Thanks to a nice reminder from Gareth, here's quite possibly the ultimate in the social derivative. This time from Cartoon Network's Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends at Macy's turkey day parade with the real-life rickroll. Pretty awesome bit of cultural thievery there.
"When we trade glasses of wine at a French bistro, nothing has changed.
We both still have a glass of wine. But something has changed. We are
a "we" where before we were strangers."
“language is simple, direct, and expressive… except that it's magical, dynamic, and unfettered. [E.B.] White looks at Thomas Paine's famous sentence, "These are the times that try men's souls." He tries switching it around to, "Times like these try men's souls." It crashes to the ground. Why? We simply do not know. No explanation seems adequate…The first sentence is better and we damn well know it. We don't know why. But we know it, as certain as the hand in front of one's face, the rain falling on the plain.”
I mentioned a shitty derivative execution by Trident with Single Girls, or better known as the mass marketing death knell of the manufactured flash mob.
But why exactly is the Trident video so painful to watch when the T-Mobile ad that begat it is such a pleasure?
We could say that great advertising tends to be the most original. Except T-Mobile was fantasticly thievish, just a little higher up the food chain.
So what does make great advertising? Or great anything? How would you describe something that’s good versus something that’s not, be it movies, television shows, a blog post or a letter to the editor.
Obviously, it depends heavily on the context. TV shows need great acting, or cinematography, emotive writing, whatever. But none of them are the sum of those parts, and generally, the things that work simply have an indescribable spark. And usually that just means they are the product people whose tastes and temperament tend make sparks happen.
In other words, some people got it, and some people don’t.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually the people who outwork and outthink and outunderstand that are the people that "got it." So it probably has less to do with something bestowed from above and more to do with the hustle to make it work.
It’s the people who are able to find the simplicity in a message, without sacrificing the threads of magic and complexity that keep it interesting.
It’s interesting to find how brands can be easily and more directly reflective of cultural blips simply because of the fact that new memes are much easier to discover.
For instance, Noah Kalina used his daily photos as shorthand for his own life’s journey.
The journey which the NBA co-opted for its “Where Amazing Happens” campaign. They similarly told their stories through still photography, using the same score that was originally written for Noah. The Rebel Xsi went back for round three, telling simple stories through photography with a track reminiscent of Noah’s.
Charlie Todd’s Improv Everywhere went sharesville by pausing about 200 or so agents in the middle of Grand Central station and filming the reaction.
T-Mobilespun it by giving it a theme song and a dance routine. Trident took a whack at it with the far less successful Single Ladies flash mob (who’s failure is probably a subject for another post).
I would call these executions Social Derivatives, marked by a semi-obscure creative influence while seamlessly using familiarity to breed favorability.
These social derivatives form a sort of tacit reverse sponsorship. Or a shorthand to say a brand’s human alter-ego might be into the same things the audience is into, while equally reflecting something new, exciting and mostly undiscovered by the mass.
So it’s great when brands can create their own cultural contexts, but it’s very difficult for most brands/people/things to be unabashedly original all of the time. At the very least, most things are borrowed most the time.
But we can use our much larger distributional platforms, our big brand voices, to bring these small interesting pieces of content/conversations/experiences and help them find new audiences who are prone to appreciate them, while giving a nod to all the folks the original material met along the way.
It's interesting to see this shift towards brands as a conduit for socializing in physical spaces, or as David Polinchock would call it, the "socialization of place."
Certainly beats an expected reaction to just running a TV advert, no?
Mash the stuff that brings people together with the mobile elements that connect us to objects as well, then we're likely to push these types of experiences even further. To put this in context, I'd highly recommend this talk from Kevin Slavin of area/code from PSFK called "This Platform Called Everyday Life" (via Helge).
"Corgan said in a statement, "The goal is to create a working
model that is not profit motivated but rather information and access
motivated. In exchange for a fixed resource base fans will be let
inside in an unprecedented way to the creative process of preparing to
make the next (SMASHING PUMPKINS) album while also inspiring an interactive dialogue that will help shape the work."
The Psychology of the Sale "Over time, the presence of sales can really diminish a brand. I used to
buy all my clothes at the Gap - I'm stuck with the fashion sense of an
8 year old boy - but, starting a few years ago, I noticed that
everything at the Gap appeared to be on sale. This is problematic for
two reasons: 1) It triggers deflationary expectations - why buy the
t-shirt now when you can buy the same t-shirt for less in two weeks,
after yet another "final" sale? and 2) It erodes the quality of the
brand, at least as perceived by consumers. I implicitly assume that Gap
has to put t-shirts on sale because they're of lower quality, when the
actual reason might have to do with the overproduction of some factory
in Turkey, or an inventory accounting rule, or some other banal
corporate mistake."