There's a wonderful Snapple ad on TV at the moment.

You can see it here.

The dialogue:

Now Snapple has got healthy green tea, tasty black tea, real sugar.  What's our slogan?

Bester stuff!

Stuffy stuff!

Good stuff for bettering…stuff.

Guys!  The best stuff on earth just got…better.

Good stuff, Greg.

I'm ok with it.

We're dating.   

It is a brainstorm gone terribly wrong.  People are so pressed to be innovative, they will say just about anything.  Bester stuff?  Stuffy stuff?

But the genius of this ad turns, I think, on the performance of the woman who delivers "good stuff for bettering…stuff."  This is not the winning ticket in this particular lottery, but that's ok.  She's dating the guy who delivered the winner.

A couple of things to note here:

What sells this ad is a fine, anthropological attention to detail.  This is what happens in brain storms these days, especially now that America is addicted to continual creativity.  What sells the ad is an exquisite care in crafting little social performances.  The way people deliver these lines, and especially the way the woman flashes her eyes and nods her head for the last line.  These flash past us, but we are (or at least I am) grateful recipients of this mastery of the art of observation as delivered then by this mastery of the art of advertising. 

But what's odd is that these details have almost nothing to do with the brand or the message in this ad.

Which leads me to wonder if some ads are perhaps a two step process:

Step 1: the cocreational peg

This is the content within that makes us love the ad, and look forward to seeing it again, and talk about it to our friends, and write blog posts about it (like this one).  This is the content that inspires us to engage in the cocreational activity with which we welcome and embrace the ads we care about.  This is the content that makes us fans and champions.  Let's call this the Jenkinsian content, after the discoverer of the value created by the impassioned fan, Henry Jenkins. 

Step 2: the rest of the ad

Then there is the rest of the ad which is about building the brand, trumpeting the proposition (better stuff) and making meanings for both.  This is conventional meaning manufacture.  This is the old work of advertising.  Indeed, it is the only thing we used to do in the creation of ads.

Now that ads leave the agency half done, as it were, now that they depend upon the cocreational activity of the consumer, Step One matters more and more.  And now that Step One matters more, the agency and the client want a new and delicate eye for cultural content.

References

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Culture And Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, And Brand Management. Indiana University Press.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Ads that live, ads that die.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  February 23.  here.
(for more on the use of nonverbal behavior in selling an ad.)

Acknowledgments:

I can't find the exact details for the creative team responsible for this very fine ad.  But here's the team who did another ad in the campaign.  (Happy to correct this list, if someone would kindly supply the correct information.) 

Agency: Deutsch, Los Angeles
President/Chief Creative Officer: Eric Hirshberg
SVP, Group Creative Director: Chris Ribeiro
Copywriter: Ryan Scott
Art Director: Ryan Hitzel
SVP, Director of Integrated Production: Tom Dunlap
VP, Executive Producer: Victoria Guenier

Appeal for info:

If anyone knows the name of the actors in the ad, please let me know. 

Irritated outburst:

Why is it still so hard to get access to a clean copy of the spot and the names of the creative team.  If anyone has a solution here, I would love to here it.  (No sites only accessible by subscription, please.  I want readers of this blog to be able to go there.)

Two items in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye today.  Both show us the American corporation as it struggles to divine the mysteries of American culture.

1) General Motors is about to appoint Bryan Nesbitt at the head of its Cadillac unit.  Typically, John Stoll tells us, brand chiefs come from sales or marketing.  This appointment suggests that GM is mobilizing to improve its grasp of the American consumer and culture.  After all, designer often have a competence here.  They listen to the zeitgeist.  They pay attention to the forms and surfaces of the contemporary world.  They have a feeling for our culture, an ear to the ground.

2) But not always.  Sometimes designers are tone-deaf when it comes to culture. Peter Arnell demonstrated this in his redesign of PepsiCo brands.  His redesign for Tropicana provoked criticism from consumer, and PepsiCo withdrew the package. 

The question: was the Tropicana redesign the one bad apple.  Or was Arnell's redesign of other PepsiCo brands flawed in a deeper, more systematic way?   Sales results for Gatorade are now forthcoming, and things look grim.  According to Bauerlein of the WSJ:

Sales of Gatorade … have slid this year despite a flashy new marketing campaign that simplified the product's label to "G."  [...]  Gatorade lost a 4.5% share of the sports-drink market and volume slipped 17.5% in the first six months of this year, according to Beverage Digest estimates.

We might see this as the result of a weaker economy.  But, no, the figures for Coca-Cola are not as bad as this, and there is some evidence of still more consumer unhappiness.

[...][C]onsumers complain they are confused by the Gatorade "G" campaign, which was meant to reverse a sales slump that began in 2008. In January, Pepsi replaced the Gatorade name on its label with a big letter "G" and shrunk its signature lightning bolt.  [...]  The idea was to make the brand cool again but it misfired. "They asked 'What's G?' and the problem was, people weren't sure," said Bill Pecoriello, chief executive of market researcher ConsumerEdge Research LLC.

The root of the Arnell debacle is clear.  Designers like Arnell confuse "culture" with "cool."  They insist that the brand needs to be "edgy," "hip," "out there."  And sometimes this is exactly right.  A careful execution of cultural meanings on the very edge of our culture is exactly what is called for.  (Snapple managed this in the 1990s.) 

But if the only thing designers know about culture is cool, we have a problem.  After all, cool makes up something like 2% of the cultural meanings in circulation at any given moment.  To be sure, they are the most conspicuous meanings, the ones with the greatest attention.  But if all the designer knows is cool, he or she has extraordinarily partial knowledge.  And eventually the partial view will exact a penalty, preventing the designer from speaking to the deeper currents of American culture, and preventing access to the full range of creative resources at his or her disposal.  Designers who only know cool are in some literal sense of the term incompetent.  Marketing malpractice is just a matter of time. 

Edgy is easy.  If you live in the right part of town, read the right magazines, and consort with the right colleagues, it is not so very hard to capture cool.  How much more difficult it is to master culture!  Now, the designer must actually learn things that are badly out of fashion, to talk to Americans who have dubious taste in clothing and eyewear, to talk about things that are never talked about in hipster Brooklyn. 

I believe good designers have always had a way of escaping the 2% approach to culture.  And I believe the profession is mobilizing to look at culture much more broadly.  As one case in point, IDEO uses ethnography to investigate the consumer in ways that take them (and the client) beyond "cool" into the details of daily life and the meanings of culture.   We shall see if the rest of the profession follows suit. 

3) We should expect a "course correction" from PepsiCo, an acknowledgment that Arnell's project was ill advised.  Bauerlein's article is the first one I've seen that puts the blame for the Arnell debacle directly at the feet of the PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi. 

Gatorade's recent makeover, launched in January, marks the second marketing stumble in six months for the company under Chairman and Chief Executive Indra Nooyi, who pledged last year to boost weak North American beverage sales with hipper marketing.

But Nooyi has yet to signal a shift in philosophy or personnel.  In her conference call, she choose instead to blame the victim.  She said:

"Clearly some of those [former] users switched to cheaper alternatives" and in some cases soft drinks.  "They didn't have a right to exist in the Gatorade world," they just liked the taste.

"Didn't have a right to exist in the Gatorade world"?  Since when did PepsiCo think of itself as a night club?  It is hard to tell from this wee fragment what Nooyi has in mind exactly, but it does rather look as if cool has infected not just the mind of the designer but the C-Suite itself.

Clearly, Nooyi needs to give a recantation.  It is time to clear the decks and start again.  Rumors now circulating suggest that the Arnell debacle will get steadily worse.  First, Tropicana.  Now, Gatorade.  Can Pepsi and Mountain Dew be far behind?  The "Arnell Affair" has the makings of a scandal.  It is time for the classic techniques of crisis control and a public reset.  This could even be an opportunity for Nooyi to promise us "cool" that comes from culture instead of the designer's lofty self regard.  She might even wish to appoint a Chief Culture Officer. 

These are interesting times…and odd ones.  GM, that great dinosaur of a corporation, appears to be leaning in the direction of a new, more robust cultural intelligence.  (And if this is the work of CMO Robert Lutz, hat's off to you, sir.  See my discouraging words on Lutz's appointment as CMO.)  And Pepsi, that darling of the daring marketer, appears to have lost its way.

The take away:  Designers are a way that culture gets into the corporation, and GM is stronger for its Nesbitt appointment.  But they can also be a wrecking crew.  The trick, I believe, is to repudiate the inclination to make cool all the designer (and the brand) knows about culture.  The American corporation must learn to stop pursuing the first at the cost of the second.

References

Bauerleign, Valerie.  2009.  Pepsi Sweats Over Gatorade.  Wall Street Journal.  July 23.  [All quotes in this post are from this article.]

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Tropicana: When CCOs Go Wrong.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  April 21.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  (Forthcoming this fall.  Preorder at Amazon here.)

Stoll, John.  2009.  GM to Name New Cadillac Chief, More Board Members.  Wall Street Journal.  July 23, 2009. 

Pattern recognition, anthropology style, consists of watching for things that make you go “hmm.”  A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a kid drive past me.  He was wearing a hard expression and a very short haircut.  The car was a Ford Focus.  And not just any Ford Focus.  It was impeccable.

Hmm.  An impeccable Ford Focus.  And a kid who looked quite a lot like a skinhead. 

What might me go hmm was the anomaly.  After all, a Ford Focus seems to me (without the benefit of anthropological investigation) a bland little car, vehicle of choice for baby sitters, clergymen, and elementary school teachers…kind and gentle souls, all.  Not tough guys.

Yesterday, I was out for a walk and who should zip past me, but another kid with short hair and a tough expression.  The car?  An immaculate Ford Focus. 

I came home with two questions: 1) were these kids skinheads?  2) Is the Ford Focus a skinhead car of choice?

Short of running after the next Ford Focus that whistles past me, shouting, “Hey, are you a Skinhead?” there really isn’t any way to answer the first question.  (I think of skinhead as an English invention, and I know they exist in America because I say the movie with Edward Norton.  Shockingly limited knowledge, really.) 

The second question is a little easier to investigate and I did a Google search with the words “skinhead” and “Ford Focus.”   They did not coincide in any illuminating way. 

But of course, I may be really barking at the moon.  There may not be any “skinhead” car.  I mean, why would someone’s politics specify their choice of automobile?  On the other hand, it is usually just when I am talking myself down in this way that someone says to me, “Ford Focus?  Skinheads?  Everyone knows that!” 

I am deputizing you, dear reader.  Place your hand on the screen and repeat after me: “I do solemnly swear to keep an eye out for Ford Focuses and the people who drive them.”  I do not advise running after them shouting questions.  That’s my job. 

Hat’s off to Bob Garfield who today takes issue with the gender stereotyping in beer advertising:

[Men] are die cut and stamped, tumbling off the conveyor into the Man Hopper, programmed to drink beer, watch football, barbecue meat and fall asleep moments after forgetting she has needs, too.

We are all, in short, Adam Carrola.

But hold on just one second. Adam Carrola’s a dick.

Yet, lots and lots of beer advertising is content to tar all of us with the same brush, to reduce us to cartoon characters of masculinity.

Garfield writes in praise of the Droga5 spot for Foster’s Victoria Bitter.

[W]hat makes it work as advertising is the recognition that you can be simultaneously distinctive and part of a larger whole, an individual bloke and a part of something larger. An ordinary beer-swilling dick, and a very special dick unto yourself.

Splendid.  At the very moment, marketing is finding new ways to talk about women (Dove, etc.), it’s image of men is now predictable.  It’s not in fact offensive.  Much of the “men as dogs, dolts, dopes” advertising can be funny.  Men like this image of themselves.  No, the problem is that it’s verging on the tedious.  The joke is wearing thin.  Verily, it has jumped the shark.

Guys will go along with this sort of thing for a little while longer.  We don’t mind being portrayed as dogs, dolts and dopes.  What we don’t like it being seen as cliches.  Call us stupid and obvious, but don’t you dare suggest we have drifted off the cultural moment.  (And what goes for men goes doubly for the ad agency that makes the ads men watch.)

Thank you, Droga5 and Bob Garfield, for getting the ball rolling. 

References

Garfield, Bob.  2009.  Most Interesting Men in the World Appear in the VB Spot:  Finally, Droga5′s Beer Ad Captures the Varied Glory of Manhood.  Adage.com.  July 20.  here.

See the VB ad here. 

GM's CMO Robert Lutz was recently told an awful truth:

In my group it is just uncool to drive a GM car — even if they are as good as the imports.

He replied:

I guess it depends whether you have your own personality or whether you are a lemming-like follower of current trends.  I think an audacious and bold person with a mind of his or her own would go to a dealership and see that our new vehicles easily trounce the foreign competition. . . . It's uncool to drive an import.

It's hard to assess how many ways this violates the marketer's handbook…but I'm going to try.

1)  We don't savage consumers for not buying the product.  We don't call them "lemmings."  In a competitive, choice-rich marketplace, the fault always lies with us.  The consumer is always right, which means, in this case, he is never a lemming.  Lutz appears to have invented a new version of "blame the victim."

2)  We don't call the consumer "uncool," and especially when our cool credentials are, well, perhaps not as robust as they might be.  A GM executive accusing consumers of being uncool, this is like John Russell, manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, accusing Mike Scioscia, manager of the Angels, of being bad at his job.  Dude, win a few games, then we'll talk.

3)  Lutz betrays the first principle of marketing know-how.  Statistically, "bold and audacious" consumers make up a tiny fraction of the marketplace.  Mr. Lutz, I'm confused.  This is your new strategy, tiny segments?  This is your path to recovery?  Poor you.  Poor GM.  Poor us.  (Our tax dollars now fund Lutz's "philosophy.")

4) But there's a deeper, dare I say fatal, flaw in Lutz's thinking.  When he suggests that if consumers only had "minds of their own," I can hear the ghost of the great French scientist Emile Durkheim spinning in his grave.  As Durkheim told us, consumers actually share minds.  We travel in groups.  No one has a mind of their own.

What we have instead is culture.  It is the ideas contained in culture that helps us understand what "transportation," "cars," "General Motors," "Buick" mean in the world, and to us.  Even when we are early adopters.  Even when we are "audacious and bold."

Eric Felten of the Wall Street Journal understands this very well:

Cars get us around, of course, but they also, in their look and feel, capture a cultural outlook, a spirit, even a national identity.

So we don't expect consumers to be heat seeking individualists, ready to break away from the herd and reach out for products that no one else quite understands.  All of us understand the world (and the products in it) as a result of the cultural ideas in our heads.  We may belong to an avant garde group and cultivate cultural meanings that are exceedingly novel and rare.  Or we may hew to the most conventional minded market.  Or we exist somewhere on the continuum in between.  But we don't think for ourselves in any absolute sense.  We do not work denovo.  Culture shapes who we are and what we want.

And what culture tells us about GM cars is that they are, very often, uncool, unattractive and unreliable.   Felten calls them, "Cars reliable in their shoddiness, famous for interiors made of cheap plastic…" These are cultural meanings of the brand that GM has created over several years of bad marketing, manufacture and design.  And if we don't like these meanings, then we change them…with good marketing, manufacture and design. 

I can't speak to the manufacture or the design, but the marketing part of this equation is pretty straight forward.  Marketing is "meaning manufacture."  It sources meanings in our culture, ones that will make the brand vibrate with currency, interest, and sometimes urgency.  And then through great advertising, new media, experience engineering, etc. it makes these meanings resident in the brand.  It is a simple act of meaning transfer.  Aristotle understood it perfectly well. 

This is when it begins to make some sense to have a CMO (or indeed a Chief Culture Officer) who knows something about the culture in question.  And it is on balance probably a good thing if this person is not Mr. Lutz.  As I argued a couple of weeks ago, it rather looks as if Mr. Lutz has his own quite fixed ideas of the meanings of a car.  Worse, he is not to alert to the other meanings that GM cars have, or through good meaning manufacture, could be made to have. 

I know this is bad tempered and hectoring of me, but golly, Lutz is the man in charge.  At a time when our tax dollars hang in the balance, it is very plainly time for GM to appoint someone else in his place.  Not to do so is marketing malpractice. 

References

Felton, Eric.  2009.  Intelligent Design: To Save Itself, GM Needs Style.  Wall Street Journal.  July 17. 

Kiley, David.  2009.  Why GM named 77-Year Old Lutz CMO.  BusinessWeek.  The Autobeat.  July 15.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer: fixing Detroit Now.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  April 14.  here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  When Cars Could Fly.  In McCracken, Grant. Culture And Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, And Brand Management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Relying on interns as a source of information about contemporary culture is a well known cheat in the corporate world. 

Here’s how they did it recently at Morgan Stanley, according to The Gawker.

Morgan Stanley has this 15 year-old intern in London, so while all these dudes were sitting around miserably trying to do analyst reports about youth media habits and shit, they realized they didn’t know shit about youth media habits, because they spend all their time in the office writing analyst reports, so they asked this intern kid, “Hey kid, why don’t you write a thing about your friend and how they use media and shit?”

Then they promptly forgot about it, because, I mean, kids, right? But then this kid comes back with this report and the analysts are like, “Holy fuck, we could totally sell this shit to other old people!” So now Morgan Stanley has published this kid’s note as a research report, and it is of course way more popular than whatever these pro guys have written this year.

References

Nolan, Hamilton.  2009.  Some Kid’s Media Mash Note is Hottest Thing on Wall Street.  Gawker.  July 13.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Forthcoming this fall.  Available for pre-order at Amazon.com here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the head’s up.

There are two kinds of brand: national and niche.  

National brands are their own planets.  They have the incumbent’s advantage, channel control, big reputations, deep pockets, and, if they’re lucky, consumer loyalty.  The downside is that they do have a gravitational field that sometimes takes them captive.  They must struggle constantly to get to know the consumer and the culture, and respond as both change…ever more quickly.

Niche brands are nimble, opportunistic, and maximally responsive.  They know their consumers up close and personal.  They can change in real time and they do.   Their challenge is to find the resources to scale up, and the marketing professionalism needed to master new problems as they climb.  Inevitably, growth takes the entrepreneur out of the segment she knows into segments she doesn’t know and usually from a few segments to many of them.  A higher order of marketing professionalism is now called for.

These brands found a way to live together.  Niche brands would do the product testing, the innovating, the market experiments.  If and when the big brands liked what they saw, they would reach down and buy the little brand up.  The niche entrepreneurs would get a big fat pay day and, after the “non-compete” expired, they would go back to what they love best, creating brands that are little and responsive.

That was then.  This is now. 

According the the AdAge today:

[I]n many cases, package-goods players are developing their own niche products rather than relying on the old model of waiting to see if an upstart niche brand will be successful and then snatching it up, much like Coca-Cola did when it purchased the now-mass Vitaminwater. “For a while, the larger companies said, ‘We’ll let someone else do it, and then buy them if they’re any good,’” said Bill Bishop, chairman of consulting group Willard Bishop. “Now it’s become evident that you give up too much in opportunity by letting it get developed by the smaller players.”

The big question: can big companies do innovation of this kind?  It means getting closer to the consumer and to the culture, and moving more nimbly than ever before.  Almost certainly, it means adding a Chief Culture Officer to the C-Suite. 

The old model, big brands buying little ones, presupposes a lag time.  And there are two problems: 1) as Bishop points out, it leaves money on the table.  2) what lag time?  The world moves too quickly for the big brand to move at its leisure.

Coke used to be able to watch and wait.  There were also hundreds of little brands milling about in the niche world.  This wasn’t laziness.  It was an efficient way of reducing risk.  Let the niche markets try out any and all possibilities.  Let consumers vote with their purchases.  Let that invisible hand world sort the world for us.  In this system, Coke let others take the risk, so that it find the profit.

But now the corporation has to play at that lowest level, of absolute novelty, sorting is pretty much out of the question.  At this level, every branding idea is still pretty much of an idea, and the world has not had a chance to vote.  In this world, the noise to signal ratio is very different.  There is lots more noise, precious little signal, and damn little sorting of any natural kind.  Now the corporation has to do this sorting by itself. 

But of course the corporation is famously tone-deaf when it comes to culture.  (This is precisely one of the reasons it had to leave innovation to someone else.)  Now it wants to do the sorting for itself, the corporation needs someone who knows culture and who can read culture with skill and acuity.  It needs a senior manager with perfect pitch.  It needs a Chief Culture Officer. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Published in October.  available for pre-order on Amazon.com here.

York, Emily Bryson.  2009.  Giants to Exploit Niche Markets.  Adage.com.  July 13.  here.

Thanks to Wordle.net for the image.

I’ve been reviewing the Bruno reviews and I’m interested to see that it delights in ambushing the unsuspecting.  Even Ron Paul, libertarian candidate for President, gets taken. Apparently, he has never heard of Cohen, Borat, or Bruno. 

Strange when you think of it.  Cohen has been a big star for several years now.  He’s appeared at the Academy Awards and won a Golden Globe.  Doesn’t he get pursued by the paparazzi?  I assume he must.   Indeed, Cohen has said he’ll retire Borat and Ali G, on the grounds that they were too well known by the public.  Strange to think that anyone who knows the characters would fail to recognize the celebrity within. 

Maybe the answer is that rubes will be with us always.  And these are the targets Cohen likes best.  People who live on the far margin, nurturing their own brand of nuttiness, safely removed from the mainstream that might otherwise redeem them. 

But my guess is that the great fragmentation of our culture means there will also be nooks and crannies filled with people who have never heard of Cohen however famous he becomes.  Now that the enameled surface of the contemporary culture is “crazed” with tiny fissures, there are more and more places for culture to take hold.

The question is: when does the center cease to hold?  This matters for Cohen because at some point the structural forces that sustains the possibility of ambush must eventually destroy the sanctimony on which, as Scott points out, he depends.

References

Scott, A.O.  2009.  Tuetonic Fashion Plate Flaunts His Umlauts.  The New York Times.  July 10, 2009.  here.

This is what success looks like.  These are the numbers for the HBO show True Blood over 12 shows. 

The DVD sales for the show are sensational: 1.2 million units, grossing some $41 million in revenue in 6 weeks of sale. 

At TVbytheNumbers.com, Robert Seidman wonders whether it’s a spillover success from Twilight.  He also wonders whether there is a gay audience for the show.  It is, in any  case, a very good show. 

For once, I’m not speculating.  That’s your job.

References

Seidman, Robert.  2009.  Are Gays Driving the Tremendous DVD Sales for HBO’s True Blood.  TVbythenumbers.com. here.  (source for the numbers charted here)

William Petersen as Gil Grissom, David Caruso as Horatio Caine, Gary Sinese as Mac Taylor, Mark Harmon as Jethro Gibbs, Anthony LaPaglia as Jack Malone. These guys are the franchise players of primetime TV.  But they are also role models.  Each represents a different management style.

David Caruso in CSI: Miami seems to have contracted a terrible case of William Shatner disease and now takes himself much too seriously.  He’s always posing with the sun glasses, standing side ways, and talking with that over-the-top emphasis.  Everything is now said with maximum menace, including things like “Billy…get…me…a…SANDwich.”  Working for a guy like this would be agony.  You’d have to worry about stepping on his lines, or standing in his light.  Bosses like this are self dramatizing, but everyone has to pitch in because they like it when we dramatize them too.  Call this the diva management style.

Of course, Petersen as Grissom left CSI, and TV is the poorer.  Sure, he was a little creepy with all the bug stuff, and, yes, he always seemed to be trying a little too hard with the poetry.  But otherwise, he seemed a decent guy, the sort of guy who would cut his staff  a little slack.  The kind of manager who didn’t care how you got it done as long as you got it done. Call this the professorial management style

What about Sinese as Mac Taylor in CSI: New York?  You get the feeling that the actor is still looking for the role, and as a result the character still has all of his humanity in tact.  He’s not quite sure how to play certain situations.  Sometimes he comes on too strong.  Sometimes, he’s dialled so far back it’s like his phoning it in.  Sinese is still working on his managerial signal, and this makes him the most human of these characters.  Not the best to work for, but the most interesting to watch. Call this the still-working-on-it management style.

This distinguishes him from Anthony LaPaglia as Jack Malone in Without a Trace.  LaqPaglia acts as if his exposure to weekly tragic events has destroyed his capacity for feeling.  His reaction to everything is the same: silent, suffering witness.  Dude, snap out of it.  We get it, life’s a bitch, then you die.  Lighten up a little. Call this the funerial management style.

The best person to work for is clearly Mark Harmon on NCIS.  That is if Anthony DiNozzo, Ziva David, Timothy McGee, Abby Sciuto,and Dr. Donald Mallard are anything to go by.  This little ensemble cast has more fun in a given program than Caruso’s people do in a season.  Viewers, too.  The secret is Gibbs’ perfect balance.  He is impatient with anything less than perfection even as he manages to indulge the playfulness and eccentricities of his crew.  It’s a fine line.  Call this the perfect management style.

In the world of TV there are several managerial options.  Those of us who serve as managers want to choose wisely. 

It’s a veritable treasure trove.  I just found a Outlook database created when I was the head of the Institute of Contemporary Culture in Toronto.  It’s large (4000 names) and it’s old (about 16 years old).  It was great to see familiar names, and I thought I would plug some of them into Facebook, the new rolodex of the digital age.

Here’s what’s odd.  Some of the names that loomed large in the Outlook database were not in Facebook.  The Outlook database was created to help the Institute stay in touch with people of influence.  It contains lots of (mostly Canadian) heavy hitters: politicians, captains of industry, heads of cultural institutions, celebrities, journalists, and academics.  This is a list of people who made their way in the world by working their personal networks.  But now they were missing from the new social networks, missing from Facebook (MFFB).

To be sure, some are in Facebook and they are flourishing.  A woman we almost hired as a research assistant is now the executive producer of a reality TV program in LA.  Others were present and closer than I could have guessed.  A family that used to live just down the road from me in Toronto now lives just up the road from me in Connecticut.  Happy surprises, both. 

And sometimes, it’s just hard to tell.  The data are unforthcoming.  You know, when we find a name on Facebook, and that’s all we find.  There’s no other information.  And no friends.  And we can guess what happened.  Someone heard about Facebook, signed up, couldn’t quite get the hang of it, and gave up.  Their Facebook page is now a kind of ghost ship, a tiny advertisement of their failure to make the transition to the digital age.  (Let’s hope your name is “Andy Smith.”  That name floating in Facebook could belong to anyone of hundreds of people.  Not so good if your name is “Grant McCracken.”  No where to hide there, really.)

Or maybe they are MFFB (missing from Facebook) on purpose.  Maybe, they don’t believe in Facebook.  They don’t believe in social networking in the digital age.  It is possible for intelligent people to take this position.  Recently I heard four people at a big time advertising age try to persuade me that Facebook is really just for kids, that it’s a passing fancy, that not very far from now it will disappear from fashion.  Their position: Ignore Facebook.  It will go away.

I can’t tell you how embarrassing this is for an anthropologist to listen to.  I have done the research, and this much is clear.  Facebook is here to stay.  It has changed selfhood and the social world permanently.  (One example: millennials are hard to manage these days because the social network has replaced the corporation has their primary “safety net.”  Now that they have Facebook, a job at a big corporation matters much less.)  Facebook has changed the structural properties of our culture.  We can ignore it.  It will not go away.

Maybe some of these MFFBs are then like Jacques Brel, that French singer who would not come to America till it had vacated Vietnam.  They’re making a statement!  If so, I have bad news.  The statement is “I have retired from the world.  I’m done.  Talk amongst yourselves.”  And this from movers and shakers.  How odd.

Is there a generational divide here?  And yes, Don Tapscott has been telling us for sometime now that these “digerati” are different from you and me.  They have more data.  And we have long suspected that Gen Y might even have different neurological wiring, the necessary consequence of monitoring all those data streams at once.

But the group that concerns me is on the other side of the generational divide.  Have Boomers so drifted out of orbit that even power players are MFFB?  Can someone make him/herself a vivid presence in the social, political and or culture world and go missing here?  Can you be a thought leader or a culture creative and not be on Facebook?  The answer to these questions is probably “no.”  Which is to say, some boomers have pushed themselves into voluntary exile.  And, yes, we expect some people in every generation to “age out” of contemporary culture.  But power players?

This may be a metric of generational fatigue.  It could be the face of generational ennui.  Perhaps after all is said and done, Boomers will prove to be a generation that will end not with a, er, boom, but a whimper.  Please, I’m begging you.  If you don’t have a Facebook account, get one now, and make me your friend.  You never know when you can help me run an Institute.

These are numbers from the estimable website TV By The Numbers (refs. below).

Bill Gorman shows two things:

1) the decline of broadcast networks (yellow column to the left)

2) the rise of cable networks (yellow column to the right) 

As Gorman notes today, cable is not just growing but moving to the center.  In the case of Bravo, for instance, this means moving from indie film, drama and the performing arts to reality, fashion and celebrity.  TLC was once a "place for learning minds" and now gives us Jon & Kate Plus 8.  The cable alternative now has a carnie instinct for a cruder entertainment. 

The question is this: does this movement to more popular themes represent a compression of cutural offerings and a dumbing down of programming.  We can argue this a number of ways.  But I am impressed with the fact that reality television is often a very successful ways of getting something like the lives of real(ish) Americans into the programming mix.  Without the innovations driven by cable, there is no way we would now have such detailed ethnographic treatments of, say, the Housewives of New Jersey and Orange County

It's a question then of winners and losers.

Two groups are relatively displaced by the "new cable:" the avant garde who prefer indie content, and taste elites who care about arts content. 

Two groups are served: a carnie audience interested in sensational coverage and the rest of us who like this window on other worlds. 

References

Gorman, Bill.  2008.  Updated: Where Did The Primetime Broadcast Audience Go?  TVbythenumbers.com.  December 03, 2008.  here.  (source of the image above)

Gorman, Bill.  2009. As Cable Networks Abandon Their Roots to Grab Audience, Where Do The Niches Go.  TVbythenumbers.com. here.