Ship-for-Brains Kmart

For many of us, our biggest strength often also turns out to be our biggest weakness.  For ad agencies, their biggest strengths often are their creativity and sense-of-humor.  Those wacky guys in the skinny jeans and pointy shoes crack me up!  But when not checked by clients and agency grown-ups, that strength can sometimes manifest itself as a weakness.

Witness K-Mart’s ad agency, Draftfcb.   (You can already tell how hip they are just by the funky corporate name.)  This is the assignment Draftfcb was given:  Promote Kmart as an online shopping outlet, something Kmart is lightly associated with.

But, it’s also critically important that any ad agency also be mindful of the overall brand backdrop for their narrow marketing assignment:   Historically, K-mart has had shitty stores, a shitty customer experience, shitty customer service, and shitty products, and, consequently, a shitty brand image.  Kmart desperately needs to change both the reality and perception of its wall-to-wall shitty-ness.

So, Draftfcb created, and Kmart approved, this gut-buster:

Neuter the Rabble.

Last Thursday night, during the blizzard before last, I drove out to the high school here in beautiful, misunderstood Edina to catch weatherman Paul Douglas’s act on climate change. The operative cliché for “my people” is that they’re all self-absorbed, hyper-competitive materialists restless-to-bored with any conversation or endeavour that doesn’t add to shareholder value in the next quarter. Nevertheless, over 100 fellow citizens slogged their way through the right-angle sleet to hear what Douglas had to say.

Being that he’s spent the bulk of his career on TV, his name and face are familiar to every Minnesotan over the age of 15, and sure enough there were people posing with him for souvenir pictures in the lobby before the “show”.

And it’s a pretty good show. Douglas, TV performer and demonstrably shrewd businessman, has a polished, credible and engaging act laying out the known reality of climate change. I doubt there was a skeptic in the theater, but the impact of deniers, willful ignorers and utter know-nothings is stark in his story of building effective consensus. (His shtick was the main attraction in a night raising awareness of Edina’s various green initiatives, for which, as Mayor and MC Jim Hovland proudly pointed out, the city — of preening, avaricious capitalists (not his words) — has already won national acclaim and regard as a leader.)

Having followed Douglas’ career since his KARE-11 days, through WBBM in Chicago, back to (and then out of) WCCO, including more than a half-dozen businesses along the way, his evolution into a prominent consciousness-raiser for climate change is surprising only in a couple of ways. There’s never been a question he is smart enough to grasp the metrics of true science, the only issue was whether he’d take the career-risk of actually proselytizing for what he knows to be true.

But he has. Perhaps most aggressively after realizing that his days with network affiliate TV were over, but he has. And it’s dramatically more than any of his meteorological colleagues left behind at any local station dare to do. In case you haven’t noticed human-caused climate change is a taboo in local weather reports … and not much less on The Weather Channel.

Douglas makes only passing reference to his experiences dealing with nervous news directors skittish about injecting anything into weather (or any element of news coverage) that comes with so much as a hint of political provocation. As he says, “Everyone on TV wants to be loved”. And you’re not creating love (translation: ratings) if you’re making some people irrationally angry.

But who, at this point in the climate change discussion, are we making angry? As Douglas and everyone who is actually conversant in science, peer review, climatology, core samples, etc. fully accepts, the “debate” over human causation is over. (Has been for years.) Those who continue to deny it, citing transparently fraudulent counter-studies (usually underwritten by the Koch brothers or other carbon producers), have no credible standing on the matter. They can make noise, bluster and rage, but from the perspective of everyone who can read a graph on carbon dioxide release, that crowd is the rhetorical equivalent of a drunk armed with the same handful of bogus bar stool talking points.

But as we’ve just seen in the Senate vote on universal background checks, an absurdly small minority of irrationally angry/misinformed citizens still has powerful influence over the well-being of the … vast … majority.

How to reverse that dynamic?

Ninety minute seminars for the choir will only do so much. Likewise, simply writing campaign checks to sympathetic politicians for election season ads has obvious effectiveness issues. Not the least of which is that the crushing majority of ads during a campaign cycle are little more than noise and annoyance to viewers.

My suggestion, both for gun control and climate science awareness, is an experiment in the full, sustained impact of … theater. Paul Douglas long ago learned and honed the techniques of performance. You have to engage and sustain an audience to get your message across. In terms of building broad cultural awareness, what if we combined the talents of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, two industries full of people who “get” the science and the consequences of doing nothing. (Add to them the military and insurance companies, two other entities long past the point of denying climate change.)

Given Hollywood’s progressive attitudes, I have to believe writers, directors, editors, actors and camera people, would fall over each other to be a part of a campaign producing PSAs on the reality of human activity on climate, pulling back the curtain on the disinformation industry, and the modest lifestyle changes that can be made (not to mention the employment opportunities in renewable energy). Ditto, a sustained campaign to further delegitimize the NRA, with the intent of rendering it inconsequential to the election prospects of Bible Belt and rural legislators.

The commonality of climate deniers and ardent gun “enthusiasts” is striking.

And the money for it? How much did Hollywood and uber-liberal fat cats pour into the 2012 election? How fast do musicians volunteer for the latest disaster relief telethon? How much of this kind of work could be had pro-bono? How much (if any) could the networks be pressured to provide at discount through their affiliates? (Okay, forget that one.)

Point being: The vast majority of the American audience is receptive to both messages, particularly on guns. The demographic downside is minimal. You’re not exactly pissing off the well-educated, top dollar crowd. Moreover the artful, entertaining application of humor, visuals and message association would likely have a solidifying effect among the young, much as gay rights has enjoyed, largely due to representations in the entertainment industry.

It’s one thing to ignore the angry rabble. It’s something better to neuter them into insignificance.

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Please. Let’s Keep Calm.

Bad things have always happened, and always will. Even in a place as “exceptional” as the United States.

I think the majority of the public understands this on both an intellectual and emotional level. Something terrible could happen to any of us at any moment. Such is as life on this planet has always been. If not some meat-eating predator, it could be a drunk in the on-coming lane, or an over-armed psycho blasting away in a movie theater, or someone planting bombs on a public sidewalk as people cheer on a marathon race.

A Tradition Unlike Any Other

Kudos to Bob Costas, NBC Sports omnipresent host, for going where truly none of his high-profile, lavishly remunerated peers dare to go. On a phone interview with Dan Patrick, Costas discussed The Masters — the Holy of Holies of pro golf — and the coverage of said event, by CBS.

“What no CBS commentator has ever alluded to, even in passing, even during a rain delay, even when there was time to do so, is Augusta’s history of racism and sexism,” Costas said. “Even when people were protesting just outside the grounds — forget about taking a side — never acknowledging it. So not only will I never work the Masters because I’m not at CBS, but I’d have to say something and then I would be ejected.”

That this fairly objective observation has been considered news worthy and even provocative gives insight into the degree to which marketing, i.e. the buy-off of all forms of criticism and conflict, trumps basic journalism in major arenas of public “entertainment”. Costas, who freely took on a similar taboo by commenting on our national gun insanity during half time of a (gasp!) Sunday Night Football game last December, has precious little company when it comes to speaking his mind on matters of obvious relevance and/or performing the basic responsibilities of journalism. And in case his more PR-minded brethren have forgotten, “journalism” doesn’t have a lot to do with keeping “the client” happy and insulated from the realities of an interactive world.

To those who say, “Costas is an established superstar. He’s immune to executive blowback. He isn’t risking anything,” I say if that were all it is where are the likes of Al Michaels, Joe Buck, Jim Nantz and on and on in the context of dipping their toes in topics that pose problematic career scenarios? At an essential point, journalism requires courage. The profession is not about gilding the lilies of those paying bills, it’s about getting the whole story and telling that story come what may.

Friend of The Same Rowdy Crowd, John Reinan, (an ex-Stribber now making a living in the PR world), recently wrote about the startling imbalance between those marketing a story (i.e. “a message”) and those still in the game of straining slickly-produced bullshit for the truth of a personality, product or event.

Said Reinan,

“Consider:

• During the last decade, revenue of PR organizations nearly tripled while revenue of news organizations was cut in half.
• Over roughly the same period, employment in the PR business grew by 30 percent while the number of paid journalists dropped by more 25 percent.
• Thirty years ago, there was about one PR person for every journalist. Today, PR pros outnumber journalists by better than a 3-to-1 ratio.”

And those are the numbers for those clearly identified with each profession. The problem with CBS — and their fawning, hyper-reverential Masters coverage is just a prime example — is that we are also living in a period when self-professed journalists, mainly in TV newsrooms, are merrily committing a form of “service journalism” essentially no different from PR houses.  Unpleasant backstories are ignored and avoided. Stories with unavoidable partisan facets, especially where one “side” could only be painted as flagrantly wrong or reckless were the full context reported, are massaged into something with broader digestibility. All, you understand, in the interests of serving “the client”, which is to say the ad revenue of advertisers who don’t like being associated with controversy.

But to confess: I say this as a guy whose antennae are always up for the classicist stench emitted by pro golf, The Masters in particular. How an event encumbered by the kind of racial and sexual attitudes it has maintained continues to be embraced for its embodiment of “achievement” and “grandeur” is a vivid testament to salesmanship over journalism.

My opinion of The Masters was confirmed a few years while talking to a “business friend” of Denny Hecker’s. (Hecker was dropping a ton of advertising coin on the guy’s business, and in turn the guy happily played Denny’s best buddy.) The two had just returned from Augusta. First class the whole way, baby. Corporate jet. Cocktails with a few of the pros. VIP privileges. The guy was beyond thrilled. The American Dream.

What sort of jerk would throw a wrench into that kind of action?

Who You Calling “Nixonian”, Pal?

There is much to love about the secret taping of a Mitch McConnell strategy session, and I’m not just talking about Mitch himself referring to it as “Nixonian”.

The story, briefly, is that back on Ground Hog Day someone recorded Team McConnell huddled to discuss the points of attack they’d likely take against various Kentucky Democrats positioning to run against their man, Sen. Do Nothing Ever, Oppose Everything Always. Whether the whole meeting was taped we don’t know. But the first eleven and a half minutes, where the team rattled off actress Ashley Judd’s vulnerabilities was and it was given to Mother Jones’ David Corn, the guy who also received the video of Mitt Romney’s now-legendary 47% comments.

The Mitch Machine immediately made a big show of calling in the FBI … the FBI! … to root out the criminal low-life who would make such a nefarious assault on the Senator’s precious constitutional freedoms. (The FBI is required to consider investigating, but hasn’t exactly jumped on it yet.)

Another Tragedy at a School…

Today’s news is dominated by yet another attack at a school; a still-unidentified assailant for reasons unknown crosses paths with 14 victims.  We used to count the interval between these events in years.  Now, it seems like months or even days.

The $1,500 Question: Why Am I Paying Google to Beta Glass?

Let’s start with the obvious.  I am a hopeless technophile and I need help.  I’m not a role model, I’m a cautionary tale.  I’m the people your parents would have warned you about if they had any idea how the future turned out.

The most recent proof of these truths is my – successful – application to be a “Glass Explorer” in Google’s project – Glass – to develop a wearable device that resembles a pair of glasses without lenses that projects a tiny image into the user’s right eyeball.  Think of it as computer that can be controlled with voice, gestures and taps with a display that sits in your field of vision. This project has been talked about for years and Google has offered various glimpses of the technology as it has developed.

It’s Nerd-TV, and I Like It

I really didn’t need that annual “State of the News Media” Pew survey a couple of weeks ago to tell me how badly TV has fallen out of the news business.

If you missed it, the gist is this: “In local TV, our special content report reveals, sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%.”

Like I said. Pretty much what you already know. Only with hard-edged percentages.

Local TV news was particularly notable for a substantial reduction in government reporting and a heightened emphasis on “live reports” which translates into “stuff we can shoot this afternoon and have on the air tonight”. What has been sacrificed is dissection and analyses of what government and business news actually means to viewers.  (No wonder you thought that Vikings stadium funding package was such a wonderful idea, if all you know about it came from TV).

To follow this devolution in “community service” to its natural conclusion, restaurant reviews and Lindsay Lohan sideboob will soon replace what is left of relevant civic issue coverage.

The cable story was notable for MSNBC being declared the clear leading perpetrator in the cheap and easy “interview” segments that have replaced what we used to think of as “news”. Why? Because actual reporting, international style, requires reporters and crews on airplanes and in faraway hotels running up a tab that diminishes shareholder value.

The shot at MSNBC is legitimate … as far as it goes. Never mind that MSNBC never was much a competitor to CNN, much less NBC News, (which seems to spend more money on medical segments for geezers and women than rattling cages on Capitol Hill).

But the Pew survey played in the same cycle as MSNBC was rearranging its primetime line-up (again), and this time for the (much) better.