Pam and I are going on vacation and I will be out of range and not posting again until January 10.
Everyone here at This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics wishes you and yours happy holidays and a wonderful new year. Please accept our best wishes!
Oh oh. The boys in the lab have found a stack of 45s and it sounds like they’re breaking out the beakers. I better go. Best, Grant
Here’s a startup idea: a consultancy that goes into corporations to discover ideas and innovations that languish there. The job: to extract brands.
Let’s be honest. The corporation has many great ideas that it never manages to harvest. These are notions sitting in reports from consultants, buried in internal committee work, neglected on the lab bench, ideas taken up and then let slip.
The culprits are clear enough. Some ideas are murdered in committee. Some are destroyed by the roller derby punishments of politics. Some drop between stools as personnel come and go. And some merely get lost in the very considerable shuffle of corporate life.
The corporation is now so good at mobilizing to address the present opportunity that it sometimes has a hard time keeping an eye on the alternative ones. What doesn’t get operationalized straight away tends to disappear from view.
The costs are enormous…and unacceptable. If BusinessWeek is right to say that we now live in a creative economy, no corporation can afford to practice infanticide of this kind. Really good ideas must be identified, brought forward, and be allowed to find the light of day. Shareholder value depends upon it. New ideas, increasingly these are what they pay us for.
It is entirely possible that the Razr, the phone that saved Motorola, might have languished in the lab, where it not for the brand extraction heroics of Geoffrey Frost (see link below). And that’s a chilling thought, that a struggling corporation might have missed its opportunity to return to greatness because, well, there was no brand extractor standing by. (To be sure, Frost was an insider. The "brand extraction" proposition makes sense when there is no insider standing by.)
The brand extractors would have to have several qualities. They would have to have a gift for absorbing vast qualities of data and the ability to detect patterns therein. This pattern detection in its turn depends upon a deep knowledge of the industry, the market, the competition, and the opportunity in question.
Furthermore, brand extractors would have to have the ability to proceed with the utmost diplomatic finesse. No idea that is forgotten or foresaken can be returned to usefulness without political consequences. That means that the incumbents will sometimes conceal ideas and they will sometimes resist extraction. When these both fail, the incumbents will attempt to influence the brand extractors one way or another. The brand extractors must be utterly unswayable and as politically adroit as they are intellectually nimble.
Brand extraction will likely look a little like the "book extraction" I proposed a couple of weeks ago (see link below). It will have to be a process that is swift and merciless, a lightning intervention more than a laborious inquisition. As long as due diligence is performed, in matters of brand extraction, faster is better.
Acknowledgments
Tom Asacker and I have been kicking ideas back and forth the last week or so, and his characteristic intelligence and acuity have clarified things for me here. Thanks, Tom.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Remembering Geoffrey Frost. This Blog Sits at the… December 19, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Book Extraction (Supplying the long tail). This Blog Sits at the… October 12, 2005. here.
Our enthusiasm for the internet is returning. The nuclear winter that followed April 2000 has lifted. The startups are back, baby. Microsoft is once more playing catch up.
If you are a civilian like me (an anthropologist, that is, without much technical savvy), it’s a little mystifying. Will Internet 2.0 (aka Web 2.0) change everything or just some things? Is this a revolutionary moment or an evolutionary one? Is everything I know wrong, or just this, that and the other thing? Is this 2.0h! or merely 2.0.
I was listening to a podcast in which Jenny Attiyeh interviews David Weinberger, Chris Nolan, and Stowe Boyd. And it filled me with that sense of panic that always happens when I listen to people talk about the future. Intellectually, I begin to hyperventilate. What if everything I know is wrong! Maybe the world is once more taking leave of my senses.
Here are three models that sort out the possibilities for me. Consider them a kind of telescope. Those who buy model 3, probably also buy models 2 and 1. Those who buy 2, probably also buy 1 (but not 3). Those who buy model 1 only buy model 1. I make no claims for the veracity or the utility of these models. But writing them out helped return my pulse almost to normal.
Model one: disintermediation
The Internet is an efficiency machine. It removes the friction that stands between buyers and sellers. Now Dell can sell directly, from factories to consumers. Now Amazon can disintermediate the bookstore and someday the publisher. We are on the verge of being able to tell how much of the marketplace was about the accidents, not the essentials, of supply and demand. Markets will verge on maximal efficiency.
In this model, the revolution runs deep but its structural effects are limited. Really, we live in the same old world. It’s just that certain pieces have been taken out. Hey, we didn’t need them anyhow. The world is merely more compact, more elegant. And that’s a good thing.
Model two: long tail
The Internet is a profusion machine. It allows small cultural producers to find small cultural consumers, and as a result, all hell is breaking lose. Chris Anderson’s long tail model (and my own plenitude model) says that the tiny acts of innovation, rebellion and refusal that used to die in obscurity can now, some of them, find just enough fellow travellers to sustain themselves. As a result, the gravitational power of the center is being made to creak like the mast of an 18th century man of war in a perfect storm. It might hold…or maybe this is the moment to throw ourselves overboard.
I recently had dinner with a journalist who belongs to the upper reaches of the newspaper elite. Casually, ever so casually, she let slip that the great newspapers may not exist five years from now. This is a very good way to get an anthropologist’s attention and make his head spin. I had to leave the table. My paper bag was in the cloak room.
In effect, the long tail model is an efficiency model too. It says that now that people can reach one another, they will reach one another. The costs of access, the friction created by the media, has dropped to almost nothing. But this model goes vastly beyond the efficiency model. It says that the structural effects of the Internet 2.0 will not be merely a matter of making the economy more efficient. There will also be social consequences large and small. The world will ramify. Elites will fall. Diversity will flourish. The fundamentals of association and government will transform. In short, the very nature of the social beast will change.
This is not a disintermediated world with "bits taken out." This is the world less hierarchical and more heterogeneous, a whole with more, and more various, parts now wired and networked in new ways.
Model three: reformation
The Internet is a reformation machine. It will create new fundamentals of and for our world. It change the units of analysis and the relationships between them. This reformation model says, in other words, that the coming changes will deeply cultural…and not merely social (model 2) and economic (model 1).
I noticed this doing research in Korea. Teens and college students were creating new networks with webpages (the local equivalent of MySpace) and and the clouds of photos and messages they were sending one another. I assumed that this was Model 2 stuff, a change in fundamentals of interaction, until they began to talk about themselves in new ways.
It became clear eventually that these people were reforming personhood and the self. The self was not merely better connected, but now more porous, more distributed, more cloud like. This cultural fundamental, the definition of what and who a person is, was changing. (In the Attiyeh interview, Weinberger talks about buddy lists in the West and what he calls the "continuous presence" of friends.)
When I listen to Clay Shirky (pictured) talk about categories of knowledge and the tags by which it is organized, I begin to wonder, as he does more brilliantly than I could hope to, whether we are looking at new ideas of the idea. This too is a good way to get the anthropologist’s attention. If there is something my tribe cares about, it is culture and the way in which culture defines knowledge of and in the world. To think that this is now "under construction" is quite enough to make me reach for a paper bag and my best hyperventilation cessation technique. Just give me a minute. No, really, I’ll be fine.
The reformation model says fundamental categories of our culture (particularly the self and the group and the terms with which we think about them) are changing. We are now down to what is sometimes called the DNA level of things. This isn’t actually a great metaphor for anthropological purposes, but the phrase is a tag, so you know what I mean. Model 3 is not about faster markets or new networks. This is a change in the basic terms of reference, the very internal blue print with which we understand and construct the world.
Model four: continuous presence (everything and everyone all the time)
One way to assess innovations is to make a guess about where we are headed. I think our economic, social and cultural destination might be this: we will be continuously connected to all knowledge and all people with a minimum of friction, and priviledge will be measured, in part, by how good are the filters with which we make contact with all but only the people and knowledge we care about. One of these filters will, I hope, be a "pattern recognition" system that detects the fundamental changes set in train by models 1, 2 and 3 so that we can have a little early warning. Because, frankly, you know, I’ve just about had it.
References
Jenny Attiyeh interviews David Weinberger, Chris Nolan, and Stowe Boyd. Thoughtcast. here.
Shirky, Clay. 2005. Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet. here.
Last week, I had a couple of thoughts on the "bloggers business school." There was some encouragement, especially from Francois Gossieaux at Corante and Russell Davies in the UK. It feels like this is an idea with legs. Now if we can just give it a head and a heart…
Naming:
How about a name? The sensible thing is to name the enterprise after it’s most generous donor. New York real-estate developer Stephen M. Ross recently gave the University of Michigan business school $100 million. My concern: would this be enough?
So let’s call it the XBS for the time being where X is the name of the future donor. And, no, I don’t think this donor is going to have to match Stephen Ross’s gift. I think we could sell the name to the right donor for around $20 million. This would generate enough interest to supply salaries and keep XBS tuition free.
Educational philosophy
The first objective of XBS is to create a network that links faculty to participants (a.k.a. students), participants to one another, and both participants and faculty to the world that is the web.
The second objective is to link XBS to the world of business, so that the network is networked, as it were.
The first objective means that instruction happens on line.
The second objective: instruction is integrated with the world.
Russell Davies is developing something like a tutorial model, and this has advantages. (If it’s good enough for Oxford and Cambridge…) For my money, this model is didactic, too much a matter of educational superordinates telling their subordinates what and how to think. (I say this with alll due respect to Russell. He is casting around for solutions to an urgent problem and he has taken it on, heroically, as a one-man exercise.)
I prefer a more collaborative model, one in which participants and faculty work together to solve problems, and master problem solving in the process. The "case study" method work nicely here, and in the best case, students are co-authors of what happens in the classroom and "tutors" are there to direct discourse. (There are HBS professors who can run an 80 minute class by asking a handful of questions. The art of teaching here: to ask the exquisitely correct question of exactly the right student at precisely the right moment. Russell, I believe, would do this brilliantly.)
But the case study is not perfect for XBS. This is because the case study is, again for my money, too artificially delimiting of the problem at hand. Case studies demand cases: usually, a 6 to 12 page, closely worded treatment of data and observation, out of which the students must extract the problem, data, alternatives, and an answer.
But the case is canned. It is removed from the real world in all its blooming complexity and churning dynamism. This prevents students from mastering complexity management (and I believe this will be their first professional responsibility in the capitalism of the 21st century). More important, the canned case forces the b-school to play johnny-come-lately to capitalism. As it stands, business schools are rest stops on the interstates of commerce. Capitalism does not run through them. It runs around them. This leaves most business schools, even very powerful ones, working at a remove.
So, let’s say XBS uses the "world study method." In this event, every problem in the classroom would have to be a problem in the real world. Below, I have attached my working notes for a case study called "Arrested Development: you’re Mitch Hurwitz, what do you do?" I think this will eventually become a cases study of the conventional kind, but what I like about it for present purposes is that it is in fact an urgent problem.
You will see that there are lots of outstanding questions in the working notes. Anything in italics is a question that would have to be supplied in the case. But these questions could be answered in the XBS classroom by participants who have industry contacts and formidable googling skills. Furthermore, the answer to these questions are changing constantly. One of Mitch’s options, internet distribution, has new options emerging all the time.
In a perfect world, the XBS contemplation of Mitch’s problem would not be a "let’s pretend" version, a mere shadow of his deliberations, but something so comprehending (and comprehensive) of the complexities of the matter, that Mitch would find it deeply interesting and useful.
In this way, XBS could serve as an intellectual staging area for the real world. Business professionals could bring their problems to the classroom. (There are precedents for this sort of thing. Harry Davis runs a product development course at the University of Chicago. Each term students address on a problem proposed by someone in industry.)
There are two objections, of course. One is that no professional marketers is going to put a real problem "under glass" in this way and so expose his or her world to competitive scrutiny. The nice thing about really productive classrooms is that they throw off a profusion of solutions. The proposer may pick and choose his/her solution and the competition need be none the wiser.
The other objection is that these cases would be short lived. Every b-school struggles to keep cases fresh. Once Mitch has made his decision, the case is dead. I am not so sure of this. After all, there are no right answers here. Even after Mitch has made a choice, the alternatives to his decision will attract student support, and as the world turns, the problem set will turn as well. Fully attached to the world, these cases may have the ability to renew themselves.
I think it would be especially interesting to give the same problem to several classes and watch each work through to its own solution. This is an evolutionary model with multiple "what if" scenarios. Each class would fix on its own particular version of the problem, data, strategy and answer. Together, the classes would supply an interesting survey of the problem various configured.
If we are serious when we say that the world is becoming more dynamic, more inscrutable, more difficult to manage, surely a business school that runs the problem set in several different ways is a useful thing. Indeed, by making itself a kind of staging area for the future, XBS could makes itself an essential part of the decision making process. We can imagine managers building it into the problem solving process. This would give them a chance to see what very complicated problems sets would look like when configured in very different ways. ("Ok, here is what the what things look like if these factors are held to be most important, and here is what it looks like if other factors prove more important.") This allows XBS to move from post hoc "catch up" to something much more prospective and useful.
The value to the business world is perhaps clear, but I think this suggests a compelling case of the value of XBS to its participants (a.k.a. students). Students will eventually be allowed onto the cat walk to see into every class that has entertained the question in question. This is really very useful, demonstrating in an illuminating way what might have happened had other options been pursued. XBS may be a better way to teach business in any case. Almost certainly, it is a better way to teach business when business practice must content with new orders of dynamism.
Appendix: Case study
[these are my notes for a case study under construction. Anything is italics is information I need to find out and build into the case. (Or it may be information I have found out.) It occurred to me that this is the sort of thing that could be left to the blogger business student to determine on their own.]
Mitch Hurwitz was sitting at his desk at The Hurwitz Company. The office was quiet, even a little mournful. Mitch’s baby, Arrested Development, had just been cancelled.
Five Emmys and the 2004 award for "best comedy series" had not been enough to protect it. As Fox executive Peter Liguori put it, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV – it’s just too small." The numbers this season had been disappointing, around 4.3 million viewers a week.
Insert here:
economics of TV:
what it costs to mount a series
how many are tried each year, how many successful
how profitable are the successful ones, who makes the profit
how many viewers are required to sustain a series
what the break even point is
when success is not immediately, who decides
famous exceptions, etc. (shows that struggled in obscurity with small numbers & finally made it)
second set:
how much can a series creator/writer hope to make, what about the West Wing writer, what about the guy who did the HBO Western, I think he started out doing NYPD Blue, we need to show that really successful shows make a prince’s ransom (this to support the argument that Hurwitz should cut his loses and begin again with a new property)
third set:
how did the audience for AD take shape.
Did the numbers build slowly?
Did early adopters convert to loyalists?
Was there a good deal of "churn" is fans came and went?)
In the old days, Mitch knew, cancellation was cancellation. The networks were god. There were no stays of executive. When the network cancelled a show, it stayed cancelled. But because Mitch was familiar with the writings of Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine and because he was a man deeply acquainted with the trends of his industry, he knew there was still hope.
fourth set:
Mitch’s career in television
what he had come to know about the industry
how things had changed as he came up, etc.
There is a good interview at the AV Club (link below)
how network TV had changed,
how cable plays had emerged,
the role of HBO in the reinvention of cable,
how even small cable outlets were now producing,
how the economics of the industry had changed as a result
sale by DVD, history, numbers, examples
distribution by internet, history, numbers, examples
video iPod and other venues
prepay for access to TV shows (see the opera subscription number)
Anderson’s small tail theory
Content from the AV Club Interview from February 05 that might be mined:
The show does need the space. Its complicated characters, baroque storylines, and manic pacing all pack a great deal of information into a small window, and it took some time to fully hit its stride, though last year’s DVD release of the entire first season made catching up easy. [Robinson]
Hurwitz created and oversees the series, which shows a little of the gag-a-minute sensibility he learned as a writer and producer on programs like The Golden Girls, The Ellen Show, and The John Larroquette Show, but finds its own unique vibe in a quick-moving documentary style, with film director Ron Howard as the narrator who holds everything together. [Robinson]
Mitchell Hurwitz:
It became a very expensive show very quickly. When I was on The Golden Girls, we’d have eight scenes per show. And when Seinfeld came along, they went to, like, 30 scenes a show, which was revolutionary. Arrested Development has probably got 60 scenes per show. It just keeps emerging as this more and more complex thing. I always try to keep it very simple at its heart.
The style of the show that has emerged is broad comedy done very dry. We throw a lot of the jokes away. So it feels improvised, but we really do write these out. We write in the overlaps often. We write in the stutters sometimes, if that’s important to a scene. Then, that said, a lot of the people on our cast—Will Arnett, David Cross, and Jason Bateman are really good at adding to the dialogue, and spinning things, and coming up with pieces here and there. But it’s a very tightly scripted show, because we’re trying to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time.
Our hope is that we just stay alive long enough that people discover it, and word of mouth develops, and that kind of thing. We’re just putting everything we can into it. So I really have no theories why it’s not working better. But on the other hand, it’s working as well as anything I’ve ever done. So it’s all new to me.
[these quotes from interview of Mitchell Hurwitz by Tasha Robinson, February 9th, 2005, http://avclub.com/content/node/24899/1/1%5D
WE WANT TO SUPPLY INFO THAT ALLOWS STUDENTS TO MOUNT AND DEFEND EACH OF THE FOLLOWING 4 SCENARIOS
THE FOLLOWING REMARKS COULD GO INTO THE TEACHING NOTE
Scenario 1: "revenge of the long tail."
Fox, bless them, gave AD it’s run. The numbers are in and the test is over. AD has found its audience: 4.3 million viewers is it. Mitch should throw in his cards. He might want to take AD to cable, but a guy with his talent and track record would do better to start again. AD gives him lots of profile and credibility. People will return his phone calls. Dump this baby. Go again.
Scenario 2: Retreat to cable
With the advent of long tail TV (LTTV?), there is a lingering hope for AD: that it takes refuge with a lesser network. There are some networks for whom 4.3 million viewers is just fine, thank you very much. On TNT, an only slightly larger number made The Closer one of the biggest hits in cable history.
The students who take this position would have to defend themselves against the accusation that there is not enough money in cable to sustain a show like AD and if some of its stars left, the show would close in any case.
Scenario 3: Return to glory
This option says, take refuge with USA network for a couple of years, let the audience build, and return to Fox (and the big money). Mitch is on record as saying, "why should we assume that when you try something different it will immediately be accepted?” This suggests that he believes that AD is a little ahead of its time. He might wish to say in play until the world catches up to him.
Scenario 4: Move to new channels and new revenue sources
Hurwitz can abandon TV distribution altogether. The advent of the DVD market gives him both a new way to get to market and a new source of funding. (See Ginna on Sternberg on Whedon’s Firefly options, below. ) There is also a internet distribution possibility, likely funded by a subscription model of some kind. [thanks to bloggers who contributed here.]
This option leaves open the "return to network glory" possibility, but I am guessing that Scenario 4 would give Hurwitz more creative freedom and better returns. It was also give him a heroic standing in the small tail markets that remain, in the case of TV and Hollywood, still pretty "fat middle."
And the winner is…
Each of these positions is defensible and every good case study should allow the class to break into camps and for controversy to ensue. But every case has, in the heart of the writer and the instructor, a right answer. And this is a section from the "teaching note" that is send to the instructor.
How do we decide which scenario? The shape of the numbers should tell us. When Liguori says, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV," this is a bad sign. This suggests that we have got everyone aboard who is coming aboard. If this is what the numbers tell us, advantage goes to students who support Scenario 1.
On the other hand, if the enthusiasm is distributed, that’s more promising. They should show degrees of enthusiasm and some evidence of conversion: that it takes awhile for newcomers to become fans, for fans to become loyalists and for loyalists to become devotees. We should see word of mouth support and the statistical evidence that WOM is indeed taking place.
Of course, there is a more fundamental problem here and that is whether news of AD actually found its way to all or most of the would-be viewers. Daniel Drezner and Debbie Millman says that news reached him belatedly…and this suggests that marketing has something to answer for. Drezner and Millman are after all pretty well informed about popular culture. If we determine that news was badly distributed, then we go with Scenario 2 and/or 3.
So the "right answer" turns on whether we think the AD audience is a long tail market, or a long tail market struggling to become a fat middle. So the "right answer" turns on what numbers we supply (or what they can be made to say). Do they show an adoption pattern for AD that is thickly packed or more stretched out? Does this flock cluster or does it attenuate?
References
Drezner, Daniel. 2005. My Personal Apologies to Mitchell Hurwitz. Blog post. November 14, 2005. here.
Justin, Neal. 2005. Neal Justin: Kyra Sedgwick is getting her closeup — finally. Star Tribune. July 28, 2005. here.
Robinson, Tasha. 2005. An interview with Mitchell Hurwitz. The AV Club. February 9th 2005. here.
Snierson, Dan. 2005. Arrested Development 2003-2005? We say goodbye to ”Arrested Development” — EW looks back on the three seasons of the critically acclaimed Fox comedy.
Entertainment Weekly. November 18, 2005. here. (subscription required)
(all quotes and stats from the Entertainment Weekly article, with the exception of the numbers for The Closer which are from Neal Justin, as above.)
last note: On December 19, there appeared an article in the NYT on new means and methods of movie distribution. All of these clippings from Holson, Laura M. 2005. Before You Buy a Ticket, Why Not Buy the DVD? New York Times. December 19, 2005
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2005/12/19/business/19Theaters.html&tntemail0=y
a couple of passages:
Among them is IndieFlix, based in Seattle, which was introduced by two independent filmmakers in October. For $9.95 a disc, the company will burn a feature or documentary film onto a DVD and ship it to a customer who has ordered it online. Another outfit, 2929 Entertainment, has teamed up with the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh to offer the forthcoming movie "Bubble" simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on cable television.
Hollywood has a long-established way of promoting its movies, mainly through blockbuster releases. Until that changes, entrepreneurs will probably continue to find it challenging to get people to watch their films and to earn enough money to make their ventures profitable.
"The idea that a lot of things can get out without marketing clout is not there," said Bob Berney, a Hollywood veteran and president of Picturehouse, a theatrical distribution company. "I think there are complications for the next several years, as we are still in a theatrically driven mode."
Still, many in Hollywood smell opportunity, particularly since Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and an industry outsider, announced he would offer some television shows and movies on the video iPod. "I’ve seen more movement in the last three months than the previous five years," said Todd Wagner, who along with his business partner, Mark Cuban, will release Mr. Soderbergh’s "Bubble" in late January. "I think people are now saying they can’t avoid this."
Geoffrey Frost died in Chicago on November 17 of natural causes. He was Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and brand stewart at Motorola. We remember him as a man responsible for one of the great acts of corporate creativity and brand rescue of our time.
Frost and the phone that saved Motorola
Motorola had pioneered the mobile-phone industry, but in the early 1990s it was foundering. It had lost nearly $6.5 billion in 2001-2002, and was now well behind Nokia, the category leader in the headset market. Korean competitors were beginning to take away market share, and Samsung and LG now had, as Anthony puts it, a "lock on cool." Motorola found itself in a competitive "death valley." It was too small to outmuscle Nokia, too large to out-innovate the Koreans.
Frost thought he saw a way out of this position and he made himself the champion of a phone called Razr that had emerged from the Moto City design center in Chicago. This slender, expensive phone was introduced in August of 2004 and it managed to exceed the company’s total lifetime projections for the product in its first three months.
One of Frost’s colleagues at Motorola, Roger Jellicoe, remembers Frost’s role.
[Frost] was frustrated with how stodgy our products had become. He wanted a couple of initiatives up and running that would break that image. ‘I don’t care what you have to do, let’s get this done.’
Frost left behind this glimpse of his strategy when he drew four lessons from the Razr success:
1. "It was a bet being made, not a base being covered. We didn’t even include it in the sector’s business plan."
2. "No compromise was the standard operating procedure. We didn’t juggle tradeoffs, we just insisted on excellence."
3. "We didn’t try to predict the market for the product based on history, we bet that if it was good enough, it would make its own market."
4. "We put the best, brightest, craziest, and most passionate people we had on it."
"Make it’s own market," now that the way marketer’s used to do it. But Razr was not just a matter of having the courage of one’s convictions. Frost had also found a way to spare the Razr Motorola’s version of "death by committee." (This is nicely documented by Anthony, below.)
It is clear that Ed Zander, the CEO who joined Motorola in 2004, also contributed both to Frost’s opportunities and his new passion. Zander put dollars behind the Razr, but he made a more fundamental contribution to the world in which Frost was working. Here is Frost talking about the effect Zander had on the Motorola corporate culture.
The single biggest change is the meetings have become much more lively, much quicker, much more participatory and conversational, if not occasionally a free-for-all. We’re getting back to the original culture that was Motorola: smart people figuring out things fast.
The admiration was mutual. Zander remembers Frost this way:
Frost was instrumental in making Motorola’s brand cool again. From the start, he shared his infectious enthusiasm for breaking the established norms and challenged us to see the world in a new way. His fresh insights, passion, energy and commitment to excellence in everything helped renew and re-invent Motorola.
Frost was a phenomenon. He won several awards, including an "Effie" Award in 2000 for advertising effectiveness. He was also named one of the marketers of the year for 2005 by Brand Week and Ad Age.
But I am not sure this is quite good enough for a marketer of this stature. And for those of us who are struggling to figure out the secrets of the new marketing, it leaves key questions unanswered, not least, "who was Geoffrey Frost?"
Looking for Geoffrey Frost
Here’s what I have been able to piece together about Frost from various sources on the internet. I would be most grateful if blog readers who knew Frost would please give me any additional details they might have. I have emailed Jennifer Weyrauch at Motorola and I will post anything she is able to send me.
What little we know.
Frost was raised in New York. I have been unable to determine where he was to school but we know he spoke Russian and Japanese. The first official notice of his career puts him at Grey Worldwide and then Scali, McCabe, Sloves, as a creative. The second puts him at Foote, Cone & Belding as executive vice president. He appears to have lived in London, Paris and Hong Kong. He went to Nike in 1996 as global director of advertising and brand communications and there he oversaw brand strategy, advertising, direct marketing and Nike.com. He was responsible for campaigns featuring Michael Jordan ("Frozen Moment") and Tiger Woods ("Hello World" and "I am Tiger Woods"). In 1998, Frost received the Cannes Grand Prix for best campaign in the world at the International Advertising Festival.
Frost joined Motorola in 1999 as corporate vice president of global marketing and communications for the Personal Devices business. He oversaw brand management, advertising, entertainment marketing, public relations, sponsorships, promotional activities, agency management, customer marketing and global consumer communications strategies. In 2003, he was promoted to senior vice president of marketing and chief brand officer. Frost because Executive Vice President in 2004 and was then the head of Motorola’s marketing, communications, advertising, events and design functions.
We know Frost was married but nothing else of his private life. We know next to nothing about his intellectual or managerial style. We don’t know where his passion for design came from. We don’t know he found his way to the agency world.
From an anthropological point of view, this is just odd. We are now treated to endless recitations of the world according to Peter Jackson, the director of King Kong. Geoffrey Frost made his own quite spectacular contribution to contemporary (and corporate) culture. Shouldn’t we know a little more about him?
References.
Anonymous. Geoffrey Frost, Motorola exec, dies at 56. United Press International.
Nov 18, 2005. here.
Anthony, Scott D. Making the Most of a Slim Chance. Strategy and Innovation, Vol. 3, No. 4, July/August 2005. Reproduced in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge under the title, "Motorola’s Bet on the Razr’s Edge." September 12, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. The Malamud Effect: ideas and the corporation. This blog sits at the… September 23, 2005. here.
Sampey, Kathy. 2005. Motorola CMO Geoffrey Frost Dies. BrandWeek. November 17, 2005. here.
Silverstone, Sean. 2005. Ed Zander on Motorola’s Tech Turnaround. HBS Working Knowledge.
November 28, 2005. here.
Postscript:
20/12/05
I haven’t heard anything from Motorola but there is an illuminating interview with Frost in The Hub, posted at Diablogue here.
22/12/05
Still no word from Motorola, but Tim Manners of The Hub was kind enough to remember Mr. Frost this way:
I interviewed Geoffrey by phone in August but never met him. He was an outstanding interview — far more thoughtful, candid and forward-looking than many other CMOs. He seemed unusually clear on where he wanted to go with Motorola and extremely excited about it. We need more people like him in marketing.
See the full interview here.
06/04/07
Geoffrey Frost’s wife recently passed away and her obituary, written by Padmasree Warrior ,may be found here.
[The ad] business is moving from a culture of ads to a culture of ideas.
So says John Condon, the new Chief Creative Officer at Leo Burnett.
He sounds a little like Dan Wieden, as quoted here in November
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.
Is this the new model? Is the ad industry saying, "We don’t make ads, we make ideas"?
Bully! It’s about time. The rise of the new consumers, new channels, new media indicate has badly damaged the old business model. The ad world has found another value proposition.
But horrors! The "idea" formula leaves the ad business without a difference.
Lots of people can supply ideas, and lots of people do, strategists, consultants, brain stormers among them. What’s more, idea production is being democratized in the hell of a hurry. Even little blogs like this one presume to show where ideas come from. There are lots and lots of players in the creativity game. (And now that BusinessWeek has declared that we’ve left the knowledge economy for the creative economy, there will soon be plenty more. )
I can’t help feeling that the better proposition for Madison Avenue is "we make meanings." The fuller statement: advertising builds brands and brand proposition through the careful, clever assembly of cultural meanings. We source these meanings from every corner of contemporary culture. We invest the brand, or the brand proposition, with meaning through the judicious choice and combination of sound, image, language, and media (i.e., advertising, point of sale, direct marketing, on-line advertising, consumer co-creation. etc.)
In the meanings game, the ad world has few competitors. There are the design firms There are the creators of the various forms of contemporary culture (music, film, journalism) who sometimes "sub in." But almost no one has the depth or the range an agency does. More important, the meanings game makes the ad biz absolutely bullet proof when it comes to the Google challenge. Google can wrangle information. It is clueless and clumsy when it comes to meanings.
But what I like best about the meanings value proposition is that it allows the advertising world to take its true skills, its real accomplishments with it as it enters the new world of new media.
There is some small evidence of panic in the agency world, as if some now believe that "everything they know is wrong" and that the agency world must reinvent itself in every detail.
Oh, please. No one in the world of business understands the process of meaning management as an agency does. It would be a pity, no, a tragedy, if this great strength got lost in the stampede to new models.
Ideas are quite wonderful. We would be poor, mere beasts without them. But in the world of marketing (to say nothing of the creative economy), ideas matter because they are the way we manage meanings.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. The Idea is king (if sometimes Charles I). This blog sits at… November 9, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Google versus Madison Avenue: no contest here. This blog sits at … November 1, 2005. here.
Vranica, Suzanne. 2005. Questions for … John Condon. Wall Street Journal. December 14, 2005, p. B3A. (no url available)
The image is Leo Burnett.
Yesterday, I offered some thoughts on the bloggers business school. There were several good responses, including one from Russell Davies who, it turns out, is all over the idea.
Davies is a star in the account planning field. Account planning was invented in UK to give ad agencies a deeper understanding of the consumer. For my money, planners are the most anthropologically minded people in the agency world. They believe in culture and many of them have a deep and nuanced knowledge of it.
Davies has created what he calls the Account Planning School of the Web. He thinks of this as a correspondence course and so far it works on a kind of call and response model made famous by African American music and the Oxbridge Don.
In the call and response model, the band leader (or don) sets a topic, a problem, proposition, and the student (or musician) crafts a response. Davies is planning to set an assignment once a month and plans to ask industry luminaries to pose problems of their own. Participants right up brief essays and submit them for Davies’ scrutiny and comment. It’s a little like visiting our Cambridge tutor and hoping to high heavens that he/she likes what we’ve done. (Because if he/she doesn’t, there’s not much place to hide…and in this case, the criticism is particularly public.)
Davies’ model occasioned a couple of thoughts:
1. that the opportunity here is not only graduate business education but executive development, that students who came for an MBA might want to stay involved with an enduring connection.
This raises questions of the kind that swarm every new enterprise in the new economy. In this case: is there an important distinction here between executive education and an MBA? How important is the latter credential? What value does it create for the participant? Or are degrees really just a bricks and mortar preoccupation?
I have a feeling that the BBS (bloggers business school) is most interesting as an information exchange of a hyper intensive, highly participatory nature. It will help cultitvate talent and in the process it will help sort talent. The MBA may be an "all or nothing" label when in fact the BBS advantage is the ease with which it demonstrates student abilities so that enterprises can made hires that are better informed and therefore more exact.
Tough questions, these, but the stuff of an excellent case study for the BBS. How much of the bricks and mortar model should a BBS enterprise carry with it into the new? What are the new units, new relationships, new incentives? Where is value truly becoming created? Where is it being captured? (I like the fact that we know live in a world where the ordinary assessment of opportunity demands quite searching questions and quite a lot of intellectual power and imaginative ability. So much for capitalism being the simple pursuit of the obvious. And just when you’re shooting your mouth off, you stumble upon a mission statement. BBS objective: to give students the intellectual power and imaginative ability demanded by the new capitalism.)
2. that the BBS could and should serve as a knowledge exchange. (Now the resonance with the Bulletin Board System has a certain poetic aptness.)
I like the idea that students work through problems together, case study style. This builds lots of skills, but it also builds lots of connections.
The knowledge exchange works on several levels. It works in the classroom but it also works across specialties. Thus Davies’ students, the good ones, have a deep knowledge of contemporary culture they can trade with students who are strong in the areas of management theory or strategy.
The connections that begin in BBS should endure into professional life. Good b-schools give the graduate access to a large field of gifted consultants who are prepared to work for free (as long as the call doesn’t take longer than 20 minutes.) The BBS school difference ought to be that it builds networks that are deeper and larger. If it doesn’t, it should. This has to be an objective. Maybe there are grounds to doubt the value of the case study method.
3. velcro world
Sometime ago, I put my money on the idea that the corporation would take on a velcro character. We would launch a new brand the way Hollywood creates a new movie, by bringing together all but only the people who can get the job done. And once the job is done, every one goes back into their respective talent pools to await the next assignment, the next configuration. (Since I made this bet, the "fixed personnel" corporation has got ever stronger.)
If and when the velcro model comes to pass, however, the blogger business school will serve us well. It will serve as a fluid network that launchs lots of fluid networks. The identification of opportunity and the problem crunching necessary to take advantage to it, these will belong to the people who are superbly good at hunting and gathering in the vast data fields of the internet, people who have astonishing powers of pattern recognition, people who can reach out and piece together the tasks and the teams that can get the job done. More and more business will move onto the internet and the bloggers skills, cultivated and intensified by BBS, will prove increasingly valuable. This might be the ultimate value add of BBS, but I think this suggests that we need to rethink the case study method.
It makes your head spin, but then I guess that’s what it’s for.
Last thought: having people like Russell Davies as a colleague, I believe that’s one of my incentives/objectives for participating in a BBS.
References
For more on Russell Davies and his experiment, here and here.
As readers of the blog know, I am keen to see the reinvention of the business school.
I have several reasons, the chief of this is that many b-schools are, like the army, fighting yesterday’s battles.
I saw someone arguing recently that the knowledge economy has been replaced by the creative economy. (Come to think of it, it was BusinessWeek. They were offering this as one of their take-aways for 2005.)
The Knowledge Economy is giving way to the Creative Economy. Information has become a commodity like coal or corn. People once thought that superiority in technology and information would ease the economic pain of outsourcing manufacturing to Asia. But it turns out that a good deal of knowhow–software writing, accounting, legal work, engineering–can be outsourced to places like India, China, and Eastern Europe, too. […]
The solution: Focus on innovation and design as the new corporate core competencies. To prosper, companies have to constantly change the game in their industries by creating products and services that satisfy needs consumers don’t even know they have yet. [BusinessWeek, below]
And I thought to myself, "oh, fine, b-schools are only now coming to come to terms with the knowledge economy. God help them when it comes to the creative economy."
In point of fact, b-schools are bad at preparing people for dynamism inside the corporation and outside in the marketplace. They are completely hopeless when it comes to teaching students about cultural literacy. And without this knowledge, MBAs cannot hope to manage or respond to sudden changes in consumer taste aned preference. Everything comes as a blind side hit.
Sometimes I amuse myself by assembling a "dream team" faculty for the "Dynamism department" at a business school. Several of the readers of this blog have a cherished place there, not to mention a named chair. (Hey, as long as I am just making it up I can afford to be extravagant.)
But then I snap out of it and it occurs to me that the bricks and mortar model here is probably done for. We must begin from the ground up.
Then I fell to thinking about a business school founded in blogging.
Here then are some rules for the blogger business school:
1. you must blog to be admitted
2. how well you blog will be used to determine whether you are admitted
3. most instruction will happen on line
3.1 there may be 1 week get-togethers in the summer, and the occasional weekend
4. everyone will keep their "day job"
5. instruction will consist in problem solving
6. using real time, real world problem sets
7. these problem sets will be created by shadowing real world problems.
[We know for instance that over the last week or so Mitch Hurwitz is struggling to decide what to do now that Arrested Development has been cancelled by Fox. (see my post on the topic). Today, we learn that Hurwitz may do a deal with Showtime. Because they are suberbly well informed, the class will have picked up Hurwitz’s problem early, come up with its own recommendations…and then rethought the whole thing as additional data about the Showtime deal becomes evident.]
8. classroom activities will take place for an hour at one’s desk, perhaps once a week per course.
9. students will do their own prep, drawing and posting useful information as they go.
10. post hoc, there will be links for follow up. For example:
10.1. each "problem post mortem" will be tagged: "this is an HR issue, with 3 options." Each options will be laid out with key passages from the managerial literature with further links to the paradigms of key thinkers. Collaborators may take issue with these assertions and correct them in the manner of a Wikipedia. This may be the only body of work that is not disclosed to a general public. This is the body of knowledge that belongs to each class.
11. problem solving will be collaborative, organized into teams, one team set against the other, teams will emerge spontaneously in the course of the debate, teams will not remain fixed in membership
12. all of this will happen under glass. The b-school will be posted! The difference between students and observers will be rights of participation as determined by program admission.
13. I haven’t quite figured out how grades are given, though this too may be an antique concept. The question is whether you get the degree, and this decide when the faculty meet to look at a student’s contribution to a problem solving session of the student’s choice, of their choice, and one chosen at random.
14. No one fails. They just don’t graduate.
References
Anonymous. 2005. Best of 2005: Ideas: The Way to Succeed in The Creative Economy: Innovate. BusinessWeek. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. The Arrested Development case study: Say you’re Mitchell Hurwitz, what would you do? This Blog Sits At the… November 25, 2005. here.
Nip/Tuck, the TV show, has opened a MySpace.com page for one of its characters. And not just any character. The page belongs to The Carver, the show’s serial rapist.
The page represent an original stream of content, one which allows Nip/Tuck writers to "explore elements of the character that we could not explore on the show."
This experiment in transmedia has been explosively successful.
"The Carver page is everything you think about when you hear the word ‘viral.’ On the first night we had it up, there were close to 10,000 people that were trying to make friends with him." (FX senior VP, marketing and promotions, Stephanie Gibbons in Crupi, below)
According to MediaWeek, The Carver’s "friends list" now stands at 60,496 MySpace members, all of them registered users who have link The Carver’s page on their own pages.
Speculation on the identity of The Carver is intense. Fans are now
building up hypotheses like seasoned litigators, deconstructing pertinent bits of dialogue, examining clips from the show and, in one case, using voice recognition software in an attempt to identify the man–or woman–behind the mask. (Crupi in MediaWeek, below)
This is "weak form" transmedia, perhaps. Nip/Tuck has opened up a second stream of narrative, only. It would be "strong form" Transmedia if it were turning this second stream over to developers outside the show. It would be "really strong form" transmedia, if we could not understand the the TV show without knowledge of the MySpace narrative
But even as "weak form" transmedia, there is a powerful viral effect. It looks as though some fan speculation is being driven by the fact the fact that they are "making contact" with the show by means of this relatively obscure, insider, channel. It may be true that this kind of transmedia transmission has a community or "cosa nostra" effect. I think fans might be less speculative, less engaged if all they had to go on was the "big pipe" information supply made available by the TV show. (Small pipes make good neighbors?)
Plus, there might be something more than transmedia going on here. After all, this second channel is not an ordinary narrative one (a comic book or novel, say). The MySpace play pretends that the fictional character is an actual one, as if The Carver has escaped the narrative and found his way into the real world. This makes for several differences, one of which is that the fan can entertain the notion that he/she is observing a less scripted, less predictable, and more dangerous creature. Suddenly the narrative signal is less predictable, less scrutable, and less controllable. This, in turn, may increase the character’s ,and the show’s, powers of engagement.
It’s weird. I just learned about Henry Jenkins’ notion of transmedia last week, and already it is proving indispensable. It looks like one of the futures of Hollywood. It is also, especially here in its viral mode, perhaps also a future of branding. How can we make brands less scripted, less scrutable, less predictable, and, in this way, more exciting? Isn’t this single most compelling on the desk of every Chief Marketing Officer? What if the answer is transmedia?
A last point: There is something odd and interesting about social networks that include fictional characters. There is something odder still about networks that form (swarm?) around fictional characters. The MySpace network seems to have responded to the Nip/Tuck fictional character with special intensity, and that’s interesting. Is there an anthropology of networks to help us understand why this should be so?
The marketing question here is how brands can create fictional characters that enter and help intensify networks, ignite buzz and build the brand? Sophie promised to have this effect (see link below). In the Nip/Tuck case the fictional character is welcome and interesting because it is driven by the TV narrative, so in this case the efficiacy of the fictional link in the network depends upon the transmedia at work. This is another reason why brands might want to engage in transmedia work.
References
Crupi, Anthony. 2005. Nip/Tuck Goes Viral With New Content on MySpace Page. December 12, 2005. here.
Jenkins, Henry. forthcoming. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Intersect. New York: New York University Press.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Transmedia: Branding’s next new thing? This Blog Sits At … here.
McCracken, Grant. 2oo5. Sophie: marketing goddess. This Blog Sits At … here.
For more on Nip/Tuck, here.
For The Carver’s homepage on MySpace.com, here.
Yesterday, the Indianapolis Colts covered themselves with glory yet again, trouncing Jacksonville and extending their winning streak to 13 games. The Colts quarterback, Peyton Manning threw for 324 yards, opening with a drive that was, in the words of the New York Times, "precise and relentless."
But for those of us who loiter at this intersection, Peyton’s more remarkable performance was the one in the MasterCard spot. This is the one from McCann Erickson calls Professional Fan.
This ad has been on air now from some weeks, but my regard for it grows with each viewing. Peyton Manning is an obessive fan who treats ordinary people as if they, not he, were the celeb. Manning is shown asking a stockboy for his autograph, cheering on a mechanic, and lying in wait for fast food servers to end their shift and leave the restaurant.
This spot puts Manning and MasterCard in competition with VISA and the New England Patriot’s quarterback, Tom Brady. I wouldn’t want to say who is the better quarterback, but clearly Manning is the better actor and as a result, MasterCard is, in this contest, champs.
The VISA spot is charming enough. It gives us Brady out to dinner with his linemen who claim to be metaphors for VISA fraud protection. (And this is pretty good all by itself, and an ad that expands the envelope of creative possibility. Hats off to BBDO New York.) But there is never any question that we are watching professional athletes manfully doing their best, teetering sometimes on the edge of self embarrassment.
Manning, on the other hand, is note perfect. It’s an all out performance. There is no "sliding" on this one. (Quarterback are allowed to conclude their "runs" with a slide, instead of contact.) Manning is not pretending to be an actor pretending to be a person. He is the crazy fan confronting the stock boy, the fast food server, the mechanic.
McCann Erickson have crafted this narrative, giving it a couple of grace notes that make it live. When Manning is shouting his praise at a mechanic, he mutters to another guy "you’re good, too." When Manning sits in a cafeteria shouting "D-Caf" at the wait staff, he is oblivious to the look of concern and astonishment he gets from one of them.
There is even an "inside joke." In the last moment, Manning asks a stock boy to sign a loaf of bread to his little brother. "He loves your work." (Manning’s little brother also plays in the NFL, which means that he is probably not really well acquainted with the shelving work of this particular Kroger employee.)
It is worth pointing out here that this is a craft that advertising upstart Google cannot have without a massive change of training and staff.
This "portrait of a fan" is detailed, damning, and punch-the-dog funny. Manning’s fan is obsessive, familiar, clueless, alarming, patronizing, intrusive, and without shame. The performance is good enough to make conflicting points: Manning identifies with the fan even as he mocks the fan. Compassion mixes with revenge. This is theatre, both relentless and precise.
There is a branding question here. What does this spot do for MasterCard? In the world of celebrity endorsement, especially when dealing with a star of Manning’s magnitude, it is normally enough to have the star merely coexist with the credit card. Hey, presto. Peyton Manning endorses MasterCard.
But, no. MasterCard and Manning conspired to engage in a detailed satire. It is worth pointing out that the Priceless campaign is now 7 years old. (I think this date is right. It is astonishing hard to get the details on ad production.) This means that McCann Erickson is now working on variations on the theme and they are working with an audience (all of us) who get the "Priceless" premise in a fundamental way. (This confirms, I think, Robert Thompson’s argument about the narrative opportunities that TV opens up…as opposed to theatre or film.)
More than than, McCann has been working with Manning for at least two years (they did an Xbox spot with him, the "trash talk" one), so they have a pretty good idea of his capacity. So many of the relationships in the world of marketing are fleeting that a deeper knowledge of this kind is not possible. But here McCann knows and understands the celebrity, and what he can do. Clearly, they are now writing for him and his strengths.
So why the role reversal? Why have Manning play a fan? It is unexpected, liminal, a little upside down, and that’s good for winning the attention of a sports fan otherwise stupified by all that bad beer advertising. It is a god brought low, and that’s very much in keeping with the democratic willingness of present day celebrities to make fun of their stardom. (They know that if they don’t do it, someone else will.)
Finally, since those Miller Lite ads from the 1990s, we have been watching athletes consenting to goof for the camera. (By some marketing alchemy, this does not diminish their standing…perhaps because they are so charged with status, they can give it away with impunity.)
What does this do for MasterCard? In the logical shorthand, we might say MasterCard is to Manning as Manning is to the fan as the fan is Manning as Manning is to MasterCard. Hmm, not quite. (But nice try.) No, the symbolic readout is simpler: MasterCard is now as Manning is: human scaled and more approachable. (The credit card players continue to be shadowed by the arrogance and self importance of the capital markets.)
Celebrity endorsements work in both directions, and this one works for Manning nicely. Every professional athlete lives in dread of the cart. Every athlete is a blown knee away from the end of their career. Naturally, athletes would like to have options, and they know they have to start cultivating their alternatives before the present one is over.
Manning has started to position himself for the post career career, and the MasterCard campaign demonstrates not just a sense of humor but a cultural intelligence that most athletes can’t dream of. (This is one of the costs of that single minded devotion to football.)
In sum, this spot is a nice little piece of meaning management. Professional Fan makes new properties for the celebrity endorser. It then transfers these to the MasterCard brand. The athlete manages in the process to restock and reposition his own brand. And finally, the fan finds himself emulated (and mocked) by a man he wants to emulate (and revere). Popular culture, it just gets interestinger and interestinger.
References
Brown, Clifton. 2005. Another Giant Step for Manning and Undefeated Colts. New York Times. December 12, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Celebrity Culture: muddle in the models. This Blog Sits At… here.
post script
Creative for MasterCard’s "Priceless" campaign is handled by McCann-Erickson/New York: Joyce King-Thomas, Executive Creative Officer; Eric Goldstein, SVP, Group Creative Director, Chris Cereda, VP, Associate Creative Director; Julie Andariese, VP, Senior Producer. I believe the account planners for the campaign were Nat Puccio and Suresh Nair. Thanks to Jon Schwartz of MasterCard International for these details.
(This is the last installment of a three-part series on branding and transmedia.)
Yesterday, I argued that, traditionally, brands have kept their icons free of narrative.
For instance, we have no idea who Mr. Clean is. There’s no backstory and not much of a front story for that matter.
But it’s not so hard to imagine Mr. Clean in more fully realized narrative terms: child of an orphanage in a French colony in North Africa (circa 1890), early childhood spend as a runner in a souk (market), taken in as a servant by a family of French nationals who holiday in Morocco and eventually he joins the household even when it is "at home" in France. In the late spring of 1907, "Gerard" is travelling back to Morocco to help to set up the summer home when (mon dieu!) he is kidnapped by pirates. Gerard sails for some years as a pirate and this allows him to built up a small store of wealth, and to return, eventually, to the souk where he buys a stock of carpets and a stall, marries his childhood sweetheart, and begins to raise a little batch of runners all his own. It is on one of his trips to replenish his supply of carpets that…
Ok, ok, will someone put a sock in the anthropologist, please? Thank you.
I didn’t say it would be a good story. I need merely demonstrate that even modest narrative gifts can help free this icon from his branded captivity. (And, yes, there is a great big problem of setting Mr. Clean and his family in a souk, mon dieu, but hey. I might just as well have chosen the current campaign for Coke which shows a young woman roller skating in what looks like Santa Monica. This has quite substantial narrative clues in place (some natural, some supernatural), and expansion would take us straight into worlds that the Coca Cola Company does want to occupy.)
The question of course is whether any brand manager would ever dare give Mr. Clean his liberty. And the answer at the moment is a resounding "no." For most brand managers, the narrative strategy will promise risk more surely than benefit, and our brand manager is really committed to sending her kids to college.
It’s also true that brand managers don’t generally know a lot about narrative and this increases the risk even more. On the other hand, brand managers are risk takers by nature and training, and the moment that someone rises to great heights in the corporation by opening things up here, well, everything could change. The narrative strategy could be an express elevator to senior management. You never know. (And, hey, if it doesn’t work, there’s always Hollywood.)
There is a simpler, less risky route and that is to evoke those two magical words from the post yesterday: soap opera. Here is a precedent for narratives that make meaning and momentum for the brand despite, perhaps because, they are so loosely tethered to it. The soap opera actually helped bring P&G to its present and very considerable glory. There was little direct connection. I guess, and I am guessing, soap operas helped to build brands and brand relationships because they demonstrated that P&G understood and cared about the emotional lives of the consumer. As a meaning maker, the soap opera is a matter more of form than content.
We might call the soap opera narratives that serve the brand "cadet narratives.". (I am thinking about "cadet lineages," where a kinship connection is simultaneously evoked and distanced.) Cadet narratives are not about the brand or its icon explicitly. They merely occupy the same branded space, while in the manner of a soap opera, keeping their distance. This narrative would be tied to Mr. Clean, say, by association, but it would be allowed to go its own way and develop its own imaginative resources.
There is a certain damage control built into the cadet model. After all, when things get a little too over the top, the brand manager can dial back the immediacy, the intensity of the association. Indeed the brand manager can dial back the connection without have to dial back the narrative. (And this, as we shall see, is key.)
I have an illustration of the cadet narrative. Faithful readers of this blog will know that, unwittingly, I invented one of these for The Coca-cola Company. Nick Hahn, Charlotte Oades and I, working in Cologne of all places, came up with the notion of a creature called Sophie. Sophie was a virtual creature, designed to exist on line and manifest in the world. We hoped that Sophie would be fabulous in both senses of the term and that she would be an object of interest and inspiration to teen girls in the middle years.
Sophie was a cadet narrative in so far her story was never about Coke or the Coca-Cola Company. Sophie was for Sophie only. As I said in the post in question:
Sophie … would be funded by TCCC (the Coca-Cola Company) but she would have to be leveraged in the most delicate way possible. The moment that TCCC claimed her, she was over. The moment TCCC so much as labelled her, she was over. The best TCCC could hope for is to have Sophie sometimes smile in its direction. This meant, among other things, merely more Cokes in Sophie’s fridge than Pepsis. Not no Pepsi’s!
And now, finally, to the Jenkinsian question: could we, should we, open brand or cadet narratives to many authors in several media. This is the heart of transmedia. To quote Jenkins once more, "A transmedia story unfolds across multiple meida platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole." Could this be allowed to happen for Mr. Clean or Sophie?
Here too the corporate instinct is to dig in and say "no." After all, the brand manager is supposed to manage brand meanings, and, surely, this can’t mean handing over the reins to everyone. But isn’t this already a central problem of the cocreation strategy, and isn’t this very much in keeping with our understanding that brands that have immaculate conception and hermetic seals are not really very interesting to the world any more. Letting lots of people play is a problem that all of us face already.
No, the real issue with the Jenkinsian challenge is allowing other professional meaning managers in on the game. It is one thing to allow consumers in on the game of meaning manufacture. It is quite another to bring in film makers, comic book artists, bloggers, writers, and then to let them loose in all the media they represent. How would we exercise any thing like David Aaker’s branding discipline in a world like this? There are too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many messages in the world. No real chance to control the inevitable diversity of treatment that would ensue. No real way of protecting oneself from brand mischief or malice.
Well, all of these anxieties are fully justified, but don’t we sound a lot like parents who would rather ground their kids forever than send them into the world? In their hearts, marketing managers know what parents do: you have to let them go.
The good news is that consumers are prepared to sort and edit. They will see the brand played out in a variety of new ways. They will hear associations reaching out of the cadet narrative potentially to reform the brand. But they are pretty good at sayng, "No, that’s not the Mr. Clean or Sophie, I know." In other words, this is not a game of high vigilance driven by copyright crazy lawyers. This is more a question of "winning some and loosing some" and the exercise of patience that rewards us because it gives us access to the sheer "invention of crowds."
Now, I can hear some marketing people banging the key board with disbelief at this, and saying perhaps, "Why would I want to entertain any of the risks of the transmedia enterprise when I can keep the levers of control to myself?"
The answer is simple. The consumer has spoken, to film makers, artists, writers, and marketers. Given the choice between something pristine and something messily more intimate, the consumer has no doubts. The latter is much more interesting, vital, robust, and engaging. It’s worth remembering that many brands are now a little like Ron Burgundy, slick with formula (both kinds) and self congratulation. The world is having a harder and harder time taking these creatures seriously. It may even be true that some brands, like some newscasters, are sustained by self parody and not much else.
Jenkins’ notion of transmedia may be the next new thing in marketing, not because we take to it joyfully but because it may be one of the best ways of making the brand an active, attractive part of contemporary culture.
Or let me put this another way. Coca-Cola is largely responsible for the creation of the present Santa "narrative." (Sorry.) The creation of this creature has done the corporation an inculculable amount of good. But very clearly if someone were today to propose such a creature the marketer’s reaction would be to limit, control and constrain. Santa is nothing if not a public property, from Coke’s point of view, a cadet narrative, given over to the inventive powers of many artists working in several media over close to a hundred years.
The Coca-Cola company doesn’t have much control of Santa now. Just as plainly, it is content that this is so. For every year, around this time, a plump, jolly man appears wearing the colors of the Coca-Cola Company.
References
Jenkins, Henry. forthcoming. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Intersect. New York: New York University Press.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Sophie: marketing goddess. This blogs sits at the intersection of anthro and econ. October 24, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2002. License to Overkill. Case Comment. Harvard Business Review. December, 8-9.
The Ron Burgundy reference evokes the lead character from a film of the same name.
The Coca-Cola Company’s creation of our image of Santa is a story that has been told in several places. See for instance Belk, Russell’s "A Child’s Christmas in America: Santa Claus as Deity, Consumption as Religion," Journal of American Culture. 10 (1) Spring, 1987, 87-100, and Okleshen, Cara, Stacy Menzel Baker, Robert Mittalstaedt. 2000. Santa Claus Does More Than Deliver Toys: Advertising’s commercialization of the collective Memories of Americans. Consumption, Markets, and Culture. 4 (3), 207-240.
Yesterday, we asked whether Jenkins’ notion of transmedia might serve as a new way to approach marketing.
In the old world of marketing, there wasn’t much transmediation to speak of. Corporations made products, and informed the advertising agency, who in turn informed the consumer. Consumer might communicate with one another, and they would certainly rebuilt the brand for their own purposes, but mostly this marketing exercise was a bob sled run, with producers at the top and consumers at the bottom. The meanings went straight down a single shute. They did not run on several tracks.
Transmedia, as Jenkins says, presupposes "a story unfold[ing] across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole."
But for Mr. Clean there was no back story, no alternative endings, no competing interpretation. There was in fact no narrative to speak of. I think some consumers surmised that Mr. Clean was an uncorked genie, a creature out of Shahrazad released from the lamp/bottle to put his magic at the disposal of the homemaker. In this case, the brand was actually removing meaning from the icon, not supplementing or multiplying this meaning.
Perdue is famous for branding what all the world thought was an unbrandable commodity, and an agency did so by making Frank Perdue a man who just a little too obsessed with chickens. Really this was a pitch about quality, but because it was dressed up as a story about Mr. Perdue, a little narrative was allowed to "sneak in."
Sneak in and stay put. The Frank Perdue story is not told by anyone else on any other media. Consumers are not encouraged to elaborate, and one can only imagine what would happen if the writers of comic books and satire were to take up the narrative "challenge" (Ozzie Osbourne, etc). Besides which, the meaning making vehicle is a fanciful version of an actual man, Frank Perdue, and there are limits to what we can do here.
There is more to think about here and I think Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s and now deceased, made for a meaning making vehicle that had a little more narrative range. I think consumers liked him because they began to make attributions and imputations of their own. He was, as we used to say of Archie Bunker, lovable in a quirky way. And "quirky" is of course a clear signal that we are veering slightly away from the well worn tracks of narrative in our culture…or at the very least we have struck complexity and that’s interesting.
But, neither Perdue nor Thomas, opened up real narrative possibilities that could be explored by several parties in several media. In a strange, imperfect way, celebrity endorsers help do this…as when Uma Thurman appears in an ad for a wrist watch. What Ms. Thurman is mostly lending is her celebrity, but little bits of her filmic narratives break off and "lodge" in the brand image. It depends upon the viewer whether these bits are Uma Thurman from Kill Bill, Dangerous Liaisons, or, God help us, Be Cool. But it is probably true that the narrative traces Ms. Thurman brings to an endorsement, she takes with her when she moves on.
And this raises the question of why it is that advertising, marketing and branding should have been so disinterested in narrative at all, let alone multiple narratives? Some of this I think we can put down to a certain "good enough for television" laziness. Some of it was due perhaps do the media hierarchy that encouraged marketing to know its place. Narrative was for the older, grander discourses. (And this was perhaps not a bad trade off after all. It forced the marketer to work with haiku economy. It also released the brand from the constraints of narrative.) And some of it may come from marketing’s early and sometimes inadvertant committment to cocreation. The more specific one was about the narrative for, say, Mr. Clean the more limited was the creative freedom left to the consumer. Or to put this more positively, it may be that the marketing team saw that Mr. Clean was more compelling when less specific.
But just when we think that there is really no place for transmedia in the world of brands, two words come to mind: "soap opera." According to Robert Allen, this form first appeared in 1930, "when Chicago radio station WGN approached first a detergent company and then a margarine manufacturer with a proposal for a new type of program: a daily, fifteen-minute serialized drama." By 1937, the soap opera, Allen says, "dominated the daytime commercial radio schedule and had become a crucial network programming strategy for attracting such large corporate sponsors as Procter and Gamble, Pillsbury, American Home Products, and General Foods. Most network soap operas were produced by advertising agencies, and some were owned by the sponsoring client." The TV version of the soap opera was created by Procter and Gamble in 1950.
The thing about soap operas, I believe, is that they were not tightly controlled by the advertising agency or brand. They were narrative enterprises that were simply allowed to run in that slightly crazy way that soap operas do, jumping wildly between plot lines, doubling back upon themselves unexpectedly, resurrecting the dead and banishing the living with nary an explanation or acknowledgment. Indeed there was so little narrative disipline here that the soap opera might as well have been unfolding across media platforms. But on closer scrutiny, we must acknowledge the obvious: there was precious little multiplicity of authority or mixing of media at work here.
But there is something of interest here, nonetheless. For here brands had apparently found a way to draw value from narrative without binding this narrative close to the breast. And this is remarkable. It suggests a time in the history of marketing when brands and narratives were "fellow travellers," when a loose association between the two was not only acceptable but efficacious. If was enough for P&G to sponsor a soap on an enduring basis for P&G to make itself the beneficiary of the exercise. (I don’t doubt there was some "forced march" association [e.g., product placement] as well.)
Ok, I’ve done it again: running out of time and no doubt, the reader’s patience. I promise to wrap this up tomorrow.
References
Allen, Robert. n.d., Soap Opera, an essay presented by the Museum of Broadcast Communications. here.
Jenkins, Henry. forthcoming. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Intersect. New York: New York University Press.
post script:
This is entry number "500" here at This blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics. I’m taking everyone to the bowling alley this afternoon, if you feel like coming. I believe there will be pony rides in the parking lot. The clowns, they’re iffy. See you there.
American Icon
Goofy was enormous. At least four feet tall. Standing guard at the door of the giftshop with that…look on his face.
The giftshop belonged to the Marriott and the Marriott stood within shouting distance of Disneyland.
So the Marriott was loaded with families coming to and from this holyland of branded entertainment.
An American Boyhood
I couldn’t feeling like that the Goofy doll was looking a little tacky, as if he’d been punked out in polyester. But as I was standing there, a family of four walked by, struggling with their luggage, obviously on their way home. The little boy, about 7, said with unmistakeable sorrow,
"Goodbye, Goofy."
It might look like 5 dollars of polyester to me, but for this little boy, Goofy was a god. Well, not so much a god as a someone with whom he had a deep and enduring emotional connection. One trip to Disneyland, a couple of hours of cartoons, and maybe a comic book or two, and this polyester bundle had slipped the bounds of implausibility and morphed into matter that mattered a lot. This childhood would be shaped, warmed, and animated by a guy called Goofy.
American Girl
I had lunch in Chicago recently with my esteemed fellow ethnographer, Rita Denny. Rita was telling me about the phenomenon called American Girl. I resolved to go see the American Girl store for myself. There’s one just off Michigan Avenue, and it was a short walk.
Trundling up the Avenue, I began to see young women clutching dolls, walking with a interesting mixture of urgency and self composure. This is one of those moments when a little cultural literacy goes a long way. Had I seen these girls before my lunch with Rita, I’d have been merely puzzled. But with an ethnographer’s expert briefing, I thought, "oh, very good, American girls on their way to American Girl."
American Girl was founded by Pleasant T. Rowland in 1985. The enterprise centers on 8 characters, each from a different moment in American history. Thus, Molly is 9 year old with pig tails and bands. Molly has seven novels. The first opens with Molly’s father going off to war, and the last, Changes for Molly: A Winter Story, describes Molly’s life in 1944 as she awaits her father’s return.
"Molly," then, is a character with several manifestations, the novels, the doll, and the accessories. Molly can be "reached" at the American Girl retail store, website, catalogue and magazine. The last was founded in 1992 and now has 650,000 subscribers.
American Girl was acquired by Mattel in 1998. Almost certainly, this is a classic case of an entrepreneur, Ms. Rowland, coming up with an innovation too strange and wonderful to interest the mainstream players in the early days. But Ms. Rowland struck a cord, stayed close to her audience, and tried things the "doll makers" would not contemplate. Thoughtful, observant, creative, risk taking, the enterpreneur creates explosive growth and Mattel is obliged to step in and buy out. Barbie meet Molly (and move over).
Transmedia
I have been thinking about Goofy of the Marriot and Molly of Michigan Avenue for awhile now, but it was not until I spend a day with my colleagues at MIT that things began to click. Henry Jenkins, with his colleagues and his students, is working on a notion called "transmedia." Here’s how Jenkins defines it:
A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.
Jenkins offers The Matrix as a case in point. This "property" is now three movies, a program of animated films, a series of comics, a couple of games…and counting.
So what happens if we thinking about brands from a transmedia point of view? I don’t mean only entertainment brands like the Matrix or Star Wars. I mean products like Campbell’s Soup, Coca-Cola, Mr. Clean, Purdue (chicken), and Brown Jordan (furniture). Should these brands "go transmedia." Is this the way to build the brand that will speak to the consumers of the 21st century?
The answer tomorrow. Please come back Part II. [Sorry, I ran out of time.]
Reference
Jenkins, Henry. Forthcoming. Convergence culture: Where old and new media intersect. New York: New York University Press.
Sony has opened a department of unintended irony and not a moment too soon.
As we noted a couple of days ago, terrible damage was done to the brand by the installation of anti-piracy software and the world is reacting badly to the PlayStation graffiti ad campaign. This might have been the moment for a little brand triage but the department is keen on other things.
We have news from Britain of a new Sony Bravia campaign called Balls. It features 250,000 colored rubber balls wildly, joyfully descending the hills of San Francisco (as pictured).
I know what you’re thinking but, no, a "balls out" visual staged at one of the centers of the American gay community is not the unintended irony I’m talking about. I mean the notion that Sony is a corporation that should be associated with creativity unleashed.
In her review of the campaigh, Barbara Lippert, of Adweek, has this to say:
As an object, a ball is an apt metaphor for creativity and expression. A self-contained geometric form, it releases and controls energy and provides kids and grownups alike a way to create intricate shapes and games. Shown in their multicolored aggregate in the spot, balls, like people, form crowds. We see the power and vitality (and aggression) in numbers. But at the same time, the tender, distinctive hues of individuals tend to shine through. […] There are shots of balls flying like birds in the sky, and also interesting cuts, once they have fallen, of how they pool at the curbs in random and beautiful groups.
Well and good. (And very nicely put). In sum, this ad is wildly at odds with the Sony we know, especially the anti-piracy debacle and the grafitti error. It is also at odds with the arrogant performance of Andrew Lack and his antagonism of Sony partner, Bertelsmann AG. Joy, untrammeled creativity, the exburance of motion and commotion, these are not the properties that spring to mind when we think of Sony.
There is one objective correlative that might work here. Sony project Spider-Man 3, is scheduled for release in 2007, and it’s budget happens to be around $250 million. Could it be that the Bravia ad is a representation, at $1000 a ball, of the sheer scale of the Spider-Man 3 risk?
Shareholder communication, it’s just so important these days.
Reference
Kelly, Kate and Ethan Smith. 2005. Sony’s Stringer Faces Havoc At Two Units. The Wall Street Journal. December 5, 2005; Page B1. (sorry, wsj not giving my the URL)
Lippert, Barbara. 2005. Barbara Lippert’s Critique: The Old Ball Game. Adweek. November 07, 2005. here.
Football has been called war by other means. As a grand exercise in strategy and tactics, it might also be called business by other means. For some purposes, football is America by other means.
So when someone comes along and threatens to change football at its core, well, we have to pay attention. Enter Coach Leach of Texas Tech, the object of an article in the NYT Sunday Magazine.
changing the game
Coach Leach has created a football program that punches above its weight. Typically, he works with kids who are not nationally scouted or ranked. But what he does with them is not to be believed. All of his quarterbacks have distinguished themselves, and B.J. Symons set a college record passing 5833 yards in a single season. The kid threw for more than 3 miles.
Coach Leach has done this without the aid of charisma…for he is unprepossessing. He is in fact sometimes mistaken for the equipment manager. In a sport that has many formidable-looking contestants, he’s the one "with this look on his face like he’s walking around an airport, lost."
An illuminating moment from Lewis’ excellent piece in the NYT:
Last year, after a loss to Texas A.&M. in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. […] The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was …. just talking about pirates. The quarterback Cody Hodges says of his coach: "You learn not to ask questions. If you ask questions, it just goes on longer."
Bloggers live for ideas, and this sort of thing kind of makes Coach Leach sound like a man after our own, usually pacific, hearts. Wrong. Coach also loves the violence of the game, counselling his players to go out "and knock the living dog snot out of people."
what is Coach doing to football?
Coach Leach’s has changed the configuration of the offensive unit, spreading it out on the line of scrimmage, so that it looks more like flag football than tackle football. The defense must now contend, as Lewis puts it, with "a truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them."
Leach uses 5 receivers (not the usual 3). They run routes that are many, various and variable
There is no play book. There are places that the offensive player is supposed to stand, things he is supposed to do.
Leach gives his quarterback the authority to change the play at the line of scrimmage,
"He [the quarterback] can see more than I’ll ever see. If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn’t get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there’s a ton of touchdowns to be had."
Speed is the order of the day. Texas Tech players are smaller and faster than their opponents.
Coach makes sure that everyone gets the ball. This is not "sharing."
"You try to get the ball in everyone’s hands because then it makes the whole offense harder to keep track of."
That’s the real objective: to maximize the complexity faced by the opposition while keeping things as simple as possible for Texas Tech players.
Oh, there’s one more thing. Iteration. Coach likes to try everything in order to discover the weaknesses of the opponent. Where do they really panic? Some of his plays are run for the purpose of discovery. They are not so much plays as fact-finding missions.
But doesn’t this waste plays? Leach runs such a prolific offense he can afford to spend plays on fact findng. Most college football time run 70 plays a game. Texas Tech aims for 90.
Hmmm…
So let’s review Coach uses speed to exhaust, variety and variation to confuse, iteration to discover, and improv to improve just-in-time responsiveness. Football has been hardening into orthodoxy for some years now. Coach appears to be doing his best to turn football into something more like basketball.
Wait a second, who does this sound like?
That’s what I thought, too. It sounds like Coach Leach is running Texas Tech the way AG Lafley is running P&G. Both appear to have a page from the complexity theory "play book." They have created organizations that are prolific, fast, responsive. They have taken organization once committed to "ball control" and "grinding it out," and made them creatures of something much closer to true dynamism.
In the case of football, this change comes, perhaps, not a moment too soon. I heard today that Monday Night Football will be consigned to cable (ESPN, but still). Now that there is a plenitude of options (lots more sports, lots more things competing with sports), it is perhaps time for football to step it up a little. I mean, some of the games this season, it’s been like listening to Coach talk about pirates for 3 hours.
References
Lewis, Michael. 2005. Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep. New York Times Sunday Magazine. December 4, 2005. here.
