“We’ve got some real problems on our hands. So what do we do about it?”
Trevor Eld is the chief creative officer at music and music lifestyle magazine, Fader, and its creative agency, Cornerstone. He’s an ex-agency guy (R/GA), whose work has always aimed to have a meaning in popular culture.
As Eld sees it, culture right now is in a very precarious place and the loss of community that feeds culture is having a negative impact on our wellbeing. Brands, he says, can help to restore culture and, through that, restore us to health.
Great work plays in culture. That’s obvious. But it’s also important because that seems to be forgotten in a lot of the work that’s being done today. Even if it’s not forgotten and people are making an effort, it’s really hard to do work that plays in culture today in a legitimate way. I’m not talking about work that follows culture or parodies culture or does something in culture that doesn’t really add anything to it – work that just sort of leeches off it. I’m talking about work that legitimately stirs culture and creates the conversation in our culture.
Because of all the sophistication and complication that we’re experiencing in culture, it’s becoming even harder to do. One of the reasons it’s so complicated is that culture depends on community and right now our communal connection to each other is being deteriorated by social media and the disruption of technology. There are a lot of positives to speak about with social media and technology overall, so this is not an anti-technology stance. It’s more an, “OK, here’s where we are. We’ve got some real problems on our hands though. So what do we do about it?
A couple of those problems are, for example, that suicide rates are up. Depression is up. Isolation is up. All the stats and all the indicators, in the US and the UK and probably elsewhere, show that people are feeling ever more isolated and alone even though we are apparently in the “connected age”. Because we’re not really connected to each other. We’re connected to our technology. And even if we are connected to those people’s profiles, we’re not really sharing and connecting with each other as much as we need to as human beings.
We seem to have told ourselves that is OK, we’re actually sharing things and we have these online communities that are really helpful. If someone was in need, they could get advice and support, and of course, that’s true. But we’ve been substituting that for the real thing. That’s created a lot of problems with families, school, friendships, relationships, marriages…and it’s trickling all the way up to culture.
Connection feeds community and community feeds culture. Our connection has been broken down and we need to do something to fix that.
There’s this idea of authenticity online that’s not authentic in real life. It’s these projected images people post of themselves and their lives onto Instagram and other social media platforms that are creating distrust between our friends and ourselves. And it’s furthering that disconnection and that isolation. That FOMO, that “I have this and you don’t”, that “I look better than you” are all triggering our comparative mind and making us feel inadequate and very depressed.
Given trust levels are so low now for our online behaviour, we have a real opportunity to create experiences with brands that actually enable people to enhance their connections with one another. And I think that people are going to become more interested in leaning back into connecting in person with somebody and actually sharing an experience with them, as opposed to just attending an event to get a photo for Instagram and then leaving.
So how do we get back to that? We have to start by creating a sense of belonging. Whatever we want to do with brands should be grounded in creating a sense of belonging in their customers. The customers will then feel they belong both to the things they create for the brand and to the brand, so there’s an exponential benefit. It’s about creating experiences where people can actually share things together, where the focus isn’t necessarily on them sharing things to social media profiles. They can still do that. It’s totally fine. No one is saying they have to stop, but it seems that all the energy and focus right now is in creating experiences that aren’t all that great in person, they’re better online. You can’t wait to leave once you get the photo.
