Adidas - Impossible is $200

Those of you who know me, know the slogan:
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VACATION AND VOCATION IS O

which I created at the Banff Centre in May, 2006.

Well, check out Addidas new "Impossible is O" campaign. Evidently O is the new black!


I like this ad not only because it uses a syntax I feel I personally invented :) but because it uses athletes as "artists". This one's with Gilbert Arena and there's one with David Beckham painting a painting too. I also like the documentary treatment of their "stories" that fleshes the campaign out. It is almost shocking too that these guys seem to be able to create pretty good art, tho' really that could be just faked by the agency.

What I like more though is Stephon Marbury's endorsement of a $15 court shoe called the Starbury... Marbury is campaigning for shoes that parents, and teenagers can actually afford, an absolutely awesome concept. What I like less about the Adidas campaign is that I'm still paying and paying and paying for all this creativity in the price of brand-name runners. Naomi Klein, in her book No Logo, actually itemizes the percentage of consumer price that pays for marketing. I'll have to look that up, but we know it's high, very high.

So kudos to Adidas for syntactic imagination, but really the campaign should read Impossible is $2OO.

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Sopranos Vista

Gosh, but I AM straying far afield. Focus, Rob, focus. Aw fuck it!

My local ISP, Rogers, just notified me by email that they are having "problems" with the Vista upgrade and that they are "working with" Microsoft... that sounds an awful lot like an episode of the Sopranos in which a local landscaper loses a Sopranos-related client to a crime-related competitor and asks the Sopranos.org (local boss) for "help"; resulting in him getting back his contract... at a cost of 50% of his revenues... ouch!

now, I don't know from Microsoft, but how much is Rogers going to have to pay Microsoft I wonder?

Bill, if you're listening, please, there's time, you CAN change the world, just not in the way you think.

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(visual) quieting - life after cars

What will we do when the streets are empty?

Please contribute your ideas by way of comments or by sending me an email to adminATkloojDOTnet. Thanks!


[ img src ]

We'll ride bicyles!


[ img src ]

We'll find other uses for cars and parking lots:


[ src: Just Add Water event by Samantha Crowhurst and Leah Sandals ]

[ src img: more about Adrian Blackwell ]

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Microsoft - the invisible possibilities ads

This is a good example of how the attempt to render a positive by portraying a negative can backfire. Here, a black waitress is shown without (outline only) the graduation cap and degree that is presumed to be necessary for her to get a better job. The ad assumes a lot of things, like that higher education is an automatic ticket to a better job and a better life, that college grads don't end up working in diners, and that people who work in diners all want to work somewhere else. The ad copy "We see..." attempts to correct the image, to explain the invisible cap and degree as "potentials," achievable with Microsoft's help, which is all well and good, but really what the ad is showing us is a happy waitress in a nice diner who doesn't need a higher education.

I also question who these ads are talking to. If they're in Harper's or The Atlantic, then they are preaching to the converted, talking to people who already have post-secondary education, validating that education as an objective for and attainable by working people.

These ads are a little old now, but might they not be considered an indication of Microsoft's increasing disconnection from reality, now crystalized in the brilliant Apple vs. PC comparative advertising campaign? But more about those later.

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visual quieting - at what point does marketing start to work against itself

The increasing price of consumer goods is largely due to marketing and delivery costs. Companies have learned that marketing pays off, especially once they reach the global scale. This cost effectiveness of marketing is what feeds the increasingly overwhelming clutter of billboards, print and other materials we face every day.

At what point is enough enough? Does brand awareness ever get sufficient that marketing budgets can be safely trimmed back, optimized so that companies start to become more responsible about the "cultural noise" they are creating.

Nike running shoes, for example, could cost substantially less if you bought them direct online from Nike. And I don't need to see another Nike ad for at least several years.

So, for example, take Nike's own numbers:
--
Consumer pays: $90
Retailer pays: $45 to NIKE, and then doubles the price for retail.
NIKE pays: $22.50 and then doubles the price to retailers for shipping, insurance, duties, R&D, marketing, sales, administration and profits.
The $22.50 price paid the factory includes: Materials: $14.60; Labor: $3.37; Overhead: $3.41; Factory Profit: $1.12; Total Costs: $22.50
[ source ]
--

and get rid of the retailer and the marketing:

Consumer pays: 33.00 direct to Nike
This eliminates the retailer (disintermediation) and much marketing so the price comes down to somewhere between 22.50 and 45.00... split the difference. This also opens room up so people assembling the shoes could be paid better, Labor is a pitiably small portion of the cost of production according to the document above. How much sense does that make?

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zefrank is one damned media savvy dude; check out this video on brand emotional aftertaste.



Not as cleverly crtical but awesome in his depth of knowledge and almost-over-the-top radio voice, Terry O'Reilly does a show called the Age of Persuasion on CBC radio (Saturday, 4 p.m.), and has just started a new blog: http://www.oreillyradio.com/

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It's tax time, feeling tied up in knots?

One the finest ways that advertising reveals truths about our culture is when it shows a problem in order to claim the solution to that problem for its product or service. The Canada Revenue Agency, a.k.a. Revenue Canada, for example, wants you to believe that they will make tax time so easy you won't have to have the flexibility of a gymnast to get through it, or that their online tools will make it so easy it will be as if you had the abilities of a gymnast. What the ad really tells us is "you can't do this". Go on, I dare you to try that pose.

And while we're talking about the tax dept. why'd they change the name? We used to have Heritage Canada, Industry Canada and others, names that had a professional feel and that put the title of what they were about ahead of Canada... Canada Revenue Agency is so utilitarian, opaque, bureaucratic, a gulag of naming.

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Hands in my pockets - Capital One

This is a series of TV spots showing banker-types following normal folks around in all sort of daily activities with their hands in their pockets. Like they are stealing, continuously, every minute of every day, in every situation. Like pick pockets, but without the craftiness.

I think these ads are only in Canada because I can't find the video anywhere on the Web. But Capital One's "Hands in my pockets" series has not only delivered a memorable jingle, known and loved (and hated by those who can't get it out of their heads) by all, but they've made a stunning indictment of Canada's Big 5 banks, who charge higher interest rates than anybody.

The gamble is that "truth in advertising" doubles back and bites them, along with their targets, in the ass. Basically, everyone hates credit gouging and the greed, disrespect, narcissism, cynacism and corruption it represents. Note to Capital One, you want our respect (and business)? Live up to your promise of a real alternative.

Whatever, we this ad.

The great irony of it is that the song, by Jim Guthrie (link below) is plural, handS in my pocketS, not hand in my pocket as the images show in the ad, and is a very sweet song about walking around with your hands in your pockets. It's dreamy and the way the ad couples it up with a hateful thing banks do is... well... brilliant, the best advertising can do combining sweet and sour, threatening and securing at the same time.

"So I forced my hands in my pockets
And felt with my thumbs,
And gallantly handed her
My very last piece of gum."
- Bob Dylan 4th Time Around

who's got it totally wrong

sorry, you can't criticize advertising properly if you're trying to get a job in advertising

view and rate TV ads - this is great site, performing a great service... Thank you!

wierd cutting edge video shit

e.g. this is why we all LOVE to drive cars and won't stop, no matter pretty much whatever...

re: prison, see my last post on the Globe and Mail ad campaign

at least somebody is paying attention to Capital One ads in video

Yet more hands in my pockets stuff:

the song, by Jim Guthrie

about the ad

about the issues

funny-cute rip off...

Pity the poor CBC, the Canadian broadcasting service, aka "the mothership" for having some good, if beside the point info about songwriters and the commercial biz

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Criticizing advertising - Prison (Globe and Mail Ultimate Home Makeover)

I've been wanting to create a place for critizing advertising, so for the next few months this is going to be that place. I'm not interested in the moral-high-ground type of criticism, as important as that may be, but in criticism that sees the critical meanings underneath the obvious messages, in TV ads in particular.

To get things started: Some of you will be familiar with my text, Prison, presented at the Banff Centre last May. Well check this out; seems I'm not the only one who thinks the middle class is a form of prison, or that prison-culture is the reality of the future. And we thought debtors prison was a thing of the past.





Globe and Mail newspaper, Ulimate Home Makeover, February, 2007
the above TV spot is online here.
There are three TV spots all together in this series, accessible from here.

other resources:

Dr. Christopher Johnson's insightful criticism of corporate names:
TheNameInspector.co blog
about it

The kind of criticism my posts won't be like:

Suicide prevention group protests Superbowl ad.
The ad they are protesting and where you can also view and rate other Superbowl ads — about the ad: a poignant reflection on the current grim conditions of work (we are robots) and how self-esteem is wrapped up in employment (lose your job and you're going to want to commit suicide) and what motivates people (your daydream of failure, ending in suicide will drive you to become a perfectionist). As if that were not enough, the anthropomorphising of the robot, which is given an imagination (tries to find other work) and emotions (experiences despair), reflects something very creepy about technology.

defenders of advertising, essay

advertising and social values, esssay

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massive change

You've heard about it. The premise is that the world is changing massively. And that such massive change is necessary if we are to survive as species on this planet.

That's a lot to absorb. Personally you have to admit a lot of things are changing, and the pace and scale of change is pretty, well, massive, but...

two things:

1. massive change kind of assumes we need to change a lot in order to stay the same, e.g., the current climate-sort-of-situation; we want to keep that, or at least avoid hurricanes in New Orleans and windstorms in Vancouver, and

2. we are in control... this is the whole premise of the captital M massive and capital C change... that "design" will be the way we orchestrate and manage change, and design, being a function of control-types, like CEOs, and NASA, doesn't really have too much to do with you and me.

however, I predict it will be not long before them, named above, and us start talking not about how to control change, but about how to adapt to change... e.g.

- no warming Gulf Stream, i.e., a much colder Europe and UK...
- melted polar ice caps and higher ocean levels worldwide... stilts anyone?
- depleted oceans as a food source... pass the rice...
- no Oxygen producing rain forests (lungs of the planet)... cough, cough
etc. etc.

the fact is the disconnect between West and East and developed and developing worlds is too profound to be overcome within my lifetime... but, being an eternal optimist, let's consider some things that we (you and me) might, together, massively change, the first of which I proposed some time ago here:
dog treats and grooming pay for Katrina's costs

So, let's look at the stats and find the nickels and dimes among our millions and billions that can, actually, produce change.

For ref: www.massivechange.com/

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