Annette Cardwell: This One Time At Computer Camp...

Grew up in Martinsville, Virginia, which is home of the oldest NASCAR track in the country — just to give you a sense of the type of people I grew up with. Grew up Southern Baptist, very religious from like all my years up until I left home.

That’s Annette Cardwell.

Annette is the VP of brand and corporate marketing at Lattice. But where she works and why she’s a brilliant marketer doesn’t matter.

Instead, I want you to picture a token Asian kid in rural Virginia with little to no access to the pop culture that weaves a hidden tapestry connecting us all. 

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I did not have access to a ton of media. Like, I didn't have access to a lot of music or movies or TV 'cause, when I was really young, we had one TV in our house. It was very old. It got one station and it was CBS, which is not even the good network. I think I got hooked on Dukes of Hazard as a result of that and like Dallas.

I was too broke to go to the movies and my mom never wanted to take me 'cause she didn't wanna spend money on it. And music was what was on the radio because my mom, she didn't value music at all.

If you grew up with unfettered access to media, it might be hard to fathom how this lack of exposure could have any measurable impact on someone's quality of life. I know I couldn't — until I heard Annette's story. 

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I was in middle school and I was trying desperately to fit in where everybody was white or black. I think around seventh or eighth grade is when it really hit home to me. Oh! The reason why they treat you differently is not because you’re necessarily just poor or whatever — it’s ‘cause you’re not white, you’re not black. You are the only one.

And so I was going through this crisis of identify in that era, where I was just trying to figure out how I was going to fit in.

To understand this moment of revelation better, it helps to understand that Annette's mother was a product of her environment. She was a single mother, born and raised in Japan, now living in rural Virginia, working in a factory and raising a child all on her own.

With so much resting on her mother's shoulders, it made sense for her to adopt their town and its predominantly white Christian community as her own. But it was an act that conditioned Annette to think of herself not as Asian but white.

Once the illusion was shattered, however, Annette sought an opportunity to discover her true identify. 

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I definitely remember when I was at computer camp — that’s some shit — in seventh grade. There were all these boys and nine girls at this computer camp that was like 300 people or something. And it was nine girls and we all were in like one floor.

And so I actually went away to computer camp and tried to create a persona. Like I said, my nickname was Ann, and it was like, oh, nobody's gonna know me. I'm just gonna go to computer camp and be another person.

And of course like it was like just a huge failure because everybody was calling me Anne and I didn't know who they were talking to. Like, it was like not responding to anything that people were saying to me.

But I remember one night we did a movie at this camp and it was Empire Strikes Back.

Close your eyes and put yourself in Annette’s shoes for a moment. 

You’ve spent your entire childhood feeling isolated. You don’t look like anybody else and you sure as hell don’t get the pop culture references they’re mentioning — they might as well be a foreign language. 

Suddenly, you’re witnessing 300 kids go from being mostly strangers to seemingly best pals — because it’s movie night at computer camp, and they’re showing the most widely recognized and referenced media franchise in human history.

And it’s there — beneath the reenactments of lightsaber duels and prepubescent impressions Yoda — that the cheat code to building relationships that transcend geographical, cultural, and social-economic boundaries reveals itself. 

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After I came back from that, I started to notice how there were these common threads across lots and lots of people. And Star Wars is one, obviously, because even in the town where I grew up, people were obsessed with Star Wars.

I remember Monty Python was one — the deep nerds at school, we could quote Monty Python.

And then like, new wave music became one because there were so few of us we thought it was our own precious fucking thing. I remember hanging out with those people and we would just listen to records and tapes, and make mixed tapes together of new wave music.

I became really close friends with my best friend in high school because I got into Pink Floyd because she was into Pink Floyd. And I never worked harder to learn something, right? That was like our thing. Like that was our bond. And like we had nothing else in common, but we could bond on that.

Annette had discovered a force that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds us together. And like Luke Skywalker, she learned to wield it — just before starting high school, where pop culture references are a bona fide social currency exchanged for inclusion.

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And like honestly, this is all translated into my life since, Ronnie.

Even as a marketer, I understand building fans is like your number one way to like gain audience and mind share and share voice and all those things.

Like if you have fans, if you have loyalists, they become your evangelists. They become your customer stories. It was just so critical to me understanding that we all seek those common threads. We all seek those shared loves and experiences. It just immediately makes you think: Oh, that person gets me!

So like even today, when I'm talking to a freaking HR leader who loves Lattice and they meet another HR leader that loves Lattice, they're just like, “Oh, we should talk! We like, 'cause you see the world the way I see it.”

And like Star Wars fans think that way. Trekkies think that way. New wave and Cure fans think that way. Fans of Anne Rice think that way. And it's like, you know, when you get into a fan community, it's the same, it's the same vibe. It's incredible. Like, oh, you get me.

As marketers we often approach content and media with a transactional mindset. We think of our content as a means to an end — whether it be a follower, a subscriber, a lead, or a customer. 

But out in the real world, away from the marketing echo chamber, media predates the existence of our professions. 

And as Annette's story reminds us, media plays a profound role in connecting us. It demonstrates that despite any differences in background being part of a broader fandom can create a sense of belonging and community. Our shared tastes and interests become the lattice work for navigating the ambiguity and act as a shortcut to understanding one another.

Until next time…

♥️ Ronnie

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