Recently, Chemistry.com ran the following commercial, on various cable networks. I've seen it on Discovery, BBC America, History Channel, and Food Network.
Now, color me surprised when this ad got pulled fairly quickly.
Do women generally like this sort of thing? Yes. Go check the comments at the Youtube site, see for yourself. I'm sure it's "cool" with the trendy set as well.
Do men who are likely to want to use Chemistry.com like this sort of thing? No. They'll hate it. Desperate, lonely guys wanting a girlfriend get ... gays on the screen?
Chemistry.com just killed their brand. Since men make up the paying customers. Women don't need and don't form the majority of the customers of dating sites.
Dating sites generally fail, because it's like that "nude beach scene" in "Eurotrip." A total "sausage fest." Far too many men, not very many women. Men can need dating sites, it's hard for some to meet women, particularly those shy, without much of a social network, and new in town. Women don't need dating sites and therefore mostly don't use them, except occasionally as either an ego booster, or more often as a screening device (and that only for income, really).
This stands as another monument to the lack of competence in the creative class. It should be a simple task: sell lonely, desperate guys that Chemistry.com will solve their romance problem. Instead, the ad agency made a "statement" which no doubt made all their ad buddies proud and boosted their own status in the ad business.
But now, for every guy who saw that ad, Chemistry.com is not for them. It's for gay men. Not straight guys looking for a date. Made worse of course by the choice of the actors, who resemble the target market of cube dwellers too much.
More evidence of lack of simple competence among the creative class. Even simple things can't get done right, because no one has a clue about the social realities beyond the terminally trendy.
...Read more
Showing posts with label creative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative. Show all posts
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Comics Books Dirty Little Secret: They Don't Make (Much) Money
Everyone is interested in Comic Book movies these days. The Batman movie's domestic box office of $480 million dollars and rising will do that. But what people don't understand is the dirty little secret of Comics Books. They don't make much money. And the success of the movies is based on work done in some cases, more than fifty years ago.
First, you can get a sense of the Comics industry by going to the SEC and using their EDGAR search engine to read the Marvel Entertainment reports. You can find the most recent 10-Q (Quarterly Report) here.
Marvel's management states that their target market is 13-18, but concedes their readership can consist of men into their mid thirties. The probable readership is likely even older. If you look at their operating information for Publishing, their operating income is 12% to 16%, over the six month periods June 30, 2007, and June 30, 2008. Clearly, Comic Book publishing is not a big money maker, compared to the Licensing (Toys and Movies) and direct movie making lines.
This is because of the unique nature of the Comic Book business. Around 2001, there were 3,000 Comic Book shops. That number is believed to be less than 2,000 nationally, in 2008. This is a huge blow, because of how Comic Books get to readers. Most "monthly" Comic Books, which can now retail around $5 or so (more evidence they are not aimed at teenagers, when you consider many readers buy 6 or 7 comics at a time, totalling $36-$42 a week), are sold in Comic Book shops. They are mostly distributed by Diamond Distributing, which has a lock on most comic books distributed to Comic Book shops. If you want to know, why the heck can't you find Comic Books in Drug Stores, Supermarkets, and Bookstores, this is why. It's true even for DC Comics, which is owned by Time-Warner. You can buy Time Magazine almost anywhere, including your local Supermarket. You can't buy "the Adventures of Superman" there.
Even if Comics appealed to younger readers (they don't) they couldn't buy them in places where it's convenient.
"Trade Paperbacks" which are collected arcs of comics are available in Bookstores, like Barnes and Noble. But, they depend on the comics that originally were sold in Comic Book Shops. You see the problem here? The Trade Paperbacks are not original work.
There are even more problems for Comic Books. The number of younger readers potentially available, is declining year after year. Because of the birth dearth. The bulk of the population, is in their 30's to 40's.
Unfortunately for Comics, most writers don't write for mass audience success. Instead they write for acclaim and admiration of their peers. For being "daring" and "edgy" and above all PC and Multicultural. Roughly half the voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections voted for George W. Bush. One would think it would not be good business sense to routinely insult the values and deeply held beliefs of half the potential customers, but Comics writers do this all the time. America is often the villain, Republicans and Christians the main villains, and Muslims put-upon innocents.
DC's Editor in Chief, Dan Didio, has a habit of killing off beloved characters with generations of fans, to replace them with gay, or hispanic, or other multicultural variations of the character that worked for in some cases 40 years or more. This is just poor business, since there are not many gay, or hispanic readers. Mexican boys have their own comics, produced in Mexico, by Mexican writers and artists, about Mexican themes, in Spanish. They won't be reading any DC comics.
What accounts for such poor business practices, the politicizing of Comic Books to the point where half the potential customers are alienated, the emphasis on PC and Multiculturalism to a slavish degree, the dependence on Comic Book shops and Diamond Distributing? When for DC Comics at least, the existing Time-Warner infrastructure can be used to get Superman comics out with Time Magazine?
Several factors. Both Marvel and DC Comics don't really expect to make any money at all with Comic Book Publishing (and Marvel's SEC filings confirm that). DC seems to publish a few titles like Wonder Woman just to keep the rights (which would otherwise revert back to the estate of the creator). Thus it's a playground for PC and Multiculturalists, the same way "Independent" movies like "TransAmerica" (about transvestites) are a playground for the same thing. No one expects to make any money, just show how "cool" one is. It's just status-displays among a hothouse of "creative" people playing with other people's money. Like Independent Films, a situation not likely to last forever.
The real money is in films and licensing. Everything from major movies, to toys, to the series "Smallville" on first the WB and now CW network, and of course video games create streams of revenue, on work done decades ago. All bring in money with no real requirement to invent new characters and universes. DC is rolled up into the Time-Warner behemoth, but there is no reason not to think that their own internal balance sheet would not look like Marvel's public one on the SEC EDGAR system. On a lesser scale, that would be replicated by independent and privately held smaller comics publishers, including Dark Horse, Top Cow, and London Knights.
My own thinking is that Demographics is playing a part in this. The following chart, from the US Census Bureau 2006 survey, shows the population breakdowns:
[Click on the image to see the full size.]
Much has been made by any number of commenters, from Steve Sailer, to John Derbyshire, to Spengler, to Mark Steyn, to in particular, Ed Driscoll, about the pathetic state of popular culture. Blogger Ed Driscoll in particular is fond of reminding us that in popular culture it's always 1968. In many ways, at best, popular culture only made advances into the 1980's. A time when innovation and new genres last appeared in rock music, movies, television, and in particular, Comic Books.
While many praise, justly, Christopher Nolan's two Batman movies, and how they rebooted that moribund franchise after the campiness of Joel Schumacher's versions, the two Nolan movies built on the work first done by Batman writer Dennis O'Neil in the late 1970's, and the follow-up work done by Frank Miller in his immortal "The Dark Knight Returns" in the early 1980's. The Frank Miller version of Marvel's Daredevil also dates from this period, where the character was taken from light-hearted "joke" to the current, dark, brooding, Catholic-Irish sin and redemption character that he's known as today.
Comic Books are probably a good a model as any to examine what happens ... when you start running out of young people. Without a constant turnover of new, younger readers, demanding imagination, novelty, and above all, fun, in their entertainment, creative people end up all too often appealing to an ever more "selective" (in the Spinal Tap sense) audience. Who will be older, and will consume entertainment as a status symbol.
Yes, in short, Comic Books became too much like Jazz. Once the music for the young to dance and romance to, now ... exemplified by the Riverside CA concerts featuring Branford Marsalis. Tickets available in the "cheap seats" for $100 a person. Not exactly a young man's music. Certainly not a young man's price.
When Comics were great, when as (one wag put it, Marvel got the characters right the first time) the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and other great characters were created, there was a whole new generation of comic book readers, young geeky boys in their early teens. Who wanted cheap, fast, and new entertainment. The virtues of this on creative people was obvious. There was no time to create uber-angsty characters and storylines designed to promote status within the creative community. Being cheap meant lots of risks could be taken, and rapid feedback from readers (who would write letters to the Comic Book companies explaining what characters they liked and hated, and why) helped creative people understand what worked and what did not for their readers.
Stan Lee and his counterparts at DC would have laughed at the idea that a multi-arc storyline would take all year, with frequent delays, and sometimes never finish at all, because artists and writers went on to other projects. Let alone replacing existing, popular characters with gay or latino versions. Lee and his compatriots knew their audience. They had enough letters from them. The writers and editors back then knew the innate conservatism (in some senses) of young, geeky boys. Boys who wanted to uphold the traditional values of heroism, monogamy, and the nuclear family. Because while they had no real ability to envision themselves as "players" they could see themselves as getting the girl through traditional heroism. If they just got bit by a radioactive spider. Or got a power ring from a dying Alien. Or got exposed to Gamma Radiation from a "Gamma Ray Bomb." All variations of King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone (or Siegfried and the Branstock Oak) and playing to the deep cultural impulse in Western civilization to point boys to the "proper" way to get the girl. Which is be the brave and good hero. Stan Lee just updated him, and made him modernly weird. So he might crawl up walls like a spider. Or shout, "Flame On" and turn into living flame and fly about, hurling fireballs at bad guys. Or nerdily create a high-tech suit of armor.
Youth culture has it's own energy (and among young men, innate conservatism in gender/sex matters). Among it's principal benefits, is the ability to take these risks and still keep going. It's not an accident that Comic Book's greatest characters and the versions audiences in movies love, result from the flowering of that youth culture in the 1940's, the 1960's, and the last gasp in the 1980's. Along with pop music, movies, television, and much else. Quite a bit of our cultural stagnation can be traced to the lack of ... young people.
...Read more
First, you can get a sense of the Comics industry by going to the SEC and using their EDGAR search engine to read the Marvel Entertainment reports. You can find the most recent 10-Q (Quarterly Report) here.
Marvel's management states that their target market is 13-18, but concedes their readership can consist of men into their mid thirties. The probable readership is likely even older. If you look at their operating information for Publishing, their operating income is 12% to 16%, over the six month periods June 30, 2007, and June 30, 2008. Clearly, Comic Book publishing is not a big money maker, compared to the Licensing (Toys and Movies) and direct movie making lines.
This is because of the unique nature of the Comic Book business. Around 2001, there were 3,000 Comic Book shops. That number is believed to be less than 2,000 nationally, in 2008. This is a huge blow, because of how Comic Books get to readers. Most "monthly" Comic Books, which can now retail around $5 or so (more evidence they are not aimed at teenagers, when you consider many readers buy 6 or 7 comics at a time, totalling $36-$42 a week), are sold in Comic Book shops. They are mostly distributed by Diamond Distributing, which has a lock on most comic books distributed to Comic Book shops. If you want to know, why the heck can't you find Comic Books in Drug Stores, Supermarkets, and Bookstores, this is why. It's true even for DC Comics, which is owned by Time-Warner. You can buy Time Magazine almost anywhere, including your local Supermarket. You can't buy "the Adventures of Superman" there.
Even if Comics appealed to younger readers (they don't) they couldn't buy them in places where it's convenient.
"Trade Paperbacks" which are collected arcs of comics are available in Bookstores, like Barnes and Noble. But, they depend on the comics that originally were sold in Comic Book Shops. You see the problem here? The Trade Paperbacks are not original work.
There are even more problems for Comic Books. The number of younger readers potentially available, is declining year after year. Because of the birth dearth. The bulk of the population, is in their 30's to 40's.
Unfortunately for Comics, most writers don't write for mass audience success. Instead they write for acclaim and admiration of their peers. For being "daring" and "edgy" and above all PC and Multicultural. Roughly half the voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections voted for George W. Bush. One would think it would not be good business sense to routinely insult the values and deeply held beliefs of half the potential customers, but Comics writers do this all the time. America is often the villain, Republicans and Christians the main villains, and Muslims put-upon innocents.
DC's Editor in Chief, Dan Didio, has a habit of killing off beloved characters with generations of fans, to replace them with gay, or hispanic, or other multicultural variations of the character that worked for in some cases 40 years or more. This is just poor business, since there are not many gay, or hispanic readers. Mexican boys have their own comics, produced in Mexico, by Mexican writers and artists, about Mexican themes, in Spanish. They won't be reading any DC comics.
What accounts for such poor business practices, the politicizing of Comic Books to the point where half the potential customers are alienated, the emphasis on PC and Multiculturalism to a slavish degree, the dependence on Comic Book shops and Diamond Distributing? When for DC Comics at least, the existing Time-Warner infrastructure can be used to get Superman comics out with Time Magazine?
Several factors. Both Marvel and DC Comics don't really expect to make any money at all with Comic Book Publishing (and Marvel's SEC filings confirm that). DC seems to publish a few titles like Wonder Woman just to keep the rights (which would otherwise revert back to the estate of the creator). Thus it's a playground for PC and Multiculturalists, the same way "Independent" movies like "TransAmerica" (about transvestites) are a playground for the same thing. No one expects to make any money, just show how "cool" one is. It's just status-displays among a hothouse of "creative" people playing with other people's money. Like Independent Films, a situation not likely to last forever.
The real money is in films and licensing. Everything from major movies, to toys, to the series "Smallville" on first the WB and now CW network, and of course video games create streams of revenue, on work done decades ago. All bring in money with no real requirement to invent new characters and universes. DC is rolled up into the Time-Warner behemoth, but there is no reason not to think that their own internal balance sheet would not look like Marvel's public one on the SEC EDGAR system. On a lesser scale, that would be replicated by independent and privately held smaller comics publishers, including Dark Horse, Top Cow, and London Knights.
My own thinking is that Demographics is playing a part in this. The following chart, from the US Census Bureau 2006 survey, shows the population breakdowns:
[Click on the image to see the full size.]
Much has been made by any number of commenters, from Steve Sailer, to John Derbyshire, to Spengler, to Mark Steyn, to in particular, Ed Driscoll, about the pathetic state of popular culture. Blogger Ed Driscoll in particular is fond of reminding us that in popular culture it's always 1968. In many ways, at best, popular culture only made advances into the 1980's. A time when innovation and new genres last appeared in rock music, movies, television, and in particular, Comic Books.
While many praise, justly, Christopher Nolan's two Batman movies, and how they rebooted that moribund franchise after the campiness of Joel Schumacher's versions, the two Nolan movies built on the work first done by Batman writer Dennis O'Neil in the late 1970's, and the follow-up work done by Frank Miller in his immortal "The Dark Knight Returns" in the early 1980's. The Frank Miller version of Marvel's Daredevil also dates from this period, where the character was taken from light-hearted "joke" to the current, dark, brooding, Catholic-Irish sin and redemption character that he's known as today.
Comic Books are probably a good a model as any to examine what happens ... when you start running out of young people. Without a constant turnover of new, younger readers, demanding imagination, novelty, and above all, fun, in their entertainment, creative people end up all too often appealing to an ever more "selective" (in the Spinal Tap sense) audience. Who will be older, and will consume entertainment as a status symbol.
Yes, in short, Comic Books became too much like Jazz. Once the music for the young to dance and romance to, now ... exemplified by the Riverside CA concerts featuring Branford Marsalis. Tickets available in the "cheap seats" for $100 a person. Not exactly a young man's music. Certainly not a young man's price.
When Comics were great, when as (one wag put it, Marvel got the characters right the first time) the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and other great characters were created, there was a whole new generation of comic book readers, young geeky boys in their early teens. Who wanted cheap, fast, and new entertainment. The virtues of this on creative people was obvious. There was no time to create uber-angsty characters and storylines designed to promote status within the creative community. Being cheap meant lots of risks could be taken, and rapid feedback from readers (who would write letters to the Comic Book companies explaining what characters they liked and hated, and why) helped creative people understand what worked and what did not for their readers.
Stan Lee and his counterparts at DC would have laughed at the idea that a multi-arc storyline would take all year, with frequent delays, and sometimes never finish at all, because artists and writers went on to other projects. Let alone replacing existing, popular characters with gay or latino versions. Lee and his compatriots knew their audience. They had enough letters from them. The writers and editors back then knew the innate conservatism (in some senses) of young, geeky boys. Boys who wanted to uphold the traditional values of heroism, monogamy, and the nuclear family. Because while they had no real ability to envision themselves as "players" they could see themselves as getting the girl through traditional heroism. If they just got bit by a radioactive spider. Or got a power ring from a dying Alien. Or got exposed to Gamma Radiation from a "Gamma Ray Bomb." All variations of King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone (or Siegfried and the Branstock Oak) and playing to the deep cultural impulse in Western civilization to point boys to the "proper" way to get the girl. Which is be the brave and good hero. Stan Lee just updated him, and made him modernly weird. So he might crawl up walls like a spider. Or shout, "Flame On" and turn into living flame and fly about, hurling fireballs at bad guys. Or nerdily create a high-tech suit of armor.
Youth culture has it's own energy (and among young men, innate conservatism in gender/sex matters). Among it's principal benefits, is the ability to take these risks and still keep going. It's not an accident that Comic Book's greatest characters and the versions audiences in movies love, result from the flowering of that youth culture in the 1940's, the 1960's, and the last gasp in the 1980's. Along with pop music, movies, television, and much else. Quite a bit of our cultural stagnation can be traced to the lack of ... young people.
...Read more
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Advertising's Disdain for the White Male: the Hipster Sneer
You've probably seen them, all over Television. No matter what show or channel you're watching, ads will show up that depict the straight white male as a complete doofus, whom the "cool people" condescendingly tolerate. Often the "cool people" are either the straight white guy's wife and children, or office mates. In the case of the latter, a "cool" Black male and white female often look at the man with disdain.
This ad is likely the worst:
Why do advertisers make these commercials? Surely they know it must tick off their customer base, which for many of these products will be straight white men. If their customer base is female, they'll object to being made to look like idiots themselves, for choosing such unsuitable husbands, or having such idiot sons, fathers, or brothers. Advertisers do it because of the Hipster Sneer.
Creative people just can't help it. The straight white guy, particularly engineers, cubicle dwellers, anyone who smacks of nerdiness, in an un-cool, live in the suburbs, drive a boring car kind of way, is the natural social enemy of the hipster. [And his competitor in the struggle for a mate -- surprisingly, Advertising is still a male-dominated activity. It's not women who are making these ads, it's men.] Hipsters, after all, have to sell attitude and elitism. While there are credentials for advertising jobs, they are surprisingly flexible. Top management of creative agencies for Nike, Reebok, or Cadillac often got their start writing copy for print ads, and worked their way up the ladder. While Ad Agencies bear little resemblance to AMC's "Mad Men," they do have a hierarchy based on how "cool" and hip each individual is, and how cool and hip they can make a campaign. The late Jay Chiat, for example, founder of Chiat/Day, got his start writing recruitment ads for Orange County, California Aerospace firms. He had no special training in design, art, consumer behavior, psychology, or anything of that nature. He certainly did have a flair for the dramatic, and a sense of how to impress people.
Many senior Advertising Executives come from similar backgrounds. As such, their stock in trade is the ability to surprise, shock, and sometimes appall their clients and consumers. But always, the Advertiser must be seen as hip, cool, and edgy. Clients hire and fire ad agencies more frequently than NFL teams hire and fire head coaches. There is very little loyalty, and few metrics to measure the success and failure of campaigns while they are ongoing, and adjust accordingly.
The process goes something like this: a Company finds itself with a dull and stodgy image, or fears it's being left behind by competitors in awareness by consumers. Company management looks around for a controversial, and above all, "cool" and hip Ad Agency known for being both shocking and "cool." Personal presentations are key here, since often only concepts and images are available, not finished ads made on spec. An ad execs ability to both build relationships with a client, even a short-term one, and appear "cool" is paramount. The execs often have nothing else. Shockingly, very little is publicly reported on ad campaign effectiveness. At least NFL coaches all have very public won-lost records.
Now the company has a new ad agency. Which will spare no effort to appear hip and happening. The Straight White Guy can be both safely mocked, and is the "enemy" of the hip creative person who often has a fairly chaotic business life, moving from one project to the next with all the uncertainty that creates, in a boom-or-bust cycle. It hasn't escaped the notice of the hip, creative person that the Straight White Guy(tm) often has the stability in his professional life that is lacking in project-oriented advertising. [Or that his stability offers an alternative to the cachet of the hipness of the "creative" ad person, in the relationship market.] Note the ad above, the Straight White Guy(tm) is both "boring" in a parody of the non-fashion oriented bad office dresser, and is presented as incompetent in dealing with any minor change. The implicit message is both: "don't date this guy" and "don't promote this guy." Remarkable since the main purchasers of ink for Dell printers at Staples are likely to be ... Straight White Guys.(tm)
Most of these ads are about the superiority of the hipsters who create them. The Hipster Sneer at the square office dwellers who work on boring day-to-day stuff. It's all about the creator. Not the consumer. The message is, the hipster is far more worthy than "this guy" in the ad, whoever he is. Even if the hipster never appears, his attitude towards the envied and resented "ordinary joe" is always present. This won't change either, until companies start moving more and more ads onto the Internet.
Internet Advertising is different. Not just with Google Ads, or various banners, surveys, and the like. No, what makes Internet Advertising so different is that it is interactive. Internet ad views, and click-throughs, can be measured day to day. Marketing managers can see daily, how well their campaign is doing, in reaching consumers, how much it costs, and what the return is (best result, viewers click "through" on the ad taking them to the site featured on the ad). As companies expect more and more Internet like reporting, and demand results from Television campaigns, room for hipster sneering (at the ordinary joes who work in ordinary offices) simply won't exist. The requirement for true professionalism will drive it out. That day is likely to be coming quite soon.
But until then, we will just have to put up with the Hipster Sneer.
...Read more
This ad is likely the worst:
Why do advertisers make these commercials? Surely they know it must tick off their customer base, which for many of these products will be straight white men. If their customer base is female, they'll object to being made to look like idiots themselves, for choosing such unsuitable husbands, or having such idiot sons, fathers, or brothers. Advertisers do it because of the Hipster Sneer.
Creative people just can't help it. The straight white guy, particularly engineers, cubicle dwellers, anyone who smacks of nerdiness, in an un-cool, live in the suburbs, drive a boring car kind of way, is the natural social enemy of the hipster. [And his competitor in the struggle for a mate -- surprisingly, Advertising is still a male-dominated activity. It's not women who are making these ads, it's men.] Hipsters, after all, have to sell attitude and elitism. While there are credentials for advertising jobs, they are surprisingly flexible. Top management of creative agencies for Nike, Reebok, or Cadillac often got their start writing copy for print ads, and worked their way up the ladder. While Ad Agencies bear little resemblance to AMC's "Mad Men," they do have a hierarchy based on how "cool" and hip each individual is, and how cool and hip they can make a campaign. The late Jay Chiat, for example, founder of Chiat/Day, got his start writing recruitment ads for Orange County, California Aerospace firms. He had no special training in design, art, consumer behavior, psychology, or anything of that nature. He certainly did have a flair for the dramatic, and a sense of how to impress people.
Many senior Advertising Executives come from similar backgrounds. As such, their stock in trade is the ability to surprise, shock, and sometimes appall their clients and consumers. But always, the Advertiser must be seen as hip, cool, and edgy. Clients hire and fire ad agencies more frequently than NFL teams hire and fire head coaches. There is very little loyalty, and few metrics to measure the success and failure of campaigns while they are ongoing, and adjust accordingly.
The process goes something like this: a Company finds itself with a dull and stodgy image, or fears it's being left behind by competitors in awareness by consumers. Company management looks around for a controversial, and above all, "cool" and hip Ad Agency known for being both shocking and "cool." Personal presentations are key here, since often only concepts and images are available, not finished ads made on spec. An ad execs ability to both build relationships with a client, even a short-term one, and appear "cool" is paramount. The execs often have nothing else. Shockingly, very little is publicly reported on ad campaign effectiveness. At least NFL coaches all have very public won-lost records.
Now the company has a new ad agency. Which will spare no effort to appear hip and happening. The Straight White Guy can be both safely mocked, and is the "enemy" of the hip creative person who often has a fairly chaotic business life, moving from one project to the next with all the uncertainty that creates, in a boom-or-bust cycle. It hasn't escaped the notice of the hip, creative person that the Straight White Guy(tm) often has the stability in his professional life that is lacking in project-oriented advertising. [Or that his stability offers an alternative to the cachet of the hipness of the "creative" ad person, in the relationship market.] Note the ad above, the Straight White Guy(tm) is both "boring" in a parody of the non-fashion oriented bad office dresser, and is presented as incompetent in dealing with any minor change. The implicit message is both: "don't date this guy" and "don't promote this guy." Remarkable since the main purchasers of ink for Dell printers at Staples are likely to be ... Straight White Guys.(tm)
Most of these ads are about the superiority of the hipsters who create them. The Hipster Sneer at the square office dwellers who work on boring day-to-day stuff. It's all about the creator. Not the consumer. The message is, the hipster is far more worthy than "this guy" in the ad, whoever he is. Even if the hipster never appears, his attitude towards the envied and resented "ordinary joe" is always present. This won't change either, until companies start moving more and more ads onto the Internet.
Internet Advertising is different. Not just with Google Ads, or various banners, surveys, and the like. No, what makes Internet Advertising so different is that it is interactive. Internet ad views, and click-throughs, can be measured day to day. Marketing managers can see daily, how well their campaign is doing, in reaching consumers, how much it costs, and what the return is (best result, viewers click "through" on the ad taking them to the site featured on the ad). As companies expect more and more Internet like reporting, and demand results from Television campaigns, room for hipster sneering (at the ordinary joes who work in ordinary offices) simply won't exist. The requirement for true professionalism will drive it out. That day is likely to be coming quite soon.
But until then, we will just have to put up with the Hipster Sneer.
...Read more
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Why Advertising Sucks
Two ads, currently running, demonstrate why Advertising today is just miserable, and a symptom of a creative class in terminal decline. One pushes agendas and messages the audience knows is just not true, and the other is determined to push hipness and edginess to an audience supremely uninterested, and indeed hostile, to those particular attributes.
First, the Circuit City Back to School Ad, seen here:
Next, the Reebok and NFL Commercial, seen here:
The Circuit City Ad, in case you don't want to watch it (I don't blame you either), opens with a nerdy High School age Circuit City salesman dreaming and drooling over Rihanna. He's interrupted in his reverie by a cute High School girl shopping for a computer, with her parents, who semi-flirts with him. It ends, jarringly, with the low price and features of the computer on sale.
This ad is a disaster. It pushes the agenda of ad agencies that seem to think that whites and blacks closely associate with each other, like the tedious ads where the dorky, nerdy white guy desperately seeks the tough masculine black guy's approval. This ad pushes two things the audience knows are not true.
First, nerdy white High School guys don't care for or even know about the existence or R&B singer Rihanna. Female singers who interest those guys are obscure, invariably waifish, girlish, "sensitive" singers in foreign or College Radio bands. They are invariably white and present a shy, "innocent" image.
Second, the Ad is likely to provoke negative reactions by men. The patronizing attitude towards the nerdy guy is palpable, and it shows the lack of understanding by a largely female-oriented advertising group, used to lazy advertising oriented to women by showing men as clueless idiots. It's true, advertisers lost the ability to sell to men. For too long, advertisers focused almost exclusively on women, and lost any ability to sell things without gratuitous insults towards men to appeal to women. You've seen the Home Depot, or other ads depicting the clueless "Dad" with the Mom and kids rolling their eyes.
It's Marketing 101 that women make most household purchasing decisions. Oddly, for hipster-oriented marketing and advertising people, one would think that current demographic realities would intrude on that myth, since they'd observe the truth enough in their own lives. Single mothers imply men outside that household, on their own. Presumably, buying goods and services. Later marriages and more divorces mean men live alone longer, as presumably, consumers and buying decision makers and not in suspended animation. While it is probably still true that men in two-parent households don't do much of the shopping, that hardly describes the vast majority of the population. Advertisers simply lost the ability to sell to men. That might have been sustainable in a good economy, not in a recession. Next time you're watching TV, look at the ads. You'll probably only see the loathesome Viagra ads and the Football-related ads directed towards men. Nearly everything else will be directed mainly towards women consumers. Because it's "cool." Or simply lazy force of habit.
This ad by Apple Computer featuring Feist, is what nerdy white guys like:
Now, the disappearance of the shared Black-White culture of popular music may be mourned. Perhaps there should be attempts to revive it. But depicting a nerdy white guy enthralled by Rihanna, when everyone knows that nerdy white guys don't even know she exists, is just dumb. Particularly if your goal is to sell the idea of shopping at Circuit City for a computer. You've just told one lie. A lie everyone knows is a lie. To what end, what advantage?
Certainly, ads far over-represent demographic reality of the racial makeup of the United States. Blacks make up 13% of the population, yet appear about half the time humans in ads are shown. Blacks and whites are shown as friends/acquaintances, often with a nerdy white guy desperately seeking a "cool" black guy's approval. Yet survey after survey confirms, that blacks and whites rarely socialize and are self-segregated. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that white and black Obama College-age volunteers did not socialize after rallies, and organized in segregated groups, all black or all white. This reflects social reality: blacks and whites don't (outside of Rap and some sports) share many interests and interact socially. Why then insist in Ads in saying the opposite?
That's the mark of an insular, removed, and ultimately declining creative class.
But there's more lies to come. A cute girl flirts with a nerdy guy? In what universe, exactly? That again is another lie. One everyone, young and old, knows is a lie. Why tell that lie? Again, it's because the ad creators are simply removed from direct, social experience, that would tell them cute girls only flirt with "hot" guys, none of whom work at Circuit City. Or shop there, for that matter.
Ask yourself these questions: Is the ad effective in reaching a particular demographic about the relative advantage in shopping at Circuit City for a new computer? Is the Ad even trustworthy? Or does it tell the viewers things they know are false, and thus undermine the entire message (of shopping at Circuit City for a new computer)? Are nerdy guys (there's a lot of them) likely to resent this commercial?
As far as I can tell, the ad means to invoke a mild contempt for the young men (he's foolish, daydreaming, geeky, the girl leads him around) to mildly appeal to women and nothing more. I don't seem much else as the ad's objective. How did this ad get approved? Credentials I suppose. The ad's creator and agency no doubt have impressive credentials, client lists, etc. Advertisers reflexively make men and boys into fools thinking it's an easy appeal to women. Women with sons or husbands or brothers or fathers oddly enough resent them being made into fools. Yet that trend continues.
Too many in our creative class are just resting on their credentials and past laurels. It's why nearly everything they create has declined in quality over the last fifteen years. There is little new blood, very few new and hungry creative people, and a lot of message pushing.
Sometimes it's just dang stupid! Consider the Reebok "Migrate" commercial. Now, quick, what is the commercial selling? Achy, emotional female folk singers? NFL players? Nope. Believe it or not, the ad is supposed to sell Reebok's new performance wicking T-shirt. Designed to wick the sweat away during hard work outs. It's like the mutant spawn of a Calvin Klein perfume ad mixed with Direct-TV ads featuring Peyton Manning touting the NFL package.
Would you have any idea that was the purpose of the Ad? No of course not. Because the ad is not about selling things. It's about how cool and hip the ad's creators really are. Compared to just dumb proletariat you, of course. And everyone else in the intended audience.
There's the various NFL players, the overly-breathy voice of Vashti Bunyan, an obscure 1960's folk singer reputed to be a descendant of "Pilgrim's Progress" author John Bunyan. The "hip" idea of NFL players "migrating" like geese, in V-formation, to football stadiums. That's the ad. It ends with the Giants in V-formation in the parking lot of the Meadowlands stadium, with a quick flash of the wording for the T shirt.
Now, how many NFL fans sit around thinking, dang, I need to be really cool and hip. Let's put on some achingly hip folk tunes! While NFL fans like watching their favorite players, the ad is confusing and silly, and doesn't feature any ... football. It's made, obviously, by people who don't know or like the NFL. Or understand their fans. The contempt and ignorance is obvious and is likely to be returned with interest by the NFL audience watching the commercial. Again, advertisers don't understand the largely male NFL audience. Who are not, to put it mildly, Madison Avenue hipsters. The reflexive dismissal of the male consumer by advertiser is likely to hurt them as the economy hits bad times and sponsors need to reach male consumers.
You can tell a lot about how healthy an industry or trade group is, by the attention to detail and craftsmanship. These two commercials, in miniature, present an advertising industry that can't even get the basics right, and have no commitment to quality. One commercial tells outright social lies, in service of mild contempt for the geeky young man. The other attempts to target NFL fans by not showing any ... football. Which is the reason for the NFL in the first place.
Advertising may not be the pinnacle for modern creative achievement, but it's not difficult either. That ad creators cannot even get the basics right, bodes ill for creative people in more demanding endeavors: film, music, television, and literature.
...Read more
First, the Circuit City Back to School Ad, seen here:
Next, the Reebok and NFL Commercial, seen here:
The Circuit City Ad, in case you don't want to watch it (I don't blame you either), opens with a nerdy High School age Circuit City salesman dreaming and drooling over Rihanna. He's interrupted in his reverie by a cute High School girl shopping for a computer, with her parents, who semi-flirts with him. It ends, jarringly, with the low price and features of the computer on sale.
This ad is a disaster. It pushes the agenda of ad agencies that seem to think that whites and blacks closely associate with each other, like the tedious ads where the dorky, nerdy white guy desperately seeks the tough masculine black guy's approval. This ad pushes two things the audience knows are not true.
First, nerdy white High School guys don't care for or even know about the existence or R&B singer Rihanna. Female singers who interest those guys are obscure, invariably waifish, girlish, "sensitive" singers in foreign or College Radio bands. They are invariably white and present a shy, "innocent" image.
Second, the Ad is likely to provoke negative reactions by men. The patronizing attitude towards the nerdy guy is palpable, and it shows the lack of understanding by a largely female-oriented advertising group, used to lazy advertising oriented to women by showing men as clueless idiots. It's true, advertisers lost the ability to sell to men. For too long, advertisers focused almost exclusively on women, and lost any ability to sell things without gratuitous insults towards men to appeal to women. You've seen the Home Depot, or other ads depicting the clueless "Dad" with the Mom and kids rolling their eyes.
It's Marketing 101 that women make most household purchasing decisions. Oddly, for hipster-oriented marketing and advertising people, one would think that current demographic realities would intrude on that myth, since they'd observe the truth enough in their own lives. Single mothers imply men outside that household, on their own. Presumably, buying goods and services. Later marriages and more divorces mean men live alone longer, as presumably, consumers and buying decision makers and not in suspended animation. While it is probably still true that men in two-parent households don't do much of the shopping, that hardly describes the vast majority of the population. Advertisers simply lost the ability to sell to men. That might have been sustainable in a good economy, not in a recession. Next time you're watching TV, look at the ads. You'll probably only see the loathesome Viagra ads and the Football-related ads directed towards men. Nearly everything else will be directed mainly towards women consumers. Because it's "cool." Or simply lazy force of habit.
This ad by Apple Computer featuring Feist, is what nerdy white guys like:
Now, the disappearance of the shared Black-White culture of popular music may be mourned. Perhaps there should be attempts to revive it. But depicting a nerdy white guy enthralled by Rihanna, when everyone knows that nerdy white guys don't even know she exists, is just dumb. Particularly if your goal is to sell the idea of shopping at Circuit City for a computer. You've just told one lie. A lie everyone knows is a lie. To what end, what advantage?
Certainly, ads far over-represent demographic reality of the racial makeup of the United States. Blacks make up 13% of the population, yet appear about half the time humans in ads are shown. Blacks and whites are shown as friends/acquaintances, often with a nerdy white guy desperately seeking a "cool" black guy's approval. Yet survey after survey confirms, that blacks and whites rarely socialize and are self-segregated. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that white and black Obama College-age volunteers did not socialize after rallies, and organized in segregated groups, all black or all white. This reflects social reality: blacks and whites don't (outside of Rap and some sports) share many interests and interact socially. Why then insist in Ads in saying the opposite?
That's the mark of an insular, removed, and ultimately declining creative class.
But there's more lies to come. A cute girl flirts with a nerdy guy? In what universe, exactly? That again is another lie. One everyone, young and old, knows is a lie. Why tell that lie? Again, it's because the ad creators are simply removed from direct, social experience, that would tell them cute girls only flirt with "hot" guys, none of whom work at Circuit City. Or shop there, for that matter.
Ask yourself these questions: Is the ad effective in reaching a particular demographic about the relative advantage in shopping at Circuit City for a new computer? Is the Ad even trustworthy? Or does it tell the viewers things they know are false, and thus undermine the entire message (of shopping at Circuit City for a new computer)? Are nerdy guys (there's a lot of them) likely to resent this commercial?
As far as I can tell, the ad means to invoke a mild contempt for the young men (he's foolish, daydreaming, geeky, the girl leads him around) to mildly appeal to women and nothing more. I don't seem much else as the ad's objective. How did this ad get approved? Credentials I suppose. The ad's creator and agency no doubt have impressive credentials, client lists, etc. Advertisers reflexively make men and boys into fools thinking it's an easy appeal to women. Women with sons or husbands or brothers or fathers oddly enough resent them being made into fools. Yet that trend continues.
Too many in our creative class are just resting on their credentials and past laurels. It's why nearly everything they create has declined in quality over the last fifteen years. There is little new blood, very few new and hungry creative people, and a lot of message pushing.
Sometimes it's just dang stupid! Consider the Reebok "Migrate" commercial. Now, quick, what is the commercial selling? Achy, emotional female folk singers? NFL players? Nope. Believe it or not, the ad is supposed to sell Reebok's new performance wicking T-shirt. Designed to wick the sweat away during hard work outs. It's like the mutant spawn of a Calvin Klein perfume ad mixed with Direct-TV ads featuring Peyton Manning touting the NFL package.
Would you have any idea that was the purpose of the Ad? No of course not. Because the ad is not about selling things. It's about how cool and hip the ad's creators really are. Compared to just dumb proletariat you, of course. And everyone else in the intended audience.
There's the various NFL players, the overly-breathy voice of Vashti Bunyan, an obscure 1960's folk singer reputed to be a descendant of "Pilgrim's Progress" author John Bunyan. The "hip" idea of NFL players "migrating" like geese, in V-formation, to football stadiums. That's the ad. It ends with the Giants in V-formation in the parking lot of the Meadowlands stadium, with a quick flash of the wording for the T shirt.
Now, how many NFL fans sit around thinking, dang, I need to be really cool and hip. Let's put on some achingly hip folk tunes! While NFL fans like watching their favorite players, the ad is confusing and silly, and doesn't feature any ... football. It's made, obviously, by people who don't know or like the NFL. Or understand their fans. The contempt and ignorance is obvious and is likely to be returned with interest by the NFL audience watching the commercial. Again, advertisers don't understand the largely male NFL audience. Who are not, to put it mildly, Madison Avenue hipsters. The reflexive dismissal of the male consumer by advertiser is likely to hurt them as the economy hits bad times and sponsors need to reach male consumers.
You can tell a lot about how healthy an industry or trade group is, by the attention to detail and craftsmanship. These two commercials, in miniature, present an advertising industry that can't even get the basics right, and have no commitment to quality. One commercial tells outright social lies, in service of mild contempt for the geeky young man. The other attempts to target NFL fans by not showing any ... football. Which is the reason for the NFL in the first place.
Advertising may not be the pinnacle for modern creative achievement, but it's not difficult either. That ad creators cannot even get the basics right, bodes ill for creative people in more demanding endeavors: film, music, television, and literature.
...Read more
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
