Selena, Annie, and More Stupid Advertising from Across the Pond

Okay, so where am I?

(More on that in a minute).

In between my regular job (well, it's not so regular, it's actually invigorating), working with the team to prepare the campaign overview for the Clio submission (it's hard to condense so much genius into a two-minute video) and re-writing scripts for my Japanese television show, I'm continuing my mission to rid the airwaves and magazines of sexist advertising.

Not that it will happen anytime soon.

*Sigh*

Tip of the hat to Annie Apple, mother of New York Giants top draft pick Eli Apple in her quest to keep women who collect athlete intimacy as trophies away from her son:

What exactly is a cleavage action pic?

Gosh, I'm so old.

The seats were pretty, pretty good last night.

But Vegas will make you feel old even if you ARE twentysomething and can stay up for 30 hours consuming free drinks and betting the come line on the craps tables.

Yes, Las Vegas, home of my old Draper Days getaways, is exactly where I am.

A much needed side trip was in order to reboot the creative engines, film a commercial, and shake my head at the overwhelming homage to "Sex Sells Advertising" that proliferates the landscape. (More on Sex Sells in another column.) Another reason to take that 45-minute flight from LAX was to see an old friend who was kicking off her concert tour,

I've known Selena Gomez for nearly a decade, first meeting her at a St. Jude's benefit gala in Beverly Hills. There was a fashion show and she was none too happy that her dress was too provocative. Somehow I was pulled into the tornado because she wasn't going on and as the only father in the general vicinity, she wanted some backup that the dress was too much for a 14 year-old to wear. I had to agree that a neckline that plunged down to her belly button was over the top. Long story short, they got her a new dress and now I get to go to Revival Concert Tour opening nights in Sin City.

Great show Selena.

Ride Me All Day

Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom, some fool who runs the advertising department for a Welsh bus company greenlit a campaign that features a topless woman holding a sign that reads: "ride me all day for £3." Cardiff will never be the same.

The now controversial ad campaign prompted social media outrage and  of  following widespread outrage on social media calling the campaign "sexist" and "vile." Tip of the hat to whomever genius didn't focus group these ads before they ran. That's like Advertising 301. Gotta focus group ad campaigns when they are going out-of-home. One slip and you're going to wind up with a lot of bad publicity.

Pretty shocking that there are still ad agencies that think this an acceptable method to use this kind of imagery to sell a bus ticket.

In a related note, the adverts featuring males doing the exact same thing does not appear to have caused as much outrage. Shocker!

The Royal Wrap-up

My Los Angeles Kings* flamed out on their way to the Stanley Cup, so I'm a little down and out recovering from the fool's good that was once the 2015-16 National Hockey League season. Nothing left to cheer for except every team playing the loathsome Anaheim Ducks.

Prince is dead, long live the king.

So instead of drowning my sorrows in a few neat Crown Royal Canadian Whiskys, I'm trying to finish my application to become the social media manager for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (or at least the minion responsible for making these decisions, because I am most certain that she couldn't care less).

And, why not? I haven't seen the Queen since I snapped off a few hundred pictures of the royal family as a youngster in the eighties on a fellowship that I won back in the day. A return to Buckingham Palace seems in order now that they posted a position for the Head of Digital Engagement with the Royal Household.

A Media Guy Original

The Royal Household advertised the job of with a salary of up to £50,000 (that's $71,000 USD for you and me) with the following enticement: “It’s knowing your content will be viewed by millions. It's about never standing still and finding new ways to maintain The Queen's presence in the public eye and on the world stage. This is what makes working for the Royal Household exceptional.”

The basic duties takes me back to the time I applied for that Ogilvy internship: “Whether you’re covering a state visit, award ceremony or royal engagement, you’ll make sure our digital channels consistently spark interest and reach a range of audiences. With an eye to the future, you’ll work to hone and shape our digital communications through sharing best practice, understanding new technologies and stimulating creativity.”

While 5.3 million followers across social media is not on the Taylor Swift or Kardashian scale, you can bet that competition will be still. Maybe I'll stick to making commercials...

...while I was filling out my application, word came through that artist now known again as Prince had passed suddenly. There's been too many great musicians that passed as of late. David Bowie, Glenn Frey and now Prince.

I liked Prince for many reasons. First and foremost, Prince was bad ass and ss I get older, I admire those who don’t give a damn about what I think. What we think. Maybe it’s the ad man in me, trying to reach that niche demographic and drive them to my product or service. He did whatever he wanted. On stage. In the recording studio. With his personal life. You name it, he did what he wanted, when he wanted. Bad ass!

I mean, Michael Jackson was coming off Thriller, only the best selling album of all time,  and Jackson asked Prince if he wanted to collaborate on a song or two. Prince’s reply “No, I’m good.” Bad ass!

That time during his 1990 concert tour where I got a press pass to take photos for the Associated Press. Seven hundred photos later, Prince's people convinced my editor to turn them over to be reviewed. Prince liked then so much he cried copyright violation and kept them. I didn't like it at the time, but honest, that was bad ass!

And then, all of that sex. Prince was all about sex. It’s the straight ahead, uncompromising sexual nature of his music. When you listen to Dirty Minds, it’s intentionally shocking and musically all over the place. He ruled the airwaves in spite of it all. He was a singular music talent whose impact resonated far beyond the radio. Here's a few snippets of what people who actually know what they are talking about wrote of him:

The New York Times Obituary
Across a career of more than 35 years, Prince released 39 albums while being lauded not only for his songs, but their visual presentation both onstage and on camera. His 1984 film “Purple Rain” is widely considered one of the best and most influential music films ever, while its accompanying soundtrack spawned the No. 1 hits “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry.” He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.

Rolling Stone (1983)
All cocky, teasing talk about sex, that's Prince. Forget Mr. Look So Good; meet the original Mr. Big Stuff. He's afraid of nothing onstage: ready to take on all the desires of a stadium full of his lusty fans, ready to marry funky black dance music and punky white rock music after their stormy separation through the Seventies, ready to sell his Sex Can Save Us message to anybody who'll give his falsetto a listen.

GQ Spends Six Days In Paisley Park
Like his records, like his stage shows, Prince’s Paisley Park headquarters is a monument to this system of beliefs. It’s a strange place, even to visit. Something in the water, as Prince once so memorably put it, does not compute. It’s not anything physical, not the two doves in their cage or the purple galaxy painted on the boardroom ceiling or the obsessive cleanliness. It’s something more intangible, and you see it in the faces of the people who work there. They’re like students taking a long, perplexing exam, trying to work out what the question means before they can start writing.

Prince Guest Stars On 'Muppets Tonight'

Time to drown myself with a royal cola...

RC Cola had some no-so-great sexist ads...more on that another day.

Not every underdog story ends well. In the case of Royal Crown Cola, every sign pointed towards an eventual victory over Coca-Cola. RC Cola started in the basement of a grocery store. They won a crucial lawsuit that kept Coca-Cola from having a monopoly on the word "cola." They were the first to introduce the public taste-test, canned soda, and crucially, diet soda. But one study, largely funded by the sugar industry, cast a false pallor over RC's artificial sweetener of choice: cyclamate. The controversy led to RC changing their formula, which fell flat with the public. RC then made a serious of bad business deals — buying furniture companies? — and now they've since become the proto-PBR of the soft drink industry. Read more on Mental Floss...

FAKE ROYALTY

Game of Thrones has a history of eliciting rather strong reactions from viewers. From its premiere in 2011 to last year's season five finale, this show has been all about shock value. From its gratuitous rape scenes and brutal deaths to incestuous affairs and mind-blowing plot-twists, the HBO fantasy drama may have generated the most WTF moments of any show in the history of television.

So, in case you've forgotten, here are the 30 most WTF moments from Game of Thrones, and all the deaths from seasons one through five:

* - Remember when the Los Angeles Kings won the Stanley Cup in 2014? I do...

The Process

I used to imagine that film directing was a fun job, until I found out that it was 95% agonizing over scripts, worrying about money and spending one’s life hunched over an editing table.

You can dream of being the auteur of the best movies in the world, but unless you actually like re-writing scripts and raising money and spending 14 hour days editing, you’re going to be pretty miserable.
 
The Buddhists call this “right livelihood”. The idea that without the right process, the reward is irrelevant.

Worry about the process, and the product will take care of itself.

Enjoli: A 30-Second Capsule of Sexist Advertising

Okay, so where am I?

I'm still hunkered down, North Korean-style*, working with the team to produce our Clio submission. We want to make the April 21st deadline and save the $25 late fee. We shall see.

I can tell you that I was inspired by this article about North Korea's Loyalty campaign where, "North Koreans are being mobilized en masse to boost production and demonstrate their loyalty to leader Kim Jong Un in a 70-day campaign aimed at wiping out 'indolence and slackness.'"

Talk about innovation!

*- Note to Kim Jong Un: This is a quasi-compliment; please do not hack me!

Anyway...while looking for commercial inspiration, I ran across the perfect late seventies ad for my latest AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER postings while simultaneously continuing my assault on sexist advertising throughout the decades. "Enjoy" the flashback.

Enjoli: The 8-Hour Perfume for the 24-Hour Woman
(Circa 1978-80)

Just like the exhausted woman in this classic perfume ad, Enjoli does it all, working overtime just to please her man perhaps. Or maybe it's telling men to buy it so he can be pleased at the bank and in the bedroom.

Seriously though...the ad was powerful and it stuck with you. I didn't have to hear the jingle on youtube to remember the words to this commercial. They have been embedded in my mind for three plus decades. Maybe I was addicted to television in 1980 (probably true.) Yet, I digress.

Listen to the jingle:

(Woman singing)

I can bring home the bacon

Fry it up in a pan

Enjoli

And never let you forget you're a man

(European guy V.O.)

Give her Enjoli

The 8-Hour Perfume for the 24-Hour Woman

(Woman singing)

I can work 'til five o'clock

Come home and read you tickety-tock

(offscreen, man) 

Tonight, I'm going to cook for the kids

(Woman singing)

And, if it's loving you want I can kiss you and give you the shiver in bed

(European guy V.O.)

Enjoli, the 8-Hour Perfume for your 24-Hour Woman

It's actually kind of remarkable the way Enjoli tries to "have it all," like the fantasy 70s feminist the ad is addressing. I mean, what does the liberated woman of the seventies get for trading in her Good Housekeeping-styled stay-at-home motherhood, smoking cigarettes, herding kids, cleaning the house, cooking seven days a week, and suppressing her dreams?

The answer is simple: More work!

In fact, the Enjoli liberated woman of the seventies is now a 24-hours-a-day working and pleasing machine, capable of doing nearly everything! In fact, if you offer to cook for the kids tonight, she make you shiver...

My takeaway? I'm beginning to think that advertising from 1950 to 1980 would have been non-existent without sexist ads. 

Innovation*: Failure is the catalyst to success

I can't believe it's been over nine months since I was trying to finish my 2015 submission for the Clio Awards. The big agencies have entire staffs cutting up footage and storyboarding narratives into two minute vignettes designed to win at beautiful, sleek statuette termed, "The Oscars of the Advertising World."

Me? I was doing it alone.

I am not unproud to say that I failed to win an award last year.

I didn't even make the short list.

Yeah, poor me.

Failure is the catalyst to success. Didn't Winston Churchill say, "Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."? He must have. There are memes all over the Internet with this quote on it, so he must have said it. It must be true as well, because Churchill failed so many times, yet he has a cigar type named after him. And, we all know that lighting up a cigar is the ultimate symbol of success.

This year, there are five of us (plus the ad agency I worked with) putting our best feet forward to craft a story that drove our 2015-16 campaign. I'm excited and hopeful.

Judging for many of the categories is weighted 80% on creativity and 20% on results. Yes, there is something to be said for innovation. What's the secret for cracking the code to innovation? Last year I spoke with Neal Thornberry, Ph.D., faculty director for innovation initiatives at the Naval Postgraduate School. He says there are seven steps that guarantee success. Further, he says that upper management is the culprit for shooting down great ideas.

“Senior leaders often miss the value-creating potential of a new concept because they either don’t take the time to really listen and delve  into it, or the innovating employee presents it in the wrong way,” says Thornberry, who recently published “Innovation Judo,” based on his years of experience teaching innovation at Babson College and advising an array of corporate clients, from the Ford Co. and IBM to Cisco Systems. “Innovation should be presented as opportunities, not ideas. Opportunities have gravitas while ideas do not!”

His innovation template outlines a recipe that seems to work:

•  Intention: Once the “why” is answered, leaders have the beginnings of a legitimate roadmap to
innovation’s fruition. This is no small task and requires some soul searching.

“I once worked with an executive committee, and I got six different ideas for what ‘innovation’ meant,” he says. “One wanted new products, another focused on creative cost-cutting, and the president wanted a more innovative culture. The group needed to agree on their intent before anything else.”

•  Infrastructure: This is where you designate who is responsible for what. It’s tough, because the average employee will not risk new responsibility and potential risk without incentive. Some companies create units specifically focused on innovation, while others try to change the company culture in order to foster innovation throughout.  “Creating a culture takes too long,” Thornberry says. “Don’t wait for that.”

•  Investigation: What do you know about the problem? IDEO may be the world’s premier organization for investigating innovative solutions. Suffice to say that the organization doesn’t skimp on collecting and analyzing data. At this point, data collection is crucial, whereas brainstorming often proves to be a waste of time if the participants come in with the same ideas, knowledge and opinions that they had last week with no new learning in their pockets.

•  Ideation: The fourth step is also the most fun and, unfortunately, is the part many companies leap to. This is dangerous because you may uncover many exciting and good ideas, but if the right context and focus aren’t provided up front, and team members cannot get on the same page, then a company is wasting its time. That is why intent must be the first step for any company seeking to increase innovation. Innovation should be viewed as a set of tools or processes, and not a destination.

•  Identification: Here’s where the rubber meets the road on innovation. Whereas the previous step was creative, now logic and subtraction must be applied to focus on a result. Again, ideas are great, but they must be grounded in reality. An entrepreneurial attitude is required here, one that enables the winnowing of ideas, leaving only those with real value-creating potential. “Innovation without the entrepreneurial mindset is fun but folly,” Thornberry notes.

•  Infection: Does anyone care about what you’ve come up with? Will excitement spread during this infection phase? Now is the time to find out. Pilot testing, experimentation and speaking directly with potential customers begin to give you an idea of how innovative and valuable an idea is. This phase is part selling, part research and part science. If people can’t feel, touch or experience your new idea in part or whole, they probably won’t get it. This is where the innovator has a chance to reshape their idea into an opportunity, mitigate risk, assess resistance and build allies for their endeavor.

•  Implementation/Integration: While many talk about this final phase, they often fail to address the integration part. Implementation refers to tactics that are employed in order to put an idea into practice. This is actually a perilous phase because, in order for implementation to be successful, the idea must first be successfully integrated with other activities in the business and aligned with strategy. An innovation, despite its support from the top, can still fail if a department cannot work with it.

My Clio Awards are aging. Both are 20+ years old. Happy birthday, buddies.

Laziness

Okay, so where am I?

Let's just say that Oscar Week ground me down like never before. And, I'm still a little stung by Jennifer Lawrence's lateness for the red carpet arrivals. Usually she's there early showing off a lovely red dress and generally trying to avoid my camera. But this time she showed up nearly ten minutes into the live telecast and stopped only few a minute for a few choice shots (see below).

I was there waiting with my #believe sign when she finally showed. Well worth the wait...Yet, I digress.

A few, uh, spa days were in order far, far from Hollywood. My feet still sore from running around three towns of red carpets and my ears still ringing from photographers imploring movie stars to look into their cameras, something struck me: when did we get so lazy?

Everyone wants a short cut now. Technology might be the culprit. It's always there allowing the slacker who doesn't want to put in the time a fraudulent avenue to appear more talented. It used to be that talent was organic. It was yours and you created it. You owned it. You studied film or music or art or past ad campaigns. Now, there's a app for that...and it's trademarked.

Can't sing? No worries, there's Auto-Tune.

Too lazy to study film? Not a problem. There's a video recorder in everyone's pocket now with editing by numbers.

Right in the style of Hemingway, paint a field of flowers just like Monet...all you need is a computer and some gall.

Journalism degree? What for? Ambush a drunk celebrity, take a picture, sell it to TMZ and BAM!...You're a journalist!

She's on the cover of Adweek!

America has become a place where fraudulent talent and faux celebrity is home. Today, you get famous if you're clever on Vine or stupid enough on YouTube. The very fact that we have elevated an entire clan of Kardashians to superstar status verifies this explicitly.

You know who I feel sorry for?: Photographers.

No line of work has been more devalued. The smartphone has turned everyone into a photographer. It wasn't long ago that a trained photographer took the time to select the right type of film, the right type of lens, exposure and lighting and then develop their own pictures in a darkroom. Once upon a time if there was a calamity, the newspaper would dispatch an entire team of reporters and photographers to cover the scene. Now, by the time the photographer gets there, he can't get close enough to shot a decent picture because of the teeming horde of people clicking away on their iPhone cameras.

Relationships? People don't event earn those nowadays with all of the shortcuts available. It used to be you'd have to haunt bars, wedding or funerals, honing your charming pickup lines to woo someone the old fashioned way. Now you get on Tinder or Grindr and your date appears as if she were delivered via UPS.

From photography to relationships, we need to get back to basics, like showing up on time for the red carpet.

Jen's wild ride through the red carpet...

Insider: The Oscars

Last one from this year's Oscars (I promise)...here's a little story I did that was picked up nationally...

Leo wins the big one.

The Oscars take an awards ceremony and elevates it to a level that all other events can only dream of; at least on television. More people watch television than go to movies, especially now with movie prices nearing twenty dollars. The levels of fashion, the A-listers, and the venue all combine to deliver nearly a billion sets of eyeballs to the ABC telecast of the show. Here we go backstage and show you the life of a reporter behind the scenes.

The 88th Academy Awards telecast was a unique experience from the get-go because of the entire diversity / #OscarsSoWhite issue that plagued the usual positive vibe that the promise of a golden, 8.5 pound, 24K statuette will usually deliver. The tone started on the unusually muted tone of the red carpet and continued all night. The diversity issued was imbued throughout the evening and into the press room.

Host Chris Rock

All of the reporters that were in attendance were literally on the edge of our seats. We simply didn’t know where the issue was going to take us. Oscars telecast host, Chris Rock, made no public statement after the controversy broke out and stayed silent all the way through to curtains up on the telecast. The controversy heightened on the speculation he was going to address it, gloss over it, or maybe make a serious statement and move on. Turns out, he hit the ground running and it was a full throttle assault on the controversy…

• “Man, I counted at least 15 black people on that montage. I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards.”
• “This is the wildest, craziest Oscars to ever host, because we’ve got all this controversy. No, no black nominees, you know, and people are like ‘Chris, you should boycott. Chris, you should quit. You should quit.’ How come there’s only unemployed people that tell you to quit something, you know? No one with a job ever tells you to quit.”
• “It’s the 88th Academy Awards. It’s the 88th Academy Awards, which means this whole no black nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times. O.K.?”
• “…in the 50s, in the 60s … we had real things to protest at the time, you know? We had real things to protest; you know, we’re too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer. You know, when your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short.”
• …and on he went, a 14-minute monologue and every word had to do with diversity.

There was a very tangible impact from the controversy that spread to the media room. Backstage, there were more African-American reporters in the press corps than we had ever seen. Most were from outlets we had never heard of, or had ever attended an Academy Awards.

From the minute the issue became a controversy, the Academy was very self-conscious and that was evident from what we saw last night. They bent over backwards to admit there was a problem. They took blame for it, saying collectively, “Yes, there is a problem and we plan to do something about it. We are going to change things.”

Eddie Redmayne and Cheryl Boone Isaacs

Indeed, President of the Academy Board of Governors, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, said, “…there’s a brand new world coming…”  alluding to their four-year plan to double the minorities in the voting members contingency and the Board of Governors.

Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne, and Academy President, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, on the red carpet.
The telecast took shots at themselves during the telecast. Some of the nominated films for Best Picture were altered via CGI to insert black actors into the films’ lead roles. In the media room, there were laughs, but after a while their was a backlash and complaints that the Academy was too over the top, where it was actually making fun of the controversy. Ah, sometimes there is no winning.

As soon as we exhaled, the moans started coming about the political pontifications of the show:

Kerry Washington and Henry Cavill backstage.

Best Costume Design winner Jenny Beavan championed for environmental water issues during her acceptance speech. "I've been thinking about this a lot, but actually it could be horribly prophetic, Mad Max, if we're not kinder to each other, and if we don't stop polluting our atmosphere, so you know, it could happen.”

Adam McKay, winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Big Short at the took the opportunity to warn voters of candidates who take money from questionable places, including "weirdo billionaires," during his acceptance speech. His movie, a financial dramedy that warns against big banks and corrupt financial systems. McKay continued, "Most of all, if you don’t want big money to control government, don’t vote for candidates that take money from big banks, oil or weirdo billionaires: Stop!"

Even Leonardo DiCaprio jumped on his soapbox to discuss global warming.

Backstage McKay was asked if  he had someone in mind during his speech and he replied, “No, I was speaking about both parties.” He elaborated in detail about the big corporations, the banks and the problems with America to the point where the press covering it tuned out to the point where they were murmuring about their wishes that people would go back to just thanking their agents and their families.

(Let’s face it, reporters are complainers at heart.)

One of the fun skits of the night turned out to be the Girl Scout fundraising. Rock spun a nice storyline where his daughters are always finishing second to another parent’s troop. To make up for that, he asked to millionaires in the audience to pony up and help the girls sell more cookies. And sell they did, to the tune of $65,000 plus raised.

$65k to the Girl Scouts!

But backstage there were more under-the-breath whispers asking, “where’s Hispanic Girl Scouts, or the Asian troop? We have the African-American girl scouts out there, so where are rest of the ethnic groups.” In effect from there, it was a collective griping session about what kind of diversity was need. The claws were out on the press corps looking for anything to poke holes into the efforts of healing. So in case you missed it, there is no winning in the press room.

Sam Smith's grossly inaccurate Oscars acceptance speech (for Best Original Song) produced a profanity-laced tirade that was directed loudly and inward towards himself as the press corps called him out. Many scurried to the buffet served by Wolfgang Puck.

If you found the time, the food in the press room is Beverly Hills chic; and that’s an understatement. On the menu: spring rolls, assorted sandwiches with artisan bread and pretzel rolls, pesto bow-tie pasta, shrimp cocktail, rigatoni, with marinara sauce, beef and chicken empanadas, grilled chicken skewers rolled in sesame seeds, beff skewers, assorted meats including peperoni, capicola, mortadella, and salami, cheeses, assorted nuts, dried fruits, and a dessert table with four different cakes, cookies, and fresh fruit.

There was Oscar-shaped salmon with caviar at the Governor’s Ball.

Hey, where's Jada? Protests outside the Oscars.