“As an industry, coolhunting explicitly turns on this production of authenticity and legitimacy. The transaction between brand and employee is one of social—and increasingly, multicultural—capital. My own misgivings about these dynamics, however, soon gave way to more practical constraints of time and money. Or so I told myself. Really, what I would be selling was not my time, but something that I realized—albeit with cringey trepidation—was far more valuable: my own multicultural capital and connections. My wasta.”
“A Spy in the House of Hip”: Trendspotting in the Middle East
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Algorithmic recommendation is not simply a higher-resolution representation of a market — a more precise picture of atomistic individuals that does away with the need for larger-scale approximations like market segments. Rather, it is another mode of the synaptic function — another technique for making and interpreting correspondences between persons and things, another way of organizing collective forms. Collaborative filters algorithmically rearticulate the relationship between individual and aggregate traits, suggesting the need for social scientific theories that eschew the classic break between groups and their members (for a preliminary attempt at such an approach, see Latour et al., forthcoming).
The work of recommendation, like the work of demographic marketing, relies on the idea that there are meaningful similarities among consumers and that these similarities correspond with similarities in objects. However, in algorithmic form, these correspondences take on new forms and meanings, blending preference, identity, and similarity. As these theories are built into online infrastructures, shaping the relations between persons and things and articulating new collective forms, they demand attention, not only as material for analysis, but as new modes of analysis itself.
”The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood
I am so excited for Kenyatta Cheese’s The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood. He’s doing a performance art piece that questions the legal standing that corporations can be treated as persons. And he’s taking it pretty far to reveal the absurdities of modern corporate jurisprudence.
Kenyatta is going to set up a corporation. He is going to sell his identity to a corporation for 3 months and the corporation will take over Kenyatta’s identity online and offline. The corporation will subsume all responsibilities for overseeing the Kenyatta Cheese brand during the 3 months. This means all uses of the name “Kenyatta Cheese” will be under the corporation’s control.
When the corporation buys the name “kenyatta cheese,” the corporation will treat it as if it bought any other product or company. So press releases, marketing, and publicity will all be part of the process.
So what are some the things that this corporation will do with the identity of Kenyatta Cheese?
- create a manual on how to be kenyatta cheese
- hire people off of Criagslist to be Kenyatta Cheese at public events (they will use the manual for guidance)
- ask friends of Kenyatta Cheese like Baratunde, Kevin Slavin, and others to be Kenyatta Cheese at social gatherings (conferences, parties, dinner events)
- hold online events where people can interact with the hired kenyatta cheeses
It really makes us think about what it means to turn a person into a product. I imagine that anyone who works at a marketing company would have a lot to learn from this. And just as a design research project, it’s super fascinating to ask how we design for users when the user is a corporation. How can Kenyatta Cheese turn himself into a replicable product?
I love art projects with critical teeth! I also love his pictograms of his project, though I believe his hair should be twice the size.
I personally am excited to see pictures of Kenaytta’s friend in an afro wig - I guess this is what it takes to get Kevin Slavin, Elspeth Roundtree, Jamie Wilkinson, and Nora Abousteit into an afro wig!
The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood
This is my project proposal for a 2012-13 Rhizome artist commission. I’m going to sell my name to a corporation for three months. They will take over all of my public interactions both online and irl. Kenyatta will become a product. I will not exist.
The Project for Corporate Personhood (aka Kenyatta Co) is a three month performance that explores the topics of “corporate personhood” and personal identity.
The American Supreme Court and some politicians have declared that corporations should be treated as persons. So what happens when a person voluntary assigns their personhood to a corporation? Can it be used to raise awareness of the issue of corporate personhood and create spectacle in the process?
Kenyatta Cheese (creator of Know Your Meme, an artist, an activist, and a person) will sell the exclusive use of his name to a corporation for a period of three months. That corporation will assume both the real world and online identity of ‘Kenyatta Cheese’, reimagining his personhood as a brand with the help of ethnographers, lawyers, focus groups, public relations departments, a creative agency, and friends and acquaintances. During this period, Kenyatta (the person) will not be able to use his name except in the case of emergencies and air travel.
In order to develop Kenyatta Cheese (the product), the corporation will conduct research and development, mining his personal life, online profiles, and browser data for uniquely identifying information. The corporation will hire his friends and family to “be” Kenyatta Cheese at public events, speaking engagements (technology and media conferences), and social gatherings, interacting with people based on their own ideas of how they think Kenyatta Cheese would behave.
These public interactions will be documented through hidden video and interviews will be conducted to capture the thoughts and feelings of the Kenyatta Cheese “betas”. People who interact with these betas will be given a business card directing them to complete a customer service survey online.
This documentation will serve as the basis of standard operating procedures for being Kenyatta Cheese, brand guidelines, and a marketing and media buying plan. The corporation will then hire social media “gurus” to take over and run all instances of Kenyatta Cheese online including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a personal website. Strangers will be hired off of Craigslist to represent the brand at public events in cities around the world (complete with afro wig and business cards). Like the research beforehand, the interactions of these Craigslist hires will be documented and they will be interviewed.
The three month project will culminate in the compilation of a dozen or so interview videos, the creation of the corporate and product documents, the capture of company interactions in social media, and hopefully two public panels: one at SXSW (or similar conference) exploring the topic of personal identity and marketing featuring 4-5 “Kenyattas” and a second panel at the New Museum exploring the topic of identity through the stories of several Kenyatta’s, artists working on similar issues, and representatives from each of the companies involved in creating Kenyatta Co.
Possible Kenyattas will include but not be limited to author Baratunde Thurston, technologist Anil Dash, artist Kevin Slavin, writers Nick Bilton and Clive Thompson, entrepreneurs Nora Abousteit, Know Your Meme co-creators Jamie Wilkinson and Elspeth Rountree, performers Mike Rugnetta and Patrick Davison, actress Michelle Krusiec, sociologist Tricia Wang, and Kenyatta’s mom.
I’ll be interested in seeing how this turns out. I’ll save some thoughts for a more in-depth post, but one thing that does immediately come to mind is the relationship of brands to social “influencers” (i.e., people within peer networks that are identified as influential in given category among their peers). In particular, I’m thinking about instances where influencers are asked to write or create content on behalf of a brand. Disclaimers aside (e.g., FTC regulations around sponsored social media posts), is there a kind of pseudo-corporate/corporatized personhood that is created in that exchange? In marketing, we talk a lot of authenticity and authentic relationships between consumers and brands. So when people in the industry reach out to influencers to connect them with a demo or a new product, there’s the hope that they’ll be so smitten with the new product that they’ll want to tell everyone they know about it. Sometimes that happens. But there’s also the reality of people who game the system and basically act as brand schillers on their blogs, so much so that their online personas are basically an extended mouthpiece for whatever brand reaches out to them. Where do they fit in a model of corporate (or branded) personhood? What larger questions about unpaid (digital) labor are raised by this exchange? More later.
Paul Manning’s anthropological analysis of the semiotics of branding. Much of the language and style is impenetrable and obtuse. Manning’s definition of branding is a bit tenuous and confusing. The brand is essentially an aggregation of semiotic (signs and signals) moments indexing tensions and relationships between producers, consumers, material and immaterial goods.
I work for the largest independent PR firm in the world as a research analyst. Branding is always top of mind for me because, unlike my colleagues who help create brands, I have to figure out how measure and assess their impact and reception in traditional and social media. The way I make sense of branding is to liken it to myth-making; brands are the mythology surrounding products, companies, and stakeholders.
I understand myths as the cultural space between the idealized and reality. A brand can be the idealized face of a company, the company a client wants to be. Other times, it can be a means to outright lie to stakeholders about the reality of a product, the means of its production (see Marx’s commodity fetishism) and the values of the company. My definition is not nearly as nuanced and detailed as Manning’s but it serves me well.
Social Media Strategy of The Day: SAP sponsored a blog on Forbes.com. Perhaps this is more common than I think, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like it. On one hand, it’s clever because it makes SAP’s content easier to access by its core audience (i.e., businessmen and women). On the other hand, I have to ask if this is going to be a way for newspapers to bring in additional revenue.
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Lastly, we set up six Facebook profiles to check the impact of sexual-preference: a highly-sensitive personal attribute. Two profiles (male control) are for males interested in females, two (female control) for females interested in males, and one test profile of a male interested in males and one of a female interested in females. The age and
location were set to 25 and Washington D.C. respectively. Figure 6 plots the similarity scores for 1 week of data. While there is more noise in general, unlike in 4(c) there is
a measurable difference between the control and test pairs; we further manually verified based on ad content that this difference is qualitative in nature (e.g. ads for gay bars were never shown for the control profiles, but shown often for the test profiles). The median similarity score for gay women was 0.15 higher than for gay men, indicating that advertisers target more strongly to the latter demographic.
Alarmingly, we found ads where the ad text was completely neutral to sexual-preference (e.g. for a nursing degree in a medical college in Florida) that was targeted exclusively to gay men. The danger with such ads, unlike the gay bar ad where the target demographic is blatantly obvious, is that the user reading the ad text would have no idea that by clicking it he would reveal to the advertiser both his sexual-preference and a unique identifier (cookie, IP address, or email address if he signs up on the advertiser’s site). Furthermore, such deceptive ads are not uncommon; indeed exactly half of the 66 ads shown exclusively to gay men (more than 50 times) during our experiment did not
mention “gay” anywhere in the ad text.
Overall we find that while location affects Google ads, behavioral targeting does not today appear to significantly affect either search or website ads on Google. Location, user demographics and interests, and sexual preference all affect Facebook ads.
”From Challenges in Measuring Online Advertising Systems
A Microsoft researcher and an engineer tested online advertising networks and the extent to which they use or do not use individual users’ behavioral characteristics (e.g., gender, sexuality) versus demographic information (e.g., age and location) to trigger ads. They created a set of test and control social profiles with a limited amount of personal information and analyzed the content of ads the profiles were delivered. The results showed that on Facebook, gay men were typically delivered advertising that used information based personal characteristics more than any other group on Facebook. Interestingly enough, the study seems to suggest that Google does not use individual characteristics to trigger ads.
Psychographic and behavioral advertising is the future, for better or worse.
Disclosure: Microsoft is an Edelman and StrategyOne client.
“We also find that consumer product innovation spans a wide range of fields, from toys, to tools, to sporting equipment, and to personal solutions for medical problems: clearly, consumer innovation is not a niche phenomenon,” Von Hippel and two European colleagues wrote. “We discover that consumer-developed innovations generally diffuse freely from the perspective of consumer-innovators. Very few consumers protect their innovations by patents or other means, or receive payments for them.”
Via The Atlantic
I read this book on authenticity this weekend. When I purchased it, I thought it would be a sociological and philosophical take on authenticity. When I received it and started reading it, it was clearly a marketing book. I hate books about marketing and branding. I generally find them sleazy like a used car salesman. To the authors’ credit, this book wasn’t all that bad, which I admit isn’t the most ringing of endorsements.
The authors define authenticity as anything relating to the consumer’s self-image. To be honest, I’m not sure what I think of this definition. On one hand, it strikes me as a bit soft, and on the other, it seems to simply capture the subjectivity of authenticity in the market place. The only aspect of the book that really grated on me was the argument that a company could render authenticity, or create authenticity. A general definition of authenticity is an experience or attribute which is not fake; something is authentic or it is not. That’s what the book would lead a reader to think. And yet, the authors encourage businesses to mass produce authenticity, which seems like a nice euphemism for not lying to customers.
Doesn’t the act of commodifying authenticity end up diminishing its value? Doesn’t it ultimately end up becoming fake? Instead of telling companies and brands to be “real,” they could just be real (read: not exploitative).
An Open Letter to All of Marketing and Advertising
Via PSFK
I’ve made similar points at work about how not every brand needs a presence in social media or a crowdsourcing campaign. Every brand needs a website that is clear, informative and encourages a user to do something like sign up for a newsletter or buy something. Nothing grates on me more than website without a purpose. There’s no excuse for a company not to have a website.
However, a Twitter account or Facebook account is not always the best avenue for a brand. For example, a company that made caulk probably wouldn’t gain much traction online-who wants to follow tweets about caulk? There is still value in offline channels of marketing and advertising.
A Few Notes About Vaseline’s “Skin-Lightening App”
Vaseline has created and marketed a skin-lightening Facebook app that lets users in India lighten their skin color in the profile pictures. Skin-lightening cremes have available in India for years and much like other companies, Vaseline wants to own a bit of the market. Commenting on the controversy around the ad, a Unilever spokesperson told CBS.com:
Vaseline is committed to creating culturally relevant products that meet the needs of its consumers in markets around the world.Much like self-tanning products in North America and Europe, skin lightening products are culturally relevant in India. In India, men use these products to lighten and even out their natural skin tone and to reduce the appearance of spots while protecting their skin from the sun. The Facebook application was created for the Indian market as a culturally relevant and engaging way for Indian men to interact with this product.
Unilever’s use of cultural relevance is intriguing. Yes, people have used and will continue to use skin-lightening creams in India and elsewhere. Needless to say, the app has ignited some criticism about the product encouraging discrimination on the basis of skin tone. It seems a bit silly, frankly, to criticize a company for trying to monetize a cultural practice or norm without criticizing capitalism itself. Exploitation of cultural norms is a mechanism of capitalism and to expect less seems naive.
Historically speaking, lighter skin was an important index of social status: those with money stayed indoors while they hired cheap labor to work outside thus maintaining their lighter colored skin. In certain parts of the world, light skin is still an index of wealth; in the US and Europe, the opposite seems to be true, as it tanned skin signifies wealth and leisure.
What seems to be undergirding the debate, however, is that Unilever’s product touches on India’s caste system in a way I don’t think the marketing team fully expected. The product and its subsequent marketing and branding efforts are focused on appearance and identity and my sense is the Unilever’s PR and marketing folks are prepared to defend the product from that perspective. Has anyone thought about why some men in India might want ‘lighter and fairer’ skin? What signal they want to send to others about themselves and their family status? I suspect the meaning is a little more than just minimizing their risk of getting melanoma.
For example, there are countries in Africa where skin-cremes are in demand. Let’s imagine another company taking this basic bit of information to help them sell lightening creams in Tanzania, a country whose albino population is being violently attacked because of their light skin. Could you imagine the PR fallout? Maybe that example is a bit of stretch, but it was the first one that came to mind.
In short, culture relevance can be an important and powerful force in marketing and PR efforts when properly thought out and extensively researched. However, when companies only scratch at the surface of a trend without digging into the “whys” and “hows” of it they’re playing with potential fire.
Social Media Marketing At Its Worst: “Can You Solve Chatroulette’s Penis Problem?”
“Andrey Ternovskiy, founder of one of the world’s hottest startups, has a problem. If you can help him, we’ll give him your resume…The problem is that Chatroulette is also very obscene. According to one recent study, a full 13% of Chatroulette users are “perverts.” For the sake of decorum, let’s say that “perverts” are naked people doing…things…All these perverts will make it very difficult for Chatroulette to sell display advertising to big brands — the most obvious potential source of income for the startup.”
Want to help? There’s a contest!
“That’s because today, we’re [Sillicon Alley Insider] announcing the first annual Solve Chatroulette’s Penis Problem And Help It Make Billions And Billions Contest.
Here’s how it works:
- You come up with an idea.
- You email it to nicholas@businessinsider.com.
- We’ll post our favorite entries and put them up to a vote.
- Taking the vote into account, we’ll pick a winner.
- We’ll email the winner’s idea and resume to Andrey Ternovskiy AND to some of our friends at potential Chatroulette investors.”
The high percentage of men pleasuring themselves on Chatroulette is only a problem because it prevents brands from buying advertising space? Really? Really? Apparently the ability of ”perverts” to use the website as a conduit for pedophilia or child pornography isn’t reason enough to clean up the site. Here’s my idea: Advertisers should just take out advertising space on the men themselves. Brands get their face time with consumers and the rest of us are spared the perversion of male strangers. Nothing like an ad for a new Disney film on DVD superimposed on top of a stranger’s perversion. After all, it’s not like the bodies of women haven’t been used to sell products or anything.
I’ll be waiting for that check.
Story: Can You Solve Chatroulette’s Penis Problem? via Animal NYC Blog via Business Insider’s Silicon Alley Blog.
