A class of their own
Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore taught me some Latin, inspiring this post about the impossible dream of ubiquity.
During my 20+ years in PR/digital, I've worked on some great campaigns but never on something instantly recognisable.
At immediate future, we won a couple of awards for our Sony Rolly influencer marketing campaign. I was loosely involved in the award-winning Twilight Football campaign for the same client. I also got a llama to predict the Champions League final result, a story with more coverage and views than anything I've ever worked on:
But I doubt when you read through those three examples, you instantly knew what I was talking about - although maybe the llama video sparked an old memory.
A campaign rarely has that kind of crossover appeal, where you only have to mention a name for instant recognition. Samsung's LED sheep were in that category for a long time. The ice bucket challenge, definitely. In recent years, the McDonald's eyebrow arches.
They're exceedingly rare. It is so rare that you might describe them with a phrase that I learned the meaning of this week: sui generis.
Sui generis is Latin for unique or "constituting a class alone".
I came across it while reading Thurston Moore's autobiography, Sonic Life.
Side note: I highly recommend this book, but don't read it expecting much insight into Thurston's personality. It's more the story of Thurston's love of music and how that music influenced his work. If you want more insight into Sonic Youth's personality as a band, read Kim Gordon's excellent Girl in a Band.
Thurston used the phrase to describe Nirvana. Many people believed that Nirvana's mainstream success set the bar for what alternative/rock/punk bands could achieve in their careers. For a long time, major record labels expected bands with the potential for Nirvana's crossover appeal to reach the same level of popularity (and shift as many records).
History tells us that these were over-inflated expectations - that Nirvana were one of the only bands to have that kind of success. A one-off class of their own. Sure, other bands were hugely popular, but none had the impact or almost universal appeal of Nirvana.
It's also the case that only very few bands make it big - but because of the mismatched expectations stemming from Nirvana's success, any alternative/rock/punk band with potential was expected to make it big.
I've been listening to loads of Wilco, Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth lately. All three are great bands - none of them crossed over into mainstream tastes. Wilco were infamously dropped by their label for failing to achieve the success expected of them. Ironically, the album that drove their label to make this decision became their most popular, sending them to new levels of critical acclaim.
Whenever a client signs off on a killer idea and we start working on the campaign, I can't help but fantasise about my own Nirvana-esque crossover success. I instantly begin daydreaming about the award entries, the millions of views, and the new clients coming our way because they want to work with the team behind THE campaign of the moment.
I know how unlikely this scenario is, but still, those daydreams bubble up in my subconscious. It's like when I buy a lottery ticket and automatically assume that I will win. I know how heavily the odds are stacked against this latest campaign hitting Nirvana levels of ubiquity, but still, the dream refuses to dull in the face of cold, hard reality.
And maybe, as with Nirvana (and other bands/artists who achieve mega-stardom), the reality of that dream won't be as fulfilling as it's cracked up to be. We've all probably been in an inter-agency meeting with someone who worked on a mega-successful campaign - they can't escape it, even if they wanted to. "Well, when I worked on the Dove' real beauty' campaign, we did it like this…".
It's the proverbial albatross in the room - you've cracked the formula to award-winning success. Do it again, or if you can't do that, at least reveal the secrets to your success for the rest of the room. I'd get sick of it quickly, just as Nirvana tired of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" being seen as "the only Nirvana song".
Of course, the challenge is that you can rarely predict how well a campaign will land. So many variables are involved; it's such a long road from the initial concept to the big launch. The final product invariably looks very different from the initial pitch deck. Campaigns that looked like a number one smash on paper fail to hit the high notes in the real world. Those lofty expectations, the dreams of making a sui generis piece of work that captures the zeitgeist and sticks in the mind for many years, are unlikely to come true.
But the good news for people working in comms is that we don't face the same pressures as major record labels in the 90s. No one expects us to find "the next Nirvana". The challenge most of us face instead is maintaining a consistent level of output that ensures clients and campaigns remain relevant to audiences. That, to slip into measurement jargon, our brand salience remains high.
And that kind of consistency lends itself to a more Sonic Youth-style career: long-term impact, having a core identity and sound, but being fearless in stretching that core with experimentation, growing alongside your audience and responding to what's happening in the world.
Nirvana, like the Peter Kay x John Smith's ads from the noughties, were in a class of their own, sui generis. We can't expect every campaign we launch to join them, but plenty of plaudits, recognition, and (most importantly) business impact can be found operating in another class.