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

The Intelligence Class & Word-of-Mouth

Another derogatory comment about the size of most social media efforts got me to thinking about the nature of influence. Particularly because for just a few bucks per thousand, I could make a whole lot more people sort of recognize my brand.

***

How do you know a person is intelligent?

Mostly, we equate intelligence in terms not simply of general knowledge so much as knowledge of the right kind of stuff. No to children’s books, but yes to obscure Greek mythology. No to short-hand texting ability, yes to spelling words most people couldn’t use in a sentence.

But I think it’s quite clear that relative to one another, most people aren’t strangely smart or strangely stupid. There are anomalies, but most of what we assume is intelligence is really a symptom of something else, maybe a natural desire to accumulate knowledge, or access to good schools, challenging parents, luck, whatever. So our version of intelligence has more to do with access to information than IQ scores.

And it’s these “intelligent” people who use that perception of smarts and access to gain influence. The more intelligence perceived, the more influence gained and the more access given. It’s the echo chamber of smarts that happens as we ask ourselves questions like...

What do we consider smart? (Reciting Shakespeare, yes, fixing carburetor, no) Do other people we define as smart consider this person smart? (smarts in TX just don’t equal smarts in NY) Does this person do things we think smart people would do? (reading the Economist, yes, collecting comic books, not so much) And finally, do these people have access to things we don’t? (whether that’s people or information)

And based on stuff like this, one person can have considerably more influence than that of another person.

And so it is with word of mouth, online or otherwise. What is important is not only reaching the same number of people as we can much more easily with reach media. More often than not, it just won’t happen. But what we can do is supply those people with the access, the information, and the kind of smarts that would make our constituents influential with the audiences that matter to us. And by doings these things, we can create or enhance an echo chamber of influence for ourselves, too.

Point being – a carburetor-fixing, comic book-collecting mechanic from Texas might not be able to sway a local election, but can become quite influential with access to the higher-ups at Marvel and a limited edition issue of Dark Avengers given the right audience.

And if anyone tells you that’s bullshit and your 10,000 earned don’t hold up to their 100,000 paid, just tell them they’re stupid. There’s an echo chamber for that, too.

Advertising is Hard.

I’ll be quite honest with you. My creative briefs all look totally different. My project approach for something I start tomorrow will look very little like what I did yesterday. Generally every project includes lots of hours of poking around, drawing nonsense, waking up in the middle of the night to jot down a moment of genius (which invariably will be incoherent only a few hours later). Format works great, but it’s usually best when it’s used to explain something that’s already been done, not necessarily setting up a challenge for later.

And I think the reason is that what we do is really fucking complicated.

At first, our creative strategy was to create a single, simple, benefit-oriented message and repeat it again and again. We assumed a rational brain with a knowable attention span as our willing recipient. But now, difficult is an understatement. We still need that single, simple something, but now that Gossage’s reality is a for-real reality, we’re expected to entertain like a movie, make inanimate objects human, be comfortable with experimentation but forecast for success, all while speaking to smaller and smaller slices of audiences and battling an increasingly misused research environment.

And media might be even worse. It wasn’t so long ago a media department could function on a single rolodex. Now they’re expected to deliver not only more platforms, but hundreds of thousands of media opportunities both online and off. Guerrilla and otherwise. And they can’t buy for impressions, but engagement, and do so creatively with content partnerships, atypical placements and the like. And we haven’t even gotten into analytics. All we know is that the old metrics aren’t worth much more than the paper they’re printed on and nobody agrees on what the hell will replace them.

Yeah, really fucking hard. Single, simple message written for TV, radio and a magazine ad sounds great. Now we know why they had so much time for a scotch. And it’s easy to understand why 360 degree marketing strategy took hold for so much of this decade. It gave us a sense of control in an utterly manic marketplace.

But back to process. Of course, I have somewhat of a way I do things, just like you yours. We read a bunch of stuff, broadly, we talk and think about the audience, the marketplace, the product, stuff like that. We have certain tricks to jog our brain when things get stale.

The problem is that stringent process is used when we’re trying to make a certain product. But now that we’re not trying to make a single proposition necessarily, and not really advertising, but sometimes applications, utilities, sometimes events or experiences, hell – sometimes training programs, kiosks, intranets, whatever. So Gossage said that people read what interests them, and sometimes that advertising. Maybe we should say that we solve problems, and sometimes that includes advertising.

Until then, this broad process allows us to mask what the actual creative process is like, a potluck of crazy sprinkled with magic.

photo via Neil Krug

Social Derivatives: Johnny Five

Here's a couple more of those fun social derivatives, these via the super awesome 87 Cool Things presentation by Google Creative Labs.

Deadline Post-It Stop Motion

Vodafone Netbook Spot

Stop Motion with Wolf and Pig

Land Rover - Photos Commercial

The Stuff that Makes Stuff Spread

I can see the decks being written now, many pinpointing the shirtless dancer as the epicenter of influence, the spark that ignited the brush. The advertising pros will study him endlessly, trying to understand his movements, learning how to reflect them so that they too could become that spark.

But while the video is still a good visualization of the way things spread, the spread itself is not so unidirectional. Obviously, the impromptu dance party probably wouldn’t have happened without that particular idiot. Nor could it have without the second or third. But I’ve seen lots of idiots dancing at festivals. I’ve been that idiot. I’m sure many of us have. But this case was different because of everyone else that for some reason were susceptible to joining. Maybe they were bored. Maybe the live show wasn’t all that appealing to the eye. Maybe it was a little chilly, or maybe all those mushrooms weren’t your garden variety.

Either way, the “influencer” in this case, wouldn’t necessarily have been such if it were the day before or the day after. He wouldn’t be that if he tried the same thing at his local bank or the dry cleaners. So while it’s great to have the respect or involvement of the so-called influentials, maybe it really is easier to just set the right conditions and create a few influencers of our own.

Or better said by Eric Sun via Mark.

“[Mostly] things don't start with special individuals - it is the rest of us and our willingness to adopt something that we see around us that really matters in the spread of behaviours and ideas through populations.”

Facebook vs. Google: The Fight for Advertising's Future

“Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn't just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.”

The struggle between Facebook and Google represents some of the same challenges happening in the advertising industry now. Those with the belief that “data is everything” complain that advertising hasn’t yet worked in social spaces, mostly because click through rates are even more terrible than usual and banners are ignored.

Data strives to make things black and white. People make things nuanced and contradictory. But I think Facebook’s struggle should be a guide for many of us working in advertising, whether we’re technically advertising or not.

Those of us that really give a shit about understanding people, the ones who aren’t likely to buy into the massive new ads from the OPA, those that felt queasy about interstitials even if they did give a higher click through rate, aren’t anti-data. But that data should be used to support our missions, not create them.

A cold-hearted reliance on numbers alone can make you small-minded and myopic. It can lead you to take shortcuts in the name of trial. It can bundle you in short-term success, celebrating fixing the coffee maker in a sinking ship.

Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I would venture to guess that he didn’t mean that knowledge is unimportant, but simply a tool to inform and check our creativity, not one meant to dictate each following step.

As I’ve been saying of late. Balance is everything. Data can’t explain meaning. Nor does an insight or an uncovered behavior describe a person in whole. So keep the curiosity and fearlessness of your gut and the layered understanding that data can provide, both tempered by the knowledge the neither are absolute.

“I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.” 

-David Ogilvy

Familiar, no?

(background photo via rabinal)

It's all about the beer.

So a friend of mine is in the process of opening a bar in Dallas. We got into a back and forth on email about advertising, particularly for crappy light beer. I thought you guys might find it somewhat interesting, and frankly, I needed a post and this is written. Score!

***

Alright, Jeff – you word whip me, and I’ll word whip you back.

As far as the beer commercials, those generally work best, at least in aggregate (in my opinion), when they mix between certain market positions (taste great, less filling, cold refreshment, whatever) and messages that are more about tacitly saying “we get you” (without saying we get you).

Look at the Bud Light Wassup commercials, or the Bud frog spots– that was bud light’s genius. (Just like one of my favorite nonsense ads ever – the Cadbury Gorilla) – the entirety of the communication isn’t really staking out a functional position, but saying – hey – I'm like you, I like the same stuff you like. Maybe we should hang out every once in awhile? You could throw a lot of Burger King’s King related stuff in that camp, as well.

As far as the cold-activated bottle, flavor protectors, stuff like that – that’s a sign of a company getting past advertising. Generally, when we’re thinking conceptually, we’re looking not just at the content of the advertising, but what sort of stuff can we relate with the audience through, what is the experience of buying/using the product, can we build a new utility into the product that increases the distinctiveness or interestingness?

So you mentioned the CMO of Miller saying the most important attribute of successful beer being (1) taste and (2) refreshment.

I would call bullshit (at least for most people). My list - 1. What do your friends drink, 2. What do your friends drink, and 3. What do you want your friends to think you drink. That may be different if you’re talking to beer connoisseurs, but for the middle market behemoths like Miller, Bud and Coors, I have trouble believing that the difference in taste, or particularly something as ethereal as refreshment, is that great.

If you actually look at most taste tests, what people say they like versus what they actually like turns into one big, mushy gray area. People say they like stuff that they won’t as much if they saw the label. There’s a cool study where they taste-tested wines by only giving the respondent its price. Of course, they’d be given the same wine at $5 and $45. Guess which one most liked better.

Same goes for taste studies on store brand vs. premium brands in supermarkets. People don’t seem to notice taste differences until they’re told the brand. Think of the Pepsi challenge, even if people chose Coke 50% of the time – who cares – you’re at least forcing your customer to ask the question, which is a good thing when you’re not the market leader.

But this is the nature of brands. I saw another study the other day that if our brains were computers, they’d be constantly consuming about 100 million bits of information per second. But you can only actively think about 200-300 bits. So what our brain acts as more than anything else is a filter, and brands or branding is simply taking advantage of that primal nature. Brands are shortcuts, things you trust buying without much consideration.

Now – if you really think about what all these brands are saying, it’s all a series of bullshit platitudes. Coors Light is the most cold? Well how the fuck do you know that? It’s sitting in the same refrigerator as the BL. I put it in my hand on it and they both feel cold. Miller – well fuck, great taste, less filling? Well, BL doesn’t feel MORE filling, does it? And great taste? Says who – that’s about the most subjective thing you could possibly say.

Either way, you do want to help people easily categorize their booze, but what you’re really doing is supplying a research subject with an answer when they say – why do you drink that? – because most people really have no idea. But people like to think of themselves as rational human beings, so they just come up with an answer that seems most plausible. Then they repeat what the advertising said, the researcher tells the agency, the agency says to the CMO – hey it worked! – and the CMO tells the CEO and the CMO gets a bigger paycheck. Woot!

But, in real life, you have to think in terms of functional drivers like taste, selection, stuff like that, emotional benefits like how a brand makes you look, feel and mesh those with the impact of social spaces on how a brand is perceived. Brand nirvana is when you have something compelling to say on all three counts.

So - for your big question – yeah, advertising works for the most part. We’re getting way better at tracking, but in short, you can see that when you advertise, sales go up and when you don’t, sales go down. There are diminishing effects when you do it too much without refreshing your message. But a lot of times, it’s also a game of chicken between multiple companies. Like Coors or BL wouldn’t need to advertise as much in a vacuum, but when you’re getting way outspent, it’s usually (not always) difficult to keep from losing share.

We are seeing an overall lessening of effectiveness in marketing spend, which does explain some of the advertising freakout, but it’s mostly because attention is splintering to lots of different channels with the internet/cable/mobile, etc. – So while people are using a ton more media than they used to, you have to advertise more and in more places to get the same affect as before, with the assumption you use the same tired advertising tactics that most still do.

As a side note, you may want to watch this video from Malcolm Gladwell at TED, it has a similar discussion of taste preferences, mostly around spaghetti sauce, but the same rules apply. Basic takeaway – back in the day, companies would test foods to try and make the perfect sauce, beer, bread, whatever – but at some point in the sixties and seventies – they realized that there is no perfect anything, there’s lots of perfect something – which is why we have a stupidly large selection of toothpaste on the shelf today. Of course, now we’re overdoing it, but that’s a different discussion.