second brain

so here's the bad news...

jon fine quotes Murdoch's main man, Peter Chernin, on the brutal truth about newspapers' single largest source of revenue, classified ads:

the classified business at newspapers is in freefall and the internet will never help us compensate for what it was

the first bit we knew, the second bit must be a bitter pill to swallow. So who will survive and how will they make money? Nobody's quite sure. News Corp are getting together to, er, brainstorm some answers...

alanis finally gets the meaning of 'ironic'

well I never thought I'd say it, but this alanis viral (her savagely satirical take on Black Eyed Peas 'My Humps') has made me think she's cool. Apparently lots of other people are having the same reaction. YouTube offers - if you're very smart - a fantastically cheap way to drive brand reappraisal.

shuffle culture

i'm thinking there is a tectonic shift in people's emotional relationship with music and other cultural content, which proceeds from our different technological relationship with it. I'm calling it the rise of 'shuffle culture' until I think of something better.

speaking very broadly, the 'old world' of media and content, in which a few companies tightly controlled the distribution of the stuff we like, encouraged very intense relationships with certain genres, certain artefacts, mainly because there were fewer of them and we had more time to get to know them. So you were a Mod or a Rocker or a Goth - each of those 'worlds' had its own set of behavorial norms, cultural codes, and so on. Or -your favourite band was Led Zeppelin and you'd listen to their new album over and over, getting lost in it, worrying over every chord change, deciphering every lyric.

the new world - in which choice is infinite and content is far more freely distributed and disaggregated, and easier for consumers to get and discard and manipulate - encourages a pick and mix, skimming and shuffling relationship with it all. And arguably a thinner emotional experience.

this is clearest in music. I know from my own experience that I rarely become immersed in an album or genre any more, but instead download hundreds of individual tracks from different artists and genres, enjoying them for three minutes at at a time, rarely going deeper. A friend of mine with a thirteen year old son described the other day how ruthlessly efficient his son is at picking the tracks he wants from a new album and discarding the others. The idea that he'd take time to get to know an album, sink into it or let it sink into him, is alien. He's on to the next thing.

Of course there are still people who become obsessive about certain bands or artefacts, but there's far fewer of them. For most of us, an increase in choice has meant a decrease in the emotional intensity of our relationships with content. Thoughts prompted in part by this interview with the brilliant music critic simon reynolds:

the landscape is completely transformed by all these massive changes in retail, distribution, media...I put the references to Top of the Pops and Radio One in the introduction to indicate that my particular expectations of pop are very much the product of an era, a particular apparatus that created certain kinds of intensity. A new landscape is emerging that is doubtless generating new ways of experiencing and discovering music, new forms of collectivity around music, yet it’s hard for me to see the changes as anything other than dis-intensifying. The web has extinguished the idea of a true underground. It’s too easy for anybody to find out anything now, especially as scene custodians tend to be curatorial, archivist types. And with all the mp3 and whole album blogs, it’s totally easy to hear anything you want to hear, in this risk-less, desultory way that has no cost, either financially or emotionally. I sense that there’s a lot more skimming and stockpiling, an obsessive-compulsion to hear everything and hoard as much music as you can, but much less actual obsession...

thinking versus doing

Bernard Matthews' plan to extend its brand into the organic sector seems like a necessary, albeit defensive, move to me, sending a much-needed signal about their quality credentials. But in an article in Marketing Week the move gets criticised by a succession of commentators, including the MD of Interbrand, who seems to see it as superfluous:

(Gareth) Hales says that many brand marketers do not realise the value of the brands that they are looking after but instead "want to be seen doing things".  He adds "They want to create action and have ideas..."

they want to actually do things? gosh, we must put a stop to that.

now, mr hales may have been quoted out of context - but I mention his quote here because it states the inverse of the real problem with much marketing, particularly at traditional FMCG companies. The problem is, marketing has become an abstraction. Marketing people (and their agency accomplices) have gotten too comfortable sitting around talking about 'brand values' and have left the 'doing' to everyone else in the company. If this was ever acceptable, it's certainly not now that the current media environment demands a stream of fresh initiatives from every brand, and the line between product and branding has become increasingly blurred. We all need to remind ourselves that 'brand' is a verb, not (just) a noun.

think local, act local?

of course, we all know the world is flat and getting flatter, that we live in an increasingly globalized world. But to every trend there is a counter-trend.

in the uk and other developed economies there is a nascent and growing movement towards localist consumerism. People in supermarket aisles can be seen picking up their frozen chicken to see if it was reared in their region or shipped in from overseas. Localism sits at the convergence of a few different things:

first, green consumerism. No Impact Man and his followers are suspicious of any food or drink (and, increasingly, anything) that has to travel more than a few hundred miles before it reaches my home or my mouth.

second, authenticity.  The search for what is real and uncorrupted becomes ever more urgent as the developed world gets ever more over-marketed - and what is local is tangibly authentic.

third, cultural production. As the internet and other technologies allow consumers to generate their own content, people are getting used to the idea that they can create their local media or use the internet to generate local activities.

this presents an interesting quandary for global brands. The imperative to integrate your communications to local markets becomes more urgent than ever before. But it's not just about communications in the traditional sense - it's about what you do for and within a local community. How do you become a genuine part of the fabric of a community? Are there implications for your supply chain? How do stay true to your global (or American or Swedish) heritage but reinvent yourself at different levels of localism? There are no easy answers. But unless your brand is thinking about them it may quickly find itself out of touch and out of place.