A Question Of Respect

A short rant on a big problem.

We have a problem. And it’s crushingly simple.

We don’t treat the audience with any respect.

“We” is really broad. Most news media, nearly all advertising, nearly all entertainment, and especially politics, have stopped treating the intended audiences with a basic level of respect. We hide our decision to sacrifice craft and care for expedience under the idea of modern life being complicated, stressful, polarized, etc, but the audience knows. They feel the undercurrent of disrespect that comes from shitty ads, mediocre content, condescending messaging, and “well, actually” that comes at them from every side.

And the stuff that doesn’t talk down to the audience? It’s *intentionally* exclusionary; whether that be A24 or The Economist or HBO (all of which I like personally), the culturally high brow, complex stuff is explicitly *not for everyone* either in price or accessibility or packaging or language.

“The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.” is one of the great axioms of advertising, and it used to be fairly universally respected. But as the wealth gap, urban / rural divide, and political polarization all aligned with shifting attitudes around education, expertise, and what “elite” means… it became a lot easier for people who shape culture to convince themselves the consumer was, well, a moron.

Note: this is not a critique of liberals in advertising & media. I think all sides of the political spectrum talk down to people equally, because most of the advertising and media landscape, the consultant class, and the majority of corporate leadership is comparatively urban, educated and wealthy. They think they’re better than working class people, at least until they need someone to fix their plumbing.

We stopped treating the audience with respect when we stopped needing to look at them. Some of that is media fragmentation. Some is cultural distance. Some is a shift to digital / remote / survey driven research rather than talking to humans. Some is just that we have started to dislike and distrust each other more, partially justified, partially a convenient cover.

The larger issue is that someone filled the gap. You know who doesn’t talk down to the audience, who tells them the people looking down on them are either deluded or liars, who respects them and explicitly tells them they’re worth of respect, regardless of what their ideas are?

Conspiracy theorists, the “just asking questions” brigade, and Joe Rogan (who might be covered by the other categories).

If you think there’s no connection between the assumption everyone who doesn’t think, act, shop or vote a certain way is an idiot, and the rising number of people who genuinely think designing 15 minute cities is a “globalist plot” to imprison them in their communities, you’re not thinking hard enough.

If everyone is passively telling you they think you’re an idiot, and you feel like you’re winning, you can believe you are superior to the mainstream and tell yourself that crap is for some other loser. If everyone is passively telling you they think you’re an idiot, and you feel like you’re losing, however… there’s something incredibly appealing about being told that you are being screwed with not incidentally, but on purpose.

How does this tie back to strategy? We need to start thinking about our audiences the same way we think about our brands; looking at their best attributes, attitudes and behaviours, rather than their worst. A great example of this from the ad industry? Content length. We constantly quote best practices for 6 second video to one another because the audience has no attention span, while also acknowledging that the most consequential election in the world may have been swung by multi hour podcast interviews. Maybe deciding against appealing to the least laudable qualities of the people you’re talking to, is a good idea.

The underlying theme here is the importance of getting over ourselves. One massive flaw in strategy specifically is the tendency to buy into the idea that our job is to be “the smartest person in the room”. Trying to make the job about intelligence instead of craft or skill is a defence mechanism, in a role that is often poorly defined, or defined by research and statistics skills that aren’t always part of our education or training. Thinking you’re smarter than the creative team, the accounts team, clients, production, whoever, is the first step to smugly assuming you’re better than other people, which is a short walk from thinking the customer isn’t worthy of your respect.

But they are the reason your job, company, industry exists. The entire job of everyone in advertising is “get people to buy things”, and without people that kind of falls apart. It would serve all of us to remember that, because when people feel your disrespect, they begin to reject your values and beliefs, and soon thereafter your brand and products. Which is where we are today, whether you look at health insurance CEOs being assassinated in the streets or people “voting against their own best interests”, as I’ve read dozens of people opine in the last few months.

You wouldn’t stand to be disrespected by someone asking for your money. Making lazy, insulting or condescending ads, media or experiences is exactly that.