Is It Hard To Be Positive?

By Paul Grimsley

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Lessons Advertising Has To Share

Being mean and moody, and grumpy and cynical seems to be the favorite thing nowadays. Light and breezy gets derided as lightweight and cheesy. Better to be Lana Del Ray than Taylor Swift.

It’s kind of pushed as a notion that the default setting for popular culture is vapid happiness, and that only those who sit around all day like Rodin’s Thinker, talking about Nietzsche, and listening to dark Gothic music have any real cultural value or significance. It didn’t always used to be that way.

The Beatles started out crafting the perfect pop song, and they had a profound effect on those who heard them. Later Beatles got more serious, and though those are more likely to be the albums that hipsters and musos offer up as influential, just for sheer impact, you need to look at the albums that caused Beatlemania to explode. They were simple, they were melodic, and they were happy (mostly).

Advertising is all about the benefits of the product. It wants to sell you on how something is going to change your life — how it is going to make living easier. Advertising is generally aspirant in its intentions. Think different. Just Do It. To quote a couple. The lifestyles on display are sunlit and energetic and they make you want to run along the beach and wear those shoes, and drink that drink, and have those friends.

It doesn’t have to be fake. I know that advertising is often seen as materialistic and based in capitalism, and damaging to artistry, but the truth is it has always been there, hand in hand, calling for people’s attention, and telling them to stop what they are doing and to partake of something that is going to make them feel better; something that is going to benefit them. You know there are moments in your life when you have really felt this, and it felt more real than any of the depressive disconnect you can fall into in your low moments.

From the vaudeville of roll up, roll up! to the beautiful art on your long player records, to the carefully reconfigured album cover that communicates from the i-pad playlist, there is something in advertising that has a kinship with the artistry it is packaging. No good having a great product if no one gives it the time of day.

When you sit down and you look at an Apple product — when you unpack it, it is a sensual experience, and the packaging and the advertising, everything works in concert to deliver the product to you. It doesn’t brood — it smiles at you, and it says, hey I have the potential to transform your life and make listening to music easier; I am an aesthetic object that will make telling time a beautiful thing. Tell me that the joy that accompanies Apple launches isn’t cool; it won’t take long to poke holes in your argument.

So, is it hard to be positive? Advertising isn’t always positive, but I’ll tell you, when it isn’t it doesn’t work as well for me. Microsoft never needed to mention the problems with Apple when promoting The Surface. A politician doesn’t need to smear someone else, they just need to talk about what they are going to do. The trick to being positive is for it to be backed with authenticity.

You cannot polish a turd. If the product has nothing to it, then no amount of advertising is going to work. So what does this mean in your life? When people tell you to be positive they are often encouraging you to slap a smile on the top of all the BS you are letting go on in your life. Being positive means being certain, hoping and grabbing the life you want; in my mind the adverts are encouraging participation, not spectatorism.

If you mistake being positive for grinning like a moron while the Titanic hits an iceberg then it’s easy to see why it’s unattractive. If you see being positive as an action, that involves doing something to get something, and operating with certainty, then it starts to be more attractive, and because of the practical element involved it becomes something that is more attainable. So, being positive, and the difficulty involved in it, really does depend on what you think is being talked about.

Advertising says this product is great, and it unpacks the potential for you. The lesson you can take from this is, you need to be positive in the sense of talking about yourself, your life, and the things you do, in a positive light, but then you need to unpack it. An advert looks to the future where the dream is realized, it tells you what it can be like, but you still have to travel to get there, you still have to attain the product.

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