Archive for November, 2009
Astonishment, its a cultural thing
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Pam persuaded me to watch the HBO documentary on the Mumbai massacre, Terror in Mumbai. It is an astonishing piece of film making, and highly recommended.There are two moments that jump out anthropologically. The teens who come to create terror at the Oberoi hotel are for a few minutes stunned by the scale of the place, its luxury of its appointments, the size of the computer screens. We can hear their handler in Pakistan trying by cell phone to talk them out of their astonishment and into action. "Throw a grenade," he says. "Just pull the pin." But the kids are simply witless. As products of the slums of Pakistan, they have never seen anything like this before.
In a sense, the unimaginable objects of the Oberoi "jam" their powers of action, indeed their very powers of observation. This is how much our "perception" of the world depends on our "conception" of their world. Here conception equals ideas in the mind and prior acquaintance in the world.
Novelty is fine if we have fair warning. We build a category in the mind, and when the novelty strikes us in the world, we are ready. If we haven't any warning, that's ok, too. Eventually, our exposure to the new will leave an ever larger "dint" in consciousness. We will build a category out of sheer exposure. Now we can see what we are looking at, and act on it. We have been astonishment proofed.
A second moment shows astonishment on the Indian side. As another group of teens burst into the railway station and begin firing, security forces installed there come to see what the commotion is. And it's entirely clear what the commotion is. There are kids with guns shooting and killing people. But the security guys can't believe their eyes. And they can't rouse themselves to action. Some run away. Other just stand there with their mouths open. (Eventually, with great bravery a couple throw themselves into action. One dies as a result.)
This shows no lack of courage. It shows is a lack of training. There is no precedent in conscious. With its sound and horror, this event is too much for them. The guards have not been proofed against astonishment. This is one reason military people are so very carefully trained. With training, they have a category and a precedent. Now it is possible to tell what they are looking at. They can commit to action even when everything is strange. Training prevents them from being taken captive by astonishment.
I think astonishment must have been at work when that couple stepped into the White House without invitation. I expect some security guy looked at the tall, slender, elegant and very blond half of the twosome and thought, "hmm, she's gotta be ok."
This guy had two categories at war in his head. One was marked "trophy wife." The other was marked "terrorist." And given the architecture of these categories, there is no way the person who belongs to the first category can possibly belong to the second. In this man's head, in our culture, these two categories are so defined as to be mutually exclusive.
We say things like "expect the unexpected." But this is just brave talk. We can't expect the unexpected, and not just for logical reasons. We can't imagine that an elegant trophy wife is a terrorist because the categories in our heads will not allow us. In this case, it doesn't really matter who good the training is. That women gets to go pretty much any where she wants.
Astonishment is a symptom that the categories in our heads have ceased to function. And without the smooth and unwitting operation of these categories, we are open mouthed and in the extreme case incapable of action. That at the limit is what culture is for. As the supplier of the categories in our heads, it is the supplier of an orderly perception of the physical and the social world. Thus does culture make the world make sense.
References
For more details on Terror in Mumbai here
No new normal
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Ever since the downturn, some have asked to expect a nuclear winter in consumer markets. Consumers, they argue, will consume different and spend much less. Our free spending ways are over.
I disagree with this argument. If nothing else, it reflects the paucity and the modesty of the social science we have created to understand who consumers are and why they consume.
I wrote a piece yesterday for the Harvard Business Review blog which argued that when we look at the deep structural inducements for consumption, there are several reasons to believe that consumers will return from this downturn to once more party like it's 1999. The link is below.
It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that the new book by Lee Eisenberg is germane here. Have a look at This is Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What.
References
Eisenberg, Lee. 2009. This is Shoptimism. New York: Simon and Schuster. The Amazon.com order page is here.
McCracken, Grant. 2009. Why American Consumers Will Spend Lavishly Again. Harvard Business Review Blogging Network. November 24. here.
Me and Rupert Murdock
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Ad Age is publishing an excerpt from Chief Culture Officer today. It's here.And I'm giving a public talk in NYC in a couple of weeks. Hope you'll come listen. It's free.
Here's the event:
Monday, December 7, 2009
CHIEF CULTURE OFFICER: Today’s necessity for successful companies
Sponsor: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Time: 6:30 p.m.Venue: The Rose Gallery
Address: 41 Cooper Square, New York City
Info: Free.
Contact (212) 353-4195
Futures of Entertainment at MIT
Posted by: | CommentsWhat was social media? What was trans-media? What was blogging and (later) tweeting? It wasn't just that we didn't have the answers. It was hard to prosecute the argument.
Every so often, we (or at least me) would have to go back and ask, "Ok, what's the formal definition of that term again." It was like learning to ride a bicycle. You would make a little progress and then suddenly forget even the fundamentals and come crashing down. They were very wild problems indeed.
Four years later these are tame problems. We have thought about them, and with them, often enough that the sheer difficulty has come out and what remains is the mobbing up.
Well, no. That's too simple. What's still not clear is the practice. How you make culture, communities, media, marketing out of these things, that remains to be seen. How we answer these questions will be very interesting indeed.
We heard David Bausola talk about what I came to think of as his story engine, aka Purefold. He has found a way to source things from the web and use them to craft narratives. We could use David's story engine as a kind of identity engine. We can be any of the people he sources from the world, surrounded by the what, the how, the when and the where he sources from the world as well. It's a fabulous culturematic, a fantastic "what if" machine.
Ken Iklund described his scenario game called World Without Oil, World Without Oil, the massively collaborative online “historical pre-enactment” of a global oil crisis. Jedidiah Jenkins gave us a glimpse of the work he is doing on Invisible Children in Africa. Victoria Jaye showed us how transmedia was transforming the BBC. Dan Goldman discussed how he means to transform the world of comics. Stephen Duncombe told us about transmedia during the New Deal. Paul Dalen shows what it is to manage musicians in the digital era.
It didn't matter who you listened to. Just about everyone was remarkably interesting. And it didn't matter who you talked to during the break. Shuffle the deck as you will, there wasn't a
dud in the group.
The organizers were kind enough to devote a session to Chief Culture Officer and that was fun. The crowd seemed to lean in and listen hard. A good sign with a group this discerning. I couldn't help feeling that I was seeing CCOs everywhere. Certainly, most of the graduates of the MIT program could claim a shot at this title.
David Spitz looked like a guy who has built himself a fast track. Here's how he is described in the FoE catalogue:
As Director of Business Development for WPP, David works with parent and operating company management to drive partnerships, investments and new product offerings in the areas of digital marketing and analytics. David joined WPP in 2005 as part of the group’s MBA rotation program, holding operating company roles with WPP’s Ogilvy and Mediaedge:CIA units prior to joining the corporate strategy and business development team in 2007. Before WPP, he was a management consultant with Deloitte’s Media & Communications practice. David has a BA from Princeton, MS from MIT (Comparative Media Studies) and MBA from Columbia Business School.
Mauricio Mota comes to FoE most years and more and more seems to be a CCO for some part of Brazil. Here's the way the catalogue describes Mauricio.
Maurício Mota is Chief Storytelling Officer and co-founder at The Alchemists Network, a Transmedia Storytelling ThinkDO Tank based in Rio de Janeiro and LA. Before founding The Alchemists he was involved with branded entertainment and advertising companies where he worked for clients such as Danone, Unilever, Nokia and other important local brands in Brazil. The Alchemists’s main objective is to incite a shift in the content and storytelling landscape by applying the concepts found in Jenkins’s Convergence Culture for brands, networks and education. Working with him on the initiative is Mark Warshaw (former Heroes’ Transmedia Director). The Alchemists initiative takes the form of a blog, workshops, consultancies, transmedia productions and an IPTV show. They are also involved with the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) at MIT, and Maurício was responsible for bringing to C3 the first sponsor companies from outside the US. Maurício started his career as an entrepreneur at age 15, when he developed Autoria, the first Storytelling Game in Latin America, based on a PhD thesis about Roleplaying Games. He launched the game through his first company, and in two years it was applied in over 4,000 schools, sold in stores all over the country and is being used as an innovation and creativity tool by companies and institutions including the United Nations, Kraft Foods and TV networks.
Lara Lee wowed us by dispatching tricky questions effortlessly. Her bio:
Lara Lee is a principal at Jump Associates, a growth and innovation strategy firm based in San Mateo, Calif. At Jump, she leads the firm’s brand community and sustainability practices and is a member of the executive management team. Named one of BusinessWeek’s top 25 “Masters of Innovation,” Lara is a frequent speaker at business, sustainability and marketing forums, most recently presenting at the Sustainable Brands ’09 conference, the Marketing Science Institute’s “New Art & Science of Branding” conference and the International IDSA conference. Additionally, Lara’s commentary and writings on sustainability, marketing, and business strategy have appeared in numerous publications, including The Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, Forbes and The New York Times. Lara has over 20 years of corporate experience in strategy, marketing, finance and general management, working around the globe with Fortune 500 organizations. Prior to Jump, Lara was VP of Enthusiast Services at Harley-Davidson, leading a division that included experiential services, a new business incubator and the company’s online presence. Over 14 years at Harley, Lara developed numerous self-funding marketing programs, served as founding director for the company’s ground breaking museum, launched a rider training business, and led a diverse set of community building programs to attract a new generation of riders, especially women. Lara holds dual master’s degrees in business administration and international affairs from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business, and a bachelor’s degree in Chinese language from Brown University.
It's an unpleasant, abominable idea, submitting something as delicate as culture to the rack of metrification.But here's why it's necessary. There's so much going on "out there" in culture, so many different people creating so many different innovations, subject to change so violent and frequent, that unless we have metrics at our disposal, well, we're done for. We have no real hope of canvassing all that water front.
It's also true that we can win arguments in the C Suite with heart felt recitations of things we've noticed. We need something that looks like evidence and works like an argument.
I was talking to a former student the other day. He works for a company that holds the copyright to popular music. They need to know who's playing what in order to collect royalties. They rely on several data sources including ASCAP which, it turns out, knows exactly at any given moment what's playing and where.
I put down my soup spoon and wept bitterly for a moment. The idea that there is a listening device this good astonished and disheartened me. Disheartened? But of course, perfect data, incredibly useful for listening for changes in American culture (imagining using this data to detect a sudden shift movement towards Country in the Northeast?) and sure as shooting, I think it's fair to surmise, no one uses it for this purpose.
It just sits there, like some wonderful scroll in a desert cave, like some wonderful device in Steven Spielberg's gigantic warehouse, the one where the US government apparently puts everything that is dangerously useful. What is wrong with us, that we should be blessed with these riches, and should fail to put them to advantage. This, this, is what's unpleasant and abominable!
It reminded me of the story about the Dole Pineapple in Hawaii. Some guy was doing a tour of the plantation on the big island, and he noticed that Dole was taking all the juice from their canning operation and pouring it into the ocean. He said, "er, could I have that?"There are lots of good data out there in addition to ASCAP. All the big pipes designed to speak to the long tail (Amazon, iTunes, etc.) must have tremendous data. They can see upturns for a particular title (have you ordered your copy of Chief Culture Officer?), and with a little experience and good training, they should be able to leap to some very useful conclusions about what is happening in American culture. Google search makes there data available in a general way (with Google Trends).
These data sources are useful individually but aggregated they are a little like a perfect weather map, an opportunity to mix the data streams and watch cultural developments take on a kind of 3D clarity. Yes, it takes a good eye and lots of experience, but I think this data is so rich, it would make geniuses of us all.
Let us get with the program on this one!
Taking things as read, V, and the consumption of popular culture
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I don't think that V, the science fiction series on ABC, is going make it. Here's why.Popular culture demands of us that we take treat many things "as read." We see the protagonist climbing out of bed in the morning. We cut to a scene that shows him beginning his day at work. We take as read all the events in between, showering, dressing, eating breakfast and the drive to work. We accept that he did these things. We understand that they are not germane to the story at hand. We are happy to have them elided from the show, to take them as read.
It's amazing how good we are at taking things as read. Even unambitious shows hurl us around with scant exposition and very few sign posts. Suddenly, our protagonist is in a large office building. That's ok. This is probably where he works, we think. We "stayed tuned." If this turns out to be someone else's place of work, we are quite happy to adjust.
We are happy to supply assumptions, and we are amiable about it. We don't think, "office building? Wonder if it's in Rio?" No, if the show has been set in LA, we are happy to assume that this building is in LA. We are just that cooperative. (Or philosophically undemanding.)
Viewers are active, even when they are not fans. They are active even when they are not especially literate in matters of media. That's what it is to belong to our culture. We are highly skilled at taking things as read (TTAR).
But TTAR can be dangerous. Once we have accepted the editing it performs on the story, what's to stop us from editing too. We see a scene taking shape, two people arguing, perhaps, what's to stop us from saying, "Got it. Argument. Let's just take this as read and move on."
A virulent form of TTAR can consume the entire show. We need only see the characters and the opening scene to think, "Very well. Good guys. Bad Guys. Conflict. Resolution. Theme music. Fade to TTAR."
Indeed the more formed a show is by genre, the more likely we are to respond by issuing a summary TTAR order. Because if we know the genre, and the show is genre bound, we can say quite precisely what's going to happen. Take a show like Law and Order, this is so very predetermined that it's a wonder that anyone bothers to watch it anymore. (But of course we do. A mystery for another time.)
I have watched two espisodes of V. This is a show with lots going for it, including several great performances, but it does feel a little predictable, a little confined. Some way into the second espisode, I could hear myself thinking: "Good guys. Bad guys. From outer space. Conflict. Resolution. ..." God, even the criticism begs for abbreviation. This "visitation" genre is now well known. Visitors with terrible powers of control... The plucky band of humans who resist... How many times have we seen this played out? And where can they go with it? It doesn't feel like there are many options here. This genre might be relatively new but it's beginning to feel like its already hollowed out. V feels like a show straight out of the TTAR pits of formulaic television.
I could be wrong, and I hope I am. But I don't believe V will flourish.
Invading the world of the Mommy blogger
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Are you watching Mad Men, the hit TV show? Noticed that look of dazed or startled expression that sometimes flits across the Betty Draper's face? I never see it in real life.
As a hardworking anthropologist, I spend a lot of time doing interviews in people's homes. Usually this means I am talking to the female head of household, a woman in her 30s or 40s.
No Betty Drapers here. My respondents are intelligent and intense. Often they will zero in on my questions, divine my intent, and take over the interview. My job now: take notes as fast as I can.
This should not surprise. These Betty Drapers are nothing like Betty Draper. They are well educated with one and sometimes two college degrees. They worked before marriage so they have knowledge, experience, and connections beyond the home. (They may well still work.) They have all the usual media feeds, so they know what is happening outside the home. And they have all the social media feeds, so they are networked everywhere. The domestic home, and middle class suburb, that may have imprisoned women after World War II are now "exploded" by education within and media without.
The last point to make here: these women know popular culture. They have new acuity that we now see exhibited everywhere. Frequently, they have that passionately informed fandom captured by Henry Jenkins. If these women are not imprisoned by a siloed suburb, they are certainly not imprisoned by "soaps" and a parochial media. Plus, they are "working closely" with their kids, and therefore well informed developments in youth culture.
When I was writing Chief Culture Officer, I kept thinking that these women would be excellent readers for the book. At some point in the evolution of every home, perhaps when the last child starts high school, women begin to think in earnest about returning to the work force (if they have not been there all along). And they would make very good Chief Culture Officers or people who work for Chief Culture Officers. They are in other words ideal readers for this book.
I have done my marketing due diligence. I have reached out to the so-called Mommy bloggers and asked them to review the book. I have reached out to neighbors and asked if they would comment on whether and how the book is useful to them. The jury is still out on my neighbors and I have one "mommy blogger" still to check in, but I am feeling underwhelmed.
Your assignment, if you choose to accept it: If you were me, what would you do to reach out to this readership?
Chuck Klosterman and the study of culture
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Here's what Michael MacCambridge says about Chuck Klosterman's Eating the Dinosaur.
Neil Postman, once argued--in the title of one of his books--that we are "amusing ourselves to death." But Mr. Klosterman's relentlessly thoughtful prose makes a case that our arts and entertainment are more suffused with meaning than ever before. Even as he's fretting over the direction of the culture, his writing stands as an eloquent defense of it.
This would put Klosterman in a league with Greil Marcus and other writers who are prepared to take popular culture seriously, to exercise a brute (not a fashionable) curiosity in its pursuit, and find enthusiasms there even when the intellectual's code discourages such a thing.
ReferencesAnonymous. n.d. Chuck Klosterman entry. Wikipedia. here.
MacCambridge, Michael. 2009. Drenched in Popular Culture. Wall Street Journal. October 24-25.
Klosterman, Chuck. 2009. Eating the Dinosaur. Scribner.
Dan Wieden, Chief Culture Officer at Nike
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[this is a passage from Chief Culture Officer, to be published in December]Dan Wieden for Nike
By the mid-1980s, the running boom was giving way to a fitness craze and Phil Knight, founder of Nike, wanted his company to take part. Knight didn’t much believe in advertising, but competition with Reebok was fierce, and he had began to work with a small shop in Portland called Wieden + Kennedy. Dan Wieden, Portland native and second generation ad man, proved an essential asset.
It was Wieden who coined the slogan “Just Do It” in 1988. Most slogans are about the brand (“Coke is it.”) They may make a promise (“You can do it. We can help”) or they evoke a mood (“Bilbao, now more than ever.”). Rarely do they tell the consumer what to do. But “Just Do It” was an imperative, impatient, presumptuous and, well, a little rude. This was not the sort of thing consumers had heard very much.
Acting as unofficial CCO, Dan Wieden had looked into the life of the consumer. He saw someone struggling to get off the couch into fitness, someone suffering aches and pains, someone tempted by excuses. In “Just Do It” Wieden found the three words that allowed Nike to intervene. Acting as unofficial CCO, Wieden had found a way to help Nike ride the fitness wave.
Wieden is the author of a 2001 ad called Tag. This TV spot features a young man on his way to work in a big city. It could be Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. (It is in fact Toronto.) All of a sudden, the kid feels a hand on the shoulder. He’s been tagged. He’s it. Pedestrians scatter. Plazas empty. The chase is on. He almost tags one woman as she enters a bus.
He almost tags another but she dives into her car. He almost tags a policeman as he pulls away in his cruiser. Our hero is a Wildebeest, charging wildly, hoping for contact. Finally, he comes upon a hapless guy in the subway, the only man in the city who doesn’t know the game is on. Tag. He’s it.
Frame for frame, Tag is probably the most exciting ad ever made. It had the drama of the chase scene in The French Connection. It won the admiration of the industry and a Cannes Lion Grand Prix.
But it’s an odd ad. It takes 20 seconds before we understand what’s happening. For a while it’s just people running around on a plaza, forcing us to puzzle things out on our own. Advertising is famous for its simplicity, repetition, and sometimes sheer stupidity (“But wait! There’s more! Act now…”). In the world of advertising, 20 seconds is a client-provoking eternity. Wieden dared tinker with the rules.
For all that, Tag is a straight forward piece of advertising. It is playful. It makes Nike the friend of spontaneity and urban athleticism. It brings the viewer off the couch to the edge of his seat, the very point of the Nike proposition. Every commuter would love to see the tedium of travel exploded this way. Certainly, every athlete (and Nike is filled with athletes) would love to see the city as a competitive space.
And there were deeper resonances. Since the 1960s and the era of the be-in, the city was being proposed as a platform for spontaneous expressive events. Street theatre was now agitating public life and the pages of Time and Life. In the TV show, Mork and Mindy, Robin Williams brought the idea of Improv to American living rooms.
Americans were giving up the Northern European idea that public behavior ought to be guarded and expressionless. They were beginning to tinker with the notion that the world could hand you a proposition and you would “go with it.” (I remember being thrown a “ball” by a passing mime in Hyde Park in the late 1970s. I threw “it” back.) Some of the raves that became so popular in the 1990s had precisely this quality, perfect strangers assembling “just in time” in abandoned warehouses. Somehow culture from accident seemed more interesting than culture that was planned.
Tag also resonated with ideas of order that were less theatrical and more scientific. The physicists sent to the desert during World War II to create the atomic bomb stayed on in Santa Fe. They were interested in how complex order could issue from simple rules. The game of Tag is based on a very simple rule, and, sure enough, it makes the disorder of city life give way to pattern. Somehow culture that was “emergent” was more interesting than culture that was organized.Tag evoked a third trend we might call “the generous strangers.” For many of us, first notice came in the form of a bumper sticker that read “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” a phrase so influential, it now has its own Wikipedia entry. Several thousand years of cultural practice and religious teaching had encouraged us to think of generosity as a personal gesture that passed between known parties. The “generous stranger” trend suggested it was better when things passed between perfect strangers. Hollywood picked up the theme belatedly and not very successfully in a couple of films: Pay it Forward (Mimi Leder 2000) and Serendipity (Peter Chelsom 2001).
With the help of digital technologies, “generous stranger” projects were (and are) suddenly everywhere. Bookcrossings has people conceal books somewhere in public for other strangers to find. In Geocaching, people search out caches using GPS coordinates posted on line, and when they find the cache, they take one thing and leave another. In Phototagging, disposable cameras are left in a public place and the finder is asked to take one photo and pass the camera along. In Where’s George, people register dollar bills, put them back in circulation, and ask finders to record the bill when it passes through their hands. It wasn’t always clear why this was interesting. Somehow it just was.
Howard Rheingold took things a step forward with Smart Mobs, encouraging people to meet together in public, to freeze for a moment in Grand Central Station, shop in slow motion at WalMart, or act out letters in department store windows. Rheingold’s book didn’t appear until 2002. But the spirit of his book could be detected in the Nike spot. Wieden had heard something stirring in our culture four years before.
Max Weber, the German sociologist, believed that as the Western world grew more rational, routinized and commercial, our experience of this world became disenchanted. The personal, the traditional, the sentimental, the human scale, all of these were diminished. Tag and its companion trends seemed to offer a restoration. Apparently, even strangers can make the city more playful and less predictable. With Tag, Wieden had made Nike a party to a re-enchantment of the world.
And that’s all very well. But of course Nike is not a philanthropic organization. It sells footwear. And here Tag performed brilliantly. It helped Nike fight off competitors who believed that the game was merely about “sports performance.” Tag gave Nike what Theodore Levitt, god of the Harvard Business School, called “meaningful distinction.” Wieden has delivered the “central part of the marketing effort.” As Theodore Levitt says in The Marketing Imagination, “All else is derivative of that and only that.”
References
Katz, Donald. 1994. Just Do It. New York: Random House. p. 138.
Marshall, Caroline. 2001. “I’ve only done great work for Nike.” Brand Republic. June 22, 2001. http://www.brandrepublic.com/Campaign/News/46980/
Hunsberger, Brent. 2008. Nike celebrates 'Just Do It' 20th anniversary with new ads. Playbooks and profits blog. July 17, 2008.
See Tag on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOzIZwRiN-I.
Names of creative team: Director is Frank Budgen, Creative Director, Dan Wieden, Hal Curtis, Art Director, Andy Fackrell, Monica Taylor, Agency Producer, Andrew Loevenguth, Copywriter, Mike Byrne, Production Company, Anonymous, Gorgeous Films, Executive Producer, Paul Rothwell, Shelly Townsend, Producer, Alicia Bernard, Editorial Company, Lookinglass Editorial, Editor, Russell Icke, Telecine Company, Company 3.
See the work of Improv Everywhere at Youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/ImprovEverywhere. And at www.improveverywhere.com.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1995. At home in the universe: The search for laws of self-organization and complexity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Culp, Kristine. 2003. "Paradise Lost,” found in a phone book in Edmonton, National Post. January 4, 2003.
Rheingold, Howard. 2002. Smart Mobs. New York: Basic Books. See ImprovEverywhere on YouTube and it’s own website at www.improveverywhere.com.
Weber, Max. 1946. Science as Vocation. Pp. 129-156, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Translated and edited), From Max Weber: Essay in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Levitt, Theodore. 1986. The Marketing Imagination. In The Marketing Imagination. New York: The Free Press, p. 128. For more on Levitt, see Hanna, Julia. 2008. ‘Ted Levitt Changed My Life.’ Working Knowledge from the Harvard Business School. December 17, 2008. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6054.html
[this passage is from McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer. New York: Basic Books. (to be published December 1, 2009.)]
Culturematic, new media, and marketing
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Monday, I reported my recent culturematic experiment, the tweeting of my train ride from Chicago and Detroit. Today, I thought I'd look at the marketing implications.Specifically, can a culturematic help a marketer help a client? Can it help build the brand? Can it help the brand participate in culture?
I think the reply is emphatically "yes." This culturematic, performed on an appropriate scale, would do good things for Amtrak. (And if there's a brand that needs good things, it's Amtrak.) In a more perfect world, Amtrak would be commissioning people to take train rides all over America, "phoning home" with new media of every kind.
Most simply, my trip to Detroit acts as "proof of concept." There are lots of people passing between these two cities, and I am guessing that many thousands of them never think to take the train. The train is so little thought of it doesn't appear in the choice set. Actually, there is no choice set. Everyone just takes the plane. Surely following a stream of tweets from the train helps change this.
But this stream of tweets does something more than inscribing the possibility of train travel between the cities. It demonstrates the pleasure of the trip. I can imagine the ethnographic interview with which we would guiz the consumer about taking the train from Chicago to Detroit.
There would be a pause, a frown, a hand to the chin, and then the hesitations,
"Gee, I don't know. The train... I mean, doesn't that take forever and break down all the time. And isn't it filled with dubious people? And... And... And."
In the absence of knowledge, doubts proliferate. The train strikes some of us as the very symbol of the old industrial regime, untouched by computers and the genius of Google programming, a great lumbering beast that travels from inner city to damaged suburb, a technology that is one snapped bolt away from joining the rust belt through which it travels.
"Train travel? No, I don't think so."
My Tweet stream is not a literary or an anthropological accomplishment, but it does communicate how much fun the train is, the pleasures there are to be had there. I think the stream also communicates that train travel is ecologically virtuous and that it is a great place to get work done. In point of fact, this tweet stream sets up a contrast that sings the praises of train travel over air travel on virtually every particular. Not bad work for such an inexpensive marketing enterprise.
You might well say that the train is a bad example of marketing with new media...because it is so very well suited to the commercial proposition in question. Train rides unfold over time, and they are rich in reportable experiences. They are in this way peculiarly tweetable. Which is to say, you can't market jeans, Coke, or movies this way.
This might be right. On the other hand, I think it would be pretty interesting to hear some tweet their day from the point of view of their Levi's. I would like to hear from a Tweeter who has taken the point of view of a carbonate soft drink sitting on the shelf of a glass refrigerator in a Mom and Pop convenience story. What about hearing from someone who has taken one of the persona away from a movie and is now living it in the street? And indeed, any product or service that is experienced-based or oriented should be able to call on twitterers. See for instance the recent experiment in which the philosopher Alain De Button spend a week as writer-in-residence at Heathrow airport.
A lot of marketers now seem to think that Twitter is really just a name game. What we want is to "infect" people with a "virus" that forces them to repeat brand name in their tweets in an outbreak of consumer enthusiasm.
How dreary! How very like the 20th century model of marketing which seeks not just sales but dominion. If we are sincere in our claims of interest in the consumer's participation, cocreation, and fuller engagement, a culturematic of this kind might be just the thing.
Chief Culture Officer out on Kindle
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I woke up this morning to find Chief Culture Officer on my Kindle. It won't be out in hard copy till December 1.
I'm not sure why the digital appears before hard copy, but it does.
And, yes, Virginia, for an author, it is very like Xmas. All of a sudden, there it is at the end of your bed.
Here is the Table of Contents for the book. In the next couple of days, I will be rolling out book content, and you can see what you think.
I am proud to have one of the largest Acknowledgments in the history of Western literature.
Why such a long list?
Two reasons.
One, quite a lot of Chief Culture Officer was worked up on this blog and I wanted to acknowledge as many readers as I could. The only way to do this is to note the names of people who have left comments. (Forgive me, please, if you have commented and your name does not appear. I tried to be systematic but some names I know escaped me. Also, the book manuscript "closed" in April roughly.)
Two,I managed to publish my last book Transformations without acknowledging friend and colleague Bob Woodard. I was so horrified I thought, it's time to keep a list. And because I am a little bit obsessive, the list grew and grew.
Here is the "acknowledgments" passage as it appears in the book:
This book was written with the help, near or distant, of many people and especially George Anastaplo, John Deighton, Susan Fournier, Jim Gough, Tom Guarriello, Henry Jenkins, Leora Kornfeld, Guy Lanoue, Kate Lee, Kay Lemon, Bill O’Connor, Steve and Virginia Postrel, Montrose Sommers, and Marshall Sahlins. Special thanks are due to my editor, Tim Sullivan, for his sterling intellectual partnership.
I am also grateful to the following people for support and inspiration of many kinds: Susan Abbott, Andrew Amesbury, Ken Anderson, Kevin Anderson, Will Anderson, David Armano, David Armour, Celestine Arnold, Tom Asacker, Ivan Askwith, Alec Austin, Jack Avery, Eleanor Baird, Laurie Baird, Darren Barefoot, Pippin Barr, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Ed Batista, David Bausola, Chris Baylis, Nancy Baym, Angele Beausoleil, John Bell, Brad Berens, Scott Berkun, Russell Bernard, J. Duncan Berry, Ralf Beuker, Stephanie Betz, Lesley Bielby, Gloria Bishop, Martin Bishop, Michael Blankenship, Danah Boyd, Mark Brady, Noah Brier, Amanda Briggs, David Bujnowski, Jeremy Bullmore, Timothy Burke, David Burn, Kenelm Burridge, Larry Buttress, Bud Caddell, Jim Carfrae, Ray Cha, Suw Charman-Anderson, Jeremy Cherfas, James Chatto, Allan Chochinov, Carol Cioppa, Kevin Clark, Patricia Cleary, Marni Zea Clippinger, Don Coffin, Chris Commins, Colby Cosh, Ed Cotton, Tyler Cowen, Steven Crandall, Pat Crane, Andrew Creighton, Gary Cruse, Simone Cruickshank, Rob Curedale, Tom Daly, Russell Davies, Guy Davies, Patrick Davis, Abigail De Kosnik, Leslie and Faith Dektor, Dino Demopoulos, Stephen Denny, Paul Dervan, John Dodds, Ana Domb, Amy Domini, Judith Donath, Colin Drummond, Dave Dyment, German Dziebel, Mark Earls, David Edery, Scott Ellington, Sean Embury, Peter England, Jim Ericson, Mike Everett-Lane, Francis Farrelly, Piers Fawkes, Rob Fields, Charles Firth, Sandy Fleischer, Jeff Flemings, Richard Florida, Denise Fonseca, Sam Ford, Nicolai Frank, Morgan Friedman, Nancy Friedman, Charles Frith, Bruce Fryer, Jed Feuer, John Galvin, Barbara Garfield, Marc Garnaut, Carol Gee, Larry Gies, Morgan Gerard, Vesna Gerintes, Nick Gillespie, Jamie Gordon, Francois Gossieaux, Jim Gough, Guy Gould-Davies, Dan Gould, Katarina Graffman, Stephen and Gillian Graham, Liz Grandillo, John Grant, Jonathan Gray, Rochelle Grayson, Lee Green, Edward Greenspon, Ric Grefe, Susan Griffin, Tom and Karen Guarriello, John and Janice Gundy, Nick Hahn, Scott Haile, Monica Hamburg, Tom Harle, C. V. Harquail, C. Lee Harrington, Stephen Hicks, Jens Hilgenstock, Leigh Himel, Ryan Holiday, Adrienne Hood, Ted Hovet, Kerry Howley, Christine Huang, Andy Hunter, Matthew Ingram, Leon Jacobs, Joseph Jaffe, Lance Jensen, Derek Johnson, Hylton Jolliffe, Matt Jones, Phil Jones, Shaista Justin, Max Kalehoff, A.J. Kandy, Anik Karimjee, Garth Kay, John Kearon, Tom Kelley, Paul Kemp-Robertson, Lynne Kiesling, Peter Kim, Rob Kleine, Nancy Koehn, Rob Kozinets, Holly Kretschmar, Joan Kron, Polly LaBarre, Vince LaConte, Johanne Lamoureux, Alain Lapointe, Joe Lassiter, Jon Leach, Anthony Leung, Curtis Lew, Mark Lewis, Xiaochang Li, Josh Liberson, Rick Liebling, Jeppe Trolle Linnet, Victor Lombardi, Geoffrey Long, Amanda Lotz, Ted Lowitz, Zbigniew Lukasiak, Tom Luke, Michael Madison, Eamon Mahony, Thomas Malaby, Beatriz Mallory, Brett Marchand, Margaret Mark, Roger Martin, Mary, Steve, Zack and Lee Mazur, Megan McArdle, Peter McBurney, Karen McCauley, Jake McCall, Andy McCauley, Seamus McCauley, Emmet McCusker, John McGarr, Joe and Christine Melchione, Bud Melman, Paul Melton, Jerry Michalski, Alan Middleton, Debbie Millman, Mary Mills, Candy Minx, Prashant Mishra, Jason Mittell, Sean Moffitt, Johnnie Moore, Karl Moore, Kim Moses, Roop Mukhopadhyay, Mark Murray, Eric Nehrlich, Matt Nolan, Bruce Nussbaum, Bill O’Connor, Charlotte Odes, Richard Oliver, Gian Pangaro, Clay Parker Jones, Lisa Parrish, Jan and Lauren Parsons, Chee Pearlman, Daniel Pereira, Martin Perelmuter, Neil Perkin, Mary Pisarkiewicz, Barbara Pomorska, Faith Popcorn, Steve Portigal, Michael Powell, Tony Princisvalle, Brandon Proia, Aswin Punathambekar, Mike Rao, Shaka Rashid, Rita Rayman, Adam Richardson, Rodrigo M. S. dos Reis, Diego Rodriguez, Daniel Rosenblatt, Mike Ronkoske, John Roscoe, Susan Royer, Monica Ruffo, Doris Rusch, Juri Saar, Danielle Sacks, Kevin Sandler, Gladys Santiago, Fredrik Sarnblad, Sean Sauber, Mary Schmidt, Nick Schultz, Yasha Sekhavat, Matt Semansky, Parmesh Shahani, Richard and Pam Shear, Brent Shelkey, James Sherrett, John Sherry, Al Silk, Simon Sinek, Naunihal Singh, Kevin Slavin, Tina Slavin, Alix Sleight, Drew Smith, Paul Snyderman, Ruth Soenius, Evan Solomon, Sir Martin Sorrell, Peter Spear, Daria Steigman, Rick Sterling, Diana Stinson, Will Straw, Rory Sutherland, Bob Sutton, Craig and Cheryl Swanson, Ashley Swartz, Wodek Szemberg, Ed Tam, Rodney Tanner, Andrew Taylor, Earl Taylor, Clive Thompson, Anne Thompson, Amelia Torode, Scott Underwood, William Uricchio, Shenja van der Graaf, Ilya Vedrashko, Carlos Veraza, Kelly Verchere, Greg Verdino, Michel Verdon, Colleen Wainwright, Jimmy Wales, Mark Warshaw, Mary Walker, Rob Walker, William Ward, Reiko Waisglass, Chris and Nancy Weaver, Henri Weijo, David Weinberger, Scott Weisbrod, Stefan Werning, Elvi Whitaker, Martin Wiegel, Sara Winge, John Winsor, David Wolfe, Stacy Wood, Bob Woodard, Michelle Yagoda, Faris Yakob, Khalil Younes, Andrew Zolli, and Edward Zuber.
Post Script
Chief Culture Officer also available for the Sony Ebook here.
Culturematic trial: tweeting train travel from Chicago to Detroit
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"Why not take the train?"I was in Chicago Saturday. I needed to get to Detroit. What not take the train.
I'm a train buff. So the train always occurs to me. And I think of it especially when confronted with the prospect of spending any time in a crowded, airless metal cylinder at 31,000 feet. Whenever I can take the train, I do take the train. (I hope the train reduces my carbon footprint, but honestly I don't know that it does. We burned a lot of diesel getting to Detroit. [If anyone knows how to do the "carbon math" here (train vs. plane), please let me know.])
Love of trains aside, I was also looking for a culturematic opportunity. My definition of the culturematic: "a little machine (or pretext) that helps make a cultural artifact." (See the post called "Culturematic: a device for making culture in two easy steps" here.)
The simple rule in this case: tweet whatever happens to you on a 5 hour train ride. There's something nicely bounded about a train ride. It edits the world for us, driving lots out, keeping lots in.
With this culturematic working for me, I didn't have to make very many literary decisions of my own. Just write about whatever happens on the train. These days people are not very well acquainted with train travel and I am assuming relatively few know the Chicago-Detroit run. It looked as if this simple rule would craft an interest artifact. It went pretty well, I think. Over 5.5 hours, I tweeted around 60 times. (These are reproduced below. Note that they should be read in reverse order.) I did everything from my ThinkPad using my own wireless AT&T link. (The train doesn't have WiFi.) There were some moments of poor reception, interminable pauses as I waited for a text and photos to upload. The audio files were especially time consuming and I lost a few. But generally, things went smoothly.
I had a set of rules within my culturematic. I wanted to be entertaining and for this I was prepared to be maximally opportunistic. I would use anything that came to hand. I also felt some vague compulsion to give the reader the sense of "being there." So I was looking for things that helped me tell "the train story." The general idea then: be lively, be interesting, have fun, craft something that had some internal coherence and some expository heft.Some tweets were a simple gift. The sound system at Union Station in Chicago has a glitch so that each gate is announced by a disembodied voice that has its own build-in repetition and echo. I recorded this using Tweetmic. (I think the links in the stream below are live. If they aren't I will try to insert them here.) It sounded like something straight out of Blade Runner, the movie. Excellent. I now had a "literary" reference.
Ethnographic observations are called for. One of these occurred to me in the waiting room from which I tweeted.
"Chicago2Detroit by train: from the waiting room: some travelers absorbed in their books. Others self conscious & look at watches ostentatiously."
(It's 6:30 in the morning so I misspell ostentatiously. Don't look.) People are often self conscious in public, and one of the usual deflection/displacement techniques we use is to look at our watches. It's says, "I'm not just sitting here. I'm waiting for something." But of course everyone in the lounge was also waiting for something, the same thing, so the message was in this case badly formed...and therefore kind of charming. We are reminded of the master observer of social life, Irving Goffman, who recorded many of the rules of public life. Its unlikely that readers see this tweet as an evocation of Goffman, but it made me feel like I now I had a "social science" reference too. Then there was the Safety brochure in the seat pocket. Perfect. It easy to see what the problem was. The designer felt obliged to use icons, because, as we all know these are the secret of clear communication. Please, she had one for fire that was pretty standard. But smoke? How to represent smoke? Hmm. She did her 
best, leaving us with a perfect target for a little gentle ribbing: "This is what smoke looks like in a train emergency."
No train travel is complete without intrigue. Everytime I went to the club car, I noticed a woman scribbling furiously. My tweet:
"There's a writer in the bar car. It's easy for a noticer to notice a noticer. I just asked her to let me know if she publishes something."
"Several missed photo opps: Farmhouse with "FIREWORKS" written hugely on side. A tiny bank with it's sign installed upside down."
I ordered lunch and was appalled. The train still serves 20th century food, manufactured and artificial. The tweet here was easy too. A photo and:"Lunch on the train. Hold the silver. Hold the china. Bring on the I-cysteine azodicarboamide.
Pretty easy target. But I'm not proud. I'll take anything that comes my way. Naturally, I felt a certain pang here. I didn't especially want to make fun of the train. Some part of the point of the exercise was to persuade to use it more. Still, I think the honest tweeter must include the bad with the good, in this case, Amtrak warts and all.
I think the most effective pieces were the recordings. (And for these, many things to the application called Tweetmic.) I managed to record the sound of the station, the train leaving the station, the voice over apologizing for a brief delay. I almost got a woman talking to her mother. I hope you can hear these in the links below. (I'm not sure how to include them if you can't.) Let's see if this works. Click
for a sound file of the train leaving the station.
I leave it to you to decide whether this culturematic worked. I think it is probably best experienced in real time episodes.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Jeanne Vaughn, Celestine Arnold, Christine Huang, and Global Hue for the invitation and to Google for the hospitality. Thanks to Russ Hopkinson for hosting an impromptu meeting of planners.
The Twitter feed for my train trip from Chicago to Detroit, Saturday, November 7.
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New media now
Posted by: | CommentsThe tide is really turning.
Just when you think the corporation is never going to get it, you hear somebody from corporate headquarters sing a rendition of the new media song that is virtually note perfect.
Plus the speaker has all those qualities that corporate players usually bring to the game: relentless, inexorable, indefatigible.
Thus spake Jeff Hayzlett at Kodak tonight in NYC.
