David Kreps Blog

Orange and the new personalisation market

I like the new Orange advert http://www.i-am-everyone.co.uk/. There are others in this vein – The Sunday Times for example. It is about personalisation. It aims to speak directly to ‘real’ people. Advertisers, it seems, are beginning to realise - no doubt through the reports of sociologists - that there is no 'Public'.... ...to realise that there are many diverse groups of people who all need variously to be catered for in targeted and unique ways. This is in contrast to the formerly popular general attempt to rationalise and generalise for 'the Public' from a 'sample' of a few, which many have begun now to see is fraught with a sociomyopia that oversimplifies and alienates badly enough to work counter to its primary, if piecemeal, aims. We are more complex than we used to think, and efficiency requires less bluntness in our implementation strategies - whatever project it may be that we pursue. Fundamentally, the efficiency of today’s socio-micromanagement is something we must all grasp - across all disciplines and walks of life - as we stand up to the collective social task of environmental behaviour change. This seems to be one story in the multiple narratives we are exposed to that really does seem to carry weight. This is an eco-social, collective responsibility moment for the species, in that it is global, and requires consensus on a geographical and population scale unprecedented in human history –at a moment when we realise how diverse we truly are. The Orange advert speaks to an understanding (within the arts community that informs these marketing tactics) of the unfolding zeitgeist of a humanity at a crisis moment in both its self-realisation and its survival potential, and how the answer to that crisis seems to us all to lie somehow within our understanding of the self, of who each one of us is, and how each one of us in our moment by moment unfolding as persons can contribute, through our self awareness and our actions, to the eco-social behaviour change required of us all to prevent the destruction of our planet.

 

 

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