Brands can do many things.  They can carry many meanings.  They can address many issues.  But should they be asked to do what Bono wants them to?

Yesterday, Bono announced from Davos that his new brand, Product Red, will be partner with brands such as American Express, Gap, Giorgio Armani and Converse.  Proceeds from this partnership will go to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

This is consistent with social marketing and what is sometimes called conscience consumerism.  And it is part of Bono’s larger undertaking: to use his celebrity to influence governments and the private sector to create social good.   

I can’t help feeling there is something grandly presumptuous about Bono when he acts like this.  This is a man we have elevated in the larger scheme of things because some believe he is a gifted musician and entertainer.  That he should now appoint himself a moral spokesperson is I think a little dubious.  Nelson Mandela can be a spokesperson.  Bono, not so much.  (I believe we must doubt Bono’s credentials even if we accept the Romantic notion that artists have a special connection to the zeitgeist of the moment and to this extend a special moral authority to speak to us and for us.  I believe that Bono is insisting on a mandate he does not have, that we did not give him.)

Some people will say "what can it hurt?"   Bono may be a nitwit.  The corporations may be ill advised to use their brands in this manner.  Some good will be accomplished and in a zero sum world this is a good that would not otherwise have been accomplished.  Only the hard of heart would interfere with this noble cause.

This is the argument that underpins many liberal causes.  The larger good accomplished eclipses any doubts we might have about the precise logic of the proposition.  Really, what can it hurt?

Here’s an argument.  Why not argue that Product Red permits the individual to believe that their philanthropic work is done.  Indeed, if they $.25 that goes from my purchase to to Global Fund gives me the sense that I am absolved of larger donorship responsiblities, what has been accomplished?  If the consumer believes that he or she "gave at the Gap," Bono branding is a tremendously bad idea. 

What I especially dislike is that when Product Red purchase substitutes for philanthropy, philanthropy loses its transperancy.  I no longer know who I am giving to.  I no longer take responsibility for making this decision in the first place, or for monitoring it in the second. 

But I am also uncomfortable with the brandng mechanics that ensue.  Building and deploying brands is a fabulously complicated business.  As it is, most corporation engage in good works (Timberland happens to be a great case in point here) but the moment they sing their own praises, we look on them askance.  Just do it, we tell them.  Don’t brag about it.  (And this is one of the reasons Timberland has not made a great public fuss about the exemplary generosity.)  There is something about generosity that springs from extrinsic motives that makes the gesture manifestly less generous. 

This raises a nice little "if a tree falls" paradox for the marketer.  If things are done, but no word goes out, what indeed was done…from a marketing point of view.  I leave this problem to nimbler wits than my own.  I wish merely the raise the possibility that Product Red may not be an alloyed good.  Let us look this gift horse in the mouth. 

Marc Babej at Being Reasonable tells us that Google appears poised to enter automated ad biz (Babej 2006 below). 

Google and Spot Runner (or something like it) could add up to a nasty scenario for the advertising establishment: automated ad placement, plus automated/mass produced creative, plus accountability via pay-per action. Word to the wise: the less you’d want to ponder this one, the more you probably should.

Spot Runner offers pre-fab ads in which a client merely inserts a company name, address and phone number.  There are several sample ads at the Spot Runner website (see below) and while they are not complete stinkers, they are bad enough to remind us why God created ad agencies.

I don’t doubt that pre-fab ads will actually ad value for little companies struggling to raise their profile in local markets.  I don’t doubt that "Bob’s warehouse" here in Southwest Connecticut would be well served by a Spot Runner ad.   (I think a number of us in my little town would be happy to pass the hat to create a "relief fund" for Bob (our own).)

There’s a reason why ads are custom made.  It is because meaning manufacture makes no sense when done in batches.  When an ad confers pre-fab meanings on a product or a brand, it’s going to look like a suit from Mark’s warehouse and it’s going to wear like one. 

It is easy to to accuse the agency of being distant, arrogant, unforthcoming, and indeed of turning out a little pre-fab of their own.  I’ve made this accusation myself (McCracken 2005b).  But finally good agencies deploy a range of talented people in the creation and execution of a very  difficult task.  They make brands.  And they made the fortune and the fortunes of the brand. 

As I was arguing several weeks ago (McCracken 2005a), Google doesn’t understand meaning manufacturer and their partnership with Spot Runnner (or something like it) is proof of this.  Lots of things can be routinized and manufactured by rote.  Ads, good ads, effective ads, are not among them.  (It’s moments like this that a $460.00 share price just seem too high.) 

References

Babej, Marc.  2006.  The Other Doomsday Scenario: Google Talks About Automated Creative. 
Being Reasonable.com.  January 18, 2006.  here.

Spotrunner ads can be found here. 

McCracken, Grant   2005a.  Google versus Madison Avenue: no contest here.  This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Economics and Anthropology.  November 1, 2005.  here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005b.  New Agencies, new clients.  This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Economics and Anthropology.  July 1, 2005.  here. 

"Product placement" has been growing fast.  According to Brandweek, "the 10 most brand-saturated prime time network television shows showed 9,019 brands, up from 5,821 last year."   

Product placement (pp) was driven by several things.  One of these was the disappearing TV ad.  With people prepared to TIVO their way through a program, pp seemed like a good way to keep promotional materials front and center.  Also, pp helped dispense with the advertising agency, in the process allowing the brand team to save money and regain control.   

But now we are hearing a note of skepticism.  Brandweek‘s Jim Edwards is leading the charge. 

First, Edwards notes, the metrics have been inflated.  The figure used for pp is often $4 billion.  Edwards believes "the actual amount of money changing hands between marketers and various media firms was probably about $1.2 billion in 2005."  The traditional ad biz totals $265 billion.  Product placement gets a good deal of the ink these days, but it is, as Edwards says, "pocket lint" in the larger scheme of things. [quotes and figures in this paragraph from Edwards 2005]

Second, pp is bad for shows.  It is because it has been devoured by pp that The Apprentice is now in decline.  Christopher Raphael, president of The Really Spectacular Company in Warwick, N.Y., says The Apprentice grew large with pp as the "network and a producer jam[med] as much brand integration and product placement in [the] show as humanly possible."  The effects of the force feeding were clear.  Jeff Greenfield, evp of 1st Approach, says "The [Apprentice] ratings decline is in direct proportion to the amount of branded entertainment."  [quotes by Raphael and Greenfield are from Edwards 2006]

This tells us that there is a muddle in the marketing model.  No one quite expected that pp would damage the pp vehicle, but Edwards, Raphael, and Greenfield suggests its does.  Why?  "Endless, shameless shilling" is not the answer.  After all, these three terms define Donald Trump and his public career most precisely.  The Apprentice was not Macbeth.  (The boys in the lab have run the tests, and this much, they tell me, is clear.) The Apprentice had no artistic or cultural value to compromise.  But shilling still damaged the marketing vehicle (the show, not the man).  If Greenfield is to be believed it broke the show (not the man, apparently).  Hmmm.

Third, pp is bad for brands.   The issue of clutter is now indisputable.  Edwards (2006) says, "Last year, there were 110,322 shout-outs for brands. In 2004, it was only 84,119."   A show like The Real World, could have 30 to 40 brands on screen in the form of furniture, phones, computers and cars.   This is a lot of noise, and it put me in mind of the college student who sold every pixel on his website for a buck.  The price is right.  The plug is pointless.

Edwards says there is now some evidence of pp flight, with "the busiest brands […] trying to find shows with less product placement clutter." {Edwards 2005].  This tells us that the best practice practioners in pp now know the game is up.  They are looking for undistracted circumstances, but they must know that these too will one day fill up.  In other words, pp was a marketing model that could only work in the early days, and those days are passed. 

Four, I think we are entitled to ask whether the model worked even in the early days.  Pp was undertaken without any clear model or test of its efficacy.  People did it because they could.  They did it because they had to.  But they did not do it because it actually worked.  (Coulda…but we had no good grounds for supposing so.)

Here are my own grounds for skepticism.

First, PP works as a simplest act of exposure.  It assumes that simply seeing the product and or the brand will make the consumer more likely to buy it.  Hmmm.  This strikes me as dubious.  If simple exposure were enough, I wouldn’t be able to walk through a WalMart without leaving "heavy."  In fact, simple exposure persuades me to buy almost nothing. 

Second, the pp model may assume that there is something more than exposure going on here.  It might assume that seeing something on TV gives the product and or brand a certain aura of prestige or credibility or attractiveness.  (This is after all why stamping things "as seen on TV" is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing handbook.) 

If I may use unparliamentary language for a moment, this is simple minded bullshit.  As Edwards points out, reality programming has been the great testing ground of pp.  And what do we know about reality programming?  It was designed to make TV more like-life, that is to say: less glorious, less credible and less attractive.  The point of the exercise was to change the way we thought about things "as seen on TV."  This means there is no halo effect at work here. 

Third, I think this points up the real peril of the pp strategy.  For lots of reality programs appear to reside in Jerry Springer’s neighborhood.  The Real World is a little iffy from time to time.  Starting Over can be especially dubious.  (Yes, I have logged the long hours to say this.)  Come to that, The Apprentice is really just an extended joke about a pompous man with a tremendous comb over, a man with so little wit, grace, humor or intelligence he makes Mr. Burns (of The Simpsons) look pretty good by comparison. 

Are these really the sort of associations we are hoping for.  Down market pomposity…I just can’t believe this is what anyone really wants for their brand. 

Conclusion

It comes down to this.  The marketing community plunged into pp with scant regard for whether it would actually be good for the brand.  And this is, frankly, staggering.  I think we might be looking at one of the great acts of marketing malfeisance of our time.  Now, that Edwards has started asking the hard questions, I wonder if we don’t have a product-placement-gate on our hands. 

And to those marketers who embraced pp because it got them "out from under" the advertising agencies, I say this: there was a reason they worked as brand builders and meaning managers.  They actually knew a thing or two about syntagmatic association, as the linguists call it.  They were good at bringing the product and the brand into exquisitely careful association with other products, ideas, people and places so to engineer the transfer of meaning.  This is what we paid them for. 

Product placement is a simple minded exercise in paradigmatic selection, to use the other linguist’s term.  Pp just tosses the product into the TV show and hopes that it will not be lost in the shuffle of all those semiotic materials flying about there.  But when we do this, there is no real way for us to control the meaning a brand takes on or gives out.  We have effectively abandoned the brand to a random set of associations.  Some of these will be neutral.  Some of them will be very bad.  One or two might serve us.  Good, we are now managing our brand meanings by accident.  Pp is in effect an abdigation of the marketer’s responsibility.  Pp is a scandal no longer waiting to happen. 

Thanks to Jim Edwards for investigative reporting. 

References

Edwards, Jim. 2005. THE TRACKER: There’s Less Than Meets The Eye In TV Placement.  BrandWeek. December 19, 2005

Edwards, Jim.  2006. THE TRACKER: Coke Forces TV Placement Clutter Debate Into The Open. BrandWeek. January 16, 2006.

Hein, Kenneth.  2006. CAA, Coke relationship no longer H’wood dream
Company unhappy with agency.  The Hollywood Reporter. January 17, 2006.

[all of these require subscription.]

Question 1: The best host of a TV awards show ever:

Question 2. Best speech at the "People’s award" ceremony last night:

Question 3. Worst acceptance speech at the "People’s award" ceremony last night:

Let the people speak! 

(These buttons don’t actually work. We don’t know enough HTML or Typepad to make them functional. [But they look good, don’t they?] Please leave your answers and your comments in the comment field. Thx. The boys in the lab.)

post script: Hey, did anyone else think that turn ads into awards was one of the most gloriously stupid, implausible, and unsuccessful episodes in the history of contemporary marketing?

Here’s a startup idea: a consultancy that goes into corporations to discover ideas and innovations that languish there.  The job: to extract brands.

Let’s be honest.  The corporation has many great ideas that it never manages to harvest.  These are notions sitting in reports from consultants, buried in internal committee work, neglected on the lab bench, ideas taken up and then let slip. 

The culprits are clear enough.  Some ideas are murdered in committee.  Some are destroyed by the roller derby punishments of politics.  Some drop between stools as personnel come and go.  And some merely get lost in the very considerable shuffle of corporate life. 

The corporation is now so good at mobilizing to address the present opportunity that it sometimes has a hard time keeping an eye on the alternative ones.  What doesn’t get operationalized straight away tends to disappear from view. 

The costs are enormous…and unacceptable.  If BusinessWeek is right to say that we now live in a creative economy, no corporation can afford to practice infanticide of this kind.  Really good ideas must be identified, brought forward, and be allowed to find the light of day.  Shareholder value depends upon it.  New ideas, increasingly these are what they pay us for.

It is entirely possible that the Razr, the phone that saved Motorola, might have languished in the lab, where it not for the brand extraction heroics of Geoffrey Frost (see link below).  And that’s a chilling thought, that a struggling corporation might have missed its opportunity to return to greatness because, well, there was no brand extractor standing by.  (To be sure, Frost was an insider.  The "brand extraction" proposition makes sense when there is no insider standing by.)

The brand extractors would have to have several qualities.  They would have to have a gift for absorbing vast qualities of data and the ability to detect patterns therein.  This pattern detection in its turn depends upon a deep knowledge of the industry, the market, the competition, and the opportunity in question. 

Furthermore, brand extractors would have to have the ability to proceed with the utmost diplomatic finesse.  No idea that is forgotten or foresaken can be returned to usefulness without political consequences.  That means that the incumbents will sometimes conceal ideas and they will sometimes resist extraction.  When these both fail, the incumbents will attempt to influence the brand extractors one way or another.  The brand extractors must be utterly unswayable and as politically adroit as they are intellectually nimble. 

Brand extraction will likely look a little like the "book extraction" I proposed a couple of weeks ago (see link below).   It will have to be a process that is swift and merciless, a lightning intervention more than a laborious inquisition.  As long as due diligence is performed, in matters of brand extraction, faster is better. 

Acknowledgments

Tom Asacker and I have been kicking ideas back and forth the last week or so, and his characteristic intelligence and acuity have clarified things for me here.  Thanks, Tom. 

References

McCracken, Grant. 2005.  Remembering Geoffrey Frost.  This Blog Sits at the… December 19, 2005. here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Book Extraction (Supplying the long tail).  This Blog Sits at the…  October 12, 2005. here.

(This is the last installment of a three-part series on branding and transmedia.)

Yesterday, I argued that, traditionally, brands have kept  their icons free of narrative. 

For instance, we have no idea who Mr. Clean is.  There’s no backstory and not much of a front story for that matter. 

But it’s not so hard to imagine Mr. Clean in more fully realized narrative terms: child of an orphanage in a French colony in North Africa (circa 1890), early childhood spend as a runner in a souk (market), taken in as a servant by a family of French nationals who holiday in Morocco and eventually he joins the household even when it is "at home" in France.  In the late spring of 1907, "Gerard" is travelling back to Morocco to help to set up the summer home when (mon dieu!) he is kidnapped by pirates.  Gerard sails for some years as a pirate and this allows him to built up a small store of wealth, and to return, eventually, to the souk where he buys a stock of carpets and a stall, marries his childhood sweetheart, and begins to raise a little batch of runners all his own.  It is on one of his trips to replenish his supply of carpets that…

Ok, ok, will someone put a sock in the anthropologist, please?  Thank you.

I didn’t say it would be a good story.  I need merely demonstrate that even modest narrative gifts can help free this icon from his branded captivity.  (And, yes, there is a great big problem of setting Mr. Clean and his family in a souk, mon dieu, but hey.  I might just as well have chosen the current campaign for Coke which shows a young woman roller skating in what looks like Santa Monica.  This has quite substantial narrative clues in place (some natural, some supernatural), and expansion would take us straight into worlds that the Coca Cola Company does want to occupy.)

The question of course is whether any brand manager would ever dare give Mr. Clean his liberty.  And the answer at the moment is a resounding "no."  For most brand managers, the narrative strategy will promise risk more surely than benefit, and our brand manager is really committed to sending her kids to college. 

It’s also true that brand managers don’t generally know a lot about narrative and this increases the risk even more.  On the other hand, brand managers are risk takers by nature and training, and the moment that someone rises to great heights in the corporation by opening things up here, well, everything could change.  The narrative strategy could be an express elevator to senior management.  You never know.  (And, hey, if it doesn’t work, there’s always Hollywood.)

There is a simpler, less risky route and that is to evoke those two magical words from the post yesterday: soap opera.  Here is a precedent for narratives that make meaning and momentum for the brand despite, perhaps because, they are so loosely tethered to it.  The soap opera actually helped bring P&G to its present and very considerable glory.  There was little direct connection.  I guess, and I am guessing, soap operas helped to build brands and brand relationships because they demonstrated that P&G understood and cared about the emotional lives of the consumer.  As a meaning maker, the soap opera is a matter more of form than content. 

We might call the soap opera narratives that serve the brand "cadet narratives.".  (I am thinking about "cadet lineages," where a kinship connection is  simultaneously evoked and distanced.)  Cadet narratives are not about the brand or its icon explicitly.  They merely  occupy the same branded space, while in the manner of a soap opera, keeping their distance.  This narrative would be tied to Mr. Clean, say, by association, but it would be allowed to go its own way and develop its own imaginative resources. 

There is a certain damage control built into the cadet model.  After all, when things get a little too over the top, the brand manager can dial back the immediacy, the intensity of the association.  Indeed the brand manager can dial back the connection without have to dial back the narrative.  (And this, as we shall see, is key.)

I have an illustration of the cadet narrative.  Faithful readers of this blog will know that, unwittingly, I invented one of these for The Coca-cola Company. Nick Hahn, Charlotte Oades and I, working in Cologne of all places, came up with the notion of a creature called Sophie.  Sophie was a virtual creature, designed to exist on line and manifest in the world.  We hoped that Sophie would be fabulous in both senses of the term and that she would be an object of interest and inspiration to teen girls in the middle years. 

Sophie was a cadet narrative in so far her story was never about Coke or the Coca-Cola Company.  Sophie was for Sophie only.  As I said in the post in question:

 Sophie … would be funded by TCCC (the Coca-Cola Company) but she would have to be leveraged in the most delicate way possible. The moment that TCCC claimed her, she was over. The moment TCCC so much as labelled her, she was over. The best TCCC could hope for is to have Sophie sometimes smile in its direction. This meant, among other things, merely more Cokes in Sophie’s fridge than Pepsis. Not no Pepsi’s!

And now, finally, to the Jenkinsian question: could we, should we, open brand or cadet narratives to many authors in several media.  This is the heart of transmedia.  To quote Jenkins once more, "A transmedia story unfolds across multiple meida platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole."  Could this be allowed to happen for Mr. Clean or Sophie?

Here too the corporate instinct is to dig in and say "no." After all, the brand manager is supposed to manage brand meanings, and, surely, this can’t mean handing over the reins to everyone.  But isn’t this already a central problem of the cocreation strategy, and isn’t this very much in keeping with our understanding that brands that have immaculate conception and hermetic seals  are not really very interesting to the world any more.  Letting lots of people play is a problem that all of us face already.

No, the real issue with the Jenkinsian challenge is allowing other professional meaning managers in on the game.  It is one thing to allow consumers in on the game of meaning manufacture.  It is quite another to bring in film makers, comic book artists, bloggers, writers, and then to let them loose in all the media they represent.  How would we exercise any thing like David Aaker’s branding discipline in a world like this?  There are too many cooks in the kitchen.  Too many messages in the world.  No real chance to control the inevitable diversity of treatment that would ensue.  No real way of protecting oneself from brand mischief or malice. 

Well, all of these anxieties are fully justified, but don’t we sound a lot like parents who would rather ground their kids forever than send them into the world?  In their hearts, marketing managers know what parents do: you have to let them go. 

The good news is that consumers are prepared to sort and edit.  They will see the brand played out in a variety of new ways.  They will hear associations reaching out of the cadet narrative potentially to reform the brand.  But they are pretty good at sayng, "No, that’s not the Mr. Clean or Sophie, I know."  In other words, this is not a game of high vigilance driven by copyright crazy lawyers.  This is more a question of "winning some and loosing some" and the exercise of patience that rewards us because it gives us access to the  sheer "invention of crowds." 

Now, I can hear some marketing people banging the key board with disbelief at this, and saying perhaps, "Why would I want to entertain any of the risks of the transmedia enterprise when I can keep the levers of control to myself?"

The answer is simple.  The consumer has spoken, to film makers, artists, writers, and marketers.  Given the choice between something pristine and something messily more intimate,  the consumer has no doubts.  The latter is much more interesting, vital, robust, and engaging.  It’s worth remembering that many brands are now a little like Ron Burgundy, slick with formula (both kinds) and self congratulation.  The world is having a harder and harder time taking these creatures seriously.  It may even be true that some brands, like some newscasters, are sustained by self parody and not much else. 

Jenkins’ notion of transmedia may be the next new thing in marketing, not because we take to it joyfully but because it may be one of the best ways of making the brand an active, attractive part of contemporary culture.

Or let me put this another way.  Coca-Cola is largely responsible for the creation of the present Santa "narrative."  (Sorry.)   The creation of this creature has done the corporation an inculculable amount of good.  But very clearly if someone were today to propose such a creature the marketer’s reaction would be to limit, control and constrain.  Santa is nothing if not a public property, from Coke’s point of view, a cadet narrative, given over to the inventive powers of many artists working in several media over close to a hundred years. 

The Coca-Cola company doesn’t have much control of Santa now.  Just as plainly, it is content that this is so.  For every year, around this time, a plump, jolly man appears wearing the colors of the Coca-Cola Company. 

References

Jenkins, Henry. forthcoming.  Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Intersect.  New York: New York University Press.

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Sophie: marketing goddess. This blogs sits at the intersection of anthro and econ. October 24, 2005.  here.

McCracken, Grant. 2002. License to Overkill.  Case Comment.  Harvard Business Review.  December, 8-9.

The Ron Burgundy reference evokes the lead character from a film of the same name.

The Coca-Cola Company’s creation of our image of Santa is a story that has been told in several places.  See for instance Belk, Russell’s "A Child’s Christmas in America: Santa Claus as Deity, Consumption as Religion," Journal of American Culture. 10 (1) Spring, 1987, 87-100, and Okleshen, Cara, Stacy Menzel Baker, Robert Mittalstaedt. 2000. Santa Claus Does More Than Deliver Toys: Advertising’s commercialization of the collective Memories of Americans. Consumption, Markets, and Culture. 4 (3), 207-240.

Yesterday, we asked whether Jenkins’ notion of transmedia might serve as a new way to approach marketing. 

In the old world of marketing, there wasn’t much transmediation to speak of.  Corporations made products, and informed the advertising agency, who in turn informed the consumer.  Consumer might communicate with one another, and they would certainly rebuilt the brand for their own purposes, but mostly this marketing exercise was a bob sled run, with producers at the top and consumers at the bottom.  The meanings went straight down a single shute.  They did not run on several tracks.

Transmedia, as Jenkins says, presupposes "a story unfold[ing] across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole."

But for Mr. Clean there was no back story, no alternative endings, no competing interpretation.  There was in fact no narrative to speak of.  I think some consumers surmised that Mr. Clean was an uncorked genie, a creature out of Shahrazad released from the lamp/bottle to put his magic at the disposal of the homemaker.  In this case, the brand was actually removing meaning from the icon, not supplementing or multiplying this meaning. 

Perdue is famous for branding what all the world thought was an unbrandable commodity, and an agency  did so by making Frank Perdue a man who just a little too obsessed with chickens.  Really this was a pitch about quality, but because it was dressed up as a story about Mr. Perdue, a little narrative was allowed to "sneak in." 

Sneak in and stay put.  The Frank Perdue story is not told by anyone else on any other media.  Consumers are not encouraged to elaborate, and one can only imagine what would happen if the writers of comic books and satire were to take up the narrative "challenge" (Ozzie Osbourne, etc).  Besides which, the meaning making vehicle is a fanciful version of an actual man, Frank Perdue, and there are limits to what we can do here. 

There is more to think about here and I think Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s and now deceased, made for a meaning making vehicle that had a little more narrative range.  I think consumers liked him because they began to make attributions and imputations of their own.  He was, as we used to say of Archie Bunker, lovable in a quirky way.  And "quirky" is of course a clear signal that we are veering slightly away from the well worn tracks of narrative in our culture…or at the very least we have struck complexity and that’s interesting. 

But, neither Perdue nor Thomas, opened up real narrative possibilities that could be explored by several parties in several media.   In a strange, imperfect way, celebrity endorsers help do this…as when Uma Thurman appears in an ad for a wrist watch.  What Ms. Thurman is mostly lending is her celebrity, but little bits of her filmic narratives break off and "lodge" in the brand image.  It depends upon the viewer whether these bits are Uma Thurman from Kill Bill, Dangerous Liaisons, or, God help us, Be Cool.  But it is probably true that the narrative traces Ms. Thurman brings to an endorsement, she takes with her when she moves on. 

And this raises the question of why it is that advertising, marketing and branding should have been so disinterested in narrative at all, let alone multiple narratives?  Some of this I think we can put down to a certain "good enough for television" laziness.  Some of it was due perhaps do the media hierarchy that encouraged marketing to know its place.  Narrative was for the older, grander discourses.  (And this was perhaps not a bad trade off after all.  It forced the marketer to work with haiku economy.  It also released the brand from the constraints of narrative.)  And some of it may come from marketing’s early and sometimes inadvertant committment to cocreation.  The more specific one was about the narrative for, say, Mr. Clean the more limited was the creative freedom left to the consumer.  Or to put this more positively, it may be that the marketing team saw that Mr. Clean was more compelling when less specific.

But just when we think that there is really no place for transmedia in the world of brands, two words come to mind: "soap opera."  According to Robert Allen, this form first appeared in 1930, "when Chicago radio station WGN approached first a detergent company and then a margarine manufacturer with a proposal for a new type of program: a daily, fifteen-minute serialized drama."  By 1937, the soap opera, Allen says, "dominated the daytime commercial radio schedule and had become a crucial network programming strategy for attracting such large corporate sponsors as Procter and Gamble, Pillsbury, American Home Products, and General Foods. Most network soap operas were produced by advertising agencies, and some were owned by the sponsoring client."  The TV version of the soap opera was created by Procter and Gamble in 1950. 

The thing about soap operas, I believe, is that they were not tightly controlled by the advertising agency or brand.  They were narrative enterprises that were simply allowed to run in that slightly crazy way that soap operas do, jumping wildly between plot lines, doubling back upon themselves unexpectedly, resurrecting the dead and banishing the living with nary an explanation or acknowledgment.   Indeed there was so little narrative disipline here that the soap opera might as well have been unfolding across media platforms.  But on closer scrutiny, we must acknowledge the obvious:  there was precious little multiplicity of authority or mixing of media at work here. 

But there is something of interest here, nonetheless.  For here brands had apparently found a way to draw value from narrative without binding this narrative close to the breast.  And this is remarkable.  It suggests a time in the history of marketing when brands and narratives were  "fellow travellers," when a loose association between the two was not only acceptable but efficacious.  If was enough for P&G to sponsor a soap on an enduring basis for P&G to make itself the beneficiary of the exercise.  (I don’t doubt there was some "forced march" association [e.g., product placement] as well.)

Ok, I’ve done it again: running out of time and no doubt, the reader’s patience.  I promise to wrap this up tomorrow.

References

Allen, Robert.  n.d., Soap Opera, an essay presented by the Museum of Broadcast Communications. here.

Jenkins, Henry. forthcoming.  Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Intersect.  New York: New York University Press.

post script:

This is entry number "500" here at This blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  I’m taking everyone to the bowling alley this afternoon, if you feel like coming.  I believe there will be pony rides in the parking lot.  The clowns, they’re iffy.  See you there. 

Sony has opened a department of unintended irony and not a moment too soon. 

As we noted a couple of days ago, terrible damage was done to the brand by the installation of anti-piracy software and the world is reacting badly to the PlayStation graffiti ad campaign.  This might have been the moment for a little brand triage but the department is keen on other things. 

We have news from Britain of a new Sony Bravia campaign called Balls.  It features 250,000 colored rubber balls wildly, joyfully descending the hills of San Francisco (as pictured).

I know what you’re thinking but, no, a "balls out" visual staged at one of the centers of the American gay community is not the unintended irony I’m talking about.  I mean the notion that Sony is a corporation that should be associated with creativity unleashed. 

In her review of the campaigh, Barbara Lippert, of Adweek, has this to say:

As an object, a ball is an apt metaphor for creativity and expression. A self-contained geometric form, it releases and controls energy and provides kids and grownups alike a way to create intricate shapes and games. Shown in their multicolored aggregate in the spot, balls, like people, form crowds. We see the power and vitality (and aggression) in numbers. But at the same time, the tender, distinctive hues of individuals tend to shine through. […] There are shots of balls flying like birds in the sky, and also interesting cuts, once they have fallen, of how they pool at the curbs in random and beautiful groups.

Well and good.  (And very nicely put).  In sum, this ad is wildly at odds with the Sony we know, especially the anti-piracy debacle and the grafitti error.  It is also at odds with the arrogant performance of Andrew Lack and his antagonism of Sony partner, Bertelsmann AG.  Joy, untrammeled creativity, the exburance of motion and commotion, these are not the properties that spring to mind when we think of Sony.

There is one objective correlative that might work here.  Sony project Spider-Man 3, is scheduled for release in 2007, and it’s budget happens to be around $250 million.  Could it be that the Bravia ad is a representation, at $1000 a ball, of the sheer scale of the Spider-Man 3 risk?

Shareholder communication, it’s just so important these days. 

Reference

Kelly, Kate and Ethan Smith. 2005. Sony’s Stringer Faces Havoc At Two Units.  The Wall Street Journal. December 5, 2005; Page B1.  (sorry, wsj not giving my the URL)

Lippert, Barbara. 2005.  Barbara Lippert’s Critique: The Old Ball Game. Adweek. November 07, 2005. here. 

Yesterday, in It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid, Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall endeavored to set the field of marketing back a hundred  years.

If they were merely three cranks in a coffee shop, this wouldn’t matter.  But Christensen is a vastly and deservedly influential professor at the Harvard Business School, Cook the cofounder of Intuit software, and, most distressingly, Hall is the "chief strategy officer"  for the Advertising Research Foundation.  Worse, what is now merely an article in the Wall Street Journal is soon to be an article in the Harvard Business Review.  Can a book from HBSP be far behind?

The three wise men assert, 

a simple rule has been forgotten. To build a product that people want, you need to help them do a job that they are trying to get done.

the marketer’s fundamental task is not so much to understand the customer as it is to understand what jobs customers need to do — and build products that serve those specific purposes.

I had a philosophy professor who, when confronted by nonsense he regarded as especially egregious, would put down his book, look away and close his eyes.  Think of me so.

The "purpose brand" proposition  is egregious nonsense.  Brands, at their best, and among other things, bundles of meanings, some of them robust, some of them delicate, all of them poised to speak to one or more segments and to deliver unto them an understanding of not just what the product does but what it stands for, how it may be used, for whom it may stand, and where it is located in the larger scheme of things, commercial and cultural.  (These values are not functions.  They are values that create value.)

To reduce the brand to "purpose" is to dumb down the enterprise, diminish the art and science of marketing, beggar the consumer, and so displace the marketer, that our three wise men must be seen to conduct themselves as  proverbial bulls in the china shop of marketing concept, method and action, destroying advances made over the 100 years. 

Shakespeare was clear on this.  When Lear is stripped of the markers of his standing, and told that he doesn’t really need them, he replies

Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s." (2.4.264)

But not just Shakespeare takes umbrage.  The social sciences once embraced and then quite emphatically repudiated the "purpose" approach to things.  They called it "functionalism" and came to regard it as a violent act of reduction.  Functionalism reduced complicated human artifacts to purposes they served.  Thus did theory make us stupid.  Functionalism obliged us to ignore much of what we knew to be true about the object of study. 

Some costs of the Purpose Brand proposition: Puccini becomes entertainment, indistinguishable from Disney.  There is no difference between time keep devices called Patek Philippe and Timex.  Ford makes the same thing as Volkswagen.  All business schools, mark you, Dr. Christensen, are pretty much the same.  Intuit is only a couple of features different from Microsoft Money.  Most of all, Mr. Hall, there is no longer any such thing as advertising strategy.  Now, it’s sell the function all day long.  (And to think that marketers and agencies actually fund the Advertising Research Foundation!)

The three wise men are a wrecking crew.  They would have us forget the advances made by Trout, Ries, Levy, Kotler, Levitt, to name a few. They would commit the marketing professional to the cultural illiteracy now installed  in the business school world  They restore to usefulness a theory that is scorned in the rest of the academic world.  But most of all they would will away some of the most interesting, most difficult, and, yes, most useful elements of the marketer’s responsibility.

Join with me now.  Let us look away and close our eyes. 

Reference

Christensen, Clayton M., Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall.  2005.  It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid.  Wall Street Journal.  November 29, 2005; Page B2. 

Shakespeare quote is approximate. 

Sad news today in the branding world.  This obit is circulating on the internet.

The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection and trauma complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71. Dozens of celebrities turned out to pay their respects, including Mrs. Butterworth, Hungry Jack, Betty Crocker, and the Hostess Twinkies. Early in his career he faced a minor scandal for appearing in "Hot Crossed Buns," a short movie that exposed his affinity for the pop ‘n fresh genre. Nonetheless, Doughboy rose quickly in show business and remained a roll model for millions. Doughboy is survived by his wife Play Dough, two children, John Dough and Jane Dough, plus they had one in the oven. The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.

The larger issue: this is a good example of a brand icon being taken up and reworked by the consumer (aka the multiplier).  In this moment of "co-creation," the consumer breaths life, humor, and interest into an icon that heretofor hasn’t done much more than giggle. 

A good thing?  If you are one of the "new marketing" marketers, you say "yes."  This is funny, lively, and animating (the funereal theme notwithstanding).  If you are one of the "old marketing" marketers you blink in astonishment, mutter "an obit for my brand!" and reach for a lawyer. 

As someone who belongs to the first group, I think the argument for tolerating and indeed encouraging this kind of thing is clear cut.  We may think of it as a simple trade off of just the kind that BMW made when it allowed Jay Leno to introduce the Z on the stage of the Tonight show. 

To get currency, spontaneity, and liveliness, we was must give up control and all hopes of micromanaging the meanings of the brand.  Or to put this another way, the only way to persuade people to take an interest in the brand citadel is to throw down the draw bridge

It’s no longer "if you build it, they will come" but "if they build it, they will come." 

References

Origins online here, here, and here.

With light editing by Grant McCracken and humor implants by Brian Kenny.

Marketing has not always distinquished itself as an intellectual discipline.  One measure: the "top ten" list for marketing books contains several titles that would be ridiculed in other more rigorous fields.   (They know who they are.  Um, no, probably they have no idea.)

Part of the problem is that marketing has been the bastard child of the professional world.  A certain stigma attaches to the field and I think its fair to say that this stigma is, to some extent, the propagandistic achievement of the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and other post-war intellectuals. 

Marketer, heal thy self.   One of the ways to fight this public standing is to lionize the founders of the field, especially when these founders are people of remarkable talent and accomplishment.

This weekend we lost Peter Drucker. 

Peter Drucker invented the field of modern management. Through his 35 books and hundreds of seminal articles Drucker has had an enormous influence on the managers of corporations, nonprofits and government agencies around the world. … According to Drucker biographer Jack Beatty…, "this writer has had more influence on the lives of human beings than any other writer of this (20th) century." Procter & Gamble’s CEO A.G. Lafley calls Drucker the Babe Ruth and Ted Williams of management writers and consultants. GE’s former CEO Jack Welch: " Management around the world owes a debt of gratitude to Drucker who devoted his life to clarifying the role of an organization in our society."  (From the website "Leader to Leader" here.)

Peter Drucker is the Father of Management. For many of us, he is our role model, continually generating new ideas and refining old ones. I regard it as a compliment when some people call me the Father of Marketing. I tell them that if this the case, then Peter Drucker is the Grandfather of marketing. (Philip Kotler here.)

Sorry not to have blogged more.  I am minutes away from having my battery run out.

Just to say, very briefly, that one of themes that preoccupied the afternoon had to do with the ways in which social software ought to, and can, make itself more responsive to the user. 

Not to be a Mr. smarty-pants about this but consumer centricity is something that the marketing community knows about.  In the person of Charles Coolidge Parlin, this community invented the phrase "consumer is king" in or around 1912. 

Indeed, the marketing community can claim to be a champion of this notion.  This might be one place that marketers can make themselves useful to the social software community.  Mind you, there isn’t much to this beyond a willingness to take vows of humility, forsake the meanings with which we construe the world, and embrace first the possibility and then the fact that others have their own ways of seeing things.  The concept here is pretty straight forward.  It’s the practice that’s hard, especially for corporations that are inclined to a certain self absorption. 

And on this note, I will seize this opportunity to mark the passing of the master on the weekend, Peter Drucker, the man who did so much to persuade that "it was not about them" but the consumer. 

Corante’s Social Architecture conference (details last post) continues.

Here are thoughts on the second presentation.

Presentation title: Is business ready for social software?

Participants: Stowe Boyd (pictured), Kaliya Hamlin, John Hagel, Seth Goldstein (John Hagel not attending)

Opens with this quote:

Eric Bonabeau

Stowe Interviewing Seth and Kaliya

From the audience, Marc (last name to follow) raised the question of whether the organization will indeed embrace the social software model, that we should expect resistance.

Here’s what I wanted to say, but couldn’t get a word in edgewise:

It may be that we have an interesting drama to look forward to as the corporation leans in the direction of the social software. Hyperbolically, we might say there is a contest between the forces of light and darkness inside the organization.

As organizations take on the structural properties that social software makes possible, becoming multiple, messy, various, iterative, anti-hierarchical, they will begin to exhibit characteristics that will empower the "bad manager." This manager will read these characteristics as "symptoms," as clear and compelling evidence that things are going badly and that command and control models must be reasserted.   (We know, I think, that this manager is tempermentally disinclined to live in the world that social software makes possible. For them, this is what chaos looks like. This is a place of danger for the organization.)

Chances are, adoption will not look gradual, and not "trickle" in its diffusion at all.   There will be a period of early technical adoption and then a pitched battle between some people (aka the forces of light) who embrace it and the structural consequences that follow from it, and others (aka the forces of darkness) who insist on jamming the signal and punishing the early adopters. This is to say that there will be an active bad of anti-adopters (diffusion theory doesnt talk enough about this group I don’t think).

Naturally, the forces of light will win in the long term (because corporations will begin to understand that social software models are an important part of their efforts to becomng Complex Adaptive Systems), but some corporate players will suffer the wrath and the punishment of the anti-adopters, the statist rear guard. Or, to put this in the language of the old cliche, they will lose the battle as the rest of us win the war.

I am in Cambridge attending the Social Architecture event sponsored by Corante . Last night we all trooped off to the Degas exhibit at the Sackler and then consumed heroic amounts of alcohol at the Harvard Faculty Club. I had the chance to talk with the man who founded Corante in 2000, Hylton Jolliffe.  It’s eerie to talk to about something that is emerging as you speak about it, to know that this conversation next year will be very different from the one you are having this year, not least because of the people in this room. 

Now I am in the Ames Courtroom of Austin hall at the Harvard Law School. (The event is co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society here.)

David Weinberger is talking about "social software." He asks that we accept for the purposes of argument that blogging, tagging, wikis, IM, chat, are all types of social software.

Now, he askes, "What do they have in common?"

They are, relatively

low tech (unexpected)

small

inexpensive

full of individual voices (quite unexpected)

participatory: more memos, more emails

speaking in our own voices

driven by and driving of a new set of values and inclinations::

empowers local knowledge

allows small contacts

encourages symmetrical connections

discourages hierarchical command and control

things David worries about:

(I missed a couple of things here)

will this create a new elite

what I was thinking while listening:

that marketing using social software to listen and perhaps help form the consumer taste and preference to which it must respond will end up making multiple and perhaps messier messages with a faster roll out and take up. It will have to be an interative process, as we work and rework the message, experimented "en pleine air" as it were.   (Sorry, that’s the Degas exhibit talking.  Degas was worked outside the pleine air tradition.  His paintings of relatives examining cotton in an office in New Orleans.  Sensational.)

But the problem here is that lots of marketers are white knuckling at the present moment, terrified of anything that is even fractionally off target or noise producing. This is an inclination driven by things in the world of culture that can be changed. But it is also I think probably driven by the street and its demand that we meet our numbers every quarter. There is no leveling in this world, No one says, well, you missed your numbers last quarter but you appear to be making it up for it this quarter.

This external constraint will make it more difficult for marketers to make us of, and enter in to the spirit of, social software.

Thoughts only. Comments please.

American consumers spend more than $8 trillion a year on everything from popcorn to Porsches and eye exams to electricity. WSJ

Not everyone likes the term "consumer." Some think it’s anti-ecological. "Consumers" sound like ravening beasts who must destroy what they buy instead of renting it from the recycler.

Others dislike the term "consumer" because it suggests that the consumer always destroys value, and can’t actually ever participate in its creation. Producers have power. Consumers do not.

There’s a third reason. When it comes to the tech sector, information economies, the software user and the internet user, the term "consumer" is simply odd.

Jerry Michalski raised this issue at a Push conference a couple of years ago, and I heard it again Monday night at the CoburnVentures dinner from David Isenberg. Their point, if I may speak for them (and I am sure they will let them know if I can not), is that when we use the term "consumer" we smuggle certain assumptions into discourse, and these stowaways are inclined to act with mischievious and sometimes malevolent intent. Calling people "consumers" prevents us from seeing them in other ways. It may indeed prevent marketing from moving from the old verities to the new ones.

I don’t honestly know the historical particulars, but I believe the term "consumer" is relatively recently arrived. Before consumers, it was customary, I think, to talk about "customers," as if all relationships were "b to b" (business to business) ones.

I did a little hunting around, with the idea that the historian of marketing, Robert Bartels, might have some thoughts on the topic. I was unable to find any. Bartels does say that Charles Coolidge Parlin invented the phrase "consumer is king" in or around 1912, so we know the term was active then.

More to the point, "consumer" was essential to the effort to make the corporation "consumer centric" (as we could now say). It is precisely because corporations were persuaded that they were selling to "consumers" that they paid attention to taste and preference. In their last days, command economies gave us a glimpse of what the world might have looked like otherwise.

All of this is to say that "consumer" has done yeoman’s service, and the rise of marketing is hard to imagine without it. Still, Michalski and Isenberg have a point, and it is perhaps now time to think of alternatives.

My current favorite is the one that spring into conversation as Isenberg were talking on Monday: "multiplier." Sure, it’s a little weird, but I gave it to the boys in the lab and asked that they do a little product testing. Here’s what they came back with:

WSJ (amended)

Good work, fellas! That’s pretty much all they could come up with.

But imagine this conversation at the headquarters of "Bang the Brand."

"Do multipliers care about this sort of thing anymore? I mean isn’t this old fashioned marketing."

There is something in the term that invites us to ask whether the product, brand, innovation, campaign does actually give the "multiplier" anything he can, er, multiply. And if the answer is "no," well, we have what we are looking for.

Furthermore, "multipiers" also bids us ask, down the road, whether indeed the product, brand, innovation actually produced anything in the world. Did the multipliers multiply it, or is it still just sitting there.

Finally, the term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work

These are thoughts only and other candidates are eagerly solicited.

References

Bartels, Robert. 1976. The History of Marketing Thought. publisher unknown. This book is excerpted here.

Wessel, David. 2005. Consumers Might Curtail Shopping Sprees. Wall Street Journal. November 9, 2005.