While catching up with the news today I came across a scathing article in the Guardian on case studies in magazines featuring real people, where the importance of the person’s story comes a poor third place to how photogenic they are, what dress size they take, how available they are and whether they are accommodating enough to tailor their story to fit the editor’s slant on the issue du jour.

A journalist who spends a lot of time finding case studies said she was frustrated by the questions posed to potential interviewees. “Can they make a photoshoot in London next Tuesday morning? Are they pretty enough? Are they willing to reveal all the right details? Does it fit exactly with what the editor had in mind?’ If the answer to any of those questions is ‘No’ they won’t be in the magazine, no matter how good the story is.”

As an advertising and graphic design agency we spend a lot of our time inventing “people”, the consumer archetypes that people our campaigns, characters that our clients’ customers will identify with, buy from, wish to emulate, trust even. Of course nobody expects the characters in advertising to be really real. Models are pretty faces to hang dreams on, celebrities are caricatures of cool, even real people are realer than real!

But it made me think; if we’re in the business of inventing people, and they, the media are in the business of inventing people, who’s telling the stories of the real people?

And then I remembered the wonderful world of blogs, where people are telling their own stories everyday; writing about their passions and their peculiarities and I thought how we as creative people should voyage on this sea more often and come back with strange and beautiful nuggets of reality to inspire and amaze us.

Posted by Elizabeth, Soupe du Jour

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