Social and Cultural Factors Collide at HRC Dinner

Outspoken gay rights supporter Lady Gaga, one of 2008-2009's biggest and brightest pop musicians, performed a cover of John Lennon's classic ballad "Imagine" at this year's Human Rights Campaign Dinner. There has already been a post about the HRC Dinner and President Obama's encouraging speech, but we felt compelled to note Gaga's appearance/performance as an excellent example of meshing social and cultural trends.

In the post containing our large scale graph, we talk about increased celebrity involvement in the gay rights movement as a potential cause of charted trends. American fame culture and the kind of publicity that a figure like Lady Gaga garners are undoubtedly influential in shaping opinions of consumers, particularly in the younger demographics where the public has a more flexible world view.

Just some food for thought!

THE Large Scale Graph

Here is our large scale graph, a visual representation of social/cultural trends in the present. We chose to base social and cultural trends off of data that is indicative of the general social mood and cultural values throughout the past four years (2006-2009). The factors we chose to track were number of movie tickets sold per year (to comedy films, the most popular genre overall), number of CDs sold (rock), number of new hybrid cars on the road per year, and number of equal rights states laws passed per year. It should be noted that data for 2009 is incomplete, as the year is still in progress.



What triggered the trends:

Recession, less disposable income, more digital downloads, desire for convenience/instant gratification, shifts in political power, progression/growth in popularity of the green movement, increase in celebrity involvement in gay rights movement, etc.

Hidden Currents/What Forecasters Missed:

Forecasters were accurate in their predictions because they alone were able to recognize the effect the economic downturn would have in terms of consumer behavior and values. They based their forecast on the continuation of steady/consistent trends (i.e. CD sales are consistently dropping from year to year), as the past 4 years haven't had many wild cards to take us off the track we've been on.

Sources:

USA Today
New York Times
TV Ratings
Neilsen Rankings
The Big Picture
Nielsen Billboard Blog
The Numbers - Movie Market Summary
Album Sales
Billboard
Human Rights Campaign
HybridCars.com