MURKETING

Consumer-generated ads to the rescue

Exciting news! The global warming crisis will soon be solved. Why? Because Current TV is having a consumer-generated ad contest, that’s why. “The way nations and societies make up their minds in the modern age has much more to do with mass advertising than many of us purists would like, but that’s the reality,” Al Gore informs the New York Times. “Since we face a true planetary emergency, we have to give the planet a P.R. agent.”

Your brow is furrowed because all this talk of “mass advertising” and PR agencies sounds kind of old-think, am I right? Well, unfurrow now. Current TV will tapping the creativity of the masses, who will be incentivized to submit their home-made 15, 30, or 60-second TV spots by the possibility of winning a brand new car! The winner will be announced in November, and after that the awesome power of advertising will kick in, hip us all to the problem of this global warming thing — which, really, has hardly gotten any attention — which I can only assume will be promptly solved.
The Times story includes a quote from Butler, Shine honcho Greg Stern. (NYT doesn’t mention it, but that agency was a user-generated-content pioneer, with its Converse Gallery campaign.) “The idea of turning to consumers to spread the word is very smart,” Stern says. “It might even preclude the need for an ad agency.”

He sounds kind of relieved.

The bomb

I had never heard of Squidsicle until seeing an image of a grenade decorated with LV iconography on Counterfeit Chic today. The post describing what it is begins, “Remember those three inert grenades I bought?” I’ll let you read the rest of the explanation there.

Obviously I’m now quite interested in Squidsicle.

Strange moments in DIY tinkering

According to the winning entry in the Instructables Office Supply Challenge, you may be able to fix your broken iPod by popping it open sticking a folded business card inside. I have no idea why this would work. My iPod isn’t broken, so I’m not going to try. But maybe yours is. Are you out there Stay Free?

“Bizarre and ill-advised”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out: The WSJ has a story this morning about the fact that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey used to be a regular on Yahoo’s stock boards, talking up his own company, and trashing competitor Wild Oats, all under a fake name — “rahodeb.” Kind of like Lee Siegel. He didn’t do this two or three times, he did it for seven or eight years. One amusing example has Mackey writing, under a pseudonym: “While I’m not a ‘Mackey groupie,’ I do admire what the man has accomplished.”

Sheesh.

The Journal story is inconclusive on the legal implications. I go along with a securities law expert quoted saying that, “at a minimum, it’s bizarre and ill-advised.”

So what will happen? Even if there’s no illegality, I can imagine a negative-publicity feeding frenzy that causes Mackey serious problems.

I can also imagine that people will shrug it off because he generally seems to be a good CEO with impressive values, and this whole incident has only come to light by way of the FTC’s not-very-convincing argument that Whole Foods should be blocked from buying Wild Oats.

Although I’ve never reported on Whole Foods, I think all in all it’s a compelling company, and Mackey is a compelling CEO. But he was spectacularly stupid to do this. There’s just no reason for it, and reading that he was hyping is own stock, calling Wild Oats a “bad company,” etc. … that’s just gross. Plus his response to the whole thing on the company site isn’t very impressive. (Example: “I never intended any of those postings to be identified with me,” he writes. Uh, no shit. That’s part of the problem.)

I guess we’ll wait and see what happens next.

Crocs Consumed

Dedicated Murketing readers will recall the recent-ish post about Crocs. Well, this is one of those instances where noodling around on this site led to a Consumed column, on the subject of Crocs, to be published this Sunday. Thanks to those who offered feedback to the earlier post.

Also, I have no idea if this will work but this is a link to the column that goes out to Times Select types.

Digg the social media murketing landscape

From an interview with a guy who runs something called Subvert & Profit, which “makes a business out of gaming social media site Digg for paying advertisers.” Basically, advertisers pay the company to get its secret team to Digg stories onto that famous social-media site’s front page, or at least as close as possible.

Q: Is [your company] the future of online advertising?

A: Our type of business will certainly become a larger part of advertising, potentially off the Internet as well. Forget about social media for a bit, and consider that S&P pioneers a mixture of two quickly rising paradigms: crowdsourcing and undercover marketing. Gaming social media sites is just a subset of that mixture.

Q: Does it work for your advertisers? How much are clients paying on average? For how many eyeballs?

A: Our system has successfully placed a good deal of content on the front page of Digg. At this point, 2 out of 3 advertisements are successful, and we’re getting better. Ultimately our attempts are at the mercy of the Digg community. The average client buys 70 Diggs, though some clients prefer to gamble by purchasing 10-20, hoping that regular Digg users will carry them the rest of the way. We haven’t collected enough data from satisfied advertisers, though I’ve heard a story on Digg gets roughly 10,000 visitors. Once a blog I run under another name got over 30,000. All of this translates to organic marketing that is an order of magnitude cheaper than most other forms of Internet advertising.

Simpsons, Kimpsons, and imaginary products

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.

The end of insignificance

I’ve made the point in passing that we might well pity the future historian, dealing with the awesome morass of personal documentation that is one of the hallmarks of the present. The scrapbooks, the professionally edited DVDs of a million weddings, the limitless digital self-data. Science fiction writer Charles Stross has a more upbeat view about it:

Some time after our demise, this information will be available to historians.

And what a mass of information it will be…

They’ll be able to see the ephemera of public life and understand the minutiae of domestic life; information that is usually omitted from the historical record because the recorders at the time deemed it insignificant but which may be of vital interest in centuries to come.

“A logo that’s about finding music”

Pitchfork interviews Debbie Harry, and the conversation turns to CBGB’s, which shut down a while back:

Pitchfork: It’s ironic that it’s living on as a fashion store.

Debbie Harry: Yeah. There’s a double edge to that, too. The girls who started the merchandising and t-shirts for CBGB’s are singers, Tish and Snooky. They used to be my backup singers for a little while. They had a band of their own and used to perform at CBGB’s, so were really a part of CBGB’s from the very beginning. They had a store on St. Mark’s Place where they sold used clothes. They used to buy dresses in these huge bundles form some warehouse. They’d buy these bulk things of old clothes and just make a huge pile in the center of the floor. People would go in there and dig through. That was Manic Panic.

Pitchfork: Could you imagine CBGB’s being better known as a brand than as a punk venue?

Debbie Harry: Well, CBGB’s was always based on finding music. So if you’re actually going to wear the logo, you’re wearing a logo that’s about finding music. That’s kind of nice.

The International Review of Wine Packaging and Aesthetics, Vol. 14

Irony
Pinot Noir, Montery County, California; South Eastern Australia
$12 (Savannah)

Sincerity
Chardonnay; Casablanca Valley, Chile
$15 (Savannah)

[Note: This is the fourteenth installment in a regular Murketing feature. For previous installments and an explanation, go here.]

Located several shelves away from each other in the same liquor store, these items simply demanded to be purchased in tandem. In fact, I briefly assumed that they must be offerings of the same vineyard. Not so. Still, it’s a particularly interesting showdown in the context of wine-label design at the present moment: Which is better, looks-wise – irony or sincerity? Read more

The Product Is You, No. 5

[The Product Is You is an occasional Murketing series collecting advertising that is aimed at advertisers: Magazines or television networks packaging up their consumers — that is, you, the potential ad target — in ways designed to attract advertisers. Previous installments here.]

In recognition of the recent reports that Jane Magazine is shutting down, two examples of how the publication characterized its readers to potential advertisers.

Crowd Control

In Consumed: Threadless: What one T-Shirt company has learned about community power — and avoiding a design mobocracy.

From Wikipedia to “American Idol,” shifting control from experts to the masses has never been more popular. As an example of what this can mean for consumer companies, the herd of anti-expertise experts often points to Threadless.com, which has sold millions of dollars of T-shirts by not hiring star designers. Founded in 2000, Threadless asks for designs from anybody who wants to submit them. These days, according to its chief creative officer, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Threadless receives about 125 submissions a day. These are winnowed by the site’s hundreds of thousands of user-voters to half a dozen new T-shirt offerings a week and sold in batches of 1,500. Winning designers are paid $2,000; almost everything sells out. The site has evolved to include a variety of clothing for kids; the owners are dabbling in other products through a new brand called Naked & Angry; and in July, the first Threadless retail and gallery space will open in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.

It’s a crowd-pleasing story, but there has always been more to Threadless than mere mobocracy. …

Continue reading via The NYT site, or The Boston Globe site.

Additional links: Glenn Jones’ site; interview with Jones at Threadless. Ross Zietz’ site; interview with Zeitz at Threadless.

Indie-ness, 2.0

I don’t where I’ve been, but I completely missed the news — apparently first revealed here by Pitchfork — that Sonic Youth has been working on what Thurston Moore called, “this Starbucks record that’s coming out.” Sonic Youth, doing a project for Starbucks?

Evidently. And this occasioned a piece on Utne.com, headlined “Selling Out Sans Guilt.”

The partnership between the corporate coffee giant and iconic counterculture band has reignited a discussion about what exactly qualifies as “selling out” these days, given the struggles that the music industry has had marketing artists during the decline of commercial radio and the rise of all things mp3.

That piece mentions the Doors’ drummer vetoing a deal that would have involved Cadillac paying $15 million to use one of the band’s songs. That serves as sort of an old-school example. For the new school, the piece links to this column, “In Praise of Selling Out,” by a writer for the Chicago Reader. The writer reels off a long list of recent entanglements between indie artists and corporations, and basically wraps up this way:

If you remember the days when it was tantamount to treason for an indie rocker to sign to a major label, you might feel like commercialization is eroding a vital but intangible spirit and polluting the noble ideal of art for art’s sake. But people who make music for a living have always needed to support themselves somehow, and they have to change with the industry that pays their bills — if they can’t stay safely in the black by playing gigs or selling records, some of them are bound to choose licensing deals and sponsorships over day jobs or credit-card debt.

That sounds more like resignation than praise. But I think the upshot is the same: My sense for some time has been that the whole concept of “selling out” has largely faded away. Many (not all, but many) indie entities — bands, brands, artists, whatever — see these sorts of deals as essentially co-promotion opportunities, and have found that they pay very little if any penalty in the marketplace for doing them. Thus, turning down potentially useful corporate dough is now viewed by many (again, not all) as romantic at best, and at worst naive.

The Product Is You, No. 4

[The Product Is You is an occasional Murketing series collecting advertising that is aimed at advertisers: Magazines or television networks packaging up their consumers — that is, you, the potential ad target — in ways designed to attract advertisers. Previous installments here.]

This is from a couple of years ago, but I’ve hung onto it because it’s one of my favorite examples of the transaction being proposed: Hey advertiser, we would like to sell you this guy.

Concern, fatigue, and doing your part

Sarah Rich in WorldChanging.com writes about “an extensive consumer survey” by two UK organizations looking at the relationship of eco-concerned consumers to the marketplace:

They point to the effectiveness of marketing tools and labeling systems that make apparent companies’ intention to provide their customers with authentic stories of corporate responsibility. They acknowledge, however, that such “voluntary consumer-facing initiatives” have always hit limits to their potential impact, perhaps succeeding in facilitating wide adoption of their gesture, but with little demonstrable change to the overall problem. Consumers either reach a point of fatigue with the decision-making process, or they readily opt for the more sustainable product, but then feel they’ve done their part and halt the progress towards wider shifts.