It’s tempting to imagine that [you] could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

Not caring works surprisingly well."

above is a quote from a clay shirky blog post in which he admittedly rants about the differences in professional risk taking between the genders. over the ensuing months since it was first posted, we’ve seen this particular quote applied to everything from one’s internet presence to one’s style of dress.

the elequence with which he states his idea is breathtaking, and reminds us of how, in a business such as marketing or design where what others think can mean everything, it’s still the risk takers that come out ahead. how better to differentiate one’s self or one’s product than to risk the very judgement that one is trying to avoid?

we can think of a few examples of marketing campaigns that changed things. the long running absolut art campaign, created in the early 1980′s by advertising agency tbwa, features the distictive shape of the absolut vodka bottle as depicted by myriad artists over the years. while there has long been an art aesthetic in advertising, this series of ads crossed the line into advertising as art.

apple ran a groundbreaking commercial for the macintosh computer during the 1984 superbowl that didn’t feature an image of the product at all, instead depicting a scene reminiscent of George Orwell’s book 1984. this commerical has been spoofed many times since then, including a politcal ad ran during the 2008 presidential campaign showing hilary rodham clinton as the big brother character.

more recently, in a 2007 guerilla ad campaign for the cartoon network show aqua teen hunger force, light boxes depicting several of the show’s characters were placed in inconspicuous outdoor areas in citys around the country. officials in boston, unaware of the campaign, reacted to the light boxes as if they were part of an apparent attack, calling in bomb squads, closing streets and bridges, and ultimately arresting two of the individuals responsible for placing the light boxes in the first place. while the resulting publicity was likely unintended, it was publicity nonetheless. and we know what they say about bad publicity.

while these examples hardly scratch the surface of the development of modern advertising, they do show that, while abandoning the traditional format or media for advertising a product can be risky, the payoff can certainly be worth that risk.