The Reality

Mark Pesce, a media professor at the University of Sydney, lectures on his “Hyperdistribution Theory.” The theory is predicated on a few assumptions: the internet’s revolutionizing effect on content distribution has transformed how advertising must relate to content, and also how viewers react to advertisers.

Traditional advertising is increasingly losing its effectiveness. One marketing trade publication said that television advertising is only one-third as effective as it was in 1990. Only 14% of people say they trust it, and only 16% are even watching the ad. So television advertising as it has existed is not sustainable.

Advertisers used to be able to simply buy or rent a captive audience. Today, advertisers have to invent ideas that actually attract an audience. Now advertising is the price you pay for not realizing the value of building your passionate tribe.
People hate irrelevant advertising. Technology and channel choice are enabling viewers to eliminate irrelevant advertising. Every brand today has to think and act like a media company. They can’t just push spots and banners out onto websites or television, brands have to pull people in. It’s a very different attitude.

Pesce’s lesson for the internet is to connect the program with the advertiser authentically. The aim is relevance: for the advertising to be relevant to the target market for the show, the advertising should feel like a compliment or a continuation of the program content.

The advertising should be integrated completely with the program. The advertiser effectively pays for the budget of the show. Then, in an internet-wired world, you hyper-distribute it any way you can. Put it on bittorrent, limewire, peer-to-peer networks, free video sites, you get it out there anyway because the advertising message – which is relevant to your audience – is part of the program.

This integration must be more than Clorox sponsoring General Hospital back in the early 20th Century. It also has to be more than glorified product placement. To be truly integrated, content must be consistent with the advertisers’ brand. The advertiser’s involvement must be meaningful, trustworthy and valuable. Brands and producers have actually got to provide something that people want, not something that people avoid.

Red Bull does it with action sports. The soda company has an in-house video content department that creates content. They have an in-house event management department that stages competitions. After building an audience for their content, ESPN is now paying Red Bull for the right to air the commercials.

Are any other brands beginning to do this?

The Times reports on the spread of branded content.  A few quotations stood out for me as furthering theories:

This branded content, the term for products figuring prominently without being overtly sold, is reminiscent of “The Hire,” a series of short films by BMW that featured its cars. Produced in 2001 and 2002, the films had directors like Ang Lee and John Woo and included actors like Clive Owen and Don Cheadle.

The story is about how this website called Massify (where amateur filmmakers vie for the chance to shoot artsy commercials for products) teamed up with an Oscar winning production company Killer Films who chose the best script.

“This is a model that Massify is trying to replicate,” said Jon Kaplowitz, co-chief executive of Massify, which is based in Manhattan. “Nobody watches commercials anymore, and it’s cost-prohibitive to buy ads online, so we approached Ace [Hotel] with the idea that if we created branded-entertainment pieces, then the content itself would be a marketing vehicle for the hotel.”

I’ve heard grumbles from many friends about facebook.  Indeed, there’s something amiss about this megalithic inbox replacement social utility that I have had difficulty diagnosing until recently.  I’ve found a few articles on the interwebs that I take to be clues.

First, Dunbar’s Number is a network theorem that states that individuals can sustain meaningful relationships with 148 people.  Beyond that point, network salience becomes much too difficult to sustain strong ties among nodes in the network.  Some neurologists and primatologists postulate that our threshold for juggling social connections is directly related to the size of our neocortex – which is bigger in women. I digress.

The other clue is my continued rumination about Jyri Engeström’s great post from back in the day about object centered sociality, and the subsequent research I did about Scandinavian Activity Theory as it relates to the sociology of information systems.

People don’t just connect to each other, they connect through a shared object that resonates with them both.  Shared objects are the reason why people affiliate with specific others and not just anyone.

The way those new ideas gelled with my undergrad studies of Communities of Practice in educational psychology class really are what led to the formulation of itsasickness: the obsession network.

Whatever the case, beyond this Dunbar’s Number threshold, people become disoriented in conversation – they literally can no longer relate to the object that brought about the conversation in the first place.  The very exchanges of conversation, the “likes”, the LOLs, the emoticons, only serve to further distance us from the object because more and more participants in the ‘conversation’ are from outside of the user’s immediate circle of friends.

Quite often, I have a hard time accepting that strangers (whose senses of humor I don’t know) could possibly be talking about the same thing in the same way in which I’m talking to my friends.  Homophily gives us tunnel vision sometimes.

Another clue:
How many people an individual communicates with probably exists somewhere between their total network size and their support network. Some research by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts observing all email communication at a university shows that the number of ongoing contacts hovers somewhere between 10 and 20 over a 30 day period.

Another clue:
The average facebook user has 130 friends which is too close to Dunbar for comfort.  This helps explain why facebook is pushing Pages so hard. FB Pages can be sponsored.

So, it makes sense that I’m disoriented by the size of our networks on facebook. The feeling that I increasingly can’t relate to what’s happening around me is akin to boredom.

If objects are what we talk about with people, then is the number of objects we can simultaneously socialize around also 148?  I would hypothesize: probably. Actor Network Theory talks about the the interoperability of objects and people in complex networks, and in my experience, this is true.  This is why memes like David After Dentist are so resonant in our internet culture: they provide the long strands that connect geographically disparate and socially removed circles of friends.  These joke memes garner tens of millions of views (DAD has 62,436,953).  Who watches the video? Probably half a million circles of friends.

If half a million people, reaching out to their immediate friends will result in 20% of the country getting touched, then facebook may be the most effective free delivery system ever.

But what can be delivered effectively online? Things like “David After Dentist,” I assume – specifically, portable and permalinked objects that have a temperament which is immediately understood: “this is funny”, “this is gross” , “this is beautiful.”

This also makes sense when looking at the array of successful “defined-temperament” community websites; sites like Wonkette.com or TMZ.com or CollegeHumor.com. These can maintain conversation threads of thousands because the temperament is constant: it’s always a story of “conservatives are nuts” or “celebrities are nuts” or “laugh at this guy getting kicked in the nuts.”

Objects can connect more people than people can.

Itsasickness keeps users oriented toward the objects of obsession.  The objects themselves exist in a worldview temperament that is constantly reiterated all over the site.  Once again, for good measure: “This is sick” = your sickness makes you extraordinary.

They are smart.

In Marx’s critique of political economy Das Kapital, commodity fetishism denotes the (quasi-religious) mystification of human relations that are said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by, and transformed into, objectified relationships between things. The things are commodities and money.

Commodity fetishism is not unique to capitalist societies, since commodity trade has occurred in one way or another for thousands of years; but in Marx’s opinion, commodity fetishism became pervasive especially in capitalist society, because this kind of society is based almost totally on the “production of commodities by means of commodities”.

That means that market relationships influence almost everything that people do, something which was not the case in pre-capitalist societies, where commerce was much more restricted. Marx was talking about object-centered sociality elevated to religious power.

In a hyper-capitalist society that is saturated with marketing distribution channels, commodity fetishism is also understood as reification, the “thing-ification” of relationship forming boundary objects.

Boundary objects are the objects at the periphery of two different clusters of non-intersecting peoples.

In other words, what we love connects us. Marx wanted that thing to be the collective, but in the most countries, that thing is the stuff (money/products/fame) we covet. Building a personal network under a single banner – a collective forming banner – based on the stuff we covet is a backdoor to Marx by way of Madison Avenue.

How can you get people to come to your thing?
Are you a politician who wants to have a full house at a fundraiser?
Are you launching a website and want it to ‘take off’?

Some network theorists would tell you that you need to genuinely reach a maven and thus achieve that elusive tipping point.

Key:

Clients sometimes ask folks like me how to get a lot of people to love their [whatever] so that they can fork over $.

Well, strategists like me can quack about actor network theory and post-ANT, and clustering along shared affinities all we want, but let’s be honest… as evidenced in the above clip, rule #1: Your shits gotta be good.