As every Friday, here’s what I’ve noticed recently in backlashes, dissent, and critiques:
1. I haven’t spent a ton of time there, but I’m interested in this site: The EnviroMedia GreenWashing Index. Submit and/or rate marketing messages touting green-ness. Interesting idea; keeping an eye on it.
2. This got linked a lot (it was even in the murketing linkpile earlier this week) but Nerve.com put together a list of its Top 25 ad parodies. Fun.
3. Speaking of hating on Dove’s “real beauty” campaign, a New Yorker profile of photo retoucher Pascal Dangin included this: “I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual ‘real women’ in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. ‘Do you know how much retouching was on that?’ he asked. ‘But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.'”
Someone at Ogilvy subsequently told Ad Age: “There was no retouching of the women.” Still, some details are unclear, and Ad Age says the story is “potentially devastating” and recaps some of the backlashing against Dove to date. UnBeige chimed in to express “deliriously wonderful schadenfreude” about the possible undoing of the “deceptive” campaign: “So now, or soon to come, everyone will be up in arms about being blindly suckered into loving the campaign for its truth and honesty.” We’ll see.
4. Anti-Advertising Agency offers up a few testimonials from current and former ad pros in response to its previously mentioned efforts to get ad pros to quit their jobs. “Advertising is inherently evil … I am glad I am not doing that anymore. It is better to starve righteously.” Etc.
5. Wake Up Wal Mart Blog has posted a video ad arguing that tax rebate checks are being used to by cheap imports from China, at Wal Mart.
6. Brainiac points to this list of 8 Classic Toys Parents Hated. Top spot: Slime.
I’ve sure ready plenty of criticisms of Dove’s “campaign for real beauty” marketing tactics, but the thing just keeps metastasizing. Via Arts Journal, this article describes how marketers got playwright Judith Thompson involved in creating a theatrical production tied to the brand:
Dove Canada’s marketing partner, ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Canada, first proposed creating a theatre piece about beauty and aging as part of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which launched in 2004.
Dove Canada’s marketing manager, Alison Leung, said Ogilvy targeted the theatre as a way to give a voice to women over 45, a group their research suggests has chronically poor body image and feels underrepresented in media and culture.
Early in the search for a playwright, Leung said Dove and Thompson forged an immediate bond during the first phone call.
Thompson concedes that for Dove, “it really is about is brand loyalty.” But: “I don’t care if ultimately they hope to sell soap with it, the soap’s fine.”
This has been all over the Web, it turns out, but just for the record, to follow up on the post about people in Ghana opting for coffins shaped like large products (beer and Coke bottles, etc.), a guy in Chicago has a PBR coffin. Since he’s still alive, he uses it as a cooler.
Recently I had to buy a new cell phone. I don’t mean that I wanted a new one with cooler features, I mean the “0” button on my old one stopped working, and it turns out you pretty much need all ten digits to use a phone, even if you’re a minimal cell phone user, as I am.
This happened to coincide with a fresh round of attention to the much-discussed problem of e-waste. (See this earlier post.) I assumed that Sprint would simply take my old phone and get rid of it for me appropriately. They didn’t. But when I got home, I noticed that they’d given me a special envelope, the one pictured here. So I guess I just pop it in there and put it in the mail and it gets taken care of for me.
Seems better to just take it from me at the store. But …
… assuming that this is on the up-and-up — and the disposal really is responsible — this envelope approach is kind of interesting. If it’s true, as this article mentioned, that there are hundreds of millions of cell phones just sitting in desk drawers, maybe somebody should come up with a way to distribute envelopes like these – or really even just distribute the mailing address. (I’ve obscured the address here because I guess there might be some kind of parameters about what phones they accept, and I don’t want the upshot of this post to be Sprint coming after me if a bunch of other providers’ phones start showing up, or whatever.)
I see that on the site of Recellular, the famous wireless recycling company, they list “use a pre-paid envelope” as a way to send them an old phone, noting that such envelopes are “available from most wireless retailers or packaged with your new cell phone.” (Does that mean all new cell phones come with an envelope? I don’t know.) I’m not sure if there’s some reason why they wouldn’t just publicize the address, for those who have an old cell phone sitting around and might be willing to spring for postage if it meant they didn’t have to drive somewhere to drop their old phone off or pick up a special envelope.
So it all got me thinking: Wouldn’t spreading the address or addresses to send your old cell phone to be a pretty easy online word-of-mouth (unconsumption) project for somebody? I mean spread them in a way that was fun and caught on and got people to take action? Good project for an agency looking to do something good? Clever student project that sparked thousands to properly unconsumed their outdated mobiles?
Is this already happening? If it is, could it be done better?
Or am I missing something obvious? About why it wouldn’t work?
Continuum Inc., in Boston, is throwing a book-release party for me there for Buying In. It’s Thursday night, June 26. It’s planned as a casual kind of thing: I’ll probably say a few words, maybe take questions if that seems appropriate, and then, you know, mingle, sign some books, that sort of thing.
It’s an invite-only affair, but if you are in Boston and interested, there’s a good chance I sneak you in. I would be pretty excited to meet an actual Murketing reader or two.
If you’re interested, email me at murketing@robwalker.net, with “Boston” in the subject heading.
There are space limitations, and this offer will expire, etc. etc. Bottom line is they’ll need my suggestions pretty soon. If we’ve never spoken or interacted, it might be helpful if you gave me some basic info to give my hosts about, I don’t know, whether you’re in the media, or marketing, or design business, or academia, or a student, or that you’re just incredibly cool. Name, title, company, and email address is what I’ve been asked to provide.
Hope to meet you…
So, see that giant representation of a beer bottle? That’s a coffin. Apparently.
Or maybe this is a hoax of some kind.
Either way, Delicious Ghost points to this Ghanaweb writeup, with more pictures: “The Ga people [of Ghana] believe that when their loved ones die, they move on into another life — and the Ga make sure they do so in style. They honor their dead with brightly colored coffins that celebrate the way they lived.”
Other branded examples include a giant Coke bottle, and an Air Jordan coffin.
Longtime readers may recall my past musings on what I refer to as “unconsumption.” I haven’t written about it lately, but I have thought about it a lot, and particularly recently, for reasons I’ll get to in a few weeks.
I’m going to start writing about it again, sort of to revive it as a theme, and I want to start by defining the term, as I now think of it. Or rather, I hope to work my toward a definition, over a series of posts, and see if anybody has a reaction or a thought or a vicious smackdown in response.
Previously I’ve written about unconsumption as a name for, basically, getting ridding of stuff, as opposed to acquiring it. And I’ve tried to explore whether that process can entail the same pleasures and satisfactions that we commonly associate with consumption (or at least the moment of acquiring something new). Today I want to expand or reframe the definition to include: Finding a new use for something that was about to become “trash.”
A number of artists and crafty types work with discarded or recycled materials — a process sometimes called upcycling. Just today I saw a post on Craftzine about someone who makes scarves out of selvedge scraps. The Crafty Bastards Blog regularly highlights upcycling creators, like this maker of recycled skateboard jewelry, or this person who makes grocery bags out of old T-shirts.
The other day, Andy Bosselman posted about a bunch of interesting T-shirt sites, one of which has an interesting unconsumption/upcylcing variation. (I read about or someone emailed me about this site at around the same time, but I can’t remember where and/or who this on Coudal.com at around the same time.) Anyway the site is called Re-Shirt.
The idea is that people donate T-shirts. In particular, you’re supposed to donate a T-shirt with a story: “a T-shirt that someone associates with a special memory: an important career step, an unforgettable football match, a demonstration in Guatemala, the feeling of an entire stage in their life.”
An image of the T-shirt, along with a short version of its story, is posted on the site, for sale.
I like a couple of things interest me about this. First is the recognition that the importance, and value, of an object has to do with its story, or rather the way its story and the owner’s story overlap. (For a whole book of examples of what that means, see Taking Things Seriously.)
Second is that each shirt chosen for sale on the site “is given its very own orange Re-Shirt Label, a number is printed on it, and it begins a new registered life. Every future owner can now document the experiences they have with their Re-Shirt online and continue the story of this piece of clothing.”
I did a Q&A a little while back here with the folks behind (Re), who do something similar, repurposing red T-shirts with an “Inspi(re)d” logo. I’m sort of fascinated with the general concept of a free-floating logo that gets put onto already-existing objects, sort of a secondary form of branding.
I wonder if there are possibilities for the unconsumption idea in that kind of strategy …
THIS JOKE’S FOR YOU:
A satirical product from a dark comedy crosses over to reality.
It’s interesting to consider the Brawndo project as metasubversion, making it possible to express knowing amusement at the absurdity of American commerce by buying something. But maybe the message is simply that cautionary tales about dumbed-down culture are a futile endeavor: show us an argument that we will buy anything, no matter how idiotic, and we say, “Awesome — how much for that?”
Or maybe the lesson is something else altogether….
Read the column in the March 4, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Previously on Murketing: about Brawndo; about imaginary brands. Even more imaginary brand links here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
The Weekend Thingdown is pretty straightforward: It’s a list of interesting … things. I’m not suggestion you need to buy any of these things. They’re just things that caught my eye. The Thingdown is planned as an every-other-weekend feature. Here goes.
Space Invaders Cutting Board, via BoingBoing.
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So, looking at the post below, which I slammed out in a matter of seconds as the last thing before shutting off the computer after a long week … I’m not proud.
Reading it now it sounds like I was rooting against Nau. Not the case. Sounded like an interesting and well-intentioned company. I was interested in it. Etc.
Second, it also sounds like I’m being rather more hostile toward cool-stuff blogs than I intended to be. Particularly given the fact that the only thing I linked to that hyped Nau was actually a trad-press article. I don’t have a problem with either cool-stuff blogs or trad-press mags advocating stuff they think is cool or noteworthy or whatever they want to do.
What I should have been clearer about is the difference between those approaches and what I do. Not that one is better than the other, but what I do is write about what people are buying — not about what I wish people were buying, or what I think they should buy. And this was the problem I was having with Nau. It sounded interesting, and the brand was coming up in lots of places, but I was not finding much in the way of actual consumer enthusiasm.
Consider, in contrast, the response to my recent blip here about the Flip camcorder: Several immediate responses from people who have bought it. Not that that’s definitive, but it syncs with the casual conversations I have etc., that people are really buying it and they’re really enthusiastic. I tried to find a pattern like that regarding Nau, but it just wasn’t there, as far as I could tell. It seemed to me that Nau was popular among certain entrepreneurs or marketers or other professional participants in consumer culture — which is interesting and legitimate, but doesn’t add up to something that I can, say, write about in Consumed.
That was the point of the original Nau post on this site, of course. If you read Murketing you know I float stuff all the time just to see what people say, and sometimes I later write about that something in the column. I had put Nau in the “wait and see” file. I guess that was the right call, but I could have expressed that better than I did last night.
For a more thoughtful response to the Nau news, see Indie Breakfast Club.
So.
Earlier I floated a post here about Nau, which was getting an amazing amount of “buzz,” from cool blogs, random people emailing me, and even the “mainstream” press (although less in category three than than in one and two).
I floated the post here because what I wasn’t getting direct evidence of was actual Nau consumers. I totally got the concept, as this article says: “the ultimate over-the-top, high-concept business. It makes striking, enviro-friendly clothing.”
Okay. But my job is to write about why people buy things, so I was trying to figure out: Who is buying this, and why?
On a recent visit to Portland, OR, I went to a Nau retail space, and it was basically me and the employees and the very aggressive marketing concept, and some stuff on clearance. So it was interesting to see, but I didn’t learn anything of use for what I write about. Meanwhile, my post did not get me any replies or comments from Nau fans.
Anyhoo, I bring all this up because it’s just been brought to my attention that Nau is ceasing operations.
Obviously, I’m glad I didn’t decide to write about the brand in Consumed. But that’s not why I bring this up. I bring it up because as far as I could tell, Nau got nonstop love from every “influential,” “tastemaker,” “thoughtleader,” blah blah blah blog you can name.
I thought that was the secret sauce? I thought if you win over the blognescnenti, then you flat-out win? Because the MSM is irrelevant? And stuff? So, what’s up? Could it possibly be that the whole bloggy-buzz thing is, oh, I don’t know … bullshit?
Just asking.
[Thanks Steve!]
Once again: Murketing’s Friday rundown of highlights from this week in backlashes, dissent and critiques….
1. Via Counterfeit Chic I learned of the above piece, actually a T-shirt image (proceeds to charity) by Nadia Plesner. I guess it speaks for itself but just in case here’s a bit of what Plesner says:
My illustration Simple Living is an idea inspired by the medias constant cover of completely meaningless things.
My thought was: Since doing nothing but wearing designerbags and small ugly dogs appearantly is enough to get you on a magazine cover, maybe it is worth a try for people who actually deserves and needs attention.
Well. One can always debate the real impact of such things, and one can also generally make a safe bet that among the reactions will be a trademark objection. That’s the Vuitton/Murakami/Jacobs bag being toted by a Sudanese refugee. And LV has sent Ms. Plesner a letter, which you can download from her site, asking her to stop selling the T-shirts.
Counterfeit Chic breaks down the legal issues with a great overview that I highly recommend.
2. Last week’s AntiFriday highlighted Greenpeace’s backlash against Dove’s dissent-ish advertising. It would appear that Greenpeace’s strategy worked.
3. This week’s top backlash/critique/dissent video comes via Agenda Inc.: A harrowing Amnesty International video regarding “waterboarding.”
The list continues after the jump.
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Posted Under:
Anti,
Backlashing
This post was written by Rob Walker on May 2, 2008
Comments Off on AntiFriday: Luxury, hunger, torture, the revolution, etc.
Design For Dreaming
[ –> Details on Sponsored-Film Virtual Festival are here.]
Design For Dreaming is the final entry in this virtual festival — and probably the best-known one. It’s even been mentioned on BoingBoing.
In part I assume this is because the film is — on one level — perfectly ridiculous, featuring a sort of Audrey Hepburn type who is “Delighted!” to see new cars that are “Oh so beautiful!” or whatever. It’s campy and funny. We all love to look at this sort of thing and snicker at how naïve people used to be. And without question, Design For Dreaming is absurd. But … I think there is more to be found here than that. Read more
A kind reader has brought to my attention the “themes” that you can acquire to pimp out, or whatever, your iGoogle home page. I’m not an iGoogle person myself, so I don’t know how new this is, but I was interested to see the sort of pitch to the potential page-pimper as “What happens when great art mixes with the Google homepage?”
I’m going to guess that one thing that happens is that Google gets paid. Because I see that much of the “great art” is by brands, such as Dolce & Gabbana, Ecko, and Bathing Ape. And even most of the artist art is from sort of brand-type artists, such as Jeff Koons. Also Michael Graves is in there, I’m not sure how to count him. And Coldplay, oddly enough.
The other possibility is that these “artists” get paid, or have been paid, by Google. My assumption is that these art pieces are more than anything else analogous to ads for the various entities represented, so the money would flow from them to Google. But maybe I’m wrong. One of the curious things about the cross-branded murketing world, especially online, is sometimes it’s hard to tell who pays whom, and under what theory.
Anyway, if you’re an iGoogler, please enjoy, uh, “personalizing” your experience.
[Thanks Rebecca!]
UPDATE 5/2: For another point of view on all of this, from representative of the super-savvy youth culture Joshspear.com: It’s a “a rad new customizing feature” that lets you “personalize your search toolbar”! What’s the point in making fun of this stuff if the coolhunters come LATER and STILL spout the SAME OLD CLICHES? Here’s something you might consider “personalizing”: your thoughts.
I forgot to mention this just now, and maybe it’s better as a separate post anyway. I was looking at the Amazon page for Buying In, and noticed that in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” lineup, aside from an assortment of books, there was the Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, 60-Minutes (Black).
Presumably this means that one person happened to double up on a book/camcorder order. But it’s still kind of interesting, because I’ve been hearing so much about these camcorders all of a sudden. Seems like everybody’s getting one.
Do you have one? I have a feeling at least one of you does — or has it coming in the mail soon.
What is it about these devices? Why are they taking off? Maybe the answers are obvious, but any good theories?
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