Without agenda

Not blogged for ages because I've been super busy. Rest assured I am still alive though. Recently I've been thinking a lot about advertising agencies and trying to reflect upon my various experiences in an effort to possibly raise helpful questions and maybe even begin to posit solutions. What is the agency model of the future?

I'm interested in how how we all position ourselves within the marketplace, in how we dress our shop windows for business, in the midwifery that brings ideas into existence, in how client ecosystems affect the nature of the idea's function, and in the relative meaning of specialisms. What I've not thought a great deal about is people. At the moment I'm more interested in the structural processes that invisibly shape everything we do, think and come to expect day to day as marketers. Those constructs that we inevitably never take the time to recognise because we're too busy getting on with it all.

I'm not going to publish my thoughts on this blog but hopefully I'll get to air them at some point or in some other publication. In the meantime I wanted to share a beautiful example of how a simple idea can spread globally. One consequence of living in a society surrounded by commercial communications is that we've become experts at redirecting our natural problem solving abilities to deal with the matter of message identification and interpretation. 'What thought or action is this communication designed to affect in me?'

What happens when we are confronted by communications lacking an agenda? More often than not it confuses us and perhaps a further reflection of today's socio-political climate is that it may also prompt suspicion even fear. We like equations that balance, our brains seek equilibrium: 'You say A + I think B = I might do C' etc. it almost serves as a contractual basis for the social construction of cognitive reciprocity. Typically when we encounter ideas that lack a neat sense of cognitive closure our only option is to define them as 'art' or perhaps we fail to even recognise them as communications at all?

Although it's been around for a few years now the 'Free Hug' movement started by Australian Juan Mann is a pure example of this phenomenon. What started out as a perfectly selfish wish for human contact easily morphed into a subtle humanitarianism that has since spawned hundreds of copycat projects in cities all over the world including Boulder (which is why it's recently popped into my mind again). Why I like this example is that the confusion and suspicion of which I talk is so evidently visible on so many of the faces of the people he encounters. They're stopped in their tracks, they fail to compute, their brains desperately search in vain for the 'why'. People eventually leave- maybe briefly happier than when they arrived but also I suspect slightly baffled as to what has just happened.

Is it indeed an art project? I don't know. Is there a better word to describe this form of interruptive communication, does the word yet exist?....If not I'm going to call them brain farks. Is it possible for a brand to communicate using brain farks? Can bafflement be as powerful as understanding? Discuss.


29 million views and counting in spite of the awful indie soundtrack