Products with (fake) benefits
Years ago on the Simpsons, the family home is destroyed by fire. An insurance agent appears on the scene and the following exchange ensues…
Agent: Any valuables in the house?
Homer: Well, the Picasso, my collection of classic cars…
Agent: Sorry, this policy only covers actual losses, not made-up stuff.
Homer: [miffed] Well that’s just great!
I had a similar reaction when I saw the recent newspaper advertisements for
SOYJOY Nutrition Bars
The details:
The Soyjoy site is thick with links to scientific articles that explain the role of soy in disease prevention and the like, but the site (as does the ad) leads with these much softer and (I believe) unreal benefits. But how appealing it is to imagine that eating some product would increase your optimism? Indeed, in preparing this post I had to think for a minute (and look on their site to check myself) about whether or not it is or could be true.
We don’t expect that Red Bull will really give us wings, other than metaphorically. Here Soyjoy is making literal promises, though, as they describe how we, the eater, will feel. Even if we decide intellectually that it’s just advertising, what is the power of association they’ve created, without having to deliver? Where does our culture (and our legal system) draw the line about what claims must be provably true and what claims are so speculative that there is no expectation of belief?
Tags: advertising, benefits, functional food, health, optimism, soy, soyjoy, superfood, truth
Advertising imitates art
AirTran poster, Savannah airport, March 2008
Minipops (an ongoing project, but a big Internet meme in 2005/2006)
Tags: advertising, airport, art, craig robinson, minipops, pixelart, poster
Japan: URLs Are Not Totally Out
In Japan: URL’s Are Totally Out we see an emerging form of advertising a web presence in Japan: showing a search bar rather than the actual URL. I looked through my recent photos and pulled some examples that show this, but also several examples that use the more traditional (if that’s the right word?!) presentation of URLs.
Search bar:
Traditional URL:
And finally, an ad for a search company (Excite? Who knew they were still around) that uses a URL, and also the increasingly popular QR code (see Rob Walker’s recent Consumed column).
(As a side note, I couldn’t find any pictures in my collection but I also remember seeing many examples of a graphical presentation of a URL that (similar to the search version above) used the visual elements of a browser’s address bar with the URL itself being typed in, complete with cursor hovering over the “go” button)
Tags: advertising, bieru, billboard, dancing johan, excite, japan, jrskiski, panda, qr code, search, search bar, search engine, sign, url, yodabashi
Ask for our latest article, Everbody’s Talkin’ At Me
My second interactions column, Everbody’s Talkin’ At Me, has just been published. I offer some thoughts on the crucial but undervalued activity of listening within the context of storytelling.
As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.
Also available: Persona Non Grata.
Tags: advertising, interactions, listening, marketing, push, storytelling, touchpoints
Japan pictures - part 3 of 3
I’ve uploaded nearly 1300 of my Japan pictures to Flickr. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, I haven’t added titles or tags or descriptions proactively, but please add comments or questions on flickr and I’ll gladly offer a story or explanation.
Meanwhile, I’m including some of my faves here, as well as part 1 and part 2.
Tags: advertising, anime, bag, banana, blade, chinese, dim sum, donut, face, fish, flickr, food, fushimi inari, garbage, gourd, homer, japan, karuizawa, kawaii, kimono, kyoto, mask, net, obey giant, orange, panda, penguin, photos, pickle, pillar, pose, poster, pumpkin, shrine, simpson, snowplow, sprinkles, suica, teddy bear, tokyo, tsukiji
Know it when you see it
Rhino art at the Centre Pompidou. Better pictures here and here
Cattle advertisement in the Bankside area of London.
Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red. Then cover it with layers of gloss. Is the result art or advertising? The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference. A museum or outside a restaurant?
Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It. But they start with the big red rhino, too.
Tags: advertising, animal, art, beef, bull, cattle, commerce, context, glossy, london, museum, paris, red, restaurant, tender
Talk to the 5th guy
The 5th guy is a public health awareness campaign from the Florida Department of Health. It
illustrates a simple point – most people respect certain hygienic norms. They stay home when they are sick. They cover their cough with their arm or a tissue. And they wash their hands, especially after using the restroom. There is observational data on that: The American Society for Microbiology sent researchers into public rest rooms to watch what people do. They found that four out of five people wash their hands after using the restroom. Thus was born the campaign’s central character: the “Fifth Guy.” In the ads, this fifth guy — played by a wonderful comic actor named Ben Spring — keeps making the wrong choices and suffering the social consequences as a result. The take-away message is: Unless you are staying home when sick, covering your cough with an arm or a tissue, and washing your hands often, you’re a fifth guy, an outlier. That’s the motivation. No one wants to be a fifth guy — to be that one person everyone whispers about.
It’s interesting to think about the line between playing on social norms and shame-based advertising. Advertising is often about encouraging you to take some action, telling you that you should take action, telling you that everyone else is doing it are basic forms of persuasion.
Florida is trying to encourage what they claim is a dominant behavior, as opposed to trying to create a new behavior, so pointing to the majority makes sense.
Many years ago I worked on a project for Unilever. They were considering the challenge of “on-the-go cleansing” — people away from the place (the bathroom at home) where they normally use Unilever products. I think the timing was just before “germophobia” went mainstream. The people we observed and interviewed were experiencing a serious tension between the need to protect themselves from germs and the need to behave normally.
You were expected to shake hands with someone in a social setting, but you were also made aware of the fact that that person’s hands were covered in germs. You were expected to share food with colleagues and friends, but you may not know if someone else put their hands in the candy bowl without washing them. And you weren’t allowed to pay too much attention to your own cleanliness, lest you be seen as having a mental illness (i.e., OCD).
We identified several strategies for Unilever to use. One of them, like the 5th guy campaign, involved making things normal by making them common. The box of office tissue that everyone takes from, or the skin lotion pump that is used by colleagues at work are both examples. Everyone uses them, therefore it’s normal, therefore it’s okay.
Another strategy involved creating hidden usage opportunities, where new cleaning behaviors could take surreptitiously, in a pocket, or in the pages of a book.
And a strategy that lived between those two was to mask new behaviors as existing normal activities. For example, makers of insulin pens have begun to make their devices to look more like pens than syringes.
I hope there’s good data with this Florida initiative, but I suspect some of the biggest change has already taken place, within the organization itself. I remember that our clients at Unilever worked hard to grasp the depth of the struggles we shared with them; indeed, they kept referring to the “people with OCD” as we reiterated that most people had these very concerns over germs but did not want to be assumed to have OCD. Our clients were participants in the culture they were seeking to understand and getting to that new perspective took a lot of work on both sides. The (what I presume to be) new thinking exhibited by the Floridians is encouraging.
Tags: 5th guy, advertising, communications, design, florida, health, messaging, norms, public health, shame
One more KFC Taiwan item
The KFC store in Taiwan also featured this mascot for a spicy chicken sandwich, with fiery hair and just a bit of drool. Are Western characters allowed to salivate in advertising? I wish they were.
Tags: advertising, asia, character, drool, hot, kfc, salivate, spicy, taipei, taiwan
Archives of American Ephemera
I recently discovered the Prelinger Archives of American Ephemera—
an amazing collection of advertising, educational, industrial, and
amateur films.
For anyone into these types of artifacts, this is a veritable buffet.
Design fans, I heartily recommend checking out American Look:
a lovely piece of Chevrolet-sponsored cultural self-definition from 1958:
Tags: advertising, American, American Look, archives, artifact, chevrolet, Design, ephemera, film, modern, Prelinger
Hot Wings
My dad received the following offer in the mail: a chance to win a free cremation. If he enters, he’ll have a chance to win each month!
They don’t specify, but I guess that must be each month until you die?
What’s especially fascinating is their connection between cremation and mobility:
“With everyone moving around these days,
placing a loved one in a ‘local’ cemetery
may not be as functional as it used to be.”
Portigal Consulting has been doing some projects recently on mobile devices, but I never thought to include cremation urns in that category.
The best part of the letter is the disclaimer at the end of the second page:
“Please accept our apologies if this letter
has reached you at a time of serious illness
or death in your family.”
How compassionate.
Tags: advertising, cremation, death, direct mail, free, marketing, mobile, mobility
Greenwashing the streets
Springwise tells us about ads that “clean” the streets.
[Using] high-pressure cleaning machines to wash brands, logos and adverts onto dirty pavements…the SAS team blasts the stencil with water and steam on dirty walls, roads, pavements or even road signs…Nothing but water and steam are used, and it’s all perfectly environmentally friendly and legal, SAS stresses. …”[W]e wanted to apply a technique that was not just eye-catching and effective but also friendly to the environment. What could be more natural than water?”
But wasting water is hardly environmentally friendly! And steam requires fuel to produce. This sort of claim is too easy for anyone to make and is too often unscrutinized, like the folks at Springwise who reiterated the company’s hollow verbiage without challenge.
Tags: advertising, brand, eco-friendly, environment, greenwashing, perception
Segmentation Politics
Today’s NYT magazine included a letter written in response to How Do you Say ‘Got Milk’ en Español? (about Hispanic advertising).
Giving catchy names to particular demographic segments is one of advertising’s oldest tricks to make the craft seem “scientific”. But why spend time defining the characteristics of each segment if it turns out everybody is a mix of all of them —“a Straddler . . . with certain Learner/Navigator undercurrents”?
Agreed. As I’ve written before, personas are user-centered bullshit.
Tags: advertising, culture, marketing, persona, segmentation, translation
What values do you tie your brand to?
Every week we sit down for humor/drama/angst/sorrow/disbelief with Rescue Me (starring Denis Leary as a substance-abusing, sex-addicted, post-9-11-traumatized death-wish-harboring fireman). Every week Match.com runs an ad that tries to link their brand to the Rescue Me brand.
Yes, Match.com. The site that says “Last year alone, more than 500,000 singles found meaningful relationships through Match.com’s online personals and singles ads.” Meaningful relationships? Have they ever watched Rescue Me? Here’s some of the “meaningful relationships” that the show has dealt with
- Denis Leary’s character (Tommy Gavin) lives across the street from his estranged wife, and does some very nasty stuff to sabotage her relationship (I seem to recall the man being framed for some credit fraud)
- Tommy’s brother takes up with the same estranged wife, and Tommy seems to rape her (but maybe she’s willing?) in response (oh, and the brother is killed and the wife has his baby)
- In parallel, Tommy takes up with the Sheila, the widow of his cousin (killed on 9-11) and they are on again and off again (violently) when she shacks up with a physically abusive lesbian
- Tommy gets involved with the woman who teaches Sheila’s son, who is also having sex with the son
- After finding his wife in bed with another fireman, one firefighter decides to “rescue” a prostitute from the life, only she scams him for his life savings
- He becomes an alcoholic, then gets involved with a nun who is leaving her calling but ends it when he can’t keep up with her voracious and unemotional sexual demands
This barely scratches the surface. The storylines move far and wide, but you no doubt get the point. How does this really fit with what Match.com is offering? Match.com could be a way to avoid having your life turn out this way, but that’s not how it’s presented.
Seems like stupid advertising to me.
Tags: advertising, bad decisions, brand, denis leary, endorse, relationships, rescue me, values
Looking for growth and finding the right meaning
A new commercial for Trojan condoms depicts
women in a bar are surrounded by anthropomorphized, cellphone-toting pigs. One shuffles to the men’s room, where, after procuring a condom from a vending machine, he is transformed into a head-turner in his 20s. When he returns to the bar, a fetching blond who had been indifferent now smiles at him invitingly.
CBS and Fox rejected the ad.
A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, “Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention — which may be allowed — and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons.”
Good example of cultural construction. A product provides a basic set of functionality, but the meaning associated with that functionality rests outside the product itself. The users, and to a large part, society in general, construct that meaning. And so the stories we are allowed to tell about the product are determined along those lines.
I also liked this part of the story:
“With a 75 percent share of the market, we can prioritize growing the category and increasing overall condom usage,” Mr. Daniels said. “Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom. That’s dramatically below usage rates in other developed countries. Our goal is to dramatically increase use.”
We know what stomach share is, but what do the marketers at Trojan call their version?
Tags: advertising, condom, culture, meaning, share, usage
Fast Food Bluetoothin’
Last week in Seattle I checked out of the hotel, loaded up the rental Jeep and as I turned onto the main road, I saw this crazy advertruck
As I gawked and fumbled for the camera, the ads in the windows rolled up to reveal the world’s largest carbo-cholestero-monster lurking within
Seconds later, as I pulled alongside, a message appeared on my cellphone, asking if I would accept a Bluetooth connection from KFC-something-something. I declined, but whoah.
I was watching them, and they were watching me. I guess this is the sort of thing you read about, but to see it deployed and actually happening right in front of me, that was quite intense.
Tags: advertising, bluetooth, kfc, message, phone car, truck