Hee-Haw Marketing

The Cultural Tour Bus

 We are on a cultural tour bus.

“It’s the difference between traveling where you go on the tour bus and they show you Notre Dame, it was built in whenever, or the one where you end up spending a month in Paris and you end up in one bar and then you’re off. I’ve always preferred the second kind. Get me off the tour bus.”

Love this little bit from David Simon of the Wire and Treme. He describes his hatred for writing for the “Average Reader,” referring to him as “that fucker” which is probably understandable for anyone that’s been asked to design for a target of 18+. Yeah, thanks for that.

He’s developed these rich stories because of a total immersion in a distinct environment, his use of live muses for characters in order to write in a proper language within a realistic storyline, an awareness of the point of view and an adherence to a core purpose, a statement that he wanted to make. Probably 4 key areas for us to develop in ad-like things, as well.

But for now, I guess my point is that we’ll never get that kind of immersion with 95% of clients that are out there. Even with a Budweiser sized budget, it’s just not possible to immerse a team in someone else’s world enough. A single insight doesn’t really give us much understanding at all. And really, with the surface level nonsense most are doing, we’re usually just pecking at observational scraps rather than reaching for some perceptive nirvana.

So maybe it should be the other way around. We shouldn’t be observing them as much as they should be living with us. We just need to get better at either selecting the archetype or maybe just selecting the clients that fit the passions of our staff.

Branding by Association (part 2)

A continuation of the thoughts in branding by association, there’s a bit of magic in how we use words and pictures to reflect the experience of an audience. These references are a brand’s language, the ability to build camaraderie through commonalities.

One of my favorite examples is dog whistle politics, a term first used in the mid-nineties when Australian pols were accused of exploiting illegal immigration as a proxy for racist language.

But, of course, the master is George Bush, who dropped subtle cues that appealed to the religious right. One of the most well-known examples comes in this interview with Wolf Blitzer (about 1:20 in) when he said, “when the final history on Iraq is written, it’ll look like just a comma.”

Most from the South would feel a not-so-faint echo of the proverb “Never put a period where God has put a comma.” (interesting discussion at the language log)

You could argue this is just a product of growing up in church rather than an underhanded attempt to influence a segment of people, but it’s hard to argue the influential part.

Another good example comes from the Burger King – Spongebob rap. I rather doubt that they necessarily thought of it this way in concept, but in this odd mashing of cultural cues, they actually seem to follow an audience lifecycle. From the spike in "Baby Got Back" as an axiom of the early 90’s while mom still found time to bump and grind, to a slightly more grown up mom watching Spongebob with her kiddos 10 years later. While I’m pretty sure I’m reading far too much into this particular video, it is an interesting way to think about crafting an appeal.

Which brings me to the (very) round-about point. We generally use all this audience stuff when crafting the concept, not necessarily the execution. We use focus groups, develop personas, etc. defining the audience as a guardrail for the creative team when the value of cultural immersion should be drawn through the execution, as well. The language, the music, the pictures, the video and the rest of it, become the environment that allows a brand speak as one of us. And the better we immerse ourselves in these collective reference points, the better we’ll be at weaving the story we’re trying to tell into the story they already know.

photo via sean lamonby

Branding by Association

In Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marsha Kinder first described her concept of Transmedia Storytelling with the phrase, “transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful players while disavowing commercial manipulation,” setting the tone for a conversation still ongoing nearly 20 years later.

While we’ve talked the transmedia part to death, we haven’t yet spent much time on the intertexuality bit. As in, a lot about distribution and not enough about what is distributed.

Intertexuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by other texts. This strikes me as a much more fertile place to play when building brand meaning, particularly given the struggle to find a human brand when we adapt them to more social spaces.

Imagine if you saw a facebook page of someone you’d never met. You can know what they like and what they don’t, what’s important to them and what’s not, we can see past conversations, what people have said about them and what those people look like. More than enough information to let you take some fairly informed guesses about their worldview.

These things are within the purview of a brand in our environment. In other words, a brand can’t be your friend, but it can get an inside joke.

It’s obvious when Nike+ associates with OkGo or when the NBA co-opts the Noah Kalina video for Where Amazing Happens.

It becomes clear when remixes mash a brand and an audience, blurring the associated meanings that lie within both.

Intertextuality places a brand in the cultural zeitgeist. It’s branding by association, cultural sponsorship, and it’s in this space – trading on the language of communities, that brands find their context.

photo via yeliR<>

Planning versus Preparation

People are pools of contradiction, trained mostly to recognize the unexpected and discard everything else.

Ironically in this reality, we made an industry out of enabling consistency in order to create an expectation. Or maybe to make a confusing marketplace seem stable.

This is what branding traditionally is, the creation of an assumption.

And it’s this need to find order in the chaos of the marketplace that brought us to planning.

Planning is just a nice word. When you think of someone who makes plans versus someone who goes with the flow, you can probably get a good picture in your head. One in a carefully constructed three-piece suit. The other in board shorts at the beach. The planner is punctual, polite and is where he is because that’s where he planned to be. The other might look a bit ragged at times, but is generally comfortable just about anywhere you put him.

One avoids the chaos by trying to create order. One thinks beating chaos is futile so chooses to enjoy the ride.

If we brought these stereotypes into practice, one model would be rigid, generalizing broad swaths of people so as to not crack the standard. The other would require a comfort in the unfamiliar few possess.

The problem of course is that neither extreme really works all that well. When we sell the idea of planning, we’re selling a calm in the clutter. And when that calm doesn’t come, brands are left ill-prepared for situations unforeseen. Sticking to the plan actually leaves us less adaptable at a time when adaptability might be more important than just about anything else.

So yes, we need plans, insights and the like, but our inability to accept the unknown is a problem with almost any of our current models. Brand after brand markets by setting and executing on a plan that leaves it unprepared for changes.

The question we’re answering now is what will things look like if we're as concerned with preparation as we are planning. How are we making companies structurally more adaptable to new situations and audiences. And what does an input into the system look like when the result is unknown.

photo via blake tackett

The Culture Clash

Since the 60’s we’ve been in this ongoing and increasingly destructive Culture War. But today, we are in the hastening days of an all out Culture Clash.

Young folks’ identities are much less obvious than they were in the prefabricated groups made so recognizable in the Breakfast Club. The jocks moonlight in hipster-wear. The preps are drowning in 80’s fashion. They are the product of all that media fragmentation we’ve been yammering about for a decade.

As Grant McCracken said in his fantastic book Chief Culture Officer, “Kids do not have multiple memberships so much as multiple selves. They are many people bundled into one. And now we can’t tell very much from the way they dress.”

And with this shift – our cultural devices are reflective of this splintering identity.

Brian Eno said in Prospect Magazine, “Go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating.”

The result of all this fragmentation combined with increasingly more effective filters has been a growing chasm between opposing viewpoints. The right and left, Christians and the Agnostic, Rural and Urban, all living in totally different worlds of their own confirmational creation.

But there’s hope in culture, mostly because these fragments aren’t linear. They don’t always cut only down obvious lines. And so we’re seeing our cultural outputs being mixed and remixed until it becomes difficult to tell where one thing starts and another begins.

We see Hyro da Hero mash together gangster and old Southern rock. Or Mayer Hawthorne, a white guy in geek-wear singing Motown soul.

What’s happening isn’t just an ironic combination of things that at first chance quickly revert back to what they were before. We’ll be left with something refreshingly new and far more interesting.

Bullworth said it best, “All we need is a voluntary, free spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody til they're all the same color.”

Well, not exactly what I was saying, but close enough to get an Amen, brother.

The Things a Computer Can't Do

We know that we are fundamentally dichotomous. Rational decision makers with an engine fueled mostly by our instinctual, emotional motivations. So when we’re making advertisy marketing things, which buttons are we usually trying to push?

IBM created a supercomputer meant only to play chess. They called it Deep Blue. In 1997, after years of failure in the quest to defeat World chess champion Garry Kasparov, it finally won.

But even after the historic win, they had largely still failed at doing what they set out to do.

“The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.”

Yes, the computer won. But only because of a superior memory, a natural progression of computing, not the re-creation of the human brain they had originally sought to make.

But perhaps something more interesting is now stirring. Computers are not just built to hold data in a vacuum. They hold and filter our own information. And as the tools to access that stored data becomes more accessible and ubiquitous, are brains are left to accomplish other things. We are quite literally becoming part human and part machine.

“A whole lot of my cognitive activities and my brain functions have now been uploaded into my iPhone. It stores a whole lot of my beliefs, phone numbers, addresses, whatever. It acts as my memory for these things. It's always there when I need it."

-David Chaimers

All this means is that those rational decisions will more and more often be ceded to computations, algorithms, and the like. It’ll weigh hundreds of options and combinations, guiding you to the most rational choice. Our brain power will be reserved for the things those algorithms have more trouble solving for. Which is all very interesting when you start to consider the power there is in that.

What this means is that we’ll be consistently playing in much more unstable places, finding relevancy not in a single usp, but in a brand’s ability to find motivations that run much deeper than most of our branding models are capable of accomplishing today.

This means resolving problems far less solvable within a few words on a brief. It means creating things more meaningful and lasting than campaigns. It means not only ceding brand ownership to the audience in the rhetorical, but in the literal. It means not only activating audiences, but providing the space for disparate groups to find commonality.

And it means not only affecting messages, but radicalizing products and services in ways that disrupt simple comparisons. Which is all to say that we’ll look less to slogans and more for purpose.

But I assure you this, this environment will be far more interesting, fulfilling and important than we as an industry have experienced before. Just as soon as we get on with it already.

What Tomorrow Will Bring

 

Between all the obligatory prognosticative posts roaming around, it's easy to forget the predictions that are really important. First - now that we've torn him down - it's about time we build Tiger back up. Like Kobe, Britney Spears and a thousand other celebrities, the only thing we like better than the fall is the rise up the other side. This seems to remain true for everyone except for child actors and stars of vh1 shows.

Second, I'll make my first million dollars, mostly by blackmailing Sean for something. Not sure what just yet. 

Third, I'm a big fan of Darren Herman, but proclaiming the death of the branding campaign within the next decade is probably a bit premature even assuming a much better measurement environment. It would require an amazing amount of invasive monitoring that traditional media has been incapable to create (or adopt) and a massive shift in privacy concerns already perked by the passive, anonymous monitoring in web-based media. And last, it assumes that we'll ever fully understand the human brain enough to know why one thing worked and another doesn't. We're pretty damn good at it in the short-term, but measuring long-term shifts haven't been the strong suit of agencies or many clients. So I guess I would say my prediction is that the opposite will happen. Our attention will shift away from causing a specific, momentary response to better understanding whether or not we're succeeding in the often arduous task of shifting behavior and attitudes.

Either way, Darren is a pretty smart guy, so we'll see how it all plays out. 

Fourth, we've spent the last decade (or two) striving for personalization, including more and more specific levels of targeting, me-based content, etc., but we've yet to see just the kind of pay off that the industry sold. Mostly because while our targeting has changed, value propositions for the most part have not. It's mostly a relic of the 360 degree brand sell that we've only personalized on the edges without actually concerning ourselves with the wants and needs of real people. Mostly because that's really fucking hard to do. Okay, that wasn't really a prediction...

But - what the backlash against algorithmic personalization will do is further the trend towards both the tangible and the authentically personalized. Emails are less meaningful than a handwritten note. Websites aren't generally as memorable as interestingness in real life. Experiences matter more. Expect to see something like the Slow Movement happening to digital things. As the amount of things I can't hold becomes more ubiquitous and easily delivered, I value stuff I can touch or things that we're clearly made for me. And, as per usual, these things will be collected and shared in digital forms. An index of my life, so to speak.

In other words, I'll value the things that are an expression of your time spent, not necessarily mine.

So there you go - that's not really a 2010 prediction, but more just a couple things that'll probably happen some day. 

photo via katarina 2353

Wait...they're putting what in the sky?

Apparently, given a couple earlier freakouts from random ambient advertising in big cities, we get to see staff emails like these that somewhat expose the absolute ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Subject: Skywriting Alert

This is a special message from the Downtown Emergency Response Team.

The ABC network is utilizing skywriting planes to create large red “V” patterns over major U.S. cities. ABC is organizing the promotional event to publicize a new alien invasion themed television series called “V”. It is reported that “V” patterns will be flown over cities such as New York and L.A. and the skywriting will be done at multiple times per day until the “V” series launches on 11/3/09 @ 8:00 PM. ABC has released a list of cities where the skywriting will take place, however the network has not identified specific locations where the skywriting will occur. October 27 - 12:00 p.m. Dallas, TX

photo via jesape