Author Archives: Grant

Virtual worlds as branding engines

I was talking to a smart marketing guy in San Jose and we were talking about how to craft brands in the Cluetrain era, now that we can’t shout at the consumer until they "get it."

Most of the properties being created in the social media space are haunted by a problem.  They are designed to be companionable and interesting.  They are intended to be something the consumer will like well enough to repurpose for their own purposes.

When this, being companionable and being useful, is the condition of entry, we know that we can not honk the brand horn loudly.  Indeed it’s not even clear we can mention it in anything more than a whisper.  Anything more forthcoming makes us conspicuous and the marketing property disagreeable and distinctly not the kind of thing the consumer wishes to distribute through their own networks, under their own names, as it were.

The solution I personally love is putting virtual worlds on line.  I love the idea of building a world that people can discover and examine and perhaps inhabit.  It should be beautiful, filled not with puzzles or violence, but with subtle little clues that allows the visitor to glimpse and then by dint of their own imaginations complete.  

The Sophie project I did at the Coca-Cola company was designed to work this way.  We created the home of a creature who was half goddess, half teenage girl.  The visitor wouldn’t actually ever meet Sophie.  But there was lots of evidence with which to understand who she was and how she acted in and on the world.  Someone stormed in and turned the thing into a TV show, or tried to, and that was the end of that.

But Sophie lives on.  These worlds are rich, participative, cocreative, mansions within mansions.  In a world this rich and this generous, the brand can make the occasion appearance, garner recognition, extract, dare I use this word, marketing value, and then make itself scarce.  When there is something much going on, when the world in question is so fabulously endowed with imaginative resources, the brand couldn’t "barge in" if it wanted to.  

I would love to hear from readers about virtual worlds that might quality.  I haven’t ever seen a Second Life that seemed to fit the bill.  I loved the atmospherics of Blade Runner and the beauty of Myst.  I like the endless nooks and crannies of GTA.  But none of these ends up a world that feels endless interesting and explorable.  But then I don’t get out much.  Please if you know good cases in point, sing out.  

Fountain

This is the view from my San Jose hotel room.  

See the columns of water, at the very center of the photo.  (Sorry it’s hard to make out.)

This fountain is empty at the moment but not for long.  

When that large shadow passes, this place will fill with people leaping, cavorting and having as much fun as humanly possible.

How different from a traditional fountain, the one that stands as tribute to the sculpture’s genius.  This one is made from water.  

How different from the fountain that rims itself with marble, a symbolic boundary broken only in times of celebration (or for the shooting of an intro for Friends).  This one lets people in.

How different from the fountain that insists on its own majesty.  This one invites commotion, rewards chaos.  

Bloomberg BusinessWeek some more

Well, it turns out they have wireless on the plane.  Woo Hoo.

This allows me to return to thoughts on the new BusinessWeek from Bloomberg.

Ian Schrager: Prophet now in search of profit

This issue end with a strange essay from Ian Schrager, founder of Morgans Hotel, the Royalton, and the Delano.

Schrager now regrets not having used a single brand for his several hotels.  At the time, he felt that a single brand name would have been seen as vain or uncool.  Also, he says, 

I worried about losing what was special about each one, so I gave each its own name.  

This feels like self repudiation from a Stalinist show trail.  It’s hard to believe one’s ears. Schrager is one of the people who led the charge against mass marketing and big fat brands.  He is one of the people who created the era of marketing now upon us. Apparently, it was all an accident.  Nevery mind.  Carry on.  

At the end of his career, I guess Schrager now likes the idea of a having something to sell, over and above the properties.  And who wouldn’t.  But he doesn’t for a minute stop to contemplate the possibility that his success came precisely from the fact that he was working brandless, that he took leave of conventional practice, that he was prepared to make each of his hotels "special."

This is odd and sad.  Can Schrager really be a pioneer who does not grasp his revolutionary accomplishment?   Say it ain’t so.

Suzy Hansen and Greece in turmoil

I am sure her editors gave her lots of navigational advice, but the piece by Suzy Hansen feels like she was simply dropped into contemporary Athens and asked to think her way home.  And sweet Jesus, does she think her way home. This is one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in a long time.  It takes on a fantastically complex and shifting world, and renders it clear without ever making it tame.  Hansen gives us everything from strategic pictures from 31 k feet and ethnographic notes from her own eyes-on experience. The commotion never does away, but ever so gently a pattern begins to form, like a black and white photo coming up out of the developing tray.  Wow, can this woman write. Wow, can she think.  Hat’s off to Hansen, and, yes, ok, her editors.  

PepsiCo and the SoBe success

In a treatment of PepsiCo’s SoBe line, we are treated to a glimpse one of the secrets of PepsiCo’s success.

Tucked into a corner of PepsiCo’s sprawling campus in Purchase, N.Y., is a space known to insiders as Adam’s room. Decked out with couches upholstered is silver leatherette, a flat-screen TV, and an Xbox 360 video games console, the one time conference room is designed to resemble the natural habitat of a prototypical 22-year-old male, right down to the pair of sneakers carefully tossed on the floor.

I know some people will dismiss this as cosmetic, too little contact with contemporary culture actually to make a difference.  But hang on a minute.  Imagine trying to make a corporation-centric decision in such a room.  Living in the very lair of the beast (and 22 year olds are beasts, let’s be clear) it must be vastly more difficult to fall into the gravitation field of the corporation and forget for whom we work.  I think this might even be better than the typical "war room" which is usually festooned with data torn out of context (and magazines). Adam’s room may be all context but it is might as well be content, so nicely does it focus the marketing mind.

References

Hansen, Suzy.  2010.  Life Amid the Ruins.  Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 28th – July 4.  

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.

Schrager, Ian.  2010.  Hard Choices.  Bloomberg BusinessWeek.  June 28th – July 4.  

Stanford, Duane.  2010.  How PepsiCo Refreshed Its SoBe Water Brand.  Bloomberg BusinessWeek.  June 28th – July 4.

Subscribe to Bloomberg BusinessWeek here.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

There are lots of surprises in the Bloomberg redesign of BusinessWeek, but check out this cover.  It’s from early June.  

Arresting.  They are?  How angry?  Pray tell?  And then what happened?  Tiny apartments?  "In misery lies hope."  

Narrative on the cover of a journalistic form devoted to telegraphic titles, this is interesting.  Something is happening at BusinessWeek and in business.

I know our interest in story telling is on the rise but this is unexpected.  And engaging. I just had to read more.  

And there are, as I say, lots of new and unexpected details in the magazine.  If I weren’t getting on a plane, I would tell you all about them.  

Kagan’s smile: negotiating difference in the American body politic

It’s lunch time at 100 Highland, and I am watching the confirmation hearings.

Russ Feingold is imploring Elena Kagan to be god-like as she exercises the powers with which she will be endowed as a (likely) member of the Supreme Court.

Feingold is solemn.  Kagan is watchful.

Then, quite suddenly, a small show a humor from Feingold as he acknowledges her origins

I also hope we will continue to see greater diversity on the court in other ways, including representation from MidWestern and Western states.  It’s important that all Americans feel that the court represents their life experiences and their values.

And here Kagan is suddenly all smiles (as pictured).

It’s one of those things that strikes a Canadian.  In the US, there are some differences that are considered non-provocative.  People will shout out passionately to declare their loyalty for a sport’s team, a university, or in this case a part of the country.  No one takes offense. More likely, they will shout "Go Wildcats" in support of their own team.

In this non provocative world, everyone, apparently, gets to shout their enthusiasms, and no one minds.  At the very worst, they will shout back with their own.  This part of the American body politic, body cultural, is entirely non zero-sum.  Your enthusiasm costs me not all.  These identity differences are, as they used to say during the English Reformation, things indifferent.  We can let them stand.  We don’t need to fight them out.

But only some enthusiasms are allowed.  Had Feingold and Kagan shared a broad smile over a shared political or gender identity, as in "Hey, let’s hear it for Heterosexuals," or "We are lawyers. Hear us roar," there would have been an explosive controversy and an abrupt end to Kagan’s judicial aspirations.

Which raises a possibility.  Could the US now so cruelly divided by provocative difference, ever be a place in which all differences, even gender and ideological ones, are things indifferent.  Isn’t this a crude measure of what we’re heading for: a world in which every identity differences is treated with this sense of largesse.

There are several anthropological and political science questions here.  What precisely is the difference between identity differences that are and are not provocative?  How do the things indifferent become things indifferent?  What would we need to do to move things different into the things indifferent category?  

A couple of posts ago, I was worried about the formation of an American body politic in which the phrase "You just don’t get it" is heard so often.  One place to go to work on this issue is to have a closer look at Kagan’s smile

Greta Van Susteren: plastic surgery trend setter?

I saw Greta Van Susteren recently. 

She is famous for her take-no-prisoners style of interviewing.  

She also famous for her plastic surgery.  

Everyone was a little surprised that she had any. She’s not a vain person.  Apparently, her husband has to remind her to comb her hair before an interview instead of after.  

So Greta getting plastic surgery was news.  

I scrutinized her carefully.  I looked at the "before" and "after" photos.  

It’s hard to see what she’s had done.  

It’s harder still to tell why she’s had work done

She is not prettier or more beautiful.  (I am not saying she’s not pretty. I’m saying she’s not prettier!) 

And then it occurred to me that we we might be looking at a new motive for plastic surgery

Perhaps Greta wanted to make herself look more formidable.  

And this would make her plastic surgery adaptive in an whole new way. 

Beauty is one thing.  But when everyone on camera plays this card, well, aren’t there other opportunities?  Formidable makes lots of sense for someone who scrutinizes people and topics for a living.  It makes sense for people who want credibility in the newsroom.  

And why stop there?  Could we be on the verge of a world in which we go under the knife to look more intelligent, more sensitive, more caring, more thoughtful, or more honorable.  To see this from an evolutionary point of view, every "species" is working the same angle. Everyone is being more beautiful…as if this were the only way to be more attractive.  

Greta is mum on the topic.  See the People story (below).  I may have missed it, but I don’t see her declaring herself explicitly one way or another.  And of course someone trained as a lawyer would play it just this way.  Let the world assume what it will.  And keep the truth to yourself.

Or maybe Greta did do it for the beauty.  We are still in possession of a possibility.  

References

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. Indiana University Press.  

Smolowe, Jill. 2002. “Nipped, Tucked and Talking.” People. February 18.  here. 

Virginia Postrel was kind enough to interview me for Enterpreneur Magazine.  

You can find an edited version of the interview at Enterpreneur.com here.

For the full version of the interview in which you will find me chatty and discursive.  

 

Virginia Postrel: What do you mean by “culture”?

Grant McCracken: I was just watching the movie I Love You, Man.  It’s a funny movie, and it’s a wonderfully observed piece of anthropology.  The Paul Rudd character doesn’t understand how to act like a “guy.”  Somehow this knowledge has escaped him.  That’s what culture is: the meanings and rules with which we understand and act in the world. 

This makes culture sound amorphous and absurdly abstract, I know.  But let’s put this another way.  Culture is the very knowledge and scripts we will someday build into robots to make them socially sentient creatures.  At the moment, we’re still teaching them to climb stairs. The more difficult task is to read social situations.  Unless we’re autistic, most of us do this effortlessly and in real time.  That’s because we have this knowledge “built in.”  Notice what it will take to build it into robots.  This is programming, exact, finite, and incredibly specific programming.  Nothing amorphous or abstract about it. 

VP: What’s the biggest mistake business people make when they think about the intersection of culture and commerce?

GM: Business people think that because they can’t see it, culture doesn’t exist.  They suppose that the moment of sale consists of a rational decision, a calculation of interest, a pursuit of benefit.  But every purchase is shaped by meanings and rules.  Whether a new product finds a place in the market depends on whether and how it squares with the meanings in our heads.  Think of all the innovations that were technically brilliant but failed because the consumer “couldn’t really get a handle on them.”  This is another way of saying that the innovation was not designed or positioned in a way that made it consistent with the culture in our heads.

VP: What can a small startup without the resources to have a dedicated “chief culture officer” do to make sure it pays attention to the relevant cultural trends?

GM: Start ups have access to lots of culture knowledge.  No need to hire a guru or a cool hunter.  They can boot strap this knowledge.  (They probably do need to read Chief Culture Officer.  I can’t urge this strongly enough.  But, hey, it’s my start up.)  The thing is to formalize all that cultural knowledge we have in our heads.  Right now it’s tacit knowledge.  Like how to be a guy.  Or things we know about culture, about television, cocktail culture, the local food movement, Burning Man.  We have to get it out of our heads onto the table.  And then we have to tag the changes we see happening.  Then we need to build a big board in order to track the changes that matter to us and we have to start making estimates about when they will reach our markets.  For the culture knowledge we don’t know, the trick is to start combing media more systematically.  In Chief Culture Officer, I talk about an investment firm in NYC that keeps track of culture by having 5 people read 300 magazines.  We don’t need to hire a cool hunter or a guru to learn about culture.  We just have to pay attention. 

GM: I think Alan Moore put his finger on the problem here in Crossing the Chasm.  In the early days, tech start ups are selling to people who are savvy enough to figure out the value proposition and make the product work.  Eventually, however, we are speaking to much larger audiences and this means talking to people who don’t get tech.  Now we have to build not from what’s technically possible.  Now we have to build to what fits in the world of the consumer.  Consumers are no longer coming to us.  We must go to them.  We have to cease being an engineer for a moment and become an anthropologist.  We must find out who the consumer is, how he lives, and what will make the product make sense to him.  In a perfect world, we build a product that understands the consumer so perfectly, he or she doesn’t even need to read the manual.  We all remember our first experience with the iPhone.  It was as if the iPhone understood us so completely, it was teaching us how to use it.  This is cultural knowledge in action.

VP: Could you give us an example of a startup that beat the big guys by understanding culture?

GM: The world of carbonated soft drinks is filled with examples of start ups that managed to spot the next trend and steal a march on the big guys: Snapple, Red Bull, Vitamin Water, Odwalla, and so on.  These startups spotted the trend and rode it to glory.  They get in early and ended up owning the market.  In the book, I try to show how Snapple accomplished this miracle.  The rewards here at breathtaking.  Snapple sold to Quaker for $1.7 billion.

VP: People often say, “You can’t teach taste.” At least when it comes to business, you disagree. Why?

GM: Culture is a body of knowledge like any other body of knowledge.  Saying we “can’t teach taste” is like saying we can’t teach finance, operations, or human relations.  Of course, we can.  But of course we have lots of people in business who have a vested interest in making it voodoo.   This is the way gurus, cool hunters, and various agencies keep themselves in business.  It’s time to get culture out of the black box.  I don’t say we don’t need gurus or agencies.  For certain purposes, they can create exceptional value.  I do say that they should not be allowed to make themselves sole source for what we know about culture.  In the run up of 1990s, serial startups found that the guy who was CFO for the last startup was now CMO for the next one.  The C-Suite is filled with fast learners, with mobile learners.  We need to get culture into this mix. 

VP: A.G. Lafley is one of the heroes of Chief Culture Officer. What can entrepreneurs learn from him?

GM: He’s the guy who helped teach P&G, that great temple of marketing, that it had much more to learn about being consumer focused.  In Game-Changers, Lafley insists that the marketer must dolly back from narrow utilities to see the larger social and cultural context, to see the consumer in all of his or her complexity.  This is the corporation making sure that the product services is “not about us,” not about what the engineers can build, not about what the marketer’s can sell, not about what the corporation has traditionally done.  It’s about who the consumer is and how he or she lives.   It’s about that software in his or her heads. 

VP: What’s wrong with “cool hunting”?

GM: Cool hunting is heat sensitive.  Cool hunters only care about the latest stuff, the fads and fashion.  But culture is vastly more than this.  It is deep cultural traditions.  These traditions change, but they do so slowly.  And when they change, they do not show on the cool hunter’s radar.  Hard to know how to quantify this, but my guess is that fads and fashions make up only 20% of culture.  Slow culture is all the rest.  What kind of professional ignores 80% of his or her domain?

VP: You’re a creative, divergent thinker, yet you seek to avoid what Claude Levi-Strauss called “wild thought.” How do you balance creativity and structure, and what would you advise entrepreneurs about striking that balance?

GM: I’m Canadian, a notoriously tidy people, the Swiss of North America.  But I am prepared to go where ideas take me.  I have this from my parents and from my education at the University of Chicago.  (The latter looks a little like Lafley’s P&G.  It accepts that the exercise is “not about us,” but about the ideas.  You adapt as you must to honor them.)  I think this makes me like most entrepreneurs who know that good things happen only when wild creativity is routinized and systematized.  Entrepreneurs have range!  They are there when the big ideas happen, driving people “outside the box.”  They then find a way to rebuild the box.  They then find a way to make something actually come out of the box.  Then they find a way to put that something out in to the market where it turns into ROI.  Phenomenal!  They are very smart and very determined.  But they are also masters of many cultures. 

VP: You introduce the idea of the “lunch list” as a way to stay in touch with culture. What is it, and how would it apply to the owner of a small startup?

GM: No one can keep track of contemporary culture but there are people who really understand individual pieces of it.  The CCO solution?  Take these people to lunch.  (Or otherwise engage them.)  My editor at Basic Books, Tim Sullivan, is a great guy to take to lunch.  He will give you the world of emerging ideas. He will let you his astounding powers of pattern recognition.  Chefs, journalists, politicians, CMOs, diplomats, all can give us a glimpse of the forces shaping the world.

VP: You talk about “fast culture” and “slow culture.” What do you mean, and how do their implications for business differ?

GM: Fast culture is great churn of our culture at any given time.  Some of the fads will cool into fashion, some of the fashions will cool into trends, and some of the trends will actually stay on to become culture.  But most fad, fashion and trend just keeps going, out of our world, eventually out of memory.  As I was saying above, it is fast culture that preoccupies us most. 

But there is also “slow culture,” and these are the long standing traditions that are part of our bed rock.  These get some attention from the academics.  The historians have warmed to the idea of culture over the last 30 years especially and this has results in some very useful work.  I am just reading a book called Hotel: An American History by Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, a wonderfully interesting look at the hospitality industry as it has shaped and been shaped by the American culture.  We need to know about fast culture, but this is like taking a major leaguers’ stats for the season and not the career.  We need to know about slow culture too.

VP: Why would Chris Rock make a good chief culture officer?

GM: Mr. Rock knows about African American culture and he knows about non African American culture, and knows how to pass back and forth between them.  This makes him a cultural entrepreneur.  We might say he’s in the shipping business. Anyone who knows two pieces of our culture is well on his or her way to mastering the larger whole.  It’s a lot like language learning.  The second language is always the toughest.  The third and fourth come more easily. 

VP: How can social media tools help small businesses keep in touch with culture?

GM: Twitter and Facebook are great ways to listen in on the conversation and to engage in it.  I recently did an interview with Bud Caddell at Undercurrent and I liked his idea that you have to keep provoking the world with comments, suggestions, and experiments.  The reactions will give us a sense, a kind of GPS signal, of where we are, of what’s happening “out there.”

VP: Does being Canadian give you an advantage as an anthropologist?

GM: An American journalist asked Martin Short why it was so many American comedians were Canadians by birth.  Shore said, “Oh, that’s because you grew up watching TV.  I grew up watching American TV.”  My sister and I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons.  We enjoyed them immensely, but there was always a small sense that we were watching something from another world.  Now that we are a diverse society everyone has access to a difference of this kind.  As a culture we are so decentered that everyone has an exceptional point of view. 

VP: How much TV do you watch every week?

GM: I watch the national average, plus I have friends who are not as diligent as they should be, so I watch their hours too.  As a civic gesture.  TV is a wonderful listening device for our culture.  The networks and cable run out a constant series of experiments (aka, new shows) and these shows are so expensive that choice are made with great care.  Which is another way of saying the experiments are very carefully crafted.  Then the TV view audience votes with their viewership and we see, hey presto, America likes Modern Marriage and it doesn’t like the show that comes after it on ABC, Cougar Town.  It’s not impossible to draw cultural conclusions from this event. 

VP: What do you make of Lady Gaga?

GM: Lady Gaga burns brightly at the moment.  She has crafted herself in the tradition of David Bowie and Madonna, changing dramatically, vividly, and often.Indeed, Lady Gaga ups the transformational cycle.  Bowie changed several times.  Madonna changed many times. Lady Gaga appears to change with every performance.  So we can take her as a measure of the speed at which we change.  But she is also a fad struggling to stay on as a fashion and then a trend and then a fixture in our culture.  Bowie and Madonna made the cut.  Chances are she will not.  But I hope I’m wrong.  She is a vivid, interesting presence.  (The real mystery here is why the music is so utterly ordinary.  Bowie and Madona were transformational here too.)

VP: You ran a “CCO boot camp.” Who came and what did they do? Do you have plans for more?

GM: We had a great mix, people from the strategy world, the C-suite, entertainment industry, the military, designers, senior managers, grad students, a real range.   In the morning, we reviewed 6 parts of American culture.  In the afternoon, we looked at how to monitor and manage culture for the corporation.  It was amazing fun.  I am now planning to do one for a gigantic corporation.  I now have a poll on my website to see where people want the next one held.  At the moment, Boston is winning. 

Books

Brooks, David. 2001. Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Simon & Schuster.  

Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber.

Docker, John. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. Cambridge. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fitzgerald, Frances. 1986. Cities on a Hill, A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures. Simon and Schuster.  

Florida, Richard. 2003. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books.  

Fox, Kate. 2008. Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.  

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor.  

Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Revised. NYU Press.  

Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Riverhead Books.  

Kamp, David. 2006. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. Broadway.  

Katz, Donald R. 1993. Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America. Perennial.  

Klein, Richard. 1993. Cigarettes Are Sublime. Duke University Press.  

Lamont, Michele. 1992. Money, Morals and Manners: the culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Long, Elizabeth. 1985. The American Dream and the Popular Novel. Routledge Kegan & Paul.  

Martin, Roger.  2007. The Opposable Mind.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press

Postrel, Virginia. 1998. The Future and Its Enemies: The growing conflict over creativity, enterprise and progress. New York: The Free Press.

Shirky, Clay. 2009. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Reprint. Penguin.

Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Wesleyan.  

Warner, W. Lloyd, J. O. Low, Paul S. Lunt, and Leo Srole. 1963. Yankee City. Yale University Press.  

Waters, Mary C. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. University of California Press.  

Weinberger, David. 2003. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Basic Books.  

Wolfe, Tom. 2001. A Man in Full. Dial Press Trade Paperback.  

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1993. The Fine Line. University Of Chicago Press.  

When did gray become the color of fast and powerful

Last night walking in Atlanta I saw three muscle cars that were gray.  Actually, I think one was a Jaguar doing an impersonation of a muscle car.  Low, sleek and noisy.  

So two muscles and a Jag.  

I noticed because of the ad now circulating that shows a gray Mustang prowling urban streets.

It’s an effective piece of advertising.  (The Ford triumph continues.)  I found myself thinking,” this isn’t selling Mustangs, it’s selling grey Mustangs.”  Dealers are going to be swamped by requests for “the grey one” and they will have to talk buyers into a red or a green.  Good luck.  This ad makes gray the necessary color.  

But I had it wrong.  This was a case of life imitating art.  Team Detroit was drawing from existing practice, not creating it. 

Which raises the question: when did gaey become the color of fast and powerful?  The follow up question: why?  What is it about gray that makes it the necessarily choice.  What is there in the cultural significance of gray (past and present) that makes it the compelling choice?  

Start your engines.  This is an official Minerva contest.  Usual terms apply.  Fewer than 1000 words, crisp, high concept, well written. Guessing, especially really good guessing, is perfectly ok.  But if you actually know something about car culture and color culture, please do share.  

If you are on the creative team of the Mustang ad, I would like to put you on the judging panel. Would Team Detroit’s Toby Barlow, Eric McClellan, Adam Hull, Nick Flora, Ron Schlessinger, Arty Tan and/or Bob Rashid, please contact me at grant27ATgmail.com.

More details

The sound track comes from Band of Skulls.  Please tell us what this music does for the ad. 

The production players

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Client: Ford Mustang

Title: _PG

Length: 60-seconds

Airdate: 4/28 TV; 4/30 cinemas



Agency: Team Detroit, Inc.

EVP, Chief Creative Officer: Toby Barlow

EVP, Group Creative Director: Eric McClellan

Creatives: Adam Hull, Nick Flora, Ron Schlessinger, Arty Tan

Producer: Bob Rashid



Production Company: Stardust / Santa Monica, CA

Director: Jake Banks

Executive Producer: Paul Abatemarco

Head of Production: Josh Libitsky

Line Producer: Paul Ure

Director of Photography: Max Malkin



Design & Animation Company: Stardust / Santa Monica, CA

Post / Editorial Producer: Alex More

Designers: Neil Tsai, Gretchen Nash, Bill Bak, Ling Feng, Juliette Park, Angela Ko

Compositors: Alan Latteri, Chris Howard

Animators: Jason Lowe, Giancarlo Rondani, Joseph Andrade, Kevin Ta, James Yi



Type/Element shoot: Stokes-Kohne Associates Inc.



Editorial Company: Cut + Run

Editor: Frank Effron

Post / Editorial Producer: Alex More



Telecine: New Hat

Colorist: Beau Leon



Music Search Company: Agoraphone

Music Supervisor: Dawn Sutter-Madell & Jasmine Flott

Song: Band of Skulls "Light Of The Morning"



Sound Design & Mix: 740 Sound Design

Executive Producer: Scott Ganary

Sound Designer : Andrew Tracy

Sound Designer : Eddie Kim

Mixer : Mike Franklin



Vehicle Drivers: Brent Fletcher, Kelly Hine

References

Wilkening, Matthew.  2010.  2011 Ford Mustang Commercial – What’s that song?  AOL Radio Blog.  May 10.  here.

See the ad here.

Low Fidelity culture

A couple of days ago, Addy Dugdale observed a paradox:

One of the things that excites people most about technology is that it is seen as a gateway to the future. So how does that explain the recent glut of lo-fi adverts, software, and user interfaces that seem to be being spewed out by so-called hi-tech companies?

Addy offers into evidence a Rube Goldberg ad from Google Chrome.  Very low fi indeed.   It show tests begin performed on the speed of Chrome versus the speed of sound, lightening, and a potato being fired from a gun.  The lab looks like a mechanic’s garage in the 1950s. It is manifestly the world of an enthusiastic amateur pretty much flying by the seat of her pants.  It’s all very duct tape and “there, that should hold it.”  This is the kind of lab where you really only feel  comfortable in full body armor. 

Addy’s right.  The paradox is palpable.  On the one hand, we have digital perfection, a search engine that returns millions of results with great speed and precision.  On the other hand, we have a world of improv and accident where anything can happen and usually does. 

We have seen this paradox before.  Sara Winge pointed out a couple of years ago that many of her friends who work in the digital world spend some of their spare time works on projects by hand.  There is additional evidence everywhere, including magazines like Craft and now a book from Make editor Mark Frauenfelder called Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World.

Addy gives us this useful glimpse of another cultural producer of this Lo-Fi effect for which I’m grateful.  (I hadn’t seen it before.)

The high priest of lo-tech sensibility is, without doubt, Michel Gondry, whose devotion to the handmade and hand-drawn knows no bounds–don’t forget, he directed a episode of Flight of the Conchords, starring the ultimate amateurs, Bret and Jermaine. Gael Garcia Bernal’s character Stephane in The Science of Sleep, whose set design was part Rube, part craftsy, says this: "I think people empathize with what I do, because it comes from here [my heart]." Gondry’s 2008 movie Be Kind Rewind explores the whole hand-made theme. A viral for the Tomorrow Awards, a competition that celebrates technological excellence in advertising is pure Gondry.

I think there are three drivers of this paradox. 

The first is a simple nostalgia.  That 50s laboratory was a nightmare of inefficiency.  Indeed, in the 1950s nothing worked especially well.   The mechanical world was shot through with imperfection and accident.  Thanks to several factors, now it works pretty well.  And because human beings are in our very souls contrary, ungrateful creatures, we now hanker after the world we have lost. 

The second is a wish for a kind of groundedness.  As the world got digitized, the grammar of everything was now beautiful organized and streaming 1s and 0s.  There almost no moving parts on my iPad.  It operates with silent precision.  So there is something kind of wonderful about tech with seams, levers, nice, big dials and moving parts. 

Digital products are silent and slightly accusatory.  They give nothing away about their internal operation, because frankly, they seem to say, you wouldn’t understand it anyhow.  Naturally, we love the Italian, nearly operatic, full disclosure of Lo-fidelity tech that discloses not just what it does but how it does it.  This is candor we can believe in.

Now that we can buy a video camera capable of very high fidelity, we like the imperfections of the Fisher-Price PXL2000, aka PixelVision, aka  KiddieCorder.  Actually, something in us requires the imperfections of the PixelVision.  (And that’s why it was one of the cult objects of the 1990s.)  Now that we can capture a perfect image, the PixelVision seems to promise a larger, poetic truth.  In a world of post mechanical perfection, we love the the actual, the manual and the mechanical.  It grounds us.  It lets us back in.  Most important, it flatters us.  (It appears to care what we think, and for this small concession we are deeply grateful.)

Third, and here we must reverse fields entirely, we love the Lo-Fi aesthetic because it is a pretty good symbol of what the world is now.  The new tech world may be  rational, exact, dependable, reproducible.  But the cultural effects are entirely opposite.  They profuse, individual, unpredictable and all a great big muddle.  Using the new technologies our culture is decentralized, distributed and busted out all over.  It proceeds with scant regard for editorial direction and elite control.  We are in the phrase created by Errol Morris, now Cheap, fast and out of control.  We have many players and an immense number of plays.  Indeed, Morris’ title seem to take on unintended significance precisely because it feel like it captured a world where everything was happening all at once. 

In this world it is as if we all occupy our own little laboratories.  We have the knowledge and the means of production that would only have to come to us if we has signed up as full time film makers, journalists, academics.  And now that we live outside these institutions, we are very largely flying by the seat of our pants.  I spend a good deal of time tapping the big dial of laboratory instruments, wondering if this reading, so interesting, is reliable.  I am, as we all are, Victorians authorized to produce new kinds of culture by the conviction that, “hey, if you us, who, if not now, when?” 

This aspect of the Lo-Fi aesthetic isn’t nostalgic or compensatory.  This aspect is tapped into what our culture is now. We have the feeling that at least metaphorically our future is going to look very like this past.  

References

Dugdale, Addy.  2010.  Lo-Fi Design is Conquering the World of Tech.  Fast Company.  June 10. here.

Frauenfelder, Mark.  2010.  Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World.  New York: Portfolio. 

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  The Artisanal Trend and 10 Things that Define it.  This Blog.  November 6.  here.

Listen to this

The Wire was a drama that ran on HBO for 50 episodes over 5 seasons, 2002 – 2008. 

What follows is from the opening moments of the first episode of the 4th season. 

A young assassin goes in a hardware store.  She is carrying the nail gun with which she shuts up the abandoned homes in which she leaves her victims. 

She is approached immediately by a salesman, a middle aged, white guy who lays on the sales pitch.  He wants the young assassin to buy the top of the line “Cadillac” nail gun.  It’s costs $650 so he’s pitching  hard.

Naturally, he has no idea is talking to a woman who managed to kill (and entomb) 5 people last week alone.  He thinks he is talking to a neighborhood contractor.

The conversation runs invisibly on two rails, the assumptions of the salesmen and the assassin working side by side.

The salesman calls his nail gun “powder driven.”

“Power driven?” the assassin asks.

“No, powder driven,” the salesman replies.

“Like gun powder.” she says.

He says, “The DX460 is fully automatic with a 27 calibre charge.  Wood, concrete, steel, she’ll throw a fastener into anything and for my money she handles recoil better than the Simpson or the P3500.”

She says, “27 calibre, huh.”

He says, “It’s not large ballistically but it’s enough.  Anything more than that and they would add to the recoil.”

It turns out the nail gun is metaphorically a lot like a real gun.  Or guys being guys, they just can’t resist making the comparison as an act of self aggrandizement. 

But all this gun-ish talk shakes something lose in the assassin.

She says, “I seen a tiny ass 22 drop a nigger plenty of days, man.  […]  Big joints, though.  Big joints just break the bones and you say ‘fuck it.’”  She laughs.

No more metaphor.  The concert is over.  The salesman sees he’s not talking to a contractor.  He’s speechless.  Someone has called his metaphor and raised it.  This is real guns, real violence, a real gangster.

The assassin goes out to the parking lot where her partner in crime is waiting in an SUV.  He asks if the new gun will hold a charge better, and she says,

“Fuck the charge.  This here is a gun powder activated, 27 calibre, full auto, no kick back, never through mayhem, man.  This shit is tight.” 

Her partner laughs and she says,

“Fuck nailing boards.  We could kill a couple of mother fuckers with this shit right here.”   Geez, we can dump the metaphor.  The nail gun isn’t like a gun.  It is a gun.  

Perfect.  Has anything this good appeared on TV before or since?  Now that you have your new iPad, load it up with a little David Simon genius.

The Good Guys

The Good Guys, the new cop comedy from Fox, is showing in my Seattle hotel room as I write this.  A month ago I argued that this show has no place in contemporary culture and therefore no hope of success.  (My assumption, unless you are have made contact with culture, your chances of making contact with commerce are remote.)  I am sorry to say that The Good Guys is as predictable and uninteresting as predicted

Dan Stark (Bradley Whitford) is a big dope, cheap, fast and out of control, a walking set of appetites, politically incorrect and proud of it, inclined to play loose and fast with the rules.  Jack Bailey (Colin Hanks) plays by the book and spends a good deal of time rolling his eyes and suppressing the temptation to tell Dan Stark to join the 21st century.  Dude!  This version of the buddy pic has been with at least since 1987 and the release of Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson as the guy who is out of control and Danny Glover his law and order loving partner. 

There are ways out of this problem.  Producers could have given the Dan Stark role to Colin Hanks.  That would have been a little counter expectational.  Better, Dan Stark could have been both cheap, fast, and out of control, and fastidious about procedure.  In the first case, the actor plays against type.  In the second, the character does. 

The old argument is that no one will bind with the show or indeed follow it unless the thing runs on the rails of established expectation.  Follow genre.  Play to type.  But these days this is the path to an early cancelation.  How is it someone at Fox failed to get the memo?  Present audiences are good enough at TV that they can watch without rails, without genre, without type.  

References

McCracken, Grant.  2010.  Calling all CCOs: how good is your gut?  This Blog. May 13. here.  

Brands behaving badly: the case for messiness

By this time, all the world is objecting to the proposal from G.M. to dump "Chevy" and hew to "Chevrolet."  it’s such a manifestly bad idea, it might actually be calculated to provoke the great linguistic love fest soon to follow.

But we can take issue not just with the what of the decision but the why.  Richard Chang of the Times gives us the memo from inside G.M.  It comes from the desk of Alan Batey, vice president for Chevrolet sales and service, and Jim Campbell, the G.M. division’s vice president for marketing.

“When you look at the most recognized brands throughout the world, such as Coke or Apple or instance, one of the things they all focus on is the consistency of their branding,” the memo said. “Why is this consistency so important? The more consistent a brand becomes, the more prominent and recognizable it is with the consumer.”

I beg to differ.  Brands did once labor to present the same face in every medium and all markets.  In the second half of the 20th century, the world of marketing and especially design was all about consistency.  This is what the corporation paid us for: to get their semiotic ducks in a row.

That was the 20th century.  Brands now want to be many things to many people.  They are called upon to adapt in real time.  Some overarching supervision is called for.  But we want the brand to give off a certain vitality, vivacity, charisma even.  And these things, as we know, come more surely from complexity than consistency. 

Naturally, this makes the marketer’s job more difficult.  In the old days, once the choice was made, due diligence was all about policing the departures that were sure to spring up in every corner of the corporation.  Now, it’s managing a bundle of sometimes discordant meanings, expressed with a variety of various visuals (and audibles). 

"Chevy" is a worthy part of this bundle.  Nay, it has deep roots in American culture.  This makes it a meaning most meaning managers would kill for.  

References

Chang, Richard.  2010.  Saving Chevrolet means sending "Chevy" to dump. June 10.  here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Daniel Rosenblatt.

JJ Abrams versus Joss Whedon, your CCO assignment

Here’s your assignment.

JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon, compare and contrast.

One way to study our culture is to compare the roughly comparable.  Nothing comes of the wildly different.  It’s all contrast, no shades of grey.  

No, what we want is a common ground from which Instructive contrasts can then emerge.  

JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon are roughly comparable. Both were born in the middle 60s.  And in the world of popular culture, both were well born.  Abrams’ mother and father were TV producers. Whedon is a third generation TV writer.  Both have changed the face of television, Abrams with… well, now I’m doing your work for you.

What I want is a brief essay, no more than 1000 words.  Let’s stick to their TV work.  Point out the similarities between these two fellas, and then their differences.  Show what they mean to popular culture.  Compare Felicity and Buffy.  Or Lost and Dollhouse.  It’s up to you.  Tell us how their TV has changed our culture.

Keep it short, crisp, intelligent and illuminating.  The winner will receive the winged bird you see above.  I like to think of her as the Owl of Minerva from Greek mythology.  We have been searching for the right statuette for years now.  Ana Domb found this one in a museum catalog. (Thank you, Ana.) Officially, this is the Chief Culture Officer Award.  Unofficially, we will call her the Minerva. 

The Minerva is really heavy.  (I have held an Oscar and I’d say they are about the same weight. It was Julie Christie’s Oscar if you must know.)  It will look good on your desk or bookcase.  When friends and strangers say, "what’s that?"  You can say, ever so distractedly, "Oh, that’s my Minerva.  I won it for something I wrote."  There will be a small pause as your friend recalculates your standing in the world and considers now whether reverence should perhaps replace the impatience with which they now generally regard you. 

Our last contest, Betty White versus Karen Black, has a winner.  It’s Tim Sullivan.  See his excellent answer below.  Congratulations, Tim.

References

McCracken, Grant.  2010.  Betty White versus Karen Black, your CCO assignment.  This Blog.  May 11.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Available on Amazon here.  (Citing this book in your essay will curry no favor with the judges.  But really, if you haven’t bought a copy, please do so now.)

Previous Minerva winners (now immortal)

Juri Saar

Brent Shelkey

Tim Sullivan

Reiko Waisglass

Tim Sullivan’s answer to the Betty While versus Karen Black assignment

Betty White v. Karen Black

This is a story of generations and media and sex, and the nostalgic value we place on them.

White: born 1922, lived through the Depression—actually arrived in California because of it, and started her career in radio in 1939, followed by TV in the 40s.
Black: born 1939, on the verge of being a Boomer. Trained in theater in college, moved to off-Broadway productions, and then to movies.

White: Since the ‘50s—with her show Life with Elizabeth—she’s had a devilish glint in her eye. She’s played against type: the pretty, sweet, slightly befuddled “girl” who secretly knew exactly what’s going on.
Black: Her first big hit is Easy Rider, 1969, a generational touchstone, cementing her place as a Boomer touchstone. In Five Easy Pieces, she’s plays the easy-to-dupe and pregnant girlfriend—no glint in her eye there. Myrtle Wilson, a variation on a theme, follows in The Great Gatsby.

White: Her medium is TV, in our living rooms every day, especially since her hit shows went into syndication. Some of us ate snacks with her after school or after work. Comforting, familiar.
Black: Lives on the Silver Screen. We visit her once in a while, and we usually don’t much like her—even when she’s determined and focused. By the late 70s and beyond, she had moved on to schlocky sci-fi and horror combined with art house pics.

White: Comedy (i.e., hard work) made to look easy. Sweet, smart, and sexy in our living rooms every day.
Black: Drama that feels hard, a little overwrought, spilling over into a genre that gets no respect.

White: She persists, she’s controlled her own destiny. In fact, with Life with Elizabeth, she was the first woman to have complete creative control over her own show,
Black: The characters she’s best known for were not people we would want to spend time with. Her affect is forced and demanding.

White: Another blow to Christopher Hitchens, who told us, infamously, in the pages of Vanity Fair “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” The reaction to that article, and the respect that female comedians have garnered before and since, culminate in the current celebration of Betty as a model for the current crop of successful women.
Black: Celebrated by the fanboy horror community, but b-grade horror flicks have little chance of breaking out into the mainstream. She’s painted herself into a corner. We can’t be nostalgic for her because her early career represents something about relationships between the sexes that we now eschew: the testosterone driven man chewing the scenery while Black’s character tries to create space for herself. She’s pre-Title IX.

Looking forward: A continued move away from and against the Boomers, as we as a society look for icons who create a foundation for Boomers, X, and Y alike through shared media.

Kill Screen, a new resource for the CCO

This is promising. 

Those of us who study culture watch for new windows.  Kill Screen may be one of these.

So when I read this paragraph, I reached for my wallet and signed up immediately.

The idea for Kill Screen was born while Jamin Brophy-Warren  was hanging out with pal and fellow Pitchfork writer Chris Dahlen in March 2009 at the Gamers Developing Conference in San Francisco.  The two began commiserating over the lack of a Tom Wolfe or Chuck Klosterman of video game writing. “Sure there were tons of bloggers dedicated to the subject,” Jamin says, “But there wasn’t anything high-end and intellectual publication on gaming. So we said, let’s do this.”

The gaming world is a kind of laboratory in which cultural definitions of self and world are being reworked, cultural rules and tolerances tested and refined.  Actually, laboratory might not the wrong metaphor.  What makes the gaming world so exciting is that it operates more like a skunk works, less academic deliberation and more creativity in real time.  In either case, if Kill Screen lives up to its objective, it will be necessary reading for the CCO.  

Reference

Boyd Myers, Courtney.  2010.  Kill Screen Magazine: what does it mean to play games.  PSFK. June 4. here.

Edery, David, and Ethan Mollick. 2008. Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business. FT Press.  

To subscribe to Kill Screen, go here.  

Acknowledgements

Thanks for PSFK for the head’s up on Kill Screen Magazine.  

What Virgin can learn from Apple (and three other thoughts on a plane)

I was trying to charge my phone on my Virgin Atlantic flight home from London and one of the attendants descended on me to insist that I cease and desist.  I tried to explain that a cell phone was essential to meeting up with one’s car service. She didn’t care.

I thought to myself, "this is not what Apple would have done."  Apple had the very clever idea of turning a moment of customer unhappiness into an exercise in the Apple way.  So we enter the Apple store with our wounded iPhone braced for an unpleasant, accusatory, uncooperative engagement with the "support" staff, and lo and behold, the Apple people actually seem to want to help, to shoulder more than their share of the responsibility to put things right, and then to send us on our way with a song in our heart.  Steve Jobs has found a way to colonize and convert the misery inflected on us by product malfunction.  So simple, so smart, and actually not very difficult.

Virgin Atlantic has not got the news.  They have an unreasonable policy.  (The adapter I was not allowed to use to charge my iPhone was perfectly ok to run my ThinkPad.)  This policy has been seized upon by a staff member as an opportunity to play "big nurse."  (How frustrating for a corporation when a member of the corporation uses their power for personal purposes in this way.)  And when I pled my case, she just got worse.  And Virgin looked still more heartless and unreasonable.

You kill yourself to build a brand, and this happens.  Natalie could have found a way to give me an extra 5 minutes of charge.  "Our little secret" and "this is an exception I make only for you" would have augmented the brand wonderfully.  But no.  Natalie was triumphant. And damn the brand.

Everything else about the VA experience, I have to say, was really pretty well done.  I recommend it.  (Just be careful to avoid you know who.)  

TWO

BP has now worked it’s way through the Kubler Ross stages of grief and bows before it’s fate.  There is only one way out.  I wish I had thought of it, but I must give credit to Gregg Fraley who over drinks after the London Bootcamp noted that BP needed to make itself the absolute master of ecological calamities, the company to whom the rest of the world turns when something like this goes wrong, the go-to expert from this point forward.  Otherwise, they are utterly the villain of the piece and the brand is a write off.  (See Greg’s blog here.)

THREE

I found a piece in The Financial Times on luxury flourishing in certain markets.  That it should do so in China is perhaps not surprising.  In Shanghai a Rolls Royce Ghost costs a quarter of million dollars.  (A Phantom twice as much.)  All the better to send that status message.  But then we are accustomed to seeing classic competitive spending, status emulation, and conspicuous consumption of this kind, and indeed, we have ideas at the ready from Veblen, Simmel and Warner, to name a few.

But luxury is flourishing in other places (and in China, in other ways) and it would appear that these traditional consumer motives are being supplanted by new ones. And then the question is, gosh, really?  Is it possible that luxury purposes serves a new emotional purposes?  Is luxury becoming more private message than a public one?  And does this private message have something to do with defining and securing us in a world awash with change? It seemed to me that some of our collective thoughts on the new Burberry branding on behalf of its trench coat might point in this direction.  Just wonderin.  Do luxury brands have new power?  This is Virginia Postrel territory and defer to her thoughts on the matter (whatever they should prove to be!)

FOUR

I am reading Lodger Shakespeare by Charles Nicholl.  I am only 20 pages in but already I detect a rising admiration and envy.  How wonderful to have a very clear topic and narrow focus.  This is what we all want: an intellectual undertaking large enough to warrant attention and small enough to limit the facts known and task assigned.  What most of us get instead is a body of knowledge and responsibility that is shapeless, fluid, and episodically inscrutable. Lucky Charles.  He is made a mesmerizing job of it.  

References

Nicholls, Charles.  2010.  Lodger Shakespeare.  Available from Amazon here.