After lunch with a politically like-minded friend, I decided to read Germinal, one of those books I’ve felt guilty for not having read for many years now — and which he had recently read and was raving about. Check out the elegant advisory that there are spoilers below . . . as if there were any other reasons for students (or tired middle-aged readers) to read it).
NYT as an article about the brand identity of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. The creator, Brian Collins, keyed off of Gore’s use of the phrase of “we the people” in his book, and then went a step further to see the me that makes up the we.
Zzzzzz. Mii/Wii, Women’s entertainment network, yawn.
But. The reason to note it here is that this is Muhammad Ali’s coinage. At the end of When We Were Kings, George Plimpton tells a story about Ali’s enduring charisma. Ali is at Harvard commencement, he is sick and has slowed down. While giving his talk, someone yells out “champ, give us a poem”. Ali points to his chest, says “Me,” points out to the crowd, says “We.” Plimpton, smiling with delight at memories of Ali throughout the interview laughs, says he looked it up and it is in fact the shortest poem known.
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Interesting memory exercise. I saw the movie a few years ago (it’s fantastic, I had forgotten what an amazing force Ali was) and I very distinctly remember Plimpton describing the poem as a union of audience and speaker. Wikiquotes, however, has it as “While I’m talking to you I’m thinking up the greatest short poem of all time. This poem tells how it feels to be great as I am: Me — wheee!”
Until I rewatch the movie, I prefer to rely on my memory. I think, and hope it’s better than the champ saying wheeeeee.
Yet another look at the branding elements behind Obama’s success. I get kind of impatient with the analysis that the brand is driving the success of the candidate. My take is that the candidate has always been different (people have been reading and enjoying Obama’s writing for years, because the thinking is different, feels new and free of baby boomer politics), and that the brand shows the difference. The focus on Gotham in the Obama campaign fetishizes the font (in the sociological sense, not the more interesting erotic sense(*)). Gotham is portrayed as having a power of its own, rather than being a reflection of the content:
Q: What is it about the typeface Gotham that adds personality to the Obama brand?
A: I don’t think that Gotham adds any personality to Senator Obama’s brand. I think it just amplifies the personality that’s already there. In fact, the typeface would work just as well for John McCain or Hillary Clinton, for that matter.
That’s kind of a messy statement and one that drifts into fetishism. Yes, Gotham amplifies the Obama brand, but then how could it work just as well for Clinton or McCain? McCain and Clinton are running classic strategies in which they secure a large part of their traditional base (which are seen as roughly equal) and fight over the center. By design, their campaigns are moderate American. Their brands need to look familiarly American. In Clinton’s case, it’s red, white, and blue, wavy flag curves and stars, and strong American typefaces. This is the standard political band:
McCain, the oft-described maverick, makes an interesting move away from the vernacular:
It’s US armed forces America, a familiar, centrist America.
It’s maverick (and I have loads of respect for McCain), but it’s grounded in the centrist strategy.
Obama’s strategy is based on game-changing (and I don’t say that as an endorsement, it’s a risky strategy), redefining traditional values, re-casting conversations Moving away from the American political vernacular that most other candidates use represents that.
There’s much more to the brand going on here than just the typeface. It runs the risk of not looking American, or at least not centrist, world leader America. The blues are measurably different, the curves connote countries and the planet, not flags.
Abandoning what I guess I’m calling the centrist America idiom is not unique to Obama or new. Gary Hart in 1984, my first political campaign, had a very high-tech typeface which Walter Mondale could never have used. What’s different is that Obama is still in the race so we have to look at the campaign to see why he’s winning when he shouldn’t be.
Gotham is not a force unto itself, rather it is a typeface that reflects the content of the campaign. As Robert Bringhurst so elegantly reminds in The Elements of Typographic Style:
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet, in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say must therefore aspire to a kind of statuesque transparency.
That said, there’s a nice bit about Gotham’s growing popularity:
there’s an oxymoronic quality to Gotham, which is why I think it’s become so popular. It has a blunt, geometric simplicity, which usually makes words feel cold and analytical (like Univers), but it also feels warm. It’s substantial yet friendly. Up-to-date yet familiar. That’s a tough hat trick. And Gotham has another quality that makes it succeed: it just looks matter-of-fact. But perhaps any typeface inspired by signs at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City — as Gotham is — will look like that.
If I had time, it would be interesting to switch the blues between Clinton’s and Obama’s materials above, and put Gotham under McCain’s military star and gold accents. My guess is that it would work about as well as dropping helvetica into the Marlboro logo:
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(*) Fetishism in the sociological sense comes from Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. His argument, vastly oversimplified, was that economists were talking about commodities (goods bought and sold in the marketplace) as entities abstracted from their physical realities (specifically, how much labor time went into their production) and turned into near-magical objects with prices that function in a world of maths and models.
i <3 
Yesterday there was a snowstorm and I needed to rent a car. When I went to Zipcar to pick up my CD-only car (why isn’t aux in standard yet?), my card was fried, so I couldn’t rent. They quickly and politely cancelled my order. I had an iPhone moment and Google-mapped an Enterprise rental about 3/4 mile away. I call to confirm that they were open and had cars available and then made the long, sloshy walk.
I don’t want to write a narrative . . . When I get there, everyone who speaks to me shakes my hand and quietly repeats my name. The woman who handles me asks a couple questions about what kind of car I need, walks me out to the lot and shows me what’s available. When I mention an aux in, she has me wait under the awning and finds two cars that have it. The manager comes out, apologizes for interrupting, shakes my hand, mentions that we spoke on the phone and quickly gets out of the way. I pick a car and we do the paperwork.
I consider people to be a painful neccesity of life, so I’m not big on the kind of counter chat she had for me. But I’ll give her this, the annoying stream of tips on saving money on the insurance and using the GPS was mitigated by the fact that it didn’t slow down the processing of the paperwork even a second. She even gave me a web-site like status: “only two more things to do before I take you to your car for the quick check.”
Once the paperwork was done, she showed me the clear clipboard with the ruler for measuring meaningful scratches and the circle for dents. We checked the car, shook hands again, and as I pulled out, the first woman at the counter, who was returning to the office with lunch, waved and told me to have a safe trip.
If you want to build a powerful brand experience that people will talk about, care about and remember, well, you should probably read Seth Godin or Lew Carbone. But if you crave loosely-argued, questionably connected irreleventia, or can’t get enough XO, stick around.