To Motivate, Or Not To Motivate
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Isn’t it funny how much things can change in just a few short years? As anyone in advertising can tell you, the great ideas of yesteryear can very rapidly become the butt of today’s jokes, and if you don’t keep up with the times, there’s a very real danger that you – the svelte and brilliant ad person responsible for the original great idea – will be forever linked to that butt.
Take motivational posters, for example. You know the type I’m talking about: photograph of a mountain, or silhouette of a runner, or a saccharine picture of a kitten hanging onto a branch, with a caption featuring a prominent word or phrase like “Excellence” or “Overcoming Adversity”, typically with an explanatory statement in smaller text like “You can achieve anything if you work hard” or “There is no reward without struggle”. Back in the late ’90s, these posters were the toast of the corporate community: you’d find at least one hanging in the offices of executives and the cubicles of overly-ambitious assistants the world over. But now, only ten years later, the overwhelming cultural trend towards irony and cynicism has relegated what was once an eager, fresh-faced expression of business inspiration to the realm of amusing curiosity at best and, at worst, the stuff of internet-meme-mockery. Many websites have started allowing users to write their own captions for a variety of photos that range from the mildly ironic to the patently absurd to the graphically offensive, and then generating the caption-with-photo into the motivational poster template. Titled “demotivational posters”, this meme has taken off in a huge way with entire websites devoted to user-generated demotivation. Here at SAPL, we recognize the need to sling a little mud our own way every now and again – and what better way to illustrate our ability to laugh at ourselves than by highlighting what happens to old ideas in a new era? Besides, some of those posters are pretty damn funny. Check it out for yourself, and share a laugh at the expense of ad people everywhere. |
Posted on December 9th, 2009
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