“I watched off and on in the first season, and loved everything about the look and sound of it (the smoke, the tight-fitting clothing, the lacquered-down hair, the clink of the ice in the cocktails, the music). Still, I couldn’t get past the outrageous womanizing and brutality of the story line. It was too painful to watch. So, no matter how graphically attuned with the opening credits that the JWT ad looked, I saw it as an amazingly boneheaded move. Why would a modern agency want to align itself with this depiction of advertising — to show that they are as backward seeming and generally ethics-free as the ad “boys” on the show? Way to go, JWT!”
Finally, I have come across an article from someone who agrees with my opinion of the show “Mad Men.” I am have expressed my opinion in this blog a couple of times, but just to recap:
It gives people the wrong impression of the advertising business today. It is easy to get caught up in the “glamor” of the show, but let’s remember, that is definitely not the world we work in today.
It is absolutely the most atrocious display of degradation towards women I have ever seen. While I recognize that may be close to the truth of the times represented, I have no desire to see it on television today.
“‘Mad Men’ is glamorous, it romanticizes our harried and hassled industry, and it lets us indulge our nostalgia for the Wild West pioneer days of the ad biz. Ah, yes — there were the three-martini lunches, the client boondoggles, the all-night benders after the annual budget meeting. There were no casual Fridays; the sharp-looking suits you see on TV were how all the dapper Don Drapers dressed. Men were in charge and women were in pursuit. The married ones were mild-mannered housewives, some desperate, some not. The working girls were cute dollybirds willing to do anything to catch a rich husband. Good times if you were a guy in the business; not so much if you were a gal.
I caught one of the recent reruns from the first season, and, just to stay current, tried to watch it all the way through. What raised the bile in the back of my throat was when the ad guys stumbled across the eternal question ‘What do women want?’ and the flippant reply was ‘Who cares?’ I don’t know about Leo Burnett or J. Walter Thompson, but ad legend David Ogilvy rolled in his grave at that moment. Here’s a guy who showed he understood what side his bread was buttered on when he said, ‘The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.’”
A continued theme in my readings and postings (here and here):
“The amount of video consumed on TV has dropped 5% among consumers who actively stream and download content…Meanwhile, movie theater consumption fell 2% while personal computer viewing grew 8%. One-in-five hours watching video is now done online.”
Video continues to be a growing method for consumer consumption of information and entertainment. According to an article in BusinessWeek this week:
“The average American (age 12 and up) with Internet access spends more than 6 hours a day watching videos, shows, news, and sports - or playing games - on screens of one sort or another…Solutions Research Group…predicts a rise to 8 hours a day in 2013.”
“…on average TV accounts for 4 of the current 6 viewing hours. The other 2 hours involve the Web, DVDs, gaming consoles, and mobile devices. (The ratio is roughly reversed for the 12-to-24-year-old set.) By 2013, the group forecasts, Americans will spend an average three hours daily viewing or playing with PCs and mobile devices.”
How do we combat that pesky DVR fast-forward button that zips our consumers right through our commercials? Product placement in the show! But is it too much? According to an article in BusinessWeek:
“…American Idol has become as much a marketing showcase as musical slugfest. Contestants cavort in rock videos to pitch Fords, troop off to Apple to record iTunes tracks, and answer questions brought to you by AT&T.”
“Three years ago, Idol scaled back its sponsors from five to three to limit ad clutter. But this year it added Apple, figuring it fit the show’s demographic. Meanwhile, advertisers like Ford Motor, which on May 14 unveiled a sportier Focus in a weekly 45-second rock video, became omnipresent. It’s a lot of plugs to get through. Idol showed 4,151 product placements in its first 38 episodes this year according to Nielsen Media Research. That’s up just 4% from ‘07, but the time on screen jumped nearly 19%, to a total of 545 minutes.”
The result? An aging audience for American Idol. Those skeptical youngsters are tuning out the product plugs and moms are tuning in instead: the median age of Idol viewers is now 43.
Over the past several years, there has been much speculation that television advertising will eventually go away. Ratings are down, it is cheaper to buy online advertising–not to mention more targeted–and who watches commercials anyway since the introduction of DVR? BusinessWeek reported on this year’s upfronts:
“A digitized world has crushed the music industry and is not crushing just about every other medium, too. But at least when it comes to the hearts and dollars of advertisers, TV remains the tallest tree in the forest….This is America, and even today nothing announces status quite like being on TV.”
“In reality, many top advertisers are moving dollars away from TV very slowly, if at all.”
Even with all the talk of a coming decline in television advertising, the spending doesn’t seem to reflect the movement yet. What will happen?
Check out the hilarious article in The New Yorker this week about technology and the absurdity of it. I think my favorite part was the first paragraph:
“Shortly before Valentine’s Day, a study was released claiming that forty-seven per cent of men in Britain would give up sex in return for a big-screen plasma television…As with all matters relating to technology, numbers are key: precisely how long were those men prepared to go without sex? And how large a screen? (Answers: six months; fifty inches.)”
Other highlights:
“When teen-age girls window-shop these days, they don’t linger longingly outside show boutiques or record stores. They cluster, sighing, noses pressed against the glass, in front of cell-phone stores. But few of these devices will ever be used for talking. The real purpose of a phone, as everyone knows, is texting. Only techno-tards make actual phone calls…”
“Congratulations. You, but especially I, now require the kindness of an eight-year-old…to turn on the television, let alone the living-room lights. This may be the first generation of children who are better qualified to survive in the world than their parents, especially if survival depends on maneuvering loyal droids to fire ranged weapons using a nunchuck.”
