The Verge, "Colorado Hashes Out Weed Advertising Rules"

As the issue of legalizing marijuana plays out on a state by state level, so does the issue of regulating the advertising of marijuana. Expect to see some weed ad submissions to CA and Archive over the next year from Colorado based advertising agencies. Here's a quick writeup published in The Verge, "Colorado Hashes Out Weed Advertising Rules - State looks to shield minors from marijuana marketing as tax debate gains momentum," by Amar Toor.

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http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4722126/colorado-introduces-regulations-for-marijuana-advertising

The Colorado Department of Revenue this week released a 136-page documentdetailing how the state will regulate retail sales and marketing of recreational marijuana. The document, published Tuesday, makes clear that weed vendors will be able to advertise on statewide television, radio, and newspapers, though they'll be subject to certain constraints. Both Colorado and Washington decriminalized the recreational use of marijuana in ballot measures last year.

Under the regulations, marijuana retail outlets will be able to buy ads in state newspapers as long as they have "reliable evidence" that no more than 30 percent of the publication's readership is under the age of 21. The same goes for ads taken out on radio and TV. Pot vendors are prohibited from buying out-of-state ads and promoting drug tourism, though they can advertise on the internet under the same demographic constraints that apply to print, radio, and TV.

Billboards and other forms of public advertising are banned under the Marijuana Enforcement Division's regulations, though as the Atlantic Wire notes, weed ads have already begun popping up across the state. Earlier this month, a pro-marijuana billboardappeared outside Denver's Mile High football stadium ahead of the Broncos' season opener, and others have appeared on taxi decals.

The regulations come amid ongoing debates in the Colorado legislature about how to tax retail sales of marijuana. A ballot initiative currently under consideration would levy a 15 percent excise tax and 15 percent sales tax on recreational weed, while an initiative in Denver would add a 3.5 percent local tax that the city could increase to 15 percent.

The proposals have raised concerns among pro-weed groups and consumers, who see the taxes as prohibitively steep. A protest was held Monday in Denver, where tax opponents handed out free joints to all in attendance. No arrests were made.

A Short Lesson in Perspective

Here's another compelling piece with a very cynical take on being a creative in an advertising agency.    Is all of this advertising industry criticism springing forth because of the recent launch of Mad Men Season 5?  

I still stand by my earlier assertion that when it's at its best, making ads can be pretty fun.  

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http://www.thesfegotist.com/editorial/2012/march/14/short-lesson-perspective#comments

A Short Lesson in Perspective

March 14th, 2012

Many years ago, when I first started to work in the advertising industry, we used to have this thing called The Overnight Test. It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend the day covering A2 sheets torn from layout pads with ideas for whatever project we were currently engaged upon – an ad for a new gas oven, tennis racket or whatever. Scribbled headlines. Bad puns. Stick-men drawings crudely rendered in fat black Magic Marker. It was a kind of brain dump I suppose. Everything that tumbled out of our heads and mouths was committed to paper. Anything completely ridiculous, irrelevant or otherwise unworkable was filtered out as we worked, and by beer ‘o’ clock there would be an impressive avalanche of screwed-up paper filling the corner of the room where our comically undersized waste-bin resided.

On a productive day, aside from the mountain of dead trees (recycling hadn’t been invented in 1982), stacked polystyrene coffee cups and an overflowing ash-tray, there would also be a satisfying thick sheaf of “concepts.” Some almost fully formed and self-contained ideas. Others misshapen and graceless fragments, but harbouring perhaps the glimmer of a smile or a grain of human truth which had won it’s temporary reprieve from the reject pile. Before trotting off to Clarks Bar to blow the froth of a pint of Eighty-Bob, our last task was to pin everything up on the walls of our office.

Hangovers not withstanding, the next morning at the crack of ten ‘o’ clock we’d reconvene in our work-room and sit quietly surveying the fruits of our labour. Usually about a third of the ‘ideas’ came down straight away, before anyone else wandered past. It’s remarkable how something that seems either arse-breakingly funny, or cosmically profound in the white heat of it’s inception, can mean absolutely nothing in the cold light of morning. By mid-morning coffee, the creative department was coming back to life, and we participated in the daily ritual of wandering around the airy Georgian splendour of our Edinburgh offices and critiquing each teams crumpled creations. It wasn’t brutal or destructive. Creative people are on the whole fragile beings, and letting each other down gently and quietly was the unwritten rule. Sometimes just a blank look or a scratched head was enough to see a candidate quietly pulled down and consigned to the bin. Something considered particularly “strong,” witty or clever would elicit cries of “Hey, come and see what the boys have come up with!” Our compadres would pile into our cramped room to offer praise or constructive criticism. That was always a good feeling.

This human powered bullshit filter was a handy and powerful tool. Inexpensive, and practically foolproof. Not much slipped through the net. I’m quite sure architects, musicians, mathematicians and cake decorators all have an equivalent time-honed protocol.

But here’s the thing.

The Overnight Test only works if you can afford to wait overnight. To sleep on it. Time moved on, and during the nineties technology overran, and transformed the creative industry like it did most others. Exciting new tools. Endless new possibilities. Pressing new deadlines. With the new digital tools at our disposal we could romp over the creative landscape at full tilt. Have an idea, execute it and deliver it in a matter of a few short hours. Or at least a long night. At first it was a great luxury. We could cover so much more ground. Explore all the angles. And having exhausted all the available possibilities, craft a solution we could have complete faith in.

Or as the bean counters upstairs quickly realized, we could just do three times as many jobs in the same amount of time, and make them three times as much money. For the same reason that Jumbo Jets don’t have the grand pianos and palm-court cocktail bars we were originally promised in the brochures, the accountants naturally won the day.

Pretty soon, The Overnight Test became the Over Lunch Test. Then before we knew it, we were eating Pot-Noodles at our desks, and taking it in turns to go home and see our kids before they went to bed. As fast as we could pin an idea on the wall, some red-faced account manager in a bad suit would run away with it. Where we used to rely on taking a break and “stretching the eyes’ to allow us to see the wood from the trees (too many idioms and similes? Probably.) We now fell back on experience and gut-feel. It worked most of the time, but nobody is infallible. Some howlers and growlers definitely made it through, and generally standards plummeted.

The other consequence, with the benefit of hindsight, is that we became more conservative. Less likely to take creative risks and rely on the tried and trusted. The familiar is always going to research better than the truly novel. An research was the new god. The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Lois Vutton luggage are not.

It takes a certain amount of courage, thinking out loud. And is best done in a safe and nurturing environment. Creative Departments and design studios used to be such places, where you could say and do just about anything creatively speaking, without fear of ridicule or judgement. It has to be this way, or you will just close up like a clamshell. It’s like trying to have sex, with your mum listening outside the bedroom door. Can’t be done. Then some bright spark had the idea of setting everyone up in competition. It became a contest. A race. Winner gets to keep his job.

Now of course we are all suffering from the same affliction. Our technology whizzes along at the velocity of a speeding electron, and our poor overtaxed neurons struggle to keep up. Everything has become a split-second decision. Find something you like. Share it. Have a half-baked thought. Tweet it. Don’t wait. Don’t hesitate. Seize the moment. Keep up. There will be plenty of time to repent later. Oh, and just to cover your ass, don’t forget to stick a smiley on the end just in case you’ve overstepped the mark.

So. To recap, The Overnight Test is a good thing. And sadly missed. A weekend is even better, and as they fell by the wayside, they were missed too. “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother turning up on Sunday!” as the old advertising joke goes.

A week would be nice. A month would be an unreasonable luxury. I’ve now ‘enjoyed’ the better part of six months of enforced detachment from my old reality. When your used to turning on a sixpence, shooting from the hip, dancing on a pin-head (too many again?), the view back down from six months is quite giddying. And sobering.

My old life looks, and feels, very different from the outside.

And here’s the thing.

It turns out I didn’t actually like my old life nearly as much as I thought I did. I know this now because I occasionally catch up with my old colleagues and work-mates. They fall over each other to enthusiastically show me the latest project they’re working on. Ask my opinion. Proudly show off their technical prowess (which is not inconsiderable.) I find myself glazing over but politely listen as they brag about who’s had the least sleep and the most takaway food. “I haven’t seen my wife since January, I can’t feel my legs any more and I think I have scurvy but another three weeks and we’ll be done. It’s got to be done by then The client’s going on holiday. What do I think?”

What do I think?

I think you’re all fucking mad. Deranged. So disengaged from reality it’s not even funny. It’s a fucking TV commercial. Nobody give a shit.

This has come as quite a shock I can tell you. I think, I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a bit of a con. A scam. An elaborate hoax.

The scam works like this:

1. The creative industry operates largely by holding ‘creative’ people ransom to their own self-image, precarious sense of self-worth, and fragile – if occasionally out of control ego. We tend to set ourselves impossibly high standards, and are invariably our own toughest critics. Satisfying our own lofty demands is usually a lot harder than appeasing any client, who in my experience tend to have disappointingly low expectations. Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.

2. Truly creative people tend not to be motivated by money. That’s why so few of us have any. The riches we crave are acknowledgment and appreciation of the ideas that we have and the things that we make. A simple but sincere “That’s quite good.” from someone who’s opinion we respect (usually a fellow artisan) is worth infinitely more than any pay-rise or bonus. Again, our industry masters cleverly exploit this insecurity and vanity by offering glamorous but worthless trinkets and elaborately staged award schemes to keep the artists focused and motivated. Like so many demented magpies we flock around the shiny things and would peck each others eyes out to have more than anyone else. Handing out the odd gold statuette is a whole lot cheaper than dishing out stock certificates or board seats.

3. The compulsion to create is unstoppable. It’s a need that has to be filled. I’ve barely ‘worked’ in any meaningful way for half a year, but every day I find myself driven to ‘make’ something. Take photographs. Draw. Write. Make bad music. It’s just an itch than needs to be scratched. Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context.. well that way, my friends lies misery and madness.

This hybridisation of the arts and business is nothing new of course – it’s been going on for centuries – but they have always been uncomfortable bed-fellows. But even artists have to eat, and the fuel of commerce and industry is innovation and novelty. Hey! Let’s trade. “Will work for food!” as the street-beggars sign says.

This Faustian pact has been the undoing of many great artists, many more journeymen and more than a few of my good friends. Add to this volatile mixture the powerful accelerant of emerging digital technology and all hell breaks loose. What I have witnessed happening in the last twenty years is the aesthetic equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The wholesale industrialization and mechanistation of the creative process. Our ad agencies, design groups, film and music studios have gone from being cottage industries and guilds of craftsmen and women, essentially unchanged from the middle-ages, to dark sattanic mills of mass production. Ideas themselves have become just another disposable commodity to be supplied to order by the lowest bidder. As soon as they figure out a way of outsourcing thinking to China they won’t think twice. Believe me.

So where does that leave the artists and artisans? Well, up a watercolour of shit creek without a painbrush. That one thing that we prize and value above all else – the idea - turns out to be just another plastic gizmo or widget to be touted and traded. And to add insult to injury we now have to create them not in our own tine, but according to the quota and the production schedule. “We need six concepts to show the client first thing in the morning, he’s going on holiday. Don’t waste too much time on them though, it’s only meeting-fodder. He’s only paying for one so they don’t all have to be good, just knock something up. You know the drill. Oh, and one more thing. His favourite color is green. Rightho! See you in the morning then… I’m off to the Groucho Club.”

Have you ever tried to have an idea. Any idea at all, with a gun to your head? This is the daily reality for the creative drone. And when he’s done, sometime in the wee small hours, he then has to face his two harshest critics. Himself, and everyone else. “Ah. Sorry. Client couldn’t make the meeting. I faxed your layouts to him at his squash club. He quite liked the green one. Apart from the typeface, the words, the picture and the idea. Oh, and could the logo be bigger? Hope it wasn’t a late night. Thank god for computers eh? Rightho! I’m off to lunch.”

Alright, it’s not bomb disposal. But in it’s own way it’s dangerous and demanding work. And as I’ve said, the rewards tend to be vanishingly small. Plastic gold statuette anyone? I’ve seen quite a few creative drones fall by the wayside over the years. Booze mostly. Drugs occasionally. Anxiety. Stress. Broken marriages. Lots of those. Even a couple of suicides. But mostly just people temperamentally and emotionally ill-equipped for such a hostile and toxic environment. Curiously, there never seems to be any shortage of eager young worker drones queuing up to try their luck, although I detect that even their bright-eyed enthusiasm is staring to wane. Advertising was the sexy place to be in the eighties. The zeitgeist has move on. And so have most of the bright-young-things.

So how did I survive for thirty years? Well it was a close shave. Very close. And while on the inside I am indeed a ‘delicate flower’ as some Creative Director once wryly observed, I have enjoyed until recently, the outward physical constitution and rude heath of an ox. I mostly hid my insecurity and fear from everyone but those closest to me, and ran fast enough that I would never be found out. The other thing I did, I now discover, was to convince myself that there was nothing else, absolutely nothing, I would rather be doing. That I had found my true calling in life, and that I was unbelievably lucky to be getting paid – most of the time – for something that I was passionate about, and would probably be doing in some form or other anyway.

It turns out that my training and experience had equipped me perfectly for this epic act of self-deceit. This was my gig. My schtick. Constructing a compelling and convincing argument to buy, from the thinnest of evidence was what we did. “Don’t sell the sausage. Sell the sizzle” as we were taught at ad school.

Countless late nights and weekends, holidays, birthdays, school recitals and anniversary dinners were willingly sacrificed at the altar of some intangible but infinitely worthy higher cause. It would all be worth it in the long run…

This was the con. Convincing myself that there was nowhere I’d rather be was just a coping mechanism. I can see that now. It was’nt really important. Or of any consequence at all really. How could it be. We were just shifting product. Our product, and the clients. Just meeting the quota. Feeding the beast as I called it on my more cynical days.

So was it worth it?

Well of course not. It turns out it was just advertising. There was no higher calling. No ultimate prize. Just a lot of faded, yellowing newsprint, and old video cassettes in an obsolete format I can’t even play any more even if I was interested. Oh yes, and a lot of framed certificates and little gold statuettes. A shit-load of empty Prozac boxes, wine bottles, a lot of grey hair and a tumor of indeterminate dimensions.

It sounds like I’m feeling sorry for myself again. I’m not. It was fun for quite a lot of the time. I was pretty good at it. I met a lot of funny, talented and clever people, got to become an overnight expert in everything from shower-heads to sheep-dip, got to scratch my creative itch on a daily basis, and earned enough money to raise the family which I love, and even see them occasionally.

But what I didn’t do, with the benefit of perspective, is anything of any lasting importance. At least creatively speaking. Economically I probably helped shift some merchandise. Enhanced a few companies bottom lines. Helped make one or two wealthy men a bit wealthier than they already were.

As a life, it all seemed like such a good idea at the time.

But I’m not really sure it passes The Overnight Test.

Pity.

Oh. And if your reading this while sitting in some darkened studio or edit suite agonizing over whether housewife A should pick up the soap powder with her left hand or her right, do yourself a favour. Power down. Lock up and go home and kiss your wife and kids.

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British born, Linds graduated with a degree in Graphic Design, and launched straight into a career in advertising having been told by a fellow student it was a guaranteed way of getting fabulously wealthy very young. Twenty five years later, he hunted down the person responsible and killed him with a baseball bat and buried the body in the woods.

Linds worked as an Art Director for several agencies in London and Edinburgh, before emigrating to New Zealand with his family in the mid nineties. He worked for most of NZ's top creative agencies, Saatchi, DDB, Colenso and The Campaign Palace before leaving agency life at the millennium to pursue his interests in Motion Graphics and animation. For the past ten years, Linds has run a successful animation studio designing and producing TVC's for tne New Zealand advertising industry.

In late 2011, at 51 Linds was diagnosed with inoperable Eosophigal Cancer. He has since given up work and spends his time at home on Waiheke Island in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf walking, writing, drawing and making music. He blogs on the tricky business of living and dying at www.lindsredding.com

Do Not Go Into Advertising, Point / Counterpoint

Is advertising a noble pursuit?  That seems to be the question here.  I will think about this little back n' forth on Gawker, and try to find something interesting to say about it all over the next few days (without endangering any career prospects within the advertising industry).

Making ads can be pretty fun.

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http://gawker.com/5896405/do-not-go-into-advertising

Do Not Go Into Advertising,
by Hamilton Nolan

Advertising is the industry that people who were not lucky enough to get actual "creative" jobs end up in. These people—creative people whose artistic or literary dreams did not work out, often due to economic forces far beyond their control—find themselves in a position in which they are obliged to use their creative talents for purely commercial ends. Selling soap, so to speak. This causes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. These people therefore expend quite a bit of time and effort justifying the position they find themselves in, in life. (As do we all!) Having justified their position to themselves, they seek to bolster their justification by attracting others like themselves into their same field. The more creative artists who do advertising for a living, the more of a real, justifiable, creative career it must be. They therefore use their considerable creative talents to sell the field of advertising itself, to their peers.

Do not fall for it, kids. Do not go into advertising.

Advertising is a far more stable career than art, or music, or writing books, or journalism—the fields that many of the people in advertising wanted to go into, originally. Those creative and artistic fields are extremely competitive. They are harder to break into. They tend to be less lucrative. Forging a successful career in any of them through one's own creativity alone is a dream that will come true only for a relatively low number of people. Lots of people want to be famous musicians. Only few will achieve that. For the rest, the advertising industry awaits, ready to use those same creative talents to sell things. Advertising is a field that is not going away. It will take you just as readily as the cold, uncaring whims of public attention will spit you out. It is a profession in which you can build a stable career. It is a good living. And Mad Men. Mad Men. So glamorous.

Do not go into advertising.

Advertising offers the creative person a bargain: You can use your creativity. Just not for yourself. In fact, you must use your creative skills in the service of something diametrically opposed to the ideals that creative people generally espouse. You will sell your creativity, for a tidy sum, to the world's faceless corporations. You, the artist, will paint their faces. You, the musician, will give these corporations their voice. You, the writer, will help these corporations speak poetically. Your creativity is pooled and used to give character to something that has no character: a corporation, a machine that makes money. Your talents are used to give that machine a soothing, attractive halo. This, at the end of your advertising career, will be the sum total of your creative output. This will be your artistic legacy. This will be what all of your poetry has accomplished. A pretty face on the machine. You, yourself, and your own soul are not part of this equation. Your own creativity does not serve those things any more.

Do not go into advertising. Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you. We all need jobs. There is nothing wrong with doing something that is not your dream job, out of necessity. But it doesn't have to be advertising. If you are young, you have time to try a lot of things. Try to be a writer. Try to make it with your band. Try to be a working artist. If it doesn't work out financially, at least you gave it a shot. And you never have to stop making art, regardless of your circumstances. Unless you agree to sell your creativity to that machine.

The advertising industry wants you. They need you. Without you, and your creativity, all the corporations lose their faces. They're not pretty any more. They need you, and your creativity, the same way that a vampire needs blood. They'll pay you handsomely. But it will never, ever be worth it. Do not go into advertising.

Unless you're black. In that case, they could really use your help.

UPDATE: Counterpoint: What the Fuck Makes You Too Good For Advertising?

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http://gawker.com/5896519/

Counterpoint: What the Fuck Makes You Too Good For Advertising?
By, Contact Drew Magary

So our own Hamilton Nolan took time out today to explain why you should never work in advertising. He is wrong. Like, really fucking wrong. Would you like to see the list of very talented and successful creative people who have worked in the field of advertising? Here's a very small sampling:

• James Joyce
• David Fincher
• Joseph Heller
• Salman Rushdie
• Augusten Burroughs
• Andy Warhol

There's a reason all of these people flourished after working in advertising:

1. Advertising forces you to get to the fucking point. The rule of billboards is that you get seven words or less. A TV ad gives you thirty seconds to get your story across. A radio ad gives you sixty, if you're lucky. You aren't allowed to run wild with every stupid, self-indulgent concept when you're working on an ad, and that's good. Because I don't want my Snausages ad to turn into a goddamn Franzen novel.

2. Advertising gives you variety. You can work on a serious tampon ad for half your day and then a gonzo comic used car ad for the other half. You work in radio, which is strictly aural. You work in print, which is strictly visual. You work in TV, which is both. You have to work in a variety of different tones: serious, comic, inspirational, sleazy... All of that is good. If all you did was sit around writing shitty heist movie screenplays at home for ten years, guess how much you'll have improved as a shitty heist movie writer?

3. Advertising teaches you persistence. Clients are assholes who take every good idea you've ever had and piss all over them, forcing you to go back to the drawing board and think of even MORE shit. But then, as you're sitting and stewing and telling everyone what an asshole the client is, you usually come up with another idea, and it's often better than what came before. Now, the client will also ending up rejecting THAT idea and reformatting an old Christmas ad instead, but at least you'll have learned that you have a deeper well of creativity than you originally thought, and that your first idea isn't always your best.

4. Advertising teaches you that your creativity isn't so goddamn precious. Take a look again at what Nolan wrote:

Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you. If you are young, you have time to try a lot of things. Try to be a writer. Try to make it with your band. Try to be a working artist.

Yeah no, that's wrong. Your creativity isn't worth anything. In fact, you probably already have a terribly overinflated sense of just how awesome all of your ideas are. "Why do I have to be slave to corporate America, man? Why can't people appreciate, like, the purity of my art?! MY PRECIOUS ART!" It never hurts to work inside a system that knocks you and your bullshit pretension down a peg. You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece. God forbid you work to please someone other than yourself.

There's also something to be said for the confidence you gain when a corporation DOES pay you to be creative. Do you know how gratifying that is? You wrote some radio ads, and someone was willing to give you money for it! That must mean you're good! In theory.

5. You learn to be a creative professional. You have years and years to write your stupid novel, mostly because no one will read it. Working in advertising teaches you to work quickly, on a schedule, and within a certain budget.

There's a new movie out called Corman's World that deals with legendary B-movie director Roger Corman and the influence he had over former employees such as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, and many, many more. Corman's movies weren't the greatest movies ever made. But each director who worked under him learned the more practical aspects of making movies, which allowed them to flourish as film directors later in life, directors who were successful both artistically AND commercially.

I worked in advertising for ten years. It's not the greatest job in the universe, and it's an industry as prone to nauseating self-congratulation as any other. The clients are dicks. The creative directors are dicks. The account people are morons (I know because I was one). It's a terribly frustrating job for anyone trying to be an "artist" or whatever the fuck. But that's precisely the point. You're not an artist. You're just a shithead, and it would serve you well to learn how to work within limits, and with other people's creative input. Who says you have nothing left to learn about how to be a writer or a director or a designer? Who says working in an actual job can't help you become better at what you do? WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

>>>

http://gawker.com/5896531/counter+counterpoint-says-the-guy-who-got-the-fuck-out-of-the-advertising-industry

Counter-Counterpoint: …Says the Guy Who Got the Fuck Out of the Advertising Industry
By , Contact Hamilton Nolan

Ah, Drew. A list of famous writers and artists who once worked in the advertising industry is not an argument in favor of the advertising industry. It's an argument in favor of getting the fuck out of the advertising industry. We recognize Salman Rushdie's name because he didnot stay in the advertising industry. We can all take this as a lesson.

And all those other valuable lessons that advertising teaches? Getting to the point, persistence, a variety of experiences, getting over your own preciousness, being a fucking professional? I know an even quicker way to learn that shit: blogging for a few years. Write, publish, argue, insult, be insulted, repeat. No crying allowed. And no fucking "brand manager" asses to kiss.

You made it out of advertising too, Drew. I am thankful you did, because you have quite a way with cuss words. Now don't go encouraging the angry bloggers of tomorrow to get themselves trapped in that quicksand. "I encourage you all to go to prison," you tell them. "If you should be fortunate enough to escape one day, you'll have great survival skills that can be put to use in something worthwhile!"

HAVE A FUCKING HEART.

The Economist Trying To Be Cool?

Jeremy W. Peters wrote an article in the NY Times on August 8th called, “The Economist Tends Its Sophisticate Garden” - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/business/media/09economist.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc -  The general thrust was that as other news magazines are flailing, or perishing all together, The Economist is flourishing in no small part because of the image BBDO’s advertising has helped them cultivate over the years.  It’s widely accepted that The Economist offers exceptional reportage on a wide range of global issues, and that it’s table stakes reading for executives and businessmen the world over.  The interesting part of the article for me was that the news that young, educated, urban hipsters seem to flaunt their reading the newsweekly as some kind of a social signifier.  In some very with-it circles, The Economist is seen as a badge of the literati, and keeping abreast of election results in Brazil, and technology trends Korea, and financial news in emerging African markets comes part and parcel with being a concerned citizen of the world.  (I have to admit that subscribe the Economist.  What can I say?  I’m a cool dude.) 

“About four years ago they began focusing on large urban areas like Austin, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, places that also happen to have well-educated populations that are likely to find The Economist’s global perspective appealing.  …  [Paul Rossi, The Economist’s managing director and executive vice president for the Americas] said that above all else the magazine’s marketing tries to stir intellectual curiosity. But he acknowledged that some will inevitably see The Economist as a status symbol. “For some people it will be a badge, for some it won’t,” he said, adding that the magazine does not intentionally shoot for that image. “If we ever started to market ourselves to be cool, it would fail.” 

That’s all well and good, and I took Mr. Rossi at his word that this flare-up of urban hipster interest was just a happy accident.  Until… drum roll …I received this “Hookup” on August 25th from Flavorpill, the daily purveyors of all that is hip and cool.  You tell me if the language in this e-mail blast isn’t trying to be “cool”?

“Talk more at dinner parties:  The Economist discount.  We've got your back on the cultural-news front, but there's more going on in the world than art shows and rock antics.  For a harder look at today's issues, we recommend The Economist, which is like the less snobby version of your super-smart older sister. Because we so value well-rounded readers, we're hooking you up with an excellent discount: 12 issues for just $12. This includes unrestricted access to The Economist online, for you glossy-paper-phobes; the Technology Quarterly supplement; 20 in-depth Special Reports a year; and the special issue The World in 2011. Subscribe now, and you'll also be entered to win one of 20 copies of the wonderful graphic memoir War Is Boring.  Sign up for The Economist, and soon you’ll be the one schooling sis.”

Even though I’m calling BS on Mr. Rossi’s claim that they’re not actively trying to “be cool,” I applaud The Economist, BBDO, Flavorpill, and whoever wrote the ad copy for the “Hookup” for keeping the brand fresh and relevant for bankers and hipsters alike. In carving out a brand position that preys on people’s ambitious and competitive natures, and sticking to it for as long as they have, BBDO deserves a lot of credit.  The suggestion that, “… if you read The Economist, you’ll be just a little bit wiser and smarter than the average guy…” is really savvy and it works.  The Economist has grown their subscription base in otherwise dire times, and they’re able to charge more for their product than any of their competition.  That is cool. 

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The Economist Tends Its Sophisticate Garden

By Jeremy W. Peters

Published August 8, 2010

Its fire-engine-red logo peeks out of fashionable handbags and from the back pockets of designer jeans. Bankers read it in first-class seats. Hipsters read it on the subway on their way to work.

The magazine markets itself to the worldly.

It’s The Economist.

The newsweekly, a bible of global affairs for those who wear aspirations of worldliness on their sleeves, did not become a status symbol overnight. It took 25 years of clever advertising that tugs at the insecurities and ambitions of the status-seeking reader to help the magazine get there.

A standout among its less successful peers in the shrinking world of weekly news magazines, the true genius of The Economist, in fact, may have as much to do with its marketing as with its authoritative and often sardonic tone on exotic subjects, like a constitutional referendum in Kenya and the history of the vice presidency in Brazil.

Selling a publication with a title that conjures painful memories of college social science requirements can’t be easy. But the brand officers at The Economist and the advertising firm BBDO have devised a marketing strategy that makes people think reading the magazine will make them smarter and more sophisticated.

Their approach has been anything but subtle. “Once upon a time, there was an ambitious young man who didn’t read The Economist. The End,” read one particularly audacious ad from 2004. Another, from 1988 said, “I never read The Economist — Management Trainee. Age 42.” One from 2001 said, “Look forward to class reunions.”

The magazine’s latest advertising campaign in the United States, being introduced in 11 cities with well-off, well-educated populations, includes two slides that riff on the theme of social advancement. In one, an ostrich has his head buried in the ground. In the second, the bird’s head pops up through the ground right under the words “Get a world view. Read The Economist.”

“They’ve always implied that if you read The Economist, you’ll be just a little bit wiser and smarter than the average guy,” said Joseph Plummer, an adjunct professor of marketing at Columbia Business School and a former executive at McCann Worldgroup. “People want to get better most of the time. And I think in the case of The Economist, what they’re doing is adding a little bit of a wrinkle by appealing to a second emotion: competitiveness.”

Americans seem to be responding. Since the magazine first began printing a North American edition in early 1981, its circulation has increased more than tenfold. (It has published in Britain, where it has its headquarters, since 1843.)

When The Economist began reporting figures to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1982, it printed about 80,000 copies and sold fewer than 8,300 on the newsstand each week. As of its last accounting, for the first half of 2010, the magazine sold an average of about 52,000 on the newsstand each week and had a total weekly circulation of just under 823,000. Newsstand sales, however, are off 9 percent from more than 57,200 in the last six months of 2009, and the number of short-term subscribers is high.

Over the years, other newsweeklies have lost huge blocks of their readerships (Newsweek and Time), reduced the frequency of publication (U.S. News & World Report) or stopped producing a regular print edition altogether (Life).

Newsweek, which was sold last week to a 92-year-old stereo equipment tycoon for virtually nothing after The Washington Post Company said it could no longer afford to keep losing money on the magazine, has slashed its circulation to 1.6 million from about 3.1 million in 2000. Time’s circulation has been cut to about 3.3 million from 4.1 million in 2000.

But The Economist has always been a different kind of newsweekly. For one, it is more expensive than most American weeklies, adding to its status-symbol appeal. A yearlong subscription is generally at least $100, versus $39 for Newsweek and $20 for Time.

It is also edited in Britain, giving it a foreign flavor that marketing experts said many readers found alluring.

“This is something that’s been written mostly outside the United States,” said Lars Perner, an assistant professor of clinical marketing at the University of Southern California, who noted the magazine’s use of British spellings — programme and globalisation — even in its American editions. “That presumably adds a certain level of sophistication that readers find attractive.”

Despite its success in reaching American readers, The Economist’s executives felt there were more buyers to be found.

About four years ago they began focusing on large urban areas like Austin, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, places that also happen to have well-educated populations that are likely to find The Economist’s global perspective appealing.

The magazine’s branding executives have also carefully selected what stores can carry it, and not just any supermarket or general merchandise store will suffice. Two they selected were Whole Foods, the high-end, high-price organic food chain, and Costco, a warehouse club.

“Whole Foods is actually a psychographic, not a demographic, said Paul Rossi, The Economist’s managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. “One of the things people say is, ‘You go after an affluent audience.’ But we don’t define our audience by their demographic. We define our audience based on what they think.”

He said that above all else the magazine’s marketing tries to stir intellectual curiosity. But he acknowledged that some will inevitably see The Economist as a status symbol. “For some people it will be a badge, for some it won’t,” he said, adding that the magazine does not intentionally shoot for that image. “If we ever started to market ourselves to be cool, it would fail.”

But it has clearly become a hip product in some circles. Until recently, The Economist could be bought at, of all places, Freemans Sporting Club, a high-end Greenwich Village boutique that sells $189 plaid button-downs and $396 suede boots. Explained the store’s manager, Jesse Johnson, “We started carrying it because we just felt it was relevant to have.” The store stopped carrying it, Mr. Johnson added, because it was not selling as well as he had hoped.

The Economist may be one of the biggest success stories among news magazines in the United States in the last 25 years, but its trajectory has slowed lately. Newsstand sales, an important indicator of a magazine’s success and a big profit center, have been in sharp decline in recent years — falling 27 percent from more than 71,000 in 2008.

And 45 percent of Economist subscribers are customers for six months or less, according to the latest circulation figures.

Among its competitors, however, The Economist is hardly alone in losing customers at the newsstand. Single copy sales of The Week, for example, averaged about 3,800 in 2009 but have dipped well below 2,000 for several weeks this year, according to the most recent figures available.

But managers at The Economist do not seem very concerned. John Micklethwait, the editor, said the magazine’s long-term success and relevance are only getting stronger in a world that is becoming increasingly global.

“It’s much easier to sell a magazine that’s as global as what we do in an era when if you live in Detroit, your life can get changed by something that happens in Delhi,” he said.

As for The Economist’s hip factor, Mr. Micklethwait said it had nothing to do with how the magazine was edited. “Once you start trying to segment and work out what people might want to see, I think that would be a journey to some type of psychological hell.”

Neuromarketing - Mind-Reading Marketers Have Ways Of Making You Buy

My sister sent me a fascinating article by Graham Lawton and Clare Wilson, published in New Scientist called, “Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy.” –

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.300-mindreading-marketers-have-ways-of-making-you-buy.html

The article is about Neuromarketing – “a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people's heads and discover what they really want.” As a creative who has too often sat behind two-way mirrors and watched my campaigns die silent deaths at the hands of generally well intentioned, but generally inarticulate people haphazardly thrown together into focus groups, learning of a potentially better way to test the efficacy of advertising concepts before they get produced was of great interest to me.

In the article, Thom Noble, the managing director of NeuroFocus Europe claims that, “What people say and what they think [in traditional focus groups] is not always the same. Conventional research really struggles with this.” On an intuitive level, I have felt Mr. Nobel’s claim to be agonizingly true time and time again. Later in the article, Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, explains, ‘the problem is that much of the decision-making process happens at a subconscious level, and experiments reveal that people are generally not very good at explaining the thinking behind their choices. “Sometimes they simply don't know why they chose things,” he says. “They concoct explanations after the fact, or make up explanations that are socially acceptable.”’ Thankfully, more scientific, technologically driven approaches to testing consumer preferences may be emerging. It’s exciting to conceive of a day where these new neuromarketing research techniques, could enable marketers get around hearing what people think they think, or what people think we want to hear them say, and get directly into what they’re actually thinking.

Regardless of whether or not these neuromarketing techniques become refined enough to be useful and affordable enough to be widely available, there were two clear takeaways in the article that are both worth underscoring.

First, ‘... our decisions are much less rational than traditional economics suggests. “We find that emotions are really important,” says Mirja Hubert, a consumer researcher at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany. “Even rational decisions are not possible without emotion.” Emotions are also key to the elusive concept of “brand loyalty” – the often irrational preference for one version of a product over essentially identical competitors.’ If we want to make meaningful connections with our consumers and build lasting relationships over time, it’s more important to make them feel something than it is to ask them to analyze, calculate, and come to a rational conclusion.

And second, ‘According to NeuroFocus's chief science adviser, neuroscientist Robert T. Knight at the University of California, Berkeley, an EEG trace [one of several technologies discussed in the article] can reveal the three things that market researchers really need to know: "Did you pay attention? Did it elicit emotions? Was it memorable?" If a product doesn't tick these three boxes then it won't succeed.’ True that, Robert T. Knight. Those are the three boxes I try to tick on everything I write.

Advertising Helps People Enjoy Things More

I’ve often had a hard time justifying to myself the fact that I spend so much of my time and energy creating advertising. Does advertising in and of itself provide any social benefit to anyone, or is it just contributing to the clutter and overall deluge information infiltrating every party of our everyday lives? A college buddy of mine suggested I look up this article - http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html - which I found very heartening. As it turns out, advertising can contribute to the pleasure people experience consuming the goods we advertise:

“ [This] research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists' notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

‘Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer's ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality," the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.” ’

-Stephen Shankland quoting a research scientist involved in the research.

I like thinking that if I write a good ad, it could help people enjoy whatever I’m pushing more than they would if they hadn’t seen the ad.



-Article in Full-
January 14, 2008 10:55 AM PST
Stephen Shankland
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

This graph shows the activity in the brain's pleasure center; there's more activity with wine subjects think costs $90 a bottle (top line) than the same wine priced at $10. The arrow shows the moment when the subjects started tasting the wine. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, "You get what you pay for."

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This chart shows that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10. (Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists' notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

"Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer's ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality," the researchers said. "Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles."

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science.

A Battle on Billboards of Ads vs. Art

A response to the NY Times article, “A Battle, on Billboards, of Ads vs. Art,” by Colin Moynihan, published on Monday October 26 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/nyregion/26posters.html -- and copied below. 

There is an interesting piece in today’s NY Times.  It reports on an artist named Jordan Seiler, and a group he founded called, “The Public Ad Campaign.”  -- http://www.publicadcampaign.com/ --  They whitewash billboards in Manhattan and allow advocates to spread anti-advertising messages, or artists to replace the ads with their own artwork work.

“ … ‘We’re bombarded by ads every day,’ [artist, Jordan Seiler] said. ‘Advertising frames the public environment as being for sale but public space is not inherently commercial.’  …  Some passers-by liked the commando like cover-ups; an artist named Jane Gennaro, who was not connected to the project, approved of the men painting over an ad for the video game Grand Theft Auto, saying, “We need to get rid of all the visual noise. …”

This raises an interesting question in my mind.  If ads were more ‘artistic,’ per se, would they be considered so offensive?  Would beautiful ads contribute to the cacophony of ‘visual noise’ we’re ‘bombarded’ with on a daily basis?

Ads are very often considered to be obstacles that impede our ability to get the information or the entertainment we’re looking for, or distractions that clutter our everyday lives.  We’ve trained ourselves to side-step or tune-out the vast majority of ads we see in nearly every context.   We tune them out, that is, unless they offer up something we want.  Nobody seems to object to an ad that give us a piece of information we find to be useful, or an ad that makes us laugh.  Thus advertisers try to cut through the clutter with targeted media placements, and offer up engaging/relevant content.  What I take from this article is that advertisers aren’t making ads that are artistic enough to be relevant and engaging to Jordan Seiler and his New York street artist friends.

While I’m sure advertisers aren’t losing too much sleep over having lost that particular audience, I do think we should pay heed to the fact that we’re very likely losing other audiences who aren’t aggressively protesting our communication efforts.   One way to get some of those audiences back might be to beat Jordan Seiler and The Public Ad Campaign at their own game.  Here’s my challenge to advertisers far and wide: make artful ads.

When I was a college student, I was an Art/English double major.  In looking for that somethin’-somethin’ I wanted to do when I grew up, advertising struck me as a real world application of many of my interests.  I perceived the industry to be an intriguing blend of storytelling, music, visual arts, and pop-culture all applied to shaping people’s perceptions of concrete things.  What I’ve learned since (and frankly should have been obvious to begin with) was that we’re trying to shape people’s perceptions of concrete things in order to sell those things.  So while I recognize today that – Advertising isn’t Art, it’s Business – I’m still unwilling let go of all that initially drew me to the industry.  Granted, advertising does thrust billboards and a whole lot of other ‘visual noise’ into all of our lives.  So when we create ads, I feel it’s important not to lose track of the fact that each of these billboards can be thought of as a canvas not only to sell things, but to sell them beautifully.  I would like to believe that I might one day create an ad Jordan Seiler himself deems worthy of hanging in his living room.

*          *          *

October 26, 2009

A Battle, on Billboards, of Ads vs. Art

By Colin Moynihan

It was a bizarre cat-and-mouse game, played on Sunday across scores of makeshift billboards in New York.

One group of artists and activists spread across Lower Manhattan, transforming innumerous wheat-pasted posters — the ones that readily sprout over scaffolding — into their own canvas.

They would whitewash the posters and then create their own work, or allow anti-advertising advocates to spread their own messages.

But just as quickly as they whitewashed and put up art, workers arrived to put up new posters where the artists had obscured the old ones.

And so it went, back and forth, with drama, confrontation and even a few arrests by day’s end.

The takeover efforts were organized by an artist, Jordan Seiler, who founded a group called the Public Ad Campaign to question and challenge the use of outdoor ads in public areas.

Shortly after 9 a.m. on Sunday, Mr. Seiler and about a dozen other participants met in his Chelsea studio, where they went over lists of targets: 114 street-level billboards that Mr. Seiler said were operated by companies that he believed were putting up ads without proper permission from the city.

A spokeswoman for the City Department of Buildings, Ryan Fitzgibbon, said on Sunday that it was difficult to immediately address Mr. Seiler’s claims.

“If outdoor advertisement is allowed, a permit from D.O.B. must be obtained in order to post an advertisement or a sign,” she said. “Advertisements are not allowed on construction fences.”

It is no secret, however, that such advertisements abound, and on Sunday morning Mr. Seiler pointed to a construction fence near his studio that was covered with dozens of pasted posters.

“We’re bombarded by ads every day,” he said. “Advertising frames the public environment as being for sale but public space is not inherently commercial.”

At 10:30, Mr. Seiler and his confederates broke up into pairs, bringing along five-gallon buckets of white paint and long-handled rollers to use to spread the paint over ads.

There were ads for drinks (Bulldog Gin, Hendrick’s Gin and Dr Pepper), movies (a comedy called “Black Dynamite,” along with a documentary about President Obama called “By the People”) and albums (“World Painted Blood” by Slayer was pasted next to “Soulbook” by Rod Stewart).

Some passers-by liked the commandolike cover-ups; an artist named Jane Gennaro, who was not connected to the project, approved of the men painting over an ad for the video game Grand Theft Auto, saying, “We need to get rid of all the visual noise.”

But on West 25th Street, a man chased two of the whitewashers, shouting, “I will sue you.”

In any event, the newly painted-over spots were not to remain blank for long. Within hours, men driving pickup trucks with New Jersey license plates put up new ads where the artists had obscured the old ones.

One of those men, on West 25th Street, refused to identify himself or the company he was working for, instead responding to an inquiry from a reporter with an epithet, and the directive, “Take a walk.”

Over the next hour or so, control of the billboards changed hands several times, with the pickup truck drivers pasting up ads for movies and parties, as — sometimes separated by only a block or so — groups of artists pasted their own images over the ads.

Meanwhile, Mr. Seiler said, five people taking part in the project were arrested on unspecified charges.

Near the end of the afternoon, one of the artists, who gave his name as Gaia, donned a disguise consisting of a black eye mask and a plastic bag that he pulled over his head like a hood. He then pasted up an image he had made of a snarling grizzly bear.

“Hopefully, this gets a chance to engage in some dialogue with the viewers,” said the artist. “In two hours it’s going to be gone.”