The brand is an elephant and we are all blind men.  The designers have one idea of what a brand is.  The Jungians another.  The marketing managers, b-school professors, advertising creatives, account planners…everyone has a formal model, and a working one.

There is an anthropological view, and Rob Walker captured it most precisely yesterday in the New York Times. 

[A brand is] a process of attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, the ideas attached to products have become more elaborate, ambitious and even emotional. This is why, for example, current branding campaigns for beer or fast food often seem to be making some sort of statement about the nature of contemporary manhood. If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people — consciously or not — to consume the idea by consuming the product. Even companies like Apple and Nike, while celebrated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand.

If brands are ideas, then branding is a process of meaning manufacture and management.  That’s our job.  How to get meanings into brands, that people might extract this meaning for purposes of identity construction.

References.

Walker, Rob.  2006.  The Brand Underground.  New York Times, July 30, 2006 and here. 

Announcement

I am on vacation this week.

It is now clear that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is a smash hit, and everyone connected to it is an absolute genius. (Bill Murray’s joke here: "I’d like to thank everyone connected to Lost in Translation, but so many people take credit for it now, I wouldn’t know where to begin.")

It’s worth remembering that the striking thing about the film, and the thing that most surely saved it from being fiber free, Nutrasweet pap, is the performance by Johnny Depp.  And this is worth remembering because Disney came close to canning his performance

[T]he eccentricity of Depp’s approach sent ripples of panic through Disney’s executive suites. Frantic phone calls were placed to Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Depp’s agent: Why is he walking funny? Why is he talking like that? Is he gay? Is he drunk? And it wasn’t only the suits who were concerned: ”The first scene I did with Johnny, I was like, What the f— are you doing?” Knightley says. ”None of us knew if it was going to work.”  

Depp was not to be deterred. ”It was just fuel to go further,” he says. ”Not because I wanted to piss Disney off, but because I believed it was the right thing to do. Finally, I said, ‘Look, you hired me to do the gig. If you can’t trust me, you can fire me. But I can’t change it.’ It was a hard thing to say, but f— it.” (Rottenburg)

Whew!  Talk about dodging a bullet!  Imagine if the lead actor didn’t have clout or courage.  Imagine a director (Gore Verbinski) who was not prepared to retire to a life as a "goat cheese farmer."   Imagine if this was a bigger bet for Disney, and not a movie based on a ride from it’s theme park.  Depp might well have been deterred.  Disney might well have prevailed.  All of a sudden, it’s no longer an opening weekend of $132 million or a ten-day-take of $258 million.  "I can’t change it."  When was the last time these 4 words made a studio this much money?

Hollywood, one of the places culture and commerce combine spectacularly in our world, is having a hard time of it. 

1) costs are going up.  The Motion Picture Association of America says that it now costs $96 million dollars on average to make and market a film.  This is up nearly $20 million from 2001.

2) ticket sales are still flat, and hover at what they were 4 years ago.

3) DVD sales are beginning to slow, after years of double-digit growth.

The industry, once famous for its big spending ways, is changing.

1) new cost discipline is in effect at the studios, not least because they are now owned by large multinationals.

2) big stars are dropping their salaries.  Tom Cruise did for Mission Impossible 3. 

3) the studios are, in the opinion of Stephen Prough of Salem Partners, "absolutely less fun" to work at. 

4) There is even talk of a "death of the middle" strategy embraced in other markets.

Hollywood executives have also opened a debate about the proper size and composition of a studio’s film slate.  One theory is that studios should do away with mid-sized films–say, with budgets in the $50 range–and instead focus on the blockbusters, such as Pirates of the Caribbean and niche products.  (Chaffin)

The "death of the middle" strategy is straight forward.  It says, spend massively to guarantee hits at the top, and fund lots of little films to fill niches (and find sleepers) at the bottom.  The middling films, the DOM stategy says, are too small for marketing muscle and too big to connect to anyone.

But what are we assuming here?  We’re assuming that the block busters are manufacturable, that the studios can manage their way to sensational numbers.  Really?  It looks like Disney came this close to refusing the essential ingredient of this summer’s blockbuster.  (Is he drunk?  Is he gay?  Please.  It’s called acting.)  Were it not for Depp’s refusal to rework his foppish Jack, this block buster might well have been a middle weight, and no block buster at all.

I wonder if it isn’t time for Hollywood to get chunkier.  Maybe the real opportunities lie in the middle ground.  A chunky approach to marketing says go for the sweet spot, the place with money enough to hire real talent, and enough freedom to set them free.  (Freeish.)  There has to be a habitable space between the deeply eccentric, entirely self indulgent freedoms of the indie and the "fear of falling" rigidities that understandably beset the studio when spending $160 million.

Maybe the next move for Hollywood should be managers who can manage the middle.  I mean most anyone can spend their way out of risk…except when they can’t (which is now much of the time).  And just about anyone can max out their parent’s credit cards in the creation of the next great indie act of film school nicherie. 

More easily said than done.  Managing the middle, looking for chunky markets, this takes people who really know the interface between culture and commerce, people who can read consumer taste and preference, who can work a fragmented culture because they know that culture, AND bring the project in on time and budget.  It takes people who know their culture and their commerce.  I don’t doubt there are people in Hollywood who qualify as centaurs, but I’d be very surprised if these people were industry standard.

Hollywood’s problem is everyone’s problem.  Every packaged goods brand face the problem of the vanishing middle.  Every marketer must learn to speak to a turbulent marketplace.  One of these days, a business school or an industry association will rise to the occasion.  In the meantime, we’ll just have to hope that the actors will save us.  (And when you are relying on Johnny Depp to save you, well, God save you, too.)

References

Chaffin, Joshua.  2006.  Hollywood’s blockbuster budgets leave the chests bare.  Financial Times.  July 17, 2006.  [source for all data reproduced above in point form]

Rottenberg, Josh.  2006.  The Piracy Debate: the rough seas of the upcoming "Pirates of the Caribbean" films.  Entertainment Weekly.  July 07, 2006.  here. 

Note

Bill Murray quote approximate.

Post Script

Russell Davies offers this as one of several insights from his stay in Portland at Nike and Wieden + Kennedy. 

7. Brands that influence culture sell more

This feeling was always in the air. People were trying to build popular culture not piggy-back on it, trying to create new culture, not just repeat old ones. About the worst thing you could say about an idea was that it had ‘borrowed interest’. And it was palpably clear that this instinct led to more effective, more profitable brands. So I remember writing ‘brands that influence culture sell more’ in a creds deck and getting the highly prized Wieden nod of approval. That was a good moment. (Or at least I think I remember writing that, it seems to have turned up in other places too, so maybe I heard it somewhere first, perhaps through some sort of strange wormhole into the future.)

Davies, Russell.  2006.  Seven things I learned at Wieden and Kennedy.  here.

Michael Keaton will do a TV series called The Company about the CIA.

James Woods will do a show this fall called Shark about a prosecuting attorney.

Kyra Sedwick triumphed in The Closer, the highest ranking show on cable.

Holly Hunter is in negotiations to do a drama called Grace about an Oklahoma City detective.

What do these actors have in common?  They can carry TV and Hollywood projects but they’d rather steal them. 

Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998) was a great picture and Keaton managed to steal it with 2 minutes of screen time.  "Ray Nicolette" is a deeply stupid FBI agent who likes to wear the FBI t-shirts they sell in tourist kiosks.  He is taunted by his girl friend’s father (Dennis Farina),

"Hey, Ray, when you’re working undercover do you ever wear a t-shirt that reads "undercover"?" 

Ray replies with a stare that is equidistant between complete incomprehension and complete hostility.   We the audience just can’t tell.  It’s the best bit of acting in a film filled with good acting. I think it’s fair to say that Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney have never been better than in Out of Sight.  Keaton appears almost as if remind us that, even at their best, they are film stars, not actors.

James Woods, as Dr. Harvey Mandrake, came precious close to stealing Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999) with a bit part about a doctor compromised by the demands of professional football. 

Kyra Sedgwick stole cable with a show that debuted in the summer time. (!)

And my favorite example is Holly Hunter who steals the whole of Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) with about 30 seconds on one quarter of the screen. 

Funny, then, that all of them should have been be tapped for television. 

At first glance, it looks like a good trade.  They bring talent and celebrity to a cable proposition that is now robust enough to pay them decently and risk taking enough to give them room to do their thing dramatically. 

But I wonder whether this does not also suggest a trend in contemporary culture and commerce.  What we are looking at might be a shift from the stars to actors, from big propositions (beauty + charisma with just enough talent) to something more intense (talent with a capital T and whatever else the actor happens to bring along for the ride).  I think George Clooney is a good case in point here.  He has just enough talent to sustain his career as handsome George.  Holly Hunter is a formidable talent who happens to be good looking.  And it wouldn’t much matter if she weren’t.  (Every show stealer is a great actor.  That’s how they do it.)

You could call this long tail casting, but only if you wanted to obscure what is going on.  Cable is eating Network’s lunch precisely because it can go intensive (narrow but deep) while the Network continues to struggle to be extensive (wide but shallow).  And if that’s all that happened, we are indeed looking at a long tail proposition.

But this is something different.  This is talent finding a new way in, and it reverses an age old pattern.  In the old days, stars would come up big and, if they were smart about it, they would spend their rest of their careers trading their celebrity for credibility, taking more difficult roles in smaller productions.  We will have to watch Kyra Sedgwick’s career with interest.  She was never mass, but her part in The Closer suggests the possibility that she might someday become so.

By this reckoning, the mass market is not dead.  It is merely more capacious.  Some of its structural properties have changed, to be sure.  Those who want a chunk of this market can’t get it merely by going wide, by being witless, agreeable and non threatening.  This fragmented mass market demands that people bring talent, take risks and proceed intensively.  Only thus can they hope to break in.  But this is not about tiny markets connected to small producers (mostly) by electronically enabled channels. 

It is as if mass culture became a larger space, and as if got larger, the traditional model of stardom and production was forced now to change.  In fact, as I was reading the obits for Aaron Spelling, I couldn’t help wondering whether the producer of shows like Charlie’s Angels would flourish in the new world of television.  I think we can take for granted that The Closer would have offended Spelling’s vaunted instincts in just about every way.  But we would be wrong, we would be naive, to suppose that this is the beginning of a long tail market.  There is something installed in our culture between the old mass media and the new long tail "youtubes" of the world.  TV calls it cable.  We call it chunky. 

If this is true, it’s good news for TV.  The future is not youtube.com. It’s good news for advertising.  The future is consumer created content and word-of-mouth.  And it is, whew, good news for anthropology.  The future is not a perfect fragmentation of consumer taste and preference. 

This world will fill with evolutionary options.  Out of this long tail noise will come winners who take, well, if not "all," then great big chucks of the marketing place.  The chief difference is that they will have to start small, risk big and leverage real talent.  But some of them, just a few of them, will prove to be show stealers.  To win in this marketplace and culture, that’s what it will take.  Not Jessica Simpson but Kyra Sedgwick.  Not Heather Graham but Holly Hunter.  Not Rebecca Romajin (Pepper Dennis), but oh, I don’t know, someone who can really act. 

Call this the rise of a chunky culture, no longer mass, not yet, and not ever, long tail.  The future of contemporary culture and contemporary culture?  It belongs to the show stealers.  I am not sure Nietzsche ever got that 3 picture deal from Hollywood he deserved, but it was he, I think, who anticipate the new industry when he said, "good poets don’t borrow, they steal." 

When Michael Keaton, James Woods, Kyra Sedgwick and Holly Hunter come to the "waste land" of television, we are looking at the era of the scene stealer, not the arrival of a long tail market.  Cable is not going to fragment still further.  It is beginning to chunk.  It is expanding enough to attract big talent, and with these steal stealers in place it will expand even more. 

There are plenty more things to say about chucky culture and commerce.  But I will close with just three.  Chunky culture is big enough to fund real talent.  (Where are the incentives in long tail markets?)  Chunky culture is big enough to encourage real risk.  (Where are the incentives in long tail markets?)   Chunky culture is big enough to have real  gravitational effects on contemporary culture.  (Long tail markets are a recreation of the tower of babel.)  Things like Arrested Development, this was long tail.  It grew big enough to max out and, God willing, it will flourish in a more narrow medium. 

But the other plays on Cable, these are now big enough to get bigger, and as they do we move from long tail to chucky. 

References

Andreeva, Nellie.  2006.  Hunter finds good "Grace" in TNT pilot.  Hollywood Reporter East. July 10, 2006, p. 1.

Nordyke, Kimberley.  2006.  Keaton, Turner make for Good Company.  Hollywood Report East. July 10, 2006, p. 5.