an authentic brand, continuity and multiplicity

16 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments

A brand’s perceived authenticity is the product of making one crucial decision – which extreme to strive for.

Authenticity is a hot topic these days for three reasons: 1) we have and are a culture that evolves and cascades more rapidly, 2) the inability, so far, for brands to identify a clear strategy for this culture, and 3) millennial studies – the realization of a generation more versed in our modern culture that brands can’t navigate these waters as successfully as they can.

In response to the attention, we’ve written books, we’ve made complex lists and rankings of the most authentic brands, and we’ve generally beaten our heads against the wall.

Authenticity doesn’t exist – at least not in the measurable way a sale or transaction exists.

Authenticity is a negotiation of perception – of the future. Brands were built on this model of time perception – after major corporations killed off your friendly milk-man (h/t to Alex Erster Chung), we needed assurance that our shelves would be stocked with our favorite products on our next visit to the store, and that those products would maintain a standard level of quality.

In other words, brands are the result of our need for continuity. If it were a Radiohead song, authenticity would be No Alarms and No Surprises.

Brands perfected continuity. Pick a message, pick an audience, repeat. And repeat again.

But then came this darn new culture of ours. With the change came our new expectation for corporations to be more responsive – to our changing needs and to our changing times.

But the Titanic wasn’t renowned for its maneuverability.

In the face of change, brands fumbled, sure, but they also experimented. In exploring culture, Unilever discovered uncharted territory in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty but because of their Axe ads, the authenticity of each were called into question. This giant portfolio brand was telling two contradicting stories.

Grant put it best,

We can’t refuse Unilever the right to make an Axe campaign without giving someone the right to refuse Unilever the right to make the Dove campaign. If we can say “no” to a sexist campaign, someone can say “no” to a feminist one.

Nothing should be foreign to brand. [...] This is precisely what is wrong with the authenticity argument now being promoted by Gilmore and Pine. In fact, brands have no native voice. They may have a brand heritage. Some brand meanings may come more easily than others. But there is nothing a brand must say, and nothing, within limits, it mustn’t say. Brands are designed to be exemplars of responsiveness.

In my opinion, the underlying issue was less the result of what both brands had to say in response to culture, and more of how infrequently they did respond to culture. Dove uncovered a real bit of truth but that truth had been lying around for decades waiting for someone to find it. Axe hasn’t responded to culture since their initial insight into their male consumer; they’ve followed the continuity route and have kept their heads down simply repeating the same Axe ad over and over again. Being highly responsive to culture is a pre-requisite for modern brand building.

Ultimately, the answer to the authenticity question is increased responsiveness + (continuity OR multiplicity).

Multiplicity is a term both Grant and Henry Jenkins use in contrast to continuity – from Henry’s transmedia work posted yesterday, multiplicity can be described as many differentiated versions of messages/meanings/characters being produced by the creator.

I would argue that cries of inauthenticity erupt when 1) a brand fails to be responsive and 2) falls too near the middle of the spectrum between continuity and multiplicity.

In response to culture, there should either be one ideal upheld and oft-repeated, or a shotgun approach of variations and innovations.

If you’re interested in this post, I highly recommend Grant’s new book, Chief Culture Officer.

core principles of transmedia storytelling

15 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 12 comments

click the image to see the full size slide

Henry Jenkins recently published his Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling from his talk at the Futures of Entertainment conference. Read part one and part two. I’ve simply paraphrased or directly lifted a phrase from Henry to make the above graphic (consider it a Jenkins Reader’s Digest post, but do read the full posts). You can also view Henry’s keynote here.

From the slide, the seven core principles of transmedia storytelling:

1. Spreadability vs. Drillability
The ability and degree to which content is shareable and the motivating factors for a person to share that content VS the ability for a person to explore, in-depth, a deep well of narrative extensions when they stumble upon a fiction that truly captures their attention.

2. Continuity vs. Multiplicity
Some transmedia franchises foster an ongoing coherence to a cannon in order to ensure maximum plausibility among all extensions. Others routinely use alternate versions of characters or parallel universe version of their stories to reward mastery over the source material.

3. Immersion vs. Extractability
In immersion, the consumer enters into the world of the story (e.g. theme parks), while in extractability, the fan takes aspects of the story away with them as resources they deploy in the spaces of their everyday life (e.g. items from the gift shop).

4. Worldbuilding
Transmedia extensions, often not central to the core narrative, that give a richer depiction of the world in which the narrative plays out. Franchises can exploit both real-world and digital experiences. These extensions often lead to fan behaviors of capturing and cataloging the many disparate elements.

5. Seriality
Transmedia storytelling has taken the notion of breaking up a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or installments within a single medium and instead has spread those disparate ideas or story chunks across multiple media systems.

6. Subjectivity
Transmedia extensions often explore the central narrative through new eyes; such as secondary characters or third parties. This diversity of perspective often leads fans to more greatly consider who is speaking and who they are speaking for.

7. Performance
The ability of transmedia extensions to lead to fan produced performances that can become part of the transmedia narrative itself. Some performances are invited by the creator while others are not; fans actively search for sites of potential performance.

Now go read Henry’s posts.

stop saying viral video

10 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 31 comments

Alright, let’s put a nail in this zombie’s head.

How a virus works: A virus is essentially a set of genetic instructions wrapped in a protein. Outside of a living cell, a virus is inert. Once attached to a host cell, a virus injects its instructions into the cell, which takes over the normal machinery of that cell for the express purpose of producing more virus particles and assembling those particles. The virus particles then reach a critical mass and break free from the host cell in order to find a new cell to commandeer. The only purpose of a virus is to produce more of itself.

We began applying the viral term to digital environments with the invention of the computer virus. This made some sense. Computer viruses often primarily function to reproduce themselves; to seize the normal functions of the system and use it to infect every host file the system accesses. Add the internet, and viruses begin to commandeer email applications in order to infect more and more systems. (these days the viral term is erroneously used to describe malware, adware, and spyware, which are not created to copy themselves)

Then came the marketers.

When we began to spend more and more of our time within networked digital systems, more examples of highly shared content appeared – this sharing occurred long before YouTube or a wide-adoption of video, but it’s safe to say that when YouTube came along, the marketers started paying attention to what we were watching.

Maybe it was because of arrogance… Perhaps marketers couldn’t fundamentally understand why we were all sharing and spreading clips of large men lip-syncing to European hit singles rather than their award winning commercials. And maybe this is why the term viral took hold – because to the marketers it must have seemed that if Numa Numa could have millions of views, almost anything could (which is true, in a way). Regardless, the viral term was applied to these videos and it has taken hold. Language tends to do that and we often tend to take artistic license with terms, marketers especially so. Big deal. Right?

Artistic license should be used to illuminate, not to obfuscate.

Jump to today. Brands now have viral video budgets. A whole new type of advertising agency has risen to life with the sole offering of creating viral videos and every other creative agency has that department or staff for that purpose. I see, at least once a month if not once a week, a slide in an agency presentation with the header of ‘Viral Video Concepts.’ We have viral video chart sites tracking top YouTube videos, books on how to create viral videos, seminars, and webinars, and marketers still don’t fundamentally understand what the hell they’re talking about.

Words matter.

They’ve pulled the wool over their own eyes. They’ve labeled the phenomenon by its visible effect, not its cause, and they’ve ignored it ever since. “Videos go viral because they’re viral videos, duh. Don’t you see the title of this slide? It says viral right in the title! And don’t worry, we’ve got some great tags, and we’re uploading it to all of the major video sites. We’re aces.” Aces, alright.

Viral assumes the mechanism for distribution is built right in. It’s not.

Here’s what a viral video would actually be: I receive a link from a friend to watch a hilarious YouTube video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. I click said link. Some malicious code on the page copies itself to my computer. That code continues to replicate across my system files. To make the marketers happy, that video also commandeers my social network profiles and publishes the same link to the hilarious video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. The same code has also corrupted my browser, now any video I want to watch is replaced with the link to the hilarious video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. (someone please write this code)

Viruses are inherently malicious because they disrupt the normal mechanics of a system. Trust me giant global brand, you don’t want to keep calling it a viral video. At some point, people may have different feelings about you huddled in some dark corner engineering viral videos to infect us with some advertising message.

Ultimately, we’re missing the point; and the point is people.

Whether you have a popular hit or near-invisible flop is solely up to people. People have to see your content and then feel motivated to spread that content on your behalf. Therefore, we have to create media that is spreadable.

Spreadable media

Spreadable media is created with an understanding of the communities of people to be courted.

Spreadable media is created so that members of those communities can easily find it. And when members of a community share it, they can use spreadable media to spot other members of their community based on their reactions.

Spreadable media is a term coined by Henry Jenkins and his research colleagues at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

Spreadable media puts people’s motivations at the forefront of its creation.

What motives, you ask?

This particular section of Henry’s work deals with motivations for spreading content, not probabilities.

On top of the core question of why someone shares a piece of content, there’s still the actual mechanic and act of doing so – which requires, principally, the time and attention for consideration.

Mike put it more simply in his post, the currency of online sharing,

What does this mean for the people trying to make spreadable media? Well, before you create anything, ask yourself, “Self, what communities am I trying to court with this content?” And then, “What about this content will motivate someone within one of those communities to share the content with someone else?” And then you can move on to, “How will anyone within any of these communities stumble upon my content to start with?”

Start thinking about people first.

Speaking of people (I’m a people).

I need your help.

I need you to help me put a stake in the viral vamp.

Next time you hear someone use the term viral erroneously, correct them. Send them to any of the posts linked to from here. Fix slide titles, call bullshit, and rename your department.

Be loud and troublesome.

In writing this post, I’m surely standing on the shoulders of more brilliant gents like Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Josh Green.

By the by, Henry is working on a new series on seven principles for transmedia storytelling, definitely give it a read.

Oh, and what should you say call a video if its been spread to millions of people? Popular. Add an adverb before popular for special emphasis (e.g. very popular)

becoming a mad man, revisited

15 Aug, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

In a bit of “holy shit that’s awesome” news, I see that my report, Becoming a Mad Man, is part of Henry Jenkin’s syllabus for the fall course he’s teaching on Transmedia Storytelling at USC. It’s sure to be poked, prodded, and maybe even dismissed, but I’m incredibly honored for its inclusion in the course.

By the way, season three of Mad Men starts today.

In the 8 months since I published the report, I’ve been rather obsessed with fan culture and have done my best to dive deep into Henry’s research (and the research of many other brilliant people). If you’d like to learn more yourself, here’s a quick roundup of my previous posts. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with a cable network to create a fan based strategy for their digital marketing team, a strategy based on the 30 years of fan research that came well before me. It was a blast, and I look forward to working with that team in the future to refine the model.

I’ve come to believe that the whole Mad Men on Twitter incident may have been small in the annals of fan expression, but it was a critical moment in time for digital marketers to take notice, be curious, and perhaps learn something. Some have learned, and some haven’t. When Paul Isakson gave up the @don_draper account to AMC, I had hoped that the network or its digital agency would have done something with it besides let it sit idle for 8 months. Instead of engaging fans during the off-season with the account, on a platform that is obviously ripe for tv fan expression, they’ve done absolutely nothing at all with it (an update: now you can help Paul man the account). But to be fair, I was happy to see the art of Dyna Moe used (she was much beloved by fans for her illustrations) in marketing this new season.

I’m excited for this new season. The writing and acting behind Mad Men never disappoints. Be sure to tune into AMC tonight at 10PM/9C.

Oh, and keep an eye on Bud Melman. I hear he’s got something up his sleeve.

fans: piracy

24 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

I’ve argued here that piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers. It isn’t that people will turn to illegal downloads because they want the content for free. My bet is that many of them would pay for this content but it is not legally being offered to them. We can compare this to the global interest generated by Ken Jenning’s phenomenal run on Jeopardy: Jeopardy was already syndicated in markets around the world so when he generated buzz, he drew people back to the local broadcaster who was selling the content in their markets. They could tune in and see day by day whether he stayed in the game. Right now, everyone’s still acting as if Susan Boyle was only one video but they will wake up tomorrow or the next day and discover that lots of those people want to see what happens to her next.

- Henry Jenkins, How Sarah Spread and What It Means (2009)

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: lost control

22 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Mark Deuze has suggested at least two reasons why production companies get anxious around such [fan] activities: the creative department’s desire for creative control, the legal department’s concerns about controlling copyright. Here, we can add a third: the promotional department’s fears about losing control over their brand message. Of the three, the last is perhaps the most absurd, since in reality, these companies lost control a long time ago; the fans can do pretty much anything they want with these brands and with a high level of visibility and going after them is a bit like Brier Rabbit pummeling away at the tar baby. Yet, even pretty innovative companies are getting trapped in the internal politics around television production and promotion, incapable of forming meaningful partnerships with their most active and visible fans, and thus almost certain to start acting in ways that are going to leave them, to continue the metaphor, looking “stuck up”.

- Henry Jenkins (2009). Going “Mad”: Creating Fan Fiction 140 Characters at a Time

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: lead users

22 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments

Eric von Hippel coined the term ‘lead user’ in 1986 while identifying sources of innovation. According to von Hippel, a lead user was a user that exhibited novel behaviors by being both an early adopter of technology and an early adapter of technology. These are people who are quick to join a new platform and adapt that platform and other existing technology in unforeseen ways. von Hippel asserts that these users are important to focus on because they may demonstrate adaptations that could spread to the wider population.

In Fanning the Audience’s Flame, (Ford, Jenkins, and others) the team writes that fans are often lead users for media properties and that “lead users are valuable to understand because their tastes anticipate untapped potentials within the marketplace.” (p 23) The team explains how fans and their efforts have helped science fiction programs like Lost which work on long and complex narrative threads sustain themselves when sci-fi was once entirely episodic:

“Today, writers such as Steven Johnson and C3 faculty advisor Jason Mittell argue that American television has reached an unprecedented level of narrative complexity and that some of the most successful shows on television – Lost (ABC, 2003-present), for example – are structured more like cult series than like mainstream hits of the past decade. The success of these series suggest that narrative complexity is no longer a niche interest, one which rewards fan mastery, but is now something all consumers demand of popular entertainment.”

Ford, Jenkins, and the team go on to recommend that fan communities should be studied closely to monitor for emerging trends, behaviors, and ways to treat media content that will quickly spread from niche culture into the mainstream.

As a witness to fans crafting fan fiction for the AMC drama Mad Men using Twitter, I’ve seen fans as lead users firsthand. Now Twitter is full of fictional characters for everything from media properties, famous novels, and even :30 spots. Fans from the Mad Men escapade have even started their own agency to provide similar efforts for other properties.

When I urge clients to look more closely at niche fan communities, I’m urging them to study the actions and social norms within these groups in order to identify any lead user behaviors that could go mainstream. Fans are creating unanticipated connections between technology, social groups, and media that will reward our attention. And the pace of the web demands we stay focused on centers of innovation, and more often, fan communities represent the undersea chimneys which give life to the next evolution of species.

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: will they go along for the ride?

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

Chances are, on a long enough timeline, every corporate marketing brainstorm hits the same grand idea: we should get our consumers to get their friends to buy our products. Without fail, we all go there eventually. Then we typically pad the idea with a lot of other things we want to ask people to do; like remix a song, vote on something, or make their own ad (woof). The do’ers in the room run off figuring out how to superimpose your head on a cartoon body while the thinkers in the room pat themselves on the back. We want fans to engage and participate; we just don’t put a lot of thought in why the hell they’d want to.

In their paper, The Moral Economy of Web 2.0, Josh Green and Henry Jenkins assert that users participate as much as they want to, depending on their skill, time, desire, interest, and knowledge. They participate as much as they want to, not as much as we want them to.

So, before you ask people to do something, think about just who you’re asking. Does this consumer/participator have the skills required? What do they need to know beforehand and have we made that clear? Are they available? Does it present a significant time sink to a hurried group?

Beyond expertise requirements, desire and interest raise important social concerns. Activity, or more traditionally consumption, is a much more social thing these days, especially on the web. As a user, you’d have to ask yourself if your friends were watching, and could be impacted by your choice, would you still commit to a public action on behalf of a particular brand?

The mantra of web 2.0 has always been, “ask not what your users can do for you, ask what you can do for your users.” Mike Arauz, a fellow Strategist at Undercurrent, likes to say, “if I choose to tell my friend about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friend.” So the mantra of our brave new world might be, “ask not what people can do for you, ask what you can do for their friends.”

Ultimately, fans are the ones that not only buy our products and consume our media, they proselytize; but not purely on our behalf. They share what they love with their social graph to engender respect, admiration and love. Only until we embed ourselves within the motivations and needs of our fans will we ever experience the kind of pass along we dream about.

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: the new consumers

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public

- Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: media consumption

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly altered by new media technologies that enable us to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. An increasingly more digitally enabled and media literate population has taken tools once the reserve of professional media producers and made reworking photographs, video, and music a routine practice. The “remixability” of media content, shared platforms for the distribution of grassroots media, and the social networks that have grown up around media properties are reshaping audience expectations about the entertainment experience.

- Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins, The Moral Economy of Web 2.0:
Audience Research and Convergence Culture

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.