Dove

has been making a big splash with its recent advertising campaign based on showing Real Women with all their flaws (i.e., a range of body tapes and ages that aren’t typical hair/skin care models), so it’s not surprising that a recent ad for Dove used the aesthetic of ethnographic interviews. This has been done a zillion times, especially in the last few years as ethnography becomes a more common touch point in our culture (and as the producer and the consumer collapse further). I’ve written about this many times, but I’m still struck whenever I see an ad doing this.

The Dove ad involved women being interviewed while they were bathing, and it cut between lower-quality video clips of several different women, with half of the clips being about the product, and half being about the process of being interviewed: “Oh, I’m in the tub, isn’t this a bit awkward?!”; “You’re all up in my armpit now.” were two examples.

I know a fair amount of research does get done in seemingly impossible settings such as the bathroom, but I’ve never been directly involved in such a study myself. I did see a Whirlpool presentation many years ago about how they did such a study (i.e., people wear bathing suits) but overall it sounds pretty fun just for the added challenges of establishing a comfortable rapport in such a socially awkward setting.

If they spend all this money to advertise a show and then a disaster happens and the show isn’t going to go on, wouldn’t they ante up with the budget to remove those ads? It’s almost a month old, which is bad, and of course the show never premiered. It just seems sloppy and embarrassing. Won’t the MTA take them down themselves?

Kind of horrifying follow-up to my recent experience with captive advertising on Contintental is in today’s WaPo

On a recent Alaska Airlines flight, passengers were told to remain buckled and seated for the last 30 minutes before landing at Reagan National Airport. It was a standard security measure for flights heading into restricted airspace over Washington.

It also turned a planeful of passengers into captive customers who were then pitched a Bank of America Visa card — with little chance of tuning it out. Over the intercom, a flight attendant encouraged passengers to sign up for the Bank of America credit card. Then other flight attendants went down the aisle handing out applications.

Marketing now follows potential customers into the skies. In the airline industry’s newest way to drum up revenue, carriers have become aggressive pitchmen for a range of products to passengers at 30,000 feet. The airlines say the ad revenue helps in these tough financial times. But some passengers liken the pitches to ads in a movie theater before the main feature.

“It’s worse than the idea of cell phones in flights,” said frequent flier Sylvia Caras of Santa Cruz, Calif.

Advertising in the air is nothing new. Most airlines run some commercials during their in-flight entertainment. And most in-flight magazines carry ads.

But until now, passengers could simply look away from the screen or turn the magazine page.

For Alexander Velaj, a Stamford, Conn., insurance agent, the latest trend in on-board salesmanship is another reason for “purchasing the Bose noise-canceling headphones.”

But Montgomery College English professor Chet Pryor said he accepts the in-flight product pitches as the trade-off for lower fares. “They’re simply something that must be endured,” he said.

Alaska Airlines spokeswoman Amanda Tobin said passengers had expressed an interest in learning more about applying for Visa credit cards and that the airline’s flight attendants share “basic” information.

(that last bit just kills me – I have a fantasy blog entry where I’d just take count of every ridiculous corporate behavior that is justified with that false marketingspeak about how their customers told them that they wanted this)

Two experiences of note with audio

i) Continental Airlines shows ads on their flights, before they begin the in-flight programming. In other words, through the regular audio system, not the headphone systems. The ads are very very loud. Painfully loud. You’re strapped into your seat and you can’t get away. The screens drop down, the audio starts. You have nowhere else to look and even with my fingers in my ears I could hear every damn noise in the Verizon and Are We There Yet? ads. Blecchgh.

ii) Walking through Midtown Manhattan this morning, I saw the all-too-familiar emergency-vehicle-gridlock scenario. An ambulance or fire truck is rushing somewhere, sirens wailing, but there’s nowhere for them to go – the lanes in front of them are blocked, so they sound the air horn, over and over again, to very little avail. Only this time it was slightly different – the ambulance in question had a modified type of siren, akin to the “wheep-WHEEP” they sometimes use as a honk, but it was almost verbal in its wide range of fluctuations. There was a large “vocabulary” if you will, and it seemed to convey more urgency, rather than rote pressure. I’m sure there is a human-factors alarm attendance specialist who designed this stuff (or at least who has written about it somewhere), but I’d never heard of it or heard it. I’m sure that eventually people will become used to it and tune it out, but since it was new to me, it caught my attention.

A variety of 3D portraits, made from bent wire, in a restaurant window (Sushi Ann) in NYC. They are about the size of a sheet of paper. Nice stuff.

’88 Dodge Aries is a fake TV ad for what was my first car. I can’t remember what year it was, but I bought it used. It had a really really awful smell in it, like an animal had died in it, but it took 3 months for the dealership perfume to wear off and for me to notice the smell. It needed a new radiator, but I had no idea; I just knew that even with the heat off, in the dead of winter, I couldn’t wear a jacket while I drove on the highway or I’d be just too hot.

I put a lot of miles on it, and then eventually it died – I think right around the time we traded it in for something else.

TV commercial (“World Gone Pretty”) for Levi’s that is a very clever, funny, make-you-laff/make-you-think comment on evolving male stereotypes and the associated consumption, with Levi’s being the honest, back-to-basics, simple (or “uncomplicated” as the ad offers) remedy. Nice. Business Week’s take is here

. Via Musings of A Social Architect

.

Earthlink is running a promotion now where you the customer (or prospective customer) can decide which of their employees deserves a $1,000 bonus. Of course, the two employees represent key benefits of Earthlink that they are trying to highlight – virus-fighting and spam-blocking.

The site [no longer active] offers you the chance to look at their desks and see how hard they are working, etc. It’s a weird sort of sales effort, perhaps bringing in the American Idol-esque participation all the while promoting these benefits of their service.

It seems that the more innovative companies are focusing their story around co-creation (an emerging buzzword) – where the customers are involved in stuff about the company, but in stuff that is relevant to them (i.e., what type of products or services are offered) – contrast this promotion with the recent AOL ads in which customers appeared at HQ to demand services they wanted. Earthlink is taking a step way back here, asking us to get involved with and care about the workaday lives of their employees, and their compensation? I don’t want a job at Earthlink and I don’t want to have to think about it. I want Earthlink to think about me and what I want and need. They’re getting at that here, but in a completely roundabout way that seems out of step with the times.

Of course, for every trend there is a counter-trend. The counter-trend that Earthlink is latching onto is participation. Going to Costco lets you feel a bit like a stockboy, open kitchens in restaurants involve you in the cooking process, etc. But in those cases, the participation supports a value (low warehouse-direct prices, freshness and quality), not simply participation for its own sake.

Virginia Postrel in the NYT

on the promise of wireless technology, selling the story of wireless, and the glum reality of a tethered techno life:
That, of course, is also the promise of wireless technology – to cut the ties that literally bind us to our desks, our homes, our mundane existences. Marketers take that promise and try to distill it into glamorous images that will inspire us to take the wireless plunge. It isn’t an easy task.

In a previous post I related my experience at AD:TECH. While there I picked up some trade rags, including DIRECT: Direct Marketing Business Intelligence. Thought it was interesting to look at some of the marketing lists now available:

Nasalguard
This is a postal list of 10,000 consumers who requested a free tube of Nasalguard, a topical gel for allergy and asthma sufferers. Buyers’ names are included as well. The average unit of sale was $10. The Internet is the source.
Selections: Hotlines, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $116/M

More than 3.2 million individuals who entered a sweepstakes and contributed to one or more charities are named here. Most are married women, median age 48, who earn $37,000 a year. Sixty percent of those listed are homeowners and about half have children. The file was assembled from mail order buyer, survey and transaction data.
Selections: Gender, age, income, homeowners, children, gift buyers, book buyers, magazine subscribers, donors by type, Internet connected, bank cardholders, mail order buyer category, golfers, travelers, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $65/M

Those who spent $1 million or more within the last 12 months on luxury homes are named on Million Dollar Homeowners, a file derived from recorded mortgage deeds. Some 133,000 records are available. Forty-one percent of these properties are in California. Other states with large counts are New York, Florida, Connecticut and Illinois. A third of these real estate buyers paid cash.
Selections: Gender, type of dwelling, purchase price, equity, type of mortgage, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $110/M

TTK Data Services, the operator of Web site Healthguides2005.com, has a list of men and women who expressed interest in laser eye surgery. TTK gathers information through online surveys. There are 473,529 e-mail and 387,222 postal records available. Prior to release to the broader market, this file was used by retail laser centers for targeted direct mail campaigns.
Selections: Hotline, behavior, income, presence of children, homeowners, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $125/M (postal or e-mail records)

More than 1.7 million donors are identified on a recently assembled file called I Give to Religious Causes. This file was built from direct mail data that’s been overlaid with mail order buyer, demographic and lifestyle enhancements.
Selections: Age, income, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $75/M

Men and women who purchased the Ogoplex digestive supplement are named on this postal file. The last-12-month count is 131,456. The unit of sale is $28. Direct mail and space advertising are the sources.
Selections: Hotlines, age, credit card, gender, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $100/M

Online publisher and conference producer Robotics Trends Inc. offers postal and e-mail lists with 6,000 postal and 5,570 e-mail records, including subscribers and attendees.
Selections: None offered
Price: $275/M (postal or e-mail file)

A combination of direct mail data generated from surveys, catalogs/subscriptions and public records was gathered to build Lifestyle’s Hispanic Females in Charge, a postal list. Some 417,049 women who head households are named. They paid for direct mail purchases with a credit card. E-mail addresses accompany 60,179 records.
Selections: Hotlines, household income, age, presence of children, length of residence, occupation, mail responsive, religion, interests and hobbies, telephone numbers, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $85/M (postal file); $125/M (e-mail file)

Thrill seekers who made purchases from various catalogs or subscribed to sports publications are identified on the Extreme Outdoor Sports Adventurists file. There are 729,443 postal records available.
Selections: BMX biking, bungee jumping, all-terrain-vehicle riding, kneeboarding, lacrosse, mountain biking, parachuting, paragliding, water skiing, windsurfing, white-water rafting, skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain climbing, rock climbing, surfing, inline skating, trail running, age, gender, home/business address, income, state/SCF/ZIP
Price: $80/M