The Destruction of Community and the Rise of the Fan Club

Via the miracle of YouTube, I spent the last hour or so watching a lecture the late Neil Postman gave in 1998 at Calvin College in Michigan. In it he brought up a compelling idea (actually dozens of them, but here I’ll just focus on one) about how technology has changed our definition of community. Traditionally, communities have been united by broad commonalities (e.g., geography, culture, history, etc.) even as the individual members of the communities differed on many particulars. Indeed, the trick of making a community function was for the individual members to find a way to work around their differences and disagreements to create a socially cohesive unit. Take away the negotiation and compromise on the points of difference and the points of commonality would not be strong enough to hold the community together.

Yet when we talk about communities in the age of interactivity, we often mean something very different. More often that not we are referring to a group of people who are in near total agreement on a particular topic. Because technology makes it easy–indeed almost effortless–to create new communities, people who find themselves in any sort of disagreement in an existing community need not work through their differences. They can simply start their own community where they do not have to put up with the annoyance of dissent. This may seem like a dream for a marketer who will benefit from gathering together a group of people who are deeply loyal to a brand, but a community it is not. It is a fan club. (Indeed, in its political incarnation it can become something much more troubling–a walled compound of people who would rather enter into an infinite loop of mutual affirmation than engage in honest and thoughtful debate. Insert your favorite–or least favorite–cable news network here.) Remember that the word fan comes from “fanatic”–a person with extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal.

But my purpose here is not to talk politics; I leave that for a different time and a different blog. In the age of social media, marketers throw around phrases like “online community” as if we all agree on what they mean. I submit to you than we don’t. As more and more brands venture into the interactive space, the ones who succeed will be the ones who are honest with themselves about whether they are looking to create a community or a fan club. Uncritical enthusiasm may seem appealing, but ultimately stronger brands are built on the support of those who see our warts and want to help us heal them.

Billion-dollar ad agencies versus twelve-dollar branded content

One of the warnings I give clients (as well as bright-eyed creatives) who wish to produce “branded content” for the interactive space–they typically have in mind some sort of video that they hope will catch fire and become part of the popular culture–is that they must understand they’re not simply competing with other branded content for the attention of consumers. They’re also competing with every amateur video on YouTube that shows a guy stepping on a rake and accidentally hitting himself in the nuts.

Clay Shirky’s recent post, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models,” does a nice job of explaining why big organizations struggle to react to the threat posed by cheap, low-quality competition:

In the mid-90s, I got a call from some friends at ATT, asking me to help them research the nascent web-hosting business. They thought ATT’s famous “five 9’s” reliability (services that work 99.999% of the time) would be valuable, but they couldn’t figure out how anyone could offer good web hosting for $20 a month, then the going rate. No matter how many eventual users they assumed, $20 didn’t even seem to cover the monthly costs, much less leave a profit.

I started describing the web hosting I’d used, including the process of developing web sites locally, uploading them to the server, and then checking to see if anything had broken.

“But if you don’t have a staging server, you’d be changing things on the live site!” They explained this to me in the tone you’d use to explain to a small child why you don’t want to drink bleach. “Oh yeah, it was horrible”, I said. “Sometimes the servers would crash, and we’d just have to re-boot and start from scratch.” There was a long silence on the other end, the silence peculiar to conference calls when an entire group stops to think.

The ATT guys, part of a company so committed to the sacred dial tone it ran its own power grid, had correctly understood that the income from $20-a-month customers wouldn’t pay for good web hosting. What they hadn’t understood, were in fact professionally incapable of understanding, was that the industry solution, circa 1996, was to offer hosting that wasn’t very good.

The world of content creation is facing a similar shift. YouTube sensation “Charlie Bit My Finger” is the most viewed minute of video in the last five years (175 million views and counting). It’s an amateur production–too grand a word really, for something so simple–with no budget, yet more people watched it than all the so-called “viral” videos that agencies spent millions of dollars making. How will big advertising  compete against such bottom-dollar threats? Emulating “Charlie Bit My Finger” is not the path. The video was dumb luck, and the people who captured the moment are unlikely ever to capture anything as interesting again.

Offhand, I think there are a couple of models that could work. First, agencies could set up something like a content greenhouse in which they try to grow their own low-cost solutions. Assignments could be given simultaneously to dozens of film students (for example). (Perhaps for a different product the assignment could be given to dozens of moms.) They’d be asked to come up with branded content on a budget of essentially zero. (Think of this as the logical conclusion of Adam Morgan’s argument that if you are having trouble coming up with a great creative idea, you should cut the budget in half and start over.) Sometimes you’ll get nothing of value, but that’s OK, because you haven’t bet a million-dollar production budget on the outcome. The key to the concept is low risk, high reward. For the film students in the greenhouse, their compensation would be the popularity of the work itself, and perhaps some sort of promise of future employment. That may not be a compelling proposition for a grizzled forty-something creative director, but it could be quite appealing to an ambitious, young hoodie-wearer trying to make his way in the world.

Another possibility is that something analogous to the early days of silent film could emerge in advertising. Think about what happened in the second decade of the 20th century: Using rather crude technology, a few auteurs emerged who were able to consistently capture magic on film. No complicated special effects, no $100 million budgets. Just whatever they were able to make happen in front of the camera’s aperture. It came down to the genius of one man. Could something similar happen in advertising? Perhaps some of the agency world’s creative superstars will shed their cumbersome organizations and set up shop with a $300 camera and a couple of tungsten lights. They may even offer to produce branded content for free and be paid by the view. For the people who are really good at it, it could be the smartest business deal they ever make.

The internet will spend less time trying to sell you things and more time helping you do things.

As evidence that the interactive space continues to trend more towards utility and away from Flash-heavy animation, I give you runpee.com, a site whose sole purpose is to identify the best times during movies to leave your theater seat and, as John Foster Dulles used to say, shake the dew off your lily. Above is the site’s scouting report on Star Trek.

What’s more, runpee.com will give you the low-down on what you missed while you were away. Despite excellent reviews, you will see that Star Trek nevertheless has multiple pee times available. Ridiculous though this all is, would you bet against the idea than an advertiser to step up to sponsor it? 7-11’s Big Gulp, perhaps?

If our civilization should last a thousand years, let men look back and say “this was their finest hour.”

Does the internet need a border fence to be profitable?

Brad Stone and Miguel Helft write in today’s New York Times that the exponential growth of internet usage in developing countries is bleeding the profit from many web-based companies. What’s happening is very simple: People in places like Turkey, Indonesia and India are spending extraordinary amounts of time on sites like YouTube and Facebook–far more than the average consumer in North America, Europe and Japan. They’re sucking up a tremendous amount of bandwidth. The problem with this is that thus far advertisers has placed little to no value on the eyeballs popular sites are attracting in the developing world. If these foreign consumers can’t or won’t buy their products, they don’t want to pay for reaching them.

As a result, the big online players have to ask themselves if growth that cannot be monetized is something they really want. It’s not out of the question that some of the most popular sites on the web will become restricted to residents of certain countries. Though this seems a betrayal of the egalitarian ethos of the internet, failing to make money is a betrayal of the reason the companies exist in the first place.

The mind-control helmet from Japan – Coming to you soon in a stylish trucker hat that’s guaranteed to wow the ladies

Scientists at the Honda Research Institute recently demonstrated an electronic helmet that allows the wearer to control a robot simply by thinking. Its inventors predict that “one day the mind-control technology will allow people to do things like turn air conditioning on or off and open their car boot without putting their shopping down.”

It seems to me they’re not thinking big enough. The e-commerce opportunities implied by this technology are staggering. Merely think about wanting something and your credit card will be charged for it. Catch a glimpse of a shiny gewgaw from the corner of your eye, and PayPal instantly bills you and ships it. Should this technology be perfected, it will be harder to get a license to run a direct-response TV spot than it is to purchase a shotgun. And rightfully so.

See the full story by Ian Sample here.

Twitter, real-time search and the integrity of information.

Some believe Twitter could find its business niche in the area of real-time search, something Google and its army of algorithms still don’t do particularly well. The only barrier between something happening on one side of the world and your knowing about it on the other is the time it takes to type 140 characters. See the full story from Technology Review here.

While I see the appeal of real-time search, the real need in the marketplace is for authoritative search. In other words, right now no one is really in the business of providing search results based on the integrity of the information returned. The interactive space is the greatest propagator of hoaxes, urban legends, rumor, innuendo, slipshod reporting and outright lies in the history of civilization. This has harmed countless people, causes and brands. Mark Twain said, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Now technology has made lies faster still.

Is a move towards real-time search a good thing, or have we simply made it easier for the truth to be trampled by a stampede of tweets?

One billion Halo 3 matches = 63 CENTURIES of consumer engagement. Are any ad agencies listening?

Bungie.com is reporting that the one billionth match of Halo 3 was played on Saturday night. So just how much Halo 3 is that? If you added up all the time people have spent playing the game, it would come to more than 63 centuries. Yes, you read that correctly–more than 6,300 years. Yet for reasons that mystify me, most agencies continue to treat gaming as if it is some sort of fringe entertainment, and even more maddeningly, as if it is something that is only engaged in by 19-year-old dudes. 

1 billion matches. It doesn’t get much more mainstream than that. Even more importantly, the enormous popularity of gaming is a great argument for a new definition of media altogether. Media are no longer what consumers watch or read or listen to; nor are they what agency media departments buy. Media are what consumers do. They’re what consumers interact with. As advertising professionals, we have to realize that interactivity is fast becoming for than an option; it’s becoming an expectation. 

The most interesting interactive work has never been in the advertising world. It’s been in gaming, and that is not going to change in the foreseeable future. The fact is that advertising can’t possibly catch up. Its only chance is to integrate itself within the fabric of gaming. We’ve seen some of that already, of course, but nothing like what we’re going to see in coming years. The movie industry should gracefully step aside. It is a foregone conclusion that gaming will dwarf it.

See the full story on Halo 3’s one billionth match at bungie.com.

A hell of an idea from the Young Guns Awards

 

In the 21st century consumers are like great boxers, bobbing and weaving, blocking everything advertisers throw at them, stepping deftly out of the way at the last second. That’s why it’s so impressive to see an idea that nails a consumer where he is absolutely defenseless. This brilliant work from the Young Guns Awards seizes on a human weakness–in this case an almost universal impulse to “steal” free wireless access whenever we can find a network that isn’t password-protected–and turns it into a powerful idea that draws people inexorably to a program on the Discovery Channel. I won’t spoil it for you by putting more details here. Watch it for yourself. Really nice thinking. Thanks to Brad Meyers for the heads up on the link.

A weird trip down memory lane in honor of the stimulus package (if you’ll excuse the expression)

Check out this deeply strange interactive piece for a site called happytaxday that was done on my watch at Tribal DDB (Braden Bickle and Travis Staut did most of the heavy lifting, so blame them). It made the One Show in 2006. Thematically, it seems to fit in rather nicely with our current economic situation–i.e., our government’s having to beg for billions or even trillions of dollars. I’ll just leave it at that and allow you to experience it for yourself.

Roll over, Gutenberg. Step aside, Farnsworth. There’s a new sheriff in town.

The most serious flaw in advertising agencies today is their collective failure to understand the seismic shift in the media landscape. Interactive media don’t represent an incremental change to the media we already have. They are totally different, irreversible, unstoppable. 

Neil Postman founded a department of Media Ecology at NYU because he understood that the media we consume form a kind of ecosystem, which, when altered, will have winners and losers. Cory Doctorow has written a very smart piece on exactly this subject that should be required reading for every agency person in America. It’s called “Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform or Destroy Your Favorite Medium.” Check it out with all possible speed.