Welcome to micro-nostalgia
A remastered 30-year old music video, the shrinkage of nostalgia, and how brands can utilise a micro approach to the trend to create energy, rather than apathy.
Nostalgia. It’s inescapable. Like that kitchen cupboard with a geode-like gradation of supermarket plastic bags. Ahh, Safeway! It’s been 30 years.
The past permeates every part of current culture: sport, fashion, music, film, games, advertising, design, food - everything. Why? Well, we’ve heard it all: the past few years haven't been great, and the future isn't looking much better, blah blah, etc. Additionally, nostalgia’s grip on current culture is exacerbated by two enablers:
The rise in power of global far-right/ultra-conservative: who’s rhetoric is built around valorising a better past, with a promise to return to ‘‘the good old days’’. Their parties are inherently built around nostalgia. And the more popular they are, the more this desire for the past becomes.
Lowering birth rates and increased life expectancy: the average age in the 70s was 28.1 compared to 38.2 years today. Nowadays, globally, there aren't as many young people as there once were. Creating more stagnance across culture - especially in the entertainment industry.
Youth culture used to drive entertainment, and though to a lesser degree, it still does. But because Gen Z is creating entertainment for themselves online, it’s much harder for brands to prescribe what they should like, unlike previous generations. For example: imagine Gen X putting their Super 8 films into a global market ASAP, how would that have shifted the film industry? Would Star Wars still matter?
Brands/studios have overindulged millennials and Gen X with nostalgia. Nostalgia has become an actual platform, rather than a strategically deployed, occasionally utilised idea. Now it works against its organic cycle: old favourites generally reappear in culture every 20-30 years. After endless remakes, sequels, prequels and everything in between - nostalgia as an idea or platform has peaked. But it’s not going anywhere.
So as nostalgia’s grip on macro culture grows deeper, the instances for impact must shrink. Enter: micro-nostalgia.
Last week, Jamiroquai released a remastered music video (?) that’s not any of their most iconic. This is interesting. The great band has benefitted nicely from the ongoing ’90s-’00s love-in. BMG, Jamiroquai’s management, went for a deeper cut in the archives to avoid the expected. Aware that fans have grown tired of easy nostalgia - so to leverage the trend in a way that offers fans energy, rather than apathy, they went smaller, tighter, micro.
Having gone down the funnel from films, TV shows and games now we’re remaking archival music videos. Long forgotten ones. (as a huge JQ fan myself this isn’t even a top 10 vid). So this release was an attempt to manufacture some fresh nostalgia. 125k views in 3 days for an account with 1m+ subscribers is nothing special. That’s 41k views a day. Some could deem it an underperformance. Imagine the numbers for a remastered Deeper Underground video - which has a dual appeal as a song from the Godzilla (1998) OST and a huge fan favourite?
Looking at the comments, though, views aren’t the metric. It’s fans having that ‘‘wow I forgot about this!’’ moment. Deeper Underground could’ve done more numbers, but BMG wanted to create a feeling. To do that, they had to go into the archives, to offer something smaller and more meaningful.
The big references are tired. It’s going to take smaller ones, tighter ones, and more informed ones, with a greater potential for emotional salience to the consumer for it to be effective.
Similarly, on Twitter, Football Twitter to be exact, a massive global community and one of the few use cases left for the app - the recent trend #BarclaysMen which features edits of some of the Premier League’s best-loved cult teams and players from the Barclays sponsorship era of 2004-5 till 2015-16 is another example of this micro-nostalgia and how it can be effective.
Sport and nostalgia are naturally intertwined, but in the case of #BarclaysMen - this isn’t looking at the great clubs and their great sides, this is looking at specific smaller sides who punched above their weight, filled with one-season wonders and idiosyncratic characters - the ones who made the game fun and chaotic. There’s a wider argument about football having a big nostalgia issue, but, #BarclaysMen energetically utilises micro-nostalgia. By fusing two eras in one: the YouTube football compilation (a trend that properly kicked off from the 2010s onwards) and old clips of the mid-00s Premier League with music from the time, stylistically, it feels like a richer, more specific use of the past in a culture that has grown obsessed with it.
Then, Drumsheds, the Tottenham-based live music venue released this absolute gem of an ad to launch their Season 3 programming. It heavily riffs on the iconic Beastie Boys ‘'Intergalactic’’ video. It fuses it with Power Rangers - imagery and an immediately nostalgic franchise, but the references aren’t used as the whole story. They’re deployed tactically to tell a better one - the use of nostalgia in marketing has to be more than the sum of its parts to be effective and to get an audience reaction and Drumsheds smashed it.
In the film industry, where nostalgia has become extremely divisive, the argument against superhero movies shouldn’t just be about mass volume = churn. It should be about the fact that we’re stuck in a loop of rehashing fixed source material and how this blocks studio’s investing in stories that can shift the conversation of the times forward, not just because a lot of them are shit now.
So as cinema’s struggle to fill seats because of the above, Sony Pictures sanctions the re-release of Whiplash globally this September, the seminal psychodrama by Damien Chazelle for its 10th Anniversary. It’s only been 10 years. Though it’s up there with the great films of the last few decades, it is on Netflix. Does it warrant a re-release? But it’s a legit, oddly welcome surprise to see it back in cinemas. With an opening weekend in the US grossing a solid $578,000 across three days - perhaps this is the kind of nostalgia that consumers want to buy into. A nostalgia that reminds them of a closer past: the mid-10s? More sharp focus than soft focus. ‘Cause being nostalgic about things from just ten years ago roots the trend in a closer reality, and if nostalgia is a means of searching for answers, does this mean what people are looking for isn’t that far away?
This idea of micro-nostalgia could read more drily- ‘‘they’ve killed all the obvious stuff, so now they’re after the not-so-obvious’’. But, if this is a landscape we’re looking at - one where nostalgia being used across all consumer categories is a mainstay - then micro-nostalgia at least, offers choices. Less brain drain elicited by more franchisal rebirths. More surprises elicited by the use of tighter, more unexpected references.