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Out comes the old receipt again!
Apr. 2nd, 2008 09:05 pmAdvertisements
I find advertising so fascinating. Daniel finds reprehensible the idea of manipulating people to buy what they don't want/need, and I can certainly see why, and maybe it is, a little bit, but the techniques of consumer manipulation is, I repeat Spockishly, fascinating. I know I've discussed this before, but I have more to say on the matter, particularly concerning poorly-thought-out campaigns. For example, on the Montgomery BART station, there is a new batch of posters for Lufthansa, which all feature variations on, "Even our connections are designed to fly all for this one moment" or "Over 170 European destinations all within easy reach all for this one moment." The all for this one moment refrain is constantly repeated, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they thought it was a good idea. According to some Business Week-type article, Thierry Antinori, VP of Marketing and Sales, says, "Our customers not only book a Lufthansa ticket, they invest their trust in us. With the campaign idea 'All for this one moment', we show that everyone at Lufthansa is committed every day to justifying this confidence. As the 'Airline of trust' we make the customers our focus of attention and we emphasize our clear service-orientation." But didn't anyone realize that "Even our connections are designed to fly all for this one moment" also sounds an awful lot as if it's implying, "Miss your connection and you're stuck on the ground"? Didn't anyone realize that "Over 170 European destinations all within easy reach all for this one moment" doesn't make any sense?
Another example, although less baffling, is the courtesy reminders they have in BART, usually featuring some ethnically-diverse-looking person smiling blandly, while text on the side of the poster reads "Please be courteous to your fellow passengers and turn off your cellphone/don't eat, drink or smoke/leave seats by the doors available for persons with disabilities and seniors*." It is completely ambiguous who these vaguely smiling people are supposed to be. Fellow patrons? BART employees showing us how nicely they can ask? People like us who follow the rules and are encouraging us (peer pressure! Just say no!) to join them? I know that the first rule of advertising is probably something like 'Attach a personality to your campaign," but whoever BART hired to do this campaign worried too much about the personality part and not enough about the attaching part.
Another blip, although this is more of a graphic design: Claritin has a bunch of ads, also in the Montgomery BART station, showing people doing activities that would normally activate allergies. One such ad shows a pretty woman driving a cute red convertible with the top down. The only problem is, the steering wheel is on the right side of the car. Does anyone proof these things? Maybe I should mention it to the back page of Consumer Reports.
This is not to say that my interest in advertisements is to mock them. Good ad campaigns are great, and I take this moment now to apologize to my mother, who very good-naturedly put up with my sister's and my insistence that we turn off the commercials between Star Trek segments. Some of them are great, and I have occasional fantasies about sending some PR person my idea and having it become a national sensation. But I'm not that brilliant. I was thinking the other day about what I could offer, and the best I could come up with was "I really like Old Navy." And that was about it.
My sister, on the other hand, once wrote an incredibly poetic description of Starbucks right off the cuff. This was when she was catching a very early bus to go to the airport after visiting me in Chicago, and as she shivered on the street corner (55th and Woodlawn, for those of you who wonder), the morning shift of baristas came into the Starbucks on the other side of the street to turn on the lights and start brewing coffee. And she ends with something like, "I know they were only minimum-wage grunts fighting a losing battle to eke out a meager living in an undesirable job, but to me they looked like angels in heaven." It was really beautiful, and I still have the letter somewhere, but I got too dusty trying to find it in my correspondence filing system (i.e., am Amazon box on the floor by my desk). At any rate, I've thought of sending it to Starbucks in my fantasies of sparking their next wildly popular multi-national ad campaign, and then they would offer me lots of money to come up with new ones like that, and I could squirrel away quite a bit of it before they discover that my next idea would be "I really like Starbucks**." But now that I think about it, they might want to cut off the bit about "minimum-wage grunts fighting a losing battle to eke out a meager living in an undesirable job," and the cadence of the slogan suffers without it.
I suppose at this point my fellow Bay-Area counterculturalists are up in arms and screaming that by liking Old Navy and Starbucks I'm selling my soul to the man. But I'm not, and if you ask me later I'll tell you why.
Prejudice
I've noticed that black people and hispanics usually get off the BART around 19th St. and 12th St. Oakland. This makes sense: 57% of the Oakland population is black or hispanic, according to the 2000 US census, while only 22% of the San Francisco population is.*** So I've started positioning myself amidst clumps of seated minorities because the chances are very high that they get off at an earlier stop and I can snag their seat on the way in to San Francisco. And it works extremely well. I am rarely still standing by the time I get to my station, while I often was before I noticed this trend and adjusted my behavior accordingly.
Therefore, I am prejudiced in the purest form of the word. I form a judgment about these people's behavior before I know anything about them. But I defy anyone to tell me what I'm doing is wrong.
More annoying things
Good grief, pundits, our nation is not in crisis! Or maybe it is, but we should re-define crisis, because so many things are in crisis that I'm amazed we can get on with our daily lives. Global warming is a crisis, racism is a crisis, our kids' graduation rate is a crisis, obesity is a crisis--just, no. They are not crises. They are, in fact, chronic problems. When you need to describe the changes in the area of discussion over decades, and describe how much better everything was in the 1950s****, that does not speak "crisis" to me. You complain about the lack of involvement in current affairs, news hawks, but I tell you: it's extremely hard to keep my interest up when it's so easy to reassure myself that there will always be another crisis tomorrow to be concerned about, and if I flip to the crossword puzzle today, I won't have to deal with your egregious grammar.
IPA
Leonard Bloomfield, you're cute in many ways, the cutest being here: However, there has arisen a convention of transcribing British English, not by the symbols here indicated in accord with the principles of the IPA alphabet [sic], but by means of queer symbols which are intended to remind the reader, irrelevantly enough, of the difference between English and French vowel phonemes:. (Language, section 6.1) Then he gives a chart of the queer British symbols, and they are just about the IPA as we know it now. Hahahahahaha. Ha.
*Another example of poorly-thought-out wording. Why should people with seniors get the seats by the doors? Shouldn't the seniors they are accompanying have first dibs? A declension system would fix this right up. Or, y'know, switching the words around.
**But I really do! I actually have a Starbucks card, that I received as a re-gift, and I love it so much that I keep it fully loaded and can go into any Starbucks, even if I'm out of cash, and have a drink, and if my co-workers are going on a Starbucks run we don't need to fumble with reimbursement because I can just hand them the card, and I love it.
***Of course, since I'm talking about people getting off the regional transit system during rush hour, what I should be looking at is the demographics of the working population. But I don't have that.
****Conveniently leaving out, of course, how things were worse.
I find advertising so fascinating. Daniel finds reprehensible the idea of manipulating people to buy what they don't want/need, and I can certainly see why, and maybe it is, a little bit, but the techniques of consumer manipulation is, I repeat Spockishly, fascinating. I know I've discussed this before, but I have more to say on the matter, particularly concerning poorly-thought-out campaigns. For example, on the Montgomery BART station, there is a new batch of posters for Lufthansa, which all feature variations on, "Even our connections are designed to fly all for this one moment" or "Over 170 European destinations all within easy reach all for this one moment." The all for this one moment refrain is constantly repeated, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they thought it was a good idea. According to some Business Week-type article, Thierry Antinori, VP of Marketing and Sales, says, "Our customers not only book a Lufthansa ticket, they invest their trust in us. With the campaign idea 'All for this one moment', we show that everyone at Lufthansa is committed every day to justifying this confidence. As the 'Airline of trust' we make the customers our focus of attention and we emphasize our clear service-orientation." But didn't anyone realize that "Even our connections are designed to fly all for this one moment" also sounds an awful lot as if it's implying, "Miss your connection and you're stuck on the ground"? Didn't anyone realize that "Over 170 European destinations all within easy reach all for this one moment" doesn't make any sense?
Another example, although less baffling, is the courtesy reminders they have in BART, usually featuring some ethnically-diverse-looking person smiling blandly, while text on the side of the poster reads "Please be courteous to your fellow passengers and turn off your cellphone/don't eat, drink or smoke/leave seats by the doors available for persons with disabilities and seniors*." It is completely ambiguous who these vaguely smiling people are supposed to be. Fellow patrons? BART employees showing us how nicely they can ask? People like us who follow the rules and are encouraging us (peer pressure! Just say no!) to join them? I know that the first rule of advertising is probably something like 'Attach a personality to your campaign," but whoever BART hired to do this campaign worried too much about the personality part and not enough about the attaching part.
Another blip, although this is more of a graphic design: Claritin has a bunch of ads, also in the Montgomery BART station, showing people doing activities that would normally activate allergies. One such ad shows a pretty woman driving a cute red convertible with the top down. The only problem is, the steering wheel is on the right side of the car. Does anyone proof these things? Maybe I should mention it to the back page of Consumer Reports.
This is not to say that my interest in advertisements is to mock them. Good ad campaigns are great, and I take this moment now to apologize to my mother, who very good-naturedly put up with my sister's and my insistence that we turn off the commercials between Star Trek segments. Some of them are great, and I have occasional fantasies about sending some PR person my idea and having it become a national sensation. But I'm not that brilliant. I was thinking the other day about what I could offer, and the best I could come up with was "I really like Old Navy." And that was about it.
My sister, on the other hand, once wrote an incredibly poetic description of Starbucks right off the cuff. This was when she was catching a very early bus to go to the airport after visiting me in Chicago, and as she shivered on the street corner (55th and Woodlawn, for those of you who wonder), the morning shift of baristas came into the Starbucks on the other side of the street to turn on the lights and start brewing coffee. And she ends with something like, "I know they were only minimum-wage grunts fighting a losing battle to eke out a meager living in an undesirable job, but to me they looked like angels in heaven." It was really beautiful, and I still have the letter somewhere, but I got too dusty trying to find it in my correspondence filing system (i.e., am Amazon box on the floor by my desk). At any rate, I've thought of sending it to Starbucks in my fantasies of sparking their next wildly popular multi-national ad campaign, and then they would offer me lots of money to come up with new ones like that, and I could squirrel away quite a bit of it before they discover that my next idea would be "I really like Starbucks**." But now that I think about it, they might want to cut off the bit about "minimum-wage grunts fighting a losing battle to eke out a meager living in an undesirable job," and the cadence of the slogan suffers without it.
I suppose at this point my fellow Bay-Area counterculturalists are up in arms and screaming that by liking Old Navy and Starbucks I'm selling my soul to the man. But I'm not, and if you ask me later I'll tell you why.
Prejudice
I've noticed that black people and hispanics usually get off the BART around 19th St. and 12th St. Oakland. This makes sense: 57% of the Oakland population is black or hispanic, according to the 2000 US census, while only 22% of the San Francisco population is.*** So I've started positioning myself amidst clumps of seated minorities because the chances are very high that they get off at an earlier stop and I can snag their seat on the way in to San Francisco. And it works extremely well. I am rarely still standing by the time I get to my station, while I often was before I noticed this trend and adjusted my behavior accordingly.
Therefore, I am prejudiced in the purest form of the word. I form a judgment about these people's behavior before I know anything about them. But I defy anyone to tell me what I'm doing is wrong.
More annoying things
Good grief, pundits, our nation is not in crisis! Or maybe it is, but we should re-define crisis, because so many things are in crisis that I'm amazed we can get on with our daily lives. Global warming is a crisis, racism is a crisis, our kids' graduation rate is a crisis, obesity is a crisis--just, no. They are not crises. They are, in fact, chronic problems. When you need to describe the changes in the area of discussion over decades, and describe how much better everything was in the 1950s****, that does not speak "crisis" to me. You complain about the lack of involvement in current affairs, news hawks, but I tell you: it's extremely hard to keep my interest up when it's so easy to reassure myself that there will always be another crisis tomorrow to be concerned about, and if I flip to the crossword puzzle today, I won't have to deal with your egregious grammar.
IPA
Leonard Bloomfield, you're cute in many ways, the cutest being here: However, there has arisen a convention of transcribing British English, not by the symbols here indicated in accord with the principles of the IPA alphabet [sic], but by means of queer symbols which are intended to remind the reader, irrelevantly enough, of the difference between English and French vowel phonemes:. (Language, section 6.1) Then he gives a chart of the queer British symbols, and they are just about the IPA as we know it now. Hahahahahaha. Ha.
*Another example of poorly-thought-out wording. Why should people with seniors get the seats by the doors? Shouldn't the seniors they are accompanying have first dibs? A declension system would fix this right up. Or, y'know, switching the words around.
**But I really do! I actually have a Starbucks card, that I received as a re-gift, and I love it so much that I keep it fully loaded and can go into any Starbucks, even if I'm out of cash, and have a drink, and if my co-workers are going on a Starbucks run we don't need to fumble with reimbursement because I can just hand them the card, and I love it.
***Of course, since I'm talking about people getting off the regional transit system during rush hour, what I should be looking at is the demographics of the working population. But I don't have that.
****Conveniently leaving out, of course, how things were worse.