on adsplainers

I was recently part of a panel discussion on "explainer" films/videos/multimedia at the University of Oregon''s Agora Journalism Center. It being a journalism school, what we screened and discussed shied away from "icky" things like advertising and promotion.

But the elephant in the room (at least, it seemed to be when I was talking to the organizer afterward) was money. We hinted at it, some people asked oblique questions about it, but we didn''t really face it head on. Which was maybe sort of silly, given that the frankest question we received from the audience all evening was:

{paraphrasing from memory}

"I''m young and in debt, so how the F do I do this kind of work without going broke? What the F did you all do? HALP"

I kind of wish I had screened what I originally planned to, because it could have been a just-as-frank answer to her question:

an adsplainer.

Kirby Ferguson showed what''s basically an adsplainer too, for Wikitribune. But I wonder if seeing two of them (his + mine), from the only two fulltime freelancers on the panel (him + me), might have gotten a practical message across more clearly about that elephant in the room--in addition to the other practical messages the other panelists were also clearly conveying, about doing "explainer-making" work as part of a journalistic organization.

people still need to sell their shit.

getting you to understand their shit

is an increasingly crucial part of persuading you. (IMHO.)

ergo: ad$plainers.

Take this ad for an athleticwear brand. There''s a jillion brands and kinds of athletic jackets. None of them are essential, for 99.9% of everyone, anywhere. So they don''t sell you on the jacket, or even the brand. They sell you on an intriguing concept embodied by the jacket.

And how do you "sell" an intriguing concept that''s (let''s be real here) almost certainly inessential? They genuinely activate your curiosity and then explain some cool shit in a compelling way.

and that''s how you get:

The funny thing is, these adsplainers are actual explainers. Is it journalism, or "educational" media suitable for classroom instruction? No. But is there meaningful information in there about how some subset of reality works, organized and conveyed in a compelling way, that you can carry forward regardless of whether or not you got "converted" RE the brand/product/service?

i.e., did you learn something?

probably, yes!

The athleticwear ad really does illuminate some cool stuff about how your visuospatial perception system works. The NPR ad (I hope, since I made it?) really does help you grok what "open source" means. The Wikitribune ad really does clarify what the f''d up economic incentives of online news are.

people have to sell us on their systems now, not just their products and services.

And you can''t just point a camera at a system and film it with attractive lighting. You have to help people make sense of what the F you''re even talking about.

Open source thingie. Wut?

Teh News is broken. O RLY?

Brain make me not see good? Explain.

Explaining interesting systems × advertising and promotion = an actual thing.

Also: a thing that people with actual money will actually pay you to do.

Also also: a thing you can get paid to do without feeling "icky" or like it''s "just the thing you secretly do to make enough money to live". Not that there''s anything wrong with that, either. I''m just saying this work is out there and you can do it and be just as proud of it as you are of your non-adsplainer work.

It isn''t even new. Charles and Ray Eames did it all the time, like 60 years ago. So maybe the difference (i.e., what I might have said at that panel I was on) is that nowadays, you don''t have to be a world-famous mid-century design duo hired by the biggest corporations on earth to do it, too.

I''m just some guy. I started making straight-ahead journalistic & educational explainers for the same publications and nonprofits I happened to be writing print articles for. Somehow it also led to people who are neither journalists nor educators--just people who need to sell their shit--asking me to do the same thing.

Errol Morris (Oscar winning "Fog of War" guy) directs beer commercials. The awesome thing is that we explainer-maker types don''t even have to get that "icky" if we don''t want to! I mean, I made an adsplainer last year about glorified HVAC systems. Partly because (being an ad) it paid halfway decently, but even more partly because I''m genuinely interested in superficially-boring-but-secretly-kind-of-fascinating crap like that.

Who''d have ever thought there''d be a market for this? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ But there is.