July 22, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

So following up on yesterday’s discussion of the otaku, and a rethinking of what it means to be otaku, let’s first consider what else, besides entertainment industry products, can one be deeply devoted to, as an otaku?

Why, technology of course.

• pasokon otaku: a person deeply devoted to personal computers

• g_mu otaku: a devoted fan of the video game world

Then there are

• Wota: (pronounced ‘ota’, an abbreviation of otaku): devoted fans of pop media “idols”

Wota are media figure otaku, so called hardcore or “extreme fans” (there are those stigmatizing connotations again) of “idols,” who are heavily promoted singing girls.

Now we get to some marginal, obscure hobbies.

• tetsud_ otaku (metrophiles/ fans of subways/undergrounds)

• gunji otaku (military geeks).

The term otaku has been applied to music, martial arts, cooking, coin collecting, automobiles, and so on (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku). That raises the question, I suppose, of what it doesn’t apply to? Let’s ponder that in a different way.

I was especially glad to find the adjective term “otakki” to describe something that is okatu-like (note: Otaki is city in New Zealand; I’m talking about otakki here). I find otakki is a preferable adjective than the terms derived from the word fan, like fannish, or fanlike (or I’ve even seen “fanny). It just rolls off the tongue better. It sounds a little like “tacky” and not so much like “crazy.”

So consider now the expository remarks Gibson made in an April 2001 edition of The Observer, where he said:

“The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. . . Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.“–William Gibson, 2001

There is no question that the term otaku has just as many unfortunate obsessive and negative connotations in Japanese as it does in American-English. It was associated first with a sort of nerdy culture (the term originally came from a form of verbal address that fans adopted, almost like the “live long and prosper” hand-sign of Star Trek fans). Then it became associated with a Japanese serial killer who had a thing for pornographic manga and anime, popularly known as hentai.

Although he starts out talking about otaku from a technically-accurate and stigmatizing distance, I think it is very noteworthy that William Gibson ends up talking about them as us, about all of us having these otaku drives. It’s not just the avid anime collectors and the Star Trek geeks. Citizens of information and consumption world, we are in our daily lives collectors, archivists, cleaning our desktops, marking our favorite pages, filing our favorite pictures. Many of us are otaku, or at least, at times, otakki.

We have these needs to latch on emotionally, to categorize, evaluate, collect, archive, and share. Of course, otaku are also active creators-both of symbolic meaning itself as well as of new things of substance like written fiction, serializations, movies, and so on.

In fact, I think this is directly on target. There is a very otaku-like (”otakki”) nature to contemporary existence, enabled by widespread digital information and communications technology, is what is creating radical shifts in consumption, and causing the shocks to the industrial system of intellectual “property” “rights.” It’s behind a lot of the fan conflicts I’ve written about (many others have too). For instance, consider the recent Rowling versus RDR Harry Potter case I wrote about in a past posting. This legal case is all about classic otaku behavior. And the jury is still, literally, out on this one.

I’d like to propose here and now a redefinition of the otakki.
I’d love to move otaku, otakki, and fan based definitions away from some of the nerdy, geeky, stalker-obsessive, creepy serial killer stereotypes that hinder our understanding of subcultures. I’d like to suggest that we have much to gain in terms of general understanding in recognizes the universality of the otakki way in our contemporary consumer culture. I’d also like to suggest that we continue to broaden and think about a science of the otaku, a science of the fan, that recognizes the universality and also the variety of manifestations of the forms of personal and cultural engagement that we have with commercial culture.

Here is the definition—academic style.

Otakki is herein defined as a way of being in contemporary human society characterized by a deep emotional and intellectual engagement with the products of commercial culture. The mode commonly manifests in intelligent interaction with consumption object “texts” of varying sorts, with the collection of various objects or forms of information, with critique and sensemaking efforts, and its commitments can also extend to include many types of creativity and communal interaction. The “texts” tend to be linked together into systems or related webs of consumption—such as “coffee consumption,” “connoisseur lifestyle,” or “media fan” and have complex linkages to other lifestyles, consumption activities, and ideologies.

This otakki engagement with commercial culture manifests in multifarious ways. It can range from sporadic activity to nearly constant questing and discourse. It can span products that are allegedly functional to those which are entirely ritual or symbolic. It can engage culture that is exclusively local or it can expand to encompass global culture.

The key to otakki culture is in its emotional engagement and the connoisseur discernment in interaction with the productions of contemporary corporations and their market offerings as against traditional religious or cultural offerings, although in contemporary capitalist economies these boundaries between art and culture, business and culture, and politics and business, often break down.

[Okay, I can’t resist ending on an otakki note about William Gibson’s novel, Idoru. Idoru is a great novel that is far less known, appreciated and cited than Gibson’s blockbuster Neuromancer; Idoru offers some profound insights on media and fandom and the way they are linked into consumer and information culture (which are themselves, in Idoru’s perspicacious vision of our near-future, interlinked). One of the things I love about the trajectory of Gibson’s work is the way his vision of the future has moved gradually from the cyber-punk near future to increasingly recent settings with their attendant social satirizing views. His latest book, 2007’s intriguing Spook Country, was actually set in the timeless time of 1999, our future-as-already-past. I’ve already written about the consumption research revelations of Philip K. Dick’s work. In the future, I’m hoping to expand this into some conjecture about the consumption worlds and insights revealed by other speculative fiction and science fiction authors such as William Gibson, Olaf Stapledon, Osamu Tezuka, Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling’s works.]

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | No Comments »

July 21, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I had the glorious opportunity to spend most of last Saturday hanging around Tokyo’s Shibuya districts.

I spent the morning in Ginza. Here’s a picture I like a lot of me with one of my wonderful hosts, Professor Junko Kimura of Tokyo’s Hosei University. We are at the Nissan Showroom in Ginza, standing next to one of the most coveted objects in the automotive fan world, the new Nissan GT-R, a very exclusive performance car that has been until very recently cloaked in mystery.

Although Shibuya is known more for its centrality as a location for youth culture and fashion, and Akihabara is often cited as a center of otaku-culture, I found that there was plenty in Shibuya to send my mind reeling about the wonders of Okatu-hood.

‘What is an otaku?,’ you may be wondering. Well, the original meaning of otaku is that it is the Japanese word for a fan, and the term has gathered many of the same unfortunate and denigrating connotations as fan has in the English language.

According to Wikipedia, a highly fannish undertaking of its own, which, in matters such as these (which involve fans of many stripes and non-fans talking about things fannish), and many others, is wrong more often than it is right, the term’s popularity in English is owed to its frequent mention and use in William Gibson’s 1996 Idoru.

In one part of Gibson’s Idoru, the term was defined in the stereotypical and stereotyping way: as a ‘pathological techno-fetishist with-social-deficit.’ The Wikipedia entry, of course, misses the context, irony, and satire in the remark, and seems to offer it up as an actual serious definition. Sort of like going to the dictionary and finding the word fandom described as “just a bunch of geeky, nerdy, obsessive losers.”

According to the Wikipedia entry, “In modern Japanese slang, the term otaku refers to a fan of a particular theme, topic, or hobby.” That’s a pretty all-encompassing definition. Let’s explore it.
Here are the two most common uses:

• anime otaku: a devoted fan of anime

• manga otaku: a devoted fan of Japanese comic books or manga-these are targeted at adults, and some are literature of a very high order, like the masterful work of Osamu Tezuka, the graduated M.D. who never practiced medicine, widely hailed as the creator of manga and anime.

Those are probably the two core, original uses of the term otaku. And there is no downplaying their central importance to the term. Just as the term fan has begun spreading in our cultural vocabulary from the world of entertainment—TV show fan, movie fan, music fan, celebrity fan, videogame fan, and so on—to the world of general consumption, so too has the term otaku been anchored in its entertainment industry origins.

And apparently the officials at the Japanese cultural ministry still not quite woken up to the significance of manga and anime. A major, recent two-page story in the English language “Japan Times” began by stating:

“It’s a fact that has long puzzled devotees and plain old tourists alike. Japan’s manga and anime arts have been wowing the world for more than a decade, and yet the national government still hasn’t got around to setting up a proper museum for their enjoyment, preservation and study. After so many years of inaction, though, it is surprising to note that two days ago on Friday, a minor breakthrough occurred. The head of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Tamotsu Aoki, announced that the advisory panel he had tasked with finding ways to improve Japan’s “dissemination of culture abroad” had come out and stated the obvious. In an interim report, Aoki’s panel made six recommendations “requiring prompt attention.” Number two on the list was that the establishment of a ‘facility for the collection, preservation and provision of information regarding the media-arts (manga, anime and video games) be considered.’”

Some much-needed appreciation, as the objects of otaku desire move into the mainstream, the trajectory I have noted above, and which was in many ways the basis of the insight behind the pop art movement of the mid-1950. And certainly Takashi Murakami’s work in Japan is an interesting combination of both otaku culture and pop art.

Tomorrow, let’s take this deeper by digging into the ways that otaku-hood expresses something integral to consumer culture today.

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Marketing Science | 1 Comment »

July 17, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I recently had the opportunity to teach a full-day workshop devoted to online communities and netnography for Nissan at their corporate retreat in Hakone, about two hours outside of Tokyo, nestled in the hot spring foothills of Mt. Fuji. It was a great session, and the feedback and comments were incredible. I’m very grateful to Hiroko Osaka, who planned the event, and to Nissan, which made it happen.

One component of the workshop involved getting Nissan’s best and brightest marketing managers involved hands-on in using cutting-edge netnographic techniques to understand how their customers made sense of their brand and the entire category online.

As we were going through different examples of online postings and communications about Nissan, a mystery emerged.

As I had been searching for popular online Nissan ads, that is, ads that were frequently shared and also commented upon by communities of consumers online, I had come across this ad. The ad was popular, it had been Digg’d previously and extensively, had lots of interesting comments on YouTube, and was around since 2006. Given that I was presenting to a mixed-gender group, and unsure whether showing this ad would make some people uncomfortable, I opted not to put it in my presentation. But here it was. It’s definitely jiggly. And in content, no doubt it’s all juggy. It spread around so it’s very viral. The Jiggly Juggy Viral Ad.

Here it is:

A group of managers, both males and females, were standing around watching this ad on their computer as one part of the netnographic overview of online communications and meanings they were examining for the program. I stopped them and asked “Why did you make such a risqué ad? What was the idea behind this.”

The manager from the USA looked at me and said, “As far as I know, we didn’t make this. I’ve checked into it before. No one here at Nissan knows where this ad comes from. It just appeared online. And that’s not even our font they are using. It’s totally not authorized and not created by us.”

Now, that’s an interesting little puzzle. I wonder if anyone out there had the answer.

Where did this Nissan ad come from?

As far as I can tell, there are only a few options if Nissan didn’t create this ad.

1. It is user-generated content. Usually for something like this, that would be the most likely candidate. But the jiggling is pretty precise, and the production values are quite high. To me, this doesn’t look like a homemade video, neither in conception nor in execution.
2. It is a fake ad planted by competitors. Sort of a little reverse viral undermining strategy. But it’s really not that offensive. It’s kind of cute, in an old Playboy mag, soft-core kind of way. If someone really wanted to undermine, I’d expect that they would go more for something more offensive or damaging to the brand.
3. It was a spoof created by an advertising firm to try out an idea, then leaked. My money is on this theory. The conception, the production values, they all smack of an ad agency. But why did they use a real brand, the Nissan Pathfinder brand to showcase? And why would they choose to share it online? Was it created for internal use, and then liked by someone so much that it was leaked? If so, it was a very successful leak. The ad is one of the top Nissan ad’s online.

One of the reasons I favor theory #3 is the existence of the old fake terrorist ad for VW that was rolling around the Internet some time back and had everyone fooled for a while. In terms of feeling like it was conceived by advertising people, and the production values it clearly embodies, it reminds me of this Nissan ad (actually, they use the VW font so it’s even closer).

The VW ad is still very much around, and still apparently arousing controversy. Here’s a link to that ad.

According to a story in the Guardian, and many, many blog postings on the topic, it’s a spoof ad that was created by two advertising people as a gimmick. Some stories say that the ad was pitched to Volkswagen, who rejected it as offensive. Other stories say that the team (”Lee and Dan”) leaked it on purpose to create controversy and further a political agenda. They do say that it “got out accidentally.”

Well, I’m not sure how that happens. I have lots of video, and none of it so far has escaped my hard-drive without my say-so.

Finally, there are those who say that this was all a very clever and rather devious campaign by VW to stir up all kinds of weird word of mouth, while staying officially above the fray. They covertly commission a few clever producers to make this video and then leak it. Then they go into the press, distance themselves from it, while acknowledging it over and over again, officially and express extreme disgust, even threatening to sue them for damaging the brand. But all the while its being viewed, over and over again. (Just like it is off this blog….)

For those conspiracy theorists, I’d like to recommend the book Jennifer Government by Max Barry . In that book, the Nike of the future covertly commissions killers to murder people for their new Nike shoes, secretly creating a sensation that boosts demand for them. It’s a fun ride of a science fictionalized marketing-satirizing book and I recommend it.

I keep coming back to the production values. I wonder exactly how this was done, the physics and biomechanics of the operation. Was it CG special effects on the order of WALL-E or Final Fantasy IV? A person mounted on some sort of platform? A gifted and talented “breast actress” who needs no mechanical assistance whatsoever?

Any insights, speculations, inside dope, personal demonstrations, or even sheer guesses into any of these abundant mysteries would be most welcome.

Posted in Culture + Ad Jamming, Conferences & Presentation, Netnography, Entertainment Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 1 Comment »