John Winsor

Moving Culture Forward

David Carr’s Media Column in the NY Times about this year’s bland White House Correspondent Association’s annual dinner with Johnny Carson-era comedian, Rich Little, as the headliner made me think about instances when culture is held back. In contrast Stephen Colbert seemed to take covers off the insular Washington scene last year with his speech, pushing the culture forward and getting people to notice that Washington was out of sync with Main Street, America. One quote that struck me was:

“Last year was a complete accident,” said Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic. “The organizers had no idea what they were getting. They knew that Colbert was hot, that ‘the kid’s liked him,’ but they were completely blindsided by the performance.”

How could they have not known?

Yet, this happens over and over. Cultures that are sick get defensive and tend to convince themselves of their own zietgest. The rest of the world simply sees them for what they are.

Only when someone is willing to standup and call things out for what they really are can the overall culture move forward.

We need more Stephen Colberts.

Cumulative Advantage

Duncan Watts, author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, pens a wonderful article about the power of culture.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that’s pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren’t studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

Home Depot Joins In

News from the front:

Home Depot today will introduce a label for nearly 3,000 products, like fluorescent light bulbs that conserve electricity and natural insect killers, that promote energy conservation, sustainable forestry and clean water.

The initiative — which is expected to include 6,000 products by 2009, representing 12 percent of the chain’s sales — would become the largest green labeling program in American retailing and could persuade competitors to speed up their own plans.

And it signals that Home Depot, the country’s second-largest retailer, is joining the largest, Wal-Mart, in pursuing issues of public concern like climate change that stores have left to governments and environmental groups.

Enough said.

Quote of the Day

The recent news that ABC was willing to entertain the possibility of a sitcom starring the Geico cavemen seemed a sort of watershed. Here were characters dreamed up as part of an advertising campaign, potentially crossing over into a venerable form of mainstream, pop-culture entertainment. While that sounds momentous, it misses a larger point. As characters in a successful advertising campaign, the cavemen are already part of mainstream pop culture. More so, in fact, than the characters in most current sitcoms.

- Rob Walker, Consumed Column, NY Times

It's all About the Green

Not long ago the expression "It's all about the green" meant something very different than it does today. With green being the cover story this week for both The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, sustainability has reached a cultural tipping point.

What's this mean to you and your brand? Well, that's a good question. To provide a bit more context check out Thomas Friedman's article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled The Power of Green. I really like Friedman's notion of Geo-Green.

Here's more :

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

Are you ready?

Brand Ubiquity

Don't get me wrong, I love Peet's Coffee. Every time I get off the plane in San Francisco I make a beeline for Peet's. But, today things changed. You see, I was driving around Boulder and there was a new Peet's. While it's cool to see Pete's here in Boulder, now that is here it's lost some mystique.

When I was in high school in Illinois every time I would go skiing in Colorado my friends would beg me to bring home a case of Coors Beer. Scarcity created loyalty.

When every brand is available everywhere, is it worth as much? Sadly, Peet's has become just another coffee shop.

A Simple Thank You

I was in San Francisco a couple of days ago. As I was leaving the hotel there were a lot of people coming in and out of the front door. And, as it happens most mornings, people were preoccupied, struggling to get to work. There was tension in the air. As I opened the door, I slowed down to let an elderly gentleman in. He looked at me, straight in the eye, and said "Thank You." That made my day!

In this fast paced world we live in, it's a good reminder that two words still have amazing power.