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Men’s body wash is a subject that rarely bubbles to the surface on a typical girls night out. But last week that is exactly what three women were chatting about on a muggy summer’s eve in a downtown bar in Durham, NC. The conversation centered on Isaiah Mustafa, host of the new Old Spice body wash campaign created by Portland’s Wieden+Kennedy.
The conversation went something like this: “Have you seen the new Old Spice campaign?” “No, what’s so special about it?” “The guy in it is the perfect man. It is incredibly funny, he walks on water, bakes a cake and SWAN DIVES onto a motorcycle in a Jacuzzi.” “Ahh-mazing.”
Giggles ensued as each woman talked about her “ideal” man. All this before Mustafa and Iain Tait teamed up to do a perfect storm of viral marketing. The 48-hour weekend campaign featured the sultry-voiced, smooth-muscled Mustafa’s filmed responses to a slew of people who posted comments or questions to the Old Spice spokesman online (notable responses are to celebrities Ellen DeGeneres, Rose McGowan, and political correspondent George Stephanopoulous). Clearly, Wieden+Kennedy hit a home run with their extended campaign, pulling off the social media marketing event of the year. The original commercial was nominated for a Grand Prix award and the latest installment of YouTube videos should stick with the internet community for a long time and in many manifestations.
More importantly, Wieden+Kennedy may have found the secret to actually selling body wash to men through catering to the eyes and ears of women. For most dudes, body wash is not an inherently cool thing to purchase nor is it top of mind in the store. Guys are known to lather up with any bar, chunk, or semblance of soap hanging out in the shower, leaving appalled women everywhere to search for, long for, and even lust after a character like the Old Spice man played to perfection by the brawny Mustafa. While AXE commercials use bathroom humor and Playboy-style sex appeal to reach their target demographic, the sleepy Old Spice of your grandfather’s generation has wised up and reached out to the holder of the purse strings, the man, man’s woman. Only time will tell the result of Old Spice’s hot new man’s impact on overall sales, currently Red Zone body wash sales have dipped. But hey, it can take awhile to wake a septuagenarian up.
Word nerds rejoice! There is a new visual “thinkmap” for those searching for the right word, at the right moment. The Visual Thesaurus provides right brain thinkers, or those that find picture and visual thinking more intuitive and productive, with an illustration of words grouped together according to similarity of meaning.
Here is an example:
The diagram works by clustering words with similar meanings in an interconnected web. A central word is used as the foundation with words closest in meaning surrounding the central word. As the web moves outward, the words become less similar in meaning to the central word, providing a spatial allocation for word relationships. Auditory working memory mainly takes place in the confines of the brain, but the Visual Thesaurus illustrates that “memory web” in a profound and useful way.
It’s almost complete, after 45 years, it’s almost there. A dozen surviving researchers are wrapping things up, puting the final touches on “Slab-Z, ” the fifth and final volume of a series first published in 1975 by Harvard University Press is scheduled to be completed next year.
DARE, “The Dictionary of American Regional English,” is finally closing in on completing what has to be the coolest thing I’ve heard about in the last few years: completely documenting America’s geographically variant vocabulary. All of it. The regional patois that communicates the great American quilt.
I’m not even going to start to go into examples, I couldn’t even begin to do it justice, you get the gist. What’s so great about it is the documentation of variant words and phrases not found in normal dictionaries that we all, no matter where we live, use with our neighbors without thinking. And if we we’re born somewhere else other than our current domicile, oh how we all easily slip into our common threads when we return ‘home’.
Tom Wolfe calls DARE his “favorite reading.” I gotta get this (that’s right, it’s only in hard copy), but I’m not even sure where to start…
Yes, we all know about Americans’ love affair with food, and the broadening of our palates the past twenty years. One of the reasons I decided on an early career in advertising was that, back then, it meant a move to NYC, which meant an increased food spectrum. Where else could I get Malaysian delivered to my door on a whim at 11pm on a Tuesday evening?
Alas, no longer. The dance of Asian and Latin cuisine has changed what we expect from food, and all kinds of food, especially ever-present junk food available at arms length in every corner C-store. Nowadays food combinations are not just the providence of chefs, but chemists in laboratories such as International Flavors and Fragrances, who provide new potions to leading snack food manufacturers. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Miriam Gottfried, in addition to adding tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, food companies now seek to add “umani,” a Japanese word meaning “good flavor.”
Umani is not a flavor, but an experience to ‘amp’ food, bring up an intensity of flavor to satisfy the need for a spicier, fruitier, bigger flavor experience. The result? Potentially, the development of a generation of flavor junkies who become desensitized to the true flavors exhibited by ‘real’ food.
No longer is hot good enough, now we need three levels of heat intensity. Fruit flavors blend to create a polyglot that really isn’t a flavor, but rather a fusion of high and low notes. We don’t really seek food that is flavorful, but rather a series of taste sensations packaged in various forms of food delivery systems.
Few fans of the magazine Gourmet expected the November issue of 2009 to be its last. However, a struggling economy, along with the internet, has made it hard for many magazines to survive.
After nearly 70 years, publisher Condé Nast abruptly stopped production of the monthly magazine due to lack of advertising sales and a shift in consumer interest. At the time of Condé Nast’s decision, both Gourmet and its sister magazine, Bon Appétit, were struggling with ad sales. Bon Appétit made the cut. Gourmet didn’t. Bon Appétit was offered as a substitute for Gourmet for the remainder of almost one million subscriptions.
Since then a slight margin (a slim 20 percent to be exact) of past Gourmet subscribers have chosen to switch to Bon Appétit. This seems odd for such highly dedicated and long-term subscribers. The lack of transferred subscriptions poses a hard question. Why did Condé Nast choose not to research the niche market of such an obviously successful magazine like Gourmet in order to keep those dedicated subscribers?
On the cover, the magazines look similar. Both share great recipes. Both feature articles about food, culture, and politics. However, the audiences of each magazine differ greatly. This is evidenced through both magazines advertisements as well as their contrasting takes on good living. Gourmet was luxurious and indulgent. It stressed extravagant travel and an elitist lifestyle. Bon Appétit stresses a comfortable home life, centering on family cooking. It offered complex, yet more accessible recipes.
While many Gourmet readers feel heartbroken about no longer receiving the magazine each month, Condé Nast’s decision makes good sense, especially when considering the economic forecast that sunk Gourmet. Foodies aren’t paying for exotic trips to experience food anymore. They’re cooking at home with their families, growing their own gardens, or buying local food. Despite a large fan base, Gourmet’s attention to life’s luxuries and hefty subscription fees failed to keep advertisers interested. In the case of Gourmet and many other magazines, ad money trumps readership and loyalty.
But after loosing 800,000 subscribers, it seems that Condé Nast missed a really great chance to study their Gourmet readers. The magazine may have been out-of-touch with the current economic reality, but its subscribers were still writing checks every year. If Condé Nast saw the end of Gourmet magazine in sight, why not find out what it was that appealed to readers and kept some subscribing for decades. That sort of insight would have been exactly what Condé Nast could have used to align Bon Appétit toward the views and preferences of Gourmet’s readers in order to boost the number of subscription transfers and keep those loyal consumers.
I gave up reading books that can be found in the business/advertising/marketing section of the bookstore a while back. Most of the books you find in that section should have never been written in the first place: authors rehashing their previous work, self-help for the cubicle crowd, and whatever flavor of behavioral psychology is cool this month. I also posit that the original, interesting books in this section are likely to be rambling, 300 page tomes that would work better as 8 page articles in the New Yorker.
So, with few exceptions, the New York Times Business Bestseller List is dead to me. One of those exceptions is Rework, from the founders of 37signals (and the masterminds behind the best blog in the world, signal vs. noise).
Rework is essentially a collection of a hundred or so brief essays on how they do business. Anyone who has read their blog knows that they are feisty, irreverent, critical, and, in the end, brutally honest and usually right. The essays are no different. From advice on how to nurture office culture, to their thoughts on the futility of meeting and conference calls, they lay it all out there for the reader to do with as they please.
I have a strong suspicion that anyone who read this book and tried to follow their lead word for word would fail – miserably. Taken with a level head and grain of salt, however, the book is filled with provocations that will change the way they go about their life at work.
Here is a brief PDF excerpt from the book. Enjoy.
HBO’s witty, iconic show, Sex and the City, saw better days on the small screen before it’s second film installment received a caustic lashing from film critics nationwide. Now the single girl empire built by stilettos and Cosmopolitans is accused of being bigoted, offensive, and abysmally juvenile for it’s outlandish portrayal of Middle Eastern sexual politics and irreverent take on marriage, motherhood, and the economic recession.
But while the filmmakers-director, screenwriters, and producers- got the formula wrong, the marketing team had the recipe for empirical success. This sequel “outbrands” its predecessor through product placement on screen (think luxurious Mercedes Maybachs on parade and cameos of glittery Louboutin stilettos) and off (HBO marketing has created bra styles for each of the four characters, cocktail glasses, and a “Carrie” necklace).
From a marketing perspective, the former cable series’ transformation into a big-budget franchise is like hitting pay dirt. American women who are sipping on the hype of sisterhood and “labels or love” will flock to the screen and then to retailers to open their wallets for Sex and the City approved (and applauded) bling. Still, some true blue fans are getting frustrated with the series market expansion, condemning it’s capitalistic embrace. Time will tell whether fans are “Carried” away with the sequel’s product placement or eternally turned off.
According to a new survey conducted by Britain’s Tesco Mobile, the Apple smart phone is considered to be a more important invention than the toilet, combustion engine, and even birth control by British consumers.
The survey interviewed 4,000 consumers between the ages of 18-65, cataloging the one hundred top inventions in order of their reported level of importance. Inventions included everything from the technologically sophisticated-the satellite disk-to the functionally simplistic-the clothes peg.
Clearly, cell phones play a monumental role in our ability to communicate with others, organize and even entertain ourselves. But is slotting the iPhone above the steam engine and the car a realistic view of it’s importance? Brits certainly think so but I wonder how the same survey would fare across the pond.
