A Line of Flight

Tackling the crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion in advertising

It has been particularly interesting to watch how, drowning in a seemingly endless momentum, marketers, advertisers, and the like have gotten used to parasite on short-term social, technological, and political trends in a senseless struggle to meet meaningless KPI’s.

However, their parasitical behaviour during long-term social and political trends, such as current ones, has its implications as this behaviour will not cut it, for there is a long-awaited demand for revolutionary action.

Revolutionary action, however, means deep and radical change. And while brands and their parent organizations can arguably take part in that, through internal cultural and organizational reforms, one question remains — should those become hypocritical value-driven communication strategies?

I would argue not. The late Mark Fisher puts it succinctly “an ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact”.

Talk has become cheap, then. Therefore, rather than turning inherently internal values and policies into bland communication strategies, brands and organizations should acknowledge their mistakes and reform in silence.

But as the cultural and political landscapes converge to become one, and more polarized than ever, this dynamic has successfully inhibited creative pluralism. One that goes beyond the dualistic conversation of today. In this, however, lies an opportunity.

To take this further, then, a possible line of flight is a complete rethinking of the uncertain role of brands as moral actors and withdrawal to what they certainly are — commodity products with their own creative and market domains.

Furthermore, and again drawing from Mark Fisher, the “crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion” that comes with the polarized cultural and political conversations has led to the total evaporation of imagination.

But recognizing this unfortunate stasis of creativity, and what led to it, can become the skeleton key toward the awakening of the slumbering “combinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available”.

In other words, instead of taking a moral stand, marketers and advertisers should take a step down.

Rather than hypocritically taking part in the grand political and social narratives of today, they should craft their own.

Ones that reinvigorate the imagination and shatter walls stamped with bland values, finitude, and exhaustion.

Because no one in the world can beat you at being the hero of your own story.

Sources

Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. John Hunt Publishing.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. John Hunt Publishing.