** Perils of Introspection**
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Over the past few days the folks here at Deltree have been passing around this short blog post entitled the Perils of Introspection. It’s absolutely worth the read, but if you don’t have the time I’ll sum it up as saying the post basically argues that when people are given time to think about why they appreciate art they will immediately over-think and eventually change what strikes them as moving or powerful. He cites an example where people are shown two posters and asked to pick one to take home with them. Some of the people are just asked to immediately pick one, and others are asked to think about why they would pick one, write down their reasoning for picking one, and then pick one.
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As you could guess, the people who just went with their gut were much happier with their decision than the people who were asked to explain why they picked one. The reason for this is that our appreciation of art is rooted somewhere different than where our brain makes logical decisions.
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The author of the article then makes the tacit argument that this proves that any critical analysis of art is stupid and pointless. I don’t quite agree with him there, but what this study does show me some huge problems in the world of advertising and content production—the ideas of “feedback”, “choices”, and of the “Focus Group.”
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What Hits and What Doesn’t**
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Before I get there, let me offer up the admittedly hard-to-prove argument that works of art produced by a single vision are usually the works that have a lasting impact. It's difficult to explain this to people who are presenting you with money, but I’ve found in my process at least that when ideas are moved back and forth, tossed around, tampered back, thought about, changed-so-as-not-to-offend this group or that group, etc. content will lose any vitality it once had.
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** You can't over-think what strikes you emotionally. Things hit or they don't. Recently at Deltree we were working on a concept of a film a mother would speak directly to her child through the lens, offering up her hopes and dreams for the future. As soon as we had it written down, we didn't need to think anymore. That's it. We knew.
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** The Focus Group**
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But what we see so much now is this new idea of the "focus group", which for some reason has taken over advertising, and led us to the sad, depressing state of the majority of advertising we see today. (Think of every infuriating beer ad on TV, where the hip, casual “dudes” treat women like shit, care more about their light beer choice than the relationships around them, etc. I mean, have you seen the ad where the guy is unable to find the words for his girlfriend, who has just told him she loves him, but he can say that he loves Miller Lite. We all laugh. Think about it for a second. A man, having just been told by his girlfriend that she loves him, can only think about light beer. We accept this. Does this not strike anyone else as totally and completely insane?)
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The thing about these ads is that they are researched to death, focus-grouped, and what you get is repetitive, the same old shit, and it’s depressing. Because when something is focus-grouped, there is only one thing that can be settled on—the least common denominator. Beer ads appeal to the idiotic common denominator among males 18-34, the cross-the-board love (or at least like) of drinking with our friends. So the ads ignore any passions this demographic may have, any hopes or dreams or desires, any love of art or sophistication, and instead these ads choose to appeal to some basic agreed-upon concept that guys our age must like drinking beer and watching sports. It’s the least common denominator. And that’s all a focus group will ever give you.
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(A good friend of mine read an early draft of this and pointed out that all this was discussed in great detail in the one Malcolm Gladwell book I haven’t found time to read yet, Blink. If it’s half as good as anything else Gladwell has written, I’m certain he does a much better job explaining this than I ever will.)
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It Works** ** ** If you use focus groups, and if the ads I've described above are what you want to produce content-wise, more power to you. It works. It’s depressing, and soul-sucking, and makes me furious every time I try to watch TV, but it works. When I go to a bar, I drink a Bud Light. Why? I don’t know. I guess because I’ve been told on TV. If you want to do something different, however, and make something that can maybe have some sort of impact, you need to remember one major thing—People our age have literally been advertised to since the day they were born. They know when they're being sold to. We don’t have the naiveté of older generations; we didn’t grow up sans internet, sans TV, etc. From the moment we wake up to our radio alarm to the second we fall asleep to Letterman, we are being sold something. And we aren’t stupid. We know when we’re being sold something.
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And we will leap at the chance for a moment, just a moment, when something on TV or the Internet stops the selling, if only for an instant, and gives us some semblance of humanity. Think of the ads or virals or whatever you've loved in your lifetime. My favorite example for this is an old VW ad with the song "Pink Moon" in it. Yeah, the ad advertises a car, but what it's really sharing visually is an experience, an experience that--to a sixteen year old kid who'd just gotten his first car--struck as honest and real and beautiful. Even better is the recent Levi's *Go Forth *commercial. Yeah, they butchered it in a second version with all the hot young Abercrombie models (focus-group alert!), but the first ad was so honest, so visually stunning, and so capturing of this feeling of pride in our country, that I didn't even care that I was being sold something. I was moved. Can you imagine a focus group coming up with that ad?
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"So, we're going to show a bunch of racially diverse, economically disadvantaged young kids, a bi-racial couple making out, a creepy businessman, and some old guys sitting in a field of corn. And then we'll put Levi's at the end." Does that fly? Does that not get laughed out of the room?
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As content-producers, that is our only hope to achieve, to give our audience one real fucking honest moment, and they'll be so relieved to get something real and true they won't even be upset that they're being sold something, if they even are. They’ll forgive you.
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** Presenting Clients with Choices**
** So what does this mean for choices for clients? You have to make your clients trust that you will produce a quality final product, because as soon as they are involved in the creative process, their fears and data and stats and relationships will muddle the process. By allowing a client into the creative process, you have essentially created a focus group. A highly-informed, deeply-personally-invested focus group, who will be so desperate not to offend, or mislead, or take chances that might backfire, that they will settle for the old Lowest Common Denominator. And thus you will have men choosing a Coors Light blue bottle over his girlfriend who is trying to sleep with him. **
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People are desperate for anything other than the same old shit. As content producers we need to be progressive, we need to trust our instincts, and we can't get stuck in the false promises of introspection.
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