Attention: a photo essay about marketing
One evening when I was a kid a tall thin young man wearing a tie and a blue blazer knocked on the door of my suburban 1970s family home. He was selling subscriptions to the Encyclopædia Britannica. My memory is a little fuzzy about the details, but I think my parents heard his sales pitch out and then suggested that they would discuss a purchase with the kids and that he’d come by again for an answer. I always had my nose in a book, so I was, of course, very keen for us to order a set. Pre-Internet, how else was I going to get my hands on what the series founders promised was “all human knowledge” (Schroeder, 1974)?
In any case, we bought the encyclopedia set (which included supplementary volumes received in the mail every so often). I spent many happy hours learning things, and there was no danger that I’d ever understand, or even manage to read, everything in those 30-some volumes.
Fast forward to the 1990s and the nascent Internet. I was volunteering at a local non-profit community radio station. A friend of mine, a computer genius from Belleville, ON, had set up our network. He set this new page called “Google” up as our home page. I remember asking him- “what’s this box here? How does this Google thing work?” He explained that you entered a search term and the website used a special algorithm to find instances of that term on the World Wide Web.
“You’re kidding??!” I said.
Wow.
Reading Regis McKenna’s article (1991), “Marketing is Everything” in Week 3 of this course brought me back to that moment (and the era that happened around it) when marketing was transformed by technology. McKenna discusses “programmability”, which he states, has led us into “the reality of almost unlimited choice” and shifted marketing’s centre of gravity from “sales-based” (as he described it, “changing the customer’s mind to fit the product”) to “customer-based” (as he describes it, “marketing that is oriented towards creating, rather than controlling, a market.”)
I often feel nostalgic for my “pre-Internet” brain; it was slower-moving, less distracted, and more self-reflective (possibly? Not sure about that one). But the Internet and digital technology have also made amazing things happen. So many amazing things, and what I now find myself lacking is not access to information but the ability to pay attention to it. Psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon wrote about this phenomenon in 1971 in an article called “Designing organizations for an information-rich world,” stating that
(i)n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon, 1971)
This brings me to this photo essay.
I’m an avid amateur photographer, raised in Calgary but living in BC now. When I go back to Calgary to visit family I always plan a few photo outings. On my 2015 visit, I decided to check out the new Ralph Klein Park, situated on the Shepard wetland in Calgary’s SE.
Welcome to the park…
As you enter Ralph Klein Park you will see ten colourful murals that depict wildlife as it is or was in the area. The art is also designed to beautify the security barriers that protect the classroom and washroom area in the park. I took these pictures of the murals while I was there.
The mural project is a partnership between Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) students and City of Calgary.
What I find interesting about the project from a marketing standpoint is that the pieces, while clearly meant to be educational, don’t act like the traditional interpretive panels that you might have seen in parks in the past; text-heavy and seeking to convey a lot of specifics about the habitats and habits of wildlife with words.
They are clean and almost textless (you can see that some of them have written labels beside some of the wildlife, but no more detail) but they still covey a lot of information to the viewer.
Some are whimsical and cartoonish, others are realistic in their approach. But each is unique, and each has a lot going on.
The panel above, by Gladzy Kei Zuniga, depicts the entire cycle of the migration of birds; ranging from winter birds like the Snowy Owl, Raven, Black-billed Magpie, to birds that are active during the spring, summer, and then fall (Alberta University of the Arts, 2015). You can see that Zuniga has colour-coded this by moving from blues to reds in the panel to show the changes of the seasons.
The panels are beautiful, and not crammed with facts and information, and they invite you to observe closely and take in what you want to without being “led” in a particular direction. It allows the viewer to direct their attention wherever it wants to go, but gives them some things to consider.
Because they use visual cues, they invite the viewer to reflect on their own memories, or at least that’s what I found when looking at them; looking at the panel above makes me think of the field near my mom’s house in SW Calgary, and the variety of wildlife I used to see on walks there.
The panel above has a bit of info about animal tracks (with local plants labeled around the perimeter). The structure you see in the gap of the mural is the LEED-certified Environmental Education Centre in the park. It’s teaching the viewer things, but extremely subtly and painlessly.
This public art partnership has been fruitful for both ACAD (now the Alberta University of the Arts) and the City of Calgary. The city was able to obtain some excellent public art at a reasonable price, and the project is a testament to the value that an ACAD education can bring to prospective students. It’s had a great deal of value for the students too, of course. And for the viewing public, who are drawn to the park to see the art, among other things.
Coming to the park is free, so this project isn’t selling anything tangible to anyone, but it is adding value all over the place. And it’s fulfilling the planners goals of increasing awareness of local wildlife, and doing so skillfully, and in an innovative way. In my opinion, it’s a great example of marketing done well.
References
Alberta University of the Arts (April 29, 2015) Alberta College of Art + Design Student Art Installed in Ralph Klein Park. Retrieved from https://www.auarts.ca/news/alberta-college-art-design-student-art-installed-ralph-klein-park
McKenna, R. (Jan/Feb 1991) Marketing is everything. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from (Week 3 materials)
Schroeder, M.R. and Schroeder, M.M. (June 1974) The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: “All Human Knowledge”. American Bar Association Journal, Vol. 60, №6, pp. 711–714. Accessed through JSTOR (UCalgary) at https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/stable/pdf/25726776.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ae647c4806a9442d4c70c6e8e894f82f4
Simon, H. (1971) Designing organizations for an information-rich world, Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 37–52. Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=33748
