IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
Last week, I started the course Fractal by Perestroika, which aims to address how communication is changing and how the way brands communicate needs to adapt accordingly. This ties into the idea that communication should happen without the interruptions caused by traditional advertising. In other words, commercials that simply present a product without adding any value no longer make sense: today, 11% of the global internet population already uses ad blockers to avoid this kind of annoyance, while Google is also considering including this same mechanism as a native feature in Chrome.
Despite this, the same study that revealed the growing adoption of ad blockers also indicates that 77% of American users say they are willing to view certain advertising formats. This means that new formats and ways of approaching the product or service offered by a brand are being developed so that the audience remains engaged with the medium without stopping their consumption of relevant content. This is the approach taken by Vice, for example, on their television channel Viceland, where some commercials show outtakes or behind-the-scenes footage of the program being aired as a "bonus" sponsored by a specific brand.
In Brazil, Vice has experimented with producing content with brands like Skol, which funded the creation of a documentary about the 20 years of LGBT pride stemming from the Gay Pride Parade that takes place every year in São Paulo. But what I actually wanted to address here are some examples of when artists teamed up with advertisers to create commercials that, in themselves, served as entertainment content, much like a short film or perhaps a game, as is the case with advergames.
This, however, concerns formats; what is curious is how, in the 80s and 90s, science fiction became a creative inspiration for commercials like the one below for Murphy’s beer, directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Some sources suggest it was directed by Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost in the Shell, but apparently, Kitakubo was responsible for the piece that aired on British TV shortly after Oshii’s film arrived in the UK.
The same inspiration also appears in a 1993 commercial made by David Fincher, director of Fight Club, for Coca-Cola. It is a tribute to director Ridley Scott and the film Blade Runner.
But Ridley Scott himself had also produced commercials, coincidentally in the same year as Blade Runner It was released in 1984. The date, iconic due to George Orwell's novel, made it the central theme of the Apple commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.
Also in the 80s, Coca-Cola once again innovated its messaging by featuring the cyberpunk character Max Headroom in its commercials. The irony is that Max was created specifically as a satire and critique of TV personalities, described at the time as a "very sterile and arrogant personification of the Western, middle-class TV host" or even as an "offensive" character to younger audiences.
The concept behind Max Headroom, therefore, was precisely to appear in dystopian contexts in the near future, where large corporations and television would be dominant. This was the grand premise of 80s cyberpunk, a science fiction genre focused on the near future with an emphasis on recent developments in cybernetics and media. Several of its authors were, in fact, professionally embedded in this context, such as journalist Bruce Sterling and advertising copywriter William Gibson.
Today, we talk so much about the use of new immersive technologies not only for producing informative or entertainment content, but there is also an entire space dedicated to branded content and advertising.
These discussions appear in cyberpunk science fiction, especially from a negative point of view, as the genre itself is characterized by a pessimistic tone. Despite this, it is interesting to observe how these works of fiction choose certain contemporary elements and extrapolate from new (or possible) technologies to highlight specific critiques.
That is, if we began this text by discussing how communication should be guided by non-interruption caused by advertising, this was precisely the problem highlighted by cyberpunk science fiction as early as the 80s, based on the excess of advertising that, precisely because it is high-tech, is capable of becoming even more invasive and providing an almost disturbing interruption. An example of this are the compulsive commercials in the film Thomas is in love, by Pierre-Paul Renders, or the various examples of holographic advertising and the famous interactive billboards that have evolved since Blade Runner to the Western version of Ghost in the Shell, released this year.
Another director to keep in mind is Terry Gilliam. From the film Brazil, from 1985, to the more recent Zero Theorem, from 2013, Gilliam has treated advertising and media culture with a "sincere malice" in a caricatured way. On the other hand, directors like Luc Besson are exemplary in creating lighthearted and humorous science fiction works, as was his most recent release, Valerian, but also the classic The Fifth Element. It was in 1997 that TV personality Ruby Rhod, played by Chris Tucker, won over science fiction fans by bringing back the same concept as Max Headroom, which reflected how sterile some 80s television figures could be, while addressing the other side of the coin: the spectacle and the bombardment of sensory stimuli.
What is interesting to note in this relationship between science fiction and advertising is how this two-way street ends up creating metalinguistic content that discusses the advertising craft itself and media culture within advertising and media such as film. A recent example of this blurring of boundaries is the launch campaign for the science fiction series Humans, from Channel 4, which featured a multi-platform front of ads for a product that was not the series itself, but rather the personal robots featured in the fictional narrative.
Along with TV commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, the campaign also included a fake auction planted on eBay, a website where visitors could customize their own realistic android, an installation of interactive panels in a London storefront, and a performance where actors were carried in carts as if they were robots being delivered to a recipient. The result was that Channel 4 had its highest viewership in 20 years during the broadcast of the series' first episode.
This means that innovating in the way a product is presented by also creating an entertainment narrative that adds value to the consumer/audience has truly shown, numerically, the potential for creating communication that is not based on interruption. At a time when the zeitgeist is so aligned with science fiction scenarios, to the point where we make expressions like "that's so Black Mirror!" a common reference in our daily conversations, then perhaps sci-fi is precisely a new avenue of opportunity for agencies to rethink how they tell stories alongside brands.
Continue reading about the subject:
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/geeks-guide-advertising/
