Ed Batista

Dethpicable

Brooks Barnes of the Wall Street Journal reports today on one of the more bizarre brand extensions I've seen in a while.  Apparently Warner Brothers is looking to "breathe new life into its animated Looney Tunes franchise and prop up the...slumping Kids' WB line-up" by creating "angular, slightly menacing-looking versions of the classic Looney Tunes characters for its new series, dubbed 'Loonatics' and set in the year 2772."

I loved Looney Tunes 25 years ago, but I'm no purist--I have no problem with Warners recycling the characters and updating them to appeal to today's kids.  But they're going about it all wrong.  The appeal of the original Looney Tunes characters was their humanity--they weren't wish-fulfillment heroes like Superman, or vacuous, saccharine figures like Mickey Mouse.

Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warners cast were by turns smug, frantic, sly, outraged, sarcastic, and sheepish.  They were, in fact, a lot like us--they were human, far more so than any other animated characters, and in that sense were the precursors to the sophisticated animation of Toy Story and A Bug's Life.

Setting Daffy and Bugs 700 years in the future isn't going to make them any more contemporary--angular, menacing-looking makeovers notwithstanding.  Even though the World War II and Bing Crosby references in the classic Looney Tunes must baffle kids today, they'll still be watched when "Loonatics" is a forgotten footnote.

Christo et Jeanne-Claude

Christo Javacheff and his wife and partner-in-art, Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon, unveiled The Gates over the weekend in New York's Central Park, their latest piece of public art and media engineering on a massive scale.  (The New York Times' coverage was superb.)

The "public art" is breathtaking, but the "media engineering" is just as important-- Christo and Jeanne-Claude pay for their projects ("The Gates" cost $20 million) not with government funds or foundation grants but through the sale of photographs, prints and other artifacts, the demand for which is spurred by media coverage of their works.  Christo and Jeanne-Claude's unique brilliance stems from the fact that they are simultaneously visionary artists, masters of PR, and savvy entrepreneurs.  (Photo of "The Gates" by djwhelan.)

In 1983, I'd never heard of Jeanne-Claude; I only knew that some one-named European artist was surrounding islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay with pink plastic, and it had somehow turned into a major media event.  (It pretty much had to be to reach me as a high-school sophomore in the suburbs of Harrisburg, PA.)  The predominant attitude in the media was, "What a crackpot!" but I noticed that, like me, they couldn't turn away.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude still take a few shots (Jeff Jarvis, I'm disappointed in you), but by and large, the media coverage of "The Gates" has been respectful, even awe-struck.  I think three factors are responsible (above and beyond the artists' mastery of PR):

• It's accessible to everyone, but it never panders.  It invites us to think about significant issues--political, cultural, environmental--while never demanding that we think at all, allowing us to simply experience it, if we choose.
• It's temporary, and like a vacation, like springtime flowers or autumn foliage, like all ephemeral things, we appreciate it all the more.
• And it's paid for--privately.  There are few things more satisfying than arguing with a philistine about Christo and Jeanne-Claude--they always object to the use of public money, and they always look disappointed when you tell them there wasn't any.

From the work itself to the way it's presented and shared with the public, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's oeuvre is a paragon of good design, and all of us--marketers, advocates, businesspeople, not just artists--have something to learn from them.

The Dilbert Defense

Seth Godin doesn't like pull-down menus for U.S. states.  He got plenty of mail from people arguing in favor of pull-down menus.  And he gives them a sound thrashing:

[H]ere are the reasons, if you insist, on why pull downs for states are silly:

...

5. The biggest reason of all: half or more of all shoppping carts online are abandoned. If this happened at the supermarket, they'd be bankrupt in less than a week. This is a crisis for anyone who sells online (except for Amazon, which doesn't have this problem--because people don't have to see any of this nonsense.) instead of Dilbertly defending the engineering status quo, teams should be working around the clock to test every single thing they can to fix the problem. [Emphasis added]

"Dilberly defending the engineering status quo."  That's beautiful.

And it describes situations I run into all the time.  Rather than respect people's own decisions about what's best for them (Every abandoned shopping cart says, "You're not worth my time, and you don't deserve my money."), engineers and their hyper-logical counterparts are constantly defending their system, whatever it may be, and criticizing people for being too stupid to appreciate its elegance or some similar ideal quality.  They want to mold people to fit their particular vision, but they fail to see that in a world of expanding choice, people will just keep on moving until they find a system that fits their own vision. 

Arthur Miller

Terry Teachout has a wonderfully contrarian critique of Arthur Miller in today's Wall Street Journal.  Obituary writers have been falling all over themselves in their rush to sing Miller's praises, but Teachout resists the urge to beatify Miller and puts his life and work in a larger context:

I wonder how much attention would now be paid to Miller if he hadn't married [Marilyn] Monroe, and if the House Un-American Activities Committee hadn't made the mistake of subpoenaing him in 1956 to testify about his Communist ties (which were extensive, though he always denied having been an actual party member), thereby bringing about his citation for contempt of Congress when he refused to "name names."  The one made him a pop-culture footnote, the other a liberal icon.

The irony is that the smartest critics of Miller's own generation, virtually all of whom shared his left-wing views, held his plays in a different kind of contempt.  Back then he took his roughest beatings from the likes of Eric Bentley, Mary McCarthy, Kenneth Tynan, and Robert Warshow, who found him heavy-handed and preachy.  Tynan, for instance, wrote that "The Crucible" "suggests a sensibility blunted by the insistence of an outraged conscience; it has the over-simplification of poster art."  Bull's-eye.

Zing!  Having suffered through "The Crucible" along with millions of other high school students, I applaud Teachout's takedown, and if it makes even one 11th grade English teacher rethink her syllabus, the world will be a slightly better place.

But in a larger sense, I wish we would take a closer look at the mid-century artists and cultural figures, like Miller, whose work revolved around a critique of capitalism and the West, who tacitly or explicitly supported Communism, who faced the wrath of HUAC as a result, and who consequently emerged as lions of the left.  In 1956, the year Miller was dragged before HUAC, the Soviets invaded Hungary, using tanks against nationalist rebels who fought with kitchen implements and gasoline.

I don't condone the repressive tactics of the McCarthy Era (and I'm disturbed by the resurgence of such tactics today.)  But Miller and his compatriots were naifs, fools or villains, and to laud them for their "principled stands" is to ignore what happened to the people who actually had to live under those same principles.

HijackThis

HijackThis is a powerful tool that'll help you analyze your system if it's been infected by malware you can't remove with programs like Ad-Aware.  HijackThis examines your registry and hard drive and creates a list of their contents in a log file that can be saved as a text file, so you can identify and remove the malware piece by piece.  It's highly rated by Download.com users and seems to be a helpful last resort.

WARNING: In most cases, the items listed in the HijackThis log are perfectly fine and should not be touched.  You can (and probably will) do serious damage unless you know what you're doing.  If you don't know what you're doing, get help analyzing your log file, either from an online tool or from one of the many HijackThis forums.  Proceed with care.

Aspirations

Major American cities can be divided into two types--aspirational cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte,  Las Vegas, Orlando, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City--and Euro-American cities such as Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco.  The former have a bright future; the latter, well, not so much.

Reduced to its essentials, this is the thesis of Joel Kotkin, an author, scholar and consultant whose work focuses on cities and the role they play in our economy and culture.  Kotkin's The City: A Global History will hit bookstore shelves in a few weeks, and although, as the title suggests, the book appears to cover a very broad span, he's recently been promoting a few specific ideas in magazine articles and op-ed pages.  The concept cited above was the theme of American Cities of Aspiration...and the Decline of Euro-America in yesterday's Weekly Standard.

Kotkin sees the two types of cities as representing, "a chasm in America, separating two competing economic regimes, one that embraces growth and new opportunity and another that increasingly seeks to preserve its privileges and coveted lifestyle."  He continues,

What differentiates these two Americas is not so much politics, but perspective on the future. Cities of aspiration like Reno accommodate job growth and attract young families who hope that tomorrow will be better than yesterday.  They offer an environment that most of our forebears--wherever they might be from--would recognize as distinctly American. In the places people are leaving, what might be called Euro-America, the focus is on preserving older urban forms, cultivating refinement, and following continental norms in attitude, politics, and lifestyle.

A map of Kotkin's "two competing economic regimes" would dovetail nicely with the current Red-Blue divide, and so I suspect this concept will be rejected out of hand by Democrats and others on the left who are concentrated in "Euro-American" cities.  This would be a mistake.  Kotkin's ideas are being promoted by the Standard and George Will, and he has sharp disagreements with such left thinkers as James Howard Kunstler and Jeremy Rifkin, but he's a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank, and he's cited frequently in the mainstream media.  Whatever you may think of Kotler's ideas, he can't be dismissed as merely a partisan tool.

And as someone who's lived in San Francisco (and loved it) for the past 15 years, I think Kotkin's thesis holds water.  In his Weekly Standard piece, Kotkin notes that, "The in-migration of educated people may prove the most important sign of the future vitality of aspirational cities. Boston may still be 'the Athens' of America, but since the mid-1990s it and other Euro-American centers have been losing educated workers, particularly those over 30."

My wife and I have two Ivy League degrees and three graduate degrees between us, but we can't afford a home in San Francisco, and we doubt we ever will.  Granted, we've chosen careers that are more fulfilling than renumerative, but we see our friends and colleagues in "aspirational cities" buying homes, and we wonder what we're doing here.   This was one of the factors that led us to recently contemplate a move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where my wife was considering a potential job opportunity.  We've decided to stay put, now that my wife's landed her dream job here in the Bay Area, but it wasn't an easy decision.  (And if you just said to yourself, "Why would anyone leave San Francisco for Lousiana?" I wonder how much time you've spent in either place.)

If you care about America's cities--all of them--and the people who make them such wonderful places, you need to take Kotkin seriously.  As he notes in the Standard, "San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and many other American cities have been losing jobs since 2000; New York has fewer private-sector positions today than it did in 1969."  They remain generally wealthy places because of a "near monopoly" in "major media...top universities...[and] financial and professional services...even as they fail to create opportunities for their working and middle classes."

This is a recipe for economic stagnation and class resentment, and simply closing our eyes and wishing Kotkin would go away and take his unpleasant ideas with him is to be complicit in the abandonment of some of our greatest cities.

Broken...And How To Fix It

Just to ward off any accusations of kissing up to Microsoft (see below), here's a shot from their campus.  If you can figure out how to get to Buildings 8-11 or 40-43, you're doing better than I am.

This example of a bad user experience comes courtesy of Mark Hurst, founder of the user experience consulting firm Creative Good, and publisher of both Good Experience and This Is Broken.  The former is a thought-provoking newsletter on a range of user experience issues, while the latter is a fascinating blog documenting bad user experiences, ranging from that Microsoft campus sign to lousy keyboards to horrible customer service.  (Submit your own!)

Apparently "This Is Broken" was inspired by Seth Godin, Hurst's former employer.  Good Lord, that man is everywhere!

The New PR

It's too easy to bust on Microsoft--so today, a bouquet.  Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and The Economist, I recently learned about Robert Scoble, a techie and well-known blogger who's now employed by Microsoft as "technical evangelist."

In this capacity, Scoble's basically an in-house blogger--sort of a corporate ombudsman, to use an old newspaper term.  He has an insider's access, but writes from an outsider's perspective--well, as outside as you can get when you're on the payroll.

According to The Economist, Scoble has "succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note."  In fact, Bruce Lowry, Director of PR for Novell, "can imagine blogs completely replacing press releases within ten years."

So far, so good.  Blogs are (or at least appear to be) immediate and spontaneous, honest and personal--everything that traditional PR is not.  And that's what makes them powerful tools in corporate communication efforts.  But those boring press releases and and staged events are that way for a reason--spontaneity and honesty can get you in trouble.

Stanford Law prof Joseph Grundfest, quoted in The Economist, says its "only a matter of time" before blogging missteps lead to lawsuits.  And Googling "fired blogger" yields 412,000 hits, in the wake of the high-profile firing of UK blogger Joe Gordon by bookseller Waterstone's.  (Guess they haven't heard about the new transparency.)

Microsoft's clearly ahead of the curve on this trend and deserves credit for their efforts.  But will the lawyers shut down the party before it gets out of hand?  Will "official bloggers" become co-opted and morph into online flacks?

Uh, Where Are We Again?

Two geography-related marketing moves are in the news at the moment: First, the Anaheim Angels (nee the California Angels, nee the Los Angeles Angels) recently changed their name a third time to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.  (Bonus cross-cultural note: that's Los Angeles de Los Angeles de Anaheim in Spanish.  Catchy!)

This news didn't go down well with anyone.  Not with the city of Anaheim, which claims to have provided $30 million in public  subsidies to support the renovation of the team's ballpark, and which filed an (unsuccessful) lawsuit to block the name change.  Not with the city of Los Angeles, which filed a brief in support of Anaheim's suit.  And not with the L.A. Dodgers, who filed a similar brief and are fighting back with a "This Is L.A. Baseball" ad campaign of their own.

But with all that opposition, there must have been something in it for Angel's owner Arte Moreno.  As he told MLB.com on Friday,

Brand You 2

Following up on yesterday's post, in a more personal vein... To paraphrase a colleague of mine who recently saw this site and my personal site for the first time: "They're so evocative--your voice and your personality come through so clearly.  Why wasn't that the case with N-TEN'?"

N-TEN is the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, and for the last four years, I served as N-TEN's first Executive Director.  N-TEN's mission is to help the nonprofit sector use technology more effectively, and it essentially operates as an association that brings together a diverse range of constituencies--nonprofits, consultants, vendors, funders and others.

During my tenure at N-TEN, it grew from a one-man staff, with an office in my living room and no members, to a four-person staff, bolstered by about half-a-dozen contractors, with a membership of some 350 organizations and an additional 300-odd individuals spread out across the U.S. and beyond.  Although N-TEN's now big enough to be sustainable, for several years it was touch-and-go, and I was very focused on growth and reaching new constituents.

As a result, the identify that I established both for N-TEN and for myself was one that assuaged critics, established connections with new constituencies, and developed relationships with prospective members.  That emphasis on diplomacy and bridge-building opened a lot of doors for N-TEN, but it also defined the organization as an essentially ecumenical forum.

N-TEN has reached the point where it needs to do more than provide a forum--it needs to take stands on issues that matter to its members--it needs to have a voice.  At the same time, I've been increasingly eager to speak my mind more freely, to be more candid and less diplomatic.  But paradoxically, although my personal goals parallel those of N-TEN, I decided to step down as Executive Director.

One of the reasons is potential brand misalignment, the same issue I discussed yesterday.   The success that N-TEN and I enjoyed over the past four years was due in part to the mutually reinforcing identities that the organization and I had established.  But both N-TEN and I are now engaged in the process of re-making ourselves, to an extent--we're finding new voices.  (As I've said to a number of colleagues, "I've been a bandleader for four years, and now I'd like to pick up an instrument of my own.")  To meet these challenges, we'll both need to focus less on relationship-building and more on critical thought, analysis, and advocacy.

But the mutual reinforcement that worked so well for N-TEN and myself in the past could have worked against us in the future as we sought to do different things.  I decided that the process would be easier, both for N-TEN and for myself, if we approached it separately, and it's looking like a sound strategy so far.  My successor as N-TEN's Executive Director, Joe Baker, is a great guy who's just the right person to build on the organization's accomplishments while leading it in a new direction.  And I'm having more fun than I've had in a long time--I feel intellectually liberated and much more free to be myself.  There's certainly some risk involved, but it just felt like the right time to roll the dice.