Cultural Cartography

Cultural Shortcuts

Had a very interesting conversation today which got me thinking. I was talking to a planner in the States and was trying to describe a certain company to him. I tried words like "progressive" versus "staid", I tried "bigger on the outside" versus "small on the inside". I even tried "more like Unilever and Procter than Nike" and I still don't think it connected. And then we started talking about what sort of people it was that worked there and he said "they sound quite Middle America" and I realised that actually that was precisely what I needed as a short cut. Forget descriptive words, forget analogies, just compare things to types of people that other people know and you're away.

How to stop people meddling with our work?

A semi-serious post after a meeting where a client in all seriousness actually said "But we tested that line last year in a different campaign and the research said it worked, so why can't we use it here?"

Making advertising into a science.
I don't think the general public would tell Einstein that his formula were not quite right or Crick and Watson that maybe DNA is a different shape, so why do people who don't know anything about communication persist in telling those whose work it is to provide communication, how to do it.

I don't mind clients who spend a lot of time working on communication adding their tuppence, but I do mind people who are in production or product development or god forbid bookkeeping telling me that they don't think what we've done is right. As if they've thought about the target group and the communication objective and also about how communication works and what the best channel is to communication what.

It makes my blood boil.

So I've decided to create a new school of advertising. It's not about KISS, it's not about single mindedness, it's about something that has such a complicated formula and background that nobody will dare to challenge me on anything. I will be the queen of the world and the queen of .... OK yes, you can see that meglomania is taking over already. But it's an important point that in the world of communication we don't seem to have worked hard enough to make our work feel like something only we can do.

suggestions for a complicated formula welcome. It could look like this.

But should have the effect of a black box so that nobody suggests changing anything.