Eureka #3: The Avant-Garde
How can a brand avoid "the shock of the new" - or worse, the banality of the new?
It's James. Hello from a cafe in the Tate Modern: home of the Turbine Hall, the Blavatnik Building, and the very popular but to my mind rather pedestrian-
(it’s daring sure, but is it art? etc etc)
Hello also from Thursday, where I am snatching time to write this now because the week has gone from a steady pulse of: thinking and writing and friendly chats and planning for the future, to a heady storm of: getting a process document drafted for a project that might start next week, meetings about a project that will start tomorrow (today!), and networking with old mentors and future partners. I guess this is how running your own show goes in the first few weeks. Perhaps this is how it goes forever. But I like the idea of Eureka being something constant in a life of change. Hopefully you do, too.
The Tate Modern is a fitting place for this issue. I have been telling my story a lot over the past week - the problem in the world I want to solve and why I should be the one to solve it. And while it's easy to do so with a friend and a full hour, that isn't going to be the case at scale. I'm thinking about getting a website up. When I only have a few slugs of text to explain what I offer - then what?
I think it's something like this.
On My Proposition
There are more new things today than ever before. Ideas, brands, movements, counter-movements, technologies, even words. People used to talk about the new normal. Now, we live in the normal new.
There is so much new stuff, or old stuff being sold as new stuff, that being ‘new’ is not inherently interesting. People don’t flock to the Worlds Fair any more to watch lightning jump between Tesla coils. They need something to solve THEIR problem, in order to garner their attention.
It’s also very possible that multiple people discover the same thing at once (far moreso than the days of Edison vs Swan). And the patent system was clearly designed for that mechanical age, when inventions could be held in the hand. What can possibly protect the inventor of features, or concepts? (Witness today, the way every social platform has lenses, stickers, and stories, without really knowing why.)
When Archimedes saw water slop out of his bath, he shouted “Eureka!”. It was the best he could do at the time, and we love him for it. But those early moments of a Eureka are decisive. Inventors are geniuses, but if they cannot explain to a non-genius audience a) what the invention is, and b) "what's in it for me?" - that invention is lost to the world. It enters the graveyard of the avant-garde. Too soon, too weird, too good. Too bad. Better luck next time.
But if you can identify the problem your genius is solving, and explain how you solve it well, a successful Eureka doesn’t just move your business along. If you do this right, you can move the world one more notch along the arc of progress. You can make the future happen - your way.
(Think about the Climate Crisis. Technologically, we have all the tools we need to solve it. It’s just an understanding and adoption challenge. That’s heartbreaking - but hopeful.)
What does a good Eureka take? It’s not just copywriting. Copywriting is often a battlefield of attention and brand attribution. But when a brand has to really explain itself, in the contexts of business to business, business to investor or business to early adopter, it’s talking to an audience that is more willing to lean in but also more critical. You need a person with not just 1) linguistic finesse, but 2) strategic and business understanding, and 3) the practised art of making complex things understandable and relevant.
Yes, I think I’m the one to do it. Ten years in successful brand strategy meets ten years of writing published, award-winning fiction. I know how to parse a business problem for what matters and a brand for its story, and I know how to make what comes out leap off the page.
The final "why me" is personal. Finding this discipline has been my own Eureka, actually. Looking back, a lot of my time in agencies was spent making old brands feel alive - but that’s not a good thing. That’s holding back progress. What I care about is not making old brands feel alive but bringing new brands, and changing brands, to life. Brands like yours.
Sound good? The words are very WIP, and will change a lot based on who we're talking to, but I believe the fundamental story is there.
Inputs
(this week as far from marketing as possible, to make up for the more work-based edition)
London Percent, by Thom Wong: My good friend Thom has written a big list of his favourite London things. Data is meant to be impartial, right? But the beauty of this is, it's utterly partial. You have as much chance of learning about the person who made the list as learning about anything on the list... also, I'm pretty sure we could feed this data into an algorithm and make a ThomTracker.
Beer trip to Llandudno, by Kevin Barrie: I did a creative writing MA a few years back. I thought I didn’t like short stories. This is how it begins:
It was a pig of a day, as hot as we’d had, and we were down to our T-shirts taking off from Lime Street. This was a sight to behold – we were all of us biggish lads. It was Real Ale Club’s July outing, a Saturday, and we’d had word of several good houses to be found in Llandudno. I was double-jobbing for Ale Club that year. I was in charge of publications and outings both. Which was controversial.
There’s laughter and heartbreak to be found - and at a time of such division in the country, there’s real empathy to be found for a bunch of blokes you might not have given a second thought. And its author, Kevin Barrie, is launching his new novel Night Boat To Tangier, at Libreria, on the 20th of June.
And we're out. It was a marketing-ey issue, I know. I'll try and push against that next week. I got a lovely bit of feedback last week for issue #2: "I'd like to be in your class." If you are in my class, I assure you I'm not the person behind the desk, but one of the kids making jokes at the back. We all are.
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'Til next time: the Tate is amazing, but very very big. Go down there, and instead of trying to cover it all, go look at one thing for ten minutes. That's the challenge.
Deeper, not broader,
James (@jamescmitchell)
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