By Scott Rosenberg
"Digital branding" was the theme for much of the day Saturday, which led to a certain amount of perplexity.
Apple's Ralph Rogers suggested that "it's the same thing we've been talking about," only the stories are about products, not lives. After all, every company has its own creation myth, its heroes and villains, its sagas of setback and rebirth.
Michael Moon of Gistics provided an outline of the "digital branding process" -- by which companies can use the power of new media to build and defend their brand identity.
Since only the tiniest fraction of the audience here is, or is likely ever to be, in a position to own the brand identity of a major corporation, the relevance of the talk seemed to be in Moon's pitch for the economic opportunities awaiting artists and storytellers, as demand grows for them to put their talents to work on the behalf of said corporations.
Moon began with a bit of history: How did Britain dominate the global sea lanes for three centuries? By controlling a handful of key straits and ports like Gibraltar, the Cape of Good Hope, Singapore and the Falklands. This put the British in the position to control the trade in spices like nutmeg -- "the economic equivalent of cocaine," according to Moon.
Why did it acquire this extraordinary value? Because, in those pre-refrigerator days, it could be sprinkled on rotten meat to make it palatable.
It's a great story to kick off a talk with, but Moon proposed it as a model for business behavior today: grab the equivalent chokepoints in cyberspace and you, too, can dominate the future the way the British once ruled the waves.
Well, as everyone knows, there were people already living in the places the British colonized, and the whole imperial enterprise turned out to have some pretty disastrous side-effects.
Similarly, there are people in cyberspace already today -- and many of them have been engaged in trying to build new communities and invent new institutions there.
There's plenty of room on the Internet, so there's no reason such pioneers and the new corporate arrivals shouldn't be able to coexist. But it was hard to tell whether Moon's "digital branding" meant that businesses should try to adapt to the ways of the Net and become good citizens online -- or whether it would impel them to try to control the Net, to seize strategic high ground in order to squeeze bigger fees from users or compile ever-deeper databases of information about them.
"The Web isn't about serving up pages," Moon said. "It's about collecting information." If he's right, it's enough to make anyone paranoid.
In the latter case, we simply wind up duplicating the power relationships of the old media in the new medium. The Web, instead of a transformative many-to-many medium, becomes one big mega-Neilsen market research tool. And to the extent that artists are drafted to make the strategy work, they are reduced to a role that's not only mercenary but potentially disingenuous. They become the people who salt digital nutmeg over rotten mass-media meat.
Many people -- and many artists -- are excited about digital technology because they see a brief moment of opportunity, as old media fall into decay and new ones are struggling to be born, to make and distribute work outside of the confines of vast media corporations.
"Digital branding" may well provide talented digital entrepreneurs with strong "revenue streams" in the future. And everybody needs to earn a living. If Moon's prediction that 13 to 20 million jobs will disappear from the U.S. alone as a result of economic dislocation caused by new technology, then no doubt we'll all be grateful for whatever paychecks we can
scrounge.
But let's not kid ourselves that it's something revolutionary.
Certainly, branding is a critical part of the way businesses operate in the "mediaspaces" and "marketspaces" Moon mapped; it's how big companies command loyalty from consumers -- and differentiate themselves, even when their products are identical. It also can be deceptive or downright harmful -- as the speaker's example of Marlboro's wildly successful targeting of teenage smokers suggested.
Moon's highly detailed model of business strategy left no room in its graphs and diagrams for the factor of morality. It's a powerful portrait of the world as it is, but leaves no room to imagine the world as we might want it to be.
One point neither Moon nor the other speakers covered was a simple one -- the origin of the word "brand." It didn't begin in the world of corporate logos and trademark names; it's what's burned into the hides of livestock.
Branding, in other words, is about who owns the herd.
Some of us still cherish the hope that new media technologies might help make the herd itself a thing of the past. If that hope proves naive, as it probably will, we should at least set aside a moment for lamentation, before trudging off to our day jobs on the corporate plantation.