Transcription
Finally, very quickly, a question from Nicks. Kings get Royy's view on the American Eagle campaign. Anything share?
I get pissed off with this. I don't think there's anything you can do about it, but it worries me because it means that a lot of interesting advertising pies the interest because it's slightly mischievous or slightly naughty. If we create a world where it people are too frightened to stick their head about above the parapet and they're too frightened to produce anything other than things that are of completely sort of anodine quality. And the reason is that the right is just as guilty of this as the left. I don't think they always were, but it's what I call confected outrage. And it's amplified massively by tabloid media. gets amplified massively by media metrics of engagement which look successful even if you're just getting the engagement of people who are mad.
But examples would be there have been one or two examples which I thought were entirely legitimate which was the Gillette ad. Mhm. Which was well-intentioned but turned out basically being an ad which insulted the target audience of of men. Okay. Uh, it conflated the me too movement with like, you know, undesirable toxic toxic masculinity and it showed two kids like boys playf fighting at a barbecue. I'm not So when I say they're play fighting, they were just having a wrestle, right? Well, all primates have done this. It's not that weird. I mean, if one of the kids is wailing on the other kid with a plank of six, you know, 4x two, I'm not that's toxic masculinity, right? Not. It it conflated really really serious problems with behaviors which were at least sort of debatable like barbecuing. It seemed to show a load of men barbecuing. Well, you know, I I think barbecuing is toxic, you know. Yeah. And but equally, it's happened with Dylan Malaney, which was just an influencer marketing campaign where they sent a load of people personalized cans of Bud Light. And um one of the recipients, one of many recipients with Dylan Malaney. It annoys me particularly in the UK when we get really jumpy about things we've never been that jumpy about. I think that was just confected right-wing outrage which they then tried to turn into a story that Bud Light, which after all is a blue collar beer, Cracker Barrel. Trump had a go at their new logo and that was interpreted in political terms. The original Cracker Barrel logo didn't have that old bloke with a barrel on it. Okay. Right. The original bar logo going back to 1930 something. The phrase a copy of nothing in the Jaguar ad was actually spoken by Sir William Lions in the 1930s who was the sort of founder of Jaguar. Okay. What they will do and and yet loads of conservative commentators leapt on that and said, you know, that's a kind of disgusting anti-conservative revolutionary sentiment. Jaguar never intended to look woke. They merely intended to look different. And you have these two particular forces on both sides. And I think it's confected outrage about Dylan Mulvaney. I think it's confected outrage about um American Eagle to a large extent. I didn't joke about that, by the way, on Twitter. I said my original I said we had this great campaign um which said that um uh um Sydney Sweeney is the flower of Aryan womanhood and the bloody client made me tone it down.
Now what I'm saying there is that you know has great genes is you know I mean the the only problem if if American Eagle had had enough budget to feature three celebrities or wanted to feature a range of celebrities of you know varying ethnicities I don't think it would have been controversial but they featured someone who is of kind of like you know fairly Nordic ancestry um uh okay and um uh you know so immediately you you get these various kind of forms of paranoia high on the extremes, not really the political extremes, the left or right, but in in many cases what they do is they collude then with media outlets to create a scandal where none was really necessary. Um, and it's deeply upsetting to me because it means that the kind of cheeky advertising, okay, this is just an example of what advertising used to be like in the 1980s. Okay. So, in the late 80s, I think it's right to say might have been no early 90s, Robert Maxwell, who owned the Daily Mirror, right, falls off, probably possibly jumped off his luxury yacht and drowns, right? Slightly mysterious circumstances. It then emerges that the whole pension fund was corrupt. He'd been raiding money from the Daily Mirror, left, right, and center, etc. The Sun, its leading competitor, is currently running a campaign where the Sun cost 10p. The Mirror was at the time matching it by also charging 10p for the newspaper. And around this time, after Maxwell goes off his yacht, The Mirror puts up its price. The Sun runs an ad on the tube which says, "The Daily Mirror now costs 30p. Don't go overboard to buy it." And that was considered funny advertising in 1993. Mhm.
Now if we get into this hyper sensitive area where all communication has to be calibrated not to offend either the most sensitive person in the room or in many cases I think people who are easily confused right okay you can't calibrate an advertising message and make it interesting to 80% same same problem applies in comedy okay you can't calibrate a comedy sketch to someone you know the Just as you can't run a restaurant which doesn't serve food to which anybody is allergic, it's not a realistic it's not a realistic aspiration for comedy. It's not a realistic aspiration for communication. It's not a realistic aspiration for advertising. And yet, of course, you know, basically a lot of people in business want a quiet life and they will not run an ad if they think there's a 1% chance that someone deliberately takes it the wrong way. M
Well you and I I had the same thing happen to me by the way which was I always ask the question and I'm I'm talking to a guy on a podcast. I am not a climate denier by any stretch of the imagination. Okay, I believe in anthropogenic climate change to a very large extent. But I'm also conscious of the fact that there are lots of cases which is you know in behavioral science where beliefs become commonplace which are also erroneous for reasons of sort of status, people wanting to fit in, people not wanting to stand out, all kinds of things. So I'm talking to this guy who's a serious thoroughgoing physics expert and I said, you know, in anything I always hold back the 10% chance that I'm wrong. Do you think there's a chance that this that the entire climate change thing has arisen through a kind of collective delusion which appealed to people's other instincts and that actually the because I wanted to hear it from a guy who's completely objective who's got a degree in like high energy physics you know what le what level of uncertainty which is never naugh by the way what level of uncertainty should I attach to this and I ask you that question because I wanted to know the answer and then suddenly people are going why is Rory Southerntherland a known climate denier? But how can I go if or climate skeptic? I'm not even being a skeptic. I'm simply saying I want to know my level of certainty I can enjoy here in direct efforts because if he put it if he said look it's about 70% certain the amount of actual effort we should put towards this is correspondingly a little bit less. And so you get this weird thing where highly educated people are weirdly more dogmatic than ordinary people are. Ordinary people exist in certainty. If the main value of an education system in Britain is to produce people who go, "Well, I think there's a single right answer to anything, and if you if you dissent, then you're either a or you're evil." Okay, then I have to say that the money spent on education hasn't been very well spent.
Well, sorry to interrupt you there. If you want to watch the rest of this live stream, you're going to have to join the full edition of the Mad Masters course. Now, what is Mad Masters, you might ask? It's a course that blends behavioral science, creativity, and data. And it's all delivered to you by the one and only Rory Southernland through monthly live sessions, on demand Netflix style modules, load bonus sessions, and even an in-person meetup at the biggest marketing event in London. There's 30 plus hours of content delivered to you exclusively by Rory. So, what are you waiting for? Pull the trigger and register now. [Music]