My standard tirade: everything is IRL
Two years ago, a creative director I was working with on a project for Microsoft Zune told me that kids today are 'post-literate.' They don't read and they don't write - everything is video and mobile and online, he said. I wondered aloud what he thought they were doing that would enable them to go completely without reading or writing - after all, basic literacy is required for most digital behavior (e.g., texting, blogging, reading sites & blogs, entering URLs, figuring out which link to click, search, email, tweeting, etc.). The world, as near as I can tell, is as reliant as ever on the written word. In fact, post-literacy doesn't mean the elimination of language, it means passive literacy - people who favor visual, oral and aural communication over the written word. This creative director believed that we are on a path towards a majority rule of post-literates, a path not far from Fahrenheit 451, or McLuhan's imagining of the global village in The Gutenberg Galaxy.
I suspect however, that it's more subtle than this - I think we're seeing language increasingly as data and code: in a database driven world, language is critical. We tag items with text in order to make search and sort more efficient. We invent hashtags as both a means of searching for threads of conversations and for telling little jokes. Users invent code to enable effective communication on Twitter and other social services. We comment, we link, we share, we post. And each time we do, we caption the content to provide some context to others (with the brilliant and wonderful exception of Listicles Without Commentary, which are comments themselves).
But this is an evolution, not a revolution. A fast evolution, admittedly, but not fundamentally altering human nature.
A BRIEF HISTORY
We port our communication from one medium to the next - from mimetic expression, to pictorial expression, to verbal expression, to written language; we go from cave drawings and etchings in stone, to portable communications, to copyable communications, to digital communications. The medium changes - and those changes do affect how we communicate and what we say - but Its essential nature is the same - we are compelled to share ideas and emotions.
The origin of language is controversial, but a basic measure is that once people started living and cooperating in groups of more than 6, some form of language was necessary. Some say this is hundreds of thousands of years ago, some say longer. People started recording their experiences pictorially and communicating mimetically as early as 60,000 years ago. Writing began in 5500 BC. Formalized games have been around since at least 2600 BC. [Excellent book on this topic and so many others that I keep at my desk when writing: Ideas: A history from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson.]
As soon as we could anticipate outcomes and retain information through communication and sharing, we weren't far from inventing imaginative stories and games. We played them with each other, and we told stories to each other, and we made music. This is what makes us human.
Okay, lesson over.
THE PROBLEM WITH BRANDS
The problem with advertising is that it seeks to leverage human nature and emotions for commercial ends, and that it believes it is somehow novel, exempt from the messiness of humanity, and forever 'discovering' the 'new' thing people do now that 'changes everything.'
Perhaps it is because I have been in the water the whole time, not stepping in and out of the river, that makes me think this is absurd. All this change washes over those who are swimming with the current. It's those standing on the shore who don't quite get it.
Ever since Al Gore discovered the Internet, it's just been one radical change after another. Those of us who are digital 'natives' have been beneficiaries of this world view, as well as skeptical of it. The tools and platforms change, but the essential drive to communicate is the same. The true source of change is in the democratization of creative behavior, in the spreading belief that everyone has something worthwhile to say that others should listen to, and in the opportunity to shout into the void and hear your own echo.
The trouble for brands is that this used to be their wheelhouse. For most of the 20th century, corporations took control of creative pursuits in the mainstream culture. They decided what you watched and listened to and read. They decided what you wore. They decided what you ate and how you ate it. They decided what success and failure looked like, and what accessories you needed to demonstrate your place in the culture.
But when everyone has a press, and a mixing board, and a publisher, and a canvas - and now, a manufacturer and distributor - the primacy of the brand is reduced. Brand stewards look around in astonishment and wonder what happened and when it happened. They thought they were exempt from all this change, if they thought about it at all.
And now, 15 years into the mainstreaming of the Internet, they are pronouncing a 'post-digital' society.
"In a way what I think is happening is that online behavior is affecting most other areas of life at the moment," says Andreas Dahlqvist, executive creative director of DDB, Stockholm, the agency behind the real-world-leaning Fun Theory.
...
"There is huge potential in using digital to enhance 'real life' experience, and I think we are just seeing the beginning of that. It's adding a new layer of value, a fourth dimension," Mr. Dahlqvist said. "It's about making digital tangible."
And this is the sort of thing that makes my head explode. People were involved in their communities and talking to each other about worthwhile things since ... forever. People had feelings about brands and even expressed them before there was an internet. A man standing in his living room shouting at the TV, a woman flipping the channel the instant that ad she hates comes on and welling up at the one where the son surprises his mom by coming home from college or the army early, the kid running into the kitchen demanding a new toy he just saw in the commercial break of his favorite cartoon, the shopper choosing a particular brand of cereal because it sponsors the US Olympic team, the teenager making a mixed tape or drawing on his sneakers, the college newspaper spoofing advertising... these behaviors have been around IRL since before the internets.
The difference is, the internets make it possible for these reactions to spread faster and to amplify - and therefore, less possible for brands to simply ignore.
So when brands talk about online behavior influencing real life, they're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. Real life behavior influences how we use and want to use technology. The tool alters aspects of our communication styles, and even the sorts of things we want to talk about, and to whom. But it does not change the essential behavior - communing, communicating, sharing, exchanging.
But because brands and marketers are beginning to 'get it' - and are starting to figure out how to leverage it - they want to pat themselves on the back and declare it 'post-digital.'
"Most of our campaigns utilize digital media as an enabler medium, having both on and offline components, because the truth is most of our lives and emotions we share take place in the real world," says Johannes Leonardo Executive Creative Director Leo Premutico. "Digital media has created a new potential for brands because it presents the ability for its consumers to share information like never before. But a lot of the effect of that takes place where it always has, offline. The most powerful ideas for us are the ones that turn the people we're talking to into the medium for the message, rather than just the destination for it. So determining the sort of work that will do that is always more important to us than whether we should do a digital, outdoor or TV campaign."
In advertising, there's never any time to celebrate, or simply adopt and integrate, or to acknowledge the obvious - it all has to be repackaged and owned, and leveraged. The degree to which our culture becomes post-literate or post-digital is the degree to which we all acquiesce to a corporate interpretation of what these essential human behaviors are for.
BUT WAIT
I can't pretend to be truly outraged here. I work in this field, and use the tools that the internet offers to get people closer in to brands. I sometimes altruistically believe that there is more good than ill to be done when people and corporations are honestly engaged with one another and constructively influencing each other, when there is enough transparency for there to be both trust and skepticism. I make my living helping brands make things that people want to play with and talk about and buy. Why bitch about it?
What I object to is the White Man's Burden attitude that marketers and brands and internet elites employ when thinking about and talking about these things. Despite being 10 years late to the party, they act as though they are doing people a favor, enhancing their 'real lives' by making integrated campaigns, giving people something to do with their idle time by creating online and offline promotions, and it seems, expecting to be thanked for the privilege. What's really happening is that marketers and brands are getting better at (yes, I'm going to say this word again...) exploiting IRL and online behavior for commercial gain. Let's just be honest about that.
I bet in return, if marketers were truly listening, consumers would be honest, too. They'd probably tell marketers that they use online tools to enable offline relationships and pursuits, and that they don't see themselves as having an offline and an online life. They'd tell marketers they don't think about brands and ads much of the time, and have been trained by convention to ignore most ads in online environments, just like they do IRL. They'd show marketers that, quite simply, people make choices, and they die. Sometimes those choices will make your client a few more bucks. Sometimes they'll choose the other guy. A lot of times they won't engage your category at all. All you, as a brand, can reasonably hope to do is be in the right place at the right time with the right product.
The rest of it is a fairy-tale.
