Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

I thought I’d revisit an old topic regarding arms race advertising. This popped up on my reader: NPR: The Thrill is Gone: How Viral Marketing Will End Up Killing Viral Marketing and the new viral campaign for the TV show House:

Bottom line: Enjoy this kind of campaign while it lasts, because in short order, we’ll all be so jaded that we’d ignore the reappearance of the woolly mammoth, convinced it’s just a scheme to market the latest Ice Age movie.

To repeat what I wrote a while back:

Advertisers are in an arms both against other advertisers and against consumers. All new advertising innovations (new media to advertise in, persuasion tactics etc.) are quickly copied by rival advertisers and they lose their effectiveness quite fast. And on the consumer front, as time goes by consumers become increasingly advertising savvy and more likely to ignore or “see past” advertising (as outlined in the NYT article).

I guess this is and always will be the advertiser’s problem; how to deal with constantly declining returns on advertising. Some brands choose to just out-spend the competition, hoping for first mover advantages in new marketing tactics by hiring the advertising talent du jour. Some brands are more responsive and consumer-centric, and move their focus away from practices to which consumers are no longer responding.

Bill Simmons is my favorite sports columnist, mainly for his funny writing style, but also for his feel for popular culture. He often mixes pop culture references into his sports columns or even writes entire columns on the subject. Here’s a recent quick interview with him, questions 3 & 5 were particularly illuminating: 5 Quick Questions with Bill Simmons

3. What’s the biggest story the media has missed this year?
The potential of Twitter. Old-school media doesn’t get Twitter at all. A lot of people still think it’s a fad and it’s totally not a fad. Cocaine was a fad. The Osbournes were a fad. Auto-asphyxiation was a fad…. well, unless you were David Carradine. If anything I think we are just scratching the surface of Twitter for better and worse: it started breaking stories last spring and over everything else, that’s why it won’t go away. Now reporters are posting scoops on Twitter before they send the finished stories into their employers. People are not seeing what is happening here. Facebook is a social network; Twitter is a media/marketing vehicle disguised as a social network.

5. Are you nervous or excited about the future of Journalism? Why?
I’m terrified. I think it’s going to hell in a hand basket. The emphasis is on quantity over quality and immediacy over accuracy; the newspapers have made it worse by trying to speed up their immediacy online over just kicking everyone’s asses with better writing and reporting. Newsmakers can control stories about themselves by selectively dispersing relevant information as well as who gets to talk to them (and for what reason). And too many writers are more interested in just saying what they have to say instead of crafting the way they are saying it. It’s a comedy of errors. I thought Season 5 of The Wire painted a bleak picture of where this is going, but even David Simon couldn’t have believed that it would get this bad this fast. I would say “nervous.”

That’s more or less the good and bad of Twitter, all in two paragraphs. Twitter’s ability of breaking and spreading news is considerable. However, I think this has had its drawbacks as well, putting and onus “on quantity over quality and immediacy over accuracy”, as Simmons so eloquently put it.

Some have already argued that Twitter will end up killing journalism, but I think this is a gross overstatement. The sad fact is that traditional news agencies have just been unable to carve up the right strategy against Twitter’s hypernovelty. The time of solely newspapers breaking stories is over; bloggers are now getting the kind of access to information traditionally reserved for the most prestigious news outlets. Grassroots journalism is doing a better job at breaking stories and faster, because they don’t have to work with the same constraints as, say, a New York Times (validity of source, brand image concerns, writing quality, legal issues). A New York Times can’t afford running many unconfirmed stories that end up blowing up in their faces. Tweeters (and blogs) by virtue of their sheer volume, on the other hand, can. The hits outweigh the misses.

Simmons hits it right on the money when he states that “newspapers have made it worse by trying to speed up their immediacy online over just kicking everyone’s asses with better writing and reporting.” The fact second opinion magazines like the Economist continue to see their subscriptions rise, not fall, is proof of this. Instead of focusing on WHAT has happened, it is time for traditional news outlets to return to reporting WHY something has happened.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

For the uninitiated, here’s a short description of what is transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins and Transmedia Storytelling:

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

An apt metaphor that Jenkins has used is the art of “world building”, creating a storyline where readers can jump in and contribute at any point or from any medium. Transmedia storytelling has usually been about expanding one cultural franchise into new media channels, as stated above. However, what happens when you start expanding cultural franchises into other cultural franchises?

Inglourious Basterds and True Romance: Bonded by Family Blood

Quentin Tarantino has been building universes since day one. The characters of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Death Proof talk about one another while eating at the same restaurants (like Big Kahuna Burger). Characters jump from one feature to another, and family relations might be mentioned in one script, but not seen on screen until another movie down the line. And at the Austin premiere of Inglourious Basterds, The Playlist learned that this film is, not surprisingly, related to True Romance, in a way that detail-oriented fans probably already suspect.

Fans of True Romance remember Saul Rubinek’s character, the producer Lee Donowitz. (Based by director Tony Scott, in a not too subtle manner, on Joel Silver.) In Austin, Tarantino said that Lee’s father is Eli Roth’s Inglourious Basterds character, Sgt. Donnie “The Bear Jew” Donowitz. Donnie is a violent, slightly unhinged individual, and some elements of that character were perhaps passed onto his son, who in True Romance is proud of his film Coming Home in a Body Bag.

I think this goes beyond just mashing up two cultural franchises in a one-off piece (like Aliens vs. Predators or Superman vs. Batman). This is more nuanced, more sophisticated and requires a higher level of literacy and dedication to Tarantino’s works. Tarantino’s works are currently confined only to the cinema medium, but I think this cross-referencing could be expanded to other media, easily. If transmedia storytelling is about creating “worlds”, as Jenkins states, then the next step might be about creating universes.

Sascha Baron Cohen’s new pseudo-documentary Brüno has been getting worse reviews than its predecessor, Borat. Most pundits feel that this is due to the film’s similarities, that the joke is sort of “played out” now. But having finally seen Brüno last night, I have a different opinion on why it was weaker (and it was) than the previous film.

Much of Borat’s interestingness stemmed from Borat talking with regular people, who often ended up showing their true colors in the process. Most of the interactions played out like a good qualitative interview: Borat was the researcher getting people to spill their guts, in their own words, with well-timed priming. Borat was the true outsider, wanting to learn about the American way of life, and people obliged. All Borat had to do was to nudge them into the right direction, and people would reveal their deep racist, homophobic or antisemite feelings. Often, it didn’t even require much.

Brüno, on the other hand, is almost a case example of bad anthropology. The spotlight is almost always on him, never on the people he’s interviewing or interacting with. Brüno is flamboyant. He’s irritating. He doesn’t get people to open up, he pushes them and pushes them until they lose their temper and reveal something about themselves. And most of the time, the results were predictable and uninteresting. People were genuinely uneasy with him, just waiting to get out of the situation. Most of the time, I ended up feeling sorry for Brüno’s “victims”, unlike in Borat. Only a few episodes felt free-flowing and enlightening (the talk show and the baby pictures), the rest was just shock humor.

I definitely think Cohen can make another film like this (more makeup and a new character and people won’t know who it is), but he has to tone it down and give the spotlight back to the people he’s interviewing.