It's an unpleasant, abominable idea, submitting something as delicate as culture to the rack of metrification.
But here's why it's necessary. There's so much going on "out there" in culture, so many different people creating so many different innovations, subject to change so violent and frequent, that unless we have metrics at our disposal, well, we're done for. We have no real hope of canvassing all that water front.
It's also true that we can win arguments in the C Suite with heart felt recitations of things we've noticed. We need something that looks like evidence and works like an argument.
I was talking to a former student the other day. He works for a company that holds the copyright to popular music. They need to know who's playing what in order to collect royalties. They rely on several data sources including ASCAP which, it turns out, knows exactly at any given moment what's playing and where.
I put down my soup spoon and wept bitterly for a moment. The idea that there is a listening device this good astonished and disheartened me. Disheartened? But of course, perfect data, incredibly useful for listening for changes in American culture (imagining using this data to detect a sudden shift movement towards Country in the Northeast?) and sure as shooting, I think it's fair to surmise, no one uses it for this purpose.
It just sits there, like some wonderful scroll in a desert cave, like some wonderful device in Steven Spielberg's gigantic warehouse, the one where the US government apparently puts everything that is dangerously useful. What is wrong with us, that we should be blessed with these riches, and should fail to put them to advantage. This, this, is what's unpleasant and abominable!
It reminded me of the story about the Dole Pineapple in Hawaii. Some guy was doing a tour of the plantation on the big island, and he noticed that Dole was taking all the juice from their canning operation and pouring it into the ocean. He said, "er, could I have that?"
There are lots of good data out there in addition to ASCAP. All the big pipes designed to speak to the long tail (Amazon, iTunes, etc.) must have tremendous data. They can see upturns for a particular title (have you ordered your copy of Chief Culture Officer?), and with a little experience and good training, they should be able to leap to some very useful conclusions about what is happening in American culture. Google search makes there data available in a general way (with Google Trends).
These data sources are useful individually but aggregated they are a little like a perfect weather map, an opportunity to mix the data streams and watch cultural developments take on a kind of 3D clarity. Yes, it takes a good eye and lots of experience, but I think this data is so rich, it would make geniuses of us all.
I don't think that V, the science fiction series on ABC, is going make it. Here's why.
Popular culture demands of us that we take treat many things "as read." We see the protagonist climbing out of bed in the morning. We cut to a scene that shows him beginning his day at work. We take as read all the events in between, showering, dressing, eating breakfast and the drive to work. We accept that he did these things. We understand that they are not germane to the story at hand. We are happy to have them elided from the show, to take them as read.
It's amazing how good we are at taking things as read. Even unambitious shows hurl us around with scant exposition and very few sign posts. Suddenly, our protagonist is in a large office building. That's ok. This is probably where he works, we think. We "stayed tuned." If this turns out to be someone else's place of work, we are quite happy to adjust.
We are happy to supply assumptions, and we are amiable about it. We don't think, "office building? Wonder if it's in Rio?" No, if the show has been set in LA, we are happy to assume that this building is in LA. We are just that cooperative. (Or philosophically undemanding.)
Viewers are active, even when they are not fans. They are active even when they are not especially literate in matters of media. That's what it is to belong to our culture. We are highly skilled at taking things as read (TTAR).
But TTAR can be dangerous. Once we have accepted the editing it performs on the story, what's to stop us from editing too. We see a scene taking shape, two people arguing, perhaps, what's to stop us from saying, "Got it. Argument. Let's just take this as read and move on."
A virulent form of TTAR can consume the entire show. We need only see the characters and the opening scene to think, "Very well. Good guys. Bad Guys. Conflict. Resolution. Theme music. Fade to TTAR."
Indeed the more formed a show is by genre, the more likely we are to respond by issuing a summary TTAR order. Because if we know the genre, and the show is genre bound, we can say quite precisely what's going to happen. Take a show like Law and Order, this is so very predetermined that it's a wonder that anyone bothers to watch it anymore. (But of course we do. A mystery for another time.)
I have watched two espisodes of V. This is a show with lots going for it, including several great performances, but it does feel a little predictable, a little confined. Some way into the second espisode, I could hear myself thinking: "Good guys. Bad guys. From outer space. Conflict. Resolution. …" God, even the criticism begs for abbreviation. This "visitation" genre is now well known. Visitors with terrible powers of control… The plucky band of humans who resist… How many times have we seen this played out? And where can they go with it? It doesn't feel like there are many options here. This genre might be relatively new but it's beginning to feel like its already hollowed out. V feels like a show straight out of the TTAR pits of formulaic television.
I could be wrong, and I hope I am. But I don't believe V will flourish.
Are you watching Mad Men, the hit TV show? Noticed that look of dazed or startled expression that sometimes flits across the Betty Draper's face?
I never see it in real life.
As a hardworking anthropologist, I spend a lot of time doing interviews in people's homes. Usually this means I am talking to the female head of household, a woman in her 30s or 40s.
No Betty Drapers here. My respondents are intelligent and intense. Often they will zero in on my questions, divine my intent, and take over the interview. My job now: take notes as fast as I can.
This should not surprise. These Betty Drapers are nothing like Betty Draper. They are well educated with one and sometimes two college degrees. They worked before marriage so they have knowledge, experience, and connections beyond the home. (They may well still work.) They have all the usual media feeds, so they know what is happening outside the home. And they have all the social media feeds, so they are networked everywhere. The domestic home, and middle class suburb, that may have imprisoned women after World War II are now "exploded" by education within and media without.
The last point to make here: these women know popular culture. They have new acuity that we now see exhibited everywhere. Frequently, they have that passionately informed fandom captured by Henry Jenkins. If these women are not imprisoned by a siloed suburb, they are certainly not imprisoned by "soaps" and a parochial media. Plus, they are "working closely" with their kids, and therefore well informed developments in youth culture.
When I was writing Chief Culture Officer, I kept thinking that these women would be excellent readers for the book. At some point in the evolution of every home, perhaps when the last child starts high school, women begin to think in earnest about returning to the work force (if they have not been there all along). And they would make very good Chief Culture Officers or people who work for Chief Culture Officers. They are in other words ideal readers for this book.
I have done my marketing due diligence. I have reached out to the so-called Mommy bloggers and asked them to review the book. I have reached out to neighbors and asked if they would comment on whether and how the book is useful to them. The jury is still out on my neighbors and I have one "mommy blogger" still to check in, but I am feeling underwhelmed.
Your assignment, if you choose to accept it: If you were me, what would you do to reach out to this readership?
Here's what Michael MacCambridge says about Chuck Klosterman's Eating the Dinosaur.
Neil Postman, once argued–in the title of one of his books–that we are "amusing ourselves to death." But Mr. Klosterman's relentlessly thoughtful prose makes a case that our arts and entertainment are more suffused with meaning than ever before. Even as he's fretting over the direction of the culture, his writing stands as an eloquent defense of it.
This would put Klosterman in a league with Greil Marcus and other writers who are prepared to take popular culture seriously, to exercise a brute (not a fashionable) curiosity in its pursuit, and find enthusiasms there even when the intellectual's code discourages such a thing.
[this is a passage from Chief Culture Officer, to be published in December]
Dan Wieden for Nike
By the mid-1980s, the running boom was giving way to a fitness craze and Phil Knight, founder of Nike, wanted his company to take part. Knight didn’t much believe in advertising, but competition with Reebok was fierce, and he had began to work with a small shop in Portland called Wieden + Kennedy. Dan Wieden, Portland native and second generation ad man, proved an essential asset.
It was Wieden who coined the slogan “Just Do It” in 1988. Most slogans are about the brand (“Coke is it.”) They may make a promise (“You can do it. We can help”) or they evoke a mood (“Bilbao, now more than ever.”). Rarely do they tell the consumer what to do. But “Just Do It” was an imperative, impatient, presumptuous and, well, a little rude. This was not the sort of thing consumers had heard very much.
Acting as unofficial CCO, Dan Wieden had looked into the life of the consumer. He saw someone struggling to get off the couch into fitness, someone suffering aches and pains, someone tempted by excuses. In “Just Do It” Wieden found the three words that allowed Nike to intervene. Acting as unofficial CCO, Wieden had found a way to help Nike ride the fitness wave.
Wieden is the author of a 2001 ad called Tag. This TV spot features a young man on his way to work in a big city. It could be Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. (It is in fact Toronto.) All of a sudden, the kid feels a hand on the shoulder. He’s been tagged. He’s it. Pedestrians scatter. Plazas empty. The chase is on. He almost tags one woman as she enters a bus.
He almost tags another but she dives into her car. He almost tags a policeman as he pulls away in his cruiser. Our hero is a Wildebeest, charging wildly, hoping for contact. Finally, he comes upon a hapless guy in the subway, the only man in the city who doesn’t know the game is on. Tag. He’s it.
Frame for frame, Tag is probably the most exciting ad ever made. It had the drama of the chase scene in The French Connection. It won the admiration of the industry and a Cannes Lion Grand Prix.
But it’s an odd ad. It takes 20 seconds before we understand what’s happening. For a while it’s just people running around on a plaza, forcing us to puzzle things out on our own. Advertising is famous for its simplicity, repetition, and sometimes sheer stupidity (“But wait! There’s more! Act now…”). In the world of advertising, 20 seconds is a client-provoking eternity. Wieden dared tinker with the rules.
For all that, Tag is a straight forward piece of advertising. It is playful. It makes Nike the friend of spontaneity and urban athleticism. It brings the viewer off the couch to the edge of his seat, the very point of the Nike proposition. Every commuter would love to see the tedium of travel exploded this way. Certainly, every athlete (and Nike is filled with athletes) would love to see the city as a competitive space.
And there were deeper resonances. Since the 1960s and the era of the be-in, the city was being proposed as a platform for spontaneous expressive events. Street theatre was now agitating public life and the pages of Time and Life. In the TV show, Mork and Mindy, Robin Williams brought the idea of Improv to American living rooms.
Americans were giving up the Northern European idea that public behavior ought to be guarded and expressionless. They were beginning to tinker with the notion that the world could hand you a proposition and you would “go with it.” (I remember being thrown a “ball” by a passing mime in Hyde Park in the late 1970s. I threw “it” back.) Some of the raves that became so popular in the 1990s had precisely this quality, perfect strangers assembling “just in time” in abandoned warehouses. Somehow culture from accident seemed more interesting than culture that was planned.
Tag also resonated with ideas of order that were less theatrical and more scientific. The physicists sent to the desert during World War II to create the atomic bomb stayed on in Santa Fe. They were interested in how complex order could issue from simple rules. The game of Tag is based on a very simple rule, and, sure enough, it makes the disorder of city life give way to pattern. Somehow culture that was “emergent” was more interesting than culture that was organized.
Tag evoked a third trend we might call “the generous strangers.” For many of us, first notice came in the form of a bumper sticker that read “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” a phrase so influential, it now has its own Wikipedia entry. Several thousand years of cultural practice and religious teaching had encouraged us to think of generosity as a personal gesture that passed between known parties. The “generous stranger” trend suggested it was better when things passed between perfect strangers. Hollywood picked up the theme belatedly and not very successfully in a couple of films: Pay it Forward (Mimi Leder 2000) and Serendipity (Peter Chelsom 2001).
With the help of digital technologies, “generous stranger” projects were (and are) suddenly everywhere. Bookcrossings has people conceal books somewhere in public for other strangers to find. In Geocaching, people search out caches using GPS coordinates posted on line, and when they find the cache, they take one thing and leave another. In Phototagging, disposable cameras are left in a public place and the finder is asked to take one photo and pass the camera along. In Where’s George, people register dollar bills, put them back in circulation, and ask finders to record the bill when it passes through their hands. It wasn’t always clear why this was interesting. Somehow it just was.
Howard Rheingold took things a step forward with Smart Mobs, encouraging people to meet together in public, to freeze for a moment in Grand Central Station, shop in slow motion at WalMart, or act out letters in department store windows. Rheingold’s book didn’t appear until 2002. But the spirit of his book could be detected in the Nike spot. Wieden had heard something stirring in our culture four years before.
Max Weber, the German sociologist, believed that as the Western world grew more rational, routinized and commercial, our experience of this world became disenchanted. The personal, the traditional, the sentimental, the human scale, all of these were diminished. Tag and its companion trends seemed to offer a restoration. Apparently, even strangers can make the city more playful and less predictable. With Tag, Wieden had made Nike a party to a re-enchantment of the world.
And that’s all very well. But of course Nike is not a philanthropic organization. It sells footwear. And here Tag performed brilliantly. It helped Nike fight off competitors who believed that the game was merely about “sports performance.” Tag gave Nike what Theodore Levitt, god of the Harvard Business School, called “meaningful distinction.” Wieden has delivered the “central part of the marketing effort.” As Theodore Levitt says in The Marketing Imagination, “All else is derivative of that and only that.”
References Katz, Donald. 1994. Just Do It. New York: Random House. p. 138.
Marshall, Caroline. 2001. “I’ve only done great work for Nike.” Brand Republic. June 22, 2001. http://www.brandrepublic.com/Campaign/News/46980/ Hunsberger, Brent. 2008. Nike celebrates 'Just Do It' 20th anniversary with new ads. Playbooks and profits blog. July 17, 2008. See Tag on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOzIZwRiN-I.  Names of creative team: Director is Frank Budgen, Creative Director, Dan Wieden, Hal Curtis, Art Director, Andy Fackrell, Monica Taylor, Agency Producer, Andrew Loevenguth, Copywriter, Mike Byrne, Production Company, Anonymous, Gorgeous Films, Executive Producer, Paul Rothwell, Shelly Townsend, Producer, Alicia Bernard, Editorial Company, Lookinglass Editorial, Editor, Russell Icke, Telecine Company, Company 3.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1995. At home in the universe: The search for laws of self-organization and complexity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Culp, Kristine. 2003. "Paradise Lost,” found in a phone book in Edmonton, National Post. January 4, 2003.
Rheingold, Howard. 2002. Smart Mobs. New York: Basic Books. See ImprovEverywhere on YouTube and it’s own website at http://www.improveverywhere.com. 
Weber, Max. 1946. Science as Vocation. Pp. 129-156, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Translated and edited), From Max Weber: Essay in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Levitt, Theodore. 1986. The Marketing Imagination. In The Marketing Imagination. New York: The Free Press, p. 128. For more on Levitt, see Hanna, Julia. 2008. ‘Ted Levitt Changed My Life.’ Working Knowledge from the Harvard Business School. December 17, 2008. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6054.html
[this passage is from McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer. New York: Basic Books. (to be published December 1, 2009.)]
Monday, I reported my recent culturematic experiment, the tweeting of my train ride from Chicago and Detroit. Today, I thought I'd look at the marketing implications.
Specifically, can a culturematic help a marketer help a client? Can it help build the brand? Can it help the brand participate in culture?
I think the reply is emphatically "yes." This culturematic, performed on an appropriate scale, would do good things for Amtrak. (And if there's a brand that needs good things, it's Amtrak.) In a more perfect world, Amtrak would be commissioning people to take train rides all over America, "phoning home" with new media of every kind.
Most simply, my trip to Detroit acts as "proof of concept." There are lots of people passing between these two cities, and I am guessing that many thousands of them never think to take the train. The train is so little thought of it doesn't appear in the choice set. Actually, there is no choice set. Everyone just takes the plane. Surely following a stream of tweets from the train helps change this.
But this stream of tweets does something more than inscribing the possibility of train travel between the cities. It demonstrates the pleasure of the trip. I can imagine the ethnographic interview with which we would guiz the consumer about taking the train from Chicago to Detroit.
There would be a pause, a frown, a hand to the chin, and then the hesitations,
"Gee, I don't know. The train… I mean, doesn't that take forever and break down all the time. And isn't it filled with dubious people? And… And… And."
In the absence of knowledge, doubts proliferate. The train strikes some of us as the very symbol of the old industrial regime, untouched by computers and the genius of Google programming, a great lumbering beast that travels from inner city to damaged suburb, a technology that is one snapped bolt away from joining the rust belt through which it travels.
"Train travel? No, I don't think so."
My Tweet stream is not a literary or an anthropological accomplishment, but it does communicate how much fun the train is, the pleasures there are to be had there. I think the stream also communicates that train travel is ecologically virtuous and that it is a great place to get work done. In point of fact, this tweet stream sets up a contrast that sings the praises of train travel over air travel on virtually every particular. Not bad work for such an inexpensive marketing enterprise.
You might well say that the train is a bad example of marketing with new media…because it is so very well suited to the commercial proposition in question. Train rides unfold over time, and they are rich in reportable experiences. They are in this way peculiarly tweetable. Which is to say, you can't market jeans, Coke, or movies this way.
This might be right. On the other hand, I think it would be pretty interesting to hear some tweet their day from the point of view of their Levi's. I would like to hear from a Tweeter who has taken the point of view of a carbonate soft drink sitting on the shelf of a glass refrigerator in a Mom and Pop convenience story. What about hearing from someone who has taken one of the persona away from a movie and is now living it in the street? And indeed, any product or service that is experienced-based or oriented should be able to call on twitterers. See for instance the recent experiment in which the philosopher Alain De Button spend a week as writer-in-residence at Heathrow airport.
A lot of marketers now seem to think that Twitter is really just a name game. What we want is to "infect" people with a "virus" that forces them to repeat brand name in their tweets in an outbreak of consumer enthusiasm.
How dreary! How very like the 20th century model of marketing which seeks not just sales but dominion. If we are sincere in our claims of interest in the consumer's participation, cocreation, and fuller engagement, a culturematic of this kind might be just the thing.
I woke up this morning to find Chief Culture Officer on my Kindle. It won't be out in hard copy till December 1.
I'm not sure why the digital appears before hard copy, but it does.
And, yes, Virginia, for an author, it is very like Xmas. All of a sudden, there it is at the end of your bed.
Here is the Table of Contents for the book. In the next couple of days, I will be rolling out book content, and you can see what you think.
I am proud to have one of the largest Acknowledgments in the history of Western literature.
Why such a long list?
Two reasons.
One, quite a lot of Chief Culture Officer was worked up on this blog and I wanted to acknowledge as many readers as I could. The only way to do this is to note the names of people who have left comments. (Forgive me, please, if you have commented and your name does not appear. I tried to be systematic but some names I know escaped me. Also, the book manuscript "closed" in April roughly.)
Two,I managed to publish my last book Transformations without acknowledging friend and colleague Bob Woodard. I was so horrified I thought, it's time to keep a list. And because I am a little bit obsessive, the list grew and grew.
Here is the "acknowledgments" passage as it appears in the book:
This book was written with the help, near or distant, of many people and especially George Anastaplo, John Deighton, Susan Fournier, Jim Gough, Tom Guarriello, Henry Jenkins, Leora Kornfeld, Guy Lanoue, Kate Lee, Kay Lemon, Bill O’Connor, Steve and Virginia Postrel, Montrose Sommers, and Marshall Sahlins. Special thanks are due to my editor, Tim Sullivan, for his sterling intellectual partnership.
I am also grateful to the following people for support and inspiration of many kinds: Susan Abbott, Andrew Amesbury, Ken Anderson, Kevin Anderson, Will Anderson, David Armano, David Armour, Celestine Arnold, Tom Asacker, Ivan Askwith, Alec Austin, Jack Avery, Eleanor Baird, Laurie Baird, Darren Barefoot, Pippin Barr, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Ed Batista, David Bausola, Chris Baylis, Nancy Baym, Angele Beausoleil, John Bell, Brad Berens, Scott Berkun, Russell Bernard, J. Duncan Berry, Ralf Beuker, Stephanie Betz, Lesley Bielby, Gloria Bishop, Martin Bishop, Michael Blankenship, Danah Boyd, Mark Brady, Noah Brier, Amanda Briggs, David Bujnowski, Jeremy Bullmore, Timothy Burke, David Burn, Kenelm Burridge, Larry Buttress, Bud Caddell, Jim Carfrae, Ray Cha, Suw Charman-Anderson, Jeremy Cherfas, James Chatto, Allan Chochinov, Carol Cioppa, Kevin Clark, Patricia Cleary, Marni Zea Clippinger, Don Coffin, Chris Commins, Colby Cosh, Ed Cotton, Tyler Cowen, Steven Crandall, Pat Crane, Andrew Creighton, Gary Cruse, Simone Cruickshank, Rob Curedale, Tom Daly, Russell Davies, Guy Davies, Patrick Davis, Abigail De Kosnik, Leslie and Faith Dektor, Dino Demopoulos, Stephen Denny, Paul Dervan, John Dodds, Ana Domb, Amy Domini, Judith Donath, Colin Drummond, Dave Dyment, German Dziebel, Mark Earls, David Edery, Scott Ellington, Sean Embury, Peter England, Jim Ericson, Mike Everett-Lane, Francis Farrelly, Piers Fawkes, Rob Fields, Charles Firth, Sandy Fleischer, Jeff Flemings, Richard Florida, Denise Fonseca, Sam Ford, Nicolai Frank, Morgan Friedman, Nancy Friedman, Charles Frith, Bruce Fryer, Jed Feuer, John Galvin, Barbara Garfield, Marc Garnaut, Carol Gee, Larry Gies, Morgan Gerard, Vesna Gerintes, Nick Gillespie, Jamie Gordon, Francois Gossieaux, Jim Gough, Guy Gould-Davies, Dan Gould, Katarina Graffman, Stephen and Gillian Graham, Liz Grandillo, John Grant, Jonathan Gray, Rochelle Grayson, Lee Green, Edward Greenspon, Ric Grefe, Susan Griffin, Tom and Karen Guarriello, John and Janice Gundy, Nick Hahn, Scott Haile, Monica Hamburg, Tom Harle, C. V. Harquail, C. Lee Harrington, Stephen Hicks, Jens Hilgenstock, Leigh Himel, Ryan Holiday, Adrienne Hood, Ted Hovet, Kerry Howley, Christine Huang, Andy Hunter, Matthew Ingram, Leon Jacobs, Joseph Jaffe, Lance Jensen, Derek Johnson, Hylton Jolliffe, Matt Jones, Phil Jones, Shaista Justin, Max Kalehoff, A.J. Kandy, Anik Karimjee, Garth Kay, John Kearon, Tom Kelley, Paul Kemp-Robertson, Lynne Kiesling, Peter Kim, Rob Kleine, Nancy Koehn, Rob Kozinets, Holly Kretschmar, Joan Kron, Polly LaBarre, Vince LaConte, Johanne Lamoureux, Alain Lapointe, Joe Lassiter, Jon Leach, Anthony Leung, Curtis Lew, Mark Lewis, Xiaochang Li, Josh Liberson, Rick Liebling, Jeppe Trolle Linnet, Victor Lombardi, Geoffrey Long, Amanda Lotz, Ted Lowitz, Zbigniew Lukasiak, Tom Luke, Michael Madison, Eamon Mahony, Thomas Malaby, Beatriz Mallory, Brett Marchand, Margaret Mark, Roger Martin, Mary, Steve, Zack and Lee Mazur, Megan McArdle, Peter McBurney, Karen McCauley, Jake McCall, Andy McCauley, Seamus McCauley, Emmet McCusker, John McGarr, Joe and Christine Melchione, Bud Melman, Paul Melton, Jerry Michalski, Alan Middleton, Debbie Millman, Mary Mills, Candy Minx, Prashant Mishra, Jason Mittell, Sean Moffitt, Johnnie Moore, Karl Moore, Kim Moses, Roop Mukhopadhyay, Mark Murray, Eric Nehrlich, Matt Nolan, Bruce Nussbaum, Bill O’Connor, Charlotte Odes, Richard Oliver, Gian Pangaro, Clay Parker Jones, Lisa Parrish, Jan and Lauren Parsons, Chee Pearlman, Daniel Pereira, Martin Perelmuter, Neil Perkin, Mary Pisarkiewicz, Barbara Pomorska, Faith Popcorn, Steve Portigal, Michael Powell, Tony Princisvalle, Brandon Proia, Aswin Punathambekar, Mike Rao, Shaka Rashid, Rita Rayman, Adam Richardson, Rodrigo M. S. dos Reis, Diego Rodriguez, Daniel Rosenblatt, Mike Ronkoske, John Roscoe, Susan Royer, Monica Ruffo, Doris Rusch, Juri Saar, Danielle Sacks, Kevin Sandler, Gladys Santiago, Fredrik Sarnblad, Sean Sauber, Mary Schmidt, Nick Schultz, Yasha Sekhavat, Matt Semansky, Parmesh Shahani, Richard and Pam Shear, Brent Shelkey, James Sherrett, John Sherry, Al Silk, Simon Sinek, Naunihal Singh, Kevin Slavin, Tina Slavin, Alix Sleight, Drew Smith, Paul Snyderman, Ruth Soenius, Evan Solomon, Sir Martin Sorrell, Peter Spear, Daria Steigman, Rick Sterling, Diana Stinson, Will Straw, Rory Sutherland, Bob Sutton, Craig and Cheryl Swanson, Ashley Swartz, Wodek Szemberg, Ed Tam, Rodney Tanner, Andrew Taylor, Earl Taylor, Clive Thompson, Anne Thompson, Amelia Torode, Scott Underwood, William Uricchio, Shenja van der Graaf, Ilya Vedrashko, Carlos Veraza, Kelly Verchere, Greg Verdino, Michel Verdon, Colleen Wainwright, Jimmy Wales, Mark Warshaw, Mary Walker, Rob Walker, William Ward, Reiko Waisglass, Chris and Nancy Weaver, Henri Weijo, David Weinberger, Scott Weisbrod, Stefan Werning, Elvi Whitaker, Martin Wiegel, Sara Winge, John Winsor, David Wolfe, Stacy Wood, Bob Woodard, Michelle Yagoda, Faris Yakob, Khalil Younes, Andrew Zolli, and Edward Zuber.
Post Script
Chief Culture Officer also available for the Sony Ebook here.
I was in Chicago Saturday. I needed to get to Detroit. What not take the train.
I'm a train buff. So the train always occurs to me. And I think of it especially when confronted with the prospect of spending any time in a crowded, airless metal cylinder at 31,000 feet. Whenever I can take the train, I do take the train. (I hope the train reduces my carbon footprint, but honestly I don't know that it does. We burned a lot of diesel getting to Detroit. [If anyone knows how to do the "carbon math" here (train vs. plane), please let me know.])
Love of trains aside, I was also looking for a culturematic opportunity. My definition of the culturematic: "a little machine (or pretext) that helps make a cultural artifact." (See the post called "Culturematic: a device for making culture in two easy steps"here.)
The simple rule in this case: tweet whatever happens to you on a 5 hour train ride. There's something nicely bounded about a train ride. It edits the world for us, driving lots out, keeping lots in.
With this culturematic working for me, I didn't have to make very many literary decisions of my own. Just write about whatever happens on the train. These days people are not very well acquainted with train travel and I am assuming relatively few know the Chicago-Detroit run. It looked as if this simple rule would craft an interest artifact.
It went pretty well, I think. Over 5.5 hours, I tweeted around 60 times. (These are reproduced below. Note that they should be read in reverse order.) I did everything from my ThinkPad using my own wireless AT&T link. (The train doesn't have WiFi.) There were some moments of poor reception, interminable pauses as I waited for a text and photos to upload. The audio files were especially time consuming and I lost a few. But generally, things went smoothly.
I had a set of rules within my culturematic. I wanted to be entertaining and for this I was prepared to be maximally opportunistic. I would use anything that came to hand. I also felt some vague compulsion to give the reader the sense of "being there." So I was looking for things that helped me tell "the train story." The general idea then: be lively, be interesting, have fun, craft something that had some internal coherence and some expository heft.
Some tweets were a simple gift. The sound system at Union Station in Chicago has a glitch so that each gate is announced by a disembodied voice that has its own build-in repetition and echo. I recorded this using Tweetmic. (I think the links in the stream below are live. If they aren't I will try to insert them here.) It sounded like something straight out of Blade Runner, the movie. Excellent. I now had a "literary" reference.
Ethnographic observations are called for. One of these occurred to me in the waiting room from which I tweeted.
"Chicago2Detroit by train: from the waiting room: some travelers absorbed in their books. Others self conscious & look at watches ostentatiously."
(It's 6:30 in the morning so I misspell ostentatiously. Don't look.) People are often self conscious in public, and one of the usual deflection/displacement techniques we use is to look at our watches. It's says, "I'm not just sitting here. I'm waiting for something." But of course everyone in the lounge was also waiting for something, the same thing, so the message was in this case badly formed…and therefore kind of charming. We are reminded of the master observer of social life, Irving Goffman, who recorded many of the rules of public life. Its unlikely that readers see this tweet as an evocation of Goffman, but it made me feel like I now I had a "social science" reference too.
Then there was the Safety brochure in the seat pocket. Perfect. It easy to see what the problem was. The designer felt obliged to use icons, because, as we all know these are the secret of clear communication. Please, she had one for fire that was pretty standard. But smoke? How to represent smoke? Hmm. She did her best, leaving us with a perfect target for a little gentle ribbing: "This is what smoke looks like in a train emergency."
No train travel is complete without intrigue. Everytime I went to the club car, I noticed a woman scribbling furiously. My tweet:
"There's a writer in the bar car. It's easy for a noticer to notice a noticer. I just asked her to let me know if she publishes something."
I kept missing good photos. Working with an iPhone (slow) from a train (fast) means you often find yourself thinking "damn, that would make a good photo" when blammo, the train hurtles onwards and the opportunity is gone. Hm, I thought, the problem is tweetable.
"Several missed photo opps: Farmhouse with "FIREWORKS" written hugely on side. A tiny bank with it's sign installed upside down."
I ordered lunch and was appalled. The train still serves 20th century food, manufactured and artificial. The tweet here was easy too. A photo and:
"Lunch on the train. Hold the silver. Hold the china. Bring on the I-cysteine azodicarboamide.
Pretty easy target. But I'm not proud. I'll take anything that comes my way. Naturally, I felt a certain pang here. I didn't especially want to make fun of the train. Some part of the point of the exercise was to persuade to use it more. Still, I think the honest tweeter must include the bad with the good, in this case, Amtrak warts and all.
I think the most effective pieces were the recordings. (And for these, many things to the application called Tweetmic.) I managed to record the sound of the station, the train leaving the station, the voice over apologizing for a brief delay. I almost got a woman talking to her mother. I hope you can hear these in the links below. (I'm not sure how to include them if you can't.) Let's see if this works. Click
for a sound file of the train leaving the station.
I leave it to you to decide whether this culturematic worked. I think it is probably best experienced in real time episodes.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Jeanne Vaughn, Celestine Arnold, Christine Huang, and Global Hue for the invitation and to Google for the hospitality. Thanks to Russ Hopkinson for hosting an impromptu meeting of planners.
The Twitter feed for my train trip from Chicago to Detroit, Saturday, November 7.
Just when you think the corporation is never going to get it, you hear somebody from corporate headquarters sing a rendition of the new media song that is virtually note perfect.
Plus the speaker has all those qualities that corporate players usually bring to the game: relentless, inexorable, indefatigible.
Tomorrow, Pam and I are going to a Halloween party. It's called Dead Brands.
The invitation: come as a brand that's gone out of business. P&G is about to suspend the sale of Max Factor in North America. So I'm going as Max.
The question is what clues to give off. I am wearing a lab coat. I may or may not have "Max" written in red on the pocket. I may have a make up brush in my pocket. (Too obvious?)
Pam is going as one of Factor's clients: Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, or Judy Garland. She can't decide which. I'm suggesting she go as Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, AND Judy Garland. I think she should go as "beauty," as in a medieval morality play. I will be wearing welder's goggles. This will serve as a useful red herry for those trying to guess what dead brand I am. If pressed, I will say that I wear them to protect my eyes from Pam's beauty.
I have been practicing my Polish accent. I'm not good at accents so I may ditch this. And Pam and I am rehearsing dialogue in the event someone needs a clue. Here's that wonderful conversation from Casablanca.
Mr. and Mrs. Leuchtag decide, heartbreakingly, to show off their English. They are preparing to leave for America the next day.
Mr. Leuchtag: "Sweetnessheart, what watch?"
Mrs. Leuchtag examines her wristwatch and says: "Ten watch."
Mr. Leuchtag: "Such much!"
It is wrong in crucial details: nationality (Max was Polish, the Leuchtags German) and historical timing (Max left in 1904, Casablanca was set in in the late 1930s), but it does help suggest that my "Max" is a newly arrived American.
Max Factor, Sr. was born Maximilian Factorowtiz in Lodz, Poland (then Russia). His father was a Rabbi, too poor to afford a formal education for his 10 kids. So Max was apprenticed to a dentist/pharmacist, and he turned this knowledge to the manufacture of rouges, creams and fragrances. His ascent was swift. He was eventually supplying make-up to Russian nobility.
When he passed through Ellis Island on February 25, 1904, Max was a man of some substance. (He came with $400, about $10,000 in today's currency.) Within a few months, he was at the World's Fair in Saint Louis selling his wares. And within a few years he had moved to LA to the very new film industry. (His work there is immortalized in the song Hooray for Hollywood: "To be an actor, See Mister Factor.")
Wow. Max effectively invents a category, securing the best customers he can in Russia. This would be enough for some. Not Max. No, Max has to go to the newest industry in the youngest part of the most recent, most reckless, positively Whitmanesque country in the world and start again. With all the risk, commotion, and difficulty this represents: new languages, new cultures, and the endless uncertainties of a new industry in a new world. We can assume that the Russia's anti-semiticism must have weighted in Max's calculation of risk. But clearly he was pursuing opportunity as much as he was fleeing risk.
Max Factor turned opportunity into an almost endless stream of innovation. He invented the term "make-up." He invented the make-up required by black and white films, color films, and for television. He invented lip gloss, pan-cake makeup, and make up that coordinated with skin tone.
He was a supplier in the transformational arts being developed in this transformational place called America. He is a cultural creative before we quite grasped the cultural or economic significance of Richard Florida's term. Naturally, because he is a creature of commerce we do not pay him his due. Walt Whitman, we remember with reverence. Max, not so much. From a structural point of view, they are not so very different.
It will take a genius to detect. But I'm hopeful. It could be Scott Lerman, Cheryl Swanson, Tony Spaeth, Richard Shear, Debbie Millman, or Tom Guarriello. But I'm hoping someone will say, "oh, so you came as Walt Whitman. Good choice."
References
McCracken, Grant. 2009. Transformations. Identity construction in contemporary culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. here.
Yesterday, Sara Winge yesterday told me about the mechanical turk.
The Mechanical Turk (as I understand it)
Let's say Amazon needs to catalog a new product. It has the word "Java" in the title, and that's a problem. The system can't tell whether Java refers to the place, the coffee, or the programming language.
Someone at Amazon could sit down and figure this out. But this would use high priced talent to perform a relatively simple task. So what Amazon does is reach out to their Mechanical Turk.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk is, as Wikipedia puts it, "a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do." It consists of thousands of people who stand ready for tasks send them by Amazon or others who may wish to use Amazon's MTurk service.
MTurk "providers" work alone, often in their spare time. Standing in line at a 7/11, they can bang out a few turns. They get paid a small fee for each decision. No one gets rich working in a mechanical turk, but many find it interesting.
That was probably not a perfect introduction to those just learning of the mechanical turk, but it sets things up for the theme of this post: how to detect change in our culture. Change in our culture (when the forecasting was easy)
In the middle of the 20th century, when we were a more organized culture, it was pretty easy to detect and track cultural change. Often it came from small elites (artists, editors, filmmakers, etc) in a handful of cities (New York, London, Paris, etc.). It was picked up by ever less obscure venues (magazines, art galleries, etc.) and began its march towards the mainstream. Many died along the way, but the ones that made it "all the way home" would shape the tastes and preferences of every consumer, and the ideas, sentiments and practices with which we see the world. They became our culture, some for the short term, some for the long.
The cultural changes were like breakers off Waikiki: big, fat, orderly, and easy to see from a long way off. Even quite dim corporations could spot the future before it had installed itself in the present. And make ready. Even in the smoke filled haze of a Madison Avenue boardroom, even to ad men soaked in gin, someone was going to say, "you know, that bohemian thing…from Paris…you know, Henry Miller. Bongos? Berets? Geez, you guys really need to get out more." The corporation might be a little a slow off the mark, but it was never completely unprepared.
Now of course the future comes from many sources and all directions and the corporation lives as Peter Schwartz once put it in a "perpetual state of surprise." There is always a blind side hit waiting to greet them…sometime…from somewhere. Those breakers at Waikiki have turned into a perfect storm. They thrash. Veritably, they boil. Change in our culture now (now that it isn't)
We really are "crowdsourced" now. In the place of small elites in a few places, cultural innovations can come from any number of people in any number of places. One of the big effects of the digital regime is that it disintermediated the old media and players, and gave us freer access of one another. Now some kid can invent a new kind of music or filmmaking, a new sensibility or point of view, and without the aid of elite players and channels, our culture can respond. To be sure, for this innovation to find its way into your world, vast amounts of capital and influence will have to be spend on its behalf. But that's the thing. Capital and access are now much more responsive than before, responding to something more like the will of the crowd than the arbiter of taste.
Of course, this makes it much harder to read the turbulent waters of our culture. Corporations that were clumsy and a little late to the party now found themselves sometimes terribly out of touch. What to do? Where the Mechanical Turk comes in
It occurred to me that the Mechanical Turk could be pressed into service here. What if we captured little innovations from the far margins of our culture, send them to our Turk providers, and asked questions like the following:
1. Is X something you recognize as conforming to some genre, style, model, pattern?
2. If yes, is it completely "true to form?" [If yes, code accordingly and end task]
3. If it is not true to form, is this because it is incompetently executed? (The maker doesn't really grasp the genre, style, model, pattern.) [If yes, code accordingly and end task]
4. Does it depart from form because it contains another form? (An example: It was usual to say of music in the late 1980s that it combined punk and heavy metal.)
5. Does it depart from form because it contains an element that is not formed (i.e., that is difficult or impossible to recognize?)
6. How new is this new element to you? [rank on continuum: from "very" to "not very"]
7. How disagreeable is this new element to you? [rank on continuum; for "very" to "not very"] [[My assumption is that real innovation is always a shocking, hard to think and therefore disagreeable. This is because we don't yet have a form in our head for it. It comes to us as noise. Avant-garde types like noise. But most of us find it disagreeable. See my discussion of the "Kauffman continuum" in Flock and Flow for more on this.]]
8. Please review this innovation you looked at yesterday [or a week ago] and indicate whether it remains "new" and "disagreeable." [rank on continuum from "yes, it remains disagreeable" to "no, I am beginning to like the look of it more."] [[My assumption is that all culture novelty is disagreeable on first sight. But some of this novelty begins to "win us over" over time. The innovations that win interest and approval from Turk providers are hot spots for forecasting purposes. In a perfect world, we would keep dropping innovations in front of our providers and watching for this "I am beginning to like the look of it more" movement. How fast and in what volume this conversion takes place is a key indicator of innovation "with legs."
I don't doubt that this looks like a dog's breakfast, especially to people with training in questionnaire design and quantitative data collection. And I know some will be alarmed at the freedom with which I have used terms like "form," "style," "pattern," etc. At least here I can reassure you that these have substance and can be identified and defined particularly.
But I believe the Zoltan approach has the following virtues.
1. It allows us to canvass consumer reactions simply. These are easy questions. They allow the respondent to give us useful data even when they cannot necessary form coherent thoughts on innovations. We are asking them to say what they like, not why.
2. It allows us to canvass consumer reaction broadly. Because this is crowd sourced, we can canvass reaction in every corner of the wired world. This allows us to contend with the very distributed nature of innovation these days. If something is stirring in Minneapolis, the mighty Zoltan will know about it. Indeed, we can track innovations minted in Brazil, track them as they pass through the Caribbean and watch for landfall on the eastern seaboard.
3. It allows us to organize our providers according to Kauffman and other identifiers, so we know the risk tolerances and innovation enthusiasm of the coders. Some coders will be stand high on the Kauffman continuum. We will know this from their other coding work and from our own diagnostics. This will make them especially reliable in identifying innovation that are noisy but promising. These people are good at handling noise. They are not so much early adopters as "early oculars." They can see the new in the noise. Those who stand in the middle of the Kauffman continuum will be reliable indicators of the likely reaction of the mainstream.
4. Data of this kind would give us a baseline from which to chart the movement of innovations. This will allow us to track whether an innovation is meeting with acceptance, how fast it is doing so, and to whom it appeals.
Reference
Lorica, Ben. 2009. Mechanical Turk Best Practices. O'Reilly blogs. June 11. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace. Indiana University Press.
McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. Basic Books. Preorder from Amazon here.
Schwartz, Peter. 1996. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. Currency Doubleday.
Acknowledgments:
John Kearon and Mark Earls are doing some fascinating work on new ways to canvass consumers. I am indebted to them for several lively conversations on this topic.
I am going to be in Chicago on the afternoon of Friday November 6 and Detroit on the afternoon of Sunday the 8th. Does anyone want to meet for coffee?
We did this in SF a week or so ago and it turned out beautifully. About 12 of us ended up in a coffee shop/bakery sort of thing. I wasn't sure we would find something to talk about. (I just knew I didn't want it to be me.) We had a lively time. We just rambled and it was fun.
There is another possibility. If someone has a hall (or a big room of any kind, really), I would be happy to do my slide show on the Chief Culture Officer argument. That's before and after we chat over coffee, that is. (It's official. I've become a shill machine and will remain so for the next 6 weeks.)
Let me know if you are interested in either eventuality. Send an email to me at grant27@gmail.com.
Wieden + Kennedy uses the words of Walt Whitman in their current work for Levi's (the "America" and "Pioneer" spots in the "Go Forth" campaign). They actually use Whitman's voice as well, recovering it from wax cylinders from the 1880s.
At first, it feels presumptuous. Whitman is perhaps the American poet. He helped grasp what America was and fashion the ideas that made it something we could think. It is not too much to say he helped found America. To see his language and voice leveraged for commercial purposes, is at first a little breathtaking.
Whitman described himself this way: "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest." (Leaves of Grass)
If there is a brand that can claim these meanings for itself, it is Levi's. Almost everything about the brand history and heritage gives it this opportunity…too rarely taken up. The W+K spots do a nice job of evoking these meanings. (Hats off to Susan Hoffman, the executive creative director of W+K, and Cary Fukunaga who directed "America" and M Blash directed "O Pioneer!") The man and the brand are rich and endlessly complicated propositions. I would very much have liked to have been in the room at W+K when they found one another.
But there is another deeper reason why Whitman ought to appear in an American ad. Advertising has taken up what Whitman thought was the poet's job. All those grim protests from Mad Men notwithstanding, W+K and other agencies are now active inventors of American culture in a way very few poets can claim to be. As Whitman said in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."
Haunted by the fashionable cant of the Frankfurt school, we are uncomfortable that Levi's should make use of Whitman. But this is wrong. I think it is thrilling to see these meanings circulating in our culture, passing from the poem through the advertising to the jeans, both resonating with and for the American experiment. It is especially thrilling to hear Whitman's voice return to us from the 19th century, the muse himself made legion. Whatever else it is, W+K's work is successful homage. And America is usually too much a creation of Walt Whitman to pause and give him his due.
A reader from the 20th century sent in this photo of an early culturematic. (Who knew!)
In this photo we see WACs composing the best selling English novel, The Tumult and The Shouting. later published under the name, Grantland Rice.
Code-named a "teletype machine" and rigged to look like office machinery, the culturematic was operated under the watchful eye of WACs (and sometimes WRENs), growing steadily more robust and productive as a culture engine.
This particular machine was eventually used to write The Lord of the Rings. It was by this time almost entirely automatic and required only a single WAC standing by to monitor and resupply. There was one thing the culturalmatic would not do, and that was to invent an author's name. An advertising agency was engaged to invent an Oxford don called "JRR Tolkien."
Then tragedy struck. The culturematic was now so good at turning out beguiling stories in lively prose, the British government stepped in, declared it a threat to the language and culture of Britain, and banished it to the basement of the Bodleian Library. At some point in the 1960s, a decision was made to send it into deep storage in the English countryside, but due an administrative oversight the culturematic was left to rust for several years on a loading dock, from which it was only recently retrieved.
On November 25, 1993, two high school football teams played to a tie.
Not the worst thing in the world, perhaps. But it happened in small town America where football can matter extraordinarily. And it happened to two teams have a 100 year rivalry described by Sports Illustrated as one of the most intense in the country.
And a tie, as they say in American sports, is a little like kissing your sister. The world is made symmetrical when the point of sports (and Western cultures) is to produce events, outcomes and asymmetries. Ties erase the event. It's as if nothing ever happened.
Someone at Gatorade had a great idea. What if, 15 years later, the teams of Easton and Phillipsburg were reassembled and the game replayed. Athletes now in their 30s got a second chance. So did the fans. Ten thousands tickets sold out in 90 minutes. And the rest of us go, "Really. How completely interesting."
This is an irresistible story line, isn't it? But it's not clear why, especially if you don't really care about football, small towns, or the ignominy of a tie. It's not because football greats, the Manning brothers, were brought in to help with the coaching. It's just happens to be flat out, eye popping interesting.
And I think this makes it a classic culturematic. I've been thinking about this idea since writing about it several weeks ago. Little examples keep popping up. I couldn't help noticing that the the book I referred to yesterday, The 100 mile diet, is completely culturematic. There are many reasons why the book resonated with our culture, but what made this fascinating reading was watching the authors solve an artificial problem: how to source all food from their immediate vicinity.
Gatorade's Replay is still better. It creates an artificial event that intersects with a real world stand off. Replay reactivates men who are no longer in their physical prime, who will play honor more than heroism. We glimpse immediately that these men will have to be retrieved from wherever the biographic tide has taken them. The solidarity of the old days will have to be accomplished over all the differences that have sprung up in 15 years. You don't have to be a culture creative to think, "hm, this is going to be dramatically juicy." We have all seen football heroics. There are only so many things that can happen. Replay gives us something vastly more authentic, where life and sport are truly going to share the field.
And what makes this culturematic is that all this grist and gusto comes from an entirely simple, mechanical premise: what if we brought these teams back together again? So much drama from so little pretext.
The brand is well compensated for its use of a culturematic. The Gatorade message: "It doesn't matter how old you are. Eight to 80, you are always an athlete." Hey, presto. The brand names attaches to a story of great interest and power. Hey, presto, the brand gets to escape the gilded palace of professional sports and enter a domain that looks a lot more like life.
Acknowledgements
I owe my knowledge of the Gatorade project to Jason Oke and Gareth Kay and their fantastic presentation at Planningness 2009.
Jason was kind enough to give me the name of the creative team:
Advertising Agency: TWBA\Chiat\Day, USA Global Director of Media Arts: Lee Clow Executive Creative Director: Rob Schwartz Group Creative Director: Jimmy Smith Writer/Co-Creator: Brent Anderson Writer/Co-Creator: Steve Howard Replay Project & Series – Head Producer: Brian O'Rourke Assistant Producer: Tim Newfang Director of Business Affairs: Linda Daubson Business Affairs Manager: Anne Thomasson Group Account Director: Brynn Bardacke Management Supervisor: Jiah Choi Account Supervisor: Amy Farias Account Executive: Adam Bersin
Director: Kris Belman, Scott Balcerek
References
McCracken, Grant. 2009. Culturematic: a device for making culture in two easy steps. September 21. here.
Oke, Jason and Gareth Kay. 2009. Connections Planning 2009. Planningness 2009. San Francisco. October 17. [This deck is available on Slideshare here.]
