Yearly Archives: 2011

CxC (the culture and commerce exchange)

This is a note for people who are visiting this blog as a result of the conversation I just had with Jack Conte of Pomplamoose.

Welcome!

Jack and I were noting three things:

1.  The world of commerce (specifically ad agencies and corporations) need a new kind of meaning for advertising and marketing campaigns.  What they need are hand crafted or artisanal meanings.

2.  The world of culture is filled with lots of cultural producers capable of producing these artisanal meanings.

3.  The world needs is some exchange that specializes in matchmaking, bring these two parties together. 

The question is: who is going to build this exchange?

At a minimum, it takes a team of people who canvas two groups, the advertisers on the one hand, the cultural producers on the other.

Would love to hear thoughts and comments below.

Thanks again to Jack for the chat!

Thanks also to Leora Kornfeld who invented the "CxC" formula several years ago.  

Making culture, provoking culture

Social worlds tend to settle.  And once they settle, a fine coating of inevitability forms around them.

Who is what to whom under what circumstances as constrained by what rules, eventually this is completely "done."  We’re weighted down by stasis.

Case in point?  A couple I saw years and years ago in a restaurant. They were in their 70s.  I guessed they had been married a long time.  Occasionally, he would raise his eyebrows and she would smile.  They had shared this meal so many times it was terra completely cognito. Jokes didn’t need telling.  They just need referencing.  This tiny, social world had settled. They were now riding the inevitability through to dessert, and, no, there weren’t going to be any surprises there either.

What happens to couples happens to corporations, universities, cities, countries. Countries? Sure, Canada.  Once dynamic, these social worlds have settled into stasis.  They are now going through the motions, even when those represent a bad, lifeless idea. 

What these static worlds need are provocations, events that "short out" the stasis, so to say. People are suddenly released from the confinement of their settled social world.  They are not freed for long, and revolutionaries are inclined to believe that this moment of liberation will last for longer than it does.  But there has been an "interrupt" as the psychologists call it. For a moment, the inevitability cracks, the rules become clear, the stasis is suspended.

There are a million possible provocations. Some years ago, Abby Hoffman showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills.  [Please share other examples in Comments.] There are species of art and/or politics that live for the provocation that will accomplish through imagination what cannot be accomplishment through more structural economic, political and social change.  Some of these groups believe in an "open sesame" event, the one perfect provocation that will set all the dominos tumbling till real and lasting change is accomplished.  This provocation may exist, but it will take a lot of very careful thinking and experiment to discover what it is. 

This is where pie comes in. A couple of years ago, a group of people stood on a street corner in Belfast, Maine, and handed hand slices of pie, pecan, pumpkin and apple, to passers-by. "The idea was to spur community and conversation, one slice at a time."  (in Edge, below.)

Pie is an interrupt.  It forces people out of that habitual frame of mind, the little script that reads, "Ok, that’s the shopping done, now I have to get to the library and pick up Betty at 4:00."  Oh, what’s this?  Pie?  And before you know it, you are sharing pie and a joke with the guy who coaches Becky, your daughter’s best friend..  You are broken out of your routines, out of stasis. 

What happens next depends upon the skill of the pieman.  In this case the pieman is Project M, something established as part of the "design for good" movement by John Bielenberg in 2003.  Project M is works as what Edge calls an "idea incubator."  Younger designers meet to "generate social problems and enhance public life."  Pie provocations had taken place in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Working with the design firm Winterhouse in Connecticut, Project M has also staged a Pizza Farm.

Designers are very good at thinking about provocations.  After all, they are in the imagination business.  They are trained to look at existing systems, spot where stasis lives, and think of ways to make things new.  What designers are not so good at, in my humble opinion, is figuring out what happens next, what comes after the provocation.  Handing out pie and pizza does have the potential for provocation.  But something substantial happens if and only if new arrangements are made visible, thinkable and doable.  Pie qua pie will not get this job done.  Pie has to be the start of something more than a jolly conversation with a soccer coach.  It must do something more than "spur conversation."  

There are social and cultural mechanics here.  (Again in my humble opinion, designers tend to assume and ignore these mechanics when addressing the design issue at hand.  Well, so do we all.  That’s the point of being an anthropologist or a sociologist, getting at the rules and meanings culture works so hard to conceal from view.  I am not accusing.  I’m just saying.)

The Point of Pie

We have used pie to draw people out of their routines, their stasis.  The point of pie is that it carries with it very particular cultural meanings.  It is indulgent, festive and when served on a street corner surprising, funny and lighthearted.  Pie sets certain meanings in train.  It has drawn people not just out of their stasis, but into an amused, curious frame of mind.  We have mobilized them.  

Talk to me, not to Becky’s friend’s soccer coach

This is NOT the time to encourage them with one another.  This is the path pack to stasis. Oh, sure, tiny trace elements of community will be generated, but these will begin to generate almost immediately and they will have disappeared within a month.  

No, we want to talk to us, and this means taking the people who make up our Project M, Pie Lab, and Pizza farm and press them into conversational service.  We want them to be there serving pie and chatting up the people who get the pie.  

Building a gift economy

There is a social science about these social moments, and we will want to consult this literature.  But for present purposes, let’s just say the following.  You the Project Pie person are building a little gift economy.  It begins with free pie.  But that is merely the beginning. Now we want the pie recipient to feel the full effect of our absolute interest.  (Almost all conversation is the opposite of a gift economy.  I give attention and time and interest to you in proportion to the attention, time and interest you give to me.)  

The idea is to gift the pie recipient with complete attention.  This means refusing our turn in the conversation.  (See the linguistic literature on turn taking for more on this topic.)  It means looking at the pie recipient as if we expect them to say something absolutely wonderful.  It means approving everything they say as if it were especially apt and especially well said.  It means, in effect, showering the pie recipient with complete approval.

But is this manipulation?

Well, I am sure some will say, but this is manipulation.  You are asking Project M people to fake interest, as if they were used car salesmen.  And this would be absolutely true if the Project M person’s heart was not pure, if his or her interest were not sincere.  But I am assuming this is wrong.  I mean otherwise you wouldn’t be standing on a street corner in Belfast, Maine, handing out pie to perfect strangers.  

No, it isn’t manipulation

Our interest is sincere.  We do want to know about them.  We want to seize this opportunity to find out who they are, to listen to anything they’re prepared to tell us.  We are doing ethnography in tiny bite size bits.  (Here too we want to consult the work on methodology.) Some people who wish to make a social difference don’t really care to hear from the Pie recipient.  They have a vision of the new world, and they mean to keep banging away at this vision until the pie recipient embraces it.  But if we have learned anything about engaging the world it is that it can’t be about us.  Our best efforts must begin with a study of them.  

Here’s what we hope for.  Gifted with pie and sincere interest, the pie recipient is now prepared to find out who we are and what we are doing here.  They are reciprocating our interest with their interest.  More than that, at this point they kind of like us.  We are funny and approachable.  There is no evidence of cult enthusiasm.  We are by every marker out culture holds dear likable.  And at this point, something miraculous happens.  Several things actually.  People come up out of stasis.  Their mood warms.  Their interest is mobilized. They identify us as someone interesting.  

Pie Project Failure

And this is precisely where most provocateurs leave them.  This is where the pie projects really fail.  I believe.  Provocateurs are mezmerized by their act of imagination, and by their sudden, charming departure from social convention.  Free pie.  Brilliant.  God, we’re groovy,  Our work here is done.  

Pie Project Success

But pie is, as I have labored to demonstrate, merely the first step, the opening gift. And almost nothing will come of it unless the Pie provocateurs are prepared to follow through with some jewel-like intervention, a further project that takes the pie recipient to the verge, indeed into the very grasp, of a new arrangement of idea and practice.  What the pie recipient needs now is a culturematic.  

(More on "culturematics" and other things to come.  This post took much longer than I can afford, and I am completely behind schedule!)  

References

Edge, John T. 2010. “The Healing Powers of a Pie Shop.” The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/magazine/10pielab-t.html

Post Script

Please come join Jack Conte tomorrow for a conversation on Ustream.tv.  See the link in yesterday’s post. 

Friday: A conversation with Jack Conte of Pomplamoose

Last week, I blogged about the Hyundai – Pomplamoose ad.

One happy outcome was the chance to correspond with Jack Conte who is half of Pomplamoose.

Jack and I are going to carry on the conversation on Friday at 5:00 Eastern Seaboard

Please come join us at UStream here.

(Apologies for the time shift.  We got waylaid by tech and time zones.) 

From comics to capital markets: Michael Knolla on how to get there from here












Today I’m featuring a guest post from Michael Knolla. 

Michael works for an investment firm.  Thanks to Pip Coburn, that great conveyor of intellectual exchange, Michael and I recently shared a conference room.  At some point in the proceedings, I overheard Michael talking about comic books and popular culture.  Passionately.

“Ah,” I thought, “This is not always the background or the passion of people working in the capital markets.”  Indeed, the worlds of investment and fan culture are pretty discontinuous.  You can do one.  Or you can do the other.  In our culture, you have to choose.

More’s the pity.  The investment world is increasingly shaped by cultural forces that fans are especially good at understanding.  And a career in investment is, I think, a great platform for anyone who wishes to carry the study of popular culture into their professional life.  The poetry and the banking of Wallace Stevens were mutually exclusive.  For Michael Knolla, there are lots of connections.

Indeed, Michael has apparently discovered a Northwest passage, and I was anxious to find out how he did it.

You will see the full text below, but I liked this passage especially.   Michael is referring to the skills he learned from transmedia or as he calls them,

“the ‘shared worlds’ of Marvel, DC, Valiant & Image comic books as well as the Dragonlance & Forgotten Realms novels.  Shared worlds, where different authors use the same settings and/or characters to tell stories with varying levels of interconnection, require a different kind of reading, I think, than stand alone or self-contained works.  With plots that would go on for months, if not years, crossing over at various times into other titles I learned to categorize and recall data in a way that helped me make connections and anticipate twists in the story.  Later this would be incorporated into one of the frameworks I use for identifying & monitoring investment themes.  It was also an early exercise in sorting signal from noise in learning which authors’ characters were more restricted in their ability to influence the larger arcs.

Michael found strategic understandings in popular culture. 

I’m guessing I was about 3 years old when my father first showed me the original King Kong.  The iconic image is of course King Kong on top of the Empire State Building with the airplanes flying around him, but what has always stuck with me was King Kong fighting the dinosaur.  This giant gorilla vs. T-Rex dynamic opened a whole new mental framework in my toddler mind, one that would be nurtured by a healthy serving of Godzilla movies as I grew older.  The latter were important as they moved the dynamic from one of x vs. y, winner take all, to a more rock, paper, scissors model.    For example, Godzilla could defeat Mothra in its caterpillar form but Mothra would triumph in the moth version, yet it might take both Godzilla & Mothra to triumph over MechaGodzilla.  It is easy to fall into heuristics in this profession when it comes to competitive advantage (that industry X is all about branding or company Y will always dominate because of its low-cost manufacturing, only to see these paradigms subverted by new distribution models or changes in the consumer decision metric) despite the warnings of Porter & Christensen.  

Michael sees a still more general benefit to this popular culture consumption.

Read enough books, watch enough movies, and you’ll eventually develop a strong sense of how stories work that enables you to go beyond Chekov’s gun in your forecasting (not just that it will be fired, but at whom, by whom, for what reason, and what the fallout and resolution will be).  This experience in predictive pattern recognition combines well with the above into a framework for developing investment theses and forecasts.

Here’s the full text.  It begins with Michael’s note to me:

Grant, thanks for the opportunity to talk about two of my favorite subjects: the research process and media consumption.  I am blessed to be someone who has found a job they truly enjoy, yet I doubt many of those who knew me in my youth would have guessed I would end up an equity analyst given that the only stock I grew up around was the livestock at the farm at the end of the street.  Yet, almost a decade into my career hindsight suggests that I was hardly disadvantaged by my starting point.  Rather, to borrow from Steven Johnson’s new book, I needed to exapt the skills I had developed in a different context to my new profession.  This is NOT intended to be an “Everything I Needed to Know About X I Learned from Y”; college, the CFA exam, the mentoring of analysts I’ve worked with, experience, etc. have all been vital to refining those skills and adding many more.  But if you are interested in how culture or commerce can catalyze/synthesize thinking about the other my experiences may serve as decent conversation starters:

·       Shared Worlds & Learning to Identify & Monitoring Investment Themes: My first experience with an investment bubble was the late 1980s/early 1990s comic book craze.  At the time I was convinced I would pay for college with my comic book collection.  Strangely enough in a way I think I have, as I pay down my student loans with the money I earn as an equity analyst.  While Marvel was briefly a publicly traded company before being acquired by Disney, and DC has been a part of Warner Brothers for some time that is not the connection I am referring to.  Rather it relates to the skill set that evolved out of reading the “shared worlds” of Marvel, DC, Valiant & Image comic books as well as the Dragonlance & Forgotten Realms novels.  Shared worlds, where different authors use the same settings and/or characters to tell stories with varying levels of interconnection, require a different kind of reading, I think, than stand alone or self-contained works.  With plots that would go on for months, if not years, crossing over at various times into other titles I learned to categorize and recall data in a way that helped me make connections and anticipate twists in the story.  Later this would be incorporated into one of the frameworks I use for identifying & monitoring investment themes.  It was also an early exercise in sorting signal from noise in learning which authors ^ characters were more restricted in their ability to influence the larger arcs.

·       “Cigarette Burns” & Leading Indicators: Many of those comics were read between shows while I worked at the movie theatre my father managed.  I’d started out tearing tickets and cleaning the theatres and worked my way up through concessions & ticket sales to eventually become a projectionist, just like both of my brothers, before heading off to college.  For a few summers I helped put together the new films each week, splicing the reels together and then running them through late at night to make sure they’d sent all the reels and they were in the right order.  To this day I can’t help but notice the “cigarette burns” that indicate a reel change.  What I came to appreciate was the structure the reels provided to a film.  They each would run ~15 minutes so your typical 90 minute film had ~6 reels, with the characters & setting being introduced in the first, the conflict in the second, and the resolution in the fifth with the denoument in the sixth.  (That reel changes also conform decently to commercial breaks when eventually aired on TV, further supports their relevance to film structure I’m guessing.) By simply watching for the cigarette burns it was easy to anticipate the pacing of a given movie.  The corollary I would later experience is the focus required to know when to look for leading indicators in cyclical industries and the understanding of the different implications depending on when in the cycle they occur.

·       Plot Structure & Pattern Recognition in Forecasting: As I was advancing from ticket tearing to concessions & tickets to projectionist I was also graduating from comics and TSR books to more “sophisticated” reading.  Again, there was a lot of time to read between shows, so the fast reading (another very helpful skill in this profession) originally honed on week long driving vacations as a child, in the days before handheld videogames and portable DVD players, was further refined between shows.  Read enough books, watch enough movies, and you’ll eventually develop a strong sense of how stories work that enables you to go beyond Chekov’s gun in your forecasting (not just that it will be fired, but at whom, by whom, for what reason, and what the fallout and resolution will be).  This experience in predictive pattern recognition combines well with the above into a framework for developing investment theses and forecasts.

·       Cash Flows Across the Value Chain: I would later go on to work at the small bookstore in the mall where the movie theatre was located, and these teenage employments provided another lesson applicable to business analysis.  Movie theatres don’t make their money off of ticket sales, but rather concessions. The lights at the bookstore were kept on not by the sale of bestsellers (particularly given the heavy discounts they often had), and certainly not via sales of “fine literature” but rather through the regular sales of Harlequin romance novels and detective fiction.  The price points on these books may have been lower, but the margins were higher and the frequency of purchase was far more regular.  This taught me to look beyond the obvious revenue streams & horse races/popularity contests to the multiple cash flows across a value chain.

·       Godzilla & the Relative Nature of Competitive Advantage: I’m guessing I was about 3 years old when my father first showed me the original King Kong.  The iconic image is of course King Kong on top of the Empire State Building with the airplanes flying around him, but what has always stuck with me was King Kong fighting the dinosaur.  This giant gorilla vs. T-Rex dynamic opened a whole new mental framework in my toddler mind, one that would be nurtured by a healthy serving of Godzilla movies as I grew older.  The latter were important as they moved the dynamic from one of x vs. y, winner take all, to a more rock, paper, scissors model.    For example, Godzilla could defeat Mothra in its caterpillar form but Mothra would triumph in the moth version, yet it might take both Godzilla & Mothra to triumph over MechaGodzilla.  It is easy to fall into heuristics in this profession when it comes to competitive advantage (that industry X is all about branding or company Y will always dominate because of its low-cost manufacturing, only to see these paradigms subverted by new distribution models or changes in the consumer decision metric) despite the warnings of Porter & Christensen.   Certain competitive advantages are stronger and more sustainable than others but the movies & comics of my childhood serve as a reminder that there is always a weak point that could be exploited, the kryptonite or Achilles’ heel if one is feeling more classical.  It may not be, or it may take longer to exploit it than your investment horizon, but you darn well better be aware of it and monitoring for it because when a competitive advantage breaks down the market shift can be fast and dramatic.   When I worked at the bookstore, where we sold Magic & Pokemon cards, and I can now see a similar learning opportunity among the kids engaged in the games (as opposed to simply collecting the cards).  That these also incorporated crude “resource management functions” makes them even better in my eyes.

·       Trinitarian vs. Bull/Bear: All this reading and movie watching eventually coalesced into what I call my Trinitarian format, and it enabled me to move outside of the simple bull vs. bear dynamic that is so prevalent in the industry.  In literature I came to understand that my appreciation of one work was often greatly enhanced by the comparison and contrast with at least two other works.  Thus my life long love of Douglas Adams was deepened by my reading of Terry Pratchett and Kurt Vonnegut.  My reading of Umberto Eco is improved by my reading of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.  H.P. Lovecraft is all the more enjoyable when read together with R.E. Howard and Dashiell Hammett.  As I began to read professionally I translated this dynamic into a framework that moved beyond reading something for and something against a given precept in a given area, to non-fiction trinities.  These would be comprised, for example, of one book written from a macro-perspective, another from a micro-perspective, and a third maybe from a non-western perspective.  Alternatively I might read works that take the same approach, but apply it to different issues or vice versa.  I have found this very helpful in my research, especially as it often highlights what a given perspective is leaving out, which is often more telling than what it includes.

Finally, only about a quarter or a third of my current book reading directly relates to my day-to-day work (i.e. would be classified as “bizbooks”).  Another third is basically fiction, which helps to refresh my mind.  My wife would always laugh when I was studying for the CFA exam that after an hour or so I’d say I was sick of reading, yet fifteen minutes later she’d find me reading a novel.  Those fifteen or thirty minutes of fiction, however, would typically rejuvenate me for another hour or two of studying.  The rest is a quest for novel frameworks and perspectives.  Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog & the Fox, for example, is one of my favorites.  The dominant metaphors in business are sports related, having inherited the position from the previous generation of military metaphors, and it is useful to be familiar with them when communicating your ideas to others.  Yet if everybody else is defining the category by singles, doubles or homeruns then it can be useful to apply a different framework as it might reveal what others are missing.  

Making culture, categorizing culture

Good things happen when we loiter.

We start to notice.

Someone was noticing at the Boston Book Festival.

Here’s what they saw:

literary tattoo
moleskin
cat jewelry
Chicago Manual of Style tote back
funny hat
drunk author

These are telling details.  They are not a perfect rendering of Book Festival culture, but they’re a charming first start.  Next Book Festival, everyone will be a little more alert.  Except for of course for the drunk author.  

BusinessWeek sent observers to airports in Paris, Montreal, and New York City. 

They began to notice and then to generalize:

Luggage Riflers
CNN Segment Chortlers
Twitchers and Touchers
Fortress Builders
Food Stuffers
The Wired Neurotic
Tabloid Readers
Chair Hoarders

Stuck at an airport, people try to make the best of a bad situation.  They resort to several strategies, all of which test the rules of public life.  Noticing happens, categories blossom. Is this perfect anthropology.  But of course not.  We have a very short while to make our observations.  The trick is to see whether we can find a "square inch" and work it.  

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the anthropological work of Normal Bob.  He has done a typology of the people we see at Union Square in New York City. Normal Bob, (aka Bob Hain) has observed "skaters," "scenesters," "models," and "junkies." He also has documented Ramblin’ Bill, The DJ and Quarter Guy.

Spotting culture is a way of creating culture.  Everyone is smarter and more observant when we’ve given them the ethnographic head’s up.  Cat jewelry?  I had no idea.  But now I will look for it.  When I am stuck at the airport, I will use the BusinessWeek typology to observe the people around me.  New categories will suggest themselves.  Old ones will get refined. Union Square?  I will keep my "Normal Bob" cheat sheet in mind as I go.

Our culture is that it is in a state of constant churn.  There is lots to observe. Patterns come and go.  And when we notice stuff happening, our work is only particularly done.  Now it’s time to create artifacts like Bingo cards, BusinessWeek typologies and Normal Bob categories. Having observed culture, it’s time to create it.   

References

Anonymous.  2010.  Boston Book Festival Bingo Card. Boston Phoenix. click here.

McCracken, Grant.  2010.  Normal Bob, Extranormal Anthropologist.  This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  click here.

Murphy, Tim. 2011. Airport Gate Semiotics. BusinessWeek. January 10 – January 16. pp. 76-77.

Acknowledgements

Patti Wood, author of Success Signals; Jason Barger, author of Step Back from the Baggage Claim, David Givens, author of Your Body at Work.  Wood, Barger and Givens are the authors of the Airport Gate typology in BusinessWeek.  

Making culture, mapping culture

A couple of years ago, Rick Meyerowitz was on the A train in New York City. He was staring at the subway map and he was thinking about lunch. Suddenly, station names began to look like food.

Rick asked, “What if I redid the subway map [as] a food map?” He brought in his friend Maira Kalman and the two of them renamed 468 stations. Avenue H became Mulligan Stew, Avenue J became Can of Soda, and Brighton beach became Beach Stroganoff. The New Yorker published their map in 2004.

This is remapping, taking a world we know, and reworking how we see it.  It’s one way to make culture.

We don’t have to work with something as grand as a subway system. Over the course of many walks, I have remapped my little town in Connecticut. I live pretty close to “the old woman who listens to her TV really loudly. She’s 100.” I am up the street from the “the house built by that crazy Swedish guy who eventually returned to Europe and died in a pauper’s hospital.” About a mile from my house is “smuggler’s cove.” Down the street from there is “The Chinese pavilion,” and from there it’s an easy walk to the “Fortress of mystery,” “Where the roller coaster once stood,” and “House of the trapped Brazilians.”

Maps used to belong to faceless bureaucracies and the state. They were literal. They gave up everything beautiful and imaginative to be accurate and clear. (By some miracle, it takes even the most sober map around 15 years to turn into a thing of beauty. We don’t know why. Apparently map makers install secret beauty on time release.) There are cultures in which maps are rich in connotative meanings (see Basso on the Western Apache, below), but usually our maps are an unamused rendering of the world. What you see is what we got.

Until now. With the decline of elites and the rise of an technologically empowered everyman, well, remapping is inevitable. All we need is the right pen and paper (or hardware and software) and hey, presto, the world begins to take on new properties.

One precedent was Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue. This give us a glimpse of The New Yorker’s myopia. Maps like this record not geographical but psychological space.  See also this map of New York City from the point of view of a 3 year old.  

Lots of options. How does a city look to any one of the groups that occupy it? How does Chicago look to a recently arrived runaway? What about a Cubs fan? How about a student at the University of Chicago? (That’s a trick question: UC students do not leave Hyde Park so they have no map of the city.)

Naturally, no one wants to use these remapped maps as way-finders. This would be like driving across the country with the aid of Denny’s placemats. But to be fair there is way finding and way finding. These remapped maps are very good for certain kinds of navigation. They can take us places we could never find otherwise. Those who make them make culture.

Please if you make a "remap," would you let us know.

References  

Basso, Keith H. 1984. “’Stalking With Stories’: Names, Places and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache.” In Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society.  Jerome Bruner, ed.  Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society, p. 19-55.

For more on the map by Meyerowitz and Kalman, go here.

Acknowledgements

Hiten Samtani for the New York according to a three-year old.  

Fee-based Facebook and Google

It’s clear, isn’t it, that we pay for Facebook and Google one way or the other.

One way: We pay by fee. 

The other: We pay in privacy. 

I get why Facebook and Google are prepared to play loose and fast with our privacy.  That’s the business model.  This is the way they make money.  They "have to."

Actually, there’s an alternative.  It is to give us the option of paying for Facebook and Google in something less precious than our privacy.

I’m not saying millions would sign up for this option.  But it would clarify the debate nicely.  It would allow Google’s Eric Schmidt to say, "Oh, privacy is important to you?  Here’s the alternative.  Pay us."

(And wouldn’t it be interesting to see someone run these numbers.  What would Facebook have to charge us in the currency was, um, currency?)  

But I think this wouldn’t just be useful for Facebook and Google.  I think it might be obligatory.  I think a fee option is something they’re obliged to make available.  It would be mean they no longer "have to" invade our privacy.  

Minerva essay contest: brief case, messenger bag, compare and contrast

I was in the Tumi store in Grand Central over the holidays and I was impressed to see their once staid briefcases were beginning to show the influence of the messenger bag.

If Jules Prown (and the worlds of material culture and art history) are right to say that some objects reflect changes taking place in a culture, what are we to make of this?

You have 1000 words and a month to complete the assignment. 

I have 9 minutes to get this post up before midnight, so no panel of judges yet.

For more on the Minerva, please see the page marked "Minerva" next to "contact." Eyes right and above.  For a little data on the relative position of briefcases (in blue) and messenger bags (in red), see this graph from Google trends. 

Post script

Thanks to the many people who commented on the Pomplamoose – Hyundai campaign.  

Cracking the Pomplamoose – Hyundai case

We all watched heroic amounts of TV over the holidays.

All of us saw the Hyundai ad that features Pomplamoose, the American music indie duo.

The Hyundai-Pomplamoose campaign looped the loop. It went from odd to charming to familiar to contemptible to irritating in about 3 weeks.

We can guess what happened.  Hyundai discovered they had a hit on their hands.  The campaign was doing good things for the brand and more to the point it was moving cars.  So they sold the heck out of it.

Poor Pomplamoose!  In a daring strategy for which I applaud them, they took this campaign as an opportunity to play pilot fish, to travel with the Hyundai shark for a short while in the hopes of sharing small bits of its dinner.  And they got consumed in the process.

Now, some people will say, "Look, no band should do a deal with the devil.  Pomplamoose got what they asked for."

Maybe.  Certain kinds of indie "cred" do depend precisely on keeping one’s distance form a project of this kind.  But for everyone who isn’t a culture-never-commerce separatist, the Hyundai-Pomplamoose case is an opportunity for illumination.  I mean, Honda used "Holiday" as their sound track for the holidays, and I bet it was great for Vampire Weekend’s iTunes sales.  Refusing all truck or barter because it sometimes goes wrong is shortsighted.

The question: what’s the best way for a small cultural enterprise like a comic, a playwright, or, in this case, a band, to maximize this opportunity and minimize this risk.

First things first.

1) Did this campaign loop the loop?  (For all I know everyone hated it from beginning.  Or, everyone loved it from the beginning and they still love it.)  What we need is data.  I am no master of the methodology but I bet someone could run the numbers for the twitter and blogging world and tell us what the "shape" of adoption was.  Did it loop the loop?  What was the loop?  How fast did this happen?  Where is sentiment now?

2) Why did this campaign loop the loop?  Is it the fact that Pomplamoose created the campaign?  I guess "creative control" was one of the reasons Pomplamoose was interested in making it.  And I guess that the handmade aspect of the spots was what interested Hyundai. Now they had "artisanal advertising."  How very fashionable, how very effective.

3)  Hey, presto, the bargain worked.  Both parties were happy.  And the campaign in the early days tumbled obliging down the Kauffman continuum, from weird, to odd, to charming. Job well done.  Culture and commerce had found a way to work together.  Let’s all join arms and sing the hymn to "win-win."

4)  Then things went wrong, badly wrong.  By sometime in the second week I was hearing people (and by "people," I mean, my wife, Pam) say, "Oh, god, not them again."

I think the problem has to be repetition.  We were obliged to watch the campaign so many times, charming turned coy.  Coy got irritating.  The campaign was pushed down the Kauffman continuum and became unendurable.

5)  One take-away: Pomplamoose should have restricted how many times the ads could be played.  And now they question, assuming this is possible, what number?  Half the number of times the campaign did play?  (Would Hyundai still have been interested?)  A quarter?

6)  But this is not just a Pomplamoose problem.  When people started to react against the campaign, they were now repudiating Hyundai as well.   It was actually in the Hyundai interest to restrict circulation.  What was Hyundai’s magic number?

7) Not all ads are created equal.  Not all "content" is the same.  I think part of the problem here comes from the fact that this was an artisanal campaign and these are delicate things. They take much of their power from whimsy.  And whimsy is perishable.  It’s natural enemy is repetition.  There are several "magic numbers."

8) The cultural, creative take away: when the campaign uses meanings of this kind, care must be taken.  What makes a "hand-made" ad powerful is the very thing that makes it vulnerable.

I can hear a couple of protests:

9) I can hear people insist I’ve found a new way to state the obvious.  They will say "repetition killed this ad.  Because, duh, repetition kills every ad."  In point of fact, there are ads I love despite the fact that I have seen them hundreds of times. So there is no simple rule of thumb.  Hyundai, with or without Pomplamoose, could have made a campaign that would have stood up to this constant repetition.

10)  From the brand manager, I hear another protest altogether, one that says, "look, I took a big risk running this campaign.  The huge response was my reward.  I hit a gusher. My job was to work the gusher."  To which the answer is, "you are not actually engaged in oil discovery here.  You are drawing on and giving to a culture.  It will give you opportunities and snatch them away the moment you overplay your hand."  The Cluetrain manifesto chaps like to say that marketing is a conversation but they are wrong.  Marketing is more difficult and less durable than a conversation. It is much more like a performance on any big city stage (Carnegie or Apollo). The audience is filled with people who are very good at listening.  Some of them are very good at producing.  Hyundai Xmas performance was a little like someone producing one successful performance of Mozart or Michael, and then to everyone’s astonishment playing it over and over and over again.

11)  Repetition is one way we master culture.  It is what moves new things down the Kauffman continuum from the "too new" to the "just right."  (See my book Flock and Flow for more on the continuum.)  It is also the way, we taken novelty and stuff it into the air extracting, shrink wrapping compactor to which we consign almost everything we love.  And this is why advertising and other kinds of marketing are NOT like a performance.  Repetition is not only OK, it’s obligatory.  But we must use it in a most precisely measured way. Because once something is done, it’s entirely done.  Happily, artifacts can be managed on the continuum and they can refreshed.  We can slow the trip to the compactor.

12)  Last thoughts.  I admire the courage exercised by Hyundai and Pomplamoose in giving this campaign go.  I think it’s up to the rest of us to figure out what went wrong and why.

13)  The bigger picture, it seems to me, is this.  We have a world of advertising that is desperate for innovation and creative partnerships.  Some of the meanings that brands need cannot be produced by the conventional agency.  We have a world of cultural producers, millions of people at this point, who are very good at producing meanings, and they would be glad of the exposure and the revenue that partnership makes possible.

14)  It’s up to the likes us, people who loiter at this intersection and others like it, to figure out how to smooth the connection and build the relationship.  And by "people" in this case I mean, yes, Pam, but also Robert Barocci and Todd Powers at the Advertising Research Foundation, Geoffrey Precourt at WARC, Sam Ford at Peppercom, Ben Malbon at Google Creative Labs, Bud Caddell at Victors and Spoils.  That’s just to name a few.

15) The immediate question, to put it in the language of a Harvard Business School case study, is this:

You are Pomplamoose or Hyundai.  What would you do?

16) The larger question:

How do we solve questions of this kind?

17) The still larger question:

How do we put culture and commerce at one another’s disposal?

References

Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Jake McKee. 2009. The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition. Anniversary Edition. Basic Books.

McCracken, Grant. 2006. Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace. Indiana University Press.