Scrolling, Strolling and Going Beyond: Will Parrish on keeping his brain fueled

Aimlessly Scrolling

We are in the business of advertising. And more importantly we are in the business of putting good ads in front of people when they are most receptive to them. So taking regular meandering scroll sessions, flicking through the backwaters of catch up TV, and being fitfully indecisive about which podcast to subscribe to isn’t a guilty pleasure symptomatic of a distracted brain (well maybe a little). These are vital secret shopper missions.

What content trends are shaping my social feed? Which are migrating to the big screen? Which will go the other way? Which platforms, people, brands are able to seamlessly populate culture in big broad media and my algorithmically curated world? What does the media say about us? What does the simultaneous arrival of Squid Game 2, The Traitors and Beast Games tell us about the state of mind of consumers? What does it say about the brands that choose to surround these psychologically challenging, squirm-making late-stage capitalism ‘game shows’? Screenshotting, phone noting, Whatsapping the ads that appear. Writing the strategy that may-or-may-not have existed to put it there. Assessing how distinct, memorable or more often than not, wasteful placements are. These regular, semi-controlled, semi-serious media magpie-ing sessions keep me honest when “the deck” for clients or the spreadsheet-based media plan comes under scrutiny.

Aimless Strolling

By the same token we need to make sense of all this noise! I live by the sea and the South Downs in Sussex. The perfect foil to drowning in billions of impressions of media and advertising content is to step away from it.

Reading other Brain Food offerings I can see I’m not alone in this thought. My hyperactive cocker spaniel doesn’t want to talk about Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with fact-checking in favour of community notes and my partner thinks no one should be paid to ask “where’s the deck” as frequently as I do. If aimless scrolling is like a regular secret shopper mission, then stepping out and stepping away is like defragging the hard drive.

Creating headspace, allowing the brain to sift and filter everything and importantly creatively interpret what could or should be done with it. We have an interesting equation to solve in our jobs - be relevant to people across an increasingly fragmented and fractured media landscape while being unique, distinct and memorable. Blend in and stand out. Perhaps fresh air leads to fresh thinking? Maybe the blinking lights of the wind farm on the horizon are a great advert for broadening my own?

Going BTS

Lastly, I love seeing the way things are made. The magic behind the magic we create. The thousands of hours of testing, tinkering, trying, failing, trying again, learning. The seventeen times an idea did not make it past the first meeting or the first focus group that led to the one time it became an ‘all time’ great.

I take a lot of inspiration from the ‘Behind the scenes’ stories from not just our world, but those adjacent and around us. If you want to feel inspired that we are not alone or indeed in a unique time for innovating, the way we create great work - then watch Light & Magic on Disney+. It's the story of Industrial Light and Magic, the SFX arm of Lucasfilm. They are the group of mismatched tech nerds, claymation craftspeople, cinematographers and storytellers who created modern special effects in the early 70s. Now they are the most reputable SFX company in the world - responsible for creating modern cinema as we know it - including creating everything from Pixar to Photoshop to virtual production.

The inspiring part is how much they absorb what is going on in the world around them, the status quo of filmmaking, and what is happening in scary, new, mind-bending parts of technology - and then bring them together in a whole new way. It’s inspiring stuff!

Will Parrish is CSO at VCCP Media