Archive for Dwell
What Makes You… You?
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I’ve been working on this post for quite some time. It’s purely conceptual in nature and I’m unsure of where it will go or even what it means to a degree. It’s just something that’s been mulling around in my brain for a while and I’m trying to figure out if it’s valid or valuable or if I should just move on.
My wife who is my de facto editor for most of my posts said that while she liked the general gist of this post that it seemed pompous. Great, so I’m an asshole. Well hopefully you won’t see this post as pompous but reflect on yourselves and what makes you… well you. Hopefully, you’re not an asshole.
“Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences.”
So where does culture fit into the mix of your DNA? Is there such a thing as cultural DNA? If you google cultural DNA there are several views of what it might be. There doesn’t seem to be any real consensus and it’s a term that seems to be applied to a myriad of things from corporate culture to the content of one’s character and more. I’d like to apply this term to people as individuals and how you’re “defined” as it relates to marketing, advertising, brand choice and purchasing decisions.
In the marketing universe typically we bucket consumers. And we bucket them as simply as possible to ensure that we reach the greatest number of people. Age, Gender, Race, Geography, Household Income. Occasionally we’ll create custom segmentations and create fancy names for those segmentations and it’s all very clever and smart. We’ll do focus groups and ethnographies in the interest of getting to know “you”.
But what really makes you… you?
I like to think of consumers as a little bit more complex.
If you think about it everyone has what I’d like to think of as cultural DNA. It’s the what makes you… you.
I’ll use myself as an example.
I myself would say that I’m defined by at least 20 different cultures/sub-cultures/communities 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, gay culture, Higher Ed Academia, NYC prep-school culture (yes it’s a culture) and so on. Then you throw in things like birth order and family legacy and things get even more complicated.
Put another way one way you could define a part of me is by my design sensibilities. I would say that I’m more “Dwell” then “Architectural Digest”. If I were to try and understand why I would guess that it was most closely related to my grandfather who was an architect who studied under Mies Van Der Rohe. Thus it’s very likely that my grandfathers design esthetic influenced my design sensibilities and in turn to this day influences purchase decisions related to various brands I migrate to.
Now what happens when you take the complexity I’ve discussed and two interesting people end up bearing children, their kids end up amassing the cultural DNA from both of their parents in addition to the cultural DNA they continually amass from external sources and sub-cultures.
And thus even more interesting and complex people are hatched.
So I guess the question is how do we take this and make it useful. Help.
Augmented Reality and Art & Copy
Posted by: | CommentsA while ago, I posted about the documentary, “Art & Copy” which hails Bill Bernbach’s industry changing pairing together of an art director and copywriter as a creative team.
During an interview on American Public Radio’s Marketplace with the director, Doug Pray, he talks about how advertising used to get done. He said, “In the old days of advertising, it was driven more by the account. And just information. It was all about you got a car, it does 12 new things this year, we just have to tell people about the 12 new things. And have a pretty picture. So you do the pretty picture. We’ll tell them about the 12 new things.”
I was paging through the Dec/Jan 2010 issue of Dwell Magazine and I came across an ad for the third generation Toyota Prius. In this particular ad the reader is invited to 1) Install the Prius Experience iPhone App from the App Store and 2) Interact by taking a picture of said ad using the “interact” mode, then touch to see features and videos.
Below is the video of the Prius Experience App, “Draw”. The description says “The Prius Experience App has four modes to help educate and entertain iPhone™ users interested in learning more about the EPA-rated 50 MPG 2010 Toyota Prius hybrid. Admittedly the “draw” feature and corresponding Times Square promotion was kind of cool. But in general, while the Toyota ad is theoretically progressive and cutting edge, it’s really just a cheap trick and the content presented is still presented just like the days of old. The only difference is the medium has changed.
It dawned on me that perhaps we’ve gone full circle except instead of telling people the 12 new things about the car in the magazine ad, we have to lure them into going through the process of installing an iPhone application to tell them the 12 things.
So I wonder, are art & copy teams to be a thing of the “old days of advertising driven more by the account?” And teams will now consist of iPhone programmers and film producers and directors in addition to copywriters. What will it take for agencies to think this way?
The latter having to do more with producing engaging and relevant content. For reference, Toyota’s Youtube channel has had a little over 107,000 views. Contrast that with Ken Block’s Gymkhana 2 which is now up to 9.2 million plus views and I think you’ll see what it means to produce relevant content that people want to engage in.
Credits:
The graphic for “Advertising Ideas” can be credited to Nick Emmel, Planning Director for Dare via Ed Cotton of BSSP
