The Savagery of Pop Culture

All right. Thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you. What's up? Hello. Hello. I came from Brooklyn, New York. I'm excited to be here. How are you guys today? How are you today? All right. I'm here to talk about pop culture. This is a fun topic. What a way to start your Thursday morning. I'm here to talk about the savagery of pop culture, how the future of culture is rendering brands impotent. But by way of introduction, just indulge me in a couple minutes or one second just to tell you who I am and why I'm on stage here. My name is Alain Sylvain. I'm the founder and CEO of Sylvain Labs. Sylvain Labs is an innovation and brand design company. We're located in New York. That's where we're headquartered. We have an office here in Amsterdam as well in Richmond, Virginia. We're about 35 people. We help companies develop new products and brands, new approaches to their products and brands. We've been doing that for about nine years. Some of our clients, companies you might know, things that we've worked on in the past. We worked on the brand strategy for Spotify recently. We helped develop the Google Assistant for Google Home. We worked on the brand strategy for Airbnb. And we're in the midst right now. We just finished the brand work for Waze, which is super cool. I'm working on that. I'm excited about that. So thank you for indulging that. But I'm here to talk about pop culture. You know what pop culture? Pop culture is that thing, that thing that just is in the air. It's in the ether. It's just this concept that floats around. And it's sort of this thing that is often viewed as trivial or frivolous. We don't really look to pop culture as being important or of value. It's just in the background. And in fact, if you're an artist or if you're completely and you kind of go, you say, this doesn't make sense. All right. This is irrelevant. This is what it's meant to look like. And then you're like, I don't know. It's not my we've been having an in-person discussion for a very long time. Hold on a second. Wait a This is the message here? I love you. So there's a question. So is there a purpose to pop? And if you look at this slide really quickly, it looks like, is there a purpose to poop? And not very different than what I'm talking about. Pop culture, there is a purpose. And I'm going to argue there's a fundamental primal purpose for what pop culture provides in society. I mean, think about the moments in pop culture that we've experienced. There's a Gangnam Style, which traveled the world in a matter of days from east to west. It was sort of this weirdly unifying human experience. There's nothing. There were more people listening to Gangnam Style than there were people that practiced one religion or spoke one language. It was really a unifying moment in culture. Or think about the palimpsest that is Harry Potter, a book series that's also movies and a theme park, and it's just a whole world. Think about all the languages and the people that have united around the story of this magical boy or the Queen Bey. And her hand gestures and how that in itself is a sort of language. Pop culture in a way is a sort of language that we use to communicate with each other. Spotify, one of our clients, they track the emojis that people use in the titles of playlists that feature certain artists. So Drake has 100 and fire, and I don't know what the drips mean or the drops mean. But Adele, Adele is kind of, you know, it's heartbreaking, it's sad, it's a little depressing, but it's pretty interesting, right? Like in some way, pop culture serves as this linguistic tool to communicate to each other. Or, you know, the, what is it? The color of the dress, is it black and blue or whatever, white and gold? That was a meme. And it's interesting to see how pop culture is evolving and playing a role digitally. And again, it's serving as a sort of language. This is America, which was an amazing song, and video a couple of months ago. It was really interesting to see how that phenomenon got adopted in Dominican Republic, and Nigeria, and Iraq. You know, this is Nigeria. It was an incredibly powerful moment. And so again, the world is communicating, is really being critical about nationhood and sovereignty and what government should provide through this song. So I would argue that pop culture is sort of the means in which culture deliberates complex issues. It's the place. It's the place where we wrestle with the concepts of the day. And I'll give you a few examples. And I'll start with in the United States. You know, in the 70s and 80s, you saw a rise of these really interesting TV shows that represented alternative families. You know, you had the Brady Bunch, where two different families that came together, and you had different strokes. And there were many of these shows that shed a new light to the new American family. And that only happened in television. That didn't... That didn't happen anywhere else. You know, they weren't talking about that in churches. Governments weren't talking about that. It was pop culture that served as sort of the petri dish for the issues that people were really dealing with. Or you think about black upward mobility in the United States. If not for shows like The Cosby Show and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, society wouldn't really understand that that was actually a real thing happening. I'm sorry to put Bill Cosby in front of you right now. Or the story of... Intrepid women rising in business. That happened in pop culture before it happened anywhere else. And thank God for pop culture to put those images forward. Or you think about in the 80s, how Madonna talked about, you know, a material girl in a material world. Or you think about movies like Wall Street. Pop culture was holding up a mirror to what was happening in Reagan, United States in the 1980s. And it was really the way that society at large understood the economically driven government that we were living in. Or you even think about, you know, Vietnam. And you think about how there was a rising tide of tension and disappointments about why were we at war? Why can't we find peace? And through artists like Marvin Gaye and John Lennon, there were these songs that really asking the question, what's going on? And so again, it was pop culture that was serving as sort of the mouthpiece for what people were feeling deep down. So that gives you a little context. And I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you about my man with the eyebrows. This dude, Richard Dupree. Richard Dupree was the president of Procter & Gamble. He took the company through the Great Depression in the 1930s and had a real imperative to get the company to survive that really tumultuous time. And he saw this fledgling technology called radio. And he felt that that was an interesting place because, you know, because men of the day were at work, women were at home, kids were at school. And so he found it as a really interesting vehicle to communicate to women at home, to moms. And so he developed a show. It was called Ma Perkins. And it was sponsored by one of their brands, Oxydol. And it was about this woman, this widowed mill worker and how she took care of her kids. And it was a really dramatic story. And it was day in, day out. These women at home were listening to Ma Perkins and developing a relationship with Ma Perkins and the sales of Oxydol shot through the roof. And it was really the first example of branded content. What we talk about today is branded content. But it was an amazing example of how culture and brands had a connection. That they actually almost needed each other. And other brands followed. There was the Colgate Comedy Hour. It ran from 1950 to 1955. Again, it was sort of the way that brands delivered their message. And for the next 50 years, really, you saw brands being the key purveyors of content. The key purveyors of pop culture. It went on for decades. And in fact, this blows my mind when you see Procter & Gamble productions as a concept. I know Procter & Gamble right now as a product company, as a CPG company. But to think of them as an entertainment company is pretty profound. So the relationship with culture and brands was forged. And we saw more and more of that. The modern conception of Santa Claus is a concept. It's in thanks to Coca-Cola. And in the 50s, really creating this icon that we now use to celebrate and organize our family events. It's a corporate invention, if I'm being honest. Or you think about jingles and music. There was a day where pop songs were used purely to sell cereal. I don't know if you remember this. I doubt it. But in the 80s, there was this thing, which I remember, was McDonald's put real recorders in the newspaper, like these vinyl records. And it was a song about... Does anybody remember this? Does anybody remember this? No. It was like two all-beef patty special sauce. It was about... Oh, you can hear it. You can hear it. It was a pop song. It was a pop song. They made 80 million of them. It went in the newspaper. It was a recipe for the Big Mac. And people loved it. I mean, you sang it like it was a Beyonce song. But it was a McDonald's song. It was a McDonald's song about a sandwich? About a sandwich. Anyway, this is where the relationship between culture and brands was created. And it was a codependent relationship. It was a symbiotic relationship. And if I could use that word and think about science, there's a great example of the acacia ants and their relationship with trees. The trees provide nutrients to the ants. And the ants, in a way, provide security for the trees. Because when herbivores come and eat the trees, the ants turn them away. Science. Science. Science. But it's pretty... It's interesting, this idea of the codependent relationship. How two species need each other. And that's how I think about culture and brands. Culture provides relevance for brands. Brands provide reach for culture. And this relationship is deep. And we've seen it at work really sophisticated ways. Again, I'm sorry. But Cosby and Jell-O Pudding Pops was a really interesting moment where a pure pop culture icon that was always over here and a... indulgent food product was over here. But they became inextricably linked. And it was actually the fuel for that product. Or Virginia Slims, the cigarettes in the 70s, which took a stand. And this notion of a female president in the 70s was almost... It was superficial. No one took it seriously. But Virginia Slims was one of these first brands that really began to speak critically and openly about that concept. Of course, it's cigarettes. So... You know, what does that mean? I don't know. Or MTV. This idea of I want my MTV that somehow MTV became... You know, was it a pop culture brand? Or was it a political brand? Or was it a culture brand? Or was it just a product that was selling advertising? And it was really another great moment of the merger of culture and brand. So brands had the benefit of a few things. One was mass broadcasts. It was really easy. You want to target a ton of people. You just would go on television. And you could have 20 million people. And in fact, the season finale of the show called MASH in 1983, 106 million people watched that show at one time in the U.S. 106 million people. That's more people than voted for any particular candidate in the election. That's almost as many people that voted in general in the American election in 2016. Think about it. And it was so profound, actually, that in the few minutes after the show ended, everyone went to the bathroom. And the water pressure in New York dropped. That's how massively important that moment of pop culture was to our lives. So it was mass broadcast. The second was this idea of the lowest common denominator. It was really easy to develop pop culture content at the time for brands because they would just find the thing that everyone loved, like the super easy jingle that you couldn't get out of your head. Nothing controversial. It was just something that washed over you. And here's a word cloud. If you took all the lyrics of the pop song, it's in 1965, and you dropped them into this word cloud, you'd see, this is what you'd see. You'd see these concepts like love and now and heartbeats. It was really kind of one note. This has been done in recent times, and there are much more complex ideas that come about. So that's the second one. That was about the lowest common denominator. The third is top-down control. In the world of music, for the past 60 years, it's some ridiculous statistic like the top-down control. The top 100 songs were developed by 20 people or something like that over the past... It was a completely monopolistic industry in that it was a very few people that decided what should be hot and what shouldn't be. And there's this dude, Norman Lear, in the 70s, that really wrote television culture in the US. He developed tons of shows that really held up a mirror to culture at large, whether it was All in the Family or The Jeffersons. And this one dude, this one dude decided and created and wrote the narrative for the lives of Americans during that time, which is pretty profound, top-down. And so it was quite easy for brands. It was like a manufacturing line. They were just pumping out culture. It was like, easy, okay, yeah. We get mass broadcast, lowest common denominator. We get one person to decide the whole thing, and it's done. And there are brands that completely, completely, completely positioned themselves as pop culture brands. PepsiCo used to always say, we are about being timely and being of the moment. But Coke was no different in creating content that also captured our imagination and, again, also stayed with the time. Brands used all sorts of trickery, all sorts of trickery to get us. They used pithy lines that somehow spoke to our inner needs. You know, I'm loving it. To think differently, just do it. Or even kind of mnemonic ideas like snap, crackle, and pop that just stay in your head. And it was profound. It was profound, the impact of brands and culture. They changed our way of thinking. They created myths. Myths like, it's got to be the shoes. This idea that I'll play ball better if I wore certain shoes is complete fiction. But to this day, you know, people believe they'll run faster. People will believe they'll do fitness differently if they wear the right shoes. And that's something that the fitness, the food, I'm sorry, the foot industry, foot industry? That's not smart. That's not smart. That was the first not smart thing I said. No, no, no. The sneaker wear industry that they created. This idea that you needed certain shoes to perform. Or this idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Lie. It's a lie. It's a lie created by the man. No, I'm just kidding. It's created by the industry. It's created by corporate industry. It's not true. Or the idea that a diamond is a symbol of love and truly love. The catalyst for, you know, eternal bliss with another person. A fiction. Not true. Or the Kodak moment. That the idea that certain moments need to be recorded so you can look back at them in the future. This idea of memories need to be captured. It's, of course, there's power to that. But does it need to be attached to a certain brand? Does it need to be attached to a certain type of film? I mean, it's this, it kind of got wrangled. Brands wrangle themselves into that bigger concept. Or all the holidays. Happy Grandfather Day. Happy Left-Handed Day. Or whatever. Like, these are things, these are hallmark holidays used to drive people to buy greeting cards. So you see where I'm going. There was a lot going on. It was set up for brands to succeed. But there was what I would call the Big Bang. The Big Bang of culture. Where there was a significant shift that happened. And I would say this happened within the past 15 or 20 years. That completely threw all this shit off. Out the window. Completely different world. It's a completely different world for brands. It's hard out there for a brand. There are a few different reasons. Quote-unquote multiculturalism. The idea that more and more people are living together. Getting new, they're stimulating by different ideas. They're open to new ways of living. The world is changing. The quote-unquote graying of America. In the 50s and 60s, as I was showing you, it was really a homogenous world. It was one family duplicated over across one country. Or across the world. And there's the idea of urbanization. Over the past few decades, we've been more and more living in cities. So people are finding new and different influences next door. Which is changing our appetite. And changing what it is that we're consuming and appreciating or valuing. Mobile revolution. The idea that we have a computer in our pocket. Again, giving us access to new ideas. Or even the social web. The idea that other people can influence us. And that media. The quote-unquote. The idea of media is actually in our hands. And not of companies. And that all results in kind of the big bang. So some of the things I talked about. Like from the idea of mass broadcast is out the window. I don't need to tell you that. Now it's about niche engagement. Where you have splinters of culture. Infinite splinters of culture. That all have their own values. Their own codes. Their own beliefs. It's not a homogenous thing. You know, you look at the top two shows in 19... Three times, Cosby. Three times. Who's counting? Okay, three times. You have the top two shows in the United States in 1988. Were shows that reflected relatable American families. The Huxtables and the Conners. That was the story. In 2018, think about how splintered and bizarre and weird it is. These two shows. Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. Dystopian stories. You know, really complicated, nuanced. Narratives. It's a very different picture. You know, if you think about it. In the 80s, it was like looking to identify with a homogenous kind of communal story. Here, it's about story. And it's about, you know, fantasy. And taking you in different places. So digital media has created a long tail of cultural identity. Where niche, weird, and one-off identities are the new drivers of the mainstream. And I'm going to show you some examples of niche weird stuff. Have you guys seen this? Have you guys seen this? This thing here. Has anybody seen this? This is a legit Instagram account of a woman who, like, pounds her face in loaves of bread. Over and over and over again. And it's really entrancing and some say erotic. But it's a thing that exists. Or, you know, these memes that are taking traditional arts and putting them in the language of social media of the day. Or this account, which you may have seen. Which is like a surrealistic 3D animated thing that you can't take your eyes off. And it's, again, the sort of thing that wouldn't work with a Colgate hour. That wouldn't play, right? That wouldn't play. So that was mass broadcast to niche. Lowest common denominator to greatest thought provocateur. You know, before it was about being generic. Now it's about challenging things. You think about concept albums. A lot of black American artists are doing this now. These greater albums that are greater than just a single song. They're poignant cultural critiques that are, you know, delivered through the form of music. When Beyonce performed at the Super Bowl, she wasn't even the headliner. Coldplay was the headliner. And she did the formation. You know, she did her first song off Lemonade. Political song about formation. If you looked at the search results the day after. Beyonce was bigger than the two teams that played that day. As well as Coldplay that headlined the event. So it was, again, speaking to provocation versus the lowest common denominator. That was a provocative moment. Or you think about all the content that's being created lately. That's these complex stories that are about identity and sexuality and mental illness. This is the new sort of language. And this is the idea of challenging the way we think. Is what? What content pop culture has become. Top-down control. That's the third one. It's not so much about top-down control as it is about bottom-up control. You see, and I don't need to tell you this. You see the influence of people on the ground up. Whether it's Instagram stars designing clothes at four years old. Or grandmas influencing people to interact with their computers differently. Or you look at, you know, all you need to do is be someone online on Twitter. And say, Wendy's, how many retweets will it take for me to get chicken nuggets for life? And they'll give you a number. And he'll actually get the retweets. And he'll actually get the chicken nuggets. This is a new sense of power that's coming from the unheard. Power. The political structure as we know it is completely changed. And we saw this within the past couple of weeks. That people can come out of the shadows and really hold power. And we're now at this point. The reason this was so contentious was it was this point. Where the unheard. And the ignored. Met the powerful. It was the moment. And I ask you, you know, how many years will it take? How many decades before that balance completely tips? And we lost it this time. But how many times will it take for us to lose it? Pop culture is savage. It's savage for brands. Whether you're PepsiCo. You guys remember this jam. Or your brands that are trying to be cool. That's the worst. You know, Meow Meow Mix is trying to play like they're. Single with the EDM track. Horrible. It's horrible. This is Google's lit report. It's the report of what millennials think is cool. It's called the lit report. And for me, the key finding is that Google is not cool. That's like trying really hard. Or this idea of product placement. This Ariana Grande video for Focus is a joke. You know, because it's a complete commercial. So brands still need culture. Culture no longer needs brands. Brands need culture. Culture no longer needs brands. The power dynamic has shifted. And I was talking about science before. There are actually examples in nature where two species that were once codependent because they didn't have enough nutrients to survive. They found a codependency. That changes when species actually become stimulated independently. Then they don't need each other. And so that's actually what's happening. Brands are going. They're going. Extinct. I believe this deeply. I believe that the concept of brands, this idea of this aspirational ideal that represented a better version of ourselves, this greater community that we wanted to be a part of, that had these really powerful promises, that's no longer the thing. That's no longer what's value. Brands are shifting. Their role is shifting from a passive stage for culture to an active challenger of culture, to an active player in culture. And I don't need to tell you that those that are active, those that do challenge culture, actually succeed in business. Industry after industry after industry. This slide could have many other examples. So I'm going to quickly go through what we would consider the new cultural code for brands. So the things that brands should do in this new era. Act on values. Don't just preach them. Spotify is a client of ours, as I mentioned. When Donald Trump came out and did the Muslim ban for the Muslim countries, Spotify really forged, used that as kind of a key part of their work, and they developed playlists and activities for the band. And it was really a great example of acting out values versus just making a promise. Talk to the ignored. Don't pander to the majority. It's very easy. You pander to the majority. Very easy to just buy into things. You think about Fenty Beauty, Rihanna's beauty line, and just how huge. That's become the key dominant player in the beauty industry within the past couple of years. And it's because of the openness and the acceptance of marginal people. In fact, her darkest shade sold out within hours. And that's because there was an unheard voice there, and a voice that felt unrepresented. Or crazy rich. The story that seeming outsider culture and world was entertaining for the mass culture. Third, lean into the backlash. Don't run from it. We heard about the Colin Kaepernick thing. You stole my thunder. Colin Kaepernick. Colin Kaepernick. That story is amazing. I agree with you. It's a truly profound story where Nike made the decision to align with something highly controversial and then reap the benefits. Phil Knight famously says, you know, talk to the people that love you. And they knew. They knew who loved them. They knew who loved them. They made that decision. And it's actually reaped them a lot of benefits. Be a native. Don't be a tourist. You know, social media, it's really funny. Brands have kind of developed personalities in social media. You know, they've developed ways of talking to really be sort of organic in culture at large. Taco Bell, a lot of people view the Taco Bell social media presence as almost a product in and of itself because it has this sort of cheeky snark that people really like. And so not all brands do this well. But it's really interesting when you're of the culture, it's easier to buy into. Challenge cultural convention. Don't blindly accept it. I mean, could you imagine REI is a brand in the States that came out and they said opt outside. You know, Patagonia has come out against Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when you're supposed to buy stuff. Brands coming out saying buy stuff. Brands going out saying don't buy stuff. Brands saying, I'm sorry, brands that go out and say don't buy stuff. And brands that say go outside and do something more important than buying stuff. That's a pretty brave thing to do in this day and age. And to use your media dollars to do that. Build culture around your products. Don't force culture into your products. Don't force your product into culture. You know, Red Bull is famous for this. Famous for really creating culture around their product where, again, are you consuming the product or are you consuming culture? This jump to me was one of the greatest moments in marketing in the past 10 or 15 years. Because it created a language and a culture. When CNN picked it up, it was like, well, CNN is picking up a live commercial that Red Bull created for an hour? Like, what? That's amazing. That's amazing. That to me is the cultural code for brands. The new cultural code for brands. Act on your values. Don't just preach them. Talk to the ignored. Don't pander to the majority. Lean into the backlash. Don't run from it. Be a native. Don't be a tourist. Challenge cultural convention. Don't blindly accept it. Build culture around your product. Don't force your product into culture. My name is Alain. I'm the founder and CEO of Sylvain Labs. Check us out. SylvainLabs.com. Check me out. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.