the art of the brand

Brands are about intent as well as presence. Underneath it all a brand delivers, or it fails. There can be long discussions about what it delivers, morally, ethically, or as an unintended consequence, as with many of the brands of the chemical industry.

   One of the interesting brands of the last decade has been e-bay, which is pseudo -arabic for electronic bid.  E-Bay has changed commerce in America, along with a related company, Amazon. The stories are well known. at different levels.  The story that interests me today is the acquisition a few years ago of PayPal, which now accounts for a large chunk (near 30%) of E-Bay’s actual revenues.

  some years ago in a town in Wisconin, a tiny note even wide spot in the road kind of town, but just a bunch of dairy farm s and a 100 square foot post office, one dairy farmer decided it would be easier for him to keep the farm running if he bought the building the post office rented from, and put in a gas station, since it was at the foot of the hill of his farm, right at the end of a long steep driveway. After a while, he would spend his spare time at th station, fixing other people’s cars, using learning he had acquired fixing his own. After a while his farm was better, and the town grew a little, and there was a need on his part for a large truck to pull stuff around. He bought a tow truck. He put in a telephone (yes, this was a while ago) and paid for the truck with wrecker calls. Totalled out vehicles wre put on a rocky part of the pasture where nohing much grew anyway, and his kids parted out the vehicles and got money for college.

 The gas station grew.  The area grew from tourism as well, more traffic, more fuel sold, more flat tires fixed, more tourists, more fuel tax making better roads, more fuel sold.

The dairy farm , never havng a cash crunch, grew as well, since he was on the buying end of lots of disress sales as the farming cycle went through its rhythms. After 3 decades, the people of the now grown town decided they could save a lot of money if they had their own bank. Guess who they came to for founding capital? yeah.

  E-Bay is busy positioning itelf t re-create that story.  The “research labs” at PayPal are now making it possible to move money over text message, do dunning, bill collection, and buyin and selling over a cel phone. On th e-side of things, E-Bay is setting itelf to become what sears-roebuck once was. You have heard them, right?  Probably not so much. The brand died when the employees lost focus, leaving behind All-State insurance, dean witter, and a handful of other financial brands. Money. Money is not real, and not truly tangible. It therefore becomes the ideal tool for building wealth on the Net.

  And E-Bay knows it.

Is there something about your own brand that you do not understand? Something about how your vision no longer makes sense in a  truly plugged in world?  Whether your brand lives or dies may depend on the answer.

It was months ago that i began blogging about the dangers of the datamining
at FaceBook.
Recently, a new trend has emerged…which may sound odd to those who don’t have a FaceBook account…aps started lying to people. Specifically about relationships, the very basis of social networking. In the rest of the Web, it is normal to see flashing banner ads proclaiming that “you are the 10,000th viewer” or  someone is searching for you, find out who”, but it hadn’t become part of the FB world until recently.
On one case, a simple middle-school level psych test changed itelf into a “speed dating” service, that sends emails saying that someone has expressed interest in dating you, but you cannot find out until you invite more friends to install the ap.
In the most blatant case last Saturday night a bot started a game of “word twist” withe me which i accepted, having been told that a real human being had invited me to play a round. After playing it, i found that they hadn’t begun, and was led to “nudge” them. The “nudge” involves sending them a message, with the note that for 30 days they would be able to access my information.
In other terms, a quasi-phishing scheme, being run right through FaceBook, with FaceBook’s evident approval: the approval of promising to provide shelter, and then failing.
A few month ago, i was, by co-incidence videotaped by a guy doing a survey of wht was right about this city.
When he asked me if the women were hot, i asked him if he was turning into a bad FaceBok ap, and he began laughing, saying he had gone to school with Mark Zuckerberg, and knew him.
I told him to tell Zuckerberg he needed to hire me as an ethicist of brand,
to review aps for exactly the kind of thing i predicted they might turn into.
The dataminers have a proper craft. Liars don’t.
Today, i learn that “top friends”–one of the most popular of all FB aps, is easily hackable, and can deliver personal information to 3rd parties, without the owners of the information giving any access at all–that they know of.
I had noticed this possibility a few weeks ago, as something that could be done trolling by hand through the data.
It hadn’t occurred to me that FB would let it get automated, or that somebody with such a long-standing relationship wit FB–the folks at Slide, who are trying to build an enterprise with their flash scripts, would let be that insecure.
Sometime early today, the ap was disabled.
And now, the one top friend i had appears to be gone.
I would rather that, than ever see her come to any any harm.

Recently, as a result of a discussion with a client about empowering children through rewarding thinking, i got sent a copy of the highlights of a book about the failures of the American lifestyle. The sender thought I would agree.
I don’t. Effective branding involves effective understanding of what people want–and what they want is a function of their environment, not yours.
So, here’s the so-called rules—and a reality check from me.
Dumbing down our kids : Why America’s children feel good about themselves but can’t read, write, or add. by Charles J. Sykes

Rule 1: Life is not fair; get used to it.
Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone until you “earn” both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping; they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you screw up, it’s not your parents’ fault so don’t whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Now, here are the real rules, as i see them lived by in high schools and colleges, evidenced on FaceBook and MySpace and rent-a-coder.
1. life is not fair…so team up with people who are good at screwing others.
2. who cares what the world thinks? if that mattered then war and racism and famine are just jolly.
3. u’ll make whatever u can talk somebody into paying u–so screw u for telling me what i can and cannot make. met the ceo of facebook lately?
o. thought not.
4. my teacher is a relict of the past or somebody trying to help me. please go back to ur john wayne movies where we get to praise toughness.
5. my grandparents were screwed over by the depression, wwi, wwi, and people like u. their thoughts on what seems fair are ptsd’d to hell and gone.
6. if i screw up, i screw up. and if my choices are believing all ur crap while my so-called future gets exported to india and china, i will feel utterly free to complain that all of u lied to me. Given the realities of lies like telling me that mountain top removal is a way to improve worker safety, ddt is harmless and suburban sprawl will empower world freedom, why am I so supposed to trust you now?
7.no, my parents got that way by being boring, and thinking that would give them stars in their crown in heaven. And if u got off their backs, maybe could talk. talk doesn’t mean listening to them lecture on and on about how i need to be “their” kid. i’m not. people can’t own people. in the usa we had a little argument about that wayy back…lincoln won and they put him on the penny so u pennypinching pundit punks  would remember that.
9. work was made for man, not man for work.
10. right. you-tube is real life…does that bother u yet?
11.no. i’ll probably end up working for myself. u people sent all the other jobs overseas when the tough-minded jocks and preppies u all love so much got a chance to make a buck off it.

 The COO of FaceBook has announved he is leacing–to become a CEO of something else, as yet to be determined.

He gets credfit for making solid the relationship withg Microsoft, and came from a position at Amazon. CEO Zuckerberg, being like…22ish when fb exploded, had an “adult” handed to him as COO as part of the funduing packs that turned the detonation into a nuclear blast.

The implementation of that msft relationship expressed as code on the back end is one of the biggest victories gates has had in the past few years, imho. Now, let’s evaluate it from the standpoint of an AMZN relationship–the same fine people who brought you “mechanical turk” which allows a free market in 60 cent an hour labor.
Is this “adult”?
The CEO of fb evolves some basically off the shelf concepts with a vision  of the “operating system for social computing.” and created what i saw yesterday described on a wall as “the wonderful and terrible world of FaceBook.”
As a dataminer and social engineer, fb has potentials that are Huxleyian in potential. Thus far, they have been usede about as Huxley suggested they would go in Brave New World.
To me, the deep story would be did the coo decide to stop being the price of the empire to become the king of something else–or is this really a philosophical difference over the direction of what human beings define as “social”?

Does it matter to you whether Microsoft owns Yahoo! or not?

A while back i commented on the irrelevancy of taking brand loyalty sides in Microsoft vs Apple.
Now that Yahoo! has temporarily rejected the opportunity to be eaten, it’s time to review the future.
Yahoo! was once a dominating force on the internet (full disclosure, I am often asked to be a beta tester, and was one of the original 7000 Yahoo! id’s, and havce spent untold hours there doing one thing or another).
Back in those neolithic times when people made fire by banging obsolete 5 1/4 floppies together,
Yahoo! did things like “beta test” the i-chat plug in, then drop it after they had reverse engineered it into Yahoo! chat.
Then the java guys staqrted arriving in greater and greater numbers, imho led by the …duh…Java Consortium, which has always seemed to have a thing against MSFT, unless they wanted to play with them for a few minutes.
In the meantime, MSFT dragged the world–not the geek world–the whole world– into 1975, whether it wanted to go or not, carrying along bloatware, legacy issues, and endless security holes, just like a plane load of aboriginals arriving at an airport with their goats, firewood, and animist cultures.
The real issues has been, since one celled creature times, that Gates felt that software was 1/2 the box, that creating software was a profession, that professionals get paid.
On the other side was the “open source” community which says, aiming a  gun at its own head “as long as i havce a day job playing with this stuff everything should be free.”
Over at Yahoo, several bux were recently spent on a facelift, which sux. doesn’t quite suck major pond water, but definitely sux. Examples? mozilla, on almost alternate days, can;t get there, or does just barely. Firefox works great, and watching my meters, sux and leaks more memory than i.e.3.02 could have dreamt of while doing it.
It is no doubt based on some very open sourcy concepts, very cute and flash-like. Very pale blue, and web2. Very much a tribute to the visual acuity of 25 yoa designers.
Historically, Yahoo! was late tio the party several times–it was the dominant me-too player, with tonnes and metric tonnes of cash behind it.
I hear frequent complaints about MSFT not understanding the internet. I hear frequent complaints about MSFT being a predator.
I also heard Apple recently try to claim that nobody reads books anymore.
The reality of the evolutionary pressure is that increasingly real power–capital–is in the hands of people aiming at open source, or giving away source, making it increasingly easy to hire labor at increasingly lower prices.
And the only pressure being offered in return is to hypothesise more and more bling in the hopes that capitakl will be attracted to it, with proprietary adaptations that let somebody get a service worker job. It’s laying there hidden in the GNU, waiting for the slow mammals to find as the last of the dinosaurs eat them.

Recently FaceBook dropped a number of its add-on “aps.” This made room for others. In mail over the weekend i was told that 3 of my woman friends needed some help. People wanted to date them, and only I could make it happen. Now, one of the women friends is specifically involved with somebody already, one of them just got done with a not-so-great relationship, and the 3rd one is …close to me. This therefore intrigued me.

here’s the email, altered to protect, well…all of us..

Upon reaching the page, I find the values of a meat rack. I further note, that what has actually happened is that the dataminers at chainn have noticed 3 women on my friends list who have not made themselves available for auction and inspection. I am further told that there is someone interested in me, and i can find out who–by accumulating enough “friends at FaceBook I can con into adding thr same ap. I will of course get paid twice as much for getting women onto the stage as men. Because ? O. yeah. That’s a standard in the meat rack industry going back to half of half price drinks for women at “happy hour” –the time spent trying to get “happy endings.”

Here’s the score card in case you wondered.

I note that for a small sum of coinage I can be put opn display with a prominent ranking. I declined the offer.

Checking the Google group–a free service by Google to Chainn, evidently, in exhcnage for noting part of my demographics–I found numerous complaints about the ap’s development and stylings. In fact, I left one of my own:
may be one of the most diseased things i’ve seen on fb recently.
lets see, u get twice as many points for getting women sucked into
it as men…which tells any woman something..if she wants to hear it.
a wonderful principal that has worked at pickup bars and meat racks
for centuries.
then the message that i am somehow more competent, powerful etc
because i am the person who can “match them up”.. with?? that doesn’t
matter, as long as some matching gets done, right?
then of course the wonderful idea that i am supposed to help
somebody else get a date with women i may be seeing myself? Sure. That
works for me.
In theory, if someone has lots of “friends” they may not notice the
set up…a chain letter with no reward except the dim impossibility of
being able to breed in the future. Why not just monetise the ap by
telling people to send $5 to the person who invited them, and tell
them to keep spreading invites?
I am interested tho, in the datamining you will be getting.
my other thoughts are on my blog.
http://bridgesolution.com/news
btw, this is not some stick in the mud who doesn’t get it. it’s
from somebody in the now enough to be repping the cheerful goths from
amazing race, but who is ethical enough to say some things are just
wrong.”

We now have another metric for the menaing of “social computing”–a term used by FB’s CEO for what is being developed overall. It looks remarkably like the formula used by ants for propagating pheromones.

When will we see valid interactions between people of integrity being the foundational basis? It’s an old problem. I congratulate the courage of some of the people at FB for attempting to head that way. I feel ever so sad for the failures of the present society to give them any examples of how to get there.

no, it;s not 42. the question is will anybody actually get value from a Superbowl spot.

The most famous example of arty advertising is the 2000 Superbowl “cat herding” commercial. at this point, the sponsor of the message is so disgusted at being taken for a ride that they have killed the webpage devoted to exmplaining what they hoped would get said.

The job of a brander is to find, maintain, and defend the message to a community of end users, not to the Clio committee.

Cat herding??

o. it was EDS.

http://www.eds.com/about_eds/homepage/superbowl.shtml

last month’s wired mag had a satire on the fact that u can play “Scrabulous” at FaceBook,and employee a scrabble playing machine ap to max your scores. With a few more add-ons, your FaceBook account can be fullly automated, letting you check in once a day to see how you rank as a person. (That feature “see where you fit in” is already suggested by compare people ap).

Hasbro and Mattel, who control the intellectual property to Scrabble, want FaceBook to remove the ap. They don;t appear to be going after the makers of the ap, or for a share of the revenue that will no doubt come. Just shut it down.

At some point, brands realise there is no shutting down innovation. I look forward to the ghost of some Babylonian potter going after Hasbro on the basis that making tiles that convey signals interpretable as sounds, phonemes, messages, and placing them onto a grid to derive further meaning and value has always been the property of the Babylonians.

Hmmm. that might be a way to finance the rebuilding of Iraq….or..not.

Here’s the state of the art,
from the “push” side, as reported today by AdAge.
“(the client’s agency) erected a billboard
in Manhattan that uses technology to project voices at passers-by. The billboard
uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an “audio spotlight” from a
rooftop speaker so that the sound seems to be contained within your cranium.”

AdAge wanted to know if its user base, the industry’s top professionals thought this was a “good idea.”
The industry professionals were as of about 1 p.m. today 51/49 about it.
And that’s the point. It doesn’t matter which way they “leaned” because the statistical reliability will be junk here.
Call it 50/50.
Ask yourself why.

Here’s my answer:
the wording of the question requires a yes.

On a larger scale, it is also a societal cultural enhancement and therefore a “good” to broadcast more loudly a discussion the industry working to “get inside people’s heads”. And about how well it is able to succeed, by using “pull” applications, in which people’s belief in the illusion of choice is used to bend their frame of reference.
Let’s set up a thought experiment to clarify this:
I create something “fun” for you to do. I make it fun by lessening your anxieties about “belonging.” I let you vote for a person as being a good person. I define good, within a set of choices as “marriage worthy” and “hot” and “kissable” and “makes me feel transparent” or “something strange”. I do this , simply, over and over.
Readers familiar with the MMPI will know the technique of asking the exact same “loaded” question in a broad variety of contexts to observe shifts in how people rebound from the question.
Slowly but surely “would make a good partner in raising a child” becomes very distant from “marriage worthy” and “makes me hot” or some variant gets closer to it.
And the animal brain takes over, and society celebrates.
The industry already does that. Daily. Hourly. And is getting better, thanks to relational databases and flash applications, and lots of server capacity to tuning in on the exact nerves to stimulate by colour and sound for each individual.
We’re not there yet. But it is provably at the point that the most socially active people in the USA can be targeted by 100 or more aiming points that the end target volunteers to aim.
And the results can be tabulated, and presented to a data feed manger in less than 5 seconds. Seem unlikely? Try going to Gooogle and searching for a three word phrase. You will quirte often get back 2-3,000,000 hits. Now look at how long Google says it took to find what you may have wanted.

All the remains is better interpretation, and the art of interpreting the datamine is improiving also..daily.

The brain already can only pretend to block out sounds. It only pretends to block out sights. The sensory input keeps coming in, and the brain has no choice but to adapt or fail.
The question I would ask is after this technology is more embedded into the economy, how will people who know who is talking when they “hear” thought–and the argument will raise to skinner/freud, hume/kant, and hopefully, to what is the purpose of society.

The issue for the information industry is what side will it “think” it chooses to be on?
Who are we?
who, in such a world is an “i”?
the art of the brand is supposed to be about being able to answer that question with honour.

Here’s a precautionary tale for brand image harmony.
One of the world’s larger corporations, an outfit not many consumers have heard of although they use products from it every day, is Unilever.
Unilver makes Knorr soups, Slim-Fast, and Hellman’s mayonaise, Country Crock, and Becel. Some may see a contradiction between making mayonaise and foods to protect the heart. to Unilever, it is all just chemicals. That’s what they sell. Chemicals. They make them attractive. They also make Axe body spray, and run a campaign for Dove soap–which of course they also make, telling young women how not to fall for the guys who wear Axe.
Recently they got called out for it. Actually, over a year ago, I was involved in a discussion group about the hypocrisy of advertsing’s targeting of youth, and pointed out “dove girl” + axe = 0 as a value, but it can sell a lot of chemicals in the meantime.
When Unliver got the call out, it’s response was  “just kidding” about Axe.
let’s get real.
Do people wear axe to project the message that they are idiots who don’t know any better? to be attractive by self-satirization, self put-down? who would they attract?
“Beauty” does not “evolve”. The perception of what “beauty” is at any point in a culture is molded by other values. That’s art history 202. And the creatives are supposed to know it.
Does anyone seriously think that the trip from some paleolithic “Venus” to Kate Moss represents a better adaptation to fecundity, social integration, healthier children? Does anybody really think that in a culture where there is no longer a functional difference between celebrity and notoriety, and someone can “be famous for being famous” that foundational perspective is getting destroyed?
If Unilever’s brands can be co-associated with the “Dove girl” perspective they will be garnishing salads with Wishbone dressings, while drinking Lipton tea–and social groups will coalesce to give thanks they aren;t married to the kind of guy who wears Axe, and in order to avoid that happening, will need Slim-Fast. A perfect circle.
The reality is that in a consumer driven economy the need to create a perceived benefit drives the creation of needs, fears, aspirations that can be satisfied by the benefits of the product offered.
Unilever, and any other manufacturer, exists by locating and exploiting niches.
That is the Darwinian standard for “beauty”.
Unilever’s defense is either then ugly, or the emperor’s new clothes.
I would offer that this entire issue is an example of the communications arts industry attacking itself for forgetting its fundamental purpose, to connect people with meaning.
If a guerilla or counter message campaign needs to be run, the strategists need to have clarity. They need to be able to defend their fundamental mission. That mission might be moving farm crops to stomachs, moving petro-stocks to skin, or creating space for community.
The art of the brand is about purpose. When purpose is not defined, things go wrong.