Both of these relate to a subject I had sworn I wouldn’t touch because it has been covered to death in other blogs and I found the subject just a tad too sensationalist for this blog, but the conclusion of this phenomenon and how it highlights contemporary culture was just too important for me to ignore.

Here in Finland, the ad world has been abuzz about a certain 20 000€ personal ad that was taken out in the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. In the ad, some man is calling after a woman he had seen and fallen for in a bar here in Helsinki. The buzz around the ad has been basically regarding if it is a viral campaign or not, and if it is, which agency did it and for whom?

Well, to the joy of romantics all over, behind the ad was a real person actually looking for his lost love. But what gave me a real pause was the way the man was discovered. The folks at Muro BBS had hacked his gmail account (which he had posted in the ad) by conning Google and thus salvaging the account’s password. This way they were able to discover the true identity of our digital Romeo.

I’m shocked that I have yet to see a single blog post or news piece condemning the way the identity was dug up, the only backlash I’ve seen was one poster at Stealthunit voicing his disapproval (his post was the inspiration for me writing about this). The method the Muro folks used was nothing short of a felony. The yellow press was more than happy to jump on the discovered identity and publish the man’s photo (albeit with his face blurred); I guess falling in love is no longer a private act in modern society, or at least one person’s right for privacy is secondary to the curious mob’s thirst for gossip. This is, to me at least, both a severe lapse of media literacy (the ad has been in the media, ergo he gets the celebrity treatment) and lack of social precedent guiding behavior. Since when has taking out a personal ad (granted, a 20 000€ personal ad) qualified as becoming a celebrity and forfeiting your privacy?

What I find ironic is that the Muro folks fit the demographic who are very vocal about protecting their own privacy on the web. But I guess compromising someone’s privacy is OK as long as it doesn’t happen to me. This is all very troubling to me, and I think it’s going to be a while until at least somewhat civil social codes are established on the internet.

Got this interesting piece from an old friend (no link, sorry) that details the current plight of the Republican party:

From the American Prospect, a quote from David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined “axis of evil”:

Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

This war is nothing if cultural. Conservative values have received a rather big gut check these past few years, and when the economy came down due to a lack of transparency (let’s just call it that, for simplicity’s sake) and when the White House was captured by Obama (who in many ways is really the antithesis to what Republicans stand for), that was the final knockout punch. Or at least then the crisis of conservatism became all too real for many of its followers.

You could sense a certain desperation from the conservative camp when John McCain pegged Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. It felt like a last-ditch effort for the road conservatives had been traveling for a while now (social conservatism, christian values, anti-elitism, free markets and tax cuts etc.) After the election, Bill Maher commented on Larry King Live that Sarah Palin was really a crossroads candidate for the Republican party. Now that the election is over, do they follow her, with what Bill called the “folksy, the candidate I’d rather have a beer with, know-nothing” rhetoric, or do they go back to their roots of being pro business, but not necessarily anti-intellectual?

Many who were “for” conservative values before the economic meltdown (or the Iraq war etc.) will and probably have jumped ship, rediscovering themselves as Keynesians (seems almost everybody swears by Keynes nowadays) and whatnot. And I’m not just talking about swing vote behavior, there might be more total transformations of identity for some, and given how easy people assume new identities nowadays through consumption and whatnot, many will not bat an eye over this.

These newly minted liberals are an interesting group to watch, but to me the “remaining” conservatives (both politicians and citizens) are even more interesting to watch. How do people react when much of their core beliefs are now being subject to such scrutiny, or even ridicule? After the election I saw quite a few calls from within the party to reinvent itself and appear more to the center – even make a more distinct break from the Christian right. So far the party has been pulled into opposite directions. The ones who want the party to stay where it is (or where it was going) are the ones who have used the most scathing rhetoric in attacking the centrists, and of course, liberals.

The selection of Michael Steele as the head of the RNC was widely seen as an outreach to minorities and possibly a first move towards the center, even though just putting a minority in such a position might not be that effective unless Steele shows some initiative on changing the party (there’s a black guy in the White House, remember?). By the way, in a rather candid interview with GQ, Steele himself said that the Republican party had trouble attracting minorities, because they give the impression that “we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them”. In the interview he also said some things about abortion and homosexuality that got the Christian right up in arms, and he was forced to apologize and retract those comments. As a side note, his critical comments on Limbaugh earlier resulted in an apology, too, showing the anxiety of the party trying to reinvent itself.

Paul Krugman has been hammering the GOP, saying that “I’m shocked by the total intellectual collapse of the Republican Party in the face of this economic crisis. [...] I suggested a little while ago that the GOP has become the party of Beavis and Butthead, reduced to snickering at line items in legislation that sound funny.” It’s kind of like the jocks at the back of the class who used to make jokes during math class, but are now seeing that nobody’s laughing with them anymore, and people are taking math seriously.

Anti-elitism that occasionally spills into outright anti-intellectualism has been a staple of the Republican party (justly or unjustly) pretty much from the times of Ronald Reagan, it appeals to much of their (christian) base. But the current level of anti-intellectualism and populism coming from the GOP does indeed seem almost excessive. My guess is that conservative values being challenged as they are might have this kind of polarizing effect, and I guess you could see some of that in how conservatives are attacking the left now. Like in a heated argument, if you are pushed or feel threatened, you will stick to your talking points even harder – even believing in them more. How long conservatives can keep going on like this, I don’t know. Perhaps at some point Obama’s political honeymoon will be over which will give conservatives a breather, but they have to address the major question of what they are going to stand for if they want to become relevant again.

From a popular culture perspective, it’s going to be interesting to see how conservative values are going to be treated in cultural products or in advertising. My guess is that there might be some imagery not unlike the anti-yuppie stereotypes of early 90s, but also some lighthearted stereotyping of conservatism. Maybe conservatism becomes sort of a guilty pleasure for mainstream America? Maybe self-irony is the way out for conservatism? But this is a topic for another post.

But, as a last note, I leave you with this post by Tyler Cowen where he plays with the idea of a truly marginalized republican party from different angles. The lack of true, formidable opposition could spell doom for Democrats as well.

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.

Still having trouble with editing the templates. WordPress keeps complaining that I need to make the files editable, and as I set the read/write rights properly, the blog just freezes. So I have to keep it on pretty much default settings. That’s why you have that “your ad here” below the first post. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna start advertising anytime soon.

I’ll probably try to modify the CSS file on my computer and just reupload it. But not right now.

UPDATE: Okay, everything is the way I like it now.

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.

It’s pretty darn awesome. And it’s spreading like crazy virally. It’s something even non-skateboarders will want to watch. And send on to their friends, some of whom likely are skateboarders. Or at least people willing to buy the video.

From a logistical/production perspective, I’m sure this move makes sense. A bigger can always gets you more scale benefits (well, not indefinitely, the cans need to stack as well) and offers the customers more variety, which can sometimes boost sales.

But still, I can’t help but think that this is a bad marketing move. Red Bull’s small size has a lot of meaning latched to it. I always thought the smaller can made people understand what it was but also what it definitely was not: soda. Because the can was smaller than a normal soda can, it meant that it’s more “potent”, in a way that you shouldn’t be drinking more than 0.25l at a time. Of course people WOULD drink more, but that was the whole idea. Also, the unique shape and size of the can made it stand out: it was a purple cow in the beverage shelf, especially compared to a lot of other energy drinks. Now they have a new bigger can on the shelf, which basically says that “sure, you can drink as much of this stuff as soda”. Also, the new can is big enough that it’s not remarkable anymore.

It’s similar to when Volkswagen tried to boost sagging Beetle sales by introducing the bigger Super Beetle (besides, I HAD to work some Cultural Branding linkage here!). The whole charm behind the Beetle was that it was small, and un-car-like. Making it bigger wasn’t the answer. I doubt the same is the answer for Red Bull.

I don’t think it’s that big of a secret anymore that presidential candidates in the United States (and over here in Europe, too) are managed almost as closely as some major corporate brands, probably even more so. All the top candidates have numerous aides and political strategists who constantly monitor voter reactions and manage their candidates accordingly. Sometimes it works (like with Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Clinton before him), sometimes it backfires (Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004), but it’s something that all serious candidates have to partake in.

Hillary Clinton is probably the most “managed” candidate of the presidential hopefuls still in the running. She has had a mountain to climb in selling herself as a serious candidate with an agenda, and not just being “Bill’s wife”, and she has done so quite successfully. But the thing is, I think her brand management may be going a bit too far, in that it’s starting to put voters off because she is so obviously playing to the crowd. For instance, take this video from the Daily Show:

Douglas Holt has an absolutely brilliant article called “Why do brands cause trouble?”, which sheds some light on the current anti-brand movement (such as Adbusters and why Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” was such a huge hit). Holt argues that brands and marketers in general are in a sort of arms race with consumers. As time passes, consumers become more media-savvy when it comes to marketers’ marketing efforts. The natural consequence is of course that once people realize HOW the marketers are trying to convince them of their products’ superiority, they become more immune to the tactics and eventually start to resent these marketing tactics and companies that engage in them. Or put it this way: once one politician goes for the baby-kissing gag, it will lose its effect each time it’s done over and eventually be resented as an obvious ploy for votes. For example, saturation of old marketing tactics, such as TV and magazine advertising, has lead to the rise of guerrilla marketing and other unconventional media. These media face, of course, a similar fate as TV and magazines as they become more saturated with competition and people become more conscious and simply bored of these tactics. One of the key findings of Holt is that consumers have become very anti-corporate as a result, which I will come back to later.

I think a similar phenomenon is happening in presidential branding. As the Daily Show clip illustrates, people and members of the media are very much aware that Hillary was essentially told by her strategists that she needs to laugh more because she’s considered too serious. Hillary’s not the only one, of course, (I saw a similar clip of Rudy Guliani) but as she was the Democrat front runner up until last week she probably held under closer scrutiny. It goes without saying that all these exposés on presidential candidates’ branding tactics reflect negatively on the candidates, because it makes them seem calculative, inauthentic and power-hungry. Which brings me to my point as to why I think Barack Obama has played his cards right up to now and why his surge in the polls could be due to his campaigning that reads like a good example of Cultural Branding.

As points out in his Cultural Branding theory, iconic brands originate from “populist worlds”, worlds removed from the cultural, political and commercial elite, which gives them considerable credibility and authenticity. If people on the “outskirts of society” accept a brand as a part of their ethos, the brand will seem authentic for the normal consumer as well (think Hell’s Angels and their relationship with Harley Davidson or punk rockers and Converse shoes in the late 70s’). I think Barack Obama qualifies here. His rise to political superstardom started from his great speech in 2004 after John Kerry’s loss, he was sort of “swooped up” into the presidential race, sort of like how a brand can be “discovered” and championed by influential users. He’s also relatively unknown as a freshman politician, where as Hillary is a Capitol Hill fixture and in many ways synonymous with politics. Obama may not be ideal in his populist world credibility, but he’s certainly better than anybody out there thanks to his “untaintedness”.

Another key aspect of Cultural Branding is that a brand needs to convey a sense of “purpose” other than the obvious of making money to retain their iconic status. This relates heavily to the anti-corporate attitude I mentioned earlier. People love to attack big brands (sometimes unfairly) when they engage in activity that they deem not supporting the brand’s “ideal” or even profiteering. Similarly, I think that a presidential candidate needs to show that he/she is in the presidential race not only because of some selfish, power-hungry motif. Vanity Fair had a great piece on the media’s perception on Al Gore in the 2000 election, in which the writer, Evgenia Peretz, argues that Gore lost in part because he looked like…

“[a] wonk so desperate to become president he’ll do or say anything, even make stuff up. It complemented perfectly the other son of a politician [Bush] running for president: irresistible frat boy who, when it came to the presidency, could take it or leave it.”

Similar rethoric can be found in this election, regarding Hillary Clinton, from Obama himself:

Sensing what he calls the “fierce urgency of now” – a line borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr – Mr Obama contrasts his motivation to be president with that of his nameless rival. “I am not running for president because I believe it is somehow owed to me or because I think it’s my turn,” Mr Obama says. “[I am running because] I believe we are on the cusp of building a new majority in America.” The applause spills over into whoops of enthusiasm.

I think that most political strategists have failed to see that because of their overtly image-obsessive tactics have been exposed, much like advertising tactics of old, people are more likely to ignore them and react negatively to them. It’s a time for authenticity and “underdogs” who speak in a rebel’s voice, as Holt puts it. Barack Obama has managed to avoid the lens of pundits like Jon Stewart for now, but as he’s become the clear front runner, he’s bound to be scrutinized more and he’s also bound to lose some of his challenger appeal. But to me it feel that Obama’s team has been micromanaging him less, unlike Hillary’s team, which makes him more authentic, and as it seems, more iconic.

As some of my readers (a total of three, no doubt) might know, I’m doing my master’s thesis in modern branding strategies. Of these, what speaks to me the most is Cultural Branding, which is championed by Douglas Holt. Cultural Branding is about creating iconic brands through myths that “solve” societal anxieties and speak to people’s most inner needs of belonging and self-identity. Cultural Branding is about managing brands as cultural objects that convey meaning in time. Brands are very much a part of our culture and vessels of our zeitgeist, very much like books and movies are. A coke bottle from the 1950s has a lot of cultural meaning attached to it, just like a VW Beetle from the 1960s, just to mention a few examples.

Cultural Branding calls for brand managers to become cultural anthropologists: looking for anxieties that stress people in their everyday lives and searching for tears in society that need repairing. To me, this means looking for the human elements that speak to people in new products, marketing campaigns and cultural phenomena. And this is what my blog is mostly going to be about. I’m trying to become more active in analyzing big cultural trends that surround us and advancement in new tech and social media, and look for that elusive “human factor” that makes or breaks the appeal.

I also fiddled with the layout a bit, which I freely admit sucked before. I’m still looking for that perfect banner image and making small corrections here and there. So it’s a work in progress…

BTW, I’m gutted that I forgot to include this link by ReadWriteWeb on hyperlocal information. It’s a good read, check it out.

There are some pretty cool trends in this field, for example Wi-Fi coming to cameras and other gadgets via cheap memory cards and of course Nokia is making moves towards this field with their acquisition of Naviteq. Also, geotagging seems to be working on Nokia phones now (got the link from Ville), so look for more from Finland’s big blue in this field.

I have no doubt that hyperlocal information is very much in our immediate future, but what I’m not so sure about is we’re going to act in this future once we get there. The Wired article to me reads as a typical techie’s wet dream where the human factors of such technologies are completely ignored. Most scenarios about hyperlocal information describe people wandering around cities while constantly being delighted by a nonstop push of information on restaurants or shops through their mobile phones. While I think some people might even enjoy this in some instances, I think traveling is about discovery and searching for unique experiences.

Brandchannel had an excellent article on the upcoming trend of exclusivity in social networks, which is well worth a read. Those of us who’ve been on Facebook longer than three months probably agree with the notion that once the gold rush to the site started, the place just hasn’t been the same anymore. You get invites to the dumbest of causes or applications (trust me, I’m guilty of sending out a few!) from friends and now most of them get the “ignore” reaction immediately. Sami N described that “Facebook apps are in general the 21st century equivalent of direct mail”, which I think is very accurate. I read a study for my thesis called “Dynamics of Viral Marketing” (which I can’t link here, sorry) that shows how rapidly word-of-mouth loses its effectiviness once the network becomes too active in its recommendations and if the network is not “tight” enough, meaning the connections between its participants are not meaningful enough. It’s a scary thought, if word-of-mouth goes, what’s left for marketers? Walling your social networks and getting to pick your friends are gonna be key in the future, or at least getting to organize your friends into different clusters with different access.

So how does this relate to hyperlocality? Well, unless the suggestions you get from your mobile phone display some sort of exclusivity, I think they are going to be ignored. I mean who wants to “discover” a shop that has been discovered by pretty much everyone? People don’t come home from New York and rave about their visit to Macy’s, it’s about the small boutiques in Brooklyn and the like. Some people might make a point of it to check if a café or small shop is NOT geotagged before patronizing them. So unless companies like Nokia manage to build some sort of exclusivity to the hyperlocal recommendations you get, I think their potential will not be fulfilled.

As Ville so eloquently put it in tonight’s Open Coffee, in the future people are going to be willing to pay for NOT being connected. If hyperlocality and social networks in general are driven by technology instead of human behavior, I’m afraid that his need for disconnectedness will hit us faster than we might think.