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:

Of course, there are issues where societies fail to reach common ground and there’s constant debate about the lawfulness of certain types of behavior. One such subject is the use of drugs, which has been raging as a debate for ages, but I doubt we’ll see a resolution soon. The unlawfulness of drugs, the theory goes, is responsible for putting a lot of underprivileged African-Americans behind bars and leaving many children growing up without male role models, which in turn has helped glorify the “thug life” and turning going to jail into a rite of passage for some (this is not to say that outlaws are only glorified in ghettos, quite the contrary). Soon, such markers of said rite being passed (baggy clothes, tattoos) spread to the rest of the society, becoming fashion.

Another legal/cultural issue under debate is copyright law and the act of file sharing. Lawrence Lessig had a great TED talk (below) that touched upon this issue.

Lessig is, as some of you might know, the father of Creative Commons. While Lessig’s argument was mainly on copyright laws stifling folk culture creativity, he also stated that we’re moving towards a polarized society: copyright owners enforce their rights overzealously, and as a result people (especially young people) are unwilling to recognize any rights to intellectual property at all. On one hand, I do feel that copyright owners have gone too far in enforcing their supposed rights, and they’re doing more harm than good to their business. But then again, this kind of behavior has created a truly bloated sense of entitlement among some people who claim that piracy is a almost a birthright.

To illustrate the point, a few days ago I found this on Mashable!:

It’s an initiative meant to support the PirateBay trial where people can upload their face to show support for PirateBay or somehow protest the unfairness of copyright laws. People are embracing criminality, kind of like vanilla versions of thugs. It’s yet another indication of this polarized nature of the whole debate, and I fear that it’s getting more and more polarized. The RIAA and MPAA have recently pledged to stop harassing regular people and their minor crimes, but these concessions might not be enough, at least not yet.

Some of this is just about the growing pains of the internet. Whenever a new medium (yes, I called the internet a medium, for all intents and purposes, it’s a medium of media) emerges, the social codes and protocols take a while to establish themselves (or at least become somewhat stable). To me, this is one of those cases. We have to find a middle ground, for both parties’ sake. We can’t turn a whole generation of people into “career criminals”, but we can’t simply abandon a model of compensation for content producers. Just last week I saw a documentary called RIP: A remix manifesto. It’s an open source documentary that very thoroughly describes what’s at stake with the copyright war. It also gives us a glimpse of how things could be if we embraced remix culture, because Brazil has already done it.

Watch all the episodes behind the link I posted. Here’s the first chapter:

Now, I’m not saying that I have never acted in this manner myself or that I’m some how above this kind of behavior (hey, I pasted a link to some photos from the fire to my Facebook status), nor am I really condemning it (though some comments were a bit on the tasteless side considering there was a real chance of lives being at danger in the incident), but I’m starting to believe more and more that this kind of hypernovelty is not exclusively a positive phenomenon of social media.

There’s a certain allure in being “in the know”. One of the most common stereotypes in cultural products is the brave journalist with the scoop story exposing the truth. Our culture reveres the pioneer and the trend setter: it’s a staple of our culture and it’s often seen as a trait of individuality. You can hear it in the way we talk about our holiday experiences, how we like “discovering” (though that’s rarely the case) new things and recommending them to friends, the we shop for clothes, and the way we value expertise, just to name a few. Having your finger on the pulse is also a sign of passion and a keenness for a given subject, which is hardly a bad thing.

However, having your ear constantly on the ground puts a certain strain on you, especially in this day and age of ubiquity of information. Whenever a new story or something interesting thing pops up, some people have an urge to “break” the story and sort of put up a flag on the story that says that “if this story becomes big, remember my name!”.

Being “first” (a rather relative term, to say the least) to blog/tweet about something has become more important than actually writing something meaningful about the subject. The urgency to act (because somebody might write about first!) does not really allow for deep thought or fact-checking. It also feeds a certain anti-intellectualism, making debate or analysis less and less of a merit of expertise.

For example, online newspapers have had to sacrifice (grudgingly, at times) some of their quality control in favor of promptness, because blogs and social networks were beating them to the story so often (as said, the hotel incident was “old news” within two hours of it happening). Smart newspapers have moved on to offer more in-depth or second opinion pieces, but that’s a whole other post.

Relating to my own field, I don’t like it how so many marketing blogs, for example, have become more or less obsessed about spreading viral videos or “cool campaigns” instead of actually discussing them. And if there is any type of analysis being done, the tone is hyped and one-sided. Ideas are reduced to bullet points or statements that look great in keynote presentations, but might not have any theoretical substance to them.

Services like Twitter have their merits – especially in acting as an information filter and connecting like-minded people – but people tend to overvalue it and forget what the trade offs of a constant information flow are. It takes deep thought, taking your time and actually detaching yourself from the information overload to create original thought.

Speed isn’t everything.

I created a draft for this post over a week ago but I thought I’d wait a while to wait for enough second hand opinions to emerge on Martin Lindstrom’s new book Buyology (link to Neuromarketing.com’s take on the book) before I’d post my impression on it. I haven’t read the book (I might in the future) and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of giving my opinion on it just based on a few reviews and the book’s sleeve text. But it’s been featured in Neuromarketing enough times that I think I know what the book is about and what its main strengths and weaknesses are. Here’s a consolidated list of reviews on it

The book seems to be getting mixed reviews: academics dismiss it and criticize it (I’d guess a bit unfairly too, since Lindstrom himself is not an academic but a, gasp, popular writer), magazines and blogs handle it with more praise and they seem to be buying into the hype. It has always been my impression that Lindstrom is a very good salesman (hell, you have to be if you get to promote your book on the Today Show), in that he knows the topic du jour and is not ashamed to ride the wave: in early 2000 he was hyping sensorial branding (his book “Brand SENSE” is bible of sorts for many advocates of Emotional Branding) and now he has turned his attention to neuromarketing, which some see as the next Holy Grail of marketing. So in short, it seems like one of those books that create a lot of buzz but eventually fail to make a lasting impact or change the field of marketing. We’ll see how my prediction fares in the long run.

But back to why wanted to write about Buyology in the first place. When the book came out, this was the first paragraph from Lindstrom’s newsletter:

It is probably one of the most controversial scientific findings of 2008. In his $7 million neuroscience-based research study, Lindstrom has spent over four years peering into the minds of 2,000 consumers across five countries to discover if there’s a parallel between brands and religion. Without disclosing too much (the findings will be published on October 20th), we can reveal that brands indeed activate the same areas in the brain as religion. By analyzing brands like Harley Davidson, Apple, Guinness and hundreds of other commercial icons, Lindstrom discovered that we are hardwired to believe in some brands. Lindstrom went further, interviewing religious leaders from across faiths and cultures. He discovered that the ingredients that create powerful religions may also be invaluable for branding of the future.

I can’t see how this is news to anybody who has been studying marketing beyond reading a few books by Seth Godin. Branding has become more and more about managing meaning, and religion is to a lot of people the ultimate path of seeking meaning, so it’s not hard to see parallels between the two. Jesus Christ is as much a cultural icon as is a bottle of Coke or a Harley Davidson. Also, people have valued the same kind of behavior in brands and religion: purity of intentions and non-profiteering motifs.

I’ve posted this link before, but Douglas Holt’s “Why do brands cause trouble?” (PDF) is an absolute must read for any marketer. In it, Holt outlines the historical change that has undertaken the world of branding from “cultural engineering” (from a time when people actually trusted brands somewhat) to the post postmodern paradigm where the best brands get a strong following by appearing “disinterested” in making money, and are more mission and meaning driven. In later works Holt has detailed what kind of missions and meanings are appealing to people through brands like Harley-Davidson, Apple etc. (like Lindstrom did above), and I’ve blogged about the subject here many times, but let’s not get into that. As for religion, it’s fairly obvious that the same kind of criticism that brands receive about profiteering and purity of intentions would be devastating to any church. For example, the church of Scientology is vilified for being nothing more than a money-making scheme, and people oppose it with a passion. People have a need to believe in something, but people also absolutely love to expose somebody as a false prophet. Hey, doesn’t the word “sellout” actually originate from what Judas did to Jesus (anyone care to fact check)?

I think by claiming this revelation of brands being similar to religion to be so “shocking”, Lindstrom had failed to do what I wrote in my previous post that brand thinkers need to drill deeper to uncover the “why” of a phenomenon. If Lindstrom had drilled deeper, he would have realized that brands and religion both are about meaning, and the similarities in neurology they create shouldn’t have come as a shock (a cynic might argue that this “shock” is feigned to create interest in the book). Of course, I’m not arguing that brands can be as strong as religious movements (and I doubt that Lindstrom isn’t arguing either), but I do think that brands and religion fit on the same scale (along with other cultural products, such as books and films) where religion sits a the top and everything else comes after it.

Teemu pointed out to me what he had noticed, that Apple had a considerable presence in Wall-E, Pixar’s latest masterpiece. Wall-E even boots up with the similar sound that a Mac does, which was very tongue in cheek. This is of course partially due to the fact that Steve Jobs used to work at Pixar, and the two companies enjoy a very close relationship even today. But what Teemu had noticed, that Apple’s presence in Wall-E had elements of meaning management in it. He suggested that I blog about it, because this subject is kinda up my alley. Needless to say, I was gutted that I hadn’t noticed it myself. But Teemu’s right, there’s a lot of meaning Apple is trying to mine in Wall-E.

I won’t go into detail about the movie’s plot, but let’s just say it’s heavily centered on green values, in a rather pessimistic way. Of course, Apple or Macintosh is never mentioned directly in the movie, but Apple’s presence is more about the small things: Apple’s familiar design language in Eve, the other robot, using the Apple chime when Wall-E boots up. But what I thought was the most obvious, and most meaningful thing about Apple, was this:

In the photo you will see that green leaf in Eve’s, uh, body. That leaf was blinking as Eve had gone in to sleep mode of sorts. The blinking was identical to how a Mac’s LED flashes in sleep mode, so it couldn’t have been a coincidence. But what I think is even less of a coincidence, is the green leaf in it. Apple has caught a lot of flack for the environmental unfriendliness of their products. Greenpeace had their prominent Green my Apple campaign. Apple has also scored low marks in Greenpeace’s guide to green electronics (guess which company ranks #1?), so they have had their work cut out for them.

I thought the subtly done meaning management in Wall-E could have been seen as a sign that Apple is aiming for a new, greener strategy. A cynic might say that everybody is these days, but the the launch of the new Macbook today showed that the company is taking green very seriously. Watch the presentation video, and you’ll see how much effort and emphasis they’ve put on the green aspects of the computer. It’s quite a huge step.

But all in all, was the meaning management effective? Or was it even intentional, or at least planned on a high level? Or was it just a gag that the guys at Pixar had done, to show their affection to Apple? We won’t know unless somebody comes forth and says it. But for now it’s a very clever way of doing brand placement in a movie. Using only the design elements of Apple products and not the company logo would make Martin Lindstrom proud.

UPDATE: Treehugger says that the new Mac is indeed very, very green (via PSFK). Great news. I think Apple really understands the concerns of their core demographic: they tend to be left leaning, young and urban, and not being a green company is against what Apple stands for, in terms of lifestyle.

But in other news, Wired reports that analysts say that the new Macbooks are too pricy to compete. The analysts cite the downturn in the economy is the main driver. I sort of disagree. Are they going to feel a pinch in sales? Sure. But I doubt that slashing prices was going to help their bottom line anyway, especially for an iconic brand like Apple.

If any ad has been dissected and talked about more the past year than this ad, I’d like to know what it is. Much has been written about Crispin landing the unenviable yet so intriguing task of rebranding Microsoft, and after the Microsoft Mojave campaign, what you see above is finally the first TV-spot.

The casting of Jerry Seinfeld seems very un-Crispin when you first think about it. Hiring a superstar, and a fading one at that (like Antti said in this Jaiku thread “Jerry belongs to the 90s”) seems like a go-to move from the mind-share branding playbook. But while Seinfed (both persona and TV-show character) is not as current or “hip”, he still packs a lot of cultural meaning. Also, how they’ve scripted the ad and treated Jerry as a character is what makes the choice intriguing.

Grant McCracken had a fairly comprehensive rundown of the ad and its meaning. Small excerpt:

The meaning mechanics of the ad are wonderful: Jerry’s shoes squeak like a cartoon character. A store called Shoe Circus. A family gathered outside the store window in solemn and learned reverence for shoes within. The meaningful glance between Jerry and Bill that makes no sense. Seinfeld’s lunatic advice that Bill try wearing his clothes in the shower. The starring role give churros. The idea that anyone would want to earn points in a store like this, especially when the card calls them a “shoe circus clown club member.” The idea that computers could ever be “moist,” “chewy,” and edible. The idea that Jerry suspected this “all along.”

As far as contemporary advertising goes, this ad is indeed rich with nuances and meanings (I’m especially intrigued by the meaningful glance and the knowing smile Jerry and Bill share) that speak to you more than a traditional ad would. I wrote in my master’s thesis that as people’s media-savviness grows, it opens new opportunities for storytelling because people understand the medium better and you don’t need to be so explicit in your selling. However, this media-savviness (combined with market saturation and clutter) also makes people more resentful of ads that they feel are too pushy, “selling” and simply insulting of their intelligence as consumers. And given that the brand in question is Microsoft, the pushiest and most profiteering brand in its industry, I can definitely see why Crispin went for a more “un-selling” approach.

I wrote in the comments of Grant’s post that I think they will be going back to the “run tight” phrase they threw around a few times in the ad. First when Jerry said it, and when the hispanics outside the shop said it. This might be just a clever and indirect way of introducing the new benefit or value proposition. It’ll be interesting to see if/how they revisit the phrase in future spots. I think these ad spots are not meant to be examined individually, they work as one long commercial, sort of how the Cloverfield ad campaign was all part of the experience, almost like a treasure hunt. I guess some parallels to “Lost” work here, too. Like somebody posted in the comments on Grant’s blog, it’s too early to tell if this is a good campaign or not.

But I’m definitely a fan, if not for the sheer volume of discussion the ad has generated.

UPDATE: Here is the second spot, the longer version.

On one hand, McCain’s decision to pick Sarah Palin as his vice president candidate was a genius marketing move. The Obama camp was telling a story about political change, and how John McCain would bring more of the same tried politics. People – especially in the Obama camp – were expecting McCain to pick a Mitt Romney or a Mike Huckabee for VP, and that would have fit the story of “more of the same”.

But McCain took that punchline away with one swift stroke. He changed the story.

For the next few days, people will concentrate less on “more of the same” but more on “bold choice”. If the story you’re telling isn’t working, tell a new story. And this is what makes this choice of VP a great marketing move. Kinda like running a great AD that gets a lot of buzz.

But the question is, where does the story go from here? Meaning what happens when the ad has run its course and people get to actually see the product. This is where this story turns into a potential marketing disaster. As some pundits have already noted, she’s unknown, woefully unqualified and a total mismatch for liberal Hillary voters, the voters she was presumably going to fetch. She also puts a damper on any accusations about Obama’s inexperience, the “other” story the republicans had going.

She’s a bold and very risky choice, but then again, a safe choice would have been playing right to the hands of the Obama camp.

We’ll see how the story goes from here.

This came out on top with a rather hefty percentage of the total votes (33.8%):

Now, I’m not going to argue taste and say that the one I voted for was any better. But it’s pretty safe to say that the winner is and was the safe choice. The vanilla of postcards.

I guess most people like bland, they don’t like the ordinary challenged in any way. The other postcards did not look like postcards, so they didn’t get the votes. But where they lacked in postcard-likeness, they made up for in originality. And in my opinion, they told a better story about Helsinki than the winner. Then again, a cynic might say that the blandness is spot on in its truthfulness. Maybe the majority of the people really are just that, bland?

It’s a fair point. The only small brand I’ve featured in this blog was Gym Jones and the only Finnish brand has been Nokia. But the thing is, I don’t think Finland has that many brands that could qualify as iconic brands, at least in the sense of portraying an identity myth. One reason is the size of our market and our relatively late industrialization, but another reason is that we’ve been notoriously lagging in the grand art of marketing. The only brands I could think of when chatting with Mikko were Marimekko, Iittala and maybe Ivana Helsinki, and with each of them I have a hard time conceptualizing an identity myth that could be clearly identifiable. Marimekko probably comes closest with its timeless and unwavering design (as Mikko said), but as said, that in itself doesn’t make for an identity myth yet.

An iconic brand?

However, when I got home I remembered a great example of cultural branding in Finland that my friend Viola had in her master’s thesis. It’s the case of Karjala (Karelia), a Finnish beer brand. As this (Finnish) Wikipedia page shows, Karjala’s sales were modest in the 1960s until the Soviet ambassador Andrei Kovaljov stated that its nationalistic imagery and name were insulting to the USSR. This created a nationalistic movement that boosted the beer’s sales immensely. Karjala got swooped up into the national dialogue and became a key and credible prop in culture, although not by its own doing (which might often be even for the better). People even had a saying in those days: “Let’s bring Karelia back, even though it’s one bottle at a time!”

Fast forward to 1994 and the beer brand decided to start sponsoring the Finnish national hockey team, and when the team won the hockey gold medal a year later the brand saw significant increases in its sales. Karjala had dipped into its heritage of nationalistic pride and gotten lucky, yet again, with circumstances that were out of its control. One could argue that any beer brand could have done the same, but I feel that the key issue here was Karjala’s nationalistic heritage, that had lived on since the 1960′s onwards. Another brand might’ve seen a small increase in sales, but Karjala saw massive gains thanks to their place in Finnish culture. It goes without saying though, that Karjala should look to reinvent its myth, I doubt that the nationalistic angle from the 90s is still resonant with culture, but that’s a whole other issue.

Karjala continues to leverage its place in Finnish culture

I also somewhat disagreed with Mikko that American culture and European culture (and Finnish culture for that matter) are so different that you can’t necessarily take from American cases examples and try to apply them here. It’s true that nearly all of Douglas Holt’s work is based in America, and I’m sure that it gives the theories a distinctive flair. But popular culture has been converging for a long time now, and the Internet has only accelerated this trend. We same a lot of the same memes, anecdotes and stories with our American counterparts. And as Joseph Campbell has shown with his work, idenitity myth as are universally identifiable. I’m sure Finland has its own versions to, for example, the American “man of action” myth, one example that immediately springs to mind is Koskela, the mythic character from Väinö Linna’s books.

From the article (in Finnish, sorry):

Yläsen mielestä Yhdysvallat varsinkin sellaisena, miksi Hollywood sen klassisella kaudella kuvasi, oli Suomen kaltainen, herroja kunnioittamaton raivaajakansa, joka oli oppinut tulemaan toimeen omin avuin.

“Sä et tyrkytä apua, koska kaikilla on samat edellytykset, kaikki pärjäävät itse.”

So it seems that Finnish and American culture might have more in common than previously thought.

It’s also very important to note that in many ways America could be seen as a testing ground for branding, because their consumer culture is so much more saturated in terms of choice and amount of advertising compared to us. I’d also argue that this leads to a higher “consumer literacy level”, as I had argued in my thesis. So in effect, America consumer culture is paving the way for European brands.

It has to do with typecasting. Certain actors get certain roles over and over again, which has its advantages and disadvantages. When Sylvester Stallone was doing action movies with over the top macho performances, he could price himself very highly because such movies (or rather, such role models) were in high demand, but as the cultural demand for tough male role models dried off in the 1990s’, he had a hard time reinventing himself. Only recently has he been able to make his return as the macho male, only because our culture has shifted in such a way that conservative values and the “man of action” (as Douglas Holt calls it) is in high demand again.

Some actors are able to avoid typecasting and can credibly play a multitude of characters. Philip Seymour Hoffman is one, but even he had to struggle after he made it big in Happiness and Magnolia, he was close to being typecast as a sort of interesting loser. His character was modified for Magnolia so it was more in line with his character in Happiness. Your previous movies determine what kind of roles are offered in the future (and what people expect from you), and I guess you’re as interesting as your latest film.

Brands are similar to actors in this sense. Microsoft is hopelessly typecast. So is Apple, although right now they are benefiting from this massively. But what most people (especially Apple fanatics) don’t seem to realize that their myth (synonym for typecast) may change in relevance, as well as where this kind of myth has demand.

Grant McCracken has written about the parallels of branding and Hollywood, or rather how branding should conducted, in his blog extensively. This post particularly hit the nail in the head in arguing that companies should approach marketing opportunities with the same agility as movie studios: create hot teams around emerging cultural topics, and deliver a product.

I’m now playing around with the idea as to how brand managers should see their jobs as “agents” for their brands. Is it better to resist your brand be typecast by branching out to different roles (in emotional branding this would be called “adding layers to the brand’s extended identity) or rather embrace it and just find the right roles for your brand’s myth? Is the best possible brand a Daniel Day Lewis or a Tom Cruise (pre going insane)? Should an agent be representing many brands and how the brands’ relationships should mesh?

It’s a work in progress.