The End of Assimilation?

This past Sunday David Leonhardt wrote a great opinion piece in the New York Times about immigration reform and acculturation. In it, Leonhardt draws a parallel between 19th Century American skepticism about Germans assimilating into American culture to similar skepticism today about Hispanic immigrants.

Leonhardt is correct about these 19th Century fears about immigrants and assimilation. In fact our lexicon of Polish jokes can be attributed to the influx of Eastern Europeans during the early 1900s many of whom had no choice but to take low-level service jobs as domestics - the jobs "white" people didn't want. 

At that point in time, neither Eastern European immigrants nor Jews were considered "white" - a term reserved only for descendants of the "Nordic Race" - ie Anglo-Saxons from Northern Europe. 

What we generally call "assimilation" truly begin after the Great Depression, and after WWII in particular. 

During these periods of time government-sponsored social programs were put in place specifically aimed at giving the masses the capital and skills required to be self-sufficient. "Self-sufficient" meant having a skill that was salable on the job market, and that practicing that skill would earn you enough money to purchase property - which was the main way of passing your wealth onto the next generation.

New Deal programs, along with the GI bill, removed many of the social barriers that stood in the way of Eastern Europeans, Germans, Italians, Irish and Jews becoming self-sufficient on their own. 

The way in which these programs were administered, in conjunction with the drawing of racially segregated neighborhoods drawn up by the Federal Housing Authority, excluded Blacks from this skill-to-property-ownership cycle.

I've spent the last year of my career as a planner focusing on diversity advertising - or ethnocultural targeting as I prefer to call it. Working in this specialized area of the industry, one hears constant chatter about assimilation. 

But I cannot help but wonder if such discussion is relevant in the 21st Century given the fact that the US is no longer an Anglo-Saxon-dominated US, but rather an ethnoculturally diverse US.

Absent a dominant enthocultural majority, what exactly is it that there is to assimilate into?

I'm looking forward to exploring this, and other related topics in this blog.

The C-word

'Agencies falling short' warns WARC this morning: http://bit.ly/wDO04U
It is hardly hardly news that the ad industry has lost touch with client needs, and by extension with organizational structures and business practices of their clients.

I've been in many a situation in which clients have been encouraged - indeed pushed to experiment with change. These are dangerous waters: change is a much more difficult proposition than firing an agency and issuing an RFP.

'Change,' is the c-word to those with a vested interested in the status quo.

Posted via email from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

An open letter to Arianna.

Dear Arianna -

Congratulations are in order: http://bit.ly/ieoZVf

You have been a positive role model for me many times over. But I have to say that I have not been this depressed since Marvel purchased Disney.

Dulles gets mighty warm; please stay frosty...mlm

Posted via email from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

This is the stuff of which revolution is made.

Have we regressed, or have we changed so little?

http://huff.to/f9mv8H 

'And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'

Posted via email from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

Inception Made Easy

I saw 'Inception' last night. What a joke! Only in Hollywood could something simple as planting an idea in someone's brain turn into a 2-hour action/adventure flick.

I mean, honstly. Even allowing for hyperbole and poetic licence, 2 hours to plant one idea in one person's unconscious? Commerce would grind to a halt if it was really that difficult. And all that dream nonsense. In reality, we flood people's unconscious with ideas their every waking moment.

This brilliant video by none other than Derren Brown is a superlative example of real world Inception and it's only 6 minutes and 40 seconds in length.

Come to think of it, 6 minutes and 40 seconds in reality is about 2 hours in dream time. I didn't just dream I saw 'Inception'...did I?

 

 

 

Posted via email from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

Is it a consumer insight?

 

I was shamed by their good will and mortified by their cooking. There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

- David Sedaris, c.o.g.

Thank the Muses for correlation. Planners, strategists and statisticians alike all preach ad nauseam that correlation and causation are not even mathematical distant cousins. A, however, client once put me in my place with a pithy truth on the topic: 'Correlation may not prove causation, but it's something!' My client, of course, was absolutely correct: correlation does not prove causation, but correlation damn sure is something. And not only is it something but, truth be told, correlation is mostly what we look for when we pour through pivot tables of cross-tabulated behavioral, demographic and purchasing behavior.

Put another way, not only is correlation most definitely something, but that something might very well be a sound customer insight about a targetable segment.

Davis Sedaris' claimed correlation about religious faith and marshmallow culinary ingenuity is easy to test. All one need do is create a two question survey - possibly even one question - devise a random sampling strategy and stand outside churches, temples and mosques following regularly scheduled services. The sampling strategy might be weighted towards interviewing women, who tend to be the household member responsible for food shopping and meal preparation. To be thorough, a representative sampling of zip codes might be covered so that demographic information can be layered atop the survey data to explore whether or not this alleged marshmallow moxie also extended into geographic location, educational level, and household income.

A similar study could even more easily be conducted via telephone by adding a screening survey on the topic of religious faith and a sampling strategy to yield a representative sampling of the entire United States population.

If the Sedaris correlation bore fruit the correlation between faith, marshmallows, and demographics could easily lead to a sound marketing strategy that included targeted messaging, product development (marshmallows that melt at specific temperatures for specific recipes, marshmallows mixed with different spices), and product extensions (Beyond Smores and Marshmallow Pie - The Complete Marshmallow Cookbook). 

Consumer insight? Yes!

Actionable? Most definitely!

Causation? Totally irrelevant!

Which brings us to the Harvard Business Review's Daily Stat of July 16:

• Blondes earn 7% more than brunettes
• Men blond women wed earn an average of 6% more than the husbands of women with other hair colors

Consumer insight? Almost. 

To take these data points and turn them into a proper, actionable consumer insight about a targetable audience for, say, a women's beauty product we would first have to determine how propensed non-blond women are to change the color of their hair either to increase their salaries, or to marry wealthier men.

Testing here is not as straight forward as testing the Sedaris correlation. To be thorough, several difficult-to-identify groups would have to be recruited: employers of at least two women where one of those women is blond and one is not; men married to blonds; men not married to blonds; and, of course, non-blond women.

Though testing could be limited only to the non-blond women group to save time and money, this direction would ignore the secondary market of men married to non-blond women who want to encourage their wives to dye their hair blond to give the appearance of a 6% higher salary.

Complicating the research even more is the fact that answers to questions on such topics as men's taste in women, income, and the lengths to which women are willing to go to make themselves appealing to men are prone to inaccuracy. But all of these risks can be minimized through rigor and methodology. In short, the study is very doable.

If ever there was a time for the women's beauty industry to take up arms against the perpetual accusations of deliberately distorting womens' collective self-image to create an insatiable demand for their products, that time is now! Right there, in the HBR no less, are two statistical data points that speak directly to quantifiable and positive effects that beauty products can have on the lives of consumers, and those effects are far more quantifiable and positive than those of virtually any other product gather dust on CVS and 7-11 shelves.

So let the testing begin! And let it reveal truths about our nature, self-image, shared values, and other deeper mysteries of the human animal.

[NOTE: Special thanks to Julie Salles, who served as wardrobe, stylist and model in the photo above, and who is first and foremost a fine photographer in her own right.]

Posted via email from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

Generation Digital 1.0

I remember the internet before the graphical web browser.

I remember pledging allegiance to Mosaic.

I placed my first order with Amazon.com in 1995 (Tufte's 'Envisioning Information') and I've remained loyal to Amazon despite their horrific recommendation engine that still occasionally recommends the Tufte books - all of which I've purchased through Amazon over the years.

(Dear Amazon - the Kindle is a red herring that's diverted your attention from the real prize. For the sake of those of us still brand loyal, please take a page out of the Netflix play book and get ready for the future. HINT: The future is not about proprietary formats and hardware: it's about facilitating the seek and find process while making your customers feel smarter. Think 'erudition engine' rather than publication models.)

And, of course, I did a tour of duty at Agency.com - that icon of dot.com brilliance and innovation, dreams and riches.

Those of us who can say 'me too' to any of the above are a bona fide generation, first-generation digital professionals, 'Generation Digital 1.0.'

AdWeek's coverage of Omnicom's announcement of the 'deconstruction' of Agency.com is no surprise to anyone who has followed the company through the peaks and valleys of its post dot.com incarnations. (And, let the record show that I was NOT at Agency.com when they pitched Subway.)

But surprising or not, the occasion is indeed a momentous one, for it demarcates the end of the Digital 1.0er generation.

Posted via email from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

The very Western privacy myth.

The fantastic NYT: Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options info graphic above was probably among the most widely user syndicated items today.

As this debate rages on, we must remember that the idea of privacy - the very concept itself - is a uniquely Western mental construct, not a universally accepted state of being.

In many Asian and Eastern-European languages there is no word that describes the concept of privacy¹. There is an every evolving body of case law on the topic in the US, but there is no right to privacy in the US Constitution, and the interpretation of what privacy is varies by US Appellate Court District.

Privacy, and the risks associated with a lack thereof, are in the cultural eye of the Facebook beholder.

Like free will, our belief in privacy may be necessary for our survival. But but the mental constructs we create for our psychic health are not proof of their existence.

Posted via web from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

Another small step towards the Global Village.

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?ei=xrLiS4j5OMmZlgeH15O9Ag&ct=res&cd=3&hl=en&sourc...

Posted via email from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

Data + Social Media = the CRM Holy Grail

Social media has been all over the New York times lately. The article that most caught my interest was not about social media per se, but rather about the self-tracking trend and entitled 'The Data-Driven Life.'

The instincts to collect data, to share, and to create stories and experiences to fill in the gaps in our knowledge are deep seeded. These instincts date back to cave drawings, Greek bards, etc. But there are also more recent and relevant historical examples. 

Photo sharing, for example, did not start w/ Flickr, the web, or even with the pre-web internet. It began in 1905 with the proliferation of pocket cameras and a change in postal regulations that allowed cards with photographs on the outside to be delivered via post. At that time, people would shoot pictures, develop postcards in their own darkrooms in low quantities, and share them via snail mail w/ their friends. It wasn't until a generation had passed that postcards were commoditized into mass-produced visual platitudes. In short, postcards were an analog form of social media. 

In 17th-18th century Europe, it was very common for individuals not only to publish memoirs - analog, ex post facto blogs - but also to publish their personal observations (ie their data) on everything from health and history to fad and fashion. And these books were not at all like books today. For one thing, they had titles like:

• 'A true and faithful narrative of what passed in London on a Rumor of the Day of Judgment,' and 
• 'They Key of the Cabinet of the Chevalier Joseph Francis Borri, in which are contained many curious Letters upon Chemistry and other Sciences, written by him, together with a Memoir of his Life,' and of course the famous and indispensable 
• 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' written in two volumes beginning in 1841 by Charles Mackay, and from which the above-referenced titles are drawn. 

Unlike the relative rarity of being published today (meaning published in hardcopy by a major publisher and widely distributed by one of the 4 major book sellers), it was relatively easy to be published in the 17th and 18th centuries and everyone who thought they had a new idea was doing it. And the titles were deliberately more akin to key word clouds than to the pithy, marketing-driven titles of today. (How else to find what you're looking for in an analog search?) 

To tie this back CRM and social media loyalty programs and to jump back once more to the 17th century, absent medical data people were susceptible to such brand stories as Alchemy and Magnetism - the latter of which blossomed into a veritable craze by the person I consider to be the Father of Experiential Marketing, Franz Mesmer. Despite the vestigial belief in Magnetism that exists to this day (http://www.magnetictherapymagnets.com) most people are more likely to believe their doctor (or Google Health) than they are a TV and OOH campaign about Magnetism - ie they're trending towards trusting data more than being mesmerized by unsupported messaging - (pun intended). 

Behavior modification is the Holy Grail of CRM, and it is a widely known phenomenon that people are most apt change their behavior when presented with ongoing feedback. The fact that people are keeping such meticulous data about themselves and sharing that data in their social media spaces opens the door to customized and mutually beneficial retention and loyalty programs that could not have been imagined even a year ago. 

Posted via web from Plastic Spoon's Posterous