Inside Tom's Head: Advertising

Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Why You Should Watch "Mad Men"

Don Draper and his rag-tag team of advertising misfits at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce come back to the small screen today, and that’s a good enough reason to write about it. You should give the show a try. Unless you’ve been living under a culture-proof rock for the last 4 or so years, “Mad Men” is an award-winning show on AMC about advertisers in the 60’s. That’s the abbreviated version. If you watch the show religiously, you know it’s really about the existential crisis of a man who never is quite sure of who he is or who he wants to be, set in a 1960’s Ad Agency. It’s a time machine to an era full of drinking, smoking, and philandering, but also an era full of change and empowerment. I could continue the pretentious drivel for a while, but I figured it’d probably be easier to persuade you to watch the show through quotes and videos, and a little commentary in between.

Go Forth, Get to Work, and Be A Pioneer

| Why Levi's "Go Forth" Campaign Resonates With My Generation |

About a year ago, I was watching TV commercials, and one came on that piqued my interest. It was mostly dark, the copy was some sort of poem, and I instantly LOVED it. That ad was the first part of Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign. The ads use Walt Whitman poems very well (on one ad, apparently it is his own voice). The copy of the poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” is supposed to evoke an emotional response from my generation, and I think it does. Here’s a snippet:

For we cannot tarry here,

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,

We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,

Pioneers! O pioneers

(Rest of poem here. Highly Recommended)

The first few ads (one embedded above, the other you can just watch on YouTube) show young people running around interspersed with grim visions of Wall Street and America. “America” is literally half-underwater in one ad, which I think is supposed to symbolize the grim, hopeless recession-era we were in (and still are, to a degree). Some people loved it. Some thought it was too arty. Others mocked it (which usually means people are at least paying attention). Either way, it really struck a chord with me, and I assume other millenials were at least intrigued.

Fast-forward a year, and Wieden & Kennedy comes back with new ads for Levi’s. W&K, out in Portland, is this year’s hot ad agency. Remember the Nike “Write the Future” ad right before the World Cup? Ever heard of the Old Spice Guy? We know that campaign resonates with the millennial generation. W&K is behind both.

Anyways, they come out with this new part of the campaign based on a dingy old town called Braddock, Pennsylvania. This town is desecrated. Dead. Like Detroit and countless other cities on the Rust Belt, this town used to be a powerful industrial city, a steel-creating powerhouse, but then jobs faded away and so did the city. Braddock is a stand-in for our broken country, and Levi’s is here to rebuild it. Levi’s is even sponsoring workshops, teaching valuable skills, so we can work.Watch the ad:

“A long time ago, things got broken here. People got sad and left. Maybe the world breaks on purpose, so we can have work to do. People think there aren’t frontiers anymore. They can’t see how frontiers are all around us.”

The ad is all about rebuilding. We know about rebuilding and repairing. Fixing New Orleans. Fixing the Gulf. Fixing the banks, and fixing health care. We’ve been left with a country in ruins. We’re here to build, to work, to find new frontiers. It’d be easy to think the only frontiers are in new tech, but we have a lot more than that to create. The new ad shows people getting ready to work. The older generations think we don’t want to work, but we do. We’re an entrepreneurial generation, ready to find these new frontiers. We’re trying to work, but for ages 20-24, the unemployment rate is somewhere around 18%. My friends and I graduated from a great university (On Wisconsin!), yet most of us are still unemployed and looking. It’s time for us to get to work.

This whole campaign is, in my mind, pretty brilliant. A year ago, when the country was even more financially broken than today, Levi’s showed us that America was broken, but we still had our youth and we could still be pioneers. Today, it’s giving us a call to action. The ad is saying that the future is in our hands, and we can rebuild. We need to rebuild. It’s up to us to fix the country.

Look, I know these ads are just here to sell jeans. They’re ads, so the main goal is to increase sales, so the effectiveness of the campaign is based around how many jeans they can sell (I’m not exactly racing to the stores). But I think good ads can resonate with the zeitgeist and create culture. Great ads become art. I think W&;K did a great job finding a basic truth about our current situation, finding a message that would resonate with our generation (the target), and boiling it down into great copy and art direction to convey that message. That's all you need: a great insight, a message from that insight, and a way to communicate that message to the right people.

What does everyone else think about the campaign? Do older generations “get it?” Am I missing anything? Let me know.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

"Spice"-ing Up Advertising

Why the "I'm On a Horse" guy is a cultural phenomenon

By this point, you’d have to be under a very large rock for a very long time to have missed the Old Spice ads. The campaign went viral when it began and continues to garner a lot of attention with each new ad. The campaign managed to get star Isaiah Mustafa a deal with NBC. It also won the Grand Prix Award at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, which is sort of like the Best Picture Oscar. Additionally, the ad was recently nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Commercial, and will most likely win (with their momentum, none of the others can really compare). So, what makes this ad campaign so special? Why does it connect with us, and why did it go viral?

The Jaded Gen-Y Guide to Business Buzzwords

Every profession has jargon that is used as shorthand, and that’s great. Using jargon is necessary so a carpenter doesn’t have to say “that big metal doo-hickey” and so scientists don’t have to use long, boring explanations to explain what a uberthermodynamic enthropic reaction is (disclaimer: I don’t think that is real). These words and phrases are around to make their lives easier and less confusing. Buzzwords in business, however, seem to be around solely to make everyone a little more confused. I think they’re around so that you can convey meaning where none actually exists and so you can sound more important than you actually are. It’s the same reason some writers use the term “antediluvian” just to say “before the flood” or “really old.”

I’m not very fond of buzzwords. For the reasons I previously listed, they’re made fun of by a lot of people (present company included). This scene from 30 Rock is a great parody of using buzzwords. I went to B-School (Go Badgers) so I have a pretty good idea of what they actually mean (most of the time). I’ve seen more acronyms than I could ever remember, have heard of more “blue oceans”, and have explained the “hedgehog concept” (all it means is “do what you’re good at.” HOW IS “HEDGEHOG CONCEPT” EASIER?). Naturally, I’m a little jaded.

I’m currently in the middle of creating a fake press release using “The Most Overused Buzzwords in PR” as a satire of the industry for The Black Sheep Agency. Somewhere in the middle of using 75+ of the buzziest buzzwords in the industry, I started to realize that there are very few people who know what any of these words actually mean. Therefore, here’s a layman’s dictionary of buzzwords you’ll hear in business, PR, and marketing from someone who is a little cynical about them. If this blog was a tabloid, I’d call this post “The Definitions THEY Don’t Want You to Know!!!” Check it out after the jump, and leave some more of your favorites in the comments.

Life 2.0

When I was a kid, I remember how awesome renting a video game was (yes, I’m old enough to remember video stores. When I was a kid, we didn’t have Netflix). I’d play as long as my parents would allow it, then wake up SUPER early the next morning so I could beat my brothers to the SNES. I’d play and play and play, only stopping to eat and sleep. Because we only had the video game for a few days, it was important to play as much as I could to get as far in the game as possible. It was a good childhood.

Even though I no longer really play, I still like the idea of video games, how you can jump into an entirely different world for a few hours and do strange, impossible things. Luckily enough, we’re entering an age where life itself is turning into a video game. This is facilitated by mobile services and new technology, each seeming more like science fiction. Here are just a few of the relatively new services that make life just a little bit more fun. These technologies are probably going to become (or already are?) the next big things.
UPDATE: I forgot a few really interesting advances in technology, so I put them at the top.

Inside Tom's Head

Pages

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Why You Should Watch "Mad Men"

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Go Forth, Get to Work, and Be A Pioneer

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

"Spice"-ing Up Advertising

Monday, July 12, 2010

The Jaded Gen-Y Guide to Business Buzzwords

Monday, June 28, 2010

Life 2.0

What I'm Reading