As I interpret this footage, Mr. Jones appears to be pissing on the whole customer generated marketing/social networking/web 2.0 clique. It’s not exactly what I would call withering, but as I interpret it, there are some substantive arguments offered. For those too lazy to read John’s post, here are the relevant bits from David’s speech to which John calls attention and my brief thoughts.

“Our industry cannot delegate the creation of brilliant ideas to consumers. That has to be our job.”

In general, I concur. However, there is always Ben’s 1%.

“What’s been quite a prevalent trend in the lazy agencies over the last two years is to go, ‘I know. Consumers can now create ideas so what we’ll do is get them to come up with the idea.’”

This is undoubtedly true, but I suggest that it derives from the fact that marketing firms are constituted for a kind of communication that is defined by the mass communication technologies of the last hundred and fifty years. Ubiquitous packet-switched networks with decent bandwidth to our homes can only encourage demand for conversation. Marketers are tooled to talk at a mass audience. This conversation stuff is new to marketers and because it seems to require something of an operational and cultural retooling, I imagine it will have to be forced on them by the market. They may try to include these initiatives in their campaigns, but until they make this constitutional shift, they will be hard-pressed to create authentic conversations.

“If you look at and go play around on the ‘YouTubes’ and ‘MySpaces’ … well, there are a few entertaining things there but there is so much utter crap there. There are only so many times you can watch someone dance in a crazy way or mime badly to a song. And so firstly, consumers aren’t that brilliant at it and secondly, what they will do is not all that relevant.”

This would seem to be the other horn of Ben’s 1% rule. To wit: if 1% of your audience will contribute something profound and relevant, it follows that the other 99% will not. It does not follow, I submit, that the conversation is thus rendered useless, for reasons I’ve mentioned previously, but it does seem to suggest that so-called CGM is likely not any kind of panacea. It is a prediction of what I have the pretention of calling my model of what is going on with marketing that the “traditional marketers” and their tools really won’t go away, but they will have to learn what the new technology really means and that discovery will necessitate a fundamental change in the constitution and creative culture of the marketing firm.

Incidentally, the depths of my loathing for the name, “Integral Marketing” grows daily. How about: Humanization? Anthropic Communication? Yuck. Tribal Marketing? Nope. Really, help me out here.

The post in question is titled, “how to be interesting.” Such a title (ignoring Mr. Davies’ demonstrated brilliance for the moment) immediately sets off alarms for me. I’d imagine some who are reading this already have a notion of where I’m going with this. The post starts with two assumptions:

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

Fine. Spot on. Then he goes on to describe a list of ten things you can do to ostensibly become more interesting. It’s a fine list of things like, “Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before.” I’d recreate the list here, but Y’all can just go read his post. He prefaces the list with:

“It’s sort of didactic, bossy even, but it’s supposed to be instructional, rules you can follow. If you do them, and send me evidence that you’ve done them for three months, then I’ll send you a marvelous ‘I’m More Interesting Than I Was Three Months Ago’ certificate.”

…but even with that preface, I can’t help but respond to the whole business by saying simply: bollocks.

I submit that the ghost in Mr. Davies’ “be interesting” machine is the serendipitous “why?” That interesting people may exhibit some of this behavior by no means suggests that the behaviors are what imparts interestingness. My one-time music theory professor and just generally all-around smart guy, Steve Heinemann, once said to me, “music theory is a description of music, not a prescription for music.” It would seem that the same applies to Mr. Davies’ supposed recipe for interestingness. The missing sine qua non in his analysis is a non-programmable inspiration.

For example, I am interested in Japanese culture. I may engage in any number of the behaviors Mr. Davies encourages, but they are not why I am interested in Japanese culture. They are merely the outward result of my interest. The reasons I am interested to include the fact that I visited Japan as a child and the accidental fact that there is an unspeakably beautiful Japanese garden in my hometown which only exists because of the fortuitous presence of a sizable Japanese community here. Yet even these facts are not sufficient to justify my interest. And if I weren’t interested in Japanese culture, no amount of blogging and scrapbooking about it would necessarily create such an interest.

Not to be contrarian, but I’d be willing to bet that none who receive Russell’s marvelous ‘I’m More Interesting Than I Was Three Months Ago’ certificate will actually be any more interesting than they were before they undertook this exercise. More known perhaps, but not more interesting. And if by chance, some do prove to be more interesting, I suspect it will be epiphenomenal to those ten habits of highly interesting people.

Though it would certainly be interesting if Mr. Davies’ were to undertake to cut my argument to ribbons. To me anyway.

I have no pretensions about being the kind of expert who has been rendering these prognostications, but I won’t let that stop me from trying to answer these questions.

I don’t have any desire to critique the film itself, so let’s just assume that Sacha and his film are good stuff. Anyway, I don’t have to critique it, because you can go to YouTube and see any number of Borat clips. Interestingly, this clip of Borat wrestling CBS’ Harry Smith has almost 500,000 views as of this evening. I submit that this is, in fact, the answer to the above questions. I don’t know how all these clips came to be on YouTube long before the movie’s release, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a part of a clever marketing strategy. I also wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the aforementioned experts knew little to nothing of this fact.

Update 11/6: That CBS clip has almost 900,000 views just two days later.

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.

Basically, antinomianism is something of a theological epitaph. Roughly, antinomians are those who would claim that their relationship with God supersedes their obligation to the law. The aforementioned Emigre scribe’s use of antinomian seemed to suggest that these marketers, in using the semantic and aesthetic currency of nascent socio-political art, are placing themselves above some ghostly, unspoken social rule. This rule would appear to be something like, “Thou shalt not corrupt the evolution of social dialogue with a commercial interest (especially when that dialogue is rich with sophisticated anti-commercialist narratives)” or, “Hey marketers! WE’RE the arbiters of cool, not you!” For my part, I cast my lot with commercialism. In short, I like stuff; especially shiny stuff, but I digress.

Why should I wish to throw in with the suggestion that marketers are antinomian? Obviously, I’m not going the anti-commercial route, ‘cause as I said, y’know, I like stuff. It is because I think marketers have placed themselves beyond the purview of another law. Specifically, marketers have largely defiled the small group ethic. I submit (and as a cursory citation of precedent for this, see F.A. Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”,) that there is a rich, dynamic, and diverse tapestry of ethical systems that dictate the intercourse of “social circles.” One’s modern social group or clique is approximately analogous to early human tribes in terms of size and other properties. The elaborate counterpoint of social, aesthetic, communicative, expiatory, and other tools that facilitate the interaction of modern social groups has evolved, tediously over many millennia, around roots set in tribal antiquity.

That marketing is largely antinomian is a foundational point for me in the pursuit of some greater understanding of the changes happening with marketing. It’s the first part of the pretentious “big idea” I’ve constructed to describe what I think the result of the shakeup will be. I know I’ve described this first point somewhat wonkishly, so I don’t know if it seems solid enough to you, fair reader, so that you might easily find something at which to throw stones. For this reason, I want to explain how this notion of “antinomian marketing” crystallized for me, in the hope that it might in turn help to describe just what the hell it is.

One thread of the story begins with Jack Kerouac. There are other people who seem to me a good way into this story, but Jack was how I first entered. I read The Dharma Bums at about age nineteen or twenty. It was a Cool Thing To Do among my peers and as it turns out, Kerouac’s theses and aesthetic are really the foundation of “Cool” as we know it. Mashing up apostate Buddhism with Jazz and existentialism, Kerouac presaged the disaffected, hip-hop/goth/green/alt culture by way of the beatniks, hippies, and x-ers. Nearly everything that pop-culture has produced since Kerouac employs some degree of the Buddhistic detachment and malcontented social criticism he helped to make popular. From James Dean right on up through Death Cab For Cutie, disaffection is packaged and sold as rebellion. Cool equals “not caring.”
Of course, this operational definition of cool is facile and sophomoric. It appears to be predicated on the idea that youth/counterculture is the primary source of novelty and must necessarily be somewhere on the scale between indifferent and hostile toward society as it stands. You know the trope; by detaching from the social norms of their parents, youth culture brings new and better ideas onto the scene. While this is certainly true in some sense, it is not an unalloyed truth.

Youth doesn’t maintain its recalcitrant antagonism indefinitely; to do so is to become intransigent. What’s more, youth culture is internally reinforcing. There can’t be complete detachment within the counterculture, because it would prevent the counterculture from existing. Ironically, this pseudo-Buddhistic detachment Kerouac lionizes is his response to a larger culture that is, in his estimation, detached from him.

The eureka moment on this came for me at a seminar a couple years ago where Hal Riney (whom I consider to be an exemplar of what is best in traditional advertising) spoke. He showed spots he’s created over the years, from the 1984 “Morning Again in America” image campaign for Ronald Reagan to the “Frank & Ed” campaign for Bartles & Jaymes (YouTube,) to the brilliant, “Different kind of company, a different kind of car” campaign for Saturn (can’t find any of the original TV spots online; boo, hiss.) It struck me that Hal’s stuff isn’t dripping with irony or malaise or alienation. It’s anything but.

I asked him about it in the Q & A session. I said something like, “It seems to me that advertisers fancy themselves a sort of clergy of cool. Your stuff, if you don’t mind my characterization, is anything but cool. It strikes me as unrepentantly passionate, idealistic, and visionary. What’s the difference? Why isn’t more advertising like yours?” Hal responded by saying he thought that marketers are too youth-obsessed, and what’s worse, they assume that the youth demographic is some kind of alien species with little connection to the stuff that human beings find viscerally compelling. “I mean, come on, we’re all human,” he said.

Which brings me back to the Hayekian small group ethos I mentioned earlier. A big part of “being human” is some degree of mastery in the use of the tools available to facilitate the interactions of a small group; your social group. If a friend is seeking to convince you of something, they must make use of their attachment to you. Said friend will not move you by being distant from you. The small group ethos is the toolset for this attachment. You misuse or ignore these tools at your social peril.

Yet misuse these tools is precisely what marketers have done. In an effort to insinuate the brands they champion into an intimacy with the hearts of the disaffected youth culture, they have adopted the disaffection to their own injury. Inasmuch as these marketers seem to see at least the Boomers as wannabe disaffected youth, there are few audience segments that don’t now receive a goodly dose of this cooler-than-thou treatment.

It’s like marketers have become the guy with the mullet and the Camaro who is constantly burning his tires at every intersection in your neighborhood. I can imagine my wife saying sarcastically, “ooooh, I bet he thinks he’s cool.” Unfortunately, he IS cool, because that “I don’t give a fuck” attitude is precisely what cool is.

Marketers know the formula so well now that they don’t even have to bother trying to attach their marketing to some latent cultural phenomena anymore. Now, they can just tell you what to be disaffected about. “Obey your thirst.” They appear to consider themselves above and maybe even the custodians of the diverse set of unspoken law that informs the interaction of our social groups. They are the antinomian high-priests of cool, and like mullet-boy, they consider us helpless to respond as they lay tire scratches at every intersection in our communications culture.

Previous: Integral Marketing, Part I – Exordium

Marketing blogger, CoolzOr provides an example of this in action. He has been served a DCMA notice from YouTube because he had posted a PSA about drunk driving which British ad agency, Lyle Bailie International cited as a copyright infringement. What does Lyle Bailie think they have accomplished by this, except to have limited the reach of a PSA about drunk driving, and demonstrated to the world that they are bullies?

Anyway, I’d wager it is exactly this kind of old-paradigm thinking that provides the space for early adopters create novelty while the incumbents sit by and watch.
h/t – Ilya Vedrashko at the MIT Advertising Lab blog

Scott Schiller, who has been doing unbelievably great stuff with Javascript for a long time now, built this devilishly clever test of your Web 2.0 bona fides. To purify myself of the crushing weight of the pressure to have remnants of these sites from his list in my cache, I’ve decided to print the homepages and burn them at some future date. I scored a 21%.

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.

I believe that core assumption is semiotic and epistemic in nature. It is de rigeur in academia that authorial intent is almost (and often even completely) inconsequential to the adduction of the meaning of a speech act. What seems to me the most profound implication of this is that groups which convene around shared grievances have become the de facto custodians of the meaning of any speech acts which they deem germane to their victimhood. I further contend that the basis for this postmodern experiment lies in what I believe to be faulty epistemic claims about the necessary contingency of truth; basically, that “truth” is linguistic/cultural/social.

“This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world …. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.”

Marketing comprises speech acts. Were the academy to promote the primacy of authorial intent, our culture would be suffused with the necessary intellectual posture to evaluate claims on their merit, even claims made by marketers. Whereas now, we’re all assumed to be hapless victims of claims, the interpretation of which has been conscripted by the demagogues of each aggrieved group.

If truth is contingent, the dogma seems to go, then individual agency cannot suffice to adduce the truth value of a claim. IOW, you can’t help it! Your individual agency is a product of your imagination! Given this metaphysical prescription, you can now manumit all complicity in any putative compulsion, say, to buy those Pumas. You’re merely a product of your culture, because any ostensibly transcendental truth cannot provide you the solace that you, as an individual, really know anything. All your supposed knowledge is merely a holographic projection of social forces beyond your control.

Heady epistemological argumentation aside, doesn’t such a metaphysics seem intuitively untenable? You know that if you kick your pricey espresso machine hard enough, you may break toes and it will hurt. Give it a try and then tell me that espresso machine merely a projection of social programming. Likewise, is it more intuitive to suggest that marketing is merely speech acts that you can effectively parse and interpret with alacrity, requiring only the assumption that the marketer (author) has an intent that you can evaluate, or rather that people can be victimized by culturally-constructed marketing significations without any reference whatsoever to the marketer’s intent, whether bad or good?

It is this latter assumption that underlies things like the prohibition on holocaust revisionism (with which I make no truck whatsoever—merely mentioning holocaust revisionism should not be construed as tacit support for such sophistry) in Austria and Germany (and other states as well?) We here in the US have our First Amendment which states, fairly unequivocally, that no laws shall be made abridging the freedom of speech. It is this Enlightenment principle that, I think, makes most Americans look askance at the notion that someone can be victimized by anything but the most egregious excesses of speech; including marketing speech.

So, In my view, Mr. Boorman’s normative proposition on this issue is precisely inverted. He’s railing against brands when what he should be doing is railing against the philosophical claim that people can only be unwitting targets of marketing-as-social-phenomena. For I would council, were I asked, that such a philosophical claim lies not only at the heart of his experiment, but also at the heart of the malaise he feels about his ostensible helplessness to resist brands in the first place.

Ironically, perhaps, I think a great many marketers fall prey to the same fundamental cynicism. The co-opting of “cool” and the tendentious focus on the youth market borne of this cynicism about truth, I believe, serves to embolden those who would claim, as Mr. Boorman seems to me to be doing, that marketing confers no value and is somehow profoundly misanthropic.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a roomful of primary school children waiting for me to brainwash them into candy/toy/alcohol consuming automata.

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 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.

I expect this story to have an eccentric orbit. But I intend that it should prefigure and ultimately arrive at a simple focus. It is this: New marketing means authentic human communication. Like all simple summaries, it’s a platitude. Personally, I get sweaty about attempting to describe the historic-philosophic-cultural superstructure of something like this new marketing stuff. But hey, if you wanted platitudes, you’d have given up on this by now.

The name I use as a symbolic link to these ideas is ‘Integral Marketing.’ I think this name pretty much sucks. As a name, it points directly to my thesis (and is something of an homage to some of the thinking that inspired said thesis), but damn if it ain’t lifeless. Here’s to hoping someone can suggest something better, because I will happily adopt it.

This much I know, this story has a curious and varied cast of strange attractors. Hal Riney shows up, which might not seem strange. He’s the consummate ad guy. I’m not ashamed to admit that I got choked up watching the original Saturn spots (can’t find them online anywhere.) Interestingly perhaps, Hal is mashed up in my head with beat author Jack Kerouac, who makes an appearance.
In pops one clever Mr. Russell Davies. He’s an Account Planner. Followed by Ken Wilber. He’s, well, a philosopher. He also holds the distinction of being the only philosopher to have his collected works published while still alive*

I plan on working in Maxwell’s Demon, Dr. Clayton Christensen, Autism, and Ovid as well.

Obviously, I’ll weave it all together at the end with a QED, full gainer, triple salchow, and a rhetorical flourish that will achieve sentience and make you a latte all while you listen to the final 2:30 of the Sinfonia of Guglielmo Tell (Chially, Pavarotti, National Philharmonic). So, y’know, if that doesn’t seem interesting, I can maybe do some sockpuppetry or something.

Next: Integral Marketing, Part II – Antinomian Marketing