ranting tantrum

Here’s an important lesson that some brands never seem to get: never try to disguise promotional communications as personal communications. It can really rub people the wrong way, like sandpaper on the knuckles.

Case in point: on a recent trip, we found ourselves checking in to a West Coast location of a national hotel brand that’s become hot with the wannabe jet set crowd. The front desk clerk was very enthusiastic and accommodating. At the end of checking us in, he said, “Oh and there’s a message for you!” He handed us a thick, sealed envelope of off-white recycled paper with our name typed elegantly on the front.

Our mind was racing. A message! For lil ‘ol us! Maybe it was an important communiqué from a client or colleague. Or a loving note from home: “hope you got in safe – we eagerly await your return!” We left the envelope sealed for the elevator ride up to the room, savoring the mystery and potential held within.

In the room we dropped our luggage and tore into the envelope. Inside was a piece of paper with typesetting on it that began: “A message from the manager.” It went on to tell us about all the wonderful new facilities of the hotel, along with a complete run-down of all the benefits of their Rewards program. We gently tore the envelope and its contents into pieces and let it fall into the elegant trash can under the desk, while contemplating the hard, gray truth that maybe, in fact, no one loves us.

For no other reason than it’s cool and beautiful, here’s a time-lapse glimpse of the recent Washington D.C. snowstorm.

In honor of this week’s contentious climate talks in Copenhagen, we’re sharing some of our favorite climate change awareness spots.

First is a spot by WFF (World Wildlife Fund) from 2008, produced by FCB Toronto:

This is an Israeli spot (also from 2008) that has amazing visual energy - and a rather disturbing soundtrack.

Whether you’re a climate change believer or skeptic, you have to admit this stuff has real power.

Nice to see good ol’ fashioned sexism is alive and well down under.

The convention in the marketing and advertising business is to address the almighty “consumer”. We launch “consumer” campaigns. We target “consumer” segments. We go “direct-to-consumer”. It’s a practice that goes back to the dawn of advertising time when the first family of ad people began scrawling slogans and heroic pictures of products on cave walls.

At Tantrum, we’ve been wondering lately if the use of the “c” word isn’t perhaps a little counterproductive to our efforts.

Think about the image that comes to mind when you hear the word “consumer”.  It’s usually a cow , a pig, or some other highly unflattering barnyard metaphor. In the human world, it’s a usually blubbery dude slouching on the couch with ketchup stains on his t-shirt. Or it’s Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtain crushing large quanties of beer cans against their coneheads. These are not exactly aspirational images.

By definition, a consumer is one who is engaged in “consumption” which itself is not such a pretty word. Not so long ago consumption was a horrible sickness that usually lead to quarantine and then death. More recently, “consumption” is often placed right after “conspicuous” and everyone knows that consuming conspicuously is a giant no-no these days, punishable by key scratches down the side of your Hummer or having Donna Karan accessories burned on your front lawn.

In psychological terms, to be consumed is not a healthy state either. It’s come to mean obsessively focusing on a single object or desire, often to one’s detriment. And in recent years, the environmental movement has done such a number on the word that you can hardly even utter “consume” without mentally filling in the rest of the phrase: “24% of the world’s resources.”

Face it, these are not good times to be a consumer.

So our question is: in such a non-consuming atmosphere, why would we aspire to talk to the kind of person no one wants to be?

Maybe it’s time we found some new ultra-insider industry jargon to stick in our briefs. Consider, for instance: In-taker. Gatherer. Citizen Buyer; Personal Purchasing Decision Maker (PPDM).

Or better yet. How about just referring the people we’re selling to as people.

As in: you’ve got your B2B campaign, your DM, your RM, your Professional. And then you’ve got your People campaign.

We like the sound of that.

This is probably stating the obvious. But if you’re a brand or a business with a flagship store in, say, Soho, 5th Avenue, the West Village - anywhere highly visible in Manhattan - and your store goes out of business, TAKE DOWN THE SIGNAGE, the lettering, the branding, anything that identifies the abandoned endeavor. Nothing ruins your brand more than giant signs underneath your logo that reads: SPACE FOR LEASE.

As seen on posters for Ben & Jerry’s hanging around town:

We married fudge, ice cream and brownies.

(Don’t worry, it’s legal in Vermont).

Geeks and their iPhones. It seems they’re everywhere these days, most likely standing in your way, oblivious, as you’re trying to get a train or cross the street.

So it was interesting to learn that this weeks New Yorker cover by Jorge Colombo was drawn entirely on an iPhone using the Brushes application. 

Brushes also has a companion application, Brushes Viewer which Colombo used to record the process of the drawing. 

Sure looks easy here, but keep in mind Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast—it gets rid of all the hesitations.”

So the next time you’re ready to throw an elbow at some annoying idiot standing in your way with their face buried in an iPhone, just consider that instead of checking their email they may actually be doing something useful.

Though it’s highly unlikely.

A nice ad for Google’s web browser, Google Chrome. This was created for You-Tube  in Japan. where it’s been gaining some notoriety and so, according to Google, will be getting broader placement.

It’s an interesting effort, well-steeped as it is in the language of electronics but humanized in the form of a wooden toy. Conceptually it’s tricky - may take viewers a few watchings to get the visual metaphor: removing blocks and obstacles and stripping things down to their most simple elements. Also, for reference it helps to be familiar with the electronic game on which the action is based. The music is an interesting take on an electronic jingle, made much brighter with a lot more actual feeling to it.

In it’s visual style and simplicity it reminds us of good old-fashioned “classic” advertising  - the kind done by Doyle Dane Bernbach in the 60’s and continued by Chiat Day and a handful of others through the 80’s and 90’s. Advertising stripped down to it’s most basic (and most interesting) elements. Less flash, more polish.

Will it help Google improve their 1.42% share of the web browser market? We’re not sure. But we wish them well with the effort.

Alright, quick admission.

Here at Tantrum we have a thing for Gossip Girl (Mondays 8pm on the CW). Don’t ask why because we couldn’t tell you. It just seems that ever since Dawson’s Creek went off the air, we’ve been pining for something light and fluffy that ambitiously sets out to capture the complicated emotions - the passion, the pain, the poetry! - of High school. And if it’s a show stuffed full of 25 year-old actors with fabulous hair pretending (badly) to be 17 year-olds, all the better. But we digress.

Dan: Wow, nice digs. You’re really moving on up…to the East side. (starts singing theme for the Jefferson’s)

Jenny: Looks like someone’s been watching too many sit com re-runs on Hulu.

Now is it just us, or did someone stick an obvious pitch for Hulu in the middle of a perfectly mediocre exchange. Outrage! Could they be more blatant and un-crafty about it? The only thing missing was a clean-cut guy showing up out of nowhere to pronounce: “Hulu is a website that allows you to watch full episodes of popular TV shows right from your computer!”

Certainly blatant Product Placementism is nothing new. It’s been over ten years since Mike Myers took on the subject in Wayne’s World . Media critics, blogs and consumer groups have been railing against it for years. Apparently nothing sticks. Our question is: at what point does the practice get out of hand? At what point does it make movies and TV shows un-watchable? Or more to the point: at what point does it make them untrustworthy.

SELLING OUT?

Remember that quaint little term. Selling out. That’s what people used to use to describe a band, or an artist or an artistic entity that gave in to the desire to make money. It was assumed that such an artist or entity was trading in artistic quality and integrity for popularity. They were branded a “Sell Out” which they had to wear on their artistic foreheads like a scarlet letter (which usually didn’t affect their sales much, only their reputations among a certain type of die-hard fanatic most likely to turn up at a Star Trek convention wearing Spock ears).

Today, of course, at the dawn of the 21st Century we have a whole new issue. Namely, what happens when you have a show or a band or an idea that doesn’t have any artistic value to begin with? And let’s face it - that’s 97.3% of popular culture right now. Many “artistic” entities of our glorious times are proudly vacuous, meandering space-fillers wholly devoid of any greater message, meaning or purpose. Essentially they’ve sold out before they even left the shelf. The sole purpose of your average 1-hour TV show, for instance, is to create 20 solid minutes of ad time for viewing in between those annoying segments of actual show. In fact, an alarming number of shows are designed with built-in marketing platforms (celebrity chefs frying on Kitchenaide appliances or home makeover gurus firing up Sears power tools). So why should it surprise us - or irritate us - that the show itself, the dialogue, the shots, the plots are turned into creepy, undeclared ad space? And yet it still does. Somehow, we expect something more, something different, something better.

Incidentally, you rarely hear the term “Sell Out” anymore. When you do hear it, it’s usually meant as a compliment. It’s as if the phrase “Dude, you sold out” has become equivalent with “Dude, you sold out the Garden!” And hey, who doesn’t want to sell something these days, whether it’s Out, Up or In. Consider too that, for most aspiring media types, selling out is not just an aspiration, it’s unemployment insurance redeemable in the form more and better work. It’s instant street cred on Hollywood Boulevard -  a sad testament to the lack of influence of all those ill-fated Trekkies and aging Led Zeppelin fans, we suppose).

A HEALTHY SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND PITCH

So what’s the answer to all this? Well, turn off your damn TV, for one. And if we could follow our own advice on this one, we certainly would. Ah, but what else would we do on a brain-dead Monday evening?

The other answer, of course, is to hope that the creators of media “products” - i.e TV shows, movies, music, websites and the like - would grow some cajones and take a stronger stand against the ever-encroaching seduction of “under-the-radar” marketing. Leave the advertising portion to people like us here at Tantrum, who pride ourselves on doing it in a way that’s honest, up-front, entertaining and insightful. (And highly effective, we might add). Advertising is no job for screenwriters, bloggers or rappers. Or the faint of heart.

Something tells us that’s not going to happen anytime soon. For now we’ll just have to put up with this annoying media potpourri of saccharin-scented dirt.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice to just sit through an entire episode of your favorite crappy TV show without getting hit over the head by un-subtle and un-clever ad pitches?