I stumbled across this while Googling for “markets are not communities” (Twitter plea for help here). The only hit was for this page at Invertigo.org. They seem to be some kind of screenprinting co-op with leftist leanings, but I’m a capitalist with a job, so I don’t have time to look more into what they’re all about at the moment — and probably never will because I’m all about finding ways to make the economy we have work rather than finding ways in which it falls short (and then advocate throwing the baby out with the bath water).
I digress… The point is that this image reminds me of how Coca Cola has online reputation management problem — which, I guess, is a reminder of how all those tree-hugging pinkos are pretty adept at effectively leveraging social media and viral marketing. But hey, they are, after all, socialist.
This is a fake JC Penny ad created that won international advertising award at Cannes this past weekend. The retailer is apparently pissed about it, and are blaming their ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi for it being produced and then leaked onto YouTube.
Personally, I think this whole thing smells of a viral astrotrufing campaign. Everyone is pointing fingers at someone else, and the only ones who seem to be able to answer any questions (the people that entered the ad spot at Cannes in the first place) is stranggely silent. As the Wall Street Journal reports:
Mike Boylson, chief marketing officer for the Plano, Texas, retailer, said he was “terribly disappointed” when he first saw the video Monday, after another Penney official noticed it on blogs that described the video as a Penney ad.
Mr. Boylson said he still was questioning Saatchi late Monday to find out how the video got made […]
In a statement late Monday, Saatchi, a unit of Publicis Groupe SA, said the ad was created by a third-party vendor “without J.C. Penney’s knowledge or consent…Saatchi & Saatchi did not enter the spot and deeply regrets the message this ad presents.” Epoch Films, the New York production company that was listed as entering the ad in the Cannes Lions Awards, declined to comment.
I suspect that JC Penny is pulling an Edelman. After all, by creating an ad that would appeal to a new target demographic but offend (or by offending) their current one and then denouncing the spot, JC Penny gets to cover all its bases. As the WSJ article concludes:
While the ad could anger parents who shop at Penney, it also has the potential to make the retailer seem “sassy, fun and irreverent” to teens, said Alan Siegel, chief executive of New York strategic-branding company Siegel + Gale.
“It’s not going to reflect well on the brand in Middle America, but the ad is nicely done and the people in it are attractive; young people in New York and L.A. will get a kick out of it,” he said.
The reason I think this might all be premeditated is that JC Penny is a very net savvy brand, and they will be throwing a s**t load of cash at their online marketing efforts this year. At the recent IRCE 2008, the same Mike Boylson that denounced the video admitted that:
JC Penney has a budget for $1.4 billion to spend on marketing initiatives and hinted that most of that money would go to jcp.com.
Companies don’t shred that kind of cheddar on online marketing unless they think that they reall get it. Granted, if they really got it, the might know better than to pull off some kind of subversive viral astroturfing stunt, but maybe they learned from Edelman’s example insofar as setting it up so they won’t get caught.
Now, I know this all sounding a bit like a conspiracy theory, and unless it’s all premeditated and they actually get outed for it I’ll never be able to substantiate any of my suspicions. But the great thing about a conspiracy theory is that it’s a lot like the existence of G*d: although it can’t be proved, it also can’t be disproved
This one reminds me of the Hitler Wore Khakis parody of a Gap ad. It’s an ad for a Hut Weber, a small, high-end hat shop in Germany. I believe it originally appeared as a print ad in the UK.
Now, the resemblance between Chaplin and Hitler is nothing new. But even if by some stretch of the imagination it wasn’t too soon for this kind of humor, a German brand should be the last to try and use it to make money.
Nonetheless, as far as advertising goes, it achieved at least half of the objective: capturing our attention. The tricky part of advertising, however, is other half of the equation: attracting the right kind of attention. After all, there’s a huge difference between increased sales and a PR crisis.
Although you can see Yahoo’s ads on TV and in movie theaters, Google doesn’t follow suit, instead relying on word of mouth, buzz marketing, and media coverage to spread its gospel.
The advantages to pursuing this kind of organic branding, Chen believes, are threefold:
Saving Money
No Risk of Oversaturation
Cultivating Your Brand
The first is straight forward, and the second has to with not having your brand associate with a disasterous campaign. The interesting one is the third, where Chen chalks it up to one of the most basic marketing tactics: mystery. Chen explains:
By not having a large presence in any of those common mediums, Google cultivates a certain mystique about them. In some ways, Google’s absence seem to imply that they are above those forms of advertising, that it doesn’t need advertising […]
What it really comes down to, however, is a question of power. When Yahoo! passed up their chance to snatch up a company with better technology, a revolution occurred in the marketplace. After all, revolutions cannot happen unless the balance of power has already been upset.
At the time, Yahoo! might have had a more powerful brand, but Google had a more powerful product. When supply is inexhaustible (as search is) in a marketplace as young as the internet was then (and may still arguably be), demand will shift overwhelmingly toward the superior supply. Without a demand, a supply is worthless, and the supplier is therefore powerless.
Retaining power, of course, is a lot easier than usurping it, and what Google has done since is implement some very straight forward measure to preserve its power base. Most of these can be found in Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power.
I believe that sex can be used to sell anything (even beer goggles). Not because I’m jaded or cynical (which I am), or because I’m a pervert (which I’m not), but because I’ve seen it first hand. I came across this on Andrew P’s blog and here’s what he had to say about:
Everyone in advertising knows that condom ads are easy to do. Well, everyone in advertising likes to say condom ads are easy to do.
I think that condom ads are easy to do for the same reason that sex can be effectively used to sell anything: sex is the only commodity that doesn’t need to be sold, so it can be used to sell anything else by virtue of mere association. So while the art of the condom ad seems to be to simply remind people of the risks of acting on their biological imperative, the art of using sex to sell is pretty much just drawing a plausible association between using a product and fulfilling that biological imperative. Some examples:
Fresh breath improves the experience of kissing you.
Expensive possessions make you seem like an able earner and, by implication, an intelligent person, and intelligence is desirable.
Lifestyle products make you seem sophisticated, and sophistication is also a desirable trait.
I can go on all day, but this is so intuitively self-evident that it would be redundant to do so. Conversely, it’s all so intuitively self-evident, it’s a wonder that sex-based marketing has the effect on us it does. I guess that sexuality is just so fun, we don’t mind if its used to manipulate us.
This all reminds me of when I worked for American Apparel. Those guys wrote the book on modern controversial marketing. First, they’ve identified their market as young hipsters. Second, they speak to these hipsters by featuring them (i.e. employees and employees’ friends) in their ads. Third, their villain is the establishment with its archaic standards of beauty and repressed notions of sexuality. Finally, they fan the flames by doing things like publishing their hate mail.
Retaining power, of course, is a lot easier than usurping it, and what Google has done since is implement some very straight forward measure to preserve its power base. Most of these can be found in 
This all reminds me of when I worked for 
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