discovery strategy

by jenks

the empire’s new clothes

Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

– Andy Warhol

It is totally disconcerting to discover a book that pretty much compiles your insights and articulates them back to you. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy & Who We Are, by Rob Walker, delves into many of the exact same observations as I have witnessed amid the ecosystem of contemporary culture, marketing, and identity. Reading it feels something like discovering America’s Next Top Model is biting your personal fashion style, I would imagine. Sure, it’s incredibly validating to see your own insights coming at you from a New York Times Magazine writer, but it’s sorta frustrating to have to know that they’re not just yours anymore.

In social science there is probably nothing as revelatory as a contradiction exposed. That the emperor is not wearing any clothes is much more stunning a revelation than any critique of the fashion aesthetic. And it’s contradictions that Walker is interested in:

There was one specific incident that finally made me reconsider what I thought I knew about consumers, marketers, and even myself. This was the news that Nike had bought Converse.

To me, Nike’s famous swoosh logo had long been the mark of the manipulated, a symbol for suckers who take its “Just Do It” bullying at face value. It’s long been, in my view, a brand for followers. On the other hand, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star had been a mainstay sneaker for me since I was a teenager back in the 1980’s, and I stuck with it well into my thirties. Converse was the no-bullshit yin to Nike’s all-style-and-image yang. It’s what my outsider heroes from Joey Ramone to Kurt Combain wore. So I found the buyout disheartening…. but why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker–any brand of sneaker?

As a consumer behavior columnist, Walker had observed as “the steady march of progress that had been reshaping media and technology for years broke into a sprint, through the rapid rise of devices and innovations like TiVo, the iPod, increasingly sophisticated cell phones, YouTube, Facebook, and so on.” He notes that according to many marketing experts and consumer-culture observers, this new landscape had created a “New Consumer:”

A clever creature armed with all kinds of dazzling technology, from ad-blocking gizmos to alternative, grassroots media. This added up to what professional zeitgeist watchers–

–and i’d like to add, none too few self-congratulatory alternative cultures–

like to call “a paradigm shift.” “Consumers don’t march in lockstep anymore,” one celebrated trend master declared. “We are immune to advertising,” other experts announced. The mindless “mass market” had been shouldered aside by thinking individuals: “Consumers are fleeing the mainstream.” Somehow we had all become more or less impervious to marketing and brands and logos; we could see through commercial persuasion.

The trade, business and mainstream press–

–as well as no shortage of idealistic social media folks–

have seconded this judgement. Thanks to “the explosion in information available to shoppers,” The New Yorker argued, “brand loyalty is in fast decline,” and “the customer is king.” The Economist, too, pointed to super-informed shoppers who have acquired “unprecedented strength” in their dealings with commercial persuaders and approvingly quoted a famous ad executive announcing: “For the first time the consumer is boss.” Advertising Age soberly informed its readers that because of “the power of the public,” consumers have lately obtained “increasing sway … over any product’s success”–in fact, the consumer is in control.

The only problem with this was that it did not match up particularly well with the realities of the marketplace that I was writing about every week in The Times Magazine.

It’s one thing to conclude that the advertising business is evolving with the new media landscape. But these giddy claims go well beyond that….

Meanwhile the number of brand messages we are exposed to goes up, and so does the amount of trash we produce. And on a more personal level: Have you noticed any decrease in the number of times you buy something you were sure you would love, only to regret it later or simply forget about in the back of a closet? There you are, contemplating the limitless and ever shifting choices in what to drink, what to wear, what to drive, what to buy. It is literally impossible to try everything for yourself. Be honest: As you navigate this brand-soaked world, do you feel in control?

Sure, we tell pollsters and friends that we’re sick of being bombarded with advertising, we’re indifferent to silly logos, we’re fed up with rampant materialism. In reality, one of the most significant changes I’ve observed over the years that consumer behavior has been my primary beat is something that goes well beyond the long-standing human tendency to enjoy acquiring things.

The change is particularly noticeable among many of the younger people I’ve met. Frequently, these smart and creative young people were quite happy to inform me that, yes, they were immune to commercial persuasion–that they saw right through it, as the experts liked to say. Meanwhile, they were playing key, active roles in helping certain products and brands succeed.

They were in the vanguard of what looks an awful lot like an increasingly widespread consumer embrace of branded, commercial, culture. The modern relationship between consumer and consumed is defined not by rejection at all, but rather by frank complicity.

This goes against what we’d want to think of ourselves, and of individuality. We want to think that our highly-attuned “seeing through”ness, and our distinctive tastes have set us apart, granted us superiority over the tastelessness of lowly label whores. We want to think that expressing our identities, and asserting our belonging within a particular cultural community is unrelated to, and, in fact, an escape from brand-consciousness. We want to think we are–as 77% of the respondents in a formal poll mentioned by Walker considered themselves to be–far smarter and savvier than most consumers. Which is a mathematical impossibility.

The truth of the matter is that actually we don’t really know ourselves that well at all. That’s the “Secret” in “The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.” We have come up with enough misconceptions about the relationship between, as Walker calls it, the consumer and the consumed, that the real mechanics of this interchange are happening beyond our consciousness. We’re not aware we’re naked beneath our fancy new clothes.

“Symbols matter to us,” Walker says:

Meaningful symbols (logos included) get created–and even when we claim to be immune from such things, we often participate in that meaning-creation ourselves….In the 21st century we still grapple with the eternal dilemma of wanting to feel like individuals and to feel as though we’re apart of something bigger than ourselves–and that, most of all we all seek ways to resolve this fundamental tension of modern life.

In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter delve into the social psychology history of individuality, excavating its modern beginnings from the wreckage of the post-WWII distrust of “mass culture.” They propose that witnessing how conformity had devastated Europe as enforced by the Nazis, plus the results of the Milgram experiment, which exposed some nasty realities about our human relationship to authority, “led conformity to become the new cardinal sin in our society.” By the time Walker gets around to weighing in on it, this manifest individualist destiny has become an American right.

Enter “The Pretty Good” problem, as Walker calls it. Or as Alex Bogusky says: “All products are excellent.” It’s no longer about what’s better than what, or what’s more reliable, or what’s more effective. It all works, it’s all really good. The way you choose between all this totally dependable functioning stuff is, essentially, based on what expresses you.

“Buying a $5,000 handbag just because it’s a status symbol is a sign of weakness,” Walker quotes a particular “keen observer of branded culture”: Miuccia Prada. “Presumably” Walker suggests, “buying a $5,000 Prada bag is okay, if you’re doing it for the right reasons–quality for instance.” But I don’t see anything ironic in Prada’s remark. It’s probably the way anorexics think about the eating habits of the obese. In between those extremes though, weakness or not, we all have to eat. And we all feel we have to express ourselves, define ourselves, locate ourselves, even, on the cultural spectrum. How do we do that in our modern world?

Well, like, take the gutterpunk bike messenger dude Walker comes across while investigating the resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon’s popularity, getting a PBR logo brand–that’s skin brand–the size of his back. This may seem a bit excessive, but “Pabst is part of my subculture,” he says. More specifically, it can function as a symbol of a subculture, and skin branding as a means of expressing both a personal commitment and community loyalty is actually not at all uncommon among fraternities. In the absence of a Greek letter, endorsing a brand–that’s logo brand–can, and often does, become adopted as a symbol of belonging to a culture or community. You might not have gotten a skin brand or bought a $5,000 handbag, but all of us have purchased things not just for our own “personal narrative,” as Walker suggest, but because they represented our culture, our context, where we belong.

This is actually the part in the book where Walker’s assessments start to fall apart, I think. Unlike his research on the consumer adoption of corporate brands, in chronicling “underground brands”–by which he means, essentially, lifestyle symbols developed by independent entrepreneurs–he doesn’t mention any research from talking directly to the adopters of these brands, and thus fails to convey that the adoption of both kinds of brands happens basically for the same reasons.

He gets part of it right. Many underground brand creators:

Clearly see what they are doing as not only non-corporate, but somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materlistic mainstream–but doing it with different forms of materialism.

Take a minute to get acclimated to the irony if you need to, but that’s not the real contradiction here. This is:

Perhaps the threat that brand-smart young people really pose to commercial persuaders is not that they have stopped buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too.

What the exact definition of an “underground brand” is–beyond being created by “brand-smart young people”–is never actually defined, and that may be the root of the oversight. Walker’s case studies for underground brands are pretty much exclusively clothing, or even more precisely, t-shirt labels, but I’ve seen the same phenomenon play out with underground music brands bands, and events. A community, weather it’s mass or niche, Greek or gutterpunk, needs symbols, and the difference between how an “independent” maker of symbols behaves vs. a “corporate” one, is that the corporate one answers to Wall Street.

You can argue that size matters. That somewhere along the slippery slope a brand is either big or small, but I would imagine even small Wall Street-beholden brands would behave the same way big ones do. And conversely, as Walker himself talks about, though doesn’t quite process to it’s logical conclusion: to stay competitive, Wall-Street brands are starting to behave like indie ones. Scion’s success via alternative marketing, which Walker calls “murketing,” happened not because it invented its own grassroots community from scratch, but because it leveraged the communities around existing independent brands in much the same way a concert venue leverages the community around a music act.

Talking to independent brand creators, Walker says, “Made me realize that it wasn’t just commercial culture that the brand underground was co-opting–it was the most exclusive and elevated form of it.”

Which is kind of like saying that an indie-rock band “co-opts” Elton John. I think music fans are only too happy to have more options.

It’s not culture that’s being co-opted, it’s industry. An indie band “co-opts” the music industry, and indie brands “co-opt” the industry of commercial persuasion itself. This isn’t a “threat” to commercial persuasion, as Walker suggests, but an expansion, an upgrade. Commercial persuasion, v. 2.0.

Or whatever.

“It’s time to set aside the old conspicuous consumption argument that consumer behavior is all about status–all about badges,” Walker writes. “If the underground logo is a badge, it’s one that is most noteworthy for how few people can see it.”

Uh-huh…

The average underground logo–just like many corporate ones–may be more subdued than, say, the narcissistic in-your-face mania of Louis Vuitton’s logo, but the underground brand is a badge, and it’s one that is most notable for how meaningfully it expresses a community. (By the way, that requires visibility). It may not be all about “status” but it IS all about identity.

Suddenly, the book is not so disconcerting after all.

    



Subscribe for more like this.






by jenks

the integration is the message

Have you seen these billboards?

They’re all over the place:

Been wondering what the hell that’s all about, maybe?

Well, answer #1 goes like this:

Hope people have been seeing the billboards that I have put up around town. I think its important everyone knows how much Sarah Marshall SUCKS! How she does look fat in those jeans! How my mom never liked her! How over her I am!

So, I used the money that I spent on her engagement ring to buy every available billboard around town. (That’s right Sarah I was going to propose to you. I was just waiting for the right time. I guess that time is never O’clock in the month of Nev-ruary).

Sarah, I really hope you are un-happy for the rest of your life – that you understand how totally over you I am.

That said, you should call me if you want to talk, I can have these things taken down.

Posted by Peter Bretter

Answer #2 goes like this:

While driving home I saw a billboard that read “You Suck Sarah Marshall”. At the bottom of the message I saw the URL www.ihatesarahmarshall.com so when I got home I jumped on my computer and checked out the website. [It’s] a blog that is currently being written by a loved obsessed 26 year old guy who is YouTubing videos about how infatuated he is with his hot TV star girlfriend.

Well, as it turns out this website is the launch of a new marketing campaign for a movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall“. I have no idea if this movie is any good although it is brought to us by the guys who gave us the 40 Year Old Virgin. On a quick side note I can not recall seeing the R rated warning on the billboard but if I had I would have known right away it was a movie.

The point of this post is to point out the way this movie is being marketed. They are utilizing a combination of vague yet somewhat shocking billboard ads to drive people to a Google Blog thats incorporating YouTube videos as a way to create buzz. It should be interesting to see how it works out.

And answer #3 goes like this:

At OMMA a few weeks ago the theme was “Welcome to the Machine.” All the panels and presentations were framed around the question: How to prepare for the kind of dubious advertising that would be in store in the “Machine”-mediated future? (At least that’s what I think the theme was supposed to mean.)

The model for creating advertising has, in general, been pretty conglomerative. The media department buys the adspace, the creative department puts stuff in the adspace, the “new media” department does….who knows what, and the whole process is as compartmentalized as an assembly line. You know, it’s funny. There’s now hypersonic sound technology, which can be used to literally beam audio ads DIRECTLY at individuals in its path, yet we still insist on referring to the internet as “new media.” And that kind of segregated perspective may be part of the problem.

In strict media buy terms all that’s going on in the IHSM campaign is a grip of outdoor and a domain name, you could even say that ihatesarahmarshall.com is a kind of “microsite” I suppose, or maybe an “adverblog,” but are any of those elements individually responsible for the effectiveness of the campaign? While there’s certainly no shortage of ads out there that make a play on our curiosity, the IHSM billboards are the first that immediately struck me as possesing a deliberate, blatant, “What the hell is that about? Oh, I’ll just check it out on my iPhone,” quality.

There’s now more and more people carrying the internet around in their pocket. What does that mean in terms of how we approach Mobile, Online, Experiential, Outdoor, or Out-of-home media–all together! Then multiply all of that by the coefficient of search.

From Boinboing:

Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently went to Japan and noticed an interesting trend in advertising there: search boxes have replaced URLs. Picture 1-160

Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL’s. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!

An ARG–which stands for Alternate Reality Game–is defined as: “An interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.” Which could also serve as both a philosophical definition for marketing in general, and a more advanced version of what the I Hate Sarah Marshall campaign has started to touch on in a very basic, accessible way. The opportunity is now there to create advertising that works not by managing to take our attention hostage for an instant, but because it’s able to move between media the same way that our attention does.

“Integration” may be getting primed to become the next “viral” when it comes to overabused industry buzzwords, but it’s more than just a trendy new widget. The next phase is not about defeating some monolithic “Machine.” It’s about figuring out: How do we create messages that cater to the way technology lets us interact with all different media? Meanwhile, the paint-by-numbers, assembly-line approach is still trying to figure out which department’s responsibility it is to come up with the answer.

    



Subscribe for more like this.






by jenks

culture seeks its level

The image “http://z.about.com/d/altreligion/1/0/W/N/2/ouroboros.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter explain that really, there was never any conflict between the two to begin with. Counterculture hinges on, and consumer culture consists of, the expression of your lifestyle/identity. Whether you’re choosing to wear Nikes, Doc Martens, or some crazy obscure Japanese brand that doesn’t even exist in the US, you’re deliberately saying something about yourself with the fashion choice. And regardless of how “counter” whatever culture you think you are, getting to express that about yourself requires buying something.

Yet the concept of a strict divide between the “mainstream” and “counter”–or “alternative”–cultures persists, and the distinction between these “affiliations” is now defined not by whether we consume, but by what. Identities hinge on particular expressions and symbols, such as music or fashion for instance. In a very simple sense, you are “mainstream” or “alternative” based on whether the way you choose to express your identity, your taste, is shared by a big group/culture, or a small one. Yet the trouble is that these expressions are given meaning precisely through their common significance within a group, if the group size changes, then so too does the meaning.

Last summer Danah Boyd wrote about the idea of “Pointer Remix“:

One way to think about remix is as the production of a new artifact through the artistic interweaving of other artifacts…. With this in mind, think about an average MySpace profile. What should come to mind is a multimedia collage: music, videos, images, text, etc. This collage is created through a practice known as “copy/paste” where teens (and adults) copy layout codes that they find on the web and paste it into the right place in the right forms to produce a profile collage. One can easily argue that this is remix: a remix of multimedia to produce a digital representation of self. Yet, the difference between this and say a hip-hop track is that the producer of a MySpace typically does not “hold” the content that they are using. Inevitably, the “img src=” code points to an image hosted by someone somewhere on the web; rarely is that owner the person posting said code to MySpace. The profile artist is remixing pointers, not content.

I kind of think of all culture creation/expression as a process of “Pointer Remix”— and when I say culture creation, I mean brand creation too. There’s a paragraph in Pattern Recognition where William Gibson lapses into fashion historian momentarily:

My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

And just as much as all labels are creating pointers, that’s exactly what we are buying. In fact, looking TO buy. Now, more than ever before, the possession of an “original” source is either impossible, pointless, or even irrelevant. In postmodernism’s revenge, even an “original” becomes a reference. A vintage dress is all about what it “points” to.

Yet as Boyd points out:

If the content to which s/he is pointing changes, the remix changes…. Say that my profile is filled with pictures of cats from all over the world. The owners of said cat pictures get cranky that I’m using up their bandwidth (or thieving) so they decide to replace the pictures of cats with pictures of cat shit. Thus, my profile is now comprised of pictures of cat shit (not exactly the image I’m trying to convey). This is what happened to Steve-O.

One of the most high profile cases of such content replacement came from John McCain’s run-in with MySpace profile creation. His staff failed to use images from their own servers. When the owner of the image McCain used realized that the bandwidth hog was McCain, he decided to replace the image. All of a sudden, McCain’s MySpace profile informed supporters that he was going to support gay marriage. Needless to say, this got cleaned up pretty fast.

Cleaning it up on myspace is easy. You can just go and find another image and use that, or, of course, you can host your own images, and that way be sure that the content being pointed to will not change without you knowing about it–but that defeats this metaphor, so pretend you didn’t just read it.

Cause what’s interesting to me is when this same phenomenon happens in a non-html-based context. Like, for example, if a priest gets outed as a pedophile. This kind of “content change” happens to real-life “pointers” all the time. Pointers that happen to be used as elements in the construction of identity.

Check this out, below is the ad campaign for the 2008 season of America’s Next Top Model:

(For the record, seeing this billboard is what inspired this whole post.)

There’s a few particular aesthetic elements to note here for the purpose at hand, and I’ll tell you what they are. The hats with the feathers, the general 1920’s and 40’s infusion with the high waists and cropped tops, and the whole cabaret/vaudeville overtone.

These are all elements of a style that’s been rocked in the scene around me for years.

If you’re interested in some history you might want to click here, but the quick version is it became a part of the aesthetic expression of a particular subculture with a significant presence all up along the West Coast. And then last week, at the intersection of Sunset and Vine a bus rolls past me carrying a whole tableau along its side of girls sporting this style. It was pretty startling to see it so out of context, since up until then I hadn’t seen this look used in any mainstream media or setting–anyone who can find links to other examples, post it in the comments, I’d love to see it.

While I personally have no idea exactly how the stylist team for ANTM got the idea for the particular creative direction in the ad, I think the possibility that this burgeoning aesthetic, with a major base of operations in LA, might have somehow made it directly onto their radar is hardly a long shot.

Boyd asks, “What happens when a culture exists that rests on pointer remix for identity construction?” Well, at least one side effect is that meanings of cultural expressions–and hence what they say about our identities–change.

One pretty consistent way this “content change” in the meaning of a cultural expression happens is in the process of becoming more exposed. It’s been going on ever since the first small local band blew up and became huge. Everything else about the music and the act might have stayed the same but the obscurity, and it’s the very “alternative”-ness itself that was a part of its meaning all along. The difference between being a fan of something intimate and distinctive vs. something mainstream and egalitarian could be kinda like waking up to discover your kitten pictures have turned into kitten poo.

Here’s another approach. In October of 2007, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an article in the New Yorker about “How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul.” The premise of the piece is that in the 1990’s rock and roll, a genre that evolved out of a tremendous black musical influence on white performers, and became the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a kind of racial re-segregation in its style:

Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

…It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted. In the case of many popular genres, the respective contributions of white and black musical traditions are nearly impossible to measure. In the nineteen-twenties, folk music was being recorded for the first time, and it was not always clear where the songs—passed from generation to generation and place to place—had come from.

…Yet there are also moments in the history of pop music when it’s not difficult to figure out whose chocolate got in whose peanut butter. In 1960, on a train between Dartford and London, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, then teen-agers, bonded over a shared affinity for obscure blues records. (Jagger lent Richards an LP by Muddy Waters.) “Twist and Shout,” a song that will forever be associated with the Beatles, is in fact a fairly faithful rendition of a 1962 R. & B. cover by the Isley Brothers. In sum, as has been widely noted, the music that inspired some of the most commercially successful rock bands of the sixties and seventies—among them Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Grand Funk Railroad—was American blues and soul.

… In the mid- and late eighties, as MTV began granting equal airtime to videos by black musicians, academia was developing a doctrine of racial sensitivity that also had a sobering effect on white musicians: political correctness. Dabbling in black song forms, new or old, could now be seen as an act of appropriation, minstrelsy, or co-optation. A political reading of art took root, ending an age of innocent—or, at least, guilt-free—pilfering.

Himself a white musician/vocalist, Frere-Jones notes that adopting a black singing style even in his own band “seemed insulting.”

By the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term “indie rock” came implicitly to mean white rock.

….How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain? I can imagine James Brown writing dull material. I can even imagine the Meters wearing out their fans by playing a little too long. But I can’t imagine any of these musicians retreating inward and settling for the lassitude and monotony that so many indie acts seem to confuse with authenticity and significance.

While the article is specifically focused on the indie rock side, he readily admits that the segregation went both ways. Just as indie rock became “white rock,” “Black” music too began to occupy a space that may be more inaccessible and irrelevant to an outside audience now than it was during the 50’s. In an audio interview accompanying the article, Frere-Jones talks more about the results of the musical re-segregation from both angles. “Why is this a hit?” He jokes, about the absurdity of “Soulja Boy’s” success. “It’s just rapping over a ring-tone.”

Social and (after a series of lawsuits involving sampling) legislative forces gradually changed the sound of the music itself, and also of the “content” in the meaning of these musical pointers. As in: what does liking Indie Rock or Rock and Roll, and even Hip Hop at this point, convey about your identity now vs. what it would have 20 year ago? 40 years ago? Lose miscegenation and something that could once be relevant to a mixed audience becomes divisive.

Just as “Nation of Rebels” points out that there is no conflict between the counter and over-the-counter culture, I likewise see alternative and mainstream culture as just parts of a greater continuum, which ultimately, despite all the obstacles that societies, politics, economics, religions, and even individual personalities may put in its path, seeks its level at the greatest hybridity. “Content change” in the meaning of its expressions is as inevitable as the remixing of the expressions themselves.

In the meantime though, I’m gonna enjoy this kitten while it lasts.

    



Subscribe for more like this.






by jenks

yet more from the New Yorker!

“THIS TRACK JUST MADE ME PREGNANT” – Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic at the New Yorker, waxes poetic about the Glitch “Lazer-Bass” Scene. Read more…

    



Subscribe for more like this.






by jenks

the medium of stories

p1220200.JPG

“We read to know we are not alone.”
– C.S. Lewis

in retrospect, it’s not so surprising that while i was studying film in college i was also producing art and music events as an extra-curricular activity. i joke that producing a movie and producing an event are pretty much exactly the same process, except with events you only get one take. in both cases what you’re producing is a story and an experience, so the transition, post-college, from film to festivals was, in a sense, really just the transition between one medium of story/experience creation to another.

whether written, filmed, experiential, or any other kind, i think stories in general appeal to us for the same reasons, yet we experience and appreciate them in different ways depending on the medium. just because the book might have been better than the movie, doesn’t mean it would make a better movie to film the pages of the book, dig?

which is the kind of analogy i think about as i read the NYTimes’ recent bit on Quarterlife, “Can NBC Do for ‘Quarterlife’ What YouTube Could Not?”:

Scripts by Marshall Herskovitz, the Emmy award-winning writer and producer, have drawn millions of viewers to movie theaters and television sets over the past two decades.

But on the Internet, where his 36-part series “Quarterlife” is unfolding on social networking sites like MySpace, the audience metrics are starkly different.

Some episodes of “Quarterlife,” a drama about a group of good-looking people in their 20s, have yet to attract 100,000 video views, according to combined view counts from MySpace’s video site and YouTube.

The low traffic numbers are significant because the series has been touted as the first television-quality production for the Web, as well as the first to be introduced online as a warm-up for its network debut. NBC will broadcast “Quarterlife” in one-hour increments beginning in February, and the Web-to-broadcast process is being closely watched as a potential business model for television on the Internet.

i wrote about quarterlife a few months back, before any of the episodes had come out. the prospect of what an “online series” could mean in terms of a new format for creating stories was really exciting to me. i even thought it was pretty neat that the show came with an accompanying online social network app aimed at being a resource for those going through their quarterlife crisis. (at least in theory. i’m not a member on quarterlife.com so i don’t really know for sure, but the impression i got is that the site seeks to facilitate collaborations among the nascent members of the creative class, and if that goal is actually being fulfilled then i sincerely applaud the effort.) that there was no indication at the time about the online series simply being a “warm-up” to a network debut is an interesting aspect unto itself, but there are more interesting things i’d like to talk about, in particular:

The Folly of a “Web-To-Broadcast” Model,
and the Tragically Misguided Concept of “Television on the Internet”

according to the NYTimes article, quarterlife’s sponsors, which include toyota, paid well above standard rates to appear with the series on the web. and perhaps the folks involved with quarterlife may want to consider why it is that they might have been willing to do that.

the same day as the NYTimes asked, “Can Web ventures like “Quarterlife” turn a profit? The answer is unclear,” online media daily reported:

CONSUMERS ARE 47% MORE ENGAGED in ads that run with television programs that they view online than those watched on a TV set, according to new research findings. A cross-media study by Simmons, a unit of Experian Research Services, also found that viewers are 25% more engaged in the content of TV shows that they watch online than on a TV.

what are the chances that toyota, what with their experience with integrating the scion brand into whyville’s online tween world, would have some understanding of the benefits of being on a medium with a much more elevated engagement rate?

as a marketer, one of my favorite things about quarterlife is that the brand integration is so seamless it makes the traditional concept of “product placement” look like cave drawings in comparison. two of the characters on quarterlife, aspiring filmmakers–the pragmatic producer and the visionary director, of course–pitch a local toyota dealership to shoot a commercial for the business. of course when they deliver the ad to the client, the owner of the dealership, says he can’t see his cars enough in the ad. how are people supposed to buy his cars if they can’t see them? so the duo then has to recut the ad to make it less high concept and more car-y, they screen the revised version for their friends, after which one of the other characters–the typically self-righteous activist stereotype who’s being positioned to become the lead character’s love interest–gives them shit for selling out and making a commercial in the first place, and bashes the “corporate hegemony” in the second. after which they deliver the revised ad only to be told it’s STILL not car-y enough, and then get scolded by the dealership owner for not being serious about their business–which is supposed to be helping HIS business sell cars. oh he also tells them that they don’t know what they’re talking about when they insist that the ad is supposed to be selling “the experience” of the car, which i thought was a particularly interesting touch. then after that other things happen, but my point is that this whole time that you’re watching several key plot points and delving into various bits of character and theme development–and this stretches out over several episodes–you’re watching toyota in the show.

it may not be subtle, but then neither was carrie bradshaw’s love for manolo blahniks. that’s the thing about authentic character development now, you and i express ourselves through the brands we buy, so why should it be different for the characters on our favorite shows? in fact, can we even identify with a completely brandless persona in a character-driven series enough to keep watching week after week?

well, to be honest, i don’t know. i haven’t really watched TV since i started college, (except for netflixing the whole run of sex and the city, and going on a 24 bender last year, and 2005 when i lived with some roommates who had a TV set, and i got all into the sopranos) but, i HAVE watched all 14 episodes of quarterlife out as of now. and if i was watching this on TV (well, if i owned a TV and was watching this on it) i think i would love it. i’d be telling my friends to watch it too, it would be significant that a television network had had the vision (or nerve) to create a show about our generation–a generation which is watching less and less TV though, and hence less and less incentive to make content for it, but regardless–if this was on TV, it’d be great!

except it’s not on TV, is it? while we allow a certain suspension of disbelief for the contrived nature of scripted programming on TV we have a dramatically different relationship with online content. we may not expect it to be TRUE, but we don’t expect it to feel artificial either. here TV’s forced quality feels almost…invasive, like getting a friend request from your mom or dad on facebook (or if you prefer: walking into your room to discover your mom or dad already in it). like, TV! what are you DOING in here?

the whole time i was watching those 14 episodes i felt like i was waiting for something to happen. some subtle yet hugely important aspect in the very nature of the show to change. i mean, great, it’s “television-quality” production for the web, but who exactly was lamenting its lack here in the first place? i’ve seen ipod billboards that felt more real and compelling than quarterlife. (and that’s coming from someone who really wanted to like the show!)

to be fair, i think the internet community too is just barely scratching the surface of the possibilities for online video content, but writing a TV script for the web is about as powerful a use of these possibilities as writing a TV script for a feature film, and given the results of that Simmons report, a “web-to-broadcast” strategy seems rather pointless considering that consumers are practically 50% more engaged with content the medium you’re starting out on. we’re by no means all looking for the same kind of content on the web, but we are not looking for the same old same old, either. i can’t wait for something to really take advantage of all the medium’s potential and uncover whole new ways of creating stories.

what do i think looks like it could be one such possibility?

    



Subscribe for more like this.