I do know a lot about all these things. And about the cultural context that surrounds them, that creates a person’s outer world.

And I have a friend, Jen, who is a psychologist. She also knows a lot about these people and things. And about the things that go on in people’s heads and hearts, creating their inner world.

It’s almost toooo much information for two people to have. So we decided to share.

Thinkers and Makers, and Indigo Insights. TMI²

We’ve created the TMI² Reports.

Quick read, INEXPENSIVE, digestible content, bullet pointed, insight rich profiles of the inner and outer worlds of the people you’re interested in learning more about.

For a pitch. Or a deck. Or to convince your client they don’t actually know ANYTHING about Modern Moms. Or Techy Teens. Or the local food movement and it’s implications on how people buy groceries… or cars… or anything else for that matter.

We’ll give you too much information- you decide what to do with it.

Whoo!

In no particular order (although, beginning with the first moments of January 1):

1. Home – LCD Soundsystem
2. You Make My Dreams Come True – Hall & Oates
3. Today, I Feel Like I’m Evolving – River City Extension
4. Before It Breaks – Brandi Carlile
5. Ghost (live at the Fitzgerald) – Brandi Carlile
6. Love The Way You Walk Away – Blitzen Trapper
7. Don’t Got To Work It Out – Fitz and the Tantrums
8. Space Before I Wake – Dan Wilder (now the Wailing Loons)
9. This Is Why We Fight – The Decemberists
10. Everywhere I Go (live at Basilica) – Lissie
11. Towers, Holocene and Calgary (tie) – Bon Iver
12. The High Road – Broken Bells
13. Lost in My Mind (live at the Varsity) – The Head and The Heart
14. The Traveling Song – The Avett Brothers
15. Salvation Song – The Avett Brothers
16. Home (live at Pelican Lake) – Wailing Loons cover of
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
17. I Follow Rivers (live at First Ave)– Lykki Li
18. Rain – Patty Griffin
19. Free – Zac Brown Band
20. Lucky Now – Ryan Adams
21. Ethiopia – Red Hot Chili Peppers
22. Post-war Blues – Dan Mangan
23. Raise Your Glass – Pink!
24. Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey
25. Midnight City – M83
26. Money – The Drums
27. Settling it Off (live at Cedar) – Peter Wolf Crier
28. I Feel It All – Feist

29. Shake it Out – Florence & The Machine
30. Junk of the Heart (Happy) – The Kooks
31. Awake My Soul – Mumford & Sons32. Gangsta (live at First Ave) – tUnE-yArDs
33. WHALE (live at 400 Bar)- Yellow Ostrich

I wasn’t optimistic. New branding for the whole show. Arrow Awards? Am I supposed to know what that means? I’m not British. Is that why I don’t get it? And then the program. Yellow? With weird graphics that look all spray painted/someone’s teenage kid monkeyed with them with the “neon” filter in photoshop? But I went. And I watched. And 2011? They were better than 2010 by ad TWO. Rapping organic farmers followed by fallen angels with wings and sparkle halos? I’M IN. And those are jus the first two honorable mentions. Finalists. Whatever.

What I noticed:

The Miss:
Virgin Airlines is still trying to out-cool everyone. Does this work in the UK? Do they not have frequent flyer programs? I don’t get it. Virgin is cool. On Delta I fly First Class. Sorry. Maybe I’m too American for you??

Agency:
Almost every ad not only had agency credits (with no names), but a production house and a director (sometimes semi-famous). The big name agencies often had “sub-titles” – to make us think the ads came from some really really really cool “thinktank” inside the agency? Nice branding.

Other Ads:
There were a few ads that referenced other winner ads from years past. That’s a cop-out, folks. Someone won an award with cars made from sugar and cake? Let’s make one from hot girls, tattoos and venom. One of my favourites fits into this category tho.. (and see what I did there?)… the ad for ad people. I didn’t catch on until the weird lego people were kids with rhythmic eyebrows. And then there were lots of bouncy balls. And a car made of cake. And a gorrila playing the drums… oooooohhhhhh. GOT IT. AND I’M YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE (minus the britishness). GOT IT.

Devices:
Lots of montages. And people moving through online and offline worlds seamlessly. And “lifetime in 60 seconds” ads.

Themes:
Technology. Apparently Intel thinks we live in the internet. So does Nike Football. And pretty much everyone talking about phones believes in Utopia. Especially Utopia with knitted things and bees (which, to their credit, are going extinct or something. So that’s actually pretty clever).

Food. Apparently food is important. To farmers. And kids. And rappers.

Audis. Apparently the new the shit.

Dogs. Apparently still cute.

The UK: Apparently still classist. Even the Beckhams aren’t rich enough. Like, A LOT not rich enough.

Emotions. Apparently humans have them, and it’s good to remind them of this. Burn their houses down. Beat up people’s wives. Kiss them at the airport (didn’t Love Actually already cover this one??). And people who are crippled, wheelchaired, or “mentally challenged” but motivated/naughty, have them in spades. Also, it’s very poetic to love a woman for her whole life. You know, because women are amazing- they should shop, and you should shop for them, at John Lewis. Like, FOREVER.

Verdict:
My almost favorite was the ad for a new intel processor. SNOOZEFEST you say? Well, I didn’t get it at first. Woman with envelope? Spys want the enevelope? Wait, now she’s a facebook photo? And now she is running and sweating? And, hang on, now she’s a video game player in a MMORPG? Huh? Oh. Wait. OOOOOOHHHHHH. Internet. Life. Seamless. Life. Internet. Well, shit.

My favorite ad of the night, tho? The Coulour Project from Dulex. Yeah. It’s PAINT. And it’s the dreaded “cause marketing.” But as someone who has seen the effects that a little paint can create (sidebar: colorfully painted LATRINES in Sierra Leone became a source of pride and status, were taken care of, were coveted even, because they were painted. In a place where people can’t afford to paint their homes, and where colors like pink and aqua are scarce, a bright pink latrine really MEANS something…oh, and then there’s the way that a simple coat of paint on my freshman dormroom brought together my parents and my roommates parents and we’re still connected, and talk about that night from Home Depot to egg shell white, 15years later… and the room felt like it was OURS…), I loved this concept. Not to mention the visual tapestry created by weaving together scenes of people painting structures they love, their own neighborhoods, all across the whole world… omg. LOVE.
I may only remember this ad because Bravia “did colour” first. But I’ll remember it. I already checked the website.

My takeaway for the biz? People had budgets in 2011. And from the calls I’m getting this month, I’d guess they have them again in 2012. Also, people still spend money on “TV.” Or. Mini-movies. Web content. Whatever. Apparently it’s got a good ROI as long as you have a big agency with a thinktank, a cool production company that sounds like a rap group, and a “director” for your “branded film.” GAME ON, I say.

Them’s my thoughts. Go see them! Let’s discuss!

1. There is something about anthropology that hates money. (big topic of conversation, this “money” these days)

2. It feels right to be critical of corproations… so can an anthropologist avoid being co-opted by the corporate culture to maintain their analysis?

3. The objective of anthropological research for branding is inherently different than the (traditional) objective of anthropological research for academia… knowledge vs. change. Some of us have the desire to “transform environments that are desperately in need of transformation.” Amen. I look forward to the time when transformative anthropology is less limited to corporations. The world is in desperate need of transformation- and anthropologists can be capable agents of change, if they are willing to act as such. (So, again, where are our public intellectuals??)

4. Where do belief and labor interact in a corporation?

5. We are having a lovers quarrel with the word “consumer.”  I loved Ken Erickson’s presentation on Walmart because I also wish we talked more about people, and cringe every time at the word consumer… To consume means “to burn up”- but that’s not what happens to a DVD when you purchase it at Kmart. You watch it. You gift it. You store it. But you don’t consume it.

6. Brands can connect people with their optimistic selves. They are agents of optimism, aspiration and identity. Brands are agents of HOPE. Ideas and movements need brands, as agents of hope and change, as much as- or more than- products do.

Looking very much forward to seeing you all in San Fran next year

a) Marketing the Anthropological Lens (no punctuation).
Application- applied anthropology continues to create career paths and job opportunities for anthropologists.
Academics-  anthropologists continue to TALK about how we need more public intellectuals, but no one seems to be DOING anything- other than, in my humble and biased opinion, David Graeber. Read his book on debt yet? I bet you’ve heard of it.

b) Marketing: The Anthropological Lens
Application:  Working in client service industries and corporate departments, whether in research, management consulting, strategy (political, governmental, economic), advertising, or what have you, how we market our unique skills as anthropologists is crucial to the survival of our careers.
Academics: The creative and productive processes that marketers (planners, copywriters, strategists, account managers, etc) develop and execute are intellectually interesting in and of themselves. In other words, not only are the products anthropological (media, artifacts, etc), but the process (with it’s meaning-making, politics, kindships, beliefs and economies) is anthropologically interesting as well.

2. Anthropological research (in a consumer setting) is about a cultural realm, not an individual realm. Food for thought when faced with clients “spec sheets” for participant recruitment.

3. Anthropological research for brand strategy purposes is not INTENDED for an academic paper- but to help a team to generate a Good Idea. The criticism of “marketing ethnography” as not “real ethnography” may be meaningless when considered in context.

4. In some place/cultures/nations, clay pots can get married. (In the USA…) Rules sometimes tell us more about the rule-makers than about the rule-breakers.

5. Marilyn Strathern only has good ideas. Her latest: In terms of kinship and discussions on closeness, we are restricted by the “English language’s propensity to endow the word relation with a tenor of positive connection.”

6. When indoors, you should take off your jacket, so that when you go outside, in the snow, you will feel the benefit of putting it back on.

7. I miss my anthropologists more than I thought I did.

3.

SO. Here are my notes from day one- basically the ideas that started to hang together in patters and mean something to me. I’ve been anthropologizing everything for so many years now, I guess I just can’t turn it off.

1. The Senses. Especially interesting presentations about the implications of the senses on marketing. How we no longer use only text-based communication, but also other types like smell and sound. The cool idea that “cultures map out different sensory experiences” and “they way we see things [or smell them or taste them, etc] is affected by what we believe..”

2. Awareness can be an analytic category. We have many types of awarenesses. From ideas like prejudices and assumptions, to sensory thinks like expectations and perceptions. This can be useful to brands in both external marketing and also INTERNAL systems and mechanisms. I loved an ethnographic anecdote about how to employ this idea in the business to business realm and started thinking more and more about the disciplines of strategic and brand planning and how to Pitch.

3. Brands need to think about “what they are doing rather than what they are being.” Like I’ve said a thousand times, BRANDS ARE SOCIAL.

4. Smell has colour.

5. We’ve only been using the tip of the iceberg when it comes to applying semiotics to branding.

6. There is “meaning-making” in the creative process as well as in the creative product. Or any product. Huge implications for anthropological inquiry here… might have found an interesting paper… maybe an interesting PhD.

7. Hope. Hope was the topic of the PhD I was working on in 2005-6. At the time, I couldn’t convince funding bodies that it was relevant. I was lucky to have advisors that, even though one of them admitted she had no idea what I was talking about or how it was anthropological, supported me anyway. Turns out we were on to something- there was a whole brilliant panel on Hope and Temporality at this year’s meetings… and the room was PACKED. I was thrilled, frustrated and sad about the progress those awesome scholars have made without me all at the same time. Sigh.
Questions I was asking that they are asking:
“What is the object of Hope?”
“What is the relationship between education and hope?”
“How is one’s capacity for self-realization influenced by Hope?”
“How does Hope create a reorientation of knowledge that inspires action?”
“Does Hope have productive power?”
“Who act as agents of Hope?”
And one cool twist, thinking about Hope vs anticipation… apparently someone called “Adams” in 2009 defined anticipation as “the palpable effect of the speculative future on the present”. I’d been saying something along the lines of “Hopes are objects, like memories of the future, that influence the present.” Again, sigh.

8. There was a whole paper on the photographer as ethnographer (and vice versa). Turns out that thinking “your camera is like your eye” is a whole lot more complicated than it sounds. Cool takeaway? “There are cultural dimensions present in image making”- from realistic to expressive photos, from documentation to representation, there are a lot of analytic tensions to choose from when developing one’s voice. !!!

That was Day One.

This December’s workshop will be organized into thematic break-out sessions with expert presentations and workshop facilitation concerning two topics (so far):

“From Boring to Big Bang” presented by Aki Spicer, Director of Digital Strategy at Fallon Worldwide

How to challenge social entrepreneurs and non-profits to outline some initiatives and brainstorm on how to frame their marketing into bigger “social” ideas.

“Community Outreach” by Kate Barrett, Applied Anthropologist

We will also be brainstorming about “Modern Money- From Fundraising to Earned Income.”

Location:
CoCo St Paul
213 4th St. E., 4th Floor
St. Paul, MN  55101

To register, click here: http://s4gmpls5.eventbrite.com

Phase one: The Wait

There are all kinds of African-Americans, and Africans, milling about mixing with all of the white business people looking for outlets, some hovering hawklike near the “outlet seats” waiting for the flight to board so they can swoop in, to plug in their Macs and phones. (Have no fear, I’ve already swooped. Two plugs. Done.)

Phase two: The Cluster

They announce that they will be boarding the flight. All of the black people get up, come over, etc. There is no line. The white people all look very confused.

Phase three: The Panic

The gate agent makes an announcement to the effect of “Please stand back if you are not in the first zones to board. I promise everyone will get on the plane.”  No one listens. There is still no line. The gate agents look entirely claustrophobic with so many people clustered up by their red do-not-pass tape.

Phase four: The Solution

The gate agent makes another announcement. “We are sorry for the delay but we will not be boarding this flight for 40 minutes. Please take your seats. There is no need to stand at the gate. We will not be boarding this flight any time soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.”  Reinforcements arrive and herd everyone into a semblance of a line.

Phase five: The Aftermath

Everyone taking their seats, when all the non-Accra people have now sat in the places with outlets that they vacated to get into not-line, means that there are Nigerian children EVERYWHERE. With no sense of personal space, and mothers sitting far away, watching, but letting them “figure it out.” So they are now figuring it out with their elbows in my back and adorable tinyness climbing all over the booths next to me as they fight over the Tic-Tac-Toe machine.

Sometimes I really, really do love, love New York. : )

I don’t know much about filmmaking. But I have friends that do, and I pay attention. I do know about storytelling. The craft of it, the presentation of it, the culture of it. And here’s my thinking. Turning a book into a screenplay/movie involves sliders. Like these:

And there are four areas of slideability; three areas in which you monkey with their sliders to achieve balance and not piss off, or lose completely, your audience.
1. Plot.
2. Characters.
3. Dialogue.
4. Design.

Most books are too dense with multiple plotlines and nuances in journey to fit into 180 minutes or less (hence why two movies that tell entire life stories, and are wonderful, Forrest Gump and Benjamin Button, take way more than that).
Most characters in books are too complex to bring to life on screen completely- they have thoughts and feelings and facets that you can describe or demonstrate with the written word and you just can’t replicate that articulation visually. You just can’t.
Most dialogue in books is amazing. Some books have a lot of it and some have very little. But movies have to find a rhythm and a style that makes sense when actually heard out loud, with multiple voices, instead of being heard internally, all in the voice of the reader.

So. The sliders. I think that when you transform a book into a movie, you have to monkey with the sliders. And it’s ALL risk taking. Which way do you GO with the slider?
I also think that the audience will only take so much sliding before you lose them.
You can simplify the characters, combine them, delete them, if you nail the logic of the plot and have a great dialogueic rhythm. We dont lose the meaning of the book.
You can simplify the plot if you create beautiful character complexity and keep the film moving through what is or isn’t said.
You can mess with the “exact quotes from the book” as long as the message is there through the plot and the articulation of the characters.
You get the idea.
So here’s my problem with the movie trailer of The Help:

The characters in the book are simple. We want to see the power of that simplicity shining through. We want to see their reason for being and that one idea that each of them symbolizes. They are archetypes (the mousey smart girl, the snob, the maternal maid, the useless mother). We need to see them as symbols. Instead, thanks to the casting agent of this movie, I see celebrities. That’s all I see. I don’t see a powerful hero in Skeeter. I see Emma Stone. With weird hair.

The dialogue is the book is powerful. The absence of dialogue, the meme about what people can and can’t say to this white and that black person, is powerful. There is so.much.tension in the dance between what is said out loud and what is totally NOT said out loud. What CAN NOT be said out loud, but sometimes is… and I dunno. It just sounds all kinds of polished up. Maybe it’s just the trailer. I hope it’s just the trailer.

The plot. We all know what this movie is about. Like I said, 436bazillion people read this book. And are still reading this book. I’m pretty sure most of them will go see the movie. And would have gone to see the movie whether Emma Stone was in it or not. Because it’s about heroism, and right and wrong, and standing up, and sitting down, and history… the plot of this book, the story, regardless of the beach-readable-format, is amazing. It’s a story we all know and don’t know and need to know.

And then there’s the design. What did it actually look like back then? Did they have curling irons? When were they sweating? How dark WAS it really when Skeeter snuck off in the night to the wrong side of town? From the look of the trailer, they had some serious stylists. And I bet they got the clothes, and the upholstery, and the wallpaper and the landscaping right. But the lighting? It’s really slick. And Skeeter’s hair is really weird. REALLY weird. And they don’t look sweaty. Isn’t it H.O.t.T.T.t.t.t.ttttt.t. in Jackson, Mississippi? I’m just not buying it. Dear Hollywood, you tried too hard. And forgot about reality. I wanted Once, and you gave me Glee.

I guess that my wish would have been, had I been in charge of the sliders, to let the characters BE simple archetypes, without famousness to get in the way, to find a way to show what was and wasn’t said, wihtout the terrible one-liners, and to let the plot just be a simple story, a feel-good, without trying so hard to say HEY! LOOK! A FEEL-GOOD!! I guess my wish would have been to keep Hollywood out of it. To let it be powerful, not polished. I dunno. I’ll be totally honest, the Hollywood stuff will probably get to me- the story is just too right. I mean, I still teared up a bit watching the trailer. But I just didn’t feel good about it. I want to feel something because a story fed my soul and I became awestruck, not because a formulaic slider-monkeying production preyed on my emotion.

PS- if you want an example of another recent beach-read-awesome-message book that I think nailed the movie, it’s Secret Life of Bees. Characters were cast with celebrities- but allowed to be complex and had powerful performances that made me forget who they were. Sophie Okinawe blows my mind. Plot was simple and left alone. Dialogue from the past infused the rhythm of the present with meaning. And was, again, delivered with meaning. Thanks, Latifah. And design. The music alone took me to another place.

Another failure? Like Water for Elephants. Reece Witherspoon had no business playing that role. A complex, moving character became a useless girl. And the incredible personification and performance by the Elephant, as Rosie, couldn’t even save it.

Ok, I’m done now.

PS- Thanks NC for the discussion. I got all fired up about it.