Pop Culture + #brands

The main message I took away from this week’s reading is one that isn’t even specific to #brands. Its’ one that’s been running through this course since the very beginning, but has never been clearer to me than in this post: when it comes to social media, nobody really knows what the heck they’re doing. Ad companies, Comedy Central, musicians, Snapchat, it’s all being made up as they go. As we adjust to these new technologies and services, the rules are still not standardized. The very last section of Weiner’s NYT article demonstrates this beautifully. Trevor Noah says that the question “every single media outlet has been facing” is how to “tap into this new world that seems to have no rules and no structure.” Erik Flannigan, a Viacom exec returned that they’re “prepared to do a lot of flailing.” Except, the media outlet’s aren’t the only ones flailing, everybody seems to be (except, of course, the legendary Millennials and their younger counterparts).

I also had a bit of an issue with Gartner’s piece. Looking back at Britney Spears and the Spice Girls, that’s been something the music industry has been trying to do for decades and now they simply have better mechanisms to do so. If you look at it from the other side, you can see that it’s a way for struggling artists to gain a foothold in a industry that was a tightly controlled oligopoly for almost a hundred years. I don’t disagree with Gartner — I think we should bring the focus back to the music and I wholeheartedly long for a more authentic music industry — but I think to blame it all on social media is a mistake. The entertainment industry did not spring up alongside MySpace.