Posts Tagged Under ‘Advertising’

Dudes, Why So Much Debt?

The Wife and I had a good discussion today sparked by Sunday’s first piece in the New York Times series on debt in America. (And thanks to J Frog for sending me that way today.)

I did learn a nice history of the lending industry from the article, in particular the industry’s shift in focus from demanding repayment to collecting fee-based income off of ever-rolling debt. While the credit-card industry, and certainly the mortgage industry of the past few years, often embodies the term “predatory capitalism”, it does seem that the article shifted too much of the onus for America’s debt problem away from the public. This is similar to media outlets who generally avoid putting any blame on the voting public for America’s political messes, for obvious business reasons. (What audience wants to be told that it’s the proverbial box of dull tacks? I prefer my mental tack sharp, thanks.)

Maybe I’m too harsh, though, because the writers and editors might have been making a point on the sly about the general public by choosing the subject that they did. Ms. McLeod — no relation to Connor, who has a far better repayment cycle with which to work — really makes one unfortunate (read: not well-thought-out) decision after another. From spending her already debt-addled medical recovery cruising QVC, to adding her 20-year-old son onto her second home-refinancing and ruining his credit too, I really don’t understand what made her do what she did.

So that raises the question: What really has made debt-laden ‘Mercans turn away from the admirable saving habits of back in the not-that-far-off day? Why is “I gotta have it” such a seemingly more powerful motivator across society now than it was then? This was the topic of conversation between The Wife and me. We came to one important conclusion that’s both seemingly unrelated but not that surprising: television.

The modern debt cycle really started to germinate at about the time the TV-raised Boomer generation was earning enough money to buy homes, sign up for credit cards and pop out Millennials like your gracious host. Boomers had grown up with TV, which based on its sheer volume of audio and visual stimulation was inevitably packed full of product pitches and brand names. Sure, their parents — the Greatests — were watching TV too, but the Depression experience burned the saving ethic into their parents’ heads for life. Greatests learned back then to do things like wearing the same six velour jumpsuits for 30 years. (Which is smart — over time this actually becomes cool, what with the roundabout cycle of retro hipness.)

Boomers weren’t about to wear velour jumpsuits; velour is too hot in summer, and after a childhood of American prosperity and the enveloping nature of TV advertising, they had to get that fine narrow-lapel suit to go with the Commodore 64 for the kids. Advertisers, too, were well-aware of just how good a job TV had done to implant the “buy stuff” message into America’s collective mind. Over time they shifted from making their products attractive to making access to their products a moral right — “You deserve a break today” and “Live richly”, not just “Our McNuggets taste totally rad” and “Hey, peep out this low interest rate.” This newly created sense of entitlement grew strong until too many people didn’t bother to use their better instincts, and the things they felt they needed encompassed even luxury goods that were previously — and still probably should be — considered impractical on the average income. Cue up many of my generational peeps growing up in this environment, who should nonetheless know better than to spend that percentage allotted for savings on Manhattan rent and cosmopolitans, and the cycle continues. (Also, thank you, Mom and Dad, for teaching me how to save cash and how to avoid becoming a spoiled jagoff.)

In conclusion, if we didn’t have TV, we might not have a subprime mortgage crisis and government bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The end.

The Top News Outlets for May 2008

Just saw this list of the most popular online news sources from Nielsen Online.

Brand or Channel — May ‘08 Unique Audience (000) — May ‘07 Unique Audience (000)

Yahoo! News — 35,846 — 30,451
MSNBC Digital Network — 35,184 — 28,347
CNN Digital Network — 33,101 — 29,094
AOL News — 22,524 — 17,444
NYTimes.com — 21,340 — 12,775

Tribune Newspapers — 16,238 — 13,300
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division — 14,629 — 12,645
Google News — 11,356 — 9,359
ABCNEWS Digital Network — 11,124 — 10,211
USATODAY.com — 10,785 — 9,528

Fox News Digital Network — 10,132 — 7,594
CBS News Digital Network — 9,225 — 8,620
washingtonpost.com — 9,204 — 8,613
McClatchy Newspaper Network — 9,131 — 9,885
Hearst Newspapers Digital — 7,955 — 8,380

WorldNow — 7,523 — 6,232
MediaNews Group Newspapers — 6,965 — 6,189
Slate — 6,456 — 3,856
Advance Internet — 6,202 — 6,006
IB Websites — 5,943 — 5,203

BBC News — 5,933 — 6,554
Cox Newspapers — 5,826 — 3,949
Belo Television — 5,354 — 3,301
Topix — 5,133 — 4,411
Boston.com — 4,962 — 4,038

Gannett Broadcasting — 4,735 — 3,030
TheHuffingtonPost.com — 4,715 — 1,327
Associated Press — 4,527 — 8,191
Belo Newspapers — 4,462 — 2,417
Fox Television Stations — 4,386 — 3,451

I’m happy to see so many newspaper companies are cracking the list. The audience is there; we just need to use that more effectively to make money and keep things going. It’s also good that the big news sites like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN beat out Google News by so much: the first three still have a human element at play in editing, proving that context really does matter.

So good news to all you editors: for now, you still can’t be replaced by robots.

Reading Recs

I recently read and enjoyed the following, so feel free to hook that up for yourself:

• This UK Daily Mail profile of John McCain’s first wife. I had always heard about his first marriage, but knew next to nothing about it. Definitely a sensationalist source, but an unflattering new look.
• An article on the prevalence of skulls by Stephen Marche in Esquire. There’s no link to it on their site, so you can just read this other description of it. Who doesn’t like a memento mori?
• This inspiring article from the Chicago Tribune magazine about a woman in Roseland (a nasty part of Chicago) who started her own anti-violence group for the teens in the neighborhood.

Good on ya.

Going A Bit Too Far With Web Advertising

I’m all for innovative Internet advertising — it puts enchiladas on my table — but Phorm’s plan for tracking users’ comprehensive Internet behavior via their ISP seems a bit overboard. The privacy concerns are obvious, so I’ll come at this from a business perspective.

Phorm on its face is obviously bad for individual media outlets, whose perspective I’m admittedly favoring: this all-sites-visited method of advertising prompts advertisers to buy based on users’ web behavior as one singular package, not separate entities grouped by the aforementioned individual outlets. The ability for each individual outlet to tailor its advertising message to its particular clients is thus diminished: this is ultra-individualistic without taking into account what visitors to, say, the New York Times have in common with other visitors to the Times‘ site. But I think this all-the-web approach is inconvenient for advertisers: Instead of buying up space on NYTimes.com based on the common interests of the Times’ audience, advertisers are going to have to do their own aggregating work to design a broad base of characteristics that somehow coincide with each other. The NY Times can provide demographic info on its audience and advertisers can reach that audience by buying on the NY Times, but how is a company wanting to reach a targeted group going to isolate that group based on their visiting tons of different sites? Phorm could probably aggregate packages of user characteristics and sell those, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

There’s also the much bigger problem of having every potential site that the user visits opt into this advertising network — it’s either that or put some sort of ISP-based spyware onto the user’s machine to serve up desktop ads. Serving advertising over top of other sites’ own advertising is a recipe for being sued, and desktop ads always drove me nuts with various file-sharing services. And that was back in the day of 2000, so I doubt users have grown an appetite in the time since.

I’ll leave the very legitimate privacy concerns to other peeps — like the New York state legislature — but I think that Phorm as an ad strategy doesn’t really address the all-important point of finding appropriate inventory for your ads.

On a related note, I think the quadrantONE network is a great idea for newspapers, but what I really want to see the network do is get into local-market ad production and sales. Once newspapers provide effective venues for small businesses to advertise online as they do now in print — the production issues in creating web ads obviously have a different set of challenges from those of print ads — then that’s a big breakthrough for newspapers.

Guinness’ St. Patrick’s Day Thing

I just saw one of the commercials in which Guinness promoted its effort to make St. Patrick’s Day an “official holiday” through the U.S. Congress. Leaving aside the fact that, pragmatically, March 18 should be the national holiday — people get hangovers, after all, and we get Jan. 1 instead of Dec. 31 off — I’ll give them credit for a clever idea-planting deal.

Clearly Guinness — and Diageo, its parent — know that this official-holiday thing, from a political perspective, really isn’t much. If Congress does recognize it, it would likely be just a symbolic recognition and not a federal holiday like Thanksgiving; if they don’t, well, whatever. The idea they’ve planted is to reinforce the predominant idea that St. Patrick’s is a time to take the entire day — particularly nice if it’s a day off anyway — and drink until you’re lying on the floor, which just might involve such Ireland-iconic (and delicious!) Diageo brands as Guinness, Harp or Smithwick’s. Either way, the drinking idea stays sticky in your brain-piece.

But back to the campaign, I would like to point out that St. Patrick’s Day is already a national holiday in — shocker — Ireland, where it is celebrated by taking the day off, going to Mass, and then hanging out at home. Parts of Ireland have imported the Americanized St. Patrick’s, but it’s by and large a day where people just rest up to honor my patron saint.

While I love a good party as much as the next guy, the wilding-out of St. Patrick’s is a trend I don’t much like — call it old-school, but St. Patrick’s Day to me is a day to watch bagpipers in parades and look back at just how far the Irish have come in the past 200+ years of America’s existence. Yes, pub-going is a big part of Ireland, but the whole get-blasted-in-green-hats thing is way more about consumerism than it is about any sort of ethnic pride. (Check out the number of Bud and Miller promos next time you’re out on St. Patrick’s.)

To acknowledge the counterargument, woo! Alcohol! But yeah, take it easy.

The Cacao Craze

Yesterday while housesitting for a friend, the wife and I finished off a hearty dinner. (For those both wondering and not wondering, I dropped culinary skillz to the tune of mussels in white-wine and garlic broth accompanied by a toasted baguette, fresh green beans in lemon-parsley butter and rosemary roasted potatoes. Fools better recognize.) While coming down from my mollusk-induced high, I opted for a piece of chocolate for dessert. I curiously noted the chocolate’s label: “65% Cacao”.

Trendspotting time, homes.

Chocolate companies are repping this cacao trend to the fullest. Take a look at some of the yuppie high-end chocolates next time you’re at the grocery store, and you’ll inevitably notice more percentage rates than a savings and loan.

For those who aren’t Pennsylvanian — read “awesome” — and haven’t done Hershey’s Chocolate World (be warned that the link features loud and annoying music), the cacao tree — native to Mesoamerica and an important part of the Columbian exchange — produces the beans that are processed into cocoa and, subsequently, chocolate. If chocolate is steel, cacao is the iron ore. (I guess that means adding milk is the Bessemer process and Switzerland is the Monongahela Valley.)

As a dude who likes to get his occasional chocolate on, I think I am qualified to state that good chocolate, like any good food, does happen solely by cramming your product with as much of one ingredient as you can. It is instead about balance: cacao is one part, but how well do you balance it with sugar, milk and other ingredients? That is key.

The cacao-percentage thing then is sly marketing: a way for one chocolate company to artificially quantify that its product is better than the competitor. I don’t know if this strategy is native to the U.S. chocolate market, but it does seem like a peculiarly American way to advertise food. Add in the oft-discussed health benefits of dark chocolate — easily confused with its tastier milk-enhanced variant, and who doesn’t like to exaggerate the healthiness of something that tastes great? — and you have the perfect status-symbol storm.

I think most of us are smart enough not to buy chocolate based on it having some higher numerical value, but I’m sure there are people who do so. To those people, I say, yo: buy the best-tasting kind, because higher cacao != consistently awesome.

This chocolate, on the other hand, always == awesome.

Pittsburgh Penguins: Worst Actors Ever

Thanks to Jerry for cluing me in to this awesome commercial. The first nine seconds are blank, but keep watching:

Why didn’t Malkin get an equally terrible/hilarious line?

Sprint Bearded Dude Commercial

There’s been this one ad on all the time during football this season, the one where the bearded dude is talking about how this Sprint service makes it seem like there are multiple copies of a person. It has lots of miniature copies of people running around.

My question is, what is the bearded dude’s accent? He sounds mostly Irish, but then he mixes it up enough that I have no idea.

These are the questions on which I think deeply.