Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

This is more of a rant, so take it as such. I’m just starting to conceptualize this subject, so there will probably be more posts to follow.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Rebooting movies after the success of Batman is only logical, Kirk.”

The new “Star Trek” movie, opening next month, boldly goes where no “Trek” film has gone before: back to the beginning. It’s set in the decades before the start of the TV series, returning to the young adulthoods of space adventurers James T. Kirk and Spock and their first voyage on the Starship Enterprise.

Some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, including “X-Men” and “Terminator,” are taking a similar back-to-the-future approach this summer. To refresh familiar film sagas and grab new audiences, studios are increasingly offering up stories that trace the early years of popular characters and tell epics from their beginnings.

Sami had spotted an interesting article about “cultural latency”, which made me think about the current state of Hollywood productions, and especially reboots and comicbook movies.

Digital distribution removes many of the friction points within the distribution system – making it more efficient, economically speaking.

But this also seems to lead to far more rapid cultural decay rates – sales charts now are driven almost exclusively by novelty – top selling DVDs are just what came out that week.

A reboot or a superhero movie has a clear business logic: you leverage a known cultural product and an existing fan base to assure you have an inbuilt audience before you even start advertising it. There’s a very clear reason why Hollywood is going for more predictability in its revenue: as the movie is released on the big screen, it’s just a matter of time when a pirate version is out there on the streets or on the internet. That’s why the opening weekend smash has become so important: get most of the money early, wait a few weeks and then start working on the home theater version, as the article stated.

Getting people to come on an opening weekend requires a lot of advertising and buzz, which has helped inflate film budgets considerably. It’d be interesting to see how much advertising is taking proportionally from a film’s budget nowadays. My guess is that the proportion has grown considerably.

Given all this, we should look for more movies in the Da Vinci code, Marvel or reboot variety. However, there’s a countering to the old “common denominator” theory. What Henry Jenkins calls “transmedia storytelling“, where a cultural product (film, book, comic etc.) is just one entry point to the franchise’s “world”, is becoming an increasing trend in storytelling. Think Star Wars and the Matrix: these franchises feature multiple products: games, books, comics etc. and they all work as individual works, but together they all tie in to the parent mythology. This is making storytelling deeper and more engaging, even as average Joe’s can enjoy just the individual works one at a time. The fans have their work cut out for them in mining the worlds and making sense of them.

Relating to this, Grant McCracken has argued that popular culture is becoming more and more self-referential, and thus smarter all the time. Star Trek was peppered with small references (albeit to Star Trek mythology) throughout the film. It’s becoming more and more rewarding watching Hollywood films if you have a wide range of pop culture knowledge.

It’s going to be interesting to see how we see and interpret movies is going to change if more and more movies are going to be safe bets. But on the other hand, Batman proved that a complex and darker movie could also make it big, and I think you could see a bit of risk taking in how Star Trek was done. I doubt that even Watchmen would have been greenlit without Batman’s success.

But on that note, here’s the trailer on the new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, by Guy Ritchie:

I wrote in an earlier post that Nokia has been quite active in looking for movies in which it could feature its brand. Since that post, I’ve seen at least three movies where Nokia had a rather prominent and calculated presence, namely Taken and Star Trek. The upcoming Transformers sequel is supposedly also peppered with Nokia’s brand.

It looks like Nokia has in many ways outsourced meaning creation to the cultural industries. Not a bad strategy per se, but a little unimaginative at least. Also, I worry that Nokia doesn’t have a clear idea as to how they want their brand to be treated in the movies they’ve struck deals with. For the most part it just looks like traditional placement to me.

Ad-Age has an article that shows that Nokia is going even further with outsourcing branding to outsiders, and I don’t just mean advertisement agencies. The article is aptly titled “Nokia Asks Advertisers to Brand Its Phones”. From the article:

If you brand it, they will buy. That’s the hope of Finnish handset maker Nokia, which is hoping mobile devices wrapped in a corporate logos will appeal to U.S. consumers.

For an undisclosed fee, the world’s biggest cellphone maker is offering advertisers the right to brand the mobile handset. Advertisers choose a Nokia phone that complements their demographic target, splash the handsets and the accessories with their visual identities, embed some mobile content into it and wrap it all up in packaging plastered with their logo.
[...]
The idea is for brands to put “content in the hands of the most potent brand advocates — people who like the brand … so much that they want to be seen with it,” said David Kohl, Nokia interactive head of sales-Americas.

I’m not entirely sure this is a well-thought out strategy. Brands are clustered into meaning groups and not all brands are “compatible” with each other. Some brands are more defined by what they are not. I don’t like the idea of a brand that’s compatible with every other brand. Isn’t that sort of saying your brand is basically meaningless? I hope Nokia does some major coordination with which brands the advertisers are allowed to strike deals like these.

My good friend and T-shirt enthusiast Jani tipped me off on a pretty cool t-shirt shop called Last Exit to Nowhere. Their idea is simple: create t-shirts that borrow from classic movies, but in very obscure and clever ways. For example:

• Kobayashi porcelain, the company manufacturing the coffee mug the detective was drinking from in The Usual Suspects
• Louis’ Italian-American restaurant refers to the restaurant where Michael Corleone famously shot Sollozzo and McCLusky in The Godfather
• Baltimore State Hospital was the hospital where they kept Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.

The list goes on and on, each shirt more inventive than the next. The designs are also top notch, making them beautiful to watch even if you don’t get the cultural reference.

The “logo” for Tony Montana’s company from Scarface

Coolness and aesthetics aside, what I really like about Last Exit to Nowhere is that it basically encapsulates perfectly two hallmarks of contemporary culture into one great case study.

First, it’s a great example of pop culture becoming smarter and increasingly self-referential. For example, in my recent guest lecture I featured a Simpsons episode that had 13 references to other pop culture works that were vital to the jokes and plot. In the same lecture, I also showed two ads that heavily borrowed from pop culture, from Pepsi and Jordan Brand. Pop culture stereotypes or archetypes work as excellent shorthands in storytelling and often they make for better and more engaging storytelling.

Increased use of pop culture refernces also requires higher cultural literacy and sophistication levels from consumers, as you have to “get” at least some of the references to fully understand the story (for lack of a better word). However, Henry Jenkins has argued that some brands and cultural franchises are also using cultural references to offer fans that little something extra, where as the “basic story” can be made sense with just a basic cultural knowledge. This is I think key for Last Exit To Nowhere: their t-shirts work as “normal” shirts just fine, but they also offer a tremendous reward for those who get it, because the references are so obscure.

For more on pop culture becoming smarter and more self-referential, Grant McCracken (again, I know) has written about this extensively, especially in his latest book Transformations, which I highly recommend.

The second aspect of Last Exit To Nowhere relates to copyright. Copyright holders and especially movie studios are guarding their intellectual property very strictly. Jenkins’ book has some pretty eye-opening stories on movie studios going after fan pages, of all things, who use their copyrighted material without permission. But what’s so ingenious about Last Exit To Nowhere, it’s that they’ve discovered a clever way to basically go around the movie studios. The things they are referencing from the movies are so obscure that they don’t usually have any graphic materials, so they have been free to create them themselves. They’re just swiping the name or idea from the movie, and creating something original from it.

Of course, even if they were allowed to borrow from the movies, these t-shirt designs would be pretty cool and worthy of printing. But I think because they have to go about this way, it adds an extra level of meaning to the shirts.

All in all Last Exit to Nowhere has a fantastic business idea that is as contemporary as they get. I think this blurb from Playboy magazine summed it up best:

Last Exit understands both the urge to represent and the need for discretion.

And oh, to my friends reading this, I ordered the design below, so don’t even think about ordering a similar one and ruining my illusion of individuality!

I’ve been thinking lately that this economic downturn might spell doom for many supposedly free Web 2.0 services. AdAge for one is predicting an end to so-called “YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism”. Before the recession Web 2.0 startups had plenty of VC money to go around, most of them having no real business plan other than “we hope we’ll get bought by Google”. Now, the well has dried up and startups are dying left and right. Last.fm already implemented a 3$ per month subscription plan to stop the bleeding. Last.fm is not the only incumbent feeling the pressure to show some profit potential. Most companies are finding this extremely difficult. It goes to show that “Twitter plans to make money was Wired magazine’s April Fools joke.

But what really prompted this post was something I stumbled upon when browsing through journals:

“The rhetoric of peer-to-peer informationalism…much like the rhetoric of consciousness out of which it grew, actively obscures the material and technical infrastructures on which both the Internet and the lives of the digital generation depend. Behind the fantasy of unimpeded information flow lies the reality of millions of plastic keyboards, silicon wafers, glass-faced monitors, and endless miles of cable. All of these technologies depend on manual laborers, first to build them and later to tear them apart. This work remains extraordinarily dangerous, first to those who handle the toxic chemicals required in manufacture and later to those who live on the land, drink the water, and breathe the air into which those chemicals eventually leak. These tasks continue to be the province of those who lack social and financial resources

In the 1990s, all of this work was invisible to those who promoted the Internet and the network mode of production as evidence of a new stage in human evolution. Like the communards of the 1960s, the techno-utopians of the 1990s denied their dependence on any but themselves. At the same time, they developed a way of thinking and talking about digital technologies from within which it was almost impossible to challenge their own elite status. ”

Source: “Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”, Book Review by Anna McCarthy

I think there’s a somewhat similar sentiment to how people feel about services like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. People take them for granted and expect them to be free, like it’s some sort of birthright. Partly this is due to people’s (I think) misguided sense of entitlement on all things web or an inability to grasp intangible value.

Mostly however, it is the service providers’ own fault for letting people believe that all and everything should and will be free services. If VC money had been more scarce, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation now. If Facebook, for example, runs out of money and decides to charge its users, even if it’s just for 1$ per year, it’s going to be a really hard sell for the community. I’ve seen already more than one Facebook group where people pledge to leave if they have to actually pay (imagine that) for Facebook.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Services like Flickr that had a business plan from the get go are in much better shape. Most startups now probably wish they had gone that route as well.

Just a quickie: my university (and current employer) has announced the winning design in the identity competition.

The winning design by Rasmus Snabb

I’m not ready to give my opinion just yet, I need to digest it first. Right now I think Helvetica might have been too obvious a choice for the font, especially if the designer had gone for something “different”. But I have to admit, this isn’t something you would expect to see from a top level university as their logo. And it’s been fun to watch people’s reactions all over the web.

Update: here is the designer’s justification for the design:

The logo doesn’t have a static visual form, it can be endlessly rearranged and changed. The typeface Helvetica has been chosen because it is the most “meaningless” typeface. The primary colours are used because in this combination the have no symbolic value but merely represent “all colours”.

That’s an interesting justification. If they get the right agency to implement the design and they introduce good color palettes for different departments etc, it could really lead to something. It’s starting to win me over a bit.

Also, I’ve seen the logo parodied a bunch of times already. It’s simple to copy (by any standard) and it’s becoming instantly recognizable. Are we seeing the birth of a true design icon already?

Update2: Wow, now we have an Aalto logo generator!

Update3: And another one!

Update 4: And now there’s even an Aalto identity website converter

Wow, I think my gut instinct was right. This identity is incredibly viral, and already downright iconic.