Tag Archives: marketing

How to fix the Conde Nast business model

Screen-Shot-2019-04-10-at-9.24.46-236AM.pngPeter Kafka has a great piece on Conde Nast, specifically how this once dominant publishing enterprise now struggles and what this means for incoming editor Roger Lynch.

“The magazine industry is in decline because the magazine industry’s core product — packaging stories and ads and presenting them together in a discrete bundle — is in decline, for an obvious reason: Readers and advertisers are more interested in spending their time and money in other ways.”

This post is an anthropological addendum to Kafka’s original. It attempts to answer why readers and advertisers are spending their time and money elsewhere.

Conde Nast and American culture come unstuck

In the post war period, America howled with change. The New Yorker and Vogue were excellent guides, a way to keep a fix on how culture was changing. These publications were working out of New York City, with a select set of gifted journalists, each of them plugged into a series of exquisite networks that ran from the Manhattan delta back into the worlds of innovation. The New Yorker and Vogue made themselves the bearers of essential intelligence. Readers were periodically “read in” to the state of contemporary culture, briefed like so many diplomats, politicians or spies, their cultural capital perpetually topping up.

But American culture changed. So much innovation, from too many parties, with so many effects. Pyromaniacs are now running the fire works factory. (And I don’t just mean Trump. There’s now a Trump on every street corner.) Unsurprisingly, the beautiful intelligence systems called The New Yorker and Vogue have been overwhelmed.

Readers no longer use these publications as they once did. They extract knowledge that is interesting but, for “read in” purposes, this knowledge is now less essential.

in sum 1: the value proposition is broken.

2) In the post war period, people were eager to hear from The New Yorker and Vogue. Eager, indeed, to defer and imitate. The value proposition was bigger than mere intelligence. It was also a matter of sensibility. What was the right style of life and view of world? Vogue and The New Yorker could supply these too. There was a hierarchy in place. Readers knew their place and accepted it. Publications were nice about it. They didn’t actively scorn the reader. (Well, sometimes they did. Paul Fussell made a career revealing status secrets to provincial readers and then scorning them for their interest.)

This is over, mostly. Hierarchy is dying. Deference is tired and tiresome. Provincial readers are no longer provincial. The level of education has risen. Data are distributed. The cultural advantage that comes from living in New York City is radically diminished. Anyone who works as a creative or a strategist routinely looks behind the curtain of American culture. There are few secrets and fewer elites. High culture knowledge is no longer “must know” capital. Neither, interestingly, is avant-garde knowledge. In sum, the New Yorker (both the person and the publication) knows less, and when he/she/it does know more, this matters less.

The reader is no longer a supplicant. The New Yorker and Vogue no longer have quite the same authority. The relationship is no longer quite so asymmetrical.

in sum 2: the value relationship is broken, too.

3) But the problem goes deeper still.

Conde Nast sits in an imperiled middle. This is where “stories” live, to be sure, but, as little bundles of proper nouns, events, causes and consequences, these stories do not take us deeply enough into details or high enough to see the big picture. “Stories” feel like a Victorian machine. Charming and noisy in a Steampunk kind of way. Dear but not useful. The scale and mechanics are just wrong. Any and all claims to utility now dubious.

Conde Nast sits in a certain middle because it is hoping to speak to as many readers (of a kind) as possible. The notion is that the article that really impresses a Methodist minister from the rough and tumble part of Cleveland, Ohio will mystify, perhaps even antagonize just about everyone else.

But, miraculously, the first principle of mass marketing and mass media has been repudiated. The status system of the post war period is suddenly ineffective and people are beginning to think of privilege as a trap. (There are several architects of the mighty ideological change, but one chief hell-raiser was Alice Waters.) Once a reward, an indulgence, an entitlement, privilege now feels “gated” or better “gating.” I have collected the ethnographic data and these data say that privilege is beginning to make people feel limited and unsophisticated. It makes them wondered if they run the risk of having the world steal a march on them. If that Methodist minister has her wits about her, her story may very well prove keenly interesting and useful…even for people who happen to occupy, through no fault of their own, quite different genders, classes, cities, and occupations. The devil is in these details, not the generalities. We are mobile and we are curious. We are (all) anthropologists. This makes the old publishing trade offs and compromises misleading.

This brings us to the big picture. Because, yes, generalities, properly constructed, do sometimes still matter. Without them we cannot see the future coming. And it is now ferociously and perpetually on approach. Sometime after World War II, “trends” died. They ran like large, handsome breakers through American culture, bringing consensus as they went. Now (cliche alert) it’s a perfect storm out there, with lots of trends moving in all directions, colliding in ways that make them impossible to track in conventional ways. And this puts paid to the diffusion models of the post war period, the ones that said if we wanted to know the future of the middle class we only needed to consult their early adopting betters (New York writers, say). The new journalism will have to look more like O’Hare on those windy summer days when the flight schedule takes on a wistful, poetic quality. (Your flight from LA? We have no idea.) This journalism will need a new kind of pattern recognition. Conde Nast may or may not be equal to the task. And this threatens the enterprise with what Taleb would call a “black swan” (i.e., an unanticipated disruption) because someone out there surely is.

Conde Nast uses conventional categories of understanding…at the very moment when these are being deformed and reformed. It uses language like “story,” “politics,” “artist,” “family,” “corporation,” “community,” “self,” “democracy,” as if these terms had not been blown to bits. This makes Conde Nast journalism a shell game. We can’t know what it’s saying. That is unless the story is formed by genre, in which cases it’s not clear why we’re bothering with it in the first place.

The loyalty to the “story” model of journalism is understandable. Simplicity, clarity, everyday language, these represent the deepest contracts between journalist and reader. But the underlying assumptions are now up for grabs. To presume them blithely on the page, it’s like taking Bolivian currency from the 19th century to our local Bank of America and hoping for a kind reception. The old exchange models are broken. We can’t use them to talk about the world in a way that matters.

Glassy and calm. That’s the quality of much American journalism. Beneath the text murmurs a lovely conviction: “this is obvious, you are smart, hey, you get it, let’s move on.” This has always been a little disingenuous. Now it’s flat out dissembling. (Well, unless of course it’s delusional. I mean, if the journalist does not recognize the sleight of hand he/she performs.) We have scant grounds for confidence. The only thing we know for certain is that the world streams with change, that most propositional bets are iffy, that most rhetorical devices are unreliable. The biggest shared assumption of all, of course, is that we share assumptions. This is really unreliable. And if this is now in question, it’s time to stop making glib assumptions about our ability to create the effortless, efficient or reliable acts of communication. (I make this argument only to contradict my argument. Sorry. Not sorry.)

Long form work has a problem of its own. The author, present but unassuming, starts us off with a very particular story, and mines the details every so patiently until the transmission of the idea is accomplished as if by magic. One of the masters of this form is John McPhee, a writer who was so good at making the details speak that The New Yorker is now addicted to his voice. It’s as if the journalist is frightened of frightening the horses. She must now eschew abstractions, metaphors, reckless claims (as above). It’s all so very patronizing. And laborious. And finally, if we are going to be honest about it, ever so slightly anti-intellectual. (Gasp.)

And then there is the herd mentality as people cluster around the intellectual trend of the moment. Someone has an idea (say, “digital engagement is bad for you!”) and then for several months everyone gives voice to exactly the same revelation as if it were new, fresh and totally original. It becomes the worldly, the tough minded, the “I really care about the world,” thing to say on line and especially over drinks. As if, God forgive us, there could be something entirely, unreservedly wrong about a technology that gives us instant access to knowledge and social connection whenever, wherever we want. The New Yorker should be working harder to murder nonsense in its crib.

I am not calling for philosophical discourse, pontificating experts or academics going all papal on us. The post modernists broke the Liberal Arts and they just don’t care. They have committed a crime against the species, and they just don’t care. The last thing we want them to do is have a go at public discourse.

In a sense, this is simple Marc Andreessenian wisdom. Publishing has suffered a disintermediation. Software is eating the world. Magazines were a nice light snack. Put it this way, and the future is clear. We have to find a way to change how a magazine mediates between the reader and the world. The solutions will not be merely digital. There is no simple UX solution, no algorithmic fix. We have to rethink categories and conventions, all that cultural stuff. All that cultural stuff the digital world likes to think is residual and likely to work out on its own. But it won’t. So the problem may be Andreessenian, but the solution probably won’t be.

Thoughts on how to create value

1) The real insight comes not from “story” but from the deeper dive and the bigger picture. The middle matters less and less. Go high. Dig deep.

2) The language of the story is itself a story. We can’t assume that even the simplest terms are reliable. Examine assumptions. Entertain alternatives. Show what differences follow from one choice over another. Most of all, we want to use language not as something transparent to reality, but as something that needs reformation.

3) There is no privileged point of view. Tell the story from several points of view, class, race, gender. Identities flourish. We are multi-perspectival. (Without being in the least Baudrillardian about it. Meaning matters. Culture continues.) This should look great on the page. And it is the world according to John Stewart Mill. So.

4) Let’s stop acting as if the story, once told, is over. What the reader needs is an arc. What came before. Where things stand now. Where things might go from here. Show things in process. This change is just now taking place in the strategic world. Until very recently, strategy firms would sell the client on a new idea with the implicit notion that “change this and you are done!” We are beginning to see that good strategies have a “best by” date. Let’s advise readers as we do clients: “this too shall pass. We want you to get into this strategy/stock/market/innovation in 12 months and out of it in 24 months.” The story is a window. Everything rushes through it.

5) Even the most sinuous prose style will not be sufficient. We need statistical data. Nothing effortful. Let’s be honest. No one wants to “do the math.” But data visualizations, these are essential. Again, it’s a world in motion and a story that only quantitative data can tell.

6) And speaking of Peter Kafka (and Kara Swisher), we must ask why pod casts are flourishing. Some insights come most surely when crackling up out of all the “noise on the line” of a real conversation. It turns out that some of the stuff the writer was supposed to eliminate, we want back in. Why? That’s a story too.

What publication will step up and reinvent reporting? The world set sail. Journalism stands on a wharf in 19th century Manhattan, smiling bravely. Who will rescue it?

in sum 3: parts of journalism are broken

It’s a lot to fix. The value proposition, the relationship and the model. Until we fix these problems, we can’t hope to fix the business model. We won’t get people to pay for content. But once we do, they will. The new journalism will be worth a fortune.

Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of 12 books including most recently Culturematic, Flock and Flow, and Dark Value. He is the founder of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum. He is a cofounder of the Artisanal Economies Project. Grant has taught at the Harvard, University of Cambridge, and MIT. He advises widely, including Google, Ford Foundation, Kanye West, Netflix, Boston Book Festival, Nike, and the White House (no, the other one).

Beth Comstock and 7 truths for the C-suite

beth comstock

(This post was first published on Medium, April 3, 2018.)

Anyone who works as a creative, a strategist, a planner, a story teller, a PR specialist, or a meme-maker knows the frustration of persuading the organization to grasp and act on culture. (No, not corporate culture. American culture.)

It should be easy but it’s not.

In fact, culture remains a kind of “dark matter” for the organization. Senior managers know it’s out there. They know it matters. They know things go disastrously wrong when they do not “factor culture in.”

But getting these managers to “get serious” about culture has been a struggle.

May I introduce Beth Comstock, until recently Vice Chair of General Electric and the person in charge of GE Business Innovations?

Here is Ms. Comstock on dual themes that are dear to everyone concerned with contemporary culture: multiplicity and fluidity.

In our lives, we are multidimensional people. We don’t want everything to be exactly the same all the time and we have different moods. I think there’s a huge segmentation going forward for marketers, for businesses where it’s state of mind. It’s contextually relevant at the moment. It’s not just, “I am a woman.” It’s not just, “I am X age. I am an American. I am a east coaster,” or, “a southerner.” I think those things are maybe more analog, and going forward, it’s much less binary; it’s much more fluid; we have gotten used to — culturally have much more gender fluidity. I think there is going to be much more interest and experience fluidity. It’s going to be challenging and exciting for certainly business and marketing people.

Who could ask for anything more? This remarks puts Ms. Comstock so far out ahead of the average manager, it’s impossible to measure.

In a more perfect world, this understanding would be “standard issue” for managers, one of the adaptions that help them navigate the complexities of contemporary capitalism. But as it is, there may be only one senior manager who grasps this point this well. Beth Comstock.

When someone doesn’t understand the new realities of the American market place, the following things become more difficult to grasp:

1. that the American consumer is now a creature of new complexity.

Shouting at consumers with dumb advertising is not just ill advised. It is an invitation to outright repudiation. It destroys brand and financial value.

2. that American marketing in general must surrender some of its “keep it simple, stupid” laboriousness for a new control of nuance and subtlety.

Let your creatives do their jobs. They understand culture, or should do. They know how to negotiate its subtleties. They know how to extract meaning that will become value. Don’t keep putting your oar in. You don’t ask their advice on a new M&A strategy. They don’t want your advice on meaning and message making. Leave it to the professionals.

3. that the American brand in particular must be a house of many mansions. It can no longer define itself in a monolithic way or speak in a single voice.

This is a special challenge for American marketing, so long the devotee of simplicity, repetition, and, um, well, repetition. Contemporary consumers, and the younger they are, the more this is true, HATE the obvious. They can do much more with much less. Stop yelling at them.

4. that American corporation can only speak to this diversity by containing some of this diversity.

There are many Americas out there. Perhaps once everyone was prepared to “go along to get along” with a set of shared meanings. Less and less so now. There are new and emerging fundamentals. But there are also differences that will never go away, and these are blossoming everywhere: race, gender, age, ethnicity, locality… Do you know them? Have you embraced them?

5. that some of the new richness and turbulence of the world out there comes from the new richness and complexity of culture.

(You’re afraid of “Black Swans” as a source of disruption? Many of these come from culture. You’re keen on “Blue Oceans” as a place to discover innovation? Many of these come from culture.)

6. that “culture” is something the corporation must devote itself to understanding.

A couple of years ago, I proposed that the organization appoint a “Chief Culture Officer.” This fell on deaf ears.

7. Let’s start with this fundamental truth, that when we say “culture” we are not talking about corporate culture. We are talking about American culture.

I wish people would stop conflating the two! The confusion was charming for a brief period. Now it’s beginning to resemble a chronic inability to distinguish between American football and European football. It’s really not a good look. Trust me.

It’s one thing to grasp these 7 truths. It’s another to put them to operationalize them as working assumptions and active ideas.

Ms. Comstock has taken the lead here as well. She grasps complexity in a practical way. Listen as she talks about Rachel Shechtman’s experiment called Story.

Meanwhile, I mean, there’s a store here in New York, I am a big fan of the founder and the store is called Story. Rachel Shechtman started it, and every six weeks it’s like a magazine and a media experience and an event. Every six weeks, she changes out and curates a new experience in retail every six weeks. So it’s hard to — it’s a hybrid. It’s hard — is it retail? Yeah. Is it media? Yeah. Is it experiential? Yeah. She has three or four different business models. That’s just one example. You are seeing more and more of those. So I think it really is this interesting mash-up of things. The winners are going to figure those two, the analog and the digital, out together.

All hail Beth Comstock. Let’s hope that, some day, all managers have her gifts.

Source of quotes:
From a podcast interview of Ms. Comstock by Mike Kearney in the Deloitte’s Resilient series here.

Conflict of interest:
None. I have never met Ms. Comstock. As far as I know, I have never worked for her, even distantly.

Photo credit:
With thanks to Joi Ito
Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) here.

The case for culture in business, as clearly and forcefully as I can make it

This is an abbreviation of talk I gave for the design firm Thomas Pigeon in early April.

It puts the “case for culture in business” as forcefully as I can make it. (NB I’m not talking about corporate culture here. I’m talking about culture as in “culture creative.”)

Here’s a summary:

SECTION 1

00:25 capitalism and its creative destruction

00:30 Schumpter
00:54 Alvin Toffler
01:11 Clayton Christensen

01:31 the world is turbulent
…and culture creatives can help

SECTION 2

01:38 strategy struggles

1:44 Peter Schwartz and the corporation in a state of perpetual surprise

1:56 we wake up one morning to discover that our business model can be ripped out from under us

2:00 Michael Raynor and the death of strategy

2:19 Nassim Taleb on black swans and the unimaginable

2:48 these guys are not the least bit defensive (a joke!)

3:07 Andy Grove, here’s how we do strategy now: act like a firehouse

3:24 all that talk of agility is Andy’s firehouse

3:40 strategy is struggling…and we can help

SECTION 3

3:45 corporations and brands are in crisis

3:48 CPG brands especially, all the big brands are down, all of them are struggling to live in this new world

4:00 brands are struggling…and we can help

SECTION 4

4:07 culture to the rescue

this world of commotion gets simpler if you get culture

4:17 getting culture makes the world less “black swany” and less “suprisy”

4:47 we can do better than Andy’s fire house

4:2 culture is the professional competence of the culture creative

4:59 culture is our competitive opportunity

5:02 culture is our difference

5:03 we have always said our difference is creativity and it is but we can’t do great creativity without a connection to culture

creativity requires culture

5:12 creativity that’s not rooted in culture has this calorie-free quality. It’s not lasting, it’s not impactful. It doesnt really change the brand. It doesn’t really touch the consumer, and it doesn’t really resonate with the culture in place.

5:25 that’s when you know there a cycle here: you’ve drawn from culture buy you’ve created something so good, it’s so powerful, it actually contributes to culture

SECTION 5

5:40 culture is 3 things, meanings, rules and motions

6:20 the difference between Roger A and Roger B
(Roger is a dog, he doesn’t have culture. Roger B is a person, he does.)

7:10 Aspies and culture (making conversation in the elevator)

7:44 three purses, one is a Birkin bag worth $14,000

8:18 culture defines how we think about self and the meanings of gender, age, ethnicity, race, and our preoccupation these days with celebrity

8:24…and how we think about groups, style, entertainment and communications are all established by culture

SECTION 6

8:48 is there a Canadian advantage?
Yes, there is (possibly)
e.g., Michael Ennis, Malcolm Gladwell, Marshall McLuhan

SECTION 7:
the case of the artisanal trend

9:08 food after World War II

9:38 the rise of prepared food: Cheese Whiz!

10:02 the artisanal trend itemized

10:38 the artisanal trend created the CPG crisis, it took on prepared food and fast food

10:46 and big brands disrupted by the artisanal
Unilever, Nestle’s, Coca-Cola, P&G taken by surprise

SECTION 8:
How can we help our clients?

11:07 first step: we map culture

11:11 culture too often the latest hippest thing, the coastal stuff, the beltway stuff, the elite stuff

11:23 the recent error of Democratic party

11:46 we want breadth of coverage

11:50 we don’t want to only listen just to the coasts

12:00 second step: choose the meanings (on the map) that really work for the brand?

12:17 which meanings work for the consumer

12:28 third step: now we build an exquisite brand

12:35 fourth step: stage events in the world that create meanings for the world (culturematics: meanings in action)

13:05 fifth step: meanings in motion. we have to track meanings, we need to find metrics. the corporation runs on numbers, all numbers are made with numbers. and when we are asked for numbers we just say just trust us, your career will be fine, your kids will go to college, you can trust us, look how hip our glasses our

13:40 it’s no longer about “refreshing” the brand, we need to be able to show when we want the client to claim this meaning and when to exit the meaning

13:51 We are still inclined to step in, offer a big idea and then leave, as if to say “our work is done”

13:50 what we need to say is “this is when we want you to get into this cultural moment and this is when we want you to get out”

14:02 this is the stuff of an enduring connection with the client

14:27 culture is our competitive advantage, it’s time to see it clearly!

This is what we do to dreamers

memobottle+manLet’s say you are starting a startup and today you are standing in front of a venture capitalist.

With impatience in his voice, the VC says,

“Tell me again exactly what your enterprise is for. How are you going to create value?”

This is what we do to dreamers.

Because the answer to this question almost always comes to you in a mad conceptual scramble for the simplest, most obvious, most literal statement of what your enterprise is “for.”

You stand, you deliver:

“Our product will help people solve problem x for consumer y cheaper than competitor z.”

Whew!

But not so fast. Because now you are wedded to it. Every time someone asks, you are obliged to repeat your simplest, least interesting statement of what your company is for.

It’s the opposite of poetry. Every time you repeat your “value proposition” it gets more obvious, practical, functional, literal, uninteresting and unbeautiful. Your dream is withering.

In the summer of 2015, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, insisted, against all measures and most opinion, that U.S. productivity was actually up.

The trouble, he suggested, is that we can’t see these gains because we are using old measures. When the GDP measure was developed in the 1930s, Hal observed, it focused on things like steel and grain. The improvements that come from Silicon Valley are harder to see.

Radical Hal. No, call him Heretical Hal. This was the beginning of the end of capitalism as a blunt object, as a search for mere utility. This was an opportunity to free ourselves from those people who see the world as a solutions to problems, and the more pragmatic and practical the better.

But we can’t complete this heresy until we begin to make certain value visible. We need to show how our enterprise will create value of a social, cultural, human kind. We will have to show that Uber is not merely cheaper than a taxi cab, but a richer, more human way to discover a city. (I set aside the labor issues for another time.) We will have to show the Airbnb is not merely a cheaper hotel room, but that it is a richer, more human way to discover a city. As it stands, and as far as capitalism (and Uber and Airbnb themselves) are concerned, this remains “dark value.”

Sometimes dark value is revealed, but typically this revelation comes late in the process. Ideas happen, capital is made added, enterprise springs into the world, innovations are rolled out. And then someone says, “Er, what about marketing?”  Planners, strategists, creatives, designers, ethnographers are summoned to contemplate this poor, beaten creature.

With any luck the post mortem goes pre mortem. The innovation springs to life, it’s coat glossy with new meaning. But often even this creative genius can’t do anything for the “innovation.” It is beyond all hope. It is designed to solve a problem that no one cares about because it adds virtually nothing to the world. “Whiter whites” are a death mask.

But sometimes these creatives discover, invent, conceptualize dark value. And the consumer will say, “Oh, that’s what it is. You kept telling me what it’s for. No, that I like. I can live that.”

By this time of course it’s all up stream. The creatives are working with something that’s mostly formed and they are working with people who really in their heart of hearts think “all the creativity stuff is really just icing for the cake. It’s the sizzle that sells the steak.  It’s the stuff you have to say to persuade the consumer to buy a product that frankly should have sold itself on the strength of it’s functionality. I mean, really, what is the matter with these people.”

What if we started looking for and working with dark value from the very beginning?

And if this sounds like a good idea, please consider buying my new book Dark Value here. It’s a bargain at $2.99.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Leora Kornfeld for engaging me this morning with a useful email. And thanks to many people on many media who have offered encouragement for the Dark Value project.

The image is from this website.

The ‘wicked grin’ test (a new creative measure)

How do you know when something in our culture is really good?

I think it’s when it makes us grin a wicked grin.

This is one of those: Dave Chappelle does imitation of Prince and Prince uses the imitation for his album cover. Dave becomes Prince. Prince becomes Dave becoming Prince.

For post-modernists, this is ‘signs circulating.’ Fair enough but not very interesting. It doesn’t explain why we grin wickedly.

It’s the relocation that does it. Daveness taking on Princeness. Princeness taking on Daveness as Princeness. These are meanings in motion. We grin wickedly because we can’t believe that Dave dared attempt Princeness. It’s not temerity that gets us. Dave is free to make fun of a genius like Prince. That’s the privilege of his genius.

No, what makes us grin is astonishment. How did Dave do it? How is that possible? Daveness and Princeness share a claim (and a proof) of genius, but they come from very different parts of our culture.  They are in a sense incommensurate.

And they just made themselves (for a moment, in a way) commensurate. This makes our minds happy…and our faces grin. I think it is at some level it makes our brains happy. Meanings attached to one thing now, astonishingly, belong to another. We can feel gears turning in our heads.

Dave and Prince have brought meanings together that are normally kept apart. And we thank them for this semiotic miracle by grinning our admiration, astonishment, gratitude. Who knew our culture could do that.

We make a lot of culture with acts of unexpected, unprecedented combination.  (I have tried to map this process for contemporary culture in a book called Culturematic.)

Indeed, wicked grinning should be the new objective not just of comedy and album cover design, but of branding, design and advertising. We used to slavishly obey the rules of official combination (aka genre). Now we bore people with this predictability. If the user, viewer, consumer, audience can see where we’re going, they won’t come with us. (Susan Sarandon did an interview yesterday on Charlie Rose in which she said precisely this.)

Compare a culturematic to old fashioned marketing. The ad man and woman came up with a blindingly obvious message, stuffed it into one of the mass media (3 network TV, magazines, newspaper, radio) and fired it at the target over and over again until our ears bled. Everyone just wanted the “persuasion” to stop. This was cold war torture. And the worse part of this torture was how completely unsurprising it all was.

Every thing changes when we assume that our “consumers” are clever and interesting, and, chances are, making culture on their own. This means first that they can see the grammars we are using. Second, it means that they are looking for culture to make their own, for critical purposes and creative ones.  Culture creative, assume you are talking to someone has smart as you are. Assume you are talking to someone who can do what you do. And go with the idea that we have no hope of success unless we are making content that makes people grin wickedly.

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green have invited us to embrace a new slogan: “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” The idea is that a message will die unless people take an act hand in distributing it by social media. I am proposed that before we apply the Jenkins-Ford-Green test, we apply “wicked grin test.” Forget the focus groups and the audience testing. Just show your work to someone and look at the expression on their face.

brand runners?

jw-joss-scifinowIf the brand is changing, how about branders?

I’ve been reading about “show runners” lately, and I thought, “hey, why not “brand runners?””

I’m not saying “let’s invent a new position.”  I’m saying, let’s ask marketing people to think about themselves in a new way.

So what is a show runner?

Scott Collins of the LA Times offers this definition.  He calls showrunners “hypenates:”

a curious hybrid of starry-eyed artists and tough-as-nails operational managers.  They’re not just writers; they’re not just producers. They hire and fire writers and crew members, develop story lines, write scripts, cast actors, mind budgets and run interference with studio and network bosses. It’s one of the most unusual and demanding, right-brain/left-brain job descriptions in the entertainment world….[S]how runners make – and often create – the shows, and now more than ever, shows are the only things that matter.

Also, see this illuminating clip from a documentary called Showrunners here.

I think a “brand runner” might look something like this.  Managing a brand is a task of fearsome complexity, keeping track of all the traditional brand meanings, auditioning all the new ones, speaking to many segments not just a couple, identifying and tracking all the coming trends (both the blue oceans and the black swans), making the brand bold and clear even as it becomes in places delicate and obscure, reaching out to a variety of meaning-makers and organizing and articulating their work, changing the brand architecture strategically, tuning the brand message in real time.  Brand running  could a lot like show running.

Most of all, the brand runner metaphor suggests that we would work with the brand in a constant but highly variable process.  Lots of big thinking.  Lots of fine tuning.  “Running a brand” seems somehow closer to the present truth than “managing” it.  The metaphor assumes that creativity is the first order of business.  Out goes the “business as usual” notion that brand management suggests.  Brand running would be less about business and more about creativity, and a constant, collaborative creativity at that.

At the Brand and Brand Relationship conference this week, we ended with a panel discussion lead by Susan Fournier and including Aaron Ahuvia, Eric Arnould, Anders Bengtsson, Markus Giesler, and Jonathan Schroeder and yours truly.  It’s wrong of me to speak for them….so I will.  I believe you could feel a certain pressure of speech or ideation in the room.   There were ideas waxing, threatening to overtake our trusted orthodoxies.  Or maybe not.  I love that moment when you can feel things “melting into air.”  And I think they were.

In any case, (new job description or no) perhaps we could think about the brand as something being constantly pitched, green lit, put into  production, crafted as an idea and a reality, with scenes, episodes and seasons, hammered out with producers, writers and actors with whom it is being thought and rethought, as it keeps melting into air and precipitating back into the life of the consumer.

For more metaphoric materials, see the Wikipedia entry for showrunners here.

Church, state, and the new rules of marketing

selbst fotografiert

selbst fotografiert

Buzzfeed has leaked an internal report from the New York Times.

I was struck by this passage:

“The very first step … should be a deliberate push to abandon our current metaphors of choice — ‘The Wall’ and ‘Church and State’ — which project an enduring need for division. Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence,” the report says. […]

“It’s the old world where the publisher and the editor work together,” senior editor Sam Sifton, who worked on the cooking project, told the report’s authors. “It’s not lions lying down with lambs. It’s a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship.”

I just finished working a project for Netflix and Wired, and I got to see collaboration up close.

Certainly, this project represents a repudiation of the old “church and state” distinction.  The “state” called Netflix paid for content that appeared in the “church” called Wired.   (And I wrote the “copy.”)

Some people will accept this as the kind of break-through that Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed has been arguing for for some time.  Others will decry it as the invasion of capital into journalism.  Still others (AdAge’s Michael Sebastian, to be exact) suggested that this story might give us a glimpse of the future in some of the ways that NYT’s Snowfall did.

But there is an anthropological observation to make, and that is none of us (and by “us,” I mean Netflix, Conde Nast and me) appeared to be looking to make this content shill for the sponsor.  More to the point, we were not conflating church and state.  If anything we were being at least as fastidious as the old order.

None of us was looking to amp up the pitch.  No one said, “Grant, can you dial up the emphasis on Netflix, please.”  In fact, the only editorial intervention was the removal of the names of shows that I had used to illustrate the power of the new TV, and this was occasioned by the fact that non-Netflix properties did not want to have their shows appear in a piece sponsored by Netflix.

Why were we being so fastidious?  I think there is a simple marketing answer here.  Any marketing exercise that shills now actually diminishes the power of the communication.  Consumers just dial that stuff out.

We have entered a new era in which viewers, consumers take intelligence and imagination as the necessary condition for their attention.  Shilling is clumsy and overbearing.  It disqualifies itself.   

This is what happens when popular culture, driven by commerce, becomes culture plain and simple.  It has to stop acting like a shilling exercise, or suffer the consequences…and these are immediately exclusion from readerly interest.

“Oh, it’s only an ad.  Next!”

The new rule of marketing says you can’t buy your way into people’s lives.  If you make marketing with scant regard for the way this marketing draws on and contributes to culture, you provoke an instantaneous push back from the consumer.

This must qualify as good news.  Even as the “grey lady” (aka NYT) wonders whether she can risk the conflation of church and state, the world of marketing is finding that it is obliged to be fastidious.  Whew.

Acknowledgements

Thanks Rick Liebling for the head’s up.

Marketing Thuggery: a case in point

Lots of people comment on advertising only to condemn it.  The Frankfurt School lives on like Frankenstein.

But I’m not one of those people.  Generally, I like ads.  They’re little production houses.  They use some part of their culture.  And they create some part of their culture.  This makes them anthropologically fascinating.  (Here’s a post on advertising I recently did with Bob Scarpelli.)

But today I’m pointing an accusing finger at this ad from DirecTV.

“Are my wires ugly.”

“No, buddy, no!  Your wires are what make you you, little man.”

Advertising is often an act of metaphor.  We find a meaning in one part of our culture and place it somewhere else.  Meanings are released.  Humor, sometimes, is occasioned.

Call it cultural arbitrage, as I did a couple of days ago.

So where do you think this meaning comes from?  It comes from the world of disability and the conversation where the father seeks to reassure his challenged son.

You think I’m being too sensitive?  Try asking a father who has had to have this conversation.  Try asking a son who has suffered this anxiety.

And while you’re at it, try exercising a little cultural sophistication.  It is, actually, what you do for a living.

This ad isn’t funny.  It’s an act of marketing thuggery.  It assigns very bad meanings to the brand. DirecTV as a brand that finds humor in disability?   DirecTV as a brand that would play upon the insecurities of a child and a father haunted by both?  DirecTV as a brand that ridicules a family that must confront ridicule as a matter of course?

Wow.  Hats off to these marketers for this tone-perfect mastery of contemporary culture, for their virtuoso ability to find meanings and make meanings for the brand.  This is marketing malpractice of the first order.  This is marketing thuggery.

Acknowledgements

Normally, I would name the agency and the creatives responsible for a great ad.  In this case, I will say merely that I think the offending agency is Deutsch.

Tahir Hemphill and the neglected genius of his rap almanac

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Last week, I had a chance to listen to Tahir Hemphill at the Office of Creative Research in New York City.

The OCR is 111 Bowery and you walk up two flights, up out of a neighborhood dominated by Chinese grocery stores.  It feels like moving up in space is moving back in time, like you are caught in something Victorian, entering one world secreted in another.  Think something out of Sherlock Holmes’ London.  A delicate, organized world now bursting with, on the verge of failing to contain, the forces that made it.  A little dreamy.  A little strange.

The Center does not disappoint on this score.  You enter to see 8 Oscilloscopes staring at you all in a row.  Back room science.  Wild inquiry.  The pursuit of knowledge running away from academic, professional and commercial convention.

Waiting for the talk to start, I fell into conversation with a guy from the “green tech” sector and for some reason, perhaps that Victorian vibe, we started talking about what great ghosts this building must have.  I was once part of the museum profession and we used to talk a lot about how to get the knowledge of the museum into the world.  Usable holographs were just then appearing on the horizon and surely some day, the green-tech guy and I agreed, every building would have hand-crafted ghosts that wander through and can be relied to tell you the story of the building.  This will be a standard feature of the well-appointed office space.  As in, “Well, I was going to work at start-up X but when I asked them what ghosts they had installed in the building (they have this great warehouse on the river), they just stared at me like it had never occurred to them.  Dude!  Dump the ping pong table and get some ghosts!”

And Tahir does not disappoint.  He started talking about his childhood, about parents who wanted him to concentrate on math and science, how he discovered art, and the talk sort of spiraled out of control like opium smoke rising (to evoke our Victorian theme again).  We were spell bound.  Only.

Tahir is famous for his searchable rap almanac, The Hip Hop Word Count.  I was complaining the other day that in an era of generalists, we are disinclined to dig deep on any given topic.  Tahir dug very deep.  Millions of people have supped from the hip hop well.  Hundreds of thousands have participated in the profit stream that ensued.  But far as I know, Tahir is the only one who actually charts exactly what happened and is happening now.  (This is a little like learning, first, that we have discovered a lost continent and that, second, only one person has mapped it.)

As nearly as I can tell (and this is me guessing) hip hop the most formative cultural trend of the past couple of decades.  It is now part of the cultural vocabulary of every cosmopolitan.  (Thanks to Jey Van-Sharp for illuminating remarks on this theme over drinks after the talk.)  It’s possible that some day we will say that hip hop made us the way people now routinely say that Shakespeare made English and the English.  (Speaking of ghosts, if Shakespeare is witness to hip hop, just how much do you think he loves it?  Very much, that’s how much.  By the way, Shakespeare’s 450th birthday is coming up.)

Tahir Hemphill has been a Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard and at The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.  So some resources have been available to him.  But as nearly as I can tell, he does not have people lined up the block to give him money.  This is distinctly not the fate of those guys who made a Hip Hop encyclopedia called Rap Genius and got bags of dough from Marc Andreessen.  And very wrong.

Really! When you think about how much meaning and value the artistic and commercial world has extracted from hip hop, this is not just wrong but  unimaginably weird.  Hemphill ought to look like a Victorian captain of industry, lauded, celebrated, admired, imitated and the person you go to when you are trying to figure out whether and how the brand or your music or your film can stick its finger in the hip hop socket.  As so many have done.

As it is, he keeps a modest office in a building that is surely the greatest story never told.  Tahir’s office is in the Millionaire’s Retirement Home, a Bronx building created in 1915 (almost Victorian!) expressly for the purpose for giving comfort to very wealthy people who have fallen on hard times.  I know.   The irony is too painful.  Many people have extracted material riches from hip hop.  Tahir is not one of them.  His wealth is all intellectual.

When you are ready to hire the very gifted Mr. Hemphill as your consultant, you can find more about him here.  

Method out of madness

In any square mile of ocean, there are some 46,000 pieces of plastic, a great and growing testament to people on ship and shore so spectacularly stupid or irresponsible that they would rather just chuck something into the ocean than make the small effort the recycling now takes. Every year, this “ocean plastic” kills one million sea birds and 100,000 sharks, turtles, dolphins, and whales. Every year, ocean plastic rises a little higher in the food chain. It’s destination: our dinner plates.

Finally, the planet decided to do something about it, patiently sweeping garbage together into the creation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), an accumulation of crap rotating endlessly out there in the North Pacific.

And there it sits, a floating garbage dump visible even from outer space. Maybe this is an ocean’s idea of accusation. One piece of litter on the high seas doesn’t amount to much, but put it all together and you’ve got one really big ecological “j’accuse.”

For the rest of this post, please visit the Harvard Business Review Blog by clicking here.  

OREOS and murmur marketing

Here’s my Harvard Business Review Blog essay on the way Oreo is celebrating it’s 100th birthday.  

The first two paragraphs:

Oreo recently stepped out with a new look. Several new looks, actually. The cookie is pictured sometimes in the shape of Elvis, sometimes with a tread mark in redcrème in recognition of the Mars Rover landing, and sometimes in colors chosen to acknowledge Bastille day.

This is an excellent way to celebrate Oreo’s 100 birthday, but it would be wrong to dismiss it as advertising’s equivalent to party balloons. There is a method, perhaps even a genius, to this good humor.

Read more BY CLICKING HERE.

 

Innovation the culturematic way

Here’s my recent post on the HBR website.  

It’s about a clever renovation at the St. Regis hotel.

This is, I believe, a great example of creating innovation through a knowledge of culture and a shift in perspective.

See the full text by CLICKING HERE.

Medieval marketing

Please come have a look at my thoughts on the revolution sweeping through the world of marketing and the rise of secret messages in contemporary culture.

You can find them here at the Harvard Business Review blog.  Click here.