Why Dirt?
The question we get asked most often by our clients (and our moms) is, “Why are you called Dirt?”
Fair enough. It’s not the most self-explanatory name out there. Some especially considerate people even avoid saying the word “dirt” out loud, perhaps worried that it’s an insult to call us by our name. (It’s not.)
For the record, here’s the story behind the name:
The explanation for “Dirt” might change, depending on the sort of work we’re tackling and the context of the conversation. Sometimes it’s about rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard work. Sometimes it’s about creating the conditions for great things to grow. Sometimes it’s about intimately knowing an audience — getting the dirt on them, so to speak. Sometimes it’s about not being afraid of provocation.
These are all true. But the best answer, the one closest to the heart of this company and what we want it to be, is that it’s about the anthropologist, Mary Douglas.
The place to start is her seminal book, Purity and Danger. In it, Douglas talks a whole lot about dirt and how we as a society decide whether something is dirty or not. Dirt is simply “matter out of place,” she famously writes. It’s about order and disorder. A thing is dirt when it isn’t in the right place at the right time, when it is unclassifiable, not because it is inherently impure or dangerous.
Think about a piece of something on your kitchen floor — some food that fell off your kid’s dinner plate, say, or a bit of earth tracked in by your dog. It’s a problem and needs to be cleaned up. But what if that matter were under the tomato plants in your backyard garden? Because the context is different, we now call that same piece of matter “compost” or “soil.” It is desired and valuable, not “dirt.”
Defining what is dirt is a way for a society to express its values and moral codes, Douglas writes, binding groups of people together, and signaling how your group is distinct from others. It helps decide what is kosher or halal and what isn’t. Who is holy and who isn’t. Who is alien or dangerous or powerful or taboo. Who belongs.
This is profound stuff — I am not doing it justice here. Please go read her for yourself. She reportedly influenced Marshall McLuhan’s work. As a sociology major back in college, this book blew my mind.
Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.
— Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger
When I was trying to figure out a good name for our company, it occurred to me—one of those proverbial lightning bolts of realization—that “dirt” is a pretty darn good metaphor for marketing. Especially our point of view on marketing, where content and context are inextricable.
In marketing, as with dirt, context matters. Order matters. Value systems matter.
In fact, the practice of marketing today is more complex and disordered than ever before. More audiences, more channels, more data and more shiny things. Too many possible paths forward. As Dianne Esber of McKinsey observes, “One agency is unlikely to be able to do everything. All of a sudden, our ecosystem has exploded, and that adds complexity for our marketers, but also for our agencies and how they partner with others to play well in the sandbox.”
So, that’s why we picked the name Dirt. It’s a reminder of the chaos that we’re here to fight. And most importantly, it represents the massive opportunity before us, to bring more order and focus—and through that, creativity—to marketing.
