Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

Other than “the medium is the message”, I think Marshall McLuhan’s most important idea was how a new medium reveals more of the old ones it seeks to replace. McLuhan also taught us that new media channels almost never wipe out the previous ones, they just reorganize our media priorities and assign new roles to old media.

Marshall McLuhan

For example, cinema didn’t kill theater, it changed our perception of it and it became a more high class medium. We didn’t appreciate the richness in storytelling books provided until TV came along. Back in the day, TV pushed cinema into more of a spectacle medium (colors, 4:3 to widescreen, high quality sound effects etc.), and this progress is still continuing with 3D movies making a comeback. To put things in perspective, even the telegram (you know “I love you. stop. send food. stop”, THAT telegram) wasn’t discontinued until 2007, and even then over 20 000 telegrams were sent annually in the US. So the so-called “wipe-out scenarios” of new media just pummeling over old ones never really work.

This is something to keep in mind the next time you read a piece on how TV is “dead”. I think we’re in the process of seeing broadcast TV being redefined, as people start to realize what TV has to offer in contrast to downloading TV shows and watching them on your computer. For all the convenience that watching TV shows on demand has to offer, I think a lot of people are failing to see what they are giving up when they switch away from scheduled programming. I got a firsthand reminder of this last spring when I was watching the Eurovision song contest (yes, I know) with a bunch of friends. The atmosphere in the room was great and vibrant, people were engaging with the show and commenting every act with vigor. You can’t get that kind of atmosphere while watching it the next day on your laptop.

Somebody might argue that this is only true for live broadcasts or major TV events, like the season finale of a popular show or the Superbowl. I agree with this, but I also think that inevitably this might mean that all TV programming is either live or original programming (meaning very few reruns). One of the main arguments for the popularity of reality TV has been that it’s cheap to produce. This is certainly true, but I think it also comes back to the disposable nature of television programming nowadays where reruns aren’t profitable anymore and more current (preferably live) TV is favored. Also, as Grant notes, reality TV is often more on the pulse of culture, and this is its main appeal:

Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap. It is by no means a “raw feed.” That is YouTube’s job. But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is “stealing signals” from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit.

The social aspects of TV aren’t limited to people watching in the same room. Even if a show isn’t important enough to “warrant” inviting your friends over, broadcasters are trying to make TV more social. NPR: Marketers Vie For TV Viewers Who Web Surf

Studies now show a significant number of TV viewers have computers perched on their laps while watching TV. They’re googling, searching and chatting online while watching football games and reality shows. Producers of TV shows and commercials are trying to capitalize on the trend.

We’re definitely in a transition period, it’ll be interesting to see to what TV will “regress into”, to quote McLuhan.

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.

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.

Here’s the second guest lecture I did for the “Brands in Strategic Marketing” course at HSE. A lot of stuff crammed into 45 minutes, but I think I got the message through.

There were a few example videos I used, and here they are, in order of presentation. They’re in the embedded presentation as well, but some folks might want the direct links.

William Shatner’s “Rocketman” performance at the 1978 Science Fiction Movie Awards
Family Guy version of the the Rocketman performance
Coke’s classic “Mean Joe Green ‘Have a Coke and smile’” cultural branding ad
Pepsis’ spoof of Coke’s ad with David Beckham
Jordan Brand XXI ad with kids all over the world doing Michael Jordan impersonations

In my last post I talked about how the copyright wars were reframing the meaning of “criminal”, and in a post before that, I had expressed my worry that on the internet, being “in the know” or even being “first” were values that trumped even empathy. Both of these phenomena represent (to me at least) the darker side of the web, or at least they are an indication of still-developing social codes.

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.

We’re all criminals in some sense, be it jaywalking, littering or some other petty crime. Laws are rarely followed to the letter; each society and culture has their norms for how much bending the law is OK. Society’s norms need to be quite stable for a society to function, and these norms also guide national ideals (the other way around, too), which in turn guide our identity construction, and thus our consumption.

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: