by Adrian Miller. We live in an era of interestingness, where attention is a precious commodity and there is emerging nostalgia for authentic relationships. It’s an age where we have a ubiquitous and pervasive connectedness to all that is interesting — the chance to continually engage with interesting people and consume interesting content. We never will have to settle for boring.
A love-it or hate-it response
A knowledge emotion, interestingness often provides a strong and immediate emotional reaction: a love-it or hate-it response. When something is new, unexpected and surprising, we find it interesting. But we also find things interesting when they are complex, hard to process and mysterious or obscure. When something is interesting, it motivates us to learn more and further exploration is required. Interestingness is thought-provoking because we don’t immediately understand it. It contains the unknown and challenges you to look at things in a new way.
Let’s face it, if the audience doesn’t find your message interesting, then they won’t find it worth thinking about. If it’s not worth thinking about, then they won’t want to engage with your message. They won’t want to make it their own. They won’t want to share it.
True interestingness, as Sally Hogshead points out, doesn’t just talk to us; it gets under our skin and into our conversations. As an industry, we need to ask the pertinent questions and, along the way, challenge what the world thinks. We are fortunate to be in a position, as advertisers, producers and creatives, to change perceptions and influence thinking, so we need to start seeing ourselves more as “interestingness curators” and, as such, create content that inspires or simply makes people think. People need to be posting thoughts, debating, and commenting on what we have produced. So, the challenge for us is to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.
Interestingness is a brand’s most important equity
“The real fact of the matter is, nobody reads ads. People read what interest them. And sometimes that’s an ad.” — Howard Gossage
No one cares how popular a brand is. People care about how interesting they are.
Most brands sincerely believe they are competing against other brands. Here’s the reality: ads don’t compete against other ads for attention. Brands are competing for people’s time.
For a brand to be interesting often involves elements that are unexplained. The brand communication should sometimes defy logic, even plausibility. It should leave you with something to think about. When all’s said and done, interestingness takes people’s brains seriously. It leaves gaps for people to fill in for themselves and gives people a reason to engage. Today, communications don’t build brands, conversations do, and the best way to do this is to be interesting. To do interesting things. To say interesting things. Interesting is, after all, the social currency of our times.
The new “interesting” economy
Yosef Waysman said it best when he suggested, “Integrating, conforming, blending — none of these pay off anymore. If you have nothing interesting to say, if you have nothing new to contribute, if you are not at least somewhat good at anything, why should anyone care about you?”
Interestingness is often sacrificed for a chance of general approval, and this is often the case for the majority of communications that we see out in the world. Yet there are people out there craving more, who would care passionately if brands only showed themselves as they truly are — sharing their interestingness with the world. Simply put, most creative work is one-dimensional. It doesn’t do justice to today’s audience. The work doesn’t play where the audience is playing.
It’s about creating a socially defined experience, and today’s world offers a better ecosystem for this. We no longer have to settle for people or content we come across tangibly. In its place, we have a way to filter and rank people and what we absorb… by their interestingness. Traditional stereotypes are shifting as we find ourselves integrated to a device that can tell us anything we may want or need to know. Being popular and well-liked used to be the main differentiator for brands. They merely aren’t anymore.
Multi-award-winning creative and awards judge, Adrian Miller, is executive creative director and founding partner of +27 Advertising. A game-changer inspired to adopt and push the smaller agency model, his career has seen him drive change in large agencies including Lowe Kuala Lumpur, Saatchi & Saatchi Malaysia, and JWT Delhi.
“Motive” is a by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but generally don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup, unless the topic is off-column.
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