Monthly Archives: July 2008

Dinner theater

Sardis_photo I tried, I really did.  I went to my first Broadway play this evening and I wanted to like it but I could only survive the first act.   

It turned out the real drama was Sardi’s.

The table straight ahead was a nuclear family, mum, dad and daughter about 14.  Dad was flying dark.  He was present.  Check.  He was enjoying himself.  Check.  But he wasn’t there.  This occasion belonged to his wife, you could tell he understood that, and his job was to turn up to turn in a cameo appearance.  His wife was a lovely person, you could just tell that immediately.  Intelligent, unassuming, gracious.  She was gazing fondly at the celebrity pictures on the wall, recalling perhaps shows she had seen, connecting with face she recognized.  The teenager was one part of "I know how much this means to my Mom so let’s have a little fun with it" and two parts "Broadway?  Negro, please.  When do we get out of here?" 

The table to the left was another nuclear family, this time with two kids. Here too Dad was present but barely accounted for.  He actually seemed to me a little nervous, as if he were perhaps a rental soon to be discovered as such.  Bad acting, no question there.  No caricature for you, buddy.  Here too the occasion was about mom, but her pleasure was not a private solace so much as it was the dear knowledge that she had brought her family into the ambit of one of the things "a family should have done" and now this too could be checked off the list.  The kids in this case, a boy of about 14 and a girl of 10 were, from what I could see of them, more engaged, and smarter and livelier about it.  Mom hung on their every word and feeling.  Who wouldn’t be engaged with an audience like this?  Generosity begets generosity.

The table to the right was a husband and a wife and two kids.  Dad was way present, paying attention, directing conversation, very like the master of the proceedings.  His wife was handsome but hard to read, as if banked.  It took a moment to guess what was going on here, and that is of course all I am doing here is guessing, but I think she was a trophy wife, and the kids were trophy kids.  Dad was wearing everyone on his sleeve. 

Catch this three act play every night at Sardi’s.  Every seat’s a good one. 

Image taken at Sardi’s well after all the actors had left the stage.

How to be a self-funding anthropologist

Rain_gear_shanghai This morning I got an email from a guy in Mumbai.  After an elegant summary of his professional circumstances, undergraduate education, MBA and present job in the world of advertising, he comes to the "big question:"

Should I head back to college and pursue a course in Anthropology which covers Ethnography as well as Research Methodology or should I look for a job and aim to learn while I work?

Here’s my reply:

Dear Sandeep, thanks for writing. 

I would choose Option B: learning while working.  The problem with Option A is that anthropology courses are bad preparation for studying contemporary culture and especially bad at preparing us for marketing research.  (I know this to be true of North American universities.  I am assuming it is true of South Asian ones.) 

Option B has challenges of its own.  The trick is to find the firm and researcher who can give you the best training.  And in this case I would look for people by reputation and by their willingness to include you in the proceedings.  You don’t want to end up in the mail room. Best case, you will end up working closely with someone smart, someone who shares the intellectual challenges and opportunities of a consulting career. 

But there is also Option C: teach yourself.  The field is not well developed.  Many of the methodological orthodoxies are slender and some of them are wrong.  There is really only one question here: what do marketers need to hear from the consumer to make them better at marketing.  The anthropological approach says, well, the closer you get, the more you know, the more deeply you understand the consumer, the richer your research will be.  Happily, this is consistent with a long tradition in consumer research that insists on treating the consumer as "king," on an approach called "consumer centricity."  The world of marketing churns with new methods, but there will never be anything more useful than sitting with a consumer in his or her home and listening very carefully. 

The best case is, I think, to combine Options B and C.  Option B can give you the knowledge of clients and presentations you need to make yourself useful to marketers.  Option C is really pretty exciting because it is entirely up to you.  As long as anthropologists absent themselves from the study of their own culture, and as long as this culture continues to reinvent itself ever more furiously, the task is urgent and interesting.  Here you may think of yourself as Malcolm Gladwell, traveling the library in search of the ideas that speak to you. 

I believe the success of Gladwell’s career, and the value he has created for people inside and outside the marketing community demonstrates that while disciplinary and professional training matter, there is no substitute for a very smart person traveling by his own lights, patiently asking of the idea he/she encounters, does this help me think about the world, or is it in some way obfuscating.  (My other exemplars are Victorian scholars.  Lewis Henry Morgan, for instance. This guy managed to found American anthropology in his spare time.  He was a lawyer by day.) 

If you choose to be a free standing anthropologist, there are two objectives: the culture below and the culture above.  The culture below is the long standing ideas and assumptions with which we make the world make sense, the instrastructure, if you will, of thought and feeling.  The culture above is the trends and innovations that pour through our world.  We want culture above and below because too often anthropology is reduced to a kind of cool hunting, a search for the latest thing and an investigation of culture above. Certainly, we need to know what social networking is, but if that’s all we know, all we can report to the client, we have removed ourselves from usefulness.

More to the point, we have sacrificed our disciplinary advantage.  Any undergraduate can pursue cool.  Only an anthropologist can observe the larger, richer cultural context from which cool springs and with which it must correspond if cool is to cool into something lasting.  Indeed I would argue that it is precisely when culture above resonates with the culture below that things "take," that innovation has a chance to transform us in substantial ways.  (And by this reckoning you could say that social networking is now finding its feet precisely because users have found a way to make it responsive to the logic of their social worlds.  This is not to say it will not change these social worlds, but first it must find a way to resonate with them.)

Your search for culture above is pretty well provided for.  There are lots of content aggregators and trend watchers that help us sort through what’s new.  They are not very good at pattern recognition but then they have their hands full just keeping the channel clear and running.  There are also the business presses, the publishing houses, all of these are in the pattern recognition game, and many of them create real value (while the rest of them create real noise). 

Your study of Culture below is another matter. This will take a Gladwellian search of your local library and the world on line. I have my own favorite texts, the ones that made the lights come on as I tried to think about American culture.  But of course they may or may not be interesting in a South Asian context.  I have posted my favorite titles in Shelfari.  My rule was to supply a list of "top 100" books.  The fact that I didn’t get to 100 is telling.  (Please consider preparing a Shelfari list for your study of the culture of Mumbai and India.)   

Casting the reading net wide.  You will have to leave anthropology for the other social sciences, and the social sciences for the humanities and sciences.  You trick is to be Gladwellian: patient, calm, inquiring, and most of all peripatetic.  Go where you have to.  And for God’s sake be Baconian.  Be prepared to think whatever you need to think to make sense of the evidence you see before you, even when this means breaking from scholarly and marketing orthodoxy. 

Much of your study of culture below will depend upon your own research.  In my case, this means looking at how people create living rooms, car design of the 1950s, the preppie revolution of the 1980s, the alternative movement of the 1990s, the transformation regimes at work in our culture.  No one will pay you to do this research.  And you won’t have a research funding from a university.  You will fund it out of your own pocket, out of the proceeds of your commercial research. 

You will fund your study of culture below out of your free time, a weekend here, a Saturday afternoon there.  You will become the master of exploiting "found time," 2 hours in an airport, 15 minutes waiting for an interview begin.  The technology serves superbly.  A ThinkPad or an Airbook, and there is almost no place or time that cannot be turned to advantage.

Running two careers will wear you out.  And sometimes it will f*** you up.  Living out a suitcase will mean that you are estranged from friends and family. Neighbors will great you in the street with surprise and say, "Grant, what are you doing here!?!"   The world of consulting is punishing, and we have not thought hard enough about how to protect ourselves from its perils.  I believe that the untold story of Geoffrey Frost and his wife is something from which we can learn.  But God knows the world of marketing is littered with stories of excess, error and personal misadventure.  It isn’t anything like that silly show on American TV called Mad Men, but the sense of a certain reckless disregard for one’s personal safety is not entirely different.  Here too social networking can help.  Facebook updates keep me and my neighbors in touch. Now when they see me in the street, they say things like, "Oh, hey, how was China?  Loved that picture of the guys in the rain."  (as above)

Lots of unexpected, unbidden opportunities will come "over the transom."  You must say "yes" when you want to say "no," and "no" when you want to say "yes." 

When Oprah calls, you have to go.  When the Harvard Business School asks you to come teach,  you must say yes.  These are opportunities to see our culture from a point of view you cannot find any other way.   Forget your precious standards, your ornate scruples.  Your job is to collect the data.  Your job is to discover a culture.   

And when you find yourself running an Institute of Contemporary Culture, as I did, and it ceases to be an institute of contemporary culture in any way that interests you, you have to leave.  Even when your boss says, "you’ve got a good thing going here.  Don’t screw it up."  For his generation, there was so much commotion and peril that it made sense to cling feverishly to good fortune.  But your generation is I think a little like my (boomer) generation, so persuaded of its specialness that it cannot bear the idea of compromise.  I look back on the several times I said "no" to advantage and shake my head.  Thank god I was protected by my naivete.  Thank God I was so badly spoiled and self important. 

Stock pile your "nos" against the day that someone says, "listen, I will set you up in the corner of the agency and you just write what you want."  This sounds like a good idea, but I think we can take for granted that the moment the biggest account starts to go south, it’s all hands on deck.  Someone will also say, "listen, you don’t want to spend your life on a plane.  Why not hire a bunch of cadets and send them out to do your bidding."  This is the managerial consulting model, but I am not sure it works for anthropology.  It is a methodological commonplace that the person who analyzes the data should be the person who collects it.  It’s not clear what delegating looks like when it comes to ethnography.  Though I must say some people seem to make it work, and I may someday change my mind.  The point here is that your commercial opportunity is your opportunity to collect data and insight that will fuel your academic work.  This can’t happen if you are merely administering from a distance.  Managing someone’s else ethnography would no doubt tells a lot about human nature, but much less about contemporary culture.

Break out one or two of those "nos" and have them ready when your anthropological colleagues insist that no one can work for the corporation without consorting with the devil.  This is a book unto itself, but three points: 

1) nothing works as well as a corporation in getting work done in the world.  This is surely a table at which anthropology wants a seat.  To be excluded here is to be confined to barracks, aka, the ivory tower.  It is to be removed from usefulness.  And no one with the exception of several thousand academic anthropologists want that. 

2) corporations are getting smarter, more agile, more moral, more intellectual.  The moral and cultural trepidations of the post war period apply less and less.  That anthropology insists on the same accusations, well, it is itself a cultural thing.  This is such a precious cultural misapprehension, a potent piece of mythology, that almost no one inside the anthropological academy can bring themselves to part with it. 

3) if you must, craft your career that serves Christ and Casear.  Play the pilot fish. Feed with the shark while the shark feeds itself.  In other words, think what you will about your paymaster and the project in hand, but do your duty to the client to the best of your ability.  I frankly think this third approach is needlessly scrupulous.  In my experience, most corporations are benign in the work they do and punctiliously moral in the way they do it.  You would be, will be, amazed at how little most current corporations resemble the "red of tooth and claw" model that anthropology insists upon.  The fact of the matter is the people for whom I work in the corporation are the most honorable people I know. 

The downside of your career will be that you always suffer a time shortage, that you are always in a state of relative sleep and tranquility deprivation, you will also be stealing from Peter to pay Paul.  But, hey, this is everyone’s condition these days, and as long as you stay out of Geoffrey Frost territory, you should be fine.  (The trick here is to identify the signs of burnout and to act of them.  We just need to get better at this.) 

The upside of all of this is that you will get pretty good at pattern recognition and speedy reporting.  Treating a different project every 3 weeks will make you better at seeing the forest and describing it succinctly.  And this will make you better at your Gladwellian mission.  You will be a better anthropologist for your commercial work, and you will outproduce many of the colleagues who insist in remaining house bound.  This says the conventional wisdom is wrong.  Commercial work does not corrupt your academic skills, it improves them. 

Downside again.  No academic anthropologist will thank you for making them look bad.  By mid career you will be producing more academic work in your spare time than they can produce from the sumptuous, well funded circumstances of a tenured post.  They will already resend you for having broking the embargo against taking contemporary culture seriously, so now they’re really mad.  Expect people to say nasty things on those few occasions you attend sherry hour.  Expect people to break off conversation and walk away from you, when they learn you once taught at the Harvard Business School.  You will find your own way to respond to this.  I use the motto of the order of the garter (to which I secretly appointed myself many years ago): honi soit qui mal y pense.  Roughly: dishonor to those who impute dishonor. 

Upside again.  You will spend so much time turning observations into ideas and ideas into words and words into recommendations, that it won’t be long before you feel like one of those teletype machines that chatter away in old movies.  It’s not quite the same as taking dictation from celestial voices.  But you will at least work with pace and dispatch.  Once you’ve worked at it, you will no longer have to work at it.  The ideas were pour out of you as fast as you can drive the black plastic keys on your slipper-like ThinkPad. 

So we are assuming that you are spending roughly half the year on your own research.  And that you are publishing same.  Finding a publisher is not easy.  Finding an agent is, in my experience, impossible.  I recently submitted a proposal for a book on branding, and one of the readers said that generally he thought the book was fine but could I please find a way to write the book without using the word "branding."  And it wasn’t a question.  This fellow hews tightly to the embargo.  He insists on the snobbery.  Surely this prohibition cannot last forever, but as long as it does, you will be rewarded for your efforts with a certain obscurity.  This could change if you would only write a popular book.  But the last time I tried, the would-be editor attempted a "hostile takeover" that would astonish even a takeover tough guy like Carl Icahn.  After years of working in close quarters with smart clients, you are now accustomed to collaboration.  Watch out for the imperial pretensions of some publishing houses.  (And not to worry, it won’t be long before these houses are disintermediated too. )

We are also assuming that you will treating your life and your career as an experiment and that you will report back on the blog you try to write everyday.  By which I mean, for God’s sake, phone home.  Let us know how it’s going.  You can’t share everything to be sure.  But there will always be a bee or two in your bonnet.  I’m pretty sure that that’s what the "b" stands in blogging.

Here’s a peculiar difficult that I will treat as a last note.  Working for corporations means that you will cultivate a feeling for enterprise.  And knowing something about contemporary culture you will see opportunity everywhere. Every week or so you will have a good idea for a business.  Don’t go there.  Your job is to study and capture contemporary culture.  It is not to bury yourself in a little corner of the economy and practice the mouth to mouth resuscitation required to keep a start-up alive.   

Thanks again for the question.  Good luck and please keep me posted.

More resources:

1) have a look through this blog using "consultant" as your key word.

2) see the deck that I did for the Canadian government.  Everything else is proprietary.  This I can share.  Find it on Slideshare here. 

3) have a look at my list of favorite books on American culture on Shelfari here.   

4) if you will forgive a moment’s self promotion, have a look at the work I did in my spare time. ( I just know you can do better. )

Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meanings and brand management on Amazon, click here.

Flock and Flow: Predicting and managing change in a dynamic marketplace on Amazon, here.

Transformations: Identity Construction in contemporary culture on Amazon, here. 

Video conferencing: will this year by the tipping point?

Cisco_logoTalk about a tipping point.  In two separate conversations today, I heard people talk about video conferencing (VC) as an idea that has finally arrived. 

But VC is like soccer.  Every year is surely the year soccer has "finally arrived."   And every year it never seems to happen. 

But VC is much more urgent than soccer.  After all, the alternatives to soccer have not left each of us stranded for hours in a God forsaken airport, or, much worse, the captive of an overheating metal cylinder sitting on a runway.

It’s not clear exactly when our love affair with air travel ended but I believe it’s fair to say that no one is travelled with pleasure the last three years.  Everyone feels taken hostage.  Air travel, once a glamorous activity for the "international traveller", once a heroic activity for the "road warrior," is now a grim necessity for us all. 

We are primed to be saved by technology in an age stuffed with technological rescue.  But video conferencing appears to play the reluctant hero. 

One of these days we look back on constant air travel is a weird 20th century thing.  Something we no longer do anymore.  It can only be a matter of time.  If not this year, next.

And once we pass the tipping point, what else will change?

Who is the Elizabethan widow now?

A2c8tf Jonathan Bate offers this interesting portrait of the social standing of the widow in Elizabethan England.

…before marriage she was expected to be chaste and during [marriage] she was supposed to be submissive; once widowed she had more freedom.  A widow even had a degree of financial autonomy that set her apart from daughters and wives, who in law were chattels belonging to their fathers and husbands.  Widows, by contrast, could carry on their husband’s business.  The legal fiction was that they were just minding the shop until they remarried, but the reality was that they often controlled their own affairs fo trhe rest of their lives…  The widow, then was the joker in the pack, the wild card who was not obliged to play by the sexual and social rules.  [In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, this character] is a free agent.  She acts instead of being acted on; she delights in setting a plot.  She has the same kind of boldness as Iago and the Edmund of King Lear has.

I wondered whether the widow has a contemporary equivalent. Which group, if any group, has this structural freedom?  Who plays the wild card?  (And this is a pressing question for anthropological purposes because it looks as if a lot of cultural change is driven by specific groups, and these groups are often defined by age. )

The precedents are well known.  Each successive generations puts its mark on contemporary culture.  Boomers helped usher in a counter-culture.  Gen X helped install an alternative culture.

Strauss and Howe, the students of Gen Y, insist that "millennials" are quiescent.  The impulses "counter" and "alternative" do not beat within their breasts.  And it looks as if they may be right.  No one from Gen Y appears to have risen to protest the Strauss and Howe designation.  (On the other hand, we mighttreat civicmindedness, to use the old-fashioned term, as their generational difference.)

But the questions stands.  Are there no "widows" now?  Is there a group of people who by their structural location and/or generational identity who is prepared to play the wild card, the free agent?  (Yes, I could be that we just have to wait for Generation Z.  I leave this question to the likes of Jane Buckingham or Anastasia Goodstein.)  But if you forced me to bet, I would say the group most likely to assume this role will be boomers in retirement.  I believe some contingent of boomers will refuse all the stereotypes associated with age, and keep on going to defy the social stereotypes of every kind.  In the process, they will be a new motor, much resented, for cultural change. 

References

Bate, Jonathan. 2008.  Dampit and Moll.  Times Literary Supplement.  April 25, 2008, pp. 3, 5, 6.

X files and the perils of consistency

Thexfiles The new X-files movie is almost upon us, and the other day I stopped my feverish channel surfing to watch a rerun. It was amazing how bad it was. 

In it’s day, in the first couple of seasons, the X-files was mezmerizing.  It didn’t matter that it was shot in my home town, that  the production values were modest, that plot lines were improbable. There was something captivating there.  Fox Mulder was tortured, complicated and wry, qualities never before given a TV character.  And of course Scully was the quiet siren, every thinking man’s idea of a bit of alright.

But this episode was appallingly bad.  Poor Duchovny (Mulder) was pallid, Anderson (Scully) overwrought.  And the problem, I fell to thinking was that this was a late season and by this time the plot line was so fantastically complicated that what made the X-Files ineffably interesting, indefinably mysterious had been burdened and broken.  The show was over.  I had this vision of Chris Carter pinioned like Gulliver by plots lines, rendered incapable of creative freedom by the promissory notes he had issued with each passing season.

Surely, it’s time to get rid of the idea of consistency.  Plot lines, let’s think of these as sight lines, a general indication of where we are going, nothing more.  Now that we live in an era of what Henry Jenkins calls transmedia, there are necessarily many versions of the narrative in play.  Who thinks that new narrative should be found by the details of old narrative.  Let us treat every season as a variation on the theme.  We would expect to see themes that resonate, but surely the pressure of each new season should be see not the slavish consistency but the departures.

We had the happy opportunity of listening to the producers of Heroes at MIT not so long ago and it’s clear that consistency is a tyranny.  It gives power to rapid fans who define their fandom by their knowledge of the narrative.  Some of these people are not cocreators of the narratives. They are jailers, constantly vigilant for any, even unimportant inconsistency.  On the other side, the newcomers look at the detail of a narrative enterprise like Lost and think to themselves, "there’s no way I can catch up."

Consistency, surely this is a cultural relic up with which we should no longer have to put.

post script:

See Rick Liebling’s very interesting contemplation of this theme here. 

Angels angelic?

Aa37wb

The thing that attracted me to the world [of bikers as depicted in the FX show Sons of Anarchy] was this amazing camaraderie. There was this amazing sort of familial "I’d kill for my brother" bond that all of them had that was just somewhat endearing.

John Landgraf, President and General Manager of FX Networks
The 2008 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour in Los Angeles
Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Image: I purchased this image from Alamy.com.  This is a huge database of photographs (12 million or so) and they now have very attractive prices for bloggers.  See their website here. 

Not kinship, kidship

Img_2715 I have spent most of July working on a project and the end is now in sight.  At 155 slides, the deck is still too large, but I have a couple of days to weed and winnow.  (If I owe you an email or phone call, expect something soon.)

As always happens on a project like this, I am an anthropologist at large, wandering around American culture, surrounded by great bodies of ethnographic knowledge and the certain knowledge that this knowledge is being ignored by my academic colleagues.  They are too pure, too proud, actually to study their own culture.

One of the things that leapt out at me on this project was how much of the social world of my respondents is organized by "kidship."  Kidship is the social connection established between adults by the relationship that exists between their children.  For dwellers of the suburb, a very large part of the people we know is determined by the connections our kids forge witlessly on our behalf.  Our child plays soccer?  We are going to know a lot of soccer moms and pops.

We may take this as some measure of the American devotion to parenthood, and I am sure it has always been thus.  But it is also true that now that the American corporation churns so, fewer friends come from work.  People are still moving often, so connections that come from one’s locality are difficult to come by, except of course as fashioned by our kids.  Kinship, the real thing, is of course a special challenge.  Relatives are spread across the country, and gettogethers at Thanksgiving appear sometimes to designed expressly to demonstrate what a good thing this distance is. 

Kidship has certain graphite quality to its sociality.  There is also an easy familiarity between parents.  As plenitude creates new diversity in the American social world, people can rely apon parenting to supply common interests and ready topics of conversation.  It is not entirely different from dogship, that extraordinarily robust sociality that seems to spring up between dog owners in the local park.  Americans who might not speak to one another for any other reason, who might labor to find something interesting or civil to say, discover that as a fellow dog owner, their neighbor is really very charming after all.  Kidship has the advantage of being something still more urgent, child rearing an art and science that perpetuates its difficulty as American culture rolls bumpily on. 

This was not the topic of my study, so I caught a glimpse of it only in passing.  But the details were tantalizing.  For example, parents tend to make better friends with the parents of older children.  And this means that the younger a child in a family the harder it is to arrange a playdate. 

Is this being studied by anyone?  Probably not.  Anthropologists are too busy pondering the moral, political and epistemological reasons why anthropology is impossible.  Oh, splendid.   Just splendid. 

Pictured: a Mexican family, um, looking in a tree.  Oaxaca 2007.   That’s Sara Winge in the center background.

Agencies and intellectual capital: enough of the Flava Flav routine

Flava_flav I have three questions:

1. when do clients require agencies to be genuinely full service?

2. when do agencies begin to leverage, and, gasp, brand their intellectual capital?

3.  when does the advertising world take a leaf from the world of management consulting?

I had lunch with Mark X last week.  We were talking about how noisy is the intellectual air space of the agency world. 

You would think that the big ideas of the ad world would be clearer.  At the very least, it should be possible to reverse engineer the great ads of the last 100 years and reach some simple, lasting, potent conclusions. 

But no.  The ad world is filled with a million quirks and inclinations.  It churns with notice of exciting trends.  It buzzes with the titles of the latest books from the business press (good to great!, made to stick!).  What is missing is a calm sense of the verities of the biz, the things we know for certain. 

Now, of course, advertising creative is often an unpredictable, largely inscrutable thing.  Inspiration descends from the heavens.  Agencies compete for the people most likely to be struck  by this lightning.  Creative directors are conduits of great value, and we should probably worship them.  But this doesn’t mean we will ever get a clear rendering of how they do what they do.  This will forever remain a matter of a "I don’t know, it just came to me" mystery.

But research and strategy, that should be another matter altogether.    Surely, these people should have a very good idea of what advertising is, and how it creates value for a client and their brands.  Surely, they should be able to roll out simple propositions of great power.  And surely we should judge them by what these propositions are.

Too often what we get is snake oil enthusiasm and not much else.  In fact, listening to certain people with strategic pretensions is like listening to someone afflicted with a spontaneous, naturally occurring affliction of buzzword bingo.  They just string all the current lingo together often with scant regard for the syntax. 

It’s kinda like they are wearing a great big Flava Flav button that reads "talk."  Clients have a question?  Push the Talk button!  And bang, out it comes: creative synergy, brand DNA, authentic this and networked that.  It’s like someone sold them a BFI R Us franchise and this is what they think they are supposed to do.  Hurl lingo bingo at the problem until no one can quite remember what the question was.

I am not speaking out against lingo.  I treasure these compact terms for their ability to telegraph complicated ideas in tiny bursts of speech.  But when all we are doing is broadcasting the buzz words, then the client is not served.  The world of discourse that is strategy ends up being an intellectual ghetto, a place where stupid people have a place to hide and talent cannot rise. And there is lots of talent out there. 

You would think that the marketplace would impose its famous discipline.  You would think that clients would say, "I’m sorry, that was almost completely incoherent," and keep saying this until agency raises their ability to offer clear, clean statements of how the agency creates value for the brand, and, more specifically, how it is earns the princely sums it demands from the client.

This brings us to the first question:

1. when do clients require agencies to be genuinely full service?

Clients are paying for good, clear ideas.  When do they start demanding them?   When do they begin to scorn the "pressure of speech" lingo bingo approach to explanation, and demand something very simple and very clear. Less Flava.  More nutrition. 

2.  when do agencies begin to leverage, and, gasp, brand their intellectual capital? 

Whether or not clients make new demands, we might expect that some agencies would step up and make intellectual power and clarity their strategic difference.  There are lots of smart people in the agency and consulting world.  But I am not sure the agency ever leads with them.  The agency might trumpet the fact that it possesses God’s new gift to creativity.  But the strategic people not so much.  I guess this will start to happen in a big way the moment a P&G says, "well, we decided to go with Agency x because, frankly, they have got the intellectual firepower.  Our existing agency, we began to feel they couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag.   I mean have you heard those guys talk?"

3.  when does the advertising world take a leaf from the world of management consulting?

This approach has been going on in the world of management consulting for a very long time.  McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting, Accenture, these firms justify their existence and their fees on the grounds that they hire smart people and they treasure and reward these people for the intellectual capital they create for the firm and its clients.  I am thinking here of people like Thomas Davenport, Philip Evans, Thomas Wurster, John Beck, Stanley Davis, Richard Forster, and Sarah Kaplan.

It’s time for things to change.

Catch and release, diffusion style

Tom Yesterday, at Truetalk, Tom Guarriello did a great reconstruction of what it’s like to ride the diffusion curve. 

He gives us an insider’s view of that human impulse for coolness, the one forces innovation through the system, turning something that is new and tantalizing into something that is tedious and laboriously obvious. 

Tom’s phenomenological exercise also shows one of the impulses that makes our culture stream with change, the way we all contribute to the formation of a world that is never still.

Georg Simmel would love this piece.  Dude!  Beauty!   

References

Guarriello, Tom.  2008.  Adopt early, adopt often.  True Talk. July 17, 2008.  here. 

Guardian angels and powerful women

In_plain_sight In Plain Sight stars Mary McCormack as a U.S. Federal Marshal who helps relocate witnesses and then care for them when they fuck up, which they do eagerly and often.  She is, in other words, a kind of guardian angel.

The Cleaner stars Benjamin Bratt as a ex-drug addict who comes to the rescue of people in need,  The_cleanerand then cares for them when they fuck up, which they do eagerly and often.  He is, in other words, a kind of guardian angel. 

We are drawn to the idea of angelic intervention.  But of course TV has too much integrity to go for celestial trumpets, fluffy wings, smiling cherubim.  No, televisual angels come in street clothing and street cred.  Our angels are troubled, this is meant to make them troubling, and this is meant to turn TV into art. 

As I remarked in the case of the CBS failure called Hack, these shows are locked in a contradiction.  They reach for credibility but finally they promise us a universe more benign.  It doesn’t matter how much credibility TV puts on the screen, finally these shows are loaded with sentimentality.  They mean to defy that Nietzschean (and trans-party) anxiety that God has fled the heavens, that goodness is now AWOL and that angels are finally "just in it for themselves."  These shows would like to be art but they are committed to corn, a place where art cannot find purchase, and ends up being lapsarian too. 

Except in the case of half of my evidence.  In Plain Sight is better than the formula.  I thought the best moment, so far, comes when Mary’s partner levels with her.  The two of them are sitting on the floor of a busted saloon.  Death and gangsters hover. 

The partner tells Mary that he wants out of their partnership and Mary protests,

You’re like my only friend.

The partner says, somewhat dutifully,

You’re my only friend, too.

He pauses, and then says,

The problem is with us is, I feel like I am the keeper of this exotic animal.  I spend my time either protecting you from the world or the world from you.  And it’s just a lot of responsibility.

Mary says, with no trace of awareness at how smart this is, let alone how unfair,

I’m sorry, but that’s your job.

And then she kisses him passionately on the cheek. 

In Plain Sight is only a handful of episodes old, but devoted viewers are beginning to understand that Mary is approaching tragic status.  She is very good at what she does, but it’s now clear she’s not much  good at anything else. In other words, the "exotic animal" metaphor is right on the money.  The only real relationship Mary is every going to have is with her keeper.  Ah, the guardian angel turns out to have a guardian angel.

And this is the theme, it turns out, in The Cleaner.  Except in this case, Benjamin Bratt talks directly to God.  Everything else is being disintermediated in a digital culture, why not this?  (And, hey, it could be he’s a Protestant.)  Holly Hunter has her own angel in Saving Grace.  And he is one of those active, engaged, dropping-in-when-you-least-expect-him kind of angels.

As usual, I am not sure what we are looking at here.  A couple of things strike me.  First, that our appetite for angels is growing so that even our angels now get angels.  Second, TV is managing to wriggle out of the sentimentality that destroyed Hack. 

And these might be related.  As TV gives us female characters as post-genre and post-gender as the ones performed by McCormack and Hunter, is it struggling to find away to reassure us?  Angels to the rescue.  It’s as if TV has found a way to say, "There, there, dear viewer, do not be alarmed by these powerful women talking the world by storm.  It’s ok.  They are not dangerous.  Look, they have keepers." 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2002.  Hack.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  December 02, 2002. here. 

Branding Obama (the politics of teasing)

Obama Maureen Dowd thinks there’s a problem in the Obama campaign. 

She wonders whether Obama might be "trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying."  What, she asks, if Obama seems:

so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters […] so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!

Dowd’s concern has appeared elsewhere.  Bill Carter of the NYT complains there’s nothing "buffoonish" about Obama and James Rainey of the LAT remarks on his campaign’s "irony deficiency." 

All presidents are people.  All people are flawed.  All president’s are flawed.  Clinton was a womanizer.  Bush a challenged communicator. Gore a bit robotic.  We know our leaders by their faults, errors and inadequacies. 

But there is more at work here than a sophomore’s syllogism.  Flaws turn out to be an essential qualities in the democratic process.  And where flaws do not exist they are made to exist.  We might argue that that’s what late night TV is for.  Letterman, Leno, Kimmel, O’Brien, that’s their job: to point out flaws, and to insist on them where they do not exist.

From an anthropological point of view, teasing is a political act. It’s part of the cultural construction on which democracy turns.  Otherwise presidents are too grand, their powers too great, their status too asymmetrical.  We scorn our politicians to level them. We tease to keep democracies democratic. 

Teasing must allowed into the the Obama campaign or there can’t be any realistic hope of the White House.  This will be a test of the Obama team.  How good are they at  meaning management?  Is there room for even this in brand Obama?

Reference

Dowd, Maureen.  2008.  May We Mock, Barack?  New York Times.  July 16, 2008.  here. 

Lil Wayne: prince of the gift economy

Lil_wayne_i Since his last LP, Lil Wayne has been working the gift economy.  In the words of Jonah Weiner,

[T]he New Orleans MC struck upon a music-distribution model so radical it made Radiohead look like Thomas Edison shipping wax cylinders by Pony Express.

Step 1: Rap about whatever pops into your head, over any beat you please–copyright laws be damned. 

Step 2: Flood the Internet with material, compiled on mix tapes or leaked a la carte. 

Step 3: Say yes to anyone who invites you to guest star on a track (anyone: meaning Enrique Iglesias and Gym Class Heroes).

Step 4: Repeat at an inhuman clip, not merely keeping pace with the relentless blog cycle–in which MP3s ping from studios to iPods to trash cans in a matter of days, but leaving the blog cycle face down on the racetrack, turf in its teeth, gasping for air. 

The big question:

How can [Carter’s new album, Tha Carter III] be anything but arbitrary and incomplete next to the gigabytes of beat he’s been dropping?

Specifically: who’s going to buy this album when they have been so generously gifted with Carter’s work for free? 

There’s no question that Tha Carter III is good. Weiner says it’s "all but a lock for hip-hop album of the year."  But the industry couldn’t help wondering whether his fans might by Cartered out, or, at least, so well supplied with Carter’s genius that buying the new album was gratuitous. 

The good news: Tha Carter III sold 156,000 copies in the week ending July 6 which brought its first-month total to 1.68 million.  This allowed Lil Wayne to displace Coldplay at number one and surpass G-Unit, John Mayer, Usher, Rihanna, and Disturbed on the charts.

It may be that Lil Wayne has succeeded here because he is, in the opinion of Rolling Stone, the "best rapper alive."  If you are this good, ubiquity and generosity have no penalty.  Free for all or fee for all, it doesn’t matter.  We have to listen.  But intuitively this seems wrong.  Surely the incentive for "giveaways" should be more pressing for lesser talents. 

But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  The economics of the "gift economy" are still a little vague.  The general idea is that gift economies spring from acts of generosity.  We create value by releasing value.    The idea is not to engage in "tit for tat" exchange, but to gift the world with our best efforts.  Think of this as a benign variation on "what goes around comes around."  What we give freely will come back to us.

This is an idea in its first blush.  The romance is still strong.  No one seems to care that the gift economy detaches producers and consumers.  No one minds that it replaces the notion of "interest" with whim and self indulgence.  I think if we posit a "wisdom of crowds" emergence theory, we might take care of this problem.  What producers want to produce might be what consumers want to consume.  This certainly is the case in Lil Wayne.  On the other hand, I can’t help wondering who’s going to produce that aluminum siding I have my eye on.  (I believe it’s safe to say no one makes aluminum as a reckless act of generosity.)

How and why this economy runs depends on your point of view.  People with New Age proclivities have a very clear idea of the mechanics of the marketplace, the celestial scales that see to the return of acts of goodness.  Others, and this seems to apply especially, to new-media, new-economy, social-networks types, seem to suppose that it’s "just gonna happen." (Funny that the real-world types should be vague, when the romantically inclined should be specific.  More mysteries for the anthropology of contemporary culture.)

The key book for most people seems to be the one by Hyde (as below).  Henry Jenkins is doing some work in the area, and this is very good news.  We could use Marshall Sahlins’ idea of  "generalized exchange," I think, but this term is just not provocative enough as a title to take the day. The virtue of Sahlins’ approach is that it encourages us to replace mystery with an appreciation for new and more circular acts of exchanges that see to the movement of  new and more various kinds of value. 

Prince or no, Lil Wayne is a wonder.  He is fantastically gifted, fabulously inventive, a veritable Shakespeare who comes to us from a New Orleans that no longer exists dripping in tats and attitude.  This is a guy who styles himself a Martian and threatens with his relentless creativity and productivity to make good on the metaphor.

And this makes Carter a cultural actor who has taken his leave of the usual grammars.  As Weiner puts it,

There’s an exhilarating, disorienting sense of freedom to the album, the rush of rules being ignored. 

And here anthropology, the economics aside, really has its work cut out for it. 

Two videos from Lil Wayne:

Wayne, Lil.  2008.  Lollipop.  here. 

Wayne, Lil.  2008.  A milli.  here.

[There is no grasping Lil Wayne from two tracks.  Listen to Tha Carter III in its entirety to see the wealth and vastness of this talent.]

References

Cheal, David J. 1988. The gift economy. London. New York: Routledge.

Hasty, Katie.  2008.  Lil Wayne knocks Coldplay from top of U.S. chart.  UK Reuters.com.  July 9, 2008.  here.

Hermann, Gretchen M. 1997. Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale. American Ethnologist. 24. 2. pp. 910-930.

Hyde, Lewis.  1983. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.  New York: Vintage Books. Available from Amazon here.

Mauss, Marcel. 1925. The Gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies.  translator Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen and West.

Pollard, Dave.  2005.  The Gift Economy. How to save the world.  April 17, 2005.  here.

Sahlins, Marshall.  2003.  Stone Age Economics.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Available from Amazon here.

Weiner, Jonah.  2008.  Makeit Wayne.  Blender.  August.  pp. 79-80. 

Bonnie Fuller wears prada?

Someone just send me a New York Times treatment of Bonnie Fuller.  It made me think of the time I visited Fuller’s editorial office in Toronto.  Bonnie was kind enough to give me a tour and stopped to ask what I thought of the cover for the next issue. 

I didn’t realize that in the fashion biz this is not a real question, but instead a cue to gush.  I said that it was a pity that you couldn’t see the model’s tarsal lids.  (I’m not sure why but visible tarsal lids often make people look a little smarter, and this model was otherwise going to look like a complete moron.  I didn’t say this last part.)

Wrong answer!   Bonnie and her assistant took turns criticizing my clothing on the ride down on the elevator.  It was a little like that scene in The Devil Wears Prada when Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) instructs Andy (Anne Hathaway) on the significance of cerulean.  I was pleased to have this chance to see myself through the lens of fashion, but I would have preferred a gentler delivery. 

The NYT treatment is more snarky than laudatory, and this is apt, I guess.  Fuller has done so much to shape the celebrity culture, it seems only right that she should be subjected to its voice.  A little bit like being hoist by your own petard.

Still the article is a frustrating one.  It flits from thought to thought to thought never allowing a larger argument to form.  And here the Times must be criticized for allowing the discourse of the subject to infect the discourse of observation.  Fashion prose may be restless and hyperactive but surely serious journalism mustn’t ever "go there."

The most illuminated observation comes from Janice Min.  I have been a fan of Min’s since I covered a fashion forum a couple of years ago. She was evidently the smartest person in the room, with the surest grasp of the the celebrity culture.  (More comments on Min below in the essay called "Muddles in the models.")

Here’s how Min explains Fuller’s success. 

She is able to almost distill the id of the reader.  She channels them in a way few others do, and what she heard is: ‘I don’t care about your acting method in your last movie. I just want to know what workout you used to get that fabulous body.’

This suggests that there has been a shift in the celebrity culture, a movement from admiration to imitation.  Fans now treat the star less as a god and more as a set of transformational pointers.  Celebrities by this reckoning are better than us but not different from us. 

This is a very big change.  Among other things, it marks the democratization of celebrity and the rise of a culture in which everyone imagines themselves a star, or at least transform themselves with a star’s effort and care. 

A whole lot of consumer and online behavior makes more sense if we make this assumption.  But never mind.  The point at hand: Fuller might be the person who helped fashioned this second stage of the celebrity culture, no small accomplishment.  Too bad she didn’t have more effect on my fashion sense. 

References

Carr, David.  2008.  101 Secrets (and 9 Lives) of a Magazine Star.  New York Times.  June 29th, 2008.

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Transformations: Identity Construction in contemporary culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press. on Amazon, here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  The Devil Wears Durkheim.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  April 2, 2007. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Muddles in the Models.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics,  October 21, 2008.  here.