Viral

Une Fille Comme Les Autres from Jalouse blog on Vimeo.

This is a smart ad for a French fashion magazine Jalouse. It is scripted in the manner of agencies making a viral video pitch to clients. What I like about it is that it mocks the whole viral pitch agencies make without appearing to do so.  

I am still surprised and bemused when clients and agencies alike in their pompousness think that their product or ad or digital engagement is going to go viral (or an idea will become ‘big ’). One would think that by now these professionals would have realized that nobody knows when (and why) something is going to go viral. 

These people seem to forget that viral is an effect, an outcome. They also seem to forget that it is next to impossible to predict this outcome. In most cases, it is on hindsight that one identifies the reasons for something becoming a viral. And that the very same reason(s) will not work another time around. 

Simply put, nobody knows anything and there is the consumer to remind them just that, time and again.

Therefore….. 

An intelligent person saying 'viral video' is like a beautiful woman picking her nose.
— Bud Caddell (@bud_caddell) January 26, 2012

  

Intelligence

I do not share the above view about life but I surely feel that way whenever I enter an autorickshaw(tuk-tuk for the uninitiated) with a suspect fare meter or worse, no meter.

This post is not about that. It is about everyday people, like the autorickshaw driver above, and the intelligence (or wisdom) they possess that is seldom recognised and appreciated. They have an uncanny knack of striking a chord with their observations about life around us.

Speaking of autorickshaw drivers, I ran into one such colourful personality in my hometown Bangalore sometime back. He was cursing the road leading to my parents place from the main road. He asked me why none us did not protest. I remember giving him some vague answer as to why it was not possible in the area my folks lived. He dismissed them with a shrug and said, “The problem is you are all educated.” He nailed it.

He went to mention that in the area he lived, there had been no water supply for a long time. When the time came for elections, he and his friends mobilized the entire area to boycott the local councilor’s visit to the area. The councilor had no choice but to fix the problem of water supply before being allowed inside the area. As a response to this gesture, they voted him out.

(BTW, he also took extra ten rupees from me as ‘hardship’ fee)

I am not alone in my encounter with such intelligence(or smarts) from the streets. I have copied below an incident narrated by the great Isaac Asimov that is at once funny and profound.

When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me.

(It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too.

Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was.

Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test.

Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too.

In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly.

My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again.

He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me.

One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand.

"The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers.

Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them."

Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you."

"Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart." 

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.

What we say to clients...

..and what we really mean.

-"We'll certainly consider that"
-Don't make me laugh!

There is a major opportunity
We need your money

Our advice to you
Our invoice to you

That's a good point, but...
I've heard some rubbish in my time...

We've been thinking
Because you obviously haven't

There's a lot of support for this concept
This is our only concept

May I make a suggestion
Do this or you're neck deep in shit

That's a challenging brief
What the FUCK do you mean?

We'll need to visit the factory
We know you have a factory in Hawaii

We won't need to visit the factory
We know you have a factory in Siberia.

This is award-winning work
You won't understand this

We've taken a radical approach
We gave this job to students

We'd like to challenge your brief
We haven't done the work yet

We've done a lot of analysis
The invoice is bigger than you expected

We've had a breakthrough with your product
You won't recognise anything you're about to see

Our creative director worked on this
If you don't buy it, you can tell him.

We're going to do a sketchbook presentation
We scribbled this down in the lift on the way up

We've done some very sketchy thinking
We worked on the wrong brief

We had three teams working on this.
Our presentation is very confused

I can sense your excitement
Hello, is anybody home?

You've given us a lot to think about
You've completely change the brief... Ass hole!

We'll go away and refine these concepts
Shit! We'll start from scratch...

 (via)

Sometimes truth can be extremely funny like the piece above. If you are in the agency business, you will understand and honed the above into a fine art. If you haven't, you should be elsewhere.