On occasion we find ourselves in client meetings with a very senior team shouldering a very inconvenient burden: convincing their CEO that the digital medium is not inert and uninvolving—that its ads are more than insinuating party crashers, that its Flash-fangled web sites don’t pale in comparison to 3-D store shopping, TV ads, magalogs, or even digital OOH advertising. “The web can’t make shoppers fall truly, madly, deeply in love with us. Period.” Thus speaks the CEO who knows from retailing—the merchant prince with skeptical eyebrow arched over all things dreadfully, dully digital.

Yes, digital diehards, pioneers and recent converts, doubts persist about the web’s potential to involve us emotionally in a brand.

If the argument were entirely without merit, rebuttals would hardly be necessary. But most of us don’t say “deeply moving,” “wildly inspiring” or “irresistible” quite as often as we’d like about our digital brand experiences. Most of us aren’t able to say, “That brand feels like me” often enough online. Hence the rise, one could argue, of consumer-generated content that makes the brand over in our own image. Brands that do make the emotional connection often employ humor, and among digital millennials, humor is king online, particularly sarcastic, knowing, parodistic, low-brow humor—emblematic of both the generation’s marketing savvy (they’re in on it) and the emotional peculiarities of a life lived virtually (and a private life lived publicly). Sarcasm and parody, after all, put some distance between “us” and “them,” don’t they.

Music will dramatically change the emotional timbre, if you will, of the web. So will the continued rise of brands demonstrating corporate social responsibility—particularly those using the power of video to spur activism.

But let’s give the devil’s advocate his due. A very thoughtful post by Sean X Cummings about the deeper emotional impact of the TV spot vs. the online banner ad, Is Digital a Hopeless Medium?, draws a series of sharp contrasts between the individual viewer/user’s respective psychological stances while online or watching TV. Online engages the cognitive cortex, TV the limbic system—allegedly the older, less understood part of the brain involving emotion, memory, learning/motivation. Though I’m unaware of any scientific proof of this argument, it seems at least superficially accurate. My rational drawbridge is down, in the way one says “my defenses were down,” when I’m watching a movie (or Mad Men) on TV, which makes it easier for emotions to cross the moat.

Cummings also argues that digital is a “learn forward” medium, chiefly informational and individualistic whereas TV is a “lean back”, communal entertainment medium. Again, these assertions seem generally true, leaving the very communal and limbic MMORPGs aside. Leaving aside digital millennials’ constant connectivity and the digerati’s microblogging and lifecasting, which also seem inarguably if strangely communal to me. Leaving aside networked brands that are either transforming “traditional” online advertising into social media marketing or dramatically decreasing spend on straightforward interruptive ads because they recognize the web’s colossal community impulse.

Leaving aside as well the imminent full-video web, which will make distinctions between so-called entertainment media like TV and informational media like the web (and first, second and third screens) superannuated.

OK. Leaving aside quite a bit.

Still, Cummings’s argument seems to contain a kernel of truth. An intuition, perhaps, about how difficult it is to describe, assess, appreciate the virtual community when members haven’t (yet) fleshmet. (I’m reviving this term because it’s deliciously, well, corporeal, and contrasts nicely with the hyperreal online.)

It does seem a propitious moment to introduce a digital experience far, far from the banner ad that Cummings spends considerable energies critiquing. A digital experience emphatically limbic and communal, that springs from the living web—and all that it implies.

The interactive installation, “I Want You To Want Me”, again, at MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind, aggregated and artfully displayed quotes and pictures from some fifteen dating sites. I touched the screen, interacted with it while standing close to several other people, including an older Italian couple who immediately grasped the dolce nature of the installation and stayed with it for quite a long time, watching others with mirth and wonder. Employing the Hallmark imagery of love, balloons that skittered upwards when touched, and hearts, it was almost all sweetness and light were it not for the unbearable lightness of being (single) that compelled our attention. Here and there and everywhere was the near universal failure of words, the maladroitness and bravado of self-packaging (“…handsome/smart/sexy/INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE, if I say so myself…”), the palpable longing. I thought even Miss Lonelyhearts from Hitchock’s Rear Window would find solace here! Not surprisingly, this exhibit was created by the two behind the web site, wefeelfine.org: “An Exploration of Human Emotion, in Six Movements” Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. If you haven’t experienced this site, “harvesting human emotions” since August 2005, you have to steal a moment and do so. Through its global reach, wefeelfine.org proves the universality of human emotions, and through its “particle theory” of sorts, we witness the personal versions and vicissitudes of the vast emotional spectrum.

Inert and uninvolving? Not for me, baby.

Tagged as: digital millenials, social web, trends

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