I was fascinated this morning to read documentary filmmaker Eric Chaikin who wrote to Bob Lefetz about the role Howard Stern has played in American pop culture.

He proposes a view of pop culture going through four eras of authenticity – a kind of dialectic.

I think brands can actually surf on any one of these four waves and I’ve added my thoughts on four brands that do this.  The only one that’s definitively broken is Johnny-Carson-era “pretense of authenticity.  And the only reason advertisers continue to use this mode is because it offers them the illusion of control.  But it’s bankrupt and it always leads to ruin.

“0) The Vaudeville Age - Uncle Miltie and Sid Caesar using TV to do vaudeville. It’s all fun. No pretense of a relationship.”

Advertising equivalent: Afflac

“1) The Johnny Carson era - the pretense of authenticity in the relationship between host, celebrity and audience. No acknowledgement of inauthenticity.”

Advertising equivalent:

Alicia Keyes endorses Blackberry.

Almost anything by Microsoft.

“2) The Letterman era - authentic inauthenticity (“welcome to my television entertainment program”). Acknowledgement that the format and the relationships are inauthentic, but playing within the structure.”

Advertising equivalent:

The Most Interesting Man in the World

“3) The Howard Stern era - destruction of inauthenticity. Acknowledgement that the entire relationship between celebrities, hosts and audience is total b.s., total authenticity between host, guests and audience. Milking it for all it’s worth.

I contend that there was a moment we crossed into the Stern era: when Gennifer Flowers held a news conference (paid for by the Star tabloid) to announce some “serious, political news”. The rest of the media reporters treated the whole thing with b.s. gravitas. And Stuttering John asked: “Gennifer - will you be sleeping with any other presidential candidates?” (As in: “What’s your next project?”) He was hustled out of the room as if he wasn’t taking the moment seriously enough. But it was exactly what that b.s. dog and pony show deserved. And there was no going back.”

Advertising equivalent: Dominos admitting that it sucks.

Insights from the cutting edge of marketing innovation

“We forget that we are amateurs…that’s right, amateurs - which means lovers.  So, if you came all the way here, it’s because you’re an amateur.”  Thus spoke the highly professional comic actor Jeffrey Tambour (Arrested Development, The Hangover) who hosted his second annual acting workshop not in LA but in Austin - the great alma mater of Indie music and film and, in the last several years, of all things digital, social and tech. 

Most of the people I know in marketing have a love-hate relationship with what they do and the interesting question is: so what do you in fact love about it? 

If your answer includes that you love learning about people and the amazing things they do with their lives, then read on.  Because I’m like you.  I have worked for decades as a Brand Anthropologist for some of the most interesting brands in the world and I am not much closer to definitively understanding the way that human beings bond with brands than I was at the beginning of my career.  Thank God.  The marketing world is changing so fast, undergoing the profoundest of transformations that, by definition, if I had a definitive understanding of anything, I’d be stiff with intellectual rigor mortis.  So, yeah, I’m an amateur. 

And here are six amateur insights I gathered in the vortex of 30,000 people by listening to the start-ups and the “happy few” big brand marketers who are succeeding at staying culturally relevant - while enjoying the healthy metrics that come with that.  Brands like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Mars, Unilever and P&G:

1) You and me, we are all anthropologists now.

2) When it comes to “targeting,” culture and behavior now trump conventional demographics.

3) We have to completely re-think what we imagine we know about “influencers.”

4) Digital media and exponential technological evolution are driving our cultural imagination in ways we don’t yet fully realize.

5) The lag time between change and corporate adaptation is where you can find your competitive advantage.

6) If you have the courage and savvy to skillfully let your own employees - and fans - take control over your content, you’ll master the new possibilities of engagement.

 1.         You and me, we are all anthropologists now.

To thrive in a rapidly changing media environment you have to have deep human insights or you’ll never grasp what the possibilities for engagement are with brand new platforms. 

For example, why did Instagram take off and why did it begin replacing Facebook with Millennials?  For the same reason that only 50% of them own automobiles, says the brilliant Debra Kaye, CEO of Lucule Consulting, advisor to an impressive roster of brands including Colgate, McDonald’s, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal, and Groupe Danone. Her point: automobiles, once the key to a life of freedom and discovery have been replaced for so many Millennials by smart phones which handily deliver on those primordial needs.  And, once Facebook starts to become a permanent record and your Mom is on it, you have to start curating what you put there.  Along comes Instagram and suddenly the spontaneity, the freedom is back! 

Another example.  Every marketer wants their content to go viral and their agencies point out the power of humor.  What makes so much content go viral?  Humor, of course - something that eludes the grasp of most corporate cultures - certainly not on their list of top priorities.  But think about it.  If you really want to understand a culture, sub-culture or micro-culture, you have to understand what they find funny don’t you?

As journalist Joel Warner and psychology professor Peter McGraw taught us, all humor, like tickling, involves a benign violation.  If it’s only benign: it’s not really funny.  Only violation: offensive.  Benign violation: the sweet spot.  Brilliant.  Just the title of their upcoming book, The Humor Code, says it all.  Grasp what makes a joke funny and you have already penetrated a large amount of the cultural code. 

Heather Knight’s Marilyn Monrobot, the joke telling computer, joined them on stage and demonstrated how her programming gives her the ability to gauge which jokes by reading live audience response and making new selections that get progressively funnier.  Now, if we could just teach our board of directors to do that.  (A little benign violation there.  Hello?  Hello?)

Crowdsourcing product innovations also requires all involved to be amateur anthropologists.  As Shiv Singh, head of digital at Pepsi, observes, crowdsourcing has helped his company get far more texture in its insights into the intersection of brand and culture than most of the conventional research they do.  He teamed up with Jen Saenz, Senior Director of Brand Marketing at Frito-Lay to share their experiences and perspective.  Before Time magazine’s Person of the Year was “You” – a corporate powerhouse was already putting “You” in control. Since 2006, PepsiCo has been at the forefront of crowdsourcing – letting fans produce the Doritos brand’s Super Bowl ads and create the next flavor of Mountain Dew or, more recently, empowering consumers to help the Pepsi brand introduce the Super Bowl Halftime Show and inspiring fans to create the next Lay’s potato chips flavors. PepsiCo has proved that this DIY approach resonates with fans – and no one defines your brands like your fans.  We live now in FameUs culture – we’re all celebrities and crowdsourcing your innovations, making your fans part of the process and giving them recognition for their contributions is a democratization of the celebrity endorsement model.

Why else?  You create a personal relationship with your fans.  You find out what resonates – you pick up a fine texture of insights that conventional research is hard-pressed to deliver.  You increase sales as Lays experienced with each of its crowd-sourced flavor experiments: big sales spikes that translated to conversion not just novelty-based trial.

Downsides?  The crazies show up and you will get all sorts of offensive entries and even possibly bad PR.  So what do you have to do?  Have a well-defined crowd you want to source from.  Have a well-briefed and well-trained top management team so they don’t panic at the first little hitch.  Think through your long game.  Where do you want this to go?  What are you prepared to do?  What are you not prepared to do?  How will you handle the crazies, who’s in charge of that and how have you empowered them for rapid response?

Socially savvy agencies and brands are anthropologists in their own rights.  The new kind of creative agency will think of the brand as a vehicle for cultural participation and will help engineer experiences that do that – to the benefit of the brand.

2. When it comes to “targeting,” culture and behavior trump conventional demographics.

Every time we buy a brand that stands for something, we appropriate its identity into our own personal social currency and it’s always such a disappointment when a brand betrays the bond we build with it by acting tone deaf to the culture from which it springs.  But big brands can easily miss all of this because they continue to see the world as comprised of demographic clusters.  But what would you rather do this weekend?  Something demographic?  Or something cultural?

As Bonin Bough, who runs global media & consumer engagement for Kraft Foods put it:

“George W. Bush and Steven Tyler.  What do they have in common?  Absolutely nothing.  But for some reason, we marketers continue to aim cookie-cutter marketing at them based on the outdated concept that people who share similar demographic traits must want the same products and services.”

We’re all learning how to apply Big Data to uncover growth opportunities but Kraft isn’t forgetting how to use retail data to tailor its promotions and messages to cultivate behavioral-based, low-hanging apples: “If you know that ‘Martha-Mom-of-3’ just bought 5 lbs of Hazelnut coffee, that’s when it makes sense to target her with an ad for creamer, filters…and maybe a muscle relaxer.”

3. We have to completely re-think what we imagine we know about “influencers.”

Ekaterina Walter, who’s in charge of influence marketing at Intel and branding guru Debra Kaye teamed up to demolish Klout and Kred as reliable indicators that you are gaining influence online.  (Klout and Kred are services that measure your online “influence” and give you a score.)  Debra’s firm, Lucule, published its new study it performed for a “virgin” consumer product and the degree to which people with low or high Klout scores could move purchase intent by their messaging on behalf of the new product.  Guess what?  People with medium Klout scores, not high Klout scores, moved the needles more effectively.  Why?  Because Klout scores just measure your popularity and don’t even take into account your impact through blogging, just the more superficial social media.

As Debra put it, “What happens if a popular guys tweets, ‘I like Coke.’  Not much.  But what happens if he drinks so much of it, he has a lot of empty bottles and then decides to build a chair out of them and then is so happy with what he made, he poses for his portrait sitting in it, then posts that online?  What happens then?  A lot.  Because it’s passionate, full of emotion.”  And that is the key to why people with medium Klout scores actually had more influence: they typically put more effort into their endorsements.

Ekaterina is a huge believer in chasing the emotion and the passion where it already exists, with the fans who take the time and trouble to write about you online without any other incentive than expressing themselves.  So many brands can’t be bothered to do the work of finding them even though services like Branderati now offer a suite of services to let you do precisely that.

Another fascinating fact from Ekaterina’s work: her studies show that the critical mass a brand needs to reach before it becomes the mass gold standard is 1 in 10.  Get 1 in 10 people to passionately believe in your brand and you have a social momentum that will overturn the habits of the other 9.  But that’s not just usage for those 1 in 10, that’s real conviction.

4.Digital media and exponential technological evolution are driving our cultural imagination in ways we don’t yet fully realize.

There were so many cool celebrities and visionaries just walking around, presenting and performing, after a day or two, you just stopped keeping track of them all and it seemed like everyone important had materialized at SXSW.  And the breaking news was equally overwhelming.  You could see demos of Google glasses apps, Hologram POS standees who talk to you, a new $2,000 3D scanner printer, the Oculus Rift 3D gaming platform, reusable rocket prototypes and a myriad of other dazzling breakthroughs stretching off into the distance, just impossible to take it all in.

Techno-philosopher Jason Silva reminded us that “hedonic adaptation” makes us take the miracles of modern life for granted.  Our linear and local consciousness, so useful to early humans, now prevents us from seeing that we live in a time of global and exponential consciousness.  There’s a huge gap between what we sense and what’s really going on when it comes to human consciousness, Silva argues and his brilliant brief videos give us shots of epiphanic espresso. MakerBot entrepreneur Bre Pettis asked us to reflect on what life would be like for children growing up with 3D printers where once they had Legos.  SpaceX founder Elon Musk quite soberly said he wished to die on Mars, “just not on impact.”  By God, if we didn’t all believe he’s going to pull it off, given his track record for success and his unshakeable conviction that if we stop trying to land on Mars, something essential in our civilization will be lost.

5. The lag time between change and corporate adaptation is where you can find your competitive advantage.

As the President of Mars Chocolate, Debra Sandler put it, “We’ve had some spectacular successes in digital engagement (her Miss Brown M&M got 4 million views on YouTube, for example), but I’ve still got to sell to my board and for many of them, well, it’s been a while since they’ve turned on their computers.”

Afraid, controlling, perfectionist, reactionary - most corporate cultures are slow and fat-fingered when it comes to all things social and digital.  So get in there, hold your ground, run lots of experiments and chances are you will transform your own outlook and the culture of your company.  Make it a point to seek out socially savvy people and provide them with a career path.  Fact is there’s precious little social media training being given in B-Schools today and many of the more creative minds are steering clear of big brands and their corporations which simply don’t know how to welcome them. Maybe your competitor is richer than you.  But if you’re learning the medium faster than they are, then you hold the reins of the category.

6. If you have the courage and savvy to skillfully let your own employees  - and fans - take control over your content, you’ll master the new possibilities of engagement.

The pyramid is upside down now points out Havas CEO David Jones.  It’s the junior people in your company who have the power to keep your brand relevant - because they are the ones who speak social fluently and live digital.  And almost every company in the world is still missing out on the tremendous opportunities they have to empower them to speak on behalf of the company and its brands.  Same with fans and creative consumers.  What holds brands and companies back?  Fear.  And lack of clear purpose.  Despite all the buzz about purposeful brands, very few brands have clear and humanly simple purposes.  Purpose, openness and savvy use of social media seem to go hand-in-hand and, these days, the edge lies more and more in what would have seem preposterously negative just ten years ago.  Look at Domino’s Pizza resurrection (stock is up 220%) since their “we admit we suck and here’s how we’re changing” campaign.  Consider applying Patagonia’s standards to your own CSR: where Patagonia tells you what’s bad about the parka they’re selling you (along with what’s good about it and what their perspective is).

Tina Roth Eisenberg, aka swissmiss, is a hero to the design community.  Shy and introverted, she has stayed away from public speaking and this year broke out of her own mold with a rousing keynote.  Our parting inspiration will be her eleven rules to live by:

 Invest in what you love

Embrace enthusiasm

Don’t complain; make things better

Trust and empower

A labor of love always pays off

Surround yourself with likeminded people

Step away from ego and collaborate whenever you can

Ignore haters

Make time to think and breathe

If an opportunity scares you, take it

Whatever you are, be a good one

What could/should “advertising” look like in 2020? Check out my entry and others’ @Whartonfoa’s Advertising 2020 Project at http://wfoa.wharton.upenn.edu/ad2020/ 

Psy is a court jester who can sing better than the straight-up troubadour.  He wants to keep us laughing as he purloins the next big pretension and he knows that Gangnam Style is his big opportunity or the end of his career.  He makes us laugh at the things we most desire and I have no doubt that he will keep on making enjoyable and talented send-ups.  It’s a revelation to watch K-Pop on Korean TV because it is way more innocent AND way more polished than anything we make in the West.  So part of what he does for us in the West is he reconnects us with our innocence even as he makes us wiser and older.

How can once devil-may-care New York City now ban the sale of 16 oz servings of sugary beverages?  Is this not a bellwether indicator of a brewing cultural crisis with all things pleasurable? Could it be linked to the way we have turned sex into a compulsively athletic activity, indeed a spectator sport, with its own set of performance-enhancing drugs and surgeries?  What about the raging diabetes epidemic despite the widespread availability of delicious and healthy food choices?  What’s driving this polarization of the psyche?  And what does it all mean for brands that offer pleasure to their consumers?

To shed light on this topic I brought together four of the most thought-provoking people I know at the Breslin in NYC’s Ace Hotel. 

Tom LaForge, Global Director, Human and Cultural Insights, The Coca-Cola Company

Tom tells me his daughter once joked that he “always has ten browser windows open” and I love the truth of this.  A true global citizen and a marvelously well-connected and well-read student of human beings, Tom will always leave you with something new you want to learn or think about.

Watts Wacker, Futurist

Lecturer, best-selling author, political commentator and social critic, Watts is one of the world’s most respected futurists - and a fully trained cowboy. Watts has been the futurist at SRI International, the legendary Menlo Park think tank, and spent ten years as the resident futurist at the preeminent social research organization, Yankelovich Partners.  He never ceases to surprise me.

Dr. Samantha Boardman, Positive Psychologist

Samantha marries the art and fashion of New York City with the rigor of a Harvard-educated, Cornell-trained practicing psychiatrist. When she isn’t seeing patients or deepening her knowledge of positive psychology, she can be found at art openings, fashion shows, on Madison Avenue or volunteering for Citymeals-On-Wheels.  I’m  a huge fan of her sparkling Twitter and Tumblr blogs that capture her fascinating cultural and psychological observations.

Sumindi Peiris, VP Marketing, Russian Standard Born in Sri Lanka, Swiss educated and now a New Yorker running one of Russia’s most valuable brands, Sumindi is an accomplished marketer who defies categorization.  But suffice it to say, her talents have not gone unnoticed by the distilled spirits industry.  Having held marketing leadership positions at Schieffelin & Somerset and Bacardi, Sumindi Peiris is now VP Marketing for Russian Standard Vodka.

To set the stage for an inspired conversation on the Problem of Pleasure, Sumindi led us in a toast according to the Russian custom.  Solemn words were said as we looked at each other with smiling eyes while clinking our glasses.  You must have eye contact with each other when you toast or, as the Russian proverb puts it, you will be cursed with seven years of bad sex. 

(You can see this practice at work in the picture of Medvedev and Obama toasting in Prague.  No seven years for Medvedev and President Obama is clearly in the loop as well.)  A beautiful reminder that all things pleasurable are best enjoyed 1) socially  and 2) anchored to a vision of what is good for us all.  By invoking such powers do we not seek to keep the addictive potential of our pleasures at bay?

Watts invited us to see our cultural crisis as the result of what happens when we uncouple pleasure and aspiration.  What drives our aspirations, he pointed out, are our perceptions.  And our perceptions are very hard to change.  If you want to help people reconnect pleasure and aspiration, you have to do your work at the level of their most basic perceptions.

Watts said: remember that all pleasurable experiences have three phases: 1) anticipation, 2) the event itself and 3) the remembrance.  Modern psychological insights teach us that the anticipation and the remembrance are in fact far more powerful in the pleasure center of our brain than the event itself.  Which is why addicts talk about “chasing that first high and never finding it” and the dangers for them of slipping into euphoric recall.

Maybe the real threat to our human liberties doesn’t come from Nanny-Dictators like Mayor Bloomberg - perhaps it comes from ourselves.  Watts has been revisiting Neil Postman’s 80s classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and was struck by his prophetic vision. 

It was 1985 and we had all seen that George Orwell’s 1984 police state had not come to be.  No pervasive power crushed us with everyday tyranny.  No, it looked like Aldous Huxley had it right in “Brave New World.”  We would tyrannize ourselves with distractions.  No one needs to take away our books because we’ve stopped reading them.  The future of culture is trivia.  Hmmm.

Samantha weighed in on the soda ban.  We’re living in a “big gulp” culture, she said,  where the pursuit of pleasure becomes more and more maniacal.  But Mayor Bloomberg’s mayoral soda edicts just represent more of the same.  “Big gulp” government looks for quick fixes and doesn’t see more deeply what is really going on.  Bloomberg’s edicts can be compared to a nanny taking away a child’s toy and hoping that their underlying behavior will change.

Samantha and Tom share an intense interest in understanding how positive psychology and its study of happiness can shed light on this. Happiness has two components: in-the-moment hedonic and affective happiness, and eudemonic happiness which is more holistic and covers bigger ideas like well-being, purpose and meaning.  Pleasure is often more closely associated with in-the-moment hedonism. Great-tasting food (and Russian vodka), a warm bath, dancing to music, sex.  We are embodied creatures and these are all the benefits of being such. Well-being includes these ideas.  But it also includes the bigger ideas of purpose and meaning.  When you dig into how people think and feel about purpose and meaning you find that living a good life, one where you help enhance the well-being of others becomes central to the conversation.  So products that one person sees as offering pleasure (picture one person enjoying one product in a particular moment), can also be seen by another as harming rather than enhancing the well-being others (picture lots of people enjoying lots of products over a long time).  Both perspectives are simultaneously and equally valid.

We live in a networked world, Tom reminded us.  Our well-being is interrelated to everyone else’s and for this reason companies need to demonstrate they care and act for the well-being of others as they do their own.  They can’t improve their well-being, financial or otherwise, if it harms the well-being of society.  Most food and beverage products tend to be about hedonics.  Even if they are at their core about nutrition they still have to taste good.  Brands, the bigger ideas we wrap around the products, are social cues to how we wish to relate to others.  As the world becomes more interconnected, companies that sell branded products need to find a way to provide pleasure in a way that clearly demonstrates that they are aware of how interconnected we all are and that they’ve taken into account the well-being of not just themselves, but everyone.  Tom likes to think of it as “a fun and challenging puzzle: a product wrapped in a brand provided by a company within a highly interrelated society.”

How does a pleasurable brand find points in people’s lives where it can be useful to them in their progressions towards happiness?  Could it be in what SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch calls the “game layer?”

Does not Johan Huizinga’s celebration of the festive culture of the high Middle Ages invite us all to be Homo Ludens - “humans who play?”  Homo Ludens feel their feelings, are grounded in their local culture and customs, love legends and lore, live in high social solidarity and enjoy good food and drink.  Sounds like positive psychology, doesn’t it?

Synthesis and conclusion: as our culture makes pleasure more and more of a problem, perhaps brands that offer pleasure can safeguard their future relevance by moving along these lines:

1. Answer the WHY of your category and your brand.  Why use it all?  What good does it do in people’s lives?  
2. Is your business model based on getting people to use your brand more and more?  Change your business model!  Find a way so that people consume your brand less but enjoy it more.  If it happens to be worth more, your “value equation” will improve and you’ll have stopped inciting excess.
3. Excavate all the seemingly weird and arcane facts and stories about your brand and make them part of your evolving content and brand identity.

And what better to see this last point in action then to just notice Homo Ludens very much at play in the Ace Hotel itself?

The way this Portland-based hotel decided to adorn its reception desk in New York City with the little-known motto of New York State: Excelsior: Ever Upwards.  The hotel used to be called The Breslin and the Ace kept the name alive in the name of its excellent restaurant - which doesn’t take reservations, so relax why don’t you?  Those pipe-tube clothing racks in all the rooms: a reference to the old-fashioned way clothes are still carted around the nearby garment district.  

And, finally the message waiting for us on the stair steps: