one-seventh

Why is this ad ineffective? Sound familiar? Yes, just like the previous post, it relies on a mental hook that is only tangentially related to the real intent. The hook is the word “own.” And the intent is to associate the well known phrase “own the road” with the notion of ownership acquired in receiving a gift. Ah, so clever.

Problems:
1. The phrase “own the road” is the freedom and power of driving pleasure of being the only guy on the road. That’s the key. Freedom. Space. Driving fast through unobstructed highways. But the images provided are totally off-message. Where’s the freedom? Where’s the wide open spaces and the flying through highway curves? The graphic is completely counter-message: we have a contained element (chunk of road) presented in a contained environment (house). Contained, not open and free. And the pleasure is not in the caressing of the asphalt, it’s in the openness of what you can do on looong stretches of it. The phrase isn’t “own three square feet of the road” - what kind of power is that? That’ll represent a split second of driving pleasure. But it’s not even presented as pleasure.. It’s a chunk of road in my arms and I’m holding it for some reason. That’s not freedom. It’s inconvenience.

2. The thought of my wife picking out a car for me is just wrong. No. My car. I pick. 

3. Additional unintentional negative associations are created. A filthy hunk of road is introduced to the INTERIOR of my house, its filthiness working against the associations of having a carefully kept interior and pride for my environment. It’s a disruption. Well done. And I’m receiving it as a gift. I am being sacked with this useless inconvenience. And somewhere, presumably just outside the house, there’s a massive pothole on my street. And now my wife is burdening me with it - it’s heavy and utterly useless and I will now somehow have to find a spot in the house for it. And on top of all this, I’m supposed to act excited to receive it.

Off-message associations are created by the creative team’s invented necessity to try to link up the word “own.” This trend is advertising has really got to stop. It’s so amateur. You want “own the road”? This next ad is how you show it. The car can’t compare, but at least the message is on code:

Why is this ad ineffective? Note that I’m not asking why it’s stupid or why it sucks, but specifically, why is it ineffective? Because it is relying on an intermediate and unrelated (and therefore off-message) mental leap to make what should be a simple and direct association. The direct association is simply that the BlackBerry Bold on AT&T is fast; in this case the focus is on non-business consumer use: fast surfing, fast downloading, fast sharing. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the core message. Everything in this ad outside of this extremely straight-forward core message is an unnecessary  distraction which is coming at the cost of using ad time effectively to hammer home the core message. So why then am I left with a mental image of a sprinter with cartoon legs? Even if the intent was to tie-in with the Olympics five months ago, the real point (the fast… and by deduction, how/why the device and/or the network is fast) is left unsupported. The sprinter is fluff. He is dead air contributing nothing to the message and yet the message is left half told. 

The idea is so bush-league. It’s embarrassing. It’s like what some cluster-fuck college marketing class would come up with. The mental leap supposedly works like this: “Hmm, well the BlackBerry Bold and the AT&T network are fast. Hmm, what else is fast? How about a sprinter? Yeah, he’s fast. And the phone is fast… so there you go! There’s your hook.” But it’s so weak. The association the ad is intending between ‘download speed’ and ‘fast’ hinge on an abstraction. The sprinter is indirect. It’s an intermediate association and also a verbal dependence on the word fast for two things for which speed is conceived of completely differently. People’s brains don’t work like that; it’s too far a leap and too abstract for an audience that is not actively playing word association along at home with 30 second spots between segments of Gossip Girl. If the phone’s data flow is fast, just show the fucking fast phone doing something fast. Show me how it’s fast. Show internet downloads. Show stuff zipping around on the phone. Show how quick it is to attach a file to an email to forward to somebody. Keep it straight-forward and clean. But at least do that. You have to actually show the phone doing something fast. But no. We have less than four seconds of actual BlackBerry use shown at a scale too small to actually see what’s happening. And yet we have Mr Unknown Sprinter with the funky legs and some lame dialogue, but no real demo of the phone being fast; no evidence at all that it’s fast other than his user-experience testimonial.

The sprinter is less than useless; he’s an unintentional negative association. When I think of data flowing I think of something that’s moving a hell of a lot faster than any sprinter on Earth. I think of something that travels like light or at least like electricity. Like fast. Like current through cable. Like radio waves. Something faster than I can actually see. A sprinter is very slow when compared to my existing mental image of data flow. So the sprinter works against the core message by planting a slower image in my head than I had before watching the ad. Not only is it an unrelated and very weak distraction, it’s actually counter-message. Nice. Very clever.

(I just took this shot.) 

2009. A new year and also the second anniversary of this very site. The first post on this day two years ago featured  a quote by John Ruskin that I have since (until now) forgotten about:

“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.”

So let’s get out there, push ourselves and make some consequence!

It’s 4:47 am. I’ve unintentionally conditioned myself to fall asleep on the living room floor just before, during or just after Seinfeld each night. Seinfeld at 10 is the tipping point for my evening: you aim to complete the day’s stuff done before the Seinfeld deadline. And then at the 10 o’clock fulcrum, you begin to wind down into the night. In theory. So what actually happens. At 9:55 I stretch out on the floor in front of the fire with a pillow to settle in for an hour of good TV, and then the voice tells you, “Ah Patrick, just close your eyes for a minute or two before the show starts. You’ll wake up in time. You won’t miss a thing, really.” Next thing you know you wake up  next to a pizza box at 1:55 with a headache and a sore back to the noise of some brutal barrage of the inane South Park voices (I hate that show and anybody who likes it - you’d have to have half your brain missing to find that show even tolerable, let alone entertaining). Or it’s some other  equally low-grade family-based “comedy” like Girlfriends or the Bernie Mac Show. Brutal. And the reason I wake up is because those shows are just too stupid to even sleep to. So deep in sleep, my subconscious decides that it’s not going to suffer any more idiocy and says to me, “Dude, I can’t take this insulting horseshit any longer. Sorry old buddy, but you’re going to have to wake up and turn that moronic trash off.”

So then you’re dragging your ass through the freezing house to bed at 2 or 3 in jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt only to be awoken by the alarm at 6:30. Either that or like tonight I just stay up and catch up on my online reading. This pattern has been going on for about a year or maybe even two. Seems that I even blogged about it back in January. Except I was funnier last time. (Nice: repeating my stories, but with decreasing entartainment value).

Bachelorhood cuts both ways: on one hand I have the freedom to make late night blueberry pancakes and sleep on the floor in my clothes without the expectation or pressure to “come to bed” at a reasonable time. On the other, I exploit that freedom every night. To my own detriment. I still have that headache actually.

In the following four scene segments of the 2005 movie “Hitch”, contrast the verbal presentation of the hero, Hitch, with the villain, Vance, two players of the same game (chasing women), but with a different nuance. In his self-descriptions, Hitch has a talent for softening the edges of his game; Vance is more blunt and honest about what he’s after. (Background: Hitch is a consultant who advises men on how to get with women; but apparently in a respectful way.)

You get the idea: Hitch, good; Vance, bad. And how do we arrive at this conclusion? Just words. Hitch uses words that make his player ways sound just fine; he has a “hot, sweaty, totally varied, wildly experimental short game” and he’s … Article continued

I dropped my iPhone on the concrete floor of my laundry room as I was getting off a call and miscalculated the location of my coat’s inside pocket and let it fall. BAM. It landed right on its corner, bounced and landed face down. I was calm, but thinking to myself, “there’s no way that it can’t have cracked.”  And yeah, it was cracked. Dozens of small and large cracks. The touch screen still worked though and I could actually still read email etc. In one area I could actually see the board beneath the screen. It was like seeing Darth Vader without his helmet.

But a cracked iPhone is a conversation starter. Holy smokes. Pull it out and people … Article continued

I wear a dress shirt everyday. Either solid black or solid white. And I’ve been doing so since the early 90’s. (Actually I was wearing dress shirts way back in high school… to go with my skinny black leather tie of course. Just to make that clear, that was the 80’s). In the 90’s the girls accused me of ironing my shirts and then crumpling them in a methodical and calculated way to achieve a certain casual appearance. *rolls eyes* But the wrinkles were legitimate: that’s how a shirt looks when you pick it up off the floor. Shortly after, around 2001 intentionally wrinkled dress shirts became fashionable and every meat head was wearing them to the bar. Aggravating. 

Anyhoo, over all these years I’ve become very particular about dress shirt design, particularly general cut and collar details. … Article continued

I swear it’s not a world of men. It’s a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, office-holders. A fucked up world. No adventure to it. –Ricky Roma, “Glengarry Glen Ross”

In architecture and planning, a democratic process is the least conducive to achieving a result of a truly special, innovative or world class quality. It is the most conducive to a mediocre result.

A disturbing “architectural” trend persists in Vancouver. It is the proliferation of the four-storey wood frame multi-residential form much larger than a house, say like sixty units for example, but nonetheless adopts the character and expression of a traditional Vancouver house. The issue is not a question of modernism vs traditional styles; so don’t misunderstand my intent here. Though I’m a modernist, I have no argument at all with any of the traditional Vancouver architectural house styles, if they are indeed traditional. Vancouver’s genuine character housing stock is beautiful. But if one of those styles or a diluted version of one of those styles, has been shrink-wrapped to fit around a form thirty times as big as a house… in 2008, then I have an argument. … Article continued

I went to see ‘Quantum of Solace’ for the second time a few evenings ago after treating myself to a thick steak at Earls. It was the day that I took my ninth NCARB exam and I wanted to just sit back and put the brain in neutral and get entertained. Brain downtime.

A few observations about the movie: one is that this Bond differs from previous versions in that he never stops to take a breath or take the time to enjoy life and its finer distractions… the ladies. Isn’t that the point of being James Bond? The women? The car, the danger, the duds, the exploits around the globe… c’mon man, you gotta leverage that good stuff into what life is really about. Those are the means, not the end. It’s all about the ladies. Historically, film Bonds had their priorities correctly aligned. And lounging was part of the act, because seduction was an art whose practice required at least a bit of time. At least one drink. Previous Bonds leveraged their business for their pleasure, taking plenty of downtime for themselves. They were always arriving in town early enough to strut around the hotel room, unpack, check the room for bugs, take a shower, get out only to discover some enemy flunky hiding in the closet. So you throw off the balcony into the pool, come back inside to put on the cufflinks, straighten the tie and wink at yourself in the mirror. Then he’ll glide down to the casino to position himself at the table right next to the hottest gal in the house or the quirkiest looking evil guy, order the drink, and then just take some more time to smoulder for a while at the card table. Plenty of time to make sly eye gestures and ignite conversation that consists of only semi-witty innuendo one-liners. He was an old-school seducer. The patient kind. Never rushed. … Article continued