There’s been some heated discussion about Disney’s 4 billion dollar acquisition of Marvel. It makes some sense for the feature film division. Even though Marvel licensed some of their best-known characters to other studios, last years’ Iron Man was quite successful and is still wholly controlled by Marvel. No doubt Disney anticipates profits from the Iron Man sequels.

More exciting for fans is the prospect that Pixar’s John Lasseter, recently given the keys to Disney’s entire animation operation, may choose to develop some of Marvel’s lesser-known characters. With talent like Lasseter in the mix, I don’t think Disney’s going to sanitize Marvel’s ethos.

The acquisition of Marvel makes even more sense for Disney’s television business, which recently launched the Disney XD channel. With DXD Disney Media Networks aims to expand its phenomenal success with tween girls to boys. The channel already carries lots of animation (including the brilliant Phineas and Ferb that is produced in-house), and plenty of the superhero kind; so it makes sense that Disney would want to own one of the major creative brands that is so appealing to its new target audience.

Control seems to be especially important because Disney operates in terms of what they call ‘franchises’ – characters (or personalities) that can be exploited across the entire range of media that Disney controls. Disney Channel’s current stars, like Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus), can reach audiences through film, television, sound recordings, Disney radio, web sites, concert appearances at Disney theme parks, and so on down to lunchboxes and paper napkins. And, increasingly, the appeal of Disney franchises is global. In order to orchestrate this dizzying matrix of cross-media promotion, and in order to protect the Disney brand, ownership of all the creative assets seems to be preferred.

At least that’s the impression that I got this August when I had the chance to hear many of Disney Channels’ top execs speak. I attended the IRTS Foundation’s Impact Summit in Burbank. Joyce Tudryn, President and CEO of IRTS, invited a group of about fifty educators in to learn about Disney’s diversity and internship programs. It was a pretty impressive show. I’m not likely to ever see so many successful execs talking about their work again. And talk they did – almost twenty hours of presentations over a two-day period. I came away somewhat better informed about their business and frankly dazzled by the professionalism of the Disney team. I also had a chance to brush up against their corporate culture, which was the most interesting part of it.

Grant McCracken has a great post up about the Disney – Marvel deal as a coming merger of corporate cultures. Sunny, mainstream Disney hooks up with dark, edgy Marvel… are there bound to be problems in this relationship? Grant suggests that the two parties might benefit from the kind of cultural interpretation and translation that anthropologists can offer.

The differences of the corporate culture are subtle and deeply embedded. Indeed they are so deeply buried they are impossible to see. You cannot see them just by looking, anymore than you can work out the grammar of a speech just by speaking. No, the thing to do is send in a team for anthropologist who will dig out these assumptions, logics and subroutines (to say nothing of the mixed metaphors) and (wait for it) build a translation table for the two companies.

Now I think it would be premature to assume that Disney will neuter Marvel, as one commenter suggested. It’s a mistake to try to read the corporate culture off from the brand. Grant’s right; cultural interpretation isn’t an obvious thing. It certainly can’t be done from behind a laptop and so ‘sending in the team’ is really the only way to get a sense of a culture. I don’t know anything about the culture at Marvel, however I had a glimpse of Disney this summer. After reading Grant’s piece I pulled out my notepad from the summit and found a few notes to develop on here.

Subtle hierarchies.

I teach at a couple of state colleges. I’m not used to overt vertical hierarchies. Perhaps any corporate structure would strike me as constrictive. It certainly felt so at Disney. Top execs were presented with the exaggerated deference shown to royalty. I had the impression that subordinates, who were powerful in their own right, practically had to make a show of fealty. Sometimes our own lack of status within the corporation was funny; we were asked at the beginning of the day to refrain from pitching story ideas to the executives (seriously). On a couple of occasions the presenters seemed slightly taken aback by our sometimes naïve and sometimes direct questions. Clearly we were not schooled in the corporate culture. Those with power in the hierarchy cultivate the impression that they are just plain folks. But those around them make them shine like the Sun King. I’m not too sure how this would go down with some of the quirkier creatives at Marvel…

Brand loyalists.

For the execs at Disney Channel, the brand is sacred. They would fall on a grenade to protect the brand. Allegiance to the Brand Promise was often pledged. They would not let us use recorders and I failed to take the whole thing down. However I jotted:

• Give the kids what they want: “relatable” characters; a “resonant theme”; featuring “kids’ milestones”.
• Give the moms what they want: constructive programs that help little kids grow and “positive” entertainment for tweens and teens.

Those who spoke from the creative side were sincerely on-board with the brand promise. Eric Coleman (a recent arrival from rival Nickelodeon where he produced SpongeBob SquarePants) made mention of the limitations imposed by the brand as if to say “we make good and interesting content AND we uphold the brand”. When Steven Vincent, VP of Music and Soundtracks and architect of the sound of High School Musical says “there’s no shortage of negativity in popular music” you’d think that Sunny Mainstream is an untapped vein in pop culture. People that do well at Disney seem to have, shall we say, no need to break with convention. On the other hand the best of them, like Coleman, and Dan Povenmire and Jeff ‘Swampy’ Marsh (creators of Phineas and Ferb) find ways to be original and exciting without riling Standards and Practices.

A differentiated organism

It’s probably just as big a mistake to read the corporate culture off of a CEO’s personal style. Disney/ABC TV President Anne Sweeney is obviously a nice person as well as a brilliant entertainment exec. VP Casting and Talent Relations Judy Taylor was the typical talent shepherd, attentive, gossipy, quirky. Adam Bonnett SVP Original Series for Disney Channel and Ron Pomerantz VP Creative Director for Disney Channel were both kind of edgy, which is understandable given what they do – make creative choices on series (or promos in Pomerantz’s case) that they must justify to (literally) dozens of very opinionated executives. Every week all the division execs meet for a breakfast meeting where they present their latest and greatest for a group critique. (I don’t think I could eat much under such circumstances). That’s a pretty strong mechanism for enforcing corporate policy. My wider point is – where does the organization’s culture originate? Certainly the CEO has great influence, but rituals such as these shape (and bend?) the powerful individual personalities that make up the division. You could say well it’s the CEO that installs the mechanisms and you might be right, but let’s not forget about the way that practices carry over from one regime to another, a kind of cultural memory.

Market-driven creativity

My favorite quote from the Summit: SVP/Radio Disney GM Michael Riley says “we are systematic about applying creativity.” This clashes with some cherished cultural assumptions about creativity and the autonomous individual Artist. Or, for that matter, other assumptions about the Artist as empty vessel touched by grace. Riley (a canuck, bless him) has an industrial model of creativity native to the audio-visual industries. How well will that go over with the creatives at Marvel? (I mean those that pen graphic novels). How industrial is the culture over there – I have no idea.

However at Disney, this model is firmly established. There is certainly a stage in any project in which intuition and gut instinct are involved (quite possibly an executive’s intuition). Then, creativity is applied until the executive suite thinks that the product at least has a chance. Then, the product is tested and more creativity is applied if necessary.
Apparently, everything is tested. Research is ubiquitous. Along with testing pilots in front of audiences, Disney does shop-alongs, hidden cameras in cars (for radio), consumer ethnography in kids’ homes etc. to try to monitor trends. Research is conducted in different parts of the world too. Some of the Summit’s most entertaining moments were in VP Brand Research Kelly Pena’s sizzle reel.

I don’t want to make an issue of this, especially because I thought the Disney researchers seemed to be very good at this kind of market research, but my bias leads me to wonder how much this research actually influences executive decisions. They call it ethnography, but it’s not anthropology. I had the impression that the research could be an elaborate justification for doing the same thing that Disney has always done. An exercise in reinventing the wheel.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps some part of the motivation for this 4 billion dollar bet originated in the bedroom of a twelve-year old boy in Manhasset or Bel Air. Roll the tape as our subject talks about his trophies. Executive Note: They like sports (good, we’ve got ESPN). The camera sweeps across his bedroom wall and lingers on a Cheetah Girls poster. Executive Note: hmmm (great, they cross over!). We dive into the back of his closet and find – Wolverine comics! Executive Note: Buy that company!

Synergy

Synergy is a dreadful buzz word. At Disney, it means that the many channels work together to cross promote properties. Demi Lovato’s new single will be played on Radio Disney, she’ll ‘drop by’ the studio when she’s in L.A. She’ll do concerts at the theme park, and guest appearances on the TV shows, etc. etc. Executives work very hard to capitalize on opportunities of this type. They also work hard at explaining to each other the priorities associated with their particular channels. Radio is looking to build particular songs and maximize their ratings; whatever Radio does for the TV channel has to work with their strategy too.
So synergy is definitely not routine. It is dynamic, taking advantage of opportunities that arise that are often unpredictable. It is entrepreneurial and requires creative and dedicated people to pull it off. The stories that the executive team most enjoys telling are stories about pulling together spur-of-the-moment media events that capitalize on such opportunities. Above all synergy involves negotiation, team-work and communication across functions. Disney is right to be proud of how they ‘do’ synergy, and they are practically unique in the number of channels that they can mobilize in synergy. The S-word has been bandied about in discussions of the Disney-Marvel merger. Can they bring this important part of their culture to Marvel? We don’t know.

By all means send in the teams. I wonder if these notes would be helpful?  By the way, I would love to go. I had a great time observing all this at the Impact Summit. And I need a job!

Thanks to Joyce Tudryn at IRTS Foundation Inc. and Frank Gonzalez and Mr. Robert Mendez at Disney/ABC Television Group, as well as all the executives that presented at the Impact Summit. They were the most gracious hosts one could have.