Planning, Politics & The Problem With Real People.

Or: Yeah, simplicity is cool but have you ever tried providing detailed descriptions of everyday life or professional practice?

“Details are dismissed as unimportant, expertise as irrelevant. People who complicate things — which might be a good definition of an expert — are viewed with suspicion.” Ian Leslie

I have had a few discussions recently around the idea that “people who work in ‘X’ are not real people”, where “X” is advertising or marketing, and I wanted to start to get my thinking in order, and also to take the opportunity to use quotation marks excessively.

A combination of a recent Ian Leslie article on the populism of simplicity and a chance encounter last week with an academic article about dangers in the discourse of democratisation in theatre reminded me of some of the issues I have with “real people”.

Which I then forgot about.

Until Campaign Magazine featured Nigel Farage on their front cover yesterday morning, giving me a nudge (nice ratio btw):

Again reminding me of the parallels between populist politics and commentaries on advertising that revolve around the juxtaposition of “real” people and “experts”:

“If the predictions now are right, this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people’, (Nigel Farage, 24 June 2016).

“People in this country have had enough of experts”, (Michael Gove in Financial Times, 16 June 2016).

Typically, when people who work in advertising are compared unfavourably with “real” people, a series of rhetorical moves takes place.

The most fundamental rhetorical move is the division of society into two opposing groups: the indistinguishable “real” people outside the agency offices are contrasted with the indistinguishable advertising professionals within.

Those within who stand opposed to “real” people are implied, by extension, to be: “fake”, “artificial”, “inauthentic” or some other form of not “real”.

While this is often presented, in both politics and advertising, as an anti-elite position, it is a line of argument that obscures issues of diversity - whether race, gender or class - reducing a complex of diverse biographies, communities and cultures to what Liz Tomlin calls a “homogeneity of ordinariness” or, in adspeak, “65,850,000 Margarets”:

The Plural of Anecdote is Anecdotes

Rather than empowering “real” people, the decontextualised opinions of Margarets are appropriated and surreptitiously used in service of the marketing professionals that she’s supposed to be providing a counterpoint to; the industry equivalent of a Donald Trump ‘Sir’ story.

What is served up are flesh-and-bone-on-bare-bones-stereotypes whose anecdotal thoughts are afforded protection from challenge because they are “real”:

The invocation of a decontextualised “real” person’s opinion as some sort of irrefutable insight into professional practice is not a reasonable argument. It is as uncritical as the slavish subservience to irrationally rational metrics, to which - again - it is supposed to be providing a counterpoint.

There is no protected class of evidence and all evidentiary claims should be subjected to interrogation, and capable of being so.

To do so, we need the details.

The Limits of Common Sense

If you really want to understand what the “real people” classification is all about, consider the constraints around what qualifies or disqualifies people as “real”:

“If the predictions now are right, this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people’, (Nigel Farage, 24 June 2016).

“People in this country have had enough of experts”, (Michael Gove in Financial Times, 16 June 2016).

“Real” people are ordinary, na?ve. They are, through the implied contrast with experts, constructed as unknowledgeable and unprofessional, unencumbered by any specialist knowledge or insight.

And mostly, when you hear talk about “real” people, it’s implied that we’re not talking about CEOs or politicians or academics or lawyers or judges. None of whom live in the “real world”.

Even the “real” people who work in the advertising industry are not included when we are talking about “people who work in advertising”.

No, they live in the world that’s filled with taxi-drivers and factory workers, people in shops and shopping centres: regular people, ordinary people.

At what point do you stop and think about how much rhetorical work is being done (and how much detail is being erased) by these constructions?

Back in the “Real World”

Instead of overcoming the type of abstractions that plague the corporate world’s thinking about its customers or having any democratising force, the “real world” construction creates one more (fantastical) obstacle between creators of advertising or marketing communications and the intended recipients of their work.

The juxtaposition of the corporate world and the “real” world treats everyday life as something outside or beyond the advertising world; positioning it as a laboratory that you can step in and out of. And, in so doing, it reinforces the self-serving idea that the advertising or marketing world’s perspective represents a “view from nowhere”. (Rather than a perspective that is, and cannot be anything but, drawn from the society it seeks to engage with).

Far from representing a critique of the industry, it has more in common with managerial discourses that see “consumers” as abstract technical objects and units of analysis that feature only in corporate artefacts like presentations and slideshows.

These are the two fundamental problems with the simplification of the “real world” and “real people” thesis.

1. Rather than speaking up for a lack of diversity, the homogenisation of the advertising industry in “real world” critiques further diminishes the visibility of marginalised voices and elides the structural inequalities that already exist within the industry.
2. Rather than giving a voice to people, the “real people” thesis transforms the complexity and diversity of all human life into a single homogenous bloc and then appropriates that voice to make unverifiable - and unchallengeable - claims.

Political populists thrive on a lack of detail.

And so do populist critiques.

They rely on unsustainably simplistic binary divisions, and appeal to “what everyone knows” without ever specifying what exactly it is that “everyone knows”. And this obfuscation of detail and denial of complexity makes their arguments elusive to pin down and difficult to challenge.

Which is why they should not be taken seriously as analysis.

Details matter.

And there is an analogous consideration for advertising and marketing practice too.

While many thought leaders in advertising and marketing exploit the ambiguity of simplistic aphorisms to build their personal brand, the seductiveness of pithy protest and pithier philosophy is ultimately destructive to detailed critical examinations of professional practice.

Summary frameworks, professional hacks and piecemeal insights can only ever have value practically.

That is, unless we provide detailed descriptions of how they work in specific situations of actual use, they are merely abstractions that omit the conditions of unpredictability and uncertainty under which they were arrived at and under which all professional judgements take place.

Details matter.

The detail of implementation, the messy complexity of getting work done and of making decisions for immediate practical purposes has value. But this is often the detail that is written out of history, and the detail which will most likely be reprised next time out, and erased again.

While simplicity of thought and expression is a useful goal, it often conceals complexity and obscures nuance. Unpicking it helps us understand how such simplicity is produced and the meaningful shortcuts it uses to makes sense.

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Emmet ó Briain is founder of QUIDDITY — an insight consultancy specialising in the qualitative analysis of culture and language using naturally-occurring data and language.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/emmetobriain