RSS

Category Archives: Media/Marketing

Nobody On The Road*

23 Mar

Have you noticed that there hasn’t been much of a teenage car culture for quite some time?  When is the last time you saw a teenager tinkering under the hood?  No doubt getting one’s driver’s license is still a rite of passage, but mooning over cars?  Not so much anymore.  The ebbing of the fascination probably began with the shuttering of drive-in movie theatres and laying off of car hops (def: wait staff who delivered food/beverage directly to cars, sometimes on roller skates.)

However, even after the rural/suburban landscape changed, kids still had a fascination with cars.  They saved their babysitting, lawn mowing and summer job money to purchase their first junky car.  For some the radio and cigarette lighter were more intriguing than what was under the hood, but there was still a fascination with having one’s own car.  A car meant freedom.  A car transported us from our parents’ homes filled with their antiquated rules, music and friends.  We stuffed our late model sedans and station wagons with too many noisy friends.  The music was our own, the smoking was incessant and we could go as far as our pooled gas money could take us.  Often it was just to the local hangout (perhaps an abandoned drive-in?) where classmates with equally stuffed cars would gather.  Perhaps there was some pilfered beer, maybe even some smooching, and definitely music.  It was our house party without the house.

Is it any wonder then, that in 2012 teenagers have absolutely no fascination with car ownership?  When you are raised in a home in which; “your music” gets equal play, your friends have 24 hour access to room/board/wi-fi and you may have free household rein during the day, what compelling reason would there be to incur the expense of owning a car?  Add to that, the ability to connect with hundreds of friends anytime and anyplace, and therefore no reason to join a (station) wagon train to an abandoned lot.  Not to mention the adult-ish responsibility of car ownership that is somewhat incompatible with today’s teen.

I can get this, you ca get this, and yet the good people of General Motors have hired a (37 year old) executive of MTV to develop marketing to youth.  Q. Is it me, or does that strike you as somewhat missing the point?

 

*Boys of Summer – Don Henley & Mike Campbell (1984)

 
2 Comments

Posted by on March 23, 2012 in Childhood, Media/Marketing

 

Tags: , , , ,

Always Be Selling

20 Mar

Are you tired, run down, listless? Do you poop out at parties? Are you unpopular?  Don’t reach for that bottle of vitametavegamin just yet.  It might not be vitamins, minerals and 23% alcohol that is lacking from your diet.  You may in fact be suffering from pitch overload.

Much is made of the unrelenting pressure and demands of sales.  Just look at those men in Glengarry Glen Ross or poor Willy Loman.  Selling can be exhausting and soul crushing.  But guess what? so is being sold to night and day, day and night.  From the moment we wake until we crumble into fitful sleep, we are bombarded.  The morning news is brought to you by…(even public broadcasting will read you corporate underwriter ads.)  The news (whether read, watched or heard) has to be weeded from the press releases and publicist’s coups.  Once out the door, wearing what was sold to you, you head for your commute.  At the bus shelter, or subway entrance, you will view at least 3 different rotating ads.  The subway car is plastered with ads (usually of a very depressing nature; lawsuits, questionable training institutes, and booze, lots of booze.)  One’s actual workday may be filled with more spin and sales, depending on one’s place and nature of work.  By the time we arrive back home, we have been pitched countless times.  It’s nothing we can’t handle.  We’re used to it.

It’s when the pitch tries to disguise itself, that things get a bit trying.  Back in olden times, when one had to get up from the recliner to turn the channel, to one of five stations; not everyone on television was selling something.  There was a format known as the talk show, where interesting people came to talk.  Some of these people were famous, sometimes not.  The reason that there were so many of these show is that they were interesting, and they were interesting because people weren’t being booked to sell a product.  Conversations were not being designed by publicists but by producers and hosts.  And I’m not just talking about Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder here; lots of hosts were creating great entertainment. Print media has become very similar to television in its mass marketed hermetically sealed value meals of stories.  Whether it’s an “expert” whose expertise is that they are selling their book, doling out a sound bite, or the hard hitting exposes about high end knock-offs periodically placed in fashion magazines, the audience struggles to discern; “is this real?”  When we add embedded advertising to the mix (shout out to General Mills for the television series Homeland!  Your Lucky Charms has never looked better in its FOUR close-ups!) it’s no wonder we’re feeling listless and pooped out at parties.

Embedding is not all that new.  Remember when Don Draper won the Clio for the Glo-Coat ad?  It wasn’t that the child as a prisoner (behind a kitchen chair) was so innovative, it’s that the commercial was filmed like a movie.  The viewer was lulled into the commercial because it felt like actual programming.  That is the point of embedded advertising.  We’re practically inured to traditional ads (unless it’s during the Super Bowl) and don’t even see the many pop-ups on our computer.  But when the ad seems like part of the narrative our brain needs a moment to register that we are being sold something.

The exhaustion comes from the fact that we have so many advertising delivery systems now.  What was the first logo apparel you owned?  Was it a T-shirt, a cap, or a cotton jacket festooned with a pattern of “Pepsi-Cola” emblazoned in red, white and blue (ahem, that was me.)  Please, that is so 1977.  There are companies who don’t even bother with design any longer, they just slap their brand/logo on the shoe, bag, shirt and call it a day.  You can’t even look at another person without seeing an ad (and I’m not just talking about people who copyright their baby’s name.)

At the end of the day, if we are surrounded by things (i.e., books, music, art) that we chose because they speak to some fiber of our being, we will rejuvenate (at least until the next day.)  But what if the book we fall asleep to is always a “bestseller” and doesn’t resonate at all?  What if at the end of the day we find ourselves surrounded by nothing more than what we’ve been sold?

 

 

 
4 Comments

Posted by on March 20, 2012 in Media/Marketing

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

And The Beat Goes On*

14 Mar

Have you heard the news?  The Encyclopedia Britannica is stopping the presses (see: changing marketplace.)  No doubt this is quite the blow to Britannica employees and door-to-door salesmen (see: Fuller Brush, Willy Loman.)  But perhaps this is actually not all bad news.

The encyclopedia had a hallowed place in many homes and hearts.  The (wonderful) film Ball of Fire (1941) updated the 7 dwarfs and their mighty leader, Gregory Peck, into encyclopedia wizards.  The quirky little brainiacs toiled for years, documenting every subject known to humankind.  It was a noble undertaking, and one made all the more enjoyable with the arrival of Barbara Stanwyck.  For decades, real-life families across the country paid for one volume of encyclopedic knowledge at a time.  The books; with their hard covers and lush pages, were displayed with pride in living rooms and dens.  For better or worse, schoolchildren used these volumes to complete homework assignments.  Those without (and there were/are plenty of those) made the trip to the library or relied on source material (a.k.a. parents) or turned in homework destined for less than an “A.”

Encyclopedias are a great source for cursory understanding of a subject, but there are now so many more of those.  With a few keystrokes endless source materials are at our fingertips.  Students (and others) can go directly to the U.S. government sites or the American Medical Association.  The very act of searching (a.k.a. researching) broadens the understanding of a subject.

Will some people confuse wikipedia with an authoritative (and fully vetted) source?  They already do.  Does the cessation of printing encyclopedias put disadvantaged students at a disadvantage?  Not in this day and age.  It’s a pretty safe bet that if a library has an up-to-date version of the encyclopedia on the shelves, they have computers and access to the internet as well.  I would posit that the elimination of the printed encyclopedia evens the playing the field a bit for students, if it weren’t for the fact that having them in the home is no longer a sign of special access to information.

Why is it even worth note you ask (assuming you don’t work in the printing or door-to-door sales professions?)  For the simplest of reasons: progress is sometimes quite progressive.  The shuttering of a theatre, restaurant or nightclub to make way for a food court or Sephora, is not progress, it’s just sad.  The erosion of demarcation between public space and private space is not progress, it just means I have to throw my body over my entree as the woman at the next table styles her hair.  The memory of salesmen, diaper service, milk delivery, Sheriff Taylor and his son Opie, fill us with a warmth and sense of safety.  Change (and growing pains) are always just a bit frightening and our instincts are to cling to vestiges of the past.  For proof, one need only witness an adolescent girl’s bedroom festooned with equal parts stuffed animals and mascara.

There once was a dizzying amount of New York (daily) newspapers, some of them having more than one edition a day.  It took awhile, but with technology we have that once again.  The insatiable human desire for information is part of our charm.  As long as our innovations keep pace with that need, we can say farewell to the past without too much angst.  For those who will miss those smooth, hefty burgundy books, just consider how much fun you’ll have convincing children that you used to have to walk to the library (in the snow, uphill, both ways) to learn who invented the printing press.

*Sonny Bono (1967)

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on March 14, 2012 in Cultural Critique, Media/Marketing

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You Could Be Another Lincoln*

04 Mar

Recently I heard of a woman who made a lovely batch of lemonade out of a whole bunch of lemons.  She had spent most of her working life in finance management.  Through pluck and competence she moved up the ranks nicely.  Then she was laid-off at the same time her son was diagnosed with behavioral issues.  Like most of us, her stress behaviors began to kick into high gear.  For her this meant organizing everything within her sight.  She had always found organizing to be soothing and imbued the results with subtle sacred qualities.  Growing up in a chaotic household and moving often as a child, she found order comforting.  So she took the doors off her son’s closet, replaced all his drawers with clear boxes and organized and labeled him into a more focused kid.  Her child’s teacher noticed the difference in his behavior, and a conversation resulted in other children’s rooms being organized by the ex-financial manager.  Packing up her label maker and color coded files one day, she joked to her husband; “This is like a job.”

I think we all know where the story goes from here.  But wait, there is one tiny hitch.  This highly educated, super competent woman decided she needed credentials.  She went off to the Organizing Institute (or something as ridiculous sounding) and got herself a certificate.  I can picture the graduation ceremony: a row of color coordinated graduates holding their hand over the heart and pledging to banish randomness and clutter.  Now that she’s certified does that mean she enjoys client/practitioner privilege?  If she discovers a bloodied shirt and knife in an over-stuffed dresser drawer is she obligated to keep that information to herself?  Why did this seemingly talented, smart, sophisticated woman feel the need to trot off to the wizard to get a doctorate in thinkology?

Could it be that we are now living in the age of expertise?  You’ve heard of the the jazz age, the cold war age, the disco age?  The age of expertise isn’t nearly that interesting or fashion specific.  The expertise age may very well be the product of the perfect storm of populace insecurity and a global speaker’s corner.  Whether people’s insecurities are innate, organic or the result of marketing susceptibility, the results are the same.  Grown people walking around feeling shaky and out of step.  They probably are perfectly happy (or happy enough) but are bombarded with messages about tablescapes, second homes in Tuscany, French parenting, Tiger’s mothering.  Having not mastered the skill of tuning out, sooner or later these various messages boil down to one thing; “other people know more than I do.”  Now, that is actually true.  But the people who know more than most of us are not the ones telling us how to carve the perfect jack-o-lantern.

People achieving expert status without robust credentials is nothing new.  Certainly we can think of at least one radio talk show “doctor” raking in the benefits.  But the platforms for such expertise have expanded beyond computation.  So we find ourselves with a huge audience for “experts” in fields which often have no history of formal certification.  Everything, and I do mean everything, has become an area of expertise.  In just one week I have heard of a woman whose specialty is herding cats, another who designs walls (she’s not a muralist or even a house painter, she tells you where to hang your artwork.)  And the infant/child fetish is still skyrocketing: getting your baby to sleep through the night? 1-800-i’ll take your money is on the way!  not sure how to toilet train? HaveM&MsWillTravel.com is at the ready.  I think we can all agree that there are iPhone app experts being created everyday.

Is all of this malarkey a sign of the end of time?  Hardly.  Would anyone confuse another “it happened to me so it must be universal” book with actual sociology?  Doubtful.  If there is any harm it is merely that throwing around terms like “expert” and inculcating people as such is not helping anyone or anything.  We’d be a lot further ahead to feel confident in our own abilities (to organize our sock draw, or teach our child to use the potty.)  Secure confident people make better decisions, for themselves, their families and even at the polls.

*If I Only Had A Brain – Yip Harburg, Wizard of Oz (1939)

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on March 4, 2012 in Cultural Critique, Media/Marketing

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Only You Can Prevent Obesity

07 Feb

“This is drugs.  This is your brain on drugs.  Any questions?”  Derivatives of this have become part of our cultural punch lines, but there was a time the blurb itself carried quite a punch.  You may remember your own reaction the first few times you saw the advertisement.  It was jarring in its unblinking visuals and straightforward message.  The brilliance of the campaign was its unflinching honesty and shock value.  It was a message that was heard loud and clear.  If memory serves, the previous public service announcement with similar impact was the single tear of the actor playing a Native American.  Throwing trash out your car window wasn’t so tempting if you thought it would make that nice silent man cry.

It’s been quite a number of decades since both of those campaigns.  During that time we have almost all our vices banned or black boxed.  Warning labels are printed on any and everything that might someday be used in a manner that leads to litigation.  You’d be hard pressed to come up with anything left for which to promote consumer awareness.  Awareness is at an all time high.  There is a different colored ribbon for every day of the week, and a rubber bracelet to coordinate.

So what is a city to do when it decides to combat obesity with an awareness campaign?   How far is a city willing to go?  Obesity, unlike drug use or littering, is rife with sensitivity.  That frying egg was not aimed at drug addicts, it was intended as a preventative message.  Littering was never seen as a morality issue, it was just time to do something about the trend.  But obesity?!  First off, the public service announcements are not targeting people who may be considering a life of obesity; they are aimed at the overweight.   People know they are overweight, and have a whole host of feelings about it.  Showing images (photo-shopped or not) of overweight people with moderately small text warning of future medical issues is one big yawn.   There is nothing shocking or even helpful about that messaging.  But it is safe, isn’t it?  Who could you possibly offend?

If you consider the health implications of obesity to be serious enough to launch a campaign, you might just have to offend a bit (or break a few eggs as the case may be.)  Perhaps more effective than showing a larger sized woman climbing up subway steps, would be showing her trying to fit into a subway seat?  Maybe an image of her getting acrylic nails and the tag line “wouldn’t it be nice to have more fashion choices?” Sexist?  Probably.  Instead of manipulating an image of a portly man to indicate limb loss, how about a campaign about libido loss?  Disease is one thing, but impotency is quite another.

How do you do this without offending?  You probably don’t.  But if the point of the campaign is to change behavior, a little bluntness might be just the ticket.  There was a time when our whole country smoked: in elevators and in movie theatres!  It took years, but boy have times changed.  Nobody ever quit smoking due to an advert of a smoker with the message; “smoking leads to disease.”  Why not emulate the success of the No Smoking campaign?  Black box processed foods, eliminate junk food in the workplace, mandate all weight loss systems to include the following declaration; “this is not an education or behavior modification program, effective only while using our product.” and develop jarring public service adverts.

If you believe that body size is too personal to discuss in a blunt and in your face manner, maybe it is in fact personal.

 
4 Comments

Posted by on February 7, 2012 in Media/Marketing

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,

← Older posts
Newer posts →