Thanks, Albert Camus.
It’s meteorological summer in Central Park; 17 days from the real “no more teacher’s dirty looks” deal. The dogwood blooms are everywhere in profusion. For those of us not lucky enough to have grown up being able to tell the season by the verdant kaleidoscope of Frederick Law Olmsted’s urban vision, it’s a reminder of what we missed.
For those lately blessed to remediate the loss, it’s a reason to fully appreciate that this park, like the place that surrounds it, is never the same thing twice.
Not so for a certain NYC industry that happens to be identified with the avenue that runs a scant two city blocks off Central Park itself. Venture over to Madison and the seasonal signs and augurs seem to portend blithe inaction interrupted by brief periods of deckchair reshuffling, balance book profit-taking, and relentless “juniorization” (to borrow Michael Farmer’s pungent term) of both the creative product and the people assigned to produce it.
Logic, of course, would suggest we’d see something quite different blossoming right about now. For one thing, we appear to -- knock on wood (hell, knock anything you damned well please) be exiting a period of enforced isolation: historically the proper conditions for introspection and realization. For another, in coming back together, this Reductionist is firmly persuaded we will uncork a new wellspring of collective creative energy.
All of which should mean that what’s been so aptly characterized as the “Great Pause” will, for the marketing arts, be followed by a great resurgence. Having thought long and hard during our winter of dismay, we’d now be returning with new clarity about the challenges that have plagued the business and, more important, new ways to surmount the previously intractable. Most specifically:
Increasing audience attention challenges compounded by the Pandora’s box of media fragmentation.
Diminished creative impact underpinned by a miscalibration of the role of data—whole swaths of our otherwise reasonable fellow travelers persist in conflating relevance (what’s meaningful to our audience) with value (what they will find magnetically persuasive).
Speaking of relevance: to show you how far we’re into looking-glass land, Google now defines the term as “how closely an ad campaign matches a user’s search, determined by the relationship between keywords, ads, and post-click landing page.” Advertising’s most important role of building awareness, interest, and creating desire—the stuff that inspires search in the first place? Gonzo.
With it goes a huge tranche of provable marketing cause-and-effect; that ain’t pollen you’re sniffing in the air— it’s doubt.
·All tossed into a bug-infested compost heap rife with dubious digital business practices, consumer blowback, counterfactual “we need all the returns with a fraction of the investment” mandates, dangerous short-term thinking, and rampant self-actualization by the attention-seeking.
Okay, okay, I know you’re thinking, “there goes The Reductionist, sailing off on the bitter boat. Shame.” But, really, that’s not the intent here, not at all. After all, as Mother Nature amply demonstrated this past weekend when she drenched Central Park on Memorial Day, there’s a yawning gap between probability forecasts and what really happens.
As it happens, there’s a whole lot of us on the more agile and creative-first side of the dock that have ideas about how to address each of the above laundry list items, and in ways that won’t leave the can’t-afford-a-Superbow-60 set in the lurch. Recently, I’ve even had the chance to test out a few working notions and with satisfyingly pragmatic results.
The conclusion: hope is the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s box. And a daunting path forward or not, we can all take a big gulp of both comfort and inspiration from a Camus quote uncovered by the remarkably thoughtful and creative co-conspirator Bob Brihn:
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was, in me, an invincible summer.”
Sounds right, doesn’t it?