@purehopedailyhopecore❤️🩹✨️#tiktokgrowthchallenge #wholesome #hopecore #USA #happy

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Once you watch enough hopecore, you start to get served this new sort of ‘staged’ hopecore content, where creators go out and create hopecore moments. In 2022, creator Harrision Pawluk was in a Melbourne food court, handed a woman a bouquet, asked her to hold it while he put his coat on, and then walked away. The whole thing was on hidden camera to capture her reaction. The video went viral with 57 million views.

A Melbourne news station later tracked down this woman (her name is Maree), who felt the video was patronizing and dehumanizing. She said she was made to feel like clickbait. And she’s right - this whole genre is about creating clickbait with unsuspecting people on the street and trying to force emotional reactions from the people that view it. If you think about it too long it’s an actual episode of Black Mirror.

There’s this Czech novelist named Milan Kundera who did alot of writing about this topic. In his work The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he talks about the concept of how “kitsch makes two tears flow, one after the other.” The first tear is about how nice it is to see kids running on grass, the second tear is about how nice it is to be moved together with all of mankind, by the kids running on the grass. The second tear makes kitsch kitsch (get it?).

The first tear is about the kids, the second tear is about you, and it’s a performance for an audience (even if the audience is just you).

@.sunveiljust playing with your friends in the grass. sounds like a dream right. #nature #innerchildhealing #dream #fyp #hopecore

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Emotion in advertising is the second tear through and through. I would venture to guess that the most awarded work is often the most sentimental, and when you look at it a little deeper, it isn't really about the subject it says it’s focused on.

P&G’s “Thank You Mom” isn't really about moms, it’s about signaling that they are a company that would honor mothers, and they delivered it on an Olympic broadcast so you are moved together with all of mankind.

It can also go the opposite way, when Pepsi tried to have Kendall Jenner join a fake police protest and hand an officer a Pepsi. That was an attempt at the second tear applied to police violence, but so far removed from any reality that it came across as fake and disconnected.

For the TikTok flower video to work, Maree has to be a part of it. The genre has to have her be the lonely old woman whose day gets made, and we have to believe that it’s real. She has to be clickbait, she has to be exploited for us to be collectively moved by the video and connected to each other. oof.

I have made this kind of work, I would say most people in advertising have. It’s low hanging fruit, and plays really well when you’re in a brainstorm and low on ideas. And when you pitch emotional driven ideas to clients they feel precious, and they’re hard to push back on and critique, so it’s (honestly) a little bit easier to get them approved.

I think it’s worth taking a step back to consider if the first tear is worth learning to feel in yourself. When you find yourself being “moved” by a piece of content, it’s worth taking a beat to see if you’re being moved by the actual thing itself. If it had to be staged, if it had to be sold to you, is the feeling you’re feeling real?

A ramen company posted this. Maybe it doesn’t matter? Maybe I should go to Sprouts and pick up some Ramen?

@ramenonthestreet"The safe place is not always the best or most interesting place" #streetinterview #interview #nycstreetinterview #ramenonthestreetinterview #hopecore #publicinterview #smilecore #motivation #wholesome #lifeadvice #immiramen #ramen #LifeAdvice #healing #inspiringstories #relatablecontent #aestheticvideo #healingjourney #rawtalks #soulcore #hearttalk #softcoreaesthetic #gentlecontent #deepconversations

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If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

@chriswillxThe World Was Never Against You

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First off: This is definitely the first step before you fully enter the manosphere, content that connects with you and tells you how to be a man. I didn’t need it, I’m the manliest man I know.

Second: I actually really liked how poetic this was. “Your parents always wanted you to be a great son, your boss always wanted you to be a slam dunk hire, every first date was rooting for you to get laid. The deck was never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own.”

The parallel here is the work of Erving Goffman, who wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1965. Erv’s whole point is that everyday life runs on theater, that the interview, the date, the Tuesday all-team sync, all of it is performance, and the audience to the show is what actually keeps it alive. We’re all performing all these things every day, but I like the sentiment that secretly we’re all just hoping everyone makes it through and succeeds. (Thanks manoverse, you’ve really got your finger on the pulse.)

I do thought, think both of these people are wrong when it comes to advertising. Advertising is a performance that nobody wants to see, nobody has a stake in (except for the people making it).

That’s why we make such a big deal out of the Super Bowl, the one time people are actually out there watching ads on purpose, where the audience exists and wants to be engaged in the work.

It’s odd — It’s almost like the people in advertising have to hold two weird, judgmental spaces. We spend a week prepping and then delivering a pitch, where a client flew in specifically to poke holes in the strategy. Then, we publish content into a feed, and an algorithm made up of people’s real feelings gets to decide whether it’s absolute garbage. It’s like performing first for audience that doesn’t trust you inherently and then a second audience that is somehow even more hostile.

So, I think Williamson’s verdict needs an asterisk for the advertising folks. Your failures are yours in the pitch rooms you wanted to win. Most of what we make will be judged by people who never agreed to watch our content in the first place. Keep going anyway, something will hit.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Janine is definitely a real person, but for our purposes she’s a character created by Oren John. His original video is linked below, where he introduces this whole idea:

@orenmeetsworldBeing anti mainstream has become a performance, this is my advocacy for the appreciation of everything

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I love this concept of ‘Aesthetic Distance’ and how brands so often try to use it to signal how important and cool they are. Originally this comes from this guy named Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote the book Distinction in 1979. The whole thesis is really about how people develop their taste: that our taste is not personal; it’s all positioning. Basically, the things you like (and the things you refuse to like) all announce your position.

Enjoying popular things is cheap and easy. Anybody can do it, and there’s a low barrier to entry. It also doesn’t really signal anything about you.

Not needing the popular things requires additional resources. You had to have time available to develop other, unique and different tastes. Maybe you have access to education that gave you a lens to better understand what would be seen (or signal) prestigious-ness.

When Janine says she doesn’t watch TV, she’s displaying the money and the time and the schooling that made it possible not to need what everybody else needs. The refusal to buy into what would be considered mainstream is the flex.

Now, to make all this pretenious-ness actually work, you have to have two elements (according to Bourdieu):

1. The thing itself doesn’t really matter, only the distance. The things that are considered “good taste” will always be changing. That’s part of the game. It’s really all about cost. If it’s free and easy to access, it’s mainstream. If it’s hard to access and expensive, it’s prestigious and exclusive (duh).

2. Your refusal to participate in the mainstream has to be witnessed. Someone has to know that you don't watch ‘Summer House’ or don't have a TV to make it matter. It’s a performance (at the end of the day).

Brands do stuff like this all the time to signal how elite and important they are (and we fall for it).

In January 2021, Bottega Veneta deleted all its social accounts, millions of followers gone, and created a news story. Their CEO told WWD the brand was “merely using their [social channels] differently.” A fan account called newbottega basically became the brand’s new unofficial Instagram.

Lush announced a global Anti-Social media Policy in November 2021, and stepped away from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat. The Row banned phones at its Fall 2024 show in Paris, and gave guests notebooks and pencils instead.

This is all Janine logic at use by brands.

“We don't really do social.”

“We don’t really do press.”

Not needing the channels is creating a clear message about being above it all. But not everybody gets to do that. A DTC startup can't opt out of social; they need to be in the conversation, they need to be present every day. Opting out of something like social media is a “luxury good.”

I would like to pretend I don't engage in this performance of having taste and pretending to be a tastemaker, but I write a Substack about advertising, so draw your own conclusions.

Oren ends his video on what he calls the last true flex: a genuine lust for life. I believe him, but I’m just not sure anyone in advertising can afford to lean into that.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

One example of this working in advertising is Avis in 1962. Everyone knew car rental ads were supposed to be kinda braggy, so when DDB's Paula Green wrote "When you're only No. 2, you try harder," it worked for them. They also didn't treat the line as a one-off thing. The self-deprecating No. 2 positioning became their brand platform, and the campaign ran for the next 50 years before it was finally retired in 2012.

The same idea was used to create DDB's "Think Small" work for Volkswagen in 1961, which sold the Beetle to Americans. The creative admitted the car was small and, in one ad's words, kinda ugly.

Ryanair's TikTok is the modern version of this. The channel actively mocks the bare-bones experience of flying on a Ryanair jet, the cramped seats, the bag fees, the experience just overall kind of being bad, and it has done this consistently.

@ryanairenjoy the view 👍 #stitch w/ @RACH 🐬 #ryanair

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But man, these can go very bad. Self-deprecation only works if you're willing to make the joke the core of the brand rather than a costume you wear for one campaign, and if you keep the wrongness somewhat moderate. A brand that mocks itself once and then retreats back into polish reads as insincere, and a brand that pushes too weird just confuses people.

Which brings me back to the mango. The keh mukarni survived 700 years because it never abandoned its template. The audience knew a twist was coming, that was part of the fun. Khusrow understood that he was writing for people who had heard a hundred of these, he just had to keep coming up with new endings.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

@var.aunevikdon't mind the stain on my shirt while i talk about how happiness is kind of embarrasing

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“The prestige of being unhappy runs so deep that we protest when someone calls us happy,” she says. “Being a bit miserable is understood to mean that you have a certain depth, while being happy means you haven't really looked around.”

In 1979, two psychologists, Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, published a study called “Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser? (Here’s the paper on PubMed if you’re really curious: LINK) They had participants press a button and observe how often a green light turned on. The actual control the button had over the light varied. What they found was that non-depressed people consistently overestimated their control. They believed they were making the light turn on, even when they weren’t. Depressed people gave estimates closer to reality.

This paper has been cited many, many times since its publication and helped coin the term “sadder but wiser.” It became this shorthand for the idea that if you seem too cheerful, you aren’t paying attention.

In 2012, a meta-analysis by Moore and Fresco looked at 75 studies over 7,000 participants and found that the depressive realism effect was negligible, that both groups actually showed a positive bias in the light test. In 2022, Amelia Dev and Don Moore attempted to recreate the light experiment at UC Berkeley and found no evidence that depressive symptoms relate to perceived control (not in any way). Sadder wasn’t wiser, it was just simply sadder.

But the original idea stuck and still hangs around today.

Creative departments run on a specific, odd, misery-is-one-of-your-credentials style system. The most respected person in the room is usually the most tired, the most overworked, the one who has seen it all. The person who sighs when someone pitches something ambitious because they know that concept will slowly be ground down into a shell of itself.

If you’ve worked for an agency, you know these rules. Don’t be the person who gets excited about the brief or says “I love this” in a review. Don’t care too visibly about a project that may or may not be killed. The only approved emotion is exhaustion, having a been-there-seen-it-all energy that signals your aloofness.

That sounds like a lot of performing for the sake of it, so let’s circle back to Vår: “Unhappiness ends up not only feeling safe, but also respectable. A simple joy feels risky, almost embarrassing.”

The person who gets visibly excited about an idea in a review is taking a risk the cynical person never has to take. If the excited person’s idea gets killed, they look naive. Cynicism is a free pass, but enthusiasm has a cost.

Alloy and Abramson’s “sadder but wiser” hypothesis confirmed a bias that existed long before they ran their experiment, that misery means depth, and happiness means you missed something.

Now, to clarify, nobody wants a creative director who claps at every concept like it’s a kindergarten recital, or praises every line of copy like gospel. But, I do think the industry has gotten comfortable with treating cynicism as intelligence, and that ends up hurting everyone.

Being excited about a concept or idea is not a sign that you don’t understand the business. I would argue that being too jaded actually means you don’t understand the creative business.

Xx, Caitlin

L B Alloy, L Y Abramson, Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?, 1979

Amelia S. Dev,Don A. Moore, Sheri L. Johnson, Karin T. Garrett, Sadder ≠ Wiser: Depressive Realism Is Not Robust to Replication, 2022

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Means Workwear posed this trick question. “Should murderers go to jail?” It’s not a real question. It’s only posed as one, and it's what’s called discursive disclosure.

Discursive disclosure was coined by communication theroist Stanley Deetz to describe how institutions suppress conflict without people realizing they’re being suppressed. You’re not censored outright, instead you’re asked a question that contains the acceptable answer inside of it. Answer anything outside of what is deemed acceptable, and you’ll be seen as hostile or strange.

For example, if you ask someone: “Should murderers go to jail?”

The socially acceptable answer is: yes. But it’s deeper than that.

In Means Workwear’s words, baked into the question “should murderers go to jail” is a whole chain of assumptions. That punishment equals prison, that prison equals safety, that questioning any part of that chain means you don’t care about victims. That if you answer anything other than the expected yes, then before you can discuss anything about criminal justice reform, you’re first having to defend yourself against the implication that you’re pro-murder.

@means_workwearJon Favreau can suck cheeks @realpodsaveamerica

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What’s Your Biggest Weakness?

This dynamic probably sounds familiar to anyone who has sat in a conference room in a blazer that doesn’t fit quite right, answering questions about their personality and job history. In my view, a job interview runs on the exact same mechanics (it’s just aimed at your labor instead of your politics).

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” is not (even a little bit) asking about your five year plan. It’s asking about loyalty to a company. The honest answer for most people is something like “hopefully making more money, maybe somewhere else, who’s to say.” But you can’t say that. The right answer requires you to invent a future where this particular employer is the centerpiece of your life and ambitions.

“Why do you want to work here?” is the exact same thing. Everyone in the room knows the real answer is “because I need to pay rent.” Instead, you need to construct a narrative of specific enthusiasm for this company’s mission and goals.

And “what’s your biggest weakness” is the most open version of this trick. It’s compliance pretending to be vulnerability. You are asked to be self-aware while actually revealing nothing.

Now Back to Deetz

In Deetz’s original framing, discursive disclosure isn't an accident of bad communication, it’s a tool of organizational power. It lets an institution get compliance from people while those people believe they’re having a real conversation, making a real choice, or being genuinely evaluated.

A job interview markets itself as an assessment of your skills, but it’s more an assessment of your ability to understand the rules of engagement. Can you read the unstated rules fast enough to perform them convincingly? Can you package your actual, complicated relationship to work into the shape an interviewer is already looking for?

This isn’t (by the way) a call to blow up every interview by telling the truth about wanting a paycheck. Rent is due on the first, that’s just what it is. But, once you know the trap, you won't fall into it. A job interview is not a real assessment of your worth, and it never will be.

Walk into that conference room with the understanding of exactly what game is being played, and decide how much of your actual self you’re willing to trade for the job.

Xx, Caitlin.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

In the ‘80s, Dan Wieden was trying to come up with a tagline for Nike. They had a bunch of different options floating around, and nothing was really working. What they eventually landed on came from a memory he had of convicted double murderer Gary Gilmore. When Gilmore stood in front of a firing squad for his crimes, he said “Let’s Do It.” Wieden changed it to “Just Do It.”

An LLM can generate you a thousand taglines for Nike. Quite frankly, it could probably even generate “Just Do It,” but it would arrive at that string of words through pattern recognition and previous creative. It wouldn’t find inspiration from the last words of a convicted killer, it can’t sit in the room the night before a deadline pulling from a specific, strange inventory of a life well lived.

The film Aftersun is focused on a father and daughter on vacation at a Turkish resort. It’s a beautiful-looking film, and the whole thing feels like a home movie, almost like you’re watching a memory. The film was written and directed by Charlotte Wells, whose father died when she was 16. She wrote the film based on old summer vacation photos, and purposely had the cinematographer shoot the father character through glass panes or at an arm’s length to represent how a child’s memory retains a parent after losing them.

The film doesn’t tell you any of these details, but as you watch, you feel this sense of melancholy, and the whole trip feels like a memory. You have to go looking for the backstory, and the backstory adds depth to what you see on screen.

An LLM hasn't lived a life, it’s just pretending to. It hasn’t been in an argument at a bar, it hasn’t dealt with love or loss.

We can't out-idea these models. We can out-human them. They don’t have access to our weird, specific, over-researched, personally strange realities. The things we think about late at night, the things we can’t let go of.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Work is also helpful in creating structure and purpose, and (quite frankly) something to talk about at dinner when the conversation gets stale. There’s nothing better than telling stories from work, especially when the stakes feel low. Work can be the thing that feels fulfilling, but it can also be the thing that keeps you from thinking about everything else. And that second piece is where we a wee bit dark.

Because (and this is gonna sound a bit cheesy, but stick with me) your life is happening whether you’re paying attention to it or not. The seasons outside your office window are changing, your friends are getting older, and so are your parents.

My Dad went to the DMV the other day to renew his license. He said the only change he had to make was his hair color - switching it from brown to gray. I guess time really is moving forward.

I’m definitely guilty of spending too much time working and ignoring other parts of my life. Big decisions I’ve needed to make have been put off because a big campaign is underway (but there’s always another big campaign or a big pitch).

Nothing actually pauses because you’re on a deadline. Everything just moves forward without you in it. The Fall will come, then Winter, even if you don't look up from your screens to see it. So, maybe it’s time to stop waiting.

Do the personal project you’ve been putting off. The one that you develop the idea for a little bit more every time you’re lying in bed at 2am.

Meet a friend for drinks even though it’s a Tuesday.

Get rejected in the pursuit of human connection. Ask someone out. Tell someone you miss them.

Cry in the shower to a sad song.

Or take a shower in the middle of the workday. (I consider this the single greatest perk of working from home).

Invite your grandma over for pasta. Or go to hers.

Take a walk around your neighborhood and wave to the old ladies watering their gardens. They will wave back.

Read a book aloud to yourself in a British accent.

Print out every photo you love and hang them on your walls with push pins. (I have a hack for covering the holes with soap when you move, just DM me).

Stay up all night watching reality TV even if you’re tired the next day.

Your work can be important. But your life should be important too. And the thing about life is that it doesn’t send you a calendar invite before it moves on without you.

It’s important because it ends.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Ten years ago she was a single mom. She was dating someone who wasn’t good for her or her son. She was living paycheck to paycheck and had no idea what her future looked like. She ended the post: “So I’m going to set my phone down, eat a few more pretzels and m&ms, and be grateful.”

The post went up on r/GirlDinnerDiaries, a subreddit where women share a photo of whatever they’re eating and share a confession or story along with it. The food is incidental, the point is the story.

I look at this Reddit almost nightly before I go to bed. I like reading the stories and seeing the bad food photos. It also makes me feel connected to these women, the way they’re sharing these stories and confessions is so vulnerable.

It’s funny, that word “vulnerable” has shown up so much in my professional work too. Every brand wants to be authentic and vulnerable with their audience. They want to feel human. Brands want the feeling of r/GirlDinnerDiaries. They want the rawness, the emotional connection, the comment thread where a thousand women say “I’ve been there.” They want the engagement rate of a woman eating pretzels alone in a hotel room and telling you the truth about the last decade of her life.

They just don’t want the actual conditions that produce it.

Because the conditions aren’t really brand safe (no production value, no narrative arc, no call to action, no trending audio, no good lighting, no face). It’s not really a good campaign, it doesn’t feel polished and pretty and real.

TikTok is not the ideal place to pull this kinda thing off, if you really want to create the performance of vulnerability that is going to drive engagement. But you do still have to think about getting good lighting on your cry face, and pairing your deep confession with a good trending audio. You gotta film the breakdown, then film the recovery, then (seamlessly) sell the skincare routine that cleared your stress acne. Nobody even sees the little #ad at the bottom. The algorithm will reward the appearance of honesty, which is different than honesty.

Every few months, some brand will try to reverse-engineer authenticity. They’ll launch a campaign about “real moments” or “unfiltered stories.” They’ll cast real people instead of models, but everything else will be carefully staged. Legal will approve all copy, on set, the moodboard will say “ vulnerable but also aspirational,” and we will end up adding a product shot just because there’s still time in the day.

Meanwhile, a woman in a subreddit will post a photo of cold leftovers and write three sentences about her divorce, and 900 people will be on board.

I don’t have a tidy takeaway here. I’m not going to tell you what brands should learn from this, because the lesson is one they can’t really use. The most honest place on the internet works because nobody is selling anything. The moment someone tries, it stops working. Maybe some places are just meant to be unbranded.

Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe it’s okay for some parts of the internet to just be for people, for human connection.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

So, eventually you go (I did). Thousands of people went, and with it came the trend of the “in-house agency” where a bunch of brands hired media buyers, copywriters, designers, producers, and strategists and built these in-house studios.

I was working at the kid’s clothing brand Hanna Andersson during part of this boom and saw them build out a full on internal studio, invest in brand content shoots, and spend real money on social to drive brand awareness. I got to do fun, creative work, and it made a ton of strategic sense.

PepsiCo built an entire internal creative studio, Keurig Dr. Pepper did the same, so did dozens of mid-size brands. They wanted to create content that told stories and sold products.

Then, there was reality. What actually happened after all the creative fun and games.

We thought the in-house, brand-side thing was safe. Agencies were unstable, if you lost the client, you could lose your job. Brand-side was a different, but also scary. It was these weird “strategic realignment” calls where a new CMO announced that they’d be evaluating the current team.

PepsiCo ended up pushing parts of its internal studio into VaynerMedia, and Keurig Dr. Pepper killed their creative studio concept entirely. Hanna Andersson (I had left by then) reduced spending on brand awareness-style content.

Building an in-house agency (turns out) is very expensive. It’s a very easy line item to cut. In-house creatives were promised they'd make the work they always wanted to make, with no middleman. What they ended up with was 10 internal stakeholders with opinions and a revolving door of CMOs that each had their own new way of solving business problems.

It’s all bad, but it’s all creative. So maybe that makes it worth it? Nobody went brand-side because they hated advertising. They went because they hated what advertising was doing to them. Whoops.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

The brief, stripped down, was basically: get people to use a dating app while making it physically impossible to date.

We pitched a campaign called Put Yourself Out There. The idea was that a pandemic could actually be a good time to use a dating app. You aren’t hiding behind a bar or behind small talk. You are a person alone in your apartment, connecting with other people alone in their apartments. There was nowhere to go, which left more room to show who you actually were.

It worked, and it ended up winning me my first Telly Award.

Curiosity

After doing this a while, my best work has been created when I was super unfocused. When I ended up goinf down rabbit holes and getting really disconnected from the actual brief.

My algorithm knows me (more than I know myself), and I know I have to break that on purpose.

Read a Substack about a stranger’s hyperfixation.

Open a fresh YouTube account and search as a different person.

Scroll weird Letterboxd lists.

Most of the time it pays off in nothing. Occasionally, it will hand you an idea.

Commitment

Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico’s residency is such a cool case study in being ultra committed to something you care about. He did a 30-show residency in Puerto Rico specifically for residents of Puerto Rico. The last show landed on the anniversary of Hurricane Maria, and overall ended up bringing millions into Puerto Rico’s economy. He cares about Puerto Rico and the people of Puerto Rico, and made that statement loud and clear.

As a human person, one of the things I have to sell is my commitment. The reason I show up in scary and unfamiliar rooms and talk a lot about cool creative is that I care about the work I create (or pretend to care). A very large number of people can technically do my job, but not everybody is gonna show up and give it the oomph.

Aloofness works for some people, I think it’s hard to market. I’m not above the thing I’ve been paid to make. I’m not too cool to try. I am very much here, trying as hard as I possibly can.

The Boring Brief

But what if I ended up writing subject lines for a regional insurance company? What if I don’t care about the product even slightly?

I think Flo is a good reference. She has been in something like 150 Progressive spots since 2008.

Car insurance is arguably the most boring product in the American economy, but somewhere in Ohio a creative team sat in a room and pitched the idea that the insurance could be funny. This lady, Stephanie Courtney, has literally created twenty years of ads as this character, and now we all know her.

Not every brand is gonna let you do that, but I do think buried in most briefs is 5% of something that is actually creative. That’s the small piece of something to grab onto (even if it’s regional insurance).

I’ve definitely worked with brands I disagree with, and people who want me to fail. Sometimes I made it work, other times I left. Both are allowed, and only you know which one is right. But when the five percent is there, it is worth trying.

I say: Go down the rabbit hole, commit to the specific thing, walk into the room, and have some damn passion.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

This is the spot:

It is pretty damn good.

But these awards are all a little bit fake anyway. You make the real campaign for the client, then you make the awards version. (and the awards version has a more compelling narrative, more gritty footage, the stuff that felt a little too risky for the real spot). I don't think my preferred version of a brand campaign spot has ever gone live, but it’s definitely been submitted as part of an awards package. (That’s kinda the whole point of a director’s cut.)

The awards system rewards the case study. Not the campaign that lives in real life.

We’ve now built an entire incentive system around awards and then clutch our pearls when people optimize for winning them. Agencies sell creative work. Awards are the proof that the creative work was good. If the proof can be manufactured more cheaply than the work itself, someone is going to manufacture the proof. That's just how incentives work.

The people most affected aren't the ones who got caught in this weird situation. They're the creatives who made real work, for real clients, and actually had impact. They watched a fabricated campaign win at Cannes while their project never even had a case study budget. I think it’s important to celebrate work, even if it wasn’t “award winning.” Here’s one spot I’m loving this week from Etsy:

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

He is wearing his own clothes. There are no fashion credits. MORE.

Image credit: Jurgen Teller

To understand what the hell is going on here, we have to understand Žižek.

Let’s start with Karl Marx: Marx believed that people go along with systems that exploit them because they've been tricked. They don't see what's really happening. The capitalist tells you the wage is fair and you believe him. The priest tells you suffering is noble and you believe him. Lift the veil, show people the truth, and they'll revolt.

Žižek’s career has been focused on flipping that idea: He says no, people aren't fooled. People know perfectly well that the wage isn't fair, that the ad is manipulating them, that the influencer was paid, that the politician is lying. They participate anyway. A cynical distance doesn't free you from the system, it lets the system keep running. "I know it's bullshit, but I'm doing it anyway" is not resistance, it’s compliance.

Žižek is really useful for thinking about advertising. The old worry was "people are being brainwashed by ads." Žižek says "people know they're being sold to, they make jokes about being sold to, and they buy the thing anyway, and that's worse."

He talks a lot about Coca-Cola, saying that the brand markets itself as special and necessary, but will never actually do what it promises (quench your thirst). That’s his point about a perfect commodity, that satisfaction isn’t the point, that your desire is. If you drink a Coca-Cola, you want another Coca-Cola. If you buy something, you want another of that something, you are now in a loop that will not end.

So Why Did Vogue Put Žižek on It’s Cover?

I think there’s a few things happening here. Žižek built his career on the idea that capitalism survives by absorbing its critics. He’s now on a Vogue cover getting photographed in front of a wall that calls the audience suckers, and tells the interviewer he calls himself a “moderately conservative communist.” It’s almost too spot on. The system takes a guy who criticizes the system, puts him on a Vogue cover, and sells him back to us.

Initially, I thought this was the point. …But maybe that’s not the point?

(lol, I promise I’m building to an actual point here)

Image credit: Jurgen Teller

He’s not styled, the poses are bad (maybe on purpose), the locations are weird. It’s all a bit jarring. Photographer Jurgen Teller has spent 30 years making fashion look awkward and exposed, and he’s using that whole skill set here. Vogue Adria isn’t trying to make Žižek fashionable. Vogue Adria is making his refusal to become fashionable into a fashion story.

The interview (I think) supports this interpretation. Žižek didn’t want to do the interview or the shoot. He told the writer, Teodora Jeremić, that he had already said everything he had to say in his books. He spends the conversation on the things he actually cares about: that the liberal center is disappearing, that Trump is power’s “obscene dimension” made visible, that the left has lost the language of dignity, and that he was happiest during Covid because he didn’t have to see anyone. He says he likes being a passive smoker. He says he would prefer to live in Svalbard.

None of this is fashion writing. It’s a man being himself in a magazine that normally asks people to be a very polished, extreme version of themselves.

So then, who is laughing at who?

Image credit: Jurgen Teller

Žižek isn’t laughing at Vogue (I don’t think). Vogue Adria isn’t laughing at Žižek, they’re letting him be the version of himself that doesn’t (necessarily) sell magazines. Teller isn’t laughing at either of them, he’s doing what he always does. The reader is in there somewhere, possibly the sucker in the whole thing (maybe not).

The cover doesn’t resolve to a clean thesis. And maybe that’s the point.

Go back to the ice cold Coke. The perfect commodity doesn’t satisfy you. It produces more wanting. You drink it, you want another one. Žižek would say the Vogue cover is doing the same thing. You look at it and you don’t know what to think, so you look again. You read the interview, you text the link to a friend, you write a Substack post about it. The cover isn’t selling you Žižek. It’s selling you the experience of not being able to figure out what Vogue is doing. That experience doesn’t end. So you keep looking.

I think that’s my main takeaway as someone working in advertising. Most brand work tries to resolve. The manifesto resolves. The values statement resolves. The brand film about joy resolves. The form and the message are saying the same thing, you absorb it in three seconds, and then you’re done. The work satisfies you and you move on.

Vogue Adria made something that doesn’t satisfy. The cover is a man looking through a hole in a wall. The interview is a philosopher saying he wants to live in Svalbard. The styling is whatever he had on. None of it adds up to a clean message, which is why I really like it.

Žižek would say we already know we’re being sold something. We’re going to buy the issue anyway. Maybe that’s what makes it work.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.

Below the Fold.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.