It's Nice That Selfridges Talks Series – Words as Communication with
James Bridle,
Paul Lewis and
We All Need Words.
Last night I attended the first of a series of talks hosted by
It’s Nice That in the Selfridges Ultralounge. The evening was set up with three lectures, each delving into areas where language plays a pivotal role within communication.
First up was the eccentric artist, coder, writer and publisher
James Bridle who spoke about many things, but I found the bit about the
Wimbledon 2010 live blog most fascinating. Online journalism seems to be taking a new turn and this example, ‘tennis-blogging' about the tennis if you like – is just the start.
On a similar topic,
Paul Lewis, the Special Projects Editor at the Guardian, and award-winning journalist, took us through the journey of tweets that told the live story of the London Riots. It’s fascinating to observe the way journalism and news broadcasting is transforming into a dialogue and collaboration between the broadcaster and the consumer. Addicted to the instant, Twitter provides us with anything breaking, and not only do we feel part of the story, we can add to it as well.
Back to
James Bridle. He introduced me to the term
Slash Fiction. Boy has this opened a new door for me. Defined by Wikipedia, ‘Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex.’ Wow. Mind blown.
In-between James and Paul,
We All Need Words took center stage. This talk was all about copywriting for the branding and advertising industries. Molly and Rob are two writers trying to revolutionize the way we write for brands. No more ‘brand slop’ was the focus, highlighting the ridiculous words and phrases being used in presentations, brand books and guidelines. Pepsi has a phrase called ‘share of throat’, which they use when describing the drinks market. Really?
I think it would be extremely difficult to eliminate the ‘brand slop’ because it has been so ingrained in our clients’ world, that removing it devalues our creative. Unfortunately, sometimes you just have to play the game in order to win new business and/or sacrifice a few pages to diagrams in order to seal a deal. Within the creative itself, simplicity and directness seem to be trending, long copy is making a return and jargon is becoming moribund. Hopefully, however, the pun will never die – if I have something to do with it!
To sum up, I think platforms like Twitter are making us better writers. 140 characters make us think, rethink and edit out thoughts. And we can try to eliminate brand values, triangles, keys, visions and diagrams – but in order to succeed, our clients and consumers need to be re-educated first. Not all brands can be ‘challenging’ and ‘different’ – and if they claim that they are, aren't those words just as sloppy?
What do you think?
Some interesting links / references:
