One of my favorite guilty pleasures this time of year is watching all the old award-winning movies in preparation for this year’s round of Tinseltown celebratory bacchanals.
While recently viewing the stunningly good Network (1976), I was struck by how what once was a mockery of inauthenticity, is now itself authenticity! When it was first released, Paddy Chayefsky’s film screenplay was a biting satire of American corporate news and how it manufactures content. The film was meant to be art as a cautionary tale. Though when you view it through the prism of current story manufacturing standards (and worse) audience cynicism, Network now appears more like historical artifact. The movie offers a perspective as to how news storytellers and their corporate kingpins manufactured reality during an analog era filled with polyester clothes. In doing so, Network’s predictive accuracy about the morphing of real and not real has even exceeded its incredibly high cinematic hyperbole.
And we are the worse for it.
As art, movie newscaster Howard Beale is provocative. But as the character archetype for a today’s bevy of pseudo-journalistic poseurs, pitchmen (and women), and ham-handed ax-grinders from both sides of the political aisle, the “real-life” impersonations of the fictional Beale leave us both slack-jawed and ignorant. Our chin has struck the floor. We are disbelieving of the chutzpah we so frequently see from perpetrators in the name of news and analysis. Their “stories” are so hollow that there is barely enough heft to be cotton candy for our minds. And we are ignorant because our modern cognitions about the contemporary stories of the day are cotton-candy-like (barely). On too many issues for which the separation of real and not real is essential, we are absent of even the depth that Beale and his fictional UBS parent employed to make sure that is all fine by us. What can you say when Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is ranked as one of the most credible journalists in today’s media?
And here’s what really sucks.
All of this is has set the standard for authenticity in the marketing communication world in which businesses seek to generate real value. Authenticity in crafting stories and delivering business value is fine. But the temptation is to ask: Wouldn’t it be better to do something to get more attention? You know, be a little outrageous, maybe like Howard Beale?
Of course the answer to these questions should most often be a resounding no. But this is rarely heeded. My brand is not well understood? My R&D outcomes need to be positioned differently? Well OK, but that lacks the kind of pizzazz I want. Let’s be outrageous!
And on and on it goes, where nothing short of grabbing an audience by their mental lapels seems to be worth the marketing effort. And like all lapel-grabbing, any benefit is extremely short-lived.
This means that the Beale tale or “art becoming life” is just another daily marketing challenge where we must decide between professionalism and pandering.
But our constant toying with this ever-flexing line of real and fake stories means it becomes increasingly difficult to know (or even passively recognize) the real from the not real.
Marketers know this is a problem, and so do the businesses that hire them. Most important, so do the audiences that marketers and businesses hope to engage. This is a fundamental reason why trust in advertising is at a nadir and why social networks have become a go-to venue for honest, though not comprehensive, appraisals of products and services.
As a marketer or business leader, the next time you wish to channel Mr. Beale and are “…as mad as hell and can’t take it any more,” think about all of this and channel something else. Move that anger into advocacy for authenticity about the way we work and the stories we tell.
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John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
