If jeans could talk - Bluenotes "Your Summer Story" ad
I love this stupid ad.
A guy submits his jeans as his "what I did for my summer vacation" paper. No one should ever have to actually study in school again!
Although this ad is a bit too much like performance art in which invariably somebody takes their clothes off, trumping anything else that might be going on; it's the subtext to the stripping that is pretty much the whole story.
In the battle of ersatz experience created by commodities vs. real experience brand intelligence - here represented by the choice of jeans - is certainly straining hard against actual experience. The ad's not so much saying that you can buy your way to success at school (or at least to a fun summer vacation) as that in the arena of conventional learning - school - a gesture can be just as smart as doing your homework the way it's expected to be done. And of course, it's the cool kids who are having all the fun.
That's not how I remember things, but then that was a different time:)
There's also a nice narrative arc to this ad with the the girl writing the word "love" at the beginning, setting things up for him stripping off his jeans later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
Information visualization, advertising criticism How meaning is made and received. If information and advertising are the art of our age, it stands to reason that they should be subject to the same standards of criticism as the other arts.
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 :)
this ad.
