Grant McCracken

New media now

2009-11-02T21:57:46-05:00

The tide is really turning.

Just when you think the corporation is never going to get it, you hear somebody from corporate headquarters sing a rendition of the new media song that is virtually note perfect.

Plus the speaker has all those qualities that corporate players usually bring to the game: relentless, inexorable, indefatigible.

Thus spake Jeff Hayzlett at Kodak tonight in NYC.

Grant McCracken as Max Factor as Walt Whitman

2009-10-29T11:53:28-04:00

Tomorrow, Pam and I are going to a Halloween party. It's called Dead Brands.

The invitation: come as a brand that's gone out of business. P&G is about to suspend the sale of Max Factor in North America. So I'm going as Max.

The question is what clues to give off. I am wearing a lab coat. I may or may not have "Max" written in red on the pocket. I may have a make up brush in my pocket. (Too obvious?)

Pam is going as one of Factor's clients: Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, or Judy Garland. She can't decide which. I'm suggesting she go as Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, AND Judy Garland. I think she should go as "beauty," as in a medieval morality play. I will be wearing welder's goggles. This will serve as a useful red herry for those trying to guess what dead brand I am. If pressed, I will say that I wear them to protect my eyes from Pam's beauty.

I have been practicing my Polish accent. I'm not good at accents so I may ditch this. And Pam and I am rehearsing dialogue in the event someone needs a clue. Here's that wonderful conversation from Casablanca.

Mr. and Mrs. Leuchtag decide, heartbreakingly, to show off their English. They are preparing to leave for America the next day.

Mr. Leuchtag: "Sweetnessheart, what watch?"

Mrs. Leuchtag examines her wristwatch and says: "Ten watch."

Mr. Leuchtag: "Such much!"

It is wrong in crucial details: nationality (Max was Polish, the Leuchtags German) and historical timing (Max left in 1904, Casablanca was set in in the late 1930s), but it does help suggest that my "Max" is a newly arrived American.

Max Factor, Sr. was born Maximilian Factorowtiz in Lodz, Poland (then Russia). His father was a Rabbi, too poor to afford a formal education for his 10 kids. So Max was apprenticed to a dentist/pharmacist, and he turned this knowledge to the manufacture of rouges, creams and fragrances. His ascent was swift. He was eventually supplying make-up to Russian nobility.

When he passed through Ellis Island on February 25, 1904, Max was a man of some substance. (He came with $400, about $10,000 in today's currency.) Within a few months, he was at the World's Fair in Saint Louis selling his wares. And within a few years he had moved to LA to the very new film industry. (His work there is immortalized in the song Hooray for Hollywood: "To be an actor, See Mister Factor.")

Wow. Max effectively invents a category, securing the best customers he can in Russia. This would be enough for some. Not Max. No, Max has to go to the newest industry in the youngest part of the most recent, most reckless, positively Whitmanesque country in the world and start again. With all the risk, commotion, and difficulty this represents: new languages, new cultures, and the endless uncertainties of a new industry in a new world. We can assume that the Russia's anti-semiticism must have weighted in Max's calculation of risk. But clearly he was pursuing opportunity as much as he was fleeing risk.

Max Factor turned opportunity into an almost endless stream of innovation. He invented the term "make-up." He invented the make-up required by black and white films, color films, and for television. He invented lip gloss, pan-cake makeup, and make up that coordinated with skin tone.

He was a supplier in the transformational arts being developed in this transformational place called America. He is a cultural creative before we quite grasped the cultural or economic significance of Richard Florida's term. Naturally, because he is a creature of commerce we do not pay him his due. Walt Whitman, we remember with reverence. Max, not so much. From a structural point of view, they are not so very different.

It will take a genius to detect. But I'm hopeful. It could be Scott Lerman, Cheryl Swanson, Tony Spaeth, Richard Shear, Debbie Millman, or Tom Guarriello. But I'm hoping someone will say, "oh, so you came as Walt Whitman. Good choice."

References

McCracken, Grant. 2009. Transformations. Identity construction in contemporary culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. here.

The Such Much scene from Casablanca here.

Zoltan indicators: Turning the Mechanical Turk into Zoltan the Fortune Teller

2009-10-28T14:25:37-04:00

Yesterday, Sara Winge yesterday told me about the mechanical turk.

The Mechanical Turk (as I understand it)

Let's say Amazon needs to catalog a new product.   It has the word "Java" in the title, and that's a problem. The system can't tell whether Java refers to the place, the coffee, or the programming language.

Someone at Amazon could sit down and figure this out. But this would use high priced talent to perform a relatively simple task. So what Amazon does is reach out to their Mechanical Turk.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is, as Wikipedia puts it, "a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do." It consists of thousands of people who stand ready for tasks send them by Amazon or others who may wish to use Amazon's MTurk service.

MTurk "providers" work alone, often in their spare time. Standing in line at a 7/11, they can bang out a few turns. They get paid a small fee for each decision. No one gets rich working in a mechanical turk, but many find it interesting.

That was probably not a perfect introduction to those just learning of the mechanical turk, but it sets things up for the theme of this post: how to detect change in our culture.

Change in our culture (when the forecasting was easy)

In the middle of the 20th century, when we were a more organized culture, it was pretty easy to detect and track cultural change. Often it came from small elites (artists, editors, filmmakers, etc) in a handful of cities (New York, London, Paris, etc.). It was picked up by ever less obscure venues (magazines, art galleries, etc.) and began its march towards the mainstream. Many died along the way, but the ones that made it "all the way home" would shape the tastes and preferences of every consumer, and the ideas, sentiments and practices with which we see the world. They became our culture, some for the short term, some for the long.

The cultural changes were like breakers off Waikiki: big, fat, orderly, and easy to see from a long way off. Even quite dim corporations could spot the future before it had installed itself in the present. And make ready. Even in the smoke filled haze of a Madison Avenue boardroom, even to ad men soaked in gin, someone was going to say, "you know, that bohemian thing...from Paris...you know, Henry Miller. Bongos? Berets? Geez, you guys really need to get out more." The corporation might be a little a slow off the mark, but it was never completely unprepared.

Now of course the future comes from many sources and all directions and the corporation lives as Peter Schwartz once put it in a "perpetual state of surprise." There is always a blind side hit waiting to greet them...sometime...from somewhere. Those breakers at Waikiki have turned into a perfect storm. They thrash. Veritably, they boil.

Change in our culture now (now that it isn't)

We really are "crowdsourced" now. In the place of small elites in a few places, cultural innovations can come from any number of people in any number of places.   One of the big effects of the digital regime is that it disintermediated the old media and players, and gave us freer access of one another. Now some kid can invent a new kind of music or filmmaking, a new sensibility or point of view, and without the aid of elite players and channels, our culture can respond. To be sure, for this innovation to find its way into your world, vast amounts of capital and influence will have to be spend on its behalf. But that's the thing. Capital and access are now much more responsive than before, responding to something more like the will of the crowd than the arbiter of taste.

Of course, this makes it much harder to read the turbulent waters of our culture. Corporations that were clumsy and a little late to the party now found themselves sometimes terribly out of touch. What to do?

Where the Mechanical Turk comes in

It occurred to me that the Mechanical Turk could be pressed into service here. What if we captured little innovations from the far margins of our culture, send them to our Turk providers, and asked questions like the following:

1. Is X something you recognize as conforming to some genre, style, model, pattern?

2. If yes, is it completely "true to form?" [If yes, code accordingly and end task]

3. If it is not true to form, is this because it is incompetently executed? (The maker doesn't really grasp the genre, style, model, pattern.)   [If yes, code accordingly and end task]

4. Does it depart from form because it contains another form? (An example: It was usual to say of music in the late 1980s that it combined punk and heavy metal.)

5. Does it depart from form because it contains an element that is not formed (i.e., that is difficult or impossible to recognize?)

6. How new is this new element to you? [rank on continuum: from "very" to "not very"]

7. How disagreeable is this new element to you? [rank on continuum; for "very" to "not very"] [[My assumption is that real innovation is always a shocking, hard to think and therefore disagreeable. This is because we don't yet have a form in our head for it. It comes to us as noise. Avant-garde types like noise. But most of us find it disagreeable. See my discussion of the "Kauffman continuum" in Flock and Flow for more on this.]]

8. Please review this innovation you looked at yesterday [or a week ago] and indicate whether it remains "new" and "disagreeable." [rank on continuum from "yes, it remains disagreeable" to "no, I am beginning to like the look of it more."] [[My assumption is that all culture novelty is disagreeable on first sight. But some of this novelty begins to "win us over" over time. The innovations that win interest and approval from Turk providers are hot spots for forecasting purposes. In a perfect world, we would keep dropping innovations in front of our providers and watching for this "I am beginning to like the look of it more" movement. How fast and in what volume this conversion takes place is a key indicator of innovation "with legs."

I don't doubt that this looks like a dog's breakfast, especially to people with training in questionnaire design and quantitative data collection. And I know some will be alarmed at the freedom with which I have used terms like "form," "style," "pattern," etc. At least here I can reassure you that these have substance and can be identified and defined particularly.

But I believe the Zoltan approach has the following virtues.

1. It allows us to canvass consumer reactions simply. These are easy questions. They allow the respondent to give us useful data even when they cannot necessary form coherent thoughts on innovations. We are asking them to say what they like, not why.

2. It allows us to canvass consumer reaction broadly. Because this is crowd sourced, we can canvass reaction in every corner of the wired world. This allows us to contend with the very distributed nature of innovation these days. If something is stirring in Minneapolis, the mighty Zoltan will know about it. Indeed, we can track innovations minted in Brazil, track them as they pass through the Caribbean and watch for landfall on the eastern seaboard.

3. It allows us to organize our providers according to Kauffman and other identifiers, so we know the risk tolerances and innovation enthusiasm of the coders. Some coders will be stand high on the Kauffman continuum. We will know this from their other coding work and from our own diagnostics. This will make them especially reliable in identifying innovation that are noisy but promising. These people are good at handling noise. They are not so much early adopters as "early oculars." They can see the new in the noise. Those who stand in the middle of the Kauffman continuum will be reliable indicators of the likely reaction of the mainstream.

4. Data of this kind would give us a baseline from which to chart the movement of innovations. This will allow us to track whether an innovation is meeting with acceptance, how fast it is doing so, and to whom it appeals.

Reference

Lorica, Ben. 2009. Mechanical Turk Best Practices. O'Reilly blogs. June 11. here.

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

McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. Basic Books. Preorder from Amazon here.

Schwartz, Peter. 1996. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. Currency Doubleday.

Acknowledgments:

John Kearon and Mark Earls are doing some fascinating work on new ways to canvass consumers. I am indebted to them for several lively conversations on this topic.

Meeting up in Chicago and Detroit

2009-10-27T18:51:37-04:00

I am going to be in Chicago on the afternoon of Friday November 6 and Detroit on the afternoon of Sunday the 8th. Does anyone want to meet for coffee?

We did this in SF a week or so ago and it turned out beautifully. About 12 of us ended up in a coffee shop/bakery sort of thing. I wasn't sure we would find something to talk about. (I just knew I didn't want it to be me.) We had a lively time. We just rambled and it was fun.

There is another possibility. If someone has a hall (or a big room of any kind, really), I would be happy to do my slide show on the Chief Culture Officer argument. That's before and after we chat over coffee, that is. (It's official. I've become a shill machine and will remain so for the next 6 weeks.)

Let me know if you are interested in either eventuality. Send an email to me at grant27@gmail.com.

Walt Whitman and the Levi's ad

2009-10-26T21:59:27-04:00

Wieden + Kennedy uses the words of Walt Whitman in their current work for Levi's (the "America" and "Pioneer" spots in the "Go Forth" campaign). They actually use Whitman's voice as well, recovering it from wax cylinders from the 1880s.

At first, it feels presumptuous. Whitman is perhaps the American poet. He helped grasp what America was and fashion the ideas that made it something we could think. It is not too much to say he helped found America. To see his language and voice leveraged for commercial purposes, is at first a little breathtaking.

Whitman described himself this way: "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest." (Leaves of Grass)

If there is a brand that can claim these meanings for itself, it is Levi's. Almost everything about the brand history and heritage gives it this opportunity...too rarely taken up. The W+K spots do a nice job of evoking these meanings. (Hats off to Susan Hoffman, the executive creative director of W+K, and Cary Fukunaga who directed "America" and M Blash directed "O Pioneer!") The man and the brand are rich and endlessly complicated propositions. I would very much have liked to have been in the room at W+K when they found one another.

But there is another deeper reason why Whitman ought to appear in an American ad. Advertising has taken up what Whitman thought was the poet's job. All those grim protests from Mad Men notwithstanding, W+K and other agencies are now active inventors of American culture in a way very few poets can claim to be. As Whitman said in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."

Haunted by the fashionable cant of the Frankfurt school, we are uncomfortable that Levi's should make use of Whitman. But this is wrong. I think it is thrilling to see these meanings circulating in our culture, passing from the poem through the advertising to the jeans, both resonating with and for the American experiment. It is especially thrilling to hear Whitman's voice return to us from the 19th century, the muse himself made legion. Whatever else it is, W+K's work is successful homage. And America is usually too much a creation of Walt Whitman to pause and give him his due.

References

See the ads and W + K account here.

See the Wikipedia account of Walt Whitman here.

Culturematic: this just in

2009-10-23T11:03:08-04:00

A reader from the 20th century sent in this photo of an early culturematic. (Who knew!)

In this photo we see WACs composing the best selling English novel, The Tumult and The Shouting. later published under the name, Grantland Rice.

Code-named a "teletype machine" and rigged to look like office machinery, the culturematic was operated under the watchful eye of WACs (and sometimes WRENs), growing steadily more robust and productive as a culture engine.

This particular machine was eventually used to write The Lord of the Rings. It was by this time almost entirely automatic and required only a single WAC standing by to monitor and resupply. There was one thing the culturalmatic would not do, and that was to invent an author's name. An advertising agency was engaged to invent an Oxford don called "JRR Tolkien."

Then tragedy struck. The culturematic was now so good at turning out beguiling stories in lively prose, the British government stepped in, declared it a threat to the language and culture of Britain, and banished it to the basement of the Bodleian Library. At some point in the 1960s, a decision was made to send it into deep storage in the English countryside, but due an administrative oversight the culturematic was left to rust for several years on a loading dock, from which it was only recently retrieved.

Culturematic II: Gatorade's Replay

2009-10-22T20:35:16-04:00

On November 25, 1993, two high school football teams played to a tie.

Not the worst thing in the world, perhaps. But it happened in small town America where football can matter extraordinarily. And it happened to two teams have a 100 year rivalry described by Sports Illustrated as one of the most intense in the country.

And a tie, as they say in American sports, is a little like kissing your sister. The world is made symmetrical when the point of sports (and Western cultures) is to produce events, outcomes and asymmetries. Ties erase the event. It's as if nothing ever happened.

Someone at Gatorade had a great idea. What if, 15 years later, the teams of Easton and Phillipsburg were reassembled and the game replayed. Athletes now in their 30s got a second chance. So did the fans. Ten thousands tickets sold out in 90 minutes. And the rest of us go, "Really. How completely interesting."

This is an irresistible story line, isn't it? But it's not clear why, especially if you don't really care about football, small towns, or the ignominy of a tie. It's not because football greats, the Manning brothers, were brought in to help with the coaching. It's just happens to be flat out, eye popping interesting.

And I think this makes it a classic culturematic. I've been thinking about this idea since writing about it several weeks ago. Little examples keep popping up. I couldn't help noticing that the the book I referred to yesterday, The 100 mile diet, is completely culturematic. There are many reasons why the book resonated with our culture, but what made this fascinating reading was watching the authors solve an artificial problem: how to source all food from their immediate vicinity.

Gatorade's Replay is still better. It creates an artificial event that intersects with a real world stand off. Replay reactivates men who are no longer in their physical prime, who will play honor more than heroism. We glimpse immediately that these men will have to be retrieved from wherever the biographic tide has taken them. The solidarity of the old days will have to be accomplished over all the differences that have sprung up in 15 years. You don't have to be a culture creative to think, "hm, this is going to be dramatically juicy." We have all seen football heroics. There are only so many things that can happen. Replay gives us something vastly more authentic, where life and sport are truly going to share the field.

And what makes this culturematic is that all this grist and gusto comes from an entirely simple, mechanical premise: what if we brought these teams back together again? So much drama from so little pretext.

The brand is well compensated for its use of a culturematic. The Gatorade message: "It doesn't matter how old you are. Eight to 80, you are always an athlete." Hey, presto. The brand names attaches to a story of great interest and power. Hey, presto, the brand gets to escape the gilded palace of professional sports and enter a domain that looks a lot more like life.

Acknowledgements

I owe my knowledge of the Gatorade project to Jason Oke and Gareth Kay and their fantastic presentation at Planningness 2009.

Jason was kind enough to give me the name of the creative team:

Advertising Agency: TWBA\Chiat\Day, USA
Global Director of Media Arts: Lee Clow
Executive Creative Director: Rob Schwartz
Group Creative Director: Jimmy Smith
Writer/Co-Creator: Brent Anderson
Writer/Co-Creator: Steve Howard
Replay Project & Series - Head Producer: Brian O'Rourke
Assistant Producer: Tim Newfang
Director of Business Affairs: Linda Daubson
Business Affairs Manager: Anne Thomasson
Group Account Director: Brynn Bardacke
Management Supervisor: Jiah Choi
Account Supervisor: Amy Farias
Account Executive: Adam Bersin

Director: Kris Belman, Scott Balcerek

References

McCracken, Grant. 2009. Culturematic: a device for making culture in two easy steps. September 21. here.

Oke, Jason and Gareth Kay. 2009. Connections Planning 2009. Planningness 2009. San Francisco. October 17. [This deck is available on Slideshare here.]

For more on the Gatorade project, please go here.

Death of concept: beginning of the end of the local movement?

2009-10-21T14:52:01-04:00

Every trend comes with a ticking clock. It may feel inevitable, but its days are numbered. This too shall pass.

Consider the Preppie/Yuppie trend that defined contemporary culture in the 1980s. It was cultivated in the late 1960s by the editors of the Harvard Lampoon.

What an act of sedition this was. Just as the "counter culture" was installing it with Maoist ferocity, these kids were imagining a trend that would be counter veiling in every way. Hippies and politicos might be bend on constructing a world that was egalitarian, communitarian, anti competitive, experimental and innovative. Preps and yuppies didn't care. They were individualistic, mainstream, upwardly mobile, competitive, conspicuously consuming, status conscious, conventional, and conservative.

As cultural observers, as Chief Culture Officers, we want this warning early. To know in the late 60s what would happen 20 years later, we would have been as gods. Actually, we would have been time travelers. We would have found ourselves surrounded by people making life bets on the current trend, even as we knew better.

This is tough luck for the CCO who also knows that the 80s regime would be repudiated in its turn by the 90s. Poor CCOs! They can't ever commit to the moment. They see how arbitrary and unnecessary is the "inevitable." Not so much gods then as those ghosts in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire. If they haven't seen it all before, they soon will.

The question: is there a trend that feels inevitable at the moment but is beginning to lose its purchase on (and in) our culture. I think one candidate could be the local movement.

This came up as an assumption of the 1960s when people scorned corporate farms and went back to the land to grow their own. Local food networks have flourished ever since, thanks in part to Alice Waters (Chez Panisse), Jessica Prentice ("locavore"), Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon (The 100-Mile Diet), and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle). The local movement has changed restaurants, markets, farming, and manufacturering. It has changed what and how we eat. It has transformed the lawn of the White House which thanks to the Alice Waters now sports a vegetable garden.

Why do I think this might be passing? I have very slender evidence. I did an interview with a famous chef a couple of months ago, and it was clear that he had completely "moved on." For most of us, the idea still hums with a little something, something. It is odd and interesting. It is engaging and endearing. It still feels like it belongs.

But what I heard in the voice of this chef was utter disinterest, and the conviction that the idea was well and truly over. This is a great moment for the anthropologist or the CCO, to hear someone talk about something in a way that says that its cultural potency is over. It doesn't mean that a mass redefinition is upon us or even that it will arrive anytime soon. But it does mean that its possible to think of the trend this way. And this strikes with the power of revelation. Wow. We find ourselves gasping with surprise. It's possible to be dismissive about something some many people care so deeply about? Wow.

This isn't so much "proof of concept" as "proof of death of concept." The idea that had captured our enthusiasm is shown to be just another idea. We can see it without it's charisma attached. (It's a little like that moment when we fall out of love with someone who has dazzled us. Suddenly they are just another person. Wow. Really?)

The first condition of concept death has been satisfied. Someone has seen through it, someone highly placed and influential. They have stripped it of its charisma. And now the second condition of death-of-concept can be set in train. The diffusion wave can launch. And for all we know its building even now. This creek bed looks dry enough but well up the mountain there is perhaps a consensus gathering. The smart CCO instructs his or her organization to "get out of way" and with any luck everyone is up and out of the way before the new is upon us.

Yes, I know, the local movement is attached to other powerful trends, especially those that now seek to protect and repair the planet. But this is always true. All trends have friends in high places. There are threats and dangers everywhere. Other trends wait their opportunity. Or it may be that what kills the movement is not a competitive idea. It may simple too small an idea to sustain our interest. It is, after all, mostly about "no." And ideas that are mostly about "no" tend to leave as quickly as they come. We like "no." We like "limit." But we don't like them for very long.

Now it's time to keep an eye out for other faint signals. Like this one from yesterday's Wall Street Journal in a treatment of Lynden B. Miller, one of the reigning designers of the public garden. The WSJ says Miller "has little tolerance for fads such as gardens composed entirely of native plants." And it quotes Miller as saying, "There's a big vocal movement but I do not feel pressured. I will not be pressured."

Yes, yes, I know, its a different domain. But here again is that sturdy, unstudied, disinterest in the trend that matters so deeply to others. A flat denial. An "I don't care what you say about it, it just doesn't matter." Oh, this inflicts a terrible wound. No trend survives it. The zealots will protest their outrage. The trend itself will struggle onward. But the everyone else knows that this can only end badly. And it's time for the CCO to construct an exit plan and when necessary to issue his or her most useful advice: "Get out of the way."

References

Kaufman, Joanne. 2009. She Creates Urban Edens. Wall Street Journal. October 20, p. D9.

Post script:

I don't honestly think the local movement is done for. It just played out that way when I wrote this up. My objective was to show that we want to see through current trends.

Second life for Second Life

2009-10-20T14:15:11-04:00

Friendster! Remember that? Me neither. It came. It triumphed. It completely disappeared. Innovations like Facebook, on the other hand, go from strength to strength.

It's the job of bloggers, planners, designers, and cultural creatives of every kind to have a look and take a guess. What is wheat and what is chaff? What will endure and what will pass?

I'm on record as saying that Second Life was not worthy of the hype. I did my due diligence. I wandered the pricey real estate, and came to the conclusion that Second Life was "vapor ville."

MIT colleagues like Beth Coleman and Ilya Vedrashko begged to differ. They could see something here that would endure. Well, we have data in hand. They were right and I was wrong.

Here's what Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News said recently:

So how are things going? Since Second Life launched in 2003, users have spent a total of 1 billion hours "in-world." User hours grew 33 percent year over year to an all-time high of 126 million in the second quarter of 2009. The average Second Life resident spends 100 minutes in-world per visit. The in-world economy grew 94 percent year over year from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009. So, pretty darn good. Back in the real world, Linden Lab has seen revenues continue to climb and is now profitable, Kingdon says. The company doesn't disclose revenues, but one analyst has estimated they will be about $100 million in 2009.

Yes, these numbers come from Linden Lab and, yes, they may be unreliable. But I think it was Clay Shirky a couple of years ago who objected to Linden Lab numbers, and I am certain they don't want to go through that again. These numbers are likely sound.

Two facts jump out. 1) that visitors are spending 100 minutes in-world. This is an absolute stunner. This metric suggests residency, not tourism. 2) Linden is profitable. Profitable? Profitability is so rare in this world, as O'Brien points out, it counts almost as an eccentricity.

Clearly it's time to examine my assumptions and look again. What is it that is keeping people in place for 100 minutes? When I wandered around Second Life a couple of years ago, I stumbled into many worlds: Alice in Wonderland gardens, clothing stores, S&M parlors, people struggling to sustain intelligent conversation, unconvincing dance clubs. Which of these has flourished? Perhaps all of them have and Second Life has added up many little worlds into a going proposition.

One of the key indicator must be the economy that grows so relentlessly. What are people buying and selling? What value is being created and exchanged? This might be a place to start. Anyone who has been to Second Life lately is encouraged to give us the benefit of their experience. Sing out.

References

O'Brien, Chris. 2009. Twitter, meet Second Life. Mercury News. October 10. here.

Leno learning: the triumph of mesmerizingly particular culture

2009-10-12T14:50:24-04:00

Jay Leno's show is doing so badly, it is now seen to endanger the health of NBC. This is failure of an almost epic scale. People are using language like "complete calamity" and "utter disaster."

And it tells us that the strategists at NBC miscalculated badly.

Let's suppose that they thought to themselves, "American culture has fragmented beyond all expectation."

And let's suppose they followed up with, "the way to speak to this culture diversity is with diversity. Let's revive the variety show."

It's a little like the Long Tail argument: if a fragmented marketplace, the smart thing to do is to own the pipeline. As long as you carry everything, in the manner of an Amazon or a YouTube, you don't have to worry about fragmentation. Build a variety show: you've got something for everyone.

But it's not clear that this logic works on TV, or in other cultural venues. Didn't someone try to put Rosie O'Donnell in charge of a variety show? And it didn't work there. It appears to be failing in the Leno case as well. (This is a useful second test, because Leno is bland and uncontroversial as Rosie was provocative. His failure says, perhaps, it's not about the host. It's about the format.)

In point 1 of the previous post, I was trying to figure out what works in a fragmented culture and I found myself arguing that what we want is the mesmerizing and the place we find the mesmerizing is not the show that has "something for everyone." It's in the show that is unbelievably particular, that appears to speak to no one at all.

For no good reason, I was thinking yesterday about that weird "learn to paint" show on public broadcasting by the guy with the fro. It turned out to be one of the great hits of the 1990s. And I was talking to someone at AIGA about the unexpected success of the Antiques roadshow.

Both these shows are mesmerizing. You can enter the room when someone is watching them, and they may not see you. Certainly, if I am watching AR, I have no idea where I am. Natural disasters can take place around me. Empires can come and go. I'm watching some 45 year old women shyly describe how she found this lamp in her attic. "I think I might be Dutch," she says. Fascinating.

And what makes these cultural productions mesmerizing remains to be seen. But I think it's something to do with how fantastically particular they are. They are in fact anti-variety. They are not built to maximize interest, or extend the reach of the show. They are exactly what they are, and for some reason, they act like a Zeno's paradox that takes out of the here and now into... Well, we don't really know where they take us. We just know we like going there.

We may take this as yet another indication of the death of the mass culture and mass markets, I guess. But who knew this is where we would end up. Interesting.

References

Carter, Bill. 2009. Debate Over Effects of Leno's Show. New York Times. October 11. here.

Business as the new rocket science.

2009-10-08T21:17:32-04:00

A friend asked me to come talk to his organization. But first he wanted to know what I would say.

Here's what I told him.

Bartholomew (not his real name)

I'd love to come work with you.

As an anthropologist, here are a couple of things I am looking at. (Not a comprehensive list).

1) the new diversity of outlook, interest, taste and enthusiasm.

We were once a monolithic society, relatively speaking. Now we are badly-herded cats. The question for senior management: what does this do to your business model?

How can the corporation be many things to many people? How do we change our media, our messaging, our meaning making...now that we are no longer broadcasting with a bull horn.

A couple of days ago, I did a piece on the "culturematic" as a way to make culture. And it has since occurred to me that this might be what we now do instead of big, fat, mass marketing campaigns. In the place of Unique Selling Propositions, fired often and loudly at a mass market as if from a cannon, we are now inclined to create engagements in the form of experience, applications, and stories that are little, funny, charming and often a little odd. This is what we appear to like, not big fat messages but cultural materials that are quirky, anti-authoritative, adventuresome, participative. (We saw this anti-modernist sensibility come up in the 1990s as one of the ways a generation defined itself. Now it seems to be going wide.)

This new sensibility, this new grammar, looks like a great way to work with, to speak to, diverse markets. We like it for its own sake, but it is also adaptive. It works when the old grammars fail.

2) the new flight from function to value

I've been working with companies that are climbing up a value hierarchy, from the creation of products that solve a problem or perform a function to bundles of value that supply a deeper, richer order of problem solving. These companies, located in diverse industries, are climbing a value hierarchy, from the simple and the functional to the more complex and less literal.

Some of this is driven by the arrival of new commodity competitors who can imitate the lower order function without being able to grasp or deliver the higher order stuff. Climbing to the upper reaches of the value hierarchy is a way to protect markets and keep customers.

And some of this is driven by a new approach from the likes of P&G. In his book Gamechangers, Lafley asks us to dolly back from a narrow view of the consumer to a portrait that is richer and more nuanced. The corporation is still supplying utility but it does so less to help the consumer accomplish "brighter whites" and more to help her address questions like "how do I make this household work."

What we are seeing here is a fundamentally new answer to Theodore Levitt's classic marketing question: "what business is our you in." The corporation is less about USPs and more about life solutions.

3) the new inscrutability of change.

No sooner do we get a fix on what people care about than they change what they care about. Our culture and our markets are in constant churn. New developments sweep through us like storms off the North Sea. To manage in a world as dynamic as this, we need to improve our meteorology. We need a "big board" that identifies what changes are coming, how quickly we can expect them to arrive, and what to do when they get here. We also need a deeper understanding of American culture. In sum, we have to start doing future gazing as a discretionary activity, and we have to stop doing it as an intuitive process. Time to get serious, systematic and disciplined. Otherwise, life in the corporation becomes a matter of struggling to recover from the latest "blind side hit."

4) the breakdown of the old asymmetries

This asymmetries made some of us culture producers and some of us culture consumers. We are all producers now. The question is how the [organization] aids, enables and variously participates in this ferocious new culture. Part of the answer here is knowing it with a depth and subtlety that enables it to supplement, shape and direct the "raw feed" of the web world. Some people are using the word "curator" here. Personally, I think this is (if we are true to the metaphor) too passive a model. We need something much more "engaging."

Taken together, these four issues show us a corporation that is entertaining into an era where it must perform a higher-order of problem solving simply to dispatch the usual business of business. No, it's not rocket science. It's more complicated than that. (See Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind as the go-to text on the new complexity in business.)

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Grant

Post Script

I will be in Memphis this weekend at the AIGA Make-Think Meetings. Please drop by and say hello if you happen to be there.

Then it's on the San Francisco and next Thursday at noon about 10 of us will be meeting at a bakery downtown. Send me an email if you are around and feel like joining us.

Gourmet, Saveur and the paradox of food in America

2009-10-07T11:29:58-04:00

When the Wall Street Journal reported that Conde Naste was closing Gourmet Magazine, it gave a chart suggesting that all the magazines in the CN stable were losing money. But a single competitor seemed to buck the trend. Saveur is actually prospering.

I asked Pam, my wife, about the difference between Gourmet and Saveur. She said Saveur is about the culture of food: people, restaurants, trends, cuisines, celebrity foodstuffs, generally speaking. Gourmet is more about the food of food: recipes, techniques, procedures.

And by this reckoning, the fall of Gourmet and the rise of Saveur is perhaps not mysterious. After all, in prosperous America, people are cooking less. They are eating out more. And they are ordering in, or bringing in, more and more.

Pam was recently looking at stoves and the sales person said of a particular stove,

"Oh, you don't want one of those. That's a trophy stove."

"What's a trophy stove?" she asked.

"Oh, you know, it's for one of those beautiful kitchens where all they do is boil water and order in."

These families don't care about recipes as they used to. This is increasingly a black box technology. We don't actually need to know how "cooking" happens. This will be accomplished by someone else somewhere else. In the language of a corporation, these families are "outsourcing" the food function. (Even as they are "in sourcing" the fitness studio and the movie theater.)

As is often the case, American culture is moving in two directions (at least for those with incomes to manage it.) People know more about food and they care more about food, but they are spending less time working with food. It's a tasty little morsel of a paradox. (Watch for coverage in the pages of Saveur.)

Post script:

I hesitate to put words in his mouth, but when I interviewed him a couple of months ago, Mark Miller, the formative American chef, and the man responsible for the American passion for Southwest cuisine, appeared to be telling me that Americans continue to be more in love with the idea of cuisine than it's reality. This would say that Americans actually love reading about food in Saveur more than they do preparing it from a recipe from Gourmet. (And not only because they are so very time poor.) And this would give us another explanation for the rise of Saveur and the fall of Gourmet. Devout apologies to Chef Miller if I misrepresent his opinion here.

Coffee in the Bay area in a week or two

2009-10-06T12:23:52-04:00

Feel like coffee?

I'm going to be in the Bay area for the third week of October (12th to 17th). I am hoping to meet up with readers of this blog.

There are a couple of opportunities:

1) I'm talking to a Policy class at the School of Information at Berkeley on Monday (12th) about how a CCO or a CCO approach can serve not-for-profits and governmental organizations. (I will be drawing on my work for museums and public education, chiefly.) I'll be arguing that the profit and the not for profit worlds are tunneling towards one another. Now that Lafley has broadened the context of how the corporation thinks about consumers and markets, the not-for-profit world is poised to supply a still broaden frame. NFPs can help the corporation identify how and where to create value in the gift economy. I will also be talking about ethnography as a method for discovering culture and about culture has the larger (largest?) strategic frame within which to think about policy decisions.

2) I'm talking to the Marketing and Consulting Clubs at the Stanford b-school on Tuesday (the 13th). In this case, I'm going to be sketching what a CCO is, why a CCO matters, and encouraging Stanford students to think of it as a career possibility. (This will be my opportunity to ask students why almost nothing of the popular culture they know so well is represented in bschool curricula pretty much anywhere in the US. Not to be a trouble maker or anything. Honest.)

3) Thursday (the 15th) is my "off day" and I am hoping that I can get together with anyone who feels like getting a coffee on a kind of "likemind" basis: just a casual get-together with whomever shows up to talk about whatever comes up. If anyone feels like meeting up, please let me know.

4) Friday (the 16th) and Saturday (17th) I will be at the Planningness 2009 meeting organized by Mark Lewis. I've been looking forward to working with planners since I started consulting many years ago. This, finally, is my opportunity. I will be talking about the Chief Culture Officer idea, in this case talking about the tactical issues and specifically how planners can use the CCO and the CCO approach as a way to shape senior decision making. Mark has organized this event as a series of workshops. So this talk will be less about the CCO proposition as a proposition and more about how to make it work. Less propositional, and more strategic/ tactical.

There are places in Planningness available. For more details, go here. As to the other occasions, space is limited by the classrooms in which the talks will take place. Send me an email and I will see if I can smuggle you in! grant27[at]gmail.com.

Transformations and the fate of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse

2009-10-05T10:14:57-04:00

Robert Seidman thinks Joss Whedon's Dollhouse (Fridays on Fox) will not survive. It is, he says, unmistakeably done for.

I think I know why. Ours is a transformational world, and to that extent Dollhouse should speak to us.

But there are two kinds of transformation: involuntary and voluntary. We hate the former. We love the latter even more.

Which transformation is Dollhouse about? It's about a woman (Eliza Dushku, pictured) trapped in an endless series of involuntary transformations. A mysterious corporation wipes her soul, inserts a new persona, and hires her out. This is the stuff of our worst realities and dreams.

The trouble is not that we can not identify with "Echo." The problem is we can identify too well. We too have been the captives of forced transformations, and it gives us no comfort to see someone else endure this horrible condition.

I hate to be a know-it-all, especially with someone as smart and culture shifting as Whedon, but I told you so. (Specifically see pages 253-273 of Transformations for an account of how voluntary transformation works and pages 236-253 for an account of involuntary transformation.)

I can't help feeling that if Fox had had a Chief Culture Officer it might well have spared Wheedon and itself this unhappy end.

References

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: managing identity in contemporary culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Seidman, Robert. 2009. Say Goodbye to Dollhouse, part II: The DVR number won't matter. October 3, 2009. here.