Judderman

I didn’t go looking for the Judderman. He arrived uninvited. As he tends to.

It has been a fairly steady minus twelve degrees celsius here in New York recently, and right on cue, there he was, skulking around the back of my memory, leering and offering me schnapps.

Something in the night air felt strange enough to reawaken this menacing character from deep within my psyche.

This was before Ben Kay reposted the Judderman ad yesterday on LinkedIn. Perhaps further proof that the Judderman can access an international collective consciousness.

For the uninitiated: the Judderman is the eponymous character from a 1999 Metz commercial, a lanky, corpse‑pale figure with an exaggerated chin, cheekbones and deep set eyes. A kind of gothic barfly who creaks into frame just long enough to fix you with a deadpan stare until he vanishes.

This is not how advertising seems to work anymore. Which is unfortunate, because it is exactly how memory works.

Modern advertising just isn’t built to haunt consumers. I am yet to see a ‘think feel do’ that reads:

• think: This is terrifying

• feel: Existential terror

• do: Seek psychiatric help

Which is a shame.

Modern advertising is built to be liked. It’s quite meticulously designed to produce a specific kind of facially encoded smile, within a research setting, at the right kind of time in the spot. The right kind of feeling, in other words. Joy. Warmth. Positivity. The flavours of emotion that test the best. The ones that can be most readily packaged up as proof that the work is going to work.

The result is that advertising’s emotional range has narrowed. Fear is too risky. Ambiguity is too confusing. Disgust might upset the easily disgusted. Transcendental awe is a bit much. Sadness is dangerous unless the brand is paying for surgery or rescuing animals. The only emotions considered universally safe are joy, and if you’re lucky; humour.

So advertising floods the world with these superficially pleasant things. Funny things. Comforting things. Optimistic things.

It’s all work that never lets a feeling sit unresolved, an approach that forbids any character from looking directly at the audience and saying something that might live inside the recesses of their soul for twenty years.

We’ve emotionally kneecapped ourselves for the sake of making things easy to test.

Judderman is memorable because it is unsettling. He doesn’t make a coherent argument or instill any optimism, nor does he command us with a call to action to ‘find’ some abstract aspirational concept, such as flow, or refreshment, or happy. He just immerses you in atmosphere. We are explicit told that we must ‘beware’ him. That’s all. But human brains remember moods.

Today, the Judderman would be killed long before he reached a storyboard. He would be deemed too unsettling. Not aligned with the brand. Not scoring well enough on key emotional positivity drivers. And what we’d get instead is a nice, funny, well-lit man in one of those ice hotels, who raises a bottle and says “Metz. Find Your Refreshment”.

It’s entirely possible that such a commercial exists, and that I have in fact seen it, but such a commercial would be immediately forgotten, like 99% of all commercials are.

The problem here is a structural failure. The entire machinery of advertising is being wired to reward shallow, emotionally agreeable ideas. This narrowing has been achieved entirely through the relentless onslaught of process. Through every system that nudges an idea toward the familiar territory of the aggregate benchmark.

It is very easy to point the finger of blame at the testing companies who extol the benefits of their particular, joy-centric methodology. But to my mind the bloody handed culprit is in fact the people who wield these testing methodologies without reflexively understanding what they are or what they say.

A test tells you how well an advertisement conforms to the particular theory of advertising that the test subscribes to. And as we all should know, there is not one correct theory for how advertising works.

This makes arguing against the testing methodology an infuriating ordeal. Push back is framed as being ‘anti science’, when in fact you are simply pulling up to a more reflexive, higher altitude, and placing the methodology in the context of the many other theories on how advertising works.

Put another way, mid-wits love a binary, and ‘science’ vs. ‘creative instincts’ goes down much easier than ‘there are many different models for how advertising functions and different tests will bias towards specific framings’.

So, as with so many other issues in this industry, really it boils down to the erosion of talent. Not enough bright people are in the room to push back against the framing of ‘if you’re against this one specific and highly biased particular form testing, then you are a luddite’.

Thanks to that, advertising is in real danger of stopping making ads that stick. Ads that people remember seeing, and remember feeling. Ads that show up many years later, when the air is ice cold and your brain is distracted on the journey to the launderette and because your body is carrying 55lbs of laundry in three blue IKEA Frakta bags over the iced roads and piled snowbanks of Brooklyn.

This isn’t a call for advertising to become solely weird or scary or theatrical. Simply that sometimes, the most effective thing you can do for a brand is to make people feel something they’re not quite sure how to describe and will be traumatised by for years to come.