I recently got sucked into the self-help/motivation side of TikTok where everything is about digging deep and finding the motivation to achieve all your dreams (at least that’s the recruitment layer I was in). That’s when I stumbled across this clip from Chris Williamson:
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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.
Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.
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All long as the economy is this bad, we will continue to make things nobody wants to watch.