The ASMR-Influenced Cinematic Design of “Phantom Thread”

When you hear the phrase “ASMR,” you might immediately picture a Youtube video of someone whispering into a microphone or tapping their acrylic nails against a hard surface. These Internet videos first gained traction in the early 2010’s and have boomed in popularity ever since. Common themes among them include whispering, scratching, tapping, massaging, makeup application, and a sense of personal attention toward the viewer.

The phrase “ASMR,” coined in 2010 and short for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” describes a relaxing feeling of well-being combined with a tingly sensation in the scalp and spine in response to specific stimuli, often sounds. There is plenty of anecdotal information on ASMR but little scientific explanation for it. Some people experience it while others do not, no one really knows how it works or why. Steven Novella, a clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine writes, “ASMR could just be a way of activating the pleasure response. Vertebrate brains are fundamentally hardwired for pleasure and pain — for positive and negative behavioral feedback… Add to this the notion of neurodiversity — the fact that all of our human brains are not clones or copy cats, but vary in every possible way they can vary."

Film directors such as Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, and Paul Thomas Anderson have all utilized the pleasant second-hand effect that certain soft images and satisfying sounds can have on a viewer in their recent films. In Dayton and Faris’s 2018 Battle of the Sexes, they intentionally employed an ASMR effect in the scene where the film’s protagonist meets her love interest to emphasize the subtext of tenderness, and recognition. Whereas Dayton and Faris employed ASMR in one scene of Battles of the Sexes, I’d argue that Anderson employed it throughout the entire 2 hour and 11 minute runtime of his 2017 film Phantom Thread to build a world that is subconsciously comforting from start to finish. The warm, inviting, ASMR-like feeling that Phantom Thread induces in viewers can be attributed to the film’s visionary color grading and sound design.

Phantom Thread is a film about an artist-muse relationship with a twist. Reynolds Woodcock is a renowned couturier in post World War II London with a painstakingly meticulous routine. He is in his mid-to-late 50’s and has run through many young female muses throughout his life. Alma Elson, about twenty years his junior, at first succumbs to his well-rehearsed method of seduction but refuses to let the spell of her desire wear off over time. She and Reynolds, both madly in love but woefully mismatched in many obvious ways, engage in a series of masochistic maneuvers that demonstrate their unfurling psychology and begs the question: Is their relationship one of collaboration or competition?

By all accounts, Phantom Thread is a technically stunning and beautifully made film and, as with all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, the look and feel are deeply rooted in the importance of shooting on analog film. Before filming began, Anderson decided that the definitive version of the film would be a 35 mm print. According to an article on Phantom Thread from the  post-production company Roundabout, “Colorist Gregg Garvin and Color Scientist Jerome Dewhurst spent many hours working on the best scanning and grading techniques, which also involved projecting a print side by side with the digital files to ensure that all the details were being emulated.” This also meant that all the visual effects were created digitally and then scanned into 35 mm negatives to match the rest of the film’s aesthetic, a reportedly challenging and time-consuming process.

Anderson’s choice to shoot on film and the painstaking color grading done by Garvin and Dewhurst do not go unnoticed. The 35 mm lens creates a texture and color scheme that place the viewer right into Reynold Woodcock’s world of pinpoint precision. Although a majority of the film takes place during the winter months in London and occasionally neighboring Yorkshire, the color palette of Phantom Thread can seldom be described as cold. Take the frame below, captured two minutes into the film, for example. Although this scene was shot outside in brisk weather, the use of the vintage lens combined with the juxtaposition of the cool and warm colors evoke a feeling of nostalgia and comfort in the viewer as well as a desire to follow the women into the house from which the warm light is being emitted.

 

 

Throughout the film, Reynolds and Alma speak in a soft, tempered way that’s naturalistic to the film’s time period and soothing to the viewer. On their first date, rather than rush to fill in any silence with getting-to-know-you chitchat, they engage in long, almost exaggerated pauses in their conversation just to look at one another. During one such pause, illuminated by the light of the fireplace, Alma announces in her soft German accent, “If you want to have a staring contest with me you will lose.” To this Reynolds chuckles and says nothing.

There is a certain inexplicable tenderness on display when, after their first date is finished, rather than try to seduce Alma, Reynolds fits her for a custom dress. As he slowly and attentively takes her measurements, chooses her fabric color, and moves her hair out of her face, the audience can feel the blossoming love between the two characters. On Youtube, this scene is featured in multiple ASMR video montages. It’s especially beloved by the ASMR community because Reynolds gives Alma his undivided attention, speaks in a slow and deliberate register, and there are numerous soothing foley noise occurring in the background, including the slicing of scissors through fabric, the creak of old floorboards, clasps being buttoned, and the sound of pins being dropped into a metal bowl. The film’s head sound editor Christopher Scarabosio told the online magazine The Credits in 2018 that, “We played with the idea that Woodcock’s house is a character unto itself, so we developed this language of creaks and pops."

The film’s soundtrack, written and composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame and performed by a string orchestra and percussive pianist, creates an atmosphere which is haunting and familiar, accentuating the moments of austere beauty while creating tension during moments of confrontation. Spin magazine describes the soundtrack’s main theme, “House of Woodcock,” as, “a series of florid orchestral swells which seem to evoke the light streaming in through the dressmaker’s tall windows.” This particular song is a recurring motif throughout the film and it contributes to the overall sound design by creating a dream-like environment for the characters to exist in.

Phantom Thread is a film to be felt as much as watched. It’s a multi-sensory experience. I’d wager I’ve seen it at least five times in the three years it’s been released. It’s a film I return to often because it gives me an inexplicable feeling of comfort and peace. Between the whirling piano, delicate foley noises, magnificent look of the 35 mm film, and palpable tenderness and care felt between the two main characters, it definitely elicits some of the sensations in me that are commonly associated with ASMR.

As Sara Bivigou writes for BFI, “So much of the magic of cinema, of why certain films become our favourites, has to do with a very personal way they make us feel good. An indefinable quality is an essential part of the enjoyment of films.” Everyone has a film that they return to time and time again for whatever inexplicable reason. Whether this film makes them happy, calm, nostalgic, excited, reflective, or emotional, the reasoning is beyond narrative, time, or anything else you can hold in your hands. Our favorite films make us feel different inside and out, and perhaps ASMR has begun to give us a language for this sensation, if not yet a full understanding of it.

Your Fan Club is The Family You Choose Yourself

The quote: “A thing is a thing. Not what is said of that thing,” has been a favourite of mine since I saw it appear on a postcard in the background of a scene from Birdman (2014). To see something clearly, that is without any assumptions attached to it, is to see something philosophically rather than psychologically. When we see an object, we usually attach feelings, opinions, and questions to it.  It is one of the core ideas of semiology that we don’t normally see what is actually there, we see what we think is there.

Now replace the word “thing” with “person.” It becomes: “A person is a person. Not what is said of that person.” Is it still true? How much of a person is determined by what is said of them versus their actual behaviour? In the information age, and more specifically, the age of digitalised personal branding, it seems our perceived appearance has surpassed the importance of our genuine one.

In this essay, I will use Psychiatrist Dr. William Glasser’s choice theory to examine how choice determines our behaviour and how that behaviour dictates our presentation of self and links intrinsically to the objects we associate ourselves with and our understanding of social relationships. At its core, Dr. William Glasser’s choice theory argues that behaviour is not separate from choice and we cannot control anyone’s behaviour but our own. To prove his theory, Glasser identifies and defines the “five basic human needs."

Dr. William Glasser argues that every choice we make works to fulfil one or more of our five basic human needs, those needs being: power, love/belonging, freedom, fun, and survival. All our choices, small and large, subconscious and conscious, reflect these inner desires. What drives us as social beings are wants. We think of what we want, behave to get what we want, and fantasise about what we want. As opposed to waking up and thinking, “I must meet my love and belonging need today,” one would instead think, “I’m going to ask my friend to see a film tomorrow night or get a drink and catch up.”

As soon as you fulfil one of these five basic human needs, you quickly replace the need with something else. As American social psychologist Frank T McAndrew said, “Perpetual bliss would completely undermine our will to accomplish anything at all – that’s why perfect contentment has probably been evolved out of us.”  

We buy the objects we do because, consciously or subconsciously, we have discovered that they work to fulfil one or more of our five basic human needs. A poster of your favourite singer on your bedroom wall works to fulfil your love and belonging need because it’s someone you admire and it makes you feel like a part of a fan club. A karaoke machine works to fulfil your fun need because it helps you achieve pleasure and it makes you laugh. A car works to fulfil your freedom need because it makes you feel autonomous and in control.

All the objects I’ve chosen to display in my bedroom, work, in one way or another, to satisfy my five basic human needs, but they also work to create my image, or presentation of self. When someone walks into my room, they immediately get the idea of the kind of person I am. My likes, my taste, my values, how I want the world to see me, and what traits I like in others and have therefore adopted as my own. 

Branding yourself through your objects is not a new concept, but the rise of social media, and more specifically Instagram, in the early 2010s, has ushered in a new age of hyper-image control and personal branding. Everything you choose to post, in addition to the objects you purchase, is a part of how you curate and present yourself to the world.

Everything I’ve ever posted on Instagram, whether I realised it at the time or not, acted to fulfil one of my five basic human needs. Posts about accomplishments worked to fulfil my power need because they made me feel recognised for my skills and gave me a sense of worth. Posts of me and my friends worked to fulfil my love/belonging need because they made me feel included in a group, accepted, and loved.

Just as studying objects can help us understand more about our social relationships, analysing our individual motives behind what we post, in line with Glasser’s choice theory, can help us understand our subconscious wants and how they manifest themselves into our online identities.

When a group of people use a similar personal branding technique, as is bound to happen, they form a subculture. Therefore, in selecting two objects that exemplify my analysis of choice theory's relationship to material culture, I looked to subcultures. In attempting to identify the subculture to which I belong, I pondered the famous ones: goths, hippies, bikers, nerds, etc., I settled upon one that I thought fit the bill most accurately and that is one of alternative culture, “alt” for short.

In exploring alternative culture and its relationship to material objects and the perception of self, I will be relying heavily upon Elizabeth Hay’s definition of “alt.” Hays writes, “Alt is an umbrella term encompassing elements of “Indie/Independent,” “Underground,” and related subcultures which are, in essence, a departure from the mainstream. Alt culture does not dramatically oppose this system. It does not ask you to live in a shack in the Ozarks, collecting firewood, smoking a pipe and mulling over the big questions, but rather embraces the gleeful freedom that modern life affords us. Alt is about turning the consumptive mechanism into a productive one, about the marriage of technology and creativity in every individual’s life. It’s about the simple systems of production and distribution, about goals within reach. It’s about the beautiful married with the superfluous. It’s about the dualistic employment of irony and sincerity, which, in their polar opposition, are actually twin ideologies.”

The objects I’ve selected for analysis are those of cornerstone value in alternative culture: The argyle sweater vest and the ironic/post-ironic tattoo.

THE SWEATER VEST

Popularised in post-World War I Britain, the argyle sweater vest remained a respectable clothing item until the 1980’s when it then became almost exclusively worn by grandfathers and golfers. The sweater vest was consequently shunned from popular fashion before becoming re-popularized by hipsters in the early 2010s and then appearing in designer editorials and being strutted down fashion week runways. It’s the classic journey of an Alt object.

As Tracy Moore writes, the sweater vest had all but “cement(ed) its status as something only worn by men who’ve given up or probably should,” but thankfully, alternative culture had other ideas. Alt culture is about resurrection, rebirth, so it’s somewhat poetic in a sense, but it’s also very narcissistic in another. In alt culture, every clothing item is a considered choice and every choice says something about you. The argyle sweater vest is no exception.

To keep up with alt trends, one must always evaluate what is uncool and how that can be flipped on its head. An art student wearing an argyle sweater vest while listening to Ariana Grande has adopted two practices from “uncool” cultures, golfing grandfathers and tween girls who listen to Top 100 hits, and combined them to create a hybrid new-age-thinker of infinite tastes. But where does that leave the flannel-and-Doc-Martens-wearing, Sonic-Youth-listening, classic “hipster” of yesteryears? Left to shudder in the shadows of post-irony I suppose. But those lamenting former trends need not fear, because alternative culture is cylindrical. Just as a trend becomes uncool, we can rely on the fact that a decade or two down the line it will be resurrected by the alts of future generations.

THE IRONIC/POST-IRONIC TATTOO

Irony and change are essential pillars to alternative culture, which is why the ironic tattoo is a fascinating paradox. Its irony makes it inherently alt, while its permanence contradicts the ever-changing and malleable nature of alternative culture.

The alt movement has been able to survive for generations because of its participants’ willingness to change. Whereas by now the punks and hippies have all but faded into history, alts are willing to change with the years. What’s uncool now will be cool next season and vice versa. While we dread the day the argyle sweater vest goes back out of style and something else uncool (Crocs? Cargo shorts? Macklemore? Prep?) becomes cool, we embrace this change because we know it’s how the subculture is able to adapt and survive. 

As Elizabeth Hays writes, “(Alt) is about the dualistic employment of irony and sincerity, which, in their polar opposition, are actually twin ideologies.” Alts don’t shun all things popular, they embrace the pretty good aspects of pop culture with playful irony.

Because irony is such a formative feature of alt culture, alts have already entered the early stages of post-irony. Post-irony is loosely defined as “ironic appreciation that becomes genuine, due to either prolonged exposure or the enjoyment derived from how amusingly terrible it is.”

In line with these two definitions, there is a distinct difference between the ironic and post-ironic tattoo. The ironic tattoo adopts the timeless aesthetic of the art form, see: I Love Mom, The Skull and Crossbones, and The Mermaid. Its irony exists in its banality. It’s the first choice in a laminated booklet of possible options at the tattoo parlour. The Post-ironic tattoo is more paradoxical because it adopts the fleeting, changing nature of alternative culture while acting as an imposing permanence. Examples include but are not limited to: a commemorative pet tattoo and Britney Spears song lyrics printed in Renaissance-style script. 

We choose how we interpret objects, whether we see them psychologically or philosophically, and the ironic nature of alternative culture lends itself much more to that of a psychological viewpoint. Alts buy objects and attach sincerity, irony, ambiguous irony, or post-irony to them. The layers and statements often become muddled, but it makes the objects fascinating to study in their relation to choice, behaviour, and social relations. While everyone tackles the age-old problem of individuality in their own way, alts, as New York Times writer Christy Wampole puts it, “tend to negotiate this problem with material things rather than concepts.”

Why do we methodically choose how we present ourselves as opposed to just “being ourselves,” as so many inspirational posters have instructed us to do? Because, as writer Adam Grant once said, “Unless you’re Oprah, 'Be Yourself' is terrible advice.”

It’s a part of our five basic human needs to feel wanted, accepted, and admired, which means we will direct our choices in the way of objects that will make us feel that way. To buy particular objects is to become a part of a subculture and feel a part of a group. To start a trend within said subculture is to feel recognised and accomplished. The objects we buy help construct our choice which in turn dictates our behaviour.

I conclude this essay as I began it, and that is with a quote from the film Birdman. The film, in brief synopsis, is about washed-up comic book actor Riggin Thompson who is the process of directing and starring in his own Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver novel. Right before opening night, he runs into New York Times theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson who tells him, with full confidence, that she will kill his play. He gets frustrated and begins to read a review she’s in the process of writing out loud,

“Lackluster… that’s just a label, marginality - that’s a label. These are all labels. You just label everything, that's so lazy. He then picks up a flower ans says, "Do you know what this is? Do you even know what that is? You don't. You know why? Because you can't see this thing if you don't know how to label it."

How we label, choose, and interact with objects has everything to do with our five human needs and how they manifest themselves into our presentation of self. In studying objects, understanding what they are at their core and the labels we assign to them, we can better understand how much our choices dictate our individualized worlds.

The Attention Economy and the Speculative Future of Digital Advertising

BA Design Goldsmiths University Dissertation, Submitted in January 2020

Three decades ago, it would have been unimaginable that the Internet would be not only commercially ubiquitous, but also pocket-sized and touch screen. As the dimensions of the Internet have changed, so have the surfaces with which we interact with digital media, particularly advertisements. Advertisements are no longer a break from reality, like a commercial between television scenes, or a billboard on the side of the road. They have seeped so far into our daily lives that we often have trouble identifying them. Assuming that technology will continue to progress as fast, if not faster, as it has in the last three decades, advertisements could take on a whole range of plausible mediums and the attention we dedicate to them could begin to act as a direct form of currency. Through design fiction, I will imagine and explore the kinds of new surfaces that advertisements could take on as we progress further into the digital age. In realising these potential surfaces, I’ll examine the relationship between overflowing information and scarce attention, and the ethics involved in using advanced technology to create more advertisements in an already sign-saturated society.

If the Internet can be viewed as a space in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we live under have to be natural to this new space. Because of this, some scholars have deemed the rising economy in the digital age to be “the information economy.” In his 2000 book “The Rise of the Network Society,” Manuel Castells writes that in the information economy, the productivity and competitiveness of agents depend mainly on their capacity to generate, process, and apply efficiently knowledge-based information. He also describes it as an economy where information is both the currency and the product.3 But Micheal H Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist and scholar at the University of California Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change, retorts this theory, writing that information would be an impossible basis for an economy because economies are governed by what is scarce, and information, especially in the age of the Internet, is more than abundant.2 Goldhaber argues that we are actually being ushered into an attention economy because attention is what flows through the Internet in the opposite direction to information. 

 

Our desire for attention is built in from birth. Babies have no monetary possessions. Attention is the only thing they have to barter with, so they learn to use it to their advantage within the first days of being born. They smile at those who smile at them and cry when they need to be fed, burped, rocked, and changed. No matter how humble a person may be, at a certain point in their life, they had to fight for attention.

 

Attention is very desirable and it is an intrinsically scarce resource, which makes it the potential driving force of a very intense economy. Lexie Kane, a User Experience Specialist at the consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group, writes, “For most of human history, access to information was limited, but today we have access to information on an unprecedented scale. Facts, literature, and art are available, often for free, to anyone with Internet access. We are presented with a wealth of information, but we have the same amount of mental processing power as we have always had. The number of minutes has also stayed exactly the same in every day. Today, it’s attention, not information, that is the limiting factor.”4

 

Goldhaber argues that attention can be seen as a type of property because property is defined as “wealth that can endure and sometimes be added to.”2 When you pay attention to something or someone, your attention doesn’t end when you lift it and place it elsewhere. The information you’ve gained from paying attention could stay with you for weeks, months, or even the rest of your life. This wealth of attention can be exemplified by brand loyalty, which is achieved when consumers feel a positive, subconscious association with a brand and purchase products from them over and over, often regardless of convenience or price.5 Attention is not a momentary thing; advertisers can build on the stock they have every time they get it, and the larger their audience, the larger their influence. In this sense, advertisers can gain a type of enduring wealth from obtaining the attention of the masses, a type of wealth that puts them in a preferred position to get anything this new attention economy offers.2

 

Everyone alive has experienced the attention economy to some degree, but through most of human history, it hasn’t been primary. In a primary attention economy, the goal would simply be to get as much attention as possible, and as we move further into this kind of economy, Goldhaber theorizes that those with enough attention could get whatever they want, and those with less attention will have their options distinctly limited.2  Advertising has always been based on the idea of capturing consumers' attention. But in the attention economy, consumers are rewarded directly for the act of paying attention. That's what sets it apart from our current economy.

 

The shift towards an attention economy wouldn't represent a complete upheaval of our current economic system because throughout history, wherever there have been transitions between economies, the old kind of wealth flows easily into the holders of the new. Following that trend, the attention of the already wealthy would be worth more than that of the already impoverished. Goldhaber writes that attention and money already flow in the same direction and makes a comparison to celebrity culture to prove his point. He states that if fans are willing to do anything for a certain star, such as queue for hours to meet them, avidly check their social media, and sing their praises whenever possible, it comes as no surprise that fans are also willing to pay money at a star’s behest. It’s just another way to follow a star’s wishes.2

 

Adbuddy in “Maniac” Season 1 Episode 2

We are moving into a period wholly different from the past era of factory-based production, and with this move, our currency will change as well.2 Goldhaber writes, “Even if the stock market doesn’t go down, money, like the aristocratic titles of the past, may be less meaningful in the future.”2 This raises the question, what will happen if attention transactions replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system? In a purely attention-based economy, people would pay for products by listening to advertisements and when they’re not listening to advertisements, they’d be buying the products they’ve been advertised. This could create an endless feedback loop and a society whose only aim is more consumption.

A recent example of companies accepting attention as an alternative form of payment came in 2016 when Amazon started selling their smartphones at a discounted price if customers were willing to let their lock screen be a billboard for suggested Amazon products.7 This promotion was retired after two years because the advertisements on the homepage interfered with the phone’s facial recognition technology and fingerprint sensors.7 According to a study by the global tech protection company Asurion, Americans check their phones, on average, once every 12 minutes – or up to 80 times a day.8 This means that the lock screen of a mobile phone has a massive amount of impressions on its user throughout the day, far more than the classical methods of advertising we’re used to such as billboards, Internet pop-ups, or promotional emails. Amazon may have presented this as a promotion, but being able to show customers targeted advertisements up to 80 times a day is worth far more to Amazon than the twenty dollar discount each phone was sold at.

In 2014, Google patented an ad-powered, self-driving taxi service that would have allowed companies to offer potential customers free or discounted rides to their place of business.9 Shoppers would pay for these rides by watching specialised advertisements in the taxi for the stores they were about to go to. According to Ars Technica, the system would be, “based on an algorithm-powered decision-making process involving the user's current location, the cost of transportation, and the potential profit from a completed sale.” Though these ad-powered taxis have only been patented and never implemented by Google, Tom Warren writes for Yahoo News that “the (taxi’s) real trick is to ensure the algorithms target the correct shoppers.”10 

Google’s ad-powered, self-driving taxi is a prime example of a plausible future where attention could be exchanged for a service, but more than that, it exemplifies the way in which companies recognize some people’s attention as being worth more than others. The taxi service would not be available to anyone simply wanting a ride to the mall. Instead, the app’s algorithm would take into consideration a user’s previous shopping habits and whether or not they have made retail purchases after using this app’s service in the past.10

Both the mobile phone and in-app taxi industries have flourished in the digital age, with the global revenue from smartphone sales totalling $478.7 billion in 201711 and the global revenue from Uber totalling $11.3 billion in 2018.12 Both the Amazon smartphone and Google in app-taxi promotions were never fully implemented, the former being retired due to technical issues and the latter being patented but never sold, but once the technology catches up, we could begin to see these industries and ones similar in scale create new platforms to mine user data. A new age of companies trying to capture our attention by presenting products as “free” or “discounted” all the while gaining a lasting influence on their customers, which is far more valuable than the amount of money they’d lose from providing their product at a discount.

These early forays by Amazon and Google as well as a rise in online attention transactions have sparked futurists to examine the possible long-term effects and consequences of an attention economy. The 2019 science fiction television show Maniac imagines a world where advertisements are more targeted and impossible to skip with AdBuddy, a service that allows users to obtain goods and services by letting an actor recite advertisements directly to their faces. These advertisements take on the physical form as the main character Annie is forced to spend an entire meal listening to someone sell her shampoo in exchange for the cost of the food. AdBuddy is an alternative loan system, in that a company pays for something you can’t afford (a meal, a train ticket) and in exchange, you sit with an actor reading out advertisements to you based on your personal circumstances. The AdBuddy actors are hired by companies on a job-to-job basis and in one scene, Annie walks by a fleet of them waiting to be deployed like a bike share dock.

Maniac takes place in a bleak, economically unstable, alternate dystopia and AdBuddy is kind of design fiction that critiques the current gig economy that has emerged out of late Western capitalism.15 Design fiction is a practice used to “explore and criticise possible futures by creating speculative, and often provocative, scenarios narrated through designed artifacts.”16 It’s a discipline that offers designers an opportunity to look far into the future as opposed to just the very near future by utilising narrative to envision new technologies.”16 The writers of Maniac have created a fictional service with AdBuddy, but by placing it within the context of an alternative dystopia, they’ve created a scenario that critiques our current economy and its possible future. AdBuddy is a realistic example of what the future “attention transactions” that Micheal Goldfaber writes about could look like.

 

In their 2001 book “The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business,”17 Thomas H Davenport and John C Beck speculate that “an industry will develop around helping organizations and people manage attention. Consultants will make their livings helping organizations produce attention-getting information and knowledge (and) digital technology will grow smaller, cheaper, and faster, and fewer technical barriers will exist between you and someone who wants to send information your way. ” Davenport and Beck’s speculations from 2001 concerning the future of the attention economy are now nearly twenty years old, and they turned out to be incredibly apt predictions. Their educated assertions demonstrate the potential benefits to studying and observing cultural trends in order to design for the future.

As consumers, we’ve gotten pretty good at blocking, hiding, skipping, and clicking out of advertisements as a means of preserving our attention from this unwanted content. But as we figure out new ways to avoid ads, marketers have intensified. In a piece for Medium, Howard Chai writes, “Anybody who uses the Internet will most likely agree that advertising is one of the most annoying things about the Internet. And they’re getting worse, they’re getting more invasive, and we are kind of the reason why. Because we’ve trained ourselves to ignore certain areas of a webpage, and invented ad-blockers, advertisers have been forced to escalate. We ignore ads on the side of the page, so they place them in-text. We scroll past video ads, so they — with the help of social media platforms whose lifeline is advertising — make videos autoplay.”18 Our determination to not look at advertisements, however, has not deterred marketers from trying to show them to us. As a response to this escalation, marketers have utilised different types of embedded advertising and sponsored content to make it harder for consumers to realise when they’re being advertised to. 

Embedded advertising is the paid placement of brands within entertainment channels such as movies, television and video games. In her October 2006 "USA Today" article "Product placement --- You Can't Escape It,"19 Laura Petrecca noted that the rise in product placement has occurred because advertisers believe consumers have become desensitized to traditional ad messages by simply leaving the room, turning the volume off, or fast-forwarding advertisements when they occur during a television show.19 

Product placement is a type of embedded advertising that has existed for a century, with its first documented use occurring in the 1920 Buster Keaton film, The Garage when a Red Crown Gasoline logo appears in the background.20 Product placement is defined as “a practice in which manufacturers get exposure for their products by paying for them to be featured in movies and television programs.”21 In his 2007 book, “Branded Entertainment: Product Placement and Brand Strategies in the Entertainment Business,” Jean-Marc Lehu writes, “A product placement can lead to a generation of a positive attitude towards the product or the brand. For a placement to become a vector of positive image for the product, it only needs to be done well.”

Product placement may seem like a rather innocuous form of advertising, but it can have a powerful effect on viewers because of its psychological implications. Psychology Today defines implicit attitudes as, “attitudes that unknowingly become associated with other objects.”22 This can be seen in the case of product placement in television and films. If the emotions we experience while watching a program are positive, those positive feelings might be transferred to products in that program, and we’ll be unaware of the transfer. Product placement can also affect implicit self-identification, which is “automatically associating yourself with an object or a consumer brand.”23 When we watch a character that we like use or endorse a brand, we can start to automatically identify with the brand as a way to vicariously experience that character’s life.

Red Crown product placement in “The Garage” (1920)

Coca-Cola product placement in “American Idol” (2002-2018)

In October of 2019, China’s largest video platform, Tencent Video, began using virtual advertising to insert sponsored products into films and series that didn’t feature product placement in the original.24 According to a 2016 study conducted by the Department of Advertising at Namseoul University in South Korea, “Virtual advertising is a method of advertising wherein a virtual image is seamlessly displayed on a TV monitor or mobile device screen so as to appear real.”25 Essentially, it uses computer graphics to insert posters, product placements, logos, or any other kind of advertisements into a video in post-production.

The study conducted by at Namseoul University notes that virtual advertising is closely related to the emergence of new media and the multi-platform system that “allows viewers to control the timing, location and content of their viewing experience.”25 The study also states that “virtual advertising is a future-oriented advertising vehicle, which is likely to spur the development of new advertising methods for the new media market.”25 

Tencent Video program before virtual advertising inserted

Tencent Video program after virtual advertising inserted

An American start-up tech company, Ryff, boasts a similar service. Ryff co-founder Mark Turner invented a specific software called Placer, which uses computer vision and machine learning technology to identify locations in videos where virtual objects can be placed.26 Their website states that their capabilities allow them to scan existing content for flat surfaces, scene composition, and sufficient light. They then use this data to anchor 3D models exactly where they should naturally fit.27 Ryff’s online reel claims they are the company for “redefining engagement” and “moving brand integration into the digital age.”28

Video before Ryff virtual advertising inserted

Video after Ryff virtual advertising inserted

Virtual advertising is similar to traditional product placement in that advertisements are ingrained in the video content people want to watch, so they can’t be ignored or filtered out with Adblockers, but they’re different in that virtual advertisements can be inserted with advanced VFX technology, so directors can film a scene without any sponsored products in the shot the production studios will be able to decide if and where advertisements get placed in post-production.

This is where one plausible ethical problem arises. Everything is carefully planned in filmmaking, including the graphic elements of a possible advertisement. If filmmakers no longer have a say in where a logo or product will be placed, it could ruin the director’s vision and the audience’s experiences if an advertisement is too blatantly obvious or completely unrelated to the storytelling or cinematography. But because virtual advertising is potentially a big revenue generator for film and television studios, it could become an immensely popular practice in post-production, regardless of the director’s wishes.

Sponsored Content or “sponcon” is a kind of embedded advertising can exist physically or digitally. Examples of physical sponcon include athletic brands paying college-aged skateboarders in major cities to wear their logo so younger kids will see them and want to buy that same brand, or designer labels paying celebrities to wear their clothes so everyone who sees the paparazzi red carpet photos will want to buy that same label. Speaking from first-hand experience, from ages fifteen to twenty, I mostly based my choice in brands around what I saw my favourite musicians, artists, and actors wearing in candid photographs. If I found out, retrospectively, they had been paid to wear those brands and I’d fallen into the very trap that billion-dollar companies had set, I’d be heartbroken. But I’m none the wiser because these possible advertisements weren’t marked as such. This kind of physical sponcon is a new kind of non-traditional advertising that allows consumers to feel as though they’ve purchased something out of their own free will and not because they were convinced to buy it by a company.

Digital sponcon is a similar idea but requires a bit more transparency on behalf of the influencer and the consumer. For years, Instagram influencers got away relatively scot-free posting ads on Instagram and not marking them as such, like they were simply recommending a product to their followers without mentioning that they were getting paid to post it.29 In 2019, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) cracked down and sent 21 Instagram influencers a letter warning them that publishing sponsored Instagram posts on their personal accounts without “clear and conspicuous disclosure” is a breach of the rules. As a consumer protection agency in the United States, the FTC is tasked with the prevention of fraudulent or deceptive advertising, and “educating marketers about their responsibilities under truth-in-advertising laws and standards.”29 Because of this crackdown and a consequential change of policy, Instagram users now generally know that they’re being advertised to when they see an influencer posting sponcon, but it’s still an effective form of advertising because users will create a direct association between the product and the person who posts it, who is typically a celebrity, model, or lifestyle influencer.

The ever-evolving nature of advertisements as well as their increasingly invasive nature in recent years has provided writers and designers alike with countless inspiration for science fiction and world building. One of these examples is the 2011 stand-alone episode “Fifteen Million Merits” from the show Black Mirror, which imagines a world where technology has made it impossible for people to avoid advertisements. In this futuristic reality, people are always surrounded by screens, in their bedroom, at their place of work, etc, and advertisements can autoplay at any time. The protagonist can skip the ads for a price, but if he closes his eyes and tries to block them out, the screens will go red and a high pitched noise will sound in his ears until he opens his eyes and finishes watching them. 

The protagonist attempting to tune out autoplay advertisements in his room

“Black Mirror: Fifteen Million Merits” Season 1 Episode 2

The protagonist attempting to tune out autoplay advertisements in his room

“Black Mirror: Fifteen Million Merits” Season 1 Episode 2

Similar to Maniac, this is an example of design fiction in a sci-fi television show. Whereas in Maniac, AdBuddy was optional, meaning users could opt into the service if they choose to, in Black Mirror, it becomes a privilege to not watch advertisements. Advertisements become a state of being, you can only opt out if you pay. Black Mirror imagines the future of advertisements to a more extreme degree, but it’s still design fiction. Within a narrative, Black Mirror has criticised our current society by imagining what unavoidable embedded advertisements could look like years down the line as technology advances and the escalation between marketers and consumers increases.

When I initially saw the semi-viral Twitter video exemplifying ways in which the Chinese company Tencent has begun using new technology to insert product placement into old television and film programs, I was shocked. I knew after watching it and reading the discourse around it, that I wanted to focus my third year project around the future of embedded advertising. The responses to the video were copious and mostly negative, with many Twitter users deeming the practice anything from annoying to unethical. After watching the video, I, like the many who responded, considered virtual advertising to be an interesting kind of technology with great artistic potential being misused for capitalist gain, but I tried to suspend my judgement.

 

One phrase in particular that caught my attention while I was reading the replies to the Tencent Twitter video was someone claiming that with virtual advertising, companies have found a “new form of real estate” to place ads on. It made me think about the “forms of real estate” that currently exist for advertisements, and have long existed throughout the previous decades. Sitting in my bedroom, currently, the only objects that can show me commercials, send me spam, or catalogue my data are my laptop and my phone. And though I’m never usually further than two meters from either of them at any given moment, I can make the decision to remove myself from these screens whenever I want.

 

Sometimes, it can feel like technology is overbearing. The popular expression “unplug,” meaning to take a temporary break from technology, exemplifies this. If we choose to, we can unplug ourselves from the digital world, from Youtube suggested videos, and the endlessly refreshable interfaces of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and apps of their nature. But this luxury of unplugging isn’t one I’d bank on having forever.

 

As the amount of information on the internet increases, so will the value of our attention. Ergo supply and demand. And, as made evident by the rise of embedded advertising, marketers are already looking for new ways to ensure the attention of consumers. New ways to show us ads we will engage with and not scroll past, mute, or click out of. 

 

Presently, the only type of advertisements that can exist in numerous formats and materials are stagnant, two-dimensional ones. In her 2010 book, “Advertising, Commercial Spaces, and the Urban”,31 Anne M. Cronin writes that “Media owners of outdoor advertising sites promote it as one of the few ways to reach a mass market in today’s context of the fragmentation of media and audiences.” Although physical outdoor advertisements do reach a substantial audience of commuters every day, they’re becoming a thing of the past. Posters and billboards can’t engage with audiences in a very meaningful way, nor can they collect and scrutinize your data to sell you products based on your search history, taste, and previous shopping habits. They rely on chance. The chance that someone who happens to be interested in what they’re selling will see it. Often times they sit there, weathered and unnoticed. They cannot compete with more modern forms of advertising such as virtual product placements and sponsored Instagram posts.

 

In many ways, old forms of advertising are ineffective for consumers and companies alike. As made evident by our almost instinctive response to click out of pop-ups and tune out commercials between television scenes, consumers dislike being advertised to. But because consumption is what drives our entire economy, consumers don’t have a choice in the matter. Unless we want to completely remodel our entire capitalist economic structure (a prospect to which I am not entirely unopposed, but I digress), companies have to try and sell us their products. So, Instead of looking at the future of embedded advertising as a technology-gone-too-far scenario, I want to explore how embedded advertising could be seen as an intertextual innovation that enhances interaction and how it could be a potentially positive alternative to the classical kinds of ineffective and annoying advertising.

 

As a jumping-off point for my third year studio project, I decided to utilise design fiction to imagine some possible ways in which embedded advertising could exist physically as well as digitally as technology advances, attention becomes worth more, and the escalation between consumers and marketers increases. In “Speculative Everything: Design Fiction, and Social Dreaming,” Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby write, “When it comes to technology; future predictions have been proven wrong again and again. In our view, it (predicting the future) is a pointless activity. What we are interested in, though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better our understanding of the present and discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, the ones people do not want.”32 Similar to how Tencent Video has found a new form of real estate for advertisements, I want to explore what other pre-existing surfaces could be reinvented to display advertisements in the digital age.

 

To reimagine advertisements for the digital age, I considered what they would look like in a future where advanced technology has made it possible for video content to exist outside of the screen and in other materials. This potential innovation would allow for endless artistic and creative potential, but it would also act as a solution to the advertiser’s demand for consumer attention. If physical materials other than screens could play video, all surfaces would become new real estate for companies to sell us specialised products in an engaging way and the old-fashioned, one-dimensional ways of advertising such as posters and billboards would no longer be the only kind that could exist physically.

 

To materialise my design fiction, I created a mock-up video of a theoretical product sponsorship: “Play-Doh sponsored by Kellogg’s.” I designed this product’s packaging and using special effects, created a video illustrating how it would work.

https://vimeo.com/379083974

Video screencaps

 

The product’s packaging

In this design, the Kellogg’s cereal advertisement is embedded in the Play-Doh product so that the first time someone opens a new can of Play-Doh, a video advertisement plays in the clay material for either Froot Loops, Eggo’s, Frosted Flakes, Rice Krispies, Raisin Bran, etc. before fading away and turning back into the original, ad-free product (see final two screencaps).

 

Similar to the Amazon and Google promotions, this product would be sold at a discounted price because the buyer would have to dedicate approximately two minutes of their time and attention toward watching and interacting with the Kellogg’s sponsorship video before they could use the Play-Doh ad-free. In this sense, the design is in line with Goldfaber’s theory regarding attention transactions because the buyer offsets the material cost of the product by partially paying with their attention.

 

This design plays upon the psychological idea of implicit attitudes in advertising. If a person sees a sponsorship message for Kellogg’s products while interacting with Play-Doh, they will transfer the positive emotions from the touch and feel of the Play-Doh to the products being advertised, albeit being unaware of this transfer. This positive association the person creates with Kellogg’s could last a lifetime and turn into brand loyalty. Both Play-Doh and Kellogg’s would benefit from this design because the former would be able to sell their product at a discounted price, thus having an edge on the market, and the latter would gain the kind of enduring wealth and influence that comes from obtaining the attention of the masses.

I created another mock-up video for a different theoretical product sponsorship: “Sainsbury's Orange Juice sponsored by Audi.”

https://vimeo.com/382628685

 

Video screencaps

 

 

 The product’s packaging

 

In this product sponsorship, the liquid poured from the orange juice container would be an interactive game in which the user drives a digitised Audi by steering the cup to the left, right, escalating the speed by turning the cup forward, or reversing the speed by pulling the cup back. After about 40 seconds, the projection of the interactive game onto the liquid would turn into orange juice. The consistency of the product would never change, only the images it displays.

 

The association between Kellogg’s and Play-Doh and Audi and Sainsbury’s Orange Juice, the former being two products marketed towards children and the later being two products adults could use at the start of their day, may seem arbitrary and a bit random, and that’s because in many ways it is. Each grouping’s products are not implicitly related to one another. But I’m reminded and inspired by the seemingly random company-to-company sponsorships of Superbowl commercial break past, such as:

 

1. Lionsgate Studios and Subway LLC

Subway sponsored the 2013 film Catching Fire by offering the Hunger Games-inspired chicken and steak jalapeno melt during the sequel film’s theatrical run33. Subway and The Hunger Games trilogy, at first glance, appear completely unrelated. But once even the most tenuous of lines is drawn to compare the two (see: the fiery taste of the sandwich and the word Fire in the film’s title) it becomes a lucrative, symbiotic sponsorship for both parties.

 

2. Pampers and Cheerios

In this 2015 commercial,34 a father puts his infant son to sleep and asks him to say “Dada” and is greeted only with “Mama” as a response. The next morning, the father feeds his son Cheerios and the baby, elated, says, “Dada!” The proud father rejoices. Voiceover enters: “With help from Pampers for a good night’s sleep and Cheerios for breakfast, your tot can do wonders.” This “wonder” in question is the small child’s ability to say “Dada.” Pampers in the nighttime, Cheerios in the morning, the cost of one primetime commercial split between the two companies. Two birds, one stone, as they say.

 

The correlation between diapers and cereal may seem a bit more direct than meat melts and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, but in my eyes, they’re both equally related and unrelated. It doesn’t matter how similar they seem, it’s beside the point. Both of these instances of sponsorship have utilised the psychology behind implicit attitudes to create positive association for their products in a new context, the same way product placement in films does. Subway wanted to get its name out there and attract attention and so did the then newly-released Catching Fire film, so they used each other’s fan bases to attract more viewers. Regardless of whatever success each company gained from these campaigns, it doesn’t change the fact that both of these sponsorships were cheesy, unengaging, and easy to mock as I have so subtly done in the above paragraphs.

 

To combat the utter boredom that overcomes consumers when presented with the film franchise sandwich and diaper commercials of the world, I made interactivity within my designed product sponsorships the central theme. When people touch and feel things, it creates a more direct association than seeing or hearing. “Interactive” has become a massive buzzword in the tech world in the last two decades. Interactive games, interactive technology, interactive art, interactive learning, and even interactive movies (see Netflix’s Bandersnatch, which was a 2018 choose-your-own-adventure style film). I believe there is a case to be made for the power of interaction between people and materials, and it’s worth examining how this interaction has changed with the rise of social media and our cultural reliance on screens.

 

Though the technology to realise my design fiction is not yet available and may never be, I wanted to design advertisements that are more interactive and therefore more enjoyable and I wanted to create a fun way of integrating video content into our physical surroundings as an alternative to present-day advertisements which seem to be a pure inconvenience to the viewer. In designing these sponsorships, I attempted not to outline a bleak, doomsday scenario, but to follow the trends of embedded advertising to a possible point in the future and theorise a way in which the attention economy implied in my design fiction could benefit both people and businesses financially.

 

But in creating a new, more interactive way for audiences to engage with advertisements, there are inevitable drawbacks and ethical questions that arise. Such as: Is being able to separate the virtual world and physical world a privilege or a right? And, is an attention economy more or less ethical than the currency-governed economy we presently find ourselves situated in?

 

By opening our laptops and unlocking our phones, we agree to expose ourselves to advertisers. We accept this annoyance as the cost of experiencing the Internet. If we were asked to pay fifteen pence to watch a Youtube video, we’d seriously reconsider watching it, and in all likelihood, click out of the page. But instead when Youtube asks us to watch a fifteen-second advertisement before a video, we don’t think of it as a transaction, even though those fifteen seconds of our attention are worth far more to Youtube than our fifteen pence.

 

The technology behind my design fiction could prove problematic in that it would have a drastic effect on people’s everyday experiences and material surroundings. If video content could exist outside of the screen, we forfeit all rights to unplugging, and our laptops and phones are no longer our only two devices around us that can show us advertisements. If the technology required to display video content in physical materials does one day exist, it could likely become misused due to marketers’ unabashed and continued desire to capture consumer attention. If not with the product sponsorships like the ones I’ve hypothesized and designed, then perhaps with more sinister and dystopian advertisements like the Black Mirror pop-up ads you have to pay to avoid watching.

 

On a surface level, delving further into an attention economy could be appealing because the thought of being able to pay for material objects and not just online videos with your attention, like the protagonist in Maniac does when she pays for a meal by listening to an AdBuddy, is very tempting. But to quote Lexie Krane again, “for most human history, access to information was limited, but today we have access to information on an unprecedented scale.”4 Now that we have this incredible access to information, it would be a shame if we weren’t able to spend our time and attention learning from it. If the attention economy were to take a full effect, people would likely get into a routine of watching, say, thirty advertisements each morning to help pay off a loan on a new couch, or they would never be able to ride the train in peace because each ride would be paid for by listening to advertisements the entire time.

 

Contrarily, the emergence of an attention economy could help consumers realise the true value of their attention and make them more conscious of where they direct it. And if marketers were able to create interactive advertisements that upon engaging with, consumers could then buy products at a discounted price, it could be a win-win for companies and customers alike. As many things do, my design fiction comes down to moderation. Or as the inscription on the ancient Greek temple of Apollo reads: “nothing in excess.” 

 

My design fiction aims to be more than a futuristic commercial enterprise. It aims to combine the upsides of two rising cultural trends, embedded advertising and the attention economy, into one product. Those benefits, respectively, are the ability for consumers to engage with clearly marked advertisements in an entertaining and interactive way and the ability for consumers to off-set the price of a material product with their attention in a way that is convenient and not overbearing.

 

Beyond my design fiction for future advertisements and sponsorships, I want to also focus my third year project on the positive outcomes of a more digitally connected physical word and how separating out digital content from the strictly phone and laptop settings can be beneficial for everyone. I want to design ways of bringing the necessary functions of the Internet into the real world so digital content does not exist simply to go viral in a vacuum.

 

A 2018 survey of 2,000 people determined that the average American spends seven hours a day looking at a screen.36 Given the fact that we’re only awake for approximately fourteen to sixteen hours a day, that means we dedicate, on average, half our waking hours to looking at some incarnation of a screen. This large number may seem improbable to some, but once you consider the fact that many people check their phone when they wake up, look at a computer screen all day while at work, check their phone during the commute home, watch a film or television show to unwind once they get home, and check their phone again before bed, it seems completely probable. Because 74 percent of employed Americans use a computer at their job,37 it has become a necessity for many to look at a screen for long hours each day in order to generate an income. When you compare that to the 58 percent of millennials who feel anxious and irritated if they can’t check their phone for a prolonged period of time,38 it becomes evident that screens have become a necessity to maintaining a social life and a sense of general comfort and inclusion.

The Internet is a revolutionary tool that is incredibly popular and consequently, incredibly misused. Because the Internet is the only place where videos can be uploaded and shared (you can’t print out a video and mail it to someone or hang it on a wall like you could a drawing or photograph), video content on the Internet exists in a vacuum. Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute31 and five hundred million people use the Instagram story feature every day.32 Because there is so much online content, It’s nearly impossible for an average person to share something that rises to the surface, because it will most likely get buried underneath anything else.

 

Because there is an unfathomably large amount of digital content uploaded by people around the world each second, people’s attention span for it has decreased. Our lack of patience for online advertisements has transformed into a lack of patience for all types of digital content. If Instagram, Facebook, or Youtube is the only outlet one uses to share one’s creative work, the engagement level goes way down compared to information transferred physically.

 

In my own art practice, I make mixed media animations and visual effects video that focus less on a narrative structure and more on crafting an environment. Whenever I complete one of these videos, I typically export it, upload it to Vimeo, post it on my website, share it on my Instagram, then I close my laptop and consider it “finished.” Social media is a great tool for sharing one’s artistic work, but it can be difficult for videographers and animators to really create meaningful engagement between their content and their viewers on these platforms. To combat this, I designed a prototype of what I’m deeming the “QR Code Cinema.” This is a mini, smartphone-optimized, cinema that allows viewers to engage with video art in a more interactive, physical way.

https://vimeo.com/385500686

 

   

Expanding on this prototype, I intend to make a new model that’s sturdier and more robust, with a handle or pulley system that makes it easier for one to insert and remove their phone. I also want to make the QR Cinema a communal, interactive experience. In the video above, the QR Code in the cinema leads to a Youtube link with one of my animations. But going forward, I want to incorporate the video art of several different artists and test the level of engagement bypassers have with it. The QR Cinema is an object that changes the meaning of a video by changing the context in which it’s viewed. Because it no longer seems as though you’re viewing a video through a phone, the level of attention and engagement one dedicates to the video inherently increases.

 

The lines between the digital world and the physical world are already becoming increasingly blurred, and I want to merge these worlds by designing new ways, both real and fictional, that the video format can be more interactive and prevalent in real life. Whether it be by way of advertising or video art, I believe there are many ways we could benefit from interactive experiences that bring some of the digital content out from the endless ether of the internet into the real world to be physically experienced. 

Printed Booklet

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