March 14, 2006

On Authenticity

All research indicates that what matters most in messaging today is authenticity.

We see it work for Dove (with its real-sized women). We see it work with Nike. And we're about to see it work for the Post and Courier.

Our creative team has produced some wonderfully refreshing spots for the Post and Courier newspaper. They feature real people telling their own true reasons for reading the paper. And, before you get glazed over thinking "Oh sure...another set of testimonial ads. Snore!!" you just need to see these spots. They've got such life and freshness and - as Charleston's own Stephen Colbert would say - "truthiness."

My guess is they'll sell papers too!

And speaking of papers, the New York Times reported today that they'll stop listing stock prices some time in the next couple of months. They'll provide all of that information on the web. Natural move. A wise recognition of the realities of today's life. When will other papers follow?

Now, here's a longer thought about authenticity and truthiness.

Last night Chris Matthews reported on some Republican hoedown over the weekend that included most of the potential Presidential candidates for 2008. He said that the focus was less on the candidates than it was on the issues. And the number one issue was marriage...the importance of every child having a mother and father. I guess this is what people refer to as "the sanctity of marriage," although I'm not at all sure what that means...and I doubt that it means the same thing to different people.

Anyway, it seems that the Republicans are fixated that the only way to provide a healthy life for a child is to have a child reared by a mother and a father...and that's issue number one for them.

Well, as I mentioned recently, my friend Fred Golding produced a brilliant documentary called "Love and Marriage," in which he followed four couples over a one-year period. There was a young midwestern couple with four kids, a couple getting a divorce (they had two daughters), a couple in which the wife is a high-powered magazine editor in New York and the writer husband is a house husband looking after their one daughter, and a gay couple (two men) who live in a suburban development with two adopted African-American children.

The documentary is non-judgmental. You get to know the couples pretty well, though, and - as far as my wife and I were concerned - the couple (and family) that treated one another with the most love, respect, wisdom and humor was the gay couple with two African-American adopted children.

If the "love and marriage" were a game, this couple would be the winner.

That's Exhibit One.

Exhibit Two is a friend of mine who - at age 60 - has just had a baby daughter. He worked on this for two years. He is divorced. He worked with California doctors to be the father of a child with a genetic mother and a gestation mother. He is ideally suited to be a father. He is smart, caring, stable, has high ethical values, and can provide well for a child in every possible way.

But one California doctor turned him down, saying he was too old. And California is the only state in which it is legal to do what he has done. So it isn't easy, even with planning, resources, desire, and suitability.

Those two lovely African-American children don't have "a mother and a father." And this beautiful little baby girl that just came to Charleston from California doesn't have "a mother and a father" either.

And yet I would argue that their respective families are as authentic or more authentic than any fantasy Ozzie/Harriet/Ricky/David combination anywhere in this country.

Authenticity isn't something that is on a piece of paper. It's something deep in the soul. The young woman enthusiastically saying "Buy the paper! Get the paper!" isn't reading a script with someone else's words. She's expressing her own feelings in her own words.

We should never be afraid of the freedom to act out one's good feelings. That's what that woman is doing. That's what that gay couple is doing. And my friend, the new father, is doing it too.

They are living out their true feelings.

In the last months of her fatal cancer, my mother discarded most of her personal papers. But she kept one small piece of paper on which she had written a quote from Pablo Casals. It's framed on my desk and it is several lines long. But the last line reads, "Do we dare to be ourselves? That is the most important question."