09/03/10

Euphemism 2.0

With our new Google/Cloud e-mail thingy, when you delete a junk mail this message pops up…

As a euphemism it takes some beating.

And it’s a phrase I might add to my personal repertoire.
Just imagine the joy of bringing a vexing encounter to a swift end with a curt, ‘this conversation has been moved to the bin‘…

One thing’s worrying me though.
A new insistence on calling every interaction, however limited and undesirable, a ‘conversation’ can only lead one way.

Is ‘conversations’ about to become the new ’solutions’?

05/03/10

Wonderful idea. Wrong species.

This was noted Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s pithy verdict on Marxism.

And it popped into my mind recently when musing on the continuing rude health of hyperbole and exaggeration in marketing communications.

The internet age, with its transparency and open access to the real state of things was supposed to bring an end to this Phineas T. Barnum style, ushering in in its stead a more grounded form of honest engagement.

But it hasn’t really happened, and perhaps Wilson’s point is the reason why - it’s just not who or how we are.
A balanced presentation of one’s strengths and weaknesses isn’t the proven track to reproductive success.
It’s all just a game of bluff - and one that, despite our occasional protestations, we know deep down we were born to play.

Which might help explain the poster below I saw last week in a club window in Barnsley:

Now looking at it, you might conclude that the guy on the left appears closer to the rhythmic instincts of Gordon Brown than James Brown; and that a fair name for these boys might be something like ‘The Yorkshire Journeymen‘ or ‘The Mediocres‘.

But oh no.

They’re ‘The Fantastics‘.

My instinct was to worry that the moniker is only setting up for inevitable disappointment.

But through the E.O.Wilson lens it makes some sense.

You’re being asked to splash out ten or twenty quid.

So they have to pretend they’re something special.
And you have to pretend you think they might be.

It’s not all that realistic.

But it is probably how we are.

PS. Agency christmas party budgets could be under pressure again this year, so make a note of the number at the bottom, just in case…

03/03/10

And the Puliser Prize for logic goes to...

Quite enough blogwidth has been taken up already by the Shawcross: Ramsey incident without murmurs now steaming in late with studs showing.

But we do feel compelled to offer one calm observation.

Within minutes of the fateful challenge we were being reassured that there just couldn’t have been any intent behind it because Ryan Shawcross ‘isn’t that kind of player‘.

Now implicit within that statement is the notion that there is such a thing as ‘that kind of player‘.

Because otherwise, stripped of its contrast, the statement is completely meaningless.
(And those men’s mensas Shearer and Pulis would surely never say anything completely meaningless.)

But the thing is that, to date, every agent of a leg-breaking challenge has, we have categorically been told, not been ‘that kind of player‘.

Which leave us with this improbable scenario…

There are, lurking in our professional leagues, examples of ‘that kind of player‘.
But none of them have yet done ‘that kind of thing‘.
Meanwhile ‘that kind of thing‘ has been perpetrated on several occasions.
But only by people who are ‘not that kind of player.’

Amazing.
I wonder what odds you’d have got on that?

26/02/10

Are you a verb yet?

Friend of mine was working on a promo video the other day with Michael Buble.

He showed him the proposed script and asked whether he was OK with it.

‘Yeah, it’s good’ he replied.

‘But do you mind if I Bublerise it a little?’

Hmm, Bublerise… presumably verb, transitive, ‘to present in a style specifically associated with Canadian crooner Michael Buble.’

Up till now I’d never imagined that there might be such a thing as a style specifically associated with Michael Buble.

But his obvious confidence in its existence is starting to mess with my mind.

It wasn’t El Buble who said that you have to be the change you want to see in the world.

But he obviously took it on board.
(And then, presumably, Bublerised it.)

Want people to think your brand is special?

Present it as special - and it will be so…

22/02/10

Mes que un partido?

I’m lucky enough to be heading to Cape Town this summer to catch some of the World Cup.

And courtesy of the FIFA lottery, one of the games I’ll be seeing is Portugal vs. North Korea.

When the unarguably football mad Charlize Theron first informed me that this fixture was to be my fate, my anticipation was for an amusing novelty game - headline-friendly Euro giants against unknowns who are unknown, etc.

But now I see it as no less than the ultimate symbolic clash of ideals.

For in the right corner we have mercurial Portugal, leading apologists for the primacy of individual flair and expression over collective discipline, and spiritually led by the man allegedly once described by Narcissus himself as ‘alarmingly egocentric’, Cristiano Ronaldo.

While in the left one we have the kings of the collective, North Korea, ready to unleash upon an unsuspecting world their unique concept of totalitarian football.

(This, I’m told, is like the similarly named 70s Dutch phenomenon in its conviction that every player can put in a solid shift in each other’s position, but without any of the flashy bits from Johan Cruyff.)

Yes, it’s the all stars versus the no names, the cult of the individual taking on the power of the collective.

This is a tension of particular fascination to account planners.

For coming on 50 years now the trend has only been one way, and numbering among the first to call the turn back towards the collective grips the planning/futurist community in much the same way that being the first to announce, say, the next ice age must surely excite the climatology one.

This ambition, coupled with the tendency of the left-leaning plannersphere towards wish-fulfilment, has resulted in many a premature call over the past decade or so.

For instance, I remember sitting on a panel of planning directors in Boston pontificating on the likely impact of 9/11 upon cultural attitudes. (Sounds embarassingly pretentious now. Felt embarassingly pretentious then.)

To a man, we were sure that it must spell the end for the ‘just me’ culture. (Yeah, right.)

And we witnessed a similar thing over here when, post-Lehmann, the planning commentariat lined up to bow in supplication before the inevitable new post-consumption economy.
(Incidentally, the only piece of actual evidence I ever heard for this inevitability was some dodgy stat about waiting lists for allotments growing in places like Richmond, which never seemed that convincing to me.)

So we’ve been painfully blinded by this false dawn before.

But if Kim Il-Jung’s red and red army strikes a hammer blow for the collective this midsummer, I might yet be tempted to again call the turn from the post-match party.

If there is a post-match party…