The Polished Turd is Dead, Long Live the Non-Polished Non-Turd

In the early noughties, after a few years of optimistically writing helicopter shots into TVC scripts, I finally got to make an ad with one.

To my chagrin, I didn’t get to ride in the chopper; instead, I stood shivering on a dried-out lake bed on the way to Canberra, watching excitedly as our camera-carrying-whirlybird tracked a hot air balloon in the early morning magic light. I confess, I may have wistfully uttered the words “smells like victory” to my art director.

The ad was by no means a conceptual tour de force, but boy did it cut through in an ad break! Its high-end production values and my prized helicopter shot ensured that it stood head-and-shoulders above most other far less visually spectacular ads.

A few years later, I stood on the cliffs of Sydney’s Royal National Park and “ooh-ed” and “aaah-ed” along with our director and crew as a DOP placed a Canon 5D into a cradle on a remote-control quadcopter, and we watched as our pilot sent it soaring into the sky. We were over-the-moon with the results: awesome client-and-audience-wowing helicopter shots without the helicopter shot price tag. Genius.

Then came the great drone-flood. Rapid advances in technology meant that any Tom, Dick, or Harriet could suddenly capture aerial footage in glorious HD. YouTube was flooded with clips of pretty much anything you can imagine shot from the sky. And just like that, heli-shots were no longer special or differentiating, and rather than coveting, I soon found myself avoiding them.

Today, technological advancements are radically and irrevocably changing the creative industries, particularly the production landscape.

In the same way the drone democratised aerial cinematography, AI is democratising slick, polished, perfect stills and Hollywood-grade film and animation. 'Visual perfection' will soon be accessible to anyone with even the most modest of budgets, and as a result, will no longer be a differentiator for brands.

In a cynical nutshell: there’ll be so many polished turds out in the world that polish alone will no longer have any value.

So what will have value? How will brands differentiate? Concept, of course, is the first clear answer. In a world that’s awash with polished turds, a polished non-turd (ie a polished execution of a good or great insightful idea) will grab attention and deliver results. But it’s the potential of the non-polished great idea that I’m excited about: work that separates itself from glossy digital perfection through its realness, its grit, grain and overt display of human involvement in its making.

I experienced firsthand the appeal of 'analogue realness' when we recently installed a series of three mechanical Phone Death artworks within standard bus shelter panels. Perspex fish were hung with fishing line, handcrafted clams opened and closed mechanically at the touch of a button, a scaled-down washing machine visibly shook as a coffee cup teetered precariously on the edge, and a stiletto-heeled boot on the end of a piston stamped up and down on a pile of unfortunate mobile phones. I’d been nervous about the work's obvious handmade nature and the response an audience might have to it, but I needn’t have been.

Before we’d even left the site, a passing car pulled over and a couple hopped out to take photos, and within minutes of installing 'The Boot', a curious crowd gathered around it, and a teenage boy was heard to exclaim, “This is actually cool!”

This is hardly a rigorous quant study of the impact of the work, but in 20+ years of putting OOH campaigns out into the world, it’s the first time I’ve observed such immediate, strong reactions.

As the on-screen extraordinary becomes increasingly ordinary, audiences will increasingly yearn for the scuffed, the tactile, the humanly imperfect. For brands, this represents an opportunity to connect people with work that carries the imperfect marks of its human making as a badge of honour. This is the authenticity that so many marketing teams talk about but so few deliver. This work will work, for the simple reason that it signals that the brand behind it has deliberately eschewed smooth, perfect, cost-effective efficiency to deliver its audience something with a stronger emotional charge. It signals care.

There is glorious precedent in this creative response to perfection and polish. In the 1970s, bands from The Velvet Underground and The Ramones to the Sex Pistols and The Clash rejected the sophistication and polish of mainstream music and culture in a frenzy of stripped-back three-chord Punk energy. Punk was anything but pretty -- that was the point -- but it connected with people. It was raw, immediate, relatable, real.

Though Punk’s anarchic, spitting, pogoing anger would be inappropriate for all but a few niche brands, there is much to be learned from the Punk playbook about embracing its visceral humanity in execution. I’m not reaching for the safety pins quite yet, but my inner Malcolm Maclaren is whispering that Analogue Punk has much to offer brands with the imagination and ambition to take the imperfect path.