For anyone who lives in a city with real problems, let me fill you in on Los Angeles' most recent crisis: rain.
That's right. This week the skies opened up and poured down for hour after hour. Starting in the morning and going well into the night. The entire city was blanketed in an off-putting grey color that's so unbecoming of its usual sun-kissed self. Simply dreadful.
And the people of Los Angeles could not get enough of it. Every conversation held in the city pertained only to the rain. It was truly a remarkable event. Most people chose to hide in their homes or apartments hoping that this was just some bad dream.
But those brave souls who made it to work for this two day torrential downpour risked life and limb to do so. Aided by an app called Waze.
Here's a brief primer on Waze for anyone who doesn't live in a city with the congestion of a coal miner suffering from a sinus infection. Waze is a GPS program that finds you the quickest way to get to your destination. It uses real-time traffic stats from other users to determine these routes. It's a pretty nifty tool. There are only two rules.
First, you have to adhere to Waze's directions absolutely. If you so much as take a right turn that it didn't call for you will be spited by the traffic gods and end up taking an additional 20 minutes to get where you're going. Waze knows. You obey.
Second rule, you have to be a maniac to use it. Or at least willing to drive like one. Most of the time Waze is perfectly reasonable. It has no vested interest in putting you in harm's way. But every so often it'll have you make a maneuver that would make Jason Statham's Transporter's knees quake. Fun things like ask you to cross a busy 6-lane street at an stoplight-less intersection. Or take a left turn into an alleyway only visible under the third moon of the month. Anything to shave a few seconds off your drive time. And if you're thinking you can get around these directions, please refer back to rule number one.
That's Waze in a nutshell. And the way it determines these routes is based off of other drivers using the app. Waze encourages its users to report events on the road. It depends on these reports to keep your drive speedy.
Those reports are what I want to talk about.
During my Tuesday morning commute I got an alert asking me to use caution because someone had reported rain.
"Watch out," it chirped, "rain reported ahead."
I laughed. Because it was funny. Adorable even. The All-Knowing Waze doesn't know how blatantly apparent the rain is.
Then 15 minutes later a second alert popped up. From a different user. And a few minutes and miles later, a third. By this point in time the little alert of "Watch out! Rain reported ahead." was more of a gentle annoyance than pleasant thing I could laugh at.
The day progressed. The rain persisted. Finally it was time to leave work.
That's when the deluge of alerts came in as torrentially as the rain. It seemed I couldn't go a thousand feed without being alerted again.
"Watch out! Rain reported ahead."
"Watch out! Rain reported ahead."
"Watch out! Rain reported ahead."
And so on. What was a pretty funny joke just 10 hours before has turned into a verse from The Devine Comedy. The alerts would not stop. The users of Waze had killed the joke.It had reached saturation but people were trying to get a piece of that action. To feel witty.
They fell prey to me-tooism. They'd flogged the rain to death.
And while my soundtrack of alerts played on I couldn't help but think of how this same phenomenon plagues advertising. People are so eager to jump onto the latest trend or style of joke. To repeat what they've seen. It's the case over and over. Commercials, banners, tweets, print ads, websites start to coalesce and become this homogeneous blob of things that were once interesting and humorous. Because it's really easy to see something that already exists, identity it as funny, and decide to use it. It makes it really, really easy to get out of the office around six and catch that thing that's so hot right now. (That's going to be bastardized by making it into some ad a couple of months down the line)
Sure, this process works but it also undersells the creativity that agencies have in them. It leads to the chief criticism of advertising that there is no creativity in the business of creativity. That we're a collection of recycled YouTube videos and catch phrases picked from existing media. To a certain extent that criticism is irrefutable.
Watch out! Derivative creative work ahead.