Ms. Adverthinker

Another rant about Mad Men in Adweek.

“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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

A female at Advertising Age had this to say:

“‘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.’”

Women are social and love to share information.  They are the gatekeepers for almost all purchase decisions for their families and they advise their friends on their purchase decisions.  So it makes sense that women would be attracted to blog-writing as a way to spread “word-of-mouth” experiences and information.  According to a recent article in AdAge:

“…more than one-third (35%) of all women in the U.S. aged 18 to 75 participate in the blogosphere at least once a week. And that number increases if less-frequent visits are factored in. Of those women who are online any amount of time, 53% read blogs, 37% post comments to blogs and 28% write or update blogs, according to the study.”

Why do they blog?

“For fun (65%)

To express themselves (60%)

To connect with others (40%)

As a personal diary (34%)

To give advice or educate (26%)”

Why do they read blogs?

“For fun (46%)

To get information (41%)

To stay up to date on family and friends (36%)

To stay up to date on specific topics (34%)

To connect with others (28%)

Entertainment (26%)”

“She’s married, well-educated, trendy and environmentally conscientious.  She works full time, is likely sleep deprived and feels that time is her most precious commodity.  Meet today’s 30-something woman.”  - Advertising Age.  The article goes on to say that women in their 30s don’t fit as easily into marketing buckets a baby boomers or male 18-35:

“Sure, they get profiled as mothers or career women, as health statistics or dating singles, but not often just as women of a 30ish age.”

Key findings from a Marie Claire survey reported in the article:

• More than half named environmental issues such as global warming and pollution as concerns.
• The relative youth of the 30-something woman allows her to be more casual about health issues, but that doesn’t mean they’re not on her mind.  Balance the health push with the realistic acknowledgment of everyday life and slip-ups for a more empathetic brand image.
• Today’s career woman doesn’t leave her business acumen at her desk.  She researches and shops products before spending any money.
• They are most concerned with their family and their own emotional health–in that order.

The CEO of Ask.com announced a shift in the search engine’s strategy yesterday, as reported in the WSJ. He now wants to “focus Ask on its core audience, predominantly women who use the site to ask questions about topics like entertainment and health. To do that, he says, the company will launch new products and enhance its technology through efforts like pulling in more community-generated answers.”

“The new strategy…is a retreat from efforts by former Ask management to broaden the search engine’s audience beyond middle-American, predominantly female consumers, who have long made up its core, to more technologically sophisticated audiences. Just last summer Ask had begun offering search results that combine text, video, maps and other results on one screen.”

The search engine also plans to “refocus the company’s products and marketing on the area where Ask believes it is strongest — searches framed as questions, as opposed to single words or phrases.”

This shift makes so much sense. Rather than competing in an already saturated search market where Google is king, Ask is smart to focus on a niche audience with whom they have already had success. And, by focusing on a niche audience, the search results will be so much more relevant for those users. I love this idea.

How addictive is gaming? “Total time spent gaming online hit 11.4 billion minutes in December, up 27% over the previous year…Only e-mail and shopping keep people online longer nowadays.”  So, naturally, media companies and advertisers are looking for ways to leverage the popularity of online games.  BusinessWeek reports that MTV has been taking advantage of this growing trend and now “is pushing hard into online games in pursuit of their rich advertising potential and can’t have failed to notice that traffic growth is slowing at social networks.”

MTV has been signing up advertisers for its games, and one of the more recent additions: Staples.  Staples “recently sponsored a game on ShockWave.com, an MTVN site that attacks millions of women users.  The game features the Easy Button from its TV spots that, when pressed, magically makes chores disappear.  Women visitors were asked to submit photos showing why they needed an Easy Button.  They voted on the top five–including a messy garage–and the winning photos were converted into digital jigsaw puzzle, which happen to be a favorite among women gamers.”

I am continually surprised at the number of female gamers, but everywhere I turn lately I am reading about the popularity of gaming and the how women love gaming too.  See my previous entry on how women spend their time online.

But, I digress.  The point is, online gaming boom is showing no signs of slowing and advertising within games is the new product placement.  In fact, advertisers are expected to spend $2 billion on online games in 2012, four times 2007’s total.

Courtesy of Advertising Age this week, we learn that 2007 was the year that women tipped the scale to compose more than 50% of online users. What are they doing online?

• Shopping: travel, clothing, health & beauty products, financial products, and food. Women 45 to 54 were much more likely than men to make impulse purchases online when given limited-time offers or extra free items.
• Gaming: women are more likely to pay for play.
• Viewing video: news, movies previews, and music videos.
• Parenting: more than 43 million moms go online daily and spend an average of 85 minutes there.
• Socializing: women 25-34, with a college degree are more often to search for local dining and entertainment information, use instant messaging, visit social-networking sites, read blogs, and download music.
• Dating: when dating online, they lie about weight more often than any other attribute.
• Staying healthy: almost 84% of all women sought healthcare information online.

When making a job switch, women are more likely to bring their success with them to the new company. Unlike men. At least according to an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review:

“Unlike their male counterparts, female stars (189 women, 18% of the star analysts in the original study) who switched firms performed just as well, in the aggregate, as those that stayed put.”

“Though female stars adopt these career strategies as a way to overcome institutionalized norms that put them at a disadvantage, their strategies are not a second-best alternative. Rather, they constitute a powerful skill set from which any manager would do well to learn. The star performer study focused on one labor market–Wall Street analysts–but the challenges these women face are similar to those in other knowledge-based industries, such as management consulting, health care, public relations, advertising and the law. Some of the female stars’ actions were designed to help them advance within their firms, and only incidentally increased their portability; others were deliberately adopted to ensure that they would be able to succeed elsewhere. Either way, the strategies of star women can help both men and women enhance their ability to shine in any setting.”

What makes the difference? Why are women more capable of building skills that can travel from one employer to the next?

(1) They focus on building relationships outside their current firm, rather that relying on internal relationships. “By contrast, male analysts built up greater firm- and team-specific human capital, investing more in the internal networks and unique capabilities and resources of the firms where they worked.”

(2) They take greater care when assessing a prospective employer. “They evaluated their options more cautiously and analyzed a wider range of factors than men did before deciding to uproot themselves from a company where they were already successful.  Female star analysts, it would seem, take their work environment more seriously yet rely on it less than male stars do.  They look for a firm that will allow them to keep building their successful franchises their own way.”

Although it unacknowledged, the bottom line is that there is still sexism in the workplace.  To overcome this persistent inequality, women must employ “creative strategies” to succeed.  One of these creative strategies is finding a wardrobe balance.  As ridiculous as this is, “women in positions of authority, from Washington to Wall Street, face fashion scrutiny that’s so intense it can border on comical,” according to an article in the Wall Street Journal last week.

“The attention brought to clothing is a two-edged sword for authoritative women everywhere.  A style misstep can be career-limiting.  Yet paying too much attention to one’s appearance risks accusations of frivolity–which is equally career-limiting.”

With the challenges that face women in the workplace, it is a wonder we have ever succeeded.  But women are intuitive, smart, and adaptive; if we figure out what we want, we will figure out how to get it.  I have seen the evidence.  Our agency, Stone Ward, is woman-owned and Millie Ward has overcome these challenges to build a successful advertising agency.  And, I am proud that we have a viable female candidate for president this year.  Maybe one day we won’t have to have discussions about the different challenges that men verses women face in the workplace; instead we will just have discussions about workplace challenges.