Advertising Right Now: Stuart Ewen Should Be Proud
2010 is already proving to be an explosive year in the innovation and growth surrounding advertising. Just last week, Google announced its ‘remarketing’ feature for AdWords, an app called CrowdZone introduced its plans to monetize the ability for people to join real-time sports-fan communities, and self-service mobile-ad startup Zeep was snapped up by Vibes Media. Emphasis on just last week.
Here in the Bay Area, it’s not necessarily breaking news that advertising in all of its innovative forms is one of the hottest industries right now, and it seems that every startup is racing toward that monetizing finish line faster than their VCs are pedaling down Sand Hill Road. But as this year is looking to be a breakthrough one in how ads are served, I can’t help but remember amidst all of the flitter and flutter of the mobilegeotargetedrichgroupon excitement, the classic book from a time when advertising was less thoughtful, more forceful, and therefore, less relevant: Stuart Ewen‘s Captains of Consciousness – Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture.
Ewen’s main premise in his 1976 seminal work – which today seems like a Donald Draper one-liner after the end of a Don/Midge tryst – is still worth remembering: the Industrial Revolution led to mass production, which led to the need for mass distribution, which led the need for people to want stuff because all the stuff had to go somewhere. The ‘captains of consciousness’ – the Ad Men – created this need/want through messages that plucked at psychological and emotional heartstrings and created our wants. Essentially they constructed our modern consumer culture.
Well, here we sit as by-products of that era and having accepted our reality that people will try to get us to buy stuff, we actually have the upper hand. And the Ad Men are listening, which is why we are seeing such massive innovation around the simple idea of relevant messaging. They are now working on a completely opposite premise: that our wants are less controllable, they can’t take us for granted, and they have to come at us where we already are – both in thought and place. And I, for one, find that quite flattering.
So if a Google ad-bot follows me around the Web and tells me about a bike-gear sale three months later, I’m cool with that. Chances are my chain needs replacing at that point. If I share an article I find interesting via ShareThis, I’m OK with that publisher storing my information and showing me better stuff next time I visit their site. It’s totally fine with me when a small business keeps in touch via regular email marketing until the time is right and I need their services. And if I’m in a new neighborhood looking for a good happy hour and a free-drink coupon pops up on my Village Voice Happy Hours app for the watering hole that’s literally across the street – well, that’s way better than if it didn’t pop up, right? The mobile-marketing push is indeed fascinating and relevant, led by companies like Placecast and Admob.
Ewen might be disappointed that the Captains succeeded in creating our current culture of consumerism and to be fair, there are many reasons to question what we’re doing and buying (questioning not necessarily being a bad thing). But if we’re going to have certain advertising realities in place, I’d rather they cater to me and not waste my time.
LaunchSquad Takes Over SXSW
This year’s South By Southwest Conference featured an impressive array of panels, parties and taco trucks. Austin’s annual gathering of tech, music and film’s rising stars is always a memorable experience and to fully take advantage of the opportunity, we brought together a number of LaunchSquad’s clients and friends for the LaunchSquad Handcrafted Happy Hour event at Péché, an elegant, old fashioned French-influenced bar and restaurant in downtown Austin. The event brought together an amazing crowd and included pre-prohibition style cocktails and food, as well as a featured drink for the evening called ‘The Launchie.’ Thanks to all who came out!
While our event was tough to beat, there were a number of other great parties, including UStream‘s kickoff party, Mashable and Cliqset’s huge bash, the Boxee barbecue and StumbleUpon and The Barbarian Group’s joint party which gets a notable mention in both the music AND fire categories due to the performance by the band Man or Astro-Man, who actually lit a theramin on fire to cap their set.
A number of LaunchSquad clients also graced the stages during the day, from ShareThis’s “The Future of Influence” panel to “The UX of Mobile” moderated by Crisp Wireless to Vook’s discussion on the ‘Brave New Future for Publishing.’ Several other clients were also in attendance, including Astia, Diapers.com, Eventbrite,Evernote, Fwix, NextNewN etworks, Particle, Radian6, SeatGeek and Vook.
Now that a full week has passed, we’ve finally recovered. Until next year, Austin!
My Android & Me: 2G2BT
Call it misguided love, but I held out with my Motorola RAZR flip phone for as long as I could – more than five years. With a job in technology, though, I found that I was actually embarrassed to whip it out at industry events and in front of clients. So back in December I told my husband what I wanted for Christmas – the T-Mobile MyTouch Android phone – and he obliged. After three months with my new Internet-enabled, “everything at my fingertips” phone, I find that I’m still not as efficient as I’d like to be … but I’m pretty sure the problem is me.
I didn’t grow up with a cell phone. My first text message was sent less than 10 years ago. I missed the AOL IM obsession of many who went to college in the early 2000s. And, most importantly, it pains me to read, let alone write, incomplete words and phrases. Therein lies my daily battle with communicating via phone, emails, texts and IMs – it takes me twice as long to send a message as those who are comfortable speaking in the “lol” and “omg” language of social media.
I realize this makes me sound seriously old school in an industry where everything is about what’s new, but I prefer to think of it as being a guardian of the established, respected rules of grammar. Like many others who work in PR, I love words and I love grammar. I proudly have a copy of the AP Stylebook sitting on my desk, representing a respect and commitment to following this established code of written language. We use it to resolve the many disputes that take place between my colleagues about when to capitalize, how to appropriately abbreviate states, when to hyphenate, and any number of other topics that come up when we’re writing.
But the nature of today’s communication – IM, text, Twitter, Facebook, etc. – is all about quick, frequent communication, and sometimes this means cutting corners, abbreviating words, occasional mis-capitalizations or misspellings, or even (gasp) leaving out words all together. I still think vowels are important, I’ll never respect “donut” or “nite,” and I’ll continue searching for the acronyms people IM me, but I realize that occasionally using shorthand, or sending an e-mail without perfect punctuation won’t make or break the English language. Communication around the globe is at an all time high, and the more we can encourage young people to interact with others, express themselves and be creative, the better, even if it’s in 140 nonsensical characters or less.