Not to be a bummer on this great inauguration day (can’t believe it’s happening), but in perfect postironic, postmodern harmony, a presidential slogan and soda marketing campaign mash-up perfectly. Is Pepsi cashing in on Obama? Consider article 1) Pepsi’s Refresh Everything, and article 2) Obama’s campaign site. Hmmm.
Leo Burnett– ad agency for Marlboro and the Army– take a hard look at the reality advertisers face with an interesting and unusually candor cultural analysis. Now, it must be strange times indeed when an ad agency serves cultural deconstruction to the masses, but as the clip indicates, the world the industry has normally been comfortable living in has and will be turned upside down. Are they grounded? You be the judge. I find most of the observations fairly astute; however there is a slight contradiction between “New Realism” and “End of Fact.” Isn’t being real also being somewhat factual? Maybe not.
PS Have you noticed this new nonlinear flying text trend? I think it’s an interesting representation of how we are moving from the linear world of books to the everywhere at once Web.
Here is the complete text of the ad:
New Realism
Economic conditions will profoundly affect our cultural context moving forward. As our creative content becomes more tangible and honest in reflection, we will be forced to be more realistic about everything over the coming years. The human story will be one of value reflection and reassessment, as both our priorities and purchases are examined in light of what is truly meaningful to us. As the language of hopes and dreams is replaced by one of pragmatism and prudence, new value systems will emerge. We will be more open to expressions that are confident, secure, uplifting, connected, honest and progressive.
This should come as no surprise but marketers are taking a perfectly great public theater tactic and turning it into a advertising technique. In the above ad T-Mobile takes the idea of flash mobs and Improve Everywhere to turn them into a hokey displays of corporate performance art. Why is this a problem? Obviously everyone are enjoying themselves. The difficulty is that practices like this contribute to an increasingly confusing environment in which the work of activists and artists get mixed up with marketing. People will no longer be able to tell the difference between guerrilla theater, performance art, street protest and marketing tactics. Ads like the above clip trivialize human creativity in the service of selling objects.
There is something a little ironic about this video. On the one hand it paints a pretty good picture of the transition from one to many to many to many media, and how that has created a problem for advertisers. But it implicitly assumes that people care about little more than brands, despite the admission that consumers are increasingly skeptical. This is all by way of making an important point that systems theorist Ervin Laszlo makes in Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, in which he argues that the previous historical epic was dominated by three Cs:
Conquest, colonization and Consumption.
Advertising, PR and propaganda were the necessary tools to facilitate policy and technology for those goals. We are now shifting into a new set of Cs:
Connection, communication and consciousness.
I think this is the complaint and challenge of the videomaker, without being conscious of the real choice, which is about intention, not products. If we stick to the old model the human species will become extinct fairly soon.
Is it my imagination or is the NYT increasingly becoming a media navel gazer by focusing more and more of its reporting on pop culture and other media? Anyhow, there was a nice little gem of an article as a result of this kind of coverage with a recent piece on the trend of artists licensing their music to advertising (see snip below). I saw this coming a while back when The Beatle’s “Revolution” aired as the soundtrack to a Nike commercial (see above), no thanks to Michael Jackson who at the time had bought the publishing rights to the Beetles catalog and started selling them mercilessly. In a strange way the commercial was a watershed for a new kind of revolution, not one intended by John Lennon.
One of the best polemics against this kind of practice comes from The Door’s drummer John Densmore in a piece he penned for The Nation a few years ago, “Riders on the Storm.” In it he tells the following story:
It all started in 1967, when Buick proffered $75,000 to use “Light My Fire” to hawk its new hot little offering–the Opel. As the story goes–which everyone knows who’s read my autobiography or seen Oliver Stone’s movie–Ray, Robby and John (that’s me) OK’d it, while Jim was out of town. He came back and went nuts. And it wasn’t even his song (Robby primarily having penned “LMF”)! In retrospect, his calling up Buick and saying that if they aired the ad, he’d smash an Opel on television with a sledgehammer was fantastic! I guess that’s one of the reasons I miss the guy.
The best argument comes from Tom Waits who successfully sued Taco Bell to stop imitating his sound for commercial exploitation. It’s quite simple: when you hear the song, which association do you want to have? As an artist is it acceptable that your music has been cheapened as a shilling jingle for some useless product, or rather that it enhance an emotional experience and be part of someone’s life soundtrack?
People should take seriously the Buddhist idea of right livelihood, which means that you do not contribute to other’s suffering by selling or promoting toxins or arms. Now that global warming is the primary health threat to life on this planet, any product that contributes or exacerbates climate change, such as cars or Las vegas– or marketing in general for that matter–, should be added to the list of no-nos.
The NYT article follows with a pretty good discussion of why the trend persists. One other tidbit before I go. I’m always on the lookout for good ad sources for my classes and workshops. The article mentions a Web service that helps you track down an artist that may have been heard on a commercial. The site is called FindThatSong. You may find the site useful for your own work.
Apparently there’s no going back, structurally, to paying musicians to record music for its own sake. Labels that used to make profits primarily from selling albums have been struggling since the Internet caused them to lose their chokehold on distribution and exposure. Now, in return for investing in recording and promotion, and for supplying their career-building expertise (such as it was), they want a piece of musicians’ whole careers.
Stacey Peralta… Why? Why? You were the definitive skateboard documentary dude, and I loved you for it. But this? Why, Why? would you sell your sole to Burger King to play out their silly Whopper Virgin scheme?!
Considering the global problem with food, particularly the ecological consequences of fastfood beef, campaigns like this make the economic meltdown sweat revenge against the idiocy of the American capitalist mind. The illusion that a hamburger can be made, transported and materialized anywhere in the world under any environmental conditions is anathma to ecological perspective. Unfortunately, my outrage plays right into Crispen’s (the ad maker) hand, whose sole intention is to piss off people like me for free publicity. And it works (damn it!). I am sucker for wanting to point this out. What a shithouse of mirrors this ad environment has become.
Anyhow, it should be fairly obvious why such marketing is unethical (my definition of ethics is whether or not something is credible). The intentionally racist and colonial design of this campaign winks at the dominant American Exceptionalist attitude that anyone not brought into our realm of consumerism is a stupid, ignorant fool. Such specimens of backward weirdoes (who wear funny handmade clothes not stitched by Chinese prison labor with Made in American labels), should be examined in a sterile lab with burgers served on plastic prison trays. Oh the drooling idiots of the world, they can’t even hold a burger properly!
In this video there is one tidbit of truth, though. Compare the local dish (at minute 7:40) and how diverse and multicolored it is. Can you imagine such a sumptuous meal could ever be surpassed by a crappy cardboard American burger? Only if Burger King has it its way.
Nike now allows you to photograph a street scene with your cellphone, which then can be uploaded to create a customized show based on the colors of your image, completing a curious cycle from street to the factory (god knows where and under what conditions) and then sent back you for more street action. This is hard to classify because it’s a hybrid of corporate DIY injected with street culture. Given that Nike is really an image company more than a maker of shoes (the company produces advertising, the shoes are made elsewhere), this seems to be another effort gain street cred by remediating the street (as is the case of incorporating new, extreme sports into its campaigns). Now, it would be fun to see shoes made with the colors of sweatshop walls!
Cellphones microwaving brain cells like popcorn? Not quite. This video and many imitators are making the rounds quite rapidly, playing on fears (dully warranted I might add) of phones frying our brains. I did a scan of YouTube to check out the phenomenon and it appears to be a fake, albeit a pretty darn good one. This ranks as an A class viral video project.
You’ve seen him plenty of times on sitcoms; he’s the dumb, bumbling, idiot dad, husband and boyfriend who appears useless at everything but bringing home a paycheck. The message: Guys are dumb and women have to lead them around. This, of course, cues the laugh track. Yet a survey from an organization called Children Now found that two-thirds of kid respondents described men on TV as angry, while respondents from another group’s survey said men were portrayed as corrupt on TV by a 17 to 1 margin. Clearly, this is no laughing matter.
Feminists have lots to complain about when it comes to ads. No doubt, some of the rankest gender identity construction can be found in beer ads. But how many think about the impact of advertising on males as well? In my media literacy workshops I find myself particularly saddened by the repeated trope that men are stupidly driven by biology– contrary to some of the classical stereotypes that men are the intellectual masters of the universe. Obviously, both images are wrong. Marc Voyer (quoted above) does a nice job of surveying a number of the worse offenders, although I’m surprised that his list doesn’t contain any alcohol ads, though I suppose that would be too obvious. I have been recently re-reading Susan Sontag, and one comment really stuck out. Violence, she says, turns a person into a thing. It made me wonder, is turning a thing into a person also a kind of violence?
Well, leave it to Taco Bell to cannibalize flash mobs, but there you have it. The voracious appetite of marketing gobbles up another activist tactic. Why am I not shocked?
To promote Taco Bell’s Fruitista Freeze, Philadelphia’s LevLane hired actors costumed in iced-over beachwear with their skin tinted blue who would freeze in position for hours while a support team outside Citizens Bank Park last week during an MLB Phillies home game handed out coupons for the frozen tropical beverage. Also, a flash mob in street clothes would do the same for a few minutes.
Because the stunt was, apparently, so successful and because, it seems, LevLane is so nice, the next day they did another stunt for free. Last Thursday during lunch, all agency employees wore orange t-shirts and walked to Philadelphia’s City Hall. On cue, the majority froze in place while a few others handed out more Frutista Freeze coupons. Ten minutes later the mob thawed, walked to nearby Love Park and refroze.
As high budget cartoon dystopias go, DEWmocracy is the mother of all corporate cannibals, riffing on the Matrix, The Invisibles, 1984, while managing to include a requisite Native American (with a really bad wig) to tell our skateboarding hero that he is “The One.” Hard to believe, but this bad acting trumps Keanu Reeves. Mountain Dew even includes pseudo participation in which user generated designs can become the next Dew label. Yeah for democracy.
The project also has a bunch of mysterious interrogation videos uploaded to YouTube, by one mysterious seedvideos1234, which is an odd bit of art imitating life given the recent scandal of the alleged destruction of CIA torture videos. But you won’t see the viral videos on YouTube associated with the DEWmocracy site, either because it’s just so bad PesisCo is disowning it, or it’s now too old to be bothered with (I have been sitting on this post for six months– sorry to be so out of it).
Just for fun, here’s an anti-Dew piece that attacks Pepsi for hypocritically advocating corporate responsibility while plastering the city with its ad graffiti.
“This is about the novelty of the space. It allows us to get our message across visually. Our 3-D campaign has the ad kind of jumping out at you, to put a little Zappos in your day. When I’m coming through security I know that it can be frustrating and this is to provide a little lightheartedness.” – Andy Kurlander, senior marketing manager for Zappos.com.
What the GOP doesn’t seem to realize, because they are idiots, is that “the change you deserve” is the registered advertising slogan of Effexor XR, a drug that many of you might have started taking as a result of all the…you know — terrorism. (Hat tip to Bluestem for catching this gem.)
Effexor, also known as Venlafaxine, is approved for the treatment “of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults.” Its common side effects are very much in keeping with the world the House Republicans have striven to build: nausea, apathy, constipation, fatigue, vertigo, sexual dysfunction, sweating, memory loss, and – and I swear I am not making this up – “electric shock-like sensations also called ‘brain zaps.’”
Its less common side effects are equally awesome in their appropriateness.
And when the Food And Drug Administration reviewed the ad copy that included the tagline, “The change you deserve,” it took issue with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Effexor, saying that the company made “unsubstantiated superiority claims.” Sounds like the GOP have picked an ironically accurate tagline for their efforts!
Greenpeace is both marketer of ideas and media critic. The above video is a recent attack on Dove, parodying its “Onslaught” campaign to criticize Dove’s use of palm oil because it destroys rain forests. The Greenpeace version is pretty intense, although a bit manipulative. What do you think?
Now Greenpeace has a “StopGreenwashing” site that allows users to submit examples of “greenwash”– “Used to describe the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service.” I applaud their effort but have a small (constructive) criticism of the project. You are asked to vote on greenwash videos, but there is no context given. You are supposed to automatically understand why the commercial is bad. Furthermore, the site offers no tools for reading ads. I hope that in the future Greenpeace will make the effort to incorporate media literacy tools into the site.
Yes, marketers are really suffering. No one loves them anymore, boohoo. They really want to be your friend, and hang out with you out of the love in their hearts to be one with your pocketbook.
AdAge stares at the marketing bellybutton asks the pertinent and obvious question of our time, Is marketing relevant anymore? Can it solve the paradox of trying to be authentic when its job is to be inauthentic? Rather than a zen paradox, this is more like fodder for Daily Show one-liners. Still, the fact they are asking the question at all marks an identity crisis that confirms my growing suspicion that advertising is becoming less and less the center of gravity of our universe. Authenticity — Whatever That Means — Is Our Only Hope – Advertising Age – Small Agency Diary (you may have to register to read this article):
My point is that there are millions of consumers steadily gravitating towards these kinds of experiences and they are defining trends for many others. And there is no way the medium or the message can possibly make any kind of connection on its own without a deep understanding of what these people deem authentic. Of course the big fear of the ad industry is that maybe the medium and the message can’t even do it together. Maybe, as people crave ever-more authentic experiences advertising itself is simply not capable of being authentic. I don’t think so. People will always need help making choices. And they’ll always gravitate towards compelling ideas. But I do know one thing. This drive towards authenticity is just getting started. If advertising is going to have a future in it, then both the medium AND the message are going to have to pass one helluva a sniff test. And that’s a tall order. Because as 81% of Americans agree, there’s a lot going on out there that stinks.
I thought I was the only one astonished by the marketing of yogurt as a weight-loss product. With all that fat and sugar didn’t someone finally wonder, hmm, isn’t this a bit like ice cream?
For over 25 years, dairy companies have been advertising yogurt as a “diet food” and their campaign has totally worked. They have somehow convinced everyone that eating sugary, fruity cream can magically melt away the pounds, and yogurt is now a staple for many dieters. But even before Stonyfield started adding glass to their yogurt, we thought it was one of the worst fake diet foods on the planet. There are so many foods out there that are healthier, tastier and far more filling than a tiny cup of lactose. If you are a yogurt addict wanting to drop those last five pounds, here are some things to think about next time you’re in the dairy section.
Want a company Web site for nothing? Ad agency Modernista has come to the realization that hosting Web sites is unnecessary when you can distribute your content across the Web. Why not? Host your images at flickr, network with Facebook, put your company information on Wikipedia and make Google your home page. Conceptual, geeky, or just plain viral? You be the judge.
