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Possibly I spent too much time reading political news, or possibly I’m just more addled than usual this week, but I didn’t notice as much backlash, dissent, and critique as usual in the last seven days. Here’s what I’ve got.
1. Recently in the linkpile in the sidebar at right I noted this NYT article, “Wal-Mart’s detractors come in from the cold.” Wake-Up Wal-Mart disputes this and says the anti-ness continues: “It is unfortunate that the Times chose to ignore all that we’ve done over the last year, and all that we are planning for this year, and instead focus on Wal-Mart’s PR stunts as evidence of an imaginary slow down.”
5. And of course no AntiFriday is complete without the Anti-Advertising Agency, which is skeptical of a Facebook application that purports to fight global warming:
WATER PROOF:
A bottled water criticized by environmentalists tries to detox is image
This week in Consumed, a look at the efforts of the luxury/status water brand repositioning itself as eco-friendly. Is this in response to the much-reported backlash against bottled water? Sort of.
[A spokesman’s] most surprising assertion is that Fiji was already an environmentally conscious company — and that’s part of what has been “frustrating” about the media coverage. He points to various conservation efforts in Fiji, and to the fact that the brand’s entire business model depends on the aquifer there remaining pristine.
Others, of course, point to another unchangeable aspect of Fiji’s model: getting that water to far-flung markets where people will pay a lot of money for it. Fiji’s luxury-chic status has always been directly tied to the idea that this is a rare substance from an exotic place. Which, in turn, is the issue that enrages its critics….
Read the rest in the June 1, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
1. Above, a trailer for a short film about the DKNY orange bikes promotion that ticked off some people so much they sawed the bikes in half when they realized it was a murketing effort that cyclists said shamlessly knocked off the “ghost bike” idea that is intended as a marker for cyclists killed or hit by a car. The film short, titled Orange Bikes Take Manhattan, plays tonight as part of a program of shorts at the Bicycle Film Festival. (Thanks Andrew Andrew!)
2. According one marketing executive: “Consumers hate us — the marketers and advertisers who invent new ways to spam them online and offline. The result: [ad/marketing pro] turnover is rising dramatically, and advertisers are ranked below lawyers in terms of public respect.” Ad Age suggests that the underlying problem, or the upshot, or both, is that “self-loathing has become all too commonplace in marketing.”
A marketing backlash among marketers? Well, no. The proposed solution is “Marketing with Meaning.” Examples: “ConAgra Foods, which has attracted more than 2 million visits to a healthful-lifestyle site since January, and Kroger Co., which has gotten more than 1.2 million votes on more than 35,000 designs in a contest to create the grocer’s national reusable bag.”
Assessing this, Anti Advertising Agency lives up to its name and critiques the critique: “A different type of more stealthy, manipulative message.” (That AAA post has drawn some comments worth checking out.)
3. Speaking of AAA: “Add-Art is a free Firefox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. Created with the support of Eyebeam, Rhizome, Add-Art releases new art shows every two weeks and strives to feature contemporary artists and curators.” Intro/demo here.
The Wall Street Journal today has a review of a novel called Dear American Airlines, written by Jonathan Miles. The novel takes the form of an “angry” 180-page letter, composed by “a 53-year-old failed poet and former alcoholic,” stranded at O’Hare because of a flight cancellation that could make him miss his daughter’s wedding.
While anger at the carrier isn’t the book’s plot, but rather (from the sound of it) a narrative device used to draw a portrait of the letter-writer, the timing is pretty amusing, given mounting consumer hostility to airlines in general, and possibly to American in particular since it made news by announcing a fee on checked luggage. (Update: Ad Age on American Airlines backlashing.)
So I’m sure American can’t be too excited about this, and I wonder: Do you have to get permission to use a real company’s name in the title of a novel?
Murketing’s weekly roundup of backlashes, dissent, and critiques:
1. Noah Brier‘s Brand Tags project doesn’t really have anti or backlashy intentions, I don’t think, but it’s really made the rounds and is worth noting as a kind of critique-enabler. If you haven’t seen it, basically the idea is you pick a brand from a list and enter the first word that you associate with the brand, then you click for the results: A tag cloud where the size of the words shown indicates how often people have typed them in as their gut reaction to a brand.
Needless to say, those gut reactions can result in some pointedly anti sentiments.
The most interesting one to me is the cloud for Twitter, which rather prominently features reactions such as “annoying,” “pointless,” “stupid” and “useless.” Meanwhile, lots of people also seem to love Twitter, and see it as wildly important. (I’ll never forget this Johnnie Moore post in which he suggested that asking “what’s the point of Twitter?” is like asking “What’s the point of life?” So if you don’t like Twitter, kill yourself?)
I just can’t get worked up about Twitter either way. Why do people have such extreme reactions to it?
2. AdPulp points the way to Debranded Home, a site “committed to helping you reduce visual pollution by lessening brand presence in your home.” The idea is that once you’ve bought something and taken it home, “its label has served its purpose.” Debranded Home offers no-brand labels instead. (The set at right costs $9 plus shipping.) I assume the idea is you put the cleaning product or shampoo or whatever into another container of your choice, then put the new label on it. There are also how-to guides for making your own cleaners.
I suppose the noteworthy thing about this is that traditionally the argument over too-much-branding-and-advertising has been about public space. I suspect more people are bothered by branding that interrupts a walk in the park or whatever. But maybe this is the last resort, at least in your own home you can escape branding, even though it’s on stuff you actually bought?
I’ll be honest: Slim pickings this week in dissent, critiques, and backlashing. Here’s all I can offer you.
1. A Christian group (“The Resistance”) is calling for a boycott of Starbucks on the theory that its logo is offensive. Significant? Uh, well, no. But I like the reverse-anti tone of the Starbucks Gossip item on the subject: “Christian group doesn’t have anything better to do than protest Starbucks’ logo.”
2. Wal-Mart opening thwarted in Chicago: Wal-Mart got the word from city officials last month that Mayor Richard Daley doesn’t want to risk a messy showdown with unions over Wal-Mart—like the big-box store battle of 2006—while Chicago is still in the running as a host city for the 2016 Olympics, according to people familiar with the matter,” says The Chicago Tribune. Via Wake Up Wal-Mart.
3. The Orlando Sentinal comes out against “Bus Radio, the prerecorded music-and-advertising programming being broadcast to students,” in Seminole County, Florida. I guess it plays on the bus. Isn’t weird that we live in a time when someone has to editorialize against an advertising medium tied directly to the school system? No? Okay, I’ll take your word for it.
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.
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.
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.
EMPOWERING BY DISEMPOWERMENT
How satirizing corporate doublespeak gets a promotion in a time of layoffs.
Despair Inc. It sells scores of posters satirizing the banalities of the motivation industry. The business first became Internet famous a decade ago, but has proved remarkably durable, with sales climbing to around $4.5 million last year.
And possibly its worldview is resonating in a lot of cubicles and offices just about now: the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently calculated that U.S. employers cut 80,000 jobs in March. Meanwhile, Despair’s sales are up about 15 percent this year. “We do see some people are buying because things are getting bad,” says Justin Sewell, a co-founder of Despair. “They’re Googling things like ‘despair’ or ‘failure,’ and we’re popping up.”
Read the column in the April 27, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
A somewhat truncated (due to being out of town) look back at this week in backlashes, dissent, and critiques. [Note: Speaking of out of town, I was in planes and airports all day and this was written last night so if missed something, set me straight. On a related note: If I owe you an email about something, I’ll catch up tonight or tomorrow.]
1. As you may have read, since it’s been on a bunch of marketing blogs, Greenpeace put out a video slamming Dove. One place to see it is on Adverblog, which also links to the Dove ad called “Onslaught.”
“Onslaught,” which is worth watching if you’ve never seen it, is probably the most caustic extension of Dove’s effort to position itself as a product with an enlightened view of the nature of beauty: In surprisingly harsh terms, the video slams “the beauty industry” for the images of women it peddles (via marketing), climaxing in a startling plastic surgery montage.
Well, I guess Greenpeace wasn’t impressed with Dove’s culture-jamming sales job, and its video, titled “Dove Onslaught(er),” uses an equally in-your-face montage to illustrate the destruction of Indonesian rainforest for (it says) ingredients used in Dove products. Read more
1. Earth Day is coming up. Guess what? Ad Age suggests there may be a kind of Earth Day backlash brewing, and that the holiday is practically becoming “the new Christmas,” as “marketers of all stripes are bombarding consumers with green promotions and products designed to get them to buy more products — some eco-friendly, some not so much.”
“Companies are saying, ‘We need something to green ourselves up, so let’s … sponsor Earth Day,'” one marketer comments. “It’s really now in this hype curve, and hopefully we’re getting toward the top, so we can start having some fallout.” Another is more blunt: ” “Earth Day’s usefulness has passed.”
2. Actually this is one from last month, but I wanted to mention it. There’s this company in Seattle that makes a single-cup, commercial-grade brewer, called a Clover, “specifically for the cafe and retail environment.” And indeed it seems their clients tended to be indie coffee shops. More recently, this company was purchased by Starbucks. At least some indie shops, such as Stumptown in Portland/Seattle are now reportedly dumping their Clovers. Says the owner of River Maiden Coffee in Vancouver: “This feels like a betrayal.” Core77 coments that the incident is a “precise, accelerated example of how a well-designed product can become a vessel into which people pour their beliefs, expectations and senses of betrayal.”
3. Via Murketing.com’s incoming links, I can offer you one person’s backlash to the recently mentioned drug advertising campaign that uses the form of “Missing” fliers, which apparently is in place in San Francisco as well as New York: “Particularly distasteful.”
More backlashes, critiques and dissents after the jump. Read more
It’s the first installment of AntiFriday, a weekly round of dissent, critiques, and backlashes in consumer culture. I hope from now on you’ll always end your work week with a check of what’s upsetting people, and go home early in disgust. List after jump.
Generally I don’t say in advance what the topic of a forthcoming Consumed will be. However, the one that’s coming out this Sunday is about Obama as muse. Surely you are already familiar with the many examples of Obama-inspired art and creativity from various sources. The subject was already in the air when I started writing, and since the column has gone to press many more examples have surfaced. Plus, as indicated by the image here by Baxter Orr parodying the now-famous Shepard Fairey Obama print (via the recently revived Animal New York), it’s reached the point that some creative types are, perhaps, starting to question the nature of this particular bandwagon.
Obviously you’ll have wait until Sunday to pass judgment on my take on what this is all about, but in the meantime, I can tell you what my take isn’t: the one offered in this recent Huffington Post item suggesting that “young artists” are inspired by the Obama campaign’s supposedly awesome graphic design. I think this is silly. Or at least I hope that’s at all it is.
Some of the Wal Mart video mentioned yesterday is making it to the airwaves, although so far it’s pretty disappointing.
Both ABC and MSNBC have chosen to highlight a clip of some Wal-Mart guys in drag at what I guess is a shareholder meeting. The spin is that it’s somehow relevant to claims of entrenched sexism in Wal-Mart management, but as far as I can see the networks are running it because it seems funny.
More interesting is this clip that ABC ran of former Wal-Mart board member John Tate shouting in a vaguely crazed manner that unions are “blood-sucking parasites.”
I believe that this is the Flagler YouTube channel, but looks like most of what’s there is more geared toward promoting Flagler than anything else.
Apparently Wal-Mart for almost 30 years employed a video-production company called Flagler to film a variety of meetings and management activities and other stuff. Some of this material was used at shareholder meetings and sales meetings and so on. It was all intended for internal use.
In 2006, Wal-Mart stopped using Flagler, a blow for the firm, which claims the Wal-Mart work was 90% of its revenue. So Flagler offered to sell Wal-Mart the whole trove for “several million dollars.” Wal-Mart offered $500,000, “arguing the footage wouldn’t be of interest elsewhere.”
Wrong! Now Flagler sells access to the material to business historians, plaintiffs lawyers, and I guess anybody else who wants to pay for it. So, the WSJ says, this means clips of Wal-Mart people joking about the safety flaws of a product, or talking about union-busting, or calling Hillary Clinton “one of us,” are making their way into the public sphere.
Wal-Mart is “reviewing its legal options.”
If I find (or you tell me about) a better link than the one above, one that anyone can access, or links to any of the actual videos, I’ll update this post with that info.
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WATER PROOF:
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Kim Fellner's book 
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