Tag Archives: Stuart Kauffman

Death of the superhero?

Screen Shot 2019-08-18 at 8.04.59 839AMReading the future is hard. It takes sharp eyes. It takes lively imaginations. It takes smart models. (There is a “good head on your shoulders” joke to be made here, but I’m going to restrain myself.)

Most of all, reading the future takes the ability to see the things coming when they are a mere smear on the radar screen, a trace of green. Is that Southwest flight 1440 taking a film crew to Sante Fe? Or is it an artifact of an aging navigational system. Only the very gifted can say.

On Thursday (Aug. 15), Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessey convened on the blog called The Watch to discuss a new show called The Boys (around the 12:00 mark). This show is interesting because it posits a world in which superheroes now work for the corporation. They have been corrupted. They are cynical. These superheroes are all working for the man.

At roughly the 14:15 mark, Fennessey says the advent of The Boys is telling.

“This is how you know we are in stage 3 of superheroes as an important cultural force.”

Fennessey believes this is indeed the final stage of the superhero moment. The first was defined by Spider-Man. The second was defined (and dominated) by Marvel. And this third as defined by the likes of Dead Pool, Suicide Squad and now The Boys. Here at stage 3 the genre gets darker, nastier, more worldly. Idealism is swapped out for story lines and characters that are more complicated and less predictable.

Hey, presto. Someone makes a prediction. Fennessey takes a stand. We have a prediction. Superheroes are in their last moment. And a great chunk of popular culture hangs in the balance.

Thank you, Mr. Fennessey. This is a real public service. There are lots of people who claim to see the future coming. Almost no one is prepared to stake a claim, to go on the record, to risk being wrong.

In fact most of us in the forecasting biz are disingenuous. We don’t often make predictions. And when we do, we erase them, the better to create the impression that we are faultless, immaculate, batting at least 900%. When it comes to predicting the future, people like to backdate their checks and otherwise fudge the record.

This is cowardly, but it is also disappointing. Because predictions are useful even when they are wrong. They tell us about possible futures (“adjacent futures” as Stuart Kauffman calls them). Now we are prepared. Now some of us can look at that smear on the radar and go, “You know, I think that could be that thing Fennessey was talking about.”

It’s useful to look for alternate explanations. As part of our “Superhero watch,” I propose two. I am not saying Fennessey is wrong. I am saying let’s get our best ideas on the table, the better to see the future coming.

1) What Fennessey sees in the advent of stage 3 is perhaps not the Icarian fall of superheroes. It may be a simple case of genre going post genre. And let’s face it, it had to. Superheroes were increasingly, to use a second term from Stuart Kauffman, “overformed.” They had quit growing. Increasingly they were a forced march, an exercise in the indubitable. We could see outcomes a long way off. Change or die, it applies even to superheroes.

2) What Fennessey sees as the advent of stage 3 is part of a larger development identified by Hargurchet Bhabra, the Canadian novelist and culture guru. Bhabra observed the improvements taking place in popular culture and said, in effect, “As long as popular culture was the captive of commercial forces, it was going to disappoint from any genuinely creative or intellectual point of view. But now that is now also the possession of large and active audiences, it is getting steadily better. And that means, at some point, popular culture becomes culture plain and simple.” By this reckoning, the superhero arc is following the trajectory of everything in (popular) culture. It started small. It’s getting better. This means letting in the dark, amongst other things.

I don’t intend to make a prediction about Fennessey’s prediction. It was a moment of illumination for me. I am trying to map and track everything in contemporary culture so anytime I can get a head’s up from an expert, my job is easier and I am grateful.

Post scripts:

  1. One more methodological point for the trend watching reader, what are the best metrics for tracking the genre and constructing our “superhero watch?” I would be grateful for any and all suggestions: grant27@gmail.com.
  2. Speaking of the “adjacent possible,” see what Rick Liebling is doing with the idea here. Very interesting.
  3. Check out the rate for Wired subscriptions. 10 bucks! I was looking at the Kauffman article on Wired and up came the inevitable “subscribe now” invitation. “Great,” I thought, “someone else wants $100 for a subscription.” This has got to be the best bargain in publishing.

Cracking the Pomplamoose – Hyundai case

We all watched heroic amounts of TV over the holidays.

All of us saw the Hyundai ad that features Pomplamoose, the American music indie duo.

The Hyundai-Pomplamoose campaign looped the loop. It went from odd to charming to familiar to contemptible to irritating in about 3 weeks.

We can guess what happened.  Hyundai discovered they had a hit on their hands.  The campaign was doing good things for the brand and more to the point it was moving cars.  So they sold the heck out of it.

Poor Pomplamoose!  In a daring strategy for which I applaud them, they took this campaign as an opportunity to play pilot fish, to travel with the Hyundai shark for a short while in the hopes of sharing small bits of its dinner.  And they got consumed in the process.

Now, some people will say, "Look, no band should do a deal with the devil.  Pomplamoose got what they asked for."

Maybe.  Certain kinds of indie "cred" do depend precisely on keeping one’s distance form a project of this kind.  But for everyone who isn’t a culture-never-commerce separatist, the Hyundai-Pomplamoose case is an opportunity for illumination.  I mean, Honda used "Holiday" as their sound track for the holidays, and I bet it was great for Vampire Weekend’s iTunes sales.  Refusing all truck or barter because it sometimes goes wrong is shortsighted.

The question: what’s the best way for a small cultural enterprise like a comic, a playwright, or, in this case, a band, to maximize this opportunity and minimize this risk.

First things first.

1) Did this campaign loop the loop?  (For all I know everyone hated it from beginning.  Or, everyone loved it from the beginning and they still love it.)  What we need is data.  I am no master of the methodology but I bet someone could run the numbers for the twitter and blogging world and tell us what the "shape" of adoption was.  Did it loop the loop?  What was the loop?  How fast did this happen?  Where is sentiment now?

2) Why did this campaign loop the loop?  Is it the fact that Pomplamoose created the campaign?  I guess "creative control" was one of the reasons Pomplamoose was interested in making it.  And I guess that the handmade aspect of the spots was what interested Hyundai. Now they had "artisanal advertising."  How very fashionable, how very effective.

3)  Hey, presto, the bargain worked.  Both parties were happy.  And the campaign in the early days tumbled obliging down the Kauffman continuum, from weird, to odd, to charming. Job well done.  Culture and commerce had found a way to work together.  Let’s all join arms and sing the hymn to "win-win."

4)  Then things went wrong, badly wrong.  By sometime in the second week I was hearing people (and by "people," I mean, my wife, Pam) say, "Oh, god, not them again."

I think the problem has to be repetition.  We were obliged to watch the campaign so many times, charming turned coy.  Coy got irritating.  The campaign was pushed down the Kauffman continuum and became unendurable.

5)  One take-away: Pomplamoose should have restricted how many times the ads could be played.  And now they question, assuming this is possible, what number?  Half the number of times the campaign did play?  (Would Hyundai still have been interested?)  A quarter?

6)  But this is not just a Pomplamoose problem.  When people started to react against the campaign, they were now repudiating Hyundai as well.   It was actually in the Hyundai interest to restrict circulation.  What was Hyundai’s magic number?

7) Not all ads are created equal.  Not all "content" is the same.  I think part of the problem here comes from the fact that this was an artisanal campaign and these are delicate things. They take much of their power from whimsy.  And whimsy is perishable.  It’s natural enemy is repetition.  There are several "magic numbers."

8) The cultural, creative take away: when the campaign uses meanings of this kind, care must be taken.  What makes a "hand-made" ad powerful is the very thing that makes it vulnerable.

I can hear a couple of protests:

9) I can hear people insist I’ve found a new way to state the obvious.  They will say "repetition killed this ad.  Because, duh, repetition kills every ad."  In point of fact, there are ads I love despite the fact that I have seen them hundreds of times. So there is no simple rule of thumb.  Hyundai, with or without Pomplamoose, could have made a campaign that would have stood up to this constant repetition.

10)  From the brand manager, I hear another protest altogether, one that says, "look, I took a big risk running this campaign.  The huge response was my reward.  I hit a gusher. My job was to work the gusher."  To which the answer is, "you are not actually engaged in oil discovery here.  You are drawing on and giving to a culture.  It will give you opportunities and snatch them away the moment you overplay your hand."  The Cluetrain manifesto chaps like to say that marketing is a conversation but they are wrong.  Marketing is more difficult and less durable than a conversation. It is much more like a performance on any big city stage (Carnegie or Apollo). The audience is filled with people who are very good at listening.  Some of them are very good at producing.  Hyundai Xmas performance was a little like someone producing one successful performance of Mozart or Michael, and then to everyone’s astonishment playing it over and over and over again.

11)  Repetition is one way we master culture.  It is what moves new things down the Kauffman continuum from the "too new" to the "just right."  (See my book Flock and Flow for more on the continuum.)  It is also the way, we taken novelty and stuff it into the air extracting, shrink wrapping compactor to which we consign almost everything we love.  And this is why advertising and other kinds of marketing are NOT like a performance.  Repetition is not only OK, it’s obligatory.  But we must use it in a most precisely measured way. Because once something is done, it’s entirely done.  Happily, artifacts can be managed on the continuum and they can refreshed.  We can slow the trip to the compactor.

12)  Last thoughts.  I admire the courage exercised by Hyundai and Pomplamoose in giving this campaign go.  I think it’s up to the rest of us to figure out what went wrong and why.

13)  The bigger picture, it seems to me, is this.  We have a world of advertising that is desperate for innovation and creative partnerships.  Some of the meanings that brands need cannot be produced by the conventional agency.  We have a world of cultural producers, millions of people at this point, who are very good at producing meanings, and they would be glad of the exposure and the revenue that partnership makes possible.

14)  It’s up to the likes us, people who loiter at this intersection and others like it, to figure out how to smooth the connection and build the relationship.  And by "people" in this case I mean, yes, Pam, but also Robert Barocci and Todd Powers at the Advertising Research Foundation, Geoffrey Precourt at WARC, Sam Ford at Peppercom, Ben Malbon at Google Creative Labs, Bud Caddell at Victors and Spoils.  That’s just to name a few.

15) The immediate question, to put it in the language of a Harvard Business School case study, is this:

You are Pomplamoose or Hyundai.  What would you do?

16) The larger question:

How do we solve questions of this kind?

17) The still larger question:

How do we put culture and commerce at one another’s disposal?

References

Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Jake McKee. 2009. The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition. Anniversary Edition. Basic Books.

McCracken, Grant. 2006. Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace. Indiana University Press.