The Sounds of Capitalism

It’s the day after the 2013 Super Bowl, and this advertising gadfly isn’t going to give you an in-between turnovers play-by-play.

A book I haven’t read yet – Pitchfork’s Eric Harvey interviews the author:

The Sounds of Capitalism
Author and musicologist Timothy Taylor on his new book, which analyzes the relationship between popular music and consumer culture.

If you’ve ever attended my song ‘n dance, it’s full of advertising history.  And I’ve written (along with many others) about the positive and negative impact of music in commercials:

03 October 2005
Invoking "The Sixties": Fidelity Financial vs. Ameriprise

09 December 2005
Boomer Nostalgia
… Do advertisers benefit from invoking the past willy-nilly? When those tunes come on, am I really paying attention? Or do they send me off into the ether, conjuring up all sorts of bizarre and moldy feelings, images, remembrances?

By the time I float back, the spot is over.

07 April 2006
Ameriprise vs. Fidelity Financial Redux
"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is being used to get aging hippies to invest for retirement. It's in a Fidelity commercial. Define irony. I strongly doubt that when a circle of stoned 19-year-olds were passing around a joint with Iron Butterfly on the turntable in 1969, they were weighing wealth-preservation versus growth as they considered the most prudent mix of stocks, bonds and other equity instruments …

11 April 2006
More In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is in a class by itself. Hear it and a veteran of the '60s might think water bong, not 401(k) rollovers.

19 February 2007
Food fights, Balloons and Dancing Gorillas
“Every time I swear I'll never again be shocked or saddened by a TV commercial ruining a treasured rock anthem, another proves me wrong.”

Timothy Taylor explains it all – or a big chunk of it:

Pitchfork: This felt like the first time that a lot of people, including the Beatles, got angry with a brand for co-opting the music of their youth.

TT: Yeah, the surviving Beatles sued them, but they didn’t really have any grounds on which to sue them because they didn’t own the copyright on their own music anymore-- they had sold it off to Michael Jackson’s company. But they still didn’t like it. Nike said they weren’t going to let that sway them, but they eventually stopped running ads with that music in there, I assume because of the bad press that they got.

This is interesting (to a doddering guy like me):

TT: … If you’re a struggling band (today), it’s less about record sales and it’s more about placement in commercials and film and TV.

So thirty or forty years from now, when you hear an old song from your teenage years, it’ll bring back fond memories of an iPhone commercial.

One reference to The Super Bowl:

Don’t think anything’s new.  Before The Clydesdales (actually The Clydesdales were around back then), before the web – there was interactive advertising. 

From 1903:

Bud…

The music in the video is a sing-a-long.  If you don’t know what a sing-a-long is, it’s sort of like Karaoke.

Read about Timothy Taylor’s The Sounds of Capitalism and listen to oodles of music from advertisements over the last one-hundred plus years.

Marketing to the Ageing Consumer

New book, a good one:

Marketing to the Ageing Consumer
The Secrets to Building an Age-Friendly Business
By Dick Stroud and Kim Walker

As the populations of Europe and the US, soon to be followed by China, grow older, it is vital that marketers understand the effects of physiological ageing and their impact on marketing.

Dick and Kim have put together a concise, brimming-with-info overview of what people 50-70+ are and will be experiencing physically and psychologically (with a larger nod to the former) – and why this knowledge is critical to companies, organizations, governments.

It’s an easy though at times startling read, backed up with clear, to the point  graphs and charts (even I could comprehend most of them). 

The message: Age-Friendly doesn’t begin and end with advertising and marketing. The initial product development, packaging, and point-of-purchase experience is likewise crucial and often ignored.

An example not in the book: Six or so years ago,  we were overwhelmed by a stunning international campaign targeting 50+ women with a line of beauty products – skin and face moisturizers, a shampoo, conditioner, etc.  Truly revolutionary advertising. The bottles flew off the shelves.

But something happened at home. The product containers were pretty much the same – a murky maroon with flaky white fonts, leading and kerning so bunched that for older eyes all was a blur. Women would reach for a specific bottle in the bath or at the vanity, and had to grab their glasses to read the label. Try that in the shower.

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.
– Bill Bernbach

But it wasn’t the product, it was the  packaging that held back this beauty line from universal, everlasting success.

Mr. Stroud and Mr. Walker address similar issues in their book.

Introduction and Chapter Selections (PDF)

Publisher’s Page

Age-Friendly Web Site

Congrats on this, Gents.

A Guide for the Perplexed

Even a lowly advertising creative-author-consultant-speaker-gadfly can’t always keep up with everything said about him on the web.

Something I missed from 2006 - a review of my 2005 book in a report by The Institute For The Future’s Richard Adler for AARP:

Aging Baby Boomers: A Guide for the Perplexed (PDF)
Nyren indicts the advertising industry for remaining fixated on allure of the “youth culture” and losing interest in Boomers, even though they still represent an extremely large and dynamic market.

The industry is still fixated…

A belated thanks, Richard!

Tablets Redux

NostraChuckus, that famed Soothsayer and advertising gadfly who’s been startling the world for years with his mundane prognostications, sometimes is surprised when his predictions materialize:

06 April 2010
The Obligatory iPad Post
I won’t be getting one (a tablet) soon, however.  I’ll wait for the model that won’t shatter when you drop it, and can be rolled up to swat flies.

He really didn’t mean it when he foretold it, but the mystikal cosmos ofttimes plays eerie tricks on him:

Now, flexible 'paper tablet' that can be rolled up
… Researchers have developed a revolutionary tablet screen as thin as a sheet of paper that can be twisted and dropped without damage - and it could replace your laptop within five years.

Stay tuned for more shocking revelations from NostraChuckus, if his feeble heart is able to survive them. 

 

 

Tablets

Tablets

Moses and the pharmaceutical industry once had exclusive dibs on this word.  Nowadays, tablet commonly refers to a specific type of computer doodad technology. 

Anacin

Not quite as ubiquitous as The Ten Commandments or Anacin, some believe they will be soon. Perhaps tablets shall impart wisdom, perhaps relieve your headache. My guess is that they may impart a bit of wisdom while giving you a headache.

In another cranny of  virtual etherland, I stumbled upon a silly jumble of 2013 predictions gathered from social media gurus. A not completely silly one caught my eye:

#3: We’ll See Media as Either Active or Passive
I believe that we will stop seeing media as social and start thinking about our media as being either active or passive. This will happen in two stages.

Stage one is the consumer. When are consumers active or passive with their media? When are they passively watching a TV show or actively taking part on Twitter?

Sounds familiar.  From 2007:

Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
There are active and passive parts of our day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It’s not really passive. It’s focused absorption. At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

This isn’t ‘down time’ (that would be sleeping), but nourishing your psyche by absorbing and not actively being involved in what you’re doing.

And there’s the ‘actively taking part on Twitter’ part:

Twitter & Advertising (2012)
… The mobile/social media soothsayers will have you believe that there is this unknown, magical mode of persuasion that has never been thought of before – and will reveal itself any day now. 

If you believe that, I have a Blackberry in Brooklyn I want to sell you.

I guess what NostraChuckus really predicts is predict what futurists will predict in five or so years.

Back to tablets and whatnot:

You should stop thinking about the next big thingamabob and whose will be best.  In five or ten years there will be all sorts of thingamabobs for just about everything.  You’ll have two or three or ten thingamabobs.  Tablets/Smartphones will be big, small, thin, simple, complex, active, passive, out the door in your purse or pocket, lost in your couch cushions.

If you’re using a tablet for a passive activity like reading a magazine – the advertisements should be passive, engaging.  I’m not sure how they’ll play vs. a print mag – and that’s the big question.  But they will have to draw you in viscerally – not with lots of annoying noise:

Digital Distractions
Advertisers are getting wise to the drawbacks of marketing in the digital nest…

Digital Distractions II
There are so many digital distractions that it’s difficult to be distracted…

That social media guru is on the right track.  He simply needs to read some of these:

The Social Media/WOMM/Web Advertising Posts