So the WSJ has a story today about Wes Anderson’s short film, to be released via iTunes later this week, that’s sort of related to his next feature, opening this weekend. Amid all the implicationizing about technology and marketing and so on, I think it’s safe to say that the key phrase in the article is: “The short co-stars Natalie Portman, who appears in an extended nude scene.”
Okay, well, now, that’s probably going to get some attention.
Further research, conducted strictly on behalf of you, the Murketing reader, leads to this Time Out article, which describes the short film.
The WSJ piece says that the short will be distributed free on iTunes, and I guess I’m kind of wondering how they’re going to do that without getting some, you know, complaints from the various cultural voices who tend to oppose things like the widespread distribution of “extended nude scenes.”
[Update: I see now that Peter Kafka is ahead of me on the point about the soundness of the marketing strategy.]
New from the ever-astonishing KAWS. He did this for/with Lucas Films, and it’ll be on sale in his Japan boutique soon, if you’re in a position to do anything with that information. I was just talking to somebody about Star Wars fandom the other day. I was into it for the first three movies, but never could get interested in the more recent stuff. Still, I had way too many Star Wars action figures not to appreciate the coming-full-circle nature of this particular item.
How small can an idea be, and still gain what at least appears to be cultural traction?
The answer is incredibly small. So small that we don’t even bother to attach a name to the person at the center of such an idea. We just call these people “[fill-in-the-blank] guy.” The two present examples are “Leave Britney Alone Guy,” and “Don’t Tase Me Guy.” In keeping with the rules of the game, I will not bother with actual names here, since it doesn’t matter.
Leave Britney Alone Guy is, of course, some guy. He made a YouTube video in which he offered a “tear-filled defense of Britney Spears.” Allegedly, he has a “large Net audience” that has made him “a darling of the mainstream media.” Also, he now has “a development deal.” Variety.com says: “Plan is to develop a docusoap built around Crocker, a 19-year-old who lives with his grandparents in Tennessee.”
Meanwhile, there’s Don’t Tase Me Guy. Again, this is some guy. This guy apparently said “Don’t tase me, bro,” while being tased at a John Kerry event. In an example of the kind of current-event product-making (“spinning products off events, or even off what the historian Daniel Boorstin called pseudo-events”) that I wrote about a while back in this Consumed, someone is selling related T-shirts. I would say the main change since that June 2006 column is that the threshold for just how pseudo an event can be before someone pronounces it a phenomenon and at least attempts to commodize it, continues to get lower.
[Update: I missed this earlier, but Adfreak prefers a different Tase Guy T.]
I should disclose that I haven’t bothered to watch any of the related YouTube videos; I’m operating on the Snakes on a Plane theory that once you “get” the phrase, you don’t have to bother with whatever cultural artifact the phrase supposedly refers to. I suggest you do the same. If you waste time actually watching Leave Britney Alone Guy, you may be several minutes late in hearing about Whoever Comes Next Guy.
Several scenes in the most recent Mad Men rated as either interesting, highly pleasing, or both. The most pleasing was the afternoon work party at a local bar, particularly the moment when all the ladies squealed when “The Twist” came up on the jukebox. It’s such a spontaneous moment of joy, it makes you wish you’d been young in 1960. Then again, it’s just a TV show, so who knows.
One of the interesting scenes was un-hero Don’s steamrolling of clients in a pitch meeting. The geezer running the cosmetics company client seems skeptical of the creative direction the ad men have come up with, and Don basically says: You’re a loser, get a clue, and until you get a clue, get out of my face. The geezer rolls over and does what he’s told.
I was once in a pitch meeting with a very hot ad firm presenting ideas to a very cold company. I assume the dynamic in such moments is never what it would be if there weren’t a reporter sitting there, but here’s how things were similar, and different. One difference is that nobody wore a suit: The sartorial power-signifier uniform was premium denim, worn basically by everybody but me. Another difference was an absolute lack of argument. The main similarity, however, was that the ad firm dominated the meeting in every meaningful way. There was some guarded skepticism, but no real objection to even the nuttiest ideas. The power, in that meeting as in Mad Men was with the agency (albeit in a different way).
Much of the ramp-up hype about Mad Men included assertions that the show was about a time when Madison Avenue was all-powerful, and this scene seemed designed to make the point. On other hand, the giveaway was Don’s mention that the client was the number four player in its industry. I have a feeling this is what sets the power tempo today as in the past: Basically, how scared is the client? How desperate is the client? How willing is the client to believe that these agency guys (then or now) somehow have the secret formula for saving their sorry ass? All of which is why my favorite bit about that whole thing was Don at the end saying, basically: So anyway, let’s hope it works out. “It’s not a science,” he grins. Indeed. My guess is that it’s not so different today.
Which brings me to the third noteworthy scene, which was both interesting and pleasing: Don hanging out with his bohemian mistress and her absurd beatnik pals. (“We’re going to get high and listen to Miles,” one of them deadpans.) There’s an almost comical air of Us vs. Them in the scene, as the beatniks mock Don for his complicity in creating The Lie that we need more stuff, and toothpaste will solve our problems, and so on — all the sorts of things that have made people like this so tedious for the entire history of people like this. I think one of them actually calls him a “square.” Don’s palpable contempt is a laff riot — “I hate to break it to you, but there is no Big Lie, there is no System” — and he’s unapologetic about drawing a bright line between himself and these sentimental bozos. He’s part of society, and they’re not, and they can kiss his ass.
Well, you already know what’s different today on this score. Today’s equivalent of the beatnik counterculturalist would not say, “Your toothpaste can’t solve our problems.” He would say, “Your toothpaste needs to sponsor an artist series if you want to connect with my demo.” And the ad-man wouldn’t say kiss my ass, punk. He’d say, “Yeah, we’re talking to Banksy.” Also, everyone in the scene would be dressed exactly alike. Maybe that’s progress, and maybe it isn’t. But a marketing pro openly sneering at the fauxhemians to grow up already? That’s about as likely today as a chorus of squeals greeting a pop hit from a jukebox in a bar. But I think it would be — almost — as much fun to experience firsthand.
[Complete Mad Men musings archive here.]
I don’t know how many scores of advertising and marketing professionals I’ve met over the years. I do now that I almost always ask them what got them into the business. And that to date, precisely one has mentioned an interest in persuasion. Why is that answer so rare? Persuasion is an interesting subject, and it’s at the heart of the advertising business. Maybe it’s just not polite to talk about it. I wouldn’t know.
I bring this up because there was very little ad-talk in the most recent episode of Mad Men, and if I want to keep going with my little series about the show, I have no choice but to go a little meta this time. So: I think it’s pretty clear that our (un)hero Don is very interested in persuasion — in fact, he’s interested in manipulation, persuasion’s even-less-polite-to-discuss cousin. And of course when I say he’s “interested” in manipulation, I mean he has a near-pathological drive to manipulate and control others.
This manifests itself amusingly when he works off whatever weird hostility he has toward his boss by tricking the older man into a 23-flight stairwalk, causing the poor sap to vomit up his 24-oyster, multi-martini, and cheesecake lunch in front of some important clients. Heh heh heh.
It was a weird moment in what was definitely the weirdest — and I think the best — episode of Mad Men to date. Don’s wife slapping a neighbor in the supermarket, Young Turk Guy delivering a bizarre monologue about how great it would be to eat what you kill as fondles his new rifle, the Dreiser-ish secretary he delivers it to offering an impossible-to-read confirmation that such an existence does sound ideal, etc. Some of this material can be read as dealing with How To Be A Man In This Modern Age, but some of it is just wack. In a good way.
Still, I hope they get back to more ad-talk next week.
Oh, and speaking of ad-talk, persuasion, and going meta: There is of course a marketing firm marketing this show about marketing. It’s called Crew Creative Advertising. I’m a little annoyed to have learned this by way of a post on Madison Avenue Journal, which says, “They contacted us early this week with a request to pre-promote this based on your robust response to date!”
Well! Nobody from Crew Creative has contacted me. What’s up with that? Don’t they want to persuade me to persuade the Murketing audience to watch their client’s show? Maybe the problem is that I haven’t been sufficiently upbeat about the program itself. Today’s post is pretty nice, though. Maybe I only did that to manipulate Crew Creative. But if so, I guess I shouldn’t talk about it.
[Complete Mad Men musings archive here.]
So this piggish ad exec and his colleague are pondering the mystery of women as they sort through their agency’s research on behalf of a cosmetics client, and the piggish guy says, “I don’t speak moron. Do you speak moron?”
Apart from suggesting to the Mad Men audience — once again — that the typical 1960 ad agency employee held a truly contemptuous view of women, surely the line is an intentional echo of David Ogilvy’s famous observation: “The consumer isn’t a moron,” he admonished his fellow ad-makers in Confessions of An Advertising Man, published in 1963. “She is your wife.”
Ah, but on Mad Men, most advertising professionals seem to think their wives are morons. So it’s no great surprise when the secretarial pool is herded into a room to try on lipsticks, and the ad gang watches through two-way glass, amusing themselves with a barrage of nasty and condescending remarks about the women. Then again, Mad Men itself doesn’t seem that impressed with the female consumer of 1960. When one secretary declines to paw through the free samples, and manages to articulate an opinion that rises above the incoherence of her peers, she’s treated like singular creature: A thinking female. She’s treated that way by the fictional ad men, but also, really, by the show itself.
Now that she herself has apparently been drafted into the efforts to create advertising to sell lipstick, we’ll see what the writers have her come up with.
The interesting thing about Ogilvy’s famous quote is that he was making a broader point about the importance of facts in advertising. What the consumer wants, he wrote, is “all the information you can give her.” Amusingly, he suggests that in a market where “competing brands are more and more alike” (sound familiar?), sometimes the best strategy is to list facts that are true of all products in a given category. For instance, his ads for Shell gave consumers facts, “many of which other gasoline makers could give, but don’t.” (We saw this idea deployed by Mad Men central character Don in the first episode, for client Lucky Strikes.)
In other words, Ogilvy was really pretty much neutral on whether the consumer was a moron. His point was that the consumer doesn’t want to be treated like a moron. The ad pro may or may not be fluent “in moron,” as our piggish friend above put it, but better not use it to communicate. That’s an interesting distinction to think about next time you hear a contemporary marketing expert going on about today’s savvy consumers. Let’s face it: We’ll never never know what they’re saying behind the two-way glass.
[Complete Mad Men musings archive here.]
Kanye West has a new CD coming out in a few weeks — can you feel the excitement?
Me neither. So I was a little surprised to read West saying this about Justin Timberlake: “I look at me and Justin like Prince and Michael Jackson in their day.”
Right. Only much less popular.
Seriously, what’s he talking about? I don’t know whether it’s a permanent change or just a slump, but pop music is just not the center of pop culture to the degree it was in the Prince/Jackson era, and surely West must be aware of this. I assume part his goal was to backhand 50 Cent, who has apparently vowed to retire if he doesn’t out-sell West.
West ought to be thanking 50, who obviously has a much better feel for the entertainment zeitgeist, and how to game it: Not by making silly comparisons to the past, but by stirring up a confrontation in the present, for no good reason whatsoever.
In fact, I look at 50 Cent and Kanye West like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal in their day. (50, of course, is Mailer.) Mailer and Vidal were trying to sell their products to a nation that had many more entertainment choices than it used to. Solution: Infiltrate one of those choices (chat shows) and make a fuss (possibly even throwing a punch). Same with 50, except he’s infiltrating the Internet celebritytainmentsphere to sell CDs instead of books. I’m not sure whether West just doesn’t get it, or if he’s trying to enlarge the feud somehow — sort of like dragging Truman Capote in.
If they can keep this hype up till the actual release date (Sept. 11), the strategy might even work.
Meanwhile, who is really the new Michael Jackson? The iPhone of course.
[Thanks, E.]
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This post was written by Rob Walker on August 23, 2007
Comments Off on Proper comparison points for Kanye West, Michael Jackson, 50 Cent, and Norman Mailer
The not-very-subtle theme of the most recent episode of Mad Men was secrets & lies — or, to say it more politely, “privacy.” Our (non)hero Don is not only juggling his boho girlfriend, suburban wife, and at least two other potential love interests, he also turns out to be living a plot-line right out of General Hospital: Secret identity, suddenly-appearing sibling, endless staring into space for dramatic effect, etc. No surprise, given all this, that he barely needs to bother brainstorming ideas for a banking client, suggesting that what the modern man of 1960 really needs is a “private” account. That is, a second set of books that he can conceal from the family, to fund his double life. All the fellow ad-men see the wisdom of this immediately.
The client does too — and in fact laughs with glee. Why? Because, he tells Don: Plenty of his customers are already doing this, “we just hadn’t figured out a way to charge them for it. “
Damn! Could this show be any more cynical? (I’m not even mentioning the sub-plot in which the junior exec is pimping out his wife so he can publish a short story — which he wants to do for reasons of office rivalry, not literary ambition.) Don’s skill seems to come from his hard-wired instincts for manipulating a consumer nation motivated largely by a desire to keep its tissue of lies together. Meanwhile, his corporate clients just want to monetize the delusions and duplicity of the masses, and find it hi-lar-ee-us when they succeed.
As always, this can all be (reassuringly) read as comment on the phony conformity of the 1950s and the soul-rot it concealed, soon to be washed away by that whole 1960s hoo-ha that I’ve read all about. Usually I’m skeptical of this line of thinking, since it’s often pretty easy to draw parallels between the persuasion industry depicted in the show, and the real one of today. But this time, I admit, I’m going to hide behind the hope that this was an episode about an America that doesn’t exist anymore. The only alternative would be to conclude that our era of Botox, premium denim, no-money-down jumbo mortgages, and self-promotional Web presences isn’t based on authentic self-expression, but on delusions that, like Don, we defend by hurling wads of cash at any threatening reality-based counter-evidence. Even I’m not that cynical.
[Complete Mad Men musings archive here.]
The Hater suggests more product-placement-riddled challenges for Top Chef:
–The Pantene Shiny Food Challenge: Make Pantene’s Brunette Expressions shampoo taste good. Contestants have 30 minutes and unlimited access to the Top Chef pantry.
-The Glad ForceFlex Challenge: Contestants are divided into teams of three. Each team is then put inside one Glad ForceFlex garbage bag (they’re very stretchy!) with the following items: 1 Bunsen burner, 1 egg, and 1 comically small frying pan. Whichever team can make the fluffiest scrambled egg without suffocating or tearing a hole in their incredibly strong Glad garbage bag (featuring Glad’s patented ForceFlex technology) wins.
And many more. Funny. The rest is here. Via TV with MeeVee.
The primary client in the most recent installment of Mad Men was, of all companies, Bethlehem Steel. Since this follows Lucky Strikes and Right Guard in an aerosol can, I’m getting the feeling that the show’s creators like picking brands and products and firms that seemed mighty in 1960, and are irrelevant, marginal, or gone today. (Bethlehem Steel dissolved in 2003.) Anyway, protagonist Don makes one mildly interesting comment – about advertising’s frequent role of telling us something we already knew but hadn’t thought about lately.I thought maybe that would be the subject of today’s Musings, but this turned out to be Pete’s episode. He’s the junior agency guy with big ambitions and all that. We learn that he’s from some kind of blueblood family, and his cartoonishly WASP pop sneers at the ad business as a disgrace to the family name.
Later, we can kind of see Pop’s point. Since the initial pitch meeting sputtered, Bethlehem’s honcho is staying in New York overnight to give the agency another crack at new ideas. Pete is given the job of entertaining the codger – an assignment that, so far as I could tell, boiled down to lining up a couple of hookers. It’s never quite made clear that that’s what the young women are, but I’m not sure what other conclusion we’re supposed to draw. It’s all handled rather matter-of-factly.
Now, I’m not in the ad business, and never was. So I don’t know. But was this standard operating procedure at one time?
In any case, later in the episode when Don wants Pete fired, the move is blocked because the agency can’t afford to alienate the old-line power families of New York.
What’s interesting about all this is that it suggests 1960 was not, perhaps, the moment of ad-agency all-powerfulness that some observers of the show have suggested. Instead, maybe, it was a time when admen were still trying to shake their image as sleazy hucksters. Maybe they were trying to become respectable members of the professional class, but — suits and posh offices and suburban homes and fancy martinis aside — not quite making it yet.
Footnote: Clearly my Mad Men musings have had little to do with the show as, you know, a show. Basically, I’m not sure I’d be watching if I didn’t happen to have an interest in advertising, and how that business/practice/cultural form changed over the course of the 20th century. However, Time’s James Poniewozik makes a fairly convincing case for the show as pure entertainment, “showing an intriguing ability to change itself up from week to week.”
This Associated Press story says: “U.S. consumers are increasingly shifting their attention away from traditional, advertising-supported media in favor of entertainment such as the Internet, video games and cable TV, which consumers pay for.” It cites a study from Veronis Suhler Stevenson. That private equity firm’s site says:
Consumers are … migrating away from advertising-supported media, such as broadcast TV and newspapers, to consumer-supported platforms, such as cable TV and videogames. Time spent with consumer-supported media grew at a compound annual growth rate of 19.8 percent from 2001 to 2006, while time spent with ad-supported media declined 6.3 percent in the period.
Here’s what I don’t get. Why is cable, for example, not considered an ad-supported medium? Yes, you pay for cable, but you also pay for the newspaper. Both have a lot of ads, and business models that rely on having a lot of ads. Maybe you could make an argument here by breaking out viewership of premium channels and ad-free video-on-demand services. But I don’t think the typical TV viewer (and a majority of American households have cable TV) really makes the implied distinction between, say, Bravo and NBC. When I watch either one, they both look pretty ad-supported to me. And both certainly feel significantly less “consumer supported,” if that is supposed to mean actively spending money, than buying a newspaper does.
What about the AP including the Internet in the not-ad-supported column? Again, yeah, you pay for Internet access, but from everything I’ve read (about what people think will happen at the NYT and WSJ sites, for instance) the movement right now is away from paid-for content and toward content that’s free to the reader — and supported by advertising.
And why aren’t movies and music mentioned at all? Aren’t those relevant to the theory that our entertainment choices are moving away from ad-supported media to things we pay for directly? (But which might of course still include paid product placements — just as many videogames do.) Maybe that stuff is in the full VSS study.
I don’t doubt that media and entertainment consumption patterns are changing, but every report or study I see on the matter seems to have some the data cut some weird way that has nothing to do with how people (as opposed to media companies, I guess) actually consume media and entertainment.
Am I missing something?
Pretty interesting interview on Freakonomics today with a guy who studies gangs. Here’s one bit I thought was good:
Q: A lot of rappers, particularly Jay-Z and 50 Cent, claim to have been successful crack dealers. Any thoughts on this? Were they just low-level dealers barely making a profit, or did they really have something to pay for their future studio time? Did any of the gang members you knew claim to be on the dealer-to-rapper fast track program?
A: In all my years of studying gangs, I have met only a handful of individuals who have actually participated in the dealer-to-rapper fast track program. Alas, they end up going to jail before they get successful, and most of the ones I’ve seen can’t sing worth a lick. I’m deeply skeptical about rappers who proclaim experience with drug sales. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but for the most part I would be very careful about the claims that are made in songs. Many rappers are highly trained musicians who have spent little time on the streets, as it were — think of Mos Def.
“Honesty — it’s a good angle.”
This line, by one of the ad agency guys in the early scene in the most recent episode of “Mad Men” when Don and his colleagues are talking about the famous VW “Lemon” ad — which came out around 1960, when the series is set — was easily the episode’s highlight moment. (If you’ve never seen the “Lemon” magazine ad, here it is.) In its time, the VW campaign that this ad was part of was different because it did not engage in overt hyperbole. In fact, it subtly mocked the overt hyperbole of, you know, every other ad in the world. Various other print pieces poked fun at the empty planned-obsolescence style “advances” touted by most car ads, for example.
That’s the honesty part. The angle part is that the campaign gave a new image to a car that, as Mary Wells summarized in her memoir, had previous been seen as “small,” “ugly,” and “a Nazi car, too soon after the war.” This is alluded to in Mad Men; one character mentions that last time he’d seen a VW, he was throwing a grenade into it. (This remark is made at a suburban house party, where the general idea that honesty is just another angle hovers over the somewhat predictable proceeds: We learn, for the umpteenth time, that shiny suburban facades conceal assorted grubby secrets, etc. But as always, I’m less interested in the plot than in the passing mentions of advertising history. So back to that.)
Thomas Frank, in The Conquest of Cool, observes: “That by the end of the decade the [VW] was more hip than Nazi must be regarded as one of the great triumphs of American marketing.” Particularly so given that its “hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass sociaety against which hip declared itself most vehemently ad odds.” Frank argues that the agency that made the campaign, Doyle Dane Bernbach, “invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism — perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age — to consumerism itself.”
Sound familiar? Sure it does. It’s a point of view that’s now so thoroughly built into contemporary marketing, we pretty much expect it. The most scabrous critiques of the culture of marketing, are produced by marketing professionals, on behalf of whoever their paying client happens to be. Transparency, the consumer-in-control, co-creation, etc.: All today’s most progressive-sounding marketing tactics are all about honesty. It’s still a great angle.
Okay, that last post was a little cranky. I better repent, before someone says I’m a dinosaur who doesn’t get it.
How about this. Let’s embrace this exciting new showcase for citizen creativity — and simultaneously devise a way of sustaining (or even starting) widespread interest in the race for the presidency. Let’s have a parallel competition, a sort of talent show of candidate questioning. Let America vote (via text message obviously) for their favorite YouTube question-videos in each debate, judging them on creativity, production values, originality, and, if you like, substance. The top vote getters get to ask another question in the next debate — although of course they’ll also continue to compete against others who have advanced, in an ongoing, elimination-style tournament.
As the number of questioners gets whittled down, more of each debate broadcast will be devoted to learning about them — who they are, what their aspirations are, how much their new branded T-shirts cost and where we can buy them, etc. At some point, all the remaining questioners should probably have to live together in a loft-style apartment, maybe in Ohio. As their fame grows, the candidates will be expected to ask them questions.
Then the final showdown: After the primaries, we have not only two presidential candidates going through the motions of the familiar leader-of-the-free-world thing, but two YouTube question-video makers, squaring off to be America’s Next Top Citizen-Celebrity! (If Bloomberg or another independent gets involved, we could bring back some of the more annoying eliminated questioners in some kind of sudden-death YouTube press conference format.)
Fun, right? See, I get it!
As you probably know, one of the questions posed via YouTube video in the recent Democratic debate, came from a snowman figure, with a Mr. Bill-like voice, who asked about global warming. What is the significance of this? Is it the end of decorum? The dawn of a new era of interactive accountability?
Don’t be absurd. It’s a branding event!
The snowman has a name, which is Billiam. According to the WSJ, the two “unemployed” brothers who created Billiam:
have done interviews with local television, snagged a spot on the Wisconsin Public Radio game show “Whad’Ya Know?” and are working on a line of “Billiam the Snowman” T-shirts. They’ve also launched a “Billiam the Snowman” presidential exploratory committee — online….
The Hamel brothers couldn’t be happier about the attention. At last count, the question has been watched 130,000 times on YouTube. “It means our 15 minutes of fame may stretch to 30,” says Nathan, 26 years old, who created the snowman with his 23-year-old brother, Greg, who does the voice.
Once again, an example of co-promotion: Citizen-whateverism that’s not about participating in a brand or an event or a process. (After all, global warming questions are hardly a breakthrough or novelty in presidential debates.) It’s about latching onto a brand or an event or a process that seems likely to draw attention, and stealing some of that attention for yourself, and your own idea or cultural offering … however threadbare that may be.
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