A lot of people are spending a lot of time these days trying to get all clairvoyant on us. Trying to predict whether advertising will zig or zag. This one says print is over. That one says TV has one foot in the grave. Movie theaters will soon be as relevant as the Parthenon. The human eyeball will gradually evolve into something approaching the size of a pea thanks to all those hours spent squinting at that teeny, little video iPod screen. Edgar Cayce, we hardly knew ye.
As for me, well, I haven’t a clue where all of this is going. Sure, I have a theory or two, though I don’t know what’s going to happen. But let me tell you, I know what I’d like to see happen. Of course, the technology doesn’t exist yet, but it will. And when it does, I know exactly what I’d like to do with it. Because no matter what twists and turns await us in the future, doing this one thing could solve a lot of problems.
I’m talking about Fenske’s brain.
That’s right. I want to upload Mark Fenske’s gray matter into a computer. Every thought he’s ever had. Every insight. Every pearl of gritty and authentic wisdom. Just hook a bunch of electrodes up to the guy’s noggin and suck it all up. All that cool thinking. All the stuff that the little twerps at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Adcenter get to hear about and most of us never will. Just upload Fenske’s brain and make it available to advertising creatives for as far into the future as the eye can see and then some.
I’m going to just say this: Mark Fenske is one of the few guys left in this business who genuinely gets it. That there’s something fundamentally deeper to all this stuff. That if a client from a neighboring star system came down here to conduct a review, well, she’d probably be pretty disappointed with the shallowness. The lack of deep insight. The absence of thought. The ready willingness to throw substance to the sharks. The mindlessness of it all. Fenske has no patience for it. So he goes to a classroom in Richmond and he talks, and he provokes, and he stirs the pot.
“Our brain’s default position in every situation we face is to angle for the way that gives the most comfort, or is the most efficient, or hippest or cheapest.
“The brain is rational. The brain aims to keep the status quo until something more comfortable comes along. The brain needs tricking. To create at a high level you must trick your rational brain into sitting down and letting the rest of the gray matter work. In your quest to make interesting work, you must not choose the comfortable way. You must not do what is efficient or logical or what satisfies someone sitting next to you. You must overrule your brain. You must march out into the field you don’t know.”
And he stirs... “To write advertising—maybe to write anything—you must be coming from where the audience comes from. Who doesn’t know the agony of having to listen to someone talk who thinks they’re more important than you are. “To attract, hold and be loved by an audience, you must be preoccupied with what preoccupies them.”
And he stirs...
“It takes magic, ludicrous, fancy, blind-flying and something hidden from probably 99.7% of the people on earth to bring an audience what they don’t know. It takes Mr. Wacko. A willingness to love what it makes no sense to. A penchant, sometimes, for turning an exact circle away from what everybody around you says is true and going in the opposite direction. These are crucial willingnesses, not something you can allow yourself to be afraid of or talked out of by the normal people around you.”
And still he stirs...
“This is me. A Michigan-football-watching, deep-fried-turkey-eating, flannel-shirt-is-a-coat man of the prairie. A barn-sized door-filler from the offensive tackle-producing breadbasket of the country. The kind of guy who wants another turkey on the BBQ while the first one is in the deep fryer. Just in case. When I sit down to write, beer and sausage is what flows in my head. If I try not to be who I am, if I try to be someone cooler or slimmer or better dressed, am I going to be able to feed the pen that sits at the end of my hand waiting for ideas? There’ll be nothing. Nothing human or new anyway. There’ll just be that nasty-faced bugaboo that doesn’t like me like I am, staring back at me with an empty expression that says, ‘Go find something to say from somewhere else, buddy, ’cause what you got in here we don’t like.’”
Somewhere, someday in some ad school of the far future, a bunch of students are going to be sitting in a holodeck classroom watching some guy trying to show them the secret to great work.
For their sake, I hope it’s Fenske.
Editor’s note: Mark Fenske’s quotes are taken from his blog at www.markfenske.com, and used with his permission.