MURKETING

“Branded” character

In an earlier post, I expressed skepticism that the various changes in the way people consume media, and what those changes mean to advertisers, will add up to “a world in which consumer engagement occurs without consumer interruption,” as some argue. Specifically, I suggested that we’re heading to a world where consumer interruption simply cannot be avoided, because it’s embedded in whatever it is we’re trying to do — the shows we’re trying to watch, the streets we’re trying to walk along, etc. As a for-instance, I mentioned an unavoidable product placement in Lonelygirl15, the much-hyped Web narrative that’s often cited as a glimpse of our supposedly empowering media future.

Having said all of that, I have to pass along this, from Variety:

In an unusual promotional partnership, Neutrogena has inked a deal with the producers of the popular Web series to help market “Lonelygirl15” — with one of the company’s young scientists to join the cast….

[The] show’s new character, who will make his first appearance Monday and appear in episodes over the next two months, had already been conceived by the show’s creators, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, as a 22-year-old scientist who helps the series’ lead characters create a serum in order to thwart an evil org known as the Order.

He became branded as a Neutrogena staffer after CAA, which reps the Web series and its producers, approached the maker of skin, hair and cosmetics products with the opportunity to tie in with the show.

Neutrogena immediately sparked to “Lonelygirl15,” considering that the show specifically attracts teen and twentysomething consumers — the demo that the company is trying to target with its products.

Variety says that having a “branded” character is an example of how marketers are becoming more “creative.” And I suppose it is.

Fact or George Saunders story?

For Scott and Katie Keppler of Rye, N.Y., the decision to seek help stemmed from a fundamental disagreement. With their second child on the way, Mrs. Keppler, 40, an accountant, wanted [to name the child] something traditional to match their first son’s name, Liam. Her husband, a software salesman, preferred unique names like Jolt for a boy or Jilly for a girl. “He was harassing me with some really strange names,” Mrs. Keppler says.

To break the deadlock, Mr. Keppler, 40, decided to spend $25 for a service on BabyNames.com that provides six options based on everything from a couple’s mothers’ maiden names to their general taste preferences (traditional, biblical, trendy, unique, ethnic and wild, among others). When their son was born in March, they tapped their favorite name from the list: Max Phillip. The Web site was a truly impartial third-party, Mr. Keppler says.

Fact of course. This is one of several highly entertaining bits from a WSJ today (here’s the link, but I believe it’s subsribers-only) on “unprecedented levels of angst among parents trying to choose names for their children.” I think this couple should have just cut to the chase and named the kid Proprietary Algorithm.

Another surprising detail from the piece: “Sweden and Denmark forbid names that officials think might subject a child to ridicule. Swedish authorities have rejected such names as Veranda, Ikea and Metallica.”

Mildly interesting product of the day

A ceramic vase that looks like a paper bag. To go with your ceramic cup that looks like a paper cup. Via Popgadget.

Hats off

Prior to reading a reference in Paul Lukas’s Uni Watch column on ESPN.com just now, I had never heard of the minor-league baseball team, the Lake Elsinore storm. But a glance at their cap should make it obvious why I had to check it out. According to the team site, it’s top-selling logo in all of minor-league baseball. I can see why. Amazing.

Crocs: Please explain

Of course you already know about Crocs. We all do. I’ve avoided the subject for a long time, assuming that any second now the trend would reverse course and go away. Instead, it just grows. The sorts of people I see in Crocs continue to expand: Chilren, old women, young men, in all kinds of situations.

I’m not sure when this happened, but now Crocs even seem to have found a place in some store windows right alongside sneakers and things decorated with skull imagery:

Why? What is the explanation for the continued popularity of these shoes? Can you tell me? Do you have a pair? Why do you like them? When do you wear them? What caused you to try/buy them?

Site update (redux)

Okay, I won’t start doing this all the time, but I thought I’d follow up regarding this post the other day about del.icio.us links and RSS and all that. A couple of comments on that post — thank you for those — led me in the right direction. Unless I’ve screwed something up, this is the last you’ll hear of the matter.

The relevant bit for readers is this. If you read this site by, you know, coming to the site itself and looking at it, then you may want to glance over, from time to time, at the sidebar at right. That’s where del.icio.us links will be added, all the time.

If you don’t know anything about del.icio.us, or RSS, etc., that’s fine, you don’t have to. All you need to know is: A rotating and constantly updated series of interesting links will now appear in the sidebar, so check it out if you want to. And you can stop reading this post and go on with the more important tasks of the day.

[I hesitate to bring this up, but: In the process of doing all this, for totally unrelated reasons, I’ve migrated my del.icio.us links from an account named Consumed to a new one named Murketing, which is what I’ll be using from now on. Again, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter. “Interesting links in the sidebar” is all you need to know.]

If, instead, you use an RSS reader, you’ll see those links by way of a daily summary now added to the Murketing feed. [And if you are an RSS reader, you may have been subjected to some double-post shenanigans as I worked all of this out. Sorry. I think that’s over now.]

From my own testing, I don’t think you necessarily have to switch to the Feedburner feed to get the links summary. Still, here is the link to that feed if you want to subscribe to it:

Subscribe in a reader

I’ve also put that link in the sidebar, for now at least. I have mixed feelings about the RSS graphic, which I think a lot of people now recognize, but which, because it is orange, is an unslightly blemish on this sight’s delightful black-and-white color scheme. So I may get rid of the icon later. Or try to figure out how to make it black.

The bottom line is, I’m pretty sure I’ve done what I wanted to do, and in a way that you don’t have to do anything. Simply do nothing! Okay?

Now, if you’re curious, this is what I did. Read more

Coming soon: Another low point

Dear Rob,

SnoreStop, the company which helped pioneer forehead advertising in 2005–

Normally, that’s where I would stop reading. But for whatever reason I skimmed down the press release. Here’s the deal:

Anxious to reach snorers and their long-suffering spouses where they need snoring relief most, Green Pharmaceuticals (the parent of SnoreStop) will shortly begin seeking couples willing to permit SnoreStop ads within and just outside of their home bedrooms, in exchange for cash prizes, a brand new bedroom makeover, or a Second Honeymoon vacation package.

The ads will come in three forms: SnoreStop posters to be placed on bedroom walls; promotional flags to be secured just outside of bedrooms; and rooftop banners to be affixed just above bedrooms. …
Recognizing that bedroom advertising can, of course, only reach a very limited consumer base, SnoreStop will supplement the campaign by sending real-life couples out into the public wearing branded pajamas reading:

OUR BEDROOM IS SPONSORED BY SNORESTOP.
SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE THE WAY WE SAVED OURS!

Here, then, another litmus test for Americans. Which of your fellow citizens will do this? Because certainly someone will.

Diversity and isolation

This is interesting:

What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes…

Still, in the long run, Putname figures: “If this country’s history is any guide, what people perceive as unfamiliar and disturbing — what they see as “other” — can and does change over time.”

Here’s the writeup from the NYT Mag.

Go Logo

In Consumed: Themed Donks: Customized cars that use commercial logos as part of the creative palette.

The allure of aesthetics has been a fact of automobile design for many decades. But carmakers have never been able to match the inventiveness of some car owners, dating back at least to creators of tangerine-flake objets d’art that Tom Wolfe celebrated in the 1960s. To believe that auto expressionists will run out of gas at some point is to underestimate their ability to create previously unimaginable novelty. Picture, for instance, a 1976 Impala improbably perched on 26-inch wheels and painted in colors inspired by a variety of Hawaiian Punch. This is what’s called a donk….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

Additional links: Pictures of donks; more pictures of donks (site plays music); and more pictures of donks; Mr. Scrape Customs; Donk Box & Bubble magazine.

Discrete shout out: Thanks Kate!

Site note

Regular readers may have noticed that a few weeks ago I started adding del.icio.us links to the site in the form of a daily post. I’m a big fan of del.icio.us, but I started using it before this site really existed, and always thought of it as something useful for organizing my own research, and didn’t give a lot of thought to whether there might be any value (to you, I mean) in “sharing” my links.

Of course I saw that other people were posting ther del.icio.us links, and realized that I enjoyed seeing them. So I finally got around to enabling the “daily blog posting” feature.
However, I don’t like the way the daily del.icio.us post looks. So I’ve turned that off in favor of the “link rolls” feature, which means that my del.icio.us links now show up in the sidebar, and update constantly as I add things. I think is both more useful, and a lot better looking.

The downside of this is people who read Murketing.com via RSS readers won’t see those links any more (unless of course they click through to the actual site and look at the sidebar). I’m not sure, right now, how to resolve that. I’ve noticed that We Make Money Not Art somehow has del.icio.us links in its RSS feed, and in its link roll, but not in the body of the main blog itself. I think that’s the ideal scenario.

There’s no tech staff or even a clever intern here at Murketing HQ, it’s just me, and for a variety of reasons (the biggies being: more pressing things to attend to; impatience; and a disinterest in either reading jargon-filled directions or having any real understanding of coding), I’m very slow and clumsy when it comes to figuring this stuff out. So I tend not to do detailed updates about every little trial-and-error tweak.

But in this case I thought I’d let you know: del.icio.us links in the sidebar if you want to see them.

The Product Is You

What’s your take on this person? Credit cards burst from her pockets. She carries two bags full of stuff, and uses two gizmos at once. Her smile is unconvincing, her gaze glassy and unfocused. She looks dazed, rather zombie-ish. Who is she?

If you’re fan of Bravo, she is you. Or at least, she is the representation of you that Bravo uses to round up advertising.

I will explain what I mean by that in this first installment of yet another new Murketing feature, an occasional series called “The Product Is You.”

Trade journals for the advertising and marketing business are themselves full of ads. Of course the ads there are different from the ones you see in regular magazines, because these are not aimed at consumers. They are aimed at advertisers.

That is to say: Networks and magazines and other entities whose business model depends on advertising take out ads in the ad trades, to attract advertisers. Got it? So what they tout in these ads-to-attract-advertising, is their audience.

What they are packaging and selling is, in other words, you, the consumer of media, potential target of advertising. If a media entity attracts consumers that advertisers want to address, then it can sell more advertising time, or space.

This Bravo ad, which took up two full pages of an advertising trade, is an example of a particular style of audience-packaging that I’ve always found fascinating. It’s an example that I think is worth lingering over for a moment.

Bravo’s pitch is that its viewers are “affluencers.” These desirable creatures are “now available” to advertisers who buy time on Bravo. As you can see, these sample affluencers are depicted here in fully packaged form. They are right there, sealed up, ready to be bought, and sold to. Read more

Re: George Saunders

This Q&A with George Saunders, by Jim Hanas for Stay Free, is worth reading. Coincidentally I just started reading his collection, In Persuasion Nation. I always read his stuff in The New Yorker, and read one of his earlier books, CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. Saunders is an astonishing writer, both in terms of his use of language, in the perceptive intelligence that guides it — that is, he both has something to say, and knows how to say it.

So a quick excerpt from the Q&A:

STAY FREE!: When you look at American culture today—commercialism, reality TV, the war, all the things that are in your stories—what do you see? What is your diagnosis?

SAUNDERS: I’ll give you a couple answers. One, there’s a cultural divide between the people at the top and the people underneath. So, in commercials: who’s making them? A handful of people. Why are they making them? To persuade us to buy things. There’s a group of people who have the power to broadcast and to put this huge machine at their disposal—this very beautiful machine that can make incredible images and sounds—and then there’s the rest of the population, which is “done to.” I would say that the gap between the doers and the done to is wider than it’s ever been. The politicians—the people running the country—are isolated from us. I’m 47 and I’ve had one contact with a congressperson—[New York congresswoman] Louise Slaughter called me back one time when I wrote her a letter—but that’s it. I’ve called a number of them, and you know that somebody checks off a box and then that’s it. That’s a huge thing, and I think it’s a new thing. I don’t think that people have ever felt as powerless or unimportant.

To read his second answer, and the rest of the Q&A, go here.

Coinage smackdown: “Skurban” vs. “Hopster”

I don’t know who floated the word “skurban” as a term to encapsulate the mix of skater and “urban” styles.

I do know that it was roundly mocked.

I also know that Complex has offered up an alternative, in the form of “hopster.” Which is meant to connote “hip hop + skate + hipster.”

Is this any better? Worse? Necessary? Interesting in any way? I’ve certainly listened to enough people tell me how their brand speaks to fans of hip hop and skating, as if there was something surprising or radical about that. (If someone said to me that their brand spoke to fans of hip hop and social realist fiction, I might be more interested.)
I have absolutely nothing riding on the answer, but if you have an opinion, let’s have it. No private email to me about it: Say it in public, or don’t. Calling me an idiot for asking the question is acceptable.
No obligation of course.

To Do in NYC: Shepard Fairey

If I still lived in the bi-state area, I would certainly check this out: Shepard Fairey at Jonathan LeVine Gallery. More here. Bias alerts: I’m generally a fan, and contributed an essay to the book Supply & Demand.

There’s a strange one in the jungle

Years ago, in the Slate days, I made some throwaway reference to the Judy’s and was pretty surprised to get immediate and enthusiastic responses about it. While murketing.com ain’t Slate in terms of online readership, maybe someone out there will want to know that in an interview with Houstonist, Judy’s member Jeff Walton says:

The million dollar question: When will The Judy’s music be available on CD or digitally?

Very soon, we are working on it now. Hopefully within the next couple of months. We will have the CDs available through a website (wastedtalentrecords.com), iTunes, and hopefully through some stores. We also plan on having t-shirts and other things. After that, we are going to do a Washarama anniversary special edition which will be a multi disc set.

Last time I looked into it, buying a vinyl, used copy of Washarama was a $50+ proposition, if you could locate one. So I’m pretty pleased to hear this. You, on the other hand, may not care, probably because you don’t have a memory of getting your nose bloodied by a hurled cup during “Guyana Punch” in about 1986 at Numbers in the Montrose. But cut me some slack, okay? And just wait, Wes Anderson will put “All The Pretty Girls” in a movie at some point, and you’ll get it.

Or not.