Cannes.The Church and the Truffle Forest.

“One should use common words to say uncommon things”

Arthur Schopenhauer

What I am about to say may make me a hopeless romantic and naive in how the world works. So be it.

There is a church in Cannes called Notre Dame Bon Voyage. It is a beautiful, quiet space. Eternal and Gothic. It is as far as you can get from the madness that I love. The Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.  

It also happens to be right across the road from the Palais where thousands of ads jostle for fleeting success.  It is one of many contradictions you find in this strange town in the South of France.

Contradictions. Cannes is full of them. It is where yesterday’s buildings meet tommorow’s ideas. Inside the Palais are the greatest ads in the world. Ads and ideas that take your breath away. Outside of it, you will find some of the worst.

Ugly flyers, buttons, badges and eager young men and women in very bright T-shirts trying to thrust something into your hand. The goody bag you receive when you register mirrors this. It is like an explosion of tinsel and jargon.

You have celebrities wheeled in who speak in vague generalities and we applaud. We take phrases from them as gospel even though we have heard them a thousand times before.Their global success defeats our well rehearsed world weary cynicism for one week a year. It would seem their presence gives us the affirmation we desperately crave. And hey, it’s awesome for our social posts.

We see the word creativity plastered everywhere but you don’t actually see much of the stuff.

We hear endless explanations, polished presentations and mountains of jargon all used to explain simple ideas.

Simple ideas.

What you do in the dark gets you into the light.

Love Freebies. Get them legally.

Let’s close 170 stores on Black Friday.

What if a country had its own phone number?

Let’s turn beer into fuel.

Let’s get two major global business rivals to come together for peace.

This is what I love about Cannes.

These are the simple ideas that should be really celebrated at Cannes. Sadly, I feel they get lost in the clutter, explanations and tectonic forces of a rapidly changing business. With the sheer scale of what is going to happen over the next couple of years at Cannes (2017 sees the introduction of the Sports and Gaming Lions) I feel like there will come a day when these ideas will become a side show. I hope I am wrong. 

Perhaps, the noise is necessary for advertising to move forward.

Perhaps, moving forward is about focusing on why our industry exists in the first place. Ideas.

The thing is, amongst all the shiny packaging, the one thing that doesn’t change is a great idea. That is why they have so much under appreciated value.

We seem to always forget this and we surround them with so much shit that it makes them hard to find. And appreciate.

It’s as if we have a forest full of truffles. And our bizarre way of trying to find these delicacies is making the forest bigger each time we look for them. We plant more trees. We have lot’s of discussions about what the perfect truffle forest is. We explain truffles. We have truffle think tanks. And eventually, we confuse the forest for the truffles.

The truth is when a hungry pig finds a truffle in the forest, it knows. When a tired pilgrim sinks to their knees in a Gothic Cathedral filled with silence, they know. And, when you see a beautiful, simple idea, you know.

Knowing is when something affects you directly. This is what a great idea can do. No explanation is needed.

Unfortunately, I think we are in danger of celebrating the explanation far more than the discovery.

We need to love the gift of an idea far more than the wrapping paper we keep smothering it in.

 

Advertising. Leicester City meet Boaty McBoatface.

 

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“Let’s have some new cliches.”

Samuel Goldwyn

My friend and kindred blog spirit, Rich Siegel, writes a fantastic blog called RoundSeventeen. Recently he told me a story about pitching an idea. It was for the Olympics. The idea was simple. Do a campaign about the athletes that come stone last at the games. He and his partner Jerry Gentile understood the power of showing an athlete just making it to the Olympics. How that makes them the true winners of the games. It would show the real spirit that creates the Olympic flame. Just imagine the stories that could be told. They were very excited.

You can guess what happened next. It went nowhere. It died. The client went for the cliche. Conventional wisdom. The right thing. Winners breaking the tape with triumphant music. The expected. What is safe. What you have seen before, many, many times before. To those clients I say this. Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards. Google the name and the film to see what you missed out on.

In the same week this all happened, I read two brilliant stories. The first was about Leicester City. This is a football team in the English Premier League that is on the verge of winning the English Premier Championship. If this happens, it will be the greatest fairytale in football. Ever.

Leicester City are battlers. Every football fan secretly loves them. They just avoid relegation. They scrap, they fight for every point. I have been to their old ground at Filbert Street. Trust me, it was a long way from the verdant, manicured pitches of Old Trafford and Anfield.

I think every football lover on the planet right now wants them to win. Why? Because it is impossible and it is not boring. As human beings we crave stories like this. The only thing we love more than patterns are when they are broken. With apologies to Manchester United, or Chelsea fans, if one of these teams won, it would be moderately exciting but entirely predictable. And that, can never match the excitement of something beyond your imagination.

The other story was the naming of a polar research ship in England. There was overwhelming support online for one name. 124,109 votes in fact. The name?

Boaty McBoatface.

So, right now, there is some poor bloody civil servant having to decide what to do. I really hope they go with this name. They probably won’t. But fuck I hope they do.

In both these examples, given the chance, human beings love something new and something different. Why? Because it makes them feel good and most importantly it’s a lot of fun. And, in breaking news, people want life to be fun. In a recent study, I just made up, fun is the number one thing that people want.

David Ogilvy once said you can’t bore consumers into buying your product. He said that 50 years ago. Today, that is far more true than when he said it.

Advertising is embracing analysis and it is important to do so. However, data isn’t going to give you stories about Olympic athletes that come last, Leicester City or Boaty McBoatface. We need to remember to embrace fun and joy just as much as certainty.

As an industry, we are at risk of telling the same stories over and over again and expecting a different result.

We will do what is correct and efficient. We will reach consensus. We will look at the data. We will make less mistakes. We also might become very boring.

We need to remember what Einstein said. Creativity is intelligence having fun. Fun is not a nice to have. It is a vital ingredient that we often forget to put into the recipe.

Human beings like the wrong things.  We like impossible stories. Stories, that confirm we can all beat the odds. We like all our odd quirks, things that don’t make sense and weird shit. 

As an industry we often try and smooth these rough edges over. We try and find a middle ground or an acceptable, average answer. Something we can all agree on. 

Perhaps we shouldn’t.

We like these odd shaped things because we are human. In fact, that’s what makes us human.

We like all these things because they make life worth living.

I hope advertising never forgets this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An algorithm hears music. We feel it.

62

“Because an algorithm can’t come up with Popeye.”

Dave Trott

About 20 years ago for a brief moment I thought I was a genius.

I had been given a brief for a large telco company and only a day to crack it. My partner and I worked late into the night. We filled the walls of our office with ideas. Some were shit, some made no sense but a few had some promise. And there was one that we both thought was really good. As a creative you know when something is good because you feel like you want to walk out of the agency and make the idea immediately. It is a heady mix of excitement and irritation.

Great ideas are ideas you can feel.

So, the next day we walked into the ECD’s office with a little swagger. We had nailed this. We presented all the ideas and then hit him with the big one. We waited for the inevitable glory. Nothing big, perhaps a ticker tape parade, thunderous applause and being fed grapes while overlooking the Aegean would be fine.

We got nothing.

He stared at us for a long time. In fact, he stared at us for so long I wondered if he was hungover or had died with his eyes open. Alas, this wasn’t the case. He reached onto his desk for a large yellow D&AD annual and opened it to a certain page and said probably the worst words a creative can hear.

It’s been done.

It had. I had a feeling that I will try and describe.

Imagine you are going into a jail cell for the first time. You are not very strong but you are very pretty. As the cell door closes you notice two other prisoners. They seem to work out a lot. The one with the eye patch smiles and blows you a kiss. This special moment is interrupted by the warden coming by to tell you your parole had been denied. And then, as an afterthought, he says your mom phoned to let you know your cat had died.

That was the feeling. It was one one I never wanted to have again. It was a feeling that pushed me forward to try harder.

The reason I mention this dark moment in my career is that lately I have noticed a lot of work that is a direct copy of pretty famous campaigns. I have seen them being entered into Award shows. I see them winning. I have even seen Creative Directors defending why they have done it in the trade press. With all this happening, I started to wonder if as industry doing something fresh still mattered.

How important is it to still try and be authentic? Should creatives focus on being efficient first and effective second? Or is it the other way round?  Should we just put any picture in those endless picture frames? Does originality, quality, emotion and feeling matter more or less than it used to? Is there a new definition of great work?

Should we still strive to make those ideas that we can feel?

While I was wondering about all this, I read two stories involving Artificial Intelligence. One was about the ad agency McCann in Japan that had created the first AI Creative Director. Essentially, it is an algorithm that looks at all the work ever made in a particular category, analyses it and gives you suggestions as to what work you should make.

The other was an article about a project called The Next Rembrandt. It was a collaboration between Microsoft, ING and Delft University of Technology. They analysed all of Rembrandt’s work pixel by pixel. Using machine learning algorithms they identified the most common patterns Rembrandt used. From this they created the first new Rembrandt in 350 years.

Now, there is no denying these developments are amazing. However, in both cases the answers or paintings that are generated are based on what exists. They are using existing data. The AI Creative Director will give you suggestions on what exists and what has worked. The advantage of that is very little risk. And perhaps, in a very fast world, that is the point. The disadvantage is you pretty much stay where you are. Risk, used to be how you got to reward. These days certainty seems to be its own reward.

The new Rembrandt I am sure is magnificent. But is it better than the original? And, is it really new? No. It’s been done. It’s just a very sophisticated copy. Is it more important than an artist in some shitty basement trying to do something authentic? No.

Picasso said computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Answers and speed these days seem to be valued above all else.

However, I believe there is something far more valuable.

Being Human.

Being alive is something an algorithm cannot do. Not yet anyway.

And being alive, is how you feel something new.

That will always be the difference.

An algorithm might hear the music.

But we feel it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advertising. Why Robots don’t do stand-up.

 

Unknown

“Sometimes you can’t see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others.”

Ellen DeGeneres

Many years ago there was a small stand-up comedy club called Cool Runnings in Melville, a suburb of Johannesburg. It was like a tiny sweaty cave where almost every comic worth his or her salt would do a set.

My friend Oscar Strauss and I were going to make a short film about a comic who had never been on stage. We followed him around for a couple of days, watching him rehearse and interviewing him about his material. Then came the big night. Within 30 seconds we realised this might be the worst idea we had ever had. This guy was ridiculously bad. I actually stopped filming because I was so embarrassed. He wasn’t funny so any empathy you had for him from the interviews went out the window. So, we ended up with a film without an ending.

But because of this doomed project I spent a lot of time there. And one night, I think it was Open Mike night, an interesting event happened. An older man got up and began to tell jokes. He was metronomic in his pace and didn’t listen to the audience. It was like he was reciting a shopping list. And because of this, the jokes just weren’t funny. You could see he had rehearsed over and over. He was robotic. Nothing would stop him. Even as the ice-cubes that were being thrown hit him in the face, he just kept going. He had made two cardinal sins. He had ignored and wasn’t listening to his audience. And, he had eliminated any shred of humanity out of his performance.

Humanity is a very underrated quality.

This is something Microsoft found out this week. They created what they called an artificially intelligent Chatbot called Tay. They released it online and within 24 hours it had become a holocaust denying racist. It was programmed to learn from interactions it had with real people on twitter. And, as you can imagine, they fed it the most racist, offensive stuff they could. A perfect algorithm, destroyed by a couple of trolls in a single day.

This shows us two things. Firstly, people very seldom do what you want them to do. They are unpredictable, so you better have more than one approach, as most great comics do.

Secondly, artificial intelligence, not to mention human intelligence, seems to really struggle with context. Which of course is everything. Just ask Microsoft.

The power of context. Comics are not just funny because of what they say. They are funny because of how they say it. And when they say it. This comes from listening. Perhaps the most human thing we can do.

My entire advertising career has been about listening and understanding context. You have many long conversations when making a commercial or piece of content. You lock down the art direction, the lighting, the script and storyboard.

And guess what always becomes tricky? The tone. The context. I have spent years in meetings where either the client, director or the agency normally end up saying this phrase:

“That’s not how I saw that in my head.”

And that is after many rounds of discussion and research. So, like that metronomic comic from all those years ago you can have all the information and still not get it right because the picture you are painting is not what your audience is seeing. A great comic makes you see the same picture he has in his head. Great creatives can do the same.

This is very seldom done just with information or data. At best, that just gives you a starting point or target. At worst you get Tay. As Einstein said information is not knowledge. You still have to do something that transforms information into an idea. Information doesn’t connect, ideas do.

What normally gets you there is a common human experience, a shared feeling and let me stress this, really listening. Humanity or a word I like, humanness. This sadly seems to be something people in our business are frightened of these days. People are far happier believing there is a clinical, logical process or list to create what every brand wants. Emotion and feeling. This is madness.

This is what I often find so strange about our business. Imagine advertising was stand-up comedy. There would be a huge amount of thought put into the venue. The food would be good. Fantastic wardrobe. Great lighting. There would be weeks of discussion and research as to how you create the perfect jokes. They would be written down and then read out perfectly by someone with perfect teeth. Everything would be perfect.

Nobody would be laughing though because we would have forgotten one thing.

Human beings don’t want perfection. They want connection.