Perspective is everything

I’m one of those millions of people who watched ESPN / Netflix ‘The Last Dance’. There’s a lot of criticism about the documentary series relying too much on the perspective of Jordan only, who maintained final cut and editorial control of the production. However, this might be the biggest impact a sports documentary has ever had on the world. Sports fans are reliving those years through the documentary and a whole new generation of kids are now getting into basketball, and the Jordan brand, because of it.

But what I really wanted to point out was this quote by Michael Jordan during an interview about his alleged gambling problem. “I don’t have a gambling problem, I have a competition problem”. I’m not saying Jordan had or didn’t have a gambling problem and frankly, I don’t care. Being the number one player in the NBA, I guess the guy had some change to spare. What does interest me is the way he turns something negative like gambling into something positive for his ‘Jordan’ brand. The power of reframing things cannot be overstated. Jordan cleverly reframes his actions -gambling - to something that makes him look great - competitive drive.

A lesson we too often forget in advertising. We forget it’s not about the products we sell from our perspective, it’s about how people see them. How you frame things really matters. Rory Sutherland illustrates it this way: “If you’re an upper-middle-class English person, you call unemployment ‘a year off’. And that’s because having a son who’s unemployed in Manchester is quite embarrassing, but having a son who’s unemployed in Thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment”. They are actually the same thing. What you call them actually affects how you react to them, viscerally and morally.

In advertising, too often, we add a significant amount of superlatives or beautiful imagery to our product and hope this will impact people’s decisions. It doesn’t, unless we find a way to make it matter. By understanding people. Their lives. Their Culture. Their context. And then reframing what we have to say in a way that makes them see us differently. Let’s stop creating amazing work that lands on an irrelevant product shot which implicitly tells you consumers “we spent all this money on an ad but we don’t really get you”.