Funorthodox
Last week a screenshot of a Deadline interview with Martin Scorsese did the rounds. He’s relating to Kurosawa, who, at 83, said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be.”
I recently caught up with my old pal Andrew Dubois, ace account guy and adjunct professor at LMU, and we got onto the topic of likely his greatest strength, having fun with work. I’ve been mentoring with LMU’s undergrad marketing program, the M-School, almost as long as Dubois has been teaching there. The first thing you learn is that college students come up with really cool ideas, and the second is that it’s because they don’t follow any of the rules us ~professionals~ have learned — they don’t see orthodoxy.
The same goes for some industry vets I’ve worked with or observed. They believe in the magic of what silly, heartfelt, or pointed storytelling can do.
One of the cool things about working at Mattel was being able to dive in to the mind of your inner kid, if it would let you pin it down and inhabit it for a few moments. Kids follow their impulses toward whatever is going to make their brain crackle — a hand on something sticky, the taste of ice cream that just fell in the grass, jumping off something that’s “SO high!” They’re learning along the way, but telling them that breaks the fourth wall of innocence and purposeless wondering.
I wrote in my last post about balancing the theory and action-driven ends of the communications spectrum. Wherever on there we are, playing with our work is a separate axis we can use as a vector toward something fresh and fun. It’s a sort-of “write drunk, edit sober” forthe marketing world: play as long as we can, then make it fit into the requisite boxes.
An example is this assignment I worked on for Volkswagen years ago. The company had just started sponsoring PSIA-AASI, the ski and snowboard instructors associations, and part of the deal was a dozen or so wrapped cars. We could have done a standard wrap that fit in the brand’s design guidelines, but we decided to partner with a skier-artist to make custom art for the cars, and create a making-of video to give it extra life.
Every project is an opportunity to do things “right,” or to decide which parts of orthodoxy to buck. Kids and old timers know how to do it.
Maybe Kurosawa had tapped into the wisdom of this Japanese death poem:
Coming, all is clear, no
doubt about it. Going, all is
clear, without a doubt.
What, then, is all? — Hosshin
—
I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
