I sent an SMS to a friend asking “hey dude, how goes the good fight?”
To you, the use of the word “dude” may be only one part of what makes you react violently against my character. Add the concept of a good fight, the word “hey” and you are positively spitting.
But then, you weren’t meant to read my personal SMS. You weren’t meant to understand.
It’s all about context. To understand the wording you would have to understand the conversation I was trying to elicit. You’d have to understand the relationship behind it and you’d have to understand the many complex forces that formed that relationship.
It’s the in-jokes, the past experiences, the past conversations that led to this point. Like I say, you wouldn’t understand.
Sometimes the point is NOT to understand the context. It’s sometimes desirable to skip over the meat that makes us people and represent the caracature.
Television works in this way. Often we are presented with a group of people we can quickly and easily demonise. Their dress sense, their attitude, their entire approach to life all neatly “understood” and ridiculed without a moment’s thought. Of course anybody’s life can be dismissed this way. Even people who use the word “dude” in conversation.
Advertising can take this route too. The nPower ads a few years back which featured ginger haired people spring to mind. They spring to mind not solely because they relied upon stereotyes and attempted to unite the non-ginger population in knowing ridicule of their red cousins. No, they spring to mind because the people who complained pretty much received the answer that they had no grounds to complain because, well, they were ginger. It is socially acceptable to ridicule them.
It’s the easy route to take. Got to do an ad for Marmite and their “love it or hate it” campaign? Throw in a pale faced, red haired person and you have an ad that can be laughed at and “got”.
But for creatives the more rewarding avenue is to consider the context, consider the narrative drive that leads to the moment or moments captured in your advertisement. That way you retain control of the interpretation, don’t piss people off and generally enable more depth to your ideas.
