You can't get purer than nothing

In the course of my journey through pop music I've noticed a new type of song, joining whiny boy rock and 100%-rhythm-and-blues-free R&B and overwrought ballads as a radio staple. It's a genre I call "I recorded this in the janitor's closet during coffee break and then finished it in Garage Band" music. The voice is autotuned, the instruments are all synthesized, there's nothing real in the entire production.

There's a certain purity in something so blatantly artificial. It reminds me a bit of the kinds of work we did at advertising, where groups of really smart, creative young people work really hard developing stuff that ranges from pure bulls--t to forgettable, like when the Sprite team had to develop TV commercial designed to convince people that Sprite tasted better than 7-Up.

Talking about taste is always fun in the soda biz, because Sprite and 7-Up are both lemon-lime sodas that taste almost identical. But around that time, Coca-Cola, which makes Sprite, was getting hammered by something called The Pepsi Challenge, where people were given small cups of Coke and Pepsi and more people preferred Pepsi. This turned out to be somewhat deceptive, because you don't normally drink 1 ounce of soda, and while Pepsi is slightly sweeter than Coke and therefore tastes "better" in small doses, for a full 12 ounces, people prefer Coke. But not to leave any stone unturned, some research guy, knowing that Sprite is slightly sweeter than 7-Up, did a scientific blind taste test. The approximate results were as follows:

Which soda tastes better?

Sprite                                   10.1% 

7-Up                                      9.9%

No difference/no preference   80% 

This led to the development of a commercial where a cute kid walks into a store and asks to trade his 7-Up in for a Sprite, because Sprite tastes better. This was a legit commercial, shot on film in a real store on Bleecker Street int he West Village, and designed to run in prime time and on major sporting events. We then brought it, as is done with all commercials, to the network Standards and Practices department for approval. These are the people who decide whether an ad meets the network's standard of truthfulness and they have the power to block anything from going on the air, and they ruled that this ad was deceptive. Remember, you can say your product is "best" as long as all products are the same, but you can't say "better" without proof.

In came the lawyers. There's always pressure at this point because the company has spent a lot of money for time to run their new commercial and they don't want to use it to run the same old one for the 100th time. The company and ad agency lawyers negotiate with the Standards people to see what can be done to get the ad to meet the guidelines. Occasionally a spot actually has to be pulled (cue loud sound of money being flushed), but most often things can be hedged. Sometimes the wording can be changed, but in this case we needed a way to say "better" or there was no point to the ad.

Let's talk statistics a bit. Let's say those numbers that I made up for the percentages were out of 1000 people (I have no idea what the number of samplers or the precise percentages are). That means that 800/1000 said no preference, which is pretty overwhelming, and 101 chose Sprite and 99 chose 7-Up. Two out of a thousand is not very much. If, however, you ignore the 80%, you have 101/200 (50.5%) versus 99/100 (49.5%). Depending on how many people they asked, that can be a statistically significant difference, which means roughly that there's a 95% probability that the difference can't be explained by random chance.

Using that logic (which is pretty widely accepted), we were able to get the Standards folks to approve the ad if, while the little boy says, "Sprite tastes better than 7-Up," we run what they call a "super," some white type superimposed on the lower part of the picture. The super began with "Among those stating a preference" and had some reference to the majority lack thereof.

Next discussion is how long he super must appear on the screen. There are standards and practices for that as well- 2.5 to 5.0 seconds depending on the length. Finally, we were told that the background in the lower part of the screen was too light, and there wasn't enough contrast to actually see the super. Back to the studio where we superimposed a grey shadow behind the superimposed white type. And the spot aired. For about a month until a new idea was developed and we started all over again.

That, my friends, is purity.