Author: Grant McCracken

A client recently asked me to comment crisply on the future. I came up with these observations.

See if you can spot my error.

1. The world is speeding up. In 1989, Alan Kay said it takes at least 10 years for an innovation to get from the lab into everyday life. Twitter did it in 4.
2. Faster change means more turbulence. Assumptions are now less reliable. Best guesses are often shots in the dark. Planning sounds like an act of courage, strategy like a flight of imagination. When Alvin Toffler warned us of this in 1970, we scoffed. Now we’re living it.
3. Every individual and organization lives in a state of surprise, as Peter Schwartz puts it. Just a couple of years ago, professional planners at a big ad agency informed me that Twitter was a passing fancy. So I was interested to note that the first thing LL Cool J did as host of the Emmy’s this year was announce the hashtags for the show. Boy, was that agency surprised.
4. There is a considerable advantage to seeing the world in motion, picking up “noise” well before it becomes an intelligible “signal.” We have to extract more intelligence from less data. We will need “big data” and good ethnography to spot and track the world in the works. For instance, this would have meant grasping the fact (and some of the implications) of Twitter in, say, 1998.
5. And what we really need is a more responsive organization, one that can reinvent itself in real time, on the fly. This will take potent, new powers of adaptation, but it’s our only hope.

Spot the error?

I carried my assumptions into the future. I continued to think about the corporation as I normally do… and resolved merely to retrofit it with new parts in order to make it more sensing and more responsive in the future.

Boo! No, really, I mean it. Boo! Bad anthropologist. Bad!

What I should have done is examine my idea of a corporation, dig out the assumptions, and re-craft the idea. That’s one of the ways we make ourselves ready for the future.

Here is my present idea of the corporation, give or take. The corporation is a thing of people, processes, places, and products (give or take). And these 4 Ps are relatively well-defined, organized, boundaried, and anchored (more or less).

But that’s a problem. This corporation is deeply at odds with the future. Because the future is never defined, organized, boundaried, or anchored. Really, it’s all just hints and whispers. Fragile melody, no refrain.

Hence, the great antagonism between corporations and time. A creature that defines itself out of definition, organization, boundary, and anchoring, must hate a future that is shapeless and unmoored. To the corporations, the future looks like the enemy, a risk that can’t be managed, an idea that can’t be thought.

The corporation puts a particular boundary between now and the future. And it guards this border ferociously. New ideas are scrutinized with tough mindedness and high indignation. If we can’t see the business model, we’re not interested. If we can’t see how to “monitize this sucker,” we’re not interested. When the future manifests itself merely as a murmur of possibility, we are not interested.

Too bad. There is really only one way to live in a world of speed, surprise, noise, and responsiveness, and that’s to visit the future frequently. And, if we have the intellectual capital, maybe get a pied-à-terre. Well, and if we’re really committed, we need someone to take up residence full time.

Most of all, we want a corporation that is porous in ways it was not before. We want it to cantilever out into the future. We want to make pieces of the future to happen inside the corporation. We want pieces of the corporation to happen out there in the future. In sum, we want the corporation and the future, once so completely separated from one another, to have a new reciprocity and transparency.

It’s a weird idea, counter-intuitive in exactly the ways that provoke suspicion and dismissal. And it is an idea that will make a hash of the model of the corporation we mostly keep in our heads. But honestly, we have no real choice.

Last week Apple’s Tim Cook made fleeting reference to “new product categories.” Bloomberg West called it “tantalizing.”

There are a couple of candidates in Apple’s “big thing” category. One is an iWatch, but I think the one to monitor is the other, Apple TV.

The current Apple TV, as it stands, is a set top box that enables an end-run around the cable companies and lets us pipe movies and TV into our living rooms. But an Apple-produced television has the potential to be so much more.

As I’ve written in my previous two blog posts, our first inclination is usually to play down the potential impact of a new technology. It’s the safe and emotionally comforting thing to do. But we should be more future-sighted. Let’s imagine, for instance, how Apple TV could change the world.

The new Apple TV will have the form factor of TV but its real and revolutionary purpose will be telecommuting so good it’s going to feel like teleportation. The Apple TV will whisk us to work, to school, to conferences, to the city, to Second Life, to our memory palace and virtual library, to shared worlds like Eve and Halo. The Apple TV will be a portal to worlds now accessible only by planes, trains and automobiles. Apple TV will turn our offices and living rooms into portals.

This Apple TV will give us signal from which virtually all noise has been extracted, a “retina display” with so much pixel density that we are no longer feel we’re taking transmissions from a distant planet, and, probably, another species. We won’t believe our eyes and ears.

The consequences will be something to behold. So let’s behold them. At a minimum, this Apple TV could change education, hospitality, work, and travel. It may even change the city. Now that we’re done, or nearly done, disintermediating old media like the newspaper, and supply chains like the book store, it’s time to solve that vexing problem of having to get ourselves from one place to another. It’s expensive, time consuming, fraught with inefficiencies, and punctured by indignities we put up with because we have no choice. (Have you flown lately?) The moment we do have a choice, it’s good bye to all that.

Let’s think about the travel industry. What should it do to get ready for Apple TV? It might consider taking the advice of NASA’s Charles Bolden Jr. who, when asked what we should do if a 50 foot meteor of the kind that hit Russia recently were to strike New York City, said, “Pray.”

The effects could be catastrophic. Direct spending on business travel by domestic and international travelers totaled $249 billion in 2011. It turns out that roughly $99 billion of this is spent on meetings and events. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we will protect this expenditure, because for some events we need to be there in-person to circulate, network, meet new people, and eat with friends we only get to see once a year.

That leaves $150 billion on the table. Let’s be really optimistic and suppose that $100 billion survives, at least in the short term, out of inertia, and because there will always be moments when McKinsey must meet with clients face to face. Let’s say the Apple innovation merely takes $50 billion out of the industry. Ooph! This must mean the death of several airlines, the loss of thousands of hotels and restaurants, the disappearance of millions of tax dollars, and the dissipation of nearly a half million jobs (assuming that we are going to lose 20% of the 2.2 million people who now work in the industry. [PDF])

We can recover tax dollars through the reform of education. Jobs will not be replaced and these workers will likely join the permanently displaced people identified recently by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. The real damage comes to airlines and hotel chains, the former never robust at the best of times. I have written admiringly of Richard Anderson at Delta. But even great management cannot protect these airlines. While we are imagining college campuses littered with tumble weeds, think of an airport that looks like a mall down on its luck, underfunded, understaffed and struggling to keep up its former grandeur.

There are three questions here. Will this new tech happen? How fast will it happen? What will it mean when it happens?

Will it happen? It will. Perhaps not as an Apple TV, or perhaps not as the innovation that Cook was hinting at for Q3 this year. But this is not a “wild card” — something too large to ignore but so improbable that it is not worth thinking about. Telepresence will happen. And if it were being driven by someone other than Cisco and HP, it would have happened by now.

We wouldn’t dream of going backwards on any of the new technologies, from a laptop to a typewriter, from a mobile phone to a rotary one, from email to an answering machine. Once we have traveled by Apple TV, we won’t go back. Put it this way. We’ll be able to get to Singapore by turning on our Apple TV — no walking to the special web-presence-enabled room powered by Cisco, even. Or would you rather take an hour to plan the trip, an hour to get to the airport, two hours to wait there, 22 hours of flight time, an hour to get through customs, an hour to get to the hotel, and then, for our trouble, a case of jet lag so vicious all we want to do is crawl into a corner of the boardroom and pass out?

Since when did the corporation care about our jet lag? Wait until someone puts together the numbers: $8,000 for the business ticket to Singapore, $1000 for room and board, another $1000 for this, that and the other thing. Multiply this by 8 trips a year times 60 consultants and even a very expensive telepresence system starts to pay for itself in almost no time.

How fast will it happen? Pretty darn. (Rough estimate.) To be sure, it’s a tipping point calculation. No one wants telepresence until everyone has to have it. What is called for is someone with deep pockets and marketing savvy. Enter Apple the company with $137 billion in cash reserves and a genius for making us need things we already have. Once Apple is in on the game, the future is no longer, in William Gibson’s phrase, “just not very evenly distributed.” It’s sitting in our den.)

What will it mean, more broadly? This is the tough question. We are capable of grasping the change as a literal shift in technology and even as a shift in the way we travel. We are less good at seeing the unintended consequences. Now we are up against our very human inclination to suppose parts of the world are somehow immune from change. This is simultaneously a failure of the intellect and the imagination, and it is a point of great vulnerability.

We can’t see some dangers, not because they are invisible, but because they so resist the status quo and our experience of the world that they are difficult to think about. Let’s look for a moment more about the implications of Apple TV. It’s not so hard to imagine a college campus that stands empty, depopulated by Apple TV-powered MOOCs. It’s a little harder but still possible to imagine an airport fallen on hard times. But when it comes to seeing the implication of Apple TV for the city, well, that’s hard. I mean, cities are a kind of geographical boilerplate. We presume their existence. They are the great machines of human existence. They are the way we got to the present day. But they don’t have to exist. There are facts and there are “accomplished facts.” These latter are so manifest and material that we come to believe, without thinking about it, that they are not just true of the moment but true of the world.

What happens when someone works out that the corporation only needs about half its current footprint in Manhattan (now that is that everyone can work from home half the week)? Multiply this by even a third of the corporations and there’s trouble in New York City. Throw in a diminished hospitality industry (hotels and restaurants), a mayor or two without Bloomberg’s managerial chops, and a return to the 1970s is not unthinkable. The ’70s were a terrible time when “mean streets” drove the flight of corporations which narrowed the tax base which diminished both social programs and police forces which made streets even meaner, and the cycle began again. It was a fall so precipitous some began to talk of the city’s “irreversible decline.” But even if it isn’t the 1970s all over again, Manhattan would become a shadow of its former self.

As we prepare for Apple TV, this is not the time to be ruled by our assumptions. There is nothing necessary about a city. It’s like the book, shaped by technological requirements, historical accidents, and several critical paths. It doesn’t have to look like this. Like the book, it doesn’t have to exist at all. As Nicholas Negroponte told us in Being Digital, one of the structural effects of the digital revolution is the distribution of things once centralized. The city may merely be one of these.

Apple has made a practice of producing Black Swans the way some people farm Ostriches. (Hard at first, then increasingly routine.) We need to get better at spotting and tracking swans.

Apple TV could make the early days of our digital transformation look mere. Yes, we digitized the analog. Yes, we disintermediated the channels of culture, communication, and distribution. And yes, we changed the economics of, um, economics. But the reformation of education and the transformation of the city, these may be still more spectacular. Apple TV may not come this fall. It may not come finally from Apple. But in some form, from someone, it must come eventually. Look for a Trojan horse in your living room and on your desktop.

In the early days of an innovation, it’s hard to tell whether we are looking at the future or just another blip on the screen.

Take the case of the Hudson Watch Company (HWC). It just got its first round of funding. From Kickstarter. It raised $115,703 from 409 backers, and will now go into production.

At this stage, the enterprise is preposterously small. (No disrespect to HWC. It’s simply a matter of scale.) We can’t believe something this tiny can tell us anything about the future. This can’t be a staging area for disruptive change.

Well, not so fast. No one at Patek Philippe has cause for concern, to be sure. But someone at Timex may. HWC may be precisely a harbinger of disruptive change.

I know what you’re (still) thinking. Timex and HWC are about 5 orders of magnitude removed from one another. Timex needs to worry about the HWC like the Yankees need to worry about a Little League team tearing it up in Arizona. Different leagues? Please. Different worlds.

But HWC could be a learning opportunity for Timex.

1. Amateurs can now make watches. And this used to be impossible. Barriers-to-entry kept out most experimenters and entrepreneurs. The corporation was protected by several requirements, deep pockets perhaps most important. Now, HWC (and precedents like Lunatik and Haruo Suiekichi) suggest that almost anyone can play. That should send a thrill of terror through Timex. They have lost their protected status. HWC may not be the one that breaks out and reinvents the industry, but there will now be a steady hail of experiments — and one of these might “take.”

2. Consumers might not want to wear your brand. The world of watches, like most of the branded world, worked on the assumption that consumers want to wear a recognized brand. But there are a couple of generations of consumer who are happier if you don’t recognize their brand. HWC makes a virtue of its necessity. It turns tiny and obscure into strategies. In the process, it illuminates a change in consumer taste and preference. Timex may already know this, but if they don’t, HWC is their chance.

3. The HWC brand is just about all story. It is, in fact, the usual artisanal fairy tale. A husband and wife decide to make their own watches and scoured Manhattan and Brooklyn for inspiration. They name their models for local streets. They use Kickstarter to raise their funds. Once, this would have been a slightly embarrassing confession of how small and, gasp, amateur they are. Now it’s a badge of pride. Once more, HWC has found a way to make a virtue of its necessity. As we know, stories are fast becoming the new coin of the marketing realm. We are told relentlessly that the brand is story or nothing at all. If Timex hasn’t heard this news before, HWC is an excellent opportunity to see the future coming.

4. HWC asked its consumer to play the role of a supporter or an insider. We hear about this brand not from a four-color ad in New York magazine. It’s not from a billboard or PR event. It comes instead as an act of humility that says in effect, “Please help us.” Kickstarter casts the consumer in an entirely new light. They are no longer mindless hordes at whom we bellow “Buy!” Instead, they are early supporters who help bring the good into existence. Marketing thinkers now urge us to establish a symmetry between producer and consumer. Kickstarter goes a step further and asks us to make the asymmetry run in the opposite direction, with the consumer now the advantaged party.

HWC is deceptive. Its structural properties make it look precisely like the kind of thing Timex should ignore. It is local, obscure, amateur, and, most of all, tiny. At this point, the innovation is not only beneath our interest. It’s beneath our professional dignity. The itch to dismiss is powerful.

Two tasks can help save us.

Task 1: Ask the question, “What could HWC be telling me about the world? What’s out here that I can’t see?”

Task 2: Ask the question, “What is HWC telling me about my assumptions? What’s in here that I can’t see? What prevents me from seeing this noise as signal?”

To dispatch Task 1, we have to set aside our skepticism and look at HWC real hard. Why does this exist at all? What large technological, social, cultural movements might be pushing it? As HBS marketing professor Bob Dolan has written [PDF], “Marketing strategy can take very little for granted. The context shapes what is possible and it is always changing. [Culture, technological and legal factors] are not fixed features of the marketing landscape, but factors to consider and monitor for signs of disruption.” What contextual factors could make HWC (or something like it) work? And in this case, the hard work is rewarded with a glimpse of one of our futures: that we may be on the verge of a new era of branding, storytelling, and relationship building.

To dispatch Task 2, we have to set aside our familiar ways of looking at the world and scrutinize our assumptions. After all, these assumptions work invisibly to shape the way we see the world. So we don’t know we are using them. This is our opportunity to examine those assumptions, and in this case we are rewarded with the opportunity to glimpse how much we are shaped by ideas of mass marketing and mass manufacture. Do we think of Timex as a large, anonymous corporation? Do we think of Timex as a mass brand? Where does this leave us with the consumer? Where does this leave us with the Millennial consumer?

To contend with disruptive change, we want to see innovations as early as we can. But in the early days, all innovations look more or less the same: they are odd, implausible, and in some cases, ludicrous. This makes us our own worst enemy. We can’t see disruptive change in its infancy because we are captives of our ideas and instincts. If we want to live with disruption, we are going to have to two-step our way to salvation.

I missed Twitter. I first heard about it when everyone did in 2006. And I started an account in a knee-jerk way. But I didn’t grasp it. In those days, I would just stare at the entry box and think, “What?”

Now of course, I pretend Twitter struck me as an irresistibly good idea the first time I heard it and that I was an early champion. I have forgotten and concealed the early days, the days in which I had no clue.

There’s a convenient forgetting going on out there. Our lives are now filled with a stream of disruption, things that are new and strange. Whatever our first reaction, we now like to pretend we were early adopters and enthusiasts. Call it “disruption denial.”

The fact of the matter is our professional lives now churn with change. Markets change. Technology changes. Consumers change. Channels change. Competitors change. This is an era of disruption. Not disruption as the occasional event, but disruption as the constant, chronic condition of our professional lives. You would hope that we were getting better at understanding and managing change. And sometimes we are. Too often however, our response is to ignore and forget change, to fake our way through it, to pretend an engagement and a mastery we do not have. And that’s bad. That means we are not getting better at change, but steadily worse. We are denying disruption, instead of adapting to it.

We seem to adopt and adapt to something like Twitter by stages, a little like Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief. Except in this case, it’s a passage from confusion to congratulation. Self-congratulation.

Stage 1. Confusion. We don’t quite get it. We sign up for the new app. We give it a whirl. Not really getting it. By this time, gurus are reassuring us that Twitter is the greatest thing ever. But that doesn’t help. We’re still not getting it. And so we turn to Stage 2.

Stage 2: Repudiation. It turns out there are lots of people who don’t get the new technology and now social life is a little like a competition to show that we’re not “falling for it.” At this point, there can more social capital in saying that we don’t like the tech than that we do.

Stage 2 is marked by snappy one-liners. With the practiced ease of stand-up comedian, we can now be heard saying stuff like, “Twitter. What could I possibly say in 140 characters?” Or, “FourSquare? Why would I want to be mayor of my living room.”

Stage 3. Shaming. This is when we are so persuaded that we’re right and the new innovation is wrong that we are prepared to make fun of the credulous among us. I was on the receiving end after I gave a presentation on new media to a large advertising firm. When I finished, three planners took turns patting me on the head and telling me, “This Twitter thing. It’s just a fad. Give it a couple of months and it will go away.” We heard a lot of this sort of thing about Pinterest in the early days. Now it’s valued at $2.5 billion.

Stage 4. Acceptance. By this time, the innovation is taking off. The middle adopters are signing on. It’s clear now even to us that Twitter is here to stay. Confronted by accomplished, irrefutable fact, we cave in and sign on.

And that brings us to Stage 5.

Stage 5. Forgetting. This is where we destroy the evidence. Now we are inclined to act as if we always understood and approved of a world installed with new innovation.

Most often, we don’t make this as a formal decision. We don’t say, “I was wrong for the following reasons. And I am converting for the following reasons.” We just slide into a new way of thinking. One minute, we are too smart to be fooled by Twitter. The next we are fully on board. It’s a like high school. We hate that new haircut until suddenly we have the new haircut. We are captives of what Mark Earls calls “the herd.”

Our motive is clear enough. We don’t want to be the person who doesn’t get it. This is amnesia performed to save face. It’s a lie will tell ourselves about ourselves for ourselves.

This is, of course, entirely human. But at some point we have to snap out of it. We have to accept that change is the new structural reality of our lives and we have to begin a new set of problem solving routines that can put things right (or righter).

When you first lay eyes on something like Twitter, don’t react emotionally, don’t reject it out of hand. And when you go back to correct those first impressions, don’t conceal the evidence so that it looks like you (we!) were right all along.

Instead, do a careful, thoughtful analysis, for and against the innovation. Write it down, and consult it every time “Twitter” comes up and enter a new, corrected assessment of where the innovation is and where it might end up. Keep doing this until, as in the Twitter case, we find ourselves 6 years down the road and can look back to see what we got right and what we got wrong.

This is one way to learn to with disruption. I would love to hear your thoughts. What are you doing to adapt to the new reality?

Thanks to Pip Coburn who applies the Kubler-Ross model to change behavior in a roughly similar way in his book, The Change Function.

Watch this ad for the fast-food chain Sonic and tell me what you think the problem is.

Here’s what I think is wrong: It violates the new “sweetness” trend. Sometime in the last 5 years, perhaps more, we have seen the emergence of a new trend that says what we want from the world and public personalities, for some purposes, is a certain sweetness. Once disdained as sentimental, maudlin, mawkish, and when exhibited in public, embarrassing, sweetness is back. Sweetness is big. Sweetness, against all odds, and quite against character, is having a celebrity moment.

Sweetness has a couple of faces. It expresses an openness to the world, a wish to be useful, an innocence, a goodness, a guilelessness, a disinclination to insist on your own interests. If there is a poster girl, it is Jess (Zooey Deschanel), the female lead in New Girl, the new show from Fox. New Girl turns out to be a veritable shrine to sweetness, as four roommates rescue one another from the stream of misadventures with madcap enthusiasm and a touching generosity.

Why sweetness? Well, we are coming out of an era of some darkness. We seemed almost to celebrate skepticism and snark. We dwelt upon the grimmest aspects of the human experience. TV and movie making were increasingly ghoulish, with new standards of viscera and depravity. Shows like CSI and NCIS dwell lovingly on the crime victim. Bright lights and strategically placed towels protect our sexual sensitivities, but everything else on the autopsy table is enthusiastically examined. Once the standard bearer of heartlessness, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) now looks a little quaint. Since its release, we have seen a succession of werewolves, vampires, serial killers, and human monsters of every kind. If you are 40 or under, you’ve grown up on a steady diet of heartlessness.

The darkness trend is obvious even in the world of sports. Boxing used to encourage the conceit that however brutal, the sport was bound by a code of gentlemanly conduct and the Queensberry rules — the so-called sweet science. This world has been supplanted by mixed martial arts, where as I understand it, if you don’t kick the other guy when he’s down, you don’t grasp the opportunity.

The sweetness counter-trend explains lots of things in popular culture. For instance, it helps illuminate the rating crisis at NBC’s Today Show, where Matt Lauer stands accused of having pushed out Ann Curry, and Savannah Guthrie stands accused of having failed to replace her in the hearts of America. Ann is genuinely sweet, whereas Matt and Savanaugh are, sometimes, merely mechanically so. Sweetness used to be optional. For the time being, TV hosts must treat it as obligatory.

Back to that spot from Sonic. These guys, always sitting in the front seat of a car at a Sonic, are always engaged in some happy speculation, as goofy as anything ever featured on Seinfeld, and sometimes funnier and more interesting. These guys epitomize sweetness. They have a quality of cheerful irrelevance and brave incompetence. They were harmless, guileless, and sweet.

So what’s wrong with this particular ad? Suddenly our dear Sonic friend reveals himself to be a guy so heartless he would steal his best friend’s wife. The veil is torn from our eyes. The lamb is a wolf. The goof is a villain. The Sonic participation in sweetness ends with a bang, then a whimper.

Brands must ride new trends the way gulls ride thermals. Everything gets easier. (And this is why planners matter so much. They are charged with scrutinizing culture and finding these trends.) When the brand runs against the trend, it takes heroic efforts just to get back to zero.

It’s not hard to imagine why Netflix has decided to focus on original programming (most recently with House of Cards and now with an animated children’s series). Making oneself an exclusive source for a show starring Kevin Spacey is a great way to sweeten the value proposition and compete with Hulu and Amazon. Plus, eventually every grocer wants to be a P&G. Why merely manage the channel when you can start filling it?

But Hollywood is not just any industry. It’s the true north of our culture. To become a broker here! Think of the power! Think of the parties! And this is why so many are called. Everyone would like to be a player and Hollywood is littered with the wreckage of careers of people who looked at the entertainment industry and thought, “I would love to be a big shot and, anyhow, how hard can it be?” It turns out that making entertainment is extremely hard. Even Disney can make a stinker like John Carter. Even very talented people (the Weinstein brothers or Bonnie Hammer, for instance) make mistakes.

So does Netflix have an edge? Is there any reason to think they can flourish where so many have failed? The apparent answer is data. Netflix has lots and lots of data. They know what we watch, when we watch, where we stop watching, where we repeat a scene, where we reach for the fast-forward button, and most critically, when we break off and move on. They know which movies sell well at 8:00 on a Friday night and which ones we like to watch on Sunday afternoon. They can surmise which directors, writers, and stars produce the most watchable entertainment. They have magnificent data.

And that’s a tragedy. Netflix has so much data that they are going to be tempted to climb into the creative tent and start offering “advice.” I mean, what is all that data (and power) for, if it doesn’t let you call some shots? They can claim to know exactly what works and what does not. Well, sorry, no. Knowing that something works leaves us a long way from knowing why something works. And this leaves us a long way from knowing how to reproduce it in another movie. The only thing this data can be absolutely sure to produce is arrogance. We have seen this mistake before.

As HBO CEO Richard Piepler explained during the Harvard Business School Entertainment and Media Summit, it’s important to give talent creative freedom. “What happened to us, which is very instructive for any company or any business, is that we fell in love with what we were doing. We got elected to the top of the entertainment firmament and we liked it there. We forgot the insurgent voice and we got arrogant…We lost the very DNA which helped us get where we were, which is that talent wanted to be in our house.” HBO had stopped being a place “where painters could paint.”

Piepler is right. There is a larger issue here, especially as every enterprise learns to speak to a dynamic, sometimes chaotic world with a new order of creativity and innovation. Everyone, not just Netflix, has to learn how to manage “painters.”

This means that whatever the data say, Netflix cannot tell a director, “We need a fight scene here.” And it really can’t say, “We need a fight scene at the 14-minute mark.” Doing so, will not only drive creatives away, but viewers as well. As Henry Jenkins has said, viewers are newly sophisticated and critical. They can see formula a long way off. They can see plot mechanics the second they hit the screen. And the moment this happens, they are off.

Netflix, therefore, will have to temper their itch to intervene. Naturally, we are not talking carte blanche here. We are not saying that we take any artist and turn them loose. Because we know a great deal of capital has been squandered by creatives keen to prove how artistic and avant garde they are. No, what we need are culture producers who are — in the language of Goldilocks — “just right.” They need to be able to tell a story and obey some of the story-telling conventions even as they do new and interesting things to break and bend those conventions. Only then will painters paint and patrons watch.

Thanks to Erik Rodin and Leora Kornfeld for contributions to this piece.

Portlandia (Fridays, 10:00, IFC) has started its third season. Fred Armisen (Saturday Night Live) and Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney) continue to search the city for satiric targets. And because satiric targets are one of Portland’s chief exports, the comedic opportunities are many: Bed and Breakfasts, knitting, pickling — and organic deodorant:

And feminist bookstores:

Since the satirical targets on Portlandia are many, it’s inevitable that Fred and Carrie will write a piece on Subaru. After all, Subaru is the standard automobile choice for Portland. Portlandians bought nearly 2% of Subarus in the United States in 2008, even though they represent less that 1% of the US population.

The Subaru is just so very Portland. It looks undressed without decals, bicycle racks, mud flaps, and a big, happy dog in the back. Radios might as well be locked on NPR. This car is earnest, unassuming, down with the counter culture — all of them. If Subaru hadn’t existed, Portland would’ve invented it.

This connection is not lost on Subaru. They are there on Friday evenings, placing ads on the show:

How awkward. Eventually, Fred and Carrie will have to do a comedic investigation of the Subaru. It is in a sense their job. Portlandia asks Portlandians and the rest of us to “pay attention.” As Carrie put it in a recent interview, “I’m skeptical of things that feel facile.” So it’s inevitable that Subaru is going to end up on the Portlandia firing line. But what happens then? Will Fred and Carrie bite the advertising hand that feeds them? Will Portlandia dare hold its benefactor up to ridicule?

“But of course they must bite the hand that feeds them,” the new marketing handbook says.

After all, we’re in the throes of a revolution in branding. The basic philosophical underpinnings of the field are changing. The old brand was as immaculate, manipulated, and humorless as anything ever produced by a Soviet politician. The new philosophy says that brands must be roomy, self-aware, happy to be part of the conversation, even if this means taking a little satirical heat.

Brands are learning to give up control to take on vibrancy. They are learning to surrender simplicity to take on multiplicity. They are having to forgo repetition to take on nuance. And all of this allows others into the lab, the place of meaning manufacture. As long as the brand treats the marketers as the sole source of meanings and momentum, well, really good brands are impossible.

This is perhaps the single biggest message of the new branding philosophy. Your solipsism is over. Brands cannot invent themselves by themselves. The brand must welcome the participation of anyone who wants to participate, even when this person harbors satiric intentions.