Smaller is way better
If you’re looking for a big idea then obsess about life’s minutiae says Creative Nathan White taking inspiration from Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine.
Size isn’t everything. But try telling adland that. Like the Big Data planners boast about, everyone wants to have the next Big Idea. It’s the white whale we’re all hunting. But here’s the thing: big is not a synonym of good; and often the best ideas are very small indeed.
Look at the animal kingdom. Nature’s most successful ideas were her small ones: beetles, cockroaches, ants. Half the planet’s biomass is bugs. One single ant colony now stretches 6000km along the Mediterranean coast. Another reaches across all of California. Cockroaches were around several million years before dinosaurs; they’ll be around long after admen have become extinct. Successful ideas are like VW Polos: small, but tough.
Nature’s big ideas, however, were mostly massive flops: titanosaurs; woolly mammoths; great whales. Of these, only the great whales remain; of those, only 2,300. What’s more powerful than a whale? A cancer cell. So what’s the key to success? Not size, but scalability.
Why, then, is advertising obsessed with size? Maybe it’s insecurity. The truth is: in this business, we are all minor miniaturists. Our voiceovers are shorter than haiku. Our ‘epic’ 60-second cinema ads are the length of one scene in a short film. We make Faberge eggs; but we think we’re Jackson Pollock. And so the main fault with ads is that they’re too broad-strokes; all that vapid stuff about ‘be you’ or ‘live life’, and scenes of laughing women eating salads. The main virtue of the good stuff isn’t how big the idea is; it’s how the small details — the granular, molecular details — are perfect.
We pretend our lives are composed of grand, sweeping themes like love and death and sex. They’re not. It’s mostly trips to Pret.
Commercials editors have a measurement called a Squib. This is the minimal amount you can change the picture for it to be humanly detectable, named in honour of the famously fernickety Vince Squib. In TV-land they talk in terms of shots and takes; in ad-land we talk in terms of frames.
We are the gods of small things; small things like how cats watch you when you pour milk (Cats with thumbs), or how foreign exchange students wear tassel loafers and too much hair gel (Blackcurrant Tango).
And that is why I love the writer Nicholson Baker.
He’s a miniaturist, like us; he writes about the minor minutiae of daily life. He wrote a whole novel about a single office lunch-break; the main plotline is the mystery of why shoelaces break at different times.
Who cares? Why obsess? Because this sort of trivial detail is what human lives are mostly made of. Literature started as stories about gods, and although we’ve changed the heroes to ourselves, we still like to pretend that our lives are composed of grand, sweeping themes like love and death and sex. They’re not. They’re mostly trips to Pret.
Nicholson Baker can write differently to everyone else because he learned his trade as a technical writer — compiling manuals for machinery and so forth. And it turned out this was the perfect school for writing about the modern world, because in technical writing no detail is too small or mundane to explain, clearly and with precision. You can’t afford to be vague, general or sloppy in a manual; every bolt-thread counts. And that close attention to the grainy texture of the everyday is why he can write stuff like this:
Has anyone yet said publicly how nice it is to write on rubber with a ballpoint pen? The slow, fat, ink-rich line, rolled over a surface at once dense and yielding, makes for a multidimensional experience no single sheet of paper can offer. Right now dozens of Americans […] are marking shiny initials on one of those gigantic, dumb, benevolent erasers (which always bounce in unforeseen directions when dropped, and seem so selfless, so apolitical, so completely uninterested in doing anything besides erasing large mistakes for which they were not responsible), and then using the eraser to print these same initials several times, backward, on a knee or forearm, in a fading progression. These are rare pleasures.
That’s not just good; that’s perfect. But it’s made up of thoughts so small nobody ever bothered mentioning them before. And now compare it with the (very similar) ad Wieden + Kennedy wrote for Honda; the one with the banana that won all the awards you didn’t.
‘Power of dreams’ is a big idea. Way too big. But Wieden + Kennedy cunningly took that sloppy, super-sized American idea and gave it the Baker treatment. Baker has himself written about the importance of granular details to big ideas in a piece that is itself composed of brilliant granular details:
“Large thoughts depend more heavily on small thoughts than you might think… Why does velvet feel smoother than chrome? Because smoothness is a secondary inference on the part of the confused fingertip, based on its perception of many fleeting roughnesses running under it too quickly to be registered. This suggestion of resistance in all truly smooth surfaces… Is analogous to the profusion, the anarchy, of lovely brief insights that we experience as we read or listen our way through a great work of the mind that, once completed, will leave us filled with large, calm truths…. Major truths, like benevolent madonnas, are sustained aloft by dozens of busy, cheerful angels of detail.”
Honda made their ‘Power of Dream’ ads out of velvet, not chrome. It’s all those “many fleeting roughnesses”; all the “lovely brief insights” that Garrison Kiellor voices, casually, as if in passing; it’s the patches of near-silence in Cog; it’s the irrelevant horses in Impossible Dream; it’s all those small, barely detectable details that add up, frame by frame, Squib by Squib, to finally do what truly great brand advertising should do, and can do, and that has nothing to do with brain-worm slogans or cocky, coked-up media buyers bragging about the size of their media packages: they leave us “filled with large, calm truths”.
Nicholson Baker shows us that the worst way to have a big idea is to try to have a big idea. Instead of attempting to ‘own’ an emotion, try honing lots of tiny thoughts instead — the tinier, the better — and see what happens. The biggest effects are produced from the smallest things; mankind’s most devastatingly powerful idea was a single atom, split in two.
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