Industry thought leader Orlando Wood, chief innovation officer at System 1 Group and the critically acclaimed author of Lemon and Look Out, has been unpicking meticulously researched testing methodologies for decades.
Look Out, his latest book, is beautifully designed and almost manuscript-like. Wood cares about the aesthetics, so you won’t find this on Kindle; it only exists in printed form. Supported by data and packed with beautifully reproduced art imagery to illustrate his points, Wood talks about how society, and advertising, is turning inwards and becoming self-obsessed.
He explains with a story: “A woman walked past me in the street with her dog. Suddenly the dog jumped up at me and started barking, straining at its leash. The owner pulled it away saying, ‘Sorry about that, he’s normally fine, it’s the cone.’ The cone, I reflected. The dog was wearing a veterinary cone and when a dog wears a cone it can become fearful and aggressive in large parts because it is denied its peripheral broad-beam attention.
“And there it is: with the narrowing of attention comes detachment, fear, aggression and the urge to dominate.”
Much like his dog story, Wood’s recent book describes how the narrowing of attention and the loss of connection with the world and people around brings a sense of anxiety, fear, solemnity and an adversarial stance, and how this is revealing itself in culture and in advertising today.
Look Out serves as a creative inspiration to help brands grow in a tech-obsessed world. It is essentially a study of attention – what Wood describes as “narrow and broad-beam attention” – and how in the digital age it has narrowed. It rests upon the hemisphere theory of Dr Iain McGilchrist, neuropsychologist and author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.
Since the 1960s we have had this mistaken idea that the left and right brain do different things
“Since the 1960s we have had this mistaken idea that the left and right brain do different things,” Wood says. “It’s not that they do different things, as McGilchrist puts it, it’s that they do things differently. They have different priorities and different modes of attention.
“The left hemisphere is narrow in its attentional field, and it extracts things from their context and likes to break things down into smaller parts. It is not very good at comprehending so-called lived time; it likes things that are familiar and repeatable. It tends to see things as right or wrong and it’s not very good with ambiguity or uncertainty and is quite dogmatic.
“The right hemisphere is responsible for broad-beam attention. It understands context better, it understands people, humour and music. It also understands metaphor and it can understand that two opposing thoughts could both be true at the same time.”
Wood says brand-building advertising, as opposed to performance-related advertising, is more important in today’s digital world.
“Brand building advertising needs to capture the attention of the right hemisphere to lodge the brand in long term memory – to create mental availability. Then performance advertising comes into play, nudging the audience towards a purchase when they are in the buying window for it.
“We live in a technological world, where a kind of engineering mindset climbs to the top, so you end up with a very literal and transactional form of advertising that is easier to measure in the short term than the lasting effects of brand-building.”
Wood says left-hemisphere thinking tends to become more prevalent after periods of significant technological change. In Look Out he traces a rise of left hemisphere dominance immediately after the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, which you see it in art from that period.
The spread of the printed word fueled the growth in reading, what he describes as a more introspective way of receiving information.
“Suddenly people blocked themselves off in box-pews, looking down at their Bibles, and a kind of solemnity took hold. Prior to that there was a greater sense of community; everyone was relaxed in congregation. The focus shifted from the altar to the pulpit from where the word of God was proclaimed. The word took on huge importance. There was the stripping away of the sights, the sounds and the smells of the church, the characters in the saints, as left-brain preferences took hold.
“You see it in the art of the period, too. The words on the canvas took on more importance than the visual image behind, and there is a sort of barrenness to the landscapes and the darkened skies. I think there are many parallels with today’s world of advertising: the words on the screen, self-consciousness and even the pointing finger, all hallmarks of the art of that period.”
Wood looks at another period when society turned inwards: the industrialisation of the early 20th century. Production-line mentality with its “componentiality” transcended factory floors and permeated other spheres, namely education and media. A similar sense of detachment resulted in a loss of context and of self, again visible in art of the period.
The art from both periods has what he calls a “rigid stare” – a striking feature of both portraits and self-portraits, suggesting both fear and the desire to dominate.
An historical analysis of TV advertising also reveals a loss of emotional expressivity in the face
“Detachment is perhaps one of the greatest dangers in a period that follows a technological leap because it makes society vulnerable; the stare can be discerned in art some years before moments of great upheaval.”
Wood’s concern is that the stare has returned and that we are seeing a similar rigidity take hold today.
“We see it in culture, in art and in advertising. An historical analysis of TV advertising also reveals a loss of emotional expressivity in the face. So, it seems a stare that coerces is replacing the look that caresses. Stasis, stop-motion, freeze-frame effects and the slowing down of time continue to triumph over a sense of flow in which a scene unfolds in lived-time. Directness, such as on-screen words, rules over the implicit in the form of dialogue and knowing glances, and rhythm over music.”
He thinks advertising has lost much of its humour – a very effective creative approach – but that the use of characters can create more emotive and engaging campaigns, that will help commit a brand to longer term memory, essential for brands to grow, particularly in a digitally disrupted world.
