In an attempt to cleanse my TikTok feed of only political arguments, I’ve tried to linger on and watch more ‘hopecore’ content. First it started out as kind, nice, inspirational content that was actually kind of nice to scroll through before I went to bed. This kinda thing:
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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).
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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?
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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.
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Everything that seems nice is actually bad. lol
The immi ramen post is kinda dark...