The myth of originality — Alain Sylvain | Sylvain Labs

Bynder
21 min readNov 11, 2020

Hear from Alain Sylvain of Slyvain Labs who presented “The Myth of Originality” at Studio OnBrand, Europe’s leading branding conference this year:

Hi, my name is Alain Sylvain, Founder and CEO of Sylvain Labs. I’m here today, OnBrand 2020, to talk about the myth of originality, how everything is derivative, but it doesn’t have to suck. And for those that are curious, I’ve been here before. Check us out at sylvainlabs.com. You will learn a little bit more about who we are and what we do. We’re a strategy and design consultancy really focusing on product innovation and brand strategy, with offices in Amsterdam, New York, Richmond, Virginia, and soon Los Angeles.

This is not the first time I’ve been here, “here.” I was at OnBrand in 2017 where the title of my presentation was, What Brands Can Learn From Beyonce. What was interesting at that presentation, a lot of the other speakers talked a lot about Kendall Jenner’s spot with Pepsi and the abomination that that was. The next year, I came back and I talked about pop culture, what brands can learn from pop culture a little bit more broadly, and the power of brands. And at that conference, everybody was talking about Colin Kaepernick and the Nike sponsorship. It was really funny. Every presentation was like, “Colin Kaepernick.” And then last year, I went back and I talked about purpose, and I was one of many people that talked about purpose. Purpose was the trend of the moment and how do businesses commit to purpose? It was just interesting to see that evolution.

And here we are in 2020, and I can’t help but wonder what are the themes that you’re going to hear about here at OnBrand? Because I’ve been here a few times, or I’ve been there a few times, I get a better sense of the audience and I know that a lot of the audience is made up of creatives, people that work with brands and in marketing. And they’re really concerned with this idea of being original and creating new stuff, and really being the first to market the way Colin Kaepernick was, the way Pepsi’s move was so jarring. In this population, we are here thinking about newness and how to be original. And it really takes me to a story.

There was this young artist’s assistant, the studio assistant, in the 15th century, who was obsessed with human anatomy. He was not formally trained, he really didn’t go to school and studied biology. But he was fascinated with how the muscles connected and allowed for movement in the human body. And he used to do these bizarre sketches in his notebook. And in particular, he was really obsessed with the human smile and really was concerned with how neurologically the brain connected to the mouth, because he really found that the humans and the way they use their mouths was unlike any other species, to smile, to eat and so on. And he studied the mouth and the poetry and romance of what a smile could be. He studied it biologically from the inside out to understand what really made the mouth profoundly interesting.

He did these bizarre sketches and this one you see on the right is the first time we really have a rendering that we can see that’s about the smile. The smile was this poetic, interesting concept. He was so obsessed with it, he would go to morgues and peel back the skin off cadavers to see how the muscles came together in the mouth to construct this beautiful symbol of the human heart and the human mind. And that’s the smile. I’m of course talking about Leonardo DaVinci and the story of how he created the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is the preeminent masterpiece of humankind. People look up to it and travel in droves to see it, really because they view the smile as such a vivid depiction of the human smile. It feels so real that it has this mystery to it.

And of course, people flock to it like crazy. And it’s a phenomenon in itself. Of course, it’s the most famous piece of art that exists. A lot of people feel let down when they get there because of all the hype that has gone into it. But even in spite of the fascination, as I told you, if you look at that story and you look at how the Mona Lisa was created, and the art and the thinking and the thoughtfulness and the deliberate approach to it, is that piece in itself original? Or are the renderings that come before it original? Or is the human body in itself original? Or is DaVinci the original indicator there? Is the Mona Lisa truly original? Is it really creative? Can we go as far as to say that the Mona Lisa is unoriginal because it was inspired by so many things to actually bring it to life?

Or how about all the genius that came from the Mona Lisa? There are master forgers at the level of DaVinci in forgery, who mastered the forgery of the Mona Lisa, or the great pieces of music, or the great artistry that was spawned coming out of the Mona Lisa. Where is the genius in that story? And is it fair to really lay it purely on this two dimensional depiction of this one particular moment in this one particular day, when there were so many things that came before it and so many things that came after it? “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there’s nothing new under the sun.” This is a long-standing mantra of humankind that there’s nothing new, that everything will come back. And in spite of all the celebration we place on one creative endeavor, there was probably genius that had happened before that that we often overlook.

And it just feeds this question, what came first, the chicken or the egg, when it comes to creativity. Here we are, all creative people coming together, looking to create something new for the first time. But really, is that even possible? What came new? What came first? And there’s a great Mark Twain quote. “The kernel, the soul, let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.”

The pursuit of originality is woven into ego. And as Mark Twain is arguing, if you really look at the foundational nature of creativity, it actually is plagiarism. And you don’t need to look at Mark Twain. Think about another great writer perhaps of our current generation, that’s Kanye West, who essentially said the same thing, maybe a little less poetically, when he said, “I find myself getting stuck in the idea of originality and letting my ego push me to say things like, ‘This person stole this from me.’ And the funny thing is it’ll be a reference I took from somewhere.” “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Everything, everything natural, everything creative was actually born of ideas that pre-existed it. And we can’t look at one piece without acknowledging the piece that came before it.

Said simply, we are drunk in our pursuit of originality. We are blind. We are running after this idea of, “I want to be first. I want to be the one.” And then really, it comes down to some evolutionary needs where we get this dopamine surge in our brain when we see something new for the first time, where we taste something for the first time. We really are obsessed with this rabid obsession with origin and with being first. And it’s really the story of humankind. That’s why we look at origin stories to inform our lives today. We want to understand where did the universe come from? Where did mankind or humankind come from? And we look to great scripture to tell us that.

Or how about our obsession with monarchies and the idea that the bloodline and original bloodline is passed on over generations. In Japan, of course, it goes back to 600 BCE. Or you can take it to modern day in the way we look at vintage fashion, that every piece of vintage fashion is somehow an indicator of some level of authenticity or a moment in time that we’re creating for, this craving for a moment of authenticity and reality. You look at pop culture today, all you need to do is go to Netflix and you’ll see an intense obsession with nostalgia. Friends is coming back. The Last Dance with Michael Jordan. JLo’s rocking the same dress that she wore 20 years ago. We are looking to the past, to history to inspire us in the present.

This also applies to innovation. All you need to do is look at the Googles and the Ubers and the manufacturers. And in automotive manufacturers, you see they’re racing intensely to achieve driverless cars, to really be the first to lead the way when it comes to autonomous. And that’s because people are obsessed with first. People are obsessed with originality and patents and so on. It was interesting to hear the CEO of TikTok say, “To those who wish to launch competitive products, we say bring it on. Facebook is even launching another copycat product, Reels (tied to Instagram), after their other copycat product, Lasso, failed quickly.” In Silicon Valley, in the world of technology, there is obsession with being first. First, first, first, which reminds me of this gift right here.

Buzz Aldrin, who’s there on the right, is famously not the first person on the moon, he’s the second person on the moon. Neil Armstrong was the first person on the moon. And in this, you’ll see how Mike Pence, the Vice President, introduces Buzz Aldrin as the famous second person on the moon. And if you look at his face, you’ll see how much he hates that. No one wants to be second. Who wants to be second? Because it echoes a plagiarism. And there’s this mantra in social media and there’s this idea in our popular culture that you don’t want to copy, you don’t want to be second. We have to be first. We have to be first. And you learn that as a kid. You learn that as a kid that copycats are bad, that imitations are bad.

And as I said, it plays out in our popular culture. It plays out especially in social media where you’re shamed if indeed you copy something. We see that in the world of fashion, we see that in the world of film, in the world of music. And certainly in your world, in the world of advertising and in brands. Spotify did this amazing campaign a few years ago, where they literally played back the data that they had when it comes to streaming. And Revolut did quite the same thing, the credit card, in playing back the same data. And they were vilified in social media, in the world of advertising. That’s because it was just a copy.

Now, what’s interesting is that the reason we look down at originality is because it reflects individuality. “It is important to foster individuality for only the individual can produce new ideas.” Culture celebrates individuality because of the sense of originality. And that’s why we build up these artists as being prolific and profoundly productive individual genius. No one wants to be unoriginal. No one does. It’s the worst thing you can tell someone, “You’re unoriginal.” And it’s ironic because there is some entertaining value or commercial value, or even biological and human value, when you look at copying and imitation. TikTok is nothing but that. TikTok is just a vehicle where we all practice the same behaviors as monotonous and bizarre as they might seem. But the idea that we’re all copying each other.

It is interesting that some get more attention than others. The girl on the right created the dance, but Charli D’Amelio made it famous. But yet, it’s all the same. Where’s the genius there? Humans are actually taught and ingrained to imitate from a very young age. All you need to do is look at babies and look at how they move and how they mimic what they see in adults. And of course, there’s a trap here, right? There’s a trap where if you imitate to a certain degree, bad horrible things can happen. Now, “We perform and imitate apparently impractical actions because doing so is the key to learning complex cultural skills, and because rituals create and sustain the cultural identities and solidarity we depend on for survival.”

By creating and mimicking and imitating the things we see, we build and we are capable of new and incredible ideas. The very nature of building a canoe is based on the mastery of generations that preceded it. It’s the copying. Or think about the profound value that the printing press had on society, where it was essentially this idea of copying ideas over and over and over again. And of course, the Industrial Revolution is really all about mass production and replication and making things, producing things over and over and over again. But I have an argument, and my argument here today is really simple. Stop stalking originality. Originality. Stop obsessing with this idea of being original because you fall into traps around imitation, you fall into traps around reproduction. You fall into this self-identity crisis.

Stop stalking originality, start compounding creativity. For me, what true genius is is when you can build on the creativity that preexists in you unapologetically, and don’t really have this shaming around what existed and what didn’t, just really build on it. And there’s really no better example in my mind than J Dilla. J Dilla was a hip hop producer who died in 2006, a profoundly important hip hop producer, who 50 years from now, people are going to talk about J Dilla like they talk about some of the greats in music. In fact, The Guardian called him the Mozart of hip hop, which I think doesn’t do him justice. You might even call Mozart the J Dilla of classical music.

J Dilla was a genius. He was a genius. He was a musician and both of his parents were musicians. He was born in Detroit. He was unapologetic about drawing references from other music in ways that other hip hop artists hadn’t. In the past, sampling was really just playing these loops. He would take parts of songs and create this complex tapestry of samples. And you were hearing things that you never heard before. And it was super complex and incredibly important in shaping the world of hip hop for the generation to come. He said, “I don’t want nobody to ever say, ‘I could have done that beat,’ or, ‘I know where you got that from.’ So what he did was in fact original, it was in fact creative. But it was based in compounding the creativity that existed before.

He’s someone who even said that, “He used the MPC 3000,” the machine he used to make his drum beats, “like Jimi Hendrix played guitar or John Coltrane played the saxophone. It was an extension of himself.” J Dilla was a virtuoso. He was a virtuoso in using the music and the creativity that existed before. And his influence, as I said, is profound. There are university seminars and symposiums about J Dilla’s work. You can map current beats back to J Dilla’s work. You can look at all the greatest hip hop artists today and the producers, they cite J Dilla as one of the most important influences in their careers.

Here’s another example in the world of music. All you got to do is Google, “Aretha Franklin, Luciano Pavarotti, Nessun Dorma,” the famous piece that Luciano was famous for. In the Grammys one year, Luciano Pavarotti got sick the night before the Grammys, he asked the Aretha Franklin to step in and sing that very iconic famous song. And she sang it like nobody ever heard it before. It was an incredible compounding of creativity. The genius of Luciano Pavarotti and Nessun Dorma compounded by the genius of Aretha Franklin, who was known for a completely different genre of music, singing in English in different contexts. Maybe we can start compounding creativity.

I mean I would argue that’s what Andy Warhol did so well by taking the pop culture icons of the moment, Elvis, Marilyn, Campbell Soup, and putting them together in a way that we hadn’t seen before, that provided a new commentary on the era that was in fact genius. Or how about the story of Berry Gordy and how he worked in Detroit at the Ford automotive plant and learned from the manufacturing line, the genius of the manufacturing line, and applied it to the world of music. So he created music in the same exact way. He was like, “Let’s create a manufacturing line of music where we find artists, we train the artists, we put them in a finishing school, we put them in the studio, then we put them out,” and that was a compounded creativity. He borrowed from a different industry to create genius in another industry.

So that teases the basic question maybe in all of our work, in all of us that work with brands who are trying to bring a sense of creativity to everything we do. How can brands conquer their fear of being unoriginal? How can we as creative people conquer our own fear of being unoriginal and maybe start compounding creativity in our own work? I’m going to go through four quick ways to do that. The first is be iterative, not derivative. There’s this fear of being derivative. There’s this language around, “Oh, that’s just derivative of this.” But when brands start unapologetically building on things on the past, it’s cool. When Volkswagen famously built on their campaign in the 60s where they had the lemon, they had the Volkswagen Beetle, and they called it Lemonade. When they launched something in 2015, in the shadow of all this criticism, they literally made lemonade out of lemons. It was very cool. It was a very interesting and inspiring way to build on the past.

Or you think about all the innovation that Apple puts out. They’re literally baby steps. There’s no giant leap. There hasn’t been a giant leap coming from Apple in years. But there’s been a constant stream of innovation, and that’s because they’ve been iterative each time building on where they were. So the second one is around repurpose, don’t reinvent. There’s this idea that we need to create something that’s never been created before. But I love the brands that are unapologetically acknowledging things that happened before. There’s the brand, PERIOD, that literally takes old advertising and just crosses out the brand and puts their own name. And that’s because in the spirit of sustainability, they’re recycling their advertising too. And that’s not something that they’re ashamed to say.

Or how Foursquare pivoted their business from this social network based on location to this B2B offering, they repurposed the technology to be relevant somewhere else. The third, be prolific, not precious. Creatives have the spirit of like, “Let’s make something and keep it to ourselves, and make it in very, very small amounts and very discreet ways.” I would argue, and this will annoy people, that Amazon is one of the most creative organizations that exists because of the sheer volume of things and shit that they’re making. It’s out of control. There’s brands and products left and right that they’re spawning and you can look anywhere. And that’s about being prolific. That’s not about being precious.

Or you think about other brands like Causebox, one of these subscription D2C services, that is unapologetic, it spills out brands and products from hundreds and hundreds of other brands. The fourth one, play, don’t work. There’s this real fear of play and what play can do. But when you think about serendipity and you think about playing, you think about imagination, that’s where real creativity comes from. And all you need to do is look at Lego and the way they herald play, or you look at Pixar and the way they allow for play to thrive within that organization. So the four ways I think brands can think about compounding creativity and avoiding the trap of originality, be iterative, not derivative, repurpose, don’t reinvent, be prolific, not precious, play, don’t work. Stop stalking originality, start compounding creativity. My name is Alain Sylvain, Founder and CEO of Sylvain Labs. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to answering some questions.

Q&A

Andrew Moskos: Hello and welcome virtually to Amsterdam. We miss having you here in person, let me start by saying that. Hopefully next year, the return.

Alain Sylvain: Yeah. No, hopefully. I miss being there. This is always such a great conference.

Andrew Moskos: Absolutely. Hey, I just want to jump right into it here. I loved your thing about play, don’t work. I read something recently interesting that said a lot of the great inventions started off looking like toys. And if you think of the Wright brother’s airplane, or even the idea of a cell phone, or even now maybe TikTok, people might say that as well. And I think that’s a nice, interesting way to look at things which is not only is it fun, but it also is an inspirational source of where the next important things are going to come from. I found that really a powerful thought.

Alain Sylvain: Yeah, thanks. No, I think there’s work and there’s play. And somehow, we’ve assigned economic value to work, but not to play, when, as you said, you can look at any great invention or any great innovation and it probably comes from a very innocent place, sometimes play. Literally kids playing around with something or someone on TikTok. There’s very little that’s actually invented with the pure intent to make money I would argue. There’s no coincidence that you look at all the Silicon Valley bros that have started all these companies, they dropped out of college when they were kids, they dropped out of… I’m sorry, they became business people when they were children.

Andrew Moskos: Yeah.

Alain Sylvain: And children play, and they played with code in their case. So yeah, I’m glad that stood out for you. I totally relate.

Andrew Moskos: So as it’s been a theme throughout the day here about social media, being a positive and a negative influence on people, from your perspective, what side do you fall on, positive or negative?

Alain Sylvain: Oh, man. That is just a crude way to talk about what social media can be. It’s mean. No, I do a lot of work-

Andrew Moskos: Sorry, sorry.

Alain Sylvain: Well no, I was going to say a lot of my clients actually work in social media. We work with Facebook, we work with Twitter. And so I’m grateful for that. But I do think social media has yet to figure out what the potential of that technology can be. And there’s a lot of room to be more ethical in the treatment of people’s data and in the calling out of factual information and so on. And I’m very critical of social media and I want to make that very clear. But with all that said, you can’t deny the power of social media. The Arab Spring would not be the Arab Spring if not for the power of Twitter. Or Black Lives Matter wouldn’t be the notion that it is if not for social media. Hashtag Me Too, which had a seismic impact on government. And every aspect of society would not have happened if not for social media. So-

Andrew Moskos: Including the workplace. Yeah, absolutely.

Alain Sylvain: Including the workplace.

Andrew Moskos: How about on the human and brand creativity side, what will social media’s influence be there?

Alain Sylvain: On the human and brand creativity side, I mean I think going back to what the presentation was, so this idea of compounding creativity, what’s interesting about social media is so much of what you see is a regurgitation or a replay or a retweet on what you saw before that. So inherently, social media lends itself to a creative exercise. In a way, it’s a manufacturing line. One person tweets something or posts something on Instagram, another one might reinterpret it. Or memes that spread. So I think social media is, in a way, a lubricant for creativity. But at the same time, it’s also a lubricant for shitty ideas and ideas that feel very stale. And instead of compounding creativity, they repeat the same thing. And that’s when things… When you copy something too much, maybe I should have put this in the presentation, when you copy something too much, it begins to lose its resolution.

Andrew Moskos: Like a photocopy.

Alain Sylvain: Like a photocopy, over and over and over. You keep copying something, it loses what makes it really unique, the detail.

Andrew Moskos: Hey, that’s interesting. It ties into a question here from the internet here. With many of us craving more familiarity and nostalgia in a time of crisis, what do you think this will have on brand marketing in the near future?

Alain Sylvain: Yeah. No, it’s a good question. I think I would like to see brands take more risks and really try to create something that’s compounded, but new. And brands are very risk averse these days, especially in 2020 with the fallout of COVID-19 and of course, the killing of George Floyd. So many brands are afraid to say the wrong thing. So they’re not actually going to take any risks. But I would say two things that might be in conflict with one another. One is brands shouldn’t be shy about nostalgia. They shouldn’t be afraid of their own legacy, good or bad. And it’s okay to dip into the attic, dip into the archive to tell a really provocative story. I mean if you look at my presentation, 90% of the presentation is actually looking backwards.

Alain Sylvain: And then at the same time, I think this idea of compounding creativity. So if you can look at the building blocks that got you to where you are today, how do you add a new piece to it that makes the whole field very different? And that I think brands need to do. I’ll just end by saying I was looking at some industry news today and I was reading all these articles about how brands are using TikTok, and how they’ve hacked marketing on TikTok. That’s not creative. That’s not creative. TikTok is a medium in itself. It’s not a creative idea. And so what I’m looking for are what are the interesting applications on those platforms that people share and actually influence behaviors and perceptions more positively?

Andrew Moskos: Well I think you’re just maybe two steps ahead of where some people are. So people go like, “Ooh, we want to be there. We want to do something with Bitcoin, or TikTok,” but that’s just when the people haven’t quite figured out what it is yet. But I mean I think what you’re saying there is by this derivative step-by-step. Okay, first we have TikTok today, 2020, then what it’s going to be next year. And then we start to realize it’s not just a place for X, it’s a tool for Y. And I think, if I may put words in your mouth, that’s what I hear you saying.

Alain Sylvain: Yeah. I mean I think there’s absolutely this repurposing of platform over time. I think YouTube actually started out as a dating site someone was explaining to me.

Andrew Moskos: Ooh, I hadn’t heard that.

Alain Sylvain: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I just made it up and started an internet rumor. But I think I have heard that these social platforms come out in one way and they, “Pivot.” This idea of pivoting is very common with these platforms. Instagram, for example, was much more of a photo-sharing concept, but it now obviously has communication and messaging and so on, which makes you think what the future of TikTok will be, what the future of Instagram can be. Can these services bolt on new experiences so as to rewrite what the offering is? What I find interesting about TikTok though is that there really was very little like it before, even in Instagram. There was very little this idea of let’s all enact these little dances in these innocent moments of play, replicate them over and over again in your own way over, and share them and playfully put them out there.

Alain Sylvain: That didn’t exist. And I think that says something about the appetite on the internet. I think people are looking for a little bit of whimsy in play, and that maybe the Instagrams of the world are a little too straight and earnest. And the versions of ourselves that we’re putting out there a little too contrived. So I think if anything, the potential of creativity on the internet I think is going to skew to more reality. People in their everyday life versus perfect poses and pictures of avocado toast. It’s got to have a little bit more story to it.

Andrew Moskos: More fun, like you were saying.

Alain Sylvain: More fun. Play.

Andrew Moskos: Play. Okay, fantastic. Well thank you very much. Super inspiring as every year. And hopefully, next year we’ll get you in person back here in Amsterdam.

Alain Sylvain: Fantastic.

Andrew Moskos: Okay.

Alain Sylvain: Thank you. I look forward to it.

Want more? Check out the other talks from Studio OnBrand 2020:

https://video.onbrand.me/

--

--

Bynder

The Bynder blog: Covering stories about the latest in branding, marketing, tech & digital experience