It occurred to me the other day that “doing the right thing” has really basically two meanings: doing what is dictated by convention, and doing what is dictated by your conviction.

I think that everyone gets these two meanings mixed up and mixed together a lot. In spite of this, it generally seems that most people tend to favor convention, and a much smaller group of people tend to favor conviction. Like Tevye, I think they’re both right. Or at least, both are necessary.

Sadly, I think people in both camps tend to demonize much more than they accept or appreciate the other camp. Those who care for convention say of those with conviction that they are (to borrow a meme from fark.com - see this thread for examples) “trying to be special”. Those with conviction call those who care for convention “sheeple” (for examples, see the Wikipedia entry for "Goth Subculture").

I can understand why the conflict is present and I even suspect there are ways in which it should be seen as healthy. What’s more, I think “doing the right thing” is more than a question of “what”; it’s at least also a question of “when”. So there’s more to the story to be investigated, but it seems incredibly useful to remember that what may appear to be “doing the wrong thing” may very well be someone’s very genuine attempt to “do the right thing”.

Like most in or near the ballpark of our discipline, we hate spec work. I think it tickles a nerve near to this dirty business, excerpted:

Do the intellectual property rights to student work produced in the normal activities of a regular course belong to the student or to the University in which the student is enrolled?

Continue reading "Ooooh, that's lovely! I'll take it!" »

There's something about breakdancing that, whether I can or not, makes me want to try it. I probably should have started when I was a nimble, back-flipping, pre-adolescent gymnast with health insurance.

Continue reading "Breakin' 3: Corporate Shuffle" »

I have to say I’ve been disappointed with the way the Republican presidential candidates have been handling the YouTube/CNN debate. When I first heard that only Ron Paul and John McCain were committed to appearing and how Romney wasn’t gonna answer no questions from no damn snowman, I immediately thought of Henry Jenkins.

Continue reading "An Humanizing Technology" »

So I was waiting for this massive file copy to complete (I'm actually still waiting) and for the hell of it, I google "marketing blog". Which, well, I just laughed in spite of myself (I'm actually still laughing). (I've now stoped laughing.) The first result is this: Shotgun Marketing BLOG.

Now let me just say that there are other bloggers I enjoy whom hail from generally the same geography as the author of Shotgun Marketing, Chris Houchens and so I was curious. Standard blogger template blog. Smattering of comments here and there.

But pow, the second post from the top struck me as perfect. Granted, this is no representative sample he's talking about (18 people) but there is definitely a rat race of memetic novelty that happens among the wired crowd.

I doesn't surprise me in the least that it takes a Kentucky blog to point that out. Good on you, Chris. I'm starting to think there needs to be a media vehicle dedicated to marketing from the midwestern/southen perspective. Just to hijack the point of his post and expand it, I think it's interesting that those who presume to speak for what the futures should look like are largely from the coasts, and those for whom such futures are intended are everywhere. Hell, I'm even being (consiously) US-centric in this post.

John Hagel is giving rhetorical form to what I think are the most important issues at the confluence of business, economics, marketing and even epistemology. His “Unanswered Questions at Supernova 2007” post from a month ago is still consuming my thoughts even when I’m trying to do other things, like eat and sleep.

Continue reading "Perceiving The Whole From The Parts" »

The great minds in advertising have long championed the emotional sell. As in, a Mercedes SL is sold on its sex appeal, and not, say, the work of the metallurgists on the new alloy used in its body. As I’ve said myself elsewhere, 90%+ of consumers don’t give a damn about your flux capacitor.

I’ve noticed an interesting parallel in sales in general. It seems that with exceptions, even if your product or service is mediocre, as long as you have developed a compelling relationship with your client or prospect, you make the sale. In fact, the relationship clearly does far more than any attempt to extol the virtues of your offering. This isn’t really a revelation. Salespeople everywhere know it.

Perhaps this is why advertising has gotten away with shamelessly lying all these years. Perhaps this is why customer service almost universally sucks (I think, in part, because it is viewed as product support and not part of the relationship.) Perhaps this is why the U.S. Congress is more predisposed to pork than sound policy.

I don't know why I haven't posted something about this before. I find myself talking about this all the time. Here's the gist:

Marketing is dead. You can be humans again.

No, really. Not the practice of taking things to market; I mean “marketing, the paradigm”. Marketing, of necessity, has been about dealing with customers at arm's length. This is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. In order to pass the value of economies of scale to customers, companies had to be big. They had to talk to a lot of people. Since Gutenberg, the only tools available for—indeed the only ways to even think about—talking to a lot of people have been unidirectional. These univalent tools are the currency of marketing. They offer really no meaningful dialogue.

Continue reading "It's the Humanity, Stupid!" »

We're back on Broad Street. Morning engagements kept me from the first two presenters, and I've come into the middle of a presentation on "Entertainment." The session is "curated" by Lee Maicon; Bald Guy, and Head of Planning at StrawberryFrog. The program doesn't contain the names of the three panelists. One of the panelists is a particularly smart cat who is speaking about narrative and meaning. He (the smart dude) just walked us through some movie clips - one from Kurosawa's "Ran", and one from the Matrix. I haven't been able to determine what exactly they're trying to tell us, but I've only been here for a few minutes.

Continue reading "futuremarketing redux - electric boogaloo" »

I'm sitting here in the "Downtown Ballroom," 41 Broad Street, NY, NY for the futuremarketingsummit. As of fifteen minutes ago, Scott Goodson was to begin his keynote. It has yet to begin. Okay, well he's just starting now. Technical difficulties with projectors and computers were repeatedly met with Scott's opening line, "Welcome to the Future."

Continue reading "futuremarketingsummit liveblog" »

So everything is changing. You may have heard. Technology, of course, is always changing. The communication culture is changing. Business is changing. Politics is changing. Change is changing.

Continue reading "Object Permanence and the Chrysalis" »

A very accomplished, well-known and respected ad guy spoke in St. Louis on Friday. I was in the audience. He was singing the praises of the Mark Ecko/Air Force One stunt. I asked him if the inauthenticity of the stunt (ie. that wasn't really Air Force One) might make peeps feel like they'd been had.

He responded to the effect that it wasn't inauthentic because it fit the brand.

An inevitable debate is taking place around the nature of the marketing. John Moore, at his excellent blog, Brand Autopsy, has been a recent party to the discussion. He offers this edited footage of David Jones, global CEO of Euro RSCG speaking at a recent AdAge clambake.

Continue reading "The Nature of Marketing Revolution" »

Russell Davies’ planning blog is a great read. I’ve been reading it for about a year now. I say this because I intend to make screed against something he wrote recently, and I thought I would show some respect before I wax polemical.

Continue reading "How to Feign Interest" »

Russell Davies recently posted the results of his “what will marketing become” poll. This reminded me that it’s been awhile since I posted the introduction to my little exegesis on the future of marketing, so I figured I’d best finish off this second piece. The top two winners of his poll were especially inspiring in this pursuit. Here goes:

I’ve long had the sense that marketers—especially the “stars” of the field—constitute something like a “prelacy of cool.” I think I extracted this idea from some Emigre essay I read like eight years ago. The essay in question isn’t available on their site, and I can’t recall the issue of the magazine in which it appeared, but it was of a piece with other of their essays in one respect; it decried the ostensible “co-opting of cool” which commercial interests visit upon the otherwise vital, dynamic art of the social vanguard. In a move that surely evoked both the adoration and egoic ire of the Emigre coterie, this essayist denominated the marketers whom execute this diabolism as, “Antinomian (Wikipedia, Catholic Encyclopedia).” I admit, I thought it was pretty clever. Which is why I’m stealing it.

Continue reading "Integral Marketing, Part II - Antinomian Marketing" »

You may recall at least the first few lines of Eliot's spirited essay on Neil Boorman's brand-burning rebirth. Mr. Boorman, loosely described, felt saddled with an unhealthy brand attachment. This brand attachment had, in his personal assessment, tossed his priorities askew, isolated him from authentic human connections, and befouled what should have been a generally fulfilling life of unicorns and pillow fights.

Sure, Mr. Boorman's melodramatic, fiery response may be best performed by moody, avant-garde artists named terrancE. And in some circles, his reputation may even suffer because of it. But for the nefarious cable providers, an earnest effort to confront and purge their faults and transgressions may be the only thing that can save their reputation from the unretractable rectal skewer of public opinion.

Continue reading "To err si human." »

There’s a clever guy named Neil Boorman. He’s got a blog wherein he is chronicling his evolution into what he clearly hopes will be the amelioration of a good many wrongs in his life through brandlessness. Merely forswearing branded goods is not enough however, for Mr. Boorman intends to burn any branded items currently in his possession.

Neil seems quite earnest and genuine in his endeavor. He’s even admitted to the glaring internal inconsistency that lies at the heart of a project to create a brand around eschewing brands. When I suggested in the comments on his blog that perhaps the entire endeavor should be considered folly in light of such inconsistencies, he seemed rather non-plussed. My status as a member of a marketing firm seemed to further aggravate the discourse. He does seem to wish to provoke marketers, so maybe I’m just the kind of cat upon which he wishes to heap polemic.

Anyway, I’ve suggested to him that he need not be offended as I am trying to address what I believe to be one of his core assumptions and not his character, motives or aspirations. Hopefully he’ll take me at face value, although I’m a marketer and all, so I’m probably planning some terrifically cynical subliminal psy-op as we speak. I thought I’d spare him the horror of a pretentiously long comment on his blog and just take my end of the debate over here. This gets pretty theory-heavy, but I want to address what I believe to be a (unwitting?) core assumption of his experiment.

Continue reading "Bonfire of Personal Responsibility" »

So this is a blog. And a rather new one at that. Acting under the assumption that a blog is the proper venue for tempest-in-a-teapot grandiloquence, I intend now to unwind my narrative on new marketing. It will shake out into a number of parts, but I must to warn you now, fair reader: I have a penchant for a kind of looping, lateral storytelling which some (the lawyers want me to warn people with epilepsy) might find, well, obnoxious. So you’ve been warned and all that.

Continue reading "Integral Marketing, Part I - Exordium" »