October 16, 2007 by jenks

across the universe’s “discovery strategy” model

first, you need to watch the trailer for sony pictures’ across the universe: here. if you cannot be trusted to come back here afterwards, however, you can just watch the shittier-quality youtube version:

ok then. now that you have been adequately briefed, we can begin.

i first saw the trailer for across the universe on quicktime.com in march and was not only blown away by how stunningly imaginative the visuals looked, but actually–i swear!–brought to tears by the drama of 60’s-era youth struggle depicted in just 2.5 minutes of preview footage! needless to say, i saw the movie opening weekend, six months later, and left the theater feeling beyond satisfied. the movie was so visually innovative and different it was like i’d just witnessed julie taymor–the director-slash-visionary best known for broadway’s “the lion king”– reinvent the very concept of movie a little bit.

i then proceeded to tell all my friends they should check it out, and even posted the preview on facebook. i was somewhat startled to discover the incongruent presence on the movie’s otherwise fairly unimaginative site of a special link that allows for easy one-stop posting of the preview directly to facebook. either this was incredibly nuanced forethought, or obviously tacked-on afterthought, i figured.

last friday, the LATimes weighed in on that debate, asking: Is this the next cult sensation? as you may have noticed, across the universe is a musical about teenagers. and while the plot-line is punctuated by beatles’ tunes, the fact that this coming-of-age movie didn’t find an audience with middle-aged boomers, who were part of the original “beatlemania,” apparently came as a marketing newsfalsh:

To judge by “Universe’s” trailer, which began screening in front of “Spider-Man 3” in May, it wasn’t immediately clear which genre “Universe” belongs to. Is it a coming-of-age story? A rock opera á la “Moulin Rouge”? A surrealistic period piece? (Answer: all the above.) Worse for marketers at Sony, the film’s distributor, contractual obligations bound them from hitting home with “Universe’s” primary selling point.

“Yoko Ono, Paul [McCartney], Ringo [Starr] and [George’s widow] Olivia Harrison were all supportive of the film, but I couldn’t use the Beatles name in any advertising,” Taymor recalled. “That didn’t make things easy. And you can’t advertise that you have Bono, Eddie Izzard and Joe Cocker in cameo roles. We didn’t have a real big push from Sony; they were stumped by it. So nobody was really sure who the film’s audience was.”

i’m ten years older than the median teen-movie demo–but on the tail end of recovery from the quarterlife crisis the concept of trying to figure out life in a conflicted, confusing, “changing world” still feels totally relevant–and that’s, i think, the cutoff point for the audience to be marketing coming-of-age tales to.

After an uninspiring opening last month… help arrived in the form of an audience whose parents were their age when the first wave of Beatlemania hit. After three weeks in theaters, the PG-13 movie finally penetrated the top 10 by connecting with a zealous core constituency: teenage girls.

….According to Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Media by Numbers, audiences are now finding their way to “Universe” thanks to Sony’s textbook execution of what is known in the industry as a “platform release.”

“Expectations were unknown. But Sony has handled it perfectly. They got big initial interest in limited release, then they’ve been capitalizing on that every week.”

“They’re taking their time. On a movie like this, that’s what you have to do.”

so… like, besides the fact that the movie’s supercute cast is totally perfect bedroom-wall poster material, and that this “60’s story” is retold with acutely contemporary (and boomer-anachronistic) sensibilities…. did, um, no one at sony bother to check if maybe teenagers might not actually totally dig the beatles, at some point before they released the movie?

three and a half years ago (maybe somewhere around the time taymor got this funny idea for a musical) USA today reported:

Beatles historian Martin Lewis began spotting a young wave of Fab Four fanaticism as emcee of Beatlefan conventions the past 14 years. Boomers constituted half of the audience in 1990. Now 75% of attendees are under 30, and many barely in their teens.

As marketing consultant for The Beatles Anthology, he met with label execs plotting campaigns targeting fans 45 and up. “I’ve got news for you,” Lewis told them. “I’m the oldest guy at Beatlefan conventions.”

Sure enough, a marketing survey showed that the under-30 constituency scooped up 40% of the first Anthology run. “I’ve interviewed those kids,” Lewis says. “I’ve said, ‘Surely you’d rather listen to Justin Timberlake. Why are you here? Were you forced by your parents?’ But they chose to be there.”

the relative “drought” in contemporary rock (“Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer,'” says a manhattan producer and guitar teacher quoted in a feb. 2006 article in rolling stone called “teens save classic rock“), multiplied by the internet’s universal ease of access to music of all decades, means you better do your homework about whom to target with your alleged “primary selling point,” yo. (even hiphop’s got love for the fab four as evidenced by wu-tang’s becoming the very first group EVER to legally sample the Beatles (!!?!)–sooooo… THAT happened.)

…anyway:

While Dergarabedian heaps praise on the marketing plan, Taymor feels the movie has benefited from a kind of benign studio neglect. “In a funny way, young people found the movie because it wasn’t marketed huge,” she said. “Young people don’t want to be dictated to about what’s the new cool thing.”

…. “We gave people the sense that they’d discovered it for themselves,” said Valerie Van Galder [the division’s president of domestic marketing].

i am sure that beyond classic rock’s sheer novelty or vintage cred, for the current crop of teenagers, its appeal likewise stems from the satisfaction in the personal discovery. this is a sense that is simply not possible to generate through mainstream teen-targeted music options. (wait… did classic rock just turn into alternative rock? wow. bizarre.)

i’ve written before about how valuable sustaining a sense of mystery can be for a brand, and it applies to the process of its initial discovery as well. whether sony was just hedging their marketing dollars on this weirdo bet of a movie, or whether they actually had the temperamental teen psyche aaaaall figured out reverse-psychology stylie when they eschewed spending money on any TV commercials, billboards, or PR, i think there’s something to be learned from across the universe’s model–accidental or not–that can be applied to a more deliberate kind of “discovery strategy”:

start with something unique. you can’t really capitalize on a “discovery strategy” if the product won’t actually FEEL new or unexpected. (of course, a “discovery strategy” isn’t really the kind of thing that well-established fare needs to pursue in the first place, so it’s the unproven stuff to which this sort of option is most applicable anyway.)
understand who the appropriate audience is and the communication / media channels they use that are particular to them. even if what you’re marketing is not a pop property but its message is disseminated through one-size-fits-all media, it invalidates the personal intimacy of discovery. a caveat in this case is using mass media to broadcast a message that will only really be meaningful to a particular community, but why do that when instead you can…
provide the tools for people to be able to easily distribute the message themselves. a handy little “post to facebook” button helps, but so would have the option to get the embed code for the preview so that people could post the video to myspace and their blogs and wherever else that wasn’t just facebook. (nuanced forethought, or obviously tacked-on afterthought, right?)
go on TRL.

and in case you’re wondering, this is NOT a “viral campaign.” the difference is between a ploy to abuse some unfortunate loophole inherent in ADD for an attention-spike, and a strategy to enable the creation of a meaningful, personally-compelling discovery that leads to a lasting (consumer) relationship.

from the LATimes:

Nicole Sacharow, 15, from Culver City, for one, ranks “Universe” among her “favorite movies ever.” She’s seen it twice and would already have notched up several more viewings were it not for scheduling conflicts with her friends.

“You go up to a group of people and say, ‘Who wants to see “Across the Universe” this weekend?’ ” Sacharow explained. “The songs are addicting. Everyone who goes to see it has the soundtrack. I listen to it every day. I hear people singing the songs around school.”

i’d say the movie has the potential to become this decade’s RENT (the war allegory standing in for the 90’s AIDS nemesis.) with wu-tang paving the way on beatle’s rights clearance, i could easily see a broadway version of across the universe in the future. but where could they find a visionary, multi-Tony award-winning director to–oh!

uh… never mind.

October 4, 2007 by jenks

broadcast through reverberation

yesterday a new client pointed me in the direction of reverbnation.com, and while i don’t usually write about websites, this is different–i can’t even help it. launched just under a year ago, “ReverbNation.com is a Music 2.0 company that is responding to the changing music business paradigm.” except, when they say it, this isn’t just nonsense hippie talk. they mean it:

We believe:

• Nothing is more important to Artists than the relationship with their Fans….We call the total value of these relationships an artist’s Band Equity™, and it is our mission to help artists maximize this.

• Active Fans are the best promoters of music on the web. Fan attention has become fragmented across the web in a way that mass marketing no longer makes financial sense (see the demise of radio, music TV). Today is the age of social networks. Artists cannot be everywhere they need to be at once, so they need to focus on activating their most rabid fans to promote them in every corner of the web.

• A Music Community is more valuable if includes all of the members of the community. We believe that fans, labels, venues, and other folks all deserve a voice in the community if it is going to be representative of the entire music ecosystem. At ReverbNation, we invite all members of the community to take part.

at first glance you notice a slick design, and an interface that makes, as the client said, myspace look like fisher price. but 10 seconds later the extent of the sophistication going on here begins to dawn, and as you continue to discover what reverbnation is actually set up to do, you understand that this is way beyond just another community site, this is an incredibly powerful broadcast tool. one developed with an impressive understanding that the new channel is now a fragmented channel. this, by the way, does not mean it’s a broken channel, but rather it is a new kind of channel. one that broadcasts like a prism rather than a laser beam, and exists, as the reverbnation mission statement points out, “everywhere at once,” rather than being confined to any one particular medium.

if you are a musician, or if you are responsible for developing the strategy for how brands spend their advertising money, you really ought to check what reverbation is doing, as it is a model for how to approach the business of message dissemination in the future–and by that, i mean now:

ReverbNation provides innovative marketing solutions that musicians need to compete, cooperate, and differentiate in an increasingly noisy online environment. Unlike typical “closed” communities, artists use ReverbNation as their home base for approaching marketing and promotion across the Internet as a whole — be it via social networks, blogs, or the artist’s homepage. Tools like TunePaks, FanReach, and Widgets give the artist the power to spread their music and information virtually anywhere. Real-time stats then provide a 360-degree view of how the music is spreading, who is listening, and which fans are actually passing it on to their friends and posting it on their pages.

the most impressive offering for artists through reverbnation, isn’t even the array of features, but the way all the tools are enhanced through a seamless integration into the rest of the social media world. a strategy that can be summed up in one word: widgets.

here’s an example of a widget in action on a facebook profile:

in one slick little box you get:

the band’s upcoming show schedule–which is incredibly easy to create since reverbnation also has venue profiles, allowing you to add ten shows in about 2 minutes.
direct links to buy tickets to upcoming shows
an email list signup form– reverbnation’s free FanReach email service allows artists to create targeted messages to fans based on age, gender, and location which is more sophisticated than the offerings of many email list service providers, and their service also lets you include music and a show schedule automatically in every email.
the widget even has a freakin “Also join Street Team” option for people signing up!

to get all these features before you would have had to go running around to a bunch of different service providers, and then work to continually integrate all the features individually into every online location where your band had a presence–and that’s all resting on the assumption that all those features were compatible with each other, and most importantly, that a bunch of musicians had the necessary marketing acumen to even understand all the features they needed in the first place.

of course, it doesn’t stop there, this widget slices and dices and plays music too. here’s another example from one of the glitch mob’s member’s profile:

it doesn’t just let you embed a playlist, it lets you create portable online music player! this means that folks don’t HAVE to stay on your profile page to listen to your music. they can be doing anything else on the internet and still listening to your serenade.

the fragmented channel, remember? it’s everywhere all at once.

there are sooo many more features that reverbnation offers that to even get a grasp on all of them would take me the rest of the day, and then i’d have to spend more time tomorrow writing about them, but i should think you get the idea at this point.

i can imagine part of the hindrance in reverbnation’s adoption is the sheer complexity, and wide array of their offerings. it’s been confused for a myspace competitor, but in reality that is a complete misconstruction of what it looks like reverbnation is setting out to do. during the many company-wide conference calls that took place in the process of House of Blues’ acquisition by LiveNation, michael rapino, livenation’s CEO, continually stressed the importance of the consumer relationship to the future of the concert promotion industry–about which, as the largest concert promoter in the world, livenation has a right to claim to know a thing or two. (if “reverbnation” picked its name in complete ignorance of “livenation” i would be tremendously surprised).

the big difference, of course is that livenation owns the venues. but in reverbnation’s case, they are setting up to own a channel. one that is deftly suited to broadcast to a fragmented audience. and if you were paying attention then you’ve also realized that it is a model for the future of message-distribution itself, also known as advertising. connecting the needs of artist, fan, and venue into a symbiotic “ecosystem” is the same as connecting the consumer, the brand, and the “venue” for a brand experience into one constant feedback loop.

now go listen to some beats:

September 25, 2007 by jenks

my so-called quarterlife

marshall herskovitz & edward zick + the quarterlife crisis + the rise of the creative class + myspace =

marshall herskovitz and edward zwick aren’t simply geniuses, they are CONSISTENTLY the only ones creating television programming that reflects the real struggles of an entire generation.

thirtysomething was before my time, (though i do know it as the series that went down in history as the first to feature a gay relationship on TV, so that already says something about the creative team’s cultural prescience), but a decade later my so-called life was RIGHT on schedule. what made that show so great wasn’t that it was incredible television (though it was–winning 6 golden globes and 7 nods in its two short seasons on TV), but because it felt like it was ABOUT ME!

well, it’s been a decade since claire danes became the vicarious incarnation of manic-paniced, post-grunge-era high school girls everywhere, and this november herskovitz and zwick are launching “quarterlife” an internet series and social network.

from the quarterlife site:

A show about a group of twentysomethings coming of age in the digital generation. And a social network about what it means to be creative, to pursue a passion, to make a difference in the world — or just to find a place in it.

From Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creative team behind “My So-Called Life,” quarterlife is the first Internet series that is as high quality as any film or television show.

quarterlife is premiering on myspace on november 11, and on quarterlife.com on november 12–but IMDB still insists it’s a TV series. hello? IMDB? might be time for a new category?

before i launch into my little speech about how amazing i think this show (which, unless you’re in the right demo for it, you’re probably going to find incredibly hokey; ahem: the demo is in high school and college, it’s not ACTUALLY 20-somethings) has the potential to be, i’d just like to point out that this move perfectly exemplifies what i mean when i say that “culture” is the next “community”–i.e. we’re all social networked out. we’re all connected and commented and poked to death. stick a fork in it. we’re done. we’re ready for social networks to become channels for cultural content, rather than JUST mind-numbing social drama timesucks.

it’s an incredible talent to be able to put a finger on the very pulse of a demographic, and use that rhythm to broadcast a beat that invokes the identification of a generation. (i swear to god, in the quarterlife trailer, it looks like one of the characters is directing a scion commercial! ok. i think it’s time now for an official word all unto itself, that does not involve several iterations of the prefix “post,” for the word “post-postmodern.” can someone get on this?)

marketing would kill for this, but herskovitz and zwick live and breathe it. the same qualities of curiosity and understanding that would allow a team of television producers to create content that bespeaks an unyielding fascination not just with generational cohorts, but with, essentially, the impacts of cultural shifts in general, are equally as crucial not just to the process of creating relevant marketing, but to generating greater cultural understanding.

god damn, that was a long sentence– but boy, it was worth it!

but wait! it gets BETTER!

in case you’re wondering what they’re gonna do in few years when the show’s characters grow out of their quarterlife crisis:

quarterlife.com is a social networking site for creative people. Whatever your interest – photography, writing, music, filmmaking, dance, design – quarterlife.com will help you go to the next level. Connect with like-minded people, gather information about schools, grants, and internships. It’s a place to explore the issues in your life, where changing the world is as real as the friends you meet.

damn. this might actually make up for the fact that the only network my so-called life had was a TV network. not that i think myspace is necessarily the right venue to launch this through anyway, but then again MSCL started out on ABC and became salvaged into cult perpetuity on MTV, so there’s always room to find where the right audience is really at. now more than ever. so we’ll, no doubt, see how it goes.
Quarterlife Trailer

aside from that, the only other thing i think they could have possibly done better is the casting. in 2007 it kinda seems really strange for a contemporary show to have an all-white cast (this isn’t facebook, after all–badumching!). it’s not just me, is it? i mean… is it weirdly anachronistic looking to anyone else?

September 13, 2007 by jenks

The Do LaB Artist Network – Issue #3: Fall 2007

The Do LaB Artist Network – Issue #3: Fall 2007

NEW ISSUE UP NOW!
http://artistnetwork.thedolab.com/fall07/

after months of work and an incredible team effort all around, the fall Artist Network is finally ready.

people without whose help this idea would not be a reality include: jesse shannon, arin ingraham, brian shaw, and albertico acosta. huge thank you to all of you for helping bring this vision to life.

July 30, 2007 by jenks

you are not the demo

photo by: anearthling

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that “you are not the user.” If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.
– jakob nielsen

much the same way that the developer is not the user, the marketer is not the demo. being a marketer does not actually make you so atypical, (anyone who has given thought to what they put up on their social network profile, and why, suddenly understands the concept of “branding”), but being who you ARE does. to a certain extent marketers address the fact that not all markets are made in their own image, but at the end of the day, despite all the demographic research, despite all the focus groups, and everything that the nielsen ratings have to say, it is, inevitably, still individuals who design the ad and its messaging. individuals whose natural tendency is to take for granted that their own identity defaults are relevant to other people. the tricky thing, of course, is that since they’re defaults, it’s quite hard to recognize their personal and non-universal nature. and since we generally tend to hang out with the kinds of folks that reinforce our own identity and worldview back to us (our “community”) we often end up viewing the people who don’t agree with us as “wrong”–just think about people with political leanings or musical tastes that are incompatible with yours….

well, it’s those same people thinking about your political leanings and musical tastes right now, and comparing how incompatible they are with their own, that are designing the marketing message that’s gonna speak to you.

as humans we define our modern identities by our cultural affiliations and lifestyle choices, and the more we are identified with them the more it can get in the way of understanding what resonates with the people who do not share our community’s language and values. as marketers–who still happen to be human–this poses a particular problem.

unlike, say, the perspective of danah boyd, i don’t subscribe to the worldview that american society is so easily split up between the “hegemony” (dominant class) and the “subaltern” (subordinate, lower class). perhaps it’s like that among high school kids, since that’s whom danah studies, but i still doubt it. if this simple split between the popular kids and the burnouts castes was a hugely relevant definition of identity then all marketers would need to do is keep cranking out hegemonic “aspirational” ad messages, go home, and call it day. the reality of ad messaging, however, seems to have gotten a bit more complicated than that since the 1950’s, and then even exponentially MORE complicated since the 1980’s. there is no universal influencer anymore. there are instead tribal market segments, and the tricky part is translating between, and even within them.

ok, i don’t know about you, but if i have to slog through reading a lot of abstract theory i tend to zone out and go skipping stones across my mozilla tabs, so how about a practical example?

nielsen writes:

The Web’s chattering classes tend to be overly engaged in the “Internet elite experience.” They actually care about the ‘Net for its own sake, and go gaga over new ways of showing maps. In contrast, average users just want to complete tasks online. They don’t particularly like the Web, and they’d like to get back to their jobs or families as quickly as possible.

i’d add that they want to get back to their own identities as quickly as possible. the “elite internet user” is a kind of identity/lifestyle/community unto itself, and it’s not that the “average” user is just a wannabe tourist in this clique, it’s that the average user isn’t even INTERESTED in being part of the clique. the average user probably has interests and ways of defining their identity that the “elite internet user” couldn’t even care about, much like an “elite soccer mom” probably doesn’t give a shit about the “Net for its own sake”–except for the times when it’s in any way involved with sex offenders, maybe.

that photo at the top of this post is for a spanish-speaking morning radio show in l.a. hosted by piolin, and i think it’s absolutely hilarious. this message, which proclaims in a broken english that “we espeekinglish tu!” is in no way aimed at convincing any native english speaker to listen to the program. this is, of course, a more dramatic example of translating between market segments since it actually involves a product and a message that, literally, speaks to a demo in a different language–but it’s not spanish. it’s spanglish.

these billboards are all over l.a. (including an even funnier one that involves the phrase “free toes free hole es” smack dab over hollywood blvd.) these are not messages relegated to some “subaltern” niche corner, they are actually pretty brazen displays of a very inside joke that is only supposed to resonate with a particular kind of identity.

even though markets are increasingly defined by their individuals’ identities, it is impossible for any one individual marketer to be able to understand and speak the language of EVERY identity out there. the first step to learning anything new, however, is to simply accept that you don’t know it. accept that you are not the demo. EVER. even if you fit the profile, it doesn’t matter. it’s not the point. it’s just luck. (like it’s lucky that you, reader, happen to be part of the 35% of internet users who are familiar with “blogs”… if you’re from the west coast, 18-34, college educated and male, you’re also likely to be a part of the paltry 16% familiar with “wikis”…. and if you happen to be surprised that those percentages are so low, considering how much impact you might feel these channels/tools carry, then it’s even more proof of why taking your personal self out of the equation when developing a strategy is crucial.)

nielsen says that the antidote to the elite “bubble vapor” problem is user testing:

Find out what representative users need. It’s tempting to work on what’s hot, but to make money, focus on the basics that customers value.

in marketing it’s not specifically about what the “user needs” but what they “relate to.” it’s not about what you think is “hot,” it’s about distilling a message and an approach that resonates with a particular identity.

Social-Creature.com

Culture | Technology | Human Behavior

content

The Do LaB Artist Network – Issue #3: Fall 2007

Subscribe for more like this.

Subscribe for more like this.

Subscribe for more like this.

Subscribe for more like this.

Subscribe for more like this.