Gates + Seinfeld

On the one hand, America can't handle 'elites.' On the other hand, this:



I tried to let the first one go, and I do like me some absurdity, but so far, this makes no sense as an advertising strategy. I have to assume that something is going to come together... Otherwise, someone's got some 'splainin to do...

BTW, in case you missed it, the first one:

The Design In-Joke Crowd

I haven't posted much about my current job, but it is certainly interesting working at a firm (albeit a small one), where a large number of my colleagues are creative people - visual and user experience designers. One of my favorite parts of this are the email exchanges, somewhere between arch and snarky, where the designers make fun of the products/ websites/ad-campaigns that some other set of designers were (presumably) compelled to do by their no-taste marketing minders. Often these exchanges are peppered with real insight or inquiry, but sometimes they're just mean (though rarely mis-guided). Some examples:

- JM sends out a site for Make My Logo Bigger Cream.
- An incredibly bad, so-bad-its-funny, ad for some sort of flu medicine.
- A possibly very good (?) marketing campaign for a futuristic toilet (sometimes, you can't tell if the designers are pro/con...)

The other side benefit, of course, is getting turned on to some very cool stuff happening, both from a design and technology perspective. Surely more fun than lawyers:

- Perceptive Pixel, bringing Minority Report one step closer to reality.
- The World Clock Project.
- Stixy, another attempt to solve the on-line collaboration problem (although looks to be a good one...)

Failure

As advertising embraces the absurd with greater fervor each day (or so it seems), will it also reach out to pathos? Can you predicate a successful advertising campaign on failure? Is the advertisement above about failure?

Selling the Absurd, part 1 of Infinity

Advertising is on the march. Yes, if there is one thing that is on the march, it is advertising -- far out-pacing anything else that might be on the march. From the subway to the bus shelter to the elevator to your mailbox to your e-mail box to your Google search results to your blogs to my blog, there it is, another opportunity to sell. So no wonder we've run out of ideas, of how to sell, of what to sell, and advertising has, once again, embraced the absurd.

Unfortunately, I can't vouch for the artfulness of this go round with the absurd. I just wanted to mention two recent offenders that have caught my attention.

If you ride the subway in New York City, you cannot avoid Windorphins. Brightly colored signage adorning the insides of cars, in bus shelters, on billboards - showing happy-looking Pokemon-like characters and bearing slogans that mean absolutely nothing. Nauseating? Yes. Cynical? Absolutely. Effective? Totally. I don't know how many subway cars I've been in when some young New Yorker asks, in that ever-flattening accent that young New Yorkers are increasingly seeming to have, "What Are Windorphins?" to which his/her friend might respond "I think we learned about it in class," and a third says, "Let's look it up on the Internet when we get to so-and-so's apartment." So, winner for Ebay. And, of course, I did come home one night to look up exactly what it is. So cheers to whatever ad agency fucker came up with this annoying campaign.

Next, the more charming and less invasive woot.com. What is woot? A website, that apparently sells only one product a day that popped up in the modest banner above my Gmails one day. Reluctantly, but unfailingly, I clicked on it. And, apparently, selling one product a day is an effective way of doing business. Per Woot's own site:

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been. But don't take our word for it: see what the online community has to say at this Wikipedia article.

So, I guess the engine of innovation chugs on, fueled increasingly by banner ads and billboards. To badly appropriate a morbid Townes Van Zandt track, well, I guess its better than waitin' around to die...

Sao Paolo: The Clean City

Ignore for a moment that the clip above is an advertisement for Sky Movies, and focus on the small distortions in the landscape present throughout - no billboard advertisements. Empty canvases throughout Sao Paolo. As described in Businessweek:

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.

It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist's dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.

In September last year, the city's populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the "visual pollution" caused by the city's 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city's streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. "It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn't legal," reasoned Kassab, "so we have decided to go all the way."

Ah, Brazil. So what are the consequences? Still unclear, as far as I can tell, but a thoughtful post on an interesting blog (with links off, including photos), and another post in Adbusters, both worth a look.

Can we do this in the United States? Yeah, probably not.

How Advertising Runs The World, part II

Seth Stevenson's Ad Report Card feature in Slate.com is generally interesting and occasionally great. Given how pervasive and influential advertisements are in our daily life, I'm glad that someone is taking the time to be thoughtful about them.

Of the higher-ups in the advertising world that I've met personally or gained an impression of through some print or video interview have come across as smart and competent about how to use the tools of their industry to achieve their objectives - communicate brand identities, introduce new products, and sell you things. But the vast majority of the advertising world seems to be made up of uninspired, dull, and misguided people.

This is, of course, an overly harsh judgment. Harsher still has been my impression that beyond a few geniuses, a slightly bigger handful of expert manipulators, and some successful copy cats, most advertising professionals have no fucking clue what they are doing. Advertising, as an industry, seems like an elaborate and extremely well-funded crapshoot. Theories abound, few of them good. Disciplines on only vaguely sounder footing, including psychology, marketing, visual design, creative writing, and even neuroscience get dragged into the tawdry discussion.

All this, I suppose, as a long-winded way to convey my ill-informed impression that few of the practitioners of advertising are as thoughtful as the handful of people who critique the industry. With that said, the current article/video essay in the Ad Report Card feature is worth a look, as it summarizes one industry veteran's identification of archetypal ads that are successful. From Stevenson's introduction:

In 1978, Donald Gunn was a creative director for the advertising agency Leo Burnett. Though his position implied expertise, Gunn felt he was often just throwing darts—relying on inspiration and luck (instead of proven formulas) to make great ads. So, he decided to inject some analytical rigor into the process: He took a yearlong sabbatical, studied the best TV ads he could find, and looked for elemental patterns.

After much research, Gunn determined that nearly all good ads fall into one of 12 categories—or "master formats," in his words.

See the essay here, with a lot of embedded video examples.

How Advertising Runs the World, part 1 of Infinity

Wired: How should we think about Google today?

[Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google]: Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system -- Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values -- all that kind of stuff.

from the May 2007 issue of Wired magazine.

"We are in the business of monetizing our services through advertising." - Marco Boerries, Executive Vice President, Connected Life Division , Yahoo! Inc.

at TIECon 2007, discussing how Yahoo! plans to make money from its emerging suite of mobile services.

Stating nothing but the obvious, but it is interesting to hear how two of the most exciting, fun, and revolutionary companies of the past ten years view themselves. Yes, both Google and Yahoo! have been on the forefront of innovating new products and business models, and continue to either build, acquire, or incubate cool new products seemingly every quarter. But at their core, and certainly at the core of their revenue streams, they each understand themselves in clear terms: as effective channels for delivering ad content to consumers.

No news here, and my purpose is only to set the table for a series of future posts exploring my love/hate for the advertising industry (where $150 billion a year is spent, annually, in the United States alone). Some of the questions I am looking to pursue:

- Are the metrics and core theses for advertising (from impressions to purchases, from direct marketing response rates to brand value) well grounded in data? Still valid as advertising finds new mediums and channels, like the Internet? Do those questions matter? [In short, No, no, and no].
- Can advertising be art? Is this redeeming?
- What are the real insights in how Google (and, to a lesser extent, Yahoo) have brought advertising to the internet?
- Is advertising an effective medium for achieving non-commercial goals?
- What happens to advertising in a world where content becomes increasingly diversified?

My admitted biases are that I enjoy advertising (when it is used to create campaigns that are artful, funny, or cool), that I think advertising can be highly successful (when it creates a meaningful brand or transparently puts meaningful product data in front of consumers), that I think advertising is generally deceptive, dishonest, unimaginative, base, and boring, that I think advertising is increasingly ineffective (who even looks at banner ads? or watches ads on TV?), that the need to circumvent the disdain that consumers have for ads, in terms of interrupting their consumption of media, will have few positive and numerous negative consequences. And so on and so on.

What I'd love to hear from you are any perspectives or questions that you'd like me to consider as I start thinking more closely about advertising, and more helpful to me, any interesting data points or analyses that you could send my way. Dear readers. All four of you.