October 2008 Archives
I'm writing a short piece now on social enterprise in an era of skepticism toward business.
Won't be the last time you'll see something on this theme.
Today on Gawker: "The Doomed Quest to Make Marketing Meaningful"
Usually, a marketing exec surveying the fundamental emptiness of their career will have that same twinge of conscience, and decide that the way to solve it is to bring some real do-gooding purpose into the marketing industry. On that note, allow me to introduce you to "purpose-based marketing," just the latest futile quest by a prominent career adman!
. . .
Though the WSJ describes this approach as "newfangled," it's been around for years. You know what the ceiling is on the market for this type of thing? The ceiling is how much extra leftover cash companies have to throw around after they do their real marketing, which has the goal of making money. Nothing "beyond making money" comes about until the "making money" part is accomplished. Corporate social responsibility is considered a luxury product. Which is why Jim Stengel's firm is doomed, according to his less conscience-plagued peers:
"This approach is "not going to save your bacon in this tough world," says Jack Trout, president of Trout & Partners, a marketing-strategy firm in Old Greenwich, Conn. Consumers are 'going for the cheaper guy now.'"
. . . after the financial crisis prompts all but one of its sponsors to withdraw. The result: a deficit--and what some would say is the parade's spiritual revival:
The lack of money has brought a greater do-it-yourself feel to the parade.
To replace floats once reserved for sponsors like Perrier, which used to illuminate part of the parade route and hand out water, artists have stepped in, [artistic director Jeanne] Fleming said. . . .
“The number of people and the inventiveness of the costumes is growing exponentially,” Fleming said. “People need the joy.”
None of the 30 staffers are getting paid and performers are getting smaller honorariums than in years’ past.
“The Halloween parade is never about money, it’s always about spirit,” Fleming said.
The Hollywood Animation Archive offers this compilation of the brilliant 1950s Piels commercials by Terrytoons with Bob & Ray. Guns, suicide, sex--these adult cartoons selling beer would never play today. Which is a shame, because that rambunctious line-crossing is part of what makes them such an effective satire of advertising itself.
Below: a somewhat more tame example on Youtube:
Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer meditates on the meaning of the game:
It makes no sense, logically, that what happens on a baseball field -- any baseball field -- could change other people's lives in any meaningful way. But throughout this exhilarating October, Jamie Moyer has made a point of stopping every night to look around and take in every unforgettable moment. So he knew exactly how profoundly this had changed people's lives.
"And I think that's great," he said. "That's what baseball does. There are going to be people today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year saying, 'I was blank-blank-blank when the Phillies won the World Series.' And that's pretty cool, to have a story of wherever they were when the Phillies won the World Series: 'I was in the parking lot. I was in the stands. I was at a bar. I was having dinner. I was coming back from a trip and I couldn't see it so I listened to it in the car.' And to me, that's kind of cool, because that's what baseball does for people. I just think that's why it's so special."
Newsarama offers this revealing meditation on Superman, media and human identity in relation to Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. The following is just a key excerpt--read the whole thing, particularly if you're trying to figure out what I'm up to with all the references to comics and pop culture.
So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let’s face it.
Subway Blogger notes today that the aesthetic quality of the DC metro is considerably greater than that of New York. No question, and the comparison holds between NYC and many other subway systems around the world, which function not just as waiting areas for transportation but as corporate art.
Last night on the way home from class I found my subway stop vestibule lined with cardboard, blankets and people asleep. In class we talked about how the relentless quest for purity in charity regulation is forcing nonprofit managers to divert money & time from programs to paperwork; simply walking up the stairs afterward was a pointed reminder of what's at stake.
Above: DJ Licky Oats & Bobbie have a laugh at a man found sleeping in the subway
Class prep kept me from my web reading, which is why I missed that yesterday was Global Pink Hijab Day, in which "muslim women across the world [wore] a Pink Hijab to raise awareness for breast cancer."
I really need to set up a calendar to keep track of charitable days . . . and weeks . . . and months . . .
Just sayin'.
Photo: Phiilies' star Shane Victorino signs autographs at a breast cancer benefit sponsored by Skinny Water.
Charity tax will be the bulk of my nonprofit law course from here on out. Even after doing this for, well, a bunch of years, I still think of the above image quite a bit when preparing!
The Gawker headline sums it up: Zombie JFK Urges Green Revolution. Personally, I wouldn't OK any ad that reminds me of Clutch Cargo:
If you're in NYC, fly, don't walk, to the Mad cover art exhibit today at the Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art. I went to the opening reception last night (I'm a MoCCA trustee), and I have to say seeing these covers in there full-size original painted form was stunning. The historic Mad #30 Alfred, the J. Fred Muggs original fingerpaint, Nixon & Agnew as The Sting--cool stuff. Also great: the opportunity to chat with Nick Meglin, Dick DeBartolo and others from the past and present usual gang of idiots.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of these covers will go to the original artists and their families.
"Life is defined by form."
That's the theme of the exhibit in the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, a compelling fusion of commerce and art. I'll have more to say about it when I'm not preparing for class, but for now I'll say simply that if you're in NYC and are interested in the dynamics of corporate identity, it's worth checking out.
No surprise to anyone who has read my academic work, my favorite art in the pavilion was Sidewalk, which shows the image of a cityscape in pools of water off the street. "I've always preferred the reflection of things to the things themselves."
And self-identified social entrepreneurs--if you don't see the connection between this exhibit and charity/business hybrids, you really need to think about what you mean by the term. For "social enterprise" to be coherent, it has to signify something more than just "things we like."
Sexx University, an academic-themed clothing line that issues its own downloadable diploma.
Marshall McLuhan was wont to say that behind every joke is grievance, and here we see another example of how society senses that higher education no longer deserves its pretensions to high status. As I explain to my students, the university emerged at a time when information was a luxury good; most people worked merely to survive, which made the people who spent time aggregating and processing data something special. Now, not so much--in the information age everyone is a professor, a person who "speaks out" about their own specialized area of knowledge.
The latest Green Issue of WWD is in, and the cover made me laugh: another attempt to get folks to buy green by vamping it up!
As usual, what actually turned me on in this issue were ads and articles that dealt with infrastructure: how the economic downturn is affecting green biz; sustainability and perfume; supply chain problems; challenges to green textile claims. The ads touted different kinds of fibers, whether natural, patented, recycled or a mix of all three.
There's a lot of interesting stuff here, so do-gooders who don't have an online subscription but live in area where WWD is sold on the stands might want to plunk down the two bucks to give it a look. Below, a couple things that I'd not seen before--
Ethical and environmentally correct fur? Who knew?
And the obligatory you-can-save-the-world-through-consumerism ad:
Bruce Nussbaum offers a useful lesson for social entrepreneurs who think innovation & metrics are inherently successful. Key excerpts:
Please read the testimony of ex-Federal Reserve Chairman before Congress on why the financial innovation of recent years, which he championed, failed so utterly. It is important to understand this failure of metrics, this failure of modeling. . . .
Greenspan: " . . . A Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the pricing model that underpins much of the advance in derivates markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. Had instead the models been fitted more appropriately to historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape today, in my judgment.”
Got that? [T]he products of financial innovation weren’t stress tested in the real world properly. It was bad innovation methodology.
It's a big reason I get torqued when SE-types criticize me for calling attention to the movement's weak points--if you don't factor in the negatives you are on your way to destruction.
Inevitable, really, since neither Luther nor Augustine say anything about Doctor Who.
From Ask the Pastor.
French theorist Berhard-Henri Levi edits and writes for Franco Sozzani's latest issue of LUV, with a portion of the proceeds going to charity. Robin Givhan has the details:
The idea for the Africa issue was sparked by conversations Sozzani had with the actor Forest Whitaker and the French author Bernard-Henri Lévy, who served as a guest editor. She wanted to focus on people, projects and ideas. She did not want to make an aesthetic statement about Africa. So she didn't fill the magazine with images of Western models in overpriced vaguely ethnic frocks. And unlike a recent issue of India's Vogue magazine, which sparked outrage among activists and humanitarians, this one won't show peasants posing with $5,000 handbags.
From The Reliance of the Traveler, on the waqf, or endowment:
Establishing an endowment is an act of worship. . . . When the endowment has been made, the ownership of the endowment belongs to Allah Most High (Commentary: meaning that even though everything is the property of Allah, the article is now dissevered from its metaphorical human ownership).
Ritual: reading the New York Post on the subway ride to my office.
Reward: articles such as Pussy-Whipped, which tells the story of Goddess Haley, a woman who became a dominatrix to fund her passion for caring for cats. Besides tending to upwards of 30 ex-strays in her Brooklyn apartment, she has also placed 90 or so cats up for adoption.
She said she became a dominatrix when she moved to New York five years ago after she saw a job ad in a newspaper. She knew that it would be a perfect way to fund her rescue operations, which can cost as much as $1,000 a month, with $5,000 per year in vet bills.
"Being a dom is hard work - I've pulled muscles whipping slaves - but I do it because I earn enough to help a lot of cats," she said. . . .
Haley works with the ASPCA in Brooklyn, veterinarian Daniel Giangola of Animal Health Care on the Upper East Side and Kittykind, a nonprofit cat-rescue group in Union Square.
The S&M "goddess" says she will go any length to fight for cats. That includes taking her day job, where she gets up to $180 an hour to abuse S&M aficionados.
Yesterday I chatted with a stellar SE leader about eugenics as a movement that illustrates how do-gooders can be blind to their destructive behavior.
It's hard for folks today to imagine how pervasive the eugenics movement was back in the day--charities funded it, taught it, engaged in forced sterilization and other horrific practices . . . truly, not one of our brighter hours.
If you're in the charity gig and haven't read War Against the Weak, a revealing history of charity's role in the movement, I strongly recommend at least giving its website a look.
"A beauty treatment for your feet."
This ad is from 1938; I've seen later ads for Red Cross Shoes, as well contemporary ads for American Red Cross Footwear for medical professionals.
Any connection with the actual Red Cross, which holds the trademark to the symbol & the ARC brand?
Haven't found the footwear in the official ARC stores. It's Saturday night, so my research stops there.
A 1912 baseball fundraiser at the Polo Grounds for survivors of the Titanic disaster.
Factory, by Alexander Blok
11/24/1903
Translated from the Russian by me
In a neighboring building the windows are yellowed.
In the evening--in the evening
Ponderous bolts screech,
People approach the gates.
And the gates are locked shut
But on the wall--but on the wall
A motionless someone, someone in the dark
Counts people in silence.
I hear everything from my height:
With a brazen voice he commands
The crowd gathering beneath
To bend their worn out spines.
They enter and disperse,
They pile the sacks on their spines.
While in yellowed windows there's laughter,
About how they put one over on these poor souls.
A couple interesting stories from this week's Crain's NY for folks interested in museums and the arts:
- The Queens Museum of Art owes its new construction project to the financial crisis. During the boom they couldn't find qualified contractors to bid on the project. Now, with so many contractors looking for jobs, they were able to find better contractors and a lower price.
"It is a terrific time for nonprofits to build," says Ken Levien, president of an eponymous construction management firm. "Next year, because the economy will be slow, something that costs me a dollar today should cost 75 cents."
- Museums and arts charities have suffered declining attendance recently---"I can almost track the falloff to the day the Lehman Brothers announcement came out," says Lisa Mallory, vice president of marketing at BAM. In response, organizations have been cutting their ticket prices upwards of 50%. Some promotions tie discounts to do-gooding, such as offering discounts to folks who bring donations to a food bank, a move that would appear to be designed to offset the perception that "at times like this, it's indulgent to take themselves to the theater."
How many times has this happened to you? You're out gathering items for a charity rummage sale, only to be captured by ghost pirates flying around in a giant red skull.
Postmodern Barney shows the way out.
OK, it may seem a bit goofy--old Captain Marvel stories usually do--but there's a more serious point here to be made about cultural perception. I read thousands of old comics as a kid and as many more as an adult, and one clear emergent pattern is that heroes don't take money for using their talents to benefit society. When they do earn money in their heroic garb, it's a trick, an evil double, a morally dubious antihero or for a good cause--hence story after story of Superman, Captain Marvel and the like helping out at charity events.
On a personal level, this doubtless played a role in my own career choices. It also feeds into how I see comics in relation to social benefit. More generally, though, it expresses a cognitive frame to which charities should pay attention: a sense of charity and profit as intrinsic opposites.
The empty sky above the ad? That's where the Twin Towers used to be. The memorial mural is just off to the left.
Perhaps not the best ad copy for the location . . .
Via LP Cover Lover, a website on songs inspired by Batman. The pictures must be seen to be believed.
Bonus cover: Johnny "Hammond" Smith's The Stinger, with Green Lantern recolored to avoid copyright infringement. Because that always works.
"Day time holding back, night time paying back."
Wonderful--one of the most impressive integrations of religion, marketing and design that I've ever seen. The designers explain:
It's something we've forgotten: years ago, fast food was health food. Clean restaurants (with white uniforms to signal sanitary conditions), untainted meat, bread, potatoes--even the sugary drinks were associated with energy.
White Castle and its analogues democratized good eating, or at least that's how it seemed. The fact that the baseline has shifted is in part an outgrowth of the impulse that led folks to eradicate malnourishment through burgers and fries.
Today's a class prep day for me, and the topic: charity & intellectual property. It's an important topic, particularly because charities tend to assume that because they're charities others' IP is fair game to take. I have an overview post on this topic over at Blog@ today, and don't be surprised if I return to the issue both here and there.
The image above, by the way, is from a charitable initiative that is at least trying not to use other companies' characters without a license: Web874 Graphics' Become a Superhero campaign, which collects and distributes holiday gifts for needy kids. The pic is from the new BAS comic book.
In related comics and culture news, the NY Times has a great feature on how "a comic-book figure, the hero of the manga series “The Drops of the Gods,” has quickly become the most influential voice in Asia’s wine markets."
The current financial crisis understandably has some do-gooders concerned. Organizations that relied on hefty returns from cutting-edge investments can no longer rely on Wall Street to fund existing programs. News reporters and nonprofit leaders are bleeding barrels of digital ink assessing the potential impact on donations, and charities that relied on debt financing are likely to face some difficult times.
These are no doubt important issues, but the effects of the crisis do not stop with money. It also shapes how people think. Capital markets morph from safe bets to slot machines. Investment bankers become villains. Entrepreneurship seems too risky for hard times, while government grants replace earned income as the symbol of sustainability.
Whether these responses are wise is open to debate, but the unavoidable fact is that they exist. People think about business one way during a bubble and another after it bursts--a response with deep roots in the way we're coded to see success and danger.
While this response may have a measurable impact on cash flow, it has even greater implications for how people perceive social enterprise. The movement has yet to grasp the extent to which it is as much a product of the bubble as subprime loans and credit-default swaps--it's not just a coincidence that do-gooders started talking business when business was good. At the peak of the bubble this gave the movement a rhetorical advantage, but as the economy tanks, this same language can make the social entrepreneur seem untrustworthy, defined by profit, self-interest and the very business practices that created the problems charity now has to solve.
For social enterprise to be more than a passing fad, we must re-think what it means and why it matters. Is Social Enterprise Sustainable? provides my own answers to these questions. I've put it online in both the print version and a director's cut series of blog posts with illustrative pictures and video. It's the first in a series of related projects, so if you read even just a part of it please feel free to share your own thoughts!
Social enterprise suffers from a serious design flaw: it focuses attention on commerce as the defining trait of a medium ostensibly distinct from commercial values. The peak of a business cycle can mask this--business becomes associated with success, and the relative contrast between types of business helps maintain the integrity of the charitable form. But the economy crashes, the commercial elements become more distinct--the social entrepreneur seems preoccupied by profit, self-interest and the business practices that created the problems we now need to solve.
A sign of the cultural shift to which social entrepreneurs need to adapt: the resurgence of business as the villain in popular entertainment.
Saatchi & Saatch launches a salvo against the green "straightjacket." One small step for Saatchi; one giant leap for social enterprise becoming the next so-called traditional charity.
Here we go again . . .
One aspect of being a professional do-gooder is hearing a steady stream of inspirational stories about charities that employ folks from needy communities.
Nice, but hardly hard core.
No, for the real radical worldchanging revolutionary stuff, ya gotta look at a product such as Dave's Killer Bread. The Dave in question isn't a pampered arugula-eating, chardonnay-drinking wuss like, um, me, but someone who has truly experienced a life-altering turnaround.
Like, heading up a baked goods brand after being in prison for armed robbery and drugs. AdPulp has the scoop, Nature Bake has the goods, and Willamette Week has the comic:
A building burns in NoLiTa. It's not at all close to what's been going on in California, but yikes.
Today's WWD has a killer article on the liquidation of Mervyns', a budget department store that served a number of communities. The most revealing part of the story comes in the description of the transactions that led to the bankruptcy. The key paragraph:
A consortium that included Sun Capital Partners Inc., Cerberus Capital Management L.P. and Lubert-Adler/Klaff Partners LP acquired Mervyns from Target for $1.65 billion in September 2004. Afterward, the owners spun off the real estate portfolio into a series of separate companies and Mervyns began paying rent.
If you've ever worked with a receivables rich but cash poor charity that has substantial real estate holdings, you've no doubt made the connection. Over the past couple decades, nonprofits have sought cash infusions through various sale-and-leaseback transactions. In fact, they became so common that you can actually buy fill-in-the-blank deal forms online. Such deals seemed like a good idea when times were flush, but as the Mervyns' collapse illustrates, they can have disastrous consequences for an organization's long-term viability.
There's also a broader lesson here for social enterprise. Just because a transaction is from the business world and seems innovative in a nonprofit context does not necessarily mean it is wise. Social enterprise has fetishized a commercial world it barely understands. Years from now, we'll look back on much of what the movement has said, done and advised the way we look at old ads with images of suburban families eating aluminum foil TV dinners and bizarre Jello molds. Sure the technology was nifty and new and time-saving, but anyone who is honest about the 1960s will tell you that they tasted like $#!%.
Above: a poster for the Vendy Awards, a project of the Urban Justice Center designed to promote its Street Vendor Project:
[I]n recent years, vendors have been victims of New York’s aggressive “quality of life” crackdown. They have been denied access to vending licenses. Many streets have been closed to them at the urging of powerful business groups. They receive $1,000 tickets for minor violations like vending too close to a crosswalk -- more than any big businesses are required to pay for similar violations.
The Street Vendor Project is a membership-based project with more than 750 active vendor members who are working together to create a vendors' movement for permanent change. We reach out to vendors in the streets and storage garages and teach them about their legal rights and responsibilities. We hold meetings where we plan collective actions for getting our voices heard. We publish reports and file lawsuits to raise public awareness about vendors and the enormous contribution they make to our city. Finally, we help vendors grow their businesses by linking them with small business training and loans.
In recent years, the social enterprise movement has more-or-less succeeded in associating "local" with "virtuous" in relation to commercial business. The Street Cart Project reflects similar semantic play, contrasting the mobile cart to a fixed structure.
Once again, design plays a role in our ethical perception. Separate carts distract from the issue of common corporate ownership, as do compelling stories of plucky individuals making a living on the streets. Moreover, note the winner of the People's Choice Vendy, the Dessert Truck--while a crowd favorite among professionals and the upwardly mobile, it's also part of a broader trend of gentrification within the street vendor industry. Replace a old diner with a gourmet dessert shop and New York is dying; flood the streets with Food Network friendly carts and you're a champion of the dispossessed.
Of the businesses that evince an attachment to personal identity, the art of marking the existence of someone who has passed is one of the most profound. Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama offered a powerful reminder of this when he recalled the impact of seeing a photo of a symbol carved on a fallen soldier's grave:
Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards—Purple Heart, Bronze Star—showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could go serve his country, and he gave his life.
Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.
Of the many things I've read on the interplay of symbol, community and personal identity, the work of Josiah Royce is particularly relevant to Powell's core point. However much loyalty to distinguishing values may divide groups, it also has the potential to bring groups together through mutual respect. Not because the people shed their differences for the least common denominator, but rather, because their loyalty toward their own values can lead to respect the loyalty evident in those with whom they disagree. This loyalty to loyalty has tremendous unifying potential within a democratic system, as it provides a practical ideal through which the many can become one without having to jettison their personal allegiances.
Long day--still catching up from the past few weeks--but I took a few minutes off to catch some fresh air. Along the way, I stopped by the Italian American Museum, housed within what was once a bank. There you can see the safe, original documents, old equipment--as it were, a teller window into the past.
One thing that stood out for me was the vivid reminder of the artificiality of segregating out so-called social benefit institutions. The bank was a social hub, a social benefit, a business that was equally extension of its owners and the community they served. Rather than twist into contortions to maintain a firewall between commerce and charity--one that didn't exist in the earliest Italian banks, by the way, which were legally both--it's far more productive to try to understand how they converge.
