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NFT:  Not Free for the Taking?

3/28/2021

6 Comments

 
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by David Hagenbuch - professor of Marketing at Messiah University -
​author of 
Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing


Like most people, I was amazed when an NFT of a collage by the artist Beeple recently sold at auction for $69 million.  It’s worth pondering why anyone would pay so much for a blockchain-based asset, but the sudden popularity of NFTs may signal a more important concern: the price that individuals increasingly pay because others can easily digitize and share their work.

Beeple’s nonfungible token has been one of several recent high-priced, head-scratching NFT purchases:
  • $389,000 for “Death of the Old,” a music video by the musician, singer, and songwriter Grimes
  • $580,000 for Nyan Cat, “an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail”
  • $3.6 million for “Ultraviolet,” an album by electronic-music artist Justin Blau, aka 3LAU
 
So, what do people who pay thousands or millions of dollars for such NFTs actually get?  They receive proof of ownership of the digital item, which comes in the form of  “a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.”
 
What makes the passion for NFTs puzzling is that people who purchase them gain virtually no exclusive use of their virtual property.  For instance, Nyan Cat is ten years old and “has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times.”  There’s no practical way for the feline’s new owner to stop others from viewing or posting their newly-acquired kitty.
 
What NFT owners receive amounts to little more than “digital bragging rights.”  It’s kind of like holding the title to a car that anyone else can drive.  Well, at least the owner can point to the title and say, “It’s mine.” 
 
The possibility that others may be willing to pay even more for certain NFTs can give them value by virtue of their potential resale.  There also may come a time when some NFT owners will be able to more readily restrict access to their digital property and monetize their asset.

In that way, perhaps NFTs have become so popular because people notice a troubling trend:  Individuals spending their time, energy, and talents to create things of value, only to have ‘anyone with a smartphone’ duplicate and share the work with no consideration of, or compensation for, its creator.
 
This issue hit home for me recently when I saw this headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Deadman Teaching.”  As a college professor, I know how helpless one can feel in front of class when nothing seems to be going right, but the focus of this piece was quite different.
 
The article described the experience of Aaron Ansuini, a college student who was really enjoying an art history course taught on video by a deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic “bespectacled, gray-haired professor,” François-Marc Gagnon.
 
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During one of the engaging lectures, Ansuini had a question he wanted to ask his instructor, so he searched for the professor’s name online, thinking it would be faster than locating the syllabus on his laptop.  What he found was an obituary--Gagnon had passed away at the age of 83 about two years earlier.
 
Until then, Ansuini and other students had no reason to think that their professor wasn’t still living.  The course syllabus made no mention of his passing, and students had been receiving messages they thought were from Gagnon but must have been from a teaching assistant.
 
Tom Bartlett the author of the Chronicle article, reached out to one of Gagnon’s children, Yakir Gagnon, a researcher at Lund University, in Sweden.  On one hand, the son thought his father would be very happy that his insights were still finding an audience; however, he also wondered about the intellectual property implications and who owned the rights to the work.

As someone who teaches a significant number of classes each week, I can’t help but wonder the same thing: whether ‘digital me’ might keep teaching after my death, but also how copies of my work might be used now without my knowledge or consent.  I also can imagine two main objections to such concerns—one related to relevance and the other to responsibility.  I’ll try to address both:
 
1) Relevance:  A natural reaction might be, I’m not a teacher, so Gagnon’s case doesn’t apply to me.”  However, people in all kinds of occupations write, say, and do instructive things that others will read and watch, if someone digitizes and shares them.
 
For instance, anyone familiar with YouTube knows its abundance of instructive videos, from cooking rice to repairing cars, which often come in convenient five- or ten-minute clips.  Most of the videos are shared with the consent of their creators, but not all, as evidenced in part by many posts that seem prematurely removed.  Some pirated videos likely earn money for others without their owners’ knowledge or consent.
 
2) Responsibility:  Even those who understand that unauthorized sharing can potentially affect anyone may still believe that employers own everything their employees do.  It’s true that in a principal-agent relationship, the agent (employee) has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interest their principal (employer). 
 
In the case of Gagnon, because his university presumably paid him, he (the agent) had a responsibility to do what his principal (the university) required, i.e., to teach art history classes.  If for some reason he didn’t want to do that, he shouldn’t have collected a paycheck.  However, did paying the professor to teach a specific class during a particular semester give his employer the right to use his digitized teaching to instruct other classes, without giving him or his heirs additional compensation?
 

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In the world before hyper-digitization, such obligations were rather clear-cut:  Job performance happened in real-time, largely constrained by a particular place and time.  The introduction of early recording and duplicating devices (e.g., video cameras, copy machines) stretched those boundaries.
 
In the current era of highly-advanced and widely-democratized digital technology, along with broadly-used social media platforms, those boundaries have been blown wide open.  Duplication and sharing anyone’s work, including employees’, is incredibly easy and enticingly convenient.   
 
The questions, then, become what employee work is fair to share digitally, where, and for how long.  Some may suggest that employers hold complete sharing rights during and even after the agent-principal relationship has ended.  Perhaps such broad employer ownership could be justified if agreed to with informed consent, but even then, the agreement would only be fair with appropriate compensation.
 
What is appropriate pay?  It might be a percentage of the present value of projected future earnings from the digitized work.  Or, it could be royalties, or residual income, that accrues whenever the work is shared.  The latter suggestion may seem unreasonable, but there is strong precedent in the form of television actors who are often compensated with royalties for each episode that airs in syndication, or songwriters who earn money every time their music is sold or played.
 
Although some undoubtedly do this, it would be unfair to pay a musician to play a piece once, record the performance without her knowledge, and make money by selling her art without her consent.  But again, even if there is informed consent, people deserved to be fairly compensated for their digitized work when it’s shared and continues to bring in dollars.
 
In a sense, everyone is an artist, creating content that benefits others now and perhaps into the future, if digitized and shared.  Maybe that future will include more robust ownership standards based on blockchain systems for sharing.  The current fervor for nonfungible tokens may be unfounded, but NFTs might be writing a script for more “Mindful Marketing.”


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Recoloring History

3/12/2021

5 Comments

 
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by David Hagenbuch - professor of Marketing at Messiah University -
​author of 
Honorable Influence - founder of Mindful Marketing


February’s Black History Month was an important reminder of the impactful roles people of color have played in our world.  History should be about what actually happened; however, some entertainment has actors playing roles that were really performed by people of other races.  Now a media icon’s popular streaming series is shining a light on such controversial casting.
 
In online entertainment, where content is king, Netflix’s original series Bridgerton, about the lives of Regency-era nobles, has risen above the populace to become a royal success.  Other period pieces like Game of Thrones and The Crown also have shown viewers’ appetites for aristocracy, but Bridgerton is different in one very visible way.
 
Playing the roles of English nobles and others, people of color are many of the series’ leading actors, for instance:  Regé-Jean Page, Ruby Barker, Jason Barnett, Martins Imhangbe, Sandra Teles, Anand Desai-Barochia, and Golda Rosheuvel.  In fact, Rosheuvel plays one of the show’s highest-ranking royals, Queen Charlotte.
 
Although some believe that the real Queen Charlotte “descended from a Portuguese branch of nobility with African ancestry,” even a casual royal-watcher knows that the bloodlines of  English nobles are rather consistently Caucasian.  So, to see persons of color playing the parts of dukes and duchesses is at least surprising, and some might say ‘historically inaccurate.’  Either way, Bridgerton begs the question:
 
Should an actor of one race portray a person of another?



First, it’s important to recognize that Bridgerton is not exactly breaking new ground.  A few months before COVID closed the curtain on live performances, my wife and I had the privilege of visiting Philadelphia and seeing one of the best examples of diverse casting: Hamilton.  The musical mega-hit features many people of color portraying individuals who in reality were white, e.g., George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr.
 
However, actors were crossing racial lines long before Hamilton hit Broadway in 2015.  In fact, it’s easy to find such film examples over the past century, and it’s worth noting that in most cases the roles were reversed, i.e., white actors played either real or fictitious people of color, for example:
 
  1. Angelina Joline as Mariane Pearl in A Might Heart
  2. Ben Affleck as Antonio J. Mendez in Argo
  3. Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson in Elizabeth, Michael, and Marlon
  4. Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  5. Laurence Olivier as Othello in Othello
  6. Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story
  7. Johnny Depp as Tonto in The Lone Ranger
  8. Katharine Hepburn as Jade in Dragon Seed
  9. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in Cleopatra
  10. John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror
 
So, what issues are really at stake when it comes to actors’ racial representations?
 
The most obvious seems to be historical accuracy.  Participants’ personal identities (racial, ethnic, gender, etc.) are important for understanding past events and how they impact us today.  For instance, it would be dishonest to depict WW II’s Tuskegee Airmen as Asian, Hispanic, or white, when almost all the squadron’s aviators were Black.  Doing so also may steal a sense of pride from African Americans today.

However, does that same need for ‘identity accuracy’ apply to entertainment?  Not necessarily.  When we watch a television series, a feature film, or a Broadway show, we know that the actors are not the actual people—it’s a morally-acceptable accommodation that Alec Hill calls “mutual deceits.”  Play-goers understand that Lin-Manuel Miranda is not actually Alexander Hamilton.  They know that he's just pretending to be him for a few hours.
 
The same logical likely applies to Bridgerton.  Even though some of the show’s characters were real people, like Queen Charlotte, it’s okay for people of other races to portray them, because it’s a largely fictional series that viewers know is taking creative liberties and not purporting to be very factual.
 

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However, that artistic license shouldn’t be wielded with impunity.  There still need to be standards, particularly related to portraying people in ways that reasonably represent who they are or were.
 
If an actor ever played me in a movie, which will certainly never happen, I’d be less concerned that the actor looked like me and more concerned that he acted like me.  No one alive or deceased deserves to have their character defamed, which is an issue I’ve written about on several other occasions:
  • Dignity for the Deceased
  • I Have a Sale?
  • Live Streaming Funerals
  • Why Negative Political Advertising Works & What Can Stop It
 
Accuracy consistent with the nature of the artistic creation (e.g., comedy vs. drama) is certainly important, but two other race-related factors also deserve consideration:  
  • Opportunities:  While it’s convenient to conclude that white actors can portray people of color and vice versa, that generalization fails to account for centuries of discrimination that have often kept from racial minorities opportunities afforded others, including work in acting.  To help overcome that historical disparity, a case can be made that persons of color should receive added consideration for acting roles.
  • Representation:  Similarly, it’s encouraging for people of any race, ethnicity, or gender to see themselves represented in desirable occupations.  Acting is such a profession for many, but even more, actors paint pictures of career possibilities with each profession they portray, from A–accountants to Z–zookeepers.
 
Realizing that my own background and identity influence my thoughts on this issue, I asked an astute student of mine, Mikayla Broome, who is a person of color, to share her perspective.  Not surprising, she offered insights that hadn’t occurred to me. 
 
Mikayla first disclaimed that while Bridgerton seemed intriguing, her impressions of the show came mainly from seeing its trailer.  She hadn’t watched any episodes because of their graphic sexual content—a good call that may be reason for future Mindful Marketing analysis.
 
In addition, she suggested that although she understood others’ affection for the show’s racial diversity, the setting in Regency-era England made the series seem "unrealistic" to her.  In keeping with that sentiment, she would “have no problem with white actors depicting the characters.”  She emphasized that was her personal opinion and she respected those whose attitudes differed.
 
Each of these reflections were instructive to me, but it was something else Mikayla shared that I found especially enlightening:
 
“I would be much more interested in a show depicting the lives of people of color in their own culture . . . like the royalty in Benin, Nigeria, the Tang dynasty in China, the Gupta dynasty in India, or Arsinoe the princess of Egypt.  People of color love to see themselves represented on the big screen with cultural accuracy. We have such rich histories that I see no need to insert us into stories that are not ours.”
 

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Again, Mikayla emphasized that her personal opinion didn’t negate the potential value of diverse casting like that described above.  However, she rightly suggested that the bar should be set higher.
 
In the category of fiction, Disney has taken significant diversity strides with feature films like Mulan, Moana, and Coco.  However, there also are so many inspiring stories to tell of real-life heroes from underrepresented people groups, such as those shared in Hidden Figures, The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind, and a Ballerina’s Tale—a documentary about Misty Copeland, the first black female principal dancer of a major international ballet company.

One might think that films featuring real-life diversity are kind-hearted charity works that do good socially but not well financially.  According to research by UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers, that characterization is not the case.  In analyzing 100 films released from 2016 to 2019, the study found that “films with diverse characters and authentic stories actually make more money at the box office.”

Interestingly, Mikayla is double-major in Dance and Business Administration.  Perhaps her future will in some way involve bringing to light real-life stories of underrepresented people.
 

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Lives are stories that intertwine to create a rich tapestry of tales that marketers and others need to tell well.  At the same time, they should seek opportunities to share more real-life stories born from backgrounds of diversity.
 
In entertainment, it’s sometimes okay to recolor history, but it’s even better to depict individuals and events just as they were.  Regardless how one might classify Bridgerton, true stories told accurately are more often “Mindful Marketing.”


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    David Hagenbuch,
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