Marketing Pop Culture

The Empire Strikes Barack

Thanks to Todd And for the heads-up on this.  You don't have to be a Star Wars fan to love the creativity here.

Hero or victim?

One of this past Sunday's Postsecrets.

More Radiohead

Yesterday's NY Times featured a big piece by Jon Pareles on Radiohead and their "online gamble".  From a culture/trend standpoint, Pareles points out that the band's move "establshed 2007 as two kinds of tipping point for recorded music." Specifically:

• One is as the year of the superstar free agent (In addition to Radiohead, there was Madonna, The Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney).

• Second "is the decisive migration of music to the Internet."  Here Pareles points to the accelerating momentum of online music, citing iTunes' position as the 3rd largest music retailer in the states, Amazon offering MP3's, and hip hop mixtapes now finding significant life online.

Another step towards digital being at the center of everything.

Radiohead in the NY Times is here.

Some thoughts on Radiohead from Marketingpopculture.com are here.

Third Apple retail location opens in NYC's Chelsea

That's right, folks: Another Apple store is set to open at 401 West 14th Street this Friday, December 7.  It says a lot about the revitalization of the former meatpacking district--which has long since sported fashionable nightspots like Son Cubano and Lotus--as well as other spots on the must-be-seen-at barometers like Soho House and the Hotel Gansevoort.

And, it's nicely timed to open right before the holidays!  While it's not quite the same as the cube on the steps of the GM building, it is sure to be another draw to that part of town.

The Mac faithful in NYC must be entering another level of nirvana over this. . .

Halloween in Brooklyn

Lots going on, I'm sure.  However, the big "news" that preempts all other announcements is that it's Halloween!  Here's how we did it in BK.  Enjoy!

1st Street at 7th Avenue

My caped crusader (left) and a buddy.

Brooklyn creativity!

A certain subversive piece of candy.

All these and two bucks will get you on the train.

The cat and the fiddle.  Get it?

Rob talks marketing on NPR

Among other things.

Yesterday, I participated in a new segment on NPR's "News and Notes with Farai Chideya," where she invited a few black bloggers to comment on hot topics in the news.  In addition to using the topic of BET's new show "Hot Ghetto Mess" to plug Black rock, I also took aim at the NAACP’s symbolic “burial” of the N-word from a marketer’s point of view.  For example, from what I could tell there was no use of new media to further the organization’s message: No video released from the event was released by the organization on Youtube, except for this CNN clip.  How about a pod- or videocast of the speeches?  Turns out I wasn't the only one thinking about this: Clyde Smith wrote a much more in-depth and thoughtful exploration of the event here.  In the end, symbolism is great, but to be effective today, organizations like this desperately need to consider how to effectively reach younger members of their audiences

For my first national broadcast media opportunity, I think I did alright.

But, please, decide for yourself. Listen to the segment here.

Shady Limited Edition Nikes

Why is Fiona smiling?  In addition to having just organized a successful listening party for  Maya Azucena and her new album, Junkyard Jewel, she is the proud recipient of a pair of Shady (as in Eminem) Limited Edition Nikes.  How limited?  18 pair were made.  So, all you sneaker freaks, don't hate, congratulate.

(Correction: Unfortunately, as it turns out, Shady was only showing them off.  But, when you see the guy from Shady leave, the shoes stay, and your friend enthusiastically posing with them, well, I guess that's what I get for jumping to conclusions.  My bad.)

Sheep, anyone? Or the Truth of Cumulative Advantage

Duncan Watts’ piece in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine (subscription required) sheds a lot of light on how cultural products make gains (or not) in popularity.  As Watts defines it cumulative advantage

means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still.  As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors . . .

Watts goes on to suggest that the main reason for this is that people are sheep.  Okay, that’s not fair.  What he says is that social influences have an effect on what becomes “popular”.  That is, none of us make decisions completely independently.  There’s always some sort of calculus of what others will like when it’s our turn to make choices.  In fact, if we’re given some indication of the choices that others have made (as was the case in the experiment that Watts and his collaborators ran with music downloads), the influence of others “played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality.”

The takeaways, as Watts indicates, are as follows:

What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history.

More importantly, trying to predict future hits become nearly impossible.

If markets not only reveal our preferences but also modify the, then the relation between what we want now and what we wanted before—or what we will want in the future—becomes deeply ambiguous.

For marketers, this is troubling, since there’s clearly no predictability.  On the other hand, as David Jennings points out, “culture isn’t culture unless it’s shared.”  But in the sharing, cultural creations not only get amplified, they’re also changed and may change the receptivity of people who come into contact with them.

Hat tip to Futurelab for highlighting David Jennings’ writing on this subject.  For those interested in further discussion in the blogosphere on this article and subject of cumulative advantage, I’d suggest you start your search here.

Baaa!

The Arrogance of a Bottom Feeder

I’ll start out by immediately admitting that this is off topic.  But sometimes, when confronted with blindingly ignorant assertions, you have to respond.  Case in point is yesterday’s NY Times article on the state of Black theater, wherein we find the following bit of text that is attributed to David Talbert:

No figure attracts more conflicting opinions that Mr. [August] Wilson, who died in 2005.  Mr. Talbert. . .is not shy about his view: if the audiences who go to Mr. Wilson’s plays are predominanty nonblack, he asked, then how significant could he be to black people?

"[H]ow significant could he be to black people?"  Huh?  For those of you who are not aware of August Wilson, he was an African American playwright who, through his 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, illuminates the humanity of African Americans throughout the 20th century.  Along the way, Wilson garnered two Pulitzer prizes (Fences and The Piano Lesson), numerous Tony award nominations, and a National Humanities Medal among others.  So let me re-phrase: August Wilson is an American playwright.  In fact, I pulled this from his obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

In dramatizing the glory, anger, promise and frustration of being black in America, he created a world of the imagination -- August Wilson's Hill District -- to rank with such other transformational fictional worlds as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Hardy's Wessex or Friel's Donegal. Critics from Manhattan to Los Angeles now speak knowingly of "Pittsburgh's Hill District," not just the Hill as it is now or was when Mr. Wilson grew up in the '50s, but August Wilson Country -- the archetypal northern urban black neighborhood, a construct of frustration, nostalgia, anger and dream.

Talbert, on the other hand, has made millions over the last 15 years trafficking in stereotypes and caricatures, leveraging a lowest-common denominator approach.  He wouldn't be the first.  Some of his works include “Lawd Ha’ Mercy” and “Tellin’ It Like It Tiz”.  Such work travels well: According to his site, his plays are seen in over 20 countries around the world.

In addition to Talbert’s dismissiveness of one of the giant’s of American theater, what’s most irksome about the above “quote” is that it seems to equate popularity as the only yardstick of relevance or importance.  Certainly, lots of people see Talbert’s plays.  But few will confuse them with art.  Wilson’s plays, on the other hand, deal with the tragedy and comedy of black life in highly nuanced ways.  So what If Talbert’s assertion is true that a majority “nonblack” audience sees Wilson’s plays?  Could Broadway’s high ticket prices relative to those on Talbert’s “chitlin“ circuit be one of the culprits?  In any case, whoever goes to an August Wilson play sees much more complex depictions of African American life than can typically be found in other media.  For that alone, Wilson deserves all the respect in the world.

James Brown, 1933-2006

Among the names he was lovingly known as were "Soul Brother #1," "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" and "The Godfather of Soul".  It's not just hip hop and soul music that owes James Brown a huge debt, but American popular music and American culture in general.

A hat tip to The New York Times' Jon Pareles, who wrote a fine obit on James, who passed away yesterday (that's somehow fitting in itself).  In some ways the article  only skims the surface as it covers his rhythmic breakthroughs and the genius with which he melded rock, soul, funk and blues  Go enjoy his music: That's the best way to remember him.

In fact, as Pareles points out, over 100 hip hop acts sampled Clyde Stubblefield's drumming on "Funky Drummer".  He mentions, LL Cool J, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys as examples.  However, pop artists partook also: Two that immediately come to mind are George Michael and Sinead O'Connor.  If you've never heard this beat (or didn't know what it was called), turn your speakers up and press play.

Check out The New York Times' obit on James Brown here.