Subject: [bitch] agitprop for agitprop - msg#00028

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Came across my desk -- from Adrants. Some guy in the advertising world,
Brian Millar (UK), who wrote this as a chapter (???) for a book, _Pick Me:
Breaking into advertising and staying there_. It's funny. The book as the
look of something academic'ish, but it's obviously not.

<quote>
Later today, or maybe tomorrow morning, you are probably going to sit down
with an advertising brief. That means that you have an opportunity to do an
absolutely outstanding piece of work, even if you're not that clever or
talented. The reason is very simple. What you do, and how you do it,
depends entirely on what you think of as great advertising in the first
place. And most creative professionals have completely forgotten what
advertising is for.

I blame Bill Bernbach. He took a badly designed, ugly car made by Nazis and
gave it a brand which was witty, intelligent and a little self-depricating.
Volkswagen: your funny friend who made cars. The campaign was a work of
genius, and it changed the course of automotive history. Unfortunately it
also changed the course of advertising history.

Forty years later, look at most reels, annuals or portfolios, and what do
you see? Hundreds of ads, one tone of voice. Your funny friend who makes
chocolate bars. Your funny friend who's an airline. Your funny friend who
sells fishing floats.

The thing is, these are not bad ads. They're fine. They work, they don't
harm the brands who pay millions for them. But here's the ugly truth: the
kind of ads you see in awards books are now a commodity. Thousands of
students leave art schools and colleges able to write an ad like that. Any
team in any agency in any big town in the developed world can turn a brand
into Your Funny Friend.

So how do you do something great, and elevate yourself above those
creatives in the next office making work that's merely good? First, you
have to stop caring about what they think. Creatives tend to judge ads by
breaking them down into craft skills: copy (how hilarious is the
headline?), art direction (how lovingly has the type been turned into an
artefact?), cinematography (does it look like this month's fashionable
film?), etc.

Listen. Crafts are little things. Whittling. Quilting. Making fudge. These
are crafts. Let's not aspire to be craftsmen. Great creative work ? and I
mean creative work in the widest sense of the word ? is a huge thing,
because, in the words of a wise old teacher of mine , it can change the
petrol that people's brains run on.

Want to see some great creative? Look at the Romans. They understood
persuasion better than anybody. It wasn't a craft to them: it was the
highest art, the key to power and fortune. Check out Quintilian's Training
of an Orator. It's a manual for persuading anybody to do anything. There's
a particularly excellent chapter explaining How to Talk an Angry Crowd out
of Tearing You Limb from Limb. You don't get that in Ogilvy on Advertising.
Read Julius Caesar's speeches to his troops before the battles they fought
in Gaul. He started with an insight: his men were tired and frightened.
They wanted to run away. He turned that on its head. You survive by
attacking, he told them. You die when you retreat. Bam. Same brains, new
petrol.

Take another example. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, they had
to spread their ideology through a vast country. So they customized trains,
trucks and ships, painting them with bright geometric shapes. These came to
your town and unfolded into outdoor stages. Actors played out scenes from
newspaper stories, ballet dancers dressed as factories explained
industrialization. You came as a downtrodden peasant. You left feeling like
a frontline soldier in the most important struggle in history. Any idiot
with a Macintosh can do a decent imitation of a Soviet Agitprop poster.
Your job is to imitate the inventiveness which conceived Agitprop in the
first place.

What have speeches and trains got to do with the toothpaste brief on your
desk? They begin with insights into the audience's lives. They use those
insights to persuade the audience to change their behaviour. That's what
you should be doing.

Consider this. In the early days of motoring, Michelin weren't selling
enough tyres. They had to persuade people to drive more. So they invented
Michelin Guides, which contained everything you needed to plan a motoring
holiday, from maps to restaurant reviews. They made it chic to travel
hundreds of miles to the Côte d'Azur, Switzerland and Italy in noisy,
uncomfortable cars. Thousands did, and millions do it today. Wearing their
tyres out as they go. Genius.

In the 1960s, JWT London were asked by one of their clients, a flour mill,
how they could sell more flour. The Thompsons creatives could have written
some ads for their client about the benefits of their Wholemeal against
Flour X. Instead, they invented the idea of ready-baked cakes, thought up
recipes and a brand with an identity and name: Mr Kipling. You can still
buy Mr Kipling cakes in any supermarket in the UK.

What do these ideas have in common? Well, none of them came about because
somebody sat down to write a clever headline or funny script. Julius Caesar
wasn't trying to win a Gold Lion at Cannes. He was just a guy in a muddy
field using every resource he had to change some people's minds. And that,
in your comfortable office, is your job too.
</quote>

"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."

-- rwmartin

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[bitch] Audience-Function

At 04:07 PM 12/13/2005, Gordon Fitch wrote: >The Artist wants the audience for the audience-function OK. Happy Tutor over at Wealth Bondage, http://www.thehappytutor.com/, has been using this phrase, "author-function." Where does it come from? Audience-function, author-function, ... ? Are there are kinds of functions. Sounds like its coming out of cybernetics systems theory, stuff influenced by Haraway perhaps? Deleuze? Tutor seem to have a litcritterish background, so is it from litcrit? "As to my Boxers, keep off of them, they are great dogs and like a lot of Germans, they can smell beer from a long way off." --Anton Benjamin Skoumal, Politics list _______________________________________________ Squeeze mailing list Squeeze-JGP88kOVi7tfR2C6ueFn4Q@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mail.pulpculture.org/mailman/listinfo/squeeze_pulpculture.org

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Re: [bitch] Audience-Function

Aha! I only briefly skimmed this many moons ago -- in some anthology. http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/english016/texts/foucault.html Michel Foucault on the "Author Function" From Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127. In dealing with the "author" as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its differences from other discourses. If we limit our remarks only to those books or texts with authors, we can isolate four different features. First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago. It is important to notice, as well, that its status as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture and undoubtably in others as well discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks before it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property. Secondly, the "author-function" is not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call "literary" (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valorized without any questions about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity. Text, however, that we now call "scientific" (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of "Hippocrates said..." or "Pliny tells us that..." were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification. Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements, or a pathological syndrome. At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended upon this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent upon the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm ther than author. Furthermore, where in mathematics the author has become little more than a handy reference for a particular theorem or group of propositions, the reference to an author in biology or medicine, or to the date of his research has a substantially different bearing. This latter reference, more than simply indicating the source of information, attests to the "reliability" of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular laboratory). The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's "profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist. _______________________________________________ Squeeze mailing list Squeeze-JGP88kOVi7tfR2C6ueFn4Q@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mail.pulpculture.org/mailman/listinfo/squeeze_pulpculture.org

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[bitch] Q for George

I'm lazy, George, and don't feel like looking up my old archives. But, as I recall, you used to talk about how the artist didn't especially like her audience -- or something like that. Any chance you've got a little time for a brief overview of what you'd said back then? Also: a warning. We're starting up with a project that's going to require a lot of testing with Mac users. One of the reasons he wanted to work with us is that he's familiar with how much effort we put into making sure the CSS-based designs worked on Macs. So, we'll probably poke in here to take advantage of y'all. *sigh* Someday, maybe we'll be able to pick up a mac for testing, though it certainly won't solve all the testing problems, since you're still talking different resolutions. Oh! Reese is taking animal pr0n pictures right now. Gotta fly! Geez, Diego's frisky tonight. Poor bunny! The fantasy of being outside fantasy http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/11/the-fantasy-of-being-outside-fantasy/ Offlist, in response to the Ann Coulter's boney knees thread, I received this comment (from a man): "The whole point of this thread just wooshed over Anonymous's head, didn't it?" [...] Fourth Carnival of Feminists http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/11/fourth-carnival-of-feminists/ There've been some questions about what the Carnival of Sex Positive Feminism would look like. Well, I think it's pretty much up for grabs, but to get a taste of what they've been doing, the inspiration for it is the overarching Carnival of Feminism. [...] Infested with bumble bees http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/12/infested-with-bumble-bees/ Damien at Ausley Road liked the Cute Nipple Clamps post and asked, "What's wrong with a little objectification?" Thanks Damien. I saw your email and I'm getting tuit. I moved this front line and center because I started a rant [...] I'm a gay man http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/12/im-a-gay-man/ I've been telling Brian that designing this blog made me realize that, in terms of some of the imagery I like, I think I'm a gay man. This gender test is from Lauren at Feministe, a post I've been meaning to read for three days now. [...] Foul! http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/13/foul/ Huh. So, I'm at a wall in my ability to think through something, so I take a break. I decide to see about that dang gender test again. I went through it again, trying to make sure I answered the questions the same as I did the first time. [...] Whack. Contact. Door. Whump. http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/11/whack-contact-door-whump/ I suppose I should tell a delightfully rambling story, to follow up to the "You had the best parties" scream- of-consciousness rant. The caption to the pic? It was from a friend of mine, ac, who used to dole it out in IRC whenever they decided to trade pics. [...] Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org _______________________________________________ Squeeze mailing list Squeeze-JGP88kOVi7tfR2C6ueFn4Q@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mail.pulpculture.org/mailman/listinfo/squeeze_pulpculture.org

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[bitch] hot lez action by and for het men

http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/14/smirking-resp/ The presdinet? says he take responsiblity.Bush takes responsibility for invasion intelligence Lesbian sex (or Stan Goff should stick to talking about solidiers, 'coz he doesn't do himself any favors by implying he knows was lesbian sex is all about. What? Do we have an anal sex gene? http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/14/lesbian-sex/ The woman question http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/13/the-woman-question/ On why the porn wars matter to "the woman question" in feminist thought. (which is related to why Goff should watch some real lesbian porn for a klewbyfour. [...] Economics of Motherhood http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/13/economics-of-motherhood/ Sort of interesting piece on figuring out if there are advantages to delaying childbearing. What was interesting was the methods the economists used. Indicators http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/14/indicators/ From Geege, who says "For your convenience, great three-year chart of Iraq war indicators." Flutter in your putter: http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/14/flutter-putter/ I was surprised eBay let it pass, though not surprised she didn't make a sale. Female sexual dysfunction http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/14/female-sexual-dysfunction/ an FYI piece. Trussed http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/13/trussed/ which is from the Village Voice,_Eat Me: a weekend among suburban cannibals. (Interesting comments from Ed!) Divorce Kevin http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/12/13/divorce-kevin/ No, not Free Kevin! Rather, Divorce Kevin! Apparently, Britney Spears' fans have had enough and see a money-making opportunity. "Scream-of-consciousness prose stylings, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults." -- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com "It's visually delicious and pensively random. Or maybe, it's deliciously visual and randomly pensive." -- Dave Harper, Space Coast Web Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org _______________________________________________ Squeeze mailing list Squeeze-JGP88kOVi7tfR2C6ueFn4Q@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mail.pulpculture.org/mailman/listinfo/squeeze_pulpculture.org