"Thus far in American history, the fact that men have escaped an onslaught of advertising for beauty products is a triumph of gender ideology over capitalism," wrote Sociological Images blogger Lisa Wade in a 2008 post. "Companies, after all, could double their market if they could convince men that they, too, were unsightly without make-up." The post examined a few attempting to market make-up for men  and left the matter alone until this week when she discovered a vintage ad by Mennen. Ah, the humiliation of "face shine."

Source: Sociological Images

New York public schools are giving students cell phones and rewarding them for attendance and good behavior with free phone credits. The program, called the Million, was designed by the advertising agency Droga5, and has already been implemented in various Brooklyn public schools. Creative Review reports that the Million has won awards and praises in the advertising world, and may soon expand to the entire New York public school system. Some teachers have said that the cell phones provide unexpected benefits, including, at least one case, the first contact number they’ve ever had for some students.

Praise for the program hasn’t been universal, however. Critics have accused the Million of “replacing learning for its own sake with a market-driven system” according to Creative Review. Others have pointed out that the incentives could unfairly punish children with serious behavioral problems. Camila Batmanghelidjh, of the charity Kids Company, told the magazine, “it’s suggesting that all negative behaviour from these children is self-chosen, and actually the ones with the serious problems do not choose. And it’s unfair then, because they’ll never get there. It actually exaggerates the divide, rather than facilitates the solution.”

The Million could also provide an avenue for direct marketing to children, though Droga5 animatedly denies that accusation. The president and CEO of the agency, David Droga said, “It was always the agreement that eventually it would be able to subsidise itself by brands being able to support initiatives, so you might have brand x that is associated with fitness, not selling shoes, but sponsoring a programme or something. There always has to be an education link, it wasn’t going to be suddenly selling burgers. That would kill it straight away because it would undermine everything.”

Source:  Creative Review  

Image by GustavH, licensed under Creative Commons.

Singapore-based ad agency Ogilvy & Mather has completed a series of ads for Matchbox called Young Warriors. It’s a rather frightful experiment with illusion. Young, white boys no older than 5 years old pose with some of the most lethal killing machines now in play in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is militarism at its worst: children piloting machines that kill children and their families (oh yes, and terrorists). Sure, kids play soldier all the time, but they are engaging in imaginative play, not warrior fetishes.

The campaign is crass enough on its own, but a tour of Ogilvy & Mather’s website adds a new layer of revulsion, namely their advice on advertising in a wrecked economy:

The key to success will be understanding the new shopper, brand and retailer. Find out how to create ‘win-win’ shopper marketing solutions and how to turn shoppers into buyers in this recession.

 Here’s more of that “win-win” vision made manifest:

(Thanks, Creative Review)

Barry Katz, writing for the summer 2009 issue of Arcade, sees the economic downturn as a much needed kick in the teeth for the design world, especially in advertising. He writes:

All this means fewer products, fewer resources expended on making things and fewer designers engaged in conceiving and planning them. Fewer products to sell means fewer advertisements, which means less paper and more trees, less air time and more air. Suddenly there is less chemical pollution of the biosphere and less visual pollution of the semiosphere. People feel less assaulted by the relentless barrage of things and images and become more attentive to the spaces between them, which they will begin to call “nature.”

Katz suggests a new breed of unemployed designers will actually design more, introducing the concept of “un-design,” a process that, among many other restorative acts, includes dismantling cigarette machines and neutralizing corporate identities. Sounds like a good start…

Source: Arcade 

 When I heard about the new legislation restricting the marketing of cigarettes , I wondered how the tobacco industry would respond. The St. Petersburg Times  asked noted designer DJ Stout of Pentagram  to dream up a solution. He came up with a novel (at least for the tobacco industry) approach: Tell the truth. He explains:

Our marketing advice to cigarette companies in the new heavily regulated era is to fully accept the new aggressive anti-smoking restrictions and wallow in the government’s apocalyptic health warnings. Don’t make excuses or dance around the stepped-up marketing regulations, just transform the whole cigarette pack into a three dimensional warning label.

I think they are brilliant, what do you think?

(Thanks Design You Trust .)

Images courtesy of Pentagram

The formerly sacrosanct separation between editorial and advertising is slowly crumbling as the bottom drops out of media budgets. What was once referred to as a wall is now more like a fence, Natalie Pompilio reports for the American Journalism Review. And that fence has a front door, and some holes in it.

“While many experts agree the beleaguered news industry has to change its ways in order to survive,” Pompilio writes, “the question is how to do so while maintaining credibility and standards.”

Source: American Journalism Review 

Think fancy lettering has no place in modern advertising? Think again. Hand-lettering extraordinaire Alison Carmichael, has made a name for herself by producing elegantly-scribed messages for the likes of Virgin Atlantic, Stella Artois, and plenty of other high-profile clients. Her pieces are provocative and often bawdy (see the promo with the renaissance-looking dame encouraging folks to “sit down and enjoy a Bishops Finger” or her dainty treatment of the word cunt), but they’re undoubtedly unique and a pleasure to look at. Carmichael tells the Creative Review, “I spent eight years really working on being able to pull off any style imaginable.” And it shows. Check out her “exquisite handjobs” for yourself.

Source: Creative Review

The Creative Review was nominated for an Utne Independent Press Award this year for its arts coverage.

Image by  Samanthatoy , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Last winter when we named Tzeporah Berman one of Utne Reader’s 50 Visionaries, we spoke to the Canadian activist about her latest project, PowerUp Canada, which challenges citizens to take the “next step” in addressing climate change—that is, pushing for greener legislation. Private actions, like switching to CFLs, still matter, Berman said, but it’s critical to extend that greenwill to the public level and start changing laws too.

Guess Chevron didn’t get the message. The May-June issue of World Watch contains a biting spoof of the energy company’s “I will” ad campaign, which depicts earnest, average-looking folks alongside statements such as “I will finally get a programmable thermostat.” The spoofs—brought to you by the League of Conservation Voters—pair Chevron execs with their own “I will” statements, such as, “I will think about cleaning up one or two of Chevron’s 94 Superfund toxic waste sites.”

Putting the focus on large-scale regulation doesn’t give individuals a pass on small-scale green choices, of course. The ads, writes World Watch, merely “suggest that the company could also do well to embrace greater corporate responsibility.”

Source: World Watch

Image by philosophygeek, licensed under Creative Commons.

Many of the most recognizable, creative, inane, offensive, and juvenile ads today come from one advertising agency: Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. In the latest issue of Creative Review, Eliza Williams looks at what makes the agency so widely popular and intensely reviled at the same time. Here are a few of their recent ad campaigns:

-- Innovative: Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application, written about on this website.
-- Sophomoric: Whopper Freakout Ads, where surly Burger King customers, deprived of Whoppers, threaten employees on hidden cameras.
-- Funny: Hulu’s ads starring Alec Baldwin.
-- Confusing: The Microsoft ads starring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
-- Culturally insensitive (and borderline imperialistic): Whopper Virgins ads, which feature taste tests given to people supposedly untouched by fast food advertising.

The company’s mastery of digital advertising began back in 2004 with the Subservient Chicken website, a collaboration with the Barbarian Group marketing firm. Now the CP + B “has been heralded by many as representing a model for the ad agency of the future,” according to Creative Review. The root of their success may lie in the offense people seem to take at their advertising. Williams writes, “Its work may not be pretty, and it may at times centre on a certain style of frat boy humour, but it will always get our attention and get us talking.”

An anonymous guerilla artist known as Princess Hijab has been drawing dark veils, or “hijabizing,” the scantily clad and sexualized women who appear on advertising around Paris. “Princess Hijab knows that L’Oréal and Dark&Lovely have been killing her little by little,” according to the artist’s website. Her response is more anti-corporate than religious, but in a city with a history of tension surrounding headscarves, the religious implications are inevitable.

“There’s no way of knowing if Princess Hijab is a hijabi. Or even a Muslim,” Ethar wrote for the excellent Muslimah Media Watch blog back in December. That aspect makes the project more intriguing. The artist describes herself as “not involved in any lobby or movement be it political, religious or to do with advertising.” In fact, if she’s not a Muslim, Ethar writes that she could lend “credibility to the idea that the dislike of being exposed to ‘visual aggression’ is not necessarily rooted in religious belief.”

Since she was profiled on the Muslimah Media Watch blog, her Flicker page and her Art Review profiles have been taken down, but more information is available from an interview with Menassat.

(Thanks, the Scoop.)

Image courtesy of Princess Hijab.

Sources: Princess Hijab, Muslimah Media Watch, Menassat

Some of Quividi’s marketing technologies carry a distinctly Big Brother vibe. Lately, the French company's gotten attention for developing billboard software that uses cameras to gather demographic information about passersby. On the Media recently sat down with Quividi’s chief scientific officer, Paolo Prandoni, to learn how the signs work and gauge how creeped out we ought to be.

In the interview, Prandoni works hard to make the technology sound harmless. He assures listeners that the cameras never record images of people. He also observes that the software isn’t sophisticated enough to reveal much about a person—apparently, it can guess at gender and age based on an analysis of basic bodily features, but not much else.

Prandoni's pretty sure that the static billboard will become obsolete. He thinks tools like Quividi's will eventually allow marketers to tailor their content in reaction to the people moving through a space. Whether or not you buy his argument that Quividi technology is more or less benign, the technology is probably here to stay, and no doubt will continue to evolve. 

Image courtesy of cangaroojack, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources: On the Media 

Imagine if your TV could see you sitting on your couch knitting, or doing a crossword puzzle, or drinking heavily, and tailor its commercials specifically to those activities, in real time.

That’s pretty much what MySpace is helping its advertisers accomplish with increasing precision, ReadWriteWeb reports. By employing “hypertargeting”—the meticulous manipulation of advertising based on individual users’ stated interests—online advertisers make old models of demographic targeting seem haphazard and inefficient.

Because MySpace users can edit their profiles in extremely granular ways—specifying everything from their age to their weight, level of education, and whether they want children—advertisers can fine-tune their messages accordingly. What’s most ingenious about this tactic (or alarming, depending on your point of view) is that MySpace allows users to list activities like “drinking” and “partying” as favorites, giving notoriously effective liquor advertisements a direct conduit into their hypertargeted audience.

Hosted by Sarah Haskins with sardonic, faux-naïve enthusiasm, “Target: Women” is the standout segment of Current TV’s online news show infoMania.

In each episode, Haskins sets her sights on an especially ridiculous media trend targeting the young female demographic, satirizing the insipid pop-culture trends that nevertheless remain infuriatingly popular, such as reality shows about weddings (“They put the ‘we’ in ‘wedding’ and the ‘end’ in ‘feminism’”), birth control ads (“It’s Yaz, the pill that stops all those symptoms, so you can do the women things you love, like run, wear big earrings, hug friends, and have a cool, non-specific media job”), and chick flicks (“She’s in for a surprise, when: unlikely suitor / high-concept hijinks / unnecessary obstacle / true love / happy ending!”).

Haskins got an easy target when Sarah Palin became John McCain’s VP pick. In her Palin segment, Haskins slyly celebrates that mythical demographic of Hillary supporters who the McCain campaign cynically believes will vote for Palin simply because she’s a woman. Haskins calls them P.A.N.T.H.E.R.s—joining other jungle-cat demographics like PUMAs and Cougars—whose acronym stands for “Proud American Needing Token Hillary Estrogen Replacement.”

Like the Daily Show or the Onion, “Target: Women” is smart satire disguised as hilarious pop-culture commentary. I hope that Sarah Haskins keeps it up for as long as the media cynically exploits her demographic—which is to say, forever.

(Thanks, Laura.)

The current issue of the Minnesota Women's Press improves upon one of Ms. magazine's popular sexism-shaming features. The Ms. version, "No Comment," simply reprints offensive ads alongside contact info for the companies they represent (here's an example, from the Spring 2005 issue). The Women's Press iteration may be a copycat, but its copy is better executed—it actually spells out what's offensive about the ad in question, a bit of directness from which the Ms. feature could benefit.

In this case, the Women’s Press takes on a BMW ad for pre-owned cars, which displays a come-hither-looking blonde woman with the caption “You know you're not the first.” “Isn't it common knowledge,” the Women’s Press snarks, “that a good used woman is just like a good used car? Or maybe the car is preferable because it doesn't talk back—or doesn't ask questions about a man's past ‘driving history.’”

Some people don’t get puns, and some of us don’t immediately spot sexism in the tiny reprinted versions of these ads—I’ve stared at more than one in Ms. without realizing what the problem is—and most of the time, a little context or analysis goes a long way.

Advertising is often thought to be a manipulative force for consumption that dupes people into buying things they don’t need. The “ad creep” that pushes product placements into unexpected venues, including airport baggage carousels and eggshells, is generally thought to be a bad thing by many in the media. Last week, author Lucas Conley and I spoke about the “arms race” between advertisers and everyone else, where advertisers try to sneak advertisements in, and people try to push them out.

The perception that advertising is hated by most people is flat-out wrong, Winston Fletcher writes for the British magazine the New Humanist. Fletcher cites statistics that 80 percent of Britons believe advertising is a good thing. While intellectuals collectively wring their hands over the glut of advertisements, Fletcher writes that ads are simply a dialogue between companies and prospective consumers, and the more creative the better.

As advertisers migrate to the internet, newspapers and magazines have thrown back the sheets for some strange print-ad bedfellows. Cue the erectile dysfunction jokes. (No, seriously.)

The sports section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently featured—exclusively—advertisements for erectile dysfunction cures, reports David Brauer at MinnPost. Brauer, who finds that the trend is not limited to Minnesota, puts it best:

The, er, deflating news? The two quarter-page ads were the only ones in the eight-page section—a truly abysmal percentage that will get journalists agitated in all the wrong ways.

—Michael Rowe

Image by Yandle, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sex trafficking has been in the news recently, with in-depth investigations and editorials decrying this form of modern-day slavery. But at the same time, classified ads placed by traffickers appear in many publications, reports the Fall issue of Ms. (article not available online). And the services they’re advertising—ostensibly “Asian fun,” “Latin pleasures,” or “relaxing body work”—are often illegal.

As part of its campaign against sex trafficking, the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW-NYC) is asking the city’s publications to sign an anti-trafficking pledge stating that they won’t accept ads from sources that seem likely to be trading in illegal sex. The organization’s suggested screening tactics include asking potential advertisers for a valid massage license—because many traffickers disguise their ads as massage services—and checking ad copy for references to a woman’s ethnicity, which is often a sign of trafficking.

Such efforts seem relatively unburdensome—but is it a newspaper or magazine’s responsibility to screen its ads for illegal activities, however abhorrent they may be?

Fifteen of the city’s publications, including New York magazine and the New York Press, seem to think so. Tom Allon, the president and CEO of Manhattan Media, which publishes the New York Press, told Ms. that “providing advertising space for prostitution undercuts our mission as newspaper publishers and as reporters and journalists.”

On the other hand, the Village Voice, which NOW-NYC estimates makes about $80,000 per month from its “adult” ads, hasn’t signed the pledge. And before New York magazine signed in November, a spokesperson told Ms. that when it came to adult ads, “[I]t’s a First Amendment issue. We can’t make decisions about our advertisers’ rights based on hunches.”

I see both sides of the argument, but ultimately, it seems unlikely that a crackdown on sex ads will make a significant dent in trafficking. These ads already flourish online at sites like Craigslist, and would probably have an even greater online presence if pushed out of magazines and newspapers.

NOW-NYC is promoting a worthwhile cause, but if laws and law enforcement were more effective in preventing and eliminating sex trafficking, this wouldn’t be an issue to begin with. There is, however, good news on that front—in June, the state of New York passed a comprehensive anti-trafficking law.

—Sarah Pumroy

Academic success tastes like an all-beef patty nestled between two sesame-seed buns. At least that’s what McDonald’s wants some schoolkids in Florida to believe. Brandweek reports that in exchange for footing the printing bill, a Seminole County McDonald’s put this ad on report cards (made available by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood). The ad entitled tykes with good grades to a free happy meal. Oh, and diabetes.

(Thanks, AdFreak.)

—Brendan Mackie

Photo by Rona Proudfoot licensed under Creative Commons.

Most ads don’t go much deeper than describing the newest high-caloric low-priced feast being touted by your local fast-food joint. But advertising can do more than spread awareness about innovative new combinations of cheese product and textured beef protein. Case in point: A blog called Osocio posts nonprofit advertisements from around the world, including this Swedish spot that imagines what would happen if HIV/AIDS were as widespread in Sweden as in Ethiopia, and this moving rap about underage sex trafficking in the Philippines.

Advertisements are like manipulative, shiny baubles that flit along the edges of our attention. And while it’s nice that some ads are being used for good, it seems that all they can really do is pique our attention for a brief moment before we get distracted again. The problem with these huge problems—the AIDS crisis, cancer, the genocide in Darfur—is that we need more than a piqued awareness to do anything more effective than feel guilty. But proper action must come from more than a 30-second television spot. Even if it is really well produced.

—Brendan Mackie

Also check out this article on the innovative nonprofit ad agency Serve, from the November-December 2006 issue of Utne Reader.