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Here’s an ad for LG mobile phones that I pulled out of a recent issue of SPIN magazine. It’s sort of odd/interesting to see the rhetoric of design and marketing used to create content for advertising. I’m referring to the need to create personas that represent some aspect of the user category that can be designed for, or marketed to. And sometimes the distinction between designing for and marketing to is blurred through the use of personas. And sometimes the personas represent an aspirational statement of the manufacturer -who they’d like their customers to be, or what they would like their products to be used for. Whether or not the products actually achieve that doesn’t seem to matter, as long as there’s a catchy phrase to represent in the simplest terms possible some key attributes.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on this approach and on LG-specifically. I have no idea if an ad creative repurposed actual content or just picked up on the approach because it reads well and maybe moves product. It’s always interesting to see one form of internal company behavior make its way into advertising, though.

From Stuart Elliot’s email-only column today

A Reader Writes: In asking you a question recently about the music in an AT&T commercial, I mentioned a college paper I wrote about “floating signifiers in popular culture,” and in answering me you asked what that was.

This is probably more information that you (or your readers) want to know, but the concept of “floating signifiers” comes out of post-modernist cultural criticism building on the language of semiotics.

Signs and symbols tend to communicate specific meanings to those who use them. That which is signified is somehow related to one or more signifiers. For example, the American flag is a signifier of both the nation and of patriotism to that nation. Logos are designed and created to become signifiers for specific companies or products, and can eventually become signifiers for entire life styles.

Floating signifiers are no longer attached to their original meanings. Either through the passage of time and changing values or intentional manipulation, they become attached to new, totally unrelated meanings. The song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was effectively used by the advertising world to shift the meaning of the “grapevine” from the gossip mill spreading rumors of infidelity, which the song lyrics originally signified, back to a literal grapevine, the source of all those dancing California raisins. They successfully created a floating signifier.

In the case of Toyota using the music from the sea chantey “A Golden Boy Again” in a commercial about football, Toyota was attempting to shift what they thought was a football signifier to their vehicles – not knowing that the song had not been successfully separated from its sea-chantey origins.

That left many viewers wondering why an auto maker would associate itself with “drunken sailors.” In this instance, the advertising world was not successful in creating a floating signifier because the song was too strongly attached to its original meaning.

A nice little essay about meaning and media and culture!

Kiss Your Beer, Hong Kong, January 2006

Here’s an amazing advertisement for Budweiser, from Hong Kong. With the phase American Kiss across the middle, and the slogan Kiss Your Beer – Kiss Budweiser.

Drink it, if I have to, but kiss it? No way. Perhaps it’s a great image for Hong Kong, but it’s amazing how wrong it seems for us here.

Oh, jeez. This is the dumbest buzzword yet!
House Calls
by Larry Dobrow, January 2005 issue of Media (reg req’d)

JUST AS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT GURUS learn about the capabilities of new products by watching consumers interact with them, media strategists are gaining a better understanding of media consumption behaviors by observing consumers at home. Deploying so-called “adthropology” strategies, they conduct in-home observation and interview sessions. A typical adthropological endeavor begins when an individual shows up at a consumer’s door, camera in tow. The observer tours the home, noting details like the location of TVs and piles of magazines that may have been saved for reference purposes. “When we were doing this for Kraft, we saw so many TVs in the kitchen. That’s an incredibly significant detail for a food company,” notes Jane Lacher, senior vice president of consumer context planning at MediaVest.

Information gleaned during home visits tends to bolster, and occasionally trump, intelligence gathered via focus group interviews, Lacher adds. “People tell you about their habits, but they tend to script a little bit. When you go into the home, you see if the newspaper has been read, or if there are coupons on the refrigerator, or how many TVs are on,” she explains. “People generally won’t tell you ‘my life is in disarray.’ So [with a visit] you get a better sense of where media fits into the picture.”

This is a new at&t ad (pdf) for the SBC merger/renaming thing that’s going down now (and filling the off- and on-line press with stories about deaths of logos, competition, brand, and the like).

The text in question:
Historically,
mergers come with a winner and a loser.
This isn’t the last time we’ll rewrite history.

seems pretty messed up. Doesn’t rewriting history mean that one goes back and changes the written record to reflect what is more preferred to think now (wasn’t that what Winston Smith did in 1984)? It’s an accusation of dishonesty when we speak of rewriting history. Yet at&t is proclaiming that they are going to head off and do just that. In some ways, the rebranding is indeed rewriting history, pretending that the split from Ma Bell and all the other mergers and splits didn’t happen over the decades, and that this company you’re doing business with is the same company back in the good ol’ days.

But that isn’t what they mean, is it? I think they mean that they’ll be making history – dispensing with the old truths and breaking barriers and doing great things. Making history, and rewriting history are two very different things.

Is this doubleplusgood quacktalk? Or just really really lazy agency work (and dumb-ass clients)?

This ad from Sonos features Mieko Kusano, director of product management, and Wai-Loong Lim, of Y Studios, their designer. Certainly, as we understand design as a differentiator, it gets talked about in corporate marketing, but the appearance of the actual designer is often limited to someone like Jerry Hirschberg in a Nissan ad. Here we’ve got the consultant with their own brand being interviewed about the product and about design. This is a designer who’s demonstrated value to his clients and who is appreciated for it! (Disclosure: Wai is a former colleague)

This post-Spurlock ad intrigued me. A sick amount of food/calories/fat, but suggested as an occasional indulgence, with a pointer to their other products for regular consumption (everyday? Yikes). Giving permission to indulge, and somehow if you don’t eat this gross beef explosion daily, then it’s okay to eat their other burgers daily? And toss in an macho appeal (as if finishing this burger is some kind of impossible accomplishment) and you’ve got a timely story that takes on the obesity/SuperSizeMe meme and deftly turns it around.

Do a Classic Triple from Wendy’s: We don’t recommend you eat this all the time, unless you’re an offensive lineman or a Kodiak bear. For everyday use, try the Classic Single or Double. But since you probably won’t climb Everest, it’s nice to tell your friends you’ve had the Triple. It’s prepared fresh, the way a hamburger should be. Do a Wendy’s Classic Triple and do what tastes right.

originally uploaded by minusbaby.

Great column that calls out what has tickled the back of my brain but never formed into a real thought – these ads purport to acknowledge and salute the fact that real women have all sorts of body types besides what you normally see in advertising, but the product they are selling is firming cream, designed to conceal or alter the body, making it closer to the “thin” ideal. I’m sure there’s some spin Dove puts on it, but really it’s a great point. Do we (or, at least, women) love ourselves for who we are, or do we try to fix things up? Seems like Dove is doing a pretty good job at having it both ways. Brilliant, yet more than a little evil.

Poise is a new incontinence-protection product for women, resembling pads more than diapers. Stuart Elliott writes about the product and their new advertising in the NYT. What struck me was the similarity between this ad and the original ads for Viagra.

On second look, you can tell which product is for a woman and which product is for a man, but the message is similar – overcome an embarrassing crotch problem and celebrate with renewed intimacy.

click on any picture to enlarge

A while back Virginia Postrel wrote about Wireless Glamour – the absence of wires from the glam photos of technology used in advertising, etc. I found these pictures in a Target advertising circular called Room Solutions. I was amazed to see pictures of messy rooms, where people own lots of stuff, it’s messy, askew, and yes indeed, there are wires – cables, cords, the whole real deal.

Sure, the pictures are entirely stylized and sort of hyper-real, but somehow it’s relieving to see a significant move away from the more idealized and yes glamourous consumer images that advertising is so fond of. I was at an annoying deisgn conference a couple of years ago and was struck when someone from IKEA showed fieldwork photos – messy homes overflowing with stuff. Of course, it wasn’t the photos that I was struck by – in doing ethnographic research, I’ve taken a million of those “real” pictures myself over the years but I was struck by the reaction – laughter. Designer after designer showed luscious product pr0n but one person showed realistic images and were met with ridicule. Now Target is using the mess of real life to help depict their ideal world – where consumers’ homes are messy and overflowing with stuff – stuff purchased at Target.