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Why Morgan Stanley needs a CCO

Relying on interns as a source of information about contemporary culture is a well known cheat in the corporate world. 

Here's how they did it recently at Morgan Stanley, according to The Gawker.

Morgan Stanley has this 15 year-old intern in London, so while all these dudes were sitting around miserably trying to do analyst reports about youth media habits and shit, they realized they didn't know shit about youth media habits, because they spend all their time in the office writing analyst reports, so they asked this intern kid, "Hey kid, why don't you write a thing about your friend and how they use media and shit?"

Then they promptly forgot about it, because, I mean, kids, right? But then this kid comes back with this report and the analysts are like, "Holy fuck, we could totally sell this shit to other old people!" So now Morgan Stanley has published this kid's note as a research report, and it is of course way more popular than whatever these pro guys have written this year.

References

Nolan, Hamilton.  2009.  Some Kid's Media Mash Note is Hottest Thing on Wall Street.  Gawker.  July 13.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Forthcoming this fall.  Available for pre-order at Amazon.com here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the head's up.

branding and the corporation: from tone-deaf to pitch-perfect

There are two kinds of brand: national and niche.  

National brands are their own planets.  They have the incumbent's advantage, channel control, big reputations, deep pockets, and, if they're lucky, consumer loyalty.  The downside is that they do have a gravitational field that sometimes takes them captive.  They must struggle constantly to get to know the consumer and the culture, and respond as both change...ever more quickly.

Niche brands are nimble, opportunistic, and maximally responsive.  They know their consumers up close and personal.  They can change in real time and they do.   Their challenge is to find the resources to scale up, and the marketing professionalism needed to master new problems as they climb.  Inevitably, growth takes the entrepreneur out of the segment she knows into segments she doesn't know and usually from a few segments to many of them.  A higher order of marketing professionalism is now called for.

These brands found a way to live together.  Niche brands would do the product testing, the innovating, the market experiments.  If and when the big brands liked what they saw, they would reach down and buy the little brand up.  The niche entrepreneurs would get a big fat pay day and, after the "non-compete" expired, they would go back to what they love best, creating brands that are little and responsive.

That was then.  This is now. 

According the the AdAge today:

[I]n many cases, package-goods players are developing their own niche products rather than relying on the old model of waiting to see if an upstart niche brand will be successful and then snatching it up, much like Coca-Cola did when it purchased the now-mass Vitaminwater. "For a while, the larger companies said, 'We'll let someone else do it, and then buy them if they're any good,'" said Bill Bishop, chairman of consulting group Willard Bishop. "Now it's become evident that you give up too much in opportunity by letting it get developed by the smaller players."

The big question: can big companies do innovation of this kind?  It means getting closer to the consumer and to the culture, and moving more nimbly than ever before.  Almost certainly, it means adding a Chief Culture Officer to the C-Suite. 

The old model, big brands buying little ones, presupposes a lag time.  And there are two problems: 1) as Bishop points out, it leaves money on the table.  2) what lag time?  The world moves too quickly for the big brand to move at its leisure.

Coke used to be able to watch and wait.  There were also hundreds of little brands milling about in the niche world.  This wasn't laziness.  It was an efficient way of reducing risk.  Let the niche markets try out any and all possibilities.  Let consumers vote with their purchases.  Let that invisible hand world sort the world for us.  In this system, Coke let others take the risk, so that it find the profit.

But now the corporation has to play at that lowest level, of absolute novelty, sorting is pretty much out of the question.  At this level, every branding idea is still pretty much of an idea, and the world has not had a chance to vote.  In this world, the noise to signal ratio is very different.  There is lots more noise, precious little signal, and damn little sorting of any natural kind.  Now the corporation has to do this sorting by itself. 

But of course the corporation is famously tone-deaf when it comes to culture.  (This is precisely one of the reasons it had to leave innovation to someone else.)  Now it wants to do the sorting for itself, the corporation needs someone who knows culture and who can read culture with skill and acuity.  It needs a senior manager with perfect pitch.  It needs a Chief Culture Officer. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  Published in October.  available for pre-order on Amazon.com here.

York, Emily Bryson.  2009.  Giants to Exploit Niche Markets.  Adage.com.  July 13.  here.

Thanks to Wordle.net for the image.

Cohen/Borat/Bruno ambush

I've been reviewing the Bruno reviews and I'm interested to see that it delights in ambushing the unsuspecting.  Even Ron Paul, libertarian candidate for President, gets taken. Apparently, he has never heard of Cohen, Borat, or Bruno. 

Strange when you think of it.  Cohen has been a big star for several years now.  He's appeared at the Academy Awards and won a Golden Globe.  Doesn't he get pursued by the paparazzi?  I assume he must.   Indeed, Cohen has said he'll retire Borat and Ali G, on the grounds that they were too well known by the public.  Strange to think that anyone who knows the characters would fail to recognize the celebrity within. 

Maybe the answer is that rubes will be with us always.  And these are the targets Cohen likes best.  People who live on the far margin, nurturing their own brand of nuttiness, safely removed from the mainstream that might otherwise redeem them. 

But my guess is that the great fragmentation of our culture means there will also be nooks and crannies filled with people who have never heard of Cohen however famous he becomes.  Now that the enameled surface of the contemporary culture is "crazed" with tiny fissures, there are more and more places for culture to take hold.

The question is: when does the center cease to hold?  This matters for Cohen because at some point the structural forces that sustains the possibility of ambush must eventually destroy the sanctimony on which, as Scott points out, he depends.

References

Scott, A.O.  2009.  Tuetonic Fashion Plate Flaunts His Umlauts.  The New York Times.  July 10, 2009.  here.

The puzzle of True Blood

This is what success looks like.  These are the numbers for the HBO show True Blood over 12 shows. 

The DVD sales for the show are sensational: 1.2 million units, grossing some $41 million in revenue in 6 weeks of sale. 

At TVbytheNumbers.com, Robert Seidman wonders whether it's a spillover success from Twilight.  He also wonders whether there is a gay audience for the show.  It is, in any  case, a very good show. 

For once, I'm not speculating.  That's your job.

References

Seidman, Robert.  2009.  Are Gays Driving the Tremendous DVD Sales for HBO's True Blood.  TVbythenumbers.com. here.  (source for the numbers charted here)

Everything I know about management I learned from TV

William Petersen as Gil Grissom, David Caruso as Horatio Caine, Gary Sinese as Mac Taylor, Mark Harmon as Jethro Gibbs, Anthony LaPaglia as Jack Malone. These guys are the franchise players of primetime TV.  But they are also role models.  Each represents a different management style.

David Caruso in CSI: Miami seems to have contracted a terrible case of William Shatner disease and now takes himself much too seriously.  He's always posing with the sun glasses, standing side ways, and talking with that over-the-top emphasis.  Everything is now said with maximum menace, including things like "Billy...get...me...a...SANDwich."  Working for a guy like this would be agony.  You'd have to worry about stepping on his lines, or standing in his light.  Bosses like this are self dramatizing, but everyone has to pitch in because they like it when we dramatize them too.  Call this the diva management style.

Of course, Petersen as Grissom left CSI, and TV is the poorer.  Sure, he was a little creepy with all the bug stuff, and, yes, he always seemed to be trying a little too hard with the poetry.  But otherwise, he seemed a decent guy, the sort of guy who would cut his staff  a little slack.  The kind of manager who didn't care how you got it done as long as you got it done. Call this the professorial management style

What about Sinese as Mac Taylor in CSI: New York?  You get the feeling that the actor is still looking for the role, and as a result the character still has all of his humanity in tact.  He's not quite sure how to play certain situations.  Sometimes he comes on too strong.  Sometimes, he's dialled so far back it's like his phoning it in.  Sinese is still working on his managerial signal, and this makes him the most human of these characters.  Not the best to work for, but the most interesting to watch. Call this the still-working-on-it management style.

This distinguishes him from Anthony LaPaglia as Jack Malone in Without a Trace.  LaqPaglia acts as if his exposure to weekly tragic events has destroyed his capacity for feeling.  His reaction to everything is the same: silent, suffering witness.  Dude, snap out of it.  We get it, life's a bitch, then you die.  Lighten up a little. Call this the funerial management style.

The best person to work for is clearly Mark Harmon on NCIS.  That is if Anthony DiNozzo, Ziva David, Timothy McGee, Abby Sciuto,and Dr. Donald Mallard are anything to go by.  This little ensemble cast has more fun in a given program than Caruso's people do in a season.  Viewers, too.  The secret is Gibbs' perfect balance.  He is impatient with anything less than perfection even as he manages to indulge the playfulness and eccentricities of his crew.  It's a fine line.  Call this the perfect management style.

In the world of TV there are several managerial options.  Those of us who serve as managers want to choose wisely. 

MFFB: missing from Facebook

It's a veritable treasure trove.  I just found a Outlook database created when I was the head of the Institute of Contemporary Culture in Toronto.  It's large (4000 names) and it's old (about 16 years old).  It was great to see familiar names, and I thought I would plug some of them into Facebook, the new rolodex of the digital age.

Here's what's odd.  Some of the names that loomed large in the Outlook database were not in Facebook.  The Outlook database was created to help the Institute stay in touch with people of influence.  It contains lots of (mostly Canadian) heavy hitters: politicians, captains of industry, heads of cultural institutions, celebrities, journalists, and academics.  This is a list of people who made their way in the world by working their personal networks.  But now they were missing from the new social networks, missing from Facebook (MFFB).

To be sure, some are in Facebook and they are flourishing.  A woman we almost hired as a research assistant is now the executive producer of a reality TV program in LA.  Others were present and closer than I could have guessed.  A family that used to live just down the road from me in Toronto now lives just up the road from me in Connecticut.  Happy surprises, both. 

And sometimes, it's just hard to tell.  The data are unforthcoming.  You know, when we find a name on Facebook, and that's all we find.  There's no other information.  And no friends.  And we can guess what happened.  Someone heard about Facebook, signed up, couldn't quite get the hang of it, and gave up.  Their Facebook page is now a kind of ghost ship, a tiny advertisement of their failure to make the transition to the digital age.  (Let's hope your name is "Andy Smith."  That name floating in Facebook could belong to anyone of hundreds of people.  Not so good if your name is "Grant McCracken."  No where to hide there, really.)

Or maybe they are MFFB (missing from Facebook) on purpose.  Maybe, they don't believe in Facebook.  They don't believe in social networking in the digital age.  It is possible for intelligent people to take this position.  Recently I heard four people at a big time advertising age try to persuade me that Facebook is really just for kids, that it's a passing fancy, that not very far from now it will disappear from fashion.  Their position: Ignore Facebook.  It will go away.

I can't tell you how embarrassing this is for an anthropologist to listen to.  I have done the research, and this much is clear.  Facebook is here to stay.  It has changed selfhood and the social world permanently.  (One example: millennials are hard to manage these days because the social network has replaced the corporation has their primary "safety net."  Now that they have Facebook, a job at a big corporation matters much less.)  Facebook has changed the structural properties of our culture.  We can ignore it.  It will not go away.

Maybe some of these MFFBs are then like Jacques Brel, that French singer who would not come to America till it had vacated Vietnam.  They're making a statement!  If so, I have bad news.  The statement is "I have retired from the world.  I'm done.  Talk amongst yourselves."  And this from movers and shakers.  How odd.

Is there a generational divide here?  And yes, Don Tapscott has been telling us for sometime now that these "digerati" are different from you and me.  They have more data.  And we have long suspected that Gen Y might even have different neurological wiring, the necessary consequence of monitoring all those data streams at once.

But the group that concerns me is on the other side of the generational divide.  Have Boomers so drifted out of orbit that even power players are MFFB?  Can someone make him/herself a vivid presence in the social, political and or culture world and go missing here?  Can you be a thought leader or a culture creative and not be on Facebook?  The answer to these questions is probably "no."  Which is to say, some boomers have pushed themselves into voluntary exile.  And, yes, we expect some people in every generation to "age out" of contemporary culture.  But power players?

This may be a metric of generational fatigue.  It could be the face of generational ennui.  Perhaps after all is said and done, Boomers will prove to be a generation that will end not with a, er, boom, but a whimper.  Please, I'm begging you.  If you don't have a Facebook account, get one now, and make me your friend.  You never know when you can help me run an Institute.

Where Have PrimeTime Viewers Gone and What Do They Find When They Get There

These are numbers from the estimable website TV By The Numbers (refs. below).

Bill Gorman shows two things:

1) the decline of broadcast networks (yellow column to the left)

2) the rise of cable networks (yellow column to the right) 

As Gorman notes today, cable is not just growing but moving to the center.  In the case of Bravo, for instance, this means moving from indie film, drama and the performing arts to reality, fashion and celebrity.  TLC was once a "place for learning minds" and now gives us Jon & Kate Plus 8.  The cable alternative now has a carnie instinct for a cruder entertainment. 

The question is this: does this movement to more popular themes represent a compression of cutural offerings and a dumbing down of programming.  We can argue this a number of ways.  But I am impressed with the fact that reality television is often a very successful ways of getting something like the lives of real(ish) Americans into the programming mix.  Without the innovations driven by cable, there is no way we would now have such detailed ethnographic treatments of, say, the Housewives of New Jersey and Orange County

It's a question then of winners and losers.

Two groups are relatively displaced by the "new cable:" the avant garde who prefer indie content, and taste elites who care about arts content. 

Two groups are served: a carnie audience interested in sensational coverage and the rest of us who like this window on other worlds. 

References

Gorman, Bill.  2008.  Updated: Where Did The Primetime Broadcast Audience Go?  TVbythenumbers.com.  December 03, 2008.  here.  (source of the image above)

Gorman, Bill.  2009. As Cable Networks Abandon Their Roots to Grab Audience, Where Do The Niches Go.  TVbythenumbers.com. here.

Noisy planet earth: are we becoming the frat house of the Milky Way?

Steve Rubel, long a maven of PR and the new media, is now committing his life to digital memory.

To the right, Steve's diagram of how various media will work to capture and communicate the fine details of his professional life.

In a couple of centuries, this may make him our Samuel Pepys, a man who speaks for us all when someone comes to see what it was like in and around 2009.  (Steve, put in a good word for my blog!)

The pre-digital Steve Rubel probably gave us several thousand words a year: presentations, releases and essays.  Most of these had no more than a fleeting appearance in the public sphere.  Now Steve is single handedly responsible for a great profusion of words, images and, what shall we call them, "sense impressions" each week.  And all of them stick.

In the old days, the pre-digital era, very little human communication made it into an enduring record.  All those thoughts, conversations, images, and interactions would blink on.  And then off.  Nothing much stuck.  And even when we managed to commit our ideas to persistent media and those media to a place of safe keeping, some one of us could be relied upon, in a moment of military rage or administrative incompetence, to burn the thing down.  Good bye to the library at Alexandria, and the riches of the classical world.

What does this digital profusion look like from afar?  What does earth look like to the observer on planet XB3892?  She's been scrutinizing us for years with a watchful, very wary, weary eye.  The first digital signals to reach her were early (and scary) German experiments in televisionduring World War II, followed by the thin stream of content from the American television networks post-war.  (What did she make of The Lucy Show?  Does she do a Ricky imitation?)  Now the signal is inky dense with fantastically particular data.  (What was Steve Rubel reading at 10:00 this morning?  Check it out here.)  All that blog data.  All those many millions of tweets.  Many more TV signals than before.  (Or does cable deny these to the heavens?)  A veritable wind storm of data now issues from planet earth.

What does our planetary observer think now?

"Good lord, they've gone hyperactive."

"Chatter boxes!  It takes them forever to get speech and now they can't shut up!"

"Those people are on something!"

"There goes the neighborhood."

Are we the new noisy neighbor in the galaxy?  Is planet earth a houseboat where they "party hearty, Marty" all night long?  Just when our planetary observer is putting her feet up after an exhausting day of signal search, this superbly sensitive creature begins to pick up little gusts of laughter, music, glass breaking, car doors slamming.  It grows louder and more obnoxious.  She tries to sleep.  Surely, this will have to end sometime.  But, no, no sooner does one lot of humans turn in than the world spins to release another great burst of data. There is no far side to this moon! They are tag-teaming her, she see's that now. She can run, but she can't hide from the party animals on planet earth. 

Brace yourself, darling, someday all of us will be Steve Rubel. 

branders brand, consumers speak

Look how great this is.  It's a promotional video for the novel called Lowboy by John Wray.  (Brilliantly reviewed by James Wood in the March 30 New Yorker).  Subway riders read from the novel while travelling.  Wonderful. 

We can see why they did it.  The novel is set in a subway.  But for branding purposes, this is metaphorically apt.  The brand will begin with the brander.  But it will take its cadence and phrasing from the consumer.

Well, actually, the consumer is still more involved.  Not just reading someone else's words, but supplying their own meanings to boot.  But still. 

"Chief Culture Officer," the talk Nancy Hill doesn't want you to hear

I did my best.  I canvassed Nancy Hill.  I ask, I pleaded, to speak at the AAAA planners' conference in SF this fall. 

As I was getting to know the marketing, branding, advertising communities, I would hear these great stories about planners' conferences.  And I've been trying to get there ever since.  After all, planners and anthropologists are birds of a feather, theoretically, methodologically, and most of all as students of American (and not just American) culture. 

But I had an ulterior motive.  I am publishing Chief Culture Officer in the fall, and this, I thought, would be a great opportunity to talk to planners, who I hope will like the book and bless it with their interest and approval.  Yes, I wanted to go to the AAAA planners' meeting to suck up to readers, to curry favor with these king makers of the marketing world.

But no!  Nancy Hill wouldn't return my emails.  She rebuffed the people I asked to act as my intermediary.  Apparently there was no way I was going to talk...to her or at the AAAA. 

I'm sure Nancy has her reasons.  And one of them may be her hostility for bloggers.  (See the article below by Hoag from adage.com and the video clip of Nancy "firing back" at the blogging community.  See also Piers Fawkes opening salvo.)

My reaction was, as it always, is childish and petulant.  I determined to book a hall across the street from the AAAA meeting and stage an anti-AAAA (AAAAA?) meeting where I would deliver an address called "Chief Culture Officer, the talk Nancy Hill doesn't want you to hear!" 

Well, now I don't have to.  As a result of the downturn in the economy, the new media that threaten to disintermediate the conference project, and perhaps even Nancy Hill's hostility for one of the most vital groups in the planning community, the AAAA meeting for this year has been cancelled.  I don't mean to take any satisfaction in this event, but it does save me booking the hall. 

And now there are rumblings.  Tweets flew from Gareth Kay and Adrian Ho.  And today Mark Lewis has a post (see link below) in which he contemplates the possibilities. 

I sure hope they include the opportunity to give a talk about Chief Culture Officers.  I can't help feeling that my chances have gone up now that Nancy Hill is no longer playing gate keeper.  I'll keep you posted. 

References

Fawkes, Piers.  2007.  This Week's Waste of Life: The AAAA Account Planning Conference.  PSFK.com.  August 10, 2007.  here.

Lewis, Mark.  2009.  No Planning Conference - what are you going to do about it.  Planning from the outside.  June 25, 2009.  here.

Levins, Hoag.  2009.  Nancy Hill to Bloggers: 4A's not a 'Wank Fest'  CEO Rebuts 'Incessantly Negative' Cyber Critics.  AdAge.com May 4, 2009. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Chief Culture Officer.  New York: Basic Books.  (to be published in October 2009; pre-order at Amazon here.)

2009 Planning Conference, once at this address, www2.aaaa.org/events/plan09 and at this address, www2.aaaa.org/events/plan09/Pages/plan09_agenda.aspx, now returns "404."  How sad. 

Issac Mizrahi on Metro North

This is an ad at my train station in Connecticut.  It 's for Liz Claiborne and it features Issac Mizrahi.  (Yes, that's my finger in the way.  Amateurs!  Anthropologists!)

Notice the man in a green scarf sitting on the bench.  On closer scrutiny, this proves to be Monsieur Mizrahi himself, lost in thought, putting in this carefully managed appearance, a little in the manner of the master Alfred Hitchcock in his early days. 

It's a wonderful piece of advertising.  It has a certain emotional tonality that distinguishes it from most of the fashion advertising I've ever seen.  It has a narrative verve, doesn't it? 

But of course the semantics of the narrative have been withheld from us.  So the fun of the ad is figuring out what's up.  There are three dyads.  The two women to the left are having a great conversation.  About what?  The two women in the middle: are they together?  Probably not.  The two women to the right: mother and child?  Surely.  That leaves the model who as a contemporary model is looking not quite of this world.  And Mizrahi himself.  Reading.  What?  Why?  What is he doing here?  It's a little like a celebrity appearance, a cameo.  The ad is equal parts naturalism and evident artifice.  Perhaps Mizrahi should be understood as a kind of muse: the designer who attends every public showing of his art.

Notice that on this instance of the ad there is graffiti that (probably) reads, "Paper Monster."  It is so placed as to seem to refer to the designer.  Wonderful. 

Monster?  Designers are monstrous in a way.  They deform the world with their creative powers.  They have no respect for conventions or some of the things we love.  They pretty much do what they want.  And to this extent the designer is a little like the trickster of North American aboriginal lore. 

And paper.  Why paper?  Is this like "paper tiger?"  Designers look monstrous but they are really not so dangerous after all.  We mustn't take them too seriously. 

In this case, graffiti makes an interesting, worthy ad still more interesting.  And perhaps we could argue that good work attracts good work.  This brand and this graffiti artist are collaborating.  Perhaps this may be another way of saying: Ads get the graffiti artists they deserve.  We can imagine the graffiti artist's moment.  He can draw a mustache on that ridiculous ad that shows a pilot for American Air.  Put if he is going to intervene in this Liz Claiborne ad, well, something more interesting is called for.  Not just called for, but actually mandated.  The graffiti artist must speak to the fashion artist, and he is obliged to bring his best game.  (Actually, the conversation is with the creatives at the advertising firm, and through them the brand, and through them Mizrahi.)  In this case, good drives in good. 

Surely, this is a new article of faith in the marketing world.  Now that we have more sophisticated consumers out there, we want to engage them by engaging their intelligence.  In a newly subtle way, the brand is reaching out and leveraging the intelligence of the consumer.  Here "work with this!"  And the graffiti artists leverages with yet another order of indeterminacy, and this adds a layer of difficulty, and those who stop to wonder are tested to get smarter and more observant, and perhaps a virtuous cycle is set in train.  Thus does the muse now participate in contemporary culture. 

Self congratulation (anthropologist cure thy self)

I learned today that This Blog came in 17th in the Top100 blogs in Advertising as established by Invesp Consulting. 

Tell me if you notice something about this list.



Everyone has a really great name except me.  And I thought I knew something about branding.  Anthropologist heal thyself.

Any thoughts on what I should call this blog would be appreciated.

Nurse Jackie vs. Dr. Hank (chewy TV meets gooey TV)

I praised Royal Pains last week and when I saw the second episode I was sorry I had. The show had turned gooey and uninteresting.  Suddenly Dr. Hank is Robin Hood, no moral conflict, no self doubt, just good old American (and doctorly) self congratulation. 

So it was a certain joy to watch the first episode of Nurse Jackie (Monday nights on Showtime).  Jackie is saintly and flawed. As the most humane person at her hospital, she is Dr. Hank and then some. But she is also a pill popping adulterer, a lapsing Catholic, a nurse who accepts no medical authority higher than her own, and a lawsuit waiting to happen.  Plus, she is portrayed here by Edie Falco who shows range and depth that did not show (that I could not see) in The Sopranos.  This is a show that takes up the complexities it looked as if Royal Pains give us.  This is chewy television. 

If you don't get Showtime, this is your excuse.  It was mine.  

More anthropologists and R&D 2.0

Commenting on the recent GE investment in research and development for emerging markets, Navi Radjou recently cautioned against the traditional approach.  Too often, he says, this hires only engineers and scientists.  "Global R&D model 1.0," he calls it. 

R&D 2.0 needs new personnel, Radjou argues, including anthropologists and economists.  What a wonderful idea, resonant for those of us who loiter at this intersection!

Radjou concludes:

Goldman Sachs predicts that the bulk of the global economic growth over the next three decades will occur in emerging markets like India, China, and Brazil. But multinationals can't capture this explosive growth unless they first upgrade their technically-skewed innovation model to a multidisciplinary R&D approach.

References

Radjou, Navi.  209.  R&D 2.0: Fewer Engineers, More anthropologists.  Harvard Business Blog.  June 10, 2009.  here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Susan Mazur-Stommen and the AnthroDesign list serve. 

Background

Navi Radjou (pictured) is the Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.