1 minute 18 seconds of pure Corporate Healing
Corporate Healing is a guided meditation built entirely from brand taglines and advertising slogans. You can begin your session right now at🧘♀️ www.corporate-healing.xyz 🧘♀️
Some background
A few years ago, while listening to the radio, I was struck by the nature and tone of the advertisements being broadcast. Although they were flogging vastly different products—life insurance, sports shoes, sugared drinks—each ad signed off with a tagline or slogan that felt closer to an inspirational quote than commercial offering: Be All You Can Be. Have It Your Way. Open Happiness. Inspire The Next.
My growing library of taglines (or are they inspirational quotes?)What felt especially jarring to me was how these taglines were delivered. Instead of communicating them in suitably airy and inspirational ways, voice actors delivered each line in a kind of frenzied, forceful way (something I assume was the result of having a tight time limit and no visual assets to lean on). Regardless, that particular ad break left me feeling rattled and confused — like a drill sargent had been shouting vaguely uplifting phrases into my face for 4 solid minutes. Wanting to play with this friction, I began collecting as many taglines and slogans as I could, looking for ways to play with their mixed messages and moods.
Corporate-Healing.xyz
That’s when I zenned my way towards the idea of reappropriating these taglines into a kind of guided meditiation. Hosted on a dedicated website, Corporate Healing is led by Geriant, a computerised voice with a Welsh accent (he was the most mystical sounding computer voice I could find). Over a composition of dreamy ambient music, Geriant reads randomly from my growing library of global taglines. As a slight nod to John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi horror They Live, I’ve set my tagline’s in a simple black typeface on a clean white background.
Economics podcast, Freakamonics recently explored a study that suggested TV advertising has far less impact than we might assume. With this in mind as an experiment I think it would be very interesting to replace regular TV ad breaks — say on RTÉ, Channel 4, ITV, Sky, etc — with my more meditative version for a month or two. Who knows, in addition to improving viewers wellbeing, sales might also go up. If there are any TV types reading this, get in touch and let’s start the mass healing.
Nuggets:
· Brands spend large amounts of money crafting these slogans, meaning Corporate Healing may well be the most expensive meditation ever assembled. Cha-ching!
· Advertising (and purpose driven branding in general) does a precise job of understanding our emotional needs. When these slogans are stripped of their visual contexts and experienced together in one communication like this, they all offer us the same thing really: to be MORE than we currently are. Maybe Corporate Healing is the communal voice of all our emotional needs and wants? Deep man.
Behold, the purest form of retail therapy
Large scale Corporate Healing?
I’d someday love to stream Corporate Healing on a massive outdoor digital billboard. If you happen to have access to one, please let me know and we can embark on some mass healing. In the meantime if you have a large TV the site streams nicely using Chromecast.
Can you make this happen?(Image borrowed from The Templates)
Or this?
(Image borrowed from Studio Tillack Knöll)
👏 to Dan Powell and Jake Adams for web development. Big thanks also to Charlie Doran for making these films and to the Wild Wild Wiglet for her prodigious hand modelling.