It’s always a delight when technology allows us to do things that elevate marketing beyond the patently commercial. It’s not art, but it can feel like it. At least momentarily.
Two high-profile videos do not a zeitgeist make, so let’s call it a mini-trend. Both current spots take culturally iconic images and animate them – quite successfully, both – to achieve a fresh expression of the deeply familiar. The right combination of fresh and familiar is media gold. When we talk about making emotional connections in marketing communications we are mining the territory of the familiar, tapping into primal triggers located deep within the limbic system of the brain.
Familiar visual and auditory cues – images or music that we’ve made associations with over the course of a lifetime – serve as shortcuts to these triggers. They can be extremely powerful. The high price for licensing such cues is a reflection both of the value of that power and the need for preserving that value through some inscrutable formula of exposure and exclusivity. I dare say that allowing Michael Jackson’s Thriller to be used for Party City advertising was probably not a wise application of this formula.
These two spots succeed in preserving the delicate balance of value in familiar cultural cues, and do it in an entirely captivating way. Good stuff.
