Strawberries

This morning I crushed a strawberry into a cup of lemonade (which was delicious, obviously) and it occurred to me how little pressure was needed to mash the strawberry.

I don't know how many of you have had the chance to crush a strawberry at home, but I can tell you that it's no easy task. You have to hold them still and apply a lot of force to make them pulpy.   But these French strawberries sort of collapse on themselves if you apply light pressure with a spoon.

It's noticeable when you eat them as well.  As you bite into them they melt into pulpy messes. At home a strawberry is a more formidable thing - it holds its shape as you go.

I like both of them - the American strawberry for its bright color, plump appearance, and sweetness - and the French strawberry for its delicateness and its less sweet, but more flavorful taste.

I wonder how much the differences have to do with climate, soil content, genetic modification, and selective breeding.  We certainly like things to be bigger and sweeter in the US, so it would make sense if we had bred our strawberries to be larger and more sugary, but it might just be differences that happened by chance.

Either way: delicious.

How I React to Famous Things.

I have this freakish obsession with touching famous things (Not people. That's too creepy even for me).  It's not that I'm going to wander up to a Michelangelo and put my hands all over an incredible sculpture - that would be bad for the sculpture after all - but if I'm in a church, or a palace, or a famous building I'll run my hand along a banister or if none of the security guards are watching too closely I'll give one of the columns a brief hug.

It all started with the Hagia Sophia last summer. There's this thing called a wishing column.  It's a brass section of one of the pillars with an a little indent in the center. You place your thumb in the little spot on the pillar and make a wish as you rotate your hand all the way around.  And for me this offered some connection, quite literally, with the building and the other visitors.  The tactile sensation of the place made a great impact on me.  I remember being surprised at how cold the wishing column was despite all the warm human touch that had graced it. I remember thinking that my wish just went up with thousands of others from around the entire world for thousands of years.

Then there was the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, again last summer, where I felt like I needed to hug every column and run my hands over every surface.  There was something so alive about it.  It was constructed with such movement that the building looks like it is vibrating. In touching it I felt maybe I could resonate with it, maybe I could become a piece of the marvelous history that went into it.

This summer, the most prominent experience I've had has been at the Pantheon in Rome. I ran my fingertips along the cold marble on the wall, a dirt red stone in particular.  Perfectly smooth and cold.  I did stop to think that it was probably not the original stone being as it's close to the door and at a height where many might touch it, but it doesn't really matter if it is the original or not. More importantly, it is a part of something great and famed whether it was in the original building or added ten years ago.  Touching it connected me to several thousand years of history.  How many people entered that building in awe? How many of them got in an argument with their spouse? How many of them wondered how it was build?  How many of them wept?

What has become increasingly clear as I've touched each great building is that it's not actually the monument that matters, but the people passing through it that do.  The people passing through these famous places make them increasingly famous as their history is put onto a higher and higher pedestal.   While most monuments are breathtaking in their beauty and grandeur, many more beautiful buildings have fallen in fires, in revolutions, or simply in the passing of time.  It is just that these have survived and have been building reputations upon themselves through the passing of time.  They are important because we have declared them so.

For me the physical contact with them brings them back down off the pedestal. Touching a railing reminds me that it's a real place, not a photo in a history book, not the essence of a Roman god, but a real thing that people go in and out of nearly every day.  This simple act reminds me that it's the people who are incredible and amazing, not the building.

Post-Cannes Bloggin'

The study abroad has long ended and my grade has since come in so I now feel free to use this blog for whatever I might.

So welcome to The Factory: Post-Cannes Edition.

What have I been up to since leaving the glittering world of the French Riviera? 

The week following the program I went to Herrang Dance Camp. It is a magical place in Sweden where you do nothing but dance for week long intervals (and fuel yourself almost completely with ice cream). I took a series of lessons in advanced Lindy Hop with a good friend of mine from Atlanta, GA.   It was common place for people to walk down the street singing Gordon Webster pieces or break into a set of Charleston moves. Everyone dressed like people from the 1930s and 40s and tattoos as well as headbands and hair flowers were abundant.  Needless to say it was my heaven - except for the part where I felt like my feet might fall off or my calves might never relax. I'll go more into detail about what I learned in a separate post.

On the last night of the camp I danced until 5AM packed my things and got on a shuttle to the Stockholm airport at 6AM. I spent the rest of the day getting to Amsterdam where my mother was waiting at our hotel. I explored Amsterdam with her for a week which was not nearly enough time to see the city. 

Now, I'm sitting in the stark white Paris apartment my mother and I have rented writing this post with the mercifully reliable internet connection we have.  I've been here for a week so far and I'll be here for another week. Still, I'm not sure we're going to see all the things we'd like to.

A Different Kind of Agency

Sitting in the Debussy, cold and a little tired, I watched David Baldwin explain to me what my future could be.  He didn’t know I was sitting there. He didn’t know he’d told me exactly what I wanted to hear when I hadn’t even known what it was I wanted to hear. I tried to talk to him afterwards, but he got called backstage and I didn’t run into him later at the festival. Of course I’ll email him, but this will be separate, formal, normal, not the ephemeral magic of hearing a version of your perfect future laid out.

David Baldwin is the founder and CEO of Baldwin& an independent agency operating out of Raleigh, North Carolina.  It is a self-described “hybrid branding/digital/advertising/mobile/social media thingy.”  It works for brands such as BMW and Burt’s Bees and was awarded small agency of the year by Advertising Age, a coveted prize in the USA, within a few years of its beginning.

The presentation Baldwin gave somehow managed to be humble even though it was entirely centered on the work of the agency.  It was self-deprecating.  He talked about their work and showed a few case studies, but mostly he talked about their policies. This is what appealed to me most.  He said they didn’t like to define jobs, a common theme at the festival, because it limited only creatives to being creative. The work they do they try not to categorize. It’s a sort of catch-all agency making ads, films, websites, social profiles, outdoor events, art, connections, and communication. 

Then he explained that they only took clients whose goals they supported. The only way they could do their work effectively was if they believed in what the client was doing. They never took business they couldn’t stand behind.  And that was the moment I thought: I could work there. That doesn’t mean I’m going to or even that it’s the right place for me.  But before hearing this I had pretty much crossed agency work off my list for future jobs.  I never want to end up at an agency where I’d have to do work for a company I don’t support. It’s bad enough that I already buy things from brands that aren’t socially sustainable, like Nike and Wal-Mart, I don’t need to help them get even more money than they already have.  I don’t want to wake up in fifty years and realize I dedicated my life selling the next version of the cigarette.  So I’ve been thinking of doing in-house PR work for a non-profit I support (because there are plenty of problems I have with some of those as well).  I’ve been trying out some internships in local non-profits, but it all seems a bit pell-mell, and it’s hard to get people to understand what exactly public relations is and how each department can use it to their advantage.  At least at an agency people have some vague idea that you’re making communication for a series of brands.

Hearing Baldwin say that his agency only takes work it supports was really important to me.  Maybe Baldwin& isn’t the right place for me, maybe the work I support wouldn’t line up with the work they did, but at least I know that some agencies operate like this.   At least I know I can expand where I’m looking in my search for a career that offers a way to make a positive impact on society to include agencies again.

Cannes Day 7 - The Last Day

On this, the last day of the festival, I started the day watching commercials. Luckily they were running through VW ads, which are usually pretty interesting, so it was less mind-numbing than usual.

After that I went to "Creativity Inside-Out: A New Way of Doing Business" put on by an agency called Big Spaceship that operates primarily out of Brooklyn. It focused on changing the nature of workspace to foster informal leaning. It was good, if slightly contradictory. One suggestion they had was not making set strategies of process, but then they were listing out strategies for this process. Otherwise they presented some interesting proposals like doing walking one-on-one meetings, having projects that are for fun rather than clients, and allowing new-comers to the industry to rotate through different projects every six months if they wanted.

Then I saw "Being the Underdog: Building an Identity through Creativity," during which a Hispanic American, a Latvian, Hungarian, and a Guatemalan talked about the ground breaking creative work happening within each community or country. It turns out when you're an underdog you aren't afraid of failing so you can take bigger risks and the pressure of having a smaller budget forces you to be more creative.  This was by far one of my favorite talks the entire week because I didn't know about most of the work in these populations (except the Hispanic American work having seen a number of Hispanic publications and ads in my Texan school district).  

It was also the most angering seminar because they crammed four countries into one session on the last day when most people don't come. It said a lot about how the industry is structured to favor those countries that are already in power. The clips shown at the underdog seminar were no less impressive and innovative than those shown by any other country or agency.  Each county, which were barely mentioned the rest of the festival, got twelve minutes to talk. Yet we already know and are somewhat familiar with the work coming from shops in the USA, the UK, France, and Australia. Brazil has been getting more time in the spotlight this year, and they are sweeping the award ceremonies, but otherwise I've seen a lot of work and seminars from countries I already know something about. The seminar for the underdogs made me aware of just how much is getting left out, particularly in Central America and Africa outside of South Africa.

Now I'm sitting in the theater one last time to watch the final awards ceremony and trying to put any negative feelings behind me, at least for the night.

It's been one hell of a week.

Thank you and good night.

Volkswagen Tall - Tall Girl

Volkswagen Tall is a spunky looking little car with a higher roof." The spot "Tall Girl" showcases a very tall woman going on a variety of outings with men who are about a head shorter than her. At the very end she meets a man whose head does not appear in frame at first.  When he comes up to her he is about the same height that she is. She gets in the Volkswagen Tall and they drive off together over a brightly lit bridge into the city. The tag line "surprising spacious" appears and the spot ends.

There is some implication that the car is like the woman - lovely, but a little quirky. It is charming and shows the theme of the car, a little different, a little special, more than the product itself. This creates a stronger feeling for the car than a number of car ads which show the car going quickly or the tech developments of the car. The ad used emotion rather than logic to sell and with a well know brand like Volkswagen, that has a reputation for being quirky, this ad fit into their larger brand voice well.

However, I was confused at the beginning as to whether she was going on dates with these men or was just going about life being taller than everyone. It was more clear at the end when she met the final man that she was going on dates, but I felt the previous scenes with shorter men should've been more clearly dates. A lot of them were outside or in big ambiguous buildings, had they happened in bars, coffee shops, and restaurants instead it would've been more clear.

Like my complaint about the Axe ad having really forgettable music I think that this commercial could've benefitted from some better music. The music was just background noise even though there was no speaking in the ad. When there is no dialogue to hear there is a great chance to hit the message home with an appropriate song. I wish a something a little quirky or a song about a search had been played during the ad.

Cannes Day 6

Today I went to the forum “Selling Sustainability – Are we there yet?” hosted by Y&R and Wunderman.  They discussed a consumer group they called the aspirationals – a group composed mainly of millennials, the generation I am part of. Aspirationals enjoy consumption and convenience, but they also take sustainability of a brand, either socially or environmentally, into account. If they are offered two products of similar cost they will, without a doubt, pick the sustainable brand, and they will be proud of it. The talk went on to say that “sustainability needs to be a force, not a fad” and that brands should promote the sustainable efforts they make.  As the media tends to only pick up on negative practices of brands they should try to be transparent and show the sustainable efforts they are making. 

At the end a very relevant question was asked: Will sustainability ever be more important than price?  They said it should be and would be because if a product is sustainable it’s actually worth more in the long run so it should be valued at a higher price.  There are a number of problems with this theory – primarily that the cheaper thing will often win out anyways because the majority of the world doesn’t have that extra money to spare.  Sustainable products have to be developed in way that they can be sold cheaply. Otherwise, they will only be used by the upper class. Sustainability has to be cheap or it will in fact just be a fad among wealthy consumers. Large brands with a lot of leverage should work to make sustainable products cheap enough to be priced competitively to regular products.

After this I got sucked into the screening room for the film ads again.  I love it and I hate it. When I watch a recorded TV I will usually watch one of the commercial breaks.  But watching ad, after ad, after ad is really enough to make me tear my hair out. Perhaps it’s because they’re so short, but I think it may be because they’re all so intense.  It made me reevaluate what I like in an ad. A calmer ad might actually work more effectively because it is a break from the stream of fast consumption.

After that I went to a seminar hosted by Burberry and Google where they showcased and compared the work they did that they felt pushed the creative bracket. It was interesting to see how both of these brands try to mesh the digital with the physical world.