How advertising can come to life
Once upon a time I wrote a novel. It was a great experience and I loved doing it. Writing a first novel (or any book) is two things: writing that book and learning to be a writer.
As I started to rewrite my book (as I learned, most of writing is rewriting) my editor and I had some great conversations about how much information to include in the book; how much to tell the reader about the story and how much of the story had to be created by the reader.
Basically we agreed that the job of the writer was to provide the strongest, sparest story, and let the reader create as much of the story as possible. At every word on the page we had to be asking ourselves what the reader needed, then to provide that and nothing extra. To live the story had to live in the mind of the reader. There was no way we could shoehorn the story into their mind. They had to be, in our current vernacular, co-creators of the story.
And if the story lived in the mind of the reader, then in fact a whole slough of stories actually lived, a different one for each reader. Different interpretations of what a sunny afternoon fishing in a boat on a lake meant. Different ideas about what a hot kiss felt like in cold winter air. Meaning was created on the fly by the audience.
So why is this relevant for AdHack?
In the advertising world great attention is paid to the meaning people get from ads. A huge research industry exists with healthy profits to provide advertisers with an illusion of certainty that their message has been received by their audience. Very little room exists for alternate meanings, for the audience to be as much a part of the story’s meaning as the ‘author’ of the work. Only rarely does anyone acknowledge the impossible crapshoot of prescribing meaning.
You won’t have heard it here first but: the audience has become the author. If brands are about meaning then we all own them. We’re all telling each other our own stories, based in our own experiences.
Sometimes our stories are trite, boring or irrelevant. But other times they’re interesting, absorbing and perfectly honest in a way that only personal stories can be.
Production values, test audiences and clever tricks don’t matter as much as real stories told in a generous spirit. Kids colouring covers the fridges, not prints of Renoirs or Ansel Adams.
Some of those real stories can be commercial. Person-to-person advertising, if we want to create a buzzword.
So why is this relevant to AdHack? We want to be the home of those commercial stories, a place to discover and create those ads. A do-it-yourself (DIY) advertising community.
Photo courtesy of plindberg.
