Slinging My Hook
Today is - as mentioned in various places - my last day at Kantar Operations. On Monday week I’ll be joining Brainjuicer as their Digital Culture Officer. “Their what?” you say - well, I’ll get on to that. But first of all I want to say thankyou to Kantar.
There are a bunch of industry ideas about Kantar around, and for me the biggest misconception is that Kantar isn’t interested in innovation. This is far from the case. Kantar is vast (26,500 people!) and it employs some of the most innovative and far-thinking researchers I’ve ever worked with. It doesn’t often shout about its innovations, and anyway the “big picture” is quite rightly about the colossal international scale it can work on with top clients. But it’s been a privilege to work or interact with people like Guy Rolfe, Andy Lees, Alex Johnson, Kyle Findlay, Lee Ryan, Dave Barrowcliff, George Pappachen, Ali Rana, and a ton more - innovative minds all. And great people are joining all the time: I’m sad that I won’t get to work with Jon Puleston from recent acquisition GMI, whose work on game mechanics has been rightly making people sit up. Though I’m sure we’ll still be able to bounce ideas off one another in conferences!
Enormous thanks and best wishes to all of them (and the many I haven’t mentioned by name).
But - obviously - what I’m really excited about right now is the new job. The idea of a “Digital Culture Officer” is stolen and mutated from Grant McCracken’s book, Chief Culture Officer, in which he says that businesses need someone to act as a kind of lens and coalmine-canary for cultural shifts, new ideas and trends.
I know the odd thing about bits of wider pop culture, obviously, but really what I want to do at Brainjuicer is play that kind of role for digital culture - social networks, online identity creation, games, collaborative projects, memes, fandoms, start-ups, communities, all the fascinating and creative ways people work and play with the Internet. I know more about some of these areas than others, but a new job would be very boring if I already knew everything about it going in.
Short version: it’s been a running joke in the pub that my job is “messing about on the Internet”. This is now truer than ever.
Why am I moving? Some reasons:
- I think social media research (what I did at Kantar) is basically a solved problem. Not solved by me personally, of course! I was a Johnny-Come-Lately in many ways. But solved by the industry - the basic outlines (listening, communities) have been in place for a while, the risks and rewards and ways to do things are well identified… there are breakthroughs to be made but the pioneer years are long past.
- Also, the “media” part of “social media” is getting most of the attention nowadays - researchers are more interested in it as a marketing medium, a branding medium, an advertising medium, a vector in which business gets done. There are people out there who live for all that stuff, but I’m not really one of them.
- Instead I think there is still an awful lot of inspiration to be drawn by looking at how people build things, enjoy themselves, and organise themselves online rather than only focusing on how they interact with brands or how they get “monetised”. This is especially the case if the way you get monetised is finding out things about people. The problem social media research has solved isn’t the only problem floating around out there.
- The part of me that writes about and loves pop music is also the part of me which gets excited by how online culture emerges, lives and dies. I get frightened and saddened by it too sometimes, but I can’t pretend that the energy and forward momentum I was attracted to in pop doesn’t exist online in terrifying quantity. So this job feels like it’s unifying a lot of the things I’m interested in, including themes I’ve been writing about in my Pitchfork columns especially.
Also, I’ve had an intellectual crush on Brainjuicer for ages, and often wondered what it would be like to work there. And now I get to find out! I am quite amazingly excited.
(But first, the pub…)
