A lot has been written about the Snoozefest called the 83rd Annual Academy Awards telecast. Setting aside the wonderful annual gown competition (or so I’m told), snooze, it most certainly was. No pacing. No real humor, and other than Melissa Leo’s F-Bomb, no real surprises. When three snarky throwaway lines from Billy Crystal look like genius and a dead guy steals the show from its hosts, you know the show’s hit some kind of bottom.
The critics lay the blame squarely on James Franco. Here’s a sample from no less than industry booster, Hollywood Reporter, which titles its review, “127 Hours of Boredom.” And it got worse. A lot worse:
“Franco seemed distant, uninterested and content to keep his Cheshire-cat-meets-smug smile on display throughout.
“What was the point, Academy? What did Franco bring to the table? His appearance played more like one of his performance art pieces than an actual attempt to be host. At least Hathaway can sing and dance and be funny.”
Other than us pseudo-Hollywood types, why do we care? The answer might be in what Franco did off-camera:
“…Franco seemed a lot livelier backstage, tweeting videos and photos seemingly every time he was off camera and as engaged in his iPhone as he was totally uninterested in the audience a few feet away.”
James Franco did several live tweets and videos during the Oscars.
Not to make too much of it, but we just might have seen an inflection point, where digital/virtual is more engaging and compelling for some folks than human and live. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed it, only the first time it’s been so clearly revealed in a spectacularly public setting.
Franco is a “digital native,” part of a generation that has never known a time prior to the Web, fast computers and texting. And if you’ve had the sometimes strange experience interviewing some digital natives for a job, for example, you can find them aloof, seemingly inattentive, even lazy. That’s because when your point of contact is a keyboard and not another’s eyes, you tend miss that body language thing. Given that 70% of human communications is non-verbal, it’s easy for both sides to misread exactly what’s going on.
I’d argue that’s what happened with Franco. Unless, of course, he was totally baked. Billy Crystal dodged flying beer cans on his way up, so did Bob Hope, Eddie Murphy and the “old guys.” But they learned to connect, live. Franco is a wunderkind, but increasingly, his life is literally in the Cloud. Just like the emerging wave of Millennial consumers. They’re changing how we think about strategy and communications, big time. Nuance, metaphor, and art give way to the blunt force trauma of 140 characters, smack ya upside the head YouTube snippets and a subterranean Facebook culture that moves so fast, no one can keep up with it.
From a traditional advertising perspective, the world is backwards. It used to be that we’d develop the campaign, then see how it played out in the “other” channels. Now it probably makes sense to start with the virtual and see if out of the morass of feedback, a campaign is necessary or even feasible.
Which is what makes our Build the Brand, Protect the Brand approach so compelling. Dialogue is going to shape the experience no matter how cool our creative is or how much money our clients throw at the problem. Just ask Pepsi and the Gap. We know how to manage consumer dialogue, using our insights and creativity to set things in motion and our judgment to keep things on track. It’s a key skill–especially for consumers who’d rather Tweet about an experience than actually live it.
