VW Routan ad vs. Ford Flex ad - retooling America's Big 3 automakers

First, thanks to the folks who commented on my post about the "aging hippies" VW Routan ad. Since then I recently discovered Ads of the World has a whole folder of VW ads. I'd like to add a couple of thoughts to my previous post.

One, I don't feel critical or bad about aging hippies. God, I AM one! And I'd die to have a vintage VW bus like the one in the driveway in that ad. I'm terribly jealous of all the folks who love their buses and rebuild them and take road trips and go to those crazy van club get-togethers.

I just thought that VW Routan ad was very peculiar thing for VW to do when hippie culture basically adopted the Beetle and the transporter and opened up the huge North American market for them. It seems just, well, ungrateful.

Second, I think we've really lost something when the only purpose a van seems to have these days is to promote middle class family values, mom's driving their kids to polo practice, schlepping around piles of consumer toys. Van used to be associated with a lot more than status quo consumerism, but these days the only sex drugs and rock 'n roll that remains is in the sound tracks.

Now along comes the Ford Flex (shown in the Canadian ad above) - not really a van but not really a truck either. What is it anyway? It should be called the Ford Can'tMakeMyMindUp.

But wait, to be honest, there's something about the Flex that grabs me. It looks a lot like this '67 Country Squire. I've always loved station wagons and have owned a few. Maybe it's the idea that you can lie down in them :)

Anyway, everyone has to be very concerned about the economy right now. Surely the geniuses working at Ford, GM and Chrysler must know that it won't matter what kind of vehicles they produce when nobody has money to buy them and the banks aren't lending.

By all means bring on the hybrids. But the idea of greening up motor transport is only part of the solution. We are going to need a lot more than that. We need to do something about six lane freeways clogged with vehicles, each with just one driver, no passengers.

Maybe the Flex and the Routan are pointing unconsciously in a new direction: Let's get everyone in America driving around together in vans. And bring back hitchhiking while we're at it.

Yes we can!


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Social Media for Publishers

Notes from a webinar with Chris Brogan, hosted by O'Reilly
December 16th, 2008

Examples of social media:

Blogging is good, can be instantaneous.

Facebook is also instant, good networking through groups
but it's important to write about more than just your own books.
(Hey, I'm doing this already http://www.readingart.ca/blog/)
It is said that on Facebook, businesses should do fan pages rather than profiles, which are for "real" people.

Twitter - most people don't like one way communications, but if you look people up, you can use like a research tool (find out who is talking about you), and people who are following you will watch what you are following... and can engage with people directly... a certain kind of bravado is entertaining, in the online world everyone is a publisher.

Somebody, whose name I didn't catch, called Twitter the "social phone"
(ha ha, in 2000 I dubbed it the "mirror phone," mirror borrowed from the research that showed that chimpanzees can identify themselves in mirrors, and because a lot of social media like blogging especially are about putting yourself up there whether or not anyone else is looking, there's a strong vanity aspect to all of it... and phone because all the online media are fundamentally call and respond, every click is a call for data, and then you want to relay that data on to others - the idea of interaction with data is perhaps overrated.)

O'Reilly said this is all about "first move" media, innovators lead.

The Secret power of Twitter:

search.twitter.com - e.g. "book and gift"
you can find people who are interested in the same things you are, or your authors are, or what your books are about, and start conversations with them... but it is very important not to overtly market to them, you have to have a "gentle" relationship with them

YouTube - book trailers
YouTube got 13 billion views last month - almost imaginable what that means.
But look at what author Scott Sigler did; he was not getting far in his writing career, but then he
made a podcast out of his book, serialized it, and that got a lot of downloads, so many that he was able to take that to publishers, show them how much interest there was in his work, and before long he had a publishing deal.
Now he is published in print but also giving away his work in PDF serialized form.
(About the image showed in the webinar slideshow of a Sigler YouTube trailer: I like the Häagen-Dazs product placement, did Sigler get paid for that?!)

LinkedIn
This is a business, professional network. Gives you a way to tap into networks like your college alumni; college graduates and professionals are big readers.

Strategy is The Diet

1. have a "home base", like a blog
- this can be "nightstand" (variety) or "niche" (specialized content, eg. business books); it can be one vertical, or it can be author specific, (there a lot of opportunity in the latter).

2. create "outposts" like Facebook, Twitter, podcasts
- be where the people are
- for marketing obviously, but also can find authors this way
- podcast book reviews

3. consider video trailers
- but be cautious about investing here: trailers are really for passionate readers
- and they are not very useful unless they are done well
- but if the tone is conversational, trailers can be done cheaply and can be effective (especially good for author personalities)

4. extend your content through giveaways
- the extra piece of stuff you can get, e.g. bought a book just so I could get a code and login and see this thing online (game?)
- "free prize inside"
- Seth Godin with his book Tribes created a social network site; it was exciting to be part of that, especially early on
- always do something outside the conventional print channels

5. put everything on paper
- consider how galleys are generally used: only go out to people who are working on the book, but the question is whether it could it be otherwise, using the text in development, drafts, partial scripts, create buzz, get people interested and involved
(We had a good experience using a wiki, we were able to develop the multi-author manuscript this way but also put some information about the book as it was developing on public pages within the wiki - but the maintenance of this was time-consuming, inho there's huge potential in wikis for publishers who have the means to invest in them.)

Kindle - (Hey, me too, I need to get one for the holidays :)

Listening is the new marketing

technorati, radiant6, Google alerts

Audio books

Chris Brogan want to get all publishing formats at once.

Somebody is going to bundle paper, audio, e-book, pdf all together for consumers.

The question is whether people would buy everything together and for how much more money; probably not twice as much, maybe 1/3.
(So there is an issue here of cost effectiveness - it's a lot of work to put out all those formats, possibly double the work - so there's a need for cost saving somewhere in the process - e.g. integration at the production level, where manuscript is xml-formatted and can flow out then into InDesign, Acrobat, web pages, etc.

Somebody is going to offer this first. You can be a "first mover" or you can end up being a "me too."

Google Reader
- excellent tool for listening
- can share your feeds with others

Outposts
- set up presence on different sites, but you have to actually be there, keep them updated

Publishers are now in the information exchange business.
- why wouldn't you buy a certain blog and find ways to monetize it?

Community
- activating people who are really active
- Google wiki within each book
- Seth Godin Tribe website
- companies that buy 50 copies of a book like Hedgehog (?)
- Would people pay per year to be part of a certain, exclusive conversation?
e.g. 24.95 for access to a social network with the author in it, book given away for free?

Print on Demand
blurb.com
lulu.com

$ COST - Really Expensive

How do you activate authors?
- especially so it isn't like you are heaping more work on them
- if you can show author that they can make the needle move, have a real impact on the numbers, then they get interested
- some authors don't like crowds, but will be socially comfortable online

Revenue
- comes out of marketing budget
- speaking of marketing, pics of covers are important, people collect them on their phones

You have to be prepared for the lonely mall effect... just because you build it doesn't mean they will necessarily come. But if you don't build it, no chance at all. Any kind of a following is good, e.g. 20,000 is a pretty decent number.

Can you get the author involved but not leading, letting the people drive the thing?

People - How do you staff this? Get someone to start one or two hours a day, with Twitter search feeding into a Google reader.

Competition - Someone's asked whether we can we do this together instead of competitively?
The answer seems to have been no, because no answer was given. Instead, Brogan mentioned that there are a lot of ways other people can come in and take your industry, then you have to work doubly hard to get it back. So the emphasis again was on first movers.

Tools - e.g. Hubspot... excellent platform for blogging with a mountain of analytics.
(And Brogan said if you buy 10m worth, he gets a pony or something :)

Small is the new big

We don't all want to eat at, shop at, go to... etc.
There's interest in the "craft" approach, e.g. microbrewers, some of whom are actually quite large.

How do you convert page views into money?
Equip people with information they need, and they will pay something for it.
But if people smell marketing, they won't go there.

--

My evaluation:

This was a great seminar, brief, to the point, well-presented.

I knew most of what was presented but I didn't know about Twitter search, so now Twitter makes sense to me.

I also liked the slogans used throughout. Expressions like "small is the new big" are entertaining and convey a lot of information.

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Where the streets are paved with grass

Can you believe that there are still car ads on TV? I mean the car industry is so screwed and yet they're still dishing up double cab trucks crushing the environment while sucking down a barrel of oil a minute. All the industy's managed to do so far is cancel Tiger Woods endorsement contract and stop using the executive jet (at least to go that one time to D.C.). Woohoo.

Anyway, the irony of car ads (and not just car ads) at a time when the economy is tanking reminded me of this ad I wanted to post about some time ago. The ad lasted about three seconds on Canadian television. I think I saw it only once but happily found it just now. I love it.

This ad for the Honda Civic is so f_d up. You can see the thinking behind it. Green is good right? Grass is green right? So what if the streets were, like, all grass?!?

The ad likely got yanked because somebody watched it and finally thought about what happens to grass after thousands of cars drive over it? That same somebody probably also noticed that all that grass with no cars actually looked pretty good, too good in fact. Maybe the ad was giving the wrong message: that streets without cars and with soft plush grass might be a really good thing.

Anyway, now we know what to do when cars finally become a thing of the past. Replace the pavement with grass! The dogs will love it. You can bike on it. Kids can play on it, and what's more, it's quiet. Brilliant!

Honda Civic "Grass" was produced by the Grip Agency.

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Canadian election results

Above reflects the proposed Canadian government made up of coalition partners Liberal and New Democrat parties, with the Bloc Quebecois party, which has agreed to support the coalition in Parliament.



Whereas the above reflects the current composition of the Canadian Parliament resulting from the 44th general election held in October, 2008.

Legend

	Proposed Coalition (including Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) - 153
	Conservative - 143
	Liberal - 77
	Bloc Québécois - 49
	New Democratic - 37
	Independents - 2
	Vacant - 0

The above diagrams are .svg files, adapted from the original found on Wikipedia.

Other seating arrangement diagrams:
the Government of Canada's, in .pdf format

an adaptation of that on Wikipedia

Generally, the results as reported on CBC

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Architecture as 3d visualization of information - Frank Gehry's Art Gallery of Ontario

Is architecture a kind of information visualization? Perhaps if you consider the functions that buildings support and the people they house to be very rich data. Consider this example below showing a topographic rendering of text topic search results in which the size and adjacency of "mountains" tells you about the similarity of results.



And if viewed this way, then does it become reasonable, or even necessary, to evaluate (criticize) architecture in information visualization terms like legibility and accuracy?


Frank Gehry's buildings, like his "Fred and Ginger" building in Prague would hold up pretty well under such scrutiny. As whimsical as it looks, the building actually takes a lot of cues (reads data from) its environment, squeezing in so as not to obstruct the sightlines of its neighbours and fluidly reflecting the river it overlooks.

At the recent OCAD VizDay, Pierre Boulanger repeated a well-known addage: without knowing the uncertainty of a piece of data, it is not a measurement, merely an opinion. Architecture is historically considered to be an art rather than a science; in that view, buildings more like opinion than data. But with Gehry's deep engagement with software, more and more his conceptual and modeling processes are data driven.


What can we see visualized in Gehry's newest project, the renovated and expanded Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto? There is something about that sweeping wing of glass along Dundas Street that seems to want to be measuring wind currents, northern light and perhaps sound bouncing around from the bustling Chinese market a block west. And the big blue titanium box on Grange Park at the rear; it's a sky-ish sort of blue, a blue like the sky reflected in Georgian Bay, meant to disappear under the right conditions. How long before the color of building facades can be modulated by computers so that they change with the weather?

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Hippie bus - VW Routan ad bludgeons aging boomers

In this TV ad airing now in Canada for the Routan mini-van, VW pictures aging hippies living chalk-a-block in a suburban house, slumped depressively over photos from their heydays, until a new Routan wheels by in slow motion, causing them to rise from their chairs, stunned. "We dared to reinvent our classic van." is the final slogan.

There's no percentage in mocking one generation to sell to another, especially if the generation you are mocking is older. Unless of course you are confident that economic clout has shifted so decisively to a younger generation that you think you can get away with it.

This is an example of a very interesting ad concept bumbling hopelessly over complexity. The relationship between generations and the adoption of the VW minibus by the counterculture are complicated matters. It would take insight and great art to handle them well; neither are evident here. For example:

A. It is interesting to think about where the hippie generation is at right now. How old are they? How do they live? What are they doing? What interests them?

Instead of answers or insight, we get clichees meant to be funny: hippies as decrepit (uniformly grey haired, wrinkled and slow moving), poor (living communally at age 65) and drowning in nostalgia (looking wistfully through photo albums that make their current decrepitude only more accute). The soundtrack, Live for Today by The Grass Roots, is like salt in the wound: counterculture spurning of convention, in particular money, leads to social and financial ruin.

B. It is interesting to think about the remarkable legacy of the VW microbus (a.k.a. the Transporter) and to try to capture some of that cultural value.

But instead of valourizing the legacy, it is mocked. The vintage bus seen briefly in the driveway is... what? still running? out of commission? a relic, as aged and useless as the various greyhairs rambling through the ad?

The VW Routan ad is an interesting development on, and departure from, an advertising trend identified in 2007 by Stuart Elliot in the NY Times. Elliot pinpointed the potential trouble even then. Just as agencies were seeing the 60s as something consumers could identify with, possibly tapping into anti-Iraq-war sentiment, Elliot noted the danger of superficiality, ads that only appeal to the financially successful of the older generation.

C. It is interesting to think that subsequent generations didn't make the same mistakes but today enjoy the kind of financial security and family life that makes the minivan the most successful of any auto manufacturers lines.

The rather grim reality here is that Chrysler minivan has consistently captured marketshare because it is incredibly cheap. Massive sales kept prices low, the joy of the market system. But as the automobile industry collapses, the minivan is unlikey to escape the fate of all other vehicle lines.

This is a train wreck of an ad that even if times were good, stumbles into the minefield of generational and economic classes, exploiting the disadvantage of one for an assumed-to-be-affluent other, that, as it turns out, has no or minimally more security.

The salvage:
Something can be salvaged from every ad, something revealing about our culture or how we think about culture.

In the VW Routan ad, it's interesting to see a group of aging people living together communally. What a good idea! Something definitely to be added to our toolbox of coping strategies for the new millennium.

The prognosis:
Will 60s nostlagia ads be shelved under the current economic meltdown? Certainly it is challenging territory, emotionally rich but also highly sensitive. Finding just the right balance between the idealism of the 60s and the cruel realities of the present could be very rewarding. The Obama agenda (www.change.gov) places high value on the ethics and creativity so evident in the 60s. Advertising with a 60s bent has the potential to reinforce the message of bringing people together, doing things in new ways.

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US Election - Visualizing the Vote

How exactly I've come to renew my interest in Information Visualization will have to wait to another blog post. It started accidentally with a workshop called VizDay at the Ontario College of Art and Design this past week.

If you've wondered as I have how the Democrats came to be identified with the color blue, contra the red that you might intuitively expect, this post sheds some light on that, http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=5679

The Liberal Values blog also some interesting maps visualizing the US election vote:

http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=5750

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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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