Dispatches from Dreamland
shots’ new US Editor, Simon Wakelin, takes the reins this week and introduces his new regular blog.
A new chapter commences as I take over the role of US Editor, covering the ad beat across America from the vantage point of Los Angeles.
Greetings from LA!
Upcoming is the West Coast report, an investigation into advertising where a number cities lead the charge, beacons of creativity on the cusp of the Pacific that include Los Angeles – a place where cars and movies are the essential icons of life, emblems of speed, light and movement.
LA is also my own backyard, an exotic home, a carnival-like metropolis carved from the desert and ringed by oceans and mountains, a place where uncontrollable forces remain at bay atop a geographically unstable region – a constant dance with a disaster-prone land that paradoxically echoes the state of advertising today.
American branding has, as we know, passed through tremendous changes since the economic crisis of 2008. Budgets have dwindled, client expectations have risen and brands strive to be heard in a world of media noise and clamor.
The recession successfully dismantled those glittering promises we had in the recent past, revealing unsettling realities beneath advertising’s affluent dream.
Yet as much as the structure of advertising has been damaged, Los Angeles remains a potent force in the industry and, in many ways, a corrective to those economic woes.
An upcoming west coast report has led to research and discussions with various ad luminaries. Although I see a vibrant form of advertising evolving from expansive dreams and progressive technology, some conversations contain a tone similar to the writing of novelist Raymond Chandler – a man who invented a mythic Los Angeles world and became a progenitor of future noir writers.
I hear clipped descriptions, odd wisecracks and disappointed romanticism when talking of advertising past and present, diatribe surprisingly similar to Chandler’s distinctly L.A. literary tone:
Here was a man who saw: “A city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” One could easily ascribe these sentiments to advertising, an entity we saw balloon out of control with outsized ambition and questionable fantasies.
Yet Chandler also had a hand at saving audiences from similarly exaggerated reflections of America on the silver screen, from the endless splendor of celebrity and glamour. He became a screenwriter of Film Noir, a new language that sparked the imagination of audiences and successfully divorced them from the Hollywood dream.
In much the same way, advertising has been forced to create a new language that also captures our imagination. Although organic and as-yet incomplete we already see how immersive and participatory branding techniques successfully attracting audiences in droves.
Suddenly we have an audience that thirsts for authenticity and involvement like never before!
Norman Mailer, famous author and one of the founders of The Village Voice felt that, “One gets the distinct impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live, or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.”
Although seeped in condescension, Mailer’s comments inadvertently raise an important point about the region: Sure, the West Coast is the end of the road for America, sure we’re up against a blank wall out here and can’t inch any further – but that’s exactly why creativity nestles deepest right here, why excitement is truly alive and well.
Advertising is our own form of classical myth. A parable that dies many deaths, a saga that has no end, an adventure that allures its audience before coming to a fearful end – only to be born again in some new, cyclical form. If we know anything, it is that advertising is more than the sum of its parts.
I look forward to your comments, thoughts and ideas as I dig deep to get a glimpse of what lies ahead. Thanks for listening. The journey is indeed the destination, so watch this space!
US Editor, shots
