men lose in superbowl spots

Odd that a televised extravaganza targetting men would be rife with advertisers belittling them. "Hey, guys, you're henpecked, emasculated and illiterate," many spots said, in essence, "but buying our stuff will make you feel virile!" Really? What guy falls for this? Don't brand shepherds realize we've come a long way since Walter Mitty. And why haven't they noticed that 39 million viewers are actually women?

In case you missed it, here's a sampling of commercials I'm talking about, and the hypothetical creative briefs they were based on:

It's not easy being a man. You have to recycle the garbage, put the seat down, listen to your wife and be nice to her mother. Whew! But a big car can make it all feel better. (Dodge)

Walking the dog and opening hard-to-open jars makes you a man. And, oh yes, so does buying our new brand extension. (Dove)

Looked down lately, guys? Something's missing. Reclaim masculinity. Put on our pants. (Dockers)

Any guy who goes shopping with a woman is a wuss wearing a skirt. But wusses can now tote a TV to the mall which will somehow make them feel less emasculated. (Flo TV) (Btw, what's up with menstrual product names? Couldn't iPad or FloTV find any women for focus groups?)

Real men don't read. They swill beer, leaving literature to the ladies. (Bud Light)

GoDaddy's entries? Predictably lame, the same sophomoric attempts at humor we've come to expect. In-house advertising at its sexist, tone-deaf worst. Not worth the trouble to embed em for you. Trust me.

an appeal to make the shorty awards, well, shorter

As my friends, family and followers on twitter are relieved to know, Shorty Award voting ended yesterday. I'm tickled that @BettyDraper finished in what appears to be 2nd place in the Innovation category, though rankings won't be announced until an awards ceremony on March 3.

So now that I've dusted myself off from the campaign trail, and had a chance to gain a little perspective, I'm thinking that if the Shorty Awards really mean to "Honor the Best Producers of Short Real-Time Content on Twitter" they ought to rethink the open voting.

Last year, Shorty winners were determined only by popular vote which meant that awards went to those with the most time and energy to devote to aggregating votes. At least one finalist, @SavvyAuntie, dropped out of the running for this reason. (Technically, she didn't drop out, but stopped asking for votes, which in a runoff determined by popular vote, is the same thing.) "It's not a fair awards ranking program. It's a popularity contest."

Anyone with a twitter account can be nominated (or nominate themselves) for a Shorty Award. The rules encourage nominees to "campaign and encourage their friends to vote for them." This is a great way to ensure that Shorty Awards is a top trending topic on twitter, but a lousy thing to do to the twitter community which is besieged for weeks with solicitations for votes from anyone with a hope of actually winning.

To their credit, Shorty Awards organizers are attempting to make the awards less about vote-getting this year and more about content creation by instituting another round in the process, a review by the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. The name may be amusing, but the membership is impressive, including MC Hammer, David Pogue (NYTimes), Kurt Andersen (NPR), Frank Moss, (MIT media lab), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr) and Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist.) According to the Shorty website, the Academy "will carefully review the finalists' tweets and fill out an anonymous survey with their choices for winners." What role their vote will play in determination of winners isn't clear, but their role is promised to be "vital."

Perhaps next year, the Academy could play an even more vital role, helping to nominate finalists. Should the Shorty evolve to be like other award shows that rely only on recognized experts in a field to identify excellence of others in it? (Imagine if the real Oscars were determined by how many votes actors could wheedle out of viewing audiences?) This being social media, I think the Shorty Awards needs to retain a social component in determination of winners. But couldn't the voting period be contracted? A month is a century in twitter time, interminable to contenders who must keep stumping for votes, excruciatingly long for the twitter community forced to endure so many appeals. Wouldn't an open voting period of a week or less be a relief to everyone?

Of course, despite my beef with an imperfect process, I'll be breathless as other finalists in Times Square on March 3, awaiting word of the winners, grateful there’s any recognition at all for an art still dismissed by so many as "frittering."

why i'm voting against @Adbroad in the Shorty Awards

If you've got other things on your mind besides social media, you might not have heard of the Shorty Awards. The Oscars of Twitter. Sans limos and red carpet and televised gala. Election is by popular vote and I'm jazzed to be a finalist in two categories: advertising and innovation.

The first round of voting was last week and there was a bit of a dust-up in advertising, the rare ad awards show in which Lee Clow isn't a frontrunner. @FrankAdman (a fictional art director from the 60s) accused @iwearyourshirt (a guy who wears other people's Tshirts for a living) of breaking the rules by getting robots to finagle votes. Turns out, boosting vote counts via robots (or humans in feverish imitation of them) isn't against the rules. But Shorty organizers reacted responsibly by re-weighting votes, assigning different values to tweets according to content and origin. Ah, the vagaries of life on the digital frontier.

Speaking of frontiers. Very few new ideas come along in advertising. But this may be one of them. Invent a fictional character---emphasis on invention. Don't appropriate a character from a TV show or film or book, a character you own no IP rights to. Invent an original character who can be made to do what you wish, gallivanting from twitter to facebook to youtube to...whatever the next social media platform will be. Use the character to build an audience. Then sell that audience like a media buy.

@FrankAdman appeared about the same time as AMC's Mad Men wandered into the twitterverse. He's a west coast art director living large in the 60s: chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, inventor of the virtual "Twittertini" which has evolved into the lexicon of social media-speak on Twitter. He now has over 14,000 followers. I don't know if @FrankAdman is for sale. But if I were Kodak or Clorox or Dewars or another brand with heritage in the 60s, I'd certainly put in a call. Er, a tweet.

I'm voting for @FrankAdman in the Shorty Awards because I love the idea of a fictional character winning in the advertising category again. (Last year's winner was the tweeter for Peggy Olson.) I want @FrankAdman and @BettyDraper to take home Shorty Awards this year. To help demonstrate the power of brand fiction in the digital universe.

I'm only sorry we'll have to pull AdBroad's campaign commercial.

To vote for Frank, go to the Shorty polls here. Vote for Betty here.

why i'm going to work in a factory

I've worked in advertising almost since Eve sold the apple and have seen lots of changes. But nothing compares to the tidal wave causing fundamental realignments in the business now. That shift is caused by the only thing that ever causes marketers to change their behavior--consumer behavior.

Used to be brands told their story via broadcast but consumers are no longer willing to sit back in their Lazy Boys, content to take in a product story pipelined to them; they expect to be an active part of the narrative. Brand stories must be recrafted to allow for audience interaction and delivered in forms created and produced for whichever environment the audience prefers to receive it.

A few frontrunner brands are recognizing this shift in consumer psychology and recrafting their message accordingly, designing campaigns to provide immersive and participative experiences across a wide range of platforms.

Coke transformed a brilliant concept behind an award-winning TV commercial into a global media franchise with multiple revenue streams. BMW hired filmmakers like Ridley and Tony Scott to create short films that highlighted particular performance aspects of vehicles. Dove deconstructed media portrayal of beauty to relieve its target consumer of cultural baggage and further insinuate itself into her good graces. AMC's Mad Men raised the bar by actually getting fans to do their marketing for them. Not only did they permit fans to appropriate characters and create a twitter-based campaign, they launched a micro-site that resulted in the conversion of over 600,000 social media avatars to what are, in essence, ads for brand Mad Men.

Plenty of smart digital strategists are out there to advise on where and how and when to launch brand stories into the webiverse. But how to decide what those stories should be? How to make a story that's not only engaging but true to the brand's DNA? How to build a mythology that extends current marketing efforts? How, in other words, to do the creative?

Which is why I'm launching Brand Fiction Factory, in the company of other Mad Men on Twitter conspirators. It's a creative content provider for ad agencies, entertainment companies, brand managers and others seeking to use narrative in the digital space to maximize consumer engagement. The factory shop sign isn't spit and polished quite yet. But doors are open and we're open for business. Do drop by!

direct mail is alive and well and going to college

Direct mail marketing may be in decline in most places, but it's thriving in a sector that has only recently accepted it: academia.

According to the front page of today's NY Times, some colleges spent over $1 million last year to market themselves to prospective students. The University of the Pacific in Stockton, California sent out bright orange packets hawking : "Waived application fee!", "No required essay!" Inside, a letter congratulated the recipient for having "earned an opportunity that is reserved for only a select few high-priority students."

The truth is, there is no application fee for anyone applying, and thus no fee to waive. And the "select few" students who received the packets were a list of 30,000 names compiled by Royal & Company, a Richmond-based marketing company that employs veterans from direct mail campaigns for long-distance phone providers and banks.

Why are providers of higher education resorting to marketing themselves like a credit card or dog food?

One answer is, schools need help landing applicants in a recession and are looking to broaden the pool of candidates who apply.

But surely the decision has something to do the fact that marketing campaigns tend to boost schools' rankings in US News and World Report, generally considered the blue book for college shoppers. The rankings depend, in part, on how exclusive a school is, based on acceptance rate. Naturally, the more applicants a school receives, the more it rejects. And that means higher desirability, at least for those who value exclusivity. And, what proud parent seeking the best for a child doesn't?

Which brings me around, once again, to the overpromise metrics.

no status update = new status symbol?

At Digital Hollywood this year, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel with Flint Dille, game designer and writer who's brought complex worlds to life on the screen. Flint raised an interesting question this week while talking to Stuart Volcow's UCLA Transmedia class, about the possibility of a rising backlash against tech media and the sheer cerebral velocity of our lives. I joined the discussion when he moved it to Facebook. (Btw, checked your privacy settings lately?)

I, too, sense a rising resistance to life lived constantly connected and at cyberspeed. Several friends tell me they're getting off Facebook because they're tired of being bombarded with friend requests from people they "didn't like in 3rd grade and surely don't want to be friends with now." One respondent told Flint that she'd started "conducting periodic 'e-fasts', 'fasting' from all e-stuff (phone, e-mail, internet) for a few days at a time" which she reported to find tremendously refreshing.

Studies show, if you're trying to be creative, uplugging for a while is the right idea. An essay in today's NYT Book Review by Jennifer Schuessler says researchers found that when your brain is in quiet mode, undistracted (like when you're under an MRI scanner, for instance, yikes) the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in creative areas like autobiographical memory and conjuring fictional events. Ironically, quiet mode is the precise opposite of the setting in which most of our brains are trying to be productive.

Aren't you a tiny bit jealous of the guy you can't call because he doesn't carry around a cellphone? The friend you see only on Skype now and then because he's holed up in Istanbul writing the Great American Novel...on a typewriter?

It used to be that 24/7 connection meant status, but now I suspect that stepping away from the digital world for a while is becoming a luxury that privileged few can afford. Having people manage around you, without your having to conduct a cyberlife, is becoming akin to the royal option of shopping without carrying a wallet. Ironically, it may also explain why Bill Gates is only now discovering twitter.

where to find what you lost in the 60s

Sadly, another casualty of the recession is Alphaville, home of the best collection of vintage toys and collectibles this side of 1963. How many trips down memory lane I took there while waiting for showtime across the street at Film Forum. Now, alas, it's going out of business which is good news for you. The smart looking book bag you always wanted? The neat-o Skipper stickers your sister swiped to wallpaper the dollhouse? That issue of Jack and Jill you lost at Girl Scout camp? Those and other artifacts of childhood can be had at half-price. No online orders. (True to the era, the only web presence at checkout is Jack.) But you can let your fingers do the walking. 212 675-6850. Doors close next Friday. Right after Gunsmoke.

Nope, this isn't a pay for post. It's a post for love, kids.