Author Archives: Grant

Mysteries of culture (exhibit 231)

This is my last day in Cologne.  I get on the plane and home in a couple of minutes. 

Two things are circulating in my head, pre-take-off.

First, after the conference yesterday, I went trooping off to see the Cologne cathedral with four Britons.  We decided to climb to the top of one of the towers, and it seemed to take for ever.  Or at least 20 minutes.

The way up the tower is a narrow stone passage.  But the final third of the passage is done in suspended metal stairway inside the tower.  I don’t think of myself as being afraid of heights, but half way up this stairway, lights of alarm began to flash in my head.

"You go ahead." I said and returned to the base of the metal stairway.  About 10 minutes, my new friends came back down.  Then one by one, they told stories about moments in their lives when they suffered a fear of heights.  

You don’t have to be an anthropologist to see what was happening here.  They were papering over my embarrassment.  They were coming to my psychic aid.  They were closing ranks.  I believe this is standard cultural form.  I wasn’t giving off embarrassment.  At least I don’t think I was.  So they were not responding to an emotional signal to me.  This is standard package stuff, I think, something you do when someone in the UK suffers a loss of face or standing.

I saw this kind of social solidarity last week in London.  People apologizing.  Lots of "after you, Alphonse."  Reams of self effacement.  As a Canadian I am pretty tolerant of this kind of thing.  Indeed, I produce quite a lot of it myself.  There are moments when I can tell my American friends just want to shout, "Got it!  You are a humble, unassuming man!  Can we take that as read, AND JUST MOVE ON!"  

This social support can take on an aggressive edge in the English case, almost as if people are policing one another.  It’s as if people are entertaining the fear that someone will jump the real or figurative cue, that someone will make a scramble for any of the capitals on hand.  They are in some sense watching one another for any sign of self aggrandisement. (At Russell Davies first Interesting event, one of the sponsors spoke a little too long, and someone in the audience shouted, "shut up and sit down.")  

Which raises a problem, anthropologically speaking?  With all this social scrutiny, how does an individual ever individuate.  How does anyone ever go against the grain?  How does anyone produce self advertisement or assertion?  How does anyone ever break ranks? 

This is a compelling question because the English are after all famous for cultural invention of the most spectacular kind.  There is (or was?) some mechanism that gave people a way out.  We know that the class system, in its most hierarchical moment, allowed high standing people out of the codes the bound other people.  (Have a look at the sumptuary legislation and you see that freedom from the rules comes at the top of the hierarchy as an act of exception.)  And in any case, again speaking anthropologically, there have to be some devices that allow people out.  (This is a question for Kate Fox and her wonderful Watching the English.  For some reason, there is no copy installed in my Cologne hotel room!)

Second, consider the movie showing in my hotel at the moment.  One Crazy Summer (1985) is on…in German. What an ethnographic treasure this is.  And somehow I missed it.  I don’t speak German but that doesn’t matter.  This is so well formed culturally, so true to genre, that I can understand every word.

One Crazy Summer is Hollywood trying to hollow out the core of the Animal House melon some 7 years after it’s arrival at the supermarket.   But that strikes me in this context that there is not a single character in this film who would not be a total night mare in ordinary English circumstances.  Yes, of course, they are inflated by the act of film making and by the Preppie cultural moment from which it springs, but every one of these characters is noisy and self asserting in a way the British would find intolerable.  Especially Bobcat Goldthwait, but not only him.  Each character, whatever his role or her dramatic responsibility, is  making what the English would call a complete "spectacle of themselves."  Ordinary American practice, that is to say, is a apparently a systematic affront to the English social scheme of things.  

I don’t really have a closer here.  And I do have 5 minutes to get down to the lobby and checkout.  But perhaps this wee post is a Valentine to cultural difference, even in a place (nationality) and at a time when this difference is supposed to be going away.  Which leaves mem with homework.  Somewhere over the Atlantic, I am going to have to decide who I am.  

You just don’t get it!

John Stuart Mill says this

…the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.  No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this mode; nor is it in the nature of human intellectual to become wise in any other manner.  (On Liberty)

"Oh, that’s no fun," I thought.  

Isn’t it more fun to go with our first inclination?  And stick to it.  Especially when people disagree.  When people don’t like our ideas, I have a suggestion.  Shout:

You just don’t get it!

And then shout at them until they do…get it.  Easy peazy, as the English say.

And that’s why I am thinking about this, I guess. I was in England for a week.  (The Boot camp in London, thanks to Mark Earls and an enthusiastic group attending, was a smash hit I am happy to say.)  I can’t help feeling there is a clear split between points of view.  

I was watching the Sky coverage of Israeli boarding of the flotilla. An interview of protesters in the street in London and some guy grabbed the camera to announce, "Sky has real problems and if you are watching this, you are probably a wanker."  There was something about the finality with which he said it that struck me.  He knew that Sky viewers "just didn’t get it."

A couple of years ago I was doing research with a guy in Germany.  He lived modestly but his sister was a big sneeze.  When she came to visit, she left her Mercedes park near his apartment, he was utterly surprised when it got well and thoroughly keyed.  There was something about his utter lack of surprise that struck me.  He knew his sister just didn’t get it.

Class warfare.  It’s a real deal here.  Part of me wants to go with my most natural ideological and emotional reactions.  But that’s not what we do.  Our job, and what a tedious job it is, is to see both sides of the picture.  We need to exhibit the mobility, the lability, of a Russian novelist.  

Like I need European inspiration.  American politics descended into "you just don’t get it" some time ago.  I can’t remember the last time I saw someone rub their chin and say, "hmm, I hadn’t thought of that.  That’s interesting."  God knows, I never say it.  I’m too busy shouting, "You just don’t get it."  

There are two possibilities here, anthropologically speaking.  

First, we have lost our Millian gift for a thoughtful examination of the issues.  We are in love with the theater of being totally right all the time.  We are addicted to emotional outrage.  We don’t care there are deeper issues.  When it comes to politics, we are all now divas.  Give us the big gesture.  Give us the sweeping condemnation.  Or leave us out of it.  Politics might once have been a game for sober souls.  Now its for emotional show offs.

Second, the cultural world has widened.  If we were to do a geographic mapping of the ideological space, we would discover that it has expanded.  So much so that it is now vastly larger than it was in the Mill’s England.  In this case, the outrage is entirely justified.  We live in a larger world, where the differences really are more different.  When the world of politics expanded, its tensility would not hold.  Ground opened up.  The consensus tore.  

Probably both are true.  And if they are both true, what then?  How do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Acknowledgements

To Katherine Bell for listening to an incoherent early statement of this argument.  

Silvia Lagnado: reluctant CCO

This just in:

Silvia Lagnado has been appointed the CMO at Bacardi.  

This is good news for those of us who care about corporations that care about culture.

Lagnado is the woman responsible for the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, the woman who found a way to make an ancient brand responsive to new ideas of beauty and body (as above).

I wrote her up in Chief Culture Officer.  I was grateful to have such a great case in point. And a Canadian no less.  I tried to get in touch to interview her.  Well, really, I just wanted to bask in her reflected glory for a moment.  

But no go.  I heard nothing back.

I figured it was just me.  Lots of people don’t write back.  (You know who you are.)  And then I heard from a friend who is a big sneeze in an institution that’s a big sneeze and he said that he too had reached out without effect.

If two data points are enough (for an anthropologist, they are of course one more than necessary), we might argue a pattern here.  A woman who had done something remarkable, nay, revolutionary, was refusing the effects, the outcomes of her new celebrity.  

So, I thought to myself, perhaps there is something retiring about this woman, perhaps she is the reluctant CCO.  Clearly not.  If she has signed up to be CMO at Bacardi, she is anything but reluctant.  

Let’s stay tuned for great things.  

References

Malykhina, Elena.  2010.  Bacadi Taps Unilever Vet as CMO.  Brandweek.  May 26th. here.

Flash marketing

What’s the hardest thing in the world to market?

Exactly.

Opera.  

It can be difficult, elitist, inaccessible, and as if this weren’t enough, it’s in a foreign language.

What do you do?

If you are the Opera Company of Philadelphia, about a month ago, this is what you do.

See the YouTube evidence here.  

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Craig Swanson for the head’s up.  

Handmade marketing

It’s turning out to be a long march.  Some 50 years ago, marketers made mass meanings…for mass markets…with mass media.  Nowadays, people are crafting brand meanings very much more particularly, making micro meanings…for micro markets…with micro media.  

At the extreme, this would mean making entirely custom meanings for very individual individuals with ever finer instruments of meaning manufacturer.  But we are some way off. And we may never reach that station.  

Still we get glimpses time to time of a world of absolute particularity.  Rob Walker and colleagues at Significant Objects give us objects to which meanings have been added in acts of handmade marketing.  It’s pretty astounding.  And of course, we know that some consumers are customizing like crazy.  

And look at this.  It’s a passage from a review of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. By Edmund de Waal. (Chatto & Windus in the UK, and as The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US.  Not till August.)

But Mr de Waal, a noted British potter and ceramicist, is intently concerned with “how objects get handled, used and handed on”. For him the netsuke, so small and captivating, were not enough as a mere signpost to a family history. He wanted “to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers—hard and tricky and Japanese—and where it has been… I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows.”

And, wonder of wonders, this is exactly what he achieves. We learn not only how the light fell from the windows, but how it reflected from the carpets and brocades that vied for attention with the netsuke nestled on green velvet in their black lacquer vitrine, and how it grew greyer when wartime privations in Vienna limited the cleaning of the glass. We learn about Viktor’s nervous tic of wiping his hand across his face as if rearranging it, and the way Emmy would spend 40 minutes having her curls pinned one by one to the brim of her hat for a day at the races, and at what times marching bands paraded past their windows and what epaulettes they wore, and how Charles carried his cane and arranged his paintings, and the mix of awe and sensuality that he must have felt as he picked up a netsuke and turned it over in his hands. From a hard and vast archival mass of journals, memoirs, newspaper clippings and art-history books, Mr de Waal has fashioned, stroke by minuscule stroke, a book as fresh with detail as if it had been written from life, and as full of beauty and whimsy as a netsuke from the hands of a master carver. Buy two copies of his book; keep one and give the other to your closest bookish friend.

Fantastic.  This is a kind of retroactive meaning making.  It take it it’s mostly surmise.  But what surmise!  By constructing the life of the object, and it’s life in the lives of people and other objects, he gives us a feeling for the nuance with which objects take on and give off their meanings.  Not to mention inspiration for those who wished to make marketing by hand. 

References

Anonymous.  2010.  Review of the Hare With Amber Eyes.  The Economist.  May 22.  here.

Significant Objects here.

Home

Glee as the new American Idol

Is Glee the new American Idol? Could be.  Certainly, Glee has momentum at the moment, and American Idol after a long and spectacular run in the first moments of its decline.  This image, from Google trends, shows Glee over taking American Idol some time in the last quarter…at least as a search term on line.

For the sake of argument, let’s say Glee is the new American Idol.  We may not be correct but we do at least have the opportunity for speculation that would not otherwise occur to us, and with this, we have the opportunity for an early warning.  (The Chief Culture Officer is prepared to be wrong much of the time in order to be "sighted" some of the time.)

Some things don’t seem to change at all.  Both shows seem devoted to the endless recitation of popular culture that is actually not all that popular anymore.  American Idol seems determined to ignore most of what has happened to music since the 1990s.  Glee the same.  (Readers of this blog will know that I take these to be one of several indicators that the "alternative" sensibility of the 1990s is now on the wane.  More evidence?  The decline of Parks and Recreation and Community and of NBC and the now departed Ben Silverman who used to work there.)

But there are some interesting differences.  American Idol devotes itself to intensely personal stories, as kids claw their way to the top.  It’s all terribly authentic. Some of the point of the exercise is to get to know these kids, to root for them, to watch a star being born.   Glee on the other hand is an exercise in flat out artifice.  We don’t get to know the "real" actors beneath the characters and there isn’t very much to get to know about the characters themselves.  This is musical theater, with much more emphasis on the music than the theater.  Indeed, the Glee plot is finally just a device for song and dance delivery. There is some dramatic continuity, some dramatic tension, but its exists for the purposes of cheap sentiment more than character development.  

Indeed, Glee appears designed for modularity.  We can break kids out for song and dance purposes and we can drop celebrities in.  I noticed today that show co-creator Ryan Murphy is suggesting that Susan Boyle appear as a lunch lady.  And with this the possibilities are endless.  Wayne Newton as the janitor can’t be far away.  Just so long as you are recognizable and can burst into song.  And this really is artifice.  Now every actor and character is just a place keeper, a pretext for the infusion of more music.

At their best, the 1990s were a time of unstinting authenticity.  I remember an editor of an alternative music magazine telling me that he couldn’t get photos of the bands he was covering because the bands insisted that a photo would demand that they "pose" and that was precisely the sort of falsehood their music was designed to refuse.  

Pose?   In the era of Glee, it’s "where would you like me?  And what expression should I wear?"  It’s not about authenticity.  It’s about being as emotionally compliant as necessary. Stardom is so precious a capital, we will pay anything for it.  We will endure TMZ coverage and much, much worse.  

By this reckoning, and it’s only a reckoning, American culture is now governed by the rules of musical theater, where kids live for the "one big break," and make any compromise necessary to get there.  This takes us several light years away from the sensibility that came out of the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s.  Chrystal Bowersox has something of this sensibility, and her victory, if that’s what happens on American Idol, may be last hurrah.  

References

Stack, Tim.  2010.  Susan Boyle to play McKinley High Lunch Lady.  Entertainment Weekly. May 19.  here.

CCO Boot Camp London: place in place

We have a place confirmed for the London CCO boot camp.  Thank you to Dare Digital for the willingness to host the event.

There are just 50 spaces in this bootcamp and we have sold 15 tickets, so please don’t leave it too late.  

More details and sign up at http://ccobootcamplondon.eventbrite.com

See you there!

Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp London confirmed

We’re on.  The Chief Culture Officer Boot Camp will be held May 28th in London.

Mark Earls has generously offered to act as London partner and copilot.  He will give us the benefit of his remarkable grasp of cultural matters, American, British and global.  I am a big admirer of Mark’s published work, and a couple of months ago I had a chance to work with him on an extended ethnographic project.  Our working relationship is well tested. 

A CCO boot camp runs the day from 10:00 to 4:00.  We are closing in on a venue, but we do not have a formal commitment.  I expect to have that soon. 

The fee will be £100.  This is an introductory rate.  (Act now!)   

The bad news: there are only 45 spaces.  (Book early, book often!)

Eventbrite is handling the tickets in its always capable way.  Click here for ticket details.  

The boot camp is based on the book Chief Culture Officer.  You do not need to have read the book to take this course. 

We will look to participants to bring their knowledge of contemporary culture.  In a couple of days, we will set up a Flickr site for images, articles and other data that people want to share.  

We did first CCO Boot Camp in New York City in February.  It went well.  (See comments from participants below)

Grant’s speaking style may be seen here at a recent PSFK event (thank you, Piers): http://www.psfk.com/2010/05/video-grant-mccracken-psfk-conference-new-york-2010.html

Here’s an outline of the day

The morning

This looks at American culture.  I open by reviewing the new structural properties of American culture: the rise of a dispersive culture, the occasional moments of convergence that still happen, fast culture, slow culture, the death of cool, the rise of the new, more active, consumer.

I then treat the following topics:

1. deindustrialization of food and the rise of the artisanal (what and why)

2. great room and the rebuilding of the Western home (what and why)

3. multiple selves (new rules for defining the self)

4. social networks (new rules for defining the group)

5. gift economy (new rules for capitalism)

6. global trends (cultural generalities we can make across cultures)

The afternoon

The afternoon I talk about the how of being a CCO.  (You may or may not want me to talk about the CCO concept.  If you prefer, I can just talk about American culture from an anthropological point of view.)

2. how to monitor  culture  (big boards, magazine, experts, early adopters, etc. how to build a grid)

3. how to think about culture (the basic building blocks from the social sciences)

4. how to act on and in culture (how to participate in culture, with advertising, social media, and cultural productions)

5. how to work with and in corporate culture (how to work with your C-suite colleagues)

Praise for the New York City CCO

Steve Nasi: The Bootcamp was a marvelous day. Amazing to be in a room full of so many folks yearning to bring a deeper kind of cultural thinking to their brands, agencies, corporations, endeavors.  And the content was a brilliant mix of deep thinking and accessible content, slow and fast culture and more.  It was inspirational to say the least. My poor wife had to deal with me going on about it at length. Despite this, she’s gunning to go next time.

Heather LeFevre: I really enjoyed the CCO bootcamp this weekend – was totally worth the trip from Amsterdam.  better than the typical planner conference where the speaker takes an hour to recap their book – I really appreciated that you gave us information that was NOT in the book that I felt I can use in my work.

Gail Brooks: Thank you so much for bringing us the CCO boot camp! An invaluable use of my time.

Rick Liebling: As an attendee at the NYC bootcamp, I’ll confirm the comments above. I got more actionable insights from that day than a week at work. Great material, presented in Grant’s uniquely engaging style. Well worth the price of admission.

Something out of nothing (cultural alchemy in a celebrity culture)

We can imagine the moment of creation.  (And I am only imagining it.)   Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel are out for a stroll one Sunday afternoon.  They drop into the Barnes and Noble on Santa Monica boulevard. 

Pack wanders past a stack of remaindered titles.  All of them, he notices, are celebrity autobiographies.  Now on sale for a couple of bucks. He picks one up and reads

“my gift is simply this: to be here with you as fully as the gods will allow, and just let you love me.” 

“Wow!” he thinks, “Funny!  Who wrote this?”  He turns the book over.  Kenny Loggins. 

Pack and Reyfel start digging through the stack.  It gets better and better. Here Suzanne Somers reads her poetry. Here Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds declare their love for one another.  Celebrities wearing their hearts on their sleeves.  So childlike and trusting, so naïve, so spectacularly vain. 

Once they stop chuckling, Pack and Reyfel think, “Hm, there’s something here.”  It takes awhile but eventually they develop a stage show called Celebrity Autobiography and eventually a Bravo TV special.  Coverage and awards pour in.  Pack and Reyfel are covered by NPR and Sunday Morning.  Relatively speaking, they have made themselves famous and wealthy.

Mark you.  The show consists only in this: passages from books from a remainder table. That’s it.  Not a word is invented.  Nothing is added.

There is one additional piece of cunning.  Pack and Reyfel conscript other stars to do the reading.  They have Florence Henderson read Pamela Anderson.  Brook Shields reads Elizabeth Taylor.  Ryan Reynolds reads Burt Reynolds. 

Sure, there are cultural questions here.  What makes this interesting?  Why are we prepared to ridicule stars we once revered.  (Perhaps this show acts like a forest fire removing some celebrities that others may flourish.)  Isn’t there something contradictory about using one star to make fun of another?  Surely, Brook Shields or Ryan Reynolds has done an interview that sounds very nearly as bad as “my gift is simply this…” 

Personally, I think we should resist the temptation to roll out a postmodernist cliché and insist that this is merely another case of a culture in which signs have been emptied of meaning and now pursue one another in endless circulation.  Baudrilliard’s argument, that is to say. In fact, there is something culturally rich, complicated and mechanically rich going on here.  These signs are not empty and they are not in flight.  If you don’t believe me, try reading just anything from popular culture on a Broadway stage, and see how much coverage you get from NPR or Sunday morning.Likewise, this is something more interesting than mere pastiche, intertextuality, or bricolage. (Thus did postmodernism beggar the social sciences, by rolling everything that happens in our culture into one simple minded notion.)  

But I am more interested in the economic question.  Pack and Reyfel found a way to invent culture out of culture, to extract value rich from value poor.  With no investment beyond their own ingenuity, they have augmented their place in the world. Forget all the cant about popular culture (talk about empty signs circulating constantly), this is astonishing: a material difference that issues from the most immaterial of differences.  Wow. Funny.  

References

The quote from Kenny Loggins appears in Rocca, Mo.  2010.  Celebrities in their own words, others’ voices.  A transcript of CBS Sunday Morning Show, May 16th on the CBS Sunday Morning Show website here.

Calling all CCOs: how good is your gut?

Next week, Fox will launch a cop show called The Good Guys.  (It previews May 19th. The series starts June 7.)

Outwardly, things looks fine.  The producer is Matt Nix, who recently triumphed with Burn Notice. Its stars Colin Hanks and Bradley Whitford, able actors to be sure. Plus Fox is good at making good TV.  

But my gut says this show is going to be a stinker.  The Hollywood Reporter description:

[The show] centers on Jack (Hanks), an ambitious, by-the-book detective whose habit of undermining himself has resulted in a dead-end position at the Los Angeles Police Department. Worse, he has been partnered with Dan (Whitford), a drunken, lecherous, wild-card cop who hangs onto his job only because of a heroic act years before.

This made the eyes roll back in my head.  At a time when Modern Family is reinventing the family comedy, Burn Notice the spy story, and New Christine the situation comedy, this doesn’t sound promising.  My first warning: I got bored in the middle of the 15 second promotion.  

Of course this is why people hate bloggers.  We don’t do due diligence.  We just make shit up.  We don’t investigate or even think very hard.  We shoot from the hip. 

But exactly!  This is precisely the time to judge the show   Before we know the details, before we have seen an episode, before any diligence is done.  When all we know is the concept, this is the best, the only real, opportunity to see whether our instincts are good for anything. (Sometimes, that is to say, bloggers do the wrong thing for the right reason.  Hasty judgment in this case is due diligence.)

It’s also a chance to go on the record.  So I’m going on the record.  I believe this show will be a stinker.  I believe it will be so bad Fox won’t run the whole of the first season.

I hope I’m wrong.  Unlike Angie Tempura (above), I am not a sneering, know-it-all, blogger.  I wish this show well.  No one likes to see this much talent, money and risk go to waste.  

Please come join me.  I would especially like to hear from those who like the sound of the concept. 

Your comments please!

References

Andreeva, Nellie.  2009.  Colin Hanks Revs Up for Jack and Dan.  Hollywood Reporter. November 3.  here.  (subscription fee may be required)

For more on The Good Guys, check out the Fox cite here.  But, please, form a judgment first!

Does Buzz Need Batteries? (thoughts on viral marketing)

Brandweek yesterday:

More brands will compensate bloggers and social media users in an attempt to generate chatter about their products, a new study found.

PQ Media said such "sponsored conversations" — which compensate social media users for discussing brands’ products — grew to $46 million in 2009, a 14 percent increase from a year earlier. Even so, that figure represented a tiny chunk (2.7 percent) of the word-of-mouth marketing category, according to PQ.

The firm now forecasts what it terms "social media sponsorship spending" to rise 26 percent this year to $56.8 million.

What should we make of this? 

One interpretation: that buzz marketing does not go unless pushed, that buzz needs batteries. 

And this is a problem for a couple of reasons. 

1) Paid buzz bloggers would become advertisers by another name.  (In what sense is “sponsored conversation” a conversation?)

2) The credibility and authenticity of blogger enthusiasm would be open to challenge.

3) The viral model may not actually work. 

Ten years ago, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger published The Cluetrain Manifesto.  Marketing would never be the same.  “Marketing as conversation” wasn’t a perfect metaphor, but it was a liberating one.  It helped corporations see that idea was not to shout at consumers but to converse with them.

As Manifesto was making friends and influencing people, another idea began to exert itself.  Buzz marketing, let’s call it, was suddenly everywhere.  The idea now was to “go viral.” 

Some marketers returned immediately to form.  “Virality.  Perfect!” they said, “We’ll get consumers buzzing about us!”  No sooner had marketers glimpsed the possibility that marketing was a conversation than some decided to make the conversation about them. 

It was that old joke all over again: “well, that’s enough about me, what do you think about me?” 

The truth is simple.  Consumers don’t necessarily care about brands.  They care still less about marketers.  They care about what they care about, and it is up to us to find out what that is.  It’s up to us to join the conversation.  There is little chance that we can start this conversation, especially if all we want to do is to talk about ourselves. 

The year 2012 will be the 100th anniversary of the phrase “consumer is king” as invented by Charles Coolidge Parlin.  The metaphor has plausibility problems of its own, but it proved influential and it remains active.  It was marketing’s way of remembering “it’s not about us, it’s about them.” 

This is another way of saying that we have been thinking about this problem lesson for around 100 years.  When does the penny drop?

Clarification: This is not an attack on viral marketing.  This is an attack on viral marketing that insists on making the brand the stuff of the buzz.  We have plenty of evidence that the corporation and marketer can create content that consumers are keen to consume and communicate.  This viral marketing is a contribution to marketing only because it is first of all a contribution to culture.  The Ford Fiesta campaign is I believe a good case in point of this kind of viral marketing (see my remarks below).

References

Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition.  New York: Basic Books. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2010.  How Ford Got Social Marketing Right.  Harvard Business Review Blog Conversation.  January 7. here.

Morrissey, Brian.  2010.  Paid Brand Conversations to Rise.  Brandweek.  Subscription fees may apply. May 11.  here.

For more on Parlin, see his entry in the Advertising Hall of Fame here.

Betty White versus Karen Black: your CCO assignment

As everyone saw, Betty White underwent her pop culture apotheosis Saturday Night when she served as host of Saturday Night Live.

No doubt Lorne Michaels thought this was a good idea, but the first mover in Ms. White’s ascent was a Facebook campaign. Well, that and a Snickers ad (eyes right).

It’s up to the Chief Culture Officer to decide what Betty White tells us about the state of contemporary culture.

One possibility is that she signals a willingness to rethink the way we portray people of age. Paul Thomas Anderson, the film director, seemed to me to signal the possibility of a change. The Dos Equis "most interesting man in the world" spot might (I repeat might) be more data on point.  Modernista did an ad for Cadillac a couple of years that could also qualify.  

Well, there are lots of possibilities.  I leave these to you.  The point of this post is to get a clearer idea of who Betty White is as a cultural artifact.  Before we figure out the significance of Betty’s SNL appearance, that is to say, we need to know the significance of Betty White. 

And that’s your CCO assignment.  I suggest we scrutinize Betty White by contrasting her to another star.  For your own purposes, you may choose any comparison that suits your fancy: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kim Kardashian, or Diane Sawyer.  But for this assignment, the comparison is Betty White and Karen Black.  

The assignment: Compare and contrast Betty White and Karen Black.  Use point form.  No more than 500 words.  Scale up from the descriptive differences to the cultural ones. Submit to grant27ATgmail.com in the next week or so.

The prize: $100, a copy of Chief Culture Officer, and a VOWEL award.  (The last stands for the Account Planner, Anthropologist, Ethnographer, Insight and Observation Award [AEIOU]) (This award is highly coveted and immediately take a job application to the top of the heap.) You will also get a place on the VOWEL Winner Hall of Fame on the CCO Ning network.  Previous winners: Juri Saar, Reiko Waisglass, and Brent Shelkey.

You may pick up your pencils…now!

References

Betty White Snickers’ Ad here.

Stevenson, Seth.  2009.  The Most Interesting Man in the World: The star of Dos Equis’ New Ad Campaign is Too Cool to Shill Beer.  Slate.  May 25.  here.

Acknowledgements

BBDO New York 
(I can’t find names for the creative and production team responsible for the Snickers ad. I would be grateful to hear from anyone who knows them.)

Carole Walker, head of integrated marketing communication at Mars.

Calling London (CCO Bootcamp)

I am thinking about doing a Culture Camp on Friday, May 28th, in London.

Time is short.

I don’t have a space yet.

The fee is likely to be 100 pounds.

It’s an entire day. We will look at American culture in the morning (with thoughts on UK and global variations) and how to do the Chief Culture Officer thing, in the afternoon.

Please, would you drop me a line if you might like to attend. Send me an email at grant27@gmail.com.

Praise for the Boot Camp we held in NYC in February:

Steve Nasi: The Bootcamp was a marvelous day. Amazing to be in a room full of so many folks yearning to bring a deeper kind of cultural thinking to their brands, agencies, corporations, endeavors. And the content was a brilliant mix of deep thinking and accessible content, slow and fast culture and more. It was inspirational to say the least. My poor wife had to deal with me going on about it at length. Despite this, she’s gunning to go next time.

Heather LeFevre: I really enjoyed the CCO bootcamp this weekend – was totally worth the trip from Amsterdam. better than the typical planner conference where the speaker takes an hour to recap their book – I really appreciated that you gave us information that was NOT in the book that I felt I can use in my work.

Gail Brooks: Thank you so much for bringing us the CCO boot camp! An invaluable use of my time.

Rusting Buicks and the destruction of wealth


[This little essay was originally posted February 26, 2010 and then was lost when Network Solutions was attacked by malware and "misplaced" my database.  I wanted to get it back in circulation.  Apologies to those who have seen it before. Special apologies to those who left comments on the original post.  There were some beauties.  Thank you, Network Solutions for being entirely uncooperative, unreliable, and unrepentant.]
 

Picture yourself in the hinterland of British Columbia.

You are many hundreds of miles from Vancouver.  

You are in the middle of nowhere on a stretch of road so desolate it feels like something out of an X-Files episode. (Cue the X-Files orchestra for that eerie theme music.)

There’s a mining camp at one end of the road and a mining camp at the other.  Most everyone here get an hourly wage. And the wage is generous.  (These rough necks are paid like princes.  Who would come to this god forsaken place otherwise?)  And because there is nothing much to do here, the roughnecks work extra hours, most days and even Sundays.  Add "time and a half" and "double time," and it’s not long before these people are worth a bundle. 

Periodically, they head for town.  For most the destination is Vancouver, many hundreds of miles away.  Guys, they are mostly guys, will hitchhike for a while. And they take buses when they must, and eventually they say, "F*ck it, I’m buying a car."  And they do.  They buy a Buick with all the trimmings.  And away they go.

The trouble is, the guys have been drinking since they left camp and by this time they are often blind drunk, and so, well, it’s not uncommon to come off the road and wrap the Buick around a tree.

And here’s the weird part.  The guys don’t get the Buick fixed.  They just keep going. What they have done to the Buick captures what they do for the remainder of this trip to Vancouver and for the duration of their stay there.  Make a hash of things.

The "skid row" in Vancouver is there to greet them.  The card sharks, hookers, and bars are seasoned tourist professionals, skilled at various kinds of value transfer.  It will take a couple of weeks.   But eventually our guys will wake up in a gutter without a dime.  

And here’s the other weird part.  They will brush themselves off, and go back to the hinterland.  Some will do this many times over several decades.  Which is way there are so many rusting cars on the roads of the interior of BC.  

From an conventional point of view this is deeply irrational behavior.  Why endure the privations of life in the bush, and the exertion and the danger of this kind of labor, unless you are going to keep some part of what you earn? Surely, the point of coming here is to earn your way out.  Not to spend your way back in.  But the hinterland is a prison to which inmates keep returning by choice.  In a sensible world, people would come here just long enough to make enough to buy the motel, dry cleaning store, or bowling alley that will release them from wage labor forever.  But no, they take their stake and they squander it. These guys seem bent on destroying wealth.  

Which brings us to Pirates.  I know you were waiting for the Pirate passage.  I’m reading a nice little book called And a Bottle of Rum by Wayne Curtis.  Here’s a passage.

After his raids, Captain Morgan and his men would sail to Port Royal to whore and drink and spend their money.  The more carelessly they could rid themselves of their gold, the happier they were.  "Wine and Women drained their Wealth to such a Degree that in a little time some of them became reduced to Beggary," reported pirate chronicler Charles Leslie.  "They have been known to spend 2 or 3000 Pieces of Eight in one Night…"  Morgan "found many of his chief officers and soldiers reduced to their former state of indigence through their immoderate vices and debauchery."  Then they would pester him to get up a new fleet for further raids, "thereby to get something to expend anew in wine and strumpets."  (location circa 664 in the Kindle version of this book)

Which brings us back to British Columbia, and an aboriginal practice called "potlatch" when rival communities would take turns dumping Hudson Bay blankets and other valuables into the Pacific ocean.  One of the explanation for this practice is that it is undertaken as a very deliberate act of wealth destruction. ( I don’t know the literature here as well as I should so I am penciling these data in provisionally.)

This destruction of wealth is a wonderful thing.  Wealth for miners, pirates, and perhaps aboriginals is charged with potentiality.  To keep this wealth is to do its bidding.  Once you’ve made a small fortune in a logging camp, some convention says, you must leave the hinterland, pay that motel, and "start a new life."  Which these loggers and miners devoutly do not wish to do.  Hence those trips to town.  These loggers are fighting demon wealth.  

Our loggers, miners, pirates (and aboriginals?) are defending their way of life.  They are destroying the money that threatens it.  They can see the potentiality of all this wealth, they can feel the cultural instructions embedded in it, and they are damned if they will give in it.  Better, easier, truer to their life missions, to piss this money away.

Actually, there is nothing irrational about this behavior.  It has a job to do and it does well. But there is no economic model that came help us retrieve the rationality of this behavior, I don’t believe.  To do this we need to look beyond "rationality" narrowly defined, beyond "interest" and "benefit" as it is usually construed. We need to capture the culture that supplies the meanings that shapes the lives that demands the destruction of wealth the results in all those rusted Buicks.  There’s a method to the madness.  In fact, it isn’t madness.  

Indeed, under carefully scrutiny a lot of economic behavior, even the b to b variation thereof, is not fully rational.  But when the economists find things that do not find the paradigm, they insist these are "irrational."  Um, but surely there is a grey area in between. That economic actors are not rational doesn’t mean that are irrational.  The trouble is that the idea of rationality is so narrowly defined is to leave much of the human experience out of account.  It is true that actors are sometimes not rational but they are almost never not interested.  They are always driven by an idea, a concept, a preference, an "interest," and almost always this idea, concept, preference or interest comes from culture.

So when Adam Smith excises culture from the proposition in a sense he assumes what he means to prove.  And he leaves us with a model that can’t explain new Buicks any more than it can rusted ones.  I mean if transportation is the object of the exercise, there’s an awful lot chrome that doesn’t seem germane.  And no, we may not put the model on life support by evoking status competition and conspicuous consumption.  Nice try, Mr. Veblen but there are so many more cultural meanings besides status at issue in any give Buick that you did not so much rescue the model as cleared the way for a more thorough going assessment of its insufficiency.  

I guess this post is my way of saying there is a lot of learn from loggers, miners and pirates.  It’s just so very difficult to get them to come in for guest lectures.  
  • Posted on: Fri, Feb 26 2010 3:23 AM

Why the iPad will flourish

[This essay was written in the first week of the iPad, when some were saying it would be a flop.  Now that it sales have reached a million, everyone accepts that the iPad is here to stay.*  But in this first week, my title was a little riskier.  I would have published it that week, but of course my blog has been down for a month.]

My iPad has left the factory!  I woke up this morning to discover it entered the UPS system in Shenzhen at 4:30 AM China time.  It will take several days to cross an ocean and a continent.  This leaves me plenty of time to wrestle with Apple expectation and my buyer’s remorse. 

Apple expectation is a wonderful place to be.  It’s that gap between hearing about the latest gizmo from Cupertino and owning one.  It is encouraged by press coverage, fan boy speculation, wild rumors and eventually those lines at Apple retail.  The only real question: will this gizmo be as great as Steve says?  Or will it be much, much better?

Buyer’s remorse is another matter.  This uncertainty haunts the purchase of every big ticket item.  And it’s a special problem in the tech world.  I bet 20% of our tech purchases disappoint; phones, computers, cameras and software we didn’t like or didn’t use.  When it comes to technology, you pays your money and you takes your chances.  

There are special grounds for buyer’s remorse in this case.  Some experts say the iPad must fail.  Smart phones deliver music.  Laptops deliver movies and ebooks.  The iPad is fighting for an excluded middle, they say, a market that doesn’t exist. 

I think the critics are wrong.  I think the iPad will be a smash hit.  I think it will find a place in our lives by making a place in our lives.  I think it will change the way we use media. 

Here’s how.  My smart phone is too small to show movies.  My ThinkPad, with its 256 GB of cluttered storage, is too small to store them.  I need is a big screen.  And I need storage doesn’t act like a loading dock, with me shuttling things in and out.  I want room enough to install several movies and leave them there. 

Is this just me?  Surely, everyone needs access to movies and TV.  These are the great conduits of our culture.  Perhaps, more important they are our respite in times of crisis.  Like being being stuck in an airplane or an airport, surrounded by crowds and screaming children.  The moving image, as Jet Blue discovered, is a great palliative.  One wants to be prepared.  iPad looks like preparation.  It will be our prophylactic against the horror of air travel.

Second, most of us now most hours of the day, laptop in place.  Even when we break for newspapers and magazines, we remain on line.  So the laptop remains in place.  This is a problem.  It means carrying our work frame of mind into our reading frame of mind.  

When working, we are hard-charging and results oriented.  When reading, we are more contemplative.   We read each story and opinion to see if it’s a) interesting, b) useful and if it isn’t, we spin it on an axis to see if and how we can make it interesting.  (For some reason, I find squinting seems to help this process, but probably that’s just me.)  Getting my news and editorial into the right form will help me use the right frame of mind.  If this gives me access one better idea a month, the iPad will pay for itself in short order.

Third, too much work makes us dull boys and girls.  The last thing I want to do at the end of a long day on my ThinkPad is to watch a movie on my ThinkPad.  The very point of the exercise is to put a little separation between work and leisure.  Without it, my leisure time doesn’t have the same recreational effect.  If the iPad can help restores this, it will serve me very well.

In all of this, iPad is creating its own market between the smart phone and the laptop.  We could call this a “white space” or a “blue ocean” but I prefer to think of it as a “third space.”  In the manner of Zeno’s paradox (and, yes, Starbucks), Apple managed to split the difference between existing categories, and honor the way the consumer sees entertainment, contemplation and recreation.  The iPad critics can’t see this third space because they work from a utilitarian point of view.  For them, iPad will create economic value only if it solves practical problems.  But Apple has always seen the economic proposition as a cultural one, as an opportunity to speak to the entire consumer in all of his or her complexity, not just the problem solver.  

So I say the iPad will flourish.  Now if only the doorbell would ring.  

Post script: I have used iPad for several weeks.  It’s strange to go back to a paper newspaper.  It feels like going back to a IBM Selectric typewriter after the launch of personal computers, really clumsy and laborious.  How quickly we adjust.  And, against Scitovsky’s "joyless economy" notion, it seems to me that it will be a very long time before the pleasure of using an iPad turns to mere comfort.  

Reference

Scitovsky, Tibor. 1976. The Joyless Economy: An inquiry into human satisfaction and consumer dissatisfaction. New York: Oxford University Press.

* This just in: Carl Howe says "Apple’s iPad will likely take the crown for the fastest consumer product growth to the $1 billion revenue mark in history, taking less than 120 days from announcement to reach that milestone."  Howe, Carl.  2010.  A New Record for Apple.  Seeking Alpha.  May 5.  here.