After skipping last AntiFriday, I’ve already shared some anti-ness and backlashing on Murketing this week: complaints about a new means of show-interruption on TBS, and mixed feelings, at the least, about street artist Fauxreel’s Vespa work (see The Aesthetic Poetic for an earlier take on that). Here’s what else I can offer from the week in dissent and critiques and complaints and like that.
1. Advertising & Marketing Made Easy and Wired both address the recent cellphone-radiation-pops-pocorn viral video — which has apparently been viewed 4 million+ times, and which turned out to be an ad. In truth, I haven’t personally seen a ton of backlash about this, but people have asked me about it. The answer is: I’m not a fan of this kind of thing, at all. But it does seem to have gotten this company’s name around. Whether it does much for the client or not, I’m guessing the marketing firm that made the thing will get some new business as a result.
2. “On July 1st, the Anti-Advertising Agency and Rami Tabello of IllegalSigns.ca will give a free workshop teaching you how to identify illegal advertising and get it taken down. You will leave this workshop equipped to have illegal signs removed in your neighborhood.” Details.
3. Variety:
The U.K. media minister has attacked product placement in TV shows and said he will not allow the practice on British broadcasters even though it has been approved by the European Union.
The news is likely to infuriate TV companies, including beleaguered terrestrial giant ITV, which are all trying to find additional revenue streams as new media continues to make inroads into traditional advertising. Read more
I mentioned earlier that on a recent visit to Richmond, VA, I “signed stock” at the Fountain Bookstore. Obviously they sell those signed copies to their local customer base.
However, I recently realized that they also sell online, and after a quick check with the excellent owner Kelly, they’ve now got a special link, whereby non-Richmonders can order one of those signed copies from the store. (Supplies limited, obviously.)
One of the things I’ve learned in the last few weeks is how much it matters to have the support of booksellers like Fountain Bookstore — an independent shop that actually has a point of view. I’ve also learned that such support is more rare than you’d think. So, when I get it, I figure the least I can do is try to support them back.
… 1960?
… 1940?
… the dawn of time?
I don’t know what I would have said, but the answer according to this story is 1985. Global unit sales were 1.8 million billion in 1985, and the “equivalent of” 1.86 billion in 2007.
I’ve always wondered how much the industry’s revenue situation has been exacerbated by the the fact that from 1985 to at least 1998 or so, sales must have been falsely inflated by ever-growing CD sales (both overpriced, and involving a lot of simple format replacement for stuff we already owned). I wonder, if there was a way to remove such sales, how much difference it would make.
Again, I’m not denying the real drops, or factors like rising population (in particular demographic bulge of Gen Y). Just musing.
Note: I know I said I’d get to that Nike follow-up today, but it’s not going to happen. It’s half written, and a little too unwieldy. I’ll get it cleaned up and presentable, and when it’s ready, will post.
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This post was written by Rob Walker on June 19, 2008
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Flickr Artifacts
This post was written by Rob Walker on June 19, 2008
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In the final section of Buying In, three forward-looking chapters explore where the evolving 21st century relationship between what we buy and who we are might go — or rather where we might take it. This section includes my argument that the conspicuous consumption, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, status-signal, “badge” theory of consumer behavior is counterproductive and out of date.
In this original essay for ChangeThis, I explore “the invisible badge” as a more useful construct for understanding, and shaping, our own behavior. Short outtake:
The framework of the invisible badge is wholly different [from conspicuous consumption]. It can only be a reflection of who you really are. It can’t be faked. The invisible badge need not derive from religion or environmental consciousness. Your belief system can be drawn from membership in a subculture, or the military, or any number of other sources. Possibly that belonging manifests itself in a tangible, badge-ish way – an old Misfits T-shirt, or a patch signifying service in the 3rd Infantry Division of the United States Army.
But (and this is crucial) even absent the visual signifier, the identity, and its meaning, remain.
I hope you will check it out.
For another view on the subject, Virginia Postrel coincidentally offers “a new theory of the leisure class” in The Atlantic.
Off topic: This was an interesting writing experiment for me, for two reasons. One is that the writing on Change This is in the form of “manifestos,” meaning it’s a much more direct exhortation than I’ve been used to writing lately. If you’re interested in more about that, read on.
Read more
Longtime readers know I have a fascination with camo. So of course I’m all over this:
It’s the Mongramouflage, a Murakami-Vuitton joint. See Giant/Robot Eric Nakamura’s post for more.
A Consumed column about camo is here.
So there’s this thing in the book where I mention how bummed out I was when Nike bought Converse, and pretty much every interviewer asks me about it, so I kind of feel like I’ve been on a Nike-bashing tour lately.
Even so, as I say in the book, speaking as a business journalist who writes about branding, I am in awe of Nike: As a capitalist success story, and as an exercise in the raw power of image-making, it is truly astonishing.
Here’s a case in point. The other day I got a call from Eric Neel at ESPN.com. He was writing about some ads Nike had going during the U.S. Open, featuring Tiger Woods. Being totally indifferent to golf, and kind of busy, I knew nothing about this, but he told me the basics. I’ll quote here from Neel’s subsequent June 12 article:
In Nike’s new Tiger Woods commercial entitled “Never,” Earl Woods’ recorded voice plays over clips of his son, as a boy and as a man, practicing his legendary swing. Full of gravitas and pathos, it’s at once the voice of the guru who raised the greatest golfer who has ever lived and the voice of the absent father who died of cancer a little more than two years ago.
While Tiger starts and stops his swings, Earl explains the way he often intentionally distracted his son in order to make him stronger, sometimes dropping a bag full of clubs when Tiger was at the top of his backswing.
“I’d say, ‘Tiger, I promise you,'” Earl says as we look upon his son’s unmistakably steely gaze, “‘that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.’ And he hasn’t. And he never will.”
See the ad here if you like.
Earl Woods, as you may know, is dead. So this is a pretty intense ad. Also possibly creepy, but never mind that. What Neel was curious about was, given that Woods went into this tournament recovering from knee surgery and not in top physical condition, wasn’t there a risk that he would stink up the joint, and both he and Nike would look bad?
In my role as a totally uninformed pundit, I responded that I didn’t think the risk was all that great, or rather that whatever risk there was actually made sense for Nike, which has long taken risks with its advertising, and has been almost impossibly effective at keeping its image fresh and relevant year after year. If this effort failed, well, so it goes.
But — what if Tiger wins? If he does, surely the coverage will be all about his awesome mental toughness and so on. Just like in the Nike ad! In fact, the ad would seem like part of the narrative of the tournament, almost like real-life Tiger was taking his cues from the inspiring marketing campaign.
And of course, Woods won.
Needless to say, I didn’t watch a single second of the coverage, so I don’t know how it all came across. But if Nike took a risk, they sure got the payoff. My musings had nothing to do with any guesses about Woods’ performance. But I will admit I followed a particular instinct: Don’t bet against Nike marketing.
So there’s that. I’ll say something else nice about Nike tomorrow. And it’s not about their ads. Or not exactly.
Powell’s asked me to write an essay for their newsletter, in connection to Buying In. Here’s a short outtake:
On a cultural level, I understand why people want to wall off consumer culture into its own category, something we don’t have to take all that seriously. Critiquing what we buy and why tilts into the commercial marketplace in ways that just don’t feel as serious, as, say, critiquing works of art — even if the definition of “works of art” has gotten pretty fluid. (Somehow a quasi-scholarly critique of Battlestar Galactica, for instance, seems more like what we think of as criticism than a deconstruction of who buys Red Bull, and why.)
But consumer culture is serious….
Read the whole thing here.
Last week I read this NYT article about the latest retail data, for May. “Sales of retail goods and services rose 1 percent in May, double what economists had expected.” Wall Street rallied as on what was seen as surprisingly good news. Since reading this, and some other stuff that I’ll get to, I’ve been mulling the relationship between the consumer mood, consumer spending, and the broader impact of the business of branding. It’s going to take me a few paragraphs to draw this together — and even then I end with questions. So if you’re interested, bear with me on this. Read more
Big thanks to everyone who came out to Friday night’s New York Buying In event at the Art Directors Club. I was happy with the turnout, happy to see old friends, happy to make new ones.
I particularly want to thank PSFK for making it happen, and I hope Piers and Hedy won’t mind if I name-check them here. We had a lot of moving parts to this thing, and they executed perfectly. Awesome job, and my gratitude is deep and heartfelt. Being the center of attention gives me the straight-up willies, but this came off so nicely even I had a good time. Thank you.
I also want to thank Barking Irons, Andrew Andrew, Fast Company, Danielle Sacks, and F2 Design.
Inevitably, too many conversations were cut short, or simply never happened; my apologies to those I didn’t get to spend as much time chatting with as I would have liked.
Finally: I would like to thank the fine gentleman who loaned (well gave) me a pen.
Originally uploaded by EssG.
Time Magazine reports on a guy who is trying to whittle down his possessions to a mere 100 things.
[Dave] Bruno keeps a running tally on his blog, guynameddave.com of what he has decided to hold on to and what he is preparing to sell or donate. For instance, as of early June, he was down to five dress shirts and one necktie but uncertain about parting with one of his three pairs of jeans. “Are two pairs of jeans enough?!,” he asked in a recent posting.
Time suggests this is a “grassroots movement,” although even Bruno seems surprised by that assertion. (“Now it’s a ‘grassroots movement,’ according to Time. Wow!”) Even so, his 100 Thing Challenge is an interesting variation on the whole voluntary simplicity idea, and also on the probably more useful notion of simply thinking harder about material culture — about what really matters, and what really doesn’t.
[Thanks for the tip, Orli!]
I’m on record as standing against the absurd hype about Barack Obama’s logo: “drastically overrated” I boldly declared (cough) in a parenthetical aside buried deep in this inexcusably long post.
Today, NYT says:
[Obama] did not initially like the campaign’s blue and white logo — intended to appear like a horizon, symbolizing hope and opportunity — saying he found it too polished and corporate.
He didn’t like “Change We Can Believe In” either. But he’s got his priorities straight, so he let it go.
Possibly he’s shrewd enough about logo design to know that the real key isn’t aesthetic beauty, it’s overwhelming repetition. (Sorry, logo designers!)
[Big thanks: discoczech!]
A friend writes:
I saw something REALLY disturbing on TV and immediately thought of you*. Have you seen these TBS ads for the Bill Engval show? He literally walks onto the screen, pauses the show with a remote, tells you to watch his new series, and then restarts it. It’s insanely awful. Made me get up and write to TBS about how bad it is. Found a youtube clip of it. Obviously I’m not the only one bothered by this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vUtfG9Bkec
Whether you watch the clip or not, a quick scan of the 200+ comments confirms that, yes, TBS viewers are mightily annoyed.
I’ve said before — and particularly a lot lately in interviews about Buying In — the real significance of TiVo and click culture (see the book for more on that) is not that it’s all given great power to the consumer (you know, “the consumer in control”) to zap past ads.
The real significance is that, faced with the possibility of people zapping past ads, etc., the commercial persuasion business has completely rewritten the rules about where and how advertising and marketing can appear. (Thus, “murketing.”) This thing is just a blunt example of one small way they’re doing that.
And it’s worth noting that, even now, less than a quarter of U.S. homes even have a DVR. But every home that gets TBS, DVR-ed or no, experiences this unpleasant stunt.
Maybe this particular style of ruining your viewing experience will fade if the backlash is severe enough, but it’ll just get replaced by more experiments in pitches that are tough to TiVo past. As with the just-noted Vespa street art campaign, I think we can expect more of this sort of thing in the future.
[Thanks, Justin.]
[* Yes, as a matter of fact, friends often think of me when they see “disturbing” things on television.]
A couple of weeks back I noted this Vespa murketing effort in Montreal and other Canadian cities: What looked like street art was actually Vespa branding. In subsequent conversation with the Globe & Mail‘s Jennifer Wells, I learned that this work was executed by an actual street artist, known as Fauxreel, whose work has included a number of billboard alternations. (I wasn’t familiar with him; here’s his site.)
The Anti Advertising Agency points to this evidence that at least some people find the artist’s collaboration with Vespa unappealing: “Sold Out For Real,” someone has scrawled on one of his (non-corporate) pieces.
So how big a deal is this? I’m not sure. Fauxreel is hardly the first graffiti/street artist to do paid work on the street for brands. (Memorable precedent: Tats Cru for Hummer.) Sure this alienates some fans and draws some sellout charges. But I’ve had plenty of conversations with people who figure this sort of thing is just fine: That it sort of amounts to corporations supporting artists, and bankrolling kinda-sorta subversive stuff.
Moreover, I suspect Vespa’s goals here had less to do with impressing street art fans than with simply finding a way (legal or not) to run a campaign that basically can’t be avoided, because it’s not happening in the traditional confines of a magazine ad you can flip past or a TV spot you can mute. It’s not about interrupting a media experience, it’s about interrupting your life. If that costs Fauxreel some credibility, well, I’m sure Vespa will live with that just fine.
Ultimately, backlashing like the above would have to get a lot more widespread before street art murketing goes away.
Originally uploaded by b0.
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