When People Ask Why You're Majoring In Anthropology, You Can Tell Them You're Working To Improve Market Intelligence

Author, Scott Berkun, spoke to anthropologist, Grant McCracken, for the Harvard Business Review.

Here's a small bit of what McCracken offered:

Anthropologists specialize in the study of culture, and culture matters in marketing because it supplies the infrastructure for thought and feeling in America. How consumers see the product, the service, or the pitch, these are largely shaped by the culture in their heads. The marketer who understands this culture has an advantage. The marketer who understands culture very well has an extraordinary advantage.
BTW, my friend Steph is an anthropologist working to help design automobiles and other products.

Who Saw This Coming?

It appears Alex Bogusky and Chuck Porter have written a diet book that argues for the use of a 9-inch plate at every meal, which can decrease one's caloric intake by 30 to 35 percent. Sounds like a good idea, but what if one stacks said 9-inch plate a mile high with starches and other fattening foods?

I Hope You Have A Bigger Toolbox

On c|net, Tim Leberecht describes the need for convergence of marketing disciplines and the opportunity it creates for the people and agencies capable of making this ideal a reality.

Brand, user experience design, product design, marketing communications, PR, online advertising, etc.--what we're seeing is an increased convergence of all these creative disciplines. It is not a matter of strategic choice, more a necessity: The truth is that today's consumers demand that all these disciplines converge.
...brand designers dispel separations that have been artificial anyway, establishing a brand-new equation: brand experience is user experience is user interface design. Digital branding is branding. And your Web strategy is your brand strategy and vice versa.


One of Leberecht's points is brand managers can't actually "manage" a brand in today's consumer-empowered media mix. Thus, the need for "brand design" that reaches across all media channels, and into areas no ad man has ever touched, like customer service.

"Get Off Of My Cloud" Turned On Its Head

John Battelle, CEO of Battelle Media, a company that sells advertising for a group of high profile blogs, is now venturing into experiential marketing.

According to Ad Age, Battelle organized what he's calling CrowdFire at this weekend's Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco.



CrowdFire is an attempt to bring a mash-up of the thousands of camera-phone pictures, hand-held digital-video recordings, blog posts and "tweets" generated at the event. He said the idea is to create a type of organized framework -- a "database of experiences" -- combining varied media generated at live shows.

"We want to get a cloud of media to become something fungible that people can see and work with to create new things," Battelle said. "I want the performance to go from one-to-many to many-to-many."

Microsoft and Intel are underwriting the endeavor. Microsoft will be promoting Windows Live products, including Live Messenger, Live Earth and Live Spaces, as well as its Zune and Xbox products.

Advertisers Try To Get Some Face Time

New facial-recognition marketing efforts are cropping up. What might make for a good plot twist in a Sci-fi novel is actually detailed in The Wall Street Journal.

Dunkin' Donuts is among the first marketers in the U.S. to begin testing the technologies, at two locations in Buffalo, N.Y. People ordering a coffee in the morning can see ads at the cash register promoting the chain's hash browns or breakfast sandwiches. At the pick-up counter, customers see ads prompting them to return for a coffee break in the afternoon and try an oven-toasted pizza.
In a separate test, Procter & Gamble is placing radio-frequency identification tags on products at a Metro Extra retail store in Germany so that when a customer pulls the product off the shelf, a digital screen at eye level changes its message. When a consumer picks out a shampoo for a particular type of hair, for instance, the screen recommends the most appropriate conditioner or other hair products, says John Paulson, president of G2 Interactive, a digital-marketing arm of WPP Group's G2 Network.


It would be even creepier if they told me I needed acne medicine or that based on my facial features I was too ugly to need any condoms.

Now In Pacifica

AdPulp started in our NW Chicago apartment nearly four years ago. Soon thereafter, BFG Communications invited me to move to Hilton Head Island to work on Diageo's liquor brands and Camel. I'm still with BFG, but Darby and I have relocated to Portland, Oregon.



I snapped the above photo of Crater Lake with my iPhone on Thursday.

If there are any Portland area writers, designers or ad people reading this, I'd love to meet for coffee or beer. You can reach me at dburn at adpulp dot com.