July 23, 2010, 12:03 am
posted by Marian, in categories: Insights  Originally posted on the Huffington Post.
If you’ve seen my recent posts, you know I’ve been thinking about the brain lately. I’m coming up on the three-year anniversary of my craniotomy—for brain tumor surgery—and the milestone has made me think about the brain, how it works, how fragile it is and how digital technology has reshaped it.
We might all think about our brains differently now than we did even a decade ago—artificial intelligence is no longer just a science-fiction plot but an actual possibility, or at least an actual potential Jeopardy! champion—but one thing that hasn’t really changed is the concept of braininess. In 20th- and 21st-century pop culture, there have been lots of people and characters whom society has defined by their brains, their intellectualism, their cerebral nature, their, well, nerdiness. In Archie comics, Betty was the brainy one next to Veronica. In Scooby Doo, it was Velma next to Daphne. The Breakfast Club revolved around the Athlete, the Princess, the Criminal, the Basket Case and—drum roll—the Brain. Thank God Tina Fey finally came along and made brainy sexy.
I’m a big fan of braininess. I think it’s an undersung virtue and a quality more people should aspire to. But like any other stock personality trait, it can drown in superficiality. We used to say that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, but now men and women alike buy frames and put nonprescription lenses in them just to look smarter.
But the physical feature that’s actually closest to our cerebral cortex is our hairstyle. And if you think hair doesn’t matter, or that you won’t be judged by it, just ask Carly Fiorina or Barbara Boxer. When it comes down to it, most of us, especially most of us women, don’t want our hair to define us as brainy. (Or to be defined as brainy at all, for that matter.) When I found out three years ago that I had a brain tumor, possibly cancerous, one of my top concerns became protecting my hair. Sure, it was a defense mechanism and a distraction, something easier to think about than my mortality, but it was also a huge part of keeping myself sane and protecting who I am.
Hair is a symbol of health and fertility, youth and vitality. It can represent power and being in control—take the recent article in The Wall Street Journal about all the A-list women who make regular appointments for pricey blow-outs at the same Upper East Side salon. Or it can be a halo of wellness and sexiness and a billboard for fun, as it was for me. My hair color helped me define myself. I was born blond and am still blond five decades later (with the help of highlights and lowlights). It’s also typically the way people describe me—“the short blonde” when I lived in Holland, land of the giants…or maybe that was just my perspective; “the quiet blonde” when I’m out of my element; “the pushy blonde” when I’m determined to move mountains or change someone’s mind.
My whole routine was this: Don’t look brainy but be brainy. After I got sucked into brain surgery chat rooms and became obsessed with preserving my long, blond tresses, my fear was that if the doctors shaved my head, I might end up looking brainy but no longer being it. Of course, this was an unspoken fear, for I never once consciously thought anything could go wrong…except that I might forget my PINs, which explains the yellow stickies all over my house with those passwords on them. Oh, and the recipes for dog food so any dogsitter would know just how much spinach goes into my pets’ homemade chow.
Yet even while I was waging a campaign to preserve my non-brainy hair—which I ultimately won when the doctors shaved 18 mini patches of hair where they lifted my scalp instead of denuding my entire head—I was taking a methodical, cerebral approach to getting ready for my surgery. I was absolutely brilliant about the big things: I drank no alcohol for months, managed to avoid all secondhand smoke, did 100 sit-ups or crunches every morning to build core strength and ate so much fish that I ended up failing the test for mercury (this was before we figured out that tuna sushi was making us all as mad as hatters).
That analytical way of dealing with things, I think, is a typical marker of braininess. Yes, it can be cold, but that’s how we stay rational. Before my surgery, I had a switch that allowed me to move over to autopilot whenever a situation became too intimate or upsetting. It was as if I could push any experience—including my brain tumor—into the fourth lane and keep directing traffic in the other three, letting work, friends and current events motor along without crashing into each other or stalling out.
My braininess gave me a real final distance that made goodbyes easy. It was a trait that served me well all those years when I was away from home more often than I was in a place I could call home. I’d spent my career on the road, living as an expat for several years, traveling endlessly, watching my interpersonal relationships being reduced to a series of see-you-soons. My friends were everywhere, and oftentimes nowhere I was—unless you count the other side of an e-mail or text.
As it turned out, having my brain cut into and having a tiny part of it removed ended up giving me a broader definition of braininess. I learned that it doesn’t have to be so analytical and removed. I didn’t have to remain in constant motion, always on planes, always juggling priorities. I think my experience is one of the reasons I chose to make a career change, allowing me to stay closer to my home in Connecticut. It also let me tap into my new discovery: that braininess means listening as well as talking.
It helps that braininess has become downright cool now. Our heroes are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin. Kids don’t aspire to be sports stars (what, and risk brain damage?) but tech gurus. I wish we had more female rock stars of the tech world, but in the meantime, you could do worse for a role model than, yes, the singular Tina Fey.
I still have my hair, and I still want to be brainy without having “brainy” be the first word people use to describe me. (Though in the top three would be good.) I still worry about tumors but am more conscious of my lifestyle as it relates to my brain health. I’m more conscious of brain health in general, in fact, and the brain injuries we’re seeing more of, and I just keep marveling at how complex that organ is. And while I’m on the subject of braininess, I think we as a society need to be smarter—about how we treat and respect our brains and those of the people around us.
July 21, 2010, 12:21 am
posted by Marian, in categories: Insights Originally posted on The Huffington Post.
I wrote in my last post about my life-changing experience of being diagnosed with a brain tumor and having a craniotomy three years ago to remove it. I was incredibly lucky—my tumor, a meningioma, was in a place the surgeons could reach without disrupting other areas, it was basically benign (but atypical, which complicates matters) and I came through the surgery with 95 percent of my facilities intact, no obvious impairments and, in my triumphant Samson moment, all my recently styled and colored hair—but the experience definitely rocked my world. I see the world differently, and I have a new relationship with my brain.
I think more about all the brain functions I used to take for granted: handling “automatic” tasks such as walking, talking, reading. (Oliver Sacks’ most recent New Yorker article, about people who suffer from alexia, or loss of the ability to recognize written language, puts the wondrousness and complexity of that last brain function into perspective.) But I’ve been especially focused on the brain’s higher functions that aren’t so black-and-white, such as memory and, especially, creativity.
People have been talking about the creative process for more than 100 years, but, fittingly, it remains mysterious and changeable. Artists and poets don’t have sole proprietorship, though; innovation everywhere matters more than ever and the half-life of any idea is increasingly fleeting, so everyone needs to use their creative process daily. It’s arguably job No. 1 for our brains these days. Anyone can do tactical; for me, being creative at work means sussing out the biggest idea. The last few weeks it was helping Yéle Haiti break through the news clutter and reignite interest in the massive numbers of people still suffering in Port-au-Prince. But it all begins with an original take, looking at the world through my crooked lens to see a new way to make things work.
An article from the Psychology Today archives breaks the process into steps. First is preparation: seeking out potentially useful information, exploring new possibilities, daydreaming and letting your mind run loose. This is harder than it sounds, since we have to overcome self-censorship (that nasty voice in our heads that says, “That’s a stupid idea”) and our tendency to focus on obvious (“duh”) solutions. Second is incubation, when you let all those inputs marinate, and let your unconscious mind take over. When you move a problem outside your fixed awareness, ideas bubble up. The next step is illumination, the aha! moment in your shower or on the treadmill. (Mine often happen when commuting on the Merritt Parkway, a curvy, scenic country road that I drive to get to the train station.) Last is translation, turning that flash of inspiration into something useful to yourself and others.
That’s a lot of brain functions for something that happens largely subconsciously, outside of tasks we can will ourselves to do. (“Be creative” is one of my least favorite instructions to give or receive—don’t we all choke under that pressure?) So many areas of the brain are involved, and it stands to reason that brain cells running amok like mine and growing into a tumor, or surgeons cutting into the brain to remove it, would have an effect on at least one of those processes. Even if there’s no physiological change, the world-shaking experience would surely have an impact.
I’m fortunate that my brain trauma didn’t really affect my creative process—or at least my output. The parts of my brain that handle creative functions weren’t directly, physically involved. Then again, I haven’t written a book since the surgery, though I did 15 books in 23 years before I went under the proverbial drill. Maybe it caused my idea bank to get deeply debited? But whether it was purely physical or partly psychological, my experience did influence the way I generate ideas and solve problems.
My journey changed my approach to creativity in many ways. Mainly, I’ve had to become more analytical, I think because patients make countless decisions, which can literally be life or death. Do I go through radiation afterward? (I didn’t.) Do I stay on anti-seizure medication? (I did.) Do I return to work immediately after surgery—within three weeks—and fake energy, or take disability and risk becoming superfluous? (I went back and ended up reengaged…but deeply sick within a month.) The overwhelming stakes, and the distance I needed to create between myself and those consequences, led me to think in rational, objective terms. I dialed down the volume on my emotions and amped it up on anything I took to be a fact.
My situation also made me more open to collaboration within the creative process and more willing to hand over the reins when that’s the best course of action. During my diagnosis and treatment, I became more dependent on others—and unbelievably calm. Once I chose a neurosurgeon, Dr. Fred Barker at Massachusetts General, I put it into his hands. I mean, I hop over to London at least once a quarter, but no part of me feels the need to get up and steer the Virgin or BA flights. In fact, I hit the seat, buckle up and fall sound asleep. Trusting Dr. Barker with my life was good training for letting go, becoming open and allowing others to guide me.
Before my surgery, my big hits might have been solo, but 2008 for me was about motivating others. When I was chief marketing officer at Porter Novelli, for instance, I led the creation of Jack + Bill, an award-winning agency initiative focused on 20-something trendsetters.
By working with other people, I realized I was also staying au courant. “Collaboration” has been the watchword of the past decade: Think about Linux, Wikipedia and everything else open-source. Creativity used to be much more solitary; now we’re eager to learn from anyone and everyone, to incorporate input from any source we can. When I have to solve a problem, I don’t reference “experts” anymore as much as I look around—on Facebook, Twitter and other online communities.
Crowdsourcing was already a central part of my professional and personal life when my brain went haywire in 2007. But it took on new meaning when the problem I was trying to solve was my own health and wellness. I became addicted to bulletin boards and sought advice from all corners: Anyone else allergic to Dilantin? Suffer from sheer exhaustion and sleeplessness but crave the normalcy of work? How do I know when it’s time to announce “I survived”? Another addictive tendency of mine is that I’m an interview junkie; I ask an extraordinary number of people, today mostly “followers,” an insane number of questions.
It’s part of my multitasking personality, which has also changed in the wake of everything happening in my head—and because of all the studies, scientific and otherwise, telling us that doing 20 things at once might not be such a good thing. More about that in my next post.
July 20, 2010, 1:00 am
posted by Marian, in categories: Insights Originally posted on The Huffington Post.
A little over three years ago, I was flying high. I was chief marketing officer at the ad agency JWT Worldwide. I’d been credited with popularizing the word metrosexual (and spent countless hours obsessing on the next big thing so my tombstone didn’t say “commercialized metrosexual man”), and my annual trend predictions were being picked up around the globe. Between all that, plus international speaking engagements and a busy calendar of media appearances, I was the picture of the energetic, successful executive. (Read: My only excesses were iced green tea, frequent-flier miles and cable news.)
Yet I wasn’t myself—not quite sick, but I knew something was wrong. I wish I’d had frequent-Googling miles, too, with all the time I spent searching and trying to match my symptoms to a diagnosis: Was it ALS? A brain tumor? An aneurysm?
In spring 2007, after traveling from Barcelona with strep throat (and having the airline misplace my luggage with antibiotics inside), I showed up at “Good Morning America” to talk about the helicopter-parents trend with a terrible cold and a drooping eye. First a makeup artist commented. Then someone said something I heard as “You’ve aged overnight. The camera doesn’t love you anymore.” I translated it as “It’s a brain tumor!” and went straight from the taping to my office Yellow Pages, where I found an eye doctor—then ended up at Norwalk Radiology. I had a CT scan because I kept insisting. The doctors treated me like a hypochondriac, another middle-aged Fairfield County, Conn., woman fighting time. But then…
Every once in a while, the patient does know best. I got the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy call in my office cubicle the next day and was told what I already “knew”: The scan showed a brain tumor, probably benign.
Along with this earth-shaking news, I quickly made a more positive discovery: The kindness of strangers isn’t just a Tennessee Williams line. The way strangers, medical professionals and friends—pretty much everyone after that first phone call—looked out for me was overwhelming. A dear friend connected me with Massachusetts General Hospital, a wonderful care center, where I had a craniotomy that July. The doctors removed a meningioma, which, they said, is the best kind of brain tumor to have. It arises from the meninges (membranes) surrounding the brain and spinal cord, is typically benign and, the Mayo Clinic says, might not always even require treatment. That wasn’t the case for me, though; the biopsy showed mine to be atypical, meaning it wasn’t exactly benign. But after almost three years and more than a dozen scans without regrowth, I’m sticking with the doctors’ assessment: incredibly fortunate, and then some. I have miles to go before I’m done saying “thank you” to the team that saved me.
So I now have a titanium skull and my head is like a weather vane, but aside from that and some middle-aged moments, my brain functions as well as it ever has about 95 percent of the time. On those rare moments when I’m overwhelmed with too much to process, I channel my inner Ronald Reagan and smile and nod.
Cracked skull, brain surgery, eight hours under the knife. But it was amazing how quick my recovery was. When I came to, I asked for my corporate credit cards and BlackBerrys (yes, plural), panicking that I was out of control and out of touch. I also, oddly, began craving hot sauce and iced coffee, addictions that continue to this day. I logged on for a conference call at work less than a week later and heard my favorite line of my recuperation: “I thought you were in a coma,” said the call’s leader, who then dived into a session that was so long and tortured it could have put us all into one.
I appeared on “60 Minutes” about six weeks after my surgery looking tired but with my speech, thought processes and head of blond hair intact. The hair was a personal triumph, as I had learned through my latest addiction, Internet bulletin boards, that my doctors were planning to shave my head. As a distraction, I’d begun a campaign to protect my hair, making sure it was long, well colored and ideally suited for not being shorn.
Less than a year later, I made a career shift, from advertising to PR. I had many reasons, but I suspect the change reflected my being “different” afterward. Doctors might tell brain tumor patients they’ll be like they were before, but as Psychology Today pointed out earlier this year, that’s not really the case.
And now, three years after my surgery, I still have questions. How did this happen to me? Was it my father’s distant cousin the dentist, who threw braces onto my teeth when I was in elementary school and X-rayed me every few weeks? Did I do it to myself when I dove into the too-shallow pool in the sixth grade and saw stars? Actually, no one knows: The Mayo Clinic says it “isn’t clear what causes a meningioma to form.”
And where did my gut feeling come from, and why did I persist to discover the tumor? I sensed the peanut that was redecorating the inside of my skull, even though the best experts have reassured me that I couldn’t possibly have known. But I could feel it. One weekend after my diagnosis, I would lie in bed and feel it somehow sparkle, and I knew that even if “most meningiomas are benign,” mine was growing and needed to come out sooner rather than later. I wasn’t afraid of the tumor, surgery or recovery, but I was deathly fearful that I’d emerge with a loss of momentum—and my joie de vivre.
The experience turned me into an advocate, and the power of the Web has made me an articulate one. It also made me realize how fortunate I am. I had the confidence and ability to speak up for myself. I was well connected and able to access top-tier resources. I was employed by a responsible company with a generous health plan. The sums on my medical bills were astounding, which made me realize how financially devastating a health crisis can be for so many Americans. The only safe way to be sick, I learned, is when you’re well enough to be CEO of your treatment plan. And no, the new health-care plan doesn’t do enough to address the possible financial ruin.
That discovery was one of the primary reasons I reorganized my philanthropic priorities (I also feel better surrounded by others who have overcome serious hits surrounding their heads). I served on the board of directors for the Bob Woodruff Foundation and ReMIND.org, which raises money and awareness for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. And my agency, Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, has jumped behind the Home Base Program, a joint endeavor from Massachusetts General and the Boston Red Sox to care for and support wounded warriors and their families.
It might seem like it, but I don’t spend all my time thinking about my brain. On the anniversary of my surgery, though, I find myself undertaking a little soul-searching. The brain’s complexity is just astounding, and our society tends to take it for granted.
In my next few posts, I’ll explore a few things I’ve been thinking about: the creative process, how our brains are adapting to this age of multitasking and the superficial dimensions of braininess.
July 19, 2010, 10:53 pm
posted by Marian, in categories: Trends Originally posted on eurorscgpr.com/blog.
I’ve been spotting trends for almost two decades. Trends are hard to figure and harder to tease out. Doing it right means tracking people, social momentum, brands, economies, companies—all in constant motion. But trends also mean business, especially for people in PR; we’ve got to be in and of the culture if we’re going to keep ourselves, our agency and our clients not only current but also thinking ahead. The wealth of material lately is nuts. Here are a few trends I’ve been teasing out of it this summer:
Get surreal. That’s my advice for anyone looking to understand the American psyche, circa 2010. The Onion just released a spot-on video of a cable newscast in 2137 with a sexed-up anchorwoman, states renamed for corporations and video-game graphics. My only quibble is that it’s so far in the future—we’re almost there now. Seriously, a former CNN correspondent told The New York Times that “[a]bout the only funnier cable news is the real stuff.” No one bothers to make things up anymore because real life—brought to us via real-time news—has gotten so bizarre that we need to view it from an ironic distance. (Not to mention that quoting The Onion has become a perfectly legit way to begin a blog post.) Ten years after “Survivor” started, we’ve gotten so used to, and so bored by, reality TV shows turbocharged by 12-step dropouts that it takes new feats of extremism to get our attention. In this age of “Yeah, so?” what would’ve been shocking a few years ago is ho-hum. How did David Letterman end up being hailed as smart and savvy for confessing that he slept with staffers? Does anyone even remember that?
That same distance defines interpersonal relationships. There’s a lack of real intimacy in our era of emo bling (that is, conspicuous displays of emotion). Facebook cuts users off at 5,000 friends—and lots of users (“users,” not “people”) have hit that goal—even though Oxford University professor Robin Dunbar posited that no one can really manage more than 150 relationships. We’ve traded quality for quantity, giving up ties that truly bind in exchange for counting thousands of friends and followers. It’s just like the way we’ve stuck i’s and e’s in front of everything to emphasize their newness but lost the essence of the things themselves. Memberships of face-to-face institutions keep declining, while we gravitate toward pop-up iConnections. Even distance learning means a breakdown in alumni ties—how excited can you get about a website you logged on to or the people you traded comments with?
So we’re craving an antidote to all that. Hyperlocal has become the new global. Local isn’t even local enough; in New York, where I work, people don’t look for news about New York but about the West Village, Williamsburg, Bushwick…. People are fiercely proud they never leave Brooklyn. This is the yin to the yang that is our absence of intimacy. We need to check in right here, not there. Remember when a well-stamped passport was a badge of honor? Now it’s a “mayoralty” on Foursquare.
Finally, dreams of immortality are giving way to reality. (Or is it surreality?) We’re sick of tofu and wheatgrass, of going to the gym and going to bed early. Knowledge is power, but it’s deeply disheartening—we keep finding out about new things that will kill us. Semi-wellness is enough, we say; a life without bacon isn’t worth living. Caloric restriction has been shown to extend longevity, but who wants to sacrifice dessert? Early detection is a mixed blessing—should women have mammograms at 40 or 50? Economists and health experts say a tax on soda will reduce obesity, but the outcry is something fierce. Meanwhile, services such as 23andMe let us swab our cheeks and assess our genetic risk for disease, taking behavior and personal responsibility out of the equation. The health police can go home…but what happens when your test comes back positive? Do doctors figure out lasting treatments that prolong life and play to your strengths? Or does disease profiling become the new racial profiling?
Supersized egos, irony, emotion, fear, social circles—things are still as big as ever. But as hyperlocalization keeps gaining an edge, the transition phase to a simpler life looks like it’s getting shorter. Stay tuned.
July 9, 2010, 1:30 pm
It’s a truism that hardly bears repeating that technology and the infinite choices it has fostered have turned the old one-to-many communications model on its head. That’s a fact for advertising, where it’s laughable to imagine businesses being able to survive simply by broadcasting their brand messages to captive audiences. It’s a fact for pop culture, as a generation that all grew up watching “Seinfeld” and “Friends” together realizes that their children will have no such shared, universal touchstones.
And it’s an especially world-shaking fact for news and edutainment—itself a creation of the 21st-century consumption mindset, which values amusement at least as much as enlightenment. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Consider The New York Times’ recent cover story about the rise of plus-size fashion, The Wall Street Journal’s glossy luxury magazine or the wall-to-wall coverage of the shenanigans of Balloon Boy last summer on CNN.)
The old idea of broadcast news—the world according to the power networks, like ABC, NBC and the BBC—is absurd. We’ll never again have another Walter Cronkite telling us, “And that’s the way it is”; nor could (or should) we trust someone to. This isn’t just about Palin-esque distrust of the “mainstream media.” It’s about getting our attention. The combined viewership for the evening news on the three American broadcast networks has been averaging around 20 million people total—that’s roughly six percent of the U.S. population, and fewer than the 24.2 million who tuned in to the 2010 finale of “American Idol,” a number producers lament was lower than in previous years.
The Beginnings of the Mycast Movement
In the 1990s, empowered by the Internet and niche listserves that grew into bona fide communities, we began supplementing broadcast news with narrowcasting. We still listened to Dan Rather and subscribed to the local newspaper, but we began seeking out other sources of news. Early online services such as Prodigy and America Online flourished because they connected us both to the wider world and to narrower streams flowing through it.
It was still just a trickle, rather than the torrent it has since become, but information about all corners of the world began flowing into the inboxes of any user who wanted it. We could access news about virtually any city we wanted, on almost any topic we chose, slanted in a way we preferred. We could get e-mail updates from friends and family. Suddenly, the “major” network news broadcasts didn’t seem so major anymore.
The Mycast Era Takes Off
For all the ways narrowcasting reshaped our culture, it still left information—and by extension, power—in the hands of a relative few. Even though they had many more outlets and were able to hone increasingly niche focuses, a professional class of journalists, reporters, producers and editors still dictated the stories that would be told. They created the content while the rest of us consumed it. (I’m talking about the days when comments hadn’t yet become a crucial part of any news story published online—it took a few years before we all started talking back and editors started taking us seriously.) Edutainment remained a commodity.
Social media threw that model out the window. Earlier this decade, all of a sudden, anyone could publish. All you needed was a computer and a WordPress account, and you could blog on any topic you could dream up. It got even easier when you could share your thoughts on MySpace and now the all-pervasive Facebook—home to more than 500 million users and on track, says founder Mark Zuckerberg, to someday having more than 1 billion users.
Facebook is brilliant for many reasons, but key among them is that it tapped into a universal desire to control social destiny, or at least a conversation or two. Social networking liberated us from being passive listeners and turned us into active participants. We get to shape our own stories now. We mycast.
Mycasting lets us have a platform for whatever we want to throw ourselves into, loudly or softly. We get to discuss our passions, our interests and our energies. We can make ourselves heard, and we can learn from one another. Rather than rely on established experts, we can each tap into a personal universe of contacts to swap advice, news and entertainment.
Mycasting has changed “going viral” from something the CDC worried about to the holy grail for performers or marketers. This modern version of old-fashioned word-of-mouth lets everyone enjoy being part of the process (extra credit for being among the first)—and can catapult someone (or some brand) from unknown to sensation far more efficiently than the most optimized SEO ever could.
It’s impossible to quantify exactly why some things are mycast into great success. But one entrepreneur who might have some answers is 32-year-old Ben Huh, who built I Can Has Cheezburger—a user-generated blog of, yes, cat pictures—into a collection of 53 sites, all created with user-submitted (mycast) content, that brought in 16 million unique visitors in one month and will earn Huh’s company a seven-figure income this year, according to a recent glowing New York Times profile.
We Rely on Our Own Circles
It’s not just performance art and cat videos that are affected by mycasting. The phenomenon is changing the way people—smart, educated, informed people, even people who work in traditional media—are receiving breaking international news and insightful political commentary. Controversial Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson told the German magazine Der Spiegel last summer:
I read lots of articles from mainstream media, but I don’t go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We’re tuning out television news, we’re tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it’s just that it’s not like this drumbeat of bad news. It’s news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it’s been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn’t matter is not going to get to me.
Anderson also told his interviewer that he doesn’t use the word “news” anymore and says he stays informed “via Twitter, it shows up in my inbox, it shows up in my RSS feed, through conversations. I don’t go out looking for it”—yet he heard about the deadly protests in Iran last June by Twitter, he says, before it was reported by any paper.
No wonder lists of influential tweeters to follow have become such a stable of industry (any industry) blogs and magazines. Even Roger Ebert just gave a shout-out to some of the astute people he follows, in a recent blog post about his newfound love of Twitter.
Portals Are Sinking
For all the insiders who choose to follow certain people based on such articles, millions more are stitching together their own tapestries of edutainment using the threads they already gather from sources within their own personal social universes. And just as the “like,” “share” (on Facebook) and “retweet” buttons are growing ever more prominent on blogs and articles, the importance and usefulness of Web portals—organizing frameworks like the very same AOL that helped set the mycasting revolution in motion—is dwindling rapidly.
Mycasting means people don’t have to go to a central place (be it a website, print newspaper or broadcast television show) to get their information. Rather, they can trust that what they need to know will find its way to them. The Wrap reported last week that Yahoo!, MSN and AOL—once upon a time the biggest sources of Web traffic—are seeing decreasing page views, visitors and time spent by users. They have a counterstrategy: to create original content, by hiring hundreds of staffers and thousands of freelancers to produce what will arguably be increasingly niche stories. (AOL already lets nearly anyone who wants to write an article on Seed, its content-management platform, do so for a nominal payment.) AOL, in fact, announced plans to “be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year.”
In other words, it’s planning to go from being a place through which broadcasts are filtered to a place where mycasts originate. And for this, the company name is apt: This is what Americans do online now.
June 23, 2010, 9:12 pm
Originally posted on The Huffington Post.
I don’t need to tell you that the world has seen its share of change lately. We used to embrace change and make it happen (which entails pretty much everything before Sept. 11, 2001). Then we watched it from the sidelines (the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the various financial crises), craved it (the 2008 U.S. presidential election) and circled back to watching—helplessly, it seems (losing patience with President Obama, the BP oil leak).
But now we’re creating change again. A New Consumerism is taking hold. People around the world are realizing their responsibility in current events and trying to take control of what they can. They’re making changes to simplify their finances, their consumption, their lives.
Unfortunately, Sarah Ferguson doesn’t seem to be one of those people. Fergie is an emblem of what was. After helping bring blood back to the cheeks of Britain’s royal family, she became a comeback brand (like Madonna) I used to admire: motivational speaker; Weight Watchers spokeswoman; head of her own charitable foundation dedicated to helping children; a voice in a Disney animated movie; special correspondent for “Today”; producer of last year’s Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend; and author of two dozen books for children and adults.
With many people in financial situations more or less similar to hers, Fergie had a story that was widely admired, in fact: Down on her luck after a divorce, getting only a reported $21,700 in alimony every year and with the bills mounting (okay, her debt, last year reported at about $900,000, is a bit different than the average person’s), she found respectable ways to keep reinventing herself and keep her head above water. Or so we thought before she was caught on tape offering entrée to Prince Andrew for about $724,000. It was beneath the Duchess of York and sad to watch when it played out so publicly.
New Consumerism may have finally flushed out her ability to change.
Many people, Ferguson probably included, have been increasingly suffering from what could be called hyperconsumptivitus extremus. But millions around the globe are taking the cure right now. Even in the United States, where the right to shop till you drop has been considered the implicit 28th Amendment, people are cutting up their credit cards and fighting their reflexive urge to splurge at the slightest provocation.
And they’re doing it not necessarily because they have to but because it makes them feel good. New research in seven markets (Brazil, China, France, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States) by my company, Euro RSCG, found that significant portions of the populations are trading hyperconsumerism for a form of consumption that’s a bit more subdued and considered—and, well, sane. (There’s more information about the study and thoughts about New Consumerism at TheNewConsumer.com. And the book Consumed: Rethinking Business in the Era of Mindful Spending, based on the study and written by my colleagues Andrew Benett and Ann O’Reilly, will be published in July.)
Of the 1,500 people in the U.S. sample, for instance, 87 percent said saving money makes them feel good about themselves. About three-quarters (78 percent) said most people would be better off if they lived more simply, and 73 percent said it makes them feel good to reduce the amount of waste they create through their consumption. A majority is actually deriving satisfaction from cutting back on their purchases during the economic downturn, and six in 10 say they’re never going back to using their credit cards the way they used to. (We’ll have to see, of course, if this is yet another way of life that will change once the economy gets back on track. I think the simple life will be with us for quite some time.)
“Cutting back” doesn’t have to be a negative. The New Consumers identified in the study have managed to turn a more mindful approach to consumption into a positive. Here are four paradigms underlying the fundamental consumer shift:
Rightsizing. For the past couple of decades, consumers have been confronted with an explosion of product choices in virtually every category. Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice, just one example, comes in 16 varieties. People are overwhelmed. They also feel more anxious about financial concerns. In response to these pressures—and to their growing concern over the environmental and social impact of their consumption choices—more consumers are hopping off the consumption treadmill, spending less time on accumulating things and more time enjoying simple pleasures. Two-thirds (67 percent) of people surveyed globally believed most people would be better off if they lived more simply, and 46 percent believed they would be happier if they owned less stuff.
Growing up. The Euro RSCG survey found that 48 percent of the global sample agreed that even though they’re adults, they don’t always feel like “grown-ups.” But they’re starting to accept personal responsibility and gain control through financial choices. Seventy percent said saving money makes them feel good about themselves (though only 31 percent have been able to put more into savings than they used to), and 38 percent (including 49 percent of Americans and 52 percent of respondents in Brazil) felt satisfied from reducing their purchases during the downturn. In addition, 39 percent have started thinking about growing a garden—a sign of wanting to not only reconnect with nature but also become self-sufficient and competent.
Seeking purposeful pleasure. The genius of modern marketing is that psychology makes us want to buy things we don’t really need because of a desire to feel good. But what makes us feel good emotionally is now changing. The New Consumers are savvier, more empowered and more demanding. Today, they’re concerned with everything from economic impacts and safety to design and provenance. They’re also more aware of their capacity to influence the world—good or bad—by what they buy. In the Euro RSCG survey, 51 percent are more interested today in how and where products are made, and 57 percent say it makes them feel good to support local producers, artisans and manufacturers.
Embracing substance. As political theorist Benjamin Barber once said, consumerism now “strives to be everything, to occupy all our time and space and push other things out. In this sense, it is both homogenizing and totalizing.” Across the markets Euro RSCG surveyed, people were tired of a culture built around trips to the mall and hours spent staring at screens. They want more substance and the fulfillment that comes with it. And they want to feel connected to something more “real.” In the survey, 51 percent worldwide were concerned that digital communication is weakening human bonds, and 59 percent worried that society has grown too disconnected from the natural world.
Sarah Ferguson became disconnected. She—and the rest of us—can probably find a few lessons in how the New Consumers are changing relationships (with people and money) and changing the way they live, and use it for our own next reinvention.
June 4, 2010, 8:08 pm
Originally posted on The Huffington Post.
For the past 40-plus days, BP’s devastated oil well has been gushing cautionary tales almost as fast as it’s been spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Executives should have listened to engineers who expressed misgivings about drilling technology. Corners should not have been cut. Regulators should have paid more attention to the company’s plans. The president should have paid more attention to the regulators. Perhaps everyone should have thought twice before drilling an oil well a mile beneath the ocean’s surface in the first place.
As a citizen of the world, I’m outraged by the environmental debacle that’s unfolding. But as a PR professional, I’m fascinated by the reputation meltdown that BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward has been enduring.
The damage to his personal brand has been largely self-inflicted. Even before he was recorded on Memorial Day apologizing to the families of the 11 oil workers killed in the April 20 explosion and to the Gulf Coast residents whose livelihoods are in jeopardy by saying, “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back,” he was mishandling his messaging.
In an article headlined “BP’s CEO Tony Hayward: The Most Hated—and Most Clueless—Man in America,” New York’s conservative Daily News recapped a few of his gaffes so far: He called the Gulf of Mexico “tiny.” He downplayed the illnesses of cleanup workers and the environmental consequences of the spill, claimed there was no underwater oil plume and, said the article, “started to look increasingly arrogant.”
On the other side of the spectrum, the liberal blog Think Progress went into more detail, pointing out that as recently as last Sunday, he denied university researchers’ reports of “plumes of what appears to be oil” —based on “video images and initial observations of water samples”—and said, “The oil is on the surface.” But who’s going to believe him after he said in a Sky News video weeks ago that the disaster’s environmental impact would be “very, very modest”?
And virtually everyone is taking BP (and Hayward, as it chief) to task for limiting journalists’ access, withholding and even fabricating information, and attempting to cut off the live video feed—cardinal sins in this era when transparency is PR rule No. 1. It’s no surprise that he’s been reported to be struggling to hold onto his job. His personal brand is beyond tarnished. Perhaps “slicked in oil and left to suffocate” is a better metaphor.
Hayward and BP have been working on damage control. He quickly apologized for the wanting-his-life-back comment, and the company has taken full responsibility for the spill. But communications pros are wondering if it’s too little too late. Ad Age reported that BP has been running full-page ads in newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Washington Post that read, in part, “We will get it done. We will make this right.”
I think Carreen Winters, executive VP of corporate communications at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ MWW, spoke for a lot of us in the PR industry when she told Ad Age, “It’s less about the timing of advertising, and more about the fact that BP’s statements about it accepting responsibility are ringing hollow.… At this point, they will only get traction with that message if we see it in action.”
Or, as a commenter on a Huffington Post piece about the TV version of these ads put it, “Talk is cheap, Tony.”
My colleague George Gallate, global chairman of Euro RSCG 4D, told me: “I’ve been staggered by all aspects of the disaster, none more so than the devastation to the environment and the lives of so many people. A lot of it seems to have been caused by a lack of respect for people, for the environment and possibly for the law. Of less consequence, but still staggering, is BP’s lack of respect and care for their own brand and their communication. Their ‘damage control’ communication is heaping more damage on top of them.”
Meanwhile, social media is letting consumers talk back and take over the conversation. The Twitter handle @BPglobalPR, which satirizes the company’s efforts to clean up the Gulf and its own reputation, now has more than 120,000 followers, about 10 times the number following BP’s official feed. In a blog manifesto, the handle’s creator, Leroy Stick, wrote: “You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand.”
Stick took his name from a stick his dad used to keep a vicious neighborhood dog named Leroy at bay. In his post, he wrote: “…if someone is terrorizing your neighborhood, sometimes it’s alright to grab a stick and take a swing. Social media, and in this particular case Twitter, has given average people like me the ability to use and invent all sorts of brand new sticks.”
BP is using old tactics to defend against these brand-new sticks. Its latest messaging might have been effective at the beginning of the disaster. But now, after weeks of downplaying and denying, Hayward and BP must do a whole lot more than run sincere-sounding advertising. They need to prove that they mean those words and make good on their promises. They’d be wise to also invest in rebuilding their reputation—they were actually an industry leader back in March—and developing new channels to communicate with all their audiences.
The latest tack BP has taken toward that last goal is particularly confounding. The company named a new head of American media operations: Ann Womack-Kolton, who served as a press officer for Dick Cheney and as a Department of Energy spokeswoman during the Bush administration.
It’s hard to imagine a PR move that is itself more likely to generate bad PR than hiring a former Cheney press officer. “It defies belief that BP could be this inept,” a Democratic Capitol Hill staffer told the Financial Times. That paper also pointed out that the liberal think tank Center for American Progress has branded the Deepwater Horizon disaster “Cheney’s Katrina,” arguing that its origins lie in the “cosy ties” between regulators and industry that began with what the publication calls Cheney’s “controversial” energy task force in 2001.
Cheney and Bush are polarizing figures in any context. But for an oil company facing charges of major malfeasance? Perhaps BP was trying to invoke media figures who have even worse reputations and more damaged personal brands than Hayward. It’s hard to think of another explanation.
June 1, 2010, 9:31 am
Originally posted on huffingtonpost.com.
“You can’t make this stuff up” has become a clichéd refrain in our reality-TV-obsessed, out-to-shock world, but sometimes life is so outrageous that there’s really no other response.
I had one of those moments when I picked up my morning paper on Saturday. The Stamford Advocate’s cover story was about a Stamford city police officer who had been suspended and was facing possible criminal charges for supposedly showing a picture of his genitals to a woman he had pulled over. It’s the kind of (unfunny) story line that might belong in an old Police Academy movie or an episode of the Comedy Central show “Reno 911!”—but as the lead article in the local newspaper of record, it made me do a double take.
It’s deeply skeevy, but (as another cliché goes) wait, there’s more. The woman had her 21-month-old baby in the backseat. And the officer was married. And a 14-year veteran of the police force. Who had been named Officer of the Year in 2006.
It was the kind of story I couldn’t stop reading, and the more I read, the more surreal it got. After the officer stopped the woman for talking on her cell phone while driving, he allegedly made a pass at her, then, when she rebuffed him for being too old (as if she needed a reason), pulled out his phone to show her a graphic photo of “what 40-year-old experience will do for you,” she says he told her.
Stamford has plenty of distinguished and dignified citizens, but it seems this officer was inspired by one of our least illustrious local institutions. The city is, after all, the hometown of “The Jerry Springer Show.” When I read stories like this, I wonder if Springer is somehow in the municipal water. (Another Springer-esque case in point: The owner of the chimp that nearly killed the owner’s friend recently died at her North Stamford home—from a ruptured artery that was said to relate to a broken heart. Her sister-in-law told the Advocate: “I think [the chimp] had a lot to do with it. She was very depressed about losing everything she and [her husband] worked so hard for.”)
The dark side can seem even darker in “upstanding” communities—and by no means is it limited to Fairfield County, Conn.; it’s just the example I’m using because it’s where I live—because it so often stays in the shadows. My grandmother used to insist that people moved to California and discovered divorce. But now people everywhere work hard to preserve their sparkling surfaces, while (mostly) hiding the salaciousness underneath. We all need to ask ourselves what really goes on behind closed doors, even when the lawns are manicured and the SUVs in the driveways proclaim children at Middlebury or UVA or Berkeley.
A lot more goes on, and more frequently, than we think. The victim of the cop’s harassment was especially shocked by his confidence. She said, “What bothered me the most about it was that it did not progress, it just started off bold. It started off with a bang. For you to be comfortable doing that, you must be doing it often.”
Perhaps the most surreal part of the story is that he thought he could continue getting away with it. If reality TV has taught us anything, it’s that there’s always an audience—and the prevalence of social media means it’s often a big one, unconstrained by geography. The Advocate’s cover article quickly became the most e-mailed on its website, drew comments and was shared on dozens of Facebook pages. A local travesty soon became a national example of stupidity and disgust.
It feels as if the news and reality TV are blending. But while the exploits of Snooki, real housewives and Kim Kardashian make us laugh, the bizarre misbehavior of regular community members is anything but funny.
May 28, 2010, 1:41 pm
posted by Marian, in categories: Insights | Trends Originally posted on eurorscgpr.com/blog.
Lately I’ve been encountering more and more gestures that feel anti-consumer. The worst offenders include, unsurprisingly, the airlines. Anyone who has been on a plane in the past decade knows that flying isn’t what it used to be, but recently it seems as if it has turned into nothing less than a race to the bottom: Which carrier can alienate its customers the most? How can they make the experience even more miserable? Who can treat passengers the worst?
The days of free snacks, blankets and earphones are long gone (though you can keep those utterly disposable earbuds “for a future flight”). Now airlines are cooking up ways to monetize things that were once considered basic human rights, or at least basic components of flying. And to make things extra difficult, they won’t take cash for them.
US Airways made headlines two years ago when it started charging for water (six months later, it ended that practice). Last month, Ryanair went a step further when it announced—in its in-flight magazine, of all places—that it was considering adding fees for using the lavatory. (As if people visit airplane facilities for the fun of it!) Spirit Airlines was quick to spin the news into a press release announcing that it didn’t have plans to levy lavatory fees—like allowing customers to attend to basic physical necessities makes it some kind of corporate hero.
That’s especially rich coming from Spirit, which now charges passengers as much as $45 for their carry-ons. The airline claims the surcharge lowers the total cost of flying, but it feels like a slap in the face to be charged extra for something that’s not really optional; you’ve got to take luggage with you. Why not just include it in the ticket price?
It’s not just Spirit, of course. Even as the hotel industry is moving toward more inclusive pricing (consider the rise of the luxury all-inclusive resort), airlines are taking an increasingly nickel-and-dime approach. While every other industry in these recessionary times has been throwing in value-adds, airlines have been adding fees wherever they can.
Baggage is a prime example. The Independent Traveler recently published a comprehensive guide to luggage fees for bags that are checked, carried on or, heaven forbid, heavy. Pretty much all the major carriers are charging something, and some are going up to $600 for an overweight bag—and that’s not even for a round trip.
Airlines are also charging as much as $25 for the privilege of making a reservation by phone. As Independent Traveler points out, a four-minute call to book a ticket works out to $375 per hour. Air Canada is charging an extra $25 to $35 per booking for “speedy” service from “specially trained” agents. Aren’t “speedy” and “specially trained” basic principles of customer service?
And then there’s the extra money they expect us to pony up for a seat. Surcharges for the extra legroom of exit rows or the first-off-the-plane convenience of the front of the cabin seem somewhat justifiable, but I can’t say the same about the extra $6 to $20 airlines such as AirTran and Spirit (again!) are charging for any reserved seat assignment at all. Consumers are forced to choose between opening their wallets and getting stuck with the middle seat in the back or risking getting bumped (because people without assigned seats are the first to be bumped from overbooked flights).
But these days, not being able to fly doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.
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