November 18, 2008

Making ads speak

DSC00079 Yesterday, I talked about the reinvention of the photograph.  A couple of days ago, I found myself reading a charming essay on how we might reinvent the Google ad.  

Hal Roberts points out in the early days of advertising, it was customary to include jingles in printed copy.  As Roberts puts it, 

"The idea of advertising as poetry seems quaint today, but actually more possible in the age of the text only AdWords format. It’s striking that AdWords today consists only of straightforward sells."

Striking indeed and a little depressing.  Anthropologically, the interesting thing about ads is that they are constantly inhaling and exhaling culture meanings.  Good ads are simple acts of Aristotelian metaphor.  They take meaning from the world and invest it in the product, brand or service.  Clearly, this "respiration" doesn't happen at all when the copy writer is restricted to copy.  

Naturally some people will say that cutting advertising off at the knees as Adsense does is a good thing.  After all, advertising is a bad thing.  So speaks Barber, Ewen, Galbraith, Klein and Riesman.  But in fact I think advertising has been a very interesting way for our culture to rehearse its option, canvass its possibilities, and rebuild and various buff and polish as it seeks to stay in touch with its own dynamism.  So speak Brantlinger, Cowen, Docker, Dickstein, Pells and Susman. 

What to do about Google ads?  Roberts charming idea is that we should resusitate jingles. Splendid.  How about some images while we're ad it.  I am not saying 4 color, 2 page layouts or anything.  Just a little something more than a handful of words..  I'm saying let's open up the door to meaning that it might flourish even here.  

References

Roberts, Hal.  2008.  Watching Technology from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. November 12, 2008. here.    

Barber, Benjamin R. 1995. Jihad Vs. McWorld.New York: Time Books/Random House.  

Brantlinger, Patrick. 1983. Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay.Ithaca:Cornell University Press.  

Cowen,Tyler  1998.  In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  

Docker, John. 1994. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. New York: Cambridge University Press. 

Dickstein, Morris. 1999. Leopards in the Temple: The transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  

Ewen, Stuart. 1976. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.  

Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1958. The Affluent Society. Boston : Houghton Mifflin.  

Klein, Naomi. 2000. No logo: no space, no choice, no jobs taking aim at the brand bullies. Toronto : A.A. Knopf .  

Pells, Richard H. 1989. The liberal mind in a conservative age: American intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. Middletown : Wesleyan University Press.  

Riesman, David. 1964. Abundance for what?  Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.  

Susman, Warren I. 1984. Introduction: Toward a history of the culture of abundance: some hypotheses.  Culture as History: The transformation of American society in the Twentieth century. Pp. xix-xxx. New York: Pantheon Books.

Post script:

My apologies for the mixing of typefaces.  Google's chrome and Typepad continue to play together only under supervision and even then too often it ends in tears.  

Posted by Grant McCracken at 07:25 PM in Advertising Watch | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 17, 2008

Photos

Andrew Keller, left, with Rob Reilly by Peter Yang for Fast Company article on Alex Bogusky by Danielle Sacks I was reading Danielle Sacks' article on Alex Bogusky the other day, and I was reminded of how much I liked one of the companion photos.  


This is Andrew Keller (on the left) and Rob Reilly, co-executive creative directors at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Coconspiring with photographer Peter Yang and Fast Company, Andrew and Rob demurred when asked to offer up the standard photo.  They gave us this. (If all motion picture images are really still, this still is superbly motionful.)

Let's face it, the portrait photo has been waiting to be put out of its misery for some time now. Those most rebellious of creatures, the rock and roll artist, still submit for magazine photos, but you can tell it costs them what's left of their artistic integrity to do so.  How many ways can you glower at the camera?

The business journalism is worse than the music press.  It's all stand and deliver.  Shoulders squared.   Chin up.  I am, the sitter says, that perfect balance of stability and imagination.  You may invest with confidence in me.  

Dude.  In a culture that prizes innovation, cranking out the same old photo sends another message altogether.  Something like: um, I haven't had a new idea in a very long time.  

Hats off to Keller, Reilly, Yang, Sacks and Fast Company.  

References

Sacks, Danielle.  2008.  Can Alex Bogusky Help Microsoft Beat Apple?  Fast Company.  Issue 126.  June. here.

Posted by Grant McCracken at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 14, 2008

Comfort food for everyone

Free form II Isermann “Idiosyncratic volatility is the signature of our economic age.”

Harris Collingwood said this five years ago, but I am beginning to see what he means. Our economy and our culture is now awash with conflicting signals and wildly alternative alternatives.

There are many questions.  My favorite: What happens next?  Typically, I then ask: What happens after that?  Often, I follow up with: And then what happens?  Yikes, where to start? How to stop?  And what if the sky is falling?

Many of the people who read this blog make their living listening for weak signals.  It's our job to see new patterns early...and then weave them together with other bodies of knowledge...and divine the strategic implications.  Our job is turn weak signals into strong indicators.  

In present circumstances, this is hard.   If we are capable of hearing very tiny sounds, this much noise is deafening.  It's a like wearing infrared goggles when someone turns the lights on. Blamo. Too much data.  

But it's worse than that.  People who do what we do are good at imagining the unimaginable. And the new unimaginables are staggering.  Most people can think a little bit "outside the box." Those of us who leave it routinely have been thrown well clear.  Some of us are wondering which "box" it was again we thought we were living in.  Challenge enough assumptions and the assumption hunters among us threaten to come undone.  

Anyhow, that's the point of this post.  I am giving everyone the weekend off.  Put down the headphones, the infrared glasses, and all the other instruments of detection.  Order pizza or your favorite comfort food.  Call all the family and the pets to assemble in front of the TV. And watch the junkiest thing you can find.  This too shall pass.  

References

Collingwood, Harris.  2003.  The Sink-or-Swim Economy.  The New York Times.  June 8, 2003.

Acknowledgements

This post is dedicated to a friend who is feeling the effects of "idiosyncratic volatility" with a special, a characteristic sensitivity.  

Posted by Grant McCracken at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 12, 2008

MIT Futures of Entertainment

MIT FoE3 The MIT Futures of Entertainment is meeting in Cambridge, November 21 and 22.  This is year 3.  


You can get all the details here.  Hope to see you there.  Please do say hi.  

Here's how the MIT website describes the event:

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media.Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.

And that was the stunning thing last year for me, seeing the an idea that has been for some time a bee in the MIT bonnet, Jenkins' idea of convergence culture, was now fundamental to the way in which many players in Hollywood now see their work.

Here are some of the people involved:

  • Kim Moses - Executive Producer The Ghost Whisperer
  • John Caldwell - UCLA, Production Culture (Duke University Press)
  • Henry Jenkins - MIT, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press)
  • Yochai Benkler - Harvard Law School, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press)
  • Rishi Dean - Vice President Product Strategy, Visible Measures
  • Anne White - VP Programming & Creative, PRN by Thomson
  • Anita Elberse - Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School
  • Sabrina Calouri - Director, Marketing and Promotions of HBO online
  • Renée Ann Richardson - Harvard Business School
  • Alex McDowell - Production Designer, Watchmen
  • Kevin Slavin - Area/Code
  • Grant McCracken - Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture(Indiana University Press)
  • Robert Ferrari - Vice President of Business Development, Turbine Inc.
  • Amanda Lotz - University of Michigan, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press)
  • Gail De Kosnik - UC Berkeley, The Survival of Soap Opera: Strategies for a Digital Age (With Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington)
  • Joe Marchese - socialvibe.com
  • Amber Case - Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant, Hazelnut Consulting
  • Maurício Mota - Director of Strategy and Business Development, New Content (Brazil)
  • Alisa Perren - Georgia State University, The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing)
  • Sharon Ross - Columbia College Chicago Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet(Wiley-Blackwell)
  • Nancy Baym - University of Kansas, Personal Connections in a Digital Age (Polity Press)
  • Alice Marwick - New York University
  • Vu Nguyen - VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com
  • Lance Weiler - Director Head Trauma and The Last Broadcast
  • Gregg Hale - Producer Seventh Moon and The Blair Witch Project
  • Tom Boland - Director of Interactive Marketing, World Wrestling Entertainment
  • Tom Casiello - Daytime Emmy Award-Winning former writer of As the World Turns, One Life to Live, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless
  • Peter Kim - Dachis Corporation

Posted by Grant McCracken at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 10, 2008

What's on? (giving TV the Talmudic treatment)

Verizon fios ad Pam and I amuse ourselves while watching TV by spotting small details and supplying the attribution.  It's an innocent connoisseurship and quite good fun on these dark wintery nights.

Pam is aces when it comes to identifying the person supplying the voice-over on ads.  She only needs a few syllables before she is taunting me with "who is that?  Oh that's easy."  I am obliged to say, "Um, is it, no, er, don't tell me, ok, I have no idea."  

And then I am given an idea.  Rather more triiumphantly than I would like: James Earl Jones! Gary Sinese!  Kieffer Sutherland!   Sally Kellerman!  I may not be very good at this but I do have my preferences.  I think Gene Hackman is just about perfect as the voice-over for Home Depot Loews, anyone for that matter.  And I think Richard Thomas (John-Boy in The Waltons) is spectacularly wrong for Mercedes (or, yes, anyone, really).   

My strength, if I can be said to have a strength, is spotting obscure precedents.  So I can tell you that the guy in the Verizon Fios TV ads who says, "We have some good stuff also," is using a style of speech that appears in the John Cusak movie High Fidelity.  (There are two assistants in the record store.  The bald one speaks like this.  It's kind of Martian, which is why I remembered it. But now I suspect it is not idiosyncratic after all.  Curious.  Where could it come from?  A small town in California?  Clearly, a thorough going anthropology is called for.   Unleash the hounds!)

Last week, I covered myself in glory, as I put it I think rather too loudly, by noting that the teenage girl who appeared as Oprah Winfrey's doppleganger in 30 Rock last week first appeared as the kid who asks interesting questions of Patricia Clarkson in The Station Agent. ("Who is she?  Oh, this is easy!")

One of the pleasures, one of the marks, of consuming popular culture is of course that we are better at it.  I think we were probably pretty good at it even in the 1950s, in the era of the "boobtube."  But now that popular is no longer a "guilty pleasure," now that it is frankly no longer popular culture but just culture, we are prepared to talk more openly about the pleasure we draw from seeing behind the scenes in this way and supplying our own exigetical expertise.

Acknowledgements

Thank you James Kirk.  

Posted by Grant McCracken at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

November 06, 2008

McCain Obama

Obama A European friend taunted me (and other bloggers) today for having nothing to say about the Obama victory. And of course I do have something to say.  It's my job.  (And in any case, I'm a chatter box.)  

Both Obama and McCain are in my opinion deeply honorable, admirable men.  So it was win-win from this anthropologist's point of view.  In addition to which, Obama is going to set many changes in train, and that is always interesting.  We are going to get to see what the systems(s) does under new and very different leadership.  Finally, Obama will accomplish social good and that's, er, very good.

But for someone who loiters at the intersection of anthropology and economics, there was a very plain difference between these two men.  They play out the enduring collision between culture and commerce.

Judged from the point of view of contemporary culture, McCain was as if from another planet. Right down to calling everyone "my friends" at the very moment he wanted to persuade us that he is not an old-style Washington politician.  (Does anyone else use this language?)  I understand the counter-argument.  When you have served your country as long, as bravely and as honorably as John McCain, you get to call the crowd anything you want.  It would be inauthentic to do otherwise.  

On the other hand, every time Senator McCain had a chance to address himself to something that resonated with contemporary culture, he didn't and plainly couldn't.  He is a creature of Washington, through and through.  And Washington doesn't understand culture, especially not the FCC and the Supreme Court, to judge from recent events.  This may be us it should be but let's be clear.  You cannot make yourself a compelling presence in our world unless you resonate with other parts of this culture.  Now, god knows there is right way and a wrong way to resonate and the last thing we want to do is to diminish the dignity of this man with suggestions that he go the painful route of Warren Beatty's performance in Bulworth.  But no one thinks this is a good idea, hopefully, not even Warren Beatty.  Even when McCain talked about being a "maverick," as he often does, he never managed to come anywhere near the term as it is now used in the new media, new markets, enterpreneurial sense divined so well, for instance, in Polly Labarre's book. 

We take for granted McCain understands how to make markets work.  But who knows even this may be unwise.  He is the guy who wanted to float mortgages.  On the other hand, we may assume that he knows that markets do better when you leave them alone.  (If only the government hadn't interfered with the sub-prime mortgage market.)

To get to Obama we have to cross the intersection of anthropology and economics.  (I had cross-walks and a light installed.  Recently, accidents at this corner have been horrifying!) Obama enjoys the advantage of belonging to a community that is now vastly influential. African Americans have made extraordinary contributions to fashion, movies, music, sports, and popular culture in the last 20 years. We might say that this wave helped get him to the White House.  And he is apparently a student of popular culture.

But if he gets culture, it's not clear he gets commerce.  It's not clear he understands that the best way to produce wealth is to stay out of the way of the marketplace.  Indeed he appears possessed of that favorite conviction that we can only do good by commission (doing stuff, passing laws, getting in there and fixing things).  What he does not appear to grasp is that, when it comes to markets, politicians do their best work by omission, by staying out of the way.  

May I say how strange it is that Republicans and other capitalists have yet to learn how to tell this story. It is so often their message, you would think by this time, and especially after Reagan, this would not be so very difficult.  

The larger question is whether Obama is a friend of the self organizing, emergent powers of the American economy or its enemy.  At this point we don't know.  Which is to say this quote from Drucker could go for him or against him.  

Innovation and entrepreneurship are thus needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as in businesses.  It is precisely  because innovation and entreprenurship are not “root and branch” but “one step at a time,” a product here, a policy there, a public service yonder; because they are not planned but focused on this opportunity and that need; because they are tentative and will disappear if they do not produce the expected and needed results; because in other words, they are pragmatic rather than dogmatic and modest rather than grandiose—that they promise to keep any society, economy, industry, public service, or business flexible and self-renewing. 

This might be precisely the way to describe the way Obama means to go about reform.  But there is some cause for uncertainty, not least becomes he comes from a university and a social service background where people are inclined to get in the way.  

But let's read on.  Drucker (now of course deceased and speaking to us via a book published in 1985) would appear to argue the case for caution. 

“Planning” as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy.  Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and entrepreurship has to be managed.  But innovation, almost by definition, has to be decentralized, ad hoc, tentative, flexible.  Indeed, the opportunities for innovation are found, on the whole, only way down and close to events.  They are not to be found in the massive aggregates with which the planner deals of necessity, in the difference between “The glass if half full” and “the glass I half empty” in the weak link in a process.  By the time the deviation becomes “statistically” significant” and therby visible to the planner, it is too late.  Innovative opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze. 

This is another way of saying, perhaps, that even if Obama is prepared to use the particular genius of American problem solving (that entrepreneurial approach to things), he cannot launch such a thing from Washington.  He's plainly smart enough.  Clearly, he is a gifted strategist and tactician.  I think the election tells us that.  But we shall have to wait and see if he possesses the real American gift for problem solving and his prepared (and permitted) to put it to work.  

References 

Drucker, Peter.  1985.  Innovation and entrepreneurship.  New York: Collins, pp. 254, 255.

For more on LaBarre's book, Maverick's at work, go here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jens Karl Kilgenstock for the prompt.  

Posted by Grant McCracken at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

November 05, 2008

homeyness triumphant

Homey ivy covered house A couple of days ago, I argued consumers would respond to the present economic downturn by "dwelling" instead of "surging." I argued that this change would be governed by cultural subroutine called "homeyness." (Both Virginia Postrel and Tyler Cowen were kind enough to point their readers to the post, and I am grateful for the coverage.)

It turns out that the world of marketing is picking up the theme, chiefly in its new attention to what WSJ writer Stephanie Kang calls "family and the warmth and safety of home." 

Pillsbury has a campaign called "home is calling."  This show a wide variety of characters (business man, woman at train station, girl at school) who click their heals as way to return to home and loved ones.  

I believe that this campaign is ill-advised.  Homeyness is not, indeed it is the very opposite of, a virtual, imaginary, or fantastic state of mind.  Homeyness is one of the great foundational part of our culture because it is so very literal, actual, and there.  No clicking of heels, no Wizard of Oz metaphors, no "transportation" should be used here.  With apologies to Gertrude Stein (who complained of Oakland that there was no there there), home is precisely where the there is, for most of us.  Home is our most substantial there.  

Toys "R" Us is reviving an old jingle and here too I think the strategy is ill advised.  Greg Ahearn, senior vice president of marketing at Toys "R" Us says that the play here is "nostalgia" but homeyness is an entirely "in the moment" experience.  Evocation of another time is as mistaken as the evocation of another place (the Pillsbury play). 

Faith Popcorn is quoted in Kang's article and she is right to say we are in a state of shock. This means we want the comfort not in a virtual home or another place, but in the most protected, controlled, personal, intimate and actual of our heres and nows.

Kang reports that other brands are having a go at the homeyness theme, including Ragu, Mastercard, Ikea, and J&J.  As it often the case, the brand manager  and the agency leaps in the right direction but ends up in the wrong place.  It is important to have more than a navigational vector when surveying the creative, branding opportunity.  In a perfect world, we are also in command of the anthropological particulars. 

Reference

Kang, Stephanie.  2008.  Marketers Take a Softer Tack to Reach Uneasy Consumers.  Wall Street Journal.  November 4, 2008.  

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  What consumers do in a downturn.  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  October 22, 2008. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Homeyness: a cultural account of one constellation of consumer goods and meanings.  Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meanings, and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22-47.  Available from Amazon.com here.   

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sue and her website How to Keep House here for the image.  This house captures one of the seven symbolic properties of the homey home.  

Posted by Grant McCracken at 02:07 PM in Anthropology of Contemporary Culture | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 03, 2008

Jameson wins the Holberg?

Jameson I just saw the announcement for the Holberg International Memorial Prize.  This year the award goes to Fredric R. Jameson.  In addition to this great honor, Dr. Jameness will receive  4.5 m NOK (roughy, $775,000 USD).

I have one question: Jameson?  This man has been a one-man wrecking crew in the humanities and social sciences.  He will leave the academic world poorer than he found it.  

I do not mean this merely polemically. 

Here's Louis Menand's on the state of the American academy:

What happened to the humanistic disciplines happened in two stages, and we are just emerging (if we are in fact to emerge) from the second stage. In the beginning, what took place was not a redefinition of disciplinarity so much as a kind of antidisciplinarity. Academic activity began flowing toward paradigms that defined themselves essentially in antagonism towards traditional disciplines.

Menand detects here,

a widely diffused skepticism about the universality of any particular line of inquiry or pedagogy, and a rigorously enforced suspicion of the notion of "rigor." In English, the discipline that seems, to its own practitioners and to others, the most thoroughly at sea, the mood is more of bewilderment than anything else.

Oh, splendid.  A scholarship derailed by antidisciplinarity.  An enguiry that is post-paradigmatic. Well, no one really cares what a college professor does with his career.  But rewarding him with honors of this order, that just seems wrong. Shouldn't bewilderment be its own reward?

References

Menand, Louis.  2001.  The Marketplace of Ideas.  American Council of Learned Societies. No. 49.  here.

For more on the Holberg Prize, go here.

Acknowledgements

With thanks for the photograph to Holbergprisen/Andrea Friestad Nyland.

Posted by Grant McCracken at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

October 30, 2008

Small talk, Ziva and art: more thoughts on 'culture above' and 'culture below'

Chaval brasil umbrella at canal from flicr When I was in Charlotte last week, I noticed my taxi driver had a copy of Common American Phrases in Everyday Contexts: a detailed guide to real-life conversation and small talk. I paged through it on the way to the airport and thought, "this is a book I have to have."  It came today from Amazon.  Here are a couple of outtakes.  

You bet your life.

That's the last straw.

You make me laugh (never said by someone who is laughing)

Shake the lead out.

I need a change of scenery.  

We know these phrases.  They are deeply familiar and we "get" them immediately.  

Now let's pretend we are recently arrived from Gambia, struggling to learn American English, and hearing these phrases for the first time.   What we are doing is eliminating all the cultural knowledge with which we normally meet and greet these phrases, the stuff we know because we're "from" this culture.  Without this knowledge, these phrases are strange.  ("I bet my what?")

Ziva by Cote de Pablo Let's call this the Ziva effect, after the character on NCIS. Trained Israeli assassin, Ziva is smart, beautiful and dangerous, but she always gets the little phrases wrong. She retrieves them from their familarity.  

Now consider these:

See you!

I've changed my mind.

Come back anytime.  

Care to dance?

These are a little more submerged.  They are harder to see as aribrary.  Our first reaction (ok, my first reaction) is to say, "these aren't arbitrary.  These don't demand cultural knowledge.  If you know the literal meaning of the terms, you understand the phrase."  Not so fast.  Culture is operating even here.  We must supply cultural knowledge to understand these phrases.  This is another way of saying that even when we're looking for the way culture shapes we see the world, it's sometimes hard to see.

Ok, that was "culture below."  Now to "culture above."  Thanks to Tom Harle, I learned today about Creative30, a website by Volvo dedicated to telling the stories of 30 creative people in the UK.  It really is fantastically interesting.  The clips are fleeting, but the data comes pouring in.  And I sat there thinking, what a wonderful assignment for anyone interested in doing anthropology.  I will issue the official competition tomorrow.  The task, for someone who wants a head start, is something like this.  Take 5 of the 30 artists and write them up in 1000 words.  Examine the clips, examine their art and activities, and give us what Geertz would have called a "cultural account."  What do these people think they are doing?  How are they doing it.  What are the cultural rules in evidence here? What relationship does this art have to the mainstream culture?  

I will withhold my own thoughts on the matter, but let's just say this.  Spears' book on common phrases give us a glimpse of "culture below," culture operating beneath the threshhold of consciousness, active but invisible, longlived, descending to us from "time out of mind" usually.  The Volvo Creative 30 site gives us something close to "culture above", that stream of novel artifacts being invented a culture's edge, as it were. This culture typically comes from people inventing and applying grammars that are unclear and emergent.  What's interesting is that they "get" some of their rules but not all of them.  There is culture at work here that these cultural innovators cannot see.  

My long standing argument: we are relatively good at monitoring and thinking about culture above.  This is after all precisely what a cool hunter is called upon to do.  What we must add to the undertaking, if we wish to give a genuinely thoroughgoing account of our world, is a new interest and feeling for "culture below."  It's not all that flashy.  It is not ,God knows, the latest thing.  But it is keenly important, and not only to taxi drivers in Charlotte recently arrived from Gambia.  

References

Spears, Richard.  2003.  Common American Phrases in Everyday Contexts.  New York: McGraw-Hill.  

Tom Harle's website here

The Volvo Creative30 website here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Chaval Brasil for the image.  See Chaval's Flickr bio here.

Posted by Grant McCracken at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

October 29, 2008

Noise in the signal

Last night on The Mentalist, the police were interviewing a suspect and the suspect was complaining.

He says (something like),

"When you weigh what I do, women don't even notice you. I'm just not a good looking guy."

One of the detectives (Tim Kang) says (something like),

"That's not true. If you went on a diet that was low on fat and rich on protein, you'd look completely different."

And he says it earnestly. Obviously, the detective a) had thought about this sort of thing a lot, and b) felt he had to share.

The chief detective (Robin Tunney) smiles a little smile. She is charmed.

And we're charmed too. So far, this has been a grueling interrogation, the police humorless and unrelenting, the suspect openly scornful of their authority. For the detective to hold forth in this way goes against the grain of the event, the script that informs every interrogation, and the role the detective has played in this interview so far.

A couple of days ago, I was commenting on the dialog in a recent episode of Life On Mars. A detective (Michael Imperioli) has offered what he thinks is an analogy, and conversation then turns on what an analogy is. I don't remember conversations of this kind happening on The Rockford Files. In fact, I think we watched the Rockford Files with the implicit promise that we were never going to hear the word "analogy" or watch characters break from character.

Dialog in the Rockford Files had a job to do: move the plot along. If necessary, it could provide emergency service. If things got muddy, if the plot was unclear, dialog would step in and offer exposition. As in, "So you're saying the butler did it!" Remarks were never "stray," dialog didn't wander. Philosophical speculation and idle advice was not forthcoming.

The police procedural has been with us for the beginning of recorded history. (The cave paintings in the south of France? Obviously an equine chase scene.) And now it's on the rise. CBS owes its current success to the fact that it is all about the procedural.

But notice that this sort of dialog signals, or may signal, that something is trying to tunnel out of the procedural. In this the most formulaic of the TV shows, there are stray remarks and wandering dialog everywhere. And we are charmed.

Of course, this might be a kind of cultural gilding. Everyone party the police procedural is better than the form. The producer, the writers, the actors, all have skills and sophistication the Rockford team could not dream of. So, inevitably, we are going to see a high caliber of work "leaking" out of the prime time TV. How could it not?

Or maybe interesting dialog is something like the crouton in a Caesar salad, there merely to add variety, texture, novelty. It's not really essential, but it adds something to the pleasure of the programming.

But there's another possibility: that even a form as well defined as the police procedure is evolving out of its traditional tough talk form.

Posted by Grant McCracken at 04:18 PM in Anthropology of Contemporary Culture | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

October 27, 2008

A new blog compendium

There's a new blog compendium here at THIS BLOG.  You can see it's "cover" to the right of this post.  

This compendium collects about 45 posts on being anthropologist for hire.   It's intended for those who might like to make anthropology their vocation and avocation.  

Click on the line that begins "Download..." and you will go to a PDF that will in turn serve as a jumping off point.  You come back to this PDF by hitting the RETURN button on your browser.

Hope you like it.  

Post script plea:

If anyone knows how I can make the cover itself "clickable," please let me know.  

Posted by Grant McCracken at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

October 24, 2008

click here

This blog compendium is meant to show you how to be an anthropologist for hire. 

Anthropology can be your vocation and avocation . You can do it by day...for clients.  And you can do it by night...for yourself.  At night, you are an anthropologist "without portfolio."  You are working on your own projects...by your own lights...for your own purposes. (My consulting work has funded 8 books and this blog.)

Click on any rectangle to go to the post.

Best,

Grant

Posted by Grant McCracken at 09:25 PM in how to be a self-funding anthropologist | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 23, 2008

Finding joy in a joyless economy

DSC00111 Yesterday, I offered a couple of thoughts on what consumers do in a recession.  They cease surging, I argued, and started dwelling.  By "dwelling" I mean the metaphor, not the literal activity. 

But in fact the pun is apt.  When consumers slow down and begin to concentrate on the here and now, the what and the where of their activity is often the home. Dwelling is what consumers do instead of buying. 

And in a sense this reverses the Scitovsky effect.  You will remember Scitovsky's book The Joyless Economy and his argument that the trouble with a consumer society is that the pleasure of ownership soon degrades into mere comfort.  It's not long before we  take our new possessions for granted. 

What the consumer does in a down economy is roll back the Scitovsky effect.  We begin to treasure things.  We re-engineer the comfort to get back to pleasure.  We begin to savor things again.

One of the things we especially savor is the home.  Home, and hearth and heart, this becomes the new geographical center of our lives. 

Some brands have always taken an interest in home.  Ikea is one of these.  Here's a lovely little ad that captures the tone of dwelling creativity and it may well work a path for future marketing.

References Scitovsky, Tibor.  1976.  The Joyless Economy.  New York: Basic Books

See the Ikea campaign here.

For another Ikea campaign, see a brilliant piece of work by Max Hattler for Beattie McGuinness Bungay here.  (The homeyness offers up lots of creative options.)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Katie Rook again for the conversation in which the aptness Scitovsky notion occurred to me and to Edward Cotton for telling me about the Ikea campaign.

Credits for the second spot Director - Max Hattler Client - IKEA Production Company - Bermuda Shorts Producer - Lisa Hill Agency - Beattie McGuinness Bungay Creatives - Trevor Beattie & Simon Bere Agency Producer - Jane Oak

Posted by Grant McCracken at 09:25 AM in Anthropology of Contemporary Culture | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

October 22, 2008

What consumers do in a downturn

Dsc00111_6 Roughly speaking, consumers have two modalities: surging and dwelling.

In the surging modality,  consumers have momentum.  We have a vivid sense of forward motion.  Life is getting better.  Each purchase is an improvement onthe last one.  Clothes change with fashion.  The material world teems with new features, new things, new opportunities, new excitement.  We look ahead constantly, keeping one foot in the present, putting one in the future.  The good life is America is always a better life. That's the fundamental promise of the consumer society. 

In the dwelling modality, the consumer is not forward looking, but concentrated on the here and now.  Now most of life's pleasure comes from counting one's blessings.  This is a dwelling modality, because the individual is no longer in transit, racing towards a better tomorrow.  Now the consumer is focused on what is good about what one has.  The consumer stops anticipating and starts savoring. 

We have to move from a surging modality to a dwelling modality when the economy suddenly "softens" and "goes south."  And there is no gear box.  There is no single or simple way of gearing down from "in motion" to "in place."  It's one of those deals where the consumer must perform his own "interrupt" (to steal a term from Information Processing), see that the world has changed, see that something new is called, identify what is called for, embrace it fast, and hold it tight. 

It's weird that in our economy/culture we go through the surging-modality transition something like once a decade, and you would think this would be enough to prompt us to formalize the transition.  I mean, shouldn't we have a ritual or something?  But no. We leave to the individual to figure this out for him or herself. (Those who do not see that the world has changed, may get the news from Donny Deutsche or Suzi Orman.)

But there is a culture form that works especially while as a set of instructions for how to dwell.  It's called "homeyness."  This is the set of instructions in an American's head, the one that helps show them how to turn houses into homes.  As culture codes go, it is an amazingly detailed and helpful as a set of instructions.  I wrote about this in Culture and Consumption II.  Those who are interested in further details are urged to consult this essay. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Homeyness: a cultural account of one constellation of consumer goods and meanings.  Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meanings, and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22-47.  Available from Amazon.com here.   

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Katie Rook for the question. 

Posted by Grant McCracken at 02:51 PM in Anthropology of Contemporary Culture | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)