Embrace conflict, just make sure you know who you’re fighting
“You Need an Enemy” is a damned good name for a conference session. Even if Shepard Fairey and Pete Favat weren’t the ones running the session, the name alone would still get people through the door. But luckily for Cannes Lions attendees, Fairey – the artist behind “Obey,” Barrack Obama’s iconic “Hope” and many other recognizable works – and Arnold Worldwide chief creative officer Favat lived up to their own marketing.
A snippet of the talk is included in the highlight reel below, focusing on Coke’s enduring messaging and place in pop culture. But the clip doesn’t touch on the session’s broader theme: tension is compelling, and marketers should use it more and to better effect when trying to create stories for their brands.
The pair mined history and pop culture to show how some of the most enduring ideas (be they social movements or ad campaigns) were born from the idea of tension. Coke’s “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” made its mark because its multicultural nature came at a time when racial tensions were high. It played off social conflict in the West, making an enemy of the status quo to create a story that the brand could play a part in.
Talking to reporters in a wide-ranging conversation after the session Sunday afternoon, Fairey and Favat better articulated the value of conflict and who a brand’s enemy should be as a way to engage consumers.
What exactly do you mean by “you need an enemy?” Why do brands need an enemy?
Favat: We are here to make people care about messages. To get people to care, you have to start off with the idea that no one is out there waiting to hear what you have to say. So if we need to create stories, our industry needs to figure out how to make people care.
A compelling story starts with a protagonist and an antagonist. If I say white, you say black. If I say day, you say night. Our brains respond to stories that have two sides, not things that go right down the middle.
Give us some examples. What are your favourites?
Favat: Personally, the “Truth” campaign that we created is one of them. We created a brand called “Truth” because the tobacco industry lied. The enemy was the lies and the deception of that industry. And another would be Nike’s “Just Do It” and it’s enemy of lethargy, complacency. They’ve leveraged that story line and that enemy. It’s genius.
Does conflict have to be socially relevant to work for marketers? Every brand has an antagonist at some point, but sometimes it’s not very intelligent. Cleaning products are against ‘bacteria,’ for example.
Favat: Don’t mistake that this is some easy formula to make messages. Don’t think ‘just because I am for white, I’m against black’ or ‘I’m detergent, so I’m going to clean bacteria.’ You have to find your way through a story into people’s lives with what’s meaningful to them.
The easy thing to do is wage war on your competitor, which is the wrong thing to do. People won’t care about the war you have with your competitor. The trick is to find, from a cultural standpoint and through human insight, what will make something resonate and really matter for that time. Ask what barrier you have to push against to leverage your message.
You recommend that marketers dive into pop culture to understand this phenomenon. But thanks to the internet and its multitude communities, pop culture is now an incredible big place. What are your filters for finding cultural trends that matter? Is it just a gut check?
Fairey: I see way more stuff than I think is valuable, but you can’t avoid that. I’m a big fan of great books, movies, art, and luckily I live in Los Angeles, which is a really cultured place. I’m surrounded by a lot of people who turn me onto things. Community is really valuable. There’s no specific ‘go to.’ I stay engaged: I go out to see live music and art shows, street art. When a lot of molecules are colliding, you figure out what the good stuff is.
Favat: It’s part gut check. Just stuff your face with culture. I don’t think you can get enough of it. There are only so many hours in a day, but you have to decide for yourself what’s meaningful to you. What makes you feel passion, emotion, anger, positiveness, or made you say ‘I’ve never seen that before.’
Like we said in the presentation, finding tension makes people pay attention. That’s the basis for a lot of the work that the two of us have done.
