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 SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
Is in town but has not been engaged.

Also,

A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS
Will be on exhibition in the next block.

MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
Were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned.

A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESS
May be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please.

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.

Shopdropping, lifted

Here then, my final bit on the subject(s) of backlashes, word-of-mouth, and the allegedly forthcoming “world in which consumer engagement occurs without consumer interruption.”

A couple of months ago, I got an email from someone named Jessica, which said: “Hey. First, I think you have a great site. I work for Travelistic.com and we have a new video online about shopdropping.” She passed on the link, which she encouraged me to post, forward, or whatever. “It seems that shopdropping is a project that’s becoming an international trend,” she added, “and definitely deserves attention!”

Travelistic turned out to be “a site that lets you explore the world through video. We host all kinds of travel videos, including user uploads, professional content, and tourist board videos.”

The video on Travelistic that Jessica pointed me to was made at a recent workshop led by Steve Lambert of the Anti-Advertising Agency, which described shopdropping as “a tactic used by artists and activists to clandestinely place objects in retail stores. ‘Dropped’ objects are usually versions of consumer products altered or recreated to detourn the retail experience. Shopdropping is a fun and easy form of culture jamming, gently subverting dominant cultural forms to create new meanings.”

On the Travelistic site, the video was headlined “Culture Jamming 101.”

I looked back at Jessica’s email, and noted that her address ended not in Travelistic.com, but in Industryninefive.com. This turned out to be “a high-energy creative think tank and advertising agency.” High energy! I like that! What else can you tell me?? I checked the site.

We could tell you we’ve crafted online strategic branding campaigns for global Fortune 500 companies, and handled the positioning and PR for multi-national accounts. But all of that seems a bit too limiting. We manage every aspect of promoting your business from conception to execution. In a word, we are ideas.

Okay, that’s enough. Stop.

Whether or not shopdropping is becoming an international trend, it was certainly never intended to be repurposed for a word of mouth advertising campaign. But I have to say, this approach seems to have been at least somewhat effective. I know that the day I after I got the email from “Jessica,” the Consumerist had a post that, while snotty and dismissive of shopdropping as a tactic, did link to Travelistic. (They didn’t mention a press release or email from “Jessica” or anyone else, so maybe they found it some other way; I don’t know.) If you Google “shopdropping,” the Travelistic “Culture Jamming 101” link comes up just ahead of a link to the Anti-Advertising Agency’s site.

(Also, there used to be a comment from a certain “Jessica” on the AAA site, which said: “Hey I just saw a video about you guys on Travelistic.com. This is the first I’m hearing about shop dropping, but I think it’s great! I’m definitely going to start downloading and dropping. Check out the video,” followed by a link to Travelistic. The comment has since been deleted*.)

Here, then, is another glimpse of what we may have to look forward to in the post-TiVo era. The 30-second ad might be less effective, and more rarely seen. But that just means everything else under the sun becomes potential fodder for “buzz”-building. Even videos of culture-jamming workshops.

Excited?

[* Mr. Lambert did not know about “Jessica’s” efforts until I brought it up. I hope to be able to share some of his thoughts about this and other subjects in a forthcoming Q&A on this site.]

Kleening up

I guess this is negative word of mouth week here at Murketing. While I was away recently, somebody from Not An Alternative sent along this Youtube link, of some activists prankishly inserting themselves in a Kleenex marketing stunt.

The marketing stunt was the Kleenex “Let It Out Tour.” This involves the brand showing up in various cities, and inviting regular old folks like YOU to sit in front of a camera, tell a story that makes you want to cry, climaxing with you actually weeping into your Kleenex. Or something like that. The site says: “Here’s your chance to participate. You might even be featured on letitout.com or included in future let it out™ commercials from the KLEENEX® Brand!”

It’s not clear to me how much this is a ripoff of Jet Blue’s ripoff of David Isay’s work, but that’s another story. Either way, it’s a complete mystery to me why anyone would want to participate in something so transparently phony. But I guess plenty of people do.

Anyway, when the tour arrived in Times Square late last month, activists associated with the Greenpeace project Kleercut were among those to get in front of the camera. After telling a standard tear-jerker, they would then say another thing that makes them sad is the forests being wiped out to make Kleenex. Obviously these confessionals won’t make it into an actual Kleenex ad, but videos made by the pranksters have gone up on YouTube, and have gotten some circulation on the Net.

Could this spark a massive consumer backlash against Kleenex? I doubt it.

But that’s not exactly what the activists have in mind, or at least it’s not the whole picture. As one of the activists in the video explains: “A lot of their money that they spend on PR is put into campaigns like this. If we can show the shareholders that the money they’re using for this PR isn’t effective, and they’re wasting a lot of money, it’s gonna cause shareholders to hopefully back out and demand cleaner, more forest-friendly products.”

Persuading shareholders? Why bother with that! If it’s true that one determined detractor can do as much damage as 100 positive mentions do good, then shouldn’t they simply ignore the shareholders and fight directly in the marketplace?

I know that everyone says consumers are more tuned in to green issues these days, but I think it would still be pretty tough to win this fight in the marketplace. However, it’s plausible that these activists can amass data (how many hits, how many views, etc.) that could be packaged as evidence that there’s a potential backlash. Convincing shareholders to believe in that backlash might be a challenge, but it more likely than trying to convince the public at large.

Coming tomorrow: One last post about word of mouth, backlashing, and murketing.

God and chocolate

Beliefnet today has some material about spirituality and spending. A list of seven tips includes advice on “How to perform random acts of kindness.” (“Create a Random Kindness Budget that you give a few dollars to each month,” etc.).

All pretty straightforward, except that that particular entry ends with:

Recommended: Give the gift of chocolate by L.A. Burdick.

Is that a sponsored link? Why that particular chocolate? Is it more spiritual than other lux chocolate brands?

Weird.

Anti-Urban

Speaking of negative word of mouth:

One thing I’ve noticed that many independent artists/entrepreneurs have in common, even when their work and cultural contexts vary widely, is a dislike of Urban Outfitters, which they all assert is a stealser of ideas. Now BoingBoing points out a blog that’s basically about this very theme: “UrbanCounterfeiters.com.”

The most recent post there is from March 17, and recounts a protest at a Vancouver location of the chain.

This seems to be the only way to get through to them – the ground roots approach, hitting individual stores and real people instead of their corporate headquarters where we’ve been virtually stonewalled – so we’re going to be handing out these pamphlets in front of the majority of their locations across the United States and Canada over the next few months. If you live in a city that has an Urban Outfitters store in it and you have a couple of hours to spare for the cause, please send an e-mail to urbancounterfeiters@hotmail.com

Worth keeping an eye on … See the site itself for more.

What to pack?

The mother of a 19-year-old soldier (actually he’s indirectly referred to as both a Marine and a soldier, which are two different things) bound for Iraq writes about what he’ll be taking with him:

Each soldier is limited to a knapsack and two sea bags — what civilians would call duffels. Space is tight. Once Greg packed his firearms, there was hardly room for any of the other paraphernalia that might make seven months in Iraq bearable, assuming that such a thing is possible.

I am not there for the send-off, but confident that he made room for his iPod. “I would lose my mind without it,” he told me during his last visit home. “What makes you think you won’t lose your mind anyway?” I wanted to ask. But that is exactly the kind of thing I can never say.

My husband reports that Greg took a stack of DVDs to play on his laptop, another piece of electronic equipment that he presumably managed to cram into his bags. But I have few details. I do not know, for example, whether he chose comedies or combat films to while away the downtime, if such a thing exists.

Here’s the whole essay.

Patterns on the diamond

The Sunday open thread on the always-interesting Uni Watch blog noted that “Padres broke out their desert camouflage uniforms.” Since I wasn’t quite so tuned in to team uniform variations in the pre-Uni Watch blog era, I didn’t know the Padres had such uniforms. I also wasn’t sure why they had such uniforms. I’m still not sure when it started, but here’s the “why” explanation from a Padres press release from 2006:

Saturday’s 7:05 p.m. matchup with the Mets marks the Eleventh Annual “Military Opening Day” presented by Northrop Grumman Corporation. The Padres will continue their custom of donning camouflage uniforms, this time wearing a desert pattern worn by troops serving the Middle East. Five thousand half-price tickets, offered to the military community until 24 hours prior to Saturday’s game, are available by presenting a valid military identification card at the Padres Advance Ticket Windows at PETCO Park.

This is an interesting convergence.

One Uni Watch commenter sticks to the aesthetic context, pronouncing the uniforms “friggin’ hideous.” Another goes with the context of, you know, the war: “I guess you have to live in San Diego to appreciate what those camo uniforms mean to us. The Padres do not wear them as a gimic, like so many teams do in the minors. They represent a serious appreciation for the vast military population that is found in San Diego.”

I’m not sure what to say about it. It never really occurred to me that defense contractors would do baseball promotions. But I guess I can’t come up with any reason why it shouldn’t happen. It just all seems a little jarring. Maybe it’s just me.

Update: Mr. Lukas (who I should have checked with, now that I think of it) fills in some details:

“The Padres have been doing the camo thing since ’99 or so, as a tribute to the city’s large military population. It used to be a once-a-year thing; now they do it a few times during the season. Back when it started, they’d just have a camo jersey but stuck with their regular caps, helmets, underlsleeves, etc., so nothing matched. Over the years they’ve slowly added an olive-drab cap, olive undersleeves, olive helmets, etc. They’ve also switched from the green jungle camo to the tan desert camo.

“I’ve always found the whole thing very odd. Like, what if a player wants to be, shall we say, a conscientious objector?”

Card design callback

In an interesting quasi-response to, or riff on, or whatever, my prepaid-phone-card design Consumed, New York design studio Iridesco posts a breakdown of designs for a ring tone card.