Monthly Archives: November 2006

Public relations post Gulliver

GulliverPublic Relations sets itself apart.  There is something "high church" about the profession,   as if it were much too fine to mix with the rest of marketing, vulgar, beer swilling, louts that we surely are.

This is about to change.  Thanks to a good article in the Financial Times today, we can see that the corporation faces two new structural realities.

1) the corporation is losing its communications advantage.

The contest that Public Relations must modulate is no longer being conducted between press releases from on high and disorganized grumbling en bas.  Thanks to the internet and the blogosphere, every grumble is, potentially, available to every grumbler.  Grumble aggregation is now possible and for some brands, now certain.  Several "grumble Tsunami" have already come running off the internet to devastate several corporations.   

2) there is no place to hide. 

According to Chris Deri, head of Edelman’s head of corporate responsibility practice,  "The expose by some 19-year old blogger of a factory in Thailand is only months off."  This means that no constraints of time and space will protect the corporation from scrutiny.  Bangkok might as well be in Cleveland.  It’s a "see through" world.

Two reactions

The first reaction from Public Relations is raw panic.  Surely, the corporation is now poor Gulliver (as above), confined and attacked on all sides by little people who have no sense of responsibility or accountability. 

Once the panic passes, a second reaction sets in.  The profession reaches for a new metaphor.  "Right, then," the argument goes, "let us think of this as a conversation."  (Bob Langert, McDonald’s head of corporate responsibility calls it a "dialogue."  Alan Marks, Nike’s head of media relations, refers to "real time conversations."  See Murray for both, below.)

I think this is wrong.   The metaphor gives us a communications event in which the corporation and the non-corporation engage in a rapid, spontaneous exchange of views.  If there is a rule in marketing after "know your audience," it is "craft your message." The corporation must continue to engage in set piece communication, crafting each method with strategy and care.   

Parts of the old model must hold

This is another way of saying that Public Relations will continue to manage public relations, and not an open, daily conversation with many hundreds, or thousands, or millions of consumers.  The principles here will be what they are in the rest of marketing.  What are the ideas, the meanings, the concepts, the promises for which the corporation stands?  How do we make these meanings most effectively using the instruments at the professional disposition.

Parts of the old model must change

Here’s what I think must change: tone.  As it stands, Public Relations speaks with a grand and formal voice.   (And this gets us back to that "high church" positioning again.)  One can’t help feeling that this press release is authoritative, possibly definitive, perhaps from the CEO herself.

This is a strait jacket.  Communications from the corporation would do well adopt a tone that is lighter.  No more thundering from on high.  No more tablets from the mount.  What we want is that engaging tone that comes naturally to the football coach, especially the ones with an Arkansas accent.  This is a tone of voice that says, "I’m just saying," instead of "hear ye, hear ye."  It is confiding, sometimes almost conspiratorial.  It is candid when it can be, and tentative when that is, in point of fact, the only real option.  The new public relations will not be a conversation, but the tone will surely be conversational.

What about those party animals? 

Yes, there is a precedent: advertising.  The rhetorical rules here are entirely difference.  These messages may be funny, casual, beguiling, ironic, playful, counter-intuitive.  These are, willy nilly, messages from the corporation.  And no one says, "hold, this will not do."  If we are prepared to let brands speak in a various, variously engaging voice, why not the corporation?  (Certainly, I do not mean to say that Public Relations has the same of degrees of freedom, merely more degrees of freedom.) 

Yes, the corporation lives in a world that is newly symmetrical in terms of power and newly  see-through in terms of disclosure.  Yes, the Public Relations profession must change.  But I wonder if conversation is the model to pursue here.  Perhaps there is something to be learning from those drunken louts after all. Let’s all drink to that.

References

Murray, Sarah.  2006.  When blogs put brands at risk.  Financial Times.  November 8, 2006, p. 10. 

The LeBrons

Lebron_james_as_jpeg_1 Last night, the best thing on Monday Night Football was a basketball player. 

LeBron James is the basketball sensation who moved straight from high school to the NBA. 

When Mr. James decided to forgo a college education, the chattering classes took him to task.  You know, the usual: "Here’s a child trading away intellectual development for fame and fortune.  What is wrong with a culture in which this can happen!"

So when Mr. James showed up in a unusual campaign for Nike, the world was surprised.  Last night, for instance, we saw Mr. James play four characters.  In the space of 30 seconds, he was "Business," "Wise," "Kid," and an athlete very like the NBA player named LeBron James (see photo above and YouTube videos below). 

Whoa, Nelly.  The performance were not just better than the average b-ball celebrity endorsement.  It was interesting, daring, dramatic, almost, gasp, artistic! Clearly, the chattering classes had misjudged the kid.  Clearly, LeBron James has his wits about him.  Apparently, the chattering classes were wrong.  (And that never happens.)

To be sure, contemporary culture has moved well beyond the "dumb jock" endorsement.  Peyton Manning is doing ads that are funny and engaging.   ESPN does exemplary ads for itself, often roping in the athlete at hand. 

Some athletes have used ads  to escape the "spam in a can" status that is otherwise thrust upon them.  They treat the ad as an a meaning making opportunity, as when Maria Sharapova did a fiercely ironic "I feel pretty" spot for Nike, the better to fight the imputation that she was a really "pin up" girl who just happened to play championship tennis.   

But the LeBron ad is much better than any of these. And it comes from a kid who is 21 years old, working without the "benefit" of a college education.  Hmmm.  Chattering classes, wrong again.

The campaign is the work of a client called Nike, widely known for the courage of its marketing, and the agency called Weiden + Kennedy, widely known for the brilliance of its work.  But these are merely the necessary condition of the "LeBrons" campaign.   We do not have any thing like a sufficient explanation of this inspired piece of endorsement risk taking.

I have scoured the biographic info on line (as below) for illumination.   This work is detailed and well done (sports journalism has got better, too!).  But no one gives much insight into what Mr. James thinks he is doing. 

One possibility, and it is merely a possibility, is that Mr. James has found a way to reproduce the foursome with whom he came up.  Early on,  Mr. James took a "four musketeers" type oath with Dru Joyce III, Sian Cotton, and William McGee and all attended St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron. The idea for the LeBrons might, just might, have sprung from this foursome. 

Another possibility:  Mr. James is famous for his team work.  Unlike many big stars, he actually passes the ball.  His passing game is, in fact, part of his genius as a player, demonstrating his Wayne Gretzky type ability to see exactly what the court is going to look before anyone else can.  Mr. James has no difficulty seeing himself as a member of a team.  And now the self has taken on a new diversity, the team work continues. 

There may be something Sharapova-like going on here.  The tag line for this campaign is "You think you know LeBron James, but you don’t."  Ah, did Mr. James feel himself painted into a corner by all the hype that surrounds is remarkable rise to the NBA?  Was this a way to take his leave of the identity being constructed for him for the sports journalists and the chattering classes? 

But why these characters, Business, Wise, and Kid?  "Business" is a creature so extraordinarily vain, he gets on the intercom during a commercial shoot to ask everyone  "please be quiet while I am dressing."  This is the gigantic ego that awaits every NBA star, and it may serve Mr. James to externalize Business early and publicly before internalizes Business.  "Wise" is an elderly creature and retired NBA all star, cranky, opinionated, and still in possession of a towering sky hook.  Wise is the most talkative of these characters, and it’s as if LeBron James wants to hear from this man, even as he wants to keep him in his place.  "Kid" is a child, a creature of simple pleasures.  And it is clear that LeBron James is living a life that absolutely extinguishes childish things.   Nice to take Kid with you while you go.

It is not impossible to imagine that Mr. James constructed the "LeBrons" in order to divide the labor of stardom and make more manageable the life of a NBA super star.   

We can imagine lots of sources of inspiration for this.  Mike Myer’s plays many parts in the Austin Powers series.  So does Eddie Murphy in the Klumps.  But the deeper inspiration may be a generational one.  Mr. James may be engaged in the "expansionary individualism" according to which all individuals claim many selves.  I understand that some will be surprised at this.  They will ask why an athlete so talented that he threatens to eclipse Kobe Bryant, perhaps even to rival Michael Jordan, would not find one self to be quite enough, and perhaps more than his share.   Well, no, finally, Mr. James is a child of his generation.  One self is interesting, and to be sure, the present self is mighty, but it can never be enough. 

Acknowledgments

Adam Roth, director for United States Advertising at Nike.  "We’re not afraid to try new things.  We focus on flying out on the bleeding edge."  (in Elliott)

References

Anonymous (a).  2006.  Lebron (sic!) James Returns in a Second Season of "The Lebrons" (sic!!) to Debut Zoom Lebron (sic!!!)  IV Shoe.  Nikebiz.com. Press release. here.

Anonymous.  n.d., LeBron James Biography.  Notable biographies. here.

Anonymous.  2006.  Maria Sharapova Dispels "Pretty Girl" Image in First Solo Nike Campaign.  Nike press release.  here.

Elliott, Stuart.  2006.  Nike Reaches Deeper Into New Media To Find Young Buyers.  New York Times.  October 31, 2006. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Peyton Manning: the man and the brand.  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  December 12, 2005. here.

Stewart, Mark.  n.d., LeBron James Biography.  JockBio.Com. here.

YouTube:

The "Le Brons" campaign ads:

here.

here.

here.

Pattern Installation: trends and trend awareness

Pantheon I had lunch with Andrew Zolli, a name now so potent in trend watching circles that the recipient is obliged to drop it early and often. Andrew Zolli.  Andrew Zolli.  Andrew Zolli.

The conversation pin wheeled from topic to topic but we did dwell from time to time on how trend awareness creates value.  (This is my rendering of my recollection of my half of the conversation.  Andrew may or may not approve what follows.)

It seems to me that trend awareness is mostly about the difference between blinking and nodding.  Blinking is what we do on first hearing about something new: email, crunking, or cold fusion, say.  That "huh?" moment, the "wha?" moment.  No, we haven’t heard about it.  We struggle.  We’re at sea.

Nodding is what we do when we have prior notice.  Email, got it.  Crunking, got it.  Cold fusion, er.  The nod says, "I’m with you.  I have a couple of understandings in place.  I am prepared to reckon with what follows. Pray proceed."  Nodding says that "pattern installation" has taken place.  The bearer is not clueless and flatfooted.  He or she is now prepared to reckon with novelty.  Pattern recognition is now possible.

(There is a totemic thing happened here.  If we nod, we are part of the tribe that "get’s it."  If we blink, we are one of those clueless strangers to whom the future is going to come as a big, constant, and grueling surprise.  (This must be another reason we like Borat.  Everyone, even me, qualifies for tribal inclusion more surely than poor old  Borat.) And of course a lot of us nod in conversation to conceal the blinking.)

Trend education is mostly about taking the client from blinking to nodding. It doesn’t have to be a lot.  Mostly, it begins with a great and powerful act of elimination.  All of these endless and confusing possibilities.  Those don’t apply here.  What you need to know are these few things.  The pattern is now installed.

The trouble is that blinking threatens to perpetuate itself.  This is what confusion is, the failure to find the templates with which new data can be rendered less confusing.  Astonishment is useful in its first moment.  It puts the creature on alert.  The world has taken leave of our senses, our understandings.  After that, it’s a problem. Astonishment can leave us hydro planing as a layer of missteps and confusion build up between us and the world.

Pattern installation isn’t very complicated.  We are not giving the client an encyclopedic grounding in the topic.  We are merely give them early notice.  It’s not really knowledge so much as a right to knowledge, a license for inquiry, a precondition for understanding. 

We could compare pattern installation to tourism.  One trip to New Orleans is always tremendously better than no trip to New Orleans.  And there is a puzzle here.  One trip shouldn’t make the difference it does.  It’s useful, though, because now we have a place to start.  We can know see what would be useful to learn and what would not be useful to learn.  We can now identify what assumptions are plausible and which once are to be dispensed with.  We can now distinguish between good questions and bad questions.  We now know what we need to know.  All assumptions are now longer equally plausible.  We now have traction.

This is what the grand tour was for.  The education of an English child of privilege in the 18th century was incomplete until they had done a little nosing around on the continent.  It wasn’t much.  But it was vastly, disproportionately better, than no tour.  The traveler remained hermetically sealed in a bubble of Englishness, traveling usually a well traveled path with friends and servants.  But it cleared away some of the things that compete for wisdom, and it installed a platform for other understandings.  The grand tour made an enormous difference.  Having seen the low countries actually did  make you a better candidate for Parliament. 

Trend awareness is about taking the client from no clue to a rough, first acquaintance. It’s not everything.  It shouldn’t be everything.  This is what confusion is: everything trying to get in.  What we need are a few understandings.  What we want is a pattern installed.

YouTube and copyright: the Platonic solution

The lawyers now want a shot at YouTube.  All that copyright in violation  All that  intellectual property at risk.  All those hours ripe for billing.  Brother, can you hook a lawyer up?   

There is a simple solution, a way to keep them out: make certain the quality of YouTube remains deplorable.  This will indicate that we are not posting the original clip from Borat, but a representation of the first form.  It isn’t pretty…and that’s a good thing.   

The YouTube version is a copy.  It’s purpose is indexical.  It exists to point to the Platonic original.  It does not pretend to duplicate the original, anymore than a road sign for New York City duplicates New York City.  So enough of the lawyerly anxiety that says if copying is allowed, copyright is void.  There are copies…and there are originals.  The imperfections of YouTube help make this distinction clear.  Only an idiot or a lawyer would confuse them.

Or, let’s think about this from an economic and anthropological point of view. This is  the difference between stealing and borrowing.  When we steal, we make ourselves the beneficiary of value that someone else has created.  When we borrow, for these  YouTube purposes, we create value for ourselves without diminishing value for the owner. 

But of course, on the internet, borrowing actually results in value augmentation for the owner.  My use of your material gives you exposure. As long as the quality is bad enough, no one is going to pay me…or not pay you.  This point is now "standard issue" wisdom in the internet economy.  I don’t know who said it first.  Doc Searls?  But everyone gets this, including the likes of Mark Cuban.  The lawyers should really stay in more.

More social scientifically, when we "borrow" something to show on YouTube, we have effectively nominated ourselves as diffusion agents.  Without the first, second and third adopters, many world transforming innovations would languish at the precipice of Geoffrey Moore’s chasm. This too is entirely clear.  I can’t believe in a time of very noisy markets and positively Amazonian competition that producers wouldn’t want every diffusion partner that comes their way.  I can’t believe they would want to shut themselves out of the wisdom crowds. 

The problem here may be one of vested interest.  Every profession has found a way to make itself the beneficiary of the new economies and cultures that the internet has opened up.  Lawyers, on the other hand, have not been quite so well served.  I don’t say we should doubt their motives when they call for the protection of copyright.  Um, yes I do.

Memory lane redesigned by Haussmann (or, the mechanization of Samuel Pepys)

Medieval_rooftops_i I have done the ethnography of memory lane.  I have sat with people in their living rooms, and asked for a tour of the family photo album. 

Two kinds of photo jump out.

There’s the  "phantom photo." The respondent may recognize one of the people in the photo ("I think that’s my uncle or something"), but the place, the season, the occasion, are now lost.  The meaning of the photo, once so obvious, has evaporated.  Interestingly, people rarely destroy these photos.

There’s the "cargo photo." These may not be much to look at.  Often, they are smudgy and badly framed.  You will be trying to make out what’s in the frame, when you realize the respondent hasn’t said anything for a little while.  Then you realize they are trying very hard not to cry.  Cargo photos carry bags of information and meaning.  Badly lit, badly framed, this photograph of a man sitting at a table at Wendy’s somehow captures the truth of who he was.  ("I don’t know what it is.  That’s the expression he always had when he was planning something.")

Phantom photos capture less meaning than they appear to.  Cargo photos capture more.

Of course, these are the problems of the old technology.  The camera, for all its genius, left a great deal out.  Indeed, all photos would be phantom photos were it not for the restoration of meaning that happens everytime the family sits down to tell the story of the family. ("That’s your Uncle Bob.  At Kalamalka.  The trip they shot the bear, I think.  Get a load of that shirt.  He looks about 20!")

But the new technologies will change memory lane in the greatest urban reconstruction since Haussmann rebuilt Paris.  Memory lane is about to get larger, more capacious, easier to navigate, and much more interesting to visit.  Or to put this is the language of marketing, these technologies will create value like nobody’s business, they will turn memory into gold. 

Four new technologies will make the difference. 

One. Cameras liked the Nikon D100 are capable of capturing sound.  I was interested to read that Patrick McMullan uses this capacity to capture the names of the people he shoots at social affairs (see Henderson below), but we could use this capacity to identify the shooter and the 5 Ws: where, when, what, who, and why.  Every photo will come with its own "voice over."  This will capture data from the person best qualified to give data.  Thus will relatives speak to one another across generations.  (Several generations down the road, the way things are said will be as illuminating as the things that are said.  "I really like great, great auntie Elizabeth’s photos.  She was so sly!")

Two. Try us we might, the photo taker can never supply enough information. And this is where the geotagging comes in (see Austen below).  Cameras will shortly be able to stamp by longtitude and latitude as they now date by time, date, month and year.  Superimpose this on a Google map and we will be able to trace the steps of Auntie Elizabeth that Sunday in 2009 when she and the family wandered through up 5th Avenue and into Central Park.  Time plus space stamping will allow us to reconstruct quite a lot of this trip: how long Auntie Elizabeth spent that afternoon in Saks, for instance.  ("That hat in the attic, is that hers!?  Maybe it’s from Saks!  Go, look at the label!  Maybe this is when she bought it!")  Data like these create a web that make other data germane and new inference possible (see Kluver below).  Imagine having the historical record and the historical artifact. 

Three. Many photos get lost in the storing or the storage.  But wireless cameras (or the camera on a wireless phone) can wick photos to safety…or at least to relatives.  Now that a photo sits on several hard drives, its chances of survival have gone way up.  And eventually someone in the private sector will create time lockers for families, records that can survive the indifference of several generations.  (And what would we pay to release the photos taken by Uncle Bob three generations after the fact?  It’s a long wait for the service provider, but the longer the wait, the more profitable it becomes)

Four. Let’s call "time lockers" a category on its own.  With Google now capable of archiving email for millions of people, it shouldn’t be very difficult to capture the photos of several hundred thousand (or at least enough to make the venture profitable.)

It is, of course, possible to capture too much information.  And this can destroy the value of a record just as surely as too little information.  Gordon Bell at Microsoft has embarked upon an effort to record everything that happens to him (see Thompson below).  When I was the head of the Institute of Contemporary Culture, we thought very hard about the possibilities of Pepysian capture.  So Bell is my hero.  But let’s be clear, for civilians like you and me, we merely want more data, not all data.  (What we want is a "Goldilocks" ratio, not too little, not too much.)

And what, precisely, is this value worth?  (And now we come to a place that anthropology and economics intersect.)  Well, you can see why an anthropologist would like a memory lane transformed by Haussmann.  The native is now doing my job for me.  The mountains and valleys of ethnographic data (note the Gibsonian metaphor), these will be a great gift.  It will mark the return of "arm chair" anthropology that has so fall out of favor in the 20th century. 

Other values are pretty clear.  Every family, even the ones that are unhappy in their own way, will be glad to have a better record.  Think of the amount of time and money that people spend on ancestry.com.  The search for roots is one of the things that make the internet the internet. Now, to be sure, some of this is driven by the silliest of human motives: the discovery, for instance, that we descend from a royal family or at least someone famous.  But I think the ancestral search gets more sophisticated, the more data is available to it.  And as the historical picture becomes more nuanced, the value of all existing data goes up, and new data takes on value enough to warrant entrepreneurial funding.  The historically rich get richer.  The historical get rich. 

But there is a deeper, more pressing value add here that is not much talked about.  As change increases and dynamism quickens, individuals will need to have archival data for personal and practical reasons.  There was a point in my life when it was possible to say that I had changed jobs, cities, addresses, relationships or perspectives once every six months.  (I know this seems preposterous but I think if you sit down and do a "identity chronology" of your own you will see this number or something like it.)  This is an awful lot of water under the bridge. The task of reconstruction is now, well, daunting.  What would I give for 10 perfectly documented photos for each of those 6 month periods? 

All of us will have fragmented selves that will need reconstruction from time to time.  But I think reconstructed lives will be especially useful to CEOs, parents, football coaches, criminals, divorce courts and of course marketers.  "What was I thinking?" this is the question that hovers over many proceedings.  From these data, even this can be extracted.  (In a perfect world, there would be little "what was I thinking " booths everywhere, to which we might repair to report when on the verge of a moment momentous.)

Memory lane, before Haussmann, was pleasant, meandering, occasional, and, most of all, optional.  Memory lane after Haussmann, this is more useful and obligatory.  This memory lane is no longer a by-way.  It’s now a Broadway, a street you have to visit or at least cross if you want to spend any time in this town.

References

Austen, Ian.  Pictures, With Map and Pushpin Included.  New York Times.  November 2, 2006. here.

Henderson, Stephen.  2006.  Party Masters: Patrick McMullan, Sharp Shooter.  Town and Country.  November. p. 296.

Kluver, Billy.  1997.  A Day with Picasso: Twenty-four Photographs by Jean Cocteau.  Cambridge: MIT Press. 

McCracken, Grant.  2003.  Tag, we’re it.  This blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  January 5, 2003. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  How to blog like an anthropologist.  This blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  August 17, 2004. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2006.  What I did on my summer vacation (or, "may I have your passport, please?") This blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  August 22, 2006. here. 

Thompson, Clive. 2006.  What if you never forgot anything: How Microsoft’s Gordon Bell is Reengineering Human Memory.  Fast Company.  November.  pp. 72-79, 110-112.

For more on Baron Haussmann, the Wiki entry is here.

For more on Samuel Pepys, the Wiki entry is here.

Parsing the symbolic logic of the Smith Barney campaign

Smithbarney_1 Smith Barney launched their "working wealth" campaign yesterday.  (To the right, a clipping from the homepage.)

I’ve written about marketing in the world of investment and wealth management before.  It is a wonderful thing to see an industry that previously would not "stoop to conquer" now actually addressing the consumer in a language he can understand. 

The industry is new to the game, so the results are uneven.  American Century Investments was, I think, wrong to use Lance Armstrong as a celebrity spokesperson.  The Citi ad that spoke of the "heart of new york" was not so much wrong as muddled.  On the other hand, recent Charles Schwab work has been exemplary.  I particularly like the ad that reads, "owning a house worth a million bucks is not a retirement plan." 

It is a pleasure to report that the SmithBarney campaign is a superb piece of consumer centricity.  It addresses the barrier in place: the fact that most consumers fail to fail to how money makes money.  Now, I know this complete confounds the financial industry. "What’s not to get?" they want to know.  But that is the point of consumer-centricity.  It doesn’t matter what we think.  It matters what the consumer thinks, and the further they are from our standard, the harder we have to work, the more due ethnographic diligence we must exercise. 

Consumers believe that money comes from a pay check.  They work hard. Someone pays them.  Now they have money.  Yes, they grasp the idea of "interest."  Yes, they understand, roughly, how the stock market works.  But the idea that this industry is all about and only about, money, this is as counter intuitive as a "virgin birth."  Money has to come from somewhere.  How can it  come, as if immaculate conceived, from other money. 

For the average consumer there is something impenetrable about financial planning.  It’s a mystery of the old fashioned kind, not something you can clear up with a flashlight and a basset hound.  No, this is one of those imponderables of the human condition, one of those things we will just never understand. 

And what a barrier this becomes for the financial industry when it finally decides to market to these consumers.  How does the consumer calculate risk in a decision making situation such as this?   Well, he just doesn’t, that’s all.  He practices avoidance.  This feels like the rational thing to do.  Marketing comes late to the game, and it must move mountains.

Oh, there is one thing that the consumer understands perfectly well: the moment he sits down with a financial adviser, he’s going to look like a rube and a dope.  Here’s another reason to practice avoidance.

What to do?  How to speak to a consumer in this frame of mind?  The Working Wealth is a great place to start.  If the Charles Schwab campaign demonstrated a knowledge of what the consumer thinks, this one shows us how the consumer thinks. 

The notion of "working wealth" complete with gears has an appealing literalism.  The first few lines of the body copy:

"Earn your first dollar by your labors.  Get up early, work late.  Get up the next day and do it again.  Keep doing it, even after the dollars start adding up."

Exactly on target.  Start with the what the consumer is thinking.

The campaign then proposes an equation, that at Smith Barney, capital works the way you do.  Hence the headline: "I am working wealth."  This is classic metaphor.  It allows the consumer to understand the unknown part of the metaphor equation (capital) with what they know about the known part of the equation (their working lives.)

Then Smith Barney invites the consumer think of himself as someone who has control of this process.  ("I am working wealth.")  Some part of their work-a-day world is a place of special control and competence for them.  Now the equation says, hey, what you know about your domain of competence, apply that to the way Smith Barney will allow you to manage your wealth.

In the symbolic logic of this ad, we step the consumer from where he is (capital comes from a paycheck) into a moment of identification (capital works the way the consumer works) into a proposition and a promise of control (I am working wealth.)  From the old world of capital to the new world of capital with a couple of phrases and around 100 words.   This is exemplary meaning management.   

The agency responsible for this exemplary work is Hill Holliday New York.  The planner was Lesley Bielby (now of Hill Holliday Boston).  The Executive Creative Director was Alon Shoval, who, with Charles Veprek, served as copywriter and, with Victor Anselmi, as Art Director.    

 

References

Anon.  2006.  I am working wealth.  Full page ad for Smith Barney. Wall Street Journal. October 31, 2006, p. A7.

For the Smith Barney "I am working wealth" website, here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Marketing the Capital Markets.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  February 10, 2006. here. 

McCracken, Grant. 2006.  Marketing the Capital Markets II.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  February 14, 2006.  here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Marketing Financial markets: Schwab Triumph. The Blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  March 1, 2006.  here.

Acknowledgments

Pip Coburn, Coburn Ventures

Nick Hahn, Vivaldi Partners

Olivier Blanchard, Corante