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 »
But that’s exactly what conservative Republicans are doing on talking head shows this week. Over and over again, when asked to explain how the bailout bill self-imploded yesterday, they cite “partisan bickering.” Frankly, I’m with Gail Collins on partisanship: it’s just part of the process. But even if you think, as did George Washington, that parties are a great evil, the phrase just doesn’t apply here.
Let’s review:
Bailout proposed by REPUBLICANS Paulson and Bernanke.
Bailout revised via negotiations with top Senate DEMOCRATS.
Revised bill supported by REPUBLICAN President Bush.
Passed by Senate DEMOCRATS and REPUBLICANS.
Dies in the House, 40 DEMOCRATS, 130 REPUBLICANS vote “no.”
The tension here, between supporters and opponents of the bill, has less to do with party allegiance than it does with who’s up for reelection: CNN reported today than 2/3 of “no” votes came from members in contested races this November. Despite the frozen credit markets and concerns about jobs and home loans, the plan just hadn’t won over most voters.
And if there IS an ideological line to be drawn between those who were for and against this bill, it’s not between Democrats and Republicans, but between conservative Republicans in the House (who made up the lion’s share of naysayers) and moderates in the Senate/the Executive agencies (who proposed and drafted the bill). Having brought DOWN a bipartisan bill by breaking with their own party, Congressional Republicans are now blaming partisan differences for the collapse of the plan.
Here’s what infuriates me most about this tactic. “Partisan bickering” is code for a belief that the governmental process is general is more of a problem than a solution to Main Street woes, and thus (as these conservatives belief) that we should reduce the size of government. To sabotage that process when it IS working, just so that you can claim on the talk show circuit that the process DOESN’T work is a cheap, base political ploy. In fact, it’s partisan politics.
So said my mother, 9:56 pm ET last night, or 2/3 of the way through the first Presidential back-and-forth. Despite Jim Lehrer’s best efforts to force the candidates to talk to one another and really duke it out on the issues, they stuck to their canned stump speeches. McCain recycled his favorite gems (like that “Miss Congeniality” line) twice in the same evening.
To the candidates’ credit, the exchange last night was wonkish, policy-centered, which is how I like my politics. But McCain failed to make connections between details (pork spending) and his broader vision (anyone?) while Obama failed to bring any of the passion that marks his broad vision speeches to policy positions. Even the NYTimes called him a technocrat. It’s almost as though he CARES more about telling us what America should look like than grappling with how to get there. A president who CAN’T get excited about detail is just as bad as one who can’t see the forest for the trees. The best policy wonk leaders of the C20th–FDR, LBJ, Reagan and Clinton–could do both: they had vision, they had policies and they could explain in accessible detail how the two connected. Read the rest of this entry »
In my history of media course, we had a guest lecture by a young scholar of 18th century European print culture the other day. Dr. Will Slaughter is a protege of pioneering cultural historian Robert Darnton. Darnton basically maintains that there has always been a news media, because any spreading of information counts as news. The transitions from people gossiping in living rooms (c. 1700), to gossiping in streets (c. 1750), to writing down their gossip (c.1800), to videotaping that gossip (c. 1950)Â are technological superficialities. He denies that there’s any historical moment where mass media is born (and thus, denies any theories that link mass media to the rise of mass/democratic politics in the mid-19th century).
In a recent column, the International Herald Tribune’s Roger Cohen makes the case that with the financial sector in turmoil, jobs at GoldmanSachs and JPMorgan might lose their appeal for bright young things coming off the Ivy League assembly line, fueling a renewed interest in public service. To Cohen, that “rediscovery of the public sphere” is an end in itself, since he associates periods in American history when the public sector had prestige with prosperity, international prowess and high morale. (I’m somewhat inclined to agree, but that’s beside my present point).
I believe a renewal of the public sector as a high prestige career for the nation’s brightest would go a long way to preventing future crises like this one. Unlike the recession after 9/11, or the oil crises of the 1970s, the current collapse is the direct result of human malfeasance, not the consequence of external forces. The nation’s brightest minds went to Wall Street, armed with the Michael Douglas belief that greed is good, and more than enough Ivy League education to find the legal and accounting loopholes that allowed them to make absurdly leveraged deals and endorse Swiss cheese loans. Meanwhile, regulators slept at the switch.
But even if they had tried, what could the regulators have done? John McCain may have spoken out of turn when he trashed Chris Cox, SEC Chairman, this week. But in principle, I sort of agree with him. The people who staff our regulatory agencies mean well, but they are just not as sharp as the people they are meant to regulate. And that’s because smart young people don’t want to take jobs in government.
I sent Cohen’s piece around to friends, and one set of comments from a U.Penn senior really hit home. He’s applying for those finance jobs, despite the current hiring freeze, because 1. it pays more and 2. working for the government is beneath his SAT score. Public service he says “isn’t something the smartest people need to do. It’s something most people can do.” So long as smart kids think that public service is for dummies, we’ll have dumb public policy.
What’s the solution? My mother, a nonprofit activist, had some good ideas. Sweeten the deal for government employees with better pay, subsidized housing or discounted college tuition for their kids. “Even if it meant higher taxes, it would surely be cheaper having smart regulators than a 700 billion dollar bailout later.”
I’m finally old enough to admit it: Mama knows best.
Ever since Sex and the City first combined girl power with expensive shopping, women have been asking whether feminism is over. Does it, some 1970s types asked, undermine feminism to be so excited about feminine clothes and romantic ambitions? If so, responded young tween viewers, does it mean feminism is over because we no longer need it?
Yeah right. Gender inequity is shrinking, but it’s far from gone. Women make 78 cents on the dollar, as compared to 60 cents 4 decades ago. We are equal to men now when it comes to college degrees, but still behind if you’re looking at science and business education. We’re twice as likely as men to fall below the poverty line once we enter the workforce, and poor women are 30% poorer (further below the line) than men. And on the cultural front, just read a few articles about Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin and you’ll see, sexism is alive and well.
As I’ve written before, shows like Sex and the City just reflect a new feminism that says equal opportunities should leave room for women’s individual choices about how feminine and how high powered we want to be. Aisha Sultan’s column seems to suggest that with the Palin candidacy, even the right wing has come around to a new choice feminism, somehow bypassing the possibility that her run is just a big political hoax.
Problematically, many women and men take the new feminism as a sign that feminism itself is irrelevant, that we’re in the “post-feminist” age. And institutions that define themselves as feminist–women’s rights groups, for example–suffer as a result. Today, I learned that Bitch magazine, a publication that along with Ms. was a leader in publicizing women’s lib, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Seems many women don’t want to read that stuff anymore, somehow ignoring all the real economic and cultural signs that we need such voices.
I can’t afford to bail Bitch out, but I can do my best to publicize their cause. If feminism is the belief in equality, then I never want to live in a post-feminist world.
