Steve Rubel, long a maven of PR and the new media, is now committing his life to digital memory.

To the right, Steve’s diagram of how various media will work to capture and communicate the fine details of his professional life.

In a couple of centuries, this may make him our Samuel Pepys, a man who speaks for us all when someone comes to see what it was like in and around 2009.  (Steve, put in a good word for my blog!)

The pre-digital Steve Rubel probably gave us several thousand words a year: presentations, releases and essays.  Most of these had no more than a fleeting appearance in the public sphere.  Now Steve is single handedly responsible for a great profusion of words, images and, what shall we call them, “sense impressions” each week.  And all of them stick.

In the old days, the pre-digital era, very little human communication made it into an enduring record.  All those thoughts, conversations, images, and interactions would blink on.  And then off.  Nothing much stuck.  And even when we managed to commit our ideas to persistent media and those media to a place of safe keeping, some one of us could be relied upon, in a moment of military rage or administrative incompetence, to burn the thing down.  Good bye to the library at Alexandria, and the riches of the classical world.

What does this digital profusion look like from afar?  What does earth look like to the observer on planet XB3892?  She’s been scrutinizing us for years with a watchful, very wary, weary eye.  The first digital signals to reach her were early (and scary) German experiments in televisionduring World War II, followed by the thin stream of content from the American television networks post-war.  (What did she make of The Lucy Show?  Does she do a Ricky imitation?)  Now the signal is inky dense with fantastically particular data.  (What was Steve Rubel reading at 10:00 this morning?  Check it out here.)  All that blog data.  All those many millions of tweets.  Many more TV signals than before.  (Or does cable deny these to the heavens?)  A veritable wind storm of data now issues from planet earth.

What does our planetary observer think now?

“Good lord, they’ve gone hyperactive.”

“Chatter boxes!  It takes them forever to get speech and now they can’t shut up!”

“Those people are on something!”

“There goes the neighborhood.”

Are we the new noisy neighbor in the galaxy?  Is planet earth a houseboat where they “party hearty, Marty” all night long?  Just when our planetary observer is putting her feet up after an exhausting day of signal search, this superbly sensitive creature begins to pick up little gusts of laughter, music, glass breaking, car doors slamming.  It grows louder and more obnoxious.  She tries to sleep.  Surely, this will have to end sometime.  But, no, no sooner does one lot of humans turn in than the world spins to release another great burst of data. There is no far side to this moon! They are tag-teaming her, she see’s that now. She can run, but she can’t hide from the party animals on planet earth. 

Brace yourself, darling, someday all of us will be Steve Rubel. 

Look how great this is.  It's a promotional video for the novel called Lowboy by John Wray.  (Brilliantly reviewed by James Wood in the March 30 New Yorker).  Subway riders read from the novel while travelling.  Wonderful. 

We can see why they did it.  The novel is set in a subway.  But for branding purposes, this is metaphorically apt.  The brand will begin with the brander.  But it will take its cadence and phrasing from the consumer.

Well, actually, the consumer is still more involved.  Not just reading someone else's words, but supplying their own meanings to boot.  But still. 

I did my best.  I canvassed Nancy Hill.  I ask, I pleaded, to speak at the AAAA planners' conference in SF this fall. 

As I was getting to know the marketing, branding, advertising communities, I would hear these great stories about planners' conferences.  And I've been trying to get there ever since.  After all, planners and anthropologists are birds of a feather, theoretically, methodologically, and most of all as students of American (and not just American) culture. 

But I had an ulterior motive.  I am publishing Chief Culture Officer in the fall, and this, I thought, would be a great opportunity to talk to planners, who I hope will like the book and bless it with their interest and approval.  Yes, I wanted to go to the AAAA planners' meeting to suck up to readers, to curry favor with these king makers of the marketing world.

But no!  Nancy Hill wouldn't return my emails.  She rebuffed the people I asked to act as my intermediary.  Apparently there was no way I was going to talk…to her or at the AAAA. 

I'm sure Nancy has her reasons.  And one of them may be her hostility for bloggers.  (See the article below by Hoag from adage.com and the video clip of Nancy "firing back" at the blogging community.  See also Piers Fawkes opening salvo.)

My reaction was, as it always, is childish and petulant.  I determined to book a hall across the street from the AAAA meeting and stage an anti-AAAA (AAAAA?) meeting where I would deliver an address called "Chief Culture Officer, the talk Nancy Hill doesn't want you to hear!" 

Well, now I don't have to.  As a result of the downturn in the economy, the new media that threaten to disintermediate the conference project, and perhaps even Nancy Hill's hostility for one of the most vital groups in the planning community, the AAAA meeting for this year has been cancelled.  I don't mean to take any satisfaction in this event, but it does save me booking the hall. 

And now there are rumblings.  Tweets flew from Gareth Kay and Adrian Ho.  And today Mark Lewis has a post (see link below) in which he contemplates the possibilities. 

I sure hope they include the opportunity to give a talk about Chief Culture Officers.  I can't help feeling that my chances have gone up now that Nancy Hill is no longer playing gate keeper.  I'll keep you posted. 

References

Fawkes, Piers.  2007.  This Week's Waste of Life: The AAAA Account Planning Conference.  PSFK.com.  August 10, 2007.  here.

Lewis, Mark.  2009.  No Planning Conference – what are you going to do about it.  Planning from the outside.  June 25, 2009.  here.

Levins, Hoag.  2009.  Nancy Hill to Bloggers: 4A's not a 'Wank Fest'  CEO Rebuts 'Incessantly Negative' Cyber Critics.  AdAge.com May 4, 2009. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  (to be published in October 2009; pre-order at Amazon here.)

2009 Planning Conference, once at this address, www2.aaaa.org/events/plan09 and at this address, www2.aaaa.org/events/plan09/Pages/plan09_agenda.aspx, now returns "404."  How sad. 

This is an ad at my train station in Connecticut.  It 's for Liz Claiborne and it features Issac Mizrahi.  (Yes, that's my finger in the way.  Amateurs!  Anthropologists!)

Notice the man in a green scarf sitting on the bench.  On closer scrutiny, this proves to be Monsieur Mizrahi himself, lost in thought, putting in this carefully managed appearance, a little in the manner of the master Alfred Hitchcock in his early days. 

It's a wonderful piece of advertising.  It has a certain emotional tonality that distinguishes it from most of the fashion advertising I've ever seen.  It has a narrative verve, doesn't it? 

But of course the semantics of the narrative have been withheld from us.  So the fun of the ad is figuring out what's up.  There are three dyads.  The two women to the left are having a great conversation.  About what?  The two women in the middle: are they together?  Probably not.  The two women to the right: mother and child?  Surely.  That leaves the model who as a contemporary model is looking not quite of this world.  And Mizrahi himself.  Reading.  What?  Why?  What is he doing here?  It's a little like a celebrity appearance, a cameo.  The ad is equal parts naturalism and evident artifice.  Perhaps Mizrahi should be understood as a kind of muse: the designer who attends every public showing of his art.

Notice that on this instance of the ad there is graffiti that (probably) reads, "Paper Monster."  It is so placed as to seem to refer to the designer.  Wonderful. 

Monster?  Designers are monstrous in a way.  They deform the world with their creative powers.  They have no respect for conventions or some of the things we love.  They pretty much do what they want.  And to this extent the designer is a little like the trickster of North American aboriginal lore. 

And paper.  Why paper?  Is this like "paper tiger?"  Designers look monstrous but they are really not so dangerous after all.  We mustn't take them too seriously. 

In this case, graffiti makes an interesting, worthy ad still more interesting.  And perhaps we could argue that good work attracts good work.  This brand and this graffiti artist are collaborating.  Perhaps this may be another way of saying: Ads get the graffiti artists they deserve.  We can imagine the graffiti artist's moment.  He can draw a mustache on that ridiculous ad that shows a pilot for American Air.  Put if he is going to intervene in this Liz Claiborne ad, well, something more interesting is called for.  Not just called for, but actually mandated.  The graffiti artist must speak to the fashion artist, and he is obliged to bring his best game.  (Actually, the conversation is with the creatives at the advertising firm, and through them the brand, and through them Mizrahi.)  In this case, good drives in good. 

Surely, this is a new article of faith in the marketing world.  Now that we have more sophisticated consumers out there, we want to engage them by engaging their intelligence.  In a newly subtle way, the brand is reaching out and leveraging the intelligence of the consumer.  Here "work with this!"  And the graffiti artists leverages with yet another order of indeterminacy, and this adds a layer of difficulty, and those who stop to wonder are tested to get smarter and more observant, and perhaps a virtuous cycle is set in train.  Thus does the muse now participate in contemporary culture. 

I learned today that This Blog came in 17th in the Top100 blogs in Advertising as established by Invesp Consulting. 

Tell me if you notice something about this list.

Everyone has a really great name except me.  And I thought I knew something about branding.  Anthropologist heal thyself.

Any thoughts on what I should call this blog would be appreciated.

I praised Royal Pains last week and when I saw the second episode I was sorry I had. The show had turned gooey and uninteresting.  Suddenly Dr. Hank is Robin Hood, no moral conflict, no self doubt, just good old American (and doctorly) self congratulation. 

If you don’t get Showtime, this is your excuse.  It was mine.  

Commenting on the recent GE investment in research and development for emerging markets, Navi Radjou recently cautioned against the traditional approach.  Too often, he says, this hires only engineers and scientists.  “Global R&D model 1.0,” he calls it. 

R&D 2.0 needs new personnel, Radjou argues, including anthropologists and economists.  What a wonderful idea, resonant for those of us who loiter at this intersection!

Radjou concludes:

Goldman Sachs predicts that the bulk of the global economic growth over the next three decades will occur in emerging markets like India, China, and Brazil. But multinationals can’t capture this explosive growth unless they first upgrade their technically-skewed innovation model to a multidisciplinary R&D approach.

References

Radjou, Navi.  209.  R&D 2.0: Fewer Engineers, More anthropologists.  Harvard Business Blog.  June 10, 2009.  here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Susan Mazur-Stommen and the AnthroDesign list serve. 

Background

Navi Radjou (pictured) is the Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.

The world of the talk show is ablaze with variety.  Jay Leno left and came back.   Conan O’Brien took over Tonight.  Jimmy Fallon took over Late Night.  Craig Ferguson is positioned to take over The Late Show.  Jimmy Kimmel continues to flourish and and David Letterman tangles with Sarah Palin.  It’s a world in a whirl. 

While all this turmoil, no one seems to be maying much attention to the arrival of Alexa Chung at noon.  Her first show was yesterday on MTV.

The show proves to be variously gossipy and a little camp, like a slumber party for big girls.  They have dressed Chung down as if to apologize for her beauty.  And her manner is in any case breezy and unassuming.  She is working from the British rule book marked “having drinks with your mates at the pub.”  And in these circumstances it works quite well, even when she baffled one guest with the word “loo.” 

There isn’t any stand up.  Because its not about her.  She doesn’t preside.  She asks her guests (yesterday: Jack Black, Michael Cera and Soulja Boy) prepared questions and let’s them do most of the work.  There’s no side kick, no band, and no desk.  Chung is funny, coy, ironical, jokey, happy, and playful.  Which is to say she has only one quality in common with David Letterman.

Apparently, we have to choose.  Late night gives us male egos, precious little charisma, a certain predictability of personal style, and nothing much to look at.  Chung on the other hand gives us unassuming beauty and a quirky charm.  I wonder if she’s on to something. 

Royal Pains deputed on USA last week.  The new episode is tonight at 10:00.  

It’s a morality tale about a young doctor pushed from the great heights of his post at a Manhattan hospital.  His sin: moral judgment.  He let a rich man die to save a poor one.  Now with debts increasing, his fiancee decamped, and depression beckoning, his only real option is to become a concierge doctor in the Hamptons. 

People in the Hamptons have so much status, they don’t defer to doctors.  And they have so much money, they don’t much bother with morals.  What they really need a doctor who will work to hire, and then look the other way.  Without his once God-like armor, Hank is vulnerable to corruption.  What will happen to our hero?

There are no soft spots in this casting.  Hank played by Mark Feurerstein is very good.  He’s maturing into the kind of actor who’s learned how do more with less.  His younger brother, played by Paulo Costanzo, is perhaps even better.  In the manner of all younger brothers, his strategy is to do more with more.  And some of the bit players are dazzling.  (See especially Ezra Miller as Tucker and Meredith Hagner as Libby) 

The dialogue is lively.  That supporting player, Tucker, explains a traffic accident that has just occurred:

“That tree came out of no where.”

His girlfriend: “Actually, it came out of the ground.”

Tucker: “Yes, but did it have the right of way.”

And the dialogue can be moving.  When Tucker goes into arrest of some kind, Libby pleads with our hero:

“You have to save him.  He’s Tucker.” 

On the page, this looks like rich kid entitlement.  But on the screen, it tells us that in these parts Tucker is mythic…or that in Libby’s life he is.

But the thing that really charmed me was the way the scene is dressed with extras.  Hollywood has made an art of peopled a scene with people that supply context without distracting us from the action or the actors.  In a manner of speaking, extras are sketched in.  Defining details are withheld.  Particularities are forbidden.  Extras are flushed through any given scene to give us the sense that this scene is set “downtown” or in an “office building.”  Extras are generic people and nothing more. 

But Royal Pains appears to dial up the specificity.  These extras are extra-extras, not just genre but kind of actual.  They are so distinctive that several times I stopped looking at the action and the actors and starting looking at the bit players. 

Under the pressure from the indie scene and a general trend in our culture, Hollywood has been shifting from formula to something more actual for some time now.  But it has done it, except in the case of the indie cinema, by relatively invisible degrees.  We follow suit, resetting our tolerances in kind, barely aware that a change of some interest and substance is taking place.

Royal Pains may tell us that a further reprogramming is under way.  If you happen to see Royal Pains tonight, please let me know if you think something is going on. 

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit:

“When you look at the last five, 10 years, there were two engines of growth. There was the U.S. consumer and credit creation. None of those are likely to be the engines of growth going forward…I’m optimistic that we might start seeing stability in the financial markets, but that’s stage one. Stage two is about what kind of world we want to have going forward, what’s the new business model? And that’s what we’re really focused on at Citi.”

“What kind of world we want to have going forward” requires a cultural calculation, whatever else it requires.  We can’t know the business model til we know the culture model. 

Pandit is asking about values.  And who better to map these values than the cultural sophisticated.  But it’s also about a deep understanding of who we are and how we define ourselves.  These are the ideas that shape us.  Some of them are values.  Many of them are not.  Here too a knowledge of culture is called for.

Now, if only there were someone in the Citigroup C-suite…

References

Sellers, Patricia and Jessica Shambora.  2009.  Power Point: Find a new business Model.  Postcards from the pinnacles of power.  Fortune on line.  here.

post script:

I am in Omaha tomorrow (Thursday) morning.  Anyone around for coffee?

Who's the most famous person you know on Facebook? 

On Saturday, I stumbled upon the Pixar film Wall-E.  I had heard it was good, but nothing prepared me for how good it was.  Wow.

Because this is the internet age, I looked up Wall E on line.  And because this is the Facebook era, the moment I saw the name of the director (Andrew Stanton), I plugged it into my Facebook search bar.  But of course I would like to be friends with a guy this brilliant. 

There he was on Facebook.  Looking way too relaxed (see photo above) to be a prime mover of a motion picture.  But no, I can't be Mr. Stanton's friend.  My only option: to be his "fan."

I balked at this. 

I have no illusions.  Andrew Stanton is a very big deal.  He is a master of a medium that matters much more than the media I have tried to make myself the master of (books and blogs).  He's a big sneeze.  I'm a wee sniffle.  Still, because this is the age of shifting power relations and a new symmetry of relation between the producers and consumers of culture (see the work of Henry Jenkins work here), I am disinclined to be a "fan."

Now, we can understand Andrew Stanton may not wish to be my friend (or anyone's friend) on Facebook.  Many millions of people know about him.  Many revere him as a god.  And several hundred of these people can be relied upon to use even something as slender as a Facebook connection the opportunity to inundate him with so many messages he will never make a film again. 

This is in the nature of fandom.  Most fans are respectful of boundaries.  But with numbers this large, there's going to be someone who just can't help themselves.  (As when someone close to me saw Elvis Costello in a New York restaurant and had to be forcibly restrained from pulling up a chair and joining him for dinner.)  They don't mean harm.  They just love the celebrity that much. 

So I understand why Stanton isn't taking friends on Facebook.  But I also understand why I don't want to be merely a "fan."  It's a little too asymmetrical for me.  It confirms my "distant planet" status.  The thing that draws me closer pushes me away.  Being a fan makes me feel a little like Wall-E, plunky, likeable, and really just totally out there in the universe. 

We need is a third category, one that gives me the illusion of a connection, even it protects Mr. Stanton for my enthusiasm.  Something between a friend and a fan.  (There are two additional possibilities: that Mr. Stanton broaden his notion of friend or I narrow my notion of fan.  Like that's going to happen.) In a still more perfect world, we would have a ziggurat, many circles ranked from quite close to quite far away. 

Categories, schmategories.  The issue is classificatory haziness.  How people are positioned relative to one another, this is the work of culture.  Culture decides who I am to you, and who you are to me.  Culture gives the ideas by which association is defined and calculated.  (Very roughly speaking, it's some version of kinship for hunter-gathers, some notion of hierarchy for pre and early modern cultures, and some notion of accomplishment for modern and post modern cultures.  With lots and lots of local variation.) 

But because our culture is in a certain turmoil, how we define ourselves relative to one another is now unclear.  We have many competing elites.  We have many evaluative principles.  We have a new discomfort with hierarchical distinction and status asymmetry.  And we have new networking technologies that give us the opportunity (and illusion) of access. 

We will work it out.  After all, Facebook only 5 years.  In the meantime, dear reader, I want you to go to Facebook and make me your friend. 

We know two things.

1) The world of airtravel is ripe for a revolution.

2) The company is place is not up for the job of fomenting this revolution.   Cisco can't get the job done.

Proposition 1: the world of air travel is ripe for revolution.

Everyone has one or more horror stories: canceled flights, late arrives, missed connections, lost luggage, being forced to sit in a plane on the ground because the airline wants to protect its on-time departure rating.  The list goes on.  In the early days, air travel was something glamorous.  Now it's more like a kidnapping by amateurs.

In Pip Coburn's view of the world, "current pain" is enormous.  That's the pain caused by the existing technology.  And "future pain" (the cost of adopting a new technology) is modest.

Yes, there will be some loss of information.  Horrors, there may even be a loss of clients.  But, wow, compare the investment you are obliged to make to get from your desk to the boardroom at the end of the hall to all the things you need to get from New York to and from Chicago.  I believe this is what the economist's call a "good deal." 

Cost recovery should happen very quickly.  Think of all the costs there are to recover: air fair, taxi rides, hotel bills, food expenses.  The high end solution for Cisco, a televisual suite, is $150,000.  It simulates the meeting room with high fidelity. 

If the average cost of a business trip is $300 air fare and taxi + 200 hotel and food, all we need are 300 trips to make back our investment.  I would guess that for a small company, this is a year's worth of travel.  And this takes no account of the increased happiness and efficiency of our staff. 

Proposition 2: Cisco is not up for the job.

Cisco has a solution.  Call it tele-precense or tele-communting.  It is capable of doing to the airtravel industry what Amazon did to retail: disintermediating it.

Here's how Cisco describes what they do:

Cisco TelePresence™ creates a live, face-to-face communication experience over the network that empowers you to collaborate like never before. Cisco TelePresence helps people meet, share content, create high-quality video recordings and events, consult with experts and deliver powerful personalized services, all using the power of the network for an immersive in-person experience.

With Cisco TelePresence:

    * Scheduling is easy-no IT support required
    * Launching a meeting is as simple as making a phone call.
    * People appear lifelike and life-size

The trouble here is that this is one of those tipping point markets.  Right now the installed base of Cisco tech is small.  And as long as this is true, it doesn't much matter that we have the technology.  We can't use it effectively till others do too.

And this is where we come down to Cisco's insufficiency.  What we need here is a marketer so smart that they can push this market over the tipping point.  Cisco need an ace like Sergio Zyman or some other master of the art and science of marketing. 

Here's what I know.  Air travel is broken.  Cisco can fix it.  Please.  Start.  Now. 

post script.

Maybe the problem is not Cisco but the ad agency.  See a Cisco ad here.

References

Coburn, Pip. 2007. The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn. New York: Portfolio.

I was in Barnes and Noble on Sunday wandering the isles.  I went to the front desk to ask for help.

Good news!  No line!  The front desk was deserted except for a single employee.  I noticed that she was rooting around in a desk.

As a good Canadian, I am not allowed to interrupt someone rooting around in a desk.  I stand close enough that they can sense my presence and wait for them to acknowledge me.  That’s the rule.

Well, the BN employee just kept rooting.  She could tell I was there.  I could tell she could tell I was there.  Her behavior become more and more self conscious.  But she was damned if she was going to look up.  Because this was, I guess, her time, and customers are just ungrateful wretches (who order from Amazon in any case). 

She kept rooting.  Even when it was clear that there were no discoveries left to make in the drawer.  Even when she was reduced to examining a mechanical pencil as if it might contain one of the mysteries of the universe. 

Finally, I stepped forward and said, “Hi, could you help me?”

She would not admit that she could help me.  She merely waited for me to ask something.  So I did.  (We cue well, Canadians do.)

“Could you look up Gaiman’s American Gods?  What section would it be in?”

She stared at me a moment, and then said,

“Oh, you would have to ask Customer Service,” and pointed to a desk a half football field away. 

This despite the fact that she was not occupied (except for that mysterious pencil) and had internet access immediately at hand. 

We can guess what was happening here.  This poor women had been treated so badly so often by so many consumers in Connecticut that this was her chance to get her own back.  And I can’t say I blame her.  Even when she was rewarding my courtesy with her rudeness. 

A little later, when Pam and I were standing in line, I couldn’t help noticing that she was engaging in a pleasant and animated way with a customer.  And it seemed to me that she had used our engagement to right the tables.  It’s a crude mechanical system.  The way to recover from Connecticut rudeness is to inflict a little of it yourself.  It’s expunges the debt or something.  You feel a great deal better.  Which would make this an important exchange in the psychic economy that organizes urban retail. 

And then I thought: the retail industry ought to hire and train “soakers.”  These people are a little like Secret Shoppers, except their job is to travel from salesperson to salesperson and soak up the animus that prevents these people from doing their job with grace and courtesy.

Soakers don’t have to be Canadians.  But I think this might help. 

I was in my local Barnes and Noble on Sunday and I bought two books.  Both of them from Amazon, online, using my iPhone while standing in the isles.

Of course I felt bad.  I learned about these two books thanks to Barnes and Noble.  They ought to have made the sale.

The problem was, I wanted both books in Kindle form and Barnes and Noble couldn’t help me there.

Still, it’s clear they ought to be getting a finder’s fee.  As should booker reviewers, websites, magazines and other players in the stream.  And it doesn’t have to be much to add up. 

If Barnes and Noble were getting .25 for every book they brought to America’s attention, it would be a pretty penny.

Here’s the thing: Amazon is now engaged in a dangerous game of “winner take all.”  It must see that it’s time to give BN a finder’s fee when I make my purchase.  Because this bookstore created value.  It instructed me in my possibilities.  And it deserves to harvest this value.

Yes, Amazon tries to do this.  I continue to be impressed by how badly it does it.  There is no substitute for browsing, and nothing browses better than a bookstore.