Designing brand callbacks
The subtle art of participation experience
Amongst our many current problems with digital communication, perhaps the one that vexes me most is our inability to extend that communication over time in interesting ways.
Everything is a snippet, every social post a contextless burp of that one thing that’s occupying our brain right now. We publish so fast, not only are these thoughts often poorly-formed, we forget almost instantly what we said, such that it’s easy to becomes repetitious or contradictory. We publish in the expectation that someone will either act instantly or completely forget what we said. But not everyone does.
One of the nice things about Substack is that it feels like the last refuge of considered writing amongst social-type platforms, where articles are built in a series and we’re not penalised for linking thoughts together across time.
When we create contexts and make loops and connections out of them it’s very satisfying to consume. It’s why episodic content works, in all its many forms, because the reader/viewer imagination becomes part of the thing, in our own minds. We anticipate, we know what’s coming, we visualise how. It’s immensely pleasurable.
And creators can have enormous fun with that and create huge saliency. Playing with expectations once created, sometimes satisfying them, sometimes subverting them. If done with love and thought, it’s the best kind of signalling, the kind that creates a real bond. It’s what advertising used to largely be about, but the era of digital attention has rather killed that.
In fact, while I’m mentioning killing, a great example of the power of callbacks is the beloved 2004 movie Shaun of the Dead, written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. What can we pinch from what they do so well in that script (and other linked films)?
The love for loops and connections
Rather than have this article get bogged down in descriptions of visual callbacks, here’s a very concise video explaining some of the ways in which Shaun of the Dead uses callbacks. A LOT OF CALLBACKS.
In fact’s it’s like a Matryoshka doll set of callbacks, very small ones inside ones of entire scenes, and after a few viewings, the realisation one half of the movie is a giant callback of the other. And then you watch Hot Fuzz and realise they continue…
The sheer amount of callbacks isn’t really the point, it’s the variety. The array of different signal types. This is where I think this movie becomes an interesting jumping off point for marketing creatives. The repetitions used in this movie include linguistics, behaviours and visuals.
Some are diegetic (i.e. the characters in the film are aware of them), a lot are mimetic (just for us the audience, conveyed by editing). They’re not all played for laughs, some are funny, some are tragic, some convey bittersweet social truths we can recognise.
Understanding the principles behind the writing allows us to see how we might transpose the techniques to brand marketing. The timing and sequencing of a single audiovisual asset like a movie isn’t the same as the spreading callbacks into the asynchronous series of touchpoints in a campaign, certain things wouldn’t work or have to be deployed differently, but it’s still possible to create powerful saliency.
From TV to Digital
As I mentioned in the intro, this stuff used to be a staple of TV advertising in the 1970s/80s from Nescafé’s “Gold Blend couple” to the “Oxo family” to my personal favourite the Leonard Rossiter/Joan Collins Cinzano ads.
Those who were around back then remember the ‘spilt drink’ physical comedy callback in them, but there were actually two, another linguistic one in the setup where Rossiter would mangle a foreign language phrase in an effort to look sophisticated.
These kind of callbacks haven’t died, in fact they still power some massively popular YouTube channels today. One of my favourites is the “Pitch Meeting” series created by Ryan George (1.3M subscribers), which uses callback phrases like “super easy, barely an inconvenience” to give us a stake in whatever movie his two characters are pitching. Go find your favourite movie on there and enjoy!
You can see the same principle at work in a B2B context on LinkedIn where brand strategist Dan Holt uses a brilliantly simple cartoon callback device in “Mary’s Marketing Adventures”, which are collated here.
A callback isn’t just use of consistent design, it’s adding layers of meaning inside consistent design. Reinforce, delight, subvert, do whatever you want (thoughtfully and intelligently).
In an age of bland attention economics, this stuff is absolute catnip for humans.
If you’d like consulting advice on using techniques like this, reach me via LinkedIn, or find out more on the Exodus 25 website.