Grant McCracken's Blog, page 21

Difficult Men. Gifted Women (Young writers, start your engines)

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I just downloaded the new book by Brett Martin.  It gives an insider's view of how cable transformed television with shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Shield.  (This transformation matters to an anthropologist because as TV goes so goes American culture.)

In particular, this is the story of "difficult men" like David Chase, David Simon, Ed Burns, Matthew Weiner, David Milch and Alan Ball.  The implication is that it takes some unholy alliance of the cantankerous and a deep, enduring oddity to foment a revolution of this order.  

As the publisher puts it on Amazon, these men gave us shows that gave us

"narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. No longer necessarily concerned with creating always-likable characters, plots that wrapped up neatly every episode, or subjects that were deemed safe and appropriate, shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Shield, and more tackled issues of life and death, love and sexuality, addiction, race, violence, and existential boredom."

Well, that and better television.  Way better television.  Helmut Minnow's "wasteland" is now producing something remarkable, and several intellectuals (below) owe us an apology.  

But Martin's book raises a question.  Some of the new TV is being written and produced by women. Ann Biderman gave us Southland and most recently Ray Donovan.  Shonda Rhimes isn't "cable" but with shows like Scandal she takes advantage of (and pushes) the creative liberties the cable revolution makes possible.  And then there is Bonnie Hammer now consumed, one guesses, by administrative responsibilities but in her day a creative force to be reckoned with.  There are many others, I'm sure.  (My memory stack holds three and no more.)

We need a companion piece, a gendered view.  We need a look at the revolution in TV and American culture driven by the rest of the industry.  There may be absolutely no difference between male and female creatives in this industry.  And that would be a fantastic finding. Yes, but what are the chances.  Almost surely there are tons of differences.  And they await the young writer prepared to dive in and phone home.  

Bibliography

Ewen, Stuart. 1976. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.



Fussell, Paul. 1991. Bad, or the Dumbing of America. New York: Summit Books.



Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1967. The New Industrial State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.



Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Picador.



Leavis, F. R. 1930. Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. Cambridge: The Minority Press.



Minow, Newton. 1961. “Television and the Public Interest: An Address to the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C.” American Rhetoric. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speec... (September 27, 2010).



Postman, Neil. 1985. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness. New York: Penguin.



Seabrook, John. 2001. Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture. Vintage.



Sennett, Richard. 1978. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Vintage Books.



Trow, George W.S. 1997. Within the Context of No Context. Atlantic Monthly Press.

The Counter Argument may be found here:

Carey, John. 2002. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. Academy Chicago Publishers.



Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Riverhead Books.



Nussbaum, Emily. 2009. “Emily Nussbaum on When TV Became Art: Good-bye Boob Tube, Hello Brain Food.” New York Magazine. http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62513/ (August 7, 2010).



Poniewozik, James. 2003. “Why Reality TV Is Good for Us.” Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/art... (August 1, 2010).



Steinberg, Brian. 2010. “TV Crime Does Pay -- the More Complex the Better.” Advertising Age. http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?a... (November 23, 2010).

 

Get Difficult Men here at Amazon.  

Automated anthropologist (some thoughts)

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Roughly a week has passed since my experiment in San Francisco and some thoughts are in order.

For those who are new to the enterprise: On July 16, I installed myself in SF and invited people to send me instructions via Twitter.  I promised to do pretty much anything people asked me to do.  

It was a disaster.  And not in an interesting way.  But in a "how could he get this so wrong" way.  

My plan was to be truly automated, to do in real time whatever I was instructed to do.  If someone said, "turn right" that was what I wanted to do, assuming that it did not put me in the path of an oncoming trolley.  If someone said, "burst into tears and wait for someone to come to your aid" I intended to do that too.  (More on motives and objectives in a moment.)

I failed at the automated thing.  The fact of the matter is I'm a nervous nelly.  So I cheated. I took assignments sent me by email with me into the day.  And then I asked my assistant Maria to decide which of the tweets received we would act on.  (Maria Elmqvist is just graduating from the Academy of Art University.  I had written to Cameron Maddux there to see if he knew of a student who could help out.  Maria volunteered).  This too destroyed the randomizing quality of the undertaking.  (Again, more on the point in a moment.)

In the press of the moment, old habits prevailed.  I have done a lot of ethnographic interviews in the street.  And before I knew it, I was interviewing people.  This created some interesting moments as when it become clear that a would-be respondent had just told me indirectly 'to fuck you and leave me alone.'  Then the media found us, and that lead us to Jonathan Bloom, a really interesting guy who works for ABC7 in San Francisco.  We started chatting and it turns out that Bloom is helping reinvent the world of TV journalism and I wanted to find out more about that.  Then he started driving us from place to place.  And by this time, my head was spinning and I was thinking, "So why did I decide to do this, again?"

So why did I decide to do this?

First, Automatic anthropologist was a culturematic and every culturematic is a hack of culture.  It creates an event designed to engage, provoke, reveal culture.  

In this case, turning yourself over to the direction of other people might be expected to raise questions about agency and autonomy.FN1  Specifically, "Who's in charge?"  And "How can someone surrender control of the self to other parties?" 

The Automated anthropologist was designed in haste.  Suddenly, I had a free day in SF and I thought, "now what?"  I am just finishing a project for the Ford Foundation in which the question of individualism surfaces almost constantly.  So I was thinking about autonomy and what it is to be a free standing individual.

As Americans we are deeply devoted to the idea that we are in charge.  We make choices. We craft lives.  We are self inventing.  The idea of voluntarily giving up this agency and autonomy strikes us as odd. (And to the media, it turns out, irresistible.) Outside of S&M dungeons and other romantic encounters, giving up control is actually unamerican.  We define ourselves by the idea that we are self defining.  

The fact of the matter is we are only partly choosing, in charge and self inventing.  We are deeply constrained and defined by social rules, cultural meanings, political forces and economic realities. I don't make too much of this.  I am not one of those social scientists who think that because we are sometimes determined by forces outside ourselves, we are wholly defined by them.  Choice makes an extraordinary role in American life. But there are moments, ghoulish, quite scary moments, when we glimpse the limits of our autonomy and I wonder if the automated anthropologist could become one of these.

More simply, I think some people heard about the automatic anthropologist and thought, "Great.  A monkey on a string!"  It was as if they had wandered by and discovered that someone had left the door to selfhood wide open, with the keys still in the ignition!  And they had an "evil genius" moment.  

"Ah ha!  My agency will inhabit his agency.  I will make him do things that embarrass him.  I will force him to hold himself up to ridicule.  Finally, my chance to play the puppet master!" Americans are deeply opportunistic (I mean this in the technical sense) and this looked like one hell of an opportunity.    

A higher objective of the undertaking was magic.  Culturematics at their best have a way of "reenchanting the world," to use Max Weber's phrase. In place of the rational, the routine and the routinized, they are designed as a way to make something wonderful happen. This is what I'd been hoping for.

Perhaps the most compelling objective of the exercise was novelty, creativity, innovation, to pile up the words we use so often these days.  One of the paths to innovation is randomness.  And we see a passion for this these days in our passion for improv and experiment.  And the Automated Anthropologist looked like a way to use randomness to march me out of the world I knew into a world I didn't.  We are self defining.  We are captives of our own little gravitational fields.  

These fields are the proverbial "boxes" we are always claiming to be trying to get out of, but it's hard.  Many of our choices have hardened into habits.  It is very hard to escape ourselves and I thought that automation and the real time feel of advice from others might walk me straight out of the world I construct for myself into something new.  (We talk grandly and often about empathy, but this is, in my opinion, merely a matter of letting difference into consciousness on a day pass with an armed guard.  The chance of assumption-rocking transformation is remote.)  

The learning, then, is clear.  If you are going to do an event like this, you have to be scrupulous and disciplined.  You have to stick to the plan.  And you have to follow it wherever it takes you.  No cheating.  And that means you can't do any of your own documentation. Leave that to someone else.  Your job is to be completely automated...by others...all the time.  

The learning may also be "don't sent a nervous nelly on a mission like this."  Or maybe that's just a note of personal criticism.  

A note of thanks.

Sometime in the 1990s, while living in the Danforth neighborhood in Toronto, on Saturday mornings, I would wander up the record store near the Danforth subway station and fell into conversation with Dave Dyment there who introduced me to the art of the Fluxus movement and Yves Klein (see Leap, pictured).  I would not have undertaken the Automated Anthropologist without this instruction.  

Footnote

FN1. Cliche alert. I blanche a little when I write this. How many exhibit catalogues have told us that the artist is "dealing with the whole question of agency."  (Plug "whole question of agency" into Google to see what I mean.)  This has become a kind of boilerplate, the thing curators says about art without saying anything more about the topic, thus betraying reflexive behavior at the moment they wish to be critical.  With some powerful exceptions of course.  

References

For the Storify summary of the event, have a look here.  

For the book from which the project stems, have a look here.  

Greg Parsons on the new world of work

Here's the video for an interview I did with Greg Parsons in Chicago on June 11.  The event behind us was NEOCON, the design event that happens each year in Chicago.  It was an impromptu interview so not only are my questions "not prepared," they are unprepared. I shot the interview on my iPhone which I thought did really well given the noise and the commotion. I have to declare a conflict of interest.  I consulted for Herman Miller on this project.  Which, I have to say, does nothing to augment my admiration for the undertaking. If only I could always work for clients this gifted.

And here's the transcript:



Interviewer: ...do? [laughs]



Greg Parsons: Oh no, no. I won't be able to take it again. [laughs]



Interviewer: No, look! We can just keep doing it until we get a take you like.



Greg: Huh? [jokingly] No.



Interviewer: We'll just keep throwing them away. I love what you just said about getting things together, getting people together, telling them the purpose and then turning them loose.



Greg: The way we manage has been...You line people up, you tell them what to do, you get a piece, you know their outcome. You make sure and you monitor, and you see how it's all tied together. The future is actually much more complex and free in that you actually take people...You align them around passion and purpose, but then you set them free. You don't pin them down, and they bounce off against each other. They build relationships and together they find the next direction.



As long as you have a clear picture of what you're trying to achieve, and a clear set of purpose and principles, that will do just fine. You teach them how to make decisions together, so it's not pinned down. Everything have a process map. It's actually let people be free, and it's counterintuitive for people to do that.



Interviewer: Yeah. It feels like we should send in a group of people called pattern recognizers.



Greg: No, I agree.



Interviewer: Who go in and say, "This is an idea." They just lift it off, as you would transparency. You just lift that off and people keep thinking, keep lifting ideas off.



Greg: That's exactly how we've designed this. We had a big idea around the living office. It's very general. It's very abstract. We started to say, we think there's eight parts of this. And then we said, no, there are nine and we actually have landed on 12 parts and it's everything from a shared vision to a place design paradigm to a set of products and a set of services. There are 12 things and we've put one person who's passionate and qualified in charge of each of the 12, haven't told them what to do in their area, but we all get together and do the nodes of our offer. Those nodes keep developing and evolving, which causes the one next to them to develop and evolve, to form new relationships and new matrixes and new networks.



It's incredibly organic and it's incredibly uncertain and it's incredibly invigorating and surprising. Sometimes you go off the rails and you pull people back, but it works, and we got to where we are twice as fast as I think we would have. As a matter of fact, I don't think we would be here today if we tried to set a process and tell everyone what they needed to do and have a process, the Microsoft project map for everything. We wouldn't even have the map done by now.



We just had a shared view, got people who were passionate, told them their area of the percolate and we just bounce of each other and build connections as we go.

Interviewer: In a sense the concept of the living office came from a living office.



Greg: It came from the principles of life and we said "What are the principles of life?" It's the elements of surprise and uncertainty, and it's freedom, these loose systems of things, interacting, each evolving on their own, but together forming an ecosystem. We said "Let's apply that to places, let's apply that to tools and technology, and let's apply that to actually how you manage people." Herman Miller has always managed this way, but we didn't know what it was, so our founder talks about covenant relationships, not contracts. We're all about innovation and imagining and delivering things that didn't exist.



It's very hard to do that in a contract relationship where you define what you need by when because you don't even know what you're doing, and so Herman Miller has always said covenant relationships, where you agree on the purpose, the goal, the objective, the loose vision.



You agree who's responsible for which areas and then you set people free and you keep kneading and bouncing off each other to get out [inaudible 03:48] . Very different, very frightening to most companies.



Completely the opposite to what we're taught is a good process for management, but it's the mode of living, it's how people live, and it's how life happens and so we believe it's probably how organizations should work...



Interviewer: You have a design degree, and an MBA, both?



Greg: I have a fine art degree, a degree in history, and an MBA.



Interviewer: Right. Your most recent degree was an MBA?



Greg: Yes. I was the wacko artist at the University of Chicago where everybody else was an investment banker.



Interviewer: [laughs] Could you see then what you're witnessing now, that the world of work, that capitalism would be flexible and fluid in this way?



Greg: No. Basically, when I went to business school, I was learning design at Herman Miller, and how we do it, which is a lot of what I'm telling you about, when we apply onto products, and then I went to business school and said "What if we applied this to business instead of products?", and it works. To me, this is how Herman Miller is innovative, but we just don't know it as a practice, and so we're getting better and better at knowing it as our practice.



Interviewer: In a manner of speaking, Herman Miller, with this new living office is exporting its corporate culture to other corporate cultures.



Greg: Exactly. We're learning it better ourselves. Most people, we do our thing and we don't even know what we do and that's how Herman Miller has an organization. It's just who we are, it's our culture, and we don't really see what we're doing, and so we're trying to step back a bit and see what we're doing so that we do it better and we actually find that we are a network organization. We are a living organization. There are these principles that we're talking about that are actually coming from us, so why shouldn't we share them with the world, because they've worked incredibly well for us in terms of innovation.

It's not necessarily right for all work, so if you're making 500,000 of the same thing, it's probably not the way to manage. But if you want to reinvent that next thing you're going to make 500,000 of, it is the right way to manage.



Interviewer: Yes, and to the extent that whatever they're doing at the moment, they're also in the game of reinventing who they are and what they will do in the next moment.



Greg: That's the other thing we are seeing. Every large company started as a small company with a big idea. Most Fortune 500 or 1,000 companies have many of these big ideas that they expand globally, expand and extend into niche markets. They drive down costs as low as possible, but then they have to reinvent the idea, because the Earth is only so big and most of these companies are global. They found the most efficient means to manufacture so costs are approaching zero or as low as possible. Now what's left is reinventing the big idea, and many of them try and apply the same principles that they have to optimize to how they invent, and it doesn't work. You have to apply what we're talking about, which is this mode of living management which is freeing people, giving them shared purpose, giving them shared direction, connecting right capabilities and passions, and then letting them evolve their part of the organization or the living organism.

That's how life works.



Interviewer: Are there any early adopters out there who will be the first ones into the Living Office and will be a laboratory for you?



Greg: Yes, there are. I probably can't share them, but, frankly, there are a number of companies we're talking to that received pieces of this. Actually, we saw it in them before we saw it in ourselves. "Hey," we said, "they're doing this. We do that, too," and we were realizing we do many pieces of it, but a lot of those pieces do live elsewhere. One fundamental thing that most of them seem to share is our perspective on purpose. When I went to business school, we were asked in a lecture hall of 40, "What's the purpose of a business?" 39 hands went up to say "to make money." I was the only one who said "to solve a problem really well." I was told that I was crazy and I left thinking I was crazy.

What I learned was Herman Miller was founded on that idea, that if you actually solve a real problem for people, you'll get rewarded much more highly financially than you would if you were trying to achieve a financial goal. The way we look at it is, if you want to make more money, don't focus on money, focus on your purpose and your passion and the money will come.



What you get is very counterintuitive, but companies like Johnson and Johnson and Herman Miller and IBM were all founded on this principle. About 10 percent of businesses seem to pursue it, and those are the ones that have lasted for many decades and have outperformed the stock market.



Interviewer: Darn, I just...Hey, there he is, Jim.



Greg: You saved me from this.

(Transcribed by Castingwords.com)  

The Automated Anthropologist (details here)

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Today, Tuesday, July 16th, I will be in SF doing what every people tell me to do.  It's an experiment, a culturematic.  

Starting at 9:00 West coast time, I will be in Union Square ready to act on your directives.

Please send those directives to @grant27 on Twitter, with #autoanthro as your hashtag.

In between acting on real-time directives, I will try to act on the suggestions you have sent over the last couple of days. Thank you for those!

You can follow the events of the day by searching for #autoanthro on Twitter. (I like Tweetdeck as a way of keeping track of my Twitter searches.)

We will take photos and video and post the former on Twitter and the latter on YouTube. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kate Hammer.)

We will post our location in SF using Glimpse with links announced by Twitter.

For those who miss events tomorrow, I will post a compilation on Storify in a week or so.

USA Today has given us early coverage (for which many thanks, Bruce Horovitz!).  You can find the details here.  

Thanks to the help of Cameron Maddox of the Academy of Art University's School of Advertising I will have the assistance of a recent graduate, Maria Elmqvist. Thanks, Cameron and Maria!

Thanks to everyone for their support.

Best,

Grant

For background, here's the email that first announced the project a couple of days ago.  

Over the course of Tuesday, July 16, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and morality(ish).

I am going to San Francisco this week.

I am giving a talk on Monday and come back to NYC on Wednesday.

That leaves the whole of Tuesday to ...

Well, that's the question, what do I do on Tuesday? (I should have booked a get-together, but things got busy and I never got around to it. Apologies to friends in SF, Eric and Ed especially.)

So this is my plan.

To put myself on automatic pilot.

Over the course of Tuesday, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and mortality(ish).

Please tweet your instructions to @grant27 on Tuesday over the course of the day.

I will tweet the results, text and photos, with the hashtag #autoanthro.

I haven't quite figured out how best to capture and sequence the requests you send me. And I can't promise to do everything that is proposed. But I'll try. I will.

Feel free to embarrass me. I believe myself to be one ill-chosen word away from social catastrophe in any case.

But the real object is ingenuity. What effects can you set in train in an American city by directing an anthropologist on automatic pilot. Think of it as a rolling Rube Goldberg event. Small events and larger narrative arcs are both welcome. (Everything from "Turn right." to "Find someone to tell you the story of [x].")

If the Twitter feed stops suddenly or you never hear from me again, well, we'll call it a long term culturematic.

Thanks for reading and thanks for any directions you send me on Tuesday! Grant

Advice to an aspiring anthropologist

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This morning I got a note from someone who wanted to know whether a master degree's in anthropology would be useful to his career as a consulting anthropologist.  

Here's my reply:

Jim,

Thanks for your note.

A couple of things spring to mind.

The anthropology consulting world does not sort very well, so the good does not rise nor the bad fall away. Partly this is because there are no real barriers to entry. Lots of people hang out a shingle, despite the fact that they don't have credentials or any real clue.

Second, clients don't seem to care that someone doesn't have a substantial career training, education or accomplishment. Procurement just goes with the low-cost provider.

So I am not sure that a master's degree makes as much difference as it would in another field.

The second thing: to judge from your background, you have a breadth of experience, and you have engaged with the world, and that means, I am assuming, you are prepared to go places other angels fear to tread.

Many organizations are saying things like, "Geez, I wonder if there is an opportunity/problem opening up in this new place, new industry, new community." More and more, organizations are confronted with "unknown unknowns" and the best thing to do is to drop someone into the place/industry/community and have them think their way home again.  This takes a kind of pattern recognition, problem cognition that anthropologists, some anthropologists, are particularly good at.  (My clients used to ask me for "to find the right answer," increasingly they ask me "to find the right question...then the right answer.")  

In my intro to Steve Portigal's new book on ethnography, I praise him for being a Mars Rover, someone you can send anywhere to capture the culture in place. A lot of anthro-consultants would wilt under the pressure. So they eliminate themselves from the competitive set. (On this website, about 4 posts ago.)

This is not to say that I know of the clients out there who would want to hire you. But I believe once you had established yourself as someone who perform this kind of problem recognition, problem solving, you will have many clients largely to yourself. (For more on being a "self sustaining anthropologist," see my contribution to Riall Nolan's Handbook on Practicing Anthropology. http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Practi....)

So my advice comes down to this.  In the absence of a really strong program and clients who are sensitive to professional credentials, it might make sense to take the year (or two) you would give to a master's program, and spent in a "proof of concept" project where you go after a big problem and in the process deepen your skills and show what you can do.

Blog it, then turn it into a book.  And that's your calling card.  Lead with a total, open, intellectual curiosity and an eye to problem-solving pattern recognition, problem solving. (Lots of people can do one or the other. Advantage goes to people who can do both.)  This is a "self invention" scenario, but if you trust your powers and experience, I suspect you can transform yourself more effectively than a Masters' program can.  

I hope this is helpful. I hope you don't mind but I am going to post this note to my website. Naturally, I will not use your name or pass it along.

Best, Grant

p.s., I am writing this from a Hilton in Columbus, Ohio where a philanthropic foundation has me for the week, talking to Americans about politics and community.  It is absolutely interesting.  I am listening to people reinventing their ideas of who they are and what community is.  In almost real time.  So keep at it.  This is a spectacularly interesting career.    

Witness De-Relocation, a new game for summer.

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Here’s a game that will give you hours of fun.

Play it with friends and family!  At the beach!



Three steps:



1. Assume everyone you meet is in witness relocation. Everyone.



2. Come up with the “real story” for each of them.



An example: My wife and I recently decided that our new neighbor was caught in the Bernie Madoff scandal, having served as one of Bernie’s assistants. In exchange for testimony, she was renamed and relocated. (As far as we know, this is completely untrue.)



Here’s how our “de-relocation” continued:



Life with Bernie was an odd outcome for someone raised by a woman who was raised on the commune founded by D. H. Lawrence and Georgia O’Keefe in the Southwest many, many years ago, someone who had, as it happens, done time of her own for breaking into the Santa Fe institute and stealing top secret plans for complexity theory.



How would someone like this find her way to New York City and into the employ of Bernie Madoff, you ask? Well, because she had a heart murmur, a speech impediment, a lust for life, and/or served briefly as the President of Columbia University and, yes, Columbia Records, it just so happened… [Off you go.]



3. When you are introduced to the person in question, be sure to murmur, “Yeah, right” when given the “cover story,” and be sure to use broad winks and rolled eyes to let them (and your significant other) know “you’re not falling for it.”

Rinse and repeat.

The corporation and the future

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This is a post I put up on the Harvard Business Review Blog.  It's about an essential hostility between the corporation and the future.  They are made of entirely different stuff, I argue.  

An outtake:

To the corporation, the future looks a risk that can't be managed, an idea that can't be thought.

The corporation puts a particular boundary between now and the future. And it guards this border ferociously. New ideas are scrutinized with tough mindedness and high indignation. If we can't see the business model, we're not interested. If we can't see how to "monitize this sucker," we're not interested. When the future manifests itself merely as a murmur of possibility, we are not interested.

Too bad. There is really only one way to live in a world of speed, surprise, noise, and responsiveness, and that's to visit the future frequently. And, if we have the intellectual capital, maybe get a pied-à-terre there. Well, and if we're really committed, we need someone to take up residence full time.

Please click here for the whole of the post.

Acknowledgements: I cannot find the origin of this magnificent image.  Please if you recognize it, will you let me know.   

Branding and the Future of Advertising (a new rule)

See this wonderful ad from Haagen-Dazs and Goodby, Silverstein:

It suggests two things, I think, about branding and the future of advertising.



1. That we are now prepared to give the viewer a little credit.

Note that the brand and the agency are prepared to go with a foreign language.

And you can imagine how difficult this conversation would have been just 10 years ago. To trust anything to subtitles! To slow the ad! To turn the viewer into a reader! Unthinkable! Quite enough to make you want to throw a piece of crockery! AND POSSIBLY START YELLING AT SOMEONE!



There may once have been a time when the ad world treated the consumer is a dolt, a moron, an idiot but those days have passed. Or in the Cluetrain era, they are passing. 



2. That we should be able to give the viewer more and more credit.

Some day, the brand and the agency will be brave enough to go without subtitles.

Have another look at the ad and put a post-it over the subtitles. The emotional power of the scene is undiminished. Indeed, it's more powerful because we don't have to take our eyes off these beautiful people, this splendid acting, and this moment of delicious outrage.

I will grant you this much.  Without subtitles, we would miss two really wonderful lines from the actress: 1. "Isn't it your turn to apologize to me?" and 2. "You shouldn't yell at me!" (This from someone who is prepared to turn "honey, I'm home" into World War III.)



Subtitles give the viewer quite a lot of work to do. Giving them no subtitles would give them still more work to do. With no subtitles, we can I think guarantee 5 or 6 viewings.



Plus, I think we could assume that many people would take to the internet to look for a translation. And assuming they end up at a Haagen Dazs website, we have another brandable moment and our ad will have gone transmedia, a very good thing.   Everyone is now a googling machine.



The two assertions come back together again in what is perhaps a new rule for the ad world.



The more credit and work we give the viewer, the more engagement, meaning and value they will give the brand.



Tip of the hat to the people responsible for this splendid work:



Ad Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Client Häagen-Dazs

Brand Manager at Haagen-Dazs: Cady Behles



Creative Department

Co-Chairman / Partner: Rich Silverstein

Associate Creative Director/ Copywriter: Will Elliott

Senior Art Director: Patrick Knowlton



Production Department

Director of Broadcast Production/Associate Partner: Cindy Fluitt

Broadcast Producer: Melissa Nagy



Account Services Department

Group Account Director: Leslie Barrett

Account Director: Erin Fromherz

Account Manager: Kristen Baker

Assistant Account Manager: Lacy Borko



Brand and Communication Strategy

Group Brand Strategy Director: Kelly Evans-Pfeifer

Senior Brand Strategist: Molly Cabe



Business Affairs

Business Affairs Manager: Mary Marhula



Outside Vendors

Production Company: H.S.I. / Person Films

Director: Michael Haussman

Director of Photography: Paolo Caimi

Executive Producers: Cecile Leroy, Michael McQuhae

Line Producer: Gianluca Leurini

Editing House: Union Editorial

Editor: Marco Perez

Assistant Editors: Nellie Phillips, Francesca Vassallo, Jedidiah Stuber

President / Executive Producer: Michael Raimondi

Executive Producer: Caryn Maclean

Producer: Sara Mills

Why do we sometimes binge when we watch TV?

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Three paragraphs from my recent Wired essay on binging on TV:

Why do we binge watch? One way to answer this question is to say we binge on TV for the same reason we binge on food. For a sense of security, creature comfort, to make the world go away. And these psychological factors are no doubt apt.

But the anthropological ones are perhaps just as useful and a little less obvious. Because, as I’ve suggested here before, “culture is a thing of surfaces and secrets,” and the anthropologist is obliged to record the first and penetrate the second to figure out what’s going on.

I believe we binge on TV to craft time and space, and to fashion an immersive near-world with special properties. We enter a world that is, for all its narrative complexity, a place of sudden continuity. We may have made the world “go away” for psychological purposes, but here, for anthropological ones, we have built another in its place. The second screen in some ways becomes our second home.

See the rest of the essay here. 

What Apple is really working on

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[image error]I sat down to wonder what Apple is working on.  

I came to the conclusion that it's not a watch or a TV.  

It's a version of telepresence so good it will be a little like teleportation, so good, that is to say, we will actually want to use it.  

How do I know?  Well, of course, I don't. My method was a kind of telepresence ethnography.  I used empathy to take up residence in the Apple culture and I saw, or think I saw, two things:

1. that Apple wants to do great things.  Reinventing the watch and the TV are too small.  

2. that Apple wants to prove it can do great things without its guru, Steve Jobs.

What, I wondered, is big enough to be big enough for Apple?  Telepresence feels right.  To create this would be to transform the home, the work place, education, and perhaps also the city.  Apple does it again.  

Anyhow, that's the argument.

You can find the post at the Harvard Business Review Blog by clicking here.  

If you have comments, I'd be grateful if you would please leave them at the HBR Blog. Thanks!

Credits: Thank you to BioShock for the image.