I was in NYC today at the Rethink meetings held by the Advertising Research Foundation. 

I fell into conversation with Chris Damsen, VP, Business Development for Netvibes.com.  And, boy, is this an interesting topic of conversation.  Now that we really can “create our own newspapers,” we have our work cut out for us.

I suddenly realized my problem with aggregators.  When I configure my feeds, I want just about everything.   This image above shows just half of the featured widgets at Netvibes.  Financial Times?  Check!  Slate?  You bet!  Billboard.com?  Yes, please!  Wired Magzine?  Wrap them up, I’ll take them all.  And then there are all the blogs.  My Google Reader has tons of them.

This informational excess is not inflicted on me by the market place, the kind of thing that worries Barry Schwartz.  No, this profusion of possibilility is created and sustained by me alone.  Hi, my name is Grant McCracken and I’m a data glutton. 

Data gluttony is a terrible condition.  Everytime I turn on my aggregator, I feel like I am at an all-you-eat event at Denny’s.  Really, it can’t end well.    And eventually, I just stop turning the aggregator on.   To cope with being a data glutton I make myself a data pauper.

What I need is advice on knowlege architecture.  Or maybe it’s a matter of data economics.  Maybe I should be treating information as if it were a scarce resource.  Maybe the aggregator should be giving me 100 points to “spend” on data feeds and force me to make choices.  All this “free” information is actually guite costly.

It sounds like a job for IDEO or someone, doesn’t it?  Give us the perfect architecture (for someones like us) and let us fill it in.  But for god’s sake don’t leave us to our own resources.  Hi, my name is Grant McCracken and I’m a data pauper. 

The upshot of this conversation for me was that a market in the information space is emerging.  I won’t pay anything for access to the New York Times.  This is an interesting aggregator, but it’s way too chunky for me to be exquisitely useful.  I want a combination of machine and human editing that gives me all but only the things I need, and for this I am prepared to pay handsomely. 

It’s not that we won’t pay for editing.  It’s becoming clear, I think, that we are now eager to pay for editing, even to pay a premium for editing.  (After all, our careers now depend upon early warning, good information, timely intelligence.  Not to know what we need to know in a dynamic economy, what could this cost us?) 

We just don’t want to pay for the editing now made available to us by the market place.  Again, the New York Times is a grand institution, but it doesn’t capture or treat the things I need to know about in the ways I need to know about them.  I need something both more extensive and more intensive.  I will pay for the Economist, and I do so because it selected out at a ferocious rate and it adds value of an extraordinary kind. 

This much is clear, there is a market emerging.  It doesn’t appear to have any entries.  I wish they’d hurry up.  Because otherwise I’m hopeless.

Alpha Media Group closed Blender magazine on March 26, 2009.  I learned a lot from this magazine and I've subscribed for several years. 

Blender was started in 1994, by Jason Pearson, David Cherry and Regina Joseph as the first digital CD-ROM magazine. 

Blender took a distinctly laddish turn when purchased by Alpha Media, who also publish Maxim.  It didn't seem like quite the sort of thing you would expect to see in a Connecticut household.  (Cover girls are strictly NOCD.)

But even at it's most voluptuous, Blender had wonderful writers.  I was a fan of Josh Eels work.  And in the current issue has a great story about Kelly Clarkson by Michael Joseph Gross. It's thoughtful.  He notices that Clarkson drops her accent all of a sudden, but leaves it to us to figure out what this might mean.

Blender, R.I.P.

PSFK is hosting a Conference in New York City, April 2.  

This panel looks especially  interesting. 

2.00 PANEL: NEW IDEA AGENCIES

Creative agencies are making more products and services to launch direct to market rather than through their clients. Moderated by Danielle Sacks, (Fast Company) including Bart Haney (Fuseproject),  Carl Johnson, , (Anomaly), Ben Malbon (BBH Labs), and Robbie Vitrano (Trumpet) will discuss the pursuit of intellectual property by forward-thinking companies and the motivations behind this movement. 

This sounds a little like the Brand Nursery idea I was kicking around a couple of years ago…except of course its much better, thanks to Piers' rather more robust creativity, and this intelligently crafted topic and panel.  

If capitalism is now increasingly about the idea, perhaps its wrong to make the corporation the locus of idea production.  If our economy is now, variously, an innovation, knowledge, relationship, gift or concept economy, it makes sense to add a third term to the usual dyad.  In addition "production" and "consumption," we need something like "ideation."  

Hollywood is good at separating out the various functions.  It's good at allowing creativity to exist free of the apparatus that will bring it into the world and manage its production of value there.  The panel organized by Piers and moderated by Sacks promises a structural innovation of this kind for the branding world. 

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women in technology.  It is organized by Suw Charman-Anderson. 

Signing the petition for this event, I was asked to identify "a woman in technology whom I admire."

My choice is Sara Winge.  She is VP of the O'Reilly Radar group.  She is smart, clear sighted, fair minded, quick eyed, and sharp tongued.  She is a very good guide to the cultures of the tech world.  She is an inventor of the Foo Camp and to this extent an architect of the structures from which knowledge now comes. 

I have a dandy picture of Sara from a Jerry Michalski event, but I can't seem to load it.  There it is. 

Post script: I apologize for the "radio silence" of the last couple of weeks.  I am almost done the manuscript.  So it's nose to the grindstone. 

I only caught the last 20 minutes of Trust Me, the show on TNT, but I was impressed by what I heard.

Mason was giving a nuanced discussion of a campaign idea.  What a nice change, I thought, from the usual approach.  You know, the one that treats the ad biz as a domain of scoundrels and the home of dumb discourse.  

But what really caught my attention is that the brand at issue is Dove.  Not a pretend brand but the real thing. 

So this is a case of product placement.  But instead of the usual, "oh, look, that characters using our product" we get something vastly more interesting and perhaps even revolutionary. 

In effect, Dove is putting its meaning manufacture under glass.  Or a facsimile thereof.  It is giving the consumer the opportunity to go "behind the scenes" and see the kind of creative work out of which Dove marketing and advertising comes.  How very risky and how wonderful. 

But it certainly suits the new mood of marketing, the one that leans more and more in the direction of full disclosure.  And we can imagine having access to a website that allows us to look in on real footage of real creatives as they really put together the current campaign. 

Consumers are now so very media savvy, we can rest assured they would not take this in the wrong spirit.  No, I think we can rely upon them, "Oh, so that's what you were thinking.  I wouldn't have done it that way.  Still…"  At the very least we could have the director's cut of the ad complete with Voice Over commentary, the sort of thing we get on DVDs. 

We want a participatory, engaged consumer?  This is an option we should explore.

Hat's off to Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny, creators of Trust Me.  The TNT website tells us that Baldwin and Coveny who have a combined total of over 20 years of experience in the advertising world having worked for J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett Advertising in Chicago

Tell me if this rings a bell.

You are reading a New York Times article this morning.  It’s an article by Dennis Overbye on the physicists who migrated to Wall Street and are now on the firing line as we look for someone to blame for the meltdown.

And you come across this passage.

Dr. Derman said the idea of a “right level” [for prices] is a “bit of fiction.”

And then this:

Dr. Taleb [in The Black Swan] has waged war against one element of modern economics in particular: the assumption that price fluctuations follow the familiar bell curve that describes, say, IQ scores or heights in a population, with a mean change and increasingly rare chances of larger or smaller ones.

Overbye continues:

But many systems in nature, and finance, appear to be better described by the fractal statistics popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot of IBM which look the same at every scale. An example is the 80-20 rule that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work, or have 80 percent of the money. Within the blessed 20 percent the same rule applies, and so on. As a result the odds of game-changing outliers like Bill Gates’s fortune or a Black Monday are actually much greater than the quant models predict, rendering quants useless or even dangerous, Dr. Taleb said.

“Ah,” you say.  You think you’ve learned something but as usual you’re not quite sure what.  You put the Times aside.

Later in the day, you happen upon an article from the Harvard Business Review.  It’s called Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption. It’s by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison.

This article recommends that corporations consider fashioning a “ecosphere,” an infrastructure, a platform in the marketplace.  Google AdSense is used as a case in point.

Google’s AdSense has protocols governing how ads are submitted, priced, presented, and paid for. It allows even small advertisers and Web sites to invest minimal time and effort, with little oversight from Google, and still generate value for one another. This platform’s scalability makes specialization by participants economically attractive.

In a weird way, you can’t help feeling that the first article and the second article are speaking to one another.

Here’s what I came up with.  I don’t doubt you can do better.

Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison are arguing that there is a way out of the tiny incremental movements that make most markets.  They are proposing something bolder, more manufactured.  Most economic players look for markets in place, and then hope through better products, prices and promotion to induce a migration until the market belongs to them.  In a sense, Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison say, start again.

The Blue Oceans argument signals this same impatience.  It bids the corporation go out hunting for undiscovered domains where there is no real competition.  It’s all just wishful thinking really.  But Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison give us Blue Oceans with a brain.  They propose the creation of blue oceans, not just there serrendipitous discovery.

Back to the Black Swan passage above.  It says sudden shifts can and do happen and when they do, order will sometimes restore itself at each level.  There is, in other words, an stability in the instability.  In the Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison way of thinking, we can induce instability and take the world and the market someplace new.  Magically, the world will reform to our advantage.

Well, not magically.  In the world of science, we can assume (or at least posit) the operation of fractal logic.  The same law of order is operating at each level.  In human affairs, we may not make this assumption.  There may be natural laws or patterns of order in the human community, but we have to find them out.

Certainly, some of the answer lies in Smith’s invisible hand.  Interested parties pursuing their private interests will find a way, and finding a way they will make a market.  And at this point, things are colorless.  These markets are content agnostic.  Within certain limits, we don’t need to know or care about what’s getting bought or sold.  We need only “sit back and watch” the thing take shape.

But here’s the rub.  As corporations get into the business of world making, we are contemplating a marketplace where interest and advantage is not enough to bring people in.  At the very least, we will need to sell the idea of how we create value.  At the very least, we need demonstrate the idea of what we think we’re doing, not just the advantage that will flow to the user of our idea.

And this puts the marketplace on the verge of creating more than markets.  Now they are on the verge of creating worlds.  And I think this is coming in any case.  I think we are beginning to suspect that we make worlds more surely and we can make them more interesting, when we supply some cultural or at least social materials.  This is what branding is about.  This is how Nike and Starbucks define what it is they do.  Shoes?  Coffee?  Please.  A much larger idea is at issue.  But something much larger than branding is implicit in the enterprises undertaken by Facebook and Amazon.  Capitalism may have embarked on a post-Smithian enterprise a long time ago.

Ok, so the corporation that wants to shape the world is obliged to make it vibrate with something other than advantage.  Interest is good.  Interesting is better.  Supplying meanings is key.  These are so much bailing wire for our emergent little world.  It gives it form, and, giving it form, it makes it robust.

I’m not sure why but this little example leaps to mind.  Consider the cafeteria at a public building that contains several city services, things like the tax department and the Motor Vehicle Bureau.  Now consider a restaurant in Hollywood frequented by agents, producers and script writers.

In the first place, everyone is there for a reason; they are just starting or finishing their interaction with the city.  They look at other people in the cafeteria, if they look at one another, with scant interest.  Who are these other people?  Who knows?  Who cares?

The Hollywood restaurant is a different place.  The parties are known to one another as old friends and old enemies.  And even when they aren’t known to one another, an industry veteran can take one look at a nearby table and say, who’s who, how the negotiation is going, and what the upshot is likely to be.  And she will do it with relish.  She likes exercising her X-ray vision.  It’s fun to read the world this well.

When Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison invite the corporation to shape markets, they open up a new prospect.  It won’t be easy, this terra forming.  At the moment, we are good at making meaning (Facebook) and good at making money (Amazon), but we are not good at doing both.

References

Overbye, Dennis. 2009. “They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street.” The New York Times, March 10 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/science/10quant.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&th&emc=th (Accessed March 10, 2009).

Hagel III, John, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison.  2008. Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption.  Harvard Business Review.  October.

Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. 2005. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House.

Here is an ad I found this morning on the train to New York City.  (Apologies for the fuzziness.  Our train goes side to side quite a lot.) 

The ad is for a Bucherer watch, and it shows a man with his daughter perched on the edge of a pool.  The emendation tells us that this man cares more for his watch than he does for his daughter.

My first indication that the 80s trend had broken was a poster for a Tom Cruise movie on which someone had scrawled: “Die Yuppie Scum.”  It was a useful indicator, a little early warning. 

Our emendator was not done.  The logo of Bucherer is, apparently, “for people who do not go with the times.”  The last 6 words are crossed out and “don’t care about their kids” is added. 

There is evidence of hostility these days…against the hedge fund managers, banking executives, those who ran the likes of AIG, and guys like Bernie Madoff.  This ad suggests that the wealthy are vain, self centered, irresponsible.  Conspicuous consumption is now doubly conspicuous. 

The anthropological questions: could this hostility scale up into a more substantial class hostility?  Will it be used by individuals to mandate their own departures from existing consumption patterns?  Can something like shame be used by some people to comment on and constrain the behavior of others?  Will this work? 

Ariel Levy reports on changes in the gay community, specially a group of women who emerged in the 1970s.

“The Van Dykes [were] a roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men unless they were waiters or mechanics, and lived on highways of North America for several years…”   

It's a wonderful article, necessary reading for someone who wants to keep in touch with what is happening in our culture.

There is an especially interesting quote that reveals something about how we go about cultural change:

Now, when the phrase “lesbian mom” is a commonplace, it’s hard to imagine a time when female homosexuality was imbued with a counterculture connotation so potent that women were drawn to it by ideology rather than by desire.  Similarly, if you are a young gay woman today, it can be difficult to understand the idea or organizing your entire existence around your sexual preference.  

In the early days, a new idea can be so powerful, it can inflect people’s very sense of desire.  It's as if people could not embrace the change at all unless they embraced it entirely.  Being a radical feminist transformed one’s entire life. 

But once the idea has helped remake our world, being a Lesbian doesn’t define everything else about you.  Now you are inclined to make your own choices.  Your politics, taste in music, choice of sports, manner of dress, these are what they are.  They may or may not be influenced by your sexual orientation. 

When it's brand new, the cultural change comes in like a lion.  It transforms everything about the individual.  The Diderot effect is formidable.  To make this choice is to make a much larger, more thoroughgoing set of choices.  But eventually, we return to a kind of modular culture, where the individual makes each choice discretely.  Our "Chinese menu" approach (i.e., "one from each column") is once more back in effect. 

References

Levy, Ariel.  2009.  Lesbian Nation.  The New Yorker.  March 2, 2009, pp. 30-37, p. 33.

What will the current downturn might mean to consumers?  Will their habits change in lasting ways?  Could we return from the downturn to discover that consumers are a very different animal, that our economy runs on new principles.  David Brooks wondered recently whether we might someday look like abstemious Amsterdam.  There is a scarier prospect: that we might go the way of Japan.

Here’s a typology of possibilities.

1. a mere quantitative change

Consumers scales back existing consumption habits.  They buy the same things, roughly speaking, but they shift from expensive to cheaper versions, from big quantities to small quantities.  This suggests a shift from European luxury cars to Japanese sedans, from luxury goods to something more generic, from national brands to store brands, from eating out to eating in, from steak to hamburger.

The logic is a simple diminution, a quantitative change that produces no qualitative change.  The world of consumer demand remains what it always was, scaled back for the moment in a managed retreat.  When trust, job confidence, credit and prosperity are restored, the consumer will come charging back.  All is forgiven.  All is forgotten.  We will party like it’s 1999.

Variation 1.1

One variation on this scheme would be to scale back all categories except one.  This consumer would make cuts across the board, but would continue to eat out at the present level, or buy the same kind of car, or … you get the idea.  For instance, we can imagine that some men might make extraordinary sacrifices to protect their purchase of a Ford 150.  This is a violation of the Diderot effect, the one that keeps consumer purchases consistent across board, and it is the kind of thing that happens only when driven by a particular idea or objective.  We need to watch for these violations, and then identify the ideas or objective that drives them.  I am a little surprised to discover that none of the national brands is promoting itself as the Exception Brand.

Variation 1.2

Another variation comes from what Silverstein and Fiske call the “trading up” effect.  In this second departure from the Diderot effect, consumers scale consumption back and then engage in a balanced pattern of buying up and buying down.   Haagen-Dazs ice cream is purchased with CostCo savings.  In this case, we need to discover where and by what calculus these trade-offs are being made. Here too brands should be jockeying to become the “trade up” choice, or at least to avoid by the “trade down” alternative.

Variation 1.3 (the long term prospect)

The standing expectation is that consumers who scale down will scale back up when prosperity and credit return.  But it is possible that the new, more modest, positively Amsterdamian, consumption pattern will prove sticky.  This is what happened in Japan in the 1990s.  Consumers gave up free spending ways and never came back.  As Tabuchi put in in the New York Times, “free-spending consumers [turned] into misers, making them a dead weight on Japan’s economy.”

A change of this order takes a full-on anthropological investigation.  In the meantime, we may speculate. I think Scitvosky’s model might be useful here.  He shows how the pleasure of a new purchase devolves into comfort and I wonder if the reverse is also true.  Displeasure, as we move to a lower level of consumption, might for some consumers eventually lose its sting and turn to comfort too. Or not.

The question is whether we might habituate to a lower level of spending.  I think this can only happen if some of the deeper cultural drivers of the consumer culture fall silent.  These would include competitive spending.  (This is largely dead among some Millenials.)  It would also include the wish to stay in fashion or in touch with the curve.  (Here too some young consumers are turning their backs on fashion, especially the branded, mainstream variety.)  There are positive forces: the wish to go green, to “save the planet,” this has been the great staple of elementary school education and it is now on the verge of being installed in our culture as orthodoxy.  (This is no doubt as it should be.)  This is where we really have to do our anthropology: what are the cultural drivers that might intervene here and lock consumption habits into place.

In sum, consumer spending may look very like a tide, falling in every category in exact proportion to the loss of disposable income and credit.  Or consumers may manage their retreat less evenly, working trade-offs to protect some categories over others.  These prospects will become clearer when the ethnographic data is forthcoming.

Soon: Thoughts on the qualitative scenario.  Specifically, how consumption patterns might change, if they are going to change in kind and not just in quantity.

References

Brooks, David. 2009. “I Dream of Denver.” The New York Times, February 17 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/opinion/17brooks.html?th&emc=th (Accessed February 17, 2009).

McCracken, Grant. 1988. Diderot Unities and the Diderot Effect. in Culture and Consumption. Grant McCracken, 118-29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scitovsky, Tibor. 1976. The Joyless Economy: An inquiry into human satisfaction and consumer dissatisfaction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Silverstein, Michael J., and Neil Fiske. 2004. Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods and How Companies Create Them. Rev Portfolio Hardcover.

Tabuchi, Hiroko. 2009. “When Consumers Cut Back: A Lesson From Japan.” The New York Times, February 22http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/worldbusiness/22japan.html?th&emc=th (Accessed February 22, 2009).

Acknowledgments

This post appeared over the weekend at the Atlantic Business Channel:  http://business.theatlantic.com/