Monthly Archives: February 2019

A Short History of Phony Applause.

We were at the ballet recently, the Bolshoi.

Where did phony applause come from? Quite possibly Emperor Nero. He hired thousands to applaud and cheer his speeches.

It’s was a live-from-Moscow performance beamed in to local cinemas.

Special only begins to describe it. 

It might have been on screen but that didn’t stop us wanting to applaud like mad.

As you’d guess, Bolshoi performances are not without rapturous applause. 

But it wasn’t always that way

In moments of uncertainty a company founded in 1776 hired claquers.

That’s French for an organized body of professional applauders. They’re paid for their efforts.

In 16thcentury France, playwrights called on claquers.

They bought blocks of tickets to give away on the promise that there would be applause enough to sway the critics and attract audiences.

But phony applause wasn’t the only trick, you had specialists.

Rieurs, laughers, were paid to laugh loudly at punch lines. 

Pleureurs, criers, were paid to sob into their handkerchiefs in moments of despair.

You also had Bisseurs. They were paid to shout ‘Bis Bis’, a request for an encore.

You might say there was as much of a performance in the audience as there was on stage.

There’s something of a digital version of this these days with video click farms.

From New York Magazine, Max Read gives us this with a link: 

On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion lookslike, find a video of a click farm: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.

No shrug of indifference to that, is there?

Phony views and sham data … maybe it’s why P&G’s Marc Pritchard pulled back from social media.

He cut $200m in 2017.

Video click farms are enough to turn us all into pleurers … with proper tears, of course.

But for many there’s a more pressing issue. The state of content and commercials.

Too many content efforts feel drab against the promise of something bright and appealing. 

Equally, for many commercials nobody’s wishing they were a split second longer than they are.

Too many of them are non-starters compared to spots from Snickers, Geico and Old Spice.

Small wonder then that trust in advertising has dropped to a record low of 25%.

This comes from Unilever CMO Keith Weed, https://bit.ly/2RrR8lA.

Of course it’s easy enough to be a pessimist, but it’s not as if we can’t apply a little reason.

Many believe we need to improve creative work. 

Among the many are Google and Apple.

They’re built on creativity; their TV spots brand with an emotional intelligence.

Their commercials have an ability to put feelings into people.

More marketers could do with that.

Maybe they should stop taking advice from themselves and read something about the power of ideas and branding.

Because to motivate people you need more than algorithms.

After all, what use is gee-whiz technology if what’s delivered is crap messaging.

Nobody’s about to applaud crap messaging, are they?