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I’ve been a loyal Mac user for 15 years.
I’m still not iSad.

It’s sad that Steve Jobs has died.  He was young, pancreatic cancer is terrible, and there’s no doubt that he was a smart guy who did a lot to transform the way we interact with technology.

I’m also a loyal Mac user.  I got my first Apple computer in 1996, and have used them ever since.  I got a huge cinema display screen in 2003 when they cost a fortune (more than $2500), and my first iPod in 2005 when they still cost a fortune ($700).

But, at the risk of getting myself flamed into oblivion, I have to say I find myself disturbed by the emotional outpourings of grief his death has engendered in the past few days.  

Steve Jobs was a business tycoon, plain and simple.  He may have transformed the way we interact with technology, but he wasn’t doing it in order to save the world (he famously canceled Apple’s philanthropic efforts when he returned as CEO, and so far there isn’t much evidence to suggest he was doing much privately, either).  He wasn’t really trying to make computers or other gadgets accessible to the masses (Apple software isn’t open-source like Linux, and the hardware isn’t cheap like PCs).  Apple may be a great place to work – but don’t expect a good work/life balance.  And if Microsoft or News Corp. had sent ‘investigators’ to search people’s homes for prototypes or information, I can promise you there would have been a huge backlash.

I don’t know…I’m all for celebrating the lives of people who have made a difference in the world.  And Steve Jobs did that.  I guess I just wish we’d do more celebrating of the people whose goals weren’t all rooted in money or who used their extraordinary wealth and influence to cure a disease or alleviate poverty.

Summer’s Eve ‘Hail to the V’ spots are definitely effective.
That doesn’t mean they’re a good idea.

 

Yes, that’s supposed to represent a talking vagina.

 

Earlier this summer, Summer’s Eve (famous for their ‘feminine hygiene’ products) launched their ‘Hail to the V’ campaign.  I strongly recommend you watch the commercials before you read the rest of this post, but since they were forced to pull the ads in July, you’re going to have a hard time finding them.  I did manage to find them on Adweek, so you can watch them here.  The ads promote a special vaginal wash and handy vaginal wipes.

It’s always a challenge to advertise ‘intimate feminine’ products without resorting to cheesy euphemisms, bad graphics, or frankly ridiculous concepts (for years, I was confused as to what Ex-Lax was, due to their use of yellow droplets and terminology referring to ‘softening agents’).  And, as the recent commercials for U Tampons have demonstrated, women are definitely ready for marketing messages that don’t resort to pouring generic blue liquid all over stuff.

But the Summer’s Eve ads left me firmly divided:  My advertising self recognized they were great advertising in many ways.  My personal self hated them.

 

Why they’re great advertising

Advertising for new products needs to do 2 things:

• Create awareness
• Create demand

And on these two fronts, the Hail to the V campaign succeeded.  

Awareness:  Stephen Colbert parodied the ads on his show, there are other parodies on YouTube (and many others have been pulled), and I’m definitely not the only blogger who jumped on the story.  Sure, parodies and criticism won’t drive long-term brand credibility, but so what?  When you’re launching a product in a crowded media market, a short-term viral frenzy is effective – you can worry about brand credibility later, once everyone knows who you are.  

Demand:  The ads do a remarkably good job of playing on the target market’s (women aged 18-34, and probably much younger) existing insecurities about their, um, intimate areas.  We’ve come a long way since Lysol was promoted as an effective feminine hygiene product, but there are still plenty of people (of both sexes) who think that vaginas are somehow ‘gross’ and ‘unclean’. 

If you’re a young woman already a little uncomfortable with your intimate cleanliness, these ads are almost guaranteed to heighten your concern:  “Oh geez, my regular soap isn’t deodorizing enough!  I’d better keep some of those wipes in my purse because after a night at the club I’m bound to smell funky, and boys won’t like that!”

So, as an advertising professional, I have to like these ads – because they do what they’re supposed to do.

 

Why I totally disapprove of them anyway

There are some people who think that advertising in general is evil.  I don’t.  I think advertising can advance technology and art, inform and educate us, change society for the better, and is one of the safeguards of a free market.  

But that doesn’t mean that all advertising is good, or that advertisers don’t have a responsibility to do more good than harm.  And that’s where these spots (which I really hope you’ve watched by now) fall down:

• They encourage female insecurity.  Do we really need more advertising that implies that women’s ‘parts’ are unclean, or that they are embarrassing, or that they need special attention in order to be socially acceptable?  Ugh.
• They prey on our most vulnerable.  We already know that girls and young women suffer from the harmful effects of self-esteem issues from a young age.  Should we be promoting insecurity about their genitalia in a ‘funny’ way that seems calculated to appeal to teens?  Especially when the company itself admits that these products are only cosmetic, and not necessary?  I say no.
• They’re racist.  While I think it’s great that the ads tried to represent women from different ethnicities (something you definitely don’t see enough of in feminine hygiene product marketing), they are beyond stereotypical:  The ‘white’ V talks about going to the gym, the ‘black’ V talks about going to the club, and the ‘Latina’ V talks like the one-dimensional Hispanic neighbour character in a cringe-inducing sitcom from the 1970s.

So, as a person, I really hate these ads.

And sometimes, at the end of the day, your ‘personal’ self has to trump your ‘professional’ self.  I’m glad they pulled these spots.

A couple of years ago, when Rock’n’Republic jeans were all the rage, a girlfriend called me in tears.

“I can’t fit into any of the RnR jeans,” she wailed.  “They only go up to size 31.  Why would they do that?”

Because the only way to get people to fork out $300 for a pair of jeans is to convince them that they’re buying into some kind of aspirational lifestyle, and you can’t maintain that fiction if “ugly fat people” are parading around with your logo on their bums.

(Don’t freak out – I put “ugly fat people” in quotes to make it clear that it’s not me making that judgment, but the people who make these products.  Being size 32 in jeans definitely does not make you fat or ugly.)

But here’s the thing:  Emaciated LA-types represent a minority of the population, and they are extremely fickle, so restricting your target market to anorexics with an excess of disposable income is virtually guaranteed to limit your long-term growth.  And when was the last time you saw someone wearing RnR jeans, or expressing a desire to buy them?

The Abercrombie & Fitch vs. Jersey Shore media frenzy

This week, clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch generated a whole lot of PR for itself by making public an offer to pay the cast of Jersey Shore not to wear its clothes any more.

(Interesting sidebar:  Two weeks ago, we had a friend from Germany staying with us, and on his list of things to do was a trip to A&F to pick up some clothes, since he can’t get them in Germany.  My reaction was so negative – and I did, in fact, reference the idiots on Jersey Shore – that he ended up not going.  But in Europe, A&F is still an aspirational brand, and considered ‘cool’.)

At first I thought the whole thing was a brilliant PR stunt.  Then I wondered whether it wasn’t a little short-sighted, serving only to cement the relationship between the brand and the cheesiness of Jersey Shore forever – I mean, has Ed Hardy ever really recovered from the whole Jon Gosselin association?  

And then I thought about the Rock’n’Republic example, and about how popular Jersey Shore is, and I realized that (a) if you don’t keep the plebes buying your stuff, you can’t keep growing; and (b) if A&F could survive that piece of cheese, ‘Summer Girls‘, the whole Jersey Shore association was probably a perfectly intelligent business decision.

The genius of Tiffany & Co.

As far as I’m concerned, the winner of the ‘aspirational vs plebes’ balancing act has to be Tiffany & Co.  Somehow they’ve managed to maintain their position as a super-high-end brand, appealing to the Birkin bag set as a suitable place to buy a $25k engagement ring and a $2500 wedding present, while also selling masses of $100 bracelets to the plebes.  

How have they managed this?

I think it’s a combination of factors:

• The brand has resided squarely in the ‘luxury’ segment of the market for 175 years, so they’re less susceptible to the whims of the marketplace
• Their pop culture references have tended towards the classic (“Breakfast at Tiffany”) rather than shoutouts in rap songs
• The cheapest thing they sell (on the Canadian website, anyway) is a $105 keychain – and $105 is still a fairly high entry-level price point
• They have resisted the temptation to trade credibility for short-term sales gains:  It’s highly unlikely you’ll see Tiffany in a product placement on Keeping Up With the Kardashians any time soon

So even as they’ve gained a huge following among teenaged girls, they haven’t lost equity with their 50-year-old mothers.  Which means that 20 years from now, Tiffany will likely have a healthier balance sheet than Abercrombie & Fitch.

I do a fair amount of blogging for clients (no, I won’t tell you who they are) and sometimes I just run out of things to say.  I can’t believe I’m saying that, and probably neither can most of the people who know me in real life, but there you go.

The situation has been complicated by the fact that the ‘return’ key on my Blackberry has stopped working, which means that my ‘Blog Ideas Notes’ file has turned into an unreadable James Joycean stream-of-consciousness text glob which is doing little to inspire me.

However!

I have noticed that people who get recognized as Great Bloggers aren’t the ones who wait around for Big Ideas to hit them.  They are simply the ones who write what they’re thinking about that day, even if it’s not exactly genius (or at least not every time).  Anais Nin made a whole career out of it, even before the internet.  And I certainly think about something every day.  

 

Part of what we do for clients is manage their social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, YouTube – I’m a big believer in social media as a great way to generate buzz, keep your brand top-of-mind, build SEO through legitimate content development, communicate your USP, and all kinds of other good stuff.  And I think just about every brand can benefit from social media strategies.

However.

I know an awful lot of people who are spending an awful lot of time on social media, installing all kinds of Twitter widgets and checking their Klout scores every 2 hours and hosting online radio chats for the same 5 participants every week…and who still aren’t making a whole lot of money, either for themselves or for the companies they’re working for.

Remember, ultimately, the whole point of social media (for businesses) is the same as the whole point of advertising and marketing:  To make it easier to sell stuff.  

Oh, I know you can’t always draw a straight line from 5000 Twitter followers and $X in revenue, any more than you can draw a straight line from a billboard by the highway and $X in revenue.  And I know there are side benefits from strong social media presences, like recruiting.  And I even know that it’s important to look at the long-term build – it can take months for a successful social media campaign to really have an impact on sales.

If you’ve been spending 15+ hours a week on Twitter for the past year, and haven’t seen a sales increase of any kind, it may be time to ask yourself some questions:

• Do I really know why we’re doing this?  In other words, do we have a strategy?
• Can we point to any anecdotal evidence that our social media efforts have delivered an ROI?  (Such as a new client first heard of us because of the buzz we’d built on social media, or that the best hire all year came to us through our Facebook page.)
• Is our website traffic benefiting from social media via clickthroughs from social media channels?  
• When our salespeople call potential clients, are they increasingly saying “Oh, I’ve heard of you guys!”?
• Is it easier for us/me to get meetings with potential clients?
• Has our Google ranking increased?  (Good social media content, and a long-term blog about your brand’s industry, will push your rankings higher.)
• Are our products/services less price sensitive than they used to be, thanks to increased brand equity?
• Have we been invited to events and speaking engagements (as a participant or speaker, not a paying attendee!) as a result of the profile we’ve built via social media?

If the answers to at least a few of these questions are yes, then you’re probably not wasting your time with social media, and the ROI should start showing up any time now.

If not…well, it’s possible you’re spending too much time on social media for its own sake, and not enough time thinking about what it’s really supposed to do for the business overall.