It's A Good Sign, But . . .

Alana Semuels has a story in today's LA Times about junk food companies, including Coca-Cola and Hershey, who have publicly taken a voluntary pledge to stop advertising their products to kids. Sort of.

The pledge restricts television ads on shows aimed at kids 12 and younger. The problem is that kids watch a lot more on TV than those shows.

Critics of the move have no faith in food companies to look out for the wellbeing of kids at all. here's the money quote:

"We shouldn't be counting on the food industry to safeguard public health," said Susan Linn, a Harvard professor and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "Corporations are bound by law to increase shareholder profits, not to promote the well-being of children."

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Commercials as Entertainment

NPH is on vacation this week, enabling him to indulge in such luxuries as American Idol. Incidentally, the real entertainment during Fox's broadcast last night was not the parade of magnificently mediocre Idol wannabees, but rather Oleg the Cab Driver, the star of Fox's innovative eight-second commercial pods.

Viewers were treated to Oleg talking to Rosie O'Donnell and Oleg ripping on Donald Trump's hair. The spots actually started the night before on Fox's broadcast of 24, and the network plans to continue through the rest of the week.

Read about it here.

And watch two clips here:



What NPH finds intriguing about the spots is that they're not attached to any advertiser. They are original programming content run during the commercial breaks with the sole objective of keeping viewers from changing the channel or skipping through the ads via their DVR. Of course, their launch runs strangely close to the start of the Nielson ratings blitz, which has some people calling it nothing more than a stunt.

But NPH is intrigued. We think there's a real possibility here for television advertising time to be changed into something else. Could it be that viewers habits (aided by new technology) of skipping out on ads has finally caught the attention of programmers, so that the 30 second ad spot will soon be a thing of the past?

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Why Do Smiling Black Faces Make White Folks Feel So Good?

The Very Left Reverend astutely observed that the Coke and Frito Lay ads during the Super Bowl were likely aimed less at African Americans themselves than they were at do-gooder white people with a collective guilty conscience. NPH thinks Doug Rushkoff's key questions are instructive here: 1) how does this ad make me feel? And 2) who wants me to feel this way?

In other words, what's my reaction and who stands to benefit from it.

In this case, NPH has to admit that the Coke and Frito Lay ads made him feel warm on the inside. "Yes," he thought, "I believe lifting up the Black Experience in America is important too." So who benefits from that swell of misplaced, surrogate racial pride? Coke and Frito Lay of course. Because NPH is now associating those brands with these good feelings about himself--NPH is racially sensitive; NPH empathizes with black people; NPH believes we can all get along; NPH is, obviously, not a racist.

But it's an illusion. The ad is lying. It's telling NPH things about himself that are not totally true; it's pumping up his sense of self-worth while simultaneously ringing a bell that's shaped like a coke bottle and smells like Cool Ranch Doritos.

But NPH can think racist thoughts; given the choice between a documentary on the Black Experience and The West Wing, he'll take the West Wing (no, Dule Hill doesn't make up for it); NPH doesn't really empathize with people who don't look like him and who aren't from places like the place he's from.

The ads are lies. They're lying about the companies who paid from them, telling us that those companies care deeply about something they most certainly would abandon if not for the prospect of profit. But, worst, they're lying about the consumer, the YOU watching the ad. They're telling you things about yourself that, in your most honest moments, you simply know are not true. You might wish they were true, but they're not and it pains you that they're not. So when a soda or chip company can make you believe for a moment that they are, well then that brand becomes the salve to your guilty conscience. So you'll reach for it next time you're in the store.

Rule one of media literacy: know thyself.

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Coersion by Radio

The next time you're in a pharmacy or a big department store, stop for a second and listen to the radio beaming overhead. Especially if you're a 25-54 year old woman. What you'll hear is what you always hear in those places--lite, dreamy, muzak. But what you'll also hear is 30 ad spots hyper-targeting you in an attempt to ramp up point of purchase sales. In other words, the radio will be talking to you.

It's part of a deal struck between a marketing company called Point of Purchase (POP) Radio and Westwood One Radio, which is the largest radio network in the country and is partially owned by CBS (sister to Viacom). So far Rite Aid pharmacies and K-Mart stores are among the first big outfits to sign up. They like it because the messages can be changed quickly and because it costs them less than regular radio.

Oh, and because you can't turn it off. Here's what the Rite Aid CEO has to say for it: "The consumer can't hide or change the channel."

In a media landscape that is increasingly giving people the control over advertising content, allowing them to block it online through pop-up blockers or browser extensions and to block it on TV through the use of a DVR, marketers are digging in their heels in those places where you can't block or skip the ad. And they're not just announcing specials and sales to the whole store; they're hyper-targeting one demographic, based on a batallion of consumer research.

NPH is just saying, beware of the radio.

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Cultish Crap

Jackie Huba at Church of The Consumer has a take on the Mini Cooper Talking Billboard Campaign. Huba is a Cooper owner herself, so when a friend asked her if she would recommend the car, she took note of the cutting edge marketing in light of her experience with the product. The billboards (which receive an electronic signal from your key and display a personalized message) are intended to intensify the "cultish loyalty" exhibited by Cooper owners already. But that cultish loyalty wasn't a result of talking billboards or secret decoder advertisements; it was the reaction of consumers who genuinely enjoyed a good product, regardless of the ads.

As for Huba, here's what she told her friend:

So I told her about the nagging problem with the hatch door that has a habit of not always latching. And the rattling noises that creep up at highway speed. And the heat that comes out of the vents unless you have the A/C turned on. And that all the dealers in Chicago are an hour away from downtown

It's a sad departure from the almost anti-marketing approach that marked the rise of the car.

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Mini Madness

Ever drive past a billboard advertising a product you use and feel a surge of pride? "Hey, that's my cell phone"; or what about, "Hey, that's my car."

Mini Cooper is banking on it. Starting this week, four American Cities (New York, Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco) will test run Mini Cooper billboards that send personal messages to Cooper owners as they drive by. The billboards use Radio Frequency Identification (or RFID) technology to send a signal from your key to the billboard. When it receives the signal, the billboard will flash something like, "Tom: king of the road." Mini owners completed surveys that will provide fodder for message content.

A lot of discussion about the billboards is centered on the safety issue. However, NPH is more interested in the marketing tactic itself. It's a great example of using a brand to create what Douglas Rushkoff calls "social currency." A brand offers itself to consumers as a way to belong to the community of its users. In an increasingly isolated culture, brands as social currency provide an acceptance and belonging that most people are not getting from traditional vendors of such things: neighborhood, civic involvement, church, even family. So the brand positions itself as your community.

While the billboards are aimed at current owners, they're no doubt part of a strategy to attract new consumers. "See," they say, "You could be on the inside of this. You could be part of the billboard message community." All you have to do is sell your soul to the brand.

Note: in Get Back in The Box, Rushkoff singles out the makers of the Mini Cooper for marketing practices that are exemplary, especially when compared to the folks who redesigned the VW Bug. What he found good about the Mini was the attention paid, first of all, to the quality of the product and not the slickness of a marketing campaign. In fact, the only marketing BMW did for the Mini Cooper was to get it in a movie ("The Italian Job") and do drive their cars around on the tops of semi trucks.

NPH wonders if this new step is in continuity with those exemplary practices or a departure from them.

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No, Seriously

This is the kind of mail solicitations that come to NPH's church.
No joke.

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It's Not Just Milk

So beverage companies fund studies of their products that produce favorable results? Well, according to this month's edition of Environmental Health Prospectives Journal, cell phone companies do the same thing. The long and short of the study (which analyzed 57 studies that appeared in the academic literature between 1995 and 2005 about the possible effects of cell phone use) is that "sponsorship" of these studies should be taken into account.

The Center for Media and Democracy summarizes the study's findings thus:

Only a third of the industry-funded studies identified a biologic effect with possible health consequences from exposure to cell phone radio waves, while 82% of the studies found such effects, as did 77% of the studies whose funding source was not identified.

Again, the question: who paid for this and why do they want me to see it?

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