Many years ago, when cynic was a mere few weeks old, we were approached by Porsche to do some work for them regarding public opinion.
To be honest, we almost felt guilty taking the money because it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what the key viewpoints would be, but as we all had mortgages to pay, we did and decided to have some fun trying to work out ways we could get the info.
To cut a very long – and boring – story short, on top of all the traditional and professional methodologies, we ended up doing some other stuff that was rather left field.
George went out onto the streets of NYC with a man holding a video camera. He had to stop random men on the street on the pretext of wanting to ask him some questions about some economic viewpoint or other.
Within a couple of minutes, Andy – in a Porsche Boxter we had hired – would come screaming round the corner, playing music at Metallicaesque decibels, shouting at passers-by in a demented and random way.
It was at this point George would look at his interviewee and ask …
“What do you think of that?”
And almost every time, the interviewee would respond with a diatribe of clichés that included such gems as …
“Wanker”
“Gets paid a fortune for doing nothing”
“Eats at hip restaurants with models”
“Snorts the average American’s annual salary up his nose”
“Probably lives in an overpriced warehouse apartment”
After a few minutes of hearing this character assassination, George would say the same thing …
“Sounds a pretty good life doesn’t it?”
To which invariably, the respondent would smile or laugh and nod in agreement.
Now is everyone who drives a Porsche a overpaid, model shagging, top restaurant eating, coke snorting’, apartment dwelling wanker?
No … however what we found interesting is that these clichés tended to be offered by pretty much every person we spoke to and yet, when we would say to them it sounded quite a cool life, they all nodded in agreement and laughed – as if they had realised for the first time their views were driven by jealousy rather than disgust.
A dear friend of mine – Juanita – calls this ‘projection’ [part of Jung’s theories / learnings / research] and whilst I don’t agree with all her/Jung’s views and theories, on this one I do … which is why armed with this information, we were able to develop some lovely ideas for Porsche based around ‘life’s not fair’ even though the German gits never ended up using any of them.
🙂
Still, this project helped explain to me why this Bentley ‘ad’ resonated so deeply with both Bentley and none-Bentley drivers alike …
As usual, I don’t really know why I’ve told you all this … especially because I’ve missed out a ton of stuff that was actually the heart & soul of the experiement … but it does possibly explain why this weekend – whilst out on the expensive streets of cold Hong Kong – I saw something that made me smile with sickening contentment …
And there I was thinking I was a socialist … no I’m not … I’m a wannabe [though some would claim I’ve climbed to the very top] wanker.
Well I do work in adland I suppose.