MURKETING

Oklahoma City to overweight residents: Eat at Taco Bell

QSR Magazine:

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett joined Taco Bell President Greg Creed today at the Taco Bell restaurant on 13920 North May Avenue to announce a unique partnership in support of the OKC Million Challenge. Beginning today, Taco Bell’s Fresco Menu, offering 9 items with less than 9 grams of fat, will become the Official Menu of the Mayor’s Challenge.

The Grinder wonders:

Do we really need democratically elected governments signing endorsement deals with internationally franchised restaurant megachains?

Obama & Fitch coverage

So, as clever readers may have figured out already, I’m not really around the Murketing HQ this week, I’m “on the road,” as they say. Today, in my hotel room, I’m watching the endless loop of Obama and Clinton clips, with the sound down, and I get interested in this one Obama clip, because this one kid behind him is wearing a T-shirt that catches my eye, and as I look harder I realize that there are three frat-looking white dudes behind him all wearing Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts. I think: Weird.

When I finally get a minute to Google, I see that of course it’s been noticed by the trad press (online), and the blognoscenti.

USA Today (online) says:

We just spoke with Tom Lennox, an A&F spokesman. “I guarantee and assure you it’s not” a product placement, he said. The company was as surprised as anyone to see the three guys, Lennox added.

This is a good example of what I hate and love and hate about the Web. On the one hand, I am annoyed that my observation is already played out. On the other hand, I am pleased that others have noticed this and are on the case. On the third hand, this is just kind of triviality that the Web is best at, but I can’t really condemn anyone else for being obsessed with triviality, because I was too.

So there you have it. All I need now is a comment telling me I’m really late on this. Anybody?

What’s murketing? One answer in two parts

Murketing, a driving theme of Buying In, is derived from the words murky and marketing. The term refers to the blurring of the line that used to separate commercial persuasion and everyday life. That plays out in a number of ways (thus it takes a book to really spell it out) but here are a couple of recent examples that have crossed my desk that suggest at least one aspect of what I mean by “murketing.”

1. Friend of Murketing.com loud paper recently dropped me a note with the picture at right, which she snapped near Port Authority. At first, she suggests, she thought maybe this was an art project, playing with the form of the missing-person/lost pet flier.

Ah, but no. It says: “Last seen while waiting for Claritin to start working.” And if you note the number on the pull-off tags along the bottom: the 800 number ends in ZYRTEC. That, of course, turns out to be a rival allergy-fighting drug.

So that’s one example.

2. This morning, other friend of Murketing.com (and I think friend of loudpaper, if I remember right) Braulio sent along this LiveScience item about a company called Flogos. The Flogos site is pretty blunt. It’s two “inventors” who “wondered what would happen if we made clouds into shapes,” and then apparently made the leap to: “What if we can make logos?” Well, then you might just get paid, that’s what!

These clouds are actually a mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium, something like what you’d get if you married helium balloons with the solutions that kids use to blow bubbles from plastic wands.

The company uses re-purposed artificial snow machines to generate the floating ads and messages, dubbed Flogos. The machines can pop one Flogo out every 15 seconds, flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500.

So that’s an other example. If you’re curious what the real after-effects of the consumer-“empowering” DVR revolution will be, well, my guess is it’s a whole lot more stuff like this.

A whole lot more murketing.

[Thanks loud paper & Braulio — I hope it wasn’t presumptuous to call you “friends” of Murketing.com!]

Nothing says true love like a year’s supply of deodorant

Definitely the promotional contest of the week:

GroomGroove.com and Gillette Clinical Strength, made by Procter & Gamble, are searching for the best marriage proposal.

Contestants can enter the “She Said Yes” contest at the site through April 21 by submitting a 30-to-350-word story. One winner will receive a year’s supply of the new antiperspirant and $1,000 in cash.

Among other things, I’m amused at the linkage of “clinical strength antiperspirant” with weddings. Certainly it’s true that an overly sweaty groom is usually a bad sign.

Via Promo Magazine.

Annals of Murketing: Scion’s cameo in phony ad starring talking rump

On her blog Ex-Files, Brandweek‘s Becky Ebenkamp reports:

To target young adults, Turner’s Adult Swim has developed a mock commercial with ad partner Scion for the second season of its show Assy McGee, which premieres April 6. After the first half of each episode, Assy stars in a 35-second animated ad set at a car lot and offers viewers “low, low prices” for the Scion xB.

Here’s a link to the faux ad. It goes right to the video, so if you’re at work, you might want to make sure no one’s going to walk by and see or hear it.

Now, if you watch it, you might question the wisdom of Scion putting its brand in this situation. Assy McGee is basically a walking naked rear end, with a cowboy hat and a gun. He/it makes exactly the sounds you would expect a walking rear end to make. Also a guy gets his shot off. Pretty crass stuff, etc. And while I would like to get through this item without using the phrase “butt of a joke,” I’ve actually just now failed, because it’s hard not to think of Scion being exactly that.

But think again, my friends. I say this “placement,” or whatever you want to call it, makes perfect sense, and is an excellent example of the murky marketing (murketing yes) of the future.

For starters, you can’t TiVo it and all that. Obvious. And a fine example of what the future holds, which may or may not include fewer 30-second spots, will absolutely include more and more deals like this get corporate dough by putting the commercial message inside the show. Get used to it. This is in essence part of the show. If you miss it, you miss a chance to laugh. And I’m sorry to say it, but I laughed.

Second, Adult Swim programming (subject of 1/18/04 Consumed) has a collegey audience that will also probably be amused, and that is precisely Scion’s alleged target. Won’t they think less of the brand for being sorta-kinda mocked? I doubt it. In fact, as this memorable Brandweek piece noted back in 2006, there’s precedent for brands paying to be made fun of — as long as it happens within the show.

Third, I say young people are Scion’s “alleged” target because I’m well aware that Scion doesn’t just sell cars to young people. (Scion comes up in Buying In, and yeah I’m gonna mention Buying In almost constantly, so get used to that too.) Plenty of non-young people, who might well be appalled to see their brand of car in this context, have bought Scions. But guess what? None of those people will see this ad, because they don’t watch Adult Swim.

Update April 4: AdFreak points out that Scion has actually made a deal to be the exclusive sponsor of Assy McGee. Just so you know.

Further (failed) experiments in TiVo-proof advertising

While I normally enjoy The Hater, today I’m annoyed: I had managed to live in happy ignorance of the Alicia Keys “minisode” series on behalf of Dove until now. Not only that, I watched the trailer. Apparently what comes after decades of annoying ads punctuating vapid TV series is a seamless blend of these varying forms of awfulness, toggling back and forth one to the other so that you cannot tell whether you are hating the entertainment or hating the ads. Hater says:

Now I have to be grateful that every commercial isn’t a 5-minute long tiny sitcom about Alicia Keys and company navigating their early 20s in the big city with the help of friendship and Dove deodorant? Thanks, Dove. The bar is so low now it’s underground.

That’s funny. But not funny enough. So if you’d like your day ruined, too: here.

Requiem for a taste-maker

If there’s been much reaction to the short story “Raj, Bohemiam,” by Hari Kunzru, on the various taste-maker, buzz-creator, cool-ness blogs, I’ve missed it. And that’s a surprise: Given that William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is such a touchstone in the world, you’d figure a fresh piece of fiction published in The New Yorker and set at the crossroads of cultural capital and commercial persuasion would get some attention.

If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you should read it. The narrator/protagonist is a certified Cool Guy plunged into existential crisis by an encounter with a fellow party-goer with some excellent vodka and a camera phone.

What was a personality if it wasn’t a drop-down menu, a collection of likes and dislikes? And now that my possessions were gone, what would I put in their place? Who was I without my private pressings, my limited editions, my vintage one-offs? How could I signal to potential allies across the vast black reaches of interpersonal space?

Upbeat? Well, no. Good read, though. Here’s the link.

(Big thanks to Brian K. for the tip!)

SX$W

I’ve been wanting to use that headline all week.

My excuse is this Wall Street Journal piece about a squabble between the music festival, and encroaching brand-promoters doing private events. Some are invite-only, meaning that your $650 all-access badge won’t get you into. Others are free and open to all — no pricey badge required. Both scenarios are an annoyance to festival organizers.

The festival now has deep-pocketed sponsors … including Citigroup Inc., Miller Lite and Dell Inc. They pay between $100,000 and $200,000 each in exchange for having their logos plastered around town.

One concern among SXSW organizers is that as more bands play outside events, music lovers could have less reason to pay for the festival itself. The parties also represent competition for sponsorship dollars and venues. For instance, one unaffiliated concert is sponsored by Tecate and Dos Equis beers.

The festival organizers’ responses to this have included calling in the fire marshall, and of course litigation.

Hopefully AdPulp, who I believe is still on the ground in Austin, will weigh in on this matter.

Q&A: Glennz: A Threadless star goes solo

A few weeks back I noted that Glenn Jones – a Threadless star I first interviewed for a July 8, 2007 column on the famous T-shirt company; he’s had 20 T’s produced via its contest system – had announced he was leaving his day job to do his own thing. He’d started selling some greeting cards and prints, but it seemed obvious that before too long he’d be bringing out some T’s.

And now, he is. GlennzTees.com has just launched. Seemed to make sense to use the occasion to ask Mr. Jones a few Q’s. Here they are, with his A’s.

So what are the basics of the new project? I gather it’s six designs to start, will they be sold mostly online, or retail, or some combo?

Well, as you know I’ve been submitting designs to Threadless for a few years now, and I’ve had a lot of designs that scored pretty highly but weren’t winners. That’s led to a lot of requests from people over the years for me to make available t-shirts of some of those unreleased designs.

So I’ve taken four of my more popular unprinted designs, like Rock Me Amadeus, and refined them taking advantage of more colours I’ve got available to me now. Plus I’ve added a couple of new designs that haven’t been seen before.

For now these will just be available at GlennzTees.com.

You mentioned to me that you’re working with some folks in Austin, TX on this. And they got in touch with you via Threadless? So who are they, and when did they get in touch? How did this come about, in other words? Read more

Bands and brands

Speaking of the whole SXSW thing, catching up when I got home yesterday I enjoyed this story in the WSJ about the hunt for bands to use in ads and videogames and so on. And today AdPulp notes this Ad Age piece noting that “Rock’s anti-corporate ethos has softened in recent years (read: totally disappeared in the case of most artists).” Both pieces are worth a read.

(For what it’s worth, the WSJ story includes a KCRW DJ who also picks songs for various TV shows and so on; I’ve written about KCRW in Consumed (January 23, 2005), and earlier with a particular focus on DJs involved in the music director biz for shows, movies, and ads here.)

Murketing in history: How Annie “Londonderry” got her name

Annie Kopchovsky …  was a Latvian immigrant living in a tenement in Boston with her husband and three young children. Spying the unlikeliest of business opportunities for someone in her position, she boasted to the press that she intended to bicycle around the globe in fifteen months, raising money for her journey along the way. …

By the time she left Boston in 1895, Kopchovsky had attracted enough attention that the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company paid her $100 to adopt the surname “Londonderry” for the duration of her trip.

Q&A with the author of a new book about Kopchovsky/Londonderry is here.

[Thanks Sara!]

Shaking Polaroid

Before this site existed, I did an occasional email newsletter called The Journal of Murketing. (I still do an email newsletter, actually, but it’s different than the old one.) In a December 2003 edition of the old J of M, I had this item:

[ ] The current hit song “Hey Ya,” by Outkast, and its video, are probably the best boost for the not-so-cutting-edge Polaroid brand in ages. “Shake it like a Polaroid picture,” goes a key lyric, and the video includes scenes of mass Polaroid-waving. Even when this kind of thing happens organically, you can count on branders to pounce, and Adweek reports that Polaroid marketers are now developing (chortle) a scheme “to build on the song’s popularity and channel that into a guerrilla campaign.” The idea is to get Outkast to use the cameras onstage, and to put cameras “into the hands of ‘Polarazzi.'” This fictitious class of people is of course made up of celebrities and under-30 “trendsetters.” “The plan,” writes Adweek, “is to hit high-profile events on New Year’s Eve as part of ‘The Polaroid Ambush.'” And its goal is to get consumers to use the cameras in “real, natural ways,” which apparently is always something that’s best accomplished through just this sort of transparent gimmickry.

I guess this scheme did not rebuild Polaroid after all. As you know, the company recently said it would stop making the last iterations of its instant film. (Also: A couple months after the above, Polaroid put out a statement saying actually you should not shake a Polaroid picture: “Shaking or waving can actually damage the image.”)

Anyway: Will you miss Polaroid? Brand Autopsy is asking.

Express yourself … or whoever

One of my favorite topics is the flipside of the supposed confessional, privacy-indifferent nature of Web expression: The amount of Web expression that is not only un-confessional, it’s somewhere between self-marketing and flat-out lying. So this story in today’s WSJ about people who crib from the profiles of others on social networking or dating sites made my day:

Online daters feel pressure to stand out and believe they must sell themselves like a product, say researchers at Georgetown, Rutgers and Michigan State universities who are conducting a joint study of them. “You are not making money off of somebody else’s work; you’re just trying to market yourself,” says self-confessed copier Jeff Picazio, a 40-year-old computer-systems manager in Boynton Beach, Fla.

Businesses have even cropped up to sell people elemements of a marketable personality. One, the WSJ says, “offers 12 ‘proven’ profiles for $4. Sample: ‘There is a shallowness, a fakeness to much of the “‘singles scene.”‘”

Worth reading.  

Real and fake and imaginary and authentic

A couple of interesting things in this Metropolis slideshow on “The Unreal World.” For instance, while it’s no surprise that you can hang out at an H/M store in The Sims, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that “the latest edition of Sim City Societies challenges players to ­create a green society by using alternative energy sources.” Is it good news that we may be on our way to tackling global warming in an imaginary world?

Also: Herman Miller “now offers Second Life members a collection of virtually rendered authorized editions of some of its best-known pieces.” Big deal, right? But this is what I like: The company “will make most of these new designs available for free to users who purchased virtual knockoffs. … from unauthorized sellers.”

That’s fantastic! If you’re going to have a representation of Herman Miller chair in a virtual world, you better make sure it’s, um, authentic. Make sure all your fake things are the real thing!

And finally, Fabjectory, which makes physical representations of avatars, for a fee.

FYI: Guy living in Ikea for a week

According to aptly named website Mark Lives In Ikea:

Comediean/Filmmaker Mark Malkoff’s New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

I don’t think it’s all that surprising. Perfect example of co-promotion.

Site says he “moved in” today and will be there through Saturday. Posting videos, etc.

Via Coudal.