De kick off van het ACMC-congres werd gedaan door Sean Pillot de Chenecy. De Chenecy is een onafhankelijk onderzoeker en brand development consultant. Hij begon zijn carrire opmerkelijk genoeg als tankbestuurder in het Engelse leger. Daarna was hij ongeveer tien jaar werkzaam op het gebied van jeugdcultuur en reclame bij twee onafhankelijke jeugdinstanties. Begin 2000 vestigde hij zich als onafhankelijk onderzoeker. Hij gaf lezingen in Engeland en de VS, met name over het onderwerp brands en branding en over de toenemende trend van merkvijandigheid bij jongeren. Die trend zet zich nog steeds door, volgens De Chenecy en vormde dan ook n van de onderwerpen van zijn speech op het ACMC-congres.
MMNieuws vroeg De Chenecy om nader commentaar op dat onderwerp en naar zijn visie op de trends die tijdens de andere ochtendspeeches aan de orde kwamen. Om praktische redenen kozen we voor een weergave van dit gesprek in het Engels.
Where do you get your information and in what way do you collect your data? What kind of sources do you use?
It is deliberately erratic. I get my information almost by accident. I have no deliberate route that I tend to take every time. I travel a lot from my London base to Tokyo, New York, Melbourne, Stockholm, San Francisco, Copenhagen etc. First of all because just by going to cities and mixing with interesting people, you naturally trip over interesting things. When I do my forecasting projects for companies I go to a certain city and I have things set up ahead of time.
Fifteen years ago I first started specializing in youth culture. At that point youth culture was fairly underground, purely from the point of view that it was poorly reported. MTV hardly existed, just as satellite tv wasnt around and the internet basically didnt exist. So what you saw then was clients in the vast majority of cases who genuinely did not know what young people were about and had no means to find this out. This has all changed over the last couple of years where the problem is now longer finding out whats going on (in either youth culture or general trend spotting terms) but what to do with the mass of information on offer. The youth/trends people are no longer really uncovering a secret source of information as opposed to just de-coding and clarifying what is right in front of us all.
Elsewhere, the ad agencies are desperately looking for a new role for themselves. The depth of advertising has been foretold since the nineteen sixties. The problem at the moment is the amount of clutter. The difficulty for good creativity is to cut through the amount of crap. The hit rate is so low from a fifty-fifty rate to a 85-15 rate that even great agencies have a low hit-rate. This is why we are seeing the rise of pr and of design and street level tactics. PR that joke industry for so long is now suddenly the thing to be into. Media management is what its at. Meanwhile, the mega-corp advertising agencies are all busy setting up their own trends departments as they seemed to get side-lined a couple of years ago by the fashion/design outfits who looked into trends in a very different way to the traditional focus-group approach from ad-land. Whilst theres nothing wrong with what most of them are doing in my view, I think a lot of them are really over complicated things, which is a very typical planners problem. What I have been trying to do over the last few years working for myself, is stay away from ad agencies and look for an unbiased non brand obsessed view on things.
Could we focus on our main point of interest: the culture industry and leisure? In what way should we approach young people? Are there any specific trends in consumption of arts and culture by young people that our sector can be happy about?
The biggest problem I see here is that there is so little connection between most young people and much of the arts world caused by such a blurred and elitist idea amongst youth of what the arts actually offer.
Which aspect of the present arts and leisure community does appeal to young people? And which means of communication can we best use in the (near) future to reach them most effectively?
To be really specific, Im a keen advocate of using radio to talk with young people about what the arts offering is, who should be interested and why etc.
Regarding the issue of immigration the present day situation in Holland is tensed. In about 20 years 20 percent of our population will be of Moroccan or Turkish descent. These groups are very much isolated from the mainstream Dutch culture. In what way could we get them to visit art galleries, theatres and museums?
I think it is all about inclusion. Inevitable Surprises thinking ahead in a time of turbulence was a very good book written by Peter Schwarz (from the Global Business Network in Washington). He looked at this about four years ago and he said we seemed to be at a cross-roads with immigration being viewed either as a threat or an opportunity, and with the decision we all make taking us into a very different future. The dark view could of course be that Europe is going to be a battleground. The problem, for instance in France last year, is the complete disconnection between the young people living in the banlieues and the rest of the French society. The young people there can be perfectly qualified, but if they go out to get a job, they can be rejected just by employers looking at the address on their cv, let alone their name, color or country of their families origin even if they themselves are second generation French. It is an impossible place to be and an impossible situation to get out of.
But if you look at it as an opportunity, things are different. It is just as in the case history of the Tate Gallery I presented this morning. The man who runs the marketing dept there, Will Gompetz, saw an opportunity in the case of the narrow demographic of people coming to the Gallery. He didnt want to put off the people who were coming to the Tate, but the whole point being that the Gallery is there for everybody, he wanted to make an effort and go out and meet the people who are not coming to the Gallery. So they went with a couple of people to the run down areas and ran creative workshops for free, saying come if you have nothing to do and we will put your work for show in the Gallery environment if you want. What they saw was extraordinary: people that had never been listened to before, who did not have a voice and felt completely excluded, and were until now confronted with elitism in the galleries, and found it completely impossible to talk about art, because they lacked the vocabulary, came to the workshops. The word got around and suddenly people who visited the Gallery saw an amazing explosion of creativity. Then they got bands playing and djs and this completely revitalized the whole place.
So what youre saying is: the only issue is to get them in there?
Yes. We should show that there is no barrier around these places. The Tate got the young people in there and their friends and parents followed because they were curious about what was happening in there. As a consequence the parents developed a different way of talking with their kids, because they saw that their kids were being given respect, and their peer group realized that art is for us all, not just a tiny minority of the over-privileged media elite.
Is there any way we can create loyalty with young people once we have attracted their attention?
Young people tend to be loyal to few brands but very loyal to an engaging and involving youth culture wherever and whenever it raised its head. So loyalty remains the elusive but vital goal.
In your speech you were talking about gossip and rumor being the marketing tools of the new millennium. Could you elaborate on that?
First of all tv-advertising is not working any more like it used to. What is working now when we are talking about where people are getting their brand-adoption or brand-rejection thoughts from, it is you believe what your friends say. People have a far greater respect for word of mouth than just another tv-ad. People talk about brands now far more than they used to. For instance: it is quite ok to talk about brands in a bar. The main thing is that people talk about brands in a bad way far more often than they talk about it in a good way. People are far more likely to talk about an ad they saw in a way that is depreciative. Brand contagion is something that is very much alive. A classic example of that is American foreign policy affecting American brands. A couple of years ago Business Week and The Economist looked at a whole body of brands, American and non-American, and after filtering out a lot of information the last thing they were left with was after the first raid into Iraq what was hitting American brands globally was basically Brand America being thought of badly, and therefore brands that had wrapped themselves in the Stars and Stripes were being hit in a big way. Rumor and gossip is wonderfully spread in a viral fashion online, i.e. via chat rooms, via mobile technology Theres a cool event going on etc and by coverage in the cutting youth/style press, i.e. Dazed & Confused.
Could the cultural world benefit from the use of branding and image building and in what way could this be done successfully?
It is all about connectivity. It is like-minded people wanting to be with other like-minded people. In an increasingly fragmented world part of the joy of going to a creative location is mixing with other people like us.
The main trend for 2006 in arts marketing is the rise of the creative class. This has everything to do with technology. Why do we see people from rough areas having the ability to give voice to their creativity? Because of technology. A classic example is Levis. They have been terrible for years but now Levis promotes connectivity through their website. Antidote searches throughout Europe, looking for fanzine culture. When they like what they find, they publish it through their micro site, they get all the different fanzines together, and put them in one little book they call Antidote, and give it out for free in the Levi-stores. It is a way of connecting people throughout Europe and a way of giving voice to people in local areas. MTV does something similar with Motorola en MTV-Starzine. So what we are seeing are developments that are very much technology-driven: blogs, pod-casting, it is all about giving voice to everyday people. Before people with a voice were either very lucky or those who had some money, and now anyone can do it. It is a way to drive us out of the impasse of non-communication, for instance with the non- Muslim establishment not talking with Muslim youth, because no one has any point of connection. Technology will give us that connection.
Auteur: Pieter de Nijs redactie@mmnieuws.nl sean@captaincrikey.com
