Archive for November, 2005
At the break from David Isenberg, I learned of this wonderful line from Roy Amara (phrasing approximate).
we tend to overestimate the effects of an innovation in its early days and to underestimate its effects in the longer term.
On other matters:
I have gone to electronically drafty conferences before, but this is astonishing. We’ve got people talking at the front of the organization, behind them on the screen that shows chat comment on the talk being given, I am looking at the Corante homepage that shows the several links that bear on the proceedings, and I just went to blog of Marc Cenedella to see his comment on the last paper. I left a comment, or at least tried to. It’s all a little dizzying.
Social Architecture: the war within the corporation?
Posted by: | Comments
Corante’s Social Architecture conference (details last post) continues.
Here are thoughts on the second presentation.
Presentation title: Is business ready for social software?
Participants: Stowe Boyd (pictured), Kaliya Hamlin, John Hagel, Seth Goldstein (John Hagel not attending)
Opens with this quote:
Managers would rather live with a problem they can’t solve than with a solution the don’t fully undersand or control. Eric Bonabeau
Stowe Interviewing Seth and Kaliya
From the audience, Marc (last name to follow) raised the question of whether the organization will indeed embrace the social software model, that we should expect resistance.
Here’s what I wanted to say, but couldn’t get a word in edgewise:
It may be that we have an interesting drama to look forward to as the corporation leans in the direction of the social software. Hyperbolically, we might say there is a contest between the forces of light and darkness inside the organization.
As organizations take on the structural properties that social software makes possible, becoming multiple, messy, various, iterative, anti-hierarchical, they will begin to exhibit characteristics that will empower the "bad manager." This manager will read these characteristics as "symptoms," as clear and compelling evidence that things are going badly and that command and control models must be reasserted. (We know, I think, that this manager is tempermentally disinclined to live in the world that social software makes possible. For them, this is what chaos looks like. This is a place of danger for the organization.)
Chances are, adoption will not look gradual, and not "trickle" in its diffusion at all. There will be a period of early technical adoption and then a pitched battle between some people (aka the forces of light) who embrace it and the structural consequences that follow from it, and others (aka the forces of darkness) who insist on jamming the signal and punishing the early adopters. This is to say that there will be an active bad of anti-adopters (diffusion theory doesnt talk enough about this group I don’t think).
Naturally, the forces of light will win in the long term (because corporations will begin to understand that social software models are an important part of their efforts to becomng Complex Adaptive Systems), but some corporate players will suffer the wrath and the punishment of the anti-adopters, the statist rear guard. Or, to put this in the language of the old cliche, they will lose the battle as the rest of us win the war.
Social Architecture, Social Software: the marketing opportunity
Posted by: | Comments
I am in Cambridge attending the Social Architecture event sponsored by Corante . Last night we all trooped off to the Degas exhibit at the Sackler and then consumed heroic amounts of alcohol at the Harvard Faculty Club. I had the chance to talk with the man who founded Corante in 2000, Hylton Jolliffe. It’s eerie to talk to about something that is emerging as you speak about it, to know that this conversation next year will be very different from the one you are having this year, not least because of the people in this room.
Now I am in the Ames Courtroom of Austin hall at the Harvard Law School. (The event is co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society here.)
David Weinberger is talking about "social software." He asks that we accept for the purposes of argument that blogging, tagging, wikis, IM, chat, are all types of social software.
Now, he askes, "What do they have in common?"
They are, relatively
low tech (unexpected)
small
inexpensive
full of individual voices (quite unexpected)
participatory: more memos, more emails
speaking in our own voices
driven by and driving of a new set of values and inclinations::
empowers local knowledge
allows small contacts
encourages symmetrical connections
discourages hierarchical command and control
things David worries about:
(I missed a couple of things here)
will this create a new elite
what I was thinking while listening:
that marketing using social software to listen and perhaps help form the consumer taste and preference to which it must respond will end up making multiple and perhaps messier messages with a faster roll out and take up. It will have to be an interative process, as we work and rework the message, experimented "en pleine air" as it were. (Sorry, that’s the Degas exhibit talking. Degas was worked outside the pleine air tradition. His paintings of relatives examining cotton in an office in New Orleans. Sensational.)
But the problem here is that lots of marketers are white knuckling at the present moment, terrified of anything that is even fractionally off target or noise producing. This is an inclination driven by things in the world of culture that can be changed. But it is also I think probably driven by the street and its demand that we meet our numbers every quarter. There is no leveling in this world, No one says, well, you missed your numbers last quarter but you appear to be making it up for it this quarter.
This external constraint will make it more difficult for marketers to make us of, and enter in to the spirit of, social software.
Thoughts only. Comments please.
Of long tails and fat middles: plenitude and the production of contemporary markets
Posted by: | Comments
Francois Truffaut defined a great movie as a perfect blend of truth and spectacle. Now it’s become bifurcated. Studio films are all spectacle and no truth, and independent films are all truth and no spectacle. (Howard Franklin, reference below)
At first glimpse, it looks like Franklin is describing the "death valley" formation we have discussed before on this blog.
The death valley problem, briefly:
Big companies are flourishing. Small companies are flourishing. It’s the one in between who struggle. Big companies have marketing muscle. They survive by bending the world to their will. Small companies are nimble. They survive by adapting to the world’s dynamism. In between we see a "death valley" filled with mid-size companies too small to bend the world, too big to adapt to it. (We could call this the "sour" spot.) (I thank Scott Miller for telling me about the death valley problem.)
Looking at Franklin’s remark, I wondered whether the death valley model is the right way to think about this problem. It may not be a question of size, and the benefits conferred by large vs. small. No, this may be a problem of plenitude. It may be that plenitude is creating bigness as much as it is creating smallness.
As the consumer becomes more fragmented and multiple, the "block buster" must achieve new degrees of generality to appeal across these new differences. It must become ever more spectacular. Now, only big studios can play. Morgenstern (below) notes that there are six big players left: Fox, Warner, Universal, Paramount, Disney and Sony. Only big budgets will work. Morgenstern says the average feature film costs $98 million to make and market.
The block buster may once have been driven by mass markets and the "dumbing down" of popular culture. (The intellectual’s favorite explanation.) But now blockbusters are being created by blocks busted, by the rise of tiny cultures and subcultures into which consumer taste is now fragmenting. Or, to put this another way, the thing that is driving the little companies, the ones that seek for truth, is also the thing that is driving the big companies, the ones that trade in spectacle. Plenitude is creating not just a long tail. It is also creating a very fat middle.
We understand pretty well how plenitude creates itself. Finer distinctions beget more intensive segments. But Truffant’s distinction between truth and spectacle is useful here. To speak to more finely defined markets, the independent film maker must speak a finer, more intensive truth. The more narrow and deep is this truth, the more likely will proximate audiences will find it uninteresting. The more intensive the truth, the less likely will an indie picture find a large audience. It had better hope so to capture as many occupants of the segment as possible if it is to have any hope of success. For some segments, the very idea of "cross over" is in jeopardy.
What a culture! At one end, we may look forward to spectacle that must be all big name stars and very special effects. Nothing less than $100 million dollars will get the job done. Only movies that really are spectacle: violations of our sense of scale and proportion will speak to all of us. (I guess this is still shared.) (Is this why Tim Burton continues to flourish against all the odds? His films violate scale and proportion, whatever else they do or do not do.)
At the other, little films that may now be as particular as a novel. Little films that must be as particular as a novel. A world of film makers who are content to live the lives of novelists. No more huge paydays. No more award ceremonies watched by millions. The rewards will have to be intrinsic because, well, you just better like what you do. We may not be making much more. And this in turn, the plenitude effect again, means that the film maker may forsake spectacle and the Truffautian bargain. Sure, every so often, someone will make a City of God or a My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But these are going to be as rare as block busters with artistic credibility.
Tomorrow I am at the Corante Social Architecture meeting in Cambridge. If you’re there, let’s catch up!
References
Howard Franklin in Morgenstern, Joe. 2005. Hollywood’s Gambling Problem. Wall Street Journal. November 12, 2005, p. P13.
McCracken, Grant. Plenitude. 2006. Plenitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
We remember
Posted by: | CommentsHow do we honor our war dead? We remember them. How do we remember them? Most years I have a good cry, sometimes in the presence of a Cenotaph, sometimes not. This year I wanted something more precise. I wanted to see sacrifice through the eyes of a soldier. Finding someone’s story in the days of metal cabinets and cardboard boxes would have taken weeks. But now we are as ghosts. No archive is closed to us. Suddenly, we drop into a diary, and, through the diary, into the trenches of France in World War I: Round the line at night. Some of the Huns’ dead still unburied (killed in October!). We had not had time to look after them. (1917.01.05) Into line again. Ground heavy with snow. Atmosphere thick with haze. Strange quietness all around. It was odd to walk for mile after mile along a staked path or on duckboards in the snow. Shell holes all covered up, so we often went in up to the knees. Held up fairly often. Shelled outside Bn. H.Q. and had four or five beside me wounded, not very seriously. (1917.01.18) Little doing in the morning. After tea Beattie, Farquharson and I went out for a short stroll. After a bit we found ourselves at the cross roads at Feuchy Chapel on the Cambrai Road. Suddenly a shell dropped less than 20 yards from us and covered us all over with mud. I stepped into a deep puddle of mud in addition. We got pelted the whole road back, as the Boche began to fire at some of our guns coming up the road behind us. This was quite a nice walk. Lovely evening. Only we would have been safer on the other side of Arras. We had even forgotten our gas helmets and tin hats! (1917.04.19) Our attack was a failure. The barrage was too fast and of the wrong nature and our men were mown down by guns and by M.G. fire. All the officers except Tobermory, A.G.Cameron and G.H.Mitchell were either killed or wounded. A.G. got 500 yards forward and into a gun pit with a few men, where I found him next morning. The Boche counter barrage was down as soon as ours. They had even been practising during the night and had given us a lot of trouble. (1917.04.23) A second attack took place at 8 a.m., but it was useless. Our form of barrage was to make up for the irregularities of our line. It proved impracticable. Our lot suffered tremendous casualties from M.G. fire in the outhouses of Guémappe. Camerons and Seaforths were in the same position. Royal Scots did well but suffered severely. They were in a more favourable position. Many soldiers lost direction too. Beattie, Farquharson and Willie Wilson killed. Southey and Padre Miller both mortally wounded. Padre Healy wounded, also Ferguson and MacIntyre, all officers. Tyson, our mess waiter, was also killed, poor kid. (1917.04.23) Waited for the dawn, and then roamed around, looking for A.G. and Mitchell. Found them with Bateman, well forward, the latter seriously wounded. (1917.04.24) Battlefield in a terrible mess. Boche used sulphurous and incendiary shells which made things indescribably bad. 46th. Brigade got Blue Line. Our Bn. and Brigade sent back to Brown Line. Trudged back with A.G. Cameron and Mitchell. Very hungry and tired. Sorley, J.G.Mitchell, and Capt. Leitch came up as reinforcements. Expect Battalion casualties to be about 300 all told. The Royal Scots hadn’t an officer left. Took things easy, trying to sleep in an old Boche dugout. Pretty cold. No word of relief. Felt rather dirty. 3rd. Division said to be coming up. (1917.04.24) These entries are from the diary of Robert Lindsay Mackay (1896-1981), OBE, MC, MB, CHB, MD, DPH, of the 11th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. References Mackay, Robert Lindsay. Memoirs and Diaries. here. Note to American readers: Some of you will be thinking, “I think he’s mixed up Veteran’s Day with Memorial Day.” Actually, I think of November 11 as Remembrance Day, after the Canadian and British convention. This is the day Canadians mourn the war dead. 
“Consumers” or “multipliers” A new language for marketing?
Posted by: | Comments
American consumers spend more than $8 trillion a year on everything from popcorn to Porsches and eye exams to electricity. WSJ
Not everyone likes the term "consumer." Some think it’s anti-ecological. "Consumers" sound like ravening beasts who must destroy what they buy instead of renting it from the recycler.
Others dislike the term "consumer" because it suggests that the consumer always destroys value, and can’t actually ever participate in its creation. Producers have power. Consumers do not.
There’s a third reason. When it comes to the tech sector, information economies, the software user and the internet user, the term "consumer" is simply odd.
Jerry Michalski raised this issue at a Push conference a couple of years ago, and I heard it again Monday night at the CoburnVentures dinner from David Isenberg. Their point, if I may speak for them (and I am sure they will let them know if I can not), is that when we use the term "consumer" we smuggle certain assumptions into discourse, and these stowaways are inclined to act with mischievious and sometimes malevolent intent. Calling people "consumers" prevents us from seeing them in other ways. It may indeed prevent marketing from moving from the old verities to the new ones.
I don’t honestly know the historical particulars, but I believe the term "consumer" is relatively recently arrived. Before consumers, it was customary, I think, to talk about "customers," as if all relationships were "b to b" (business to business) ones.
I did a little hunting around, with the idea that the historian of marketing, Robert Bartels, might have some thoughts on the topic. I was unable to find any. Bartels does say that Charles Coolidge Parlin invented the phrase "consumer is king" in or around 1912, so we know the term was active then.
More to the point, "consumer" was essential to the effort to make the corporation "consumer centric" (as we could now say). It is precisely because corporations were persuaded that they were selling to "consumers" that they paid attention to taste and preference. In their last days, command economies gave us a glimpse of what the world might have looked like otherwise.
All of this is to say that "consumer" has done yeoman’s service, and the rise of marketing is hard to imagine without it. Still, Michalski and Isenberg have a point, and it is perhaps now time to think of alternatives.
My current favorite is the one that spring into conversation as Isenberg were talking on Monday: "multiplier." Sure, it’s a little weird, but I gave it to the boys in the lab and asked that they do a little product testing. Here’s what they came back with:
American mutlipliers spend more than $8 trillion a year on everything from popcorn to Porsches and eye exams to electricity. WSJ (amended)
Good work, fellas! That’s pretty much all they could come up with.
But imagine this conversation at the headquarters of "Bang the Brand."
"Do multipliers care about this sort of thing anymore? I mean isn’t this old fashioned marketing."
There is something in the term that invites us to ask whether the product, brand, innovation, campaign does actually give the "multiplier" anything he can, er, multiply. And if the answer is "no," well, we have what we are looking for.
Furthermore, "multipiers" also bids us ask, down the road, whether indeed the product, brand, innovation actually produced anything in the world. Did the multipliers multiply it, or is it still just sitting there.
Finally, the term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work
These are thoughts only and other candidates are eagerly solicited.
References
Bartels, Robert. 1976. The History of Marketing Thought. publisher unknown. This book is excerpted here.
Wessel, David. 2005. Consumers Might Curtail Shopping Sprees. Wall Street Journal. November 9, 2005.
the idea is king (if sometimes Charles I)
Posted by: | Comments
Smart people in small shops believe the best ideas come from smart people in small shops.
Today, evidence that this could be true. Wieden + Kennedy is a smallish shop situated in Portland. Recently, they landed accounts from the Coca-Cola Company and P&G. Small may or may not be beautiful. It certainly is flourishing.
Certainly, W+K is not tiny, nor is it obscure. (The work for Nike precedes them everywhere.) But they are not a conglomerate. That TCCC and P&G should be prepared to trust them with a large account is telling.
What it’s telling me: that the boutique (or boutique-ish) agency may finally triumph. This appeared to be happening a few years ago. Very small agencies were winning business away from giant advertising firms. (One of them was called Taxi, apparently on the grounds that they never wanted to get larger than.)
But then along came the global brand, and suddenly everyone said, "No, we can only do business with firms that have representation everywhere." Good bye, boutiques.
Now, plainly, big agencies should be as creative as small ones. There is no technical reason why not. But in point of fact, bigness in agencies is sometimes as destructive of the innovative instinct as it is elsewhere in the corporate world. (And if an ad agency is not innovative, really, what’s the point? It should be grounds for immediate cessation…whereas a more conventional corporation without ideas is good for, well, they could last another 3 or 4 years, easily.)
Here’s what Dan Wieden had to say when pressed by the Wall Street Journal. (And, frankly, it kind of made me want to weep with gratitude.)
WSJ: For years marketers ballyhooed about the virtues of having a global ad firm that had offices in hundreds of markets around the world. Is that sentiment changing? And if so why?
Mr. Wieden: Yes. Obviously I sense change. You can see it with who we are going to bed with these days. When all this consolidation went on there was many voices that said ‘scale is king’ and it turns out — thank God — that the idea is king. At the end of the day, one individual with one good idea can trump an entire network of thousands who don’t have an idea.
Why should this illumination, that the idea is king, be so hard for the corporate world to fix upon? There can’t be any question. We’ve all sat in those committee meetings that take forever, turn the problem into mush, the problem solvers into morons, and, finally, give advantage to the time servers and the knuckle heads. (This surely the scary part. The knuckleheads feed on large committee meetings like ghouls staggering around in a Buffy graveyard.)
Surely, we will someday grasp that the corporation is a holligan, a veritable regicide, who, unless watched constantly and scaled back with enthusiasm, will destroy the very thing, the precious resource, on which the body politic (aka competitive success) depends.
Increasingly, it seems to me that innovation, the true spirit of creativity in the marketplace, belongs to those who are prepared work small and fast. The longer it takes, the more people it requires, the less likely it is to happen. Let’s call this "Wieden’s law."
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. The Malamud effect: ideas and the corporation. This Blog Sits At… here.
Vranica, Suzanne. 2005. Small Firm, Big Ideas: Coke and P&G Sign On. Wall Street Journal. November 9, 2005, page B3E and here (subscription required).
culture studies and capital markets: parallel or converging?
Posted by: | Comments
Yesterday I had drinks with a friend from Toronto. We talked about the crisis that besets cultural studies. Once the new kid on the academic block, the field is now in steep decline, losing both students and credibility at an impressive clip.
The crisis was played out recently in the pages of Time Magazine. Several people were asked to identify the formative trends of our time. David Brooks, Mark Dery, Esther Dyson, Malcolm Gladwell, Moby, Tim O’Reilly, and Clay Shirky took up the assignment and several of them distinguished themselves.
Things did not turn out quite so well for Mark Dery, author and "cultural critic," as Time describes him. He piped up early but his contribution was ill advised and off target. He was to speak 3 more times and then fall silent. (It is impossible to say whether he spoke infrequently or that he was edited out, but then these outcomes are, perhaps, symptomatic of the same problem.)
Dery rolled out the idea that technology has separated us. "More and more, we’re alone in public." We were just putting away the hankies when he piped up again to say "the 18-year-old with a modem is just a click away from a universe of fellow travelers." Now we were obliged to wonder whether he did, or did not, mean to imply that ‘more and more, we’re together in private.’
It may be that Dery wished to evoke both ideas, as bookends for his argument, but in these the last days of the paradigm, it is more likely that he is merely reproducing one of the chief problems of the field: the use of fixed piece, pre fab analysis when something bespoke is called for. The cultural theorists look for a target and fire at will. The discourse is found to be totalizing, essentializing, fetishizing, epistemologically presumptious, ideologically deplorable, or otherwise insufficiently scrupulous. And the cultural studies crew believe themselves to be deeply scrupulous.
Scrupulous to a fault because they are now intellectually incapable. The Time debate was as close to a fair test as we are likely ever to have. A cultural critic now called upon to compete with a musician, several journalists and a couple of technological savants. It turned out he had almost nothing useful to say. Indeed, as we have seen, confronting the big issues of the day, he was almost completely silent.
Dommage, ca. But not surprising. Denis Dutton gave us fair warning of the problems here more than a decade ago. But the infatuation was intense and certain scholars made life long committments from which intrication will be tricky. (Chances are no one thought to insist on a prenup.) How appalling it must be to see this discourse now under challenge and so widely. We may expect to see the cultural theorists hauled before Judge Judy any day now. ("Your honor, I believe these people stole my college education.")
The cultural studies shelf at the book store grows more slender with each passing year. The conditions of knowledge are so scrupulous that it’s hard to construct an argument, and almost impossible to sustain an entire book. Most discourse is now a recitation of the verities and even Routledge cannot recycle these forever. (They will of course try.)
Students are now bailing out. Were it not for the fact that cultural studies was for awhile the only corner of the campus in which students could pursue their interest in contemporary culture, this defection might have happened long ago. (And this might be part of the problem. Cultural studies are better represented on campus, and with alternatives come choices, and with choices, come winners and losers. As long as cultural studies were sole source, they could misbehave themselves…which is to say, I guess, that the cultural studies frankenstein had several accomplices on campus. Those who staged the embargo against the study of contemporary culture must share some of the responsibility.)
Then there was the Sokal hoax. A physicist persuaded the journal Social Text to accept for publication a paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" as a contribution to "liberatory post modern science." Professor Sokal revealed that his paper was designed to show the limitless credulity of Social Text, to demonstrate that Social Text was, in effect, incapable of simple acts of scholarly discrimination. The effects were devasting. The culture studies crew had brought ridicule upon themselves.
Mind you, this community of scholars doesn’t always need intervention. A lot of prose is so bad, so self indulgent, that Denis Dutton staged a contest to honor its excesses. Professor Dutton notes,
Thus in A Defense of Poetry, English Prof. Paul Fry writes: "It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness – rather than the will to power – of its fall into conceptuality." If readers are baffled by a phrase like "disclosing the absentation of actuality," they will imagine it’s due to their own ignorance. Much of what passes for theory in English departments depends on this kind of natural humility on the part of readers. The writing is intended to look as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he’s just an English professor showing off.
Finally, there were the defections. Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan Jr. professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard, is widely known for Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1995) and Sex and Real Estate (2000). Talk about an English professor showing off. But recently Garber published what she called "an old fashioned kind of book" entitled Shakespeare After All. From someone like Garber, this is nothing less than a recantation, and, for the cultural studies crew, a terrible loss.
Fine, that was drinks. I then proceeded to a dinner hosted by Pip Coburn, a guy who runs Coburn Ventures a company that sells data and perspective in capital markets. To be honest, Pip is a little disconcerting. I once shared a 50 minute limo ride with him. All the while he was on the phone and never once did I guess what he did for a living. (This is a very good way to initimidate an anthropologist. If you can give up 50 minutes of spoken testimony and not give the game away…well, we like to think you just can’t.)
Pip asked me to say a couple of words and I decided to regale the 15 Wall Street types in attendance on the topic of "cultural literacy." I had about 12 minutes to speak. I suggested that a deeper and entirely current knowledge of contemporary culture was important for fund managers and stock brokers because a) this culture shaped consumer taste and preference and b) was itself shaped by a steady stream of innovation and discontinuity, c) early warning was the road to profit, and d) no warning was the road to ruin.
I offered two examples: that Levi-Strauss missed hip hop in the middle 1990s and managed to lose $1 billion dollars in sales that year. The money manager who knew that this trend was on the way, and that Levi-Strauss was "unresponsive," would be in a position to trade accordingly.
My second example had to do with the "great room" trend in North American homes. My argument was that this trend must tell us that there is a change in the North American notion of the family and that early warning of this trend would serve as fair warning of developments that would one day run through the capital markets.
It was only while I was going to sleep that I thought of a third argument. It’s a bit "house that Jack built" but then these things sometimes are. I have argued that Levitt might be wrong when he explains the drop in violent crime in the American city. A competing or additional explanation is that the new cultural authority of hip hop helped to broker a massive transfer of esteem from the suburban teen to the urban one. As long as hip hop prevails, the urban teen is well compensated (even when his socioeconomic status remains asymmetrical), but the moment the trend moves on, we might expect urban crime to rise once more. And this must have consequences for property markets and eventually capital markets.
Someone disputed my argument with conviction and skill, and I began to think that in fact the capital markets may not need cultural literacy after all. It is an open question.
If we decide that the capital markets need this kind of knowledge, we would then have an extraordinary incentive to develop our stocks of cultural knowledge and the indicators with which we track changes in consumer taste and preferences. One of my dinner companions told that he spends the day monitoring 8 monitors. I am guessing that these are Bloomberg-type data sources.
If the capital markets decide to embrace cultural literacy, Bloomberg is going to have to add a terminal or two. More to the point of this over long blog entry, the cultural studies are going to find themselves confronted with a very worldly problem, playing host indeed to the very capitalists they now so disdain. That is, if they are still in business.
References
Brooks, David, Mark Dery, Esther Dyson, Malcolm Gladwell, Moby, and Clay Shirky. 2005. What’s Next Forum: The Road Ahead. Time Magazine. October 24, 2005, pp. 80-86.
Dutton, Denis. 1992. Delusions of Postmodernism. Literature and Aesthetics. 2: 23-35 and here.
Dutton, Denis. 1999. Language Crimes: A lesson in how not to write, courtesy of the Professoriate. Wall Street Journal. February 5, 1999. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Rap and the esteem economy. This Blog Sits At… here.
Smith, Dinitia. 2005. A scholar of the outre returns to Shakespearean Basics. Wall Street Journal. January 11, 2005.
Stearns, Peter N. 2003. Expanding the Agenda of Cultural Research. The Chronicle Review. Chronicle of Higher Education. 49 (34): B7. here.
How brands go bad: Microsoft vs. Google vs. Amazon
Posted by: | Comments
Google continues to experience rough air as it seeks altitude. We might think that they would have looked at Microsoft before them. Microsoft managed to squander a vast amount of brand equity and brand opportunity by acting like the bully on the block, putting the screws to third-party competitors with all the grace and generosity of a Chicago street gang.
But no. Google decided to piss off the entire academic world by appearing to disregard copyright. For a marketing point of view, this is a howler of the first order. It is harder to imagine a segment better placed to do you harm than the academic world. They have much too much time on their hands, possess snit sharpened wits, and have access to the minds of the young for four formative years. Good one, Google. (Though I must say, I am sympathetic. Academics with life time security are well compensated. The state might well say, "your publications belong to the public domain." Many scientists already act is precisely this spirit.)
Enter Amazon with a program of its own. None of the Google/Microsoft bullying here.
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos wouldn’t comment specfically on the Google library program. But he said, "It’s really important to do this cooperatively with the copyright holders, with the publishing community, with the authors. We’re going to keep working in that cooperative vein."
Hey, presto. This is largely a matter of respect. The Internet players needs to be seen to be honoring the old technologies (print), the old institutions (universities) and the old content professors (professors), with a nod in their direction. And surely it can’t be very hard to create a micro payment system that send small amounts of value to the producers. (One would have thought that this is the kind of thing Google could have banged off in a Sunday afternoon.) This is about diplomatic gestures, and these don’t have to be expensive.
But no one, not Google, not Microsoft, not Amazon, not Apple has come to terms with the real issue. At the moment, everyone is looking for the payment model. As the head of the Authors Guild puts it, "The book industry has to find its equivalent of iTunes."
Oh, please. What the industry has to find is its equivalent of iPod. Until we have some sleek, perfect, deeply useful, "have to have it," "have to hold it" piece of technology for reading digital format, this issue will remain a minor one. Here’s what we need, a piece of hardware that makes hard copy, ink of paper books look antique and preposterous. What we need is a piece of technology that is so perfect to the hand and the eye, so good at capturing our "marginalia," so good at helping us extract, organize, store and repurpose the text in question, that we cannot go home again. What we need is technology that makes a pulp of fiction.
Yes, we still love the feel, the ease, the tangibility of books, but somewhere out there is a piece of technology that does for reading what the computer did for word processing. And once it is in place (designed by Apple, softwared by Microsoft, supplied by Amazon, with content discovered by Google?), we will go back to "books" with the same astonishment with which we go back to an IBM selectric II typewriter. These were the ones that made it sound like World War I is taking place in the living room (when it was merely your girl friend writing her thesis).
Will someone please create a reading machine.
References
Mangalindan, Mylene and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg. 2005. Google This: Amazon Plans to See Portions of Books Online. Wall Street Journal. November 4, 2005, p. B1.
Brands, a new content supplier?
Posted by: | Comments
Brands have a new way to win the loyalty of the consumer.
They can serve as a "content supplier."
My argument can be reduced to a number of propositions.
1. That consumers, especially younger ones, are building social networks with new urgency.
Technology makes this easy. The sheer churn of contemporary life makes it necessary. Like any complex adaptive system, consumers understand that one of the best ways to respond to dynamism is with more social contacts. These contacts serve as portals of knowledge and opportunity.
2. That these networks are content hungry.
Social networks have an hydraulic quality. They must carry information in order to sustain themselves. So the only way to maintain them is to feed them.
In the case of Korean college students I interviewed a couple of years ago, this meant sending a constant stream of messages and photographs through their networks.
3. that these consumers are content hungry.
Much of the content that passes through social networks is modest in its character. It is informational, but the information is pretty slender. Or it’s phatic, and a declaraction of mood. In either case, it is almost purely hydraulic. It is designed to keep the channel open and the network alive.
4. that consumers need more and new content suppliers.
Traditionally, we have thought of high school was an educational enterprise. We now know this is wrong. No, high school exists to create content for teenagers that they might build, expand, sustain and vivify their social networks. (As in "So then Jeannie slaps him, like, really hard and I was standing there, and then Suzie starts to laugh, so I start to laugh, and he gets really mad and everything.")
Popular culture, and especially the vast media industry that supports our preoccupation with celebrities, might also be seen as a content supplier. This is to say, we pay attention to the latest goings on of Jennifer Anston not so much because we are interested but because we believe our friends will be interested. (How many males read the Sports page because this supplies coin of the conversational realm?)
5. that brands can supply new content
Experimential marketing points in this direction. It creates events that can then be reported through the network. Buzz marketing is of course precisely about driving communications between consumers. (Strangely, it has been incurious or unsophisticated about the mechanics of networks and the motives of network communication. Why is this?)
6. but will they?
I don’t think any brand is now in the business of building the brand by making itself a content supplier for the consumer. Certainly, it is true that any great new product (iPod) and lots of new creative (see the new campaign for Playstation) will generate lots of chatter around the water cooler and supply to this extent lots of "network activation. " But this is happening as an unexpected spin-off of the marketing enterprise.
This reminds me vaguely of the Dole pineapple operation in Hawaii in the 60s. Someone asked what they did with the juice after putting the pineapple slices in cans. "Oh, we throw it in the ocean." There is value being created here that is not being captured.
More pressingly, because brand managers are not creating network value in a self conscious way, they are not using the body of knowledge that we know have on this topic.
This suggests that we need to establish a rapproachement between the branding community and the social software community. This will take some doing as the two communities have very different ideas of what they do, and want to do. (The social software community does not think in terms of content creation, for instance.)
Who will take the lead?
References
For more on social software, see these websites:
Powerpoint under pressure: the real marketing
Posted by: | Comments
No one much talks about this aspect of marketing. To listen to the experts and the bloggers, marketing comes from people who are as well rested and stress free as 17th century French aristocrats.
But the reality is, as most of us know, well otherwise. As I noted in yesterday’s blog, I worked all day on a presentation that I will make this morning. Powerpoint dumped a quarter of the deck around 8:00. That meant pressing through to 11:30. I went to sleep with the thing unfinished.
Something unpleasant happens to cognition under this kind of pressure. We lose our intellectual elasticity. It becomes harder and harder to make the larger point. It becomes harder and harder to see the larger point.
I think this tells us something about deck construction, that we are working on the particular details of each slide, and then periodically perform a "fly over" to see how things look and where we might go. At some point, these higher conceptual abilities just give up and go home.
Now the writing process is a forced march. We are visited by the sickening possibility that we might have to stand up in front of a roomful of people and have to embarrass ourselves. (After teaching my first class at HBS, I asked a colleague how I did. "Fine," he said, "there was no spreading stain on the front of your trousers, and that’s the first thing we look for.") And now that Powerpoint mysteriously erased a quarter of the presentation, we are living with this fear too. As time runs out, the pressure increases, the elasticity diminishes, and …
The thing I hate most is that the swirling stops. When we’re well rested, it’s as if the deck and the writing process is surrounded by lots of little idea parts and possibilities. Best case, we draw on these as we go. But when fear and exhaustion have done their work, the creative world becomes very quiet. We move from powerpoint to powerpoint, but really it’s not happening.
The trouble is I am, as we often are, working with diminished resources. I spend Sunday, Monday and half of Tuesday working flat out on a new project for a new client. I finished on schedule but I could tell I was feeling a little glasseyed. I took a break, to "recharge." But when really tired, we are very like the batteries that used to plague the laptop industry. Batteries would suffer a "false floor" effect. We could recharge them all we wanted, but they weren’t going get more than a 20% charge.
So if we have been overdoing, rushing from one high pressured project to another, there is a cumulative cost. The usual remedial effort doesn’t help. We are now working with a permanent deficit. Sleep helps. And last night I got 7 hours. I found myself dreaming about the deck.
I got up this morning and the 20% charge was enough to help me see how to complete the thing. I present in an hour. I will let you know later in the day how things went.
Networks are our networth: Notes from a hotel room
Posted by: | Comments
I am in Toronto. I am working on a powerpoint presentation that needs to be perfect before I go to sleep tonight. I have to present it in the morning to a roomful of high powered marketers.
It’s hard to hear myself think. My room is on the 4th floor of a court yard and there are a couple of maples in the courtyard which are now host to 200 starlings who are now debating something at length and at volume. It is deafening.
I think the debate goes like this, "Now? How about now? What about now?" These starlings have more sense than to spend the winter in Toronto. Not when flights to the south are so cheap. And there are other reasons for leaving. The chief of these is that many Canadians don’t do dynamism with gusto. What did Peter Ustinov say about Toronto, that it was "New York City as if run by the Swiss." (And I think Bjork says something like, "I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me." I believe she meant "Canadian.")
Personally, I blame the likes of Margaret Atwood. You could get everything Ms. Atwood knows about the well springs of contemporary culture into a phone booth and still have room left over for roughly a dozen college students. The lit crit crowd has an embargo on certain kinds of thinking and Toronto appears to be engaged in a building frenzy, as if a dynamic culture could be imposed in the form of daring new architecture.
But as we know, this is not where dynamism comes from. Wishing will not make it so. You can not build an opera house and rebuild the musem (as they are now doing) and hope to inspire (or license) dynamism. The city that needs encouragement (or approval), well, this is really too desparate to think about. But of course if you want proof, note that the Roy Lanham (as above) has dominated Top 40 radio here in Canada since early July. We may think of this as the triumph of Canadian content.
I don’t think dynamism-loathing applies to the marketers I am talking to tomorrow. At least, it better not. I am arguing that we are seeing a fundamental shift in the consumers under, say, 35. The groups to which they belong are now much larger, more flexible, more communicative. Indeed, they are less like groups and more like networks of a certain kind. The trick will be to peruade my audience of the marketing implications that follow from this argument.
I shall also argue that the new fluidity of the social group is reproduced within the individual. People under 35 tend to build and sustain some quite complicated identity portfolios, with lots of diversity and lots of change. If the group has become a network, so has the self become a network…and whopping great marketing implications follow from this too.
Anyhow, that’s the argument. But if my audience are not buying dynamism as the organizing fact of contemporary life, they are not likely to smile upon my effort to suggest that the dynamism of the whole is also the dynamism of the part and the part’s part, as it were. The broadest polity, the groups within it, and the selves within these groups, all are fluid, multiple, changeable and a lot like those Starlings debating their departure time, in constant, noisy contact.
But, hey, what I’m telling you for? I have to finish the damn thing. Pray for me.
post script: so it’s now 10:30 and thanks to those geniuses at Microsoft, I am still at it. Twelves slides simply disappeared from the deck, and I have only now reconstructed them.
But I just took a wee TV break and remembered why marketing can be fun in Canada.
I found myself looking at an ad for Monster.ca. It opens with a group of office workers standing around the water cooler. One of them says, "well, it’s your cow" and everyone laughs.
Now this is an act of major mischief. The line comes from a book written by John Kenneth Galbraith about his boyhood on a farm in Ontario. In Scotch, John tells us about the time he was sitting on a fence with a girl. A cow and bull began to copulate in the field before them, and John, persuasive even in his youth, said, "I wish I can do that." His companion replied, "well, it’s your cow."
Ok, back to work. Pray for me more.
Google versus Madison Avenue: no contest here
Posted by: | Comments
Seeing an opportunity to expand that expertise into traditional media, Google in recent months has purchased ad pages in two technology magazines and made the space available to some of its advertisers. Google has also indicated that it is thinking about extending its ad-placement services to other areas, possibly including TV. (Brian Steinberg, WSJ)
The WSJ says that Google’s move has Madison Avenue trembling. For God sakes, why? Google doesn’t know anything about advertising.
All Google does is provide a channel for the delivery of what might just as well be classifieds. Everything in this pipeline is information. None of it is meaning. And meaning is what Madison Avenue makes. Meaning is what Madison Avenue does.
Of course, this does not mean that Google won’t stride into the advertising business and make an ass of itself. Most smart people look at marketing and say, with a patronizing smile, "How hard can this be?" They then try to do it themselves, in the process giving the world a most convincing demonstration of how hard it is.
It’s as if smart, numerate people believe that their qualifications are not so much skills, as secret passwords to any part of the business world they care to enter. And indeed, as long as the part of the business world they want to enter is governed by economics assumptions, this is largely correct. But the moment, they want to enter the part of the marketplace governed by culture, new rules apply, and now even very smart, and very numerate people are inclined to screw things up royalty. (This would be where the Google founders founder, I guess.)
What should Google do? I have a deep intuition that the right thing to do is to buy everyone in the corporation a copy of Culture and consumption II. Make that two copies. Mind you, that could just be me.
What will Google do? Chances are, it will try to enter advertising on it’s own and make a proper hash of it. Then it will buy an advertising agency and try to reverse engineer it to see how it works. (And wouldn’t we all like to be flies on the wall to witness this exercise in the inscrutable.)
What should Madison Avenue do? Tremble? Hah! There is a whapping great difference between computer science and cultural science.
References
Steinberg, Brian. 2005. Google Weighs on Madison Ave.: Ad Firms Watch Closely As Search Engine Ponders Move to Traditional Media. Wall Street Journal. Oct. 31, 2005. here. (subscription required).
