by mark May 25th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
I know I may sometimes give people the impression I’m a Luddite, or worse still, just some grumpy, old guy who refuses to admit how rapidly the world is changing because he’s just too sclerotic to adapt to it.
That’s really not the case. I actually love change. I thrive on it. I just don’t think things change quite as fast or dramatically as some people–many of them journalists, media types or advertising people–would have you believe.
For example, here’s a great “the more things change, the more they stay the same” story I read in The Wall Street Journal recently.
Continue reading ‘“Plus Ca Change” Moment’
by mark May 23rd, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
This is probably going to get me into all kinds of trouble with the PC police, but I don’t care. In fact, I sometimes think the overzealous pursuit of political correctness is one reason why there seems to be so much more ordinary advertising today than there was twenty years ago.
I don’t think advertising needs to go out of its way to offend people to be extraordinary. But when it can’t exploit the foibles that make us human, I think it loses an important tool. For example, I know I read somewhere that you probably couldn’t get network clearance for the famous “Thatsa some speecy meat-a-ball” Alka-Seltzer spot today out of a concern that it would offend Italian-Americans. (Who I must assume are not offended by all the stuff the networks do clear, namely their programming.)
Be that as it may, it seems like it’s been a while since I had an extraordinary ad to sing the praises of, and just because this one may clash with a few people’s delicate sensibilities, I couldn’t resist bringing it up for two reasons.
Continue reading ‘Good Catch’
by mark May 20th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
As John Maynard Keynes once said, “in the long run, we’re all dead”. However, when it comes to shorting stocks, it doesn’t take very long to make a boatload of money as many a hedge fund has demonstrated. The questions are always which stocks to short and when?
Okay, so just over a month ago I wrote about that peculiar “knights of the round table” advertising IBM is running to support its corporate services business and suggested I would keep an eye on its stock to see if there’s any connection between errant advertising and errant management in general. And what do you suppose I found?
Continue reading ‘The “Short” Run’
by mark May 18th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
So I get this e-mail from Madison + Vine today, M+V being AdAge’s attempt to serve the burgeoning field of advertainment and product placement. Two areas I’m not especially keen on, but I have to keep up with the times, even if I spend most of my time laughing at them.
Here are the gems I was made aware of this time. A product placement specialist, Amy Willstatter, was so diligent on behalf of her tequila client “she even got Neil Simon to OK a script change promoting the product” in the play “Sweet Charity”. Why do I not think this was a “charitable” donation on Mr. Simon’s part? And more importantly, why would a person of Mr. Simon’s stature and means change a script to tout a brand of cactus juice?
Continue reading ‘Charity, Eh?’
by mark May 16th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Some of you may remember a post I made a while ago (Terrible Connection) in which I castigated Vonage for its “do stupid things” print advertising. A position I was forced to modify (Vonage Volte-Face) when I saw the same approach executed as a TV commercial and liked it quite a bit.
What I concluded was that since print advertising and television advertising are consumed in very different ways perhaps the style of humor suited to each must be different as well. And based on this new Vonage print ad, they seem to have arrived at the same conclusion.
Continue reading ‘New & Improved’
by mark May 13th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
I was getting my teeth cleaned the other day–okay, maybe more information than you need–but at least you now know I have clean teeth. At any rate, my hygienist said something that almost sent me out of the chair.
What happened was she asked me what brand of toothpaste I use, and after I told her, she said: “That’s what a lot of my patients say, but even more of them tell me ‘Oh, I just buy whatever’s on sale.’”
Yes, yikes and double yikes. That’s the sort of answer that should give all of us, not least of whom the folks at P&G, heart palpitations. Since that’s exactly what ten-out-of-ten practitioners of extarordinary advertising are supposed to prevent, right?
Continue reading ‘Decaying Brands’
by mark May 11th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
In fact, make it a triple and maybe this ad will start to make some sense. It was bad enough back in January when I commented on the vapidity of this campaign. Now it’s become downright obnoxious.
Who in the world is this advertising talking to? People who presumably pride themselves in not being influenced by advertising despite the fact that they are at this very moment looking at an ad? People who couldn’t care less that some old duffer drinks the stuff, but will be thrilled to know he does?
Is this ad supposed to be funny?
Continue reading ‘Make That A Double’
by mark May 9th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
GE stopped making small appliances quite some time ago, but in the irony department the company’s latest advertising effort cannot be beat. If you opened today’s New York Times or Wall Street Journal, you saw what I’m talking about. You also probably saw it if you looked at USA Today or the Los Angeles Times since according to his week’s AdAge the ads are running in “four major national newspapers” and commanding a “substantial portion of GE’s $90 million ad budget.”
What “it” is is a) too big for my scanner, so you’ll have to put up with my description, and b) an 8-page magnum opus of corporate navel-gazing the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long time. On the first page, there’s a single-word headline: “ecomagination”. (That thud you just heard was my head hitting the desk as I was overcome with the need to sleep.) This is followed by a spread that uses the same word as a call-out to a patch of grass growing out of a plastic head labeled like an old-fashioned phrenology chart. (Odd choice that, for a company that makes MRI devices.) Next is a spread featuring a GE locomotive looming over a sunflower. (Huh?) Followed by one with a squirrel on the mast of a wind turbine. And finally, on the last page that clever coinage “ecomagination” again, this time against a blue sky with one puffy, little white cloud.
Pretty ho-hum, eh? But where’s the irony, you ask?
Continue reading ‘From Irons To Irony’
by mark May 5th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
In the book I make the statement that “Apocalyptic pronouncements may make for good REM lyrics and provocative magazine leads, but they have a dismal record when it comes to business forecasting.” What reminds me of this is all the recent clamor about “chaos” in the media world triggered by industry pundit Bob Garfield (whose picture can be found beside the word “strident” in the dictionary, I believe).
But he’s not the only one. I’ve got a file stuffed with articles about “dramatic changes in the world of media.” How VOD is going to send the TV commercial to RIP. How the next great media platform is going to be the screen on my cell phone. How Nielsen is positively pulling its hair out (when it’s not being yanked out by its customers) trying to determine more accurately who is being reached by what commercial message when.
Obviously, with marketers feeling tremendous pressure to deliver measurable results (now that Sarbanes-Oxley has taken the finance department out of that game), they are responding with a vengeance as they usually do:
Continue reading ‘Apocalypse Never?’
by mark May 3rd, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Regular readers will know that I am desperately trying to establish some sort of correlation between the quality of a company’s advertising and the performance of its stock. Obviously if there is one, this would be a humdinger of a hedge fund strategy since most people, including all those guys sitting on their fat wallets in Greenwich, know as much about evaluating advertising as they do about muon plasma physics.
My IBM experiment is still inconclusive; the stock being pretty much at the same price today as it was when I questioned the firm’s “Galahad” advertising approach a few weeks ago. But lookee here.
Continue reading ‘Ticker Shock’
