Still surfing

I'm always relieved to hear that not everyone knows exactly what they want exactly when they want it, so I was pleased to come across a bunch of interesting media research in the public domain for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, most of it here. Particularly interesting to me was the study of how viewers currently navigate through their viewing options with Interactive Program Guides (IPG’s) which is the semi-official name for those grids floating over our TV screens when we flick on our digital cable/dvr remotes.

What the research revealed is that despite the many ways we now have to get exactly what we want when we want it (Tivo, Netflix, OnDemand) the majority of television viewing (over 50% the respondents claim) is still driven by general surfing behavior. Unlike the web which, most evidence suggests, is increasingly destination oriented, television remains well suited to the pleasurable of experience of surfing or just seeing “what’s on.”

Also interesting was the way research called attention to the IPG as an important media vehicle. The specific language in the IPG grids had a significant impact on viewing choices both at the primary schedule-matrix level and at the secondary (more-info) level. Intriguing to me because it basically means that networks and anyone interested in getting viewers to tune in should not take the language in grid listings for granted but think of these IPG’s as communication vehicles at least as--if not more--effective than tune-in advertising.

Sunday-afternoon viewing: the power of convention

Saw two movies this holiday week-end for the first time in maybe a decade and while the two could not be more disparate in theme and tone (The Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men and Seinfeld’s Bee Movie), the combined experience of the audience reactions reinforced my generally cranky instincts about our deep investment in genre convention.

Like most of the pro critics, I found No Country pretty fantastic. The first half hour takes you right away; the clockwork structure, the breathtaking cinematography, the acting. Even the Coen brothers characteristic vices (easy glibness, playing with violence for effect) are replaced by a seriousness about the characters. And yet, most of the audience in the full suburban theater I saw it in
weren't happy with the ending. They voiced their disappointment out loud: “I want my money back," "It was such a good movie at the beginning.” I obviously don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but it’s fair to say that the movie undermines your expectations for a certain kind of conventional Western conclusion. The ending is totally consistent with the structural and narrative terms of the movie, but my audience didn’t care. They wanted Clint Eastwood. It reminded me once again how deeply invested we are in genre conventions and how little tolerance we have for cultural expressions that don't follow the rules.

Speaking of cultural conventions, Bee Movie falls right into the sarcastic center of kid culture these days, with the same knowing, ironic tone of the revolting Shrek franchise, and lots of screen time filled up with half-hearted set-pieces satirizing (or pretending to satirize) adult culture (Larry King, Goodfellas, The Graduate). There is even a twenty minute court-room drama parody. What? I realize these things are supposed to keep the adults entertained (aren't we clever that we can recognize scenes from other famous movies), but it seems more like a failure of the imagination. When did kid movies become nothing more than an excuse to create set pieces for easy jokes? My kids stared at the screen just hoping something would happen beyond listening to the Seinfeld character do his Bee stand-up routine. Do people really like this stuff? A bee version of Larry King?

But has anyone else mentioned the movie is practically an allegory for Seinfeld’s own professional life. (Spoiler alert: don't read further if the plot of Bee Movie is important to your viewing satisfaction). A bee rebels against the conventions of the hive because he doesn’t want to do one job for the rest of his life. When the bee’s rebellion is surprisingly successful and they get all the honey they've ever made back, the hive stops production because they have more honey than they know what to do with. The bees slip into aimless and unsatisfying lives of leisure. Unfortunately, this has disastrous effects on the natural world (no pollination, no flowers, etc) and the bees realize they need to get back to work to save the world. Maybe it wasn’t all about the honey after all? Sucks to become irrelevant, doesn’t it?

Experimental office fiction #2

The only habit of highly successful people that Meyers could remember was #3: first things first. The other ones, something about being proactive, another one that encouraged you to synergize were too vague to be of much use. But the illuminating distinction between urgency and importance was so simple and so clear that it spoke to Meyers hunger for a secret key, a filter or even just a new perspective with which he could change the course of his career.

It was maybe bad luck that much of what had often been urgent in Meyers’ life also turned out to be important. His failure to clean the gutters a few Octobers ago had had disastrous consequences on a load-bearing wall in his kitchen. Not to mention a scarring fight with his ex-wife. But this unpleasant memory did not diminish the power of the principle. Even years later, the urgent/important paradigm had a special place in his cognitive tool-kit. Other systems (colored parachutes, personal brands, emotional intelligence) had come and gone but first things first remained an operating principle. Whenever Meyers heard the phone ring or just recalled some annoying errand he’d been putting off for weeks, he would find himself asking himself: Is this just urgent? Or is it really important?

It’s true that there had been stretches of time when it was difficult for Meyers to identify something important enough to put off all the things he didn’t want to do, but that was no longer the case. Importance had been thrust upon him, and he felt a renewed energy and focus. He went to work the night after their first meeting, surfing the Internet, looking for more clues to the character of B--, the great man he was now responsible for advising.

Invisible forces seemed to be aligned in his favor once again for Meyers discovered that B-- was speaking at a conference that very week-end at a resort in Southern Maine. B-- was on a panel provocatively titled, “Breaking the Rules.” Meyers immediately called the number listed on the website. The woman on the phone made sympathetic noises but explained that the conference was unfortunately fully booked. Meyers was not surprised. He had long been an avid conference attendee and knew how fast they filled up, especially with speakers of B—‘s caliber. It had probably been booked for months.

The woman was explaining how he could sign up to see the speakers streamed on the Internet but Meyers was already imagining the conference itself: all the small delightful details, from the excitement of choosing among the array of panels, the animated debates at day's end, big talk about the future, the sense of possibility. You could find yourself talking to the founder of of empires. You never knew where they might lead. That’s why Meyers usually attended several a year. It had been another sticking point in his marriage. But what was more important than career development! An experienced conference-attendee like Meyers knew that even first-rate conferences had a high rate of cancellations at the last minute. The kind of people who let the urgent get in the way of the important, Meyers thought. But Meyers wasn't one of those people. He was already searching for a hotel room.

Intuition wins again

"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again."
--W. Blake

Everyone's (or at least my) favorite columns in the Saturday NYT’s business pages—What’s online? What’s offline—explored (or summarized other explorations) of the perennial question in business culture. What makes a good manager? Method or Instinct? A well-honed system or a well-developed gut? Judging by these two summaries, the gut is clearly winning but maybe because we’re tired of the alternatives.

The What’s Online column cited an article in The Economist which in turn cites several other sources, including HBS professor Rakesh Khurana, critiquing the degradation of business schools from a “serious intellectual endeavour to a slapdash set of potted theories.” There are also counter-arguments, including a study out of Stanford and LSE which claims that companies adopting business school methods outperform the competition, but even this evidence seems further compromised by the celebration of intuition on the parallel column, celebrating the power of intuition.

The core evidence in What’s Offline is from the MIT Sloan Management Review (though Woman’s day and Fast Company are also cited) which explains how you can improve your intuition. While the article seems designed to articulate a more complicated notion of intuition--

“Intuitions is a highly developed form of reasoning that is based on years of experience and learning and on facts, patterns, concepts, procedures…stored in ones head.”

--the implications don’t exactly take us somewhere new: Managers should learn to seek out new experiences (to internalize a broader array of patterns), harness their emotional intelligence, and reflect on their intuitions before acting too rashly.

To me that’s starting to sound a lot like what we used to call "using your judgment" or even “paying attention,” but to be fair, I should check out the MIT article first.

What’s most interesting to me is the rising popularity of of “intuition” as a quality of value in managers in general and leaders in particular, whether it’s leaderships bio’s like Welch’s Straight from the Gut to Gladwell’s Blink to celebrations of any kind of intelligence besides the old-fashioned kind: Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Multiple Intelligence. Perhaps business schools are already teaching courses entitled “Not just for women anymore: the uncanny instincts of successful leaders.”

When did intuition suddenly become so valuable a core competency? It's easy to understand why we all want it: it's faster and cheaper than research and analysis and a lot more exciting, almost mystical in it's power. But why do we--in a data-rich field like business--suddenly value it so highly? Is it because we now have too much information? And it's too easy to get stuck in an analysis (paralysis) mode and be unable to act? Or is the ascendancy of intuition a biz culture corrective to a long period of overly restrictive, pseudo-scientific systems which dominated management training for decades: creating Whyte’s Organization Man an valuing systems and bureaucracy at the cost of creativity and innovation. I’m sure the story is more complicated than that, but it’s worth exploring further.

Do they have to like it?

It’s an old truism in the agency business that creatives care too much about the quality (originality, aesthetic beauty, executional detail, etc.) of their work and not enough about whether it will actually build the brand and the business. Now this is supposedly changing along with many other things in adland, but I don’t think it was even true in the old-fashioned world. And not because creatives were so focused on business results. But rather because marketers evaluate marketing ( TV in particular) much more subjectively than they usually admit, whether it works or not.

The reason I’m making this observation now is that I recently heard about two marketing clients from significant brands who killed a campaign because the marketer and his staff simply "didn’t like it.” Even though there was abundant evidence--both hard and soft metrics—that the campaign was working, they just couldn’t get over the fact that the work represented their company in style and tone that they didn’t like. It was unconventional, they weren’t. Even if the target was responding, they just don't want to be a talking monkey (that’s a placeholder).

It’s their prerogative of course; they are writing the checks. But it’s more evidence that even though managers often talk a tough game when it comes to keeping costs down, some might be just—if not more—sensitive to how the marketing looks and feels. Does my boss like it? Does my staff like it? Will I go down in company history as the idiot who approved the talking monkey campaign?

You can hardly blame them. The work a CMO stewards is more public and exposed than the work of almost anyone else in the company, certainly at the executive level. Employees might not like what the CFO has planned for them, but most can’t complain about it. The same can’t be said for a TV ad or website or DM that is going to be seen by the all the employees and their wives and most of their friends.

If it doesn’t work out, a creative can always leave it off the reel. A CMO has to live with it. It’s a dilemma, particularly when we have to challenge the client to break out of conventions in order to achieve their often ambitious goals. Of course you can always avoid clients who aren’t ready to walk the talk, but it’s hard to know that beforehand. I’m inclined to think that along with coming up with the great ideas, we also have to get good at making clients comfortable with them. A subject that is worthy of a post of it's own.

New metrics: or some things I wish I could measure

Just sat through an engaging presentation from an online market research company (OTX) which has some new brand-experience measurement tricks up their sleeve (modeling store environments, distracted exposures, etc). But the presentation also reminded me of the other things I wish someone knew how to measure in a cost-effective way.

1) Brand utility: of all the newly coined phrases describing the attention to what brands actually do for consumers (vs. what they merely show and tell), “brand utility” is my personal favorite. I first heard it in an interview on PSFK with Benjamin Palmer though I think he co-credits Johnny Vulcan of Anomaly with the coinage. Wouldn’t it be great if we could develop a metric that would measure a brand’s utility factor (or whatever we call it) in relation to the competition? If what we are all saying is true, then “utility” should be just as, if not more, important than “relevance” and “uniqueness” and all the traditional metrics.

Imagine if we could compare the relative utility factors of all the travel sites out there: Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia, Orbitz, etc. This wouldn’t be a strict usability measure which is easy enough to generate but rather some combination of ease of use and ability of the brand to anticipate and facilitate your desires behavior, both on and offline. It would be a more comprehensive measure than one you could generate through simple online user satisfaction survey.

Amazon might be considered the gold-standard of a certain kind of ecommerce transactional utility, against which other ecommerce brands could aspire.

Once we established a baseline, then we could--theoretically of course--measure how much a given usability, service improvement or new application impacted the score, and then (praise be the intelligent designer!) we might even determine if the cost investment in the improvment was worth the result? Maybe someone can already do this; But I haven’t come across it.

2) Sharability/Network/Viral effects: Another thing almost everyone wants these days is for their work to go all viral: have consumers talk about their brands and products and advertisements for free, for fun. It’s not easy but not impossible to measure how well content (or a conversation, as we say today) travels around the web once it’s produced, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could pre-test the power of a piece of a content in some kind of enclosed network? You might call it something like a Network Communication Test. The goal would be to see both how sharable some particular chunk of content was and to understand why it was so sharable. Which might even help us develop even more viral-icity.

3) Participation: Everyone not yet involved in social media that wants to be involved in social media looks at the rise of MySpace and Facebook and thinks it’s easy to get consumers to participate in their sites, rating and reviewing and uploading video of themselves doing stupid things with their friends when they're drunk. Those of us working on sites of various kinds know it’s not as easy as it looks. That we often have to prod consumers (with incentives of various kinds) to get them going and optimize the mechanisms for involvement before the machine really starts humming. Would love to find some way to measure the interest in and barriers to participation on a competitive basis at a significant scale and then compare the effectiveness of various models of inciting involvement.

Any takers?

Experimental office fiction #1

The first resume that Julia ever received in an official Human Resource capacity that she really remembers in detail was printed on hand-made paper, embedded with tendrils of organic material, leaves and petals of some flower. Lavender, Julia thought, because the smell reminded her of summer afternoons, sitting around the lake at her father's house where there was always lots of lavender. She remembers carrying it into the cubicle of her colleague, Linda S., who was equally astounded. They traded a couple jokes about it. It was pretty paper, but you couldn’t even read the type that was printed over the tiny flowers. It looked like the candidate’s name was “Sucks” though they both guessed it was probably Susan.

For years, Julia used this example at her speaking engagements at colleges and career fairs. She didn’t actually bring in the resume because that would be a violation of privacy, but told the “sucks” joke and spoke about the lavender scent filling her office. I wanted to put it in a vase, she said, dryly, at most of her speaking engagements. She always got a couple good laughs out of it, loosening everyone up, because who didn’t know not to do something this stupid?

Julia is remembering that resume now because she just received another DVD in the mail. It wasn’t the first; they’d been trickling in for the past year actually. Julia wasn’t a fan of this whole video thing. It seemed much too intimate. Not professional. But this is different. In the past week, she’s gotten three copies of the same one. She isn't even sure it’s a resume. There isn’t a cover letter. Just one of those CD covers slid into the plastic sheath with the title: My Destiny by Justin Clover.

This time, however, the background behind the title has pictures of a young man, presumably Justin, playing his guitar, rock climbing, smiling with his arm around a young woman, sitting on the beach with a large dog, even a baby photo! And most weirdly of all, a man in a white robe kneeling before another figure in a long red and white robe. It looks like a confirmation ceremony, at least to Julia, who is Catholic. She holds the DVD in her hand for a long thirty seconds. She isn’t sure she should put it in her computer, fearing it might contain some kind of virus.

Julia doesn’t sit in a cube anymore. Not for a long time. She’s a VP now, running a small HR group devoted to what they call “Transitions” at V-- which usually means firing people. She spends most of her time on exit interviews and employee-satisfaction surveys, but around spring, she always helps troll through the unsolicited resumes. She decides to call Cherie, who is the VP in charge of most of the entry-level evaluations, but Cheries not there. Julia goes back to the stack of resumes but pretty soon her curiosity gets the better of her and quickly, before she can think about it, she pushes the DVD in the drive and pulls her hand away quickly.

Right away, a soundtrack comes on. It's very loud choir music of some kind, so loud that Julia has to turn down the volume on her computer speakers. Strike #1, Julia thinks. On the screen there is a table of contents.

My Origins
My Joys
My Influences
The Truth
My Destiny

Julia can feel her heart racing, but she’s not entirely sure why, except maybe because she knows that those boys who shot their classmates made weird videos. A thought that convinces her she has to look. What if she could stop something terrible from happening?

With her hand on the mouse, she scrolls the cursor up and down the list. Finally she shuts her eyes and just clicks. She hears the whirring of the drive and almost instantly regrets it, feeling an odd and totally pointless panic.

For a second or two the screen is just white, which is a kind of relief. She gives it a moment, but nothing happens except the light gets brighter, so bright she has to squint. She didn’t know the computer could even get that bright. Shit, she thinks, it is a virus, and she’s about to hit the escape button when she hears a sound. She thinks it’s a thumping at first but then realizes is actually more of a fluttering noise, or clicking, like a vast swarm of insects, their metallic wings clattering over the sky or pattering against a giant pane of glass. From the bright white panel, a pattern starts to emerge (a school of fish?) a mass of little dark shapes moving together through some murky surface.

She feels really weird now and she’s sure it’s nothing but trouble and hits eject. The drive dutifully spits the disc out. For a minute, Julia just sits there listening to the office noises and takes a deep breath, hoping she hasn’t infected the server with something. "Jesus Christ," she thinks and says softly to herself. She looks at the DVD again, a little metal tongue sticking out of her drive. But she doesn't touch it. She decides she'd better wait for Cherie and goes to get some coffee.