Branding, Culture and Debate at the 2010 Ottawa Writers Festival
The spring edition of the 2010 Ottawa Writer Festival took place this past week. Unfortunately, I missed the Saturday events (a pretty full, exciting day from the looks of it) but I managed to see a few other events, none especially literary (but maybe that’s the point).
On Sunday, April 25th, I attended The Age of Persuasion with Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant, two ad men who host a weekly show on CBC Radio about the pervasiveness of advertising and how it affects our day-to-day lives. They have a new book coming out this spring. Called The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture, it tells the story of marketing, from the early days in the 1960s to present-day and beyond.
According to Tennant, the book starts with ad clutter, the idea that ad men work against each other, which is what makes marketing so invasive and ubiquitous. He said this idea led to a question: how many ads are people exposed to each day? One morning, he decided to count the number of ads he saw and heard from the time he woke up in the morning to the time he arrived at work. It came to around 600. In the course of a day, he says, an individual can be exposed to up to 6000 ads.
It’s no wonder the room was packed. Everyone in our society has experience with marketing. We are exposed to it from the time we are born to the day we die, and, as a result, we have strong reactions to advertising and branding, and strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t, what’s appropriate and what’s not.
Tennant and O’Reilly used this to their advantage. The points they made were clarified with a variety of examples. Talking about marketing to the senses, they told the story of how Mercedes Benz has a 35-person department dedicated to creating and fine-tuning the sound made by a closing car door. The thinking is, and this is based on evidence, that the whoosh and click sound continuously cements in the minds of buyers the idea that they’ve made a wise purchase. It’s a satisfying sound, a sound that says, “this is a powerful, well-crafted machine.”
It’s not something you traditionally think of as marketing, but it’s all part of selling an experience. And it’s the reason brands are such powerful things. Advertisers are like lawyers, says O’Reilly, they present the best side of the case. The only difference is that advertisers work on you over the course of your lifetime, appealing to your senses, emotions, humour and anything else they can think of to win you over to their side.
When the floor was opened to questions, someone asked: as people start to seek out their own entertainment and don’t rely on broadcast television and advertisers to dictate what they watch, how will advertising change?
Tennant and O’Reilly think it will lead to a shift back to a golden age of advertising, where ads are cleverly woven into storylines, much as they were with radio advertising in the 1920s. This kind of advertising is more honest, they think— in exchange for your attention the ads give something back, something funny, witty or clever that you can appreciate.
On Tuesday evening, the last day of the festival, I saw Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World with Wade Davis and Extraordinary Canadians with a bevy of famous authors/political figures: John Ralston Saul, Adrienne Clarkson, Mark Kingwell and Douglas Coupland.
The first event featured Davis, a BC-based anthropologist who makes documentaries for National Geographic, giving a variation of his 2009 Massey Lecture. Instead of me recapping it, listen to the lectures here, or watch him speak at the 2008 TEDTalks here.
Let me just say that he is worth listening to and watching. He delivered an articulate and interesting lecture about the importance of cultural diversity, complete with great photos and fascinating stories to go along with each one. What does it mean to be human and alive? He asked. When you ask that, he says, the answer comes in 7000 different voices and different ways. Culture is not decorative, and cultural diversity is as important as genetic diversity. Cataclysms, such as the use of rape as a systematic weapon of war in the Congo or the killing fields of Pol Pot, come from a breakdown of culture, when people feel disconnected and disaffected.
The final event of the festival was an all-star round-table discussion of life, literature and Twitter. John Ralston Saul hosted Douglas Coupland, Mark Kingwell and Adrienne Clarkson in a discussion about, well, I’m not entirely sure what their focus was. It drifted from Marshall McCluhan and the other famous Canadian thinkers featured in Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series to the invasiveness of social media to the impact of childhood illness on the development of brilliant authors. It was interesting to listen to, for the most part, like attending a dinner party with very intelligent and well-spoken guests.
All in all, it was a good festival, and I’m looking forward to the post-festival events: Yann Martel on May 10th, A Gaza Doctor’s Journey with Izzeldin Abuelaish on May 17th and Joanne Harris on May 18th.
Tags: Ottawa Writersfestival
