Monthly Archives: January 2006

Life style construction: a training ground for marketers

OriginalchaplogoRussell Davies has kindly asked me to act as a visiting professor at the Account Planning School of the Web.  I am honored.

Now I must think of an assignment.  Here’s one.  It’s called "Building a lifestyle."  By "lifestyle" I mean the characteristic choices from media and material culture that a group of consumers uses to define itself and the world.  I cast the net wide to include: the Rat Pack, Preps (in the 1980s), Sloan Street Rangers, Geeks, Chaps (see the website http://www.thechap.net), Mods, Rockers, Skinheads, Hippies, the New Georgians, and so on.  You get the idea.  (See the bibliography below for supporting documents and other suggestions.) 

The Rat pack life style includes characteristic choices in how to conduct oneself in public (fist fights OK), a style of language (lots of beatnik talk), highly characteristic dress (styling suits with thin labels and ties), a defining way of thinking about and treating women, a very particular view of maleness, a very particular view of the world (self advertising mixed with deep solidarity, splashy, public, brawling) and so on.  (How particular was this lifestyle versus other lifestyles of the postwar period?  Try to imagine Cary Grant as a Rat Pack member, or any of the Rat pack guys as Cary Grant.)

I want APSW students to design a lifestyle from the ground up, specifying favorite music, films, novels, style of dress, home furnishing, style of speech and so on.  Make it cohere in some ways.  Make it inconsisent in other.  Build in some contradictions.  It is the latter two, as much as the first, that make a lifestyle live. 

I am tempted to impose this constraint: For American students, the demographic segments lives in the American sunbelt.  For British students, they live in the Home counties.  In both cases, these consumers are middle class, retired and over the age of 55.  Nota benne: this age group is still often stereotyped as unimaginative and culturally conservative.  The rest of us know better.  There are NO constraints here.  Take for granted that this segment is as creative and reckless as any other. 

Education Objectives

1. Great account planners, in my experience, are informed about their cultures.  They know life styles.  My hope is that building life styles will make students sensitive to the issue of lifestyle and more appreciative of naturally occurring choices.

2. Many of the great brands came up by drawing inspiration and loyalty from a new lifestyle (Jeep, Scotch, natural food, and so on).  And some brands have actually created a new lifestyle (Starbuck’s Third space, Nike’s athletics for everyone).  This is the original "blue ocean" strategy.  Build a lifestyle and some part of consumer loyalty, taste and preference belongs to the corporation.  (This way lies glory and ever lasting fame for the account planner.)  This is something more than an exercise.

This may or may not be the final form of the assignment.  I will look to Russell for his advice.   

Reading suggestions

Allsop, Kenneth. 1964. The Angry Decade: a survey of the cultural revolt of the nineteen-fifties. London: Peter Owen Limited.

Artley, Alexandra, and John Martin Robinson. 1985. The New Georgian Handbook. London: Ebury Press.

Asimov, Eric. 1996. The New Bad-Boy Sound: Space Age Pop. The New York Times January 6, 1996: E2.

Barr, Ann, and Peter York. 1982. The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook: The first guide to what really matters in life. London: Ebury.

Belk, Russell W. 1986a. Yuppies as Arbiters of the Emerging Consumption Style.  514-19. Advances in Consumer Research, ed. Richard J Lutz. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research.

Birnbach, Lisa, ed. 1980. The Official Preppy Handbook.  New York: Workman Publishing.

Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Cohen, Leonard. 1966. Beautiful losers. New York: Viking Press.

Dyer, Richard. 1994. Fashioning Change: Gay men’s style.  Stonewall 25: The making of the Lesbian and Gay community in Britain. editors Emma Healy, and Angela Mason, 178-88. London: Virago Press.

Finestone, Harold. 1960. Cats, Kicks and Color. in Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the person in mass society. editors Maurice R. Stein, Arthur J. Vidich, and David Manning White, 435-48. Glencoe?: The Free Press.

Fitzgerald, Frances. 1987. The Castro. in Cities on a Hill: A journey through contemporary American cultures. Frances Fitzgerald, 25-119. New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster.

Heerdegen, Juergen, and Andrew Dickson. Straight-edge.com.

Katz, Jon. 2000. Geeks how two lost boys rode the Internet out of Idaho. 1st ed ed. New York: Villard Books.

Kluver, Billy. 1997. A Day with Picasso: Twenty-four Photographs by Jean Cocteau. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Swingers. 1996. Doug Liman.

Lippert, Barbara. 1995. Our Martha, Ourselves. New York Magazine May 15, 1995: 26-32, 35.

Twist. 1992. Ron Mann.

Sager, Mike. 1995. Generation H. GQ 65, no. 9: 276-83, 303, 306.

Watson, Steven. 1995. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, rebels and hipsters, 1944-1960. New York: Pantheon Books.

Wolfe, Tom. 1970. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Cursor crawl: a postmodernist afflication

I am still in Pasadena, bathing in the decanted light that is winter in southern california.  The conference on luxury by Virginia Postrel was really interesting, and I got to hear several very smart people say some revelationally smart things.

But as I wait to leave for the airport, I realize I have that terrible affliction, cursor crawl.  The cursor on my screen is no longer still.  It now heads up the screen at a slow but steady pace.  This turns my GUI into a game of whack-a-mole.  No sooner have I positioned the cursor over the thing I wish to "click" than it serenely continues its journey upwards, so that by the time I click, I am out of range.  Now, I position the cursor below the thing I wish to click, and wait.   Crawl and click, it’s a brand new game from Kenner. 

This should be a minor convenience, and, if I had a sense of humor, it might even be a little fun.  But instead it is pretty close to agony.  Watching the cursor crawl up the screen is indeed so painful, it might as well be making that sound of a nail on a blackboard.  Something happens to my nervous system, and I feel like shouting (which, it turns out, is not allowed at a Westin).

Something has happened to my nervous system.  It now presupposes the existence of computer technology (in this case a ThinkPad X40).  This machine is no longer "at my finger tips."  It is now my finger tips and, in good moments, the instrumentality that does my bidding in the electronic world.  To have some part of this malfunction begins to feel like a very personal malady, and an intolerable handicap.

This evokes a one of the theme’s of Virginia’s conference: that the luxuries of one generation have a way of becoming the necessities of the next.  This effect has happened in my life time.  Email, once kinda of useful, is now essential.  When failing technology turns it into a game of whack-a-mole, well, I’m a deeply unhappy guy.  I believe Adam Smith would understand.

Oh, no, no mo Bono! (the davos delirium continues)

Bono Brands can do many things.  They can carry many meanings.  They can address many issues.  But should they be asked to do what Bono wants them to?

Yesterday, Bono announced from Davos that his new brand, Product Red, will be partner with brands such as American Express, Gap, Giorgio Armani and Converse.  Proceeds from this partnership will go to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

This is consistent with social marketing and what is sometimes called conscience consumerism.  And it is part of Bono’s larger undertaking: to use his celebrity to influence governments and the private sector to create social good.   

I can’t help feeling there is something grandly presumptuous about Bono when he acts like this.  This is a man we have elevated in the larger scheme of things because some believe he is a gifted musician and entertainer.  That he should now appoint himself a moral spokesperson is I think a little dubious.  Nelson Mandela can be a spokesperson.  Bono, not so much.  (I believe we must doubt Bono’s credentials even if we accept the Romantic notion that artists have a special connection to the zeitgeist of the moment and to this extend a special moral authority to speak to us and for us.  I believe that Bono is insisting on a mandate he does not have, that we did not give him.)

Some people will say "what can it hurt?"   Bono may be a nitwit.  The corporations may be ill advised to use their brands in this manner.  Some good will be accomplished and in a zero sum world this is a good that would not otherwise have been accomplished.  Only the hard of heart would interfere with this noble cause.

This is the argument that underpins many liberal causes.  The larger good accomplished eclipses any doubts we might have about the precise logic of the proposition.  Really, what can it hurt?

Here’s an argument.  Why not argue that Product Red permits the individual to believe that their philanthropic work is done.  Indeed, if they $.25 that goes from my purchase to to Global Fund gives me the sense that I am absolved of larger donorship responsiblities, what has been accomplished?  If the consumer believes that he or she "gave at the Gap," Bono branding is a tremendously bad idea. 

What I especially dislike is that when Product Red purchase substitutes for philanthropy, philanthropy loses its transperancy.  I no longer know who I am giving to.  I no longer take responsibility for making this decision in the first place, or for monitoring it in the second. 

But I am also uncomfortable with the brandng mechanics that ensue.  Building and deploying brands is a fabulously complicated business.  As it is, most corporation engage in good works (Timberland happens to be a great case in point here) but the moment they sing their own praises, we look on them askance.  Just do it, we tell them.  Don’t brag about it.  (And this is one of the reasons Timberland has not made a great public fuss about the exemplary generosity.)  There is something about generosity that springs from extrinsic motives that makes the gesture manifestly less generous. 

This raises a nice little "if a tree falls" paradox for the marketer.  If things are done, but no word goes out, what indeed was done…from a marketing point of view.  I leave this problem to nimbler wits than my own.  I wish merely the raise the possibility that Product Red may not be an alloyed good.  Let us look this gift horse in the mouth. 

Misreading Adam Smith (and, why we love technology)

Adam_smithSorry not to have posted yesterday.  I am in Pasadena for a conference and only narrowly survived JetBlue passage from JFK.  It is 6 hours in the air, 9 all together and it took awhile before powers of thought and speech returned.

I had the occasion to observe how powerfully the JetBlue brand manages to make the best of a bad situation and very close quarters.  And I have never been so grateful for the good company of bad TV.  But there is a limit to what even great brands to do, and over 6 hours, the press of fellow passengers makes the whole thing feel like steerage, or, possibly, that we have been kidnapped and stuffed in a trunk.  My advice: use this airline only for shorter flights, and then be careful to sit in the back of the plane where there are two extra inches of room.

I also had occasion to read a little Adam Smith, specifically passages from The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  (I don’t care how crowded the plane, there’s always room for the other Scottish philosopher.)  As an anthropologist interested in economics, you would think that I know my Smith left, right and center.  The truth is otherwise. 

Too bad.  Because here I discovered Smith offering a very anthropological account of why we care about technology.  The second paragraph could have been written to describe any one of us, burdened as we usually are by a laptop, PDA, cell phone, and Blackberry.  As Smith says, we "walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles."

A watch, in the same manner, that falls behind above two minutes in a day, is despised by one curious in watches. He sells it perhaps for a couple of guineas, and purchases another at fifty, which will not lose above a minute in a fortnight. The sole use of watches however, is to tell us what o’clock it is, and to hinder us from breaking any engagement, or suffering any other inconveniency by our ignorance in that particular point. But the person so nice with regard to this machine, will not always be found either more scrupulously punctual than other men, or more anxiously concerned upon any other account, to know precisely what time of day it is. What interests him is not so much the attainment of this piece of knowledge, as the perfection of the machine which serves to attain it.

How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew’s-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.

Now, its clear that Smith wants to make this argument to take issue with ideas of utility he wishes to correct, and it is clear that to use this argument for my own purposes, I am misreading it, or at least removing it from its proper rhetorical and logical context.

But, hey.  (Now that’s a nice little anthropological moment, isn’t it?  You know exactly what I am doing with "but, hey" [telling you that I am going to do what I know I should, strictly speaking, not do] but you are capable of that interpretation only because you have occupied this culture for the last 20 years.  Mr. Smith, on the other hand, would be mystified.) 

It is as if Smith is saying that there is something about the object that serves as an expression of its use, that it works, when we look upon it, as an anticipation of itself, as a kind of prediction of its efficacy.  It’s as if Smith is saying that we treasure the object, that we take pleasure in the sight of the object, because it is a time machine showing us what it can do. 

The view of the object (watch or PDA) treats it as a statement of the owner’s enablement or potentiality.  And clearly the other Scottish philosopher was on to something.  Objects add enablement to the owner.  Without apology or hesitation, we claim this enablement as our own.  Nice work, Mr. Smith.   The utility is not (only) the function.  The utility is not (only) the enablement.  The utility is (also) that new confidence that in a world of astonishing complexity and dynamism, we are enabled. 

The trouble with anthropology and economics is that they meet only at an intersection, and then proceed, without a second thought or a fare thee well, in different directions.  So it’s charming when we may suggest, however dubiously, that this was not always so, that a founding economist saw us whole. 

References

Smith, Adam.  1759. Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation Consisting of One Section.  Part IV of The Theory of the Moral Sentiments.  Available on line here. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Virginia Postrel for bringing this passage to my attention.  See Virginia’s website here.

Branding brilliance from Apple

Apple_logo Sometimes, the right choice for the corporation is the wrong choice for the brand.

Take, for instance, Apple’s decision to install Intel chips in the Mac.  There are, clearly, good technical reasons for this move.  But the potential branding consequences…yikes!

The Apple-PC contest breaks along one of the ideological fault lines in our culture.  It pits creativity against productivity, individuals against corporations, imagination against pragmatism. 

Jobs had paid hugely for this position.  Apple became the right machine for the design department, and the wrong machine for the rest of the corporation.   Expensive.  Heroic.  Brand building.

And now at risk.  Putting an Intel chip in an Apple machine, isn’t that like embracing the enemy?  The Mac now had a stow away, an alien on board.  What if, late at night, as we slept, the spirit of the PC slipped out of the chip into the soul of the Mac?  What if the brain of the machine changed the soul of the machine?  What if Mac lost its Macness, and the magnificient brand equity for which Jobs had paid so dearly? 

Well, if you are Apple, you do the right thing.  You confront the problem head on with a little anticipatory meaning management.  Hence the ad that’s been playing this week. 

We are in a clean room.  Technicians are handling a piece of hardware ever so delicately. 

The voice-over (Keiffer Sutherland):

The Intel chip
for years, its been trapped inside PCs
inside dull little boxes
dutifully performing dull little tasks
when it could have been doing
so
much
more
starting today the Intel chip will be set free
and get to live life
inside a Mac.
Imagine the possibilities

This neatly changes the polarity of the event.  It’s not Intel that will change Mac, but Mac that will change Intel.  In fact, the Mac is liberating the Intel chip from its PC captivity.  Indeed, Mac will do for the Intel what it does for those who use a Mac: make both more creative, interesting, engaged.  Beauty!

One particular word of praise: the lab technician who handles the chip in transition is perfectly cast and brilliantly directed.  Her face captures the gravity and the mischief of the event.  Her tiny smile of triumph forms our reaction, by suggesting it, inviting it, proposing it only.  Nice. 

And particular word of criticism: why choose Keiffer Sutherland as the voice over?  To be sure, it is a great voice, combining useful warmth and urgency.  But Sutherland is mostly shaped in the public mind by the show 24, in which he plays a man trapped in a machine he cannot understand.  Is this not precisely the image of the Intel chip we wish to avoid and that the ad struggles to f inesse?

The ad comes from TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles.  It can’t say that I was impressed with this agency when I worked with them for the Coca-Cola Company.  But they are on a tear at the moment.  The Los Angeles office is responsible for the "why" spot for Jimmy Dean.  (A man in a sun suit solemnly tells his daughter that his job is to light and heat the earth.  She responds by wrinkling her nose in the world’s most delicate performance of devoted dubiety ever caught on film.)  The New York office of TBWA\Chiat\Day is responsible for the Nextel "Dance Party" ad, which is very close to a thing of genuis.

It is sometimes the marketer’s job is to build the brand.  Sometimes, it’s our job to remove the brand from harm’s way.  Hat’s off to Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day for an amazing piece of anticipatory meaning management. 

References

The Mac-Intel-Apple ad, here. 

The Nextel ad, here.

For more on the agency, here. 

Charlie Rose doesn’t get it

InternbadgesmBlogging is a funny enterprise.  Most of us define our interests broadly.  No one has a specific mandate that says "look here," or "examine that."  We consult our sources, and wait for something to ping.

A ping says "there’s is something out there."  We don’t what it is.  We just know that it is.  It’s up to us to poke around till the ping reveals itself. 

This morning started with a story in the New York Times about Robert A. Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company and Steven P. Jobs, chief of Pixar Animation.

Ping.

This is a story about an old media player working with a new media player.  And the contrast between Iger and Jobs is thoroughgoing.  These guys are different by temperment, interest, outlook.  The fusion point is potentially a fission point, and that makes the Disney-Pixar connection is a nice opportunity to observe worlds in transition (if not in turmoil).

But it turns out that what really captures one’s attention are the remarks by Brian Grazer.  Grazer is apparently a friend of Iger’s and when asked to comment, Grazer says that Iger and Jobs should get along well together because "Bob’s been No. 2 for so long he is not so covetous of power.  A partnership is more biomedically comfortable for him."

Ping!

"Biomedically comfortable"!  Steve, turn the sub around!  This is promising.  We have just had a glimpse of the inside of Brian Grazer’s head, and…and…and more data is required immediately.

So I googled Brian Grazer and, praise God, it looks like there is a Charlier Rose interview.  Mr. Rose is not the best interviewer in the world, but 60 minutes is lots and lots of data. 

Ping!

We can have the interview, but it turns out it’s going to cost $34.95 on DVD.  The transcript, by email, will cost $9.95.   There appear to be old shows from mid-1990s on Google Video that cost $.99.

Ping!

I thought public broadcasting was funded "by viewers like you."  And the Bloomberg website says "Major funding for CHARLIE ROSE is provided by Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Cisco Systems, and DLJ direct." 

But when we buy a DVD or a transcript, we appear to be paying Charlie Rose, Inc.  We would like to know more about this company, but the http://www.charlierose.com website is not forthcoming.  There is link called "about the show."  There is no "about charlie.rose inc."  All we get an address on Lexington Avenue in New York City. 

Ping.

Charlie Rose is withholding his interviews from the new media world.  He may be a man of the people on PBS, but on his own website, it’s strictly "pay per view."  The costs of distributing transcripts is of course neglible, and we must wonder why Mr. Rose is not a little more open source, participatory and generous about this.  In short, Bob Iger may not be the only person struggling to understand how new media and the internet change the world of ideas.  Intellectually and otherwise, old economies are giving way to new ones, and Charlie Rose doesn’t get it.  (Charlie Rose interviews all and sundry and he still doesn’t get it.  This is most odd.)

Ping.

Charlie Rose appears to be using public, philanthropic, and donor funds to produce these interviews.  Then, apparently, he keeps the rebroadcast proceeds for himself.   This is not a new media problem.  This would appear to be a very old fashioned issue of morality and ethics. 

References

Holson, Laura and John Markoff.  2006.  At Disney, a Dealmaker in the Grip of Technological Change.  New York Times.  January 23, 2006.  here. 

For the Bloomberg claim about Charlie Rose funding, here. 

Amazon goes Hollywood

Amazon_1According Brandweek,

Amazon.com will attempt to expand its brand by offering a weekly online program, Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher. Streamed live through a high-definition media player, the program, slated to run for 12 weeks starting June 1, will begin showing previews on Tuesday, Jan. 24.

According to Amazon,

Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher has a simple, yet powerful mission-to help our customers discover new books, films, and music, and to help the creators of these works find new audiences. (Kathy Savitt, Amazon.com vp for strategic communications, content, and initiatives, as quoted in Anonymous 2006, below).

Now this raises some of the same problems we discussed yesterday, but it also confronts us with a spectre much more terrifying: undue brand specificity. 

The really great brands are a study in multivocality.  So when you sit down with consumers and ask them to tell you about the brand, the first reaction is often, "well, let’s see, Coca-Cola, it’s, well, its sort of.  I mean, you see, its…"

Now normally when this happens in an interview, the consumer is spitting nails of frustration  (fixing the anthropologist to the methodological cross in the process), but in this case, even as they are stumbling over their words and virtually drooling with indecision, they are smiling…and this is because they are talking about something that is many things to them.

Amazon is not an old brand, but it has taken on some of this magnificient indeterminacy.  Amazon was beginning to take on that transcent quality that great brands have.  If you thought about it, it was equal parts the Pacific Northwest, Jeff Bezos, tremendous choice, the death of retail, and particularly a respite from the horrifying push and shove of December shopping.  There is something magical about the brand, as in, "I want Tom Asacker’s new book on my doorstep tomorrow" and there it is. 

There is even something endearing about the brand, and I think this comes from those sometimes wildly  mistaken recommendations Amazon makes from time to time.  ("It’s trying," we think to ourselves, "it’s trying.")    It’s almost as if Amazon the brand bears a resemblance to Bezos the man.  Both are transparent, agreeable, eager to please.  (No trace of the smugness of a Bill Gates or the arrogance of a Steve Jobs.)   But we know there has to be lots more going on.  And there is it.  Some brand traces…and a certain indeterminacy.

This is put at risk when Amazon appoints Bill Maher as a voice of the show.  Here Maher is in November of 2005, talking Bush’s "big bird flu speech."

[Bush] made a big announcement today which – and, look, bird flu could be real. My parakeet used to say, "Polly want a cracker," and now it says, "I’m bleeding out of my rectum."

Funny…but vulgar, anti-Bush, and anti-pet.  (And in this country, presidents may be fair game, but pets are still sacred.)  The mismatch between Maher and Amazon grows still more marked when Maher is strident and scornful, as he almost always is.  This is really unBezosian.  Indeed, it pushes the Bezos image in the direction of Gates and Jobs, and perhaps beyond.

But the real problem is that it is, as any single voice must be, particular.  And this interferes with the brand indeterminacy that Amazon needs.   Great brands are a house of many mansions and there is always that transcendant quality.  The last thing we want is a new face and a particular voice for the brand. 

Long term solutions

This is a short term problem.  There will come a time when consumers become familiar with the idea that the brand speaks with many voices.  Some of them already grasp this and have come to expect it. 

But let’s face it: many consumers and that’s because we keep insisting that the brand is a single thing and that it speak with a single voice.  I give you this announcement from Brandweek.

Wal-Mart has named auto industry veteran Julie Roehm as svp-marketing communications, responsible for the overall development and execution of advertising strategies, creative services and special events for Wal-Mart Stores U.S.A. She will report to John Fleming, Wal-Mart’s chief marketing officer. This is a new position within the company.

"By creating a single source of responsibility for our marketing communications, we will ensure the consistency of our message to our customer," Fleming said in a statement. "We want our customers to know that whatever their shopping needs, Wal-Mart provides products and services that are relevant to their lifestyle, at great value. Julie’s experience will be instrumental in our efforts to showcase that message." (emphasis added)

There we go again, insisting on consistency in the age of the long tail when consistency is where brands go to die. 

So Amazon’s problem is a short term one.  One day, there will come a time when Amazon will be able to use Bill Maher and Dennis Miller as simultaneous spokespeople.  (There will come a time when it has to.)  But until then let us wonder about this choice of Maher.  It will not be good for the brand. 

References

Anonymous.  2006.  Amazon Expands Footprint with Original Programming.  Brandweek.  January 19, 2006.  here.

Maher, Bill.  2005.  Real Time with Bill Maher.  November 4, 2005.  Transcripts on line.  here.

O’Loughlin, Sandra.  2006.  Chrysler’s Roehm Drives Over To Wal-Mart.  Brandweek.  January 18, 2006.  here.

Starbucks goes Hollywood

StarbucksLast week, Starbucks announced its interest in a closer connection with Hollywood.  For starters, it will promote a Lions Gate film called Akeelah and the Bee in return for an undisclosed portion of the box office proceeds.

Hollywood is thrilled, I’m sure, at the prospect of a new marketing vista and the opportunity to reach the consumer in the uncluttered space of the Starbucks. 

But what’s in it for Starbucks? 

Well, there are those dreams of empire.  As Gray and Kelly of the WSJ put it,

Starbucks Corp., having conquered the coffee business and staked a claim in music, is setting its sights on Hollywood.

Starbucks is so very good at the coffee business that it must be getting restless.  Plus, Schultz has always insisted that he is in the "lifestyle" business and he recognizes Hollywood as the most important lab benches for cultural (and lifestyle) innovation.  This partnership is well advised.

And as the WSJ points out, with drive-through windows and breakfast sandwiches, Starbucks is now competing with McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts.  The Hollywood connection might be a useful point of difference.

Fair enough.  But I have a question.  What does this do to Starbucks as a "third space."  This was one of the great marketing accomplishments of our time: to see that there was the opportunity, the wish, for a space between work and home, and then to build it.  In effect, Starbucks was doing a little cultural innovation of its own.  North America has never been entirely comfortable with life in public.  Unlike the European cultures from which it sprang, public space in the new world was an excluded middle, not quite informal enough to give the comforts of home, not quite formal enough to be governed by the rules of work.  Hence, the drive through line…or, the restaurant in which we are aware of others only until conversation and the Bordeaux draws us into a world of our own.

Starbucks actually managed to build a third space, and then to monitize it.  Bravo.  How many of the success stories in American culture come from people who have the courage and smarts to give us cultural innovations of this kind?  (I give you the iPod, the Blackberry, the Coca-Cola Company, Nike, Sony, to name a few.)

So what happens to the third space when Starbucks "goes Hollywood?"  What happens when the third space fills us with DVDs and CDs, to say nothing of promotional messages on the sleeve of every coffee-cup. 

The WSJ sees a danger: "Starbucks could risk alienating customers or diluting the value of its brand if its promotions come on too strong."  And Ken Lombard, the man in charge of the Hollywood connection for Starbucks, does too:  "Our customers aren’t going to walk into their favorite Starbucks and suddenly feel like we’ve commoditized music and CDs."  Apparently, Starbucks will sell 20 or fewer titles at a time. 

But frankly, I am not reassured that Starbucks has thought through the potential danger.  (Just for starters, what the heck does Lombard think "commoditize" means?)  If I were a Wall Street analyst, I want to hear that benefit (new revenue streams, new connections to the beating heart of contemporary culture, new sources of interest in a Starbucks store) actually outweighs risk.  More precisely, I want to hear that the sacred ground of Starbucks retail is not going to be sacrificed in pursuit of a few extra bucks.  As it stands, this space has an interesting "hard to put your finger on" quality which I personally I like lot.  Shilling for Hollywood might give Starbucks a quality that’s really easy to put our finger on. 

What are the fundaments of the Starbucks brand?  It begins with the coffee.  It continues with the creation of a coffee connoisseurship that comes to us out of Venice (via Seattle).  But what is crucial here is what Starbucks managed to do with that retail space.  They gave it something.  And that something gives us something.  And they did such a good job here that not even the ubiquity of the Starbucks outlet (there are now 5,500 of them) has really damaged the magic of this space.  (In fact, it turns out that not even the now reliable truculence of the serving staff can damage the magic of this space.)

We are not good at thinking about how the Starbucks space creates value for the brand and adds value to the Starbucks proposition.  So it’s difficult for The Street to factor this in.  But when, as an investor, I pick up the Wall Street Journal, I want someone, preferably Lombard, to "run the numbers" here and reassure me that brand equity is in good hands.

As Katherine Stone put it rather nicely in a comment on this blog this morning, (referring to bad brand stewardship on the part of the Coca-Cola Company): "Here they go again siding with money over magic."  This is the story of American capital: corporations that build brands and then destroy them.  It is, to be sure, a death of a thousand cuts: a brand extension here, an ill advised partnership there.  It all seems like a good idea at the time.  But eventually the pursuit of minor profit sacrifices the real founts of value.  As Katherine’s remark reminds us, we understand more and more these days that the money comes from the magic, and that we "commoditize" this magic at our peril. 

What would it cost us in time, effort and investment to build a brand like Starbucks from scratch?  Could we build it from scratch?  Do we wish to put this accomplishment at risk?  Or, more exactly, when, where and how can we leverage the brand without diminishing it. 

For all I know, this Hollywood partnership may be exactly the right thing to do.  I guess what I want is the due diligence of a real analysis. 

Reference

Gray, Steven and Kate Kelly.  2006.  Starbucks Plans to Make Debut in Movie Business.  Wall Street Journal.  January 12, 2006. 

Google and the ad biz

GoogleMarc Babej at Being Reasonable tells us that Google appears poised to enter automated ad biz (Babej 2006 below). 

Google and Spot Runner (or something like it) could add up to a nasty scenario for the advertising establishment: automated ad placement, plus automated/mass produced creative, plus accountability via pay-per action. Word to the wise: the less you’d want to ponder this one, the more you probably should.

Spot Runner offers pre-fab ads in which a client merely inserts a company name, address and phone number.  There are several sample ads at the Spot Runner website (see below) and while they are not complete stinkers, they are bad enough to remind us why God created ad agencies.

I don’t doubt that pre-fab ads will actually ad value for little companies struggling to raise their profile in local markets.  I don’t doubt that "Bob’s warehouse" here in Southwest Connecticut would be well served by a Spot Runner ad.   (I think a number of us in my little town would be happy to pass the hat to create a "relief fund" for Bob (our own).)

There’s a reason why ads are custom made.  It is because meaning manufacture makes no sense when done in batches.  When an ad confers pre-fab meanings on a product or a brand, it’s going to look like a suit from Mark’s warehouse and it’s going to wear like one. 

It is easy to to accuse the agency of being distant, arrogant, unforthcoming, and indeed of turning out a little pre-fab of their own.  I’ve made this accusation myself (McCracken 2005b).  But finally good agencies deploy a range of talented people in the creation and execution of a very  difficult task.  They make brands.  And they made the fortune and the fortunes of the brand. 

As I was arguing several weeks ago (McCracken 2005a), Google doesn’t understand meaning manufacturer and their partnership with Spot Runnner (or something like it) is proof of this.  Lots of things can be routinized and manufactured by rote.  Ads, good ads, effective ads, are not among them.  (It’s moments like this that a $460.00 share price just seem too high.) 

References

Babej, Marc.  2006.  The Other Doomsday Scenario: Google Talks About Automated Creative. 
Being Reasonable.com.  January 18, 2006.  here.

Spotrunner ads can be found here. 

McCracken, Grant   2005a.  Google versus Madison Avenue: no contest here.  This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Economics and Anthropology.  November 1, 2005.  here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005b.  New Agencies, new clients.  This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Economics and Anthropology.  July 1, 2005.  here. 

Product placement as marketing malfeasance

Trump_1"Product placement" has been growing fast.  According to Brandweek, "the 10 most brand-saturated prime time network television shows showed 9,019 brands, up from 5,821 last year."   

Product placement (pp) was driven by several things.  One of these was the disappearing TV ad.  With people prepared to TIVO their way through a program, pp seemed like a good way to keep promotional materials front and center.  Also, pp helped dispense with the advertising agency, in the process allowing the brand team to save money and regain control.   

But now we are hearing a note of skepticism.  Brandweek‘s Jim Edwards is leading the charge. 

First, Edwards notes, the metrics have been inflated.  The figure used for pp is often $4 billion.  Edwards believes "the actual amount of money changing hands between marketers and various media firms was probably about $1.2 billion in 2005."  The traditional ad biz totals $265 billion.  Product placement gets a good deal of the ink these days, but it is, as Edwards says, "pocket lint" in the larger scheme of things. [quotes and figures in this paragraph from Edwards 2005]

Second, pp is bad for shows.  It is because it has been devoured by pp that The Apprentice is now in decline.  Christopher Raphael, president of The Really Spectacular Company in Warwick, N.Y., says The Apprentice grew large with pp as the "network and a producer jam[med] as much brand integration and product placement in [the] show as humanly possible."  The effects of the force feeding were clear.  Jeff Greenfield, evp of 1st Approach, says "The [Apprentice] ratings decline is in direct proportion to the amount of branded entertainment."  [quotes by Raphael and Greenfield are from Edwards 2006]

This tells us that there is a muddle in the marketing model.  No one quite expected that pp would damage the pp vehicle, but Edwards, Raphael, and Greenfield suggests its does.  Why?  "Endless, shameless shilling" is not the answer.  After all, these three terms define Donald Trump and his public career most precisely.  The Apprentice was not Macbeth.  (The boys in the lab have run the tests, and this much, they tell me, is clear.) The Apprentice had no artistic or cultural value to compromise.  But shilling still damaged the marketing vehicle (the show, not the man).  If Greenfield is to be believed it broke the show (not the man, apparently).  Hmmm.

Third, pp is bad for brands.   The issue of clutter is now indisputable.  Edwards (2006) says, "Last year, there were 110,322 shout-outs for brands. In 2004, it was only 84,119."   A show like The Real World, could have 30 to 40 brands on screen in the form of furniture, phones, computers and cars.   This is a lot of noise, and it put me in mind of the college student who sold every pixel on his website for a buck.  The price is right.  The plug is pointless.

Edwards says there is now some evidence of pp flight, with "the busiest brands […] trying to find shows with less product placement clutter." {Edwards 2005].  This tells us that the best practice practioners in pp now know the game is up.  They are looking for undistracted circumstances, but they must know that these too will one day fill up.  In other words, pp was a marketing model that could only work in the early days, and those days are passed. 

Four, I think we are entitled to ask whether the model worked even in the early days.  Pp was undertaken without any clear model or test of its efficacy.  People did it because they could.  They did it because they had to.  But they did not do it because it actually worked.  (Coulda…but we had no good grounds for supposing so.)

Here are my own grounds for skepticism.

First, PP works as a simplest act of exposure.  It assumes that simply seeing the product and or the brand will make the consumer more likely to buy it.  Hmmm.  This strikes me as dubious.  If simple exposure were enough, I wouldn’t be able to walk through a WalMart without leaving "heavy."  In fact, simple exposure persuades me to buy almost nothing. 

Second, the pp model may assume that there is something more than exposure going on here.  It might assume that seeing something on TV gives the product and or brand a certain aura of prestige or credibility or attractiveness.  (This is after all why stamping things "as seen on TV" is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing handbook.) 

If I may use unparliamentary language for a moment, this is simple minded bullshit.  As Edwards points out, reality programming has been the great testing ground of pp.  And what do we know about reality programming?  It was designed to make TV more like-life, that is to say: less glorious, less credible and less attractive.  The point of the exercise was to change the way we thought about things "as seen on TV."  This means there is no halo effect at work here. 

Third, I think this points up the real peril of the pp strategy.  For lots of reality programs appear to reside in Jerry Springer’s neighborhood.  The Real World is a little iffy from time to time.  Starting Over can be especially dubious.  (Yes, I have logged the long hours to say this.)  Come to that, The Apprentice is really just an extended joke about a pompous man with a tremendous comb over, a man with so little wit, grace, humor or intelligence he makes Mr. Burns (of The Simpsons) look pretty good by comparison. 

Are these really the sort of associations we are hoping for.  Down market pomposity…I just can’t believe this is what anyone really wants for their brand. 

Conclusion

It comes down to this.  The marketing community plunged into pp with scant regard for whether it would actually be good for the brand.  And this is, frankly, staggering.  I think we might be looking at one of the great acts of marketing malfeisance of our time.  Now, that Edwards has started asking the hard questions, I wonder if we don’t have a product-placement-gate on our hands. 

And to those marketers who embraced pp because it got them "out from under" the advertising agencies, I say this: there was a reason they worked as brand builders and meaning managers.  They actually knew a thing or two about syntagmatic association, as the linguists call it.  They were good at bringing the product and the brand into exquisitely careful association with other products, ideas, people and places so to engineer the transfer of meaning.  This is what we paid them for. 

Product placement is a simple minded exercise in paradigmatic selection, to use the other linguist’s term.  Pp just tosses the product into the TV show and hopes that it will not be lost in the shuffle of all those semiotic materials flying about there.  But when we do this, there is no real way for us to control the meaning a brand takes on or gives out.  We have effectively abandoned the brand to a random set of associations.  Some of these will be neutral.  Some of them will be very bad.  One or two might serve us.  Good, we are now managing our brand meanings by accident.  Pp is in effect an abdigation of the marketer’s responsibility.  Pp is a scandal no longer waiting to happen. 

Thanks to Jim Edwards for investigative reporting. 

References

Edwards, Jim. 2005. THE TRACKER: There’s Less Than Meets The Eye In TV Placement.  BrandWeek. December 19, 2005

Edwards, Jim.  2006. THE TRACKER: Coke Forces TV Placement Clutter Debate Into The Open. BrandWeek. January 16, 2006.

Hein, Kenneth.  2006. CAA, Coke relationship no longer H’wood dream
Company unhappy with agency.  The Hollywood Reporter. January 17, 2006.

[all of these require subscription.]

Rootgate: it’s getting worse and worse

Test_patternNice work by Brad Hill over at Digital Music Weblog on efforts by CEO  Howard Stringer to sort out the Sony copy protection debacle.

Howard Stringer’s much-publicized remarks about Rootgate, issued at CES, are so clueless as to amount nearly to a denial of reality. "Clearly the perception out there is that we shouldn’t be doing too much of that copy protection stuff." Actually, that’s not the main perception, though I wish it were.

[…]

But here’s where Stringer seems to be improvising wildly: "…protecting the artist’s right is not something that should be automatically dismissed by the push-and-pull generation." I’m sorry–the what? Did he say the push-and-pull generation? Is this a sexual reference? Does he mean the rip-and-burn generation? The point-and-click generation?

Brad decides that Stringer means the "on-demand" generation and this is, I think, a pretty good guess.  But this is odd.   Why are any of us having to guess when listening to a chief executive give  a formal address in the public arena on a matter of grave import to the Sony corporation.  (Especially when the speaker is an Oxford man, with a masters in history.  This is a guy who spent his life in an educational system that prizes clarity above all things.)

"Push and pull generation."  Perhaps Howard wishes to evoke young teens inclined to minor assault on a fair ground.  Does Howard feel like he’s been wilded?  Has this recent controversy about rootgate leave him feeling like he’s been "jumped in?"  Is this what the consumer looks like to the top man at Sony, a fractious crowd capable of minor violence and non-felonious assault?

If ever there were a measure of the gap between corporations and their consumers, the Rootgate debacle is it.  It demonstrates that Sony "does not get" the new contract and connection that is being fashioned slowly but surely between the two.   But then the CEO stands up and in the place of a full recantation treats us to phrases that are either a further demonstration of how little he understands his consumers, or a revelation of the disquieted assumptions he entertains about them. Most odd.

There is something impressive about this kind of candor, even if it is a little baffling.  I mean normally CEOs are scripted by PR and wander off script at their peril.  We are grateful for this opportunity to stare into the world view of the CEO (if that’s indeed what we have done).  Stringer is impressive: Oxford degrees, military service, Japanese speaker, distinguished career as a journalist, effortless administrator.  There is apparently nothing this guy can’t do.  So why can’t he get in touch with contemporary culture and the new marketplace?

References

Hill, Brad.  2006.  Howard Stringer’s Push and Pull Generation.  January 11, 2006. here.

Crumbs: how to write a sit com

Crumbs_1 Crumbs premiered last night on ABC.  Marc Berman calls it "the funniest new sitcom of the season."

Pam and I weren’t very many minutes into Crumbs when she exclaimed, "I know this story!"  Art was imitating life most precisely: a gay writer from Hollywood, the family owned restaurant, the 3 sons, one of whom dies tragically, the instability of one parent, the infidelity of the other.  It was as if Greenwich gossip had taken to the screen.  The very particular story of one local family was now the stuff of prime time TV. 

And this art imitates life once excluded from prime time TV, managing, in the opening 2 minutes, to reference gay sex, interracial sex, sex in a public place, sex with one’s psychiatrist, and sex with one’s hospital attendant.

John Crook says series creator, Marco Pennette, was "convinced such a show would be too unconventional and daring for a network to consider. Fortunately, in the wake of … wildly successful shows such as Desperate Housewives and Lost, ABC jumped at his pitch."  We might add to this the license established by HBO and cable TV.

Art raiding life turns out, in this case, to be good for a sit com.  It confers a certain freshness, a new narrative range, the ability to surprise.  Many sit coms are over formed.  All the narrative excitement must come from a single pretext.  On Two and A Half Men, this means working the rich but pretty narrow formula established by the Odd Couple.   

But Crumbs reaches out of the usual situations into family tragedy, personal hardship, and most powerfully into the particular and the idiosyncratic: a restaurant, a brother’s death, a mother’s mental illness, a father’s infidelity.  These are not the things that normally "make the cut" when creative choices are being made.  It is by hewing to life (or something life-like) that Pennette is able to import the unpredictable and so distinguish his show from the usual sit com. 

Jonathan Miller once argued that the surest way to starve a stage play was to make a character overdetermined.  He noted, for instance, that if we make confer upon the character all the characteristics that say, "elderly" (i.e., grey hair, stoped posture, quavering voice, myopic gaze and so on), that the character disappears from view.  The highly redundant character is invisible. The secret is to make sure that some part of the character "plays against type."  The voice should be youthful, or the hair red, or the clothing fashionable.  Some part of the character should be, strictly speaking, unexpected, unpredictable, and "wrong."  Now the character lives.

Of course, sit coms don’t simplify because writers are lazy or because we want our comedy dumbed down.  They narrow the narrative package because this is the gesture of economy on which all comedy depends.  We always remove from the signal anything that might interfere with reception.  Charlie Sheen as whathisname on Two And a Half Men is funnier when we don’t have a back story for him.  All communication must begin with a massive act of exclusion.  There is, in short, a good reason why most sit coms pare away the idiosyncratic and the particular.  They just get in the way.

So why is it that we are now willing to entertain entertainment with Pennettian surprises?  Why is the sit com now leaning in the direction of the stage play?  Why is it bowing to Miller’s dictim, having for so long scorned it?  I raised this question on Tuesday and several posters suggested that the answer lay in the book by Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You. 

But this mistakes the question I am asking.  I get that we are more sophisticated as cultural consumers.  I understand that DVDs and dot.com communication allows us to master complexity in ways we could not before.  I am asking a different question: what makes us want this kind of complexity, especially in an era in which we so routinely suffer information overload and attention deficits?

I think the answer might be that we are in a period of transition moving from cultural consumers to cultural producers.  We get the basic propositions of a TV show in one and then even as we take up residence in the show we question casting choices, cameras angles and the actors’ comedic timing.  We’re redoing the show "in our heads."   It’s as if we having extra processing cycles to work with. 

The thing about formulaic TV is that it represents a kind of tournament approach to creativity.  One idea takes all.  We decide the show is about an odd couple.  Hey, presto, the thing is done.  All that remains now is the ingenuity required to make the jokes extracted from the proposition witty enough to sustain our interest.  (And it is a measure of how very good are the writers and actors of Two Men that they have managed to sustain the thing this well this long.) 

And how that we are, in a sense, co-producers of the comedy in question we particularly resent the tournament model.  Give us any piece of the proposition and we can pretty much guess the rest.  Idiosyncratic comedy is harder and more interesting.   The combinatorial possibilities begin to multiply.  Predicting becomes much harder.  There is much more to second guess.  In effect, tournament comedy cuts us out of the action.  We like the big idea, or we don’t.  But there’s not much we can do about it.  Combinatorial comedy gives us somethng to work with.  And with all the extra processing time on our hands, we need something to work with.   

Of course, this is a way of going back to the Jenkensian point that says the cultural consumers are more sophisticated.  And I am quite sure that this take on Crumbs owes a good deal to my colleague at MIT, Sam Ford and his recent paper on Fan communities.  But I believe (rather too defensively?) that this approach to the new structural properties of popular culture takes us beyond the ground mapped out by Johnson. 

We shall see how Crumbs does.  But, in general, I think there is a "take-way" for those of us who craft the cultural artifacts of contemporary culture.  If we want engagement with a single consumer or a community of consumers, we  want to stuff the signal with the unpredictable and the idiosyncratic as surely as we once stripped this out.  Once committed to the unmistakable and the indubitable, popular culture has had a change of heart.

References

Berman, Marc.  2006.  The Programming Insider.  Friday.  January 13, 2006.  (I think this comes to me by special subscription.) 

Crook, John. 2006 ‘Crumbs’ Turns Family Pain into Dark Comedy.  http://www.tv.com.   here.

Ford, Sam.  2006.  Fan Communities.  White paper, Comparative Media Studies Department, MIT, in press.

Jenkins, Henry.  2006.  Convergence Culture.  New York: New York University Press.  Forthcoming.

Who’s Coke Is It, Anyway?

Coke_iiThere’s a great story in the WSJ yesterday about a new conumdrum for the Coca-Cola Company: American consumers are buying Coke made in Mexico. 

You might think that The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) would embrace this development.  After all, Classic sales are down %10 (since 2000) and the TCCC’s share of the industry is at an eight-year low.  Consumers are so passionate about "hecho en Mexico" Coke that they are prepared to pay a premium, as much as $.25 a bottle.  In an industry that moves heaven and earth to create (or protect) a two-penny margin, this is a staggering development, and very good news.  No?

No.  TCCC is now condemning Coke importation "as the work of bootleggers."  There are lots of technical reasons why TCCC should react this way, some to do with issues of formula, and some to do with the way production and distribution dovetail in  the TCCC system.  But I can’t help feeling that the hoped-for suppression of Mexican Coke is also driven by a disagreement over what "authenticity" means and a dispute over who owns the brand.

Some consumers now insist that Mexican Coke is a more robust brand than American Coke, not least because it is charged with meanings that American Coke never had, or long ago gave up.  In particular, Mexican Coke is charged with a powerful nostalgia, a remembrance of childhood south of the border.  (Hey, this is cultural meaning being monetized, and it turns out to be worth around $.25 a bottle!)

Now there was a time when American Coke had a meaning this powerful.  I think, for a time, the brand (as crafted by Norman Rockwell, among others) stood for the quintessential small town American experience.  This was compelling for native-born Americans who, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, migrated from small towns (and farms around them) into the cities.  The Coke message was here what it is in the Mexican case: a "world we have lost" nostalgia.

There was a second group who sought and bought the nostalgia message.  Many newly arrived Americans had come in pursuit of the small town dream (even as  they were now stuffed into big, Northern cities).  Indeed, for many of these people, American was what TCCC creative said it was, and Coke remained their connection to the America they would sometime call their own. (This would make the brand point in the opposite temporal direction, not nostalgic but anticipatory, even as the "quintessential American" meaning remained the same.)

That’s all gone now.  The Classic brand has lost its potency.  The old meanings have, variously, washed away, decaffinated, and lost their fizz.  It would be easy to blame TCCC for this loss of brand value but that would be facile of us.  In fact, the Classic brand has been diminished by all of the challenges that face every American brand: the fragmentation of the marketplace and America, the explosion of meaning makers, the crush of small, more potent, brand players, to name a few.

But sometimes the world comes to a brand’s rescue.  And it is hard not to think that this is precisely what has happened with Mexican Coke.  Here are consumers who have, for their own reasons, found a way to restore the brand to "real thing" status.  Hey, presto.  The brand rebounds.  Or could for at least one segment.  And lest we suppose that this is merely a Hispanic play, let us note that many non-Hispanics want access to the authenticity of a Coke from Mexico (for some of the same reasons they embraced Corona as their choice of beer). 

But, again, no.  TCCC is acting like administrators of the Roman empire who have discovered that they must now contend with a small group of enthusiasts in Gaul who worship Rome and Romanness with new intensity.  The Roman decision: put them down!  Because the passion of the zealot is dangerous even if it happens, for the moment, to run in your direction.  It’s the principle of the thing.  "We don’t want your zeal," says the administrator, "we just want your obedience."

Actually, there is a better way of putting this.  TCCC is now acting like the Catholic church  confronted by a cult of Christians who forsake orthodoxy for their own special brand of religous fervor.  "No, no, no," says the Church.  It is the Church that decides what devotion means and what belief shall be.  It’s Rome that determines the forms and vessels of religious inspiration.  The zealots can just cut it out.  We decide.  Not them.   

It is easy to be snide here.  And we must remember that TCCC’s problem is the problem of every brand.  All of us need to grasp that we are not the arbiters of the brand and that we must defer to to the consumer even when he or she takes leave of our brand orthodoxy and starts making things up.  We aren’t Rome any longer, not the empire, not the church.  We are shepherds.

The bigger challenge for TCCC: it is to admit that even the magnificent corporation that has created and preserved "real thing" authenticity must now admit to the possibility that there are many authenticities.  This is the lesson of plenitude.  This is the lesson of the long tail. 

Some meanings of the Classic brand are constructed through long standing, patient, and deeply sophisticated  acts of meaning management.  Some are just conferred upon us.  TCCC would do well to act opportunistically and capture the Mexican message.  After all, empires are not forever.

Reference

McCracken, Grant. 1988.  The Evocative Power of Things: consumer goods and the preservation of consumer hopes and ideals. Culture and Consumption I.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Terhune, Chad.  2006.   U.S. Thirst for Mexican Cola Poses Sticky Problem for Coke.  The Wall Street Journal.  January 11, 2005, page A1. 

The People’s Awards Award

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Question 1: The best host of a TV awards show ever:

       
       
       
       
       
 

Question 2. Best speech at the "People’s award" ceremony last night:

       
       
 

Question 3. Worst acceptance speech at the "People’s award" ceremony last night:

       
 

Let the people speak! 

(These buttons don’t actually work. We don’t know enough HTML or Typepad to make them functional. [But they look good, don’t they?] Please leave your answers and your comments in the comment field. Thx. The boys in the lab.)

post script: Hey, did anyone else think that turn ads into awards was one of the most gloriously stupid, implausible, and unsuccessful episodes in the history of contemporary marketing?

Puzzle time: why is contemporary culture becoming more complicated?

LostLost. Alias.  24.  Something is happening on TV we don’t expect of a "wasteland."  Some prime time shows are becoming complicated.

Day time TV was often complicated.  Soaps shamelessly so.  And occasionally, soaps migrated to night time, there to wow us with narrative improbabilities (e.g., Bobby Ewing redux) and to prove that continuity was probably more trouble than it was worth, and, actually, a good way of spoiling the fun (to say nothing of the franchise). 

Prime time TV is, as we say, episodic.  Each show was supposed to be free standing and one-off.  No prior knowledge was presumed.  If we had seen the show before, great.  If not, never mind.  Narrative constructions like Rockford Files or Two and a Half Men are so structurally simple and referentially redundant, that prior introductions were quite unnecessary.   (In any case, a car chase is, forgive me, not so hard to follow.)

Prime time TV was not about continuities.  It was about episodes.  The world that just kept starting over.  Time didn’t happen.  Events didn’t accumulate.  There were no critical paths, no path dependencies, no differences that ever made a difference over the long term.  Typically, people didn’t age.  They didn’t change.  They didn’t grow.  Outside the narrow narrative particulars, prime time dramas were timeless and placeless.  It was as if all the characters had a really terrible case of amnesia. 

Clearly, this is changing.  Shows like 24 are really unthinkable without a knowledge of the larger, overarching narrative.  Lost the same.  I am noticing that while House can be watched without a knowledge of narrative continuity, it makes a vast difference when this is in place.  Even with the cheat sheets from Entertainment Weekly (to say nothing of the love notes), Lost remains daunting.

So what is going on here? Henry Jenkins tells us that all consumers of contemporary culture are becoming more sophisticated.  This opens up the possibility of narrative complexity…or at least it helps discourage the "keep it simple, stupid" that was once the watch word of Burbank and Hollywood. 

But even as viewers have become more sophisticated, they have entered an era of time poverty, attention deficit, and information overload.  For my own sake, the idea of sitting down to work out the complexities of 24 make my eyes roll back in my head.  Or to adapt the language of Robert Hutchins, a formative president of the University of Chicago, "whenever I feel the temptation to watch Alias, I lie down until it passes."

So there are powerful forces working against the trend towards complexity.  That it persists and appears actually now to flourish suggests that the "forces for" must be very strong indeed. 
So what are they?  Beyond the new media literacy, what drives the trend to offer TV narrative that replaces the old strategy (broad access to shallow narrative) with a much more demanding one (narrower access to deeper narrative)? 

For those who care about the study of contemporary culture, this is a nice little challenge, a rich little anomaly.  Individually, and more probably collectively, we can figure this out.  I would do it myself, but what do you take me for, an anthropologist?