What does Facebook betting on “groups” say about culture, the census and how we define ourselves?

"When I was four years old
they tried to test my I.Q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong…”

Ani DiFranco

As the 2010 Census is being compiled one thing that we can most certainly be assured of is that we’ll probably recognize America as considerably different then it was say 20 years ago. We will see far more examples of other races, religions and ethnicities. While the census is used for lots of very important things, in the past it has been the single greatest overall driver of marketing decisions.

This being the case we can also be assured that marketing to said demographics will become increasingly challenging as well as remarkably inefficient and hardly cost effective. This is in large part because of what I like to refer to as “cross-culturalization”. This is simply where people from multiple ethnicities, races and religions share like interests.

In the past, marketers have traditionally marketed to people by finding the most similarities possible to reach the largest swath of people generally via demographics and household income otherwise known as “buying power”. Just consider the term, “general consumer”.

Is there really still such a thing?

Furthermore how people define themselves will hardly be answered by the census.

Zuckerburg would have you believe that Facebook’s fate to continue to remain relevant rests largely with the growing of the “Groups” functionality. No doubt he’s read Seth Godin’s “Tribes”. Interestingly enough today there was an editorial in the New York Times by David Brooks about “Flock Comedies” and shows like Dick Van Dyke, The Waltons and The Cosby Show being replaced by shows such “Friends”, “Sex and the City”, “How I Met Your Mother” and “Glee”. The editorial makes the argument that these “…shows also serve one final purpose. They help people negotiate the transition between dyadic friendships and networked friendships.”

Arguably the Internet has exploited people’s ability to group themselves and congregate together well before Facebook. Following a blog might be the simplest means of identifying with an interest or a group.

One question Facebook may want to confront is whether a group’s identity or brand is diminished by it being on Facebook. By its sheer size, Facebook is the Wal-Mart of social media regardless of whether or not it cares to admit it. ASMALL WORLD would not be the brand that it is if it were on Facebook. Perhaps there could be opportunities for Facebook to private label groups able to utilize Facebook’s functionality. But, let’s be honest, one thing about associating with a certain group is the notion of exclusion and to be a part of a certain group requires a degree of legitimacy or street cred.

Then there is the very real fact that there are some groups that people don’t want to be openly associated with. Take being gay, in which Facebook was recently accused of likely “outing” gays.

One of the simplest descriptions of Facebook I ever heard was, “It’s a TV channel I can turn on to see what my friends are doing.”

So let’s run with that. One could make the assertion that Facebook is really akin to an original big three TV network before cable where at any given point a marketer can reach the largest number of people. Let’s call Google the largest of the big three. Google however will always have search relevance for its ad platform. With Facebook though it has to provide relevance by interest. And here Facebook is actually becoming cable before our very eyes with groups becoming channels such as the Disney channel or Spike or Lifetime. However the same way marketers struggle to get a relevant message across requires understanding your audience.

And this is where groups come in.

What Zuckerberg isn’t saying is that basically groups will become a giant ad serving platform. Take for example the group “Mom’s Who Need Wine” which has about 336K+ followers on Facebook. Not too shabby a number, right? And where better to offer up any number of specific offers, Groupon like capabilities and so on based on hosts of data and data mining and insights to prospective advertisers.

At its core, I think Facebook is right culturally about the concept of groups. But I think Facebook has some considerable uphill battles. One is trust. The other is why Facebook? Facebook Groups is where the wannabes will live. The legit groups will be places like ASMALLWORLD or ShredUnion. As an advertiser, do you want to be where trends begin or where trends go to die (e.g. Wal-Mart). For that I suggest you ask Grant McCracken, author of “Flock and Flow”. Furthermore, if you start a group like “Moms Who Need Wine” why should Facebook make all the revenue off a group they didn’t even start?

Zuckerburg and the team at Facebook will position groups as what Facebook users want. And truth be told, that’s a load of crap. Groups is a way to make money. In interviews with Facebook staffers, nobody talks about the needs or wants of consumers… they talk about not being “… surprised if only 5% or 10% create groups,” noting “that’s 25 to 50 million people — not a small number by any standard.” Those are Nielsen numbers. Another factor to consider is what are real groups such as “Mom’s Who Need Wine” versus fad groups such as "Sorry But I Can't Hear You Over This SunChips Bag" which currently has more than 51,000 friends.

So the question is what consumers do. And that, as I think we’re readily aware by this point, is anyone’s guess.

Yet Another Example of Not Getting It

Cadillac broke new work today by BBH. All I have to say is, why?

This work is no better than the last few rounds of work by Modernista! or the work of their previous agency. I will give Modernista! props for the “My Cadillac Story” effort but Cadillac a thumbs down for abandoning it.

The line “Mark of Leadership” is meaningless especially when they’ve been playing catch-up to the Europeans, Japanese and now Korean’s (Hyundai Genesis) when it comes to quality. Simply saying it does not make it so. Sure the blokes at Top Gear found new love for the second generation CTS-V but they weren’t making apples-to-apples comparisons to other Euro (M5,RS4, C63)/Japanese (IS-F). The comments in the AdAge article are all sadly accurate. Probably the best comment was about the tagline being “destined for the ‘one year and out’ dumpster.”

Most importantly what this shows me is that what Cadillac nor BBH seems to understand is that :30 spots aren’t necessarily the name of the game anymore. Start with a great product and build compelling content around that product at strategic touch-points. It’s great that Cadillac has a YouTube channel but judging from the total views of all of the work on their channel (885,329) the “content” is hardly compelling. You want compelling content? Have a look at Ken Block’s DC Shoes/Monster Energy Drink/Subaru“infomercial” which is at 14 million views and counting. The aggregate of the DCShoesFilm Channel is at 34 million views and counting.

Cadillac has a great story to tell. Did you know the gear shift pattern/pedal configuration as we know it is courtesy of Cadillac? It’s unfortunate that no one is able to help Cadillac try to tell it.

What Sex Toy Parties Might Tell Us About Race/Ethnicity, Culture, Socio-Economics and Birth Order

Before you all start think this is going to be some freaky NSFW blog post, I assure you that’s not the case.

I will offer a disclosure that there are links to fun pop culture points of reference that might be deemed offensive. If you’re averse to strong language or content that might be deemed offensive, don’t click on them.

Lastly, I’m sure there will be plenty who will accuse this post of being simplistic, racist, enforcing stereotypes, short-sighted and I’m sure the list will go on. To you, I urge you to comment and make your case. What I can tell you for certain is that this post will pose far more questions than it answers but I look forward to a lively debate. And away we go…

Several years ago my wife had an opportunity to go two sex toy parties.

The first was a portion of a bachelorette party among a group of women who were white and from well-to-do backgrounds. Picture the scene from the movie Old School with Andy Dick (except sans Andy Dick). Regardless, it was shall we say, tempered and at times awkward.

The second was among a very diverse group of women. One is the wife of a good friend who’s a local creative director. We’ll call her Allie. She’s Puerto Rican and Jewish and grew up on Manhattan’s lower East Side well before it was a fashionable place to be. She’s stunningly attractive and smart as a whip and has a mouth that would make a sailor blush. She could go to a Lisa Lampanelli show (strong language/content) and if Lampanelli started to give her the business as comedians are wont to do, Lampanelli would get it right back and the show would end with the two of them best friends. Allie is one of the funniest people I know by far. Among the other women at the party were a few women that I worked with and much like Allie would routinely make the guys in the agency feel like Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas when he enlists the services of Elizabeth Shue and she describes what she’s willing to do (strong language/content). There were also a handful of other women of various ethnicities, mostly Black and Hispanic and none afraid to make their opinions known.

My understanding about this second sex toy party was that it was remarkably graphic, honest and funny to the point that more than one woman had to excuse themselves to relieve themselves lest they soil a couch from laughing so hard.

What I find most interesting about the foray into this topic is that most will fail to ask the question, “Yes, but why?”

I met a sociology professor a few years ago and we were talking about a variety of things and I posed the question to him of “Why Jews were so intent on dating/marrying/procreating only other Jews?” I had dated a couple of Jewish women during college and after and was curious why they seemed doom to fail. I naively believed what popular culture had told me. Nice Jewish boys want to marry their moms and nice Jewish girls want to be provided for the way their fathers had provided for them. The professor smirked and then provided a much simpler and enlightening answer. “If your race were almost systematically eliminated by a single force of evil and tyranny, wouldn’t you do anything in your power to restore the foundation of the lineage?”

I won’t digress into a debate of interracial dating in which all trends point to a ridiculous literal melting pot but I got his point. The insight was a much deeper understanding of what drove the behavior. And if I were tasked with creating advertising for a Jewish personals web site, that insight would no doubt influence the creative, perhaps not explicitly but at the very least tonally.

So my question about the sex toys party is yes, but why? Why was there such a remarkable difference?

Was it race, socio-economics, culture, birth order, a combination? Are white upper-class folks really so uptight and can’t let it all hang out? Are they inherently repressed? (strong language)

Are the Tyler Perrys or Tracy Morgans or Mo’Niques truly representative of black folks? I will say, put a bunch of black folks on a dance floor and we’ll make this summer’s most popular line dance look good. Still the question is valid, have black folks gotten white folks to chill out perhaps as Sin LaSalle played by Cedric the Entertainer from the movie “Be Cool” might suggest (strong language)?

To further confuse things, for the purposes of this post, let’s use the formal definitions of culture as:

1. “the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture.”
   
2. “Anthropology. the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.”

In other words I’m not solely limiting culture to say that of say “country of origin” which I believe is highly limiting. I myself would say that I’m defined by at least 10 different cultures/sub-cultures built up throughout my exposure to a variety of people and experiences throughout my life. This would include, Black culture specifically as it relates to the Civil Rights movement, Beat Generation writers, 60s drug culture, 80s preppy culture, 80s punk culture, early action sports culture, traditional sports culture, feminist culture, Italian-American culture, Higher Ed Academia and so on.

My wife was raised Catholic, the youngest of four kids. While young she knew modest beginnings having grown up in central Massachusetts to fiscally conservative parents. Her mom can reuse a sheet of tinfoil longer than anyone. As she got older however she became accustomed to a very fortunate lifestyle and was exposed to yacht clubs and country clubs. While she graduated from a regional high school outside of Worcester, MA, she summered on the Cape and graduated from the best private undergraduate and graduate schools and is considerably well travelled. She’s also highly philanthropic and having done Teach For America and continues work as a guidance counselor at a struggling high school in a neighboring town that would literally qualify as “the other side of the tracks”. My wife has the gift of being universally and unconditionally accepting and accepted and can float from class sphere to class sphere effortlessly.

Knowing this let’s look at some similar themes of the two groups:

The first group was predominantly white women from the more insular communities my wife was a part. It’s accurate to say that this community represents the top five percent of the country from a socio-economic perspective. This is a group where I can attest first hand that there is a degree to what is deemed acceptable behavior/conduct.

If the second group was unified by any one thing, it is likely socio-economic. Not necessarily by current status but by background. Almost everyone in the group despite their current status came from relatively humble beginnings. Additionally, I suspect in some cases, birth order and gender played a role among several of the women in the second group as well including my wife. If you look at each of my wife’s siblings starting from the oldest, they are each more relaxed than the next with my wife being the most relaxed and most influenced (socially) by her older brother closest in age. Call it a stereotype but the most crass women I’ve ever known almost unanimously have at least one older brother.

Are there anomalies? Of course. Fellas, if you were going to Vegas for a guy’s weekend would you prefer to go with Clarence Thomas or Tracy Morgan. Ladies would you prefer a Vegas weekend with Condoleeza Rice or Mo’Nique? The former in each case have no doubt been taught and have continued to elect to conform to elite societal norms.

Maybe that’s my problem is my reluctance to conform to societal norms. But I digress.

As I said, this post creates far more questions than it answers and here’s short list of mine. Feel free to add, answer, debate.

1. As a universal culture, are we becoming more relaxed and less pressured by societal constraints of certain etiquette?
2. What are the drivers of relatively newfound acceptance or the ability to feel less uncomfortable at things that a mere 10 years ago would make most squirm? Is it the effect of media in popular culture? Reality television?
3. As a result of the impending Census outcome, how will we define cultural groups especially from a marketing perspective?
   
4. There are no clear cut means of segmentation. There are always anomalies. Every segmentation is meant to ensure capturing the greatest number of people (customers) as possible. Will it be defined by country of origin? Generation? Race? Socio-economics?
   
5. Will marketing segmentation exacerbate a class war, pitting the Wal-Marts against The Nordstrom's?
   
6. Will there be such a thing as “class acculturation” the way the there are degrees of acculturation among Asians and Hispanics?
   
7. Will America be divided by level of educational attainment, as some suggest?

I'm not sure about the answers to all of the questions. I have a hypothesis or two but much remains to be seen about how nimble large corporations will be.

In any event, to pile on to the “stereotypes” as Mike Myers would say in his SNL “Coffee Talk” skits as Linda Richman…

“Discuss.”

Looking at the Past to Arrive at the Future

I’m an adviser to a start-up agency called Pomegranate.

Like many of my brethren in the industry, we're working hard to address the question of the business model as well as the compensation model. I think plenty of agencies have tried to address the compensation model (which in some instances led to huge industry shifts e.g. the segregation of media) but few have tackled the actual business model.

We’re not necessarily sure we’re going to create the template for the “agency of the future” but we’re certainly hoping to not look anything like a “traditional” agency. This is probably easier said than done but we’ll die trying and hopefully all remain housed, fed and clothed in the process.

Our bet is that it will look something like what Joseph Jaffe proposed which is sort of a hybrid model. Incidentally, Bud Caddell did a great blog post rounding up the latest and greatest pontifications on what the “agency of the future” will look like.

One of our key goals is to address the issue of extensive overhead. And not necessarily so we can put it back into our own pockets. Of course we’d like to make a nice living but don’t feel a need to be obscene.

In any event one of the first people recruited was a CFO. He’s hardly the CFO type actually but his acuity with all things dollars and cents (and other things too) is astounding. We also wanted someone from outside of the ad/marketing business. This was very much by design.

In recruiting someone with no real marketing experience let alone advertising experience required me giving him a sort of Agency 101 tutorial. This was a wonderfully helpful exercise for me because looking at the model of yesterday really got me to think about how and why we will do it differently today.

I’d love to get feedback and encourage discussion about what’s missing or am I completely off my rocker?

What drives costs at agencies is overhead. Space and people. Roughly 6-10% of an agency’s revenue goes to space. Every big agency is in A-class space and spends a boatload on it. Then it’s people who drive costs and everything essentially boils down to billable hours. (New business pitches drive costs as well but that's a whole other blog post.)

Agencies have traditionally been built based on mediums (ways to reach the consumer) and there were four basic mediums:

· Advertising (TV and print)

· Direct marketing (direct mail, direct response, 800# call to actions)

· Public relations

· Digital (web sites)

There are also media companies which are responsible for buying ad media (places where the ads go e.g. TV, online magazines, sponsorships).

All of this is based on what’s known as disruption marketing. In other words, I as the consumer am interrupted from a program and fed an ad, like it or not. These days the world is moving more towards permission-based marketing. This is where I as the consumer am largely in control of which “content” ads or otherwise I’d like to see. There may still be some disruption marketing there but companies have to be much smarter about placement because if marketing is not aligned with content appropriately I’ll find something else to watch.

So what does this have to do with the hybrid approach? It’s acknowledged that for any client it’s imperative that we know our client’s business inside and out and we understand their customers and everything about those customers. However, gone are the days where we “push” a message out to the broadest amount of people and hope that they’ll respond which is basically what :30 (thirty second) TV spots are.

Now, for any given effort we may decide to develop say… a mobile phone application. This requires idea creation and oversight from the principals, a little art direction and then programmers to develop it. The heavy lifting is done by the programmers but that’s not a function we want to own, nor should we because every client is different every client's need is different and every client’s customer is different and how we reach them is inevitably going to be a broad mix of mediums.

I’ll use Sunoco as an example. Sunoco’s retail strategy for the past several years has been “The Official Fuel of NASCAR”. So they put the signage on everything and then some and do a few ads with NASCAR drivers and sprinkle it with a loyalty program and presto everyone comes running. Not so much. They’ve effectively made NASCAR “the” strategy as opposed to being a part of “a” strategy and in all likelihood have probably alienated anyone who isn’t a fan of NASCAR.

An approach might be to have NASCAR as a part of a greater motorsports strategy. Sunoco is also the official fuel of Porsche Club of America (not sure how many Porsche Club folks are NASCAR fans). This is a great affinity group and ones who are likely to evangelize the brand. Sunoco also happens to be in Philadelphia within maybe two hours of something like a good 3-4 nationally known Porsche tuners. Another part of the strategy might be supporting those groups with a little more TLC and letting them organically help to grow a loyal base of customers. The bottom line is it’s an effective strategy that doesn’t require the full-time hierarchy of agency staffing that you need to find ways to keep busy.

Typical agency staffing looks something like this:

CEO

Creative (develops ads/strategy)

· Chief Creative Officer

· SVP Creative Director

· VP Creative Director

· Associate Creative Director

· Art directors

· Copywriters

Account Management (client relationships/strategy)

· SVP Group Account Director

· VP Account Director/Management Supervisor

· Account Supervisor

· Account Executives

· Assistant Account Executives

Account Planning (customer insight)

· SVP Account Planner

· VP Account Planners

Studio (prepares creative for production)

Traffic (manages timelines and information flow)

Broadcast Traffic (manages timelines and insures that TV ads get to the right networks/stations/etc)

Then of course there are the support functions for all of this (HR, admins, finance/accounting).

Mirror all these people for all of the different mediums I told you about and you’re talking about a lot of frickin’ money in which people scramble with timesheets to account for the billable hours agreed upon. As advertising agencies battle with corporate procurement, agencies are now butting up against the evil they’ve in essence created.

Our CFO also asked how long clients stayed with agencies.

It used to be forever. Literally. Up until the 80s, accounts stayed with shops for 20+ years. Now days, agencies are lucky to hold onto business for more than a few years. This is largely a result of a three things. 1) Quarterly earnings – if you’re not moving the needle, you’re out. 2) CMO tenure – on average I believe it’s less than 24 months. This is also tied to quarterly earnings. 3) When the CMO goes or there’s a significant shift in the agency such as a creative talent leaving, business often shifts with it. There is very little loyalty left in the business anymore. There are other reasons why client’s part with agencies related to poor client service management or not delivering solid creative product as well but the bottom line is agency/client relationships are often pretty tenuous.

Now after re-reading all of this I’m wondering why I signed up to help these guys?

Oh yeah I love it.

Oh and while I can’t fully predict the success or failure there is one thing that I do know and that is for an agency like thisto succeed is going to require a first client who is willing to take a risk to help the industry evolve and know that mistakes will be made but figured out. Kind of like this whole social media thing.