Strands of Genius: Zoom Dysmorphia, Principles of Creative Effectiveness, Better Ways to Be Informed
plus our thoughts on: breathwork, nostalgia
WRITING FROM | Nashville, TN
WORKING ON | Stakeholder interview discussion guides, project kick-offs, travel planning
LOOKING AHEAD
March 12-17 | Nashville, TN
March 17-21 | Atlanta, GA
March 21-31 | London, UK [Faris][Rosie TBD]
April 1-29 | Beersheba Springs, TN
April 29-May 1 | Nashville, TN
May 1-28 | London, UK
May 28-June 6 | TBD: Portugal or France
June 6-24 | London, UK
June 24-27 | New York, NY
June 27-July 12 | Wingdale, NY
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
After taking two weeks off, we’re feeling rested and restless. Sometimes people say they need a vacation from vacationing… and TBH, we’re feeling that a little bit. Taking time away from our screens is always welcome. Celebrating two people we love getting married was incredibly special. An extended vacation with some of our favorite people after so long without a friend vacation was super fun. And yet… health club fell by the wayside. We were nursing hangovers rather than healthy spirits on our yoga mats ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (It happens!) But, we’re excited for a little more routine and a lot more rest.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Supergoop unseen sunscreen (not an sponsorship, just a genuine product endorsement/recommendation for anyone who hates sunscreen), (this is Faris, I want to second that, I hate the way sunscreen usually feels and this is really great), Scott&Ivan, all their families and friends, Javier, a yacht that didn’t quite go where we wanted it to, Isla Holbox, group tattoos, too many tequila shots, Chedraui rotisserie chicken, island micheladas, delicious ceviche from Isla Mujeres, a lack of wifi & YOU.
S C H O O L O F S T O L E N G E N I U S >> H I G H L I G H T S
// Breathwork Session with Georgia Roberts | Community Meet Up
Monday, April 4th at 3:30 PM EDT // 7:30 PM BST
:: THE LINKS ::
A CASE OF ZOOM DYSMORPHIA
I (Rosie) loved this take on Zoom Dysmorphia because it captures a few things that I feel like have been missing from the previous conversations around Zoom fatigue. 1) It’s not just that we have to look at ourselves more, it’s that we don’t always recognize what we see. 2) It’s not just that we feel judged on our appearances, it’s that our fatigue increases and our engagement decreases, the more time we spend on Zoom with our cameras on. “Part the problem of Zoom Dysmorphia, then, is that no one is supposed to look at their faces all day. But the deeper problem is that women are trained to dislike those faces — not because they don’t look like their own, but because they don’t look like the ideal.” She notes that she doesn’t judge those who use Botox (and says she doesn’t think it’s different from dying your hair or an Invisalign that’s not medically needed)… “But I wonder, too — as so many have before me — about all the energy we’re spending trying to win a game we’re set up to lose, instead of changing the parameters of the game itself,” writes Anne Helen Peterson 3) She sums up her piece with a link to another long read article (The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors) and notes how men would paint pictures of women and title them “Vanity.” And here’s where things get more interesting: “Mirror gazing for women “was (and still is) a survival technique. In reality, a woman at the mirror is practicing. She’s seeing herself how men see her, how society sees her. She’s assessing her value and figuring out how to enhance her worth, her power.” Zoom can easily feel like the latest iteration of that mirror: yet another way to see ourselves the way those in power see us. But unlike the still image, which freezes our value in place, video does something slightly different. It catches us in communication, in doing, in being. It reminds us — uncomfortably at first — that the whole of the self is much more than the ability to set one’s face. It re-adds the complexity to the picture.” (Anne Helen Peterson)
PRINCIPLES OF CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS
We’ve been doing a lot of work on creative effectiveness for various clients and that means reading widely across the robust research that exists. ‘Good creative’ is widely acknowledged as the biggest contributor to advertising effectiveness, both short term and long, but what constitutes ‘good’? “We mostly recognize ‘good creative’ by its impact, because advertising is creativity in the service of commerce. ‘Good creative’ drives fame” but what does it look like? Well, we know that “Creativity is most effective when it is distinctive, emotional, novel, well-branded and has some longevity” so Faris explored what means and some implications in his column this month. (WARC)
BETTER WAYS TO BE INFORMED
This is a very entertaining short video describing how we struggle to consume news in times of extremity, without making ourselves feel bad, with some useful and considered tips and tactics to staying informed, should you choose to, while protecting your mental health. See Faris’ media pyramid for more of this sort of thinking, which we need more than ever in light of the ‘context collapse’ of real time social media feeds, that currently intersperse war footage with fast food restaurant brands making fun of each other. We especially the recommendation in this video to use email newsletters ;) (Youtube )
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: NOSTALGIA, REDUX ::
While on vacation, I read Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Anderson, which is very good.
(Practically all non-fiction books have a subtitle but rarely do you see a sub-sub heading, with two colons! I probably shouldn’t read this sort of thing on vacation since it is wonderfully written and researched but somewhat disheartening, let’s say, about the current state of my nominal adopted home.)
Like his previous book, also great, called Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History (double colon!), it’s about the USA and how it is, in many ways, exceptional, but especially in how it has come to think about money, and community, and taxes, and itself and its own history. Anderson is a funny, passionate and erudite writer.
His primary thesis is that for most of its relatively short history, the USA was obsessively focused on the new, which drove it to staggering economic heights, as fashions and fads turned over so fast you could almost feel it, driving consumption and innovation. Pictures of young people from the 50s and the 60s, or even the early 60s to the later half, are distinct and easy to identify. That process of cultural experimentation seems to have slowed down dramatically, photos of people from the early parts of this century easily co-mingle with photos from today, literally thanks to the internets, and the fashion is mostly identical, or recycled from earlier eras. Bucket hats are back! Maybe cargo shorts next? (“Please noooooooo,” interjects Rosie.)
Part of this Kurt ascribes to a backlash to the intensity of new in the 1960s, but part of it is built into the identity of the USA, which, as a very young country, is uniquely prone to extremely recent nostalgia. Cowboys like Wild Bill Hickok became carnival attractions within their own lifetime, as the reality of the Old West rapidly gave way to myth-making. Further, aspects of that nostalgia are used as cultural vectors to propagate increasingly reactionary conservative values, trying to turn the clock back on progressive gains made for minority groups over the last few decades, involving women’s or LGBTQ+ rights, for example.
Or, at least, seeming to - but Anderson’s insight is that this is mostly distraction, because the only motivation of the wealthy extreme right is, and has always been, to ensure the rich get richer. The wealthiest don’t care a whit about the culture war, they archly weaponize wedge issues to distract liberals, who do care about equality and helping the oppressed, from having the bandwidth to tackle the financial re-organization of the country, especially around taxes, and loopholes in the code - like the carried interest loophole that lets fund managers magically turn their income into capital gains, with a much lower tax rate - that only apply to a handful of the very wealthiest Americans. Hence the current state of inequality which only really compares to the Gilded Age a century ago, and the consolidated dominance of a handful of companies in every sector.
I’ve been thinking about this, via a media lens, since at least the 90s when I was the media editor of my university newspaper, examining how remakes had begun to be a thing, and are now the only thing, and I wrote a long, cultural analysis about ‘toxic nostalgia’ in 2016…
…so it’s fascinating to see a writer explore this thesis and its implications, especially one who has been working in the media, as journalist and satirist, throughout this period. Some of his personal stories are gloriously funny and very prescient.
For the advertising focused, I also wrote about how this phenomenon has been playing out in our industry, in 2020, and I've put an extract of that below since it has some more specific recommendations that might be helpful, since the trend continues apace. At least, two Super Bowl spots were ‘homages’ to previous Super Bowl spots this year! What I call ‘assets’ here have since come to be known as ‘fluent devices’ thanks to the excellent work and writing of Orlando Wood.
Hindsight is so 2020: Why advertisers are doubling down on nostalgia
The science fiction author William Gibson, famed for his vision and coinage of ‘cyberspace’, recently suggested that we have grown weary of the future. “All through the 20th century we constantly saw the 21st century invoked,” he said. “How often do you hear anyone invoke the 22nd century? Even saying it is unfamiliar to us. We’ve come to not have a future”. He dubbed this “future fatigue” and suggested we have retreated from the techno-utopian ‘Californian Ideology’ - a mix of technology, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism - and that the backlash had brought us to the present moment and the explosion of mindfulness. This is, however, not the only evident cultural reaction.
When faced with an increasingly complex present in which various core cultural narratives seem to be in question, there are two distinct human responses. One is to imagine a better future, which is loosely progressive, and the other is to harken back to an imagined past. Focusing on the present is inherently difficult for human minds, they roam past and future while we make tea, hence the reason meditation was invented: to calm our monkey mind. This, combined with the ever increasing fragmentation of media, which makes it harder to make new things famous from scratch, is partially why culture seems unable to resist the lure of nostalgia, in movies, music, television and politics [which seem increasingly blurred]. Nostalgia comes with built-in audiences and awareness.
Inevitably, any trend in media and culture will find its way into advertising, which faces its own complex present. The recent batch of research from Binet & Field and System1 both suggest a ‘crisis in creativity’ - specifically that there has been a decline in the effectiveness of ideas that are winning creative awards over the last decade or so. When considering that, one avenue to explore is going back before that to modern classic campaigns and assets that have performed in the past.
Ten years ago, Old Spice and W&K caught the ‘lightning in a bottle’ they strive for with an ad that dominated the Super Bowl and advertising conversations for years, despite not airing during the game. They followed up with the Responses campaign, perhaps the apotheosis of ‘real time marketing’ and the start of its decline. This year the Man Your Man Could Smell like returns to embarrass his son, who favors the more reserved Ultra Smooth line, with his magical masculinity. At the time, there was a typically polarized debate about the efficacy of the work, in comparison to its social media and cultural impact, but the Effies award paper shows that sales more than doubled during the campaign. Another ‘modern classic’ campaign that had substantial momentum on the early web was Budweiser’s ‘Wassup.’ It became a ‘winged word’, flying out of the ad into imitative parlance.
‘Wassup’ returns with a remake featuring Alexa and various internet-enabled devices talking to each other, jumping on the voice bandwagon with a message to avoid drunk driving, in a co-promotion with Uber. In the UK, one of the most famous poster campaigns of all time has just returned. The Economist has resurrected its classic white-on-red letterbox posters originally written by the legendary David Abbott. The new work also features Alexa, because it is a ‘sign of the times’.
The campaign most obviously drawing from the nostalgia wave, which means that the movies currently playing at the cineplex are Star Wars, Bad Boys, Jumanji and Top Gun, is ‘Sequels’ from Geico. The strategy might be showing but it’s one of the few brands with the creative breadth and heritage to make this idea work. The insurance giant ran some of its modern classics and then asked fans to vote for their favorite characters, doing some large scale likeability research on their underused brand assets.
This brings to mind the differences between ads and assets. Assets require investment and accrue value slowly, they are elements of brand. Characters like Progressive’s Flo become more valuable the longer they run and they can do a lot of creative heavy lifting. This requires longer term thinking and investment in the present, which is where our future fatigue fails us.
Another way of thinking about future fatigue is short-termism, which is an ongoing challenge. Measuring ads solely for their immediate effect, rather than for their potential as assets, means it’s less likely we will keep investing in them, even if they are gaining strength. Brand characters and distinctive formats are assets, whereas Wassup is an ad. True, true.
FX
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rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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