Produced
Two of the more notable ads we’ve seen this year came out this week.
Siete and Air, the software company, both released what you might describe as mini films. You can watch them here and here.
This newsletter isn’t a critique of the ads themselves, but it is a critique of the style. That is: highly produced.
From the sounds of it, Siete produced their “ad” in-house. Who knows how long that took to produce. Air, according to Adage (when was the last time a software startup was featured there?), worked with a former Wieden+Kennedy creative director.
Both of these come about a month after Basecamp did something similar. (They hired an agency, then, in typical Basecamp fashion, scrapped the agency and did it in-house.) And Liquid Death has been doing this for years.
The theme here is production quality.
After years of hearing ugly, lo-fi and UGC-centric content was the future, there are at least a handful of notable “eff yous” to that line of thinking. Even if each of the aforementioned brands still do some content like that, these examples aren’t just departures. They’re wholesale abandonments.
We think there’s a reason for that. As we wrote in Influence last summer:
The social graph helped accelerate connections and, therefore, word of mouth, essentially pulling forward influences at a faster rate. (Hence: Influencers.) While a shift, it was based in traditional social norms. It was just faster.
The algorithm, though, is a move away from that. In fact, it is—in many respects—a move back to Madison Avenue-type advertising, where insights you don’t catch about yourself are used to manipulate interests and desires, both in categorical form (I want this type of thing) and specific brand form (I want this specific thing).
Perhaps this is why so many are so uneasy about it. Maybe some of us—especially the influencers (like Kylie)—have a sense we’re losing control.
It’s almost as if these brands understand the difference in how content is distributed now and believe higher production quality is the next “arbitrage moment.”
Something to pay attention to.