Archive for February, 2006
Stuart Elliott vs. Barbara Lippert: Battle of the Bards
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Fame Tracker has a cunning feature called Two Stars One Spot that performs an act of celestial economy: If two stars are too much alike, Fame Tracker proposes an act of elimination.
Thus did Wing Chun (Fame Tracker founder) compare Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney in the "Battle of the Probably Quite Affordable Leading Men."
Two Stars One Spot sprang to mind when I read Stuart Elliott’s column on advertising this morning in the New York Times. Now, I like Stuart Elliott but I can’t help feeling he has been a little reticent and unforthcoming lately, somewhat off his game.
So this morning was a revelation. Elliott came out swinging.
At last, the 20th Olympic Winter Games have finally finished. Rarely have so many worked so hard to produce so dull and disappointing an outcome. And rarely have the flops, flubs and foul-ups been so overwhelming. But enough about the advertising.
Baboom! Stuart isn’t taking prisoners. "Far too many commercials," he said, "were unimaginative, derivative and pedestrian."
This closes the distance between Elliott and the other great observer of advertising, Barbara Lippert. Lippert writes a column for Adweek, and her work is splendid. I mean, really splendid.
And this is heartening. Slowly but surely, popular culture has improved its critical standards. After many painful years, the likes of Rex Reed were supplanted by the likes of Roger Ebert who was then improved upon by the likes of Lisa Schwarzbaum.
So much for the movies. What about advertising? Unless I’m missing someone, Lippert was the sole voice that combined the gifts of intelligence and critical acuity. If Mr. Elliott is now in the game, that’s two.
There is plenty of room here. My morning epiphany was premature. It is too early for a Two Stars One Spot standoff. Vast stretches of commercial culture remain to be assessed and assayed. Two people is hardly enough for all the artifacts of advertising.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed. Without gifted observers, we cannot give heart or credibility to gifted participants. More practically, we cannot persuade clueless clients to give agencies the freedom they need to do great work. A blessing from Lippert or Elliott, this is just the thing to keep the philistines at bay. A wider distribution of the work of Lippert and Elliott, and before you know consumers themselves will become more intelligent, more demanding..that all creative and critical boats might rise with the tide.
References
Chun, Wing (aka Tara Ariano). 2005. FameTracker: 2 Stars, One Slot: McDermott vs. Mulroney. here.
Elliott, Stuart. 2006. More Tin Than Gold for Olympic Spots. New York Times. February 28, 2006. here.
Lippert, Barbara. 2006. Barbara Lippert’s Postgame Superbowl Critique. Adweek. February 7, 2005. here.
Marketing headline: what’s good for the agency actually good for the brand
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Is TV advertising dying? How about brands? There is, I think, a connection.
It is now commonplace to announce the death of TV advertising. The new marketers are positively noisy on this theme. The assumption is that ads will move from TV to product placement, internet, gaming, blogging, etc.
And it’s not just an assumption. In the UK, Heineken is shifting a £6.5m budget from television to sports sponsorship. Ford now spends about 30%-40% of its ad budget on traditional advertising, compared with around 80% five years ago. The move to online advertising is happening more quickly than expected. According to Heath Terry of Credit Suisse First Boston, the market for online ads will increase 32 percent to $16.6 billion in 2006.
So is this a good idea? Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not an idea. It’s blind rush from one side of the marketing vessel to the other. We are abandoning TV advertising with scant regard for larger costs.
And there are larger costs. According to the BusinessWeek Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard, Heineken has falled from #82 in 2001 to #100 in 2005. It is, in other words, hanging on to Top 100 classification by its fingernails. This might not be the time to move from spots to sports.
My argument is (a) that of all the old media devices at the marketer’s disposal, TV advertising created the most potent meaning and value for the brand, (b) that the new media forms of advertising are pretty modest meaning and value makers, and none competes with TV ads, and (c) that the move from TV to other forms of advertising may be expensive for the brand.
Today, I happened to stumble upon the Account Planning Group awards for 2003. (I was searching for the exemplary Ben Malbon.) Here are some of the things I found.
Rebecca Morgan of Bartle Bogle Hegarty got shortlisted for work she did for Barclays. (She may well have won the award. I write this under a little time pressure.)
This market tries to build trust by making banks likeable – we think the job is to make Barclays seem more knowledgeable about money.
This is an interesting marketing proposition and it is impossible for me to imagine that it is something that could be accomplished outside the world of TV (and print) advertising.
Here’s another. Fern Miller of JWT got shortlisted for work he did for Nestle and Kit Kat.
Kit Kat was being forgotten by consumers and nothing about the famous "Have a Break" campaign was helping them to remember. The solution is to reinvent the break territory, turning it from a platform for little more than well-branded entertainment into a powerful opinion about the importance of the break in this, the country with the longest working hours in Europe.
Good luck communicating this in any of the new alternatives. I venture to say none of the campaigns that drew mentions (and awards) from APG could be undertaken in new media advertising (or old media variations).
Summing up
I know what everyone believes: that people TIVO through ads, that television is losing its audience to gaming and the Internet, that television audiences are fragmenting, that TV channels are multiplying, that the game, is, in effect, up.
This, too, is true: that the alternatives to TV advertising are abysmally bad. Product placement is now regarded with suspicion. From a meaning manufacture point of view, this was always a kind of hitchhiking, effectively borrowing the power and the narrative of the TV show or movie in question.
Google advertising! This is ought to be a punch line. If advertising could be reduced to the classifieds, newspaper advertising would have been plenty, and Madison Avenue would just happen to be a street in Manhattan.
And those colorful, motionful ads that compete for my attention on the websites of New York Times and Wall Street Journal. That’s the problem, isn’t it? I am trying to read!
I don’t doubt that television is dying. But when was the last time you discussed an ad you saw on line, or a product you saw placed in a movie? No one cares about these ads because they do not have powers of metaphor or narrative. The 30 second spot is a precious resource in the world of brand building. To dispense with it is a very bad idea.
References
For the Account Planning Group Awards for 2003, here.
Anonymous. 2006. Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard. BusinessWeek. here.
Berman, Saul J. Niall Duffy and Louisa A Shipnuck. The end of television as we know it: a future industry perspective. Publication of the IBM Institute for Business Value. here.
Martinson, Jane 2005. Agency says goodbye to Walter. The Guardian. February 18, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Product placment as marketing malfaesance. The Blog Sits At…. January 17, 2006. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Madison Avenue and Google: no contest. This Blog Sits At … November 1, 2o05. here.
Thaw, Jonathan. 2005. Online Ad Growth Accelerates, Outpacing Newspaper, TV Spending. Bloomberg.com. December 28, 2005. here.
Lovemark
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Yesterday, I noted that Blue Ocean Strategy does consistently well in the Amazon rankings despite the fact that it is not very good, spectacularly naive, and almost certainly too French.
Today, I am taking on another title: Lovemarks. The cruelest thing about this book, for me, is that its worst rank on Amazon is better than my average rank there. (You may treat everything that follows as sour grapes.)
There is lots to like about Lovemarks. It is written in an accessible prose. It is generously supplied with images that do make things more lively and interesting. The expanded edition includes quotes from readers. So it’s kind of interactive.
The good news: this book is art directed. The bad news: so’s the prose.
This is breathless, imperative, exclamatory and over capitalized.
Be passionately curious about everything. (p. 206)
The reader ends up in a state of conceptual excitation that I have not experienced since I spent an afternoon at the Science Center in Toronto. After a couple of hours of pushing buzzers, spinning wheels, and otherwise "making science," its all I could do to keep from "operating" every shiny object in the parking lot. The spirit of the exhibit space had colonized consciousness.
So it is with Lovemarks.
I began to notice that all my thoughts were followed by exclamation points! I had to struggle to keep from shouting pronouncements at fellow passengers on the train. (I am on the train as I write this.)
It may be unfair to examine this kind of thing too carefully. But unless I am mistaken, this is what we do with "books."
Consider this.
Give your brain a rest. There is nothing wrong with thinking but thinking demands action to make any sense. (190)
My brain is quite rested, thank you, and I am very glad to hear that there is nothing wrong with thinking, but I can’t imagine what you mean. "Thinking demands action to make any sense." I am trying to think what you mean, but… Oh, I see, I must act it to get it. Dramatize it. Shout it at fellow passengers, possibly? No, that didn’t help. Some seem, well, distressed and I’m none the wiser.
But this is too easy. And coming from an obscure author like me, it does sound like sour grapes. No, if I am to "add value" here is by offering an act of intellectual salvage. (If only that gave me claim to 10% of the value of the wreck.) Is there a way of seeing how Lovemarks creates value for the reader? Is there some way pulling it off the rocks of exclamation, contradiction and hyperventilation?
I think there is. We may think of Kevin Roberts as a prophet. Lovemarks is an opportunity to escape the way brands are defined by economics, business schools, the big consulting houses, most senior managers, and the capital markets.
The "economics model" defines the consumer as an economic man, the purchase as a transaction, motive as the search for utility, marketing as exchange of information, and brands as a badge of trust.
The "lovemarks" model says the consumer is a little dreamy, purchase an act of connection, motive the search for meaning, marketing the exchange of emotion, and the brand, wait for it, a mark of love.
This is a better view in some ways. With people like Clayton Christensen insisting on functional branding, we need all the Kevin Roberts we can get. As long as b-schools and seniors managers treat brands like blunt objects, Lovemarks gets high marks.
But there is a larger issue here. We have been searching for a way out of the economic model for some time now.
Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences. The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches. (David Brooks in the New York Times)
This might be called the "Northwest passage" of our time. (European nations of the early modern period risked lives and fortunes searching for a faster way to the riches of the Orient.)
Has Roberts found the Northwest passage? Does Lovemarks give us a way of moving beyond the economic model into something richer, more nuanced, more, er, Asian?
Well, yes and no, but mostly no. He has sold a lot of books, and some of them are probably being read by the inhabitants of the economics approach to branding. And some of these will have had an conversion experience and now regard all trademarks, potentially, as lovemarks. But many more will have looked at the riot of image and assertion and said, "Oh, lord, let me return to the verities of economics."
Lovemarks is messy, self indulgent, and where it is intelligible, wrongheaded. Lovemarks, we are told, are created when branders cultivate mystery, sensuality and intimacy. All these are apt objectives for the marketing team and important objectives for the brand. But all are astonishingly delicate, perishable and nuanced.
The bad news: we simply cannot get there from here. If we want mystery, sensuality and intimacy, it’s going to take something more the exclamation and exhortation. It’s going to take something more than advice like:
Get out of the office. Ask the great questions. (206) Call three consumers. Every day. (144) Give your brain a rest. Embrace emotion. Kick the information addiction. (190)
If we want to win mystery, sensuality and intimacy for the brand, it’s going to take a system, dry, thoughtful, grounded, nuanced, and powerful. It’s going to have to be something that the people at McKinsey (or any HBS grad) can look at without sneering. (We can just imagine how they received, "Kick the information addiction.")
The corporation has always known the brand is something more than an economic proposition. And finding that "something more" was the ad agency’s job. The corporation used the agency to make imagination, creativity and better branding available, without having to endure it inhouse, or allowing it to interfere with the economics model. But, in the last decade or so, branding (and the creativity and innovation it represents) has become too important to be left to the agency alone. That’s why, not incidentally, the God-like A.G. Lafley consented to write the introduction to this book. Creativity, once the special preserve of the agency, was now everyone’s concern.
What Roberts spotted is that the madness of the agency must now migrate into the larger corporate world. Banging insight, Mr. Roberts. But your book is enough to make one weep. These ideas are too important to be trusted to the exclamatory mode. There is a Northwest passage out there somewhere. But we are not never going to find it this way. We are going to need the help of better navigators.
Here’s the thing that really rankles. Lovemarks is misnamed. It should have been called Lovemark. For it is in fact a lavish, four colour, print ad for Saatchi and Saatchi. I can’t believe the other agencies are letting him get away with this. I know the CEO of Arnold has a book out. How about the other agencies? Time for other CEOs to put pen to paper. And when they do, they should call me.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Economic Man: Absent without leave in the pages on the NYT. This Blog… here. (for the quote from Brooks)
McCracken, Grant. 2005. And stop calling me stupid. This Blog … here. (for a criticism of the Christensen "function" model of branding)
Roberts, Kevin. 2005. Lovemarks: the future beyond brands. 2nd edition. New York: powerHouse.
Not Blue Oceans, Blue Planets!
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Here’s what I have to look at every morning.
Two of my little books (Culture and Consumption I & II) are struggling to climb the ladder. Today, they are doing relatively well, their ranking marked in 5 digits. (I won’t tell you the number of times I find them ranked in the deep 6 digits. 400,000 is not uncommon.)
But every morning, Blue Ocean Strategy, the book by Kim and Mauborgne, is right up there. IN TWO DIGITS. I don’t begrudge them this success. Yes, I do.
Kim and Mauborgne say that companies should forsake the roller derby in which companies fight for tiny, and brief, moments of advantage. No, they say, strike out on your own. Look for blue oceans that are presently unoccupied, markets you can have all to your own.
The good thing about this book is the fact that it tells us how much marketing has become a game of ideas, imagination and innovation. Indeed, it is increasingly a game in which advantage goes to those who can step out of received wisdom and current assumptions, and see the world new. This is great news for the likes of me and you (dear reader). After all, we are the people who live for (and through) our wits. An intellectually vital market place is good (and billable) news.
The bad thing about the book is that the book is naive. Only academics could have written such a thing. Blue Ocean Strategy acts as if "wishing makes it so," all we have to do is to find an uncontested market space and all the hard work of marketing just goes away. Hurray!
If only it were so. If only we could just wish away the competition and the close quarter combat that characterizes every mature market. Yes, General Motors created a blue ocean when it was prepared to customize in a way that Ford would not. Yes, Dell created a blue ocean by disintermediating the marketplace. Yes, the megaplex changed the movie house. Yes, Cirque reinvented the circus. And, er, that’s pretty much it.
This kind of good fortune happens to a handful of companies. (This is, not incidentally, the reason the book is so thin on examples, and why several of them seemed forced.) To mix my metaphors, people find blue oceans about as often as they are struck by lightening. (Yes, there is an evolutionary joke lurking in there somewhere.)
To make this the strategy for everyone to follow…well, it’s just nuts. It’s like telling every baseball team that, if they want to win, they should just go out and hire a Roger Clemens. Great, thanks. Why didn’t we think of that?
But there is a deeper problem with Blue Ocean Strategy. Two of them actually.
The first is that Kim and Mauborgne don’t ever see the underlying cultural trend that creates up the ocean. The GM opportunity is driven by an American individualism that demanded that people have distinctive cars. The megaplex trend represents a fragmentation of consumer taste and preference (perhaps a first hint of Anderson’s "long tail"). If the corporation really wants access to blue oceans, one of the things that it needs to do is to monitor trends with new acuity. Kim and Mauborne do not see this.
Second, there is a DIY opportunity here. Some of the corporations have opened up blue oceans because they helped to create blue planets. Nike discovered the fitness trend early, and made it an American pasttime. Starbucks created a new category of public space, (aka, the "third place"). Coca-Cola helped to invent Christmas. Pepsi helped to create youth culture. Snapple helped to invent the 1990s.
The "blue planet strategy" are not so much about discovering empty spaces. It’s about something more pro active, creative and hand’s on. It’s not a matter of shifting assumptions and changing frames. It’s about making something new (or newish).
Naturally, comporate acts of invention have to correspond to something in the culture. Consumers have to be able to grasp the "third space" concept, and they have, at some level, to need to want it. So there is an element of discovery. But finally, this is an act of cultural creation that takes the considerable intelligence, deep pockets and vast retail resources of a Howard Schultz.
Talk about ownership. Corporations that merely discover new oceans may "own" these oceans till the rest of the world comes piling in. But corporation that create new planets, this is a deeper ownership. After all, the corporation owns the blue prints, not just the phenomenon. They get the blue planet "down to the ground." They invented it.
Naturally, this is not the sort of thing to which the corporation takes easily. Blue planet creation would take a room full of cultural engineers, a certain amount of patience, and a willingness to get out of the discovery game into the creation one.
The corporate world can engage in acts of cultural invention. And by this means they can create blue planets. (The good news is that the blue oceans come attached.) But there is an "entry cost" here. They are going to have to stop listening to French intellectuals.
References
Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne. 2005. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
The ranking in the image above comes from Titlez here.
I told you so
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Ok, they got him. Yesterday, the President of Harvard University resigned.
Now, I am not going to say I told you so.
Yes, I am.
I told you so.
In March of 2005, I wrote a piece called President Summers, Beware the Yalies of the Yard. My argument, briefly, was that there are really two Harvards: the outer rings occupied by the professional schools, the Economics department and some of the physical sciences, and the inner planet of the Yard.
The outer rings are occupied by scholars who are ambitious, worldly and engaged. The inner planet is occupied by people who do not have power and do not like those who do have power.
My conceit: that the inhabitants of the inner planet are really more like Yalies. President understood his colleagues of the outer rings. Generally, I think they were happy with him. Fatally, he misunderstood his colleagues from the Yard. He did not see that they were Yalies.
Am I right to say Summers was brought low by the Yard? Joseph O’Donnell, is a former member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and a prominent donor. This morning he was quoted in the New York Times:
"How can anyone govern a university where a fraction of faculty members can force a president out?"
Here then is my warning to President Summers from March of 2005.
President Summers: Beware the Yalies of the Yard.
I think I see President Summers’s problem. He has been speaking to his Harvard faculty when he should have been addressing the Yalies of the Yard.
I don’t have a lot of ethnographic data on Yalies but I do recall one astonishing weekend I spend with 8 of them in Washington. We were there for a Yale-Smithsonian conference and, as part of the proceedings, we, the participants, were driven around the nation’s capital in a small van.
What caught my attention (and there is nothing like forcible confinement to sharpen the senses) is that the Yalies kept up a line of self congratulatory humor and comment that said, roughly, "this may be Washington, but we are Yalies!" It was as if they were trying to show they were not threatened by the nation’s capital. In that great tradition of protesting too much, they managed to demonstrate just the opposite: "This is Washington, we are terrified."
As I say, it is not a lot of data, but it makes a nice little puzzle. Why would people from one of the nation’s great universities become defensive when obliged to tour the nation’s capital?
One way to solve this puzzle is to embark in a long, reckless, thoroughly speculative, and utterly groundless discourse on Yale’s strategy of self presentation, and this is precisely what I intend now to do. For roughly 304 years, Yale has fought a status game with Harvard and lost it almost every year. (They’ve done some what better in the classic football contest, where the two schools are virtually tied.) For all its greatness, Yale is poorer than Harvard in virtually every category. For all its antiquity, it is a newcomer. Yale sometimes wins "the game" (as they call the Harvard-Yale gridiron contest). It almost never wins the comparison.
This is tough on a college, even one as mighty as Yale, and a response is called for. The classic cultural response is to doubt the grounds of the comparison, and here, I think, Yale may have been tempted by two options. The first is to insist that Yale is other-worldly and to that extent a finer, more cerebral enterprise than Harvard. This is one of the ways Oxford declares its difference from Cambridge and all those earnest, artless scientists on the fens. The second, and this might be offered as a demonstration of the first, is to position Yale as a place that refuses power as enthusiastically as Harvard pursues it. (Do universities "position" themselves in this manner? Nations do. At the end of the 19th century, France recognized that it would lose all future military contests to Germany and all economic ones to England. Culture seemed the wisest course, the prudent thing to do.)
Did Yale "manage" the Harvard comparison this way, by escaping it on the grounds of a higher calling? I can’t say. This is, I hasten to remind you, discourse both speculative and groundless. But we judge ideas by the work they perform in the world, and this one helps explain a couple of things. It would explain why those Yalies were so threatened by Washington. It would also explain why Yales are so often liberal and/or lefty. (If there is a single reason that keeps the Democrats out of the mainstream, it is their presumption of moral superiority. Thus have they removed themselves from the mainstream.) Finally, it would explain why we’ve heard of almost no one at Yale. I bet with a little effort you could name ten to twenty people teaching at Harvard. Take a moment. Think of Yale. Three? Five? Any? No, Yale is too good for this world, too good in any case to be compared with the likes of worldly Harvard. ("Whew! You can not judge us, we are too fine.")
That’s the trouble with this status strategy. Renounce the world often enough and, after awhile, otherworldliness becomes obscurity. Those who are too good for the world are charged with ever fewer responsibilities and finally, the world begins to lose interest altogether.
Back to President Summers (just ignore the sound of gears grinding heroically as I redirect the argument). President Summers comes from the outer ring of his university, the economics department, a place so worldly and influential it supplies many people for Washington posts, including, of course, Summers himself, who was secretary of the treasury there. Harvard has not been shy about power. The business school, the law school, the medical school, these are the brilliant rings of the planet and carry the university’s influence out into the world and back again. Ironically, only the Kennedy school manages to keep itself disengaged (managing to look a little Yale-like in the process).
All of the professional schools know a thing or two about chain of command, the realities of power, the privileges of standing, and what it takes to make the world bend to Harvard’s, or anyone’s, influence. The rule here, and it’s got to be in Machiavelli somewhere, you can’t be too particular or fastidious. You have to get on with it. The chief executive officers of these schools are not quite CEOS in the corporate sense, but certainly they bear very little resemblance to the godly churchmen who were their predecessors. They know the lessons, the realities, of power in a way that most academics do not.
Here’s the rub. President Summers comes from these outer rings. He embraced its culture. He constituted himself a creature of power, a man of standing. He wore, we might say, his rings on his sleeve. And then he made an anthropological error. He assumed that his Harvard was everybody’s Harvard. He failed to see the Yalies within.
Mr. President! The first rule of rhetoric is "know your audience." Harvard has a little Yale, the scholars who occupy the liberal arts, the social sciences and the Yard. These people are largely shut out of, or kept from, Harvard’s engagement with the world. Not for them the government posts, the consulting gigs, the television interviews, the world’s eager consultation. For most of them the "ambit of influence" is the table they commandeer each day at the Faculty Club, and, outside of academic circles, not much more. (Notice I am using here a rhetorical trope here called "exaggeration".)
I’m sure this rankles but it should not surprise. After all, most scholars in the humanities and social sciences have made Yale’s bargain with the universe. They have insisted that they are much too good, too noble, too moral to engage with the world. They have, in sum, cultivated an obscurity of their own. They are now a little like ceremonial creatures of court removed from the world that they might commune with the gods. Not for them the rough and ready pragmatism of the outer rings. As keepers of the nobler view, they are, some of them, just a dubious hat and push cart away from wandering out of the Yard to shout imprecations at startled fellow Cantabridgians. (That pesky trope again.)
This strategy of absenting yourself from the real world has many implications. Some of them are tragic. (The social sciences and humanities are now frightfully out of touch with some of the real compelling intellectual issues of our day. Too bad. They might have been useful.) But here is the important implication for our purposes. If you are surrounded by power but kept from it, if you are made a ceremonial creature, but only that, if you absent yourself from the world, and rewarded with obscurity, if all these things are true, you are in a very bad temper a good deal of the time. The world has done you wrong.
Now, we know what happens to ceremonial creatures when they are wronged. They become obsessed with form. The world may not respond to their will, but they will have their due. They will insist upon a precise acknowledgement of every detail of the ritual regime. In President Summers’ case, this means no gratuitous references to the ROTC program, that sterling demonstration of the military-industrial-educational complex. It means no reckless comments about women and science. This too is, forgive me, a "motherhood" issue in the Yard. And it means that the President may not evidence the arrogance of the CEO from the outer ring, nor the swash buckling style we might expect from a man who owes his Harvard position, in part at least, to the fact that he once had a corner office in the corridors of power.
Finally, the Yalies of the Yard have one metapragmatic directive: you may have power, you may have the task of bending the world to Harvard’s will, but.don’t. rub.our.noses.in.it! Give us this illusion: what we think matters, what we do counts. And by all means, observe the ceremony and ritual that is our balm, our succor, our consolation. Mr. President, we have only one power, that of form, and unless you honor us by acknowledging it, we, sir, will make you pay.
(Sorry that got a little CSI: Miami at the end there, didn’t it?)
BHL as Inspector Clouseau?
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Bernard-Henri Levy came to America "in the footsteps of Tocqueville" to study what he calls,
[a] crisis of identity. The powerful country in the world does not know what it is, it feels itself in a deep trauma, a deep neurosis. It was interesting to go behind the curtain.
Oh, please. This is the difference between America and France, isn’t it? America knows perfectly well that it "does not know what it is," that it cannot know what it is. There are so many groups, driven by so many ideas, subject now to so many regional, ethnic, lifestyle, gender variations that America is a fountain of cultural invention.
This causes no "deep trauma." We all understand that difference breeds difference and we can never catch up. A few people have lost their courage and run straight into the embrace of orthodoxy of one kind or another. But most of us are reconciled to the fact that we live in a society of very strange strangers, and we accept this with the equanimity with which we regard the weather and the incompetence of our local baseball team: "whaddayagonnado?"
Second, I think we all understand, and one feels sure that Tocqueville would have grasped this, that there is no "curtain" to go behind. No one is charge. No one calls this shots. I thought for a moment that it might be Ryan Seacrest. I was wrong.
One could argue that Tocqueville was particularly well situated to grasp some of the more difficult aspects of an earlier America. Being a Frenchman of this generation and this intellectual moment, he had an advantage. BHL, on the other hand, appears to suffer an intellectual deficit.
France knows too well what it is, and this is a great and grave problem. French self knowledge hangs like a millstone around the neck of national, economic and cultural aspiration. To be sure, there is still a curtain in France, and behind, awash in self congratulation, a media green room, filled with politicians, film stars, and not least intellectuals. (America learned long ago that intellectuals would necessary be the last ones to get the news and took pains fastidiously to ignore them. Only Robert Thompson is still consulted.) A visitor can penetrate the curtain in France, but this would be perhaps the worst place to go looking for national, cultural truths.
Somehow, one feels that Tocqueville is the wrong comparison for Bernard-Henri Levy. I do not mean to be disrespectful, but it occurred to me that Inspector Clouseau is a perhaps more apt. And not the version accomplished by Peter Sellers. ("You’ll catch your death of cold, Clouseau!" "Yes, yes, I probably will, but…it’s all part of life’s rich pagentry, you kneu.") M. Levy resembles M. Martin more.
Yes, I think that’s it. BHL is to Tocqueville as Martin’s Clouseau is to Sellers’ Clouseau. Not so much an act of deference as a comparison that’s ill advised.
References
Levy, Bernard-Henri. 2006. American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. New York. Random House.
Swanson, Carl. 2006. American Psychoanalyst. New York Magazine. January 23-30, p. 78. here. (the quote comes from this article)
Wood, Gaby. 2003. Je suis un superstar. The Observer. June 15, 20003. here.
For more quotes from Inspector Clouseau, here.
Economic Man: Absent without leave in the pages of the NYT
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Yesterday, David Brooks declared the displacement, perhaps the end, of economics as we know it.
Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences. The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches.
For a guy who has distinguished himself as someone with special powers of pattern recognition, it’s a disappointing showing. And as someone who presumes to write a blog that sits at the intersection of economics and anthropology, I feel I should respond.
First, there is some evidence that economic man is "on the run," abandoning, in the process, our dearest assumptions about the actor’s rationality and the reasonableness.
But notice, most of the irrationality that troubles the political world come from people who are not very good at being economic actors. Most of us suspect that if the countries and cultures of the Middle East had real economies, they would be very much less inclined to take umbrage against slights, real and imagined, inflicted or merely drawn. Certain Middle Eastern countries and cultures appear to live in a perpetual state of status anxiety, a condition exacerbated by the fact that they do not have real economies and the benefits, liberties, and dignities that flow there from. (This argument is hardly original. It appears to be one of the mainstays of the Bush Whitehouse. And there is no chance that it is mysterious to Brooks who knows this White House very well.)
So, no, actually, it is a little early to start declaring the death or displacement of economic man. He may be challenged or beleaguered where economies are diminished or compromised. But, hey, that’s why we call him economic man. He is unlikely to flourish everywhere. (And surely, he would be murdered in his sleep in most traditional, face to face, societies.)
But Brooks finds evidence of the elipse of economic man in Western, market societies where "cultural differences become more pronounced, not less, as different groups chase
different visions of the good life." But this obscures the fact economic man is the very platform on which most of this Cambrian cultural invention is made to happen.
It was as if the species always over-estimated the constraints that needed to be imposed, and the conformity that needed to be extracted, for a social world to work as a social world. We could read the West as an experiment in the dismantlement in these constraints, and the creation of a market economy as an "eureka moment" in this experiment. The more this market economy established itself, the smaller proved to be the constraint/conformity rule set required for social, cultural, and political order. Once the market economy was fully in place, once this served as the great gyroscope of the social world, individuals and groups were released to rework their cultural definitions. Now a great profusion of cultural invention was now inevitable. This invention may appear to efface the rationality and reasonableness of economic man. I prefer to think it demonstrates what can be accomplished once commerce is made to serve a platform for culture.
We are only beginning to think of ways to think about this relationship between culture and commerce. The complex theorists give point the way by giving us models that help reveal how culture patterns can emerge from commercial ones. Neither this larger intellectual project, nor the complexity theory contribution to it, can be unknown to Brooks.
Certainly, it’s true that there are parts of the economics model that require renovations more dramatic than anything ever dreamed of by a University of Chicago economist. But these will come in time. Truly, market societies release forces and powers that now make the world various and inscrutable. But we will come to terms with these mysteries not by displacing economic man, but seeing that he maximizes with a cunning we have yet to fathom.
References
Brooks, David. 2006. Questions of Culture. New York Times. February 19, 2006.
Lighting it up at the Coca-Cola Company
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I haven’t always been an enthusiastic consumer of Coca-Cola advertising. But the Diet Coke spots are getting steadily better.
The "effervescent" campaign devised by Foote, Cone & Belding, New York. Kate Beckinsale (right) appeared in a spot called Tingle. Adrian Brody starred in a spot called Bounce. There were a couple of other spots in the series: a girl roller skating in what looks like Santa Monica and a guy dancing in his Manhattan apartment. (You can see the Roller Skater spot here.) I believe this campaign was launched in 2004, a year in which the Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) spend $10 million on Diet Coke advertising.
Not everyone shares my enthusiasm.
Despite anticipation for the new Coke commercials, at least one analyst says advertising for carbonated soft drinks in the United States, good or bad, doesn’t have a huge impact on the business. "If you look at what is really going to drive the business, it is noncarbonated [drinks] and innovation," said John Faucher at JP Morgan. "It is not a new ad campaign for the core Coca-Cola brand." (from Wilbert, below)
Golly, what are the chances that this guy has a clue about the relationship between advertising and branding? I have the utmost respect for analysts. They practice an empirical and intellectual engagement with the world that puts most social scientists (and, I think it’s fair to say, almost all anthropologists) to shame.
But I also know how analysts are trained and I know that there are only one or two MBA programs that can talk about the role of advertising in an penetrating way, let alone begin to assess whether a particular campaign might or might not add value to a brand. Chances are John Faucher has not graduated from one of these. (His remark tells us so.)
Happily, people inside TCCC are not so hampered.
“The strategy for the global Coke campaign is to make choosing Coke a purposeful act,” said Mary Minnick, the head of marketing strategy and innovation. “We don’t just want to be entertaining or be different, we want to be more relevant. We want to build a relationship with consumers, not hold a mirror up to them.” (from Hein and Sampey, below)
This is an interesting model that marketers may with to conjure with. In the meantime, we may admire the recent Diet Coke ad ("Haircut") that seems to me to capture and perhaps illuminate Minnick’s philosophy.
A young woman enters a very old fashioned barbershop. She emerges triumphant. The risk has paid off. She went into the shop a great beauty. She emerges a great beauty who has claimed her beauty with an act of daring and imagination.
(Let me be perfectly clear. The Diet Coke ad in question is from FCB. The global campaign to which Ms. Minnick’s refers is the work of Weiden and Kennedy. I am merely supposing that what Minnick says of the global campaign gives us a glimpse of the ideas now animating ALL the advertising we will see from TCCC for the forseeable future. This may be rash. It may be wrong. Consider it my demonstration that you don’t have to be an analyst to put your foot in it.)
With this "light it up" spot, TCCC has laid claim to some of the more interesting cultural experiments at work in our world. It lays claim to self ownership, self construction, self transformation, blurred boundaries, the playfulness of self presentation.
All of these were for virtually the whole of the 20th century a "no fly" zone for the Coca-Cola Company. With its fastidious reluctance to treat these themes, PepsiCo has enjoyed a free run of the most dynamic and vital parts of contemporary culture. More exactly, they belonged in the 1990s to Snapple and all the little brands that were prepared to conduct themselves as if they had actually noticed what was happening in popular culture.
TCCC revved the creative engines. It reached deep for new inspiration. It thought on several occasions way outside the box. But as long as it was unprepared to treat a theme like the one in "light it up" there was no way it could really light it up. The brand remained the handsome, military officer who was not likely to add any thing to the ball. Presentable, but a little unforthcoming in matters of conversation, humor, drama, and of course dancing. Really, he just stands there, looking noble.
I may have made to much of Ms. Minnick’s remarks, but let’s hope not. Let us hope TCCC is preparing to rise to the challenge of contemporary culture. (And why should it not. After all, it made a good deal of it.)
References
Hein, Kenneth, with Kathy Sampey. 2006. Pouring It On: Coke Unveils New Tagline, Products, Philosophy. Brandweek. December 08, 2005. here.
Sampey, Kathleen. 2004. FCB: ‘It’s a Diet Coke Thing’. Adweek. May 05, 2004.
Wilbert, Caroline. 2005. New Coke Ads for 2006. The Atlanta Journal Constitution. December 23, 2005.
Credits
Here, thanks to Barbara Lippert, the names of the creative team responsible for "Haircut."
Agency
Foote Cone & Belding, New York
Creative director
Gary Resch
Art director
Mark Warfield, Todd Eisner
Copywriter
Greg Wikoff
Agency producer
Kelly Fagan
Director
Robert Logevall
Branding: a river runs through it
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Brands used to be carried around the big top of popular culture in triumph. Clowns scattered. Children thrilled. The crowd roared.
Now culture and commerce are so changeable, disaster is always near at hand. It’s harder to keep pace. It’s harder to stay put. Brands no longer move in triumph. Now it’s all they can do to hang on.
There are two ways to restore the brand to glory.
The first is to give it a new breadth of reference. The brand has to talk to lots of smaller consumer segments. And we’re not talking about the long tail brands here, but "fat middle" ones. These must make their great big markets out of lots of little ones.
The second is constantly to renew the freshness of the brand, to keep the brand in touch with the hyperactivity of popular culture. After all, the phrase "attention span" is now a misnomer. My attention stopped "spanning" a long time ago. Now it tends to hop and skip and…I’m sorry, what was I saying again?
Yesterday, I found a nice solution from Aquafina (the water brand from PepsiCo). According to Jon Lafayette and TelevisionWeek, Aquafina has done a deal with IFC (Independent Film Channel) to sponsor a website that will show short films submitted by the public.
The website will be called Media Lab (which will surely interest the people at MIT). Evan Fleischer sees the website as a way to build the IFC brand.
One of our core missions is to provide filmmakers with a place where they can express themselves unedited and uncut. That’s the way we run it on the network and the way we run it online.
No doubt, Media Lab will do good things for IFC but what impresses me is how well it works for Aquafina. Media Lab builds a shunt into the brand through which the most contemporary of contemporary culture can run like a river.
IFC is not going to edit this material. Some of it will be bad film making. Some of it will be outrageous film making. Aquafina doesn’t need to care. It is close enough to take credit and far enough away to avoid contamination (when this might occur). Now it has a constant stream of various meanings and absolutely current ones running through it.
This needn’t be the sum and total of the brand. It will be a relatively small part of the meaning portfolio. But there it is what Michael Hammer, senior brand manager, calls a "more alternative [and] unique way[] to complement the other media that we have."
Brilliant. We have seen something like this strategy before. Absolut did a particularly brilliant campaign in which the bottle was made to take up residence in the city. Yellow taxi cabs in Manhattan in the shape of the Absolut bottle, say. Benson and Hedges, the British cigarette brands, did something similar.
The IFC "river runs through it" strategy is in some ways more effective and vital. It brings diverse and current meanings into the brand, better than taking the brand out into the world (as Absolut and Benson and Hedges did).
I believe we are getting the hang of this, we really are.
References
Lafayette, Jon. 2006. IFC banking on user-made films. TelevisionWeek. February 6, 2006, pp. 6. 18.
Marketing the capital markets II
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Sorry I didn’t post yesterday. UPS managed to move my new computer from Shanghai to Norwalk in 3 days. Impressive!
Then it took 3 days to fail to deliver it the last mile. Not impressive!
When bad execution happens to good brands! At some point, the letters UPS came spontaneously to stand for "U People Suck!" Juvenile, I’m sure, but when brands disappoint us, we will rewrite them.
My distinguished colleague at Corante, Olivier Blanchard, very kindly smiled on my Friday post about marketing financial services, and asked me for more on the topic. I am happy to oblige.
Friday, we noted that financial services and the capital markets have recently been obliged to climb down off their high horse. Now they must at least pretend that the "consumer is king," that "voice of the consumer" counts, that it is time to be "consumer centric," [insert favorite marketing cliche here]. (Well, they may be cliches to us. Not in the money biz, apparently.)
Friday, we noted there are muddles in the models. Thus, when American Century Investments uses Lance Armstrong, it’s not clear they have it exactly right. The metaphor (Lance is to athletic achievement what you the consumer can be to financial achievement) spins into implausibility. No meaning is transferred. A great wad of cash is wasted. The consumer is mystified.
Today, an ad from citi:
It’s not I$NY
The heart of New York
is so much more than Wall Street
To help keep it in perspective,
we offer free financial guidance
to help you get control of your future.
Because after all,
people drive the economy.
The stock market just rides shot gun.
Something about this ad makes me nervous. There is something odd about protesting the obvious. Surely, none of us has ever doubted that "the heart of New York is so much more than Wall Street."
I can’t help wondering whether this is not a kind of semiotic leakage. Without meaning to, the ad gives away the Wall Street conviction that it is the center of NYC.
And then citi presumes to help me "keep it in perspective." Um. Actually, I believe this is my job, keeping things in perspective is, and, no, no help is actually called for.
Then there’s the non sequitur: financial guidance will help me keep the fact that Wall Street is not the heart of Wall Street? Really? I guess I see what’s intended here. That good advice will help me think less about money, and that will help me participate in the life of the city. But, er, advertising is the art where perfect clarity meets perfect compression. No guessing should be necessary.
But then things get really strange. "People drive the economy, the stock market just rides shotgun."
So you’re saying my career is a covered wagon. Really, I am so flattered. Really, I am this close to tears. And, what, you’re protecting me? With a shot gun? Get out of here! I’m, like, Roy Rogers. And you’re like…Jingles! Jingles with a shotgun! That gives me a nice warm feeling. A large, stupid man with his finger on the trigger.
But let’s take the metaphor seriously. On Friday, I compared the capital markets to the black nobility of the Vatican: creatures of great power, prestige and standing. But this metaphor repositions things rather dramatically, doesn’t it? Now the capital markets are creatures of the open range. No important distinctions of rank here. And all of us are creatures of action, quick to respond to the lawlessness of the wild west. (I rather like this part of the equation. Contemporary markets are a little like the wild west, dangerous and unpredictable.)
This concept of the capital markets is a little better than the aristocratic one. It collapses the status difference. It supplants lordly disdain with something more engaged, more combative. But I can’t help feeling there is a via media here, something in between the grand elites and rough hewn heroics.
It’s a little like watching an evolutionary process. An industry that never used to care about marketing is having to learn how to do it on the run, branding itself as it goes. Each players in the industry is trying out several experments. Some of them (Lance and Jingles) will work as object lessons, what not to do. The industry "brand" will eventually prove emergent.
I’m just guessing but I think the future of the marketing the capital markets lies almost exactly between Jingles and J.P. Morgan.
References
Blanchard, Olivier. 2006. Let the games begin. Editorial at Corante Marketing. here.
Marketing the capital markets
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The office of J.P. Morgan and Company at 23 Wall Street is luxurious but unmarked. The implicit message: "If you have to ask, you can’t come in."
The world of financial markets was close to an aristocratic preserve. Its occupants were to capital what the "black nobility" were to the Pope: noble Roman families with prestigious ceremonial positions at the papal court and vast influence in the city beyond.
These princes of capitalism weren’t like the rest of us, grubby merchants struggling to make a living. These people came from good families. They had the benefit of good degrees, patrician manners, and the right connections. Most of all, they enjoyed a certain self confidence, and a quiet self regard.
Most of all, the princes of capitalism did not shill. After all, shill was shrill. Every gentleman and woman understood that the first law of status was sprezzatura (to conceal art with art, to conceal effort with grace). You might be "working at it." But you must never be seen to be "working at it."
If you have to ask, you can’t come in.
But things have changed. Now the capital markets live in a world that’s a lot like yours and mine. They have to ask. This means marketing.
And they have their work cut out for them. Most people still treat matters of money, capital, finance, the stock market, and even simple banking matters as if they were essential mystical or at least magical. The math makes it scary. What remains of the hauteur of the capital markets makes it intimidating.
But there is a mystery at the very heart of money. For most people, even sophisticated, well educated people, in a sensible world, money doesn’t make money, people do. Most were raised with a notion that value is created by an "honest day of labor." The idea that money makes money, this is insufficient narrative. Who’s the agent, we want to know. How can something make more of itself? (I know it sounds crazy. But then that’s what anthropology is for: unearthing things that on finer scrutiny are simply odd.)
Lots of the consumers of financial institutions practice "money avoidance." Once they set things up, they tend to leave them be. Leave to the expert. Even if the interest rate is ludicrous. Even if the financial products are completely wrong for them. Good news for the existing bank, mutual fund or credit card. Bad news for anyone who is trying to win new business.
But everyone is now trying. And the most trying try are those photos we see in the lobby of our local bank. Stock images of happy families, young, prosperous, sunny. Oi! This marketing gesture is designed to put a human face on capital, but, for my money, it just ends up making the enterprise look even more mythical and extraplanetary. I mean, who are these people?
And then you get the ad that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this morning. It reads "Put Your Lance Face on" and it shows Lance Armstrong head and shoulders, larger than life. The photo is over-lit so that we can see every pore on Mr. Armstrong’s face and Mr. Armstrong has an expression that is absolutely Martian. He looks like the human machine we know him to be.
We can see what American Century Investments was trying to do. Here’s what the ad says:
What does it mean to put your Lance face on? It means taking responsbility for your future. It means developing a plan for the most important goals in your life. It mean staying focused and determined in the face of challenges. When it comes to investing, it means the same thing. Lance makes every decision count. You can too. For more information, contact our financial advisor…
Not very subtle. Not by any means state of the art advertising. But a sincere effort to draw a comparison between Lance Armstrong and the kind of investor we can be if we work with American Century Investments.
The trouble is, and this is the strategic problem, it is really hard for any of us to accept the comparison. All of us know Lance Armstrong to be a kind of God. I mean, the guy recovers from cancer and wins the Tour de France. He wins the Tour de France over and over again. If there is a hero in our world, if there is a human who has assumed mythical proportions, it’s Lance Armstrong. The ad would like to transfer meaning (responsibility, focus, determination) from Lance to us, thanks to American Century Investments, but none of us is likely to find this plausible.
The trouble is, and this is the executional problem, the ad itself exacerbates the strategic issue by giving us a picture of Lance that confirms our worst suspicion: that he’s not like us, that all comparisons are preposterous. Lance is a Martian. We are not. (Well, I’m hoping I have a couple of Martian readers. You know who you are.)
I am sure my distinguished colleague in Toronto, Susan Abbott, a former banker and a gifted marketer, would have caught this marketing howler. I suspect that Pip Coburn and his remarkable team at Coburn Ventures would have thought their way out of it.
But a good deal of the rest of the capital markets are struggling to catch up to an elementary understanding of marketing. How they must stoop to conquer!
References
Anon. 2006. "Put Your Lance Face On." Full page ad for American Century Investments. Wall Street Journal. February 10, 2006, p. A9.
start up idea # 7: lifestyle architecture
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As I reported a couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies, God of planning, asked me to sit in as an instructor in his Account Planning School of the Web. I was happy, indeed, honored to participate.
Russell has now posted my assignment here and I was moved to attach this comment. Anything in italics was added after the fact (of posting the comment).
Russell, this looks great. Looking forward to new species springing to life first as assignments, then as realities. Russell Davies and company, lifestyle architects.
This is a start up we must start up. I’m thinking of a subscription model. Consumers/clients pay us $112 a year for a new lifestyle every quarter.
Come to think of it lifestyle instruction is the sort of thing we, sometimes, we read magazines for and its not clear that there is a niche here for us to occupy. On the other hand, if what we are offering is a deep cultural specification of the style in question, this might be different and interesting. (And like totally worth $112.00 per annum.)
Those who want a more complete specification of the cultural meanings and objectives of the style in question or deeper instruction in the "script" for same can pay us more.
And a lot more would not be out of the question. Some will take umbrage at this abrogation of the individual’s right and responsibility to define the self by the self. But golly, we call on experts to help us design everything else in our lives. And this is pretty close to what many Manhattan psychiatrists do…and surely we can do better than this community of professionals. I mean, we actually know something about the culture in question.
Absolutely, custom made, bespoke lifestyles, well, those cost more.
In a transformational, Ovidian culture, surely this is an idea well past due.
As to our business model, or better, our business style, I’m thinking of something along the lines of Saville Row tailors. You and me and others standing around thinking deep thoughts on what lifestyle might "suit" this particular client. Me: "I’m thinking this fellow needs a home in the south of France." You: "No, no, no. Rykivik (sp!) one weekend. Mexico City the next."
Thanks, Grant
References
I am almost certain that the front cover of Fast Company pictured here features a picture of Russell Davies. But I might be wrong. And if I’m wrong, I’m really embarrassed.
Muddles in old media models
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There was this morning a distressing interview in the Wall Street Journal: Brian Steinberg talked to Ann Moore, chairman and chief executive of Time, Inc.
There is some evidence that Ms. Moore gets the challenge ahead.
We are a content company, OK? We create and we edit, and we aggregate the best content out there. We can deliver to you, our reader, in whatever format you want it in the future — maybe not on paper.
The "maybe not on paper" is a worrying. It’s almost certainly "probably not on paper" and that much should be clear.
But then things get a little alarming. Ms. Moore says,
One of the biggest threats to our business is this confusion in the public between real, fact-based, checked news and opinion, which is very cheap… And so, I’m really committed, as is John Huey, to really paying attention to Time and figuring out how we can hold up the price value of fact-based news.
This is a gratuitous swipe at blogging, clearly, but worse than that it demonstrates this sense that Time will continued to be a journalistic silo or citadel, with writers "in here" and readers "out there." This boundary has blurred and journalism will adapt or die.
And please don’t tell me that the value add is fact checking. Your value add, Ms. Moore, if I may presume to say so, is pattern recognition. You have some magnificently gifted editors and journalists with a nice track record. We must hope that they are still up to the task now that we live in a world where info, data, outlook mutliply like the Mayfly of a Cambridge spring.
But then things get really distressing. Steinberg askes a difficult question about John Huey, the new corporate editor in chief at Time.
Mr. Huey suggested in a recent New York magazine article that he might not read some of Time Inc.’s women’s titles if he didn’t have to. But titles like People and InStyle are the powerhouses of the operation — and also where you made your mark before becoming CEO. Do you and John need to have a little chat?
Beauty, Brian. Ms. Moore is obviously a gifted political actor and she cannot criticize Mr. Huey. But, lord in heaven, why did she hire him? This is another boundary that has coming crashing down. I refer to the distinction between "serious journalism" and "popular culture." If your editor in chief insists on the silo or citadel approac here, God help you. Two "boundary errors" of this kind, and, as Heidi Klum would say, " you out."
Thoughts on the media summit tomorrow.
Steinberg, Brian. 2006. Time’s Chief Plats A Digital-Age Transformation. Wall Street Journal. February 8, 2006. p. B3.
Being Mitch Hurwitz
Posted by: | CommentsTomorrow, I am doing a presentation at the Media Summit in NYC. (1:00-2:30 at McGraw-Hill Building, 1221 Ave. of the Americas at 49th St. [6th Ave]. I think if you say you are my parent, brother, sister, son, daughter, or cousin they will probably let you in.)
The title for the session is Developing the Next Generation of Entertainment, Media & Technology Thinkers and Visionaries – Science vs. Commerce vs. Theory.
Anna Marie Piersimoni of the American Film Institute has set the theme which is, roughly, the rapidly changing landscape of technology, ideas and behavior in entertainment media and its affect of these on the future of university education in the field.
We only have 10 minutes, but I am going to give a presentation called "Being Mitch Hurwitz: strategies for managing new media."
My slides:
Slide 1: We hold these truths to be self evident
that there are
new consumers
fragmentation of taste and preference
newly participatory, newly aggressive
new producers
cable outlets, video games, bloggers, fan fic, etc.
new media
DVD, internet, mobile phones, cable, etc.
that the entertainment industry is struggling to catch up
that the university world is well behind the curve
this is an opportunity to make ourselves useful
my approach: a Harvard Business School model
a transmedia model
Mitch Hurwitz has a problem, we can help solve it
Slide 2:
Strategy 1: a business model Mitch Hurwitz & Arrested Development
4.3 million viewers a week too small for Fox, not bad for TNT (e.g., The Closer)
a case of long tails, fat middles (& arrested development)
thinking technologies, i.e., more nimble business models
what we need, very precise measures:
the break even numbers for each production model
how much does it cost MH to make AD for PT, cable, DVD, etc.
the break even numbers for each channel
how many viewers/buyers does MH need for each channel
the momentum indicators
who is watching, how fast are they signing on, can MH wait?
loyalty vs. churn measures do we keep viewers or entertain new people every week?
loyalists, are they dense or distributed? informed or not? in or pending?
a predictive model MH could have used
Slide 3:
Strategy 2: Transmedia
what MH might have done in the first instance
transmedia as a way of building an audience
(e.g., Batman, several comics, several movies, fan fic)
Henry Jenkins. Transmedia. Cultural Convergence. Forthcoming.
alternative ADs licensed or merely encouraged
fan fic, internet,
dividing the labor across several creative streams
let them run, unapologetic difference,
complete cocreation compliance
opportunities for engagement/participation/knowledge
solves the diffusion problem of strategy 1
MH doesn’t have to start cold, people know about it, and bec. they are coauthors they tune in to “see what you’ve done with the idea”
in the meantime, MH then scales up steadily to prime time AD starts small: internet, small cable, big cable, network, prime time
Slide 4: the academic contribution
1) to determine the alternative producing communities, how they work, how MH draw upon them
2) to build this knowledge into the curriculum so that students leave the academy with a fuller knowledge of contemporary culture, and how they can make a living in this culture
3) bringing business models to the liberal arts (yeah, right)
For more details on the conference here.
Session Participants
Moderator, Anna Marie Piersimoni, Director, Internet Communications, Director, Media & Technology, American Film Institute
Allen Sabinson, Dean of Antoinette Westphal College of Media, Arts & Design. Drexel University Carol Wilder, Associate Dean & Chair, Media Studies & Film, The New School
Paul Levinson, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the communication and Media Studies Department, Fordham University
Scott B. Barnett, Assoc. Director of Academic Computing, Sarah Lawrence College
Beer ads and the Superbowl (and the winner is…)
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You’d think the Superbowl was a contest between ad agencies, and of course it is. After the ads, various media pundits are called upon to pundit (or punt it, as the case may be). The results are almost always grim, a thorough going demonstration of how little we understand advertising and the culture for which and to which it speaks.
Eugene Secunda, an adjunct media studies professor of the department of culture and communication at New York University and former senior VP at J. Walter Thompson went so far as the suggest that beer consumers are "essentially nihilist" and "cynical, hostile, angry people. There’s a lot of mindlessness and destructiveness."
Really?
George Hacker, director of the Alcohol Policies Project for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said beer ads tell viewers that beer is "the raison d’être for being involved in the sport."
Wha?
Pleading for mercy, one of our own, Linda Kaplan Thaler, CEO and CCO of Kaplan Thaler Group, said creators of successful beer commercials must "think of the mind-set of the person they are trying to reach.’
And on behalf of beer companies, I’ve spent a lot of time in bars talking to people about beer consumption. The mind-set is not mindless or destructive. No one I talked to thought that beer was the raison d’etre for being involved in the sport of football. (Mind you, and to be fair, I did not interview anyone in an insane asylum.)
To sum up this research for Miller Lite, I wrote a little essay some years ago called "Riggins man" which seemed to me to capture the mind-set of beer consumers. I can share it with you because Margaret Mark, an executive with the JWT, republished it in a book called the Hero and the Outlaw.
Riggins man
Riggins man was first spotted in the early 1980s at an affair of state. He was in fact discovered in a Washington stateroom filled with dignitaries, luminaries and celebrities. The dinner was held to celebrate Reagan’s presidency and a new era. This was Washington at its most sumptuous. The president himself was about to speak. The crowd fell silent.
Almost silent. From a far corner of the room came a rumbling sound, almost as if someone were snoring. As it turned out, someone was snoring. Someone had fallen asleep in front of the President of the United States on one of the great social events of the season. The ceremonial order of Washington had been breached. The new imperial presidency had been wounded.
People were outraged. Who dared affront the president? Eyes searched the room for the author of this impertinence. Where was the poor schmo who had pegged out in his salad? He will be made to rue this day. The crowd will set upon him. They will hound him into a life of bureaucratic insignificance on the far reaches of empire. This guy will be lucky to end up running a post office in rural Oregon.
Two legs stuck out from beneath rich linen folds to mark the culprit’s lair. Here the snorer lay. A group gathered to look on in astonishment and indignation. Someone peered under the table. He was, first, puzzled, and, then, he smiled. The word spread, and now everyone was smiling. The snorer, it turned out, was John Riggins, running back for the local football team, the Washington Redskins.
The diplomatic incident de-escalated as suddenly as it had arisen. Everyone suddenly stopped ‘recoiling in horror’ and ‘sniffing in disapproval.’ No one leapt to restore the honor of the president. Security wondered whether they shouldn’t remove this "stupid, vulgar" man. But everyone just looked at them, as if to say, "What, are you kidding? Let him sleep. He’s probably really tired or something." In the blink of an eye, everyone went from high indignation to rye amusement, as if to say "Well, that’s John Riggins for you. Riggins fell asleep listening to the president? Wait till I tell the kids."
What protected Riggins from punishment? Partly, it was the old joke, "where does an elephant sleep?" (Anywhere it wants to.) But there was something else. Riggins’s gesture tapped the way Americans define maleness. Confronted by ceremony, formality, and politesse, the Riggins male is supposed to crawl under a table and go to sleep.
Football players, the theory goes, are works of nature untouched by civilization. They are men who do not know and do not care for the niceties of polite society. Football is, after all, the practice of barely mediated violence. It is an exertion of a primitive kind. Off the gridiron, out of violent male company, obliged to present a social self, these men are bored witless. Remove this elemental man from his elements, and a nap is inevitable.
Almost every group of males includes a Riggins male and almost all of them surround him with ambivalence. He is essential even as he is there on sufferance. He will often react without thinking. He will often engage in reckless behavior. He will precipitate misadventure, fights, and commotion. He is gives new meaning to the cliché, an accident waiting to happen. He is tolerated by the group precisely because he has a Riggins quality, because he keeps the flame for the group, he is an elemental male.
The classic representation of this character in popular culture was John Belushi, an actor who made the cultural form his "part" on screen and, tragically, off. A somewhat more nuanced portrayal has come from Steve Zahn who played the part in SubUrbia (1997, Richard Linklater). He is "Buff," a maniacal teenager who plays triumphant air guitar and taunts the world with mock but vivid threats of sex and violence. He is exuberant, good hearted, red necked, and clueless. Buff is never really sure what is going on around him, but he is quick to surrender to the impulse of the moment, whatever that might be. His group of friends indulges him even when his behavior reflects on them. He is a cherished member of the group even when at odds with it.
In Out of Sight (1998, Steven Soderbergh), Zahn (as Glenn Michaels) plays the role again, but Soderbergh, in his characteristically brilliant way, finds a way to undo the myth. Glenn plays the thoughtless force, but it isn’t long before he finds himself out of his depth. In a key scene, he is called upon to participate in a savage act of murder, and he is thoroughly undone. The remaining scenes show him wandering catatonically in a blood stained sweater, still at a remove from the world around him, but not any longer because he is a vital, primitive force at odds with it.
I will spare you the strategic recommendations, but this will give you a small indication of the "mind set" of the beer drinker. Now, clearly, Riggins man is in the Steve Zahn "format," an unusual male and a small part of the larger group. But my argument was that all guys, when drinking beer, especially in groups of men, veer towards Rigginsness. Even guys who are otherwise mild mannered and bookish.
Now that we have the mindset, we can assess the advertising winners and the losers of Superbowl more carefully.
Winners (in this order)
1. Bud Light: Hidden beer in office (The beer hunts reveals the Riggins man within)
2. Bud Light: Save yourself (stealing another man’s beer is exactly what Riggins man would do)
3. Bud Light: Fridge worship
4. Bud Light: On the roof
Losers (in this order)
1. Michelob Ultra (girls don’t tackle Riggins men)
2. Miller Genuine Draft (Riggins man does not care about checkgirl’s approval. At all.)
Honorable mention
1) Degree for men: the "stunt" spot is almost perfectly Riggins, including touch of self mockery at end.
2) Ted Ferguson, Stunt man (this is another spot for Bud Lite, not shown during the Superbowl).
On the client side, the award goes to Marlene Coulis, 14-year A-B veteran, and the first woman — and first Hispanic person — to hold the top marketing post and Bob Lachky here predecessor.
I am unable to identify the agency responsible for this work. If anyone knows, please let me know.
Thanks to fellow Canadian and Montrealler and friend, Stephane (see his excellent comment below), I can now say that the agency in question is DDB, Chicago. Now, does anyone know the names of the creative team?
References
LaPointe, Joe. 2006. Great Beer Ad Debate: Funny or Irresponsible. February 5, 2006. here.
(both quotes above from LaPointe)
Find all the ads from the Superbowl at ifilm here.
