#42 – On uniting shame, impractical planning rules, collective yearnings, and the blinding whiteness of advertising
Hello and happy Friday!
After an unexpected, unplanned break (oh the joys of parenthood) we’re back this week with a fresh dose of inspiration, injected straight into the pulsing heart of your online life.
This week we’re going on a journey into the shame uniting fandoms; our collective and undefined yearnings; exploring a highly impractical (and impactful) approach to briefing; musing (once again) the end of brand building as we know it; and the blinding whiteness of advertising.
Enjoy the read.
Six Links of Inspiration:
Shame, intimacy, and community: fangirls are mocked, but it is more complex than you might think. A lot has been written about fandoms and communities. I have done so myself. But here’s an angle I haven’t considered so far: “Shame can be used in creating shared intimacy between fans and fostering a sense of community” The article dives deep into the stigmatisation of female fans (fangirls) and the hubris around their’s and other people’s obsessions. But the bit I found most interesting really is how shame isn’t just a negative, isolating feeling. It is ”a dynamic emotion important in thinking about how these fandom spaces are formed in the first place, and how kinship is created among fans. While it is common to think fandoms are simply organised around a shared object of devotion, it is the relationships between fans that generate and sustain these communities.”
Game over for broad reach TV marketing fanatics? Who doesn’t love a warm, welcoming invitation into a debate? I don’t consider myself a “broad reach TV marketing fanatic” – but I do like the idea of “broad reach.” So this one is worth interrogating, because we’ll see a lot more of this over LinkedIn and the marketing press soon. Coca Cola shifting budget away from TV-centric to experience-based. Away from mass-reach to targeted digital. A move taken by Nestlé, too. It goes hand in hand with most of our attention increasingly being trapped in Social Media channels (if you want to equate time spent with attention and fucks given.) No more broad level targeting, focus on reaching category buyers (or very likely buyers) instead: “positive intenders.” I get the efficiency argument here. Particularly in categories bought as widely as those. But there are a few things I’m wondering about and I don’t have the answers: is this approach basically giving up on growing the category? What about people who’re not in the category yet? (Or is this preemptive of an eventual ban on all kinds of communications for sugary drinks/snacks?) How will the cultural value and signalling power of Coca Cola suffer in the very (very) long term? After all, we don’t buy the brand we think about when we buy, we buy the brand we think the collective conscience thinks about when they see us buying.
Two Simple Planning Rules. Steve Walls shared a highly impractical and inefficient way of making briefings more impactful and effective. Bring in the people you’re talking to and about. I am equal parts enamoured and anxious about this approach. Because it requires discipline to carve out the time in the process (read: rush) to get the work out. And it’ll show who truly wants to make impactful work – or who’s just here to create more noise.
Here are his two rules:Briefs written without the planner meeting and spending time with someone in the target audience should never be signed off.
Briefings given without someone from the target audience being in the room should be scrubbed from the record and re-scheduled.
In 2024, everyone is yearning – but what for? I’ve started watching One Day recently. Every episode is just enough time to flop on the sofa, eating dinner, and enjoying a little break from the noise, stress, chaos of the day. It’s a nostalgic trip into a past we all had in some shape or form. The show is the hook for this article in DAZED: ”The show’s pre-smartphone era setting makes this ‘yearning’ feel more profound: it forces everyone to be confronted by both the merciless passing of time and the lost, unalloyed optimism of the early 1990s.” The rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia seem to strike once again. But the article goes on to explain why we seemingly are yearning more (or at least more openly): ”Anecdotally, there seems to be an unshakeable sense that something has been stolen from us. A lot of friends in their late twenties and thirties, worn down by 15 years of wage stagnation and rising cost of living, seem to be isolating themselves, growing more risk-averse and inclined to settle. Friends in their early twenties, after having two years of their youth stolen by the pandemic, complain about struggling to let their guard down and form meaningful connections. What unifies the two is a kind of deathly boredom and disillusionment with modern life – a yearning for something in the future to feel optimistic about.”
How Do You Make Email and Texts Steal Less Time? What sounds like a productivity hack is really an enquiry how emails and texts have made our relationships and friendships poorer. ”In slightly different ways, they’ve tangled the promise of immediacy and ease and mass connection and control (I can have so many group texts! I can get so many work tasks done! I can do a quick check-in on my parents or my kids or my friend! I can respond exactly how I want to when I want to!) and ensnared us in patterns of communication and care that might periodically feel comforting but aren’t actually nourishing. We maintain far larger networks of connection but those connections are far shallower.”
What We’re Losing in the Blinding Whiteness of Advertising. This is an important read about the world most of us find ourselves working in. Donovan Triplett writes about the relationship between race and creative choices and finding himself and his self in the world of advertising. But the argument and observations are universally important. “Whether in subject, setting, or stylistic choices, we tend to be good at noticing the imprint of Black culture in the creative works of Black people. But why are we so bad at noticing the imprint of white culture? Some of it may be rooted in the perception of identity across races. A study from the Pew Research Center found that only 15% of white adults view their race or ethnicity as central to their identity, compared with 79% of Black adults, 59% of Hispanic adults, and 56% of Asian adults.” Being aware of that imprint and its (potential) impact – only 32% of Black audiences feel industry representation of their identity group is accurate – is key, because the creative choices we make, the words we use on strategy slides, on research summaries, create ripples in culture: ”With one tinted assumption, an entire pasture of the nuance-rich work is blotted out, in favor of a portrait aligned more closely with the way white cultures tend to think and behave.”
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, it means a lot. If you want to do one more thing for me, why not sharing this edition of inspiration with your network?
Enjoy your weekends,
Maximilian