Entries Tagged 'advertising' ↓

I’ve been re-reading Daniel Boorstin’s classic 1961 work of social criticism The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (which is extraordinarily fresh and insightful for a 45-year-old book, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day).

Underlying Boorstin’s thesis of a mid-twentieth-century American populace transfixed by images is his notion that advertising—or any kind of marketing—succeeds by holding up a mirror to potential customers and offering them an enticing, image of themselves (more on this another day, but let’s just say for now that advertising is about fantasy-fulfillment).

Now, along comes the NYT’s Elisabetta Povoledo to tell us that Italians are transfixed by a six-part TV biopic, “The Boss of Bosses,” because the mirror it holds up to its audience shows a somewhat less than flattering image of itself [e.a.]:

“Italy has always been fascinated by the Mafia, by its personification of evil,” [a reporter] said in a phone interview.

Another possible explanation for the popularity of “Il Capo dei Capi” may be that it goes beyond mere storytelling and puts Italy in front of an unflattering — if engrossing — mirror of itself. It suggests that if Mr. Riina became the most formidable and feared mobster in Italian history, it was thanks to the collusion of political and economic forces at various levels of Italian society.

“It’s not fiction — it’s a real story that tells 50 years of Italian history, and it names names,” said Pietro Valsecchi, who produced the series. “It tells us just what sort of country we have been living in, it shows us the complicity of the state, it puts the Mafia in our face.”

There’s some evidence for the notion that its roots in reality drive the popularity of the series:

“The Sopranos,” the HBO drama about Italian-American bad guys, never caught on here.

The producer gets the last word [e.a.]:

Fictionalizing reality may be the best way to educate Italy’s distracted audience, Mr. Valsecchi said. “Italians don’t read newspapers — they barely glance at headlines. But here they’re getting the full story, with all its implications.”

Well, he gets the next-to-last word. I get the last word, which is a minor amendment to Mr. Valsecchi’s proposition: Fictionalizing reality is a way to infotain an audience—that is, to capture its attention. But let’s not get carried away. That is different from educating the audience.

Michael Cohen just figured out why we’re going to be in Iraq for a long time (hint: because of Al Qaeda):

In an otherwise fascinating and brilliant overview of Al Qaeda’s current status, [one of the nation's foremost experts on Al Qaeda] sounded one note that struck me as off-key, namely that we can’t leave Iraq because it will play directly into the terrorist organization’s narrative about American retreat - a narrative that was initially constructed in the aftermath of Vietnam and reinforced after American withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia.

At the time, I found the notion troubling, akin to the “credibility” notion that infused the thinking of so many Cold Warriors during the Vietnam War.

But it got me thinking and I went back to look at the President’s August 22nd speech to the VFW in August and I was struck by the fact that he made an almost identical argument.

Where exactly have you been, dude? The best documentary program on televsion, PBS’s Frontline, made this argument on October 4, 2001. Many deeply serious foreign policy thinkers—especially on the right, but also on the left—have been making this argument since 9/11: that Al Qaeda attacked us because it perceived us as weak and soft and lily-livered and unwilling to fight back.

I can’t remember how many articles I read in those first few months after 9/11 in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, to mention just a few, that made this same point over and over again. Of course that was early on, when intelligent people were still looking for real answers.

They just won’t reject Rudy, goddammit. (He may play the Theme Song from 9/11 everywhere he goes, but they don’t know him like we know him, says New York magazine.)

Enter the Politico: Fuggedabout Rudy! He’ just too liberal for you!

Giuliani-Appointed Judges Tend to Lean to the Left

When Rudy Giuliani faces Republicans concerned about his support of gay rights and legal abortion, he reassures them that he is a conservative on the decisions that matter most.

“I would want judges who are strict constructionists because I am,” he told South Carolina Republicans last month. “Those are the kinds of justices I would appoint — Scalia, Alito and Roberts.”

But most of Giuliani’s judicial appointments during his eight years as mayor of New York were hardly in the model of Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito — much less aggressive conservatives in the mold of Antonin Scalia.

A Politico review of the 75 judges Giuliani appointed to three of New York state’s lower courts found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 8 to 1.

Scared yet? Well, McCain just announced. Sorta. In the “newly usual way” (according to the NYT’s Adam Nagourney): on Letterman.

How old school (hat tip: BuzzMachine).

Ezra Klein halfheartedly shoots down *** Matthew Yglesias’s assertion that there is something very wrong with the contemporary American body politic, because it seems that only celebrity politicians, rather than capable wonks, can get any attention these days—as if politics were, you know, a popularity contest or something.

My faith in humanity was restored when I delved into the commens section and found the posters there even more critical than Klein was of Yglesias’s silly reasoning—or grasping at straws, more like.

And then the commenters got to talking about how candidates have to sell themselves:

> Romney is top-tier because just looks and sounds like a President

To me there’s way too much car-salesman in there. I don’t see stately and Presidential so much as I do slick. I like his voice though.

Posted by: Fred | Feb 20, 2007 6:05:30 PM

If I was running for President, I’d rather look like a car salesman than a double-chinned bore. You do have a good point though. Charisma is in the eye of the beholder.

Posted by: Korha | Feb 20, 2007 6:18:43 PM

 

Charisma is in the eye of the beholder.

So true. The problem is that people buy used cars with alarming frequency.

Romney never struck me as a used car salesman, though. He came across as more the guy who exudes an aura of, “People trust me because I’m tall and have thick hair,” which, for me, means I automatically do not trust him. The rest of the world feels differently, however, which is how people like Romney and most members of corporate boards got as far as they have.

Posted by: Constantine | Feb 20, 2007 7:58:46 PM

 

>>people buy used cars with alarming frequency

That struck me as a brilliant observation, particularly in light of an old article (in The American Prospect, from 1991) written by the sociologist Michael Schudson that I just happened to read today, “Delectable Materialism,” in which Schudson examines ever-fashionable critiques of American consumer culture. Because at base Yglesias is critiquing the selling of politicians—in other words, the consumer model of selling (and buying) politicians.

On the subject of selling us stuff through advertising, Schudson writes about one supposedly nefarious scheme that was thought up by GM:

[T]he old complaint [is] that modern industry is dictated by “planned obsolescence” or Sloanism, the annual model change that Alfred P. Sloan introduced at General Motors to coax people to buy a new car even when they have a serviceable old one. Here changes in products are not only useless but manipulative, aimed only at pointless product differentiation to which people will attribute unfounded meaning.

The only trouble is, as Schudson points out, that people didn’t have to be coaxed into buying new cars:

In the case of the automobile industry, consumers were not, in fact, happily holding onto their cars for years until Sloan found a way to introduce wasteful fashion to utilitarian transport vehicles. Years before Sloan dreamt of the annual model change, the used car market was huge and by 1927 its volume outstripped new car sales. People were obviously “buying up” as they could afford to, reproducing in the automobile an objective correlative of already existing systems of class and status distinction. They were resisting the implications of Henry Ford’s one model, one price policy.

So that’s why we buy politicians’ sales pitches! Because we all—well, most of us—start out with used cars and with used-car pitches. (We’re looking for value for our money and we want to believe!) It is only when we can afford to “buy up”—in cars and in politicians—that we get more discriminating. Hmmm.

—————-

***here’s why it should be shot down wholeheartedly: read Gail Collins’s very amusing book Scorpion Tongues for a quick romp through the hair-raisingly and viciously gossipy history of American politics up until—more or less—the 1930s, when Americans became fixated on a different breed of celebrity (movie stars), with whom politicians had to begin to compete in order to stay relevant. Thus the relentless manufacture of “images” for politicians (first critiqued in The Candidate).

The Candidate

And, lo and behold, here we are today in the era of the totally “focus-grouped” politician.

But wait, because there’s a counter-argument (pro-focus-grouped politician, that is) to be found in Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call, an indictment of the Supreme Court’s unjust decision in the 2000 election, a graphic description of the Republican machine’s successful post-election campaign (led ruthlessly and brilliantlly by James Baker), and a devastating critique of the terrible mistakes made by Al Gore in his campaign—chief among them his refusal to ask for or take advice from anyone. No focus groups for him (or, as with the “earth tones” fiasco, the wrong advisers). He kept his own counsel and ran his own campaign. And he ran his post-election campaign, too. I guess I don’t have to tell you what happened.

But perhaps you live in Lebanon and have a yen for different scent, one that reminds you of Hezbollah. How about buying “Resistance Perfume”? It’s unisex, it sells for only $1, and it

comes “exclusively” with a political message and a picture of Hizbullah’s secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Apparently, the scent of resistance is a strong and musky one that comes with a single pledge - “a truthful” one.

“You are the truthful promise … and I have great faith in you and I promise you divine victory,” is the perfume’s slogan, borrowed from one of Nasrallah’s speeches during the July-August war with Israel.

A digitally manipulated picture of a sinking ship, meant to represent the Israeli warship damaged by a Hizbullah missile during the conflict, along with reprints of Nasrallah’s speeches and messages from the “Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons” - are all part of the perfume’s package, turning a cover into a political message.

It’s the “green” choice too, by the way:

“We can put popular European brands” in the “Resistance” bottles, he said. “Versace, Chanel, Escada, white musk, floral scents, whatever scent you want, you can get.”

You can read all about it here: “New Perfume Smells Like ‘Divine Victory” ***

—-

*** The headline refers to Hezbollah’s propaganda campaign, begun immediately following Israel’s smashing of Hezbollah strongholds to smithereens. The ad campaign proclaimed, in French, Hezbollah’s “divine victory” over Israel. I wrote about it here, and I’ll be writing more about propaganda and PRopaganda(TM). They go hand in hand with infotainment.

In the Washington Post, Anthony Shadid writes about a poignant, ironic ad campaign in Beirut that was born of the chaotic political/social/confessional/economic climate in  beleaguered Lebanon—which one of the campaign’s creators called “a country on the verge of ‘absurdistan.’”

Here’s one of the posters:

Farcical signs list doctors by sect. “If we keep thinking like this, the future is going to look like this,” said ad agency’s Kamil Kuran.

Photo Credit: Courtesy H& C Leo Burnett Agency

It was born out of fear:

 Manal Naji, a 27-year-old senior art director, had glanced at a r?sum? tucked underneath another piece of paper. “Christian,” it read. “We were so shocked,” she recalled. In the end, it turned out it was the name of the applicant’s father, but it gave Naji an idea. “What if it actually existed,” she said. “What if it reached the point of putting it on your job application.”

“We wanted the same shocking effect,” added Reem Kotob, a 25-year-old member of the creative team.

And now it has gotten people to think. 

Many have praised the ads for asking uncomfortable, even taboo questions about a system in which sectarian affiliation determines everything from the identity of the president to loyalty to sports teams. Some have mistaken the campaign for reality. Across the capital, one in six billboards was torn down, prevented from being put up or splashed with paint, usually the tactic of choice for conservative Muslims irked by lingerie ads.

This is rich.

Margaret Hodge, a British cabinet minister who claims to have disagreed with Tony Blair’s foreign policy since 1998, has accused him of following a policy of “moral imperialism”—i.e., “exporting British attitudes and ideas to other countries,” according to The Times (London), which also reports that she later denied having made this remark.

Whether or not she actually said this is, frankly, irrelevant. It’s what Blair has been challenging, in speech after speech, as stubborn and bizarre Western “opinion.” Implicit in Hodge’s controversial remark is her perspective—that the West’s values are alien and unwelcome in the rest of the world and that we’re bullying people and trying to shove these things down “their” throat.

I was going to write a high-toned, morally outraged post, with links to Tony Blair’s most recent speech in defense of Western values and Shelby Steele’s Essay “White Guilt and the Western Past.” Oops—I guess I just did.

Perhaps I can make amends by offering up an example of what I consider to be moral imperialism: MSNBC’s breathless Special on Scientology, featuring TomKat, the Camera-ready Castle at Bracciano, fashions by Giorgio Armani, guest list by [insert name of Cruise's PRopaganda (TM) Team here: they have just earned themselves a gigantic bonus, 'cause The Glamorous Scientology Wedding of TomKat has totally hijacked the airwaves], with stupendously reverent questions by anchor Alex Witt and soothing responses from the Rev. John Carmichael (”Church of Scientology”)

Political commentators seem surprised by the fact that negative campaign ads attract media attention, whereas boring old vote-for-me ads don’t:

No Negativity, No News Coverage?

Friday’s Tennessean has an interview with Vanderbilt University political science professor John Geer about negative campaign ads. This segment…

What portion of campaign ads in presidential campaigns did you find were negative?

Over the last 44 years there has been an increase in negativity. But it’s basically a 50-50 divide. But if you were to listen to coverage of campaigns you’d think you only get negative ads.

…reflects directly on The Tennessean and the rest of the Nashville news media, which seem to be covering only those races this election year in which one or both sides are launching negative ads.

Why is anyone surprised by this?

Television thrives on conflict.

Audiences love gossip.

The best attack ads reveal (or make up) the best dirt.

The end.

Last week, I mentioned that Reuters had taken a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind by establishing a news bureau in the online simulation-world-site Second Life. Well, miracle of miracles, as the Guardian reports, it turns out that book publishers got there first.

The first time I meet Penguin’s digital publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen, I crash land at his feet. Admirably unperturbed, he shows me his house, we have a chat about Penguin’s latest digital initiative, then fly to a library before he teleports me into the future….

Businesses as diverse as car manufacturers (such as Toyota) and clothing companies (including Adidas and American Apparel) have established a presence in Second Life; the news agency Reuters recently made the news itself by announcing that it is to embed a journalist within Second Life to hunt down stories to report back to the real world.

Penguin, however, is the first major publisher to dip its toe into the virtual world and, appropriately, it has chosen Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as the book with which to test the waters. With its invention of the notion of a “metaverse” (a contraction of “metaphysical universe”) it is acknowledged as the inspiration behind Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Penguin went whole-hog with this experiment, working with Rivers Run Red, a “virtual world design agency” (who knew??), to create a version of Snow Crash that would appeal to Second Life visitors:

[T]his offers readers excerpts of the text, an audio clip and a link which clicks through to a dedicated Second Life page on the Penguin website, complete with the opportunity to buy the book at a discount. They are now developing a virtual bookshelf of other Penguin titles for the Second Life resident.

Penguin isn’t the only publisher to latch on to the Second Life phenomenon. A small press has opened shop there too:

This “ground-up” approach to publishing within Second Life is interesting a publisher at the other end of the commercial spectrum. Neal Hoskins (avatar name Fernando Proctor) is the publisher-founder of Winged Chariot, a real-world small press specialising in children’s literature in translation. He is a relatively newcomer to Second Life but, when we meet for a (virtual) cuppa by a (virtual) roaring fire in a (virtual) log cabin, he is keen to talk about the opportunities for developing literature within the world rather than bringing it in from outside.

In the virtual world there are benefits to being a small publisher, says Hoskins. You can move more quickly to experiment with new ideas, and there is less competition from the “big guys”.

“I’d like to look for talent in here,” he muses, “I envisage starting small with something like a poetry or secrets wall where residents can leave notes about their Second Life experiences, and then publishing the best of them, like Paul Auster’s True Tales of American Life. The book could even be brought back into the real world. We could open a fiction imprint list in Second Life, something that’s really difficult for an independent publisher in real life.”

Whether these experiments pay off in dollars remains to be seen, but Second Life has certainly captured the imagination of a lot of people: there are 1 million subscribers so far.

You can follow Penguin UK’s discussion about virtual publishing here, on their blog.

Hezbollah continues its propaganda campaign, this time in French:

Lebanese workers hang an advertising poster showing Hezbollah fighters launching Katyusha rockets, with the French words reading: ‘Divine Victory,’ at the highway of Beirut international airport, Lebanon, in this picture taken on Aug. 18, 2006. Even Hezbollah has joined the advertising blitz. The guerrilla group paid a public relations firm US$140,000 (euro 111,358) to design a campaign called ‘Divine Victory.’ Hundreds of billboards have sprung up across the country in Arabic, English and French _ glorifying what many in Lebanon see as a Hezbollah victory over Israel in the 34-day war that ended with a U.N.-brokered cease-fire on Aug. 14.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The billboards didn’t exactly “sprung [spring] up across the country.” They are part of a massive PR campaign. The incredible details are here, in Newsweek. Reprinted below is the professional advice offered to Hezbollah by the PR firm it engaged for the campaign:

Lower your “message density”: Islamist propaganda was once known for its densely impenetrable Arabic, peppered with quotes from the Qur’an. But Kawtharani says that in this campaign, Hizbullah has made an effort to get “straight to the point” with its slogans. The international public “expects a clear and single message,” he says. “That’s the language of the media these days.” So Hizbullah settled on the simple and catchy “Divine Victory” slogan, and repeated it over and over.

Speak in the lingua franca: One of the striking things about Hizbullah’s campaign is that many of the billboards around Lebanon are in English, crafted explicitly for foreign TV cameras. Some of Hizbullah’s six-man creative team, like Kawtharani himself, studied at the American University of Beirut and are fluent enough to employ a more subtly effective English idiom—the MADE IN THE U.S.A. banners, for example.

Employ irony: Some of Hizbullah’s most common ads use a tactic that Kawtharani calls sending “double messages.” One example: a red banner featuring the slogan extremely accurate targets! juxtaposed against the rubble of Beirut’s southern suburbs. “In advertising, irony is part of the modern style,” says Kawtharani. “The audience will receive the double message.”

Sanitize the images: Conventional wisdom holds that Hizbullah gained sympathy throughout the war by circulating graphic images of Lebanon’s dead, often in e-mail chain letters. But now that the war is over, says Kawtharani, publicizing what he calls the “more aggressive” visuals can be counterproductive. Some of Hizbullah’s ads thus feature symbolic images of the killing—bodies wrapped in blankets, for instance—but avoid the most horrific scenes. The West already considers Hizbullah a “bloody party,” Kawtharani acknowledges. Continuing to publicize carnage would reinforce this image, especially among foreign audiences.

The New York Times predicts that the term “Islamic fascists,” having proved oh-so-unpopular, will no longer emanate from Bush’s mouth.

By Labor Day, Islamic fascists and Islamo-fascism were the hot new conservative buzzwords.

And then, just as suddenly, they were gone — at least from the president’s lips.

“The debate that we wanted to launch was about an ideological struggle against an enemy that has very specific plans, ambitions and aspirations, much like movements of the past, like fascism and Nazism,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president. Addressing the term Islamic fascists, Mr. Bartlett said, “I’m sure he’ll use it again.”

But it seems unlikely Mr. Bush will use it again, given the outcry it provoked.

Muslims, both here and in other countries, were deeply offended.

We’ll see about where Mr. Bush goes with the term “Islamic fascism,” which gets across the message that there’s an ideology behind the terrorists who are threatening our way of life (a notion that progressives would rather not engage, because it leaves them with no peaceful options for dealing with terrorism).

Meanwhile, our pop culture reliably takes on politics—sooner or later. In this case sooner: an ad agency has caused an uproar by creating a radio spot for a car dealership that is said to be declaring a “jihad on the auto market.”

A car dealership’s tongue-in-cheek radio advertisement declaring “a jihad on the auto market,” will not be changed, the company said.

The ad has drawn criticism that its content is offensive to Muslims.

Several stations rejected the spot from Dennis Mitsubishi, which boasts sales representatives wearing “burqas” — the head-to-toe traditional dress for some Islamic women — will sell vehicles that can “comfortably seat 12 jihadists in the back.”

Jihad is a holy war waged by Muslims in defence of Islam.

“We firmly believe the ad does not in any way disrespect any religion or culture, but we feel, I guess, that maybe poking a little fun at radical extremists is fair game,” dealership president Keith Dennis said.

“It was our intention to craft something around some of the buzzwords of the day and give everyone a good chuckle and be a little bit of a tension reliever.”

Good luck with that!