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NEUROECONOMICS, OR: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON BRANDS

2/23/2009

For the first time, a team of medical and economic researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to determine biologically the impact of brands on the human brain. This brainstorm in brain branding known as neuroeconomics was reported by the Wall Street Journal, usually more concerned with economics than neuro. And while the findings may only prove what Grok probably knew instinctively 10,000 years ago in a cave, when he held up a rock and said: “Grok’s rocks. Last longer,” that won’t stop me from reporting this amazing scientific corroboration of the obvious.

The researchers took the brains of twenty highly-educated people and studied the impact of strong brands and weak brands in both high interest and low interest categories: cars and insurance. The MRI was fitted with a video monitor (they’re everywhere these days, aren’t they?), logos were flashed, and brain activity measured.

The result? When strong brand Volkswagen was flashed, a strong pattern of activity was noted in the part of the brain associated with positive emotions, self-identification and rewards. When an unknown car marque flashed, activity was churned up in parts of the brain associated with negative emotions and memory, suggesting the brain had to work for a response.

The surprise came with the low interest category of insurance. A strong brand, European insurerAllianz, produced as powerful a reaction in the brain as Volkswagen. And a weaker brand,Volksfursorge, evoked the same dreary response as the unknown car.

The lesson is irrefutable: a strong brand is a neurological powerhouse operating independent of the product itself. People clearly care more about status symbols like cars and fashion than they do about abstractions like insurance. Yet a strong brand in either category evokes an identical explosion in the nervous system.

So while it’s no surprise your heart beats faster in an Apple store or Ferrari showroom, when you put on a pair of Prada eyeglasses, stroll through Victoria’s Secret, or drink a Coke (which I don’t), apparently the same electricity fires up somewhere in your nervous system when you sign up for Geico insurance (but not Nationwide) or slip into Calvin Klein underwear. (Speaking of which, Calvin Klein’s daughter once said: “Why is it that every time I have sex, I have to read my father’s name.” But I digress).

Interestingly, throughout this exercise in logo-flashing and brain measuring, the decision-making part of the brain was curiously absent. Implying a brand is some evolutionary and neurological shorthand, allowing people to act spontaneously and instantly without having to figure things out.

In advertising, we struggle every day to reach the hearts and minds of consumers. Maybe we should be turning our attention to the synaptic vesicles.

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TAKEN BY "TAKEN"

2/21/2009

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Why am I so taken by Taken, the new thriller wherein Liam Neeson, hero of far classier movies, becomes a born-again Bourne? And why would I write about it in this space, a blog devoted to culture, meanings and branding rather than to cinematic chit chat?

Moreover, in the dazzling heat of today’s movies – from the twin political reincarnations, one evil and one saintly, of Nixon and Harvey Milk, to the brilliantly executed epics of Slumdog and Benjamin Button, to the Holocaust Film Festival, represented in descending order of quality by The Reader, Defiance and Valkyrie –Taken, while certainly a tour de force of pulp fiction, hardly rates a blip on the meter.

Certainly, there is action. Liam Neeson, ex-CIA man, becomes a one-man killing machine and urban commando in the furious quest to save his 17-year old daughter from slavery and human trafficking. Single-handedly, he rips through a bizarre underworld of Albanian sex traffickers, the interference of corrupt French Secret Service, the aristocratic French twistoids who auction off female slaves in the finished basements of their chateaus, and finally, the Arab thugs around a sheik who just added Neeson’s daughter to his cherished collection of virgins.

Virgins. It reminds me of Dennis Miller’s observation about the suicide bombers who dream of 72 virgins in Paradise. “72 virgins?” Miller asks incredulously. “After three or four you’re gonna want someone who knows what they’re doing!”

But I digress.

So this is a thriller that is truly thrilling, but only because unlike most action movies in our popcorn world, where a little plot is added simply to justify the car chase, the action here is in service to archetypes and themes that resonate deeply in our culture.

Archetype One: The beleaguered, divorced father desperate to connect with his daughter in the face of a smirking ex-wife married to a zillionaire.

All the divorced dads out there, from Alec Baldwin to the anonymous hordes who hand over half their salaries to divorce lawyers and the other half to ex-wives while not really getting to see their kids all that much, know about this one.

Neeson lost his family because of his CIA work. And everything that made him a great CIA “Preventer,” as he calls it, makes him a pathetic, eccentric figure in the upscale suburban society where he has returned to re-establish a relationship with his daughter. She is actually a rather vacuous, bourgeois twit, pampered by her step-father’s zillions and her insidious ex-wife-from-hell of a mom, but, well, she’s his daughter.

In his control-freak, anal-compulsive, security-at-all-costs rigidity, Neeson is a little off. He gives his daughter a karaoke machine whose operating manual he studied for days. The zillionaire step-father gives her a horse.

Archetype Two: The transcendent, supernatural devotion of parent to child, or: “Oy, what we do for our kids.”

Against all his doubts, after lying about the security and real intent of her trip, Neeson’s twit of a daughter sashays off to Paris for the summer with fellow bimbette in search of thrills and rock groupie-ism. They are so clever, they fall into the clutches of kidnappers about a minute and half outside the airport terminal. This is the plot point wherein Neeson transforms from awkward dad who misses his little girl into Rambo on the Seine (as opposed to Rimbaud on the Seine.) In our coddled and corrupted culture, we find fascination, indeed a craving, for Neeson’s crystalline integrity, unyielding devotion to purpose, and willingness to battle heaven and hell — mostly hell – for his daughter.

Archetype Three: The meltdown of the bourgeois fortress and the triumph of the dark forces

In the moment of evil, when the iPod-wearing, designer-label brandishing, suburban princess is taken to be sold into slavery, all the money, social standing and glittering complacency of her mother’s world is suddenly seen to be what it is: worthless. Powerless, in the face of forces that live outside and below civilization and reason. Just like the masters of the universe in the world economy today, standing helpless as financial turmoil grips the globe, disappears their money and evaporates their jobs. It is only the arcane killing skills, and archaic integrity of Neeson that can save the day. And so, as the saying goes, the first shall be last, and the last shall be first, and the mocked figure becomes the hero, and in the end, all the coddled, arrogant ones can do is thank him.

In the real word, Bernie Madoff has soup every day in his penthouse with his wife and watches the evening news.

In Liam Neeson’s world, his bones and gold fillings would have long ago been melted down and sold to pay back the investors.

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"IT DOESN'T MAKE ME DREAM," OR, VIVE LA MANIPULATION!

2/19/2009

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"It doesn't make me dream."

She was dark and exotic looking, a major woman in advertising in Paris. And that was her response to an advertising idea. “It doesn’t make me dream.”

Had we been in America, her counterpart would have said: “I don’t think it’s on strategy,” or “I think it’s too generic,” or “It doesn’t communicate natural ingredients clearly enough,” or “I like it, but I don’t think you’ll ever get it past the client,“ or “I don’t think it’s in the brand personality.”

But in Paris, all the president of a major agency said was: “It doesn’t make me dream.”

In this comment is all you need to know about the difference between France and America. Truth in Advertising means you learn the truth of a culture by studying its advertising.

French culture, and the French psyche, revere the ideal, relish the theoretical and have a passionate love affair with philosophic absolutes. Facts are a bit downscale. Reality, a messy inconvenience. The famous quip about the French mind goes like this: “Sure, it works in practice, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t work in theory.”

It is the idea of the product rather than the product itself. An Air France commercial portrays sexy models sleeping on cloud pillows. (Not a gleaming plane or price from Newark to St. Louis in sight.) In a Paco Rabanne spot, a man and woman twirl slowly in the air having, well, sexual intercourse.

Hardheaded, repressed Protestant-Ethic America, on the other hand, is precisely the opposite. Just the facts ma’am, both in court and in commercials. Don’t give me some theory. I’m a practical guy. Don’t bore me with prissy intellectualizing or that effeminate stylishness. That’s way too…French.

You could never foist a George Bush on a country (aside from some handy intervention by the Supreme Court) unless you had a streak of anti-intellectualism and anti-sophistication a mile wide and 3000 miles long. From that ex-president’s tortured attempts to speak English, to the simply tortured Humphrey Bogart, to the don’t- say-much-but-shoot-when-I have-to Clint Eastwood, the dry, anti-intellectual, facts-only American archetype has ruled ever since the day the Puritans landed and made up a country from scratch.

Selling is second nature to the competitive, individualistic, rational Anglo Saxon mind. And America is one big sponsored universe. From the sides of buildings, to the screens of elevators, to the bodies of athletes, to the products placed judiciously in the frame of major movies, hardly an inch of real estate is free from some form of sponsorship opportunity.

France is different. With a left-wing soul and an idealistic DNA, they have always had a complicated relationship with money, and a positively hostile one to selling. Commercials weren’t even allowed on French TV until 1968.

And then, it has always been illegal to denigrate your competitor in advertising. And it has always been illegal to give out a phone number and instruct viewers to CALL NOW! Sacre bleu! How do you run a country that way?

Here’s how. President NIcolas Sarkozy just reversed forty years of sex, wit, poetry and elaborate digital effects known as French advertising, and banned all commercials from four French TV stations during the evening hours.

The country that deep in its soul believes it invented human freedom just can’t seem to lose its distaste for manipulation in the realm of commerce. The stores aren’t even open Sundays, the day Americans devote to their religious observance: shopping.

But don’t get me wrong. America believes in the Rights of Man, too.

That’s an HBO series, right? I think I saw an ad for it.

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CONTESTS ABOUT ENTERTAINMENT ARE APPARENTLY MORE ENTERTAINING THAN ENTERTAINMENT ITSELF.

2/12/2009

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Somebody who isn’t, is infinitely more fascinating than somebody who is.

Take movie stars. They are the divinity of a secular culture because they pretend to be imaginary people and only speak words written by somebody else.
It is interesting, then, that out of the vast population of non-imaginary people who worship actors for playing imaginary people, only some actually see those actors playing imaginary people in movies. But every one of them tunes in when the actors act like real people and accept awards for playing imaginary people convincingly.

This is the mystery of the Academy Awards, and it isn’t just academic. Stars derive distinction solely by playing imaginary people. Real, they are not much different from you and me. So how did watching them do nothing but say thank you become the most important night of the year?

Perhaps those statues are transcendent talismans, possessed of an overwhelming magnetic power. Well, let’s create a show where past Academy Award winners trot out their Oscars and hold them up. No one would watch.
Perhaps it’s the clothes. Not really, or else billions of people would be flooding their way into fashion shows and bringing cities to a standstill by assembling in front of shop windows.

Perhaps it’s the eerie spectacle of artists losing. Contests about entertainment are apparently more entertaining than entertainment itself.

Academy Awards are like funerals. People who never speak to someone while that person is living will travel to the ends of the earth to be at their funeral if that person dies. To the ends of the earth, and the person is no longer there.

Clearly, somebody who isn’t, is infinitely more fascinating than somebody who is.

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PEPSI: THE CHOICE OF A NEW DE-GENERATION

2/9/2009

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They joined the agency when Madmen was real, the election of John F. Kennedy signaled a new era of hope, and their red, white and blue soda cans took their place on the credenzas of BBD&O, right next to the bourbon. They left 48 years later, when Madmen was a nostalgic TV show, the election of Barack Obama signaled a new era of hope, advertising’s torturous slide had begun long before the economy in general, and there were hardly credenzas anymore at BBDO, let alone bourbon.But in between, Pepsi was the Choice of a New Generation.

Of course, new becomes old. Generations de-generate. And choice chooses something else.

So the choice of a new generation, the signature soda pop promoted by the signature pop culture agency, left New York not too long ago and joined a hip younger brother “duding” around in Venice, California: TBWA Chiat Day

BBDO began as Barton, Batten, Durstine & Osborne. A comedian of the time said the name sounded like a suitcase falling down the stairs. Along the way, the name morphed and evolved. They dropped the litany of two-syllabled names born of the Anglo-Saxon Transcendence. Then they lost the ampersand. With its streamlined architecture of anonymous letters BBDO (the voice of a new generation), led by short-of-stature but long-on-influence Phil Dusenberry, they launched Pepsi on the wave of youth culture and high production values.

In a massive and massively expensive insurrection, they laid siege at the barricades of the quintessential American brand: Coca Cola. If Coke was “IT”, well, “IT” meant old. If Coke had a venerated history, it meant Coke was your father’s sugar water. If Coke was as American as mom and front porches, well, that America was gone.

It may never have been formulated this way in the strategic documents of BBDO (or perhaps it was), but the agency sensed that myths were changing. Norman Rockwell America was passing, being replaced at warp speed by a media-driven, celebrity-obsessed culture.

In other words, adolescent America had won.

Archetypologist Clothaire Rapaille has long described the American cultural unconscious as an adolescent culture, with all the flips and foibles of adolescence: frenetic, attention-deficited, lacking fixed identity, continually seeking re-invention and renewal, devoid of history and tradition. And, because of this lack of self, obsessed with heroes and celebrities.

BBDO rode the youth culture wave, also known as the triumph of adolescent America. There is no history, the brand announced: only now. There is no geography: only a screen. There is no culture: just the ephemera of media-driven images. It was People magazine as brand. It was casting more than creativity. So there was Ray Charles, who of course was eternal. And, MC Hammer: less so. There was Michael Jackson’s hair on fire, probably the least of his problems. Cindy Crawford’s curvature. There was Paula Abdul, prior to her successful revival as a has-been. And Britney…

It is ludicrous, in light of today’s realities. They actually called it, without irony, “The Cola Wars.” But BBDO fought the fight of ephemera valiantly, till the young got older, people got healthier, and the economy got sicker.

Come alive, TBWA. You’re in the Pepsi generation.

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WHEN YOU HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STAR, MAKE SURE YOUR STAR DOESN'T FALL OFF THE WAGON

2/1/2009

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

Pot, shmott. Anyone who spends half his life swimming back and forth in a chlorinated pool deserves any stimulation or solace he can get.

The issue is: what happens when you hang the sacred hat of your brand on a human being, flawed and imperfect as humans are. And encouraged to be even more flawed and imperfect by being big paid mega dollars for lending their persona to goods and services.

I once worked on a chic, hip little print campaign for Rose’s Lime Juice, a humble old-fashioned drink mixer marketed to the avant garde art and gay communities. Annie Liebovitz was the photographer. Pairings of interesting creative celebrities were the subject. As the tagline for Roses was The Uncommon Denominator, the idea of the campaign was coupling a traditional, established artist with a young, avant garde figure. One subject was Norman Parkinson, grand old man of the photographic arts who had spent decades photographing both British royalty and the royalty of fashion. His mate in this ad was Robert Mapplethorpe, careerist hero of the gay demimonde who among many other things, was famous for rendering homosexual S&M images in exquisite, almost classical fashion.

So the photographers were photographed by the photographer’s photographer. And all was hip and chic until days after the shoot, Mapplethorpe announced, tragically, that he had AIDS. Back then, this meant the end. Period. And the client was in the unspeakable position, after all the sympathy was extended and expended, of deciding what to do. Having hung your hat on a celebrity, you have to put on your hard-headed client hat and ask: do I run this ad? Yes, this is beyond commerce, yes, we will not confuse human values with mercenary concerns, yes, this is beyond ads. But…do we run this ad or not? It may seem heartless, but they were confronted with the issue of all the meanings and realities of AIDS being injected into their brand, since a celebrity endorsement is nothing but injecting your brand with the ethos of a particular individual.

In the end, courageously, they ran the ad, and it changed nobody’s life: neither ours, nor Robert’s, nor the brand’s. It even occurs to me that if it happened today, the client might ironically be accused of capitalizing on a fatal disease to sell products. Things have changed.

But as Tom Wicker of the New York Times once said during one of Donald Trump’s periodic rendezvous’ with bankruptcy: “A lot better men than Trump have learned that those who live by PR can die by PR.”

Or, when you hitch your wagon to a star, make sure your star doesn’t fall off the wagon.

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