Read it. Blog it. We'll talk about it Monday. (Remember: No class Friday.) They both fit right in with what Arthur Berger and Jean Kilbourne have been saying about advertising, but they put a spin on it.
One insight comes at the very end of the story about Peter Arnell, whose recent Tropicana orange juice packaging has bombed but whose other projects seem to be flourishing:
... it occurs to me that the way to understand Peter Arnell is to think of everything he does as a kind of high-stakes performance art. Not just the commercials and advertisements, but everything—the meetings, the memos, the celebrity phone calls, the crazy brainstorming genius shtick. When it works, it works. Who knows why? You can study it, but you can't explain it. So Peter Arnell seduced PepsiCo into forking over millions of dollars, and gave them a memo about perimeter oscillations and the gravitational pull of a soda-pop can. Is that nuts? Probably.After you read the whole story, you'll see why Lyons doesn't know quite what to make of it all. I don't know either.
But guess what? While the new Tropicana box fizzled, Pepsi says Arnell's new logo for its soda cans is working. "Our business momentum has really changed," says Burwick, PepsiCo's marketing boss. "Customers like the new design. Our bottlers like it. We're happy with the work." I keep remembering something Arnell told me when we sat down to breakfast in New York. "It's all bulls––t," he said. "A logo on a can of soda? Please. My life is bulls––t." Did he really mean that? Maybe. Or maybe, like everything else, it was all just part of the act.
But I can guarantee you, it'll leave you thinking about what we do in communications.
The other article, article headlined "Generation Diva," is by Newsweek's Jessica Bennett. She writes about children in beauty contests and
Why are this generation's standards different? To start, this is a group that's grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading. These girls are maturing in an age when older women are taking ever more extreme measures, from Botox to liposuction, to stay sexually competitive. They've watched bodies transformed on "Extreme Makeover"; faces taken apart and pieced back together on "I Want a Famous Face." They compare themselves to the overly airbrushed models in celebrity and women's magazines, and learn about makeup from the girls of "Toddlers & Tiaras," or the show's WEtv competitor, "Little Miss Perfect." And while we might make fun of the spoiled teens on MTV's "My Super Sweet 16," these shows raise the bar for what's considered over the top.Which leads me to a couple of questions:
A combination of new technology and the Web, is responsible—at least in part—for this transformation in attitudes. Ads for the latest fashions, makeup tips and grooming products are circulated with a speed and fury unique to this millennium—on millions of ads, message boards and Facebook pages. Digital cameras come complete with retouching options, and anyone can learn how to use Photoshop to blend and tighten and thin. It's been estimated that girls 11 to 14 are subjected to some 500 advertisements a day—the majority of them nipped, tucked and airbrushed to perfection. And, according to a University of Minnesota study, staring at those airbrushed images from just one to three minutes can have a negative impact on girls' self-esteem. "None of this existed when I was growing up, and now it's just like, in your face," says [New York City social worker Anna] Solomon, 30. "Kids aren't exempt just because they're young."
1. Are these trends real, or are they just a way for Newsweek to sell magazines?
2. What do the Newsweek stories tell us about pop culture?
3. What do they tell us about advertising? What do they tell us about the media ... including Newsweek?
4. If even half of this is true, what can each of us do as media professionals to keep our personal and professional bearings in a society that seems to have lost its bearings?
1 comment:
1. The trends are real, however I doubt they’re as big as Newsweek makes them. However, the point is to appeal to a certain audience, an audience that likely wants the story blown up to make seem bigger.
2. The stories tell a lot of pop culture, about how marketing affects people and their decisions. One story is about a man that creates pop culture and the other is about people taking pop culture WAAAAY too far and starting their children into pageants before they can think for themselves.
3. The Peter Arnell story tells a lot about advertising. You can consider it art but in the end it’s hit and miss and sometimes things work, and sometimes they don’t. The pageant shows how the media can blow what it wants out of proportions… and really I don’t want them to make this ‘child pageant’ stuff more popular.
4. I don’t really think professionals care. I think they’ll continue to do what they think sells and society will continue to read what is more interesting than the truth. If you want to stay on a straight path, don’t fall into the hype and become corrupted.
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