Flashbulb Memory: A Repository of Personal Headlines
There is a peculiar subspecies of memories called “flashbulb memories.” These memories are distinct from the hazy and obscure memories we typically collect. They are the detailed, vivid impressions of a moment. They do not fit into a sustained narrative but, instead, encapsulate and symbolize the components of a longer story or event.
Flashbulb memories, as their name suggests, capture an instant in time with remarkable clarity. Like an Impressionist painting, they fossilize and preserve a single, incandescent instant.
Flashbulb memories are thought to be a kind of autobiographical memory. These memories capture both the images associated with an event, as well as the feelings, emotions and significance individuals assign to it. Because of these characteristics, flashbulb memories are remarkably durable. Unlike everyday memories, which recede and sink from our consciousness as they are replaced by new ones, flashbulb memories remain lodged in our consciousness and easily accessible.
When you are preparing a video marketing piece, you should aspire to produce something that will be filed away as a flashbulb memory. You must aim to produce a final product that will be branded into the consciousness of the viewer.
This may sound like an impossible challenge. To replicate the characteristics of a flashbulb memory in the humble mode of online video marketing is an ambitious agenda. But, as I’ll suggest below, it’s not impossible to fashion an image that becomes permanently affixed to the minds of consumers.
Less Lofty Than You Think
Each of us carries within our inner trove of memories a few of startling clarity. These are not, however, all significant – they might have just made a particularly significant impression on us. Stills from films, pieces of music, scrumptious bites of food, and particularly pleasant or unpleasant aromas, may all be filed away as flashbulb memories.
The film critic Dana Stevens described one of her flashbulb memories in an analysis of the 1979 film, “Alien.” Stevens wrote, “The scene in which the alien chews its way out of Hurt’s stomach remains the pièce de résistance…It’s one of the handful of movie moments that once seen can never be unseen, as much as you’d like to erase it from memory.”
While Hollywood has manufactured its fair share of flashbulb memories, the internet is the factory of them.
There is, after all, a reason why Oxford Dictionaries chose “gif” as this year’s word of the year. “Gif” can function as both a noun and a verb: it is both an image format and a process by which a video is condensed into a short, constantly looping image.
Gifs, as Devin Coldewey presciently pointed out in a post titled “Flashbulb Memery” have important social functions for humans. They act as the flashbulb memories of our contemporary era and make it easier for us to communicate with one another in a time when interaction is becoming increasingly impersonal. We struggle to resonate with one another when communicating over the web and, for that reason; we employ gifs as a kind of shorthand communication. Rather than regaling our fellows with extended stories about events and explaining what those events mean for us, we simply send the people we are speaking with gifs which communicate the same thing. Gifs have the advantage of doing so more clearly and more concisely.
Here is Coldewey’s take on the 2012 Olympics:
You remember the 2012 Olympics not as some huge extended event layer overlaid on your life in that period, but in McKayla Maroney’s skeptical face or the swimmers clinging together like otters (choose your own iconic moment). From there, again, the rest of the event — medals, injuries, ignominies, ceremonies — fades into prominence.
And, as Coldeway makes clear, gifs are very much like flashbulb memories; they are vibrant and they are resilient. Maroney’s facial expression subsumed the Olympics entirely and is now the most recognizable thing about the 2012 London Games.
What Stevens and Coldewey are suggesting should encourage video marketers; flashbulb memories are not the preserve of significant historical or personal events. They can be associated with seemingly trivial events or come to inhere in silly images – like those that frequently make up online video marketing pieces.
Conclusion
Online video marketing needs to be designed in such a way that it can become a flashbulb memory. While this piece has simply laid out a new perspective on online video, without providing explicit advice on how marketers can make videos that will become flashbulb memories, it’s enough (for now) for marketers to try to manufacture memories that resist decay and decomposition. It’s enough that they be ambitious and want their online video marketing to stick with viewers.