awshitnotagain

Warning: May encounter f-word. Read carefully.

Two years ago some guy in New Brunswick threatened to beat the crap out of a school principal who stopped his little school kids singing O Canada every morning as if they were Americans. The principal reasoned that we should keep the singing to really meaningful situations, like when someone dies or maybe on Remembrance Day, but not for hockey games, or curling bonspiels or by half-awake little kids in school who probably didn’t even get breakfast that day.

We’re celebrating bombing Libya and taking credit for the end of Gadaffi. We have these polemically-correct people like Don Cherry, Stephen Harper, Ezra Levant and Jason Kenney deciding who is Canadian enough to be one of their guys. How anal is that?  Now, because of these polemically-correct dudes we’re all self-conscious, and getting worried that someone’s going to see you sitting quiet and not shouting at the kid refereeing your kid’s hockey game and maybe taking down your license number to send to the Report An Unpatriotic LazyPerson Hotline. RAULPH! (Kind of a Rottweiler sounding. Actung!)

No, It’s no fun being a Canadian anymore. Polemically-correct guys have taken all the fun out of it. Now you have to wave the flag or cheer on kids hitting other kids with sticks. We used to be confident. Now we’re all insecure and uptight about who we are. And we’ve become angry with each other. Doesn’t make any sense.

There’s other stuff coming off this pretentious horseshit too. You don’t see huge flag poles with tiny Canadian flags on them anymore. I liked those little Canadian flags. It put the context of the country in equilibrium with our own ideas about how we treat each other. And the big poles said something about the country’s structure. Solid, brick shithouse strong. Hearty. It’s windy here, and cold as a well-digger’s bum. We need stuff that won’t blow away or get brittle. In other words, catch my drift,  patriotism, really is the refuge of the scoundrel. It’s the people who make the country, not a flag that we should be concerned about.  Because if you worship a flag, you have to agree with all the stuff it represents, like how the poor are treated and how our first Nations people are treated, shit like that. Some of it is shameful. How can you salute that every day or sing about it in schools.

People all over the world used to like Canada because it was benign and rather nice. Simple folk. We were confident enough to make fun of American ignorance, and their patronizing opinion of us, because we knew that although far from perfect, we had a better system for living on this continent than they did and weren’t all caught up with gold medals on our balls and saluting everything that had a uniform on it. It was another way to live in North America, sort of for the people, not in spite of them. Instead of American exceptionalism we were into Canadian everyoneism.

Of course this didn’t apply to the already insecure dudes, the Yankee Yearners, like Brian Mulroney, a very nice guy who got his start sitting on the knee of that bigot McCormick who owned the Chicago Tribune, and gave Mulroney 10  bucks for singing “When Irish eyes Are Smiling”. And remember Mulroney and his wife singing with that refrigerator spokesman Ronald Reagan. Unfuckingbelieveable. Even my dog was sick on the couch and he could hardly hear. That’s when people started wondering what Brian was ingesting that wasn’t in Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating.

The business elites here, including their Ibbotsonian-style press lackeys are still pretty much convinced that the real game is down south too and we’re just wuzzes. I think John Manley is now head anti-wuzz, but I haven’t seen the standings lately.

Before they took all the fun out of Canada I loved hockey because it was a game, tough, and honest, itchy stockings and all. After the game you did other stuff, you didn’t keep the sweater on and sit in a bar eating buffalo wings and watching other games, grunting and making those Don Cherry comments. You had a life. When kids played hockey you didn’t have a bunch of parents watching, and yelling to hit that little bugger in the other team’s sweater. Parents weren’t even there. they were working or at home making love or Shephard’s Pie and maybe Finnan Haddie, not wasting their time trying to live vicariously through some skinny kid who has been taught, like a monkey on a chain to please his or her masters. Now we have little kids talking about hits as if you got an assist for delivering one. All because of a man who never won a Stanley Cup, played one game in the NHL, and never went to war, yet talks as if he liberated Holland. An insecure person if I ever saw one. Now kids play football the same way. I heard a coach telling 7-year-olds about hitting. “Hit every guy you see wearing the other team’s sweaters.” Running, catching passes, blocking, tackling were not even mentioned, winning either. It’s now only about hitting. In hockey they have hit stats. Done wonders for Radiology department productivity stats too.  Cherry himself must also have some kind of serious Gadaffi-type psychosis to keep wearing those jackets made from chintz sofas. It’s no fun being Canadian anymore.

We’re now told it’s great to be a jingoist, to adore the military, and above all, to show the world we can, to foul this essay with an atrocious cliché, “Punch above our weight!” Oops, sorry, I just threw up in my mouth.

Our soldiers, honest, straightforward and honourable people led by political deviates are overseas getting killed saving people in Afghanistan while some of our own Canadian people, First Nations and Innu, for example, are up poo-poo creek and have life spans in the 40’s.

A sly cabal of thin-lipped rightist think tank jerks keep spreading the word about how terrible our health care system is while our life expectancy keeps rising and the people using the system love it. Unfortunately, nice people like squash players and runners get a bit pissed because they have to wait a bit for treatment. If they didn’t run, they wouldn’t need the knee surgery. No one said they had to run a marathon. They could just run enough to stay fit and feel good. Wearing out your knee joints is a sign you need to speak to a therapist. TO BE CONTINUED AS THE COUNTRY TURNS RIGHT AND CONTINUES ITS HEADY STROLL INTO RATPOOPLAND.

My own early experience with market research uncovers an nagging bias as I reflect on my life in this business. Fit for nothing else, I fell into advertising. My lack of education, failure at schools, insecurity, partial madness, and need to build model airplanes and send them aloft, flaming, assured me a full advertising career, although I knew it not at the time. In those days, of course, advertising was not beset with left- brain, process-driven people bent on careers, people who wanted to stay away from “career-threatening moves.”

In those days, we just wanted to do ads. It was a surprise to me that money was involved. It was not a surprise to the agency owners, male to a vest, gladhanders with carnivorous smiles, and that kind of Christian decency which didn’t stop them from paying us so-called creative types a pittance of what they spent on camel’s hair overcoats or keeping their wayward children out of the newspapers and jail. But there were advantages to working in their ad agencies which few creative people today enjoy.

They tolerated individuality. They revelled in turmoil. We got pissed as newts on good Scotch every Friday afternoon in the office. We had chair races down the corridors. We made gliders out of foamcore. Big ones, four-foot wingspans. One of mine could carry a stapler and three erasers. Even the suits were nuts. One of them was brought back from lunch in total amnesia. For weeks after, we’d knock on his door and inquire: “Any news yet on who you are?” This was before the full effects of a plague hit advertising, the terrible, droning infestation called advertising research. Pythagoras in bed with Nostrodamus. Although it began in the early ‘20s, with earnest scholars trying to ascertain which messages evoked positive responses, and evolved to the study of eyeball twitches, and the measure of moisture on respondents’ palms, advertising research has today become almost a branch of the forest products industry, one of its main purposes being the covering of clients’ asses with sufficient paper to prevent career damage.

Advertising research as an industry has grown from 500 million to 7.5 billion dollars a year in the past 30 years. Yet we notice no great improvement in advertising creativity or efficacy. Improvements exist in terms of digital technology, but the large mass of advertising is as dull and boring as ever. Have we seen any enormous advertising breakthroughs which have exceeded those of the 1960s? Those campaigns which have outstanding persuasion and memorability are most likely to have been conceived in spite of research’s mournful admonitions to cease, to water down, to play safe. Yes, we need ad research. Yes, it’s helpful. And yes, there are a lot of bad ideas out there. In fact there are mostly non-ideas out there.

But good creative people can be just as wrong as any $500,000 research study. And for a lot less. What creative judgement could out err Detroit’s researched evaluation of the meaning of foreign imports? Or Cocoa-Cola’s disastrous research which promised success for New coke?

There are no more leaders. Only systems.

The loss of creativity and originality which advertising research has inflicted in toto on advertising is mirrored in the loss of leadership which political polling research has inflicted on political leaders. Political polling has bred chicken leaders. They peck and creep. The research numbers, however inaccurate in their biased gathering, are looked upon as gospel truth by news media and political hacks alike.

That they are answers to biased and restrictive questions asked over the phone at the most inopportune times, like while your sausages or toast is burning, doesn’t matter. The numbers matter. They don’t have to be correct. They just have to be numbers. What they bring the process-driven political or advertising research person is a version of truth.

That it may be complete horse manure, formed from 250 phone interviews with people who are not only disinterested but so bored with watching Seinfeld reruns they’d just love to give you their opinion on user-pay healthcare for welfare-ineligible immigrants living in semi-detached urban dwellings, doesn’t matter.

That it’s complete horse manure doesn’t matter. But 250 tonnes of horsepoop is indeed impressive compared to one steaming trailside dump. In short, personal initiative, intuition, vision, inspiration, originality, courage and optimism, the guts and glory of the big idea as it is of the individual, have been sacrificed to the big team approach and the illusory safety of numbers. That spontaneity that each of us has, that we should bring joyously to our work, is dead. And alas, as creatives we have gone from being optimistic adventurers, to being the prey of research accountants. The extraordinary ability of the human mind to think creatively is a problem for ad agencies because they want to be recognized as technologically able.

Numbers instead of ideas.

Our submission to technological reductionism and numeracy in all creative advertising thinking endangers the creation of persuasive ideas. The advertising milieu has opted for a physics approach rather than an intuitive, biological approach with little room for intuitive thought or what might be termed, local knowledge. To quote the eminent British physicist, Lord Kelvin: “When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind”. Kelvin uttered this in 1884, but it is gospel today.

Let me answer Kelvin with the quote of a famous American inventor, yacht designer and engineer, Nathaniel Greene Herreshoff. Herreshoff designed 6 America’s Cup winners in the late 19th century, the same time as Kelvin’s quote. In a speech at M.I.T. Herreshoff noted: “When designing tall structures such as masts, while it is important to get the mathematics right, it is even more important that the mast look as if it won’t fall down.”

Staying within the yachting context, Ted Turner once had Britton Chance design a potential America’s Cup yacht and Chance, a brilliant and very scientific naval architect, was convinced by the numbers that he had a design breakthrough. His yacht featured a keel trailing edge which was 5 inches wide instead of tapering to a point. His research numbers pointed to great boatspeed.

However, in reality the resulting drag from turbulence made the boat very slow, and Turner, losing race after race, furious, and never without a crackling retort, yelled at Chance: “Geez, Britt, even a turd is pointy at both ends!”

In more temperate contemplation, the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell once noted: “What I do is arrive at an idea I like, then I try to prove it with mathematics. If I can’t, I don’t throw the idea out, I throw the mathematics out, and start again.” Therefore we have Math; Math Lite, and Math with Added Thinking Power! Unfortunately, straight Math is the marketing metrics mantra today.

I hesitate to say it, but I realize I have become a very thinkless person. Incredibly ignorant of my own system of government, completely saturated in Americana to the point that I must use Walt Kelly’s Pogo to try to poke my thinking awake. Who are we? Why are we? Zombies in tuques slowly pushing carts and trudging through shopping malls and Wal-Marts, grazing, looking for the next trinket to bring its plastic happiness to us and quell for awhile that hollow feeling that we are really a people without a country? A nagging feeling we try to douse by doing things that don’t require us to actually think?

The i-tech revolution of mindless activities is a godsend here, and may be the reason we are its greatest users on earth. We have become citizens without a country, favouring American TV for our entertainment and political interest. Or copying it like, CBC’s Dragon’s Den, proving we can do puerile crap too. Is there no more sense of common good, no sense of Canadianness unless it’s manifested as hockey? Can you imagine Americans only watching Canadian television programming? Flip that thought and you have our predicament. The second largest physical country on earth with a consequent tiny  population who, since Canada’s discovery almost 500 years ago, in large part, have lived not by their ingenuity and innovation, but by simply scratching out, digging up, cutting down, trapping, shooting, and hooking whatever riches existed within our thrall. Still doing it today, like poor pickers in an enormous bitumen garbage dump.

Our aboriginal forebears had more innovation and more ingenuity as well as an established cultural and artistic sense that reflected their own presence in time and space. A more honest sense of who and where they were. They’re paying for it now though.

Several of our attempts at turning our dug-up, cut-down riches into compassion and feeling have been repudiated by our present government’s eager appeals to our own selfishness and our dark side, our need to be entertained and to be thought of as individuals, and not as part of a wide-spread collectivity that realizes the value of connectiveness as a channel to express compassion and understanding of the human condition, and hence our survival as a country. An entity, an ongoing conversation about ourselves. Not wanted by this control-freak led government.

With the help of marketers, sly political back roomers as well as corporate and almost fascistic think-tankers, we have been trained to be selfish. And so we gave our votes to a political party that wants our television programming to be  American. A political party that would vastly increase military spending, eager to buy twenty-five thousand million dollars worth of fighters designed for incursions as stealthy clean-up fighters in other countries while lying to us that it would cost just 14 billion. A government that is spending enormously on the building of new jails to continue to fashion us as Americans, while cutting every facet we have of empathy for each other.

Meanwhile our aboriginal populations, now have the same life spans as those third world people we have cynically used in their crises to ensure our being seen as a great and benevolent people. Unless we wake up and begin to think of ourselves as a collectivity, a country of equally different people together, a conversation, if you will, we’re doomed.

We’ve truly become thinkless, and we’re at the nadir of this country’s headlong plummet into selfishness, as the last election result is proving. Nastiness is growling up, snarling and screeching insults at anyone who is “other” in opinion or make-up, and I question all the things I have contributed to make this so.

The most I can come up with is, pathetically, a comment from the American genius, Walt Kelly, “I have seen the enemy and he is us”.

Alas, I’m thinkless, unless it’s about me.

The trappings of brand are so clearly defined, its delineations so firm one wonders how the object of such a construction can ever receive the affection of a buyer, customer or consumer. Yet it is with affection that one becomes close to products or services. This affection is a relative term to be sure, but it helps us think of how products and services become chosen. Over-emphasis on the technological elements of brand keep us from the actual feel of the person. And we neglect those tonalities which can build affection. Rules, architecture and brand literature have become ends in themselves, assuring that incursions into intuition, exploration, and musings are de-valued currencies.

Many companies use brand as a physical control mechanism through grids, templates and type  dictates, in the hope that aggregate physical uniformity will build positive awareness. A solely physical aesthetic becomes outdated almost as soon as it is established, and its use, restricts its efficacy whereas an approach using tonal value as the essential element is not affected by time or space as there is no physical trail, merely feeling.

I use “tonal value” to describe a mechanism for ensuring that a given product or service is stimulating that inner core of affectionate feeling. Although tonality in our business normally refers to an approach stance taken in a specific execution, tonal value here is the feeling of comfort emanating from the person relative to a given product. It is always important that the tonal value strives to increase the affection in which a product is held, not just in the execution of the advertising.

Because we are interested in the positive feelings a company or brand elicits, we must design tonalities which enhance and encourage these feelings. But often we seem concerned with rigid architectural grids and logical appeal masquerading as feeling. Yet brands like Nike are unhampered by a need to have physical commonality in their advertising as long as the tonality remains constant to the feeling Nike wants to engender and enrich. And so Nike work may have words, no words, hand-written scripts , illustration, photography, people, no people, but it will always have the same tonality. And it results in advertising which eases its way into the marrow of positive feeling consumers have for Nike, without danger of becoming outdated.

Rather than projecting a structured message, this work draws the reader into the advertisement, fostering participation. I have called this pulling in of the reader/viewer; ingression. In a similar way to Nike work, some Volkswagen work has been  very ingressive, using nuance and subtlety to stroke those deep affectionate feelings people have for the car, letting the windshield wipers grooving sweep enrich an experience of feeling, bringing the people in the car into empathy with their outside world. Another spot continues this feeling as we see people exuding good feelings, passing them on, relating to life, being inclusive, all under the aegis of a Volkswagen. This is such a powerful and positive change from earlier Quebec Volkswagen Golf spots which had a macho and surly: “Tasse-toi mon oncle!” (Get out of the way!) projected attitude which may have momentarily excited an element of the market but did nothing to enhance love, need and affection for a Volkswagen.

An ingressive approach, isn’t in your face, it’s in your soul. And it’s nothing new. There have been many campaigns which used a rhetorical approach to involve readers, viewers or listeners. What these campaigns do is involve by insisting on participation in the recipient’s own terms.

For example, in the late 1970’s, The Long Distance Feeling juxtaposed familial scenes with romantic love songs, each one resurrected from the past.

These songs; Near You, Anytime, and Are You Lonesome tonight, had been old hits revived yet again by Elvis Presley. Their rights were bought for as little as $2500. Today, published hits can cost a million. There were bargains lying around in the ‘70s, waiting to be discovered and to connect again with the feelings of people.

The scenes in The Long distance Feeling were purposely left unresolved, so the viewer could participate by inserting her or himself in the scene, and thereby creating it. No one was ever seen with a phone and no phone ever appeared. Morris Wolfe, writing in Saturday Night noted:

There’s a poignancy, a bitter-sweetness about this sixty seconds of film that I find quite overwhelming. There’s a Japanese flavour to it, its individual images expand in my head like good haiku; the cumulative effect of the images is reminiscent of the work of the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. The world of Ozu is the world seen through the eyes of a devout Buddhist kneeling on his or her tatami mat. It’s a world of fleeting human experience, filled with what the Japanese call mono no aware, sympathetic sadness. (Poor old Ozu would turn over in his grave to hear his work compared with a television commercial.)

I know that in the U.S. long-distance calls covering the same distance as calls in Canada cost less than half of what they do here. I know that, nonetheless, the CRTC has just allowed Bell Canada yet another hefty increase in its rates. I know that Erik Barnouw is right when he says in The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate that “to manufacture a product without at the same time manufacturing a demand has become unthinkable.” (People have to be taught to want “The Long Distance Feeling.”) I know that these commercials have been successful in doing just that — revenue from long-distance calls increased by fifteen per cent last year. I know all these things and they bother me. But they don’t keep me from getting choked up every time that damn “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” commercial comes on TV.

— Saturday Night, November 1978

While the television landscape was frenetic with projected messages, these ingressive spots  just appeared as havens, inviting participation, encouraging reflection. And each time a Long Distance Feeling spot aired, toll rose dramatically. I repeat, these were not projections, they were communions with viewers, nothing analogous, not actors acting, but rather memories and love restirring.

Television is a landscape, for the most part frenetic and noisy. We have made it that way because it is expensive and exciting and we feel we must be very dynamic when using it.

It is a mistake to define television as something we look at. We must think of it as something we look through, to see something else. We must reach through the medium to reach the person. We invariably think of television in terms of movement. The pictures almost always move. Yet when we put still pictures on television something interesting happens. We want to look at them. Because they’re recognized as stills, they alert the mind to look for content which explains. With moving pictures, we are trained to go for quick cuts and tricky bits which may, with music, deliver an effect which in itself explains nothing but is fun to look at. The right music, sometimes strange and unfamiliar, in conversation with sparse simple visuals can be haunting and thought-provoking. But the stylistic tethers which the awards show dictates consider kosher for the moment dictate the way we do ads (win approvals from judges), and we experiment little with the medium.

If we are quiet and intriguing, we can enter in near silence and stay for awhile in the viewer mind. This is the basis of ingression. The hard part of advertising; actually getting in to the viewer’s mind. Breaking through the clutter is merely elbowing your way through a crowd and having nothing to say when you get to the front. This work needs extensive thought and a research methodology which breaks free from the restrictive tenets of both qualitative and quantitative judgement which in the advertising milieu is frequently taken as fact, rather than as raw material for critical thinking.

An ingressive approach  is based on the premise that the effectiveness of any communication is dependent on the depth of feeling realized by the recipient for that piece relative to the bank of feeling already held.

The psychological stance of a recipient is all important. Brand frequently tries to present a linear constancy of physical message, rather than tonality alone, mistaking  the hardware of communication with the message itself.

But the message is always the feeling.

The most powerful weapon in the marketing armamentarium is still that of a big idea, be it the product or service itself or the perspective in which it is presented. When we deal with a consumer public, we, in many cases are up against whimsy, feelings and the potential for something I call “affection”.

These are sort of G-spots of communication.

They are notoriously difficult emotions to reach, let alone categorize and qualitatively or quantitatively chart as they involve delving into the inner feelings of people, and with advertising research methodologies, usually in a group pack atmosphere. Of course, many products and services may themselves not be capable of eliciting emotional responses from respondents. For this reason, marketing strategies may just deal with logical, epidermal benefits of products and services; value, price, availability, service, rather than on the effects these benefits have on that affection roster each consumer surely holds in her or his mind for certain products.

As well, because modern brand practice is system-driven, and technological systems abhor nuance and subtlety, obvious and blatant appeals to emotion tend to replicate themselves among competitors, and cars racing through  bucolic and verdant countrysides in television commercials  appear so often that Irish and Tuscan tourist boards must benefit greatly, even as car sales lag.

I believe that a consumer emotionally accepts the product on a tonal feeling of comfort basis, depending upon the product’s ability to inherently elicit feelings. If this is so, then marketing must lift the heavy emphasis on brand as control and begin to focus on stimulating the affectionate inner feelings of consumers relative to a product in question. The only way to do this is to throw emphasis on the creative idea as the driver which can reach past the logical appeals and the banal cliches and caress the cosy inner feelings of the subject consumer.

It may be easy to establish this tonality through the advertising, and this is sometimes very effective, but much product advertising may be enjoyed without the  product itself eliciting that comfortable feeling, and hence not being purchased. Pepsi advertising is frequently liked better than Coke advertising, yet Coke is the enduring symbol of America, not Pepsi. It is the real thing. This ironic effect of “like of advertising with reluctance to purchase” results when the communication is pushed out from the marketing perspective rather than pulled in or ingressed from the customer/viewer perspective. (The converse can also be true, abysmal advertising will often not deter a consumer from enjoyment of a product toward which they feel affection).

It is always important that the tonality strives to increase the affection in which the product is held, not just in the execution of the advertising.

Surely this is the great challenge, to design advertising which stimulates and increases that feeling of affectionate need a consumer can have for a particular product. Merely creating awareness is not enough, we must create and then increase those affectionate inner feelings. Brand can’t always do this effectively because it normally throws emphasis on projected, controlled messages rather than reaching in to caress the consumer’s inner feelings and emotions, letting  the consumer participate.

Brand as practiced today is predominately a technological control system and a system by definition is an enclosure. A fault of technology is its inability to process nuance, in fact, to tolerate nuance at all, PowerPoint being the classic example. Yet all feeling is composed of nuance, and nuance is what makes us all different, in the way we think, act and live.

As the elements of intuitive, creative and reflective thinking are not part of an enclosed system, they can open up the vast unexplored world of ideas and allow the unexpected, the serendipitous to occur. Why would we not take advantage of this phenomenon? When we slavishly use the brand system enclosure, we demean the importance of the freedom of the creative mind to explore, and to use nuance to reach those inner depths of affectionate feeling each consumer holds.

For all these reasons, the  recipient’s feelings should dictate the execution. This requires solid intuitive, empathic, creative and critical thinking, the hallmarks of gifted creatives.  With a dogmatic and rigid emphasis on brand dictates, creative potential to reach those inner feelings is hindered.

And, as can be clearly seen and heard in a retrospective of current advertising, creatives are left to merely construct witty lines or punny visuals,  that play around the outer fringes of a consumer’s consciousness with no chance of exciting visceral feelings of affection.

How many ads do we see that are clever and witty in themselves, but bring no promise or affection for the product they serve? Offering affectation will not stoke and enhance affection in the consumer mind. Awareness is not enough. Having someone feel affectionate towards your product is money in the bank.

In THE SCIENCE OF THE BRANDS: ALCHEMY, ADVERTISING AND ACCOUNTANCY*, Anthony Tasgal, a talented British account planner (who may be a closet creative and a good one) argues for a move to biology from physics and scientific reductionism in thinking about problems in marketing and advertising communication. The physics approach has ensured the continued use of  shaky reassurances such as quantitative research, what he calls arithmocracy; the dabbing of evaluative numbers on ideas, and a sense of brand safety because of rigid physical control of space through grids, templates and rules which purport to ensure predictability. The reality is that advertising research methodologies offer no such predictability.

A biological approach, using intuition, insight,  empirical observation, a bit of human weirdness, close study and critical thinking would seem to offer more hope of breakthroughs. Biological approaches can be at least as effective as those formed from classical physics-based research methodologies. And quite probably as wrong, although the colossal failures of research which devastated the U.S. auto industry when the foreign car invasion began would be hard to top. So would the research that stated emphatically that Doyle Dane Bernbach’s campaign for Avis: ( WE’RE NO. 2, WE TRY HARDER) would fail miserably because Americans go with winners. Perhaps the first proponent of a biological approach, William Bernbach, ignored the research and a historic campaign was born. Strategically, it was brilliant, as there was no No. 2, just Hertz with  a tremendous market share, and several other companies grovelling for crumbs. Avis instantly came up to the level of Hertz. This was the true mark of genius in the Avis campaign.

Another advantage of a biological approach is in its ability to move to the emotion side, away from the logic base of the scientific rationalists. Affection then becomes a tool although in so doing presents a problem to some creative teams who have been trained to react to briefs created in the nuance-free rationalist tradition. For example, the buzz word edgy  has come to mean moving to one side of the creative spectrum, to shock, to show the bizarre, to move toward the taboos, as far away from emotion as possible. A major error resulting from thinking that “breaking through the clutter” is the sole purpose of advertising. Breaking through meaningfully into the mind is the business of advertising.

Whole reputations have been made by simply being more gross, disrespectful, shocking. The other side of this spectrum is infinitely more dangerous for the creative. It is the side wherein the creative attempts to reach a consumer with true emotion. The danger comes because the creative is operating near Hallmark country, where the possibility of accidently producing cheesy, banal and mawkishly sentimental work is absolute anathema to a creative’s reputation.

That’s why it’s dangerous. And that’s why it’s infinitely more difficult to operate successfully at this end of the edgy spectrum. In a minefield of cheese and corn. But there is another path, where true original feeling is virally delivered right into the heart of a consumer. Few creatives are capable or have the courage to move skillfully into this area, except perhaps, in those PSA spots which inherently offer blatant emotional appeal. But it is here that the progress will be made, the affection built and the  true value of a great idea established.

In many posts past I have tried to explain some of the elements, which have helped cut down advertising’s potential to be more persuasive. Largely, in my view, it is the imposition of systems throughout our technology-driven lives which has made advertising, ineffective and in many ways patronizing. Our lives and our eras are forever themed and the general theme today is technology.

Kim Vicente, in THE HUMAN FACTOR*, offers a brilliant assessment of how technology has failed to recognize the human factor in its headlong rush to develop itself.

Vicente has done much to ease the effects of wanton technology development within the aircraft milieu. Some aircraft are now completely computerized, and airmanship has been replaced in some cases with typing skills. In fact pilots have been known to exclaim, “I can’t fly anymore, but I can type 50 words a minute”. The physical aspects of control in some aircraft have also changed, with no physical connection between control column and flying surfaces such as flaps and ailerons. These have been replaced with, basically, telephone wire attached to little servo motors near the control surfaces. Can you imagine pushing the stick sideways to bank a turn and hearing a little voice saying, “I’m away from my aileron right now, but if you leave your name, the date and the reason for your call I’ll get back to you as soon as I can”. Meanwhile the Matterhorn or a giant Burger King sign is growing larger in your windshield. What’s next?  The flight display indicating that one should proceed to the crash site?

Well, you can see the value of Vicente’s point about technology’s need for a human counterpoint.Vicente’s solution is something called Human-tech, the rational acknowledgement of the importance of the human factor in technological design. Vicente, an engineer, breaks the human factor and technology factor into five relationships. His approach calls for the application of systems-thinking to all problems involving the human element. This is an interesting book, but in a way  it reminds me of the old saw (sorry): To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My concern is with the way technology has insinuated itself into our lives. We have always had systems. But we have not always thought that we needed systems for everything or that everything was a system. I suppose we can argue that systems do comprise everything we do. We can also say a dog is a system but my dog to me is a pal who likes to pee on a tree.

But it is the religiosity and fervour of the idea by its scientifically-oriented proponents that I find disturbing. It seems to discount the power of individual thought in any attempt at solving problems, giving strength to systems thinking, while denigrating individual dynamics. Individual dynamics might simply be superb airmanship. The Air France AirBus that went down off Brazil may have been a simple failing in airmanship.

But the very premise and the consideration of Kim Vicente’s Human Factor takes it far from the thinking behind technocracy, and deals realistically with the overwhelming influences technology is exerting upon us. To his credit Kim Vicente has put out a wake-up call. My concern, of course, is how systems thinking affects the way persuasive advertising ideas are created.

Fortunately, we are beginning to see reaction from progressive elements of the advertising community with the emergence of small, simply-ordered, creative partnerships, sans retinues, and with very close associations with clients who are themselves unencumbered with technological paraphenalia and jargon.  If they can resist the technological siren call of perceived knowhow and remain small,  they will survive.

The advertising business is a simple business and self conscious because of it. It is the art of persuasion and the generation of ideas is its work. Media is transport. The death of commission and the rise of fee has required agencies to staff up with fee generators, and to acquire systems which can give a perception of prowess. Rational linear systems like account planning have reduced creatives to being highly paid cake decorators. What is required are bright creative minds which can roam the realm of the unexpected and relate findings to specific problems.

The schooled creative mind is a bright mind’s thinking tamed. It plods into its problem, satchel full of things it knows, ticking off its checklist as a pilot would, disciplined, methodical, incisive, systemitized, hoping to find a truth.

The feral creative mind, in panic to find a truth, jumps back and forth, turning over stones, sniffing the air, all at once, up and down, a niggling doubt removed, another rising, something far away related, something not, a howl in the night, until, through all the crumpled paper in a cluttered mind a light is struck that’s soon so bright a problem fades, and a feral creative mind can live another day. We need more of these feral minds.

Goodbye, good luck and don’t forget the nuance.

As the agenda emerges from the shadows, and the country increasingly shows signs of becoming a police state, where are the arrogant defenders in the media who said there was no hidden agenda?

Some of course are just selfish fools or forelock tuggers, and when you get down to the actual courageous journalists in Canada you’re faced with a very short list. They know who they are.

Editorialists in almost every newspaper in Canada urged Canadians, to give the Conservative Party a chance. Where are these fools now? Too cowardly to admit their allegiances to their owners’ dictates? Or merely naïve as most of us are, convinced it couldn’t happen in dear Canada?

Bell Media got rid of Michael Harris, purportedly because he was critical of some Israeli policies. Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail editorialists are still in awe of Stephen Harper’s leadership. Maple syrup dripping from their lauditory editorials, spiced here and there with a tut-tut or two to reduce a whiff of toadyness.

Columnists like Margaret Wente, a Canadian with almost completely untouched American libertarian biases, someone whose Ayn Rand-like anal reflexes tingle whenever there’s a liberal, social or progressive policy to denounce, will never admit she was or is wrong. It’s just not in her DNA, so she’s an innocent soul in this whole appraisal of the media’s abetting of the oncoming Canadian disaster. A nice person too, apart from her inability to think critically, and to challenge her own assumptions as she does those of others.

The real guilty ones are those who are merely day trippers, lost in thumbing their BlackBerrys or tweeting their dumb asses off. So caught up in present-mindedness they can’t think of the stinking accumulation of shit, reeking mounds of dung building around them and the entire country. I blame them for letting all of us down. Yes there are honest journalists, a majority probably, but not possessed of the courage needed to speak out in an articulate and honest manner.

The rest, whose purpose seems to be to support the party in power are merely courtiers, tacitly partnered with the PR and lobbyist factions, sneaky and vicious, unscrupulous mediocrities with no sense of honour or grasp of humanity’s need for a better world, which would bring a noble purpose to their presently trivial lives.

They’re not up to it. We’re so doomed.

In recent years, a kind of cankerous anger has muttered its way into online comments of political articles in newspapers, and the same vulgar and disrespectful, personal invective is seen in so-called attack ads.

The proportional amount of this vulgar effluent in political party terms is probably something like Conservatives 467, Liberals 24, NDP 3. These figures are about as accurate as the stats and comments in the attack ads of the various Parties, but there is a proportional disadvantage for the Conservatives as they are rolling in dough from their rabid followers and have the media tonnage to literally deluge TV land at will.

And who can blame them for getting more coverage, even if (or especially if) the ads are vindictive, tasteless, vulgar disrespectful, crass and, well, cheesy.

The seething anger problem has been defined as differences between left and right wing ideologies, and this has clouded the picture. But the current Conservative government has embraced many so-called centre-left policies. And the Liberal Party has often moved to centre-rightist expression.

What has been brought in by the Harper government is an American Republican Party  ‘dress code’ of expression, a brazen, disrespectful and frequently tacky approach against those with whom it doesn’t agree. Nowhere does it appear more viciously (and often incoherently) than in comments to online press articles. The juvenile aspects of the retorts beg the question: Is it true the Conservative government hires young people (trolls) to flood comments sections on their behalf? If so, we’ve reached a new stage in agitprop, and perhaps we could call it trollprop.

No one really wants their government to fail, nor do they expect it to be perfect. What they do expect is a modicum of decency, a respect for the instrument of Parliament, which is the voice of the people of Canada, all of them, not just little batches, here and there, who happen to have politically expedient biases and reside in strategic ridings.

This is not new, and all parties have contributed, except maybe the Greens and Rhinos. So let’s celebrate the bountiful cheesy effluent our glorious leader has imported from his buddies to the south especially the best ones at despicable and creative lying, as well as the cosmetic surgery performed on half-truths. God knows they deserve some recognition (she told me so).

After all, it is innovation, sort of, even if the entire thing was borrowed from the Americans. Each week or so, depending on their awfulness, we’ll highlight an MP who has extinguished her or himself in the style of post-Republican invective so adored by the man who brought this cheesy shit to Canada.  Bon appétit!

I have struggled for years for a word to describe the Harper Conservative Party of Canada. Right wing doesn’t go far enough. Fascist goes a bit too far. There are some worthy people in the Conservative Party. But something else about them rankles. And finally, I’ve found a word that explains, to me anyway, exactly what one might call the Conservative Party of Canada in terms of its strategic position.

A word that might explain their ramping up of prison construction, the tough on crime agenda, the faux concern for health of children and mothers worldwide, women’s right to choose aside, the brook-no-dissent against any part of Israel’s policies, the as-yet-unpublished book on hockey and the hanging out with NHL guys, kissing athletic asses instead of babies, even the appearance at a Tim Horton’s rather than going to a real meeting.

Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada is still in the thrall of Leo Strauss. And with it in seeming agreement on the need to separate thinking from principles, in fact to practice a noble deceit. A sort of two truths approach. One for fighting for one’s own ideological ends, and another truth for the masses.

Noam Chomsky said one of Lenin’s famous admonitions was that one could lie, steal, or cheat, for the cause itself has a higher truth.

In our situation here in Canada, this might be riffed as concentrating on keeping the fear and loathing ramped up from time to time, and appealing to the base interests we all possess, to our dark sides, until such time as enough mass is built to assure a majority, at which time the reality the Harper CPC yearned for, the so-called hidden agenda, could flourish.

For those four minority government years the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper was just a house with an imposing façade, all of the little touches and tugs and hopes and biases fed expertly through a propaganda system the envy of right-wingers worldwide. A sort of 21st century Goebbelsdorf, with 1500 government mediacrats checking every utterance.

The house behind the minority façade was completed years ago. An architectural maquette of it would have shown an authoritarian and dictatorial edifice built of fear and punishment. The architects were Frederich Hayek, Leo Strauss and others. Margaret Thatcher did the decorating. And the Façadists, delighted and eager to begin the tweaking,  moved in last May.

Living in a cloistered mall-less town has dangers for those who would explore outside. Just creep out of this little town and see what’s going down in the mall centres.

Mall-orgasms occurring every minute.

Overweight teens in the food court in Champlain Mall in Moncton laughing at the fart sounds their pushed back chairs make as they leave to graze again.

Dear elderly folk leaning on their shopping carts in Wal-Mart as they slowly troll the aisles, looking for their daily hit. Mesmerized young bumcrack-sporting people in the Wal-Mart’s electronics and entertainment section proving Huxley’s prophecy that given a choice we’ll entertain ourselves to death.

Everyone alone together, there for the fix, no thought buzzing above their next hit, and Mr. Harper will be in there sucking around for your vote for at least 10 years.

Meanwhile, the cars and trucks race past Sweet Little Sackville On The Marsh, the horrid screeching noise outside their closed truck windows is the rush of air being pushed by huge truck-mimicking pick-up truck frontal areas, followed closely by cup holders and the fattest people in Canada heading out to get their Lotto Max hit. Inside they listen to George Canyon, and other twangs.

This is the marrow of the country we’re talking about, the guts of it, brave and noble people, now turning themselves into Cheez-Whiz foam hat wearing clones yahooing at a free day given for winning a vote-in allowing them a little money to fix something up in town.

Meanwhile the biggest church in town is up for sale. The Memorial Library at the university, a war memorial for 73 university students killed in the Great War, has been torn down for space to put up another memorial to someone who paid for part of a new fine arts centre. And as the trucks whiz by, rattling the No Shale Gas signs, the Premier of New Brunswick has decided he wasn’t right to take away free flu shots for those most in need of them.

We’re so doomed.

The problems with the Harper government have less to do with left or right leaning in political terms than with its lack of empathy as well as its intolerance of differing opinion that has always been a defining part of the Canadian conversation. Mr. Harper and his acolytes have borrowed an American Republican Party approach that infects the very marrow of the Canadian persona.

It’s an approach that we can describe adjectivally as: Vulgar, sanctimonious, arrogant, mean, coarse, devious, unethical, humourless, unprincipled, graceless, sleazy, vicious, vile, dishonourable, thick-headed, and wrong.

And it’s unbecoming to a nation that has until now thrived and grown on its embrace of people in need of hope and the means of achieving their potential through escape from domineering ideologies. The constancy of Mr. Harper’s unprincipled approach is foreign and disturbing to those who have a love for this unique and open country.