and possibility. Eyes. Mouth. Parting lips. Anticipation. Closer. Yes. Complicity. A submission, a moment shared in time and trust, a kiss offered, a kiss taken; a first intimacy. Kissing is The Business.”

Remember to Breathe: A novel (2012)

 

It feels like about once a quarter, a new viral ‘pheno-meme’ storms out across the internet. Each example makes it ever-clearer that all content is far from equal. The short form ‘video’ that goes stellar is fast becoming the ‘new broadcast’, not reaching everyone all at once in a single Super Bowl spot buy, but rather multiple millions in an ever skyward arc over a week or two.

Content that gets to 300+ views is an achievement. The 1,000 view marker is wholly kudos deserving as milestone’s go. 1m views? Well, that’s the super leagues, think segments from US chat shows like ‘The Tonight Show’ with Jimmy Fallon. Fallon’s lip sync battle with Paul Rudd – very funny – is clocking close on 8m views. And I still grin when I think of the little ditty Sarah Silverman put together in duet with Matt Damon: 5.9 views.

But the stuff that goes into the tens of millions – wtf, how many views?! – well, that’s simply epic, MASSIVE, a bona fide juddering of the zeitgeist.

The latest content ‘Must See’ is ‘First Kiss’, which I first saw early last week, when it was at around 20m views. Me = late to the party. As you read this, it’ll be north of 60m.

First Kiss got me wondering, why do I like it? Why does it work? What can we learn from it? Why has it caught the touch paper that is cyberspace?

Can viral video be deconstructed, the nature of its allure and communicability be some kind of calculation? Might there just be a genesis code upon which we can devise a circa three minute stream that games the online system? Or is every content pheno-meme something different, each its own exception to any governable rule, where the only thing we can really garner is that each is just bloody good and worth a watch in its own imaginative and inimitable way? I wondered. And I still wonder. And the thing with wondering is that it can easily lead to ‘listing’. Here are seven reasons why First Kiss works:

1. It feels real: ‘Authentic’ seems to be a word that never goes out of fashion in branding, advertising and film-making circles – and certainly, First Kiss doesn’t feel like fakery. It’s intimate, tender, very human; honest. It feels very real. The camera is openly capturing a genuine moment. No one is ‘acting’. And this is the really rather smart bit, because…

2. Its set-up makes it unique: For 99 folk out of 100, whacking a camera in their face changes their behaviour. They freeze, freak, act weird, turn odd. The camera is an invasion. Behaving ‘normally’ in front of a camera is actually abnormal. Curiously, in First Kiss, the camera ‘heightens’ the participant’s ‘naturalness’, first their awkwardness, then everything else. The camera’s presence actually makes the moment. Kissing a stranger is already weird. ‘The Camera’ compliments rather conflicts the weirdness. It adds to and captures and ‘gifts’ us a moment we otherwise would not have had the chance to see.

3. ‘The Familiar’ is flipped: It’s a great one-line concept, a ‘high concept’: “We asked 20 people to kiss for the first time.” But it’s not just 20 people, it’s 20 strangers. A first kiss is normally between two people who know one another on some level, human attraction established. First Kiss flips something universally familiar: make strangers kiss. The result is something awkward… But that’s not awkward. Because there’s consent and curiosity. And the casting of the ‘consentees’ is perfect. Everyone is appealing. They’re not airbrush beautiful. Nor are they ugly. They’re easy to look at.

4. Voyeuristic Permission: The digital age invites us to watch. In the ‘content game’, there is no game if there are no watchers, but understanding the emotional role of the online viewer is key. In Red Bull Stratos: we watch in awe. If watching live: awe and apprehension (will he make it, will he die?). With Epic Split: it’s a retro-rebooted slice of “did he really do that?” With First Kiss, how will they, will they kiss the way they look, what will happen then?

5. It’s ‘Happy-Making’: Human nature is portrayed as we hope, believe and want it to be. People kiss. No one’s hurting anyone. In fact, a few are really getting into it. Afterwards, they’re still goofy, but they’re also closer, different, relieved, relaxed, the intimacy has created something new which we’ve bared witness to. We have witnessed something transformative.

6. It’s nicely done: First Kiss is all very well judged. The emotional tone is just right. The production values are spot on. The monochrome really adds. The soundtrack ‘We Might be Dead Tomorrow’ perfectly complements, as does the absence of any over indulgent graphics or preachy final message. Nothing is heavy-handed.

7. It’s vicarious & prompting: I was having a drink with a film director buddy, recently single, who said it made him want to kiss a stranger, or kiss someone new, or do both. First Kiss is very relatable, emotionally accessible; easy to empathise with and get on the inside of. Even if you don’t want to kiss a stranger, everyone’s got a string of first kisses in their memory vault.

Content that makes us feel better about ourselves, about life, about what it is to be human – this, we are going to be interested in and drawn to.

Whether viewers know it or not, First Kiss was made by 3-employee US fashion brand, Wren. But not knowing doesn’t suddenly make First Kiss less. The film is deliberately, shrewdly, unbranded. To be judged in its own right.

As Melissa Coker, founder of Wren, points out, “It’s a very noisy world out there.” By filming strangers kissing, she has our attention.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, The Wall, Yahoo Business Advisor and Business 2 Community.

Related articles

That First Kiss

The Native... Returns

Now Do Wear to the Left, 007

GREAT BRAND THEORY, INVISIBLE DESIGN & NODDY HOLDER

 

“Why not write the crowds into the song?”

 

Some men are born great. Others have greatness thrust upon them. Slightly abridged, but you’ll recognize the line: Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, passing comment on how our natures and our circumstances influence how we step figuratively up to the plate. Philosophically speaking, provocatively speaking, the line is also a bit of cheat in that it mashes together opposing schools of thought.  

 

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle proposed ‘Great Man Theory’. Carlyle’s thinking was that greatness is the stuff of nature, leadership a slug of DNA code sitting snuggly (or absently) in the double helix. Great men are born that way. That was Carlyle’s reckoning.

 

Tolsty (he of War & Peace and seriously impressive beard) sat on the other side of the debating chamber. Leo argued man’s moments of greatness to ‘zeitgeist theory’, to the times we pass through and how we take whatever slings and arrows on the chin. Context makes us great.

 

As a formula for brands and advertising (and their potential role in culture), I think we can take sage instruction from Messrs.’ Carlyle and Tolstoy. Meaning, for one thing, that ‘the Bard of Avon’ would have also made a damnably shrewd brand builder.

 

I believe brands are made great. In making them great, I’d like to suggest that ‘Great Brand Theory’ is not in isolation and opposition to the zeitgeist. Rather, ‘Great Brand Theory’ is a brand intrinsically so designed that it’s open-minded and adaptive to change. A great brand is a flexible brand. It’s one that knows what to do with the opportunities, as and when they come knocking. Opportunities, of course, are the external factors, as determined by those Tolstoyan circs of the day.

 

The great brands have the skills to surf the zeitgeist’s swells and troughs. Ineffectual brands sink beneath them. With a final glug that’s equally ineffectual.

 

And in ensuring that brands surf rather than sink, a singularly simple question arises. What is our zeitgeist, ‘der Geist seiner Zeit’ (as Gerg Hegel phrased it back in 1848), this spirit of our 2014 times?

 

Certainly enough, it is a digital one. Meaning it is a technologically-empowered one. A creatively-enabled one. A ‘mobile computer in our pocket that connects us to the world’ one. By consequence, it is a liberated one, in that the Digital Age gives all voice and invites us all to like/comment/share and tweet/post/upload.

 

Our zeitgeist is not one where anyone’s role is that of passive and mute witness. Our zeitgeist is one of being actively invited to get stuck in and a play a part. And this all has huge implications for how brands can make themselves great, and how advertising must consider the role it gives people. Which brings me to Noddy Holder (and isn’t the non sequitur it may appear).

 

You may well be as familiar with the work of Slade as you are with the frequently quoted lines of Shakespeare. And even if you’re not so au fait with the former, I’d wager you could sing along to ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’, a track that first entered the UK charts at number 1 back in February 1973. It stayed there throughout March, selling half million copies in its first 3 weeks. It is said that the factory couldn’t press the vinyl’s quickly enough. Ten years later, US heavy metal group Quiet Riot achieved massive success, sold 6 million copies of their cover version, and then in 1996, UK pub rockers Oasis paid homage with their own take.

 

‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ might be a seriously good tune to mosh or jog to, but I also believe its success is due to what it’s about. I think it resonates with audiences, because it’s about them.

 

‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ saw Slade attempt to “recreate and write about the atmosphere at their gigs”. Front man Noddy Holder recalled it as, "how I had felt the sound of the crowd pounding in my chest". Co-writer Jim Lea added, “I thought — why not write the crowd into the songs.” (Source: Wikipedia)

 

“Why not write the crowds into the song?” I love this sentiment. I love the acknowledgement that a moment is defined by its audience, that they make it what it is. Without the audience, Holder & Co were just a group of crazy-haired guys up on a stage performing to an empty room.

 

Why not write the consumer into the campaign? Of course, this is what ‘Great Brands’ do. In our connected and converged age, great brands ensure their audience feels the noise by making them the centerpiece of the campaign moment. Great brands acknowledge that it is the contribution, energy and participation of the audience that defines the advertising, so making it a moment full of both noise and feeling. Campaigns that embrace the zeitgeist are campaigns that invite consumers to play their part. Great brands put consumers not just in control but ‘in character’.

 

Bud Light’s 2014 Super Bowl spot, ‘Ian Up For Whatever’ is a perfect example of a brand putting ‘The Consumer’ in character, of literally writing them into the campaign.

 

'Ian Up For Whatever' - Bud Light 2014 Super Bowl (#UpForWhatever)

 

The ad might center on Ian Rappaport, but we enjoy his adventures vicariously, our delight in watching turning the third person narrative into a first person experience. 

 

The Heist, Zombie Run and Tough Mudder are recent additions to this burgeoning cultural trend in “first person/in character/’gamefied’ experiences. We now live in an age where we can hire zombies to chase us, and pay for the pleasure of tackling obstacle courses that electrocute us, while giving us permission to get as muddy as 5 year olds.

 

These very physical experiences reflect what has already taken place online, of the shift from ‘passive observer to active participant’.

 

Culturally, significantly, we’re moving more and more from ‘See it’ to ‘Live it’, meaning the designing of ad campaigns has become the designing of human experiences, of brands creating something for us all to live through.

 

Once upon a time, advertising campaigns were all about visibility. They were messages piped to us through static media channels. A big poster on a big flat poster site. 2D, unmoving, changing every 2 weeks. There was a time when poster sites couldn’t change image in the blink of an eye, and that change could not be prompted by, say, the Sun coming out or the passing of a plane overhead. In our analogue past, ‘media’ was rather unremarkable and ‘The Campaign’ was obvious in intent, on the nose in message, all elements quite literal and clearly visible.

 

We’ve moved from using media that makes the brand message ‘Visible & Literal’ to something that is much more ‘Staged & Revelatory’. 21^st century advertising isn’t simply about the stuff that comes at you head on. It’s about the stuff that comes at you from the side, wraps round you, that creates a narrative context in which you have a role, with a desired emotion being all part of the plan.

 

Great brands are becoming cultural architects, their advertising becoming as much about the stuff you can’t see, constructs of ‘invisible design’, about the deliberate crafting of character-based first-person experiences.

 

Great men, great design, great bands, great brands, great experiences; none of these things happens by chance. In each case, our zeit invites it. But in making it so, we all have our parts to play.

SP.

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

THE NATIVE... RETURNS

 

Epic Split. Volvo trucks (2013). Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors

 

I got into the advertising business because I liked advertising. I liked it back then. And I still like it. And it’s why I’m inclined to still call an ad an ‘ad’, and view advertising as something that can be brilliant and that may still serve to influence, even inspire.

 

I say all this because eyeing ‘Advertising’ head on right now, you can’t help but note the furrowed brow of existential angst. In defence, the ad industry isn’t alone. The angsty frown is endemic of our times.

 

Our Digital Age now pushes at the borders of previously understood meanings and practices. ‘How things once were’ now feels shaky; no longer proven. ‘How things can be’ becomes open rolling debate and ongoing exploration.

 

Challenges to why things exist and how they might alternatively exist is actually all very exciting. Yet speculation begets uncertainty begets possible misdirection. New words pop up, old words require redress and face inquiry. 'Advertising' is one such ‘Word & Deed’ that's been summoned to the stand. What the hell does it mean anymore? Just what is advertising? Is it fit for 21st century purpose? Or is it all a bit Betamax in an age of Blu-ray, its profile too Cro-Magnon for this era of cloud computing?

 

It was John Claude Van Dame’s Epic Split that really got me wondering. Some were quick to explain Epic Split (and its success) as an ad trying not to be an ad. It felt a little as if praise for this slice of viral genius was being given rather reluctantly. (At time of writing, Epic Split’s at 69.7m You Tube views.) Surely, some suggested, the only way any ad can be this popular is if it’s an ad masquerading as “great content”?

 

I’m not sold.

 

The only thing that’s great content… is great content… and isn’t it possible that great content can still actually be “an ad”?

 

My feeling is that we might be guilty of sucker punching ourselves. Ours is an industry that invented “New & Improved”, imbued weighty meaning to words like Plus and Ultra. From Ariel Ultra to Google Plus, the ad community will perhaps always be the most open-minded when it comes to a new formula (whether in tablet or code) – and ‘Advertising’, as an industry and as a noun, is getting its own ‘Ultra’ treatment.

 

The ‘Advertising Ultra Plus’ of our prime time hour goes by the strapline ‘Native Advertising’, the implication being that advertising sans prefix is potentially some kind of Old Wold paradigm putz.

 

Which leads me to suggest this. ‘Native Advertising’ is nothing new. At least, not in sentiment. To steal from a Thomas Hardy novel, I think we’re more so discussing ‘The Return of the Native’.

 

Native Advertising is nothing more than a returning articulation of a long-standing intention. It’s a reminder that brands must be built on one thing, on producing images and proposing ideas that are worth a damn; that are made of the stuff we all naturally want and enjoy.

 

‘Advertising’ is content (of a type), and all content has worth when it entertains or informs us. Entertain me. Inform me. Do either or both. Content that has a ‘pay off’ will always be worth my while and be the content I want and seek out. And there’s no reason that can’t assume the form of an ‘ad’.

 

Not wishing to come over all nostalgic, but off the top of my head, consider... Canal Plus’ ‘Never under estimate the power of a great story’, Guinness Surfers, the Stella Artois Jean de Florette-inspired series that came out of BBH in the 90’s. From the same decade and agency, add Levis and Boddington’s. Think (trust me, it’s fun to) Kylie Minogue besting a bucking bronco, brought to us courtesy of Agent Provocateur; Tiger Woods bouncing a golf ball on the head of his club; Terry Tate playing ‘Office Linebacker’ for Reebok; a John West fisherman kung-fu fighting a big bear. And this is all before I throw in Cadbury’s drum-playing Gorilla, TBWA’s ‘Get a Mac’ campaign and Wieden+Kennedy’s re-imagined Old Spice Guy. (If you haven’t clicked on at least one of those links, there’s something wrong with you.)

 

All of the aforementioned: content that naturally rewards. The fact there is a commercial agenda behind it, that it’s content “as brought to you by a brand”... well, that’s incidental. Native Advertising is a new headline that’s nothing new. It’s Clive Owen starring in 8 online movie shorts for BMW Films back in 1992. It’s Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Lever Brothers selling soap to 1930’s housewives via the ad format of daytime radio ‘soap operas’. (P&G still run a production arm.)

 

Just as in the 1930’s, I’d like to think that brands still have the capacity to become radio, TV and film producers. I’d like to think that ad-funded in these “native” times can simply encourage any brand to make a brilliant piece of content, while remaining editorially impartial.  Similarly, I don’t mind if there is commercial bias if the ‘content’ makes me smile the way I did when I saw Bud Light’s “Ian up for whatever”.

 

Can we simply file ‘Native Advertising’ under the catch-all, "Advertising is dead, long live advertising"? I suspect we probably can. Let’s not be so quick or so premature as to lament the demise of ‘advertising’. Let’s unfurl that brow.

 

While being de rigour, I’d argue that Native Advertising is principally a return to timeless brand thinking. Which is something we should never tire of - where great content can be advertising, in that it needs to be smart and enjoyable, rewarding to watch and potent in its ability to persuade.

 

To this end, let me conclude by telling you that my 7 year old son is a fairly serious fan of superheroes, his favourite Avenger a photo-finish between Iron Man and Thor. I'm with him on that. But as much as my son likes superheroes, he likes super villains more. "Why, Dad, is Loki such a good bad guy?” he recently asked. "Maybe because he's really smart, and cunning, and has all the best lines?" This received a sagely nod from my son and a, "I think you're right."

 

Where ‘Epic Split’ was my favourite ad/native ad/brand film/content piece of 2013, Jaguar’s ‘British villains’ is already my favourite of 2014 - because it's simply so very satisfying to watch. Because my 7 year old thinks it's “brilliant”. Because it makes us both grin on the outside and glow on the inside. And because it reminds me that ‘advertising’ hasn't changed. Not the really good stuff.

 

Great ‘advertising’ can still be great, whatever age you live in or age you are. Great is the work you know the moment you see it, irrespective of the label you give to it.

SP.

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

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.

TRASHED IN PARADISE

WHY WE ALL NEED TO START LISTENING TO JEREMY IRONS

“I wanted to make a documentary about something that needed to be talked about. I spend much of my energies telling fictitious stories. This is a very true story. An important one.”

Jeremy Irons, interviewed at IFFP

 

When someone like Jeremy Irons speaks, you figure people will listen. Because he’s Jeremy goddamn Irons, top tier A-lister, Best Actor Oscar winner. As in Dead Ringers, The Lion King, Die Hard 3 Jeremy Irons, who can even make a papal wardrobe (The Borgias) look passable.

So you bet, if I was making a movie (or in this case a documentary), then Jeremy Irons would be up there as my first choice go-to, like he’d be for most everybody, like he was for Candida Brady.

Candida Brady is the director of last year’s eco documentary, Trashed. Brady describes herself as a mother worried “about the effect our toxic legacy is having on our children”, where researching for the project compelled her to make Trashed, “come what may.”

Which leads me to one very simple question.

Trashed, starring Jeremy Irons; this important true story that had to be made come what may; have you heard of it and seen it?

Because I hadn’t. At least, I hadn’t until recently visiting a film festival (the IFFP) on the Greek island of Patmos. And it was after the screening that I got to interview Jeremy Irons and admit that his new movie had been new news to me. Yes, a little awkward. But also telling. And rallying. So let me save you the same admission, tell you about Trashed, and compel you to see it, too.

 

A PARADISE CALLED PATMOS; A MOVIE CALLED TRASHED

Trashed screened on the third day of third annual film festival on Patmos. It was a day where a troop of SPF 50’d children had been combing the beaches for discarded water bottles and lollipop sticks, before then turning them into pieces of artwork that went under (the right kind of) hammer in the festival’s charity auction that evening.

The setting of Patmos is rather perfect for screening an eco docu like Trashed, because Patmos is an island paradise, an Aegean gem, where crystal clear waters are cut by diagonal blades of sunlight that still shimmer 20 metres down. The glancing eye of a visitor might miss the island’s landfill challenge or ongoing beach and water clear up, but it’s there and happening.

And it’s very likely because you’re so accosted by nature’s beauty, on such a beautiful island, that you feel more aware of the care we should be taking with our planet, and how we might be quite seriously trashing it.

 

Skala, from above (Patmos island)

Of course, this open-your-eyes island life vantage is rarely afforded. Too often, we’re all too busy marching through our every-days with our heads down and our thoughts everywhere else. Which is where Jeremy Irons, Candida Brady and Trashed come in.

Irons is plainly aware of how profile and celebrity can force people to slow their march, to stop, stare, and be drawn closer to the flame.

“I feel it’s incumbent on people who have a profile to raise the profile of these issues. We have no agenda. We don’t have to answer to shareholders. We artists just get to look at the world around us, free of bias, so we get to see it pretty clearly.”

And what is clear is this: Trashed is a documentary that needs to be seen, that needs to enter the mainstream. Because we’re (still) trashing the planet. We’ve heard this enough to stop thinking about the implications, to start humming to what’s become white noise - but Trashed rearticulates the message, volunteering a not just inconvenient but downright harrowing set of truths.

Our life of making and chucking away plastic anything should come with a multi-generational cancer-causing health warning. Really, truly, it should. This is why Candida felt compelled to make this movie. This is why Jeremy Irons is a UN Goodwill Ambassador (of the Food and Agriculture Organization) and served as Executive Producer on Trashed. It’s also why Irons didn’t just lend name and voice and simply commit a couple of studio days on voiceover duties.

“I wanted to be the voice of the audience, to really be there, in it, the one asking the questions the audience would like to ask.”

Consequently, Irons very deliberately puts himself in the frame, in the narrative cross hairs. He is not just our guide but our eye witness, travelling from Lebanon to San Francisco, via the UK, Iceland and Vietnam. The globe-trotting is the opposite of glossy. It demonstrates the scale of the issue and how heart-felt the matter is for Irons, Brady, and all involved. This kind of sincerity makes for what the critics like to call “brave” documentary-making.

Certainly, Trashed doesn’t hold back on the heavy punches. There are shock tactics. When Irons is feeling it, you feel it too. And that’s maybe as it should be, because to leave a lasting impression sometimes requires candour and the suspension of sugar-coating and niceties.

Trashed becomes a movie to face up to.

 

THE TRUTH IS… IT AIN’T EASY SELLING GREEN

“Money is to be made in recycling. We have too many incinerators in England and Europe - what are laughingly called waste-to-energy incinerators”, says Irons. “They are in fact waste-to-waste. But policies and new methods of recycling can be put in place. Some of this is very simple to do.”

We chuck away, and it becomes landfill, hidden away, out of sight and mind. Or we try and incinerate what we chuck, and it becomes ash, but then what do you do with the ash, which, as Irons emphasises, is simply a different kind of waste. What happens to all the smoke that hopefully just blows away? A big sky full of air. A big sea full of water. Surely our waste would dilute?

Wrong.

The long-short is the opposite. Nature doesn’t dilute pollution, but re-concentrates it.

Every plastic bag we bury or burn goes back into the environment, and back into the food chain, which goes back into our mouths. Whatever goes into the air and soil and sea goes back into us. The fish, the livestock, their diets becoming our diets, becoming carcinogenic metals (the most bad-ass kind of nasties called dioxins) that we can’t excrete and that accumulate in increments, rather like a time bomb ticking down.

So recycle or die becomes the message of Trashed, because we’re killing ourselves by not. And yet…

It ain’t easy selling green. Green still creates an audible groan. Eco messages still fall on too many deaf ears. Until the sky falls or the seas rise enough to start building Arks and grabbing our snorkels, until we have palpable and all-too-late evidence, then the great danger is that we’ll mostly continue to think and feel and behave in all ways short-termist. By consequence, governments don’t push the green agenda because they don’t have to, because green issues don’t sway voters or win elections.

Green still gets dismissed with a wafting hand, the preoccupations of tree huggers and tofu munchers.

Occasionally green cut-through. An Inconvenient Truth created global alarm about global warming, but that movie message has thinned since its 2006 moment at the podium. The truth is, with our goldfish memories and inclination to swerve inconvenience; we need to be frequently reminded of how we’re trashing the planet. It’s only through reminder and prompting that we’re likely to stop trashing and start fixing.

Trashed becomes a fresh reminder and aid memoir: we cannot keep treating our world the way we’ve been treating it. And this fresh reminder, where and when it is seen, is affecting change. Irons points out,

“Those who see Trashed, some are decision-makers, many can be influencers. Trashed screened in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg subsequently made a statement that from now on, all plastics of whatever type, would be recycled.”

Even Jeremy Irons can only open so many doors, hearts and minds to a set of ideas that needs to become a better way of life. The trick is: how do you get everyone to see it?

Until attending the Patmos film festival, I awkwardly admit, I hadn’t. “Is Trashed creating the reaction you’d hoped?”, I ask. “Is it yet being talked about the way you’d hoped?” Irons is very open in response.

“It’s always difficult to know.”

 

THE DISCOVERABILITY BOOGEYMAN

Go to IMDB and Trashed gets an 8.6 out of 10, having so far generated… one ‘user review’. It also got 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. The scores are great… but you don’t have to search deep in cyberspace to establish that Trashed hasn’t yet gone supernova.

Trashed’s one user review on IMDB is from a guy who watched it at the Cork Film Festival last Autumn, who calls it “well intentioned” but who felt at times “like standing up and going ‘OK I GET IT!! LET'S MOVE ON!!’"

It’s says everything about our Ctrl-Alt-Comment times, when a 0.20 second performing Google search for “Trashed” takes you one click away from first-stop site IMDB - where the first batch of words you read includes a guy who saw it in Cork and felt frustrated by how Trashed reinforces its message.

Stay on IMDB and you’ll discover Guggenheim and Gore’s 2006 global warming warning, An Inconvenient Truth, has 497 user reviews. It has of course had 7 years to generate those reviews, but there’s no question that at its time of release

An Inconvenient Truth gained the kind of mainstream attention that got it shown in company lunch breaks and school classrooms. And even 497 user reviews is modest the moment you step outside the docu genre.

Blockbusters like Avengers Assemble have nearly 1500 user reviews on IMDB. We live in a digital age, the ‘Age of the Share’, where a mercurially chosen few find fame and following, and where most “content” fizzles into nothing. “Discoverability” is the challenge, in this vast and misty digital sea of so much.

The movie, music and publishing industries are all kept sleepless and nocturnal by the “dicoverability” boogeyman. Because he can neither be understood nor caged. Because “The Discovered” is not necessarily based on criteria like quality or importance. The absurdly trivial catches on.

Sneezing panda’s, Clit Lit and South Korean pop videos become global idea viruses and pop cultural tent poles. ‘PSY – GANGNAM STYLE’ is closing in on 2 billion views on YouTube and nearly 8 million ‘Likes’. Considerably more effort than clicking a ‘thumbs up’ icon, over 26,000 people have felt sufficiently compelled to write a Customer review on amazon.com for Fifty Shades of Grey. Irons is entirely right when he says,

“There is a clear feeling from a growing number of people that the time has come for us all to start to try and change our ways, and to endeavour to live a more careful life."

Yet society still inclines to mobilize en masse and devote its time to the pop culturally trivial and inconsequential. The challenge with a movie like Trashed is how you get a subject of significance to not just ripple but shockwave the Zeitgeist, to get as many people to see it as have read Fifty Shades or done the Gangnam pony dance. This is where you and I come in.

To repeat Irons, “The time has come.”

 

TIME TO SUIT UP

Don’t we all want to leave this place better than we found it; the planet, an heirloom past on in reasonable shape?

A toxic legacy is no kind of legacy.

While we’re here, don’t we want to achieve something of worth, make the odd contribution that’s real, tangible, even noble? Sure, we might not be able to be noble every day.

We may have bills to pay that urge us to pursue things more mundanely every-day, but surely on some days, we can aspire to making a lasting difference. And surely every day, we can recycle, which will all add up to making a genuine difference too.

A recycling culture isn’t as difficult or as overwhelming as it might still feel. Sure, big business with deep pockets and political connections will resist society’s efforts to change. But politics and big business still has to move with the social tide.

We need to create new, stronger currents.

We’re not yet indignant enough. We haven’t yet demonized apathy toward recycling, or vilified the daily practices that don’t support it.

Recycling needs to be made simpler for people, the way smoking was suddenly made hard. “You can’t smoke in here. Get outside in the cold if you want to smoke. Oh, it’s raining? Good.”

Smoking has been socially marginalised, the act now seen as foolish, reckless, selfish, stupid. Even with a piece of dream-casting like Irons, there’s still no absolute guarantee that any movie and message is going to be seen and heard. A green message, about conservation, recycling and the consequences of not recycling: this stuff doesn’t tend to fan the flames of fanboy frenzy, get the whispering classes yabbering, or trend in Cyberspace like a new Bond or Batman movie.

Assemble the Avengers and everyone will get giddy and the Box Office tills will trill to a note in the billion dollars register. But make a documentary about trash, which makes us feel not like superheroes but planet-trashing parasites… well, it’s a tougher selling flavour of Kool Aid.

Only, Trashed is a Kool Aid we need to drink and a message we must heed. It’s action out of awareness time. Avenger-like, we need to assemble, to suit up, as individuals, and as a society. We need to watch movies like Trashed, start being smarter and behaving better - in order to save this planet and give us any shot of there being a real-life sequel. We need to listen to Jeremy Irons:

“We have to build up general public consensus. We have to change our ways. We have to build a movement about an unacceptable state of affairs.”

Before the Patmos screening, Trashed had passed me by. Only, it doesn’t have to have passed any of us by, because it only came out late last year and it isn’t even yet out on rental. So consider this a Bat sign in the night sky. Let’s get Trashed trending. Let’s ensure Jeremy Irons and Candida Brady are heard and that their movie is seen… “come what may”. Tweet @TrashedFilm and this link to the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UM73CEvwMY.

Then VOD it through Vimeo for $5.99. It’s coffee shop money, certainly worth 98 minutes of your time.

See it, tweet it, trend it. Please. And if you don’t, I might just tell Jeremy. And you can trust me, you don’t want that kind of awkward.

SP.

Simon Pont on Transmedia (2013)

 

Convergence Culture, 'The Monster', Jaws, District 9, Limitless, The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus and the Mariana trench.

Here's a 9 minute excerpt from my keynote at Meg13, discussing the theory and practice of Transmedia story-telling. 

 

Recorded by SVT on March 7, 2013 @ MEG, Sweden.

 

Massive call-out thanks to agency F&B and to Meg for the very kind invitation.

To watch the full length 30 minute keynote, click here.

SP.