From Philip Reynolds, Associate Creative Director, Palio

There are two sides to Amtrak’s New York-to-Saratoga train, the Adirondack. If you’ve done it before, you know to get a seat on the “good” – west – side of the aisle, because that’s the side that affords you one of the most beautiful 3-hours of view I know; the wide, watery Hudson River and all the activity along it.

Only a train traveler gets to see it. I-87, the more traveled auto route, claimed the land and the views nobody else wanted. When I took the trip down on a cloudy early morning recently, I spent much time looking out the window at forts and farms, barges and green hills shrouded in Washington Irving mist. I always get on the good side of the train.

Then, just after that trip, I was reading the paper – an item about the war. Apparently an American soldier over there isn’t so different from me after all, in that she spends way too much time looking at Powerpoint presentations. Some in the military are saying that this is a problem, because Powerpoint forces out an appreciation for complexity and connection. Instead you get the tyranny of bullets spewed out, slide after slide, in a relentless, mind-numbing drive to get to the point. “Hypnotizing chickens” is the wonderful phrase they use for the Powerpoint briefings they give the press over there.

In a second item, Alice Miller died at age 87. Miller was a psychoanalyst who in 1981 published an influential book that helped to overturn the dominant Freudian model of parent-child relations. The Drama of the Gifted Child advanced the idea that we were all permanently scarred in childhood by our parents who enforced codes of conduct through psychological pressure, corporal punishment, or worse. This idea, though out of style in our culture today, provides a fresh perspective on the message testing I had observed the day before.

Market research is, after all, an offshoot of psychology; and many researchers boast graduate degrees in that field. Both disciplines use scientific methodology to explain a mysterious subject (person, creative concept). I think market research today follows Freud. Our children – I mean our creative ideas and executions – are wild, naughty things that benefit from parents working them into things fit for a civilized world. But if Alice Miller had her way, we’d see this wildness as a power with which we should not fiddle. What are we doing to our children, I mean our concepts? Are we killing their natural power and magic in an effort to get them to conform to our market research models? Are they born perfect and we don’t realize it?

So Alice Miller is gone, Powerpoint is king, and I observe market research. It’s a small rebellion, but for the ride back to Saratoga I’ve put myself on the bad side of the train, looking at the rockfaces and ditches and architectural mistakes of the east.