Irreverent Thinking

The current experiment of running a (YouTube) video on our site has been met with a mixed response. But it has gone rather viral (in a small way). Frames have been grabbed and photo-shopped by a number of people outside of my immediate network. This made me realise that, in a small way, we had created a viral storm - or a viral storm in a tea-cup as I now call it. These storms are quite interesting as it does drum up interest in our company. Which is a “good thing”.

Those that had a negative view came, primarily, from the “old money” agency economy. The gist of this view was that the “production values were too low”, “you must use an autocue”, “look at better post-production”, “it’s all in the editing”… You get the drift. Interestingly the view was not “the content is rubbish and you are spouting poo” but just that the production value (i.e. the video) was not up to the standard used in a 30 second Guinness advert.

And then on Wednesday I watched Manchester United beat Chelsea in the Champions League and saw an advert for Ford Football. What the hell? Are Ford now manufacturing footballs or are they simply copying Nike’s move into vertical markets?! But I digress. The advert was a series of (low production value) videos shown in a (YouTube style) frame. So maybe it’s true, and shock video has taken over the world. Maybe people simply no longer trust over-produced, over-glossy videos. I somehow prefer the real world version and don’t trust the gloss.

The upshot is that we are going to have a crack at recording more videos for our site, based around environmental and personal information. This forces the production values to be non-glossy, immediate and very relevant. No doubt we will see a polarisation of viewpoints. First one goes up today, have a look and pass a comment. I’d love to hear what you think about this experiment!

I think this falls into two areas, firstly design for design sake - we know that a Dyson vacuum doesn’t need to be funky colours so we understand that this is design for design sake and secretly we all know that costs time and money so we are prepared to pay for that. The same way we buy posh espresso coffee machines for home and then never use them. It’s appealing to be different (or is it more the same?) so that why we do that and maybe also explains how a lot of aspirational marketing is done - make the product or service something to aspire to and then you are creating demand; messy and unruly but it works in today’s “social climbing” society.

The second kind of design is BAD design and this hacks people off, waaay more than aspirational, plastic moral based stuff. Bad design turns people off, good design of this sort goes unnoticed unless you have an interest in it or have a eureka moment. At a recent meeting filled with execs I asked them to give me a very recent example of good design and I got some very interesting answers. The best answer came from a CEO who listed the “1 hr to the front of the queue” markers that they have at Disney World as the best piece of design he had seen.

To many traditional marketers this is not design, the reality of it is that people see the world like this - ignoring the exceptional design work of, say, Scaglietti designing Ferrari cars which almost transcends design into beauty. The most far reaching examples of good design are almost all simple and focussed on the needs to the beholder.

And now to corrupt one of my favourite quotes: Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away - Antoine de Saint Exupéry