Author Archives: Grant

Buy this product: we have writers standing by

Today Very Short List pointed us towards a site called Unhappyhipsters in which images like the one above are fetched from the pages of Dwell magazine and then given small narrative indicators that give them new meaning.

"It become their routine…"  Wonderful.

Last week, on the post on Significant Objects, I contemplated a commercial world in which new products came with narratives attached, new meanings, which we could use to reimagine our present circumstances.

I just bought a new bag from Tumi.  My last one gave up the ghost last week in Seattle.  I like the idea of getting messages from Tumi as it imagines the things that are or could be happening to me.  With a link to my TripIt file, Tumi could know where I am, even, if I allowed it, what hotel I was staying it.  With GPS location permission, I could have a rough idea of my circumstances.  All of this data makes it possible to feed me a stream of narrative suggestions that are plausible at least by time and place.

Oh, alright.  This isn’t quite right.  But the idea remains promising.  Consumer goods, thanks to brands and meaning makers in the world of marketing, have always come with meanings. And they will continue to do so.  But in addition to these quite general meanings, it is possible for the brand to communicate many more particular meanings.  As long as they some how resonate with what is happening in my life, they will be interesting and fun.  Animating, actually.

"We have writers standing by!"  When does this become a brand promise?

References

The Very Short List treatment is here.

The Unhappy Hipsters website is here.

By their lettuce we shall know them

One way to track culture is to track cuisine.

And one way to track cuisine is to track farm produce.

Why?  Because farm produce comes with numbers as crisp as a head of iceberg lettuce.

Consider this snippet from an essay by Russ Parsons:

As late as the mid-1970s, iceberg lettuce accounted for more than 95% of all of the lettuce grown in this country.

Then along came the reborn Caesar salad. Invented in a Tijuana restaurant in the 1920s (which one is a subject of a bitter interfamilial dispute), for decades the Caesar kind of limped along in all of its garlicky glory as a California specialty Then, all of a sudden, in the late 1970s it was "discovered" by the fast food industry, often topped with very untraditional grilled chicken, and there followed a couple of decades of extremely heady popularity.

From almost nothing, by the mid ’90s, more than 16,000 acres of romaine was being grown. By 2000 that had increased to more than 60,000 acres and today it stands at more than 80,000.

Now, the work of the CCO begins.

What was the cultural significance of the iceberg salad? I think the answer here has something to do with what we were doing to food after World War II. Iceberg lettuce was easy to truck. It "kept" well. It was easy to prepare. Kids liked the snap, crackle, pop. The fact that it didn’t seem entirely natural…well, this was the 1950s, the decade that gave us TV Dinner, Tang, and Sugar Pops. In the 1950s, artifice was not a bad thing in food. Indeed, a postwar culture seemed to delight in seeing just how far food could be removed from nature. Consider Kraft Dinner. That orange color. It looked radio active.  And that was regarded as a good thing, something one looked for in a family dinner.

But what about Caesar salad?  It feels very Frank and the Ratpack, doesn’t it?  Extravagant in its garlic, in its dressing and, when prepared at table, in its theater.  Caesar salad is the kind of salad you would expect to be served in one of those swank night clubs, the ones you entered, if you were any kind of celebrity, through the kitchen, dropping twenty dollar bills as you went. (Recall from memory, please, the scene in Goodfellas movie.)

But while Frank and the Ratpack have been enjoying a certain "reheating" in the last few years, chiefly in the form of the "playa," the rest of American cuisine has moved swiftly away from just about everything it stands for.  So why?  Why should the Caesar salad have flourished?  What does it say about us?

Your turn.  Best answer gets a copy of Chief Culture Officer.

References

Parsons, Russ.  2010.  Rise of the Modern Romaine Empire.  LA Times.  January 27, 2010. here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alexis Madrigal for featuring this article on his website.  See this excellent website here.

Thanks to Alisa Weinstein for letting me know about Alexis’ website.

Note: This post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle of 2009.  It was reposted December 25, 2010,

Meaning manufacture, old and new (Significant Objects)

In the old days, most of the meanings of our objects came prefab.

This what brands did for us. Brands, and the advertisers, planners, researchers, and  marketers who made them.

Inevitably we would add meanings to our possessions.  We might finesse the ones we found there.  But mostly, anyone with the same objects had the same meanings.  Thus did our material culture make our culture material.

We have since seen the rise of custom-made meanings.  This is one of the reasons we like antique fairs, and farmer’s markets is that these objects have been stripped of their original meanings and taken on new, historical, ones.  What used to be someone’s tea cup is now our Victorian teacup.

It’s the reason we like the tourist trinkets we bring back from vacation.  These were likely hand made somewhere.  That textile just says Mexico.  More than that, it says, "our vacation in Mexico."

It’s also the reason we like artisanal goods, the chocolates, beer and bread that is so popular now.  There are no brands here. These products take their meaning mostly from the process of hand crafting and the person who made them.  These objects come with stories more than meanings and we like to tell these stories.  "Well, Frank, that’s the guy who made these chocolates, he’s got that little shop down on Cambie, Frank used to be a professional football player.  No, I am not kidding."

Of course this sort of thing has always been true of high end restaurants.  This has always been hand crafted, unbranded (at least in so far as national brands are concerned), and meanings that come with this food are all about this very particular restaurant, chef, owner, designer, etc.  Here the brand is a man or a women.

The rich like to live in a relatively unbranded world.  Kitchens, furniture, bespoke tailoring, all of this is completely custom made.  It’s fun to go due north on Madison, I think it is.  In mid town, we are looking at branded stores, but as we hit the the upper east side, the brands fall away.  Now all the shops are little and very particular.  This is no brand land.

Experiments like Etsy give us a glimpse of a democratized version of this world.  Now, the rest of us can own customized stuff. No brands.  No manufacture in the industrial sense.  What we buy from Etsy.com is unique and if its to mean something, it will be because we have invested it with meanings particular to our own lives and sensibilities.

So I was interested to note the website called Significant Objects.  (Thanks to Leora Kornfeld for the head’s up.)  This was invented by Joshua Glenn, Matthew Battles, Rob Walker and others in the summer of 2009.  Here’s how they describe what they do.  (Sorry to be vague about the founders of Significant Objects but they appear to take pains to efface their identities on the SO website.  I can’t but wonder whether they are waiting for authors to supply identities for them…or at least names.  Excellent strategy.)

Significant Objects has three steps:

1. The experiment’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

2. A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

3. Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

The first version of Significant objects can be defined still more particularly:

Significant Objects was originally intended as an experiment exploring the relationship between narrative and value. (In fact, we didn’t think many writers would want to participate — before we launched the experiment, we listed 100 writers we knew or just admired and asked ourselves, “How do we convince/cajole/trick/browbeat these talented people into helping us with no guarantee that they’ll get anything out of it whatsoever?”) Our goal, then as now, was not simply to generate content, or to provide writers with a fun creative exercise, but instead to pair our carefully curated objects with stories that we’d curated every bit as carefully. We want the site to offer a consistently great reading experience — and we put a lot of effort into that.

The relationship between narrative and value.  How very interesting.  Economics is not very good on this relationship.  Indeed the idea that stories can create value is a little mystifying.  And this would be a good time to come to terms with this, because as I say, it is the coming thing.

I fell to thinking about a variation of the SO theme.  As it stands, in what remains of the old world of marketing, a watch comes charged with some standard meanings, crafted by the CMO, the brand, agency and its creatives.  Take for instance the Rolex that uses the Bond movie franchise to give the watch a certain quality of romance, danger, adventure, etc.

A SO approach would craft the meaning of the objects more particularly.   The brand could engage a team of writers and have them standing by to deliver stories to the owner, perhaps on a just in time basis.  What I am a buying the watch then is also a stream of stories that might come to me every day or week or month.  Tomorrow, I might get an email that reads

Today your watch is owned by a functionary, a man who lives in Ottawa and works for the Canadian government.  You have a secret.  You have embezzled $3 million from the Canadian government.  Today is actually is your last day.  You wouldn’t be here, but the embezzlement will finalize today. You are nervous.  Actually you’re sweating bullets.  Make it through today, and you can spend the rest of your life in some sunny country that laughs in the face of the Canadian extradition.  But you can’t help feeling that suspicions are flourishing.  You know people are looking at you.  Aren’t they? Every glance, every comment today will be charged with menace.  Have a nice day.

This is narrative and I believe our Rolex is more valuable for it.  As these stories change, as we enter the narratives that come with the watch, the watch becomes more and more valuable.  It serves as a portal on alternative realities and multiple selves.

References

See the Significant Objects website here.

See the Smoking Man Figurine complete with a very interesting story by Vicente Lozano here.  (this image lost in the melt down, see note below)

Note: This post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle of 2009.  It was reposted December 25, 2010.

Zappos and the problem of forced fun

I wrote a post today on the Harvard Business Review blog on how corporations sometimes commandeer the emotions of their employees.

I believe this practice is wrong.

What do you think?

The post is here.

Note: this post was lost due to the Network Solutions debacle of 2009.  It was reposted on December 25, 2010.

Eyelashes in the field

I flew into Seattle this week sitting beside a woman with great, swooping eyelashes.

She was dressed fashionably but casually.

"Odd," I thought, "She’s not dressed up or anything.  Why the false eyelashes?"

Apparently I think false eyelashes are formal wear.

And I think in a sense they are.  False eyelashes are about glamor, and fancy, or at least formal, dress. They are a big gesture, one that marks the occasion as special.

Yesterday in the street in San Francisco I saw the same thing: a woman casually dressed but with big, fat lashes.

It doesn’t take much to get me shouting with the excitement. Two data points! The results are in, ladies and gentlemen!  We have a new trend!!!

"Not so fast," said Alisa Weinstein at a CCO meetup at the 21st Amendment bar.  Alisa thought my "sightings" were probably not false eyelashes but real ones, and the result of Latisse, a prescription drug that makes eyelashes longer.  Ah, anthropologists, always the last to know.

And now we begin the process of adjustment.  In a couple of months, I will stop thinking of big, fat eyelashes as formal wear.  A few months after that, I will stop thinking, "wow, you must be using Latisse!."  Eventually this social innovation will be as unexceptional as blond(ed) hair.  I never think "Wow, you dye your hair!"  I never even notice the artifice.

We have lots of transformational activity to look forward to.  Some of the early adventurers suggest we might someday use plastic surgery in a more aggressive manner.  (See my book Transformations for a glimpse of Orlan, Wildenstein, and Cher.) Once we start mucking about with our DNA, the sky is the limit!  It won’t be long before our social world looks as odd as that bar scene from Star Wars.  No aliens required.  And eventually it will never occur to us to notice.

References

Anonymous.  2009.  Brooke Shields Promotes Latisse, Prescription Eyelash Lengthener. Celebrity Beauty Buzz.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Transformations: Identity formation in contemporary culture. Indiana University Press.  available on Amazon here.

The Latisse website here.

Post script.

This post filed from somewhere over the heart land of America at 31,000.  I am still thrilled to get wireless access on an airplane.  Talk about an adjustment curve.  A reader three years from now is going to say, "Really. That was a big deal?  How quaint."

Anthropologist goes all roller derby

This is me this morning at KZOK-AM (CBS) "The Bob Rivers Show" in Seattle.  (I’m promoting Chief Culture Officer.)

With me, four women who belong to the Dock Yard Derby Dames, a local roller derby team. They were also doing the Bob Rivers Show.  (This proved to be really interesting.  Bob is an incisive and gracious interviewer.)

The woman grimacing is Mytai Smashya.   Or maybe that’s "Mytai Smashya?"  (aka "Might I Smash you?") I am still trying to choose my derby name.  

Clearly, I also have to work on the attitude.  Less smiling.  The hat’s good though.  The D stands for Derby.  Watch for me at a rink near you. References More details on the Dock Yard Derby Dames here.

Girls at Yale in the 1960s

I recently met a spell binding story teller.  An entire table, fell under his spell, like children at story time.  

One of his stories was about women at Yale when he was an undergraduate there in the 1960s or the 70s.

Many of these women, he said, knew the character they resembled from high fiction or art.  What’s more, they did everything they could to heighten the similarity.

If you looked like someone out of Austen or Bronte, at Yale, you walked it, talked it and coiffed it.

If you looked like someone painted by the pre-raphaelite brotherhood, this too was a similarity to be heightened, an advantage to be taken advantage of.

Forty years later, it’s hard to imagine that this still happens on university campuses.  These days inspiration is more likely to come from Kanye West lyrics (surely the only place where "blond dyke" and "Klondike" are made to rhyme.)

These days, if we are lucky enough to resemble a Hollywood celebrity, well, this is a piece of good fortune too considerable to pass up.   I remember seeing Toronto fill with David Bowie lookalikes when he was in town for a concert.  I couldn’t tell whether these people always sought to show the resemblance or were doing so just for the evening.  Pretty remarkable, either way.  In our culture, we are jealous of our uniqueness.  Only extraordinary admiration (or advantage) can move us to imitation.

But this is only sometimes slavish imitation or an act of deference.  It’s fun to quote celebrities with fleeting moments of comparison, as when we say "bag" the way Kristen Wiig does in her SNL "checkout lady" skit.  My wife does an excellent imitation of Jennifer Coolidge.  ("Thank goodness for the model trains.  It’s where they got the idea for the big trains!")

So what’s the difference between imitating a Jane Austen character or Kanye West?  I think imitating pop culture celebrity is actually more fun and more interesting.  More is left to our creative endeavor.  I mean, we arewearing a Jane Austin or Emily Bronte character.  And we are obliged to wear it all the time.  It is fully formed and we are punished, not rewarded, for departure.  We are it.  It is never us.  There is no cocreation here.

Quoting celebrities is playful, various, optional.  And we can draw on any number of celebrities over the course of the day. Actually, we are not looking for similarity (and certainly not for identity).  We are looking dramatic, transformational resources we can use for our own purposes.

Boldly stated, this is the difference I think between high culture and low culture, and it’s the reason we have moved so relentlessly from one and the other.

And that’s the challenge for social critics.  The traditional approach in an essay of this kind is to shake our heads in disapproval.  What a good thing it must have been to see all those Austen and Bronte girls at Yale!  And surely it’s a very bad thing indeed that we are moving from high fiction to the vulgar, democratic arts of Hollywood and popular music.

But this gets it, I believe, precisely wrong.  Low culture, as some insisted on calling it, is more flexible, accommodating, and creative.  It gives us a grammar instead of a language.  It gives us form that gives freedom, not a form we must con-form to.

Post script

This post filed at 31,000 feet, courtesy of Gogo and Virgin America.  The latter has been a really charming experience. The music doesn’t suck.  There are two celebrities on board. The movies leave something to be desired but hey I’m blogging.  And I have internet access. The post was written over Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Transformations: identity construction in contemporary culture. Bloomington : Indiana University Press.

Note: This post originally lost in the Network Solutions debacle of the 2009.  It was reposted December 25, 2010.  

So you’re a Chief Culture Officer, what would you do? (Minerva Contest)

Every Harvard Business School case study seems to open with a manager sitting at his or her desk, contemplating a problem. The case study put us in the manager’s shoes.  Here’s the problem, the case says, what would you do?

Let’s say, you’re Patricia Lindbergh. You are the newly appointed CCO at the XYZ corporation.

And your CEO has a question.

Last night, in a rare moment of respite, he was sitting with his wife and kids watching their favorite TV shows.  And the family got to talking.  Is TV changing? They thought maybe it was.  But no one could figure out how or why.

The CEO says, "Hey, not to worry.  We just hired a Chief Culture Officer.  I’ll ask Pat tomorrow.  She’ll know."

So this morning, when you got to work, there was a little note on your desk from the CEO.  It reads, "Hey, my wife and I were wondering: is TV changing?  Clue us in!  Thanks.  Charlie."

Geez.  Big question.  As a CCO, you follow TV.  And there’s lots of stuff in play.  One of the ways to approach this question is to look at Charlie and his family were watching last night.  If you knew what they was looking at…that might help.

As a CCO, you subscribe to lots of data sources, and one of your favorites comes from Marc Berman. Marc writes The Programming Insider, and here’s the snippet that gets your attention.

It’s clear that CBS and ABC are in pretty good shape.  And it’s clear that NBC continues to struggle.  It’s not that the NBC programming is bad programming.  You like some of NBC shows that are tanking. They’re smart, interesting, funny television.

As you sit at your desk, and gaze down into the tidal flows on the Avenue of the Americans, you think, "hmmm."

There’s something here. But what?

Something tells us that this comes down to the cultural difference between what Berman calls "yesterday’s winners" and "yesterday’s losers."  What is the difference between these two groups of shows.  What do they tell us about TV and our culture?

Please answer this question ("What’s the cultural difference between Berman’s Winners and Losers?") as briefly and as pungently as you can.  Please keep your answer to fewer than 500 words.

Best three answers get a copy of Chief Culture Officer and my undying admiration.

References

Berman, Marc.  2010.  The Programming Insider.  Media Week.  January 15.  here.

Winners of the last contest

The winner’s of the last competition are:

Bryan

Simon Steinhardt

Batcraft

Congratulations on great work.  Please send me your best mailing address, so I can send you your copies of Chief Culture Officer.

Note: this post was lost in the Network Solutions debacle of 2009.  It was reposted here December 25, 2010.

Chief Culture Officer watch: the troubling case of Jeffrey Zucker

The troubles at NBC have finally reached CEO Jeffrey Zucker, a guy so deft he had previously escaped criticism. Now the knives are out.

"Somebody needs to pay when a poorly thought-out experiment [i.e., the Leno move to 10:00] fails to the tune of millions of dollars, [and results in] the loss of a bankable star i.e., [the threatened departure of Conan O’Brien] and a public-relations nightmare that has the potential to threaten a proposed mega-merger [i.e., with Comcast].  And there is no doubt that the person who should pay for this instantly legendary [screw-up] is the man at the top who instigated the whole thing: Jeff Zucker." [Chez Pazienza, Huffington Post (as quoted in Macdonald, below)]

No doubt the factors that explain Zucker’s managerial difficulties are several and complex, but one in particular jumps out.

In the words of Richard Siklos, Jeffrey Zucker is someone,

who came up on the news side of the business, and he didn’t care for, or have an affinity for, the entertainment business and Hollywood per se.  [in Macdonald, below]

Apparently, Zucker is good at business…but bad at culture.  He knows how to run the company.  But he has no feeling for what the company does.

This is odd.  After all, NBC is mostly a cultural enterprise.  It works when it can read culture. It works when it can produce culture. Naturally, someone like Zucker needs to have the managerial skills to run a large and complex corporation.  But this is the necessary, not the sufficient condition of his (and its) success.  The sufficient condition is simple.  Zucker should know and love entertainment.  (See Maureen Dowd’s column for a nice treatment of the specific implications of Zucker’s incompetence here.)

It would be one thing if this cultural knowledge were arcane, possessed by a very few people tucked away in an obscure institutions (aka the university).  But what Zucker is missing is the cultural competence possessed by most of his viewers, especially the ones under 35.

Here’s what we know:

1) that popular culture became culture (see the work of Steven Johnson and Naussbaum).

2) that culture went from something very simple to something increasingly complex (for simplicity sake, let’s treat HBO as our case in point).

3) that cultural consumers have become increasingly well informed and sophistication (so says the book of Henry Jenkins).

A odd and uncomfortable possibility suggests itself: that NBC managed to hire one of the few people in contemporary America who doesn’t get TV.

How can this have happened? Checking someone’s cultural competence is pretty easy.  All someone at NBC needed to do was to take Zucker to lunch and quiz him on his favorite shows.  Even a brief conversation would have revealed the depth and sophistication of his knowledge.

And now a second possibility suggests itself: that the people doing the hiring at NBC don’t much know about the culture, either.  There is, perhaps, a systematic bias for business and against culture in the NBC c-suite.

Simply: NBC appears to be all about business and not about culture at a time that the corporation is increasingly about culture even when all about business.

Oh for a CCO…or just a CCO who grasps his culture at least as well as most of his viewers do.

References

Dowd, Maureen.  2010.  The Biggest Loser.  The New York Times.  January 12, 2010.  here.

Macdonald, Gayle. 2010. Boy Wonder’s Blunder. The Globe and Mail. January 14, 2010.  here.

Nassbaum, Emily. 2009. When TV became art. New York Magazine. December 4.

Note: this post was in the Network Solutions debacle of 2009.  It was reposted December 25, 2010.

Real Time Transformation

Have a look at this ad.

It’s from Liberty Mutual. It shows impact beginning at one end of a car and running through till it exits the other end. Accident becomes repair. Almost instantaneously. Fantastic.

It reminds me of an ad for Acura (I think), that shows shop windows changing in real time and restaurants in a constant state of renovation. It reminds me of that fantastic passage in the book by Sarah Thornton about the club scene in London where she sees dance fashion changing in the course of a single song.

This is the terminus (if that’s not absolutely the wrong word, and it is) that awaits us in our present trajectory, a culture where everything streams with change all the time.

Here is the creative team, to whom, hat’s off!

Advertising Agency: Hill Holliday, Boston,
USA Creatives: Michael Shaughnessy, Scott Noble
Producer: Alex Vainstein
Production Company: Smuggler
Director: Stylewar DP: Barry Peterson
Producer: Tim Kerrison
Editing Company: Bugg Editorial NY
Post Production: The Mill / Los Angeles
Exec Producer: Sue Troyan
Producer: Asher Edwards
Telecine: Fergus McCall – The Mill / New York
Lead Flame: Chris Knight
Flame Assist: Ant Walsham
Combustion: Shane Zinkhon, Gavin Camp
Lead CG: Robert Sethi
CG: Dan Marum, Matt Longwell, Jamie O’Hara
Art Support: Steve Cockonis

References

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

Note:

This post was lost in the Networks Solutions debacle of 2009.  It is being reposted December 25, 2010.
 

Bud Caddell interview

This is a transcript of an interview of Bud Caddell by Grant McCracken in New York City on December 22, 2009. This transcript has been lightly edited.

Grant McCracken:  One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, good. I think we’re good. So, so, just to give you the set up here.

Bud Caddell:  Right.

Grant:  I guess I have two broad questions, and the first is, how you, through Undercurrent, bring culture to the corporation. And the other question is more to do with how you interact with, work with, engage with culture, for your own purposes or for any purposes.

Bud:  Right. Well when I think of when I started at Undercurrent and the work I’ve done in the past, the Internet, I mean the Internet is definitely where I come from, mostly in my point of view and my understanding of things.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  The Internet still seems like this very foreign, strange, unknowable thing to most of the C-suite. In the very early days, it was enough to simply walk in and pretend to be an astronaut reporting on some alien world. To say, this is actually what "the kids" are watching, this is what’s spreading online, this is how to think about playing these spaces, and so on. But now, I think there’s an assumption that people have that they ‘get it.’ And unfortunately, they don’t.

I think the toughest bit for people to understand is the micro-targeting of groups that you have to do when you talk about culture these days, and especially how they’re networked digitally. You know, I think most brands will say, "We want to talk to music fans. Let’s design a program to get us to speak to music fans."

No one wants to self-identify themselves as a music fan anymore. It’s more like, "Are you into nerd core hip hop in Brooklyn right now?" I can talk to that group and kind of understand the social currency that’s being exchanged between that group. But I can’t tell you how to speak to music fans as a mass group because no one in the world, you know if you have a room full of real people, "Are you a music fan?" Everyone would kind of look at you like you’re an alien. And so being able to show people…

Grant:  Right. You could almost do this negatively. The people who say, "absolutely not," are almost certainly music fans.

Bud:  Right, right, right.

Grant:  Because they just refuse the idea.

Bud:  Absolutely. And how one music, how the nerd core hip hop guy in Brooklyn relates to his friends and his peers is incredibly specific to that group. And trying to design a program that reaches mass first, isn’t going to spread at all. It’s not remarkable, there’s nothing about it that’s going to appeal to anyone at a level that they’re used to now identifying to. So instead, you should go and identify these groups and suss out how you can work together with these different groups to create something that’s spreadable. And as people who see the world how I see the world; you have to collect success stories and share them every chance you get. Ford and its Fiesta Movement is an example I talk about a great deal.

Grant:  Which movement?

Bud:  The Fiesta Movement for Ford. The Fiesta team, of which we played a part, created a program and an idea that was totally dependent on micro-targeting. The idea was: let’s go find twenty-something YouTube storytellers who’ve learned how to earn a fan community of their own. Who can craft a true narrative inside video, and let’s go talk to them. And let’s put them inside situations that they don’t get to normally experience/document. Let’s add value back to their life. They’re always looking, they’re always hungry, they’re always looking for more content to create.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  They don’t get experiences like go fly on a biplane, go wrestle an alligator, go do these ridiculous things that the team asked them to do for the program.

Bud:  I should also say that fortunately, the Fiesta is a great vehicle, and could be the right vehicle for Ford at this present moment. And with the right vehicle and the right program, the Fiesta team saw 60,000 hand-raisers after the end of seven month program, 97 percent hadn’t ever owned a Ford before, and they sold 10,000 units in six days. Pre-sold online. Altogether, it’s an incredibly novel way to market and sell a vehicle; and so far, a truly successful way.

Grant:  Holy Toledo.

Bud:  And at this point there’s been no mass media or traditional media behind it. The team didn’t buy a standard placement on any site, it was just this distributed idea of "let’s go play in the networks that people are already spending their time in."

Grant:  Boy, that’s brilliant.

Bud:  And you know, that, taking that example around to people explaining how the team strove to talk to people in the way they want to be talked to, and targeted people down a very specific level in order to get success – that’s how you start to change people’s mind about how culture works, at least online. That’s the recipe for creating things that spread inside and across cultures.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And if you can’t see that kind of spread happening then what you’re doing isn’t successful, and second, it’s a bad spend of money if we’re talking about digital.

Grant:  Right. Right.

Bud:  If you’re not focusing on things that will amplify–or multiply, as you put it–you’re not spending your money wisely. How I dig into cultures is, I look for the outliers, the strangest possible things and I watch how they spread. It’s too difficult to study a homogenized group, for me at least. It’s the strange things, the uncomfortable things, that provide real insight. Like astro-physics, it’s the anomalies that really confound or prove our theories. And of course, I also experiment. I try and do the most ridiculous things I possibly can and see what, if anything, people will pick up on. For example, I dressed as a fictional character from Mad Men at Interesting New York and gave that presentation and I was incredibly uncomfortable. And I guess it’s about putting yourself in really uncomfortable situations. I also painted Keyboard Cat. I had this idea that I was going to start painting popular YouTube videos.

I was going to start with Keyboard Cat because I caught it at the exact, perfect climax of it’s popularity. It just appeared on the Colbert Report. So I painted it within a week and I put it on eBay and astonishingly it sold for a thousand dollars.

[laughter]

Bud:  Just ridiculous, I mean and it was really uncomfortable to go drop off that painting because I thought I’d been Punked. I thought I was going to show up and it was going to be a big laugh. But no, someone really found that valuable to them. And they send me photos of it. I’m not sure of any other way to understand culture without mucking about in it.

Grant:  Right. Nice. So in the first case, you’re looking for–it’s as if–it’s as if you believe that there is, somewhere in the world, a tiny perfect culture. In the case of Fiesta, right, there’s a tiny group of people, deeply committed fans, who can be relied upon to express that commitment through something that’s then distributable. And then that’s the–so the trick is to get down to, to find them wherever they are in the world. And that’s like sorting, sorting, sorting till you get right down to "this is the group." And then taking that message and working it’s way up from their particular enthusiasm to a larger group. Is that right?

Bud:  Right, and I think that–I often say, "kill the influencers" or kill that idea that there’s the same group of people that can help you spread anything. If you can just talk to this one guy over and over, and over, and over again, for anything you’re doing, you’ll see success. Bah. It’s really about finding a group of people who, when you can provide the right kind of value to them, your objectives or your purpose aligns. These people really needed more content to grow their fan‑ship. And that was something the Fiesta team could provide.

And you know it was also about "and then multiply this by a hundred." The team found a hundred of these people, gave them cars for six months with free gas and free insurance. And really just let them go, they didn’t have rules on how they had to talk about the car.

And Ford actually asked them not to use the Ford logo in any of the videos because they didn’t want commercials – they wanted stories that were told by these people. The team just gave them opportunities to do ridiculous/amazing/funny/important things. And then the bulk of the team’s work was to ask and offer good ideas for YouTube videos, aka missions. Each agent had to complete one mission per month, that was their sole requirement, so it was up to the team to either probe the agents for ideas or bake up compelling ideas for content.

The missions involved everything from volunteer for meals on wheels to take a box of kittens and see if they’ll play soccer.

 

Grant:  Yeah.

Bud:  Yeah. And through that, there’s actually a great video floating around from one of our agents where another YouTube vlogger brought up the question of YouTube creators being paid or sponsored. And our agent created this amazing video response detailing the program more coherently than I ever could and the team never asked her to say a thing. She just said, basically, "They’ve just come to me and said, ‘How can we make what you’re doing better? And how can we give you more things to video?’" We had no idea that she was going to do that. That she had actually created–but it was a perfect, like–she captured perfectly what we were trying to do.

Grant:  Right. Hm. And Ford was happy?

Bud:  Ford–

Grant:  They must have been thrilled.

Bud:  Yeah, they’re ecstatic.

Grant:  Was there an intermediate period where they thought, "What is this? We’re losing confidence?" I mean, before the sales numbers came in.

Bud:  Right. You know, I have to say Ford was pretty bold. I think, especially the team we had the pleasure of working with, had earned a good deal of trust all around before the program was ever conceived or conducted.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And also this wasn’t–the campaign started off right at the high point of the crisis for the auto bailouts.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And we hadn’t yet even gotten the announcement that Ford was the only brand not asking for money. This was still when, you know, "Are they going to survive? What are they going to do?" And I have to say, it was incredibly bold of them to say, "This is what we’re going to do." But it was also, in terms of what they normally spend advertising cars; it was a tiny, tiny fraction of that. Because we weren’t doing any TV. No print. No traditional media in any way. The cost was the cost of bringing the cars over from Germany.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And then the associated cost of just–the cost of maintaining the vehicles for six months.

Grant:  Totally.

Grant:  It feels to me like the perfect opposite of your approach, is the one that I heard about when I–the first work I ever did as an anthropologist doing commercial work was for Methuen Esty. And I was working on the Jeep account. And they were telling me.  People would talk about the culture of Detroit. And they would talk about this guy who was called–and they had some name for him, like "60 minute Henry" or something.

Bud:  [laughs]

Grant:  He would only shoot at dawn during the magic hour. And he would only shoot when the light was perfect.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  Your ad could take, like a month and a half to shoot.

Bud:  [laughs]

Grant:  Fantastically expensive! But in those days, that was still OK.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  You’re talking about something vastly less expensive. 

Bud:  Frankly, I can’t say, because I don’t know. I can say that for most campaigns or executions, it was tiny. And part of that was simply because it was kept small. A small team. At any other brand, there are dozens of agencies sitting at the same supper table wanting a meal from every single project. A real trouble for most brands these days seems to be the number of mouths they have to feed.

Grant:  Yeah, totally.

Bud:  And then the management of those agencies is the most, you know, consumptive of time and energy, really. It’s amazing to me the burden the modern brand manager faces.

Grant:  Right. Yeah.

Bud:  Just to orchestrate all these different moving parts together is difficult. And then at the same time, that time spent isn’t going directly to make the product better or make the advertising better or more effective.

Grant:  Right. Exactly.

Bud:  At the end of the day, it’s hard to say what exactly all that effort has bought you. This isn’t exactly the most hospitable environment for a good idea.

Grant:  Yeah. It’s like the great whale called Ford has all of these barnacles kind of attached to it. And they have to feed. They have to sustain themselves. They’re like pilot fish following a shark or something. Yeah. Totally.

Bud:  [laughs] Well, most brands are like that. My experience with Ford was, happily, the exact opposite. But I suppose that anyone who has money right now, especially with what the economy is, answers a lot of phone calls. I suppose it’s the nature of our industry now – the splintering. It forces brands that outsource this work to juggle a myriad of teams and organizations to see anything through.

Grant:  Yeah. And it will privilege the existence of people inside each of their organizations who are not necessarily the most creative, or the most interesting. And so that even after the agency detaches from this client, it will be different.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  It will be less indie. That’s interesting. So, you–just to talk for a moment about Undercurrent. You were saying that the two founders have different approaches to culture?

Bud:  Right. Well, I can’t give away too much of what makes us special, but we have, Josh Spear, who comes from an entrepreneurial/blogging background, he’s been blogging at Josh Spear for a quite a while now – one of the first people to actually make a real go of it. And he uses his site to highlight the newest and most interesting things he’s seeing.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  He’s definitely not what you’d call a trend hunter, that he goes out and makes these documents that say, "Orange and red and violet are going to be the big colors next year." But he’s kind of, he was tasked from a very early stage of identifying these small groups doing really interesting things, and kind of staying ahead of that. And then Aaron Dignan, who comes from branding, and I’d also say from kind of a Behavioral Psychology background–really starts to think about motivations of people, and how they work together in a more collective/collaborative way. And so together, that’s an incredibly powerful kind of duo, I think.

And that’s, I mean, if I can say, I think that’s what has made us successful today. Is those two viewpoints coming together. And then we have, the third partner who’s incredibly talented in actually building, running an agency and understanding how the agency world works.

Grant:  Right. Is he Canadian?

Bud:  No, he’s not Canadian. [laughter]

Grant:  Often it’s a Canadian. And so, your role in Undercurrent?

Bud:  My role, I’m a Strategist at Undercurrent. So it’s the day-to-day strategy work of identifying a brand’s objectives, identifying the places they want to play. And crafting a strategy, either for something that’s as quick as the next two weeks for a project. What a project would look like over the next six months? To what should this giant global brand look like in 2014?

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And kind of taking the long view for them that way.

Grant:  Right. Right.

Bud:  And everything in between.

Grant:  Yeah. And how do you do that? I mean, that’s a ridiculous question…

Bud:  Right, right.

Grant:  …so I’ll leave it to you. But how do you do that?

Bud:  For me, it’s about trying to understand the small, small subcultures themselves, and actually digging in… research… surveys… focus groups… or just peering in and asking critical questions. I also think it’s both easy and critical to create digital experiments that can collect data for us about what people are doing/saying/sharing and how they interact with new stimuli. I very much focus on the data we all tend to cast off during our normal every day digital behaviors.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  So if it’s…

Grant:  I love that notion of people "throwing off data."

Bud:  Right! And there’s just so much intelligence that brands could be capturing out there. Based on that data. And everyone’s really just sticking to these things print out as pretty trend lines over time. Real data, valuable data, is usually a bit messier than that. At least at the start.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  So a brand manager or marketer might say, "let’s just look at sentiment." Sentiment can only offer so much. Because it doesn’t say the influence of that person speaking. It doesn’t really say how that conversation is affecting people in a connected network. It’s just a percentage that you can track over time. But we can look at what people are talking about…your brand, and the words that they associate with them. And also, who are these groups? You know, that are actually speaking about it? Is it a tightly-wound group? Is it a large but not very connected group that’s talking about it? And what does that mean for anything you want to do there? What can you learn about these barely connected groups before you try to influence them?

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And then I look at the brand. I suppose that’s a bit backwards from how it’s done traditionally. But people come first, corny, but true. Understanding how and why people behave the way they do is the first step to understanding what they can do on your behalf. But it means starting with the mess. Starting with the tiny interactions and seeing where they lead.

Grant:  Yeah. The "macroscope."

Bud:  Right, right. Yeah.

Grant:  Is that your term?

Bud:  No, it’s actually a term I’ve borrowed. I can’t remember the originator but it’s a great one. It’s like watching these tiny interactions kind of funnel back into a larger system.

Grant:  Right. Oh, there’s something I wanted to ask here. And then somebody started vacuuming.

Bud:  [laughs]

Grant:  Oh! You said that the people at Undercurrent, Undercurrent sort of sees you as somebody–you said you can "do stuff quick." And then you have sort of disposable time. And it sounds like the–Undercurrent’s quite happy to have you use that in risky ways. Which is to say you try stuff, it doesn’t work, well, that’s OK.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  Can you take us through that?

Bud: I can say that I work for and with people that trust me to use a small percentage of my time to experiment. I think Undercurrent understands the importance of intellectual curiosity – we work in an industry where it’s almost enough to simply sound right – these are the so-called experts. But it’s not enough to simply sound right – you need to be right – especially when someone is paying for your thinking. So I’m allowed time to experiment and to do ridiculous things. like, pretend to be a fictional character from a TV show on Twitter. And I’m also allowed to read an inordinate amount of information everyday that makes me smarter, and makes me better at what I do.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And once you have, say, 20 people inside your walls that have that time, it’s only multiplicative. It only makes you smarter on a much larger scale. when everyone can kind of share with one another the really interesting things they’re finding, the conclusions that they’re drawing, and can question each other. And that time to draw those conclusions together, to hash things out, that’s sacred time for any organization.

Grant:  Right. The Mad Men Experiment. Could you just, for the record…

Bud:  Sure.

Grant:  …take us through what you were thinking and how you got involved in that? And the question I’m especially interested in was, was that for you? Or was that for Undercurrent? Or, does that difference really not make any difference?

Bud:  Right, right. it’s definitely still kind of a blurred line. You know, what these activities are for, and who they’re for. But when I started The Mad Men Experiment, it was–at first it was just, I saw a couple characters on Twitter and I thought that was amazing. I thought, "I love the TV show, I love Twitter," and I loved how advertising people loved the show and loved Twitter. It was the perfect environment for the right kind of exercise.

So I decided to create a fake character that could "insert himself" into the scenes that he’d be able to comment on. Kind of like a "Puck." Someone who can sit off-scene a bit and make judgments, or commentary.

And really, from there, after all the accounts were shut down, and Twitter took them down, and people were outraged, you know. It really affected me from just my point of view of how culture happens, and how narrative exists for a fan, and how people should be able to play with it.

I grew up watching Sci-Fi. My memories of being a kid and watching TV with my dad was, we watched "Star Trek: Next Generation" every day. When he got home, my father is a contractor–so when he’d get home he was exhausted. And we didn’t have a lot of conversations. We just watched Star Trek.

Grant:  [laughs]

Bud:  And, you know, the idea of the Holo-deck, even into "Star Trek," I think is fascinating. There are characters on a TV show creating their own narratives inside the TV show.

Grant:  Yeah.

Bud:  So they played with narrative in really interesting ways. And that’s how I saw things. And growing up–when I was a kid, too, I made my own comics and things like that. This idea of when I take characters and do really interesting things with them, that’s an expression of my fandom. That’s an expression of my passion for the show.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And to attack that as a content creator seems just incredibly dumb. There’s no other word for it. And so when I saw that, I built the website WeAreSterlingCooper.com to be a manifesto and a catalog of different articles that people were writing about what was happening. It captured all of the characters’ Tweets, and it was there to stand for something. I think sometimes we need a crystallized message of exactly what’s happening inside these micro-communities to reverberate more loudly. That was the right moment for that, I think. : I mean it obviously kind of worked out that way.

Grant:  Yeah. How did it shape, form what–I take it–it never worked back to the show itself?

Bud:  Right, right, right.

Grant:  You’d hoped it would, right?

Bud:  Yeah.

Grant:  Just tell us, in a perfect world, what your hope was that the show might actually embrace…

Bud:  Right. I was hoping that the creators of the show would see the very specific behaviors that were going on. And the behaviors that were going on were people were asking the characters hint-questions right before the show would air every Sunday. They’d want to look for a hint. Because at first, everyone thought these characters were actually created by the show. And so they were actually expecting to get kind of teased before the show started. And then there were lots of conversations going on between commercial breaks about, "Oh my God, did you see this?" and they expected the characters to reply back to them.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And then off-season, I was really hoping that that would be a time that they could play around with narratives. Bring in, you know, third-party characters that no one’s even heard of before. Kind of like play like a little offstage action going on, there.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And that’s just what I was hoping is that they would come to some of these people that have proven themselves over weeks and weeks of time, writing really amazing content. Working together in really collaborative ways. And tease, even if the brand just teased out a little bit of information that Sunday before the show had aired.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And then it would look like one of the Tweets were really prescient about something that would happen. And that would create a huge spark of interest. Especially on Twitter. Because Twitter is such a medium for media fandom. Like that’s what’s happening on Twitter right now. It’s full of people expressing their opinions about shows they’re currently tuning into, and things that happened last night.

And it’s a perfect environment for that kind of thing to happen. And it’s just Tweets. It’s such a small investment of time and creative energy to be able to send a few characters’ waves, and just see what happens.

Grant:  Yeah, yeah. and it’s like that "Share it Now" you were talking about in your Slideshare deck. It allows, Twitter does–I don’t know what the number is–hundreds or thousands of people. And because it means that everybody can only communicate in these tiny bursts, then many more–there’s an absolute relationship to how tiny the message is to how many people can actually participate, I think.

Bud:  Right, right. It’s also interesting because what it takes to actually become a trending topic on Twitter is interesting. It really doesn’t take much. It takes only about a thousand Tweets per hour. Last time I measured it.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  And so, a very small conversation between–a very small but passionate group of people can actually push things into trending topics. And then that–trending topics bring so much attention to things. So it’s a great place for brands to play with. Especially media brands.

Bud:  Yeah, totally.

Bud:  Like, they should play in that space as often as they possibly can, throw out as much content to these creators as they can to hope–to spike those trending topics.

Grant:  Right, right. And so, "Mad Men" had a celebrity effect. I mean, that’s one of the reasons I know about you.

Bud:  [laughs]

Grant:  Is that…

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  "Here was this guy who…." Right? And that would just point around. And it was like, it was galvanizing. It was like, really? You know. It was really this magnificent act of poaching. Taking something that was in the mainstream, and making it–giving it this trans‑media presence and stuff. So it was really–people were agog at the sheer imagination and the daring, and the–I perhaps shouldn’t have said that. ‘Cause the next question is, how did it change your public persona?

Bud:  Right, well…

Grant:  And your private one for that matter?

Bud:  Well, I mean, I can also say that at the time I was trying to publish the report, I received quite a few anonymous emails that had threatened me…

Grant:  Really?

Bud:  …about ever working in advertising again.

Grant:  Really?!

Bud:  Right. [laughs]

Grant:  From who? [overlapping] Who would write something like that?

Bud:  Well, I mean, the interesting thing is, when I published the report, actually, the head of rather well known agency called my boss. And just asked, "Have you read this thing? Have you seen what he said?" It was really insane, because I had tried to actually get him on the phone before I published it to ask him a few questions to include in the report.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And I very much, you know. I never intended for it to make anyone a villain. It was just a really complex story that I could tell. And, everyone’s point of view, there’s definitely a lot of validation for it. But he would never speak to me. But the first call he made, when it came out, was to my boss who just said, "It’s great, isn’t it?"

Grant:  [laughs]

Bud:  And then he hung up the phone. I thought that was a shame and so, at first, it was like what am I actually doing here? I am so ignorant of how the advertising industry itself works. It’s a bit like that. But also, people kind of came out of the woodworks. People who have been creating and supporting fan-fiction for a long time expressed interest in what I was doing, and they’ve since  shown me incredible support in many things I’ve done.

I think too, it’s just about I found the right time, and I had the right point of view for that right moment. I think for anything I’ve done that has actually gotten popular that’s really it. I had the right point of view at the exact right time, and found enough people around me that were willing to help me push that.

end of part 1

Grant:  You’re making it sound as if you just happened…this is just a piece of good fortune, but if you do it often enough it’s not good fortune it’s you consulting what?

Bud:  It’s about conducting a thousand tiny experiments every year.

Grant:  Oh, and some of them work and some of them don’t.

Bud:  Some of them work and some of them don’t. And it’s about constantly reading and constantly staying on top of different conversations and taking the temperature of many, many different people. And asking them their opinions on wide-ranging things. So as I wrote my report, I asked many of Henry Jenkins’ researchers questions about the topic. And I sought out everything written about fan-fiction, transmedia, and content creation I could and some I used and some I discarded. 

It seemed like what was going on with conversations around trans‑media really made sense with what was happening inside fandom – and the consortium kids at MIT knew this and were already blurring the line.

And there seemed to be these merging subcultures, all going towards the same place. And I tried.‑‑and what I wrote was trying to pull these together and say, "We’re all going to the same place here."

Grant:  Right, and that’s an academic place, or do you mean a cultural place?

Bud:  Right. More of a cultural place.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  Fueled by those small academic groups. They were the ones asking really interesting, tough questions. I mean a lot of times it’s frustrating because they are such unanswerable questions. But they are really puzzling moments. I think if you put enough of them together and experiment with them, really interesting things could happen.

Grant:  Yeah. So you do experiments that draws other people in, or drives them out, but whatever happens that is all grist for the mill. That’s all kind of data you can use to take the temperature of the moment.

Bud:  And I can use that later for anything else I’m doing, because I’m testing a few of my hypotheses. Another example is a site I built that allowed anonymous strangers to exchange secrets via email, At Your Secret Service. I had watched these overlapping groups of friends go from visiting PostSecret every week to posting a personal on Nerve.com. And for some reason, those two behaviors together interested me. Maybe it’s because my best dates have always involved spilling way too many secrets to a total stranger…

But I thought, how can I build something that start that interaction? And what happens from there? Like if I just get two balls going down the same hill together, how do they collide? And a lot of things I wondered with that was just about peoples feelings about anonymity online, and the security of personal information. It’s like a big thing to play with, before I go and talk to a major brand who might want to put money against a kernel of an idea. It’s good that I have experimented with it before, and I understand people’s reaction to it.

Grant:  So sometimes it’s instrumental but sometimes it is just a brute curiosity.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  What will happen if…?

Bud:  So painting YouTube videos was just extreme curiosity. Because it’s also one of my hobbies that I enjoy, painting, because it’s a hobby that I have that I don’t obsess over. I can just be completely awful at it and it’s important to have a few of those. Because everything else I do I trying to be better than myself at. But that was one I could just be like, "it’s time I can unwind and not obsess over this." But now it’s become that, simply because of the success of that painting. But that was really just me saying I don’t think there is a lot of difference between our shared experiences watching the same videos on YouTube as it was painting animals on the cave walls.

I know that sounds kind of ridiculous but a shared experience that we had with one another and things that we talk about. So I was thinking, "What if I painted those? And could I sell them online?" Just enough to recoup the canvass and the paint. And it ended up being‑‑selling for $1000 and the canvass and the paint cost me $50. It is just amazing the way that just happened to work.

Grant:  So this is kind of your world as a laboratory and you try different things. It sounds like you welcome inspirations, you welcome new ideas when they’re inspirations and you are not doing a careful serving process where you say, "Yes, this is a good idea because it will accomplish this goal, or give me this kind of data, or speak to this clients need." Something comes in over the transit, just, well‑‑you tell me. It doesn’t seem like you are doing a careful auditioning of these ideas. Many ideas come over and how do you recognize the ones you want to follow up on?

Bud:  It’s a bit of questioning labor and how labor intensive these things are. How quickly can I execute a very, very small nugget of my curiosity? Just to see what it will turn into. Can I build it from there, and that’s exactly what I tell my clients to do as well. Find that speck of dust that could turn into a pearl and just see what happens, meaning measure the hell out of it. Instead of aligning every bit of resource that you have in your agency and your brand to execute a single idea; Do a thousand tiny small experiments, and the ones that actually start to catch on fire, start putting wood on them and see where that goes.

Grant:  So you want them doing a thousands things?

Bud:  I do. And it could align and it should align with their overall strategy. So if it’s a Pepsi, it’s the idea of multiplicity. The idea that they can create these diverging messages and diffuse them out to the world. They should be doing an enormous amount of things at once. And trying to create meanings inside different communities. Because that really fits their brand. They’re not continuity, like Coke would be. They have the freedom to express themselves like an artist.

Grant:  Totally. Totally. But however many ideas you have, not all of them‑‑and even after you’ve said, "Can I execute this quickly?" You still have more ideas than you can execute.

Bud:  Absolutely.

Grant:  How do you sort?

Bud:  I sort by keeping a really engaging group of people around me that I can bounce ideas off of. That’s step one. Ideas tend to vomit out of my mouth, too. I don’t hold them or keep them precious. I don’t keep anything to myself. I talk to anyone I possibly can that’s around me and say, "I have this idea." Or "Do you think this is interesting, too? Maybe we can do this?" And their reaction to it, I gauge if they find it interesting. If this incredibly bright, diverse, and interesting group around me finds this interesting, there might be something to it afterall. And then I think about things like, "How quickly can I execute? Can I execute it by myself? How many more people do I need to involve in this to make it happen?"

And sometimes an idea requires an army. I’ve tried to launch a website plannerreads.com, that grabs all the aggregated shared items from all the planners that I could possibly find on the Internet. And just accumulate them and say, "these are the most shared topics right now. These are the articles everyone is reading."

That was just something where I needed to get an army of people together to make that happen. But that benefits all of us, because now there is a resource out there where you can go and find this all. And see, here we are, and this is what were interested in.

Grant:  And where is that?

Bud:  It’s plannerreads.com. It’s constantly broken, and I’m constantly trying to change things. And I’m not exactly sure what it will evolve into but there it is. Step One. I also come into ideas because I notice behaviors that are shared among like‑minded people. There’s just so many of us inside Google Reader and there are so many of us who express ourselves by sharing things, sharing different advertising topics that we’re currently reading. So what can I do with that behavior? And what can I do with that data?

Grant:  I love that idea of people just streaming with data. I know when I was reading your Slideshare deck about now. I like the idea of people sort of streaming through a "now." And then I like the idea of, I don’t know quite‑‑the visual is something like, you know what I mean? Like if you do the visual that shows‑‑that shows, I don’t know. Anyhow, sorry. I just like that idea of everyone giving off data.

Bud:  It’s like a comet’s tail, right? And it’s just there waiting to be looked at and tracked and understood. And also what we’re really missing is how does that data change over time? And what can we learn there?

Grant:  Yeah.

Bud:  What are my behaviors now that I didn’t have six months ago? 

Grant:  Yeah.

Bud:  How are my behaviors changing? And we could track most of that. It’s sitting out there. Dormant. But at the same time, brands are fine spending millions of dollars for research with focus groups of a hundred people. I’m making it sound too easy – it’s a monumental challenge, collecting that data, and extracting insights from it. But it’s there. The opportunity. The oil’s there, we just have to drill for it.

Grant:  Yeah. Yeah. And I’m interested in how guilty I am of a kind of amnesia where my ideas are changing and I’m not fully aware that they’re changing. So it’s only when I stumble upon an old email that I think, "Man!"

Bud:  [laughs] Right.

Grant:  "I don’t think that!" But obviously I once did and I somehow quietly concealed the transition from the old idea to the new idea. So it’s useful‑‑I like the idea of something imprinting function. It’s like stamping, you know? So you have that stream that’s passing through you. And if, just to get an imprint at some interval. It would be interesting just for individuals.

Bud:  And making guesses. I like to make guesses and just write them down. Where do I think…? A lot of people seem to be using Foursquare. When do I think Foursquare will hit 300,000 users? And I’ll write that down, and come back to it later.

Grant:  Huh!

Bud:  You know? And just try to make guesses about how these new things that are popping up on the Web, what will exactly happen with them. Or, like, where Lady Gaga will be a year from now? It will be interesting. Interesting question. How many actual records will she sell of her next album? If Apple releases the fabled Tablet, will the stock go up or down? Stack up your assumptions, make a guess, write it down, and figure out where you went right or wrong.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And record as many of those as possible I think. Because if you don’t know your hit or miss rate, it’s really easy to buy into this idea that you understand what’s going on. Because that’s the dark side of digital, is that you can surround yourselves with only people who are like‑minded. So you could constantly have this feedback saying, "Yes, we’re all correct, at all times."

Grant:  Right, yeah, yeah, no. exactly. And then there’s that terrible kind of self‑congratulation that people have, ’cause they’re all in the know.

Bud:  Right. Yeah.

Grant:  But you’re not very different from somebody who doesn’t have a clue. They have a little noise‑making contest in this room, every‑‑just about this time. So…just making a racket. Yeah, very good.

Bud:  I think it comes, my idea of experimentation just comes from being a coder. Growing up, playing with code. But I was never really trained in how to program. But the idea of, "I think I can make this because I see something over here, and I see something over there. And I think I can do something with that."

Grant:  Yes.

Bud:  And teaching kids that, I think, is really important. Teaching them to experiment with possibilities, not just code and code structure. But just, can you make that happen? What’s the possibility of that?

Grant:  Yeah. Yeah. Listen, we’re going to get driven out of here. How are you doing time wise? It’s 3:00.

Bud:  I’m fine. I’m actually off today.

Grant:  Are you? Then I’m just going to pause this. Just start this. So we were just talking about the‑‑this place where this is, maybe….shoot. It’s not very stable is the trouble. Something, put it all‑‑that sugar dish was perfect as a stabilizer. But if we just leave it here that maybe will do. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. If you could just say a couple of things?

Bud:  I’m just talking now. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Grant:  That’s pretty good but it’s not tremendous. Keep talking if you would?

Bud:  My name is Bud Caddell I am [laughs] testing the microphone on your recording device now. [microphone noises]

Maybe, I might have something in my bag you can prop it up with.

Grant:  Oh, that’s a good idea.

Bud:  Or maybe my bag itself. I’ve got two books, that might work.

Grant:  Totally. [laughter] Great.

Bud:  Maybe in between them?

Grant:  Sure. Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to work. But maybe if that just gets us closer to it.

Bud:  Sure.

Grant:  Can we just go to the washroom?

Bud:  Yeah, yeah.

Grant:  Yeah, so I’ll be right back. [long pause, background noises and distant talking until 48:07]

Grant:  Ah, so where were we? This is an amazingly uncomfortable couch, isn’t it?

Bud:  It is.

Grant:  It’s like…

Bud:  This middle cushion.

Grant:  Yeah.

Bud:  I like the elephant head on the wall, though.

Grant:  Isn’t this amazing? It’s like younger gentlemen, killing everything that moved.

Bud:  Right, it’s safari in the library, you know. [laughter] I like it.

Grant:  God. It really is, there’s a wonderful museum in Montreal on like the campus of McGill that like it is itself a museum piece.

Bud:  Mm‑hmm.

Grant:  it captures that Victorian enthusiasm for cataloging and stuff and there’s a way in which this is kind of an archaeological remainder.

Bud:  It is.

Grant:  So you cast the net wide, in terms of listening, you were saying, to 400 blogs, reading 400 blogs.

Bud:  Right. Right.

Grant:  And how do you choose those 400?

Bud:  I try to choose them based on some kind of diversity. I don’t want to read too many social media blogs, I don’t want to read too many advertising blogs, I try to make sure that they are written from different points of views, written by and for completely different audiences, I subscribe to five or ten, you know, just image‑sharing sites.

Grant:  Mm.

Bud:  Where people can kind of post what they found across the Internet and I watch what is trending there, that to me is just as interesting as what’s going on right now.

Grant:  Sorry, what was that, where do you see the, where are you most interested in seeing stuff trending?

Bud:  In image‑sharing sites?

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  So those are sites where people have an account where they can grab images from across the web and say, "this is what I’m sharing right now."

Grant:  Yep.

Bud:  And you’ll see, you know Britney Murphy, the actress who just died?

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And before I read that on the New York Times or anywhere else, her photos just took over all these photo sites. Like people were just cataloging like every movie she’s ever been in, every shot that they could find about her, across the Internet, and I saw this slew of them, so I knew something must have happened.

Grant:  Right, right.

Bud:  You’ll see Johnny Depp trend on certain days and you’ll wonder why or what new story about him has caused that to happen. It’s just a really interesting way of looking at a different kind of output. And, and, wondering why those kind of interactions are taking place. And I try to grab from as many different sources as possible and I’ll always to keep it if it interests me, you know, in any way, even if it’s just purely curiosity’s sake, it’ll stay on my reader for awhile, and I’ll kind of demo it and if it doesn’t really fit or if I’m not getting as much value from it, I’ll kick it out.

And I’ve tried to, you know, I’ve tried to weed that reader down to maybe 200‑300 blogs. My ability to make it through my Reader is dependent on the work that has to get done in my email box, though, of course.

Grant:  Mm‑hmm. Mm‑hmm.

Bud:  And I go through my reader at such a fast clip.

Grant:  You must.

Bud:  I do.

Grant:  And you must, I sort of, I guess it’s just me, but I sort of have to sit and then think, look at something and then read it and then sort of think about it, so I’m really slow but it sounds like you just sort of blast through.

Bud:  I burn through it and I look for things that stand out to me based on topic, based on what I’m seeing and I’ll save those posts to go deeper on later.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  But I go through it so fast, I want a foot pedal for my computer. One that so I can just keep tapping my foot to go to the next item while I’m eating or writing or anything else.

Grant:  Right. And are you good at framing? I mean, I’m kind of good at, I mean, you know, I see what I see, but it takes me a lot longer to go, well, what is this? You see a glint of something in a blog post and you think, oh this is just another point of view. Assembling that point of view, it’s like, you know dealing with an old fashioned Hollywood camera, like a team of men kind of have to like move it to get the new view perspective, but it feels like you’re pretty nimble in that regard.

Bud:  I think it just comes from empathy. I try to assimilate or try to understand people’s point of views quickly when I encounter them.

Grant:  Mm‑hmm. Mm‑hmm.

Bud:  And I try to dissect how they see their world. And it helps that I’m just a really good sponge. If you put me near someone, and near someone who has talent or ability or interests that I have no idea about…

Grant:  Mm‑hmm.

Bud:  I really try to glom onto it and figure out how it works.

Grant:  What is that? Where’s that from, you figure, in your case?

Bud:  Well, it’s funny because you know, like I said, my father is a contractor.

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  And he has this amazing ability to take apart any machine and put it back together and watching him do that as a kid was amazing and unfortunately, I got none of that ability myself. You know, my brother and my sister can take apart anything and put it back together, my sister took apart an Apple IIE when we got it as kids and put it back together and she was six.

Grant:  Whoa. Whoa.

Bud:  And so my, I have that ability to kind of disassemble things and reassemble them, but for ideas or point of views – I think that’s the manifestation of my father’s gift.  And so when I meet people, that’s what I really do, I try to "suss out" their motivations, their filters, in order to see the world they see.

And literally I’ve collected so many different kinds of people over the years – it’s an amazing tool to use to see things from different perspectives; like trying on new eyes, how would Aaron see this? How would Jamie see this?

Grant:  Nice. Nice.

Bud:  And how can I understand all of it in the context of what I’ve seen before.

Grant:  Yep. So you have, you have a set of pattern recognitions, depending on people you’ve worked with, whose characteristic pattern recognition you now sort of decoded and internalized.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  And, that you need Aaron’s pattern recognition, that just happens, I’m assuming, just when you’re engaging with a problem that’ll just swim in.

Bud:  Right, right.

Grant:  It’s not because you, you’re not in fact canvassing possibilities, that stuff’s purely intuitive, unconscious.

Bud:  I feel like it, right. Like when I’m reading something or when I’m seeing a new headline, you know I really do, it bounces in my head almost in his voice.

Grant:  Mm‑hmm.

Bud:  He’s in my head dissecting it for himself.

Grant:  Nice, nice. And so a lot’s coming in and it sounds like you’re not always having to reach an opinion about what it is you see. That’s you read some stuff without reaching a conclusion and it, it has a kind of latency, is that the term people are using now? It exists in your pre‑conscious mind and you’ll call upon it later, if and when it’s useful.

Bud:  Yeah, I definitely try to reserve my point of view for things until I, because when I’m at this, my behavior when I’m going through my reader is such a fast‑paced behavior, that I don’t want to subject things that I’m seeing to a direct point of view at that kind of speed. Especially because, you know, I’m dealing with very subjective topics when it comes to culture itself.

Grant:  Mm. Mm. So you’re moving back and forth from the microscopic to the macroscopic?

Bud:  Right, right. And it’s‑‑it really is a frenzy of attention splitting and then a very, very, deep dive on it later. I’d love it if I could say it’s a very conscious switch on my part but it really is just part of my process at this point. It happens when it happens – usually when something repeats something a friend has said, or a colleague questioned, or I’ve seen from the past.

Grant:  Mm‑hmm. So you’re casting the net wide, you’re taking lots in, oh are you using any particular software to keep track of, to tag things and sort them and keep them?

Bud:  I use Google Reader to burn through a standard set of sources, the 300+ blogs. I use Delicious to catalog things that I’m actually going through and find some value in bookmarking for later consumption. I use Twitter to bounce through what my social graph is sharing at the time and to also throw out nuggets of ideas myself. See that’s another thing, I test my point of view of things, by sharing the link and attaching only a sliver of my point of view, where I’m kind of headed with it, and I send that out to, you know those 3,000 people that follow me on Twitter and they echo back to me such a splintering of their opinions and their takes on things.

Grant:  Right. And is that truly a splintering or do you end up seeing that there are three different points of view, or there are three points of view but only one of them interests you and you discard the other two, or… How do you organize the public’s reactions?

Bud:  I think I… Right. I think I see extremes. I think that’s how people want to express themselves there. And that’s the trap we find ourselves falling into, I suppose. You know I’ll get back three extreme points of view based on what I just shared, and I can weigh those against each other and say, "Where in the middle of this does this actually lay, or is it one of these extremes?"

Grant:  Yeah. And are you keen to find that middle position?

Bud:  Personally, I like to view things first through as much of a black and white lens as I can to try to, you know… And see what falls into those accepted filters already. First and foremost, is this one of those rare occasions when something is black and white? But when it doesn’t fit that box, or it confuses me and I’m perplexed or puzzled, that means there’s obviously more nuance to it. And that’s when things‑‑alarm bells go off in my head and that’s when I know to dive deep into things.

Grant:  Nice. I don’t know if‑‑but in the book, I talk a bit about working with my advisor at Chicago called Salens, who stops and finds something in my paper, and that was a good paper, but because he’s got something that he can’t make work. And that’s when you see him stop and really begin to think about, "Is this something new in the world for which I need new categories?" Or, you know, "There’s something imperfect about my categories and how might I change them? And having changed them, what happens to the thing I think I have here?" Is that kind of what we’re talking about here?

Bud:  I think, absolutely, that’s exactly what it is. And that’s when you’ll see me‑‑I think my coworkers will laugh about it, but that’s when you’ll see me just stare blankly at my computer and get up and go to an empty whiteboard and I’ll start drawing or diagramming things. That’s the moment when something does not compute with a very finite set of rules I’ve given myself to use as filters – and that means things can actually begin to get interesting.

Grant:  Right, nice. So lots coming in with…in moments of examination and reflection, and then lots goes out in the hundreds, thousands of experiments a year.

Bud:  Something, you know.

Grant:  Whatever it is.

Bud:  Something like that.

Grant:  Yeah. But that’s you kind of almost taunting the world. I mean, I have this image, kind of, of a child with a stick. [laughs] Forgive me now, I’m not diminishing you.

Bud:  [laughs] No, no, no.

Grant:  Yeah, but it’s almost like, "If I provoke the world, what will it do?"

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  Which is… Is it kind of like that?

Bud:  Yeah, and I think that’s the route I take with blogging, too.  I’ll throw out a point of view or specific topic with a really sharp point of view that I know isn’t really well‑formed or isn’t, you know. I know that it’s going to cause people to say something, and that’s the interesting part for me; being able to have people to respond to the things I write and say…And then also they bring me, not only different points of views but different research that I haven’t read yet, different work on the topic. Like today when I said, "Is social media plateau‑ing?" I said that to cause a reaction.

Grant:  Right, and you got one from me.

Bud:  Right, and I got… I checked my phone just now and I got someone who is arguing your same point of view, that it’s something that’s more known. But I know that when I say that, I’m going to call out two camps, and each camp is going to have their point of view. And it’s impossible for me to understand what they’ll bring to the table beforehand, but that reaction to it I find so interesting. I’ve actually talked to some successful bloggers and they tell me that they craft a blog post and then they take out the last two paragraphs. You know, they take out that resolution.

Grant:  Brilliant.

Bud:  They keep it in conflict, they keep people wanting to come back to it.

Grant:  Right, that’s brilliant. And I always feel obliged to end with a punch line.

Bud:  [laughs] Right.

Grant:  And I like that idea of withholding the punch line. That’s really good. What should I ask you here? So it’s kind of like a distributed thinking. When you provoke the world with an experiment or with a blog post that is unfinished or deliberately, maybe, antagonistic, it forces the‑‑the world will, so engaged, reply, and that becomes part of the thinking you have at your disposal. So you kind of engage the world to help you think a bit?

Bud:  Yeah absolutely, and I can do that in a lot of different ways.

Grant:  Right, ’cause the traditional… you know the French, Classical model, it’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis, or something, and you’re kind of letting somebody do the antithesis and then you do the synthesis. But it’s kind of like it’s a distributed… Do you think…? Is that a… I find it a useful way of thinking, but I’m not sure you do.

Bud:  Right. I also have a personal fear of following my own arguments too far down the rabbit hole. In college, if a professor asked for a ten page essay, I’d turn in 25 pages. And somewhere on that journey, I’d draw bizarre conclusion, bizarre even to me, and all too often, lose the plot. I didn’t need the starter’s pistol, I needed the bit of tape you break at the end of the race to say, "stop."

Grant:  Right.

Bud:  It’s protecting myself from my own obsessive thinking.

Grant:  Right. You’re the opposite of the guy I heard speak last night who was apparently kind of the world‑ranking expert on Broadband and, you know, public access to, you know, digital access. And he wouldn’t let people have the conversation they wanted to have. And people would ask him questions and the most obvious question was, well, "What’s…Where are you going with all of this?" You know, he kept sort of setting up these observations, and you think, "Great. The punch line must be coming."

Bud:  [laughs] Right.

Grant:  And it wouldn’t come. And so he was kind of stage managing…he was wrangling the conversation in the most annoying, least productive way. And it’s like you’re reaching out happily, provoking…What’s…? Yeah. I mean some people would say reading 200 or 400 posts a day, that’s a recipe for, you know, total intellectual chaos. But that doesn’t actually trouble you. It’s when you begin to assemble ideas and work them out and write them out, that’s when you… That’s the moment where… What? You sort of climb aboard this topic and take it where…go wherever it takes you. And even if that’s not a coherent, logical stream of exposition. Sorry, I’m just sort of babbling to myself.

Bud:  Yeah. I’m definitely… It’s certainly, at times, reading this much can be disruptive to just trying to get something done, or trying to focus on a specific topic. But I think it’s really important sometimes. I have the great fortune to be paid to think, and so I should put myself in situations where I’m mentally uncomfortable. Where I am, you know, almost suffering information overload because that’s the time for me to make decisions.

When I have that much information coming at me, that’s when I can make a decision to limit, and that’s when I can make a decision to focus, and what to focus on – having to make that decision in my process is really important to me.

Ultimately, me saying the same things that I know, with a lack of information from the outside world, is boring. It’s boring to me, and I feel that it would be boring for other people.

Grant:  And if what…If what your firm does is think for companies, for other firms, and if the world is maximally confusing, and various, and emergent, and hard to read, then you’re sort of precisely the embodiment of what Undercurrent is supposed to do. And to that extent, precisely what it is the corporation needs, to the extent they understand what they’re signing on for when they engage you. That’s the headlight on the locomotive, isn’t it? Somebody is kind of thinking, "What do I see before me? And can I think it? And if I can’t think it, what would I need to think instead?"

That’s a very‑‑Geez‑‑the corporation lived a pretty simple world, and it had a handbook, and it wasn’t that complicated. Then you develop rules, you "re‑routinzed’ the world, and now it’s just off. So unless you’ve got somebody doing what you do…

Bud:  And taking it back to what a brand manager, these days, is responsible for is overwhelming. They’re responsible for all ends of production, all ends of actual delivery of product. They’re responsible for the advertising, for the marketing, for reporting. There’s just so much they’re trying to juggle at the same time, I think it’s too much. I think they’re overburdened with that. And then adding on information intake with that is frightening to them. Now they have to go read blogs plus they have to manage the normal day-to-day? It’s overlooked when we talk about what brand managers should be or shouldn’t be. Just all the other responsibilities that they’re forced, right now, to tackle.

Grant:  So every brand manger should be thrilled to have you or somebody like you in there on their behalf. But most brand managers, because they are creatures of some vanity, as we all are, like to think that they do the heavy lifting. That if something is going to be taken away from them, it should be the lower order intellectual activities, to free them up for the deep thinking. And in point of fact, how do you finesse that?

Bud:  We were fortunate for a while that we came from the Internet. And the Internet is such a novel, strange, quirky place.

Grant:  You knew they didn’t know.

Bud:  Right. It was a known unknown. We could almost come in like Jack Hanna on late‑night TV, and show you an ocelot. Like this is what a kid looks like on the Internet. And as that becomes more known, I think we’ll be more challenged to provide added value with our role – which is spectacular, really. So I think it’s up to us to move higher up the food chain, honestly, and to come in at the CMO or CEO level, and to say "This is what’s needed for a real change across the organization."

And it’s up to us to show how an organization can benefit from digital technologies. Not just, "Let me tell you how small groups work on the Internet." But how can technology empower the small groups that already exist inside your giant brand that employs tens if not hundreds of thousands of people? And how do we use those people already using digital technologies in a really interesting, beneficial way? Take the idea behind PlannerReads, capitalizing on the shared behaviors of a group, and apply it inside your organization.

Grant:  Yes.

Bud:  So all of us must grow our own skill set, I think, to survive. Make ourselves more uncomfortable.

Grant:  It’s nice. It’s a conspiracy of smart people, finally. And it’s people smart enough to know the real order of difficulty we’re looking at as we try to solve problems and the kinds of intellectual activities you’ve just described. To know that those are necessary, to know that there have to be moments when you don’t know and you put yourself in a state of real discomfort. What’s the famous line from George Bernard Shaw, "Most people would rather die than think. Most do."

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  Right? We get comfortable with our categories, we use them over and over again, and it’s that climbing out of that, it’s like getting out of a capsule without a suit on. Right? It’s not pleasant not to think in the ideas that make thinking easy. It’s quite horrible in a way. Unless you’re pushed into it in a moment of inspiration. Just suddenly you have an idea, and you went through all the pain of transition, somehow it happened to somebody else, you don’t know, but you just got the idea for nothing.

Bud:  Right.

Grant:  You didn’t have to spend anytime in the world doing this. That’s all right, I’m just babbling.

Bud:  For me, pain is often‑‑and pain and being uncomfortable are the best catalysts for thinking. Brands are too untouchable. Brands have amassed too much power for themselves. So they never really have to be uncomfortable unless they want to make themselves feel uncomfortable.

Grant:  And in a weird way, maybe the CCO becomes the detonation box that you have inside the C suite. You have the person who is prepared to make themselves exquisitely uncomfortable so that other members of the C suite don’t have to, "That’s what we pay you for, to spare us that discomfort." [laughter].

Bud:  The whipping boy of the organization.

Grant:  Yes, totally. I still like the William James’ notion about the "routinization" of religious experience, and he says, you know by the medieval period, "If Christ himself had wandered up the steps of the Catholic Church in Rome, they would have said ‘There, there, thank you very much. Go, keep moving, we’ve got this under control. We know what religion is, we know what divine inspiration is, we know who God, all of this stuff is mapped, thank you. We don’t want you.’" The corporation gets exactly there. It’s just this weird tension. It’s a kind of creative destruction thing going on constantly. You have to be absolutely certain about certain things to make your way on the world. Then you have to destroy that certainty to get to what’s, sorry, I’m blabbing.

Bud:  It’s at the intersection to me. Like understanding how process works, how your products are made, understanding how people work inside an organization, those are the known knowns. Those are the things, as a brand, that you should have a clear point of view on. But where you interact with regular human beings, that’s the really interesting part ––  if you can forget for a moment that you know how that’s supposed to occur, that’s when the real curiosity and the real insight can happen. But perhaps unfortunately, brands have agencies to sit at those points of intersection. And so the agencies may get smarter at times about intersecting with real people, but the brand itself has very little insight into that. They have retail agencies, they have digital agencies, they have traditional agencies that create and learn about these interactions.

That’s why I also think the future of the agency model is one that becomes a data hub or an insight engine for the brand, and they need to be able to come back to them with those insights in a really packaged and interesting way.

Grant:  Yes, come back to the corporation?

Bud:  Come back to the corporation and say, you know especially the AOR model, "We’ve been your agency of record now for two years. Where’s the data? Where’s the insights that you’ve gleaned from this data that say like, how you’re consumer is changing, or how your involvement with them has changed over time."

Grant:  Yes.

Bud:  And that just is missing.

Grant:  Yes. Well I think I’m running out of questions, and it’s my fault. There are a million things to ask, but maybe we should call it a day. If I may, I’ll look through what I have, and see what else I need to ask you, if I could follow up.

Bud:  Sure.

Grant:  But this has been great.

Bud:  Yes, thank you so much.

Grant:  No, hey, my pleasure. Thanks a million.

Transcription by CastingWords

 

 

Creativity’s brief moment in the sun?

At year’s end, I have an unhappy thought, that some of the creative professionals who rose of prominence in the first decade of the 21st century will be eclipsed by the end of the decade.  My unhappy thought: the first decade of the 21st century will be for some creative professionals, a brief moment in the sun.

This suspicion turns on three propositions.

1) There has been a change in supply.

As Henry Jenkins pointed out in Textual Poachers and as I labored to point out in Plenitude, the distinction between cultural producers and consumers began to blur in the last 20 years.  Indeed, there was a vast migration from one side of the distinction to the other.  Many people who once merely consumed culture (in the form of film, art, comedy, observation, journalism, criticism) were now surprisingly good at producing this culture.  Suddenly in the economy of culture, the number of suppliers exploded.

2)  There has been a change in demand.

The first decade of the 21st century  was the moment in which the corporation reached out and embraced creativity. We have many institutions and people to thank for this, including BusinessWeek (when it announced the innovation economy), Richard Florida and his study of the creative class, the Kelley brothers (David at Stanford design school, and Tom at Ideo), Roger Martin at the Rotman School, to name a few .

3) There has been a change in the market in which supply and demand find one another

Recently, I was chatted with Richard Shear. He’s owns a design firm.  Over the years he’s done very well, thank you very much. But he can see a cloud on the horizon.  He is seeing some corporations "crowdsourcing" their creativity.  They hold competitions in which all the design talent "out there" is encouraged to apply.  The best work is selected…and paid much less than my friend would have charged.  In sum, demand may be increasing, but supply is increasing more. So prices are falling.

A case in point: that image that appears in the upper right hand corner of this post?  I just bought it from istockphoto.  It cost me a dollar.

4) Creative professionals may lose their moment in the sun.

The economics of creativity may be changing, and this trend appears to be on a collision with the trend that made designers the charmed creatures of the corporation.  It’s possible that the great golden age of commercial creativity may end almost before it began.  By the end of the decade of the next century, we may be looking at a very different design world.

5) Recommendation

In the new "crowdsourced" economy, there will be one place where designers will continue to flourish.  It will be with clients who do not know what they need.  When they do know what they need, they will take advantage of the new economy.  But when they don’t, they will need a enduring connection with a designers who gets who they are, who the consumer is, and what the culture is.  They will need designers who deliver a larger package of knowledge, intelligence, and creativity.  (To be sure, this is the way great designers always seen what they do.)  The upshot?Designers should be cultivating the skills that enable them to deliver ideas and intelligence, not just design.  (To be fair, this is what all design schools say they do.)  This will take a new order of professional development.  (It will mean that designers will have to be Chief Culture Officers, whomever else they are.)

There’s good news: that as the world grows more dynamic, more and more clients are going to need more foundational work from their designers.  They won’t know what they need. They will come to the designer with a wish for a bigger picture, pattern recognition, a true knowledge and mastery of culture, a feeling for the competitive field and a deeper skill set that is perhaps now usual.

References

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

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge.

McCracken, Grant.  1997.  Plenitude.  Toronto: Periph Fluide.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  Basic Books.

Mandel, Michael.  2004.  "This Way to the Future." BusinessWeek, October 11.

Kelley, Thomas, and Jonathan Littman. 2005. The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization. New York: Broadway Business.

Moldoveanu, Mihnea C., and Roger L. Martin. 2008. The Future of the MBA: Designing the Thinker of the Future. New York: Oxford University Press.

Winsor, John.  2009.  The power of And.  John Winsor’s Blog.  December 30. here.

Acknowledgment

I have the uneasy feeling that my recommendation comes from someone somewhere.  I have been reading widely over the holidays, and there has been a lot of water under the board (internet surfing, that is).  If someone knows the source of this argument, please let me know.

Note: this post was lost late last year due to Network Solutions’ incompetence.  I am reposting it today December 31, 2010.

7-11, where brands go to die

Think back, way back, to the last time you were in a 7-11.  Recall the smell, the light, the linoleum underfoot, the clerk behind the counter.

It’s as if everything that is bad and wrong in the ordinary world has assembled in a kind of jamboree of awfulness. When I used to frequent one in downtown Boston, I would shuffle around endlessly looking for something to eat. And I came to the conclusion that with the exception of a token apple or two, only artificial food is allowed in this place.  If you ate here exclusively for a month (instead of at McDonald’s), there is no chance you would complete the assignment.

But it’s not just food that’s bad for you.  Something about this very entropic place actually manages to wick away your knowledge of the world; what time it is, what season it is, what neighborhood, city, region you are in.  And once the locational knowledge goes, it’s not long before basic identity info begins to go.  Forget eating at 7-Eleven for a month. Try living there.

We are bat-like creatures, bouncing signals off the world to locate ourselves in this world.  You can try this in 7-Eleven. But no signal returns.  You are lost in a box lost in space.

So what happens to the brand in this box? But of course it withers and dies.  It has been crafted by brilliant marketers. Millions have been spent to give it all but only the meanings that will make it resonant, interesting and vivid.  But none of these meanings are robust enough to survive the 7-Eleven.

And what happens to culture in this box?  Damaged beyond recognition.  It has been crafted by the rest of us.  And we what a thing we have accomplished.  Talk about resonant, interesting, and vivid. That’s us.  But even this is not robust enough to survive 7-Eleven.  It is impoverished and hollowed out.

There have been two recent attempts to save the 7-Eleven.  One was the Homer Simpson "endorsement."  D’ho!  I think this was a bad idea.  (See my blog post below for the larger argument).  More promising is the appointment of Rita Bargerhuff.  Yes, she was the one who okayed the Simpson endorsement.  And that tells us that she’s trying and that she knows the direction 7-Eleven must move: away from "convenience" (that concept that has underwritten so much bad design and experience) to something funny, playful, more responsive to the culture around it.

Who knows? Perhaps Bargerhuff will someday double as 7-Eleven’s CCO.

Reference

Hein, Kenneth.  2009.  7-Eleven Elevates Bargerhuff to CMO.  BusinessWeek.  November 18.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  Homer Simpson and the 7-Eleven Endorsement debacle.  This Blog.  July 17.  here.

Note: this post was lost due to Network Solution incompetence in December 2009.  I am reposted it today, December 24, 2010.  

That Mythic Beer Guy

We are sure to see lots of him during the Super Bowl.  Call him the Beer Guy.  He is happy, loud, playful and a bit of a dunce.  He could be a fraternity brother.  He could be a sports fan. But most of all he’s a myth.

The Beer Guy is mostly a figment of the marketing imagination.  He was invented to sell things to men.  And men, many of them, like Beer Guy well enough.  Most of these guys can do a convincing performance of Beer Guy.  And there are moments when this is precisely the person they wish to be.

But it’s also true that even for these guys, Beer Guy is a stereotype and an embarrassment.  As the standard device for selling beer, it is tired, stupid and done.

Certainly, if you put guys in a focus group room, they will tell you how much they like beer guy.  After all, this is the idiom men use for certain social occasions.  But if we spend a little more time talking to men, we discover that there are depths and subtleties to masculinity and most males that the Beer Guy modality does not capture and cannot represent.  Indeed, there are many people in the average portfolio of selves than marketer’s seem to know about it.  It’s as if marketing has latched on to Beer Guy and now clings to him for dear life.

Does Beer Guy sell beer?  I think there’s a certain amount of wear-out here.  It’s enough already.  Guys are not going to foment a revolution of the kind that women brought against marketers.  No, they will just grow ever more tepid in their brand enthusiasm.  Anyone who insists on using Beer Guy to sell beer is trading in tedium.  And is there any thing more tedious than a typical beer ad.  Really, in the world of culture and creativity, the typical beer ad comes across of the idiot cousin.

Somewhere someone right now is working on an ad for the SuperBowl.  Let’s ask them to do at least this: work in secret signals that let us know that you know that this is not all there is to the American male.  These guys you insist on portraying as big happy dopes?  They actually have higher intellectual faculties.  How about engaging them?

Note: this post was lost in December of 2009, thanks to Network Solutions incompetence.  I am reposting it today December 24, 2010.  

Art of the Trench coat: unexpected lessons from the luxury brand

Thanks to Eminence Grise, I recently had a look at Burberry’s Art of the Trench.

It’s a lovely, brooding site, the kind of thing you browse with the restless, deeply jaded eye of a French cafe dweller, especially if you are like me an ancient roue.

I was too jaded to do a full reconnaissance.  (Plus, my view was sometimes blocked by American tourists.  Why must they torment my city with their graceless parkas and athletic shoes?  I mean, really.)

But I noticed this much..

In the beginning, the world of fashion was inhabited by models, impossibly tall, thin, elegant and beautiful, who were shot by professional photographers and then edited and air brushed by sharp eyed editors as a result of which transformation the models became still more tall, thin, elegant and beautiful.  Our job: to look on with drooling admiration, our face pressed against plate glass, a bitter autumnal wind tugging at our unforgivably unfashionable outfits, get-ups (and parkas).

The Art of the Trench marks two departures from this world.

The website features lots of photos of people in the Burberry trench.  Most of these photographs are taken by a professional photographer but they show "real people."

The notion here is that Burberry trench is no longer one perfect idea in Plato’s cave.  Actually, thanks to it’s must-have status in the world of the officer, the spy and the detective, it always had a second life as a friend of romance and adventure.  But typically Burberry ignored this tradition, and presented the trench the way the fashion world presented most everything…for our drooling admiration, our face pressed against etc. etc.

Burberry is wrestling with Plenitude and the fragmentation of taste in our culture.  There is no longer one single perfect Trench.  It is understands that if Burberry no longer controls the Trench, that it has to share authorship with the rest of us. Burberry has in other words discovered cocreation.  And not a moment too soon.  To live in the new world, brands are no longer missiles fired into the night air.  They are now what we make them on the ground, or they are nothing much at all.

But the website here goes a step further.  They accept photos from real people.  The photos are bad.  And the people are, well, really real.  Warts and all.  And for me at least this is a step too far.  I don’t actually want to see really real people.  It turns out, shame on me, that I still want my luxury brands (and the models who bring them to me) to have a certain exalted status.  I am happy to be forgiven the long climb up Mount Olympus, but I have now discovered that I don’t really want to make that trek all the way down into the really really world.

This is just a little too authentic for me.  (And for others, I’m guessing.  You tell me.)  But then I’m an ancient roue who insists that the world, my Paris, present itself as something stage worthy and perfectly crafted.  Otherwise what’s a Paris for?   Luxury brands deliver an exaltation.  This is one of the things they do for us.  No?

Post script:

This praise for Burberry is perhaps too tame.  Seconds after finishing this post, I read Cathy Horyn’s "Reflections on a Weird Year" in the New York Times.

I’m … completely fascinated by the potential for fashion companies to really use the Web and digital technology in much more interesting and purposeful ways than they so far have. I don’t mean Facebook and Twitter and 13-year-old bloggers (isn’t she 16 yet?), but rather rethinking a brand in terms of digital and making it as important a consideration as design and print advertising, which is still what most brand managers trust. Some companies plainly “get it” (look at hermes.com), but more brand chiefs need to inform themselves and make digital a top-down priority.

References

Anonymous.  2009.  Model Citizen.  Eminence Grise.  December 22.  here.

The Burberry Art of the Trench website here. 

Horyn, Cathy.  Reflections on a Weird Year.  New York Times.  December 23.  here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Grace Peng.

Note: this post was lost due to Network Solutions incompetence in December of last year.  I am reposted it, today, December 24, 2010.