Probably Not That Good For Business.
TDC Stumble Upon. Screenshot.
Barebones is now on StumbleUpon.
Not by its own merits I am afraid, but because of Claus and Britta, the nude couple populating TDC’s recent brand advertising campaign. Someone stumbled upon TDC In The Nude, the barebones post written about 2 weeks ago. TDC is the used to be Danish PTT, and now the major telecommunication company in Denmark.
The post was added to the pornography topic on StumbleUpon.
What can I say? It’s a wide world out there, but pornography? I’d rather have it photography.
Probably not that good for business.
Danish Mother Seeking Refuge
Screen Shot Danish Mother
That seems to be it. The party is over, and people at Visit Denmark are sobering up. Fast. Hangovers linger, and there is still a smell of old booze in the creative kitchen at the agency. The advert has been taken off You Tube so clicking the links in the posts below will take you nowhere. The website is gone as well.
Lessen learned.
Of course you can still find the advert on the net. Here it is at Danish newspaper Politiken’s website. This incident will never go away. The campaign may be over, but the bad taste will remain.
Creatics – Reclaiming A Word for Barebones.
Creatics in Action. Berlin 2008. (c)
Many years ago I invented a new word.
The word was creatics. It was a combination of two other words; the word creativity and the word tactics. If you google creatics, you will find reference to a series of articles, that I wrote in the mid eighties. Unfortunately now, the series was written for a Danish periodical, and thus written in Danish. If you read Danish the series is, in other words, already there for you to read.
You will find that the word later have been taken up by other people. Can’t blame them since it is a good word, but they use it in different contexts. Or in no context.
I will now reclaim the word creatics, and make use of it as a name for a new barebones theme. My intention is to rewrite the articles for barebones, but with the changes and adaption necessary to make a better fit for the barebones communication project. There will be some changes, but not that many. The concept will stay intact.
The main mission with the series of articles was to establish the fact that having an idea, is not something that fall from heaven, but a process that you can learn and learn to deliberately work with in generating new ideas.
Why is this relevant on a blog on efficient communication? For two reasons:
The first reason is, that in communication creativity plays an important part if you want to stand out from the flow of communication that is all ways surrounding you. Being it voices, noises, images, tactile communication and other forms.
The second reason is, that I find that creatics and phenomenology goes well together. You know, that I have started a barebones theme on phenomenology here on the blog. That theme has, so far, only one post in it, but there will be plenty more. The first post is: phenomenology: what is intentionality? I can see from the blog statistics, that this post is pretty well read, which is a motivation for speeding that blog theme up a bit.
One of the beauties of creatics is that if you search for something, and you search hard enough, that something will, after a while, come to you in various shapes and/or forms. For many months I had the idea of elaborating on the creatics for this blog. And this is what happened less then two weeks ago: I was ordering a couple of books by advertising wizard David Ogilvy on Amazon. When I order books there, I always have a look around for other complementary titles that could have an interest. And this title popped up: “A Technique for Producing Ideas”. Written by James Webb Young. As the price was fair, I ordered that book too.
And I have read it. That was the specific incident that pushed me to elaborate on creatics on this blog 
. James Webb Young phrase two important things about how to get ideas: “First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it. Second, while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it”.
If you would like to go ahead on your own, please read this book. The subtitle could as well have been creatics. It is only 48 pages long, so you will read it in no time at all. If you are an advertising woman, or and advertising man, you will appreciate, that the foreword is written by another advertising guru: William Bernbach.
Do I have a photograph for this post? Just to make it a bit livelier? And maybe to make a silent comment to the words? I might have. I’ll insert a photograph later.
Later: I am sure that you have seen the photograph by now? Your task is to figure out why I have chosen this particular photo for this text. And what the photograph does to the text by just being there .
And by the way; The word creatics is hereby reclaimed.
On Hermeneutics: Strange Fruit.
Strange Fruit. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.
I didn’t know I had this picture. Well, I knew that I might have a picture of a poster. I was testing some photographic gear, and this poster was positioned right outside the store. I wanted to check the sharpness on a fixed Canon 400 mm lens. At that time I had no idea that there was a little sticker attached to the poster. A sticker, that completely changes the message of the original poster. Brings in an unexpected layer of connotations.
It’s all about hermeneutics, and I will return to this post. Soon.
Now it is late. Too late. It ’s already the day after.
What About Hermeneutics?
It is long over due, I know.
On occasions I have used the term “hermeneutics“, but so far refrained from explaining what hermeneutics is, and how is it to be understood as a barebones notion. I will do that now.
Some of you may remember the very basic barebones communication diagram (below), that I posted last year. No need to change that, and I will show it here once more. See the word “hermeneutics” on the horizontal cloud in the illustration? Why it is placed there in the same section as phenomenology, and not as a separate vertical cloud similar to semiology, gestalt psychology, et cetera?
The answer to these questions are easy to give: In the barebones universe hermeneutic is not considered as a special region of the communication area, is it considered as a communication fundamental.
Basic Barebones Communication Diagram. Copyright 2008/2009 Knut Skjærven.
Using the esoteric words of philosophy, you could say that hermeneutics here have an existential or even ontological status. Don’t let yourself be scared away from this area by these words. Existential means simply: that which fundamentally comes with human existence, and ontology is simply the science of that area. If you are in for an academic career, you are welcome to obscure this to a lesser and even larger extend (irony). You’ll find indications of such obscurities when you look these words up on Wikipedia
The barebones’ stand on hermeneutics has been phrased very well by David E. Linge in his in Editor’s Introduction to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “Philosophical Hermeneutics”, University of California Press, 1976. Here is what he says, and you are welcome to read this as a statement that goes along perfectly with barebones communication.
“The task of philosophical hermeneutics, therefore, is ontological rather then methodological. It seeks to throw light on the fundamental conditions that underlie the phenomenon of understanding in all its modes, scientific and nonscientific alike, and that constitute understanding as an event over which the interpreting subject does not ultimately preside. For philosophical hermeneutics, “the question is not what we do or what we should do, but what happens beyond our willing and doing.” Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, University of California Press, 1976, page ix.
To be continued …
Why is hermeneutics important?
Why is hermeneutics important? Why is it even very important? Here as some of the obvious reasons, spelled out:
1) If hermeneutics is fundamental, as we see it on barebones, it attach to every act of communication.
2) If hermeneutics attach to every act of communication, it a good idea to understand a bit of how it works.
3) If you have the idea, that you want to have a bit of control over what and how you are communicating (many people have that idea), you might want to use hermeneutics in an active way.
4) If you have the idea, that you want to understand some of the mechanisms at work at the receivers end of your message, verbal or visual or other, you may want to use hermeneutics in an active way, as well.
5) As advertising is not different from communication, but just a special branch of it, advertising people should take notice as well.
I good way of getting you there is to have a look at a new model of communication, and that will come up on this blog pretty soon. From this post on, there will be more posts on hermeneutics. I am sure that you want to know the basics of the hermeneutic circle, and the hermeneutic spiral.
So you need to stay tuned. Have a good day.
Fleggaard Commercial: 10 Mio Plus Views
Where is this going to end? I asked the marketing manager, Nanna Harder, at Danish retailer Fleggaard for an estimation of how well the now famous commercial works. The estimation is 10 mio plus views so far. She says: “We are no longer in control”. The estimation is given by a Dutch company specialising in viral statistics. The commercial is spread by hundreds of websites all over.
On their home page Danish Fleggaard had 70.000 unique visitors in December 2007. That jumped to 400.000 unique visitors in December 2008 after the commercal was released on the net. “We have had more than 1 mio unique visitors on our web site so far”, Nanna Harder continues.
For more barebones information on this commercial, please go here - and here.
Link to Fleggaard.dk to view the commercial.
Make sure that you are over 18 if you wish to see the commercial.
Is this “Quite Simply The Best Commercial Ever Made”?
Screen shot from Danish commercial. Reproduced with permission.
I made a promise, earlier this year, that one of the ambitions for 2009 was the be more specific in my analysis of real life communication. In other words, not so much “acadamia”, but more concrete, specific analysis of what I called real life communication.
This was not only my ambition. It seems to me that the barebones of communication, over the last year, had been skinned enough to start redressing them with softer tissue. The are, in other words, enough resource information on the blog to start putting it to critical use.
What will be the object of this first proper analysis? Some of your have noticed that there was a post on a certain commercial from Danish retailer, Fleggaard, who used partly undressed women to advertise for their retail outlets just on the other side of the border to Germany. That post hit pretty well on the blog and has been the top post ever since. Seems there are a lot of people internationally that are interester in Danish/German border shopping . So I will use this commercial for the specific analysis. Seem like a good idea, right?
So before we start on this mission, here is what I would like you do to:
a) see the commercial a couple of times. Familiarise yourself not only with what you see, but with the way the commercial is put together, structured. For purpose of analysis, it is a good idea to split the commercial into sections and shots. You’ll find the commercial on Fleggaard’s web site. You need to mouse over the screen on the wall to activate the movie. Or you could go directly to the movie.
b) go to the CET-Checklist , or pick it up below. Follow the links and get an understanding of the checklist. Read thought the different checkpoint and get them under your skin.
You need to spend some time on both, and while you do that I will start finalising this post. The post will be continued … you need to come back to this post.
The CET checklist:
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
What is the impression given in this movie? And how is it given? It is on, it is two, is it even more, maybe even conflicting impressions?
In my opini0n, this movie does rather good. The overall impression is that these people are very dedicated towards their end, which is to spell out the the name of the product and the product price in the sky. On the ground they move firmly, up the stairs they move sternly and in the plane, in the plane they act dedicated, and when they jump from the plain is is with the same decisiveness as when they enter.
There is a tail to it when a single girl falls into the swimming pool, but that is added for the humour of it. Attention from the people on the ground is drawn towards the sky divers, and nice wraps up the urgency of what is going on in the sky.
I rate this +3.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Dominant mood. Got the be image or product. There is not much product in this move. It is all image. Besides the name Siemens and the price tag, that is.
I rate +3.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
There isn’t much text/speech in this commercial, so there is nothing really to get in the way of the visuals. Could this have been done in another way or even better with a speech over? Hardly.
I rate high even here: +3.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
The structure should be as simple as possible, and the structure in this commercial is indeed very simple. Camera follows the girls from moving rapidly on the ground till they are floating in the air. One could ask if the last scene with the girl in the swimming pool distracts, or is necessary, for bringing the message through. Maybe not, but as long as it is perceives as as add on to the “main story” is does not harm any.
I rate this +3.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
I am not sure that this point fits very well here. If anything, it takes the consumers point of view. Anyway there are not much product display in the commercial, so that is out. I am a bit cautious here.
I rate 0.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
The target consumer are males between 20 and 50. There are about 700.000 of them in the area (this is stated by the advertiser Fleggaard in a mail to me. I would say that the commercial does a good job in targeting male consumer.
I rate high: +3.
7. Thoughts Worth Entertaining.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
It is even my opinion that the casting, the clothing, the lack of clothing, the simple story told, and the whole drive of this commercial do a very good, and entertaining job.
I rate +3.
8. Connotations.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Connotations are in full bloom here. The connotations are clearly sexual, and appropriate to the male segment in question here. I might add that there are, IMHO, nothing shameful in this.
Rating +3.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
How well are gestalt factor used? If at all? The commercial is held together by, amongst other things, proximity, similarity, direction, and you might even say the factor of the good curve: Movement.
Rating +3.
Overall results:
.. soon to be stated .
Barthes on Studium and Punctum in Photography.
So we have to return to Roland Barthes then. And we will.
There has already been a section of Barthes’ connotation procedures on this blog. The number of posts in that section are some of the most sought.
What impresses me about Barthes is his ability to be very precise in some of his writings, and very obscure in others. Actually I prefer the obscure Barthes, because it gives me the change to fill in his obscurities with my own ideas (whatever they are worth). They give me a chance to close the gap of what Barthes writes, and what I think I understand of what he writes. And I like to think that I understand something.
His most impressive book is the one he wrote shortly before his untimely death in 1980. He was his by a truck on his way from a luncheon meeting with President François Mitterand. He died at a Parisian hospital a few hours later.
Barthes was a lover of photography. In his Camera Lucida, from 1980, he tried to redefine photography. Key notions in this book are studium and punctum, both notions invented for the occasion. By Barthes, and both reasonable obscure.
The aim of this blog post is roughly to “indicate” what Barthes had in mind by these two words, and try to show how they both can be useful both in analysing photography, and in general communication, as well. We might even adapt the words studium and punctum as barebones household words. Hmm .. we will see about that later. It depends on how this little investigation turns out.
Way back. One day Barthes discovered a couple of pictures in an illustrated magazine. Pictures shot by the Dutch press photographer Koen Wessing from a mission in Nicarague in 1979.They made him pause, and he went later form more pictures from the same photographer. One particular picture has been made famous by Barthes: the one with the two nuns walking alongside a demolished street where you find three soldiers present closer to the camera. (See some of Koen Wessing’s photographs here, indcuding several copies of the the one with the soldiers and the nuns, that Barthes talkes about).
He askes: “Did this photograph please me? Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for me) I understood at once that existence (its “adventure”) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world (no need to proceed to the point of contrast): the soldiers and the nuns“. (page 23).
Above: Just an example of what Barthes might have in mind when speaking about studium as e.g. “the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world”. Shot in Caen, France. Copyright 2008: Knut Skjærven.
Above: Another example of what Barthes might have in mind when speaking about studium as e.g. “the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world”. The discontinuous elements are more subtle is this photograph. Shot in Arles, France. Copyright 2008: Knut Skjærven.
Barthes went on to investigate more photograph by the same photographer, and found that many had this same dual construction, the juxaposition of themes. And he goes on in his maybe most precise description of studium:
“What I feel about these photographs derives from from an average affect, almost from a certain training. I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, “study,” but application to a thing, taste for someone, i kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions”. (page 26)
And in the very next paragraph, Barthes goes on to lay bare his next key notion: “The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive point; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me”. (pages 26 and 27).
A bit later on in the text, Barthes talks about studium as matter of grasping the photographers intention, of entering into harmony with them, of approve or disapprove of them. But also to try to understand them. Studium is a kind of education trying to bring forward the point of view, the idea and the context of the photograph(er). Basically an intellectual discipline which outcome springs from the capacity for understanding held by the spectator.
Studium operates in the arena of liking, while punctum operated in the arena of loving, as Barthes indicates.
There are, of course, much more to this than these quotations from Barthes’ Camera Lucida will reveal. For those really interested in Barthes’ thoughts, and his work on photography in particular, the hard way is to get the book and read it. Then make up your own mind about what studium and punctum really are all about. The intentions here are more down to earth: how can these to notions be used, if they can be used at all, to understand photography, visual messages and maybe even contribute to the wider understanding of communication? Even useful for analysing and understanding advertising? To accomplish this I will probably have to bend the notions a bit, but as Barthes himself was a prime bender, we should have no problem with that.
The tricky thing is not pointing to, and elaboration on photographs as examples of studium. All photographs can, in fact, be considered as studiums. Definitely the challenge is finding and explaining the arrows Barthes is talking about as punctums, those accidents that pricks and makes small holes in you. Particularly if you insist on these holes being of an objective character. Luckily Barthes does not insists on any objectively here. Punctums are private and personal, which makes our task much more easy, but on the other hand it makes punctums less operative for communication analysis. What is barebones’ stand on this, then? Do, for instance, the two pictures above contain punctums? If so, where and what are they? What and where could they be? Well, the fact that you start looking for punctums at all misses the point. Punctums hit you, so go looking for something that might hit you is moving the scene from punctum to studium. Punctums are also casts of the dice.
What does Barthes have to say about this punctum? Let see if we are able to track it down a bit. Often, he says, the punctum is a detail, a partial object. Could be a dirt road as in a old photograph by Kertesz; a belt or the strapped pumps as in a an old picture by James van der Zee; Andy Warhols nails in a shot by Duane Michaels; a group of nuns that just happened to be there as in the shot already mentioned by the Dutch photographer Koen Wessing.
And more: What also seems to be important is that the punctum has the ability to be expansive. It can take over the whole picture. Dominate it. Punctums are not intentionally put there by the photographer. Barthes talks about the photographers “second sight” by just being there, shooting, at the right moment.
So then, punctums are obscure and rather individual. Does this mean that they are non existent? Not so, but it might mean that it is useless to look for them as deliberate construct to direct the gaze, interest and meaning in a photograph, or other visual message. Punctums are random – if at all. In an operative environment like barebones communications, punctums will be of little use.
————————————————
NB! Just to let you know: I don’t think that Barthes’ studium is restricted to photographs that in some way contain “the co-presence of two discontinuous elements”. I do however think, that photographs that contain such elements sometimes tells a more vivid story/adventure, than photographs that do not contain such elements. And I do believe, that is was photographs like these, that triggered Barthes into the studium/punctum reflections.
What you may also want to know, is that Barthes in Camera Lucida explicitly refers to the phenomenological method (and Edmund Husserl) as inspirational for his investigation into photography. See the book chapter 8.
————————————————
Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida, Vintage Books, London 2000. Translated by Richard Howard. For full information on the book see Library Thing. Page references are made to this version of the book.
A Simple Statement on Product Positioning
Homage to the advertising community.
This is a picture of basic product positioning. And an important statement it is.
However, it is also a visualisation of how to direct and hold attention in a visual message. And to instigate story telling. Consider this post as a barebones notebook post, so you need to come up with the reasons-why yourself.
Shot in Berlin June 2008 during the soccer match Germany/Turkey. That would be June 25, 2008. They tell me that it was a great game.
Cheers
CET Checklist for Advertisers.
Follow the links to read more about the individual checkpoints.
Is this checklist useful at all? As any other checklist it is, but you need to be aware of the fact that the results coming out of the checklist will never be better than the evaluations put into it. So, if you don’t know much of communication in general, and advertising in special, you may want to start here
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
7. Thoughts Worth Entertaining.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
8. Connotations.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
9. Gestalt factors.
Evaluation Scale: -3***-2***-1***0***+1***+2***+3
Good luck with it. If you need a more extensive explanation, please go here.
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