We are not here to do what has already been done
By James Hurman,
Idealog January/February 2007, page 84. Illustration by Adrian Clapperton
James Hurman examines our obsession with originality
Last year in Auckland, a group called Godmarks launched a campaign of billboards designed to generate a more positive feeling toward Christianity: white words on a black background from He Himself, they say things like “I was just thinking about you”, “I love everyone, even Christians” and my own favourite, “Well, you did ask for a sign”.
At an end-of-year gathering, filled with the spirit of Christmas, I dared to speak some kind words about the campaign among a group of creative people.
The group hastened to recalibrate my view, pointing out that the campaign was a copy of an earlier American campaign, and in light of this poverty of originality, was utterly meritless.
An idealistic judgement, one might say. Regardless of whether or not the campaign was effective, it was no good because it wasn’t original. The evening wasn’t spoiled with an argument, but the question had been asked: why do we have such an obsession with originality?
Godmarks on an Auckland bus; GodSpeaks on a Florida billboard
We all know it’s true. An unoriginal idea, no matter how engaging, entertaining, likeable or strategically sound, will struggle to make it out of most creative companies. The words ‘it’s been done’ will sour the sweetest of ideas.
There’s a sensible argument that dates back to the beginnings of the creative revolution that says original ideas have a far greater chance of standing out among the clutter. But surely we would consider the Godmarks campaign original from the point of view of the consumer—most New Zealanders won’t know of the Florida campaign, and thus to them is it not completely original?
Yet the belief persists that it would have been more virtuous to have created a purely original campaign, never mind that it might not have served Godmarks so well. From where does such a staunch ideal stem? Is it because there’s such shame in being labelled a plagiarist that even in the case of total innocence it’s prudent to avoid suspicion?
It’s only human to feel a sense of injustice when we learn of those who have knowingly passed off others’ work as their own. Blogs at home and abroad are rife with accusatory posts detailing idea larceny.
Apple’s Intel ad; The Postal Service’s vid
Consider the Apple campaign announcing their introduction of Intel chips to Mac computers. In January 2006 at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, Apple launched a new commercial. The similarities between the spot and a recent music video for American band The Postal Service were clear. Both pieces feature bunny-suited scientists in a space-age laboratory making eyes at each other while they work. Blogs such as cultofmac.com carried the story complete with a frame-by-frame video showing the identical features of the two films. Gradually it emerged that directors Josh Melnick and Xander Charity made both the video and the ad, but neither the band nor its label had given permission for the commercial to go ahead.
Since the ruckus, the original Postal Service video has graced iTunes’ front page and appeared on its most popular music video list. It remains to be proven whether this is Apple’s way of making good with the band or whether it was all been a marketing ploy, but Apple’s agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, can’t have enjoyed the attention.
Western society has evolved to reward originality and punish plagiarism. Intellectual property law is the zeitgeist of modern business, and a corollary of this is a culture of publicly shaming unoriginal creative efforts. Badland, a blog on website ad-rag.com, is dedicated entirely to the outing of suspected acts of advertising plagiarism.
So is it to avoid being shamed that we steer clear of well-sailed waters? Or is it because originality of thought is a romantic trait, a mark displayed by artists and scientists of genius, a prized virtue we claim for egotistical reasons?
We can draw parallels with the art world. Most modern artists are as obsessed with originality as we are.
But this has not always been the case. Our modern notion that the artist must be original would have been completely foreign to the Egyptian, Chinese or Byzantine master, or indeed any medieval artist of Western Europe. Up until the end of the Renaissance, an artist who deliberately sought originality would have been considered mad rather than gifted. A great artist used to be a copyist—of the ancients, of nature, of the ideal form. It wasn’t until the 18th century that unpredictability and eccentricity began to be seen as signs of genius.
The same goes for literature. Rather than writing original plays, Shakespeare appropriated sources and fashioned them anew, but modern writers are sensitive to any similarity of plot or prose. “Originality, not just innocence of plagiarism but the making of something really and truly new, set itself down as a cardinal literary virtue somewhere in the middle of the 18th century and has never since gotten up,” says literary critic Thomas Mallon.
Today, originality is the yardstick against which most art is measured. American painter Robert Henri captured the artist’s pursuit in 1923: “We are not here to do what has already been done.”
Einstein is celebrated for thinking up something most of us don’t understand
In its December 31, 1999 issue, Time magazine revealed its list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. At the top was Albert Einstein. The embodiment of scientific genius, Einstein’s originality of thought is stupefying. Even those of genius were stunned by the notion of relativity. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously commented, “I still can’t see how he thought of it.”
Despite Einstein’s genius, Time’s choice to sit him atop its list was an interesting one. To people who think for a living, like other scientists, artists or even advertising creatives, Einstein is relevant. He was the ultimate thinker. He developed an understanding of relativity just by thinking about it. But to the rest of the world—the much larger group who don’t spend their days in labs and studios—the great physicist’s relevance is indirect and limited.
One could argue that Martin Luther King’s struggle for racial equality has had a greater impact on our everyday lives, that Churchill’s tenacity in the face of fascism saved democracy, that Ford’s vision of the motorcar changed everything, and that for their direct and tangible influence on all of our lives they should take precedence over any theoretical scientist. So why the kudos for Einstein, a man most famous for thinking up something that most of us don’t even understand? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the 20th century was characterised by an obsession with original thinking. We’ve evolved from a culture which rewarded conformity and tradition to one which celebrates individuality and innovation. This democracy of thought is what some would consider the greatest cultural achievement of our time, culminating in the symbolic demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Within this context, original thinking has become loved and revered—both a symbol of freedom and an agent of progress. Those we believe to be geniuses we hold in the esteem that earlier generations reserved for royalty. Albert Einstein is King. Creative people can hardly be blamed for striving toward originality. Society worships it.
The Backstreet Boys sold 32 million copies of their awful debut; Radiohead chalked up a mere four million sales of OK Computer
But what role does originality actually play in persuasion? It’s all very well to value originality in and of itself—but as Mark Twain said, “the man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
We’ve accepted the wisdom of Ogilvy and Bernbach that original ideas have a better chance to stand out, but is there more to it than that? An analysis of successful creativity in the entertainment industry draws a frustrating conclusion: the more original the product, the less likely it is to appeal to most people.
It’s easy to cringe upon learning of the success of the Backstreet Boys. Poster boys for a generation of derivative, formulaic, highly-engineered pop, they have sold a staggering 87 million albums globally since their debut in 1995.
Contrast them with one of their most lauded, influential and original peers: Radiohead. Considered by some critics to be the greatest album of all time, OK Computer appears near the top of virtually every major ‘best albums’ list, from The Guardian to Rolling Stone. And yet this masterpiece has sold only four million copies worldwide. It’s difficult to see the justice in the Backstreet Boys’ debut album outselling one of the most original creative efforts of the 20th century by a factor of eight.
Björk, one of the most innovative and fearless songwriters of all time, has sold around ten million albums during her 20-year career. By comparison, Dido sold 13 million copies of her debut album No Angel—which one critic described as “music to microwave lasagne to”—dwarfing Björk’s entire career in 52 minutes flat.
Titanic grossed US$1.8 billion—ten times as much as Cannes Palme D’or winner Pulp Fiction
The box office paints us a similar picture. Forty films from history have grossed over $500 million globally. Twenty-six are adaptations from popular books or comics (such as Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man), sequels to previously successful franchises (Star Wars, The Matrix) or adaptations of historical stories (Titanic, The Passion of the Christ), rendering them unoriginal from conception. The remaining 14 big hitters—such as Independence Day, Ghost and Armageddon—all follow the formulaic three-act linear structure that Hollywood demands.
It’s interesting that when screenwriters pen a film that they hope will be made in Los Angeles, they follow a prescriptive set of rules which determine the length and structure of the film. The fact is that Hollywood leaves very little room for originality because most people tend not to enjoy original films. Sure, films such as Palme d’Or winners Pulp Fiction and Fahrenheit 911 and popular classics Forrest Gump and ET have met with both critical acclaim and enormous box office success. But the rule prevails—if we’re looking to entertain a mass audience, we’re better to show them something they’re familiar with.
What if, rather than to entertain, we want to persuade an audience? Is originality more helpful than familiarity when constructing an argument?
At Ogilvy London in 2004, planner Olivia Johnson was conducting research for her client, Dove, with the aid of feminist icons like Susie Orbach and Gloria Steinem. The resulting report, The Real Truth About Beauty, shows that just nine percent of women consider themselves ‘attractive’, 60 percent strongly agree that society expects women to enhance their physical attractiveness and 68 percent strongly agree that “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can never achieve”.
Johnson responded with a campaign that questions the images pumped out by the beauty industry. And so the Dove ‘Campaign for real beauty’ was born. Well, almost.
Senior managers at Dove are predominantly male. They’ve built a massive global business partly through advertising which, like all their cosmetic industry peers, uses aspirational images of beautiful women. To suggest to them that they should shoulder the weight of an entire culture’s manipulation and crusade philanthropically against it could easily be dismissed as preposterous.
The ‘Campaign for real beauty’ is clever, but the real innovation is that it was made at all
But Johnson was persuasive. She found the daughters of those mostly male senior managers. She filmed them talking candidly about how imperfect they felt. She showed those tapes to their fathers at Dove.
It was a powerful argument. Businessmen are used to making rational, objective judgements, after taking in research presentations full of graphs and charts. An appeal from your own daughter is completely original. The campaign was approved and rolled out globally.
Our psychological reaction to arguments is similar to our physical reaction to a virus. Our immune system, the first time it’s exposed to a foreign body, has a tricky time beating it. However, when the virus returns, it’s innocuous. We have no trouble dealing with an unoriginal virus. Likewise, an unoriginal argument is likely to suffer defeat at the hands of our immunity. There’s an ability in all of us to think our way out of even the most robust argument given enough time.
Countless case studies and research papers illustrate the ability of original ideas to cut through, but I suggest that, further to merely getting noticed, an original argument has a better chance of persuading people because they haven’t yet developed immunity to it.
The 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle said “originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.” He was speaking in the Victorian era, but the sentiment rings true today. We clamour for originality and it’s rewarded handsomely on the stages of our award shows, but in boardrooms and strategy meetings we constantly quarrel with it. What makes an original piece of communication, for example, a better bet than running something that we can see has worked for another marketer? Are we sure we’re not being creative just for the sake of it?
Well, originality does aid in cut-through and persuasion. It does make communication more effective. But it also moves us forward. Keeping the muscle of originality well-toned means we’re continually finding new ways to engage with consumers, new ways to keep advertising and marketing palatable and permissible to society and new ways to differentiate products and brands.
As another of Time’s 100 most important people, Coco Chanel, said: “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”
I’m with her.
Comments
Simon Young
Great quote from CS Lewis on originality:
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
– C.S. Lewis"
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