More Delicious than Delicio.us

Delicious, Reddit, Digg — they're all so 2007. Besides, they have nothing to do with advertising.

This site does: Adverlicio.us. It's an online archive of online ads. Like this terrific interactive banner ad for Volkswagen, which encourages you to drag and drop the features of the car onto the car, right in the ad. (Click on the image below to see the live ad.)


Aspiring creatives, take note: If you have the skills and talent to create ads like this one, you'll get hired, even during a recession.

Boom Boom in the Routan Room

If you've seen the TV commercials for the Volkswagen Routan, the ones featuring a perfectly cast, perfectly straight-faced Brooke Shields lamenting the growing social problem of women having babies just for German engineering, then you know that it's a beautifully executed satire. You know that she's not suggesting that women are really doing this, any more than Jonathan Swift was really suggesting that the Irish should eat their own babies.

I swear, though, the more I see this ad (and the longer, documentary-style video on the Volkswagen website), the more I start thinking, well, gee, maybe I should...

Good grief!

I shake my head and remind myself that I've always owned a Volkswagen. I grew up with German engineering. Heck, even my toaster is German! I do not need to have a baby with a strange man I barely know!

But my reaction speaks to the brilliance of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. How they hit exactly the right nerve in the target market. How their impeccable casting of Shields nails audience resonance as it was meant to be in a perfect advertising world.

Obama Love Love Me Do

I get what McCain's advertising gurus are trying to do. I get it, really. And they're succeeding in much the same way as my grade three crush, Rodney Sanford, succeeded in his objectives, when he used to cross town to play on my street.

So he could pull my pigtails, of course.

The Bale of his existence

It's taken twenty years, but my friend Harrison Cheung finally got some payback for his tireless efforts promoting an unknown actor named Christian Bale. Here's his story in England's Daily Mail.

Not Mad for Mad Men

I wanted so much to like Mad Men, I really did. The show is about advertising, and I'm an advertising maven. It's set in the sixties, and I totally groove to that vibe. It was critically acclaimed before the first episode aired last year, and so I made a point to watch the pilot. After that, I seemed to always have something else to do on Thursdays at 10:00.


When the DVD came out a few weeks ago I bought it so I could try again. Maybe it'll grow on me, I thought. Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge. So I watched the whole first season, and now I'm ready to deliver a verdict.

In just a second. Let me get my glasses. My eyes have gone slightly crosseyed, what from having been rolled every few minutes for the last 13 hours.

Watching Mad Men would make for a great drinking game, even better that "He's dead, Jim." Every time you see a sixties cliché being delivered with all the subtlety of, say, a stripper working the pole, you take a drink.

It seems to me that series writer and producer Matthew Weiner wanted to make a show about what he thinks we think the sixties were like, in exactly the same way that he created a show about what he thought we thought Italian mobsters were like. The difference is, most of us have no experience with real mobsters.

Weiner used to write for the Sopranos. Now, that was never my favourite show, but I did enjoy it, and I watched all of seasons 1 and 2. The dialog never struck me like, "Yo, bad guy, I'm a gangster, and I'm going to shoot you now," but that's exactly how Mad Men seems to me: "Hee hee, I'm a silly woman, so I totally understand why you don't take me seriously. No, really. I get it!"

In good storytelling you develop strong, complex characters, drop them into a turbulent world, and create conflicts for them to handle. Matthew Weiner's method is to begin with the situation, like, hey, let's show that people smoked a lot back then, or that they drove drunk — then you contrive the characters' movements around them. Watching Mad Men is like watching the assistant director do the blocking.

The most creative part of Mad Men is the opening titles, which you can download as a screensaver from the AMC website, and I did. I hope they win the Emmy for that, really, I do. They also received nominations for production design, costumes, and hair styles, sure. Even cinematography. Even direction, if I squint a little. But outstanding writing? Puh-leez. And especially for the pilot. The clichés were coming so fast and furious, they even obscured the heavy handed metaphors. When the little girl runs into the kitchen with the dry cleaning bag over her head, I actually burst out laughing.

The characters drink and smoke in almost every scene. We get it: people smoked back then. They make a point of showing the pregnant woman drinking and smoking, so we can scream self-righteously. The kids bounce around in the car, without seatbelts. Yeah, yeah — how did we ever survive?

Still, I persisted, trying to enjoy the set design. I do love the sixties furniture, and other authentic details, like the garish nail polish colours. And I squealed with delight at the costumes, especially Betty's groovy white sunglasses and fabulous High Society dresses. And I want to care about Pete and Peggy, I do. Maybe if the writers had given them a back story; if they'd known each other before Sterling Cooper, I could believe Peggy's doe-eyed devotion to him, but I don't.


(By the way, if you're wondering where you recognize her from, it's the West Wing. She was Zoey Bartlet, the president's daughter. And Joan was Saffron on Firefly.)

I tried to like Peggy. She's prudish, but determined, so I tried to comprehend why she would sleep with the first guy in the agency who was rude to her. On her first day. I cheered for her, as she fought the rampant sexism to become a copywriter. And when her zipper split and only the most dense of viewers would not have realized it was because she was pregnant, I really began to admire her, because she hid it with fat clothes, knowing she'd be forced to quit her job if her situation became known.

Then, in the last episode, I had to crawl out from under my disbelief which couldn't remain suspended, and crashed down on my head -- she didn't know she was pregnant? There are so many reasons why that's not plausible, I won't insult your intelligence by listing them.

Eye rolling moment number 847: Don Draper shows up at his mistress's apartment and tells her to pack her bags, he's taking her to Paris. She declines, opting instead to stay, because she and her friends were about to get high and listen to Miles. Now, I've got nothing against Miles, but if the man I was sleeping with showed up waving his bonus cheque and wanting to spend it on me, I wouldn't even stop to pack.


Are we really expected to sympathize with Don Draper? He has everything, so he wants what he can't have, and we're supposed to feel sorry for him. It's just not working for me. "I'm not used to being talked to this way by a woman," he says, when meeting a prospective new client. The writers were obviously at a loss to come up with a more subtle way to convey the sexism of the times.

I think that's the root of what annoys me about the show: the writers think we're stupid. That unless they deliver every line in the most heavy-handed way, we won't get it.

Note to Matthew Weiner: We get it, already.


Season 2 begins tomorrow, and am I going to watch it? You bet I am, and I'll tell you why. My favourite scene in season 1 is when Betty shoots at the neighbour's pigeons. She's got some serious rage bottled up, and could go postal any minute. I'm dying to see what she'll do in season 2.

And now instead of living in a pleasant suburb, we're living in the basement at her mom and dad's

I wrote that title from memory, and I've only seen the new Freecreditreport.com ad three times. It's more catchy, and more memorable, than even Weezer's new song, Pork and Beans. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if someone from Weezer isn't writing those jingles.

I think the ads for Freecreditreport.com, where the young man sings about the woes bestowed upon him because he didn't know his credit was bad, are absolutely brilliant.

The first one, Pirate, was beginning to grate on my nerves, to the point where I'd change the channel when it came on — but it was always too late. Just like the horrendous Hotel California, all you need to hear is the first couple of notes and it's stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Or week.

And then, just when I thought I couldn't stand to hear it one more time, along came the new one, Dream Girl, and damn it if I'm not hooked again.

The ads were created by The Martin Agency, of Richmond, Virginia. They're also the agency behind the Geico ads featuring James Lipton and Peter Frampton (which I also think are brilliant, especially the James Lipton one).

So they're entertaining: check. Memorable: check. Catchy: check. Clever: check. But what are the ads saying? What is the commercial message being communicated? Let's read the lines, and between them:

"I should have gone to Freecreditreport.com; I could have seen this comin' at me like an atom bomb."

The implication is, if only he had checked his credit... what? It wouldn't be bad? How does knowing you have bad credit change the fact that you have bad credit? The ads imply (and very well) that, somehow, using Freecreditreport.com would have prevented our hero from having to wait tables in a pirate costume (or drive a beat-up car, or live in his girlfriend's basement).

It usually surprises my students when I tell them, it's against the law for advertisements to lie. But it's true. You can't outright lie — but you can imply like hell.

That's why these ads are so brilliant. They imply that by signing up for Free Credit Report's monthly monitoring service, that you won't have bad credit. Of course that's not true at all, but people believe what they want to believe, and they want to believe there's an easy solution to the problem of bad credit.

Oh — the ads also imply that the service is free. It's not.

You can watch all three Free Credit Report ads here.

But is it safe to take it in the bathtub?

I just received an email from Amazon announcing its new electronic book reader, Kindle. "Reads like paper!" they claim. Uh, yeah, right.

Didn't they try this about ten years ago? I swear I downloaded a Stephen King e-book. It's probably still on my old IBM Thinkpad, which I can't bear to throw away. Just in case, you know, some day it becomes a valuable antique. Or I remember where I put that first screenplay I wrote.

No surprise to geeks and geek lovers eveywhere, one of the first Kindle titles available is Snowcrash.

Music, the Internet, and Pop Culture

I've been a subscriber to David Strom's Web Informant since before it was a blog; since before there was such a thing as blogs. I still get it delivered via email, and today his essay was about pop culture, and how soon we'll need a dictionary to keep up with it. To prove his point he linked to the new Weezer video, Pork & Beans.

Wal-Mart is America's largest music retailer, and as such wields a great deal of power. They refuse to carry CDs with images or lyrics their company disapproves of. They refused to carry Sheryl Crow's CD because the lyrics of one of her songs went like this: "Watch out sister/Watch out brother/Watch our children as they kill each other/with a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores." Is that right? If not, what can be done about it?

And finally, in memory of George Carlin, should his seven words you can never say on television be permitted on television?

Was that really Mary Darling commenting on our class?

Many of you wrote blog posts last week about Little Mosque on the Prairie, but only one, Wilson Ramirez's, generated a response from Mary Darling, the show's executive producer.

Wow!

The Internet skeptic in me wants to know if that was really her, or just someone claiming to be her. Ms. Darling, was that really you?

If it was really you, and you're reading this, to answer your question we are at San Jose State University, and the class is called Electronic Media and Culture. I'm Canadian, and if you saw Mike Myers on The Daily Show last week promoting his new movie, The Love Guru, then you know about our subversive movement down here in the States. I'm proud to be doing my part.

Critical Film Analysis: Writing a Movie Review

We're going to spend two classes (Wednesday and next Monday) on the topic of movies as cultural education. If you haven't already done so, have a listen to Tim Robbins and Edward R. Murrow again (clips are here). They were talking about television, but their points apply to movies as well.

Sure, movies can be pure entertainment, but the best ones are usually more than that. They make us think about our society and culture, question what is, and wonder what might be. They are, in a subversive sort of way, educational.

Your mandatory blog writing assignment for next week will be to write a movie review. You may choose either Kramer vs. Kramer, Brokeback Mountain, or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — or another movie of your choosing in the same vein. The vein is this: these movies educates us about a way of life we might not be familiar with, and in doing so attempt to make us more accepting of them. In your review, I want you to critique the film from that perspective.

In the second half of Wednesday's class we'll watch Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and on Monday, Kramer vs. Kramer. Here are some other links we'll be using in class:

Roger Ebert's review of Titanic
How to write a movie review
Classroom viewing of Brokeback Mountain brings lawsuit
Viewpoint: Censorship money is not worth it
Roger Ebert's review of Brokeback Mountain

For your consideration this Monday

For your consideration, from the Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2008: Broadcast networks under seige by Scott Collins. Did the writer's strike signal the death of broadcast television as we know (or knew) it? How do you consume broadcast media (radio & television), and has that changed in the last year or two? Do you watch TV online? Listen to your favorite radio station online? Do you wait until your favorite shows come out on DVD and watch them that way? Download them from iTunes or some other site? Do you watch TV on your iPod or cell phone?

For your consideration: Hulu. What do you think of it?

For your consideration: Tim Robbins's keynote speech at the National Broadcasters Association, April 14, 2008. Watch the first few minutes here. Read the full text here.

For your consideration: Does Tim Robbins's speech remind you of anything?

For your consideration: Little Mosque on the Prairie.

For your consideration: The Telecommunications Act of 1996. You can read the full text on the FCC's website, but you're not likely to want to. Instead, consider the FCC's report on the steps taken to implement the act. The most contentious of which are these: The order eliminating the national broadcast radio ownership limits; and the order eliminating numerical limits on national broadcast television ownership. Consider as an example: the Walt Disney Company owns ABC, which includes the television network and all these radio stations. What do you think will air on all those news programs if something bad happens at a Disney theme park?

For your consideration: Satellite radio is a $2 billion business that charges people for something they were used to getting for free. Are you willing to pay for it? Do you think it will succeed? What do you think the radioscape will look like ten years from now?

For your consideration: In the early days of radio its advocates promoted it as the great democratizing medium. (The same was said about the Internet 80 years later.) Do you think radio can be democratic in light of the deregulation that allows a few large media conglomerates to own most radio stations? Can a medium that charges subscribers be democratic?

For your consideration: The FCC regulates "terrestrial" radio but not satellite radio. Do you think that's right?

For your consideration: The FCC says this about its regulation of broadcast and cable television: "FCC rules generally do not govern the selection of programming that is broadcast. The main exceptions are: restrictions on indecent programming, limits on the number of commercials aired during children's programming, and rules involving candidates for public office." I can't seem to find, on the FCC website, a definition of obscene or indecent programming. Can you? How do they decide whether something is obscene or indecent? (Interesting article in the New York Times asks the same question.)

I have GOT to watch South Park more often!

Thank you Wilson for the link:

Something's in the air, all right

It puts me in mind of country roads back in my homeland, the farms of Southern Ontario, where the fragrance makes you want to roll your windows up.

Last Friday at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, the most prestigious, most coveted prize, the Grand Prix for film, was awarded. This is Fallon London's synopsis of their entry, "Gorilla," which took the prize:

"We hear 'In the air tonight' by Phil Collins as we realize we're in front of a calm looking gorilla. 'I've been waiting for this moment for all of my life…' The ape stretches its neck like a heavyweight boxer would do before a fight. He's sitting in front of a massive drum kit as the best drum fill of the history of rock is coming. The Gorilla knows this. He smashes the drums phenomenally - feeling every beat. The camera leaves the ape and his drum. United, the way they are meant to be."

Huh?

This ad isn't postmodern, it's just ridiculous.



The problem, for me, is that it's not a gorilla, it's a guy in a gorilla suit — I mean, that's obvious, isn't it? Does anyone really believe for one second that it's a real gorilla?

And don't say of course not. Go ask your English teacher what suspension of disbelief means. In order for us, the audience, to believe the story (and a good advertisement is simply a very concisely told story) we must believe that what we are seeing is possible.

I believed the apes in Planet of the Apes. I believed the Borg, and Q. I didn't believe Julia Roberts in Mary Reilly (or in Michael Collins, for that matter).

The gorilla in this ad might as well be wearing a Julia Roberts suit.

For John McCain, it's not Easy Being Green

(With apologies to Kermit the Frog.)

I just read an interesting article in AdAge called "McCain Me-Tooism on Global Warming Is Not Convincing." It's a critique of McCain's latest advertisement. The author, Ken Wheaton, writes:

John McCain has a new ad out emphasizing the environment. I won't dwell on the fact that Team McCain once again is using B-roll and music that should give even the most conservative art director a heart attack... But I will dwell on the content of the ad, such as it is. John McCain, the viewer is informed, "sounded the alarm on global warming five years ago." It's one thing to claim McCain broke with George W. Bush -- which he did -- it's another to claim that McCain was sounding an alarm about global warming in 2003. If I remember correctly, the alarms had long been sounded by then. So bragging about sounding the alarm sort of puts me in mind of Al Gore inventing the internet.

Watch:

Media kits

Media kits are packages of information about the consumers of a particular media property, such as Rolling Stone magazine. Media kits are used by media buyers at advertising agencies to make their decisions about where to spend their advertising dollars. They are also the tool of the advertising sales representatives at the magazines, who use media kits to sell their magazine's audience to those media buyers.

There are approximately 13,000 magazines in print at any time in the U.S. How does a media buyer choose which ones to buy ads in? By studying the audience demographics as described in the media kit, then choosing those publications whose audiences most closely match the target market for whatever it is they are advertising.

Most magazines have a website. To find the media kit, first go to their website, then scroll down to the bottom and look for the link that says something like "Advertise with us" or "Advertising information." It might even say "media kit." Here are a few direct links to magazines' media kit page:

Rolling Stone
Us Weekly
Vanity Fair
Chill magazine

This week's blog assignment

For this week's first blog topic, choose one of the following:

Do you think the government should ban books under any circumstances?

Under what circumstances, if any, do you think schools should give in to challenges from the public and remove books from their libraries?

Write a defense of one of the books on the ALA’s banned books list -— but only if you’ve read it.

What do you think about the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces?

Lou Dobbs, yellow journalist

What else can you call the man when he fans the flames of a conspiracy theory?

Thank you to Eric, for writing recently on his blog about the Amero, the supposedly proposed (by whom, no one has said) North American-wide currency, along the lines of the Euro.

Here's the link to Lou Dobbs's report on CNN (I don't know when this aired) in which he goes on about the supposedly secret government initiative to create a North American Union. He mentions, with horror, the name of this initiative: The Security and Prosperity Partnership.

And here's the link to a recent joint statement by North America's leaders, published on The White House's website, about what, exactly, The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) is.

I can't see any similarity between what CNN reported, and what the SPP actually is. Can you?

By the way, according to the Wikipedia, the Amero is just an idea, nothing more. There has never been a government proposal from any of North America's three national governments to actually implement such a thing. Which means the journalists who are ranting about it are nothing more than conspiracy theorists.

Who the hell is Steve Previs, anyway? Nothing gives credibility to journalism like a Yahoo! email address.

Millennials Get It

The first blog writing assignment I gave my student last week was to answer the question, do you consider yourself a Millennial? We watched the CBS News report on this new generation and I asked them to find at least one other reference to Millennials, and link to it in their blog post. You can watch the video here.

Most of them wrote about how offended they were by the negative characteristics being attributed to their generation, so I thought I'd direct your attention to a very positive review of Millennials that was recently published in Advertising Age magazine (and available for a short time on AdAge.com). It's called "Plenty of Skill and Smarts in Class of 2008" by Beth Ann Kaminkow. She writes,

The Class of 2008 already knows a lot of things the current work force is still trying to figure out. They've lived in an online and offline world that makes them comfortable bringing new thinking to agencies that are working to bring their clients' brands closer to consumers. They "get" the idea of convergence -- in media, in technology and in the way people live -- because that's how they live. So we need to be willing to learn, as well as teach and mentor.

So, like it or not, those of you who were born in the 80s and are coming of age in the first decade of the new millennium have been given a label: Millennials. Dreaming up labels for the generations is something the media has been doing since the phrase Baby Boomer was coined, and personally, I think yours is much cooler than that one.

I still like mine best, though; maybe because mine, Generation X, was invented by Canadian author Douglas Coupland.

Summertime, and the students are blogging

I'm teaching a summer section of a course called Electronic Media and Culture (RTVF110, for those of you at SJSU), and, in an effort to be green and, more importantly, to really engage with new media, the students are blogging again.

Look over to the left to see a list of links to these new student blogs.

Welcome to the blogosphere, all of you!