Media Mandible

Two nights ago, my friend Julie Fotheringham gave an unsolicited performance at Judson Church. Julie has applied to perform at Judson in an official capacity three times, and has always been turned down. So this time, she showed up and performed for the crowd immediately after the scheduled show had finished.

Some interesting marketing stuff going on here. Julie didn’t do something she’s rehearsed. She watched the whole official show, and then referenced and parodied it in her own piece. She calls her piece a response. In other words, she was using another brand’s positioning to create a conversation, giving her own brand value. She couldn’t perform in the space officially, so she simply re-positioned herself as the performer who performs against the space.

She’s still applying to perform at Judson officially, probably using this piece as part of her application materials. So there’s sort of a Harol Bloom-esque thing going on, in that she’s fighting against the canon in order to become part of it.

She also has an intriguing look and more flexibility than a rubber band, which should help too.

p.s. If you look carefully, you can spot me in the video, near the beginning and then near the end.

p.p.s When the crowd got up to leave after the initial performance, a number of people stayed seated, looking at the performance area, and we immediately recognized each other as members of an audience within the audience. There was a round of knowing looks and smiles.

Microsoft’s latest ad campaign shows people of all occupations, colors, and creeds proudly exclaiming “I’m a PC.” The implication, of course, is that John Hodgeman’ dorky character from the Mac ads isn’t an accurate representation of the type of people who use Windows.

But here’s the problem. Hodgeman’s chubby, white, bespectacled, clumsily dressed self isn’t supposed to represent PC users. He’s supposed to represent the PCs themselves.

Think I’m splitting hairs? Watch any of the many Mac ads and see if they ever break the mold. The hipster is never a Mac user; he is always a Mac. The doofus is never a PC user; he is always the personification of the machine itself.

But does it really make a difference? Yes, because the new Windows ads rely on the implication that they are combating an unfair stereotyping. A stereotyping of people.

Microsoft’s new campaign implicitly says to the viewer: “Using a PC doesn’t mean being boring and myopic like the fat guy in the Mac ad! It means being an interesting, unique person like yourself, doing the interesting, unique things that you do when you are at your very best.”

This kind of utopian appeal to everyone’s best possible self is hard to argue with. Could a PC be used by all those interesting people, to help them do all those interesting things? Of course.

But the Mac ads were never suggesting otherwise. Their message is actually much more precise and practical. They’re saying: “Choose your tools carefully. Our tools are better.”

And in order to make that point, they have personified those tools…not the users.

The Mac campaign does not imply that PC users are boring people. It implies that they are interesting people with crappy computers.

And, for people who can work through the thought process outlined above… that makes the Windos ads stupid beyond belief.

Right?

Before Alan Ball’s new HBO show, True Blood, premieres this weekend, let it be said for all who don’t already know that the future of advertising has already been changed.

It’s not just that the massive campaign for True Blood involves blogs, tweets, and dating sites from inside the fictional universe of the show. It’s also that, within that universe of vampires living openly among humans, there is an advertising campaign for an imaginary product (”True Blood,” a blood substitute)… and there is also commentary on that campaign, from within the fictional universe.

In other words, people living in the world outside the show (previously known as ‘reality’) can’t talk about the effectiveness of the campaign for True Blood, the TV show, without also discussing the imaginary (but fully realized) discussion of the imaginary (but fully realized) campaign for True Blood, the blood substitute.

True Blood, the blood substitute, is fake (not real blood) and also fictional (doesn’t exist). This dual non-ness of the thing is turned on its head by the fact that the product’s name contains the word “true,” as if to suggest something genuine. That the TV show, ostensibly demarcating the border between the viewer’s reality and the fantasy that makes up and supports the story, is also named after the imaginary product that is the focus of the imaginary ad campaign, only blurs the lines further. Finally, the basic question of whether vampires deserve civil rights, apparently an ongoing issue on the show, is obviously begging deeper questions outside the show about what it means to be alive, free, moral, and genuine.

In other words, the campaign for True Blood, the TV show, has already created such a labyrinthine discourse that it’s nearly impossible to talk seriously about the real campaign without also becoming part of the campaign for the non-existent product, which implicitly makes you part of the campaign for the real product.

Can you say what I just said, more clearly than I said it, and without somehow embracing some aspect of HBO’s show, or the surrounding campaign? Try it.

I have spent a great many meetings and emails explaining to designers, copywriters, and creative directors what makes a good interactive (”rich media”) banner. My thesis can be pretty much boiled down to this:

a) The initial interactivity should not be a hard sell, i.e. it should not involve the user clicking through to another site, and it should not imply the user’s interest in purchasing the product (or service) being sold.

b) The interactivity should be a metaphor for the user’s presumed interest in the product. If the banner expands into a golf course for the user to play on, then it should turn out that the golf metaphor has been chosen for a reason that relates to the actual sale, even if it isn’t obvious at the time.

c) By the time the user is prompted to actually deliver the fatal click indicating that they might actually want the product, their state of mind has been changed to make them more receptive to the product than they were before. In corporate sales terminology, you might say that the purpose of the interactivity is to “socialize” the user on the idea of delivering the final click. (more…)

Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane is making a series of cartoons that will only be available through Google AdSense banners, posted to sites where the target demographic already hangs out.

This is a good idea…if you’re selling the TV show, or advertising on the TV show, or if you’re Google. It’s not so great if you’re the publisher, or another advertiser on the site. Here’s why.

Assuming that the show is popular (and it will be, at least initially), it won’t be long before a list of the lucky sites gets posted somewhere under a header that reads “Here’s where to find Seth McFarlane’s Google TV show.” Fans will then go to those sites and obsessively refresh the pages until they see the show. Then, most likely, they’ll leave the site.

All those refreshes that happen before the TV show loads? That’s wasted inventory. Some other advertiser paid for it, and now their branding impact and CTR will plummet while each impression lasts a fraction of a second.

And those pageviews will affect the sites’s estimates of their own inventory, which they use to sell to other advertisers. Estimates will have to be adjusted from “we get a million pageviews per month” to “we get two million pageviews per month, but only when McFarlane’s show appears on AdSense, and when that happens, half the impressions are wasted if you’re any other advertiser.” And don’t forget: If you’re another advertiser, then when the McFarlane ads are running, (more…)

Brooklyn’s Gowanus Lounge has posted an interesting series of blog entries about an outoor apartment rental ad placement gone horribly wrong.

In placing an ad for apartment brokers above a community garden, the agency clearly thought they had made a perfect match: They were targeting neighborhood-conscious people with an ad aimed at neighborhood-conscious people. What could be simpler?

And yet, the agency didn’t consider that the ad itself would be exactly the type of eyesore that neighborhood-conscious people can’t stand to have in their neighborhood.

Physicists and anthropologists like to say that it’s not possible to observe a situation without changing it. If, for example, you go to live with indigenous people in the rainforest to study their culture, you will become a part of that culture. So what you’re observing, as an anthropologist, is what that culture is like with a person from a developed nation living in it.

It’s the same for advertising. You can’t just consider the target demographic in terms of who they are. You also have to consider them in terms of how they’ll react to your ad. Not the product you’re selling, not the ad’s “call to action,” background color, etc., but to the presence of the ad itself. To the fact that it exists, taking up a certain specific space in the consumer’s line of sight. Is that okay with them?

What are some ways this agency might have presented an ad for the same service, in the same location, while avoiding the hostile reaction?

garden spider (get it?) photo  by General Wesc

Barack Obama is using LinkedIn’s public question/answer feature to ask LinkedIn users what they think America must do to stay competitive.

I doubt Obama is going to read all 3,000 (and counting) answers, but that doesn’t matter. The real subtext here is that:

a) He’s giving people a public forum in which to give him advice, and

b) He’s demonstrating that he knows how to use LinkedIn.

It’s also damn smart marketing, because asking a question on LinkedIn is free for members. He’s paying for the question to be “featured” and for some co-branded banners that draw attention to it. But that’s really not very expensive, given what’s going to come out of this.

Obama’s LinkedIn question, and all the answers to it, are going to just stay there, on LinkedIn, forever. People are going to read the thread, quote it, and respond to it elsewhere. It helps LinkedIn, it helps Obama, and if he becomes President, it may become an oft-referenced, or at least oft-reviewed, thread, in which case it will also be good publicity for everyone who participates in it.

Smart, cost-effective advertising, now matter what your politics are.

Right?

Think about the maneuver that’s really going on here. Advertising your product, by talking only about your competition’s product, and yet not saying anything negative about the competition. It’s an ad for the other side. In a case like this, the more sincere it comes across, the better it works. Part of what’s so effective about this is how difficult it is to argue with.

Can anyone name a case of this technique being used to good effect in private-sector advertising?

Someone at the executive level recently attempted to console me on my unemployment by slapping me on the back and exclaiming “You’ll be fine. You’re a commodity.”

This put me in the uncomfortable position of having to either a) be insulted or b) tell myself that he had no idea what “commodity” means. (I opted for both, actually. Wouldn’t you?)

A commodity, in the business sense, has two basic characteristics:

a) People want it.

b) They don’t want it specifically.

Take this barbershop, for example (in my neighborhood here in Park Slope). The proprietors put a poster in the window illustrating the various hairstyles they offer. But they didn’t make the poster. They ordered it from a poster company that got the hairstyles from a barbershop in Baltimore.

What’s interesting is that the barbershop with the poster in its window (here in Brooklyn) makes no effort to hide the fact that it isn’t their poster. They don’t care. They don’t think that their customers should care either. You want a haircut? They have haircuts. They are not trying to convince you that there is anything special about their haircuts. They are admitting that they are a commodity.

The thing about commodities is, people aren’t picky about where they come from. They get purchased from the vendor that delivers them fast and cheap. So if you’re a commodity, then you are in demand, but you are never in more demand than any of the millions of other people who are, for all practical purposes, exactly like you.

I guess there are a lot of people in the world who aspire to be commodities. But I’m not one of them. Are you?

Soon, you’ll be able to decorate your avatar’s home with furniture from a virtual Ikea.

No word yet on whether you’ll have to spend several hours moving your mouse back and forth while your avatar puts it together.

photo by Leslie Duss