Monthly Archives: May 2008

Marketing out of control at FX

I have broken my FX boycott, and the enterprise now lies around me in ruins, proof that I cannot mobilize public opinion even the tiniest bit.

I have a good excuse, though.  To boycott FX would mean missing The Riches, and this would mean missing Minnie Driver, a woman so exquisitely talented that she must now be regarded as perhaps Hollywood’s greatest gift to television. (The contenders for this honor being Holly Hunter, Glenn Close, Lili Taylor, and Kyra Sedgwick.)

So I am watching the April 22 episode and low and behold, there is evidence of marketing mischief and meddling everywhere. 

First, Eddie Izzard, as Wayne Malloy, is seen driving a GMC Acadia.  This is one of the sponsors of the The Riches and ads play several times in the course of this episode.  I don’t like product placement, as I have argued here, but as long as we TIVO through the ads this is perhaps forgivable.

But about one quarter through the episode, FX puts Minnie Driver, as Dahlia Malloy, in a GMC product on a GM lot.  Driver is sitting in the Acadia, talking on the phone. 

A neighbor comes up and says, "Ew!  Nice wheels!"

Minnie Driver responds, "I want to buy one."

Neighbor, "You sure?"

Minnie Driver, "Yeah."

Then a salesman walks up and says,

"So what are you thinking? GMC Acadium?" 

Neighbor, "How much down?"

Minnie Driver, "Yeah, how much down?"

Salesman, laughing, "Zero money down." 

Neighbor, "What’s the sticker price?"

Salesman, "It’s right there.  That includes a navigation radio with a rear view camera system."

Driver, "It’s zero money down?"

Later, Ms. Driver is made to say,

"It’s a great deal."

"I like that car though!"

and, once more behind the wheel of the GMC Acadia. 

"I’m feeling inspired.  I never bought a car before."

Holy ****.  This may very well be the most egregious example of commercial interference ever registered in our culture.  Recall that my original objection to FX was that they put an ad for one of their shows in the corner of the screen for the duration of an episode.  I thought this was a little much. 

But to put a sales pitch in the middle of the dramatic action, and to reduce a dramatic genius like Minnie Driver to a product pitcher, this is insufferable. 

If ever you doubted this Driver’s talent, check out The Riches.  It is an astonishing performance.  No sooner was FX gifted with this performance than they decided to make Ms. Driver start selling cars.  ("It’s zero money down?")  This is a little like asking Baryshnikov if he won’t mind demonstrating the latest fitness gear from the Home Shopping Network ("Zighmazter!") during a performance at the New York City Ballet. 

Now we know marketers have been meddling with cultural content for sometime now.  Here’s what Cameron Crowe had to say about the issue, roughly a decade ago

You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys.  You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people.  What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big, broad joke, a high concept.  Everything is tested.  The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer’s confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent."

But notice that in this case, the marketer is interfering with creative content.  But in the FX case, the marketer is actually insinuating the product in the creative content. 

Now there is a weird sort of solution to product placement problem.  We only need change the polarity.  We need to use TV shows as laboratories for the creation of product and brand ideas which then may be exported to the world.  As Rob Walker was saying on Sunday in the New York Times,

Pete Hottelet … has started a business devoted to bringing to life certain products from movies. His business is called Omni Consumer Products, a name borrowed from the fictional megacorporation in “Robocop.” In addition to Brawndo, Omni has acquired from Paramount the license to market Sex Panther, a made-up cologne from the Will Ferrell vehicle “Anchorman” (“150% More Awesome Than Any Other Cologne. Ever.”).

I am not squeemish about the interactions of culture and commerce.  I am inclined to agree with the likes of Tyler Cowen that on the whole, culture and commerce have been better for one another than generally supposed by the guardian intellectual.  But this FX event must mark the limiting case.  Surely, it stands as proof that there are moments when culture and commerce must keep their distance. 

The first question: who’s to blame?  It is hard for me to believe
that most everyone on the set is embarrassed by this thing.  The
question is, who is the culprit?  Presumably, this scandal takes us
into the upper reaches of senior management at FX.

The second question: how do we get FX to stop and discourage others from starting?  I would suggest a boycott but, well, that didn’t really turn out so well the first time.  Plus, we would miss all of Ms. Driver’s subsequent performances. 

Any thoughts on next steps would be very much appreciated. 

References

Rountree, Cathleen.  2008.  Film Actresses Find Second Lives on TV.  Women in World Cinema with Cathleen Rountree. here.

Walker, Rob.  2008.  This Joke’s On You.  New York Times.  May 4, 2008. here. 

Weinraub, Bernard. 1997. Hollywood learns small is beautiful. Globe and Mail/New York Times. February 25, 1997 (GM): D3.

Acknowledgments

Elana Swartz, my colleague at C3 MIT. 

the business case study: raw versus cooked

Talk about a power grab.  A couple of days ago, the dean of the Yale School of Management offered his definition of the "raw case."   (For all I know, this idea has been in circulation for some time now.  This is the first I have seen of it.)

The "raw case" is delivered not in the tidy 20 pages of the Harvard Business School (HBS) case study but online in a multimedia format. 

[This] conveys material through a variety of perspectives and data streams that can include original source documents such as 10-K filings and analyst reports, news media reports (print and broadcast), faculty-authored notes and background readings, scholarly articles, interview videos or transcripts with the parties involved, as well as other multimedia tools, such as Google maps. Raw cases consist of hundreds, even thousands, of “pages” of data. So, in addition to the lateral synthesis of many disparate piece of information, part of the student’s assignment is determining the most effective allocation of time and attention in order to answer the assigned question or perform the required analysis.

We think of this gift to the b-school community as a Trojan horse.  If Yale can persuade the world to adopt the raw case, it will have displaced the HBS case study format and some of the influence and the centrality of HBS itself.  (Finally, a business school acting like a business!) 

To confirm our suspicion that imperial motives drive this gift to the b-school world, Podolny speaks of the incumbent dismissively.  He calls the classic HBS offering a "cooked" case.  Wow.  Can you spell "positioning," boys and girls? 

Podolny says that this shift in formats is driven by the new intellectual and problem solving style in incoming students.  This is a little patronizing but it is nice to see a business school that pays attention to the cultural developments taking place off campus.

References

Podolny, Joel.  2008.  Transforming the MBA for the 21st Century – A commentary by Dean Joel M. Podolny.  Published in the Economic Times on April 28, 2008 and reproduced on the Yale School of
Management website here.

Reverend Wright, the CEO, and dreaming in politics and business

I have a friend who as a child glimpsed the possibility that he might be dreaming all the time.  Everyone has had that "is this a dream?" sensation.  Most of us shake it off.  He didn’t.  Not really.

What got my friend was the fact that he couldn’t prove that he wasn’t dreaming.  The fact that it didn’t feel like he was dreaming wasn’t proof that he wasn’t dreaming.  After all, his dream might consist in the conviction that he wasn’t dreaming.

He told me this matter of factly over dinner.  And I’m glad we were in a restaurant.  Because now infected by his epistemological panic, I felt the urge to start screaming, boxing my ears and carrying on like a deeply frightened, crazy person, and this sort of thing is frowned upon in the Harvard part of Cambridge.  (In the MIT part of Cambridge, it is of course completely ok.) 

Which brings me to Reverend Wright.  What must it be like to be him this morning?  On Monday, he gave his National Press Corps, a spirited defense of his religion, his church and his politics.  The next day he wakes up to discover that Obama calling his performance a "spectacle" and "a bunch of rants,", black leaders calling him a "narcissist" and the New York Times editorial accusing him of "racism and paranoia."

If you saw the performance on Monday, you know that Reverend Wright will be astonished by this criticism.  He spoke as a man who believed in his own grandeur, his centrality in the larger of schemes, the urgency with which the American polity required his guidance.  In sum, it was clear that here was a guy who lived in a bubble, who lived in a dream.  And this morning, he woke up.

Wright had no idea that he lived in a dream, I guess, because he must be surrounded by people who keep congratulating him on being so darned magnetic.  Indeed, the dream was really well insulated.  (Without an ethnographic investigation I wouldn’t want to say what the R value was exactly, but we have to know it’s high.)  It took national exposure, following by almost unanimous criticism to bring him around.  (We must hope it brought him around.)

There is a second, haunting possibility.  And that is that Reverend Wright was actually engaged in dream defense.  Now that African Americans have served as head of state, head of the military, and may yet serve sometime quite soon as the President, a pastor could be forgiven feeling that his very mandate to preach the way he does, his very self created centrality in the community, has been thrown in question.  Maybe Reverend Wright was engaged in sabotage against the man who’s candidacy inflicted sabotage on his own place in the world. 

Let’s go with the first interpretation, if only because it’s more Christian.  Which brings me back to my theme.  Reverend Wright was dreaming and he couldn’t tell he was dreaming and there was nothing in his world that was going to let him out of his bubble, back into the world.  It’s easy to look at this as a catastrophe happening to someone else, a very bad dream, as it were, that couldn’t possibly happen to us. 

But in point of fact, anyone of us could be caught in a dream.  And this is especially true if we are CEOs.  Every corporation has a culture.  The upside of this culture is that it supplies a set of assumptions and understandings which when well tuned to the world help us navigate and negotiate its complexities.  But when its wrong, it puts us at odds with the world.  It captures us in a dream that even really good spreadsheets can puncture.  Reverend Wright looks like a particularly tragic figure, but there are lots of CEOs who are "living his dream."  They are merely waiting for the moment to wake up. 

References

Anonymous.  2008.  Mr. Obama and Rev. Wright.  Editorial.  New York Times.  April 30, 2008.  here.

The Wikipedia article on Reverend Wright here.