It's like riding a cycle

In the late 1970s, the Bee Gees brought a new sound to music when they layered falsetto harmonies over catchy grooves the NYC club scene could dance to. And people devoured it. Before long, disco infected popular culture to such a degree that nothing was exempt, from films to fashion.

Disco became so ubiquitous, people couldn’t escape it.

The culmination of the discontent played out when Major League Baseball hosted a “Disco Demolition Night” promotion at a double-header in Chicago in 1979 where disco albums were piled onto the field to be literally blown up. It was so hyped, the night ended in a riot.

Everything is cyclical

Design. Fashion. Music.

Disco music never left, by the way, it’s just not called disco anymore.

Kinda the way mini-vans became so synonymous with uncool, they had to be rebranded by the car manufacturers as SUVs – better looking mini-vans with regular doors instead of sliding ones.

What’s a compact SUV? A station wagon.

Trends like this fascinate me. And it appears that it’s been going on since the dawn of humankind.

Devour, divest, diverge.

Business is no exception

For anyone in marketing, a small handful of topics have monopolized the convo over the last two to three years. That, alone, can exhaust someone's interest.

"The end of cookies is coming! The end of cookies is coming!"

Will this be a huge deal?

We'll know in early 2022... Wait, strike that.

We'll know in late 2023... Wait, strike that.

We'll know in 2024. Maybe.

“The metaverse is coming! The metaverse is coming!”

This inundated our feeds and inboxes for at least a year, but I can't recall the last headline I've seen.

Is the metaverse already dead as disco? Did we just get tired of talking about it? Or has it already started to rebrand itself in different forms (e.g., KISS 2.0)?

“AI is coming! AI is coming!”

My brother likes to bomb our family with AI-enhanced pics of him riding giant furry pigs, etc. That alone makes AI worthwhile to me. I'm amazed at how quickly so many people have started using AI as an idea generator or executional tool.

There's a lot of fear associated with AI. Some fears seem more founded than others. Take the scenario of bad actors and deep fakes, for example. It doesn't take much imagination to see how that could play out to cause global problems.

Let's all put a lot of love out into the universe that AI will be used for more good than evil. Also, if you see something, say something. ??

Will AI eliminate creative jobs? Maybe if your approach is so shallow it can be replicated by code. But it's not, right?

One of the most important things a Creative brings to the table is the consultation during the creative process. Asking great questions, listening with intent, pivoting and flexing in search of glorious insights and actionable gold.

I’ve been in countless client meetings where our convo has led to realizations of new approaches or opportunities, at large, that far exceeded the task at hand. That takes two people – a Client with deep subject matter expertise and a Creative who is adept at critical thinking and maintaining an outside perspective (i.e., the target audience). It’s kinda magical.

Then, use AI as much as you want to ideate or bring your ideas to life. Game on.

To quote Marie Curie, "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

Most cycles have brakes

In the song Hey Hey, My My, Neil young penned the lyric, "It's better to burn out than to fade away."

The false dichotomy is one of my favorite logical fallacies – something is either X or Y, pick one. But it’s easy to expose a false dichotomy: Just provide a third option.

1) Burn out.

OR

2) Fade away.

How about this:

3) Spark on a regular basis.

We could all probably do better with smart moderation vs. oversaturation. Maybe if society at the time hadn't exploited disco so much, it wouldn't have gotten to the point where people reveled in the thought of exploding crates of albums.

Lever on and off

Oversaturation is not sustainable.

Whether we choose to recognize it or not, we're wired like cave people. They walked a lot, then they had short bursts of energy when running after prey (or avoiding becoming it). Then they rested again. It's the whole basis of countless workout programs, such as interval training.

Embrace new things. Leverage them. But try not to let the hype get your brain stuck in hypermode.

It's easy to let the information we're inundated with skew our perception. Worse yet, our brains may get oversaturated and eventually riot against [insert trend here] like rock-zealots turned on disco.

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Jeff Thomas is a professional Creative in Cincinnati, OH. He's been a writer ever since he started writing.