MURKETING

Trust me

Asked to rank their level of trust in a dozen industries ranging from insurance to health care, respondents around the world invariably put media and entertainment dead last, according to Edelman, the U.S. public relations and consulting company that conducted the surveys.

— International Herald Tribune.

The silver lining here, for me, is that this must mean Edelman won’t bother to pitch me anymore. Why would their clients want to be mentioned in some untrustworthy media outlet?

Rock and rockets

Pretty interesting NYT dispatch today from Sderot, an Israeli town near the Gaza Strip, where there’s a vital local-music scene:

In the Israeli public consciousness, Sderot is a place of poverty and danger. It has been barraged by more than 4,000 rockets in the last six years, including nearly 200 since the shaky cease-fire began in November. Six people have died from the attacks, and dozens of homes have been damaged.

And yet Sderot is also the hometown of a pop culture hero of the moment: Kobi Oz, the lead singer of the Teapacks, the Israeli pick for the popular Eurovision song contest. Mr. Oz made headlines in March when organizers of the contest suggested that his song “Push the Button” might be disqualified for carrying an inappropriate political message. [The Teapacks are scheduled to perform in the Eurovision semifinal in May.] The song riffs on the Israeli fear of being obliterated by an atomic bomb.

The link.

Symbol status

I was reading something about the logo that represents Rotary clubs — “a brilliant advertising image, it has proved as lasting and recognizable as any corporate symbol,” historian Victoria de Grazia observes in passing in her 2005 book Irresisitible Empire — and ended up going over to Rotary International’s web site.

There I was surprised to find that you can get a Rotary-branded credit card. There’s a part of me that would like to break out the Rotary Platinum Plus Card at lunch with some trend-watcher or “thought leader,” just to see if anybody would notice, or react.

A different sort of wine packaging

The WSJ has a good story today about a “cult” wine called Screaming Eagle. (It’s a subscribers-only article, but here’s the link if that’s you.) The winery doesn’t do tours, or having a tasting room, and — as the owners are notably willing to tell the Journal — they’re big on secrecy in general.

This tradition goes back to 1986, when [founder Jean] Phillips, a former real-estate agent, bought the 68-acre Screaming Eagle ranch and started making wine in a 12-by-18-foot stone building. She made just 200 cases of her first vintage. Wine critic Robert Parker awarded her 1992 release a nearly perfect 99 rating, and Screaming Eagle scored instant cult-wine status.

Ms. Phillips resorted to a common cult-wine practice: She sold only to people on a mailing list, with a limit of three bottles a year. The list was full by 2000. She closed the waiting list after thousands of people had signed up….

Those who have made it onto the list are often elated. One grateful buyer sent Ms. Phillips a photo of his baby in a bassinet next to a bottle of Screaming Eagle, sending updates with photos of the growing child each year.

Regarding that last detail: Ew.

Regarding the story in general, I wonder how important is, in building a culty business, to have an early stamp of endorsement from a widely-known expert.

Think it over

Recently I was introduced to the very pleasing Psychology 101-ish term, “need for cognition.” Or maybe I was introduced to it years ago, when I took Psychology 101, and had forgotten. Anyway, it basically means this: People who have a high “need for cognition” like to think, and those who don’t, don’t. I liked this because of course I think of myself, and my readers, as people with a high need for cognition.

Then I started thinking about it.

Do people really self-identify as not liking to think? There’s a lot of evidence — I think — to support the contention that many people do not, in fact, like to think. That’s why gossip and shopping tips are more popular than long investigations of complex topics.

But how, exactly, do psych researchers figure out who are the people who don’t like to think? Who would say, “I prefer to think as little as possible.”

I found this quiz, which appears to be designed to measure need for cognition.

The first item is: “I would prefer simple to complex problems.”  You’re supposed to rate to what degree this statement is characteristic of you, the quiz-taker.

This gave me pause. For one thing, if I know what this quiz is about, and I see myself as a person who likes to think, I know what the “right” answer is. Looking at the list, the “right” answer is fairly obvious in almost all cases. Other statements are: “Thinking is not my idea of fun,” and “The notion of thinking abstractly appeals to me.”

I’ll tell you what I think. I think this quiz measure the degree to which you want to be perceived, or maybe even perceive yourself, as a person who likes to think. Which is quite a different thing than being a person who really does like to think.

For another thing, while I see myself as a  person who likes to think, the fact of the matter is — if I really think about it —  I’m not sure that the “right” answers would really be honest. I know I’m supposed to say I prefer complex problems to simple problems. But come on. I’d prefer no problems at all! I’ve got plenty of problems to deal with, every week, and if I could make the problem-barrage simpler, I’m pretty sure I would.

But maybe the truth is that this is only what I think! Maybe the truth is, while I would claim that I’d prefer to cut down on the problems, my actual behavior is a morass of problem-creation, and when I don’t have enough problems to think about, I go searching for more. Without even thinking about it! After all, one thing I do recall from Psychology 101 is that there’s often a disconnect between what individuals say, and what they do.

So what does it all mean? I’m not sure. I need — possibly I really and truly need — to think about it some it more.

Music as punishment

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.

Ink, Inc.

In Consumed: The Tattoo Aesthetic: Why, despite years of trendiness, the old-school tattoo tradition hasn’t faded.

It has been several years since even Ozzy Osbourne could see that tattoos were overexposed: “To be unique, don’t get a tattoo. Because everybody else has got tattoos!” Yet despite the fact that tattoo imagery is everywhere — serving as the basis for reality shows, as a de facto part of N.B.A. uniforms and, increasingly, as an element in marketing — it retains its appeal as “an authentic and real part of culture,” one advertising executive recently informed The Chicago Tribune. What’s surprising about the popularity of tattooing is that it won’t seem to go away — that some tattoo imagery still seems authentic, even when it’s mainstream….

Continue reading by way of this New York Times Magazine link, which will probably expire in a week, or this Boston Globe link.

Related Links: Gyro/Sailor Jerry case study; Scott Campbell.

Space City flashback

As I’ve said before, I tend to think that the most interesting stuff that surfaces in YouTube and other online video venues is often footage that’s 25 or 30 years old. So I was pretty excited to read in Houstonist that ABC-13 had put the entire debut episode of its “Live at Five” broadcast, from 1977, on its site.

I grew up in the Houston broadcast area, so Dave Ward and Marvin Zindler and Ed Brandon are familiar faces and voices. I was really excited to see some early Marvin footage — but that part of the broadcast turned out to be disappointingly tame and boring. Although, interestingly, Zindler was updating a report he’d done 30 years before the 1977 broadcast.

Clearly he hadn’t hit his stride yet in 1977. Here’s the current picture of Zindler on ABC 13 site:

The guy is a classic. This four-second YouTube clip is all you need to know. Although this one-minute clip that exults in his famous phrase “Slime in the ice machine!” is also pretty great. Though whoever uploaded it really should have let it go a little longer, since the news anchors’ bemused expressions after one of Marvin’s reports is usually pretty priceless.

Anyway, the highlights of 1977 broadcast turned out to be the old ads for Brawny, Patio frozen dinners (which I used to eat all the time), Alberto V05 hot oil treatment, and so on. Also the news broadcast’s endless opening theme song. And Dave Ward’s surprisingly robust hair, and co-anchor Jan Carson’s even more robust bow.

It’s hard out there for a primper

Robin Givhan of the Washington Post addresses the standout items in the recently disclosed expenses of John Edwards’ presidential campaign:

They are the ones incurred at Designworks Salon in Dubuque, Iowa, Torrenueva Hair Designs in Beverly Hills, Calif., and the Pink Sapphire salon and spa in Manchester, N.H.

The campaign paid $800 for two haircuts from the Torrenueva salon. Designworks provided $248 worth of camera-ready makeup. And Pink Sapphire was called on two occasions for Edwards’s makeup needs at $150 and $75 a visit. Together they account for $1,273 worth of professional grooming, from trims to foundation.

Edwards has a bit of an image problem in this area. His campaign is supposed to be all about “the two Americas,” not about him being the “Breck Girl” candidate, or YouTube videos of his pre-interview makeup sessions.

Givhan isn’t terribly sympathetic:

Edwards considers triple-digit grooming expenses a part of campaigning. He listed his salon and spa bills under “consulting/events,” after all. And the truth is that audiences expect politicians to look polished on television. They don’t want to see some washed-out guy with a shiny nose waxing on about his call to public service. And politicians are only human. They want to make the best impression.

But there is a line between grooming and primping. Brushing your teeth is grooming. Giving yourself a big Chiclet smile with veneers is primping. Having an adept barber come around to the hotel to give a busy candidate a trim is grooming. Getting the owner of an expensive Beverly Hills salon to come over, knowing full well that the cost is going to be 10 times what the average Joe is likely to pay for a haircut . . . that’s a Breck girl move.

Death and MySpace

This article in the Houston Chronicle looks at a particular aspect of the online reaction to the Virginia Tech killings:

On Facebook.com, many of the Tech students are using a black ribbon over the school logo as their icon. A quick search on Technorati yields thousands of blog posts on the subject. Beth 0319 writes: “I didn’t know anyone there but I just feel this tremendous sadness that has no where to go. It’s just all so senseless.”

Is the grieving process different for Generation Y, a group that has come of age at a time of world turmoil and a time when social networking has reached critical mass?

…

Monday’s tragedy, [the author of a book about teenagers and technology] said, is the first massive incident to occur after the revolution in social-networking technology. Now the dead’s MySpace pages become tribute pages, where friends and family continue to have a conversation as if they were still alive.

I’ve mentioned earlier, probably more than once, that we’ve gotten much more aware of Army culture since moving to Savannah, because there’s a base nearby that houses the 3rd Infantry Division, now in the process of embarking on what is for many soldiers a third deployment to Iraq. When someone from the 3rd ID is killed — there have been five such deaths so far in 2007 — it’s covered in the local paper, and we’ve noticed that such stories often mention the tributes that have appeared on the soldier’s MySpace page.

I suppose that a year ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me that soldiers would have MySpace pages, but many of them do.

And this practice that the Chronicle describes above is routine — people post messages to soldiers who have died (in what, if I may say so in passing, would seem to count as a “massive incident”), as if they’ll be checking MySpace in the afterlife.

This seems odd, at first, but I don’t think the urge to do this is so different from leaving flowers on a grave, or from “speaking to” the deceased in remarks at a funeral.

The Chronicle story also mentions a site called MyDeathSpace.com, which I’d never heard of. Among other things, the site publishes news of MySpace users who have died, and provides a link to each person’s MySpace page, so you can click straight through to read the tributes, or leave one yourself.

I am somewhat curious about whether MySpace itself has any kind of policy about what happens to a given page when a MySpace user dies.

Annals of self-promotion

Despite evidence to the contrary, I hate to promote myself. I find the process humiliating. But increasingly, I think, it’s inescapable, which explains why I’m lately very alert to every fresh rationale to make me feel better about something I’m probably going to have to do whether I like it or not. Thus while watching this documentary about Mark Twain on PBS the other night, I was interested to learn how early in his writing life he shamelessly promoted himself, and how aggressively. And how well.
After an early series of travel articles that he wrote was picked up by several newspapers, he decided to leverage this into a publicity event and turn it into a lecture. He rented the Academy of Music, on Pine Street in San Francisco, for 50 (borrowed) dollars. He also spent $150, also borrowed as I understand it, to advertise and promote the event. This was in 1866. The $200 he spent would work out to just over $2,500 in today’s dollars. Twain would’ve been 30 or 31 years old, and I’m pretty sure he’d only started wrtinng for money a year or so before that. A young writer today borrowing and spending $2,500 to promote himself seems kind of brazen.

Anyway, here’s part of what the newspaper ad promoting his “Lecture on the Sandwich Islands” said:

A couple of things about this. First, I think it holds up pretty well. Maybe it’s not going to cut it as a McSweeneys submission or whatever, but for something written in 1866, it’s pretty self aware.

More to the point, the ad assumes an audience that’s already used to the tomfoolery of promotion, and ready to laugh at a knowing critique of it.

This interests me a great deal, because so many analyses of the modern, “savvy” consumer who “sees through” traditional marketing imply that until relatively recently, consumers mindlessly took orders from advertising. In reality, there’s a mountain of evidence that consumers have been able to “see through” (and mock, and reject) advertising for a long, long time. And this might be the earliest example I’ve seen that however “savvy” consumers are today, the widespread ability to see ad hyperbole for exactly what it is, is anything but new.

Morever, this is a good example of how making fun of advertising can be a good form of advertising: Twain’s performance sold out, and he was on his way to an extraordinary career — thanks to his enormous talent, yes, but also thanks to some pretty clever self-promotion.

Fast Food Realism

Here’s an amusing project: Photographs of ad images of fast food, paired with the same item “purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort.” Guess which category the above Whopper image falls into?

Via Coudal.

Gold Prize

By and large, the Pulitzers are a mystery to me. But the round of winners just announced included a truly pleasant surprise: Jonathan Gold’s win in the criticism category.

We became somewhat acquainted with Mr. Gold back when we lived in New Orleans; he would visit from time to time doing recon for Gourmet Magazine, and we would benefit because he needed diners. He was such a nice guy! And he really knew his subject. I hadn’t been a reader of the L.A. Weekly prior to that, but started checking out his column — and became a fan. (If you’ve ever perused that list of links at rights, you’ll notice that it includes one to his column, in fact.)

Apart from being a gifted and incredibly informed writer on the actual subject of food, he’s also a gifted and incredibly informed writer on the subject of Los Angeles. That is, he makes the column not just a series of restaurant reviews, but something like a food-based series of explorer’s dispatches, and the result is an ongoing guide to what a fascinating metropolis that city really is. Finally, he pulls of the tough and admirable task of giving his writing with a real point of view without simply writing about himself.
Plus he’s surprisingly knowledgeable about heavy metal. Among other things. Not that that comes up in the column.
Anyway, his work is great, and I can’t remember being so pleased about a Pulitzer winner.

Pop-culture Evolution

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.

The other side of your angry rants at overseas service reps

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.