On the eve of Roger Federer's win, thought it was a great time to highlight this fantastic article from The New York Time's Play Magazine on watching Federer as a religious experience. Download 20federer.pdf .
The point is that words describing his game - great, magnificent, amazing, powerful - all fail to truly describe what it's like to watch him live. Due to excessive and inflated use, words, in particular superlatives, have lost their meaning.
This is particularily troubling for brands that are leaders. Calling yourself the "best". "cleanest" or "finest" doesn't really mean what they used to. If anything, people actually distrust the words.
This article also highlights how hard it is to convey experiential things through media. Any tourism account faces this. Take Canada. How do you convey to someone on the other side of the world what it's like to drive down the Bow Valley outside Banff surrounded by the massive poetic beauty of the mountains dramatically surrounding you as you breathe in pure air with a pine twinge after being filtered by the surrounding pristine forests. To do so literally is difficult, if not near impossible. Fortunately, we're not journalists. Advertising has the tool of creativity to bring these sorts of things to life.
Unfortunately, so many tourism accounts rely on the cliched "vista shot" with a witty headline. What a waste.
Comments