Mumblecore

I read an article in the NY Sunday Times about Mumblecore. This is a new film movement (I guess only in America at the moment) that relies on naturalistic, low-budget production and often improvised dialogue. It's apparently a defining genre for today's 20-somethings. So will Hollywood or Madison Ave find it first? Will it translate to the UK? And, maybe interestingly, why on earth would a traditional ad agency be any better at making mumblecore ads than say a 20-something video-literate blogger? Perhaps this is another example of how traditional classifications and definitions of agency specialisation are going to erode. And another question mark over how agencies resource.

The future of TV advertising? Admovies: a theory.

It seems like planning is trying to position itself (sensibly) as the driving force, or glue, for the new media landscape. You know, how to balance TV with digital with all the other channels, fragmentation and consumer media-pull.

I was talking to Richard today about what the new communication model looks like and remembered some of the things people talked about tha the APG Big Thinking day last week. That TV is still tremdously powerful to touch people's emotive core, that even in a consumer-pull media world, repetition is still important. Jonathan from PHD was talking about how TV needs to borrow more from Hollywood. My agency is built on 'entertainment' in communications as a core principle, so I agree.

So here's a theory, I think we're going to see much longer TV spots in the new world. We're going to see a renaissance of great TV commercials, but they're going to epxlore a broader emotional spectrum - be scary, shocking, sad, funny - all in the same spot. Mini-movies. 3 minutes, 6 minutes or whatever. More like BMW films but served up in ad breaks.

We haven't quite figured out what the rest of the communications might look like yet - more to follow on this. But I do think that these new spots aren't the natural province of 'TV agencies'. Just because you can tell a simple, short, one-dimensional story in 30 seconds, there's no guarantee those skills will translate to creating admovies.