colindrummond’s posterous

I’m looking forward to appearing on FearlessQ+A with @bogusky and @DagnyCPB (http://www.justin.tv/fearlessqa. Twitter: @fearlessqa). I know some peeps are interested in more detail on the topic, so they can formulate questions. Here are my notes, in case it tweaks some ideas. Have no idea how much of it we will touch on. It’s divided roughly into 3 areas: being a student of culture, applying that to marketing and finally, applying it to interactive. Fair warning, they are just notes, so they may be a cryptic.

1. Being a student of culture.

• There are a number of skillsets that can hone your ability to be a student of culture: anthropology, sociology, psychology, journalism. Anything that tunes you into the forces that drive culture and pop culture. These disciplines will help you stand outside culture, so that you can observe it without getting fooled by it.
• the ad schools and college communications programs are good in that they try to teach you how to actually “make” ads, but it would be a mistake to only do that stuff. Planners and creatives can make the mistake of focusing exclusively on the specific target, product and competitors. When you do, you end up with strategies in a vacuum. You need other skills like the above to find ways for your brand to not just participate in culture, but to actually change it.
• Culture can be defined as the implicit rules that everyone lives by. Culture has inordinate power of over us, much more than we realize.
• There are things in culture that always change and things that never change. Universal cultural values or hard-wired primitive human patterns at odds are always with the constant change of pop culture. That tension is one way to create real energy to work with.
  

2. Applying culture to marketing and advertising.

• The secret: remove yourself from culture.
• Tension: making people tense with ideas that challenge culture’s implicit rules. When you challenge the rules, it makes people tense. When you make them tense, it gets them talking.
• Always start with the product truth and build out from there.
• Tweak culture around the brand, so that people can see brand in new light.
• CP+B examples: man chicken, I’m a PC, etc.
  

3. Applying culture to “interactive.”

• Plan around a broader definition of interactivity. How it’s been co-opted by the digital world, but it’s really about any interaction: digital, retail, product, customer service, etc.
• Create a platform for participation among multiple people and brand (not the one-way model of agency communication, where you tell them the benefit repeatedly until they absorb it).
• CPB has always been interactive. MINI fold-up magazine stuff, etc.
• Shockingbarack as risky venture absolutely dependent on participation.

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