MURKETING

Cover versions

Just the other day, while fiddling with the new “My Times” thingy offered by the NYT, I learned that Dwight Garner, an editor at the book review with whom I used to kill time on the 11th floor (if I’m remembering right) patio on 229 W. 43rd St., has a blog on the Times site. I’ve been enjoying it, and knew that before long he’d have something that would give me an excuse to hype it. And here it is! In this post, he mentions this site of Kerouac book covers from around the world. The above is my favorite, from a 1995 Ukraine edition of On The Road. You know I love a visual remix. Anyway, apparently the book review will be printing a number of the cover variations this weekend.

Last note on the marketer Facebook invasion

Ad Age’s Matthew Creamer on the rush of marketers into Facebook-land that I was pondering earlier this week:

Not since the advent of blogging four years ago have ad and media types so jumped on a new-media bandwagon for their own communications and networking purposes.

It’s as though the ad business, frustrated with voyeuristically looking on at the rampant growth of younger-skewing sites such as MySpace, finally has a network of its own and has responded with an eruption of self-expression….

Why the sudden rush to a platform that’s been open for some time? “A lot of marketing people felt they were too late on blogosphere 1.0, which was very generous to those who moved fast, so they’re trying to avoid that this time around,” said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Nielsen Buzzmetrics. “Also, they’re realizing what all the college kids did: that Facebook is a solid platform with sticky appeal.”

Q&A: The Hundreds, a year later

I’ve been meaning for a while to catch up with The Hundreds, one of the subjects of the brand underground article I did for the NYT Magazine a while back. At that time, founders Ben and Bobby Hundreds were just starting to venture beyond T-shirts. Now they regularly produce jeans, button-down shirts, shorts, and so on. They have a spinoff brand for women called Tens. They’ve opened up their own store (on Rosewood near Fairfax in Los Angeles), and have about 10 employees, plus part-timers and interns. Of course, they also still make T-shirts, both their own and with collaborators like Shalom and others. Bobby Hundreds still finds time to write thoughtful stuff on the brand’s blog — and to answer Q’s from me. Here goes.

Q: I think it’s been a good year for The Hundreds — new brands, new store, etc. But before we get to that, what’s been the biggest disappointment, frustration, or surprising challenge of the past year?

I guess the most surprising thing is that we have virtually no complaints! We’re kinda wrapped up in our own world, so we pay no mind to gossiping, politics or negativity that seems to circle the scene. We love what we do, just as much if not more as when we first started. We’re surrounded with a strong, positive crew of friends and employees who are passionate about the brand. And most importantly, we have a loyal following of supporters worldwide who are dedicated to The Hundreds. So how can I be disappointed or frustrated by anything?

If I remember right, you were financing the Hundreds completely on its own profits — that is, no loans and no investors. Have you kept that business structure or have you gotten financing of some kind?

I am very happy to say that as of date, we have still yet to receive backing from an investor or loan institution. The Hundreds is still being operated completely off of our own initial funds from our personal bank accounts.

We really did start the brand off of $200 from each of our pockets, which should be a testament that you don’t need a greedy corporation behind you to make a name for yourself in this industry. Read more

The Product Is You, No. 9

[The Product Is You is an occasional Murketing series collecting advertising that is aimed at advertisers: Magazines or television networks packaging up their consumers — that is, you, the potential ad target — in ways designed to attract advertisers. Previous installments here.]

Here, another blunt example of the exchange these ads elucidate: The advertiser is invited to “buy” a CNBC household, and in this case the attraction (per the pitch at least) is obvious — such households are full of people with money. So much money they have a guesthouse. If metaphors don’t cut it, the boast about wealthy viewers is spelled out on a second page.

The upside of consumer Web research … for retailers?

The savvy modern consumer doesn’t just wander into a store and buy stuff. S/he researches online, taking full advantage of previously unheard-of information-gathering technologies and like that. And then what happens? According to a study underwritten by Yahoo and something called comScore, s/he spends more money than people who don’t “pre-shop” online. Supposedly this is because of exposure to online advertising.

A release says:

Exposure to online advertising is fundamentally changing the way consumers shop, according to new research from Yahoo! and comScore, Inc. The study, which examined the impact of search and display advertising on in-store sales for five major retailers, showed that consumers exposed to online advertising tend to research or ‘pre-shop’ online prior to purchase, and this behavior ultimately leads to increased in-store sales. These highly-engaged ‘pre-shoppers’ spend an average of 41 percent more in-store when compared to consumers not exposed to online advertising.

I’m not sure I believe this, or at least that online advertising has much to do with it. But it’s interesting. Via Retail Design Diva.

Backlash product of the day

We Are The Market says: “If you can’t get with the global hoopla surrounding the release of the limited edition canvas tote by Anya Hindmarch, this is probably the bag for you.” At Cafe Press.

What time is it?

Just bringing you the latest in watches that don’t really help much if you want to know what time it is (previous posts here and here): These “close to undecipherable yet stylish” products from Sea Hope, via MoCo Loco.

Wal-Marting of Facebook? Or Facebooking of Wal-Mart?

Either way, draw your own conclusions about how this news relates to our earlier discussion:

The world’s largest retailer on Wednesday is launching the “Roommate Style Match” group on Facebook, a social networking site that has millions of college-age users, in the hopes of grabbing a larger chunk of back-to-school shopping dollars.

Facebook users who join the Wal-Mart group will be able to take a quiz to determine their decorating style and get a list of “recommended products” they can buy at Wal-Mart to mesh their style with their roommate’s.

Via Retail Design Diva.

Recall question

Here’s what I don’t quite understand about the latest recall, of various Mattel toys. It’s being positioned as another example of the China/supply/manufacturing-chain problem. About 250,000 of the toys had lead paint on them, as I understand it, and this seems consistent with that positioning, since the paint is being blamed on murky subcontracting.

But most of the recall is about something like 9 million toys with small magnets that can (I gather) easily come out and be swallowed. That sounds more like a product-design issue, no? If the design included these little magnets, and did not include any way to prevent them from being removed or whatever, then what difference does it make where the design was executed?

Moreover, it appears that some of these 9 million toys being recalled were actually sold as many as four years ago. Mattel was already involved in an earlier, similar recall, and a different company that had a similar problem with small magnets has already paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits on this same issue.

I’m not saying the magnets aren’t a serious problem, because from what I read it sounds like they are. I just don’t understand the general suggestion that the problem is the fault of shady outsourced manufacturing firm(s). Maybe I’m missing something?

Design: Another backlash candidate?

In other backlash news, ad agency Butler, Shine’s blog Influx Insights posts about “the impending design backlash,” citing Icon Magazine. The August issue of Icon Magazine includes 50 (!) “manifestos” from critics, architects, and designers. A few are pretty crabby, mostly the first two, from Peter Saville (“Creativity has become part of the business of social manipulation.” “Much of the work being done now lacks meaning and the designers know it.” Etc.) and Jasper Morrison:

Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazines and marketing departments, it’s become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise…

Elsewhere the magazine suggests “Why Design Needs a Recession.” Listing a variety of design/marketplace problems and complaints, the magazine says: “Design is in a decadent phase that won’t abate until we are forced to rediscover what it is that we need.”

Fun stuff. On the other hand, it turned out that most of the mini-manifestos were not particularly crabby at all.

Dept. of sentences I never thought I would read

Coudal.com: “It’s not Van Halen without Michael Anthony.”

“Top Chef” murketing tips

The Hater suggests more product-placement-riddled challenges for Top Chef:

–The Pantene Shiny Food Challenge: Make Pantene’s Brunette Expressions shampoo taste good. Contestants have 30 minutes and unlimited access to the Top Chef pantry.

-The Glad ForceFlex Challenge: Contestants are divided into teams of three. Each team is then put inside one Glad ForceFlex garbage bag (they’re very stretchy!) with the following items: 1 Bunsen burner, 1 egg, and 1 comically small frying pan. Whichever team can make the fluffiest scrambled egg without suffocating or tearing a hole in their incredibly strong Glad garbage bag (featuring Glad’s patented ForceFlex technology) wins.

And many more. Funny. The rest is here. Via TV with MeeVee.

All of my “friends” are going to be marketers

Has anybody started a Facebook backlash yet? I see Newsweek is speculating on whether Facebook can hang onto its “cool.” I’m in no position to judge such things, but I will pass along this one anecdotal observation.

A few months ago, I joined Facebook. This in itself is a bad sign, but then again I’m a journalist who covers consumer culture, and in the course of snooping around on something or other, I basically had to join. I did just enough with my account to make it clear who I was, and why I was there, and then got on with whatever I was working on.

Soon I started to get friend requests. I would accept, log out, and get back to work. That has continued. I think I have 30 friends at this point, but I’d have to log on to check, and I don’t want to bother. Here’s what’s new:

Recently, an increasing number of the friend requests are from marketing people. Consultants, ad agency folk, the like. So far, they’ve mostly been from people who I actually have interviewed or am friends with or have some other connection to. But yesterday I got one from a guy I really don’t know, he’s just a marketer type who has pitched me in the past. I can’t decide whether to accept. I think this is a bad sign.

I guess it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen, and that it will happen, in particular, to me. And I have nothing against Facebook, which seems like it might be worth spending time on, if I had any time to spend. (That’s why I can’t decide whether to accept this guy’s “friend”ship, because I’m holding onto the possibility that I may actually find Facebook useful at some point.) And at least Facebook doesn’t give me the same instant, throbbing headache that MySpace did.

But as an observer of marketers, and of trendiness, I would say that there may be a familiar pattern here, following Second Life and MySpace. First there’s an audience. Then the marketers (and the journalists and the trend-watchers) flood in. And then there’s a backlash. Often led by the marketers, the journalists, and the trend-watchers. So we’ll see.

Update: Mike Arauz answers “Yes. The Facebook backlash is now underway. (And like all respectable backlashes these days, I’m sure we will see the backlash-to-the-backlash before most Facebook users have even had a chance to update their status.)” I think is parenthetical point there is good. Here’s his whole post.
And: AdPulp weighs in, and notes earlier chatter of Facebook fatigue.
Plus: More related links in the comments. Thanks all.

Mad Men Musings

The primary client in the most recent installment of Mad Men was, of all companies, Bethlehem Steel. Since this follows Lucky Strikes and Right Guard in an aerosol can, I’m getting the feeling that the show’s creators like picking brands and products and firms that seemed mighty in 1960, and are irrelevant, marginal, or gone today. (Bethlehem Steel dissolved in 2003.) Anyway, protagonist Don makes one mildly interesting comment – about advertising’s frequent role of telling us something we already knew but hadn’t thought about lately.I thought maybe that would be the subject of today’s Musings, but this turned out to be Pete’s episode. He’s the junior agency guy with big ambitions and all that. We learn that he’s from some kind of blueblood family, and his cartoonishly WASP pop sneers at the ad business as a disgrace to the family name.

Later, we can kind of see Pop’s point. Since the initial pitch meeting sputtered, Bethlehem’s honcho is staying in New York overnight to give the agency another crack at new ideas. Pete is given the job of entertaining the codger – an assignment that, so far as I could tell, boiled down to lining up a couple of hookers. It’s never quite made clear that that’s what the young women are, but I’m not sure what other conclusion we’re supposed to draw. It’s all handled rather matter-of-factly.

Now, I’m not in the ad business, and never was. So I don’t know. But was this standard operating procedure at one time?

In any case, later in the episode when Don wants Pete fired, the move is blocked because the agency can’t afford to alienate the old-line power families of New York.

What’s interesting about all this is that it suggests 1960 was not, perhaps, the moment of ad-agency all-powerfulness that some observers of the show have suggested. Instead, maybe, it was a time when admen were still trying to shake their image as sleazy hucksters. Maybe they were trying to become respectable members of the professional class, but — suits and posh offices and suburban homes and fancy martinis aside — not quite making it yet.

Footnote: Clearly my Mad Men musings have had little to do with the show as, you know, a show. Basically, I’m not sure I’d be watching if I didn’t happen to have an interest in advertising, and how that business/practice/cultural form changed over the course of the 20th century. However, Time’s James Poniewozik makes a fairly convincing case for the show as pure entertainment, “showing an intriguing ability to change itself up from week to week.”

To Do in Savannah, GA tonight

Reception for Greta Ackerman Advertising Design M.F.A. Exhibition: “The Ironic Brand.” Monday, 6-8 p.m., Alexander Hall Gallery, 668 Indian St., Savannah, Ga.

Savannah College of Art and Design advertising design M.F.A. candidate Greta Ackerman’s thesis exhibition is an experiment in brand communication and advertising design. Ackerman seeks to express how one anti-mainstream brand, Barking Irons, can engage in self-promotion without sacrificing edgy authenticity.

You will of course recall that Barking Irons was one of the subjects of the Brand Underground article from last summer, so I’m quite keen to see this. For those of you who can’t make it to Savannah tonight, I’ll report back here later this week.