Culture Hacking starts with the recognition of intelligence in cultural codes. Although they may not always live as clean quantitative figures, it is time to think of cultural codes in congruence with Big Data. It’s about seeing the opportunity, through cultural understanding, to create work that affects individuals with greater potency and resonates with scale. Marketers should design innovative culture hacking initiatives on their own terms and look to culture hacking as an investment in brand relevance and sustainability.http://www.marcgeffen.com/

1. Culture
hacking
Marc Geffen
@marc_it
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2. this is quite cryptic.
Consumer
Culture Brand
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3. we can hack it and make it useful...
Insights planning strategy
"The account planner is that member of the agency's team who
is the expert, through background, training, experience, and
attitudes, at working with information and getting it used
– not just marketing research but all the information
available to help solve a client's advertising problems.
- Stanley Pollitt
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4. we thrive on information
Demographics
Digital behavior
Consumer Consumer Journey
Site/search analytics
? Culture Brand Sales data
Brand history
(but maybe we re missing something)
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5. ok, let s define culture
Culture emerged as a concept…encompassing all human
phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics…
…it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to
classify and encode experiences symbolically and communicate
symbolically encoded experiences socially
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6. Information encoded in Culture
can spark great ideas
Good ideas are contextually relevant.
Great ideas are universally human.
make things for the masses but talk to the individual
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7. a word from the professor
“ ‘My specialty is cultural anthropology,’ the professor
said…‘One aim of my field is to relativize the images
possessed by individuals, discover in these images the
factors universal to all human beings, and feed these
universal truths back to those same individuals. As a
result of this process, people might be able to belong
to something even as they maintain their autonomy.’ ”
- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
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8. find an intersection of truth
Human truth
Consumer
Cultural truth Culture Brand Brand Promise
How does the brand fit
into the story of our lives?
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9. how can we make
Culture
a key ingredient in our work?
9

10. start collecting & experimenting...
to create a cultural filter
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11. In a world
XX
?
where __________ is true
the big disruptive/aligning thought is _______
what this means is that __________
this could impact brand __________ because
we could test this by__________.
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12. culture is tough to
navigate
?
but there are clues along the way:
Cool hunting
Trend spotting
Meme tracking
Patterns/Movements
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13. some thought-starters...
Culture
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14. Culture
is generational
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15. meet generation sell
Today s ideal social form is not the
commune or the movement …it s the
small business. Every artistic or moral
aspiration — music, food, good works —
is expressed in those terms.
Our culture hero is not the artist or
reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the
entrepreneur. Autonomy, adventure,
imagination…The characteristic art form
of our age may be the business plan.
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16. culture yields data
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17. what Mad Men can teach us
The Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of
nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is
thought to have happened, in the decade
between forty-fifty years past.
40s/80s 50s/90s
What drives the cycle…though pop culture is
most often performed by the young, are the
directors and programmers—the suits who
control and create…they are and always have
been, largely forty-somethings. Forty years
past is the potently fascinating time just as we
arrived, when our parents were youthful and
in love
17

18. In a world
XX
where __________________ is true
the big disruptive/aligning thought is_______
what this means is that __________
this could impact brand __________ because
we could test this by__________.
18

19. Culture
is functional
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20. lists are universally human
The list is the origin of culture. It s part
of the history of art and literature. What
does culture want? To make infinity
comprehensible. It also wants to create
order — not always, but often. And
how, as a human being, does one face
infinity?... the shopping list, the will,
the menu — that are also cultural
achievements in their own right.
- Umberto Eco
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21. Culture
is experiential
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22. without a story, a taco is a taco
The food vendors are like artists…You re
eating, but also meeting the people who
are creating the culture…
it has a mentality of having gotten there
first, being the influencer in your group.
If you have an Instagram account, you feel
you can say something was delicious…
I used to spend five hours in a record
store looking for albums…Now
everything s online. But I can t find
artisanal sausage online and eat it right
away. Maybe food markets are the vintage
record shops of 2012…
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23. Culture
is psychological
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24. thoughts on the digital mindset
The current incarnation of the Internet - portable, social,
accelerated, and all-pervasive - may be making us not just
dumber or lonelier but more anxious, prone to obsessive-
compulsive and attention-deficit disorders…Our digitized
minds can scan like those of drug addicts…
One idea is that online life is akin to life in the biggest
city…no less mentally real - and taxing - than New York or
Hong Kong. The data clearly support the view that someone
who lives in a big city is at higher risk of psychosis…if the
Internet is a kind of imaginary city, it might have some of the
same psychological impact.
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25. takeaways
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26. Cultural Insight is powerful...
XX
Inject a stronger cultural point of view into work,
the next step: from insights and strategy to content creation.
the challenge: Don’t be clever, be useful -Jon Steel on Planning
Elevate thinking from tactical wins to
the opportunity: BIG ideas that resonate on truth
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27. the opportunity:
brands become icons when they respond
to a particular moment in time
-Douglas Holt, How Brands Become Icons
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28. THANK YOU
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29. • Slide 5: Wikipedia
• Slide 6: tweet from @reiinamoto Sources
• Slide 15: The New York Times, November 2011 -
h-p://www.ny5mes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the‐entrepreneurial‐
genera5on.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
• Slide 16: The New York Times, April 2012 -
h-p://www.ny5mes.com/interac5ve/2012/04/30/technology/three‐years‐of‐
kickstarter‐projects.html?src=tp
• Slide 17: The New Yorker, April 2012 -
h-p://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/04/23/120423taco_talk_gopnik
• Slide 20: Brainpickings, December 2011 -
h-p://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/12/22/umberto‐eco‐on‐lists/
• Slide 22: New York Times, May 2012 -
h-p://www.ny5mes.com/2012/05/27/nyregion/in‐new‐york‐dining‐the‐appeal‐of‐
exclusive‐and‐ar5sanal.html?_r=3
• Slide 24: Newsweek Magazine, July 2012 -
h-p://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/08/is‐the‐internet‐making‐us‐
crazy‐what‐the‐new‐research‐says.html
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