Optimising for ‘Aliveness’

Recently I was explaining a personal dilemma to a friend. Should I do the big, scary and potentially rewarding thing I was considering or should I do the safe, bland and sensible thing?

He then introduced me to Oliver Burkeman and his concept of Aliveness.

Burkeman tells us that Aliveness is different to being alive: A sense of aliveness comes when we “fully inhabit our existence” he says. That is, when we’re in tune and engaged with the world around us, when we’re actively participating in our environment and our community.

The enemy of this sensation is when we try to “exert too much control over reality”, says Burkeman. When faced with a tough decision or a fork in the road, he thinks that a good question we can all ask ourselves is whether a choice ‘will take us in the direction of greater aliveness?’

Burkeman talks about trying to ‘navigate by aliveness’: Will a decision connect us more to the world and people around us? Does a choice represent a more risky, yet rewarding path?

My friend was arguing that I should also consider navigating by aliveness when dealing with my specific dilemma.

It’s an interesting idea, especially in the context of modern existence. For the fortunate people living in the largely peaceful, developed world abundance & existential safety are the primary characteristic of many of our lives and many of our tools (media included) directly enable us to ‘exert control over our reality’. We are rarely hungry. We are never bored. We have information and content at our fingertips. We can order anything we want and it’ll arrive within minutes, or at the most, days.

The question I keep coming back to is whether the technological capabilities we enjoy today are things which make our lives - and the experience of our lives - better or worse? We spend time with our heads buried in our feeds. It’s almost impossible to be bored. Does this encourage a sense of aliveness or hinder it? My conclusion, is that much of modern life works counter to the feeling of aliveness.

Nothing illustrates this issue for me in the way that videos of nightclubs from the 90s do. People are in the moment. They are ecstatic. Europhic.These people are experiencing something. They are experiencing it together. They are alive.

Compare this to footage of crowds in nightclubs today. You’ll see people not dancing. Recording their experience through their phone. They are there. But they’re not there. Alive but not experiencing aliveness. Modern crowds in the superclubs of Ibiza seem to capture this shift perfectly. People are consuming, not contributing to a collective experience. They are concerned with gathering evidence that they bore witness. And in doing so, they remove themselves from the moment and from the fullness of what they might have experienced.

‘Aliveness’ as the opposite of ‘Dull’

A long drive this weekend from St.Ives in Cornwall back to London gave me some time to think about this concept in more detail. I find myself instinctively drawn to it on a personal level, especially given the dilemma I have continued to weigh up in my mind. But, what about if you transposed it to brands, marketing and communication. After all, we routinely anthropomorphise brands don’t we? We append to them human characteristics such as tone of voice, values and personality traits. Could we use ideas aimed at human self help and apply it to the construct of brands and their marketing output?

For the last 18 months a growing coalition of voices within the marketing community including Adam Morgan, Peter Field, Jon Evans, Andrew Tindall and Karen Nelson Field have been talking about the ‘cost of dull’. The numbers involved are staggering. 50% of ads are less engaging than a video of a cow in a field, for instance. Or, if you produce a campaign that is no more enaging than cows in a field, it’ll end up costing you an extra £10m in media spend to have the same commercial impact as an ‘interesting’, engaging campaign.

The reason for dull? Peter Field’s work suggests this is the cumulative impact of 15+ years of chasing short term, performance orientated results with short term, performance orientated tactics. The rise of digital channels and the ability for brands to laser target individual consumers (at least in theory) and to demonstrate short term measures like clicks and conversions (rather than the infinitely more messy, infinitely less provable ‘brand’ activity) has led to an epidemic of dull communication.

To apply Burkeman’s frame - is ‘dull’ marketing what happens when marketers and advertisers attempt to ‘exert too much control over their reality’? In this search for control do they create and impose seemingly safe, sensible guardrails around their marketing activity. Guardrails that might look sensible in the short term, but may ultimately limit a brand’s vitality and it’s ability to connect with consumers more effectively and to prosper in the long-term. The thing that is notionally safe, ends up becoming dangerous.

I think a second issue where aliveness is concerned may also be on the horizon. Generative AI. Mind-bending stunts are now available at the push of a button. The cost - or effort - involved in executions like the TNF x JD Sports Big Ben Puffer Jacket (below) have dropped to zero. Imagery like this is superficially impressive but lacks vibrancy. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t have the kind of energy - or aliveness - that the best, most creative forms of communication do. And that’s before we get to the torrents of slop which are of a far far far lower quality than this effort.

If Tim Ambler’s view was that the best advertising is wasteful and signalls strength to consumers in the way that a Peacock’s tail signals suitability to a mate, will a torrent of Gen AI content exacerbate the ‘dull dilemma’ and does ‘optimising for aliveness’ provide a way back toward effective communications?

Dimensionalising ‘Aliveness’

What might an approach striving for more aliveness look like in marketing terms? How might we think about building activity which is characterised by this sense of vitality and vigour which one would assume would make it magnetic to consumers?

It would have to be the opposite of dull. It would have to create value for consumers. Most performance marketing focusses on rational information that creates no real value for the consumer - focussing instead on what a brand thinks is most compelling about itself. So from a communications standpoint, we should probably aim for activity that is either wildly entertaining or wildly useful to consumers.

From an effort standpoint - against the backdrop of Generate AI - it would have to be seen to be an activity which is either incredibly difficult to pull off'; requiring a brand invest time, energy and resources into the production of the communication; or it would have to represent a risk, being understood by consumers to be something that could possibly involve the financial ruin of a company or perhaps even the loss of human life if it were to go wrong.

I’ve found it interesting to plot ‘communications style’ and ‘effort’ as two axis on a boston matrix. Because then we can start to illustrate what aliveness in marketing might look like through the use of existing case studies from the real world.

Sony Bravia’s famous Balls advert was an era-defining advert for me - I’d just started working in media. A combination of the creative idea, the soundtrack but also the execution. It was vibrant and vivid and had an energy unlike anything I’d seen. When you learn how they actually made the ad - using real balls, closing roads…. it becomes even more impressive.

Still entertaining, but risking human life - Project Stratos was similarly ‘era defining’ for me. Not a TV ad. A youtube video. And not just any Youtube video, but one of the most audacious things a brand and a person could ever do in the name of advertising. Red Bull doesn’t claim to be an extreme brand, it shows that it is through the incredible stunts it pulls off.

Oatly’s Show Us Your Numbers campaign is a perfect embodiment of a utility offered to the consumer at great effort. Oatly calculated their carbon emissions and printed the number on each pack - helping consumers understand the environmental cost of their decisions. This required the brand conduct a painstaking and forensic analysis of their entire supply chain to ensure the number they claimed on pack was accurate. If this wasn’t difficult enough, they took the issue to the German Parliament and lobbied policy makers directly that all brands in the food category should be forced to do the same in order to help consumers make more informed choices about their diet and the impact it makes on the environment.

Lastly - Amazon Prime. An offer to ship goods and have them on your doorstep next day, all for a low low fee. Amazon now has the infrastructure and scale to make this work. When it launched, it cost the company massively to be able to provide this service. Ideas in this segment represent a bet on how a business can reframe the value proposition in a category or sector - if it works, market share follows. If it fails, it could be a financial disaster.

Optimising toward ‘aliveness’

I’d love to test whether the dimensions of ‘aliveness’ work in the same way Tim Ambler thinks advertising works: do consumers feel, either implicitly or explicitly that risk and difficulty, mediated through the lens of entertainment or utility, make for more magnetic, effective and altogether more ‘alive’ communications?

Personally, the idea of aliveness is resonant one. One that encourages a person to think beyond the immediate horizon. To push themselves further and into places and spaces which whilst uncomfortable might represent a growth opportunity. I wonder if the same is true for brands: when the status quo is one of consumer disinterest, of dull communication driven by a desire for ‘short term’ certainty - could pushing your activity further and optimising to ‘aliveness’ represent a route to brand growth?