Clive Desmond

Partner/producer, Louder Music and Sound Design

Television advertising is here to stay. Although the television as we know it is not. Pulling into the station is a device which is part television and part computer.

I think there will always be work in this business. The production and communications of products is a gigantic machine which requires constant feeding and incessant promotion. Louder is a software company that makes an appealing product. People, for whatever reason, need music in their lives. They want it in their commercials, in their tv shows and in their films. tv is, by and large, self-referential. It loves itself – because it’s almost glamorous and makes so much money – and it will not willingly go away.

The pundits, with all due respect (especially in the print media) are hell bent on predicting the end of the webs and the end of mass communication. But people still tune in en masse to see Star Trek or Monday Night Football. And Roseanne, America’s Funniest Home Videos and Melrose Place have pretty big ratings.

I have no doubt that we are going to get more and more channels. And most likely they will arrive via the telephone lines directly onto our desktops. Viewers, however, sometimes need big stories with big stars and big effects, etc. And viewers will continue to watch the webs because they have the money to attract top writers, actors, directors and musicians. They – the webs – know how to make successful entertainment products.

There is of course a very dark side to tv maintaining its relevance. And with O.J. Simpson, they are doing a very excellent job of it. This, at least, seems to be one of the methods tv is currently using to solve its relevancy quandary. I suppose the thinking is: ‘Show all private acts no matter how gruesome and you will achieve relevance.’

And from a marketing point of view there are some obvious and odd benefits. Very few advertisers could afford to buy the kind of time Mr. Simpson got in his epic car chase. And he was driving a white Ford Bronco. That was a lot of exposure for Ford.

Louder is aware that the new sites will require music and audio services. Granted some people will go to their cousins to have the score written, but the large sellers like the soda companies and the car companies and the nationals will continue to need a class audio productions.

Today, many advertisers author phrases like ‘big, bold and friendly. Give us your money to invest,’ etc. I think that sort of expansive and generalist formula will give way to a more private language. In a sense, radio has been doing this all along. And with the advent of the Mac Tv or the pc tv, now I can see television traveling down the same road.

(Louder principal/producer) Steve Convery thinks the templates of mass communication will change. In today’s mysteriously vague scripts, Brand Y is ‘young fun,’ Brand Z is ‘spontaneous fun but not irresponsible.’ As the field becomes crammed with new sites (stations, channels whatever you want to call them) which attract specific kinds of viewers, the script is going to speak in a more relevant manner to the viewer.

In the long run, I think there will be two basic tiers of mass communication. And Louder will have its multiple and curious tentacles rippling through this vast sea of corporate and personal binary information. There will be the large sites like Fox and Paramount and Sony for example. Then there will be thousands if not millions of individuals or groups broadcasting and exchanging their ideas with millions of other people on the Internet.

As a user of the net, it’s educational and fun to chat with London and Singapore and Seattle. However, if I am at all like anyone else on this planet, there are times when I simply do not wish to converse out there in cyberland. There are times when I simply wish to be entertained – to flump out in bed and watch William Shatner beat up Malcolm McDowell or thrill as Jean Luc Picard vaporizes another evil Romulan spy. You don’t get those kind of experiences in cyberspace.

So it goes to follow, there will be giganto ads and then some kind of folksy things made by individuals. Look at the homepage. What is the homepage on the Internet if nothing more than an ad for an individual?

I believe it’ll be six of one and a half dozen of the other. Except that the half dozen of the other is going to be millions and millions of half dozens.

At the moment, it’s sort of hip for tv advertising to let you know that it’s tv advertising. ‘Here I am. I am a tv commercial. I just dropped by for 30 seconds to let you know about these interesting things.’

I see a complete blurring of the lines between ad and program coming down the tracks.

A copywriter friend of mine in New York was working on a sitcom with Nike and a number of comedy and gag writers in l.a. last year. They’re going to stage a sitcom and those Nike sneakers are going to be central to the plot.

It’s a very interesting creative challenge. How does one keep an audience and a plot happening when a shoe and its apparent attributes are the controlling idea? I guess you’d have to write a lot of big and little jokes. And it may harbor the return of the sight gag in sitcoms.

Well, if that is successful, and Nike is a big part of the culture, I suspect everyone will do it. It’s a throwback to the early days of television advertising. Roseanne and Jello. Growing Pains and Miller Lite. Travelers Insurance and Tony Orlando and Dawn. It’ll be huge and it’ll be weird. But we’ll adapt. I don’t know if we’ll be a better people for it. But it’ll probably go that way. Just because it makes a certain amount of economic sense.

Great performers will never go out of vogue. And neither will great scripts. They are instrumental to all forms of mass communication. With no great actors and singers and writers, all you have is confusion. So the 500 billion-channel universe will continue to need and develop talented performers, both in front of the microphone and behind the recording console.

I also think we will continue to be a celebrity-obsessed society. So long- and short-term celebrities will play a fairly big role in getting and keeping our attention. My fear, given this O.J. Simpson trial, is that some people – of dubious distinction – may be famous for years and years on end. Maybe forever.

Before there can be a critical television advertising creative epiphany, there must be a revolution in terms of ease of access. As the tv and the computer become one device someone somewhere is going to have to make this new gizmo easy to use.

As it stands now, the world of computers confuses a lot of people. It takes a certain kind of curiosity to master Windows or Mac/OS. And it takes a very patient person to get into telecommunication. And there’s way too much protocol for the average dude and dudette.

The next big step will be voice-command operated hardware. And once you can tell your Mac Tv what to do and it does it, well then it’s going to be a rather different ball game. People who would never consider getting a Computer Tv combo device, will go out and get one.

In this month’s Wired, Brian Eno has some very precise ideas about creativity and composition. Creatively the next step is composition based on modules.

In addition to buying Madonna tapes or Lionel Hampton cds, we will also be able to buy music sequencers that emulate absolutely brand new music based on Madonna’s aesthetic. Different for every playing. And one could mix and match composers. And you will be able to stuff your own musical aesthetic sense into the mix as well.

So we will have machines that can write fresh music based on Bach’s critical insights, or Hayden or the Crash Test Dummies.

It is not hard to imagine this concept extended into tv advertising. Imagine a machine which catalogues your aesthetic sense in great detail.

An advertiser has a pitch to make. Say the product is a Miata. Say the storyline in the commercial is about a lonely woman and she is going for a drive in her new Miata. Say you’re sitting at your Mac Tv. And you’re playing an online game or watching an online show of some kind. Okay. The show stops. The ad starts downloading into your hard drive. Your hard drive sees the story template. Lonely girl. Miata. And some kind of conclusion.

Your Mac Tv starts to filter out certain aesthetic choices and replace them with colors and values which appeal to you. So the girl becomes a blonde. Her Miata – based on your favorite colors – is blue. The incoming template looks at your taste in music and commands the song sequence to perform in a Country and Western genre. The ad begins and it’s pretty much a combination of some copywriter’s insight and your personal aesthetic sense.

In the next apartment your neighbor is seeing the same ad. Only the woman is a man. And the car is red and the music is hip hop. And that’s because her aesthetic filters are shaping the story template the advertiser sent to conform to her tastes.

This is all kind of an extension of Photoshop and Quark. And married to some kind of high-resolution Quick Time. Or whatever the hell it’s going to be called.

In terms of plotting, it’s possible that for nihilists, the commercial will end with a dreadful senseless car accident. And for optimists, the commercial will end with the lonely woman meeting some stud and driving off into the sunset.