American culture* and big data (case study 6)
American culture is a dynamic thing. It is busting out all over. There are several ways to content with this blooming confusion, and we will look at several…
Author: Grant
American culture* and platforms for producer creativity (case study 5)
Yesterday we talked about platforms for consumer creativity. Today we will talk about platforms for the producer creativity. The corporation was meant to serve as this platform. It…
American culture* and platforms for consumer creativity (case study 4)
What happened to mass culture, mass marketing, and mass media? Well, several things. One is the inclination of consumers to make their own culture. Once passive recipients of…
10 questions for world builder Gerry Flahive
10 Questions for Gerry Flahive Gerry Flahive is the creator of a fictional character, Bert Xanadu. And Bert Xanadu is man who was the Mayor of Toronto in…
American culture* in the digital space (case study # 3)
I This is a series of posts that examines how and why American culture matters to American business. The opening post was “American Culture* and the Harvard Business…
American culture* and the new new Coke
This is a series of posts that examines how and why American culture matters to American business. The opening post was “American Culture* and the Harvard Business School…
American culture* and the story of OJ
[This post was originally published on Medium and LinkedIn.] This is a series of posts that examines how and why American culture matters to American business. The opening…
American culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery
[this post was originally published on Medium and LinkedIn] When the Harvard Business School invited me to teach a few years ago, I had one question. “Why?”…
Beth Comstock and 7 truths for the C-suite
(This post was first published on Medium, April 3, 2018.) Anyone who works as a creative, a strategist, a planner, a story teller, a PR specialist, or a…
Transparent marketing and design
[This post first published on Medium March 16, 2018] I was looking at the app store this morning and noticed in the upper left hand corner The Art…
Gruesome TV: dumb culture returns?
The thing that strikes you about The Frankenstein Chronicles is how gruesome it is. This was true too of The Alienist. In both cases, the series begins with…
Craft fatigue / Artisanal exhaustion?
One of the things we are watching at Culturematic HQ is whether the artisanal theme is beginning to run out of steam. Leo Burnett London offers us this…
Culture when it takes us captive
[This post was originally published on Medium.] Every organization operates out of an idea of itself. (We call this idea several things: our “business model,” our “value proposition,”…
Why you should move from Word to Pages
[This post originally appeared on Medium.] ○ Word is expensive, Pages is free. ○ Pages used to be bad at footnotes (while Word was always superb). Now it’s…
Google’s early warning of the rise of Trump
[This post first appeared on Medium, October 23, 2017] All social observers should (still) be asking themselves, “How did we miss it? How did we miss the rise…
Goat Rodeo vs. dumpster fire
One of the pleasures of American English is its gift for new and pungent metaphors. My new favorite: goat rodeo. I used it often while driving with my…
How to make a good ad
There are two DNA ads running at the moment. They illuminate the art of advertising today. The first is called Testimonial: Livie and it’s for AncestryDNA.com. This is…
Google Trends as life advice?
[this post first appeared on Medium] I was in Portland last week looking for artisans to interview for the Artisanal Economies Project and stumbled upon a vintage clothing…
Fred Armisen is, like, so mean. So mean.
[this post first appeared in Medium.] A friend told me about seeing a freshman on a university campus in the UK. The kid was clearly in agony. And…
Ken Burns, an anthropological portrait of an artist and the edge
[This essay first appeared in Medium. It has been lightly edited for presentation here.] In the world of documentary filmmaking, it feels like there’s the era “Before Ken…
The case for culture in business, as clearly and forcefully as I can make it
This is an abbreviation of talk I gave for the design firm Thomas Pigeon in early April. It puts the “case for culture in business” as forcefully as I…
TV: new rules, new viewers, new challenges
This is the presentation I gave at Streaming Television and Second Screening Workshop at Boston University. TV: new rules, new viewers, new challenges from Grant McCracken
The Artisanal Economies Project, entry # 2: The Peacefield Farms interview
This is a clip of an interview of Kaelin Vernon of “Peacefield Farms” with Sam Ford, Grant McCracken and Josh Poling acting as interviewers. The interview was conducted…
A letter to my culture interns, Jarvis and Donte
I have never had interns before. In fact, I thought there was something wrong with using them. But I now have two. I will call them Jarvis Rochford and Donte Cole.…