Showing posts with label Advertising Age. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Advertising Age. Show all posts

Monday, April 9, 2012

Poor Sally Draper! Years from now -in the past- 'Mad Men's' Sally is going to tell her own daughter a true story about getting a hit of Sec from Grandma, of crawling under the couch to avoid killers, and her daughter is NOT going to believe her!; Kiernan Shipka shines!



AMC-TV video: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner on episode 504 and its themes of sexual violence and what it takes to be a man. April 8, 2012. http://youtu.be/oEbQyd78k50

Poor Sally Draper! 
Years from now -in the past- 'Mad Men's' Sally is going to tell her own daughter a true story about getting a hit of Sec from Grandma, of crawling under the couch to avoid killers, and her
daughter is NOT going to believe her!; Kiernan Shipka shines!


The 1966 newspaper headline about serial rapist and killer Richard Speck that Sally had been forbidden from reading, which she later fished-out of the garbage can and read under the covers of her bed with her flashlight. Reading the accounts of how the women were tortured by Speck caused Sally to get anxious and made her unable to sleep. April 8, 2012 screenshot by Hallandale Beach Blog.


An antsy Sally under the covers, flash light still on. April 8, 2012 screenshot by Hallandale Beach Blog.


This angst eventually caused Sally to temporarily make peace with her disagreeable babysitting step-grandmother Pauline for a bit, and later, accept a hit of Seconal from her so she could sleep -under the couch, where nobody like a homicidal killer would find her, since she'd read that the only one of the nine kidnap victims to survive had hidden underneath a bed. Above, the scene greeting her mom and step-father returning home late from a trip the next morning: a sleeping Pauline, and a completely wide-awake Sally hiding under the couch. April 8, 2012 screenshot by Hallandale Beach Blog.

For someone like me who has had a well-worn paperback copy of Madison Avenue's iconic treatise "Ogilvy on Advertising" on my bookshelves since I was about eleven years-old, someone who still remembers what the old advertising agency acronyms used to stand for, and who, somewhat  mischievously, when conversations I had while working for influential D.C. law firms were getting stale, would drop those agency names into the conversation to see if people were actually paying attention, and thus knew that DDBO and Young & Rubicam (Y&R) were NOT the same as Piper Marbury or Williams & Connolly or Winston & Strawn, I thought that Sunday night's episode of "Mad Men"on AMC , "Mystery Date" was by far the best I'd ever seen.


Mid-1960's TV commercial for Milton Bradley's "Mystery Date" board game.
http://youtu.be/XHsQpTbQ9Uo


AMC-TV video: Talked About Scenes Episode 504 Mad Men: Don's Fever Dream. April 8, 2012. http://youtu.be/PYRdALzZgKI


Vanity Fair
Seconal Is the New Bugles! Mad Men Introduces Sally Draper’s Nascent Pill Addiction
by Juli Weiner 9:28 AM, APRIL 9 2012

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/04/Seconal-Is-the-New-Bugles-emMad-Menem-Introduces-Sally-Drapers-Nascent-Pill-Addiction

I knew I was right today when I turned to Slate's Monday morning rehash of the show here, where lots of smart people paying attention share their hunches and interpretations: 
Don's Mystery Date Goes Bad
By Julia Turner, April 9, 2012
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2012/mad_men_season_5/week_3/mad_men_recap_don_and_the_body_under_the_bed_.html 

and lots of fans of say, a more typical Conventional Wisdom mindset, were thrown for a loop. Good!  

See the archives at http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club.html

Before the new season started a few weeks ago, I came across these pieces and videos on Mad Men's young star Kiernan Shipka and saved them for a rainy day:

Kiernan Shipka as the savvy go-to Child Star psychologist 
http://youtu.be/AjprZrWBh9w


New York Magazine
The Fug Girls Track the Fashion Evolution of Mad Men Daughter Kiernan Shipka 
By The Fug Girls
3/29/12 at 11:45 AM 



Those of you who are new to this blog should know that I have always been intensely interested in advertising and marketing and read everything about them, hence, the previously-referenced David Ogilvy book.

In the pre-Internet years of the early and mid-1980's, when I was home for the summer from IU, and living with my mother near The Falls, i,e. S. Dixie Highway & S.W. 136th Street, in what is now the Village of Pinecrest, I used to weekly drive about a half-hour away to get to the only new stand south of downtown or Brickell that sold Advertising Age, so I could read what was in the real world of marketing and persuasion.

With the newest issue in my hands, whether I read it poolside at the upscale apt. complex pool I lived at or over at the Godfather's Pizza in the retail complex next to the Pearl's crafts shop on S. Dixie Hwy. & 136th Street, taking full advantage of their delicious salad and individual pan pizza, when I read those articles and analysis about campaigns that soared or fizzled or about who was moving where to be the new Creative Director at some hotshot boutique ad shop, I was mentally far from the mortal coil of South Florida.

Here, unfortunately, the local advertising industry was very, very insular and almost seemed to be more in the client hand-holding business than anything else.
To an extent that would be hard for many of you readers to believe now, given how far it has fallen, the advertising world of that time was also very Miami Herald-dependent.

Up until I want to say the mid-to-late 1980's, everything else being equal, working in the Herald's Advertising Dept. was perceived as a pretty cool job where you could make good money and meet a lot of the genuinely clever 'creative' people throughout the region, given that there were no meaningful alternative serious news newspapers, or, alas, a real regional interest magazine that went hard after upscale readers, like The Washingtonian or Chicago Magazine did,once "MIAMI" magazine bit the dust more than a decade before.

Oh yes, I remember "MIAMI" magazine of the late '60's and early '70's!
My mom's office downtown had a subscription to it and New York magazine and always brought home the old copies after everyone had already read them because she knew that I would devour them.
And I did.

The latter was where I first read Nik Cohn's 1976 cover story, "The New Rites of Saturday Night," the story that was later was adapted by Lesley Stahl's screenwriter husband, Aaraon Latham -and James Bridges- into the blockbuster film, "Saturday Night Fever." 
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http://www.amctv.com/

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Get me a Tesla Roadster, stat! The sexy electric car that turns heads

Pull quote from below:
"And, man, talk about a babe magnet."




See also: http://www.teslamotors.com/
-------------
Advertising Age

Tesla Motors: an America's Hottest Brands Case Study

By Jean Halliday
November 16, 2009

Unusual in the car business, Tesla Motors does no advertising and has no agency of record. Instead, the private, plug-in electric car outfit in Silicon Valley's San Carlos, has relied on the internet, word-of-mouth and CEO-co-founder Elon Musk. The South African-born entrepreneur is the reluctant face of Tesla. He described himself as "basically an engineer" whose "intrinsic nature is to be introverted."

Mr. Musk is regularly out stumping for his electric cars at conferences, with reporters and at the handful of company-owned dealerships in the U.S. and abroad. He made an appearance this year on David Letterman, who invited him after buying a Tesla Roadster. Tesla's Roadster has gotten visibility from appearing for free in 2008's "Iron Man" movie, BlackBerry ads and a coming California Tourism blitz.

Read the rest of the story at:
http://adage.com/article?article_id=140487







Here's an excerpt of the Churchill Club
interview in April where Musk explains
why fully EV trumps plug-in Hybrids
http://gas2.org/2009/05/10/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-explains-why-fully-electric-cars-trump-plug-in-hybrids-video/
--------------------
Per the article below, Ener1, Inc., which
owns 31% of Th!nk is also based in the
land of the Hoosiers.

http://www.ener1.com/ http://www.think.no/
----------------------
http://www.reuters.com/article/reuterscomService5/idUSTRE5AG5FE20091117

Norway electric carmaker
Th!nk picks Indiana for U.S. factory

By Poornima Gupta

November 17, 2009

Friday, July 10, 2009

Advertising: TAC's PSA from Down Under leaves you stone cold sober

I first heard about this very compelling
PSA commercial that's currently running
in Australia from a friend who's a
high-ranking executive in the advertising
industry here in the U.S.

That's actually the sort of job that I
always imagined for myself while I was
North Miami Beach and then at IU,
back when I routinely and devoutly
devoured Advertising Age and the
late Dunn's Business Monthly like

(Today's amusing AA online headline:

BK Will Forgo Sex in Exchange for

Cheeseburger

Promises Franchisees to Tone Down

Advertising if Value Menu Is Approved)


(For the record, back then, my back-up
career plan consisted largely of being a
savvy and influential Media Analyst for
Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, now
part of Credit Suisse, and eventually
forming a VC (venture capital) company
of my own specializing in media properties.
Then, eventually parlaying some of the
profits of those enterprises in owning
a minority ownership stake in a MLB
team in South Florida that I helped
create and would market to make it
both dynamic, appealing and
profitable.

Now that you know that fact, perhaps
some of you out there in the blogosphere
will better appreciate where I'm coming
from in my past and future criticisms of
the Florida Marlins ownership and
marketing operations, a few posts of
which I've kept in cold storage since
last year, ready for use on a rainy day.
Well, I think it'll be raining next week!)

Getting my hands on those particular
magazines back then wasn't an easy
task and required time and commitment
in the form of a trip from NMB a few times
a month to a small magazine shop off
of S. Dixie Highway, south of the U-M,
that was one of only 2 or 3 places in
all of South Florida that even carried
Ad Age back in Ye Olde Times.

Back before there were plenty of clean
and well-organized Barnes & Noble
and Borders stores in upscale retail
outlets to satisfy those specialized
reading needs of mine.

That desire to be part of the challenging
and VERY competitive artistic and
creative side of business life is what
led me initially to move to Chicago
in 1985.

That, along with my many friends
from IU beckoning me to move there,
who thought that I'd just love spending
afternoons at Wrigley Field and
nights along Rush Street and would
fit right in.
They were right!

And as it happened, my first year
there was Andre Dawson's first year,
an MVP year which I saw in person
about 15 times that year at the
Friendly Confines.
Well, to be honest, their collective pull
of attraction plus the always sage and
practical advice of Jack Hanrahan,
then a Media Director at Leo Burnett
and a great and loyal IU alum who was
always such a tremendous help to me
when I was at IU and part of Student
Alumni Council.

That was especially true when we
needed a truly dynamic speaker to
speak to students at one of our big
annual events about life AFTER
Bloomington.

Jack Hanrahan never disappointed
in all those years I was there because
he doesn't know how to tell a bad story,
or ever fail to keep a promise, a great
combination.

He's also someone who can consistently
tell what at first seems to be merely
an amusing anecdote, but weave it
into a compelling, over-arching narrative
that paints a much larger picture than
at first glance.
Of course, that's part of why he was
so great at his job

After Jack spoke to us one year at
an event that got a great turn-out and
was a big success, he kept in touch
and was always quick to share a clever
suggestion or two that he thought
would help make our/my efforts more
successful.
Thanks to him, they usually were.

After I got to Chicago, I met with Jack
and some other folks at his office, and
after it became rather apparent within
a week or so that nothing was going to
open up that summer at Burnett,
Jack made a few phone calls around
town, selling my potential and personality.

Thanks to his efforts and I'd like to think,
a small amount of my talent, a week later,
I met with an important VP over at the
one-and-only J. Walter Thompson.

It actually looked for a bit that my future
was going to include working at JWT,
then the world's largest advertising
agency.
Unfortunately, that was the summer of
my advertising discontent, since that
summer, Saatchi & Saatchi was on
the prowl in a big way for American ad
agencies, and every agency in Chicago
responded by shedding or trimming
or shredding newly-hired personnel
to make themselves appear more lean
and financially taut.


This very powerful PSA below that was
done by Grey (Melbourne) for client TAC,
the Transport Accident Commission
in Melbourne, is one you'd never see
the likes of in the squeamish U.S.

Like so much of the very best advertising,
it works because it's 100% true and plays
into consumers basic beliefs about behavior
amd personal responsibility.



For more information on this ad and others in the
series, see

A particularly effective TAC PSA from two years
ago called Young Cops causes the very same
anxiety to wash over you, because you know
what's coming but you still end up watching.

Video URL:



Another innovative marketing approach
that TAC's taken in trying to reduce auto
accidents is their Yellow Card program,
which consists of people rebuking their
own friends and family in a very tangible
way, like a soccer referee giving a public
warning, that probably couldn't work here.

-----------------------
Sydney Morning Herald
Blurred Vision
Richard Blackburn,
August 23, 2007

Drugs cause more fatal road crashes than speeding and twice as many
as alcohol but NSW authorities have been slow to adopt random roadside
----------------
I'll have a lot more to say about the
advertising industry in future posts
here, including some amusing
fact-filled anecdotes about marketing
campaigns involving South Florida
and Chicago, as well as national
campaigns.

Because I read so many books and
magazine stories about the dynamic
figures behind the agencies in NY
and Chicago, including the classic
Olgilvy on Advertising,
I still recall the old names of the ad
agencies before countless mergers made
them both larger (yet dimmer!), and harder
to understand what the letters stood
for, -if they stood for anything at all.
And I still recall who was a longtime
client of whom.

Eastern Airlines, The Wings of Man.
Yes, that really is the voice of Orson Welles.

--------

------
Concluding with my favorite all-time PSA,
for Radio Free Europe, a commercial that
left an indelible mark on my consciousness
as a kid.

"Peter was a boy when he left Hungary..."

You can never go wrong with Ben E, King
and the Drifters singing On Broadway...