In one of the handful of scenes in the second episode of Mad Men that was explicitly about advertising, main character Don listens to the ideas his creative team has come up with to sell an exciting new product: Right Guard, in an aerosol can.
The ideas turn on the excitement of this new technology, which the creative gang says ought to be linked to, you know, rockets, and the exciting future. (The assignment is a clever choice by the show’s writers, given that aerosol cans, which no doubt really were seen as a breakthrough at the time, were eventually demonized as an environmental menace.) Don says this approach is all wrong, because plenty of people fear the future, and because while the product is for men, it will be bought by women, and the rocketships & progress approach won’t work for them.
Put aside whether these observations are original, or even true. Instead consider the way Don arrives at them: it’s an instinct, a hunch, a feeling in his presumably golden gut. Read more
The most enjoyable moment in the debut episode of Mad Men was — of course — the scene in which the advertising agency protagonists meet with their big tobacco-company client. It’s 1960, and becoming clear that tobacco companies aren’t going to be able use the rational-sounding sales pitches about how cigarettes are somehow good for you. Everyone’s has read in Reader’s Digest that the data just don’t back this up. What to do?
The meeting seems to be in a tailspin when Don, the slick-hair, gray-suit, main character of the show, asks the crusty old Southern tobacco magnate how his cigarettes are made. He latches onto a word in the man’s matter-of-fact description: Toasted. He writes it on a chalkboard: Lucky Strikes tobacco — It’s Toasted.
But, the magnate says, every brand is toasted. Then it sinks in. Here is what can replace the rational pitch — the meaningless pitch. Just put the phrase out there, and let the consumer fill in the blanks. Toasted? That sounds good. Must be good. Must be a point of differentiation — and a damn good one — if they mention it in their advertising.
None of this is spelled out, of course. But it’s a fair summation of a broad-brush shift that makes advertising today so different than it was in earlier eras. Read more
This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with. Rare indeed are holdouts like Bruce Springsteen who simply perform and record. The usual rationale is that hearing a U2 song in an iPod commercial or seeing Shakira’s face on a cellphone billboard will get listeners interested in the albums that these artists release every few years after much painstaking effort.
So writes Jon Pareles in the NYT today, in an article about the business of Prince. Who, he argues, fits the pattern in some ways, but is different many others. Still, he writes, Prince “doesn’t have to go multiplatinum — he’s multiplatform.”
Well said. What I wonder is how multiplatform models will get built in the future. Prince, U2, Sting, even Shakira and 50 Cent, owe a good chunk of their brand equity to old-style big record company mass market oriented tactics (the kind that resulted in multiplatinum sales) that seem to be increasingly incapable of building new pop stars of similar stature. Maybe the American Idol creations have some of that stature, but it’s not clear to me if it will be lasting, and in any case it’s hardly a pure grass roots thing.
Seems like stars who made their name in the “old days” (that is, anytime up to a few years ago) have a lasting advantage in the multiplatform marketplace.
The insane Simpsons movie marketing attack is getting a lot of attention, but I have to mention two aspects of it. One is the strategy of making over certain 7-11 locations into Kwik E Marts stocked with the various fake products that are part of the show’s universe. It is definitely the most fully realized experiment in imaginary brands that I’ve ever seen. Here’s a set of images of the NY Kwik E Mart from Freshness. Here’s an overview of the imaginary brands on offer (via this guy, who’s got a list of Simpsons marketing tactics going).
The other interesting thing is that there’s a Vans artist series tied to the movie. Actually, that’s not really so interesting by itself, but one of the artists invited into the collaboration was Murketing favorite KAWS. One of the things KAWS is known for is his “Kimpsons” imagery. (Examples below and here and here.)
Some intellectual property owners might see something like that and send a cease-and-desist. Others are clever enough to do nothing, until the day comes to send a contract and a check. An image of the KAWS/Simpsons/Kimpsons Vans (among others from the series) at Complex.
What’s your take on this person? Credit cards burst from her pockets. She carries two bags full of stuff, and uses two gizmos at once. Her smile is unconvincing, her gaze glassy and unfocused. She looks dazed, rather zombie-ish. Who is she?
If you’re fan of Bravo, she is you. Or at least, she is the representation of you that Bravo uses to round up advertising.
I will explain what I mean by that in this first installment of yet another new Murketing feature, an occasional series called “The Product Is You.”
Trade journals for the advertising and marketing business are themselves full of ads. Of course the ads there are different from the ones you see in regular magazines, because these are not aimed at consumers. They are aimed at advertisers.
That is to say: Networks and magazines and other entities whose business model depends on advertising take out ads in the ad trades, to attract advertisers. Got it? So what they tout in these ads-to-attract-advertising, is their audience.
What they are packaging and selling is, in other words, you, the consumer of media, potential target of advertising. If a media entity attracts consumers that advertisers want to address, then it can sell more advertising time, or space.
This Bravo ad, which took up two full pages of an advertising trade, is an example of a particular style of audience-packaging that I’ve always found fascinating. It’s an example that I think is worth lingering over for a moment.
Bravo’s pitch is that its viewers are “affluencers.” These desirable creatures are “now available” to advertisers who buy time on Bravo. As you can see, these sample affluencers are depicted here in fully packaged form. They are right there, sealed up, ready to be bought, and sold to. Read more
More evidence of … something. Via Adrants/American Copywriter.
The Geico cavemen sitcom has been picked up by ABC, and will air Tuesday nights at 8 Eastern. So reports the NYT:
The half-hour series will have a different cast from the seven commercials that have appeared since the campaign was introduced in 2004…. But the premise of the sitcom is the same as the campaign: The cavemen, living in contemporary America, seek to counter what they perceive to be prejudice against them….
ABC hopes that the popularity of the caveman campaign will translate into ratings, [some network guy] said, as part of the network’s plans to reinvigorate the lackluster sitcom genre by “taking real chances” with premises and plot lines. ..
ABC and Geico “may collaborate on some form of integration,” [the guy] said, referring to interweaving references to Geico into story lines.
Search that articles the “previous coverage” links in vain for a reference to this Consumed on the subject.
Also: AdRants has posted that the early word on the sitcom is not good.
Finally: Here is a clip and some hype from ABC’s site.
So have you actually read the petition that Paris Hilton’s people are apparently trying to use to keep her out of jail for this DUI thing or whatever it was?
She provides hope for young people all over the U.S. and the world. She provides beauty and excitement to (most of) our otherwise mundane lives.
Apparently more than 3,000 people have signed it.
I think they should go to jail.
I guess I’m kind of late on this, but if others have picked up on, I haven’t seen it. And I have to pass it along.
Fortune’s Roger Parloff (a former colleague of mine) examined an interesting question in a March 27 post on his blog, Legal Pad:
The tormenting of Guantanamo detainees by subjecting them to round-the-clock barrages of blaring rock music has raised a thorny, if thus far hypothetical, legal question: Is torture a “fair use” under the Copyright Act?
It seems that some musicians don’t want their music used by the government as a kind of harrassment weapon. Fair enough: Maybe they have an ideological disagreement with the government — or maybe they just figure having their music associated with punishment is bad for the brand.
Perhaps a copyright violation lawsuit is their way of stopping it? Mr. Parloff weighs the answers. After all, as he points out, the practice has become more routine:
In previous years, we would, only once in a great while, see our government use copyrighted music — mainly hard rock and heavy metal classics — to break down a foe’s will to resist. We saw it used in Panama, for instance, to drive Noriega from his palace and then, years later, in Waco, Texas, against David Koresh and his Branch Davidians (with unanticipated results). But with the arrival of the War on Terror and our liberation from previously crabbed interpretations of international human rights commitments, high-decibel music may now be becoming a fairly routine interrogation tool used in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, perhaps also, an archipelago of secret C.I.A. prisons across Eastern Europe. … Barney the Dinosaur’s excruciatingly monotonous “I Love You” theme … has apparently been found by military intelligence officials to possess powerful, yet so far entirely unrecompensed, coercive properties.
Posted Under:
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Ethics
This post was written by Rob Walker on April 24, 2007
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In Consumed: The Geico Cavemen: What an ad campaign spawning potential sitcom characters really reveals.
The recent news that ABC was willing to entertain the possibility of a sitcom starring the Geico cavemen seemed a sort of watershed. Here were characters dreamed up as part of an advertising campaign, potentially crossing over into a venerable form of mainstream, pop-culture entertainment. While that sounds momentous, it misses a larger point. As characters in a successful advertising campaign, the cavemen are already part of mainstream pop culture. More so, in fact, than the characters in most current sitcoms….
Read the rest of the column by way of this New York Times Magazine link, which will probably expire in a week, or this Boston Globe link.
[April 20 Update] Some blog references/reactions to the column: Scott Goodson/StrawberryFrog; Jason Oke/Leo Burnett Toronto; Disney corporate blog; PSFK.
A little while ago I highlighted a Wall Street Journal piece that looked at the experience of call-center workers in India — how they’re trained, how they’re perceived locally, and so on. A piece on Marketplace yesterday looked at another side of the equation — and how it’s entering Indian pop culture:
The way the Indian call center worker has been the source of ridicule in the U.S., the angry American caller has become legend in India.
Call centers employ around 600,000 people here. Because the industry has propelled India into the global marketplace, the phenomenon has an outsize impact on middle-class culture. It’s spawned a couple TV shows and a best-selling novel called “One Night at the Call Center,” in which demanding customers make the workers’ lives miserable. It’ll be released as a Bollywood film later this year.
We’ve never watched America’s Next Top Model, but lately I’ve been indirectly kept apprised of the show by the local newspaper. This is because someone from Savannah is among the competitors, so the paper runs an update every week. (Savannah is not a big news town; there was also a local on American Idol, and when she was voted off this week, it was a front-page story.)
I bring this up because of this week’s Top Model summation:
Savannah resident Brittany Carrigher made it through the third round of America’s Next Top Model, remaining a favorite of the judges with her interpretation of a model electrocuted in the bathtub.
Fantastic.
If you root through the massive pile of paper that is the Sunday New York Times, you will find a magazine called Key. Key is a real estate-focused spinoff of the Times Magazine. Within Key you will find a longish article/essay by me, on the subject of property-related television shows. I’m pretty happy with the way this came out, and while it’s a little long to read online, I hope you’ll take a look one way or another. I really enjoyed writing it. Here’s the start:
What makes a house a home is a topic suitable for poetry. But a house or a home is always something else. It is property. Does this fact contain poetry? Probably not. But it does contain entertainment. It’s a form of television entertainment I’d never paid the slightest bit of attention to until I got involved in buying property myself, which happened right around the time that the long housing boom was unraveling last year. Previously invisible to me, these entertainments were, for months, the only things I wanted to watch. Buying, selling, updating, restoring and “flipping” for quick profits — it all ran together, but I watched even when I couldn’t remember if the title of a certain show was “Flip This House” or “Flip That House.”
It turned out these were two different shows, and with every “pain of U.S. housing slump” headline, the inventory of real estate entertainment looked a little more glutty. It made me ponder this curious genre’s fate….
Our TV show of the moment is Top Chef, which has turned out to be pretty weird, and pretty entertaining. This Las Vegas Weekly article on recent events that have made the show resemble a psychology experiment gone awry, with some contestents ganging up on strange-haired Marcel, sums up the dynamic: “The consensus on many message boards is that the show is playing out as an allegory for high school: there’s the hotheaded bully, the sly instigator, the sexually frustrated, angry kid, the strident cheerleader with the dubious smile, the shy girl who is always studying in the library, the stoner. Marcel’s role seems to be the socially awkward geek who doesn’t know how to relate to people.”We’ve been puzzling over why every other contestent seems to hate Marcel so much. He seems vaguely annoying, but we never really see him doing anything particularly awful. New York recently interviewed some of the other contestents, and Sam (who is supposed to be sexy hunk-boy, but is actually kind of gross) says: “The past couple of episodes they’ve made him seem like some sort of a sweetheart. Everyone was asking me why I had this outburst with him, but they didn’t show him accusing me of cheating for fifteen minutes.”
Hmm. Anyway, both those links via this post on The Grinder, which earlier had this other post passing along a theory that the most recent episode’s quasi-beat-down of Marcel was even more Lord of the Fliesy than the show suggested, and was toned down through editing.
All those links are full of “spoilers,” as they say, if you haven’t been watching. (If you have been watching, please note that we watch the show Thursdays, not when it airs on Wednesdays, so don’t tell me what happens in that 24-hour gap, okay?) Top Chef is a good candidate for a TV binge next time a “marathon” of episodes is on, so keep that in mind.
Speaking of which: Binge marathon-watching has become an under-examined form of TV watching. I’ve been meaning to write about that forever. I think it’s an antidote to the millions of entertainment choices: You just veg out and let the show wash over you, hour upon hour, as passively as possible….
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