BrandsAmongMany

I have to admit, this is really the first year that the term Cyber Monday has entered my lexicon. The idea makes perfect sense: an upswing in internet purchases the first workday back from Black Friday because people are buying things they couldn’t find over the weekend. I don’t have an issue with the concept of Cyber Monday…

What I find rather disgusting, however, is that companies are making a blatant attempt to extend the already overtly (and overly) consumeristic tendencies of Black Friday. By taking a term that was coined to encapsulate the economic trend of seasonal shopping and making it a forward-facing marketing term, retailers are attempting to sucker just that much more money out of us. And this year, they’re not taking it lightly:

There’s even been websites dedicated to it. Shop.org has created CyberMonday.com to keep track of all the deals, including a bunch of exclusive ones. And the list above barely scratches the surface. Of course, if you look at Shop.org’s About statement, things become a little more clear:

Since its inception in 1996, the Digital Retail Industry has joined with Shop.org to create a community of like-minded executives with the common purpose of advancing their industry through the sharing of knowledge, experience and expertise.

With over 700 member companies and thousands of actively participating executives, today’s Shop.org network is more vital than ever. The association is focused on the challenges and opportunities most pressing to Digital Retail:

All of which sounds great from a consumer perspective. A coalition dedicated to making digital retailers more aware of best practices and easy-to-use websites. Until you get to the final couple of sentences in that mission statement:

Shop.org’s exclusive focus is to provide a forum for retail executives to share information, lessons-learned, new perspectives, insights and intelligence about online and multichannel retailing

“Retail executives”? Wait, I’m not a retail executive! And now I’m not so convinced that they’re interested in me as a consumer at all. In fact, I’m feeling more like their mission is take as much from me as they possibly can, and to collaborate on how to best milk me for more. Yup, feels like Cyber Monday is another step toward scraping all meaning other than credit card debt from the holiday season.

Well first of all, obviously here at *AmongMany we do care, a little. I was asked to look into this Motrin Mom’s debacle after seeing the ad on youTube. I read the comments, I watched the responses, I look at the twitter backlash, the websites devoted to writing about and/or slandering Motrin, and the Motrin Response Apology:

And what’s my take on this all? Am I personally offended? No. Do I think Motrin deserves to be boycotted for making this ad? No. Do I find it distasteful? Eh, no. And that led me to think… who made this ad? How did it get greenlit. I know I have tried to do much more distasteful things and was met time and time again with –’ but we might offend old people,’ ‘what about all the people who are bowlegged,’ ‘but some people are afraid of pigeons.’

Anyway this train of thought led me to wonder, who made this ad?
Some would argue, there is no way this ad was made by a mother. Maybe the person was young, and thought they were being clever. Or maybe some man, who hated how his wife was always wearing the stupid sling and complaining about her back, sent his wife to go see a chiropracter, who she fell in love with and then subsequently left him, wrote the ad. Who knows. But more importantly:

Can you tell if an ad is made by a man or a woman?

Remember this pregnancy test ad?

I remember the first time I saw it I thought, there is NO WAY that ad was created by a woman. I could envision two dudes, sitting in their office being handed this pregnancy testing brief and freaking out. They would begin by exchanging stories about girls they were with, and then they’d focus back down on the brief. They’d read all these impressive stats on the accuracy of the test and then they’d learn you PEE on it. They’d chuckle and then BAM. Technology you pee on, an ad is born, with a man stamp of approval.

A few weeks ago I came across this site called GenderAnalyzer.

It claims to have the ability to analyze your website using the text-classifier uClassify that “has been trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women.”

When I had it scan my personal blog, it predicted I was a man. FAIL.

I had a friend in school who claimed he could always tell the gender. Sweet, sensitive, hand-written, borderline-kinda-maybe funny — it was by a girl. He was a jerk (chicks do love hand-written type).

So back to this Motrin ad. Who made it? Could a female be as insensitive as the blogs make them out to be? Wouldn’t she recognize with all her maternal instinct that holding a baby in a trendy sling was meant to increase the bond between mother & child and look trendy at the same time? I don’t know. When I watch the ad I don’t hear a woman the same way I do when I hear Kashi ads.

What do you think? Can you tell the gender of an ad?

These days, you can find a Facebook group (or six) for just about everything under the sun. Want proof? Do a quick search through the groups section for “Saved by Zero” and you’ll find nothing short of 11 different groups dedicated to Toyota’s newest television commercial touting their extended 0% financing program. While most advertisers pray for their work to “go viral” (I shudder at the phrase), I don’t think this is what Toyota’s agency (Saatchi?) had in mind.

The backlash against this diminuative little piece of film is nothing shy of impressive. The largest of the Facebook hate-groups has swelled to more than two thousand members in only ten days. But the discussions don’t end on Facebook - in fact the social community is perhaps just the tip of the spear. Enraged (and rarely do I use that word to describe viewers of a TV commercial) viewers are coming out of the woodwork in communities of every type imaginable across the web.

Rants can be found on CraigsList (more than one), on sports forums, on gambling sites, and even on Esquire’s website. Major news sites including Forbes have picked up on the story. Someone even went so far as to create a petition to have the ad pulled.

I think we can safely say that this effort has “gone viral”. But perhaps not in the manner that anyone would have hoped for. In fact, I can’t imagine that anyone expected too much of this ad at all. At a glance, it just another mediocre-at-best car advertisment screaming about finance rates on a dozen models - something we’ve all heard thousands of times by now, unfortunately.

But tick people off just enough and you’ll find exactly how powerful an outlet the web can be. People who use the web to foster any number of diverse interests have found common ground on this one, and they’re not going quietly into the night this time. Sure, plenty of ads have been pulled because they outraged this group of fanatics or that one, but can anyone else remember a commercial that’s been pulled - not that this one has…yet - because it was just plain bad? Keep an eye out. This could set an unusual precedent.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen the spot yet, here it is:

So yesterday morning I got a friendly email from a reader named Lornie:

Hi Danny,
Have you seen this yet? not sure what to make of it….
http://lifetakesvista.com/
Lornie

At first glance, of course, it looks like any other email I get from various PR people looking to promote the newest campaign by agency X or company Y, most of which I ignore (I’m not usually too interested in playing shill for some company’s new TV campaign). The only thing that led me to look into this one a little further was the fact that Lornie’s email didn’t come from a PR company account and didn’t name agency X or company Y. Well, that and the fact that I actually hadn’t seen the Life Takes Vista effort yet.

So after taking a quick look at the Life Takes Vista site, my immediate question to Lornie was…

What’s your connection to the campaign?

To which she responded:

zero. i dont work for msft. (actually unemployed at the moment) not sure if its from msft because i searched the web and didnt see anything on this…or theyre trying to be stealthy!

At first I took her answer at face value. But, in the midst of looking further into the campaign to ready a post, I stumbled onto a couple of other blogs who heard from a “loyal fan”, Lornie:

jkOnTheRun
James Kendrick’s Twitter
The Ranch
Flickr

Of course, these aren’t the only blogs talking about the effort. There’s still the lingering question of who the heck is responsible for this campaign (blatant rip-off?). It doesn’t appear to be an official Microsoft effort. In fact, there’s discussion around that question in a couple of places:

AdRants
CrunchGear

Hrm. As CrunchGear points out, this feels either like a very smart effort by a couple of ad students to get themselves noticed (feels like a reach to me) or an effort by a couple of bored Crispin employees who didn’t get the idea through during the original effort. A little further digging reveals that the Life Take Vista site is being hosted by a company in Denver under anonymous administration - only a stone’s throw from Boulder…

Suddenly Lornie seems less like a friendly reader and more like a PR agent that she seemed like to begin with. Lornie, I’ll be the first to offer my most sincere apologies if I’m wrong - we appreciate a tip as much as the next guy - but this one just feels dirty. A search for the email address the tip was sent from reveals nothing, which would be rather unusual given how many forums, websites, etc. most digitally savvy ad students are signed up for. And a search for Lornie’s full name also reveals nothing…no Facebook profile, no LinkedIn account, no personal website…nothing.

So short answer…I’m not sold. This feels like nothing more than a covert, subversive attempt to get eyeballs on a rip-off campaign. Which it seems to have accomplished - along with building a wealth of negative brand equity. Kudos!

J. Crew has been widely lauded lately. They’ve taken huge steps toward separating themselves from competitors like GAP and Banana Republic by bringing a distinct feel to their brand. Unique partnerships and tactics – like offering vintage Rolex watches and high end, created just for J. Crew pieces, as well as their recently opened Tribeca Men’s Store – have set the company in a league of their own.  But, despite the company’s recent rise as one of the premier mid-level fashion brands (Is it just me, or is it a little scary when $70 shirts are “mid-level”?), consumers are standing up and taking note of their sometimes questionable statements and actions facing loyal customers.

Perfect example? While poking around in hopes of finding a coupon or free shipping code for an order I was placing, I came across this short but interesting thread of comments. A distinctly unhappy undertone from a few customers was compounded by this statement, presumably from a J. Crew employee:

Just so you know, we’re onto the people who abuse coupons and we will now check all pre existing orders to ensure you have not used the same coupon twice.

That, of course, instigated even further negative response from the contributors. Complaints of poor service and a decline in quality are most prominent – an issue that I’ve noted myself based on my latest order. I’m still waiting for a sweater that I ordered on Sept. 24, and I’ve received not follow up or further indication of when the item might ship (despite it being listed as “in stock” when the order was placed). I also had a couple of items that were simply dropped from my order due to “lack of availability”, but that I was able to reorder the following day.

For a company with this kind of following, and make no mistake, they do have a following, moments like the comment above are just about inexcusable. Perhaps it’s true and they are cracking down on coupon use, but there’s no reason to broadcast it to the world. We can only hope that this was a random incident by a proud employee.

Perhaps this is a perfect demonstration, then, that larger companies need to start thinking about social media training. They need to understand that their employees actions have resonance for their brand. Sexual harrasment training is mandatory at just about every sizeable company today, and that’s an issue that only costs them money in the event of a lawsuit. Social media mistakes are a daily occurance, but go unchecked at every turn.

There’s money to be made in this folks. Someone step up and make it happen!

We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.

Yep, here we go again, quoting movie lines to make a point about branding. Hey, not my fault if Ed Norton has a way with words (Not sure what scene I’m referring to? Have a look here.).

So, the question is…are we? As marketers (advertisers, branding gurus, digital desperadoes, call yourself what you will) we sell ourselves on our expertise of many areas. Sure, we call it “marketing” or whatever, but when it comes down to it, we’re selling our understanding of human nature (psychology), our ability to tap into that in a manner that will gain attention (creativity), the potential of that message to have an impact on the people we’re talking to (strategy), our ability to sell our ideas through to the client (salesmanship), how well we can actually create what we’ve said we can create (production), and a slew of other bits and pieces that we encounter along the way.

That’s a lot of “expertise” – a lot of different minds – that comes together to be successful at this thing we do. That’s lot of points along the way for something, even the smallest point, to go slightly awry. It’s no wonder, then, that we might occasionally get caught up in our own heads. It’s easy for us to get excited and see the potential behind an idea that makes perfect sense to us, based on our background, but has little meaning or resonance for the “average joe”. It’s easy for us to get caught up in the excitement of buying back our own fat asses.

This begs the question: how much of what we do, especially digitally, actually reaches out into the “real world”? How many of the soccer mom’s in Wisconsin engage in the newest methods of digital communication – the mechanisms that we often consider the forefront of the digital revolution?

Consider this: just the other day I found myself explaining Twitter to a project manager at a popular traditional “hot shop” that we’re partnering with on a current project. If she didn’t know what Twitter is, can we expect the masses to encounter a message that we propagate using it as a distribution tool? Probably not.

Perhaps more importantly, though: do they have to? If the mechanisms that we’re using to reach the influentials are successful, does it really matter if the soccer mom hears directly from us? Isn’t that the point of targeting the influencers - so they’ll spread our message to the masses? Aren’t the social media tools that we use to spread our gospel really just weapons in our arsenal that can be used to reach the specific people we want to hear about our cause because we know that they’ll help spread the word?

Or more simply put, are we buying or are we selling the fat asses? And do we have the gumption to accept the voice of reason and understand when we’re getting caught up in our own heads? I don’t expect a simple answer. It will vary by company, by project, by client, by concept.

But as soon as we lose awareness of the question, we lose our ability to control the answer. And once that’s gone, we’re just another cog in the fat ass economy.

Noticed a tweet by the crew over at Imperial this morning that stirred some thoughts:

Oddly enough, this short little statement does an excellent job of encompassing much of my interest and my progression through the industry (though slightly out of order). I started as a marketing major in undergrad, moved on to the creative side of advertising, and have now found myself inching closer toward product development as the opportunities have allowed (and hopefully will allow more in the future).

So the question, of course, is “what’s next?”…

As times have changed and the mechanisms for delivery have fragmented and spread, “the industry” has struggled to keep up. In my experience, the connection between strategy and creative is tenuous at best. So is the connection between creative and the medium. Add the prevalence of new technologies – both technologies that help the delivery of a branded message as well as those that help the consumer to avoid those messages – and suddenly it seems that “tenuous” might be a generous offering. Realistically speaking, we haven’t cracked the formula on the first three. But that’s never stopped us from jumping toward something new in the past, has it?

What will that be? I have no idea.
What should it be? How about working to perfect the understanding of what we already have?

The television-driven model is well into its death throes – in fact, it might already be dead if there were more openness toward embracing the future. It’s only our refusal to admit that what we’re used to isn’t necessarily right anymore that’s holding us in the past.

It is changing though. Brands are finally realizing that they don’t have to spend multiple millions of dollars producing television spots to see results.

Don’t believe me? Have a look at Kellogg who’s planning to cut commercial filming by 10-20% next year. For a company that makes 350-400 television commercials a year, that could cut as many as 80 spots from the production schedule in 2009 at a savings of $1M for every 3 commercials.

Product development is an area where most agencies are barely scratching the surface. Case in point: at my last ad agency job, I threw out an idea for a new package design for one of our clients that aligned perfectly with the 10-minute diatribe that the strategy team had just presented. The response:

That’s package design. That’s outside our pervue.

Um…NO. How is anything…ANYTHING…that has to do with the brand we’re working on “outside our pervue”? Until that mentality is shunned by agencies, product development won’t have a place within their walls. Instead, it will be pioneered by the small, seldom-heard-of companies that focus directly on that niche in the market. And they’ll have free reign until someone can step up to challenge them.

So, to answer the question…
Product development is a nearly untapped market for our industry right now. And it will remain that way until the agencies get their own houses in order. Until we can rethink the marketing and advertising sides to align to the realities of the modern market. And who will be king? The one who can do just that and then make product development a serious part of their repertoire. Let’s get now right before we worry about what’s next?