Toad's Friday Fave - Holiday Edition

And so the season begins.

To celebrate, I'm posting this promo video that MTV ran last year. It's brilliantly funny (still) and the propping and casting are genius. Ditto the lyrics.

And to start it off on the right note, I'll remind my UK readers that in the US, a "cupboard" is a cabinet used to store food. (I think y'all call it a "pantry.")

Enjoy

More Starbucks

So the commercial I referenced in my earlier post is finally up on YouTube.

Pretty, pretty treacly.

Clearly not going for the Beverly Hills/Upper East Side/wannabes crowd with this one, which is pure heartland.

Sometimes You Don't Need A Headline

click to enlarge

I really like this Audi ad, done by fellow blogger Simon Veksner, a/k/a Scamp, who works at BBH in London.

And while I'm sure the chicken-crossing-the-road thing has been done before, I like the juxtaposition of the downscale-joke-chicken with the upscale-big bucks-convertible.

The "get" is nice too- it makes you feel smarter somehow, for solving it. Kudos to Audi for not making them put in a headline or a copy line to explain the joke to the truly dumb. Having to figure out the not-very-difficult-to-figure-out joke on your own somehow adds to the upscale feeling of the ad and the car.

Dove Gets The Axe Effect

It was sort of inevitable.

At some point, people were going to figure out that Dove was made by Unilver. And that despite the high-minded messaging of the Cannes-award winning Dove viral videos, Unilever, the parent company, still made a whole mess of products that perpetuated the "beauty myth" the Dove advertising bemoans.

Now Axe is certainly one of those products, though it's clear (to me anyway) that the message is pretty tongue-in-cheek. I'm far more bothered that Unilever makes a skin-lightening cream for women in India. (Or so sayeth my fellow blogger, High Jive, who is very up on these sorts of things.)

So Exhibit A is the YouTube video above, a mash-up of Axe ads and the latest Dove video, "Onslaught." It was put together by a planner at the Martin Agency and it's already logged over 40,000 hits.

Exhibit B is this article in Ad Age, about the backlash, which, it seems, has even included editorials in newspapers like the Boston Globe.

My take: It's too easy for us to forget that the megabrands we deal with come with a history. And with a parent company. Dove is Unilever. It's not some homemade soap that's only sold in Whole Foods. There's a lot of history, a lot of older ads featuring the very same unrealistically airbrushed models they're now whining about, and (of course) a parent company that's one of the prime villains behind "The Beauty Myth."

And while I very much appreciate the sentiment behind the Dove campaign, it was foolish of them to think they could launch that positioning without acknowledging their parentage and their past.

Thanksgiving Break

Should have posted this on Wednesday, but I'm taking the Thanksgiving holiday off.
Just to recharge and relax and all that.

See you on Monday.

Starbucks Goes Over To The Dark Side

One of the key pillars of faith of Web 2.0 is the fact that the most successful companies of recent years (Starbucks, Amazon, Whole Foods) succeeded despite (or because of) very limited use of advertising, relying instead on things like word-of-mouth, store experience and the like. Or as Starbucks founder Howard Schultz noted “the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart… not an ad campaign.”

So it comes as something of a shock to the marketing community that, according to today’s (unlinkable) Wall Street Journal, Starbucks is planning to launch a major advertising campaign. Developed after years of relationship cultivation by Portland's Wieden and Kennedy, the first round of commercials are described as whimsical, roughly animated holiday spots where “a bearded skier and reindeer are stuck on a ski lift, and the skier offers the reindeer a cup of coffee.”

Simple enough, but the whole idea of running national TV commercials goes against much of what Starbucks stands for. The company has tried to retain its image as the friendly "corner coffee bar" through community involvement and lack of any strong national media campaign. Observers feel the impetus for the new campaign was the news that U.S. sales were actually down last quarter for the first time ever, coupled with increased competition from both McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts.

Whatever the case, it’s worth considering whether Starbucks is in fact, deluding itself, whether the company stopped being considered a local brand years ago or if the lack of national media presence coupled with low-key community activism did indeed allow them to escape the imprimatur of “faceless global corporation.”

Ubiquity aside, Starbucks does have a sterling reputation for being a generous employer, and the stores locations in upscale communities allowed them to blend in quite seamlessly with their surroundings. But as they rapidly expand (3,000 new stores in the past two years) and move out into the mainstream, that approach may no longer work. For what appears to be “just another store" on the Upper East Side or Beverly Hills stands out in stark contrast to the chain stores lining the highways of middle America.

So it seems to me that Starbucks has to decide what they want to be when they grow up: the coffee shop of choice for upscale Americans and wannabes, or a national brand that brings top quality coffee to the masses. The former company wouldn’t need to do much advertising—just less expansion. The latter would come to rely on it. And if they choose the latter route, do they risk alienating their core base, who (let’s face it) still like the fact that a Starbucks cup carries more than a bit of snob appeal cachet, something a more mass-market company wouldn’t have.

Curious to see where they go with this.

Toad's Pre-Thanksgiving Friday Fave

Props to Cathy Taylor at Adverganza for finding this gem of a spot for J.C. Penney via Saatchi/NY. Another entry in my ongoing Friday custom of spotlighting noteworthy TV commercials.

It runs a full two minutes, so I'm not sure where it actually runs, but that's besides the point. It's a wonderful little movie, perfectly cast with the sort of real looking children so rarely seen on television. Even the location, in an old-fashioned blue collar neighborhood with back alleys and Radio Flyer wagons is perfect: there's a timelessness to the setting that enables the fantasy.

There are lots of great little details (check out the signs on the fence) that it's worth watching twice, just to pick up the nuances.

I haven't been to a Penney's in a while, but if the in-store experience can match the magic of the commercial, they'll have a very merry Christmas indeed.

More Perspective

So like everyone else, one of my first reactions to the news that award show magician Tony Granger was taking over the CCO job at Y&R was "Damn, they must be paying him zillions."

But upon reflection, it hit me that they're probably paying him around $2-3 million a year, which is likely the pinnacle of creative salaries. Which is what numerous not-very-impressive 20 and 30something Wall Streeters make come bonus time. And what numerous writer/producers of network TV shows can make in just one season. And what numerous engineers and other mid-level employees of hot 2.0 shops walk away with in stock options.

Like the title says, it just gives all those late nights a little perspective. But more importantly, it tells me how undervalued our contributions are -- not just us creatives, but the industry in general. Now that we've lost the 15% commission, we need to find a better way to get remunerated for our ideas. Because that's our real contribution and it's not a minor one. We provide real value and benefit to our clients and we need to find a fair and equitable way to monetize it.

Maybe those Hollywood writers are on to something.