That's Interesting!

It's vintage Gossage: The long copy (3:15 video) creates a lot of space in the action to engage the viewer. Genius copywriting and acting make it something you actually want to watch - even though it’s an ad. (It would kill in the Super Bowl.) It's endearing honesty ("for people who eat food and go places") is like Pink Air and his other ads for Fina. And it is designed to be PR-generating. Gossage believed in ads as starting points for conversation that could be amplified by people and the press. Other qualities of Interestingness make it worth thinking about. Forcing the viewer to sit with negativity in the form of discomfort/awkwardness of the situation and conversation. A situation we've all been in. The incongruity from the unexpected pairing of DeNiro and Asa Butterfield and their developing friendship. Is this really happening? And even if you don’t recognize Butterfield, and maybe especially of you don’t recognize him, the viewer is compelled to stay p...

30 years ago, I didn’t think of my job as interestingness management, but that is the job that I learned working for Jon Steel at Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Before I left my internship at BBDO (an office of wonderful, lively creative people hamstrung by a Boreplex of client inertia and disempowerment) and walked a few blocks up Front Street, a friend from the office wished me good luck before adding, “I heard they send you out with a gun and a single bullet and say, ‘Sell the work or don’t come back.’” She was half-kidding, of course, but that’s one way the Boreplex infects your mind, by whispering in your ear, “There must be a catch” every time you see interesting work from somewhere else.

This collaboration makes sense, but is it interesting? It has signs of interestingness: when we see something that we appraise as likely to be interesting: Both Dove and Nike have done interesting things in the past and, while not always true, interesting x interesting usually equals interesting. And both have established a pattern of marketing that aims to empower girls/women. So teaming up on an important social mission, using sports participation to build confidence in girls, reinforces both brand patterns. And if this is as deep as the causal viewer goes into this collaboration, the appraisal is likely to be: "That's great! Good on both of these brands for doing something positive in the world." But there is more to being interesting than just the signs. The signs of being interesting alone have less of a chance of creating long-term memories and mental availability than a deeper level of thought generates. Finding something 'interesting' is also an assessme...

The word "interesting" gets a bad rap. To many, it sounds dismissive, cold, cerebral (heaven forbid!), or in the case of Hollywood movies, even villainous. Though often dismissed as lacking emotion or values, interestingness is actually packed with human values, stemming from the appreciative wonder that comes from having patterns (not fixed ideas or judgments) to apply to everything you see: Humility "Stay Stupid." (Jim Riswold) " "Anyone who wants to be cured of ignorance must confess it." (Montaigne) Openness, Tolerance Traits generally correlated with progressive values and personality types, but interestingness has a conservative core: the preservation of differences, grounded in the acceptance of strategic uncertainty. Curiosity “Be curious. Not judgemental.”(Ted Lasso)  "A desire to understand. Not “lost in thought”, but found. Inclusiveness No more, ‘But I’m not a creative!’ Maybe not, but you know what’s interesting and what isn't....

The creative is a very efficient way to improve ROI. Something that is not talked about enough. "...getting to this improvement through investing in creative that had greater resonance and impact." according to Kim Malcolm Can't wait to read the full case study. ---------------------- From @KimMalcolm LinkedIn Post Shout out to the Clorox team ( Ben Jordan  and  Oksana Sobol ) talking with  Karen Sharp  at TMRE about how they have driven much improved creative effectiveness over time.  How? - They moved from late stage testing to learning from insights early and often during development - They stopped treating research as ‘single use’ and instead reuse data again and again to learn from all they do - They moved from inconsistency in how the teams get consumer insights to systematizing it across the business (and I am sure much more besides to drive such an awesome outcome!) Congrats to them.  It's really great to see bravery in changing up how things ar...

Dave ( https://lnkd.in/ezJfGxQg ) is at UC Boulder, so he’s got a front-row seat to the Buffaloes' transformation into a somewhat better performing, but much more interesting product. Of course, fans like winning and the Buffaloes are currently 4-3, just barely a winning record. But there’s a lot packed into that ‘just barely.’ 'Just barely’ is a big part of what makes sport interesting. CU just barely lost two of those games, one in double OT. What we really like is riding the wave of possibility, when ‘everything is on the line’ whether or not it’s your team. In ‘The New Ballgame,’ Russell Carleton, a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan (a peril of geography, I suppose) describes a game that made him question what he was actually there for: “It’s an odd thing to watch the pitcher from a visiting team creep closer to a landmark achievement like a no-hitter, because you don’t know whether to root, root, root for the home team, or to root for history to take place. Life is full...