Advertisers have always sold “youth.” Drink this juice, use this lotion, take this little blue pill and stay 17 forever. But this season brings a new twist . Advertisers are reviving old ad campaigns to sell new products: ie buy this and feel like you did when you last heard this jingle.
Exhibit A: “In an Absolut World.” When I was a kid, Absolut had a series of magazine ads with a the tagline Absolut _____. Each ad was a picture of a scene with the Absolut bottle shape embedded somewhere, like a Where’s Waldo. The tagline filled in the blank with a word to describe the scene. “Absolut Brooklyn,” my personal favorite, had the bottles as the arches in the Brooklyn bridge. The photography was pretty stellar, and teens used to collect them like celebrity clippings, but most collectors were underage. Not so good for business. Now we’re all grown up and vodka-drinkers ourselves, so the ads are back: a new series fills in the ____ in the tagline with a place name and gives us a picture that symbolizes the local zeitgeist. In theory, the selling point here is the same as in the old ads, “Drink Absolut and your ____ will be more absolutely ___.” But to me, the ads say “Come have a drink with an old friend, the brand you used to love and can now afford to buy.”
Exhibit B: “Citi Never Sleeps.” Citigroup has this new commercial out “Citi never sleeps.”
If Citi’s agency had invented the line yesterday, it might have worked as a reassuring description of a company watching out for its consumers in a rapidly changing, volatile, even scary business environment. But in actuality, the tagline is a revival of the line “The Citi Never Sleeps,” which Citibank used in the pre-Sandy Weil days to describe itself as financial firm serving Wall Street fat cats and paced to their trading schedule. Hardly the same company. Hardly the same idea. But using the same line today bypasses all the intervening changes to say, “Hey, remember us? We were around when you were getting richer.”
Even deeper down, however, I think the attempt to package nostalgia as a ticket to youth is as much about the ad agencies as it is about the clients they represent. The 1980s, when these campaigns ran, were boom times for the platforms we now deride as “old media.” Revisiting them says “Hey, remember when Madison Avenue mattered?” And whether or not the ads work, dabbling in that nostalgia makes MadAve feel better.
My good friend Megan and I spend a lot of time emailing one another with thoughts on Maureen Dowd’s NYTimes columns. We both generally dislike Dowd’s work, yet somehow we can’t get her off our minds. My major problem with Dowd isn’t the arguments she wants to make–I’ll agree with her, for example, when she depicts George W. Bush as simpleminded and Dick Cheney as manipulative. It’s the fact that her style of snarky satire only confirms the dangerous stereotype people have about women in power–that they are catty and clawing–the same stereotype Dowd often complains about. In general, Dowd has a tendency to mimic or come down to the level of the people she is trying to dismantle.
This weekend’s column was a perfect example. Dowd’s right that Sarah Palin is less than brilliant and that the Joe Six Packs like her for it. There is surely room for a sustained examination of why folksiness beats intellect in our politics, so much so that intelligent leaders (Bill Clinton, Rhodes Scholar comes to mind) have to play down their brains to succeed. But Maureen Dowd is hardly in a position to complain about someone speaking to the lowest common denominator. If she’s so in favor of high-minded elite discourse, why doesn’t she write some?
Last week, I had a great time blogging the veep debate briefly considered doing the same for the presidential debate on Tuesday night. I’m glad I thought better of it, because the whole thing was a big bore. In fact, the ennui of it all was the only thing pundits agreed upon this morning. Otherwise, they were busy hashing out the same old attacks on each other, which is precisely what the candidates did themselves.
There WAS one surprising source of amusement, however, when both Obama and McCain said Warren Buffett would be on their short list for Treasury Secretary. I have misgivings about asking private sector experts to run public sector enterprises. Sometimes, as in the case of Mike Bloomberg, it works out great. Other times, a la Mitt Romney, it flops. The key is whether the expert can check their private enterprise mentality at the .gov door, since business and government just don’t work the same way.
A former teacher of mine put it well today when he compared working in public schools to independent ones. At a private school, you can accept only students you want to teach; at a public school you have to teach the ones you have. Similarly, Warren Buffett can “throw on his living room floor the balance sheet of any company he doesn’t want to invest in. You can’t throw millions of people on the floor.” A Treasury Secretary is like a public school teacher in the hardest inner-city school–you will never have enough books or enough time, but you still have the teach the kids you get. Could a man worth 50 billion and used to making his own choices face that?
Awhile back, I mocked the NY Times’ plan to cut costs by combining sections of the paper to streamline printing. Today, the new NY Times debuted at my doorstep and I found it a bit sad and thin to hold.
But one story from last week’s OLD paper has me thinking this scheme is a good idea after all–this item on a terrorism trial that is now in its appeal stage appeared in the Metro section, instead of with other war on terror headlines in the national and international front section. Why? Because the trial itself was in Brooklyn and the reporter who found the scoop was probably on the metro beat.
In the NEW paper, that story would appear in the front section, because there is no Metro section, but it would appear buried in the back of that section, under the heading for New York regional news. I want the Times to go further, by merging all National, International and Regional coverage and organizing the front section with the biggest stories from all three beats in front. In other words, put the Brooklyn terror story on page 1 instead of page 20.
Why? In today’s globalized world, no story is ever completely bubbled off in one geographic zone: the best national stories have local color; the best local stories have international import.
Turning the front of the NYTimes into a single Headline News section is an important acknowledgment of that.
There is a lot being written about this election as a watershed moment for the rise of new media political coverage. One reason is just timing: the election comes just as new media is really hitting its stride. Another reason is the many young people joining the political ranks after consuming gallons of Obama Kool-Aid. A third reason, however, is the level of micro-competition taking place here. By micro-competition, I’m thinking of the LONG campaign season due to the heavily fragmented primaries (some 15 candidates in all). That process created a culture where, even more than usual, little details mattered as voters tried to differentiate between candidates whose policy positions were often alike. That culture has fed into the general election, even though there are real policy topics to discuss now. With all that detail, in this nitty-gritty (or nit-picky, depending how you see it) campaign culture, new media has come to play a crucial role. Blogs are ideally suited to link together small items to help us see the whole. More importantly, they’re ideally suited to comment on small items in rapid succession: which is why if there’s one blogging practice that really exploded in this election, it’s the practice of live-blogging political events. With that, here are my live thoughts on tonight’s debate.
9:00 pm: Both candidates come out strong. Biden is forceful and makes himself the wonk–calls out Sarah Palin early for being fluffy by asking if HE can “get back to the question.” She’s articulate and poised, more confident than she has seemed in interviews with the press, and carefully steering the first question about the economy to her (professed) area of expertise, corruption.
9:20 pm: Ouch, Palin is using her stump speech again. “Government is too often the problem.” She is making a point of showcasing everything she learned in debate boot camp this week. “McCain’s plan is detailed, and I want to give you some details.” And she does actually know the numbers, impressive. If she could have said ‘detail’ again she would have. Not sure how credible it is to say the government is bad when you are running to join it, but hey, that’s just me. Biden is acing the delicate balance of being aggressive against Palin’s policy statements without attacking her and taking the feminist backlash by speaking to Gwen Ifill and not Palin directly. Biden’s best comment so far: McCain’s health care plan is “the ultimate bridge to nowhere.” Read the rest of this entry »
