Back With Another One Of Those Blog-Rockin’ Beats

I've complained more than once about the song "It's Your Thing" by the Isley Brothers being used in commercials. Specifically, that it's been used in commercials for a variety of different products, with each company seemingly oblivious to the fact that it's already been associated with a different brand.

So, imagine if I'd been asked, "What do you think will be the next song to get overused in commercials for multiple brands at the same time? Hint: it's from another group with 'Brothers' in the name."

I would have said, oh, no, not "Unchained Melody!" That's such a classic song that so many people love. It would be such a shame if it became associated with dog food and denture cleaners

But no, it's "Galvanize," by the Chemical Brothers.

It started with a series of Michelin ads, which used the song for its distinctive "dun dun dun" part. That got it recognized enough that stadium DJs started playing it at sporting events. I thought that was a weird enough path for a song to go through pop culture: being revived by a commercial almost twenty years after it was released and getting attention beyond what it originally got. So I thought about remarking on it, but never got around to it.

But then, I hear it again on a Hummer ad. They're using the "Push the button" part to advertise their four-wheel steering. That's a different part of the song, so people may not even realise it's the same song. I suppose that's a way around the problem of over-using songs in ads: each company uses a different part of the song. Maybe that will even have a positive effect on music: You’ll put more effort into the complexity of your songs if you know you can sell different parts to different companies.

Oddly, we still haven’t seen the most obvious use; the song is, after all, named after an industrial process. It just seems natural that eventually we'll hear, "Ziebart reminds you..." (start music) "The time has come to…Galvanize!" (cut music quickly, because Michelin owns the dun dun dun part.)

But I'm also thinking about the demographic implications of this. It was all fun and games when it was another generation's songs getting overused. I could feel cheapened, but I'm trying to look on the bright side: We won the demographic competition (where "we" refers to late Gen-X, early Millennials, or in my case, Mid-Xer who stayed in university too long and thinks he's a borderline Xer-Millennial.) And now our music is being used to sell expensive stuff like high-end tires and SUVs. Yes, I realize it's a fleeting title, since it's only a matter of time before the next music takes over. But we could get a bit of an extension while advertisers struggle to make ads out of emo.

Things The Teenage Me Would Have Found All Too Believable About Life In The Future

There’s a service where a small business can get a name and logo made for them by Artificial Intelligence. Such uses of A.I. in creative industries is quite controversial. And yet, a TV commercial for this service sidesteps the controversy, and instead shows a young proprietor of a small business explaining the concept to her older business partner. The partner exclaims, “A-I-Like-It!”

Say My Name, Say My Name

In the U.S., companies can advertise prescription drugs, but there are a lot of requirements, most notably the requirement of reading the list of side effects, however long and embarrassing. They can be kind of gross and scary, but I actually like hearing those lists. It’s refreshing for ads to have to present both sides of the story, and it’s amusing to think how much money was spent to tell you about all the humiliating shortcomings of their pill. But most of all, it reassures me about the structures of society. We often think of government as being a puppet of big business, but if a multi-billion-dollar pharma conglomerate still has to warn you that their product may cause 'anal leakage,' then it’s clear that regulations still have some teeth.

(Fun fact: The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that allow the advertising of prescription drugs.)

In contrast, here in Canada, we have pretty severe restrictions on these ads. You can advertise prescription drugs, but you can’t mention what the drug does. And I have to say, these ads are even worse than the fast talker trying to sneak anal leakage past us.

For one thing, if you can’t tell anyone what the drug does, there’s not much else you can do except repeat the name of the drug over and over, in an aggravating and blatant exercise in name recognition. In their defence, the advertisers do try to make a joke of it. And in their offence, even that is really annoying.

It’s the most insultingly cynical that advertising can get. I mean, advertising can, theoretically be a good thing: a business is making the case of how beneficial their product is. That’s how it should be, and — I assume — how it once was, when advertising first crawled out of the primordial goop. But we all know most ads are not really very useful; it’s mostly just psychological tricks, trying to associate the product with a catchy jingle, or sex, or a promise of restoring confidence in your masculinity. We know all this, but we tell ourselves advertising can be a good and useful thing to justify to ourselves that this is all acceptable.

But these prescription ads puncture that pretence, because they’re the purest form of anti-intellectual advertising. You can’t pretend they’re a useful service to the public, because they tell you literally nothing other than the product name. These ads are actually dumber than showing half-naked women in a beer ad; that ad is at least making the (ridiculous) case that the beer will make you attract women. Prescription ads don't even do that. There's no hiding the fact that it's pure repetition aimed straight at lodging the brand in your lizard brain.

And I have no idea how this regulation makes sense. As I said, it’s good to have some limitations on the advertising of prescription medication, but in this case it’s not helping. They’re telling us what is available, but not telling us anything else. Even the American ads warning us about anal leakage are at least giving the public some info. (And don’t worry, by the comic rule of three, I won’t bring that up again.)

It should also be noted that there is another kind of ad allowed in Canada, which is essentially the opposite. In this case you’re allowed to talk about the medical problem, and even tell people that there are one or more solutions available, you just can’t tell anyone what it is. So essentially it sounds like a non-profit public service announcement, except for the note at the end to talk to your doctor about prescription medications, hint-hint, nudge-nudge. For some reason, these kind of ads are mainly used to tell us about toenail fungus cures. Apparently there’s a lot of money in that: It's at the top of the list of things I can't believe are sold so hard, ahead of home-delivered mattresses and reverse mortgages.

Anyway, if you’re like me, you’re hugely curious about what some of these commonly-advertised drugs are for, but you never actually look it up, because that would feel like you’re giving in, and you can’t let these ads win. Well, I figured I’ll take that on so you don’t have to. I looked up the drugs being advertised in name only in Canada right now: Ozempic, Rybelsus, Saxenda and Contrave. The answer is, they're all for weight management and diabetes. There are differences in how they're administered, and what specifically they're used for, but they're all after a similar market. I guess I should have guessed that, since these ads are among the few with actors of a variety of body types, a Sherlockian hint that came dangerously close to giving us real information.

How The Meaty Have Fallen

Years ago, I wrote a post about how many ads use “It’s Your Thing” by the Isley Brothers. The point was that it’s really over-used, and worse, lazily used — by advertisers looking for a cheap expression of … I don’t know, individuality, or something? I was pointing out that it just keeps getting warmed-over by the ad industry, despite it already being associated with the last second-rate brand that used it, and also, in complete obliviousness to how cliched it is. 

(After the recent passing of Rudolph Isley, I should point out that I have nothing against the song itself, but it’s become generic ad music, about as fresh as 70s Muzak.)

So I was absolutely shocked when I saw McDonald’s latest ad campaign built around that most over-used song. It might not be a surprise for younger people: Today, McDonald’s is just another established brand casting about for something that will appeal to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. (Seriously, that’s what they’re calling it.) 

But when I was younger, Mickey-D’s were legendary for their marketing prowess. Among anyone with the self-awareness to realize that marketing was happening, they were the epitome of corporate Svengalis making the public dance to their choice of tune. Children loved them. Teens loved them even though children loved them. Parents hated them but let their children drag them there anyway.

To be honest, I always thought the legend of their gastronomic propaganda was a little exaggerated. After all, if they could control the general public’s tastes, wouldn’t they choose something easier to make than burgers? I mean, they are a fairly complex food; they do have all the food groups one way or another. Wouldn’t it be more profitable to command everyone to desire raw soy beans or something?

But even if they were never a burger collective controlling the American palate, they were the pinnacle of twentieth-century marketing. Yes, they had missteps like the Arch Deluxe or their foray into Pizza. But on the other hand, they built an empire with a clown and a big purple lump, convinced kids to have their birthdays there, got us to drink some kind of orange syrup at public events, made the McRib into a major event, and made a legend out of a burger that’s half-bread and has an unclassifiable-sauce.

So it was a shock to see them build an ad campaign around this cliched song that a regional chain of muffler shops would be embarrassed to use. On the one hand, it’s kind of refreshing; instead of marketing going after the youths, here they’re going after, I don’t know, the Boomers, I guess? But it’s also a bit sad. It’s like a TV show that came back for one season too many, an aging rock star dabbling in smooth jazz, or an athlete that doesn’t know when to quit. Wow, I saw communism fall, and somehow the fall of McDonald’s marketing is more shocking.

I’m Gonna Mess Your Mind

Congratulations to Spain on winning the women’s World Cup. They now join Germany as the only countries to win both World Cups. Meanwhile everyone’s world has been turned upside-down by the jump in parity in women’s soccer, leading to plenty of upsets and Cinderella teams.

Here in Canada, we’re in mourning; we won gold at the Olympics - in our greatest soccer achievement ever - but followed that up with not getting out of the opening round here. If you’re not familiar with it, in men’s soccer, the Olympics are limited to under 23, but for women, there’s no limit, so it’s like smaller a World Cup. So you’d think it would be harder to advance in the Olympics, where you’re playing higher quality teams sooner. And yet, Canada has gone to the Olympic semi-finals three times in a row, but only made the World Cup semis once, back in 2003.

But for much of the world, the big news is the early exit for the two-time defending champion Americans. If you watch the men’s World Cup, you know that favoured teams having an embarrassing run and going home early is a regular occurrence. But now supporters of the U.S. Women are in existential panic.

Years ago, I noted that it was weird but refreshing to watch the fans of American men’s soccer, because it was one of the few places where the United States was regarded as just another country. What was especially weird was that American fans seemed to be okay with that. To be fair, we’re only talking about a subset of Americans, since the majority don’t really follow soccer even when the U.S. is involved, but there is a subculture within the U.S. that cares about its team, even on the men’s side, and it’s remarkable what an internationally-reasonable attitude they have.

All that’s happening right now is that the U.S. Women’s team is going to have to take on that same attitude. While watching the hype surrounding the Americans going for a Women’s World Cup three-peat, I realized that the truly unusual thing about the Men’s team fandom is that it’s one of the only places where you’ll see Americans being patriotic, but not buying into American Exceptionalism. They’re proud of their country, they support their team, but they don’t think their country is inherently better or apart from the others. The women’s team will have to adopt that attitude. In their case, they’re a great team, but just a team. So it’s a subtle change, but they’ll have to go from thinking of themselves as the Harlem Globetrotters to merely the New York Yankees.

Watching Americans watch their Women’s team, it’s been more like business as usual for Americans in international sports, with even well-meaning Americans seeing their team as above everything else. Take advertising, for instance. Even here in Canada, we’re subjected to ads for American brands that glorify the American women, oblivious to the fact that they’re our chief rivals, and thus, not really who we want to see celebrated in every commercial break. It’s reminiscent of that one American you see on lists of the dumbest things said on the internet, asking a British person if they celebrate the Fourth of July. 

Partly, this is because their Women’s team has been a boon for those looking for female role models. And finding role models for our kids is a universal thing, so they’re just assuming the whole world will join in on glorifying the stars of their team. It hasn’t occurred to them that if my daughter’s role model was just knocked out of the tournament by your daughter’s role model, then I won’t want to join in on the adulation.

And that brings us to the goodish news: you can look at this as another example of women’s soccer hitting the mainstream. When a sport starts out and creeps along in the margins of the sports world, there tends to be a communal feeling, like it’s all of us against the world, looking for acceptance of our sport. But once you’re in the mainstream, we can all think of it in competitive terms. This sport has finally made the big time, now that I hate your daughter’s role model.

Lucretia, My Election

There's a series of ads going around trying to guilt us into buying jewelry for Mothers' Day. They each feature a mother's voice talking about things they've put up with over the years. In one of them, she talks about "putting up with your goth phase." It ends with a yearbook photo of a vaguely gothy teen - fair enough. But it's accompanied by some sort of death metal. So now I'm like, great, I have to boycott a jeweller, because they don't know the difference between goth and metal. The future sure is weird.

But on the other hand, gothism has been getting some respect. Andrew Yang, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has said that he would be the first ex-goth president. Oh, yeah, he could be the first Asian-American major party candidate, but the important thing is, we could have a former goth in the White House, which I assume would not stay white for long.

My first reaction was to marvel at how many people are running for the Democratic nomination. Candidates always try to carve out a niche for themselves: you have the education candidate, the law-and-order candidate etc. But there have got to be a lot of people if you're stuck with being the ex-goth candidate.

To be fair, most of the bands that Yang mentions as his favourites would be more accurately classed as Dark Wave. But I'm glad to finally find a left-wing politician who shares my musical sensibilities. I had an on-and-off series of articles about right-wingers who liked the same music I did, even when the music's message hugely contradicted their own policies.

But even though I'm tickled by this development, I have to temper my feelings, because I know that this is part of what is bad about politics today. People are choosing politicians as though they are a lifestyle choice, rather than based on substantive policies. As they say, people vote for the candidate they'd rather have a beer with. That's an attitude that's led to many bad election choices, and it's not any better to ask which candidate you'd like to sip absinthe with. So remember, vote for the best candidate, even if they don't know anything about your music. Express your lifestyle through some other choice, like jewelry.

The Future Is Bunk

Ford has a new ad featuring Bryan Cranston in a variety of guises talking about innovation. The premise being that some unknown "other guys" are talking about doing futuristic things while Ford is and always has been actually building it.

The most dramatic part is the android Cranston, which is quite well done. It's like the ad grabs you and holds you out over the Uncanny Valley, and teases, "gonna drop you, gonna drop you!" Of course the fake TED talk is good too. But the president in the plane just looks so old-fashioned now. I mean, a president swamped with work? Weird. But I appreciated the concept the best, since I've always hated it when companies make vague claims about future technology. "Use Smith Brand soap. One day soon we'll bring you cyber soap."

The ultimate in future promises was a series of ads AT&T did in the early nineties. They made a lot of promises about future products like video phones and smart homes. That really ticked me off, because they were trying to sell us on things that they clearly were nowhere near delivering. Why not just promise us warp drive while you're at it?

At the risk of getting even further off track, someone uploaded the entire series to YouTube, and it's fascinating to see the view of today from a quarter-century ago. I'm pleasantly surprised at how much they got right. Well, they "got it right" in the sense that it would happen. In most of the cases, it wasn't AT&T that brought it to us. I wonder if there's grounds for a class-action suit here?

But back to Ford. Much as I like the idea of the ad, it all comes off pretty flat. For one thing, is "Paint it Black" really the best song to accompany the monologue? Let's talk about building the future with a song about depression. Okay, now that I think about it, I guess it was a reference to the Model T coming in black only, which was for the sake of standardization and efficiency, which was one of the innovations they're talking about. Just think, they've been sitting on that one since the song came out in the sixties.

The biggest problem, however, is that it's so out-of-step with reality. Ford is a company that just decided to dedicate itself primarily to Trucks and SUV's. Sure, those are popular, but in the public's imagination, they represent the Walmart parking lot more than the future. And they don't have a Prius or a Bolt in their line-up to point to as something they're pushing the limits with right now. So the climax of the ad is Cranston dissing other companies for not being futuristic enough while driving a bulky pickup that looks like it could have come from any time in the last couple of decades.

What's especially perplexing is that the ad and the campaign it's a part of is apparently supposed to be putting down tech companies. I had assumed that the vague "other guys" mentioned in the commercial were other car companies. But no, they're thinking of the tech companies that have been encroaching on the car biz. What? I know, I've been critical of such companies, but let's face it, it's quite an indictment of the American car business that Tesla has gotten as far as it has. Meanwhile, when I just went Googling for the latest on Ford electric vehicles, I just got promises that they have electric trucks coming soon. So this is the biggest self-own in advertising since Diet Coke's "Just For the Taste of it."

This Here Gerenuk

Google is making a marketing push for the various incarnations of the Google Assistant. That includes an ad showing people narrating videos with obvious errors, like misidentifying the Eiffel Tower. Every time I watch that one, it seems quite unbelievable. Not that people would misidentify the Eiffel Tower - I totally buy that. I just can't believe the ad is going to win anyone over.

As I mentioned in one of my first posts, the internet allows you to cure your ignorance almost instantly, yet so many people just don't use the opportunity. And one of the defining characteristics of our age is that despite being a time of abundant information, so many people don't care whether or not they are correct. In a world where anonymous social media sources are more esteemed than experts, it's hard to imagine anyone caring whether they've correctly identified some animal at the zoo.

To be clear, I'm not putting down people who lack knowledge, but come on, if you can't recognize giraffes or the Eiffel Tower, you've probably been hiding from learning most of your life. Or to look at it another way: If you have a great lack of knowledge, surely you would get used to the idea that you’re often wrong about things, and thus you’d learn not to make over-confident statements about things you know little about. But if you persist in making authoritative statements anyway, you presumably care more about sounding smart than being smart, so you're not going to change just because you can ask your phone. After all, you've always been able to ask the person next to you, you just don't want to.

Indeed, the second half of the ad is the fakest-sounding, with the same people reacting to being informed by Google. They all take it quite well, humbly accepting the correction in a way that’s completely alien to anyone on twenty-first-century planet Earth. Come on Google, your business is built around knowing the Internet, yet you haven’t noticed that people don’t react politely to being challenged in public? I hate to play the Silicon-Valley-is-out-of-touch card, since that seems to be the explanation for all shortcomings of technology today; but that seems to be the case here. Google is assuming that the public is crying out for more information, and valuing facts above all else.

I’ve Got The Brains, You’ve Got The Looks

I'm really getting sick of investment commercials. I know, you have to expect this sort of thing at tax time, but now it seems like they're going year round.

I especially hate those Questrade ads where they have highly assertive customers talking back to their brokers. The intended result is that were supposed to feel empowered to rebel against our brokers. But for me, the feeling I get is sympathy for the brokers. Poor guys, having to defend themselves against people who are surprised to find that mutual funds have fees. The fact that they don't lose their temper shows some remarkable restraint. I think i'll invest with them. Where do they sell Strawman Funds?

The Wealth Simple ads have a bunch of people in the target demographic talking about investing. At first, it was kind of refreshing: they talked about money in a relatable, down-to-earth way. They managed to sound like overwhelmed consumers, without sounding like the unrealistically dense idiots normalizing stupidity on most commercials.

But as the campaign has gone on, they’re increasingly being smartass know-it-alls. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were showing people learning about investing and thus getting more confident, but instead they just seem to be getting more arrogant but still clueless.

I mean there’s that one where the woman talks about how you don’t want to invest in big institutions, because everyone knows that large organizations are crumbling dinosaurs going nowhere, really, just trust us, the upstart investment company. Then she says you want to invest in the “disrupters,” a word she surely learned from an online TED Talk. Has she ever thought about how many startups go nowhere? I know millennials hate being characterized as inexperienced and unworldly, but they’re old enough to remember the dot com crash.

And now there’s a new ad, where they tell you how your money can make more money, and that money can make more money, etc. It leaves me depressed that they feel the need to explain compound interest to people. I guess it’s good that they’re trying to clean up after our education system. But mainly I’m suspicious of it. Why are they specifically targeting the least knowledgeable segment of the audience?

Is Pepsi Okay?

I'm amazed by these new diet coke ads. Coke seems to be rebranding it, with energy-drink-style cans, and young-person-based-ads. I know I'm not the target market, but they look awful. You know, the ones where they're walking down the street talking to you.

(And here's the other. I have to admit: it's cute that if you're watching closely, you'll see them pass each other. I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to notice that.)

I may not be the target market, but I do remember some of the embarrassing ads that tried to appeal to me when I was part of the hot demographic. Both then and now, it was clear that they were putting these ads together based on what the ad execs had seen on TV or overheard in malls, not by actually talking to young people. "Maybe you're into friends who leave voice mail"?!? What does that even mean? Can you be into friends who don't use voice mail anymore? It's like they wrote the script using Mad Libs Millennial Edition.

I guess there is a certain challenge in understanding new generations. In my case, they were trying to figure out what Generation X cared about, before finally realizing it was nothing. Now they're trying to focus our what Millennials have in common, and are realizing that is also nothing. Well, one thing most of them do share is a disappointment in an economy that isn't giving them opportunities for rewarding or prestigious careers. You know, like jobs in advertising, where they could have prevented this embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Pepsi had an ad that walks us down memory lane. That's a big departure for them. As I observed previously, one of the few constants throughout my life had been Pepsi constantly trying to align themselves with whatever young people idolize. But one of the necessities of that strategy is that your ads have to live in the now: if you're appealing to today's kids, you can't mention that you were also trying to appeal to their parents. In this case, they not only admit that, they go on to tell you that they helped your grandad score at the drive in.

The fact is, we've entered a new pop-cultural epoch, where time no longer exists. Between reboots, rehashes and remixes, we're experiencing everything at once, so nothing can be hot, cold, retro, or camp anymore. It's like at the fall of communism, some people claimed it was the End of History. I didn't believe that then, and it turned out to be totally wrong, but somehow Pepsi rejecting trendiness feels even more monumental. It's like the concept was dying on us, and society needed Pepsi to give us permission to let it go, and herald this new era.

This Post Might Be A Tide Ad

After the Superbowl is over, you can tell how good a game it was by how much talk is about the game and how much is about the commercials.  This year it was a great game, so there's relatively little talk about the ads, but here's a few thoughts.

First, can we declare a moratorium on meta ads? They can be funny, But enough already. Let's admit that Tide made the ultimate meta ads this year with their ads disguised as other ads, and leave it at that. I hope all the other advertisers appreciated what that did for them, forcing viewers to pay attention to each new commercial for a surprise switch.

But I was also surprised by the Very Serious commercials. For instance Budweiser highlighted their supplying of water to disaster-afflicted areas. They demonstrated this by showing some engineer flip a switch causing the machinery to go from producing cans of Bud to cans of water. I had trouble hearing the rest of the commercial over the sound of everyone in Canada making "what's the difference" jokes, but I saw them list the various places they've provided water. I was pleased to see they included Puerto Rico, despite it being an embarrassing point for the current administration. Now if they'd also included Flint, I'd have gone right out and bought a case just for that.

The biggest fumble had to go to Dodge Trucks - oh, I'm sorry, "Ram" - who set their ad to a recording of a Martin Luther King speech on the importance of service. How could they possibly think that was going to work out for them? Did they somehow find that the demographics of their market happen to line up with the people who look up to King, but wouldn't find it tacky for a corportion to co-opt his image?

There was a similar problem with an ad for Hyundai, bragging about donating a portion of sales to cancer charities. It was a hold-nothing-back heartstring-tugger, but it really felt awkward. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they are donating money to a good cause, though I am troubled by the fact that they just paid $5 million to tell us that they give to charity. But besides that, it seemed almost as tone-deaf as the Ram ad. In both cases, they didn't understand that as a corporation, there's going to be a certain cynicism inherent in the audience, and they have to respect that. It's okay to show your company doing good things, and even congratulate yourself a little for it. But when you go into full tearjerker mode, no one's buying the idea that you're that idealistic.

Mr. Pop-Culture's Penguins

I'm not sure how we got to the point where two different Canadian companies are using penguins in their ads. But here we are watching CIBC and People's Jewellers alternately sending flightless avians to sell goods and services.

The CIBC penguin began with an ad that seemed like a one-off, using that flightlessness to sell its flight rewards program. That was cute, so they wrote in an entire family for him, and now the penguin is selling all kinds of banking services that don't seem to have any connection to his species.

Here's a fun fact: the female penguin has pink around her eyes, which you might assume is an outdated way of indicating her gender without stuffing her into a dress. But these are Magellanic Penguins, and they do have a pink spot around the eyes where there are no feathers. That's apparently not related to gender, but at least the ads are more accurate than you would think.

People's (or Kay in the states) is taking a different approach, showing penguins in a more natural habitat, and making reference to the fact that male penguins sometimes impress a mate by offering a pebble. This really shows how advertisers are quite different from other people. Most of us hear about that beautifully simple practice among a beloved animal, and find it heartwarming to feel a connection with a living thing so different and far away. Ad makers say, hey, let's make fun of those silly birds.

It doesn't help that it has a cheesy english accent narrator. You'd think they would have had a Morgan Freeman impersonator to reference March of the Penguins. Maybe they were trying for a David Attenborough sound; if so, it didn't really work. It just sounds like the generic slightly silly pompous english accent used to indicate stuffy authority.

Sadly - though not surprisingly - the pebble story is not really true. Male penguins do present pebbles to their mates, but it's not a proposal; it's just to help build the nest, which is made of pebbles. There's no attempt to impress the mate with a particularly nice pebble. And that leads to the ultimate irony of the ad: We're supposed to look down on these uncivilized animals for trying to get a mate with a particularly nice rock. And the ad is using this to sell diamonds, which themselves are just really shiny rocks. That's silly to begin with, but it turns out that unlike us, the penguins' rocks have a purpose, while we've created a huge global infrastructure just to get at the shiniest rocks on the planet.

Ghost Of The Machine

Apple is running a TV commercial showing a child doing all sorts of things with her iPad, ending with a neighbour asking what she's doing with her computer.  The child responds by asking "What's a computer?" I suppose the message is that the iPad is so unlike a conventional computer as to be unrecognizable. But I'm thinking that it's still pretty inconceivable that a kid would not have encountered a computer at that age, so the message I'm getting from it is that if you give your kid an iPad, your kid will be an idiot. I can't be the only one thinking that the child-actor's line delivery is particularly wooden, presumably because it's so unbelievable. She's probably wondering to herself why these adults find it so important that they see a distinction between computers with keyboards and computers without.

I don't really get it either. But it seems that adults have a big fascination with kids not knowing what obsolete technology is. Although the trend has subsided a bit, I can't count how many links I've seen passed around Facebook of videos of children perplexed by VCR's, Walkmans, phone dials, etc. First of all, I don't really know what the attraction is. I try to avoid seeing evidence of my age, but apparently some people can't get enough, like being unable to avoid picking at a scab or something.

But I also wonder about some of these kids. Just because you've never used something personally, you still get introduced to things a number of other ways. Usually that would be your parents and the media. I never had to place a call through an operator at a switchboard, but I saw them in movies. I never bought any records, but my parents had them. At some point it did occur to me to ask my parents why they had all these flat boxes with pictures of Elvis on them, as well as who this "Elvis" person was.

The fact is that we're all subjected to old-fashioned technology throughout society. Many people have noted the oddness that the 3.5" floppy is the universal symbol of saving a file, even though they haven't been used for years. And as I was thinking about this post, I came across this comic on that very idea. Old fashioned ideas often become symbols. I'm typing this entry on a web page that uses a picture of a bell to represent "notifications" even though bells have just been Christmas ornaments during my lifetime.

And also, you might be surprised how many things that are still in used in society that kids don't understand. I remember as a young child thinking that it was turning the steering wheel back and forth that made a car move. That wasn't because cars were obsolete, it was because this is a complicated world, and it takes a while to learn all about it. I was too distracted by learning grammatical structures and object permanence to learn the details of current technology. 

We all end up learning about a lot of the culture that came before us. You'll probably find that even kids have learned a lot about what came before them, eventually. Some kids are faster at picking it up, and some are slower. I've always assumed that they single out the latter for those "today's kids don't know what a flip-phone is" videos. Those kids are easy to find; they're the ones with iPads.

Can't Get Enough Of That Overthinking Commercials

Today at the grocery store, I happened to see a box of Sugar Crisp cereal, with its cartoon bear mascot, Sugar Bear. That bear has been around forever; I remember him trying to sell my generation cereal, now he's back for our kids.

I found him a little confusing as a child. I remember he started off as a normal anthropomorphic bear. Then they introduced the idea that eating Sugar Crisp made him into some sort of super bear. Okay, fine, we have the transforming hero trope. Even we youngsters had been introduced to that through Popeye. In Popeye's case, it was based on eating nutritious food, while Sugar Bear just had some sort of epic sugar high.

But at some point they seemed to forgo the transformation concept, and just had Sugar Bear be super powerful all the time. That seemed like a cheat. Even back then, I could see that the trade-off of this trope is that the hero has powers to defeat his foes, but also had normal human (or ursine) weakness. You can't just discard that and have him be some sort of all-powerful ultrabear who, for some reason, only battles enemies that threaten our cereal supply.

I wasn't sure if I remembered all this correctly - it's not like I actually ate Sugar Crisp. I prefered Cheerios, which only had that bee in the ads. He didn't introduce challenges to story-construction theories; his only problem was being short a couple of limbs. But it hit me: this over-formalized analysis of pop culture that used to just exist in my head, but now I often see it in another place too: Wikipedia. So I looked it up there, and sure enough, it very earnestly explained that in the mid-to-late 1980's, the super bear concept was dropped for a bear that simply had a "vitamin-packed punch."

Also, it turns out that it's only here in Canada that it's still called Sugar Crisp. It's become "Golden Crisp" in the U.S. to avoid association with sugar. But apparantly we don't worry about that. I'm not sure what that says about our respective countries.

The Fall Of Television

We're seeing ads for this fall's new TV shows. That seems so quaint; it hearkens back to a simpler time when all the shows started at the same time, then half of them were canceled in the first month, like some sort of media Hunger Games. These days it's more complicated, with shows coming out at different times of the year, having breaks mid-year, coming back from the dead, etc.

But we still have some new shows debuting in September the way God intended. It's weird watching them publicized now, because these ads aren't the usual commercials for shows; they have to spell out the premise/catch/novelty of the show. And we watch them knowing that it might be an idea that becomes iconic and gets copied for years to come, or it might be quickly forgotten like some unprepared tribute from district eleven.

The Good Doctor

The ads stress this is the autistic doctor. That's potentially an interesting idea, but it's also derivative of the smart but socially difficult person trend. It was hardly surprising that it was from the makers of House. It could still work, though the ads make it out to be a heavy-handed feel good story, complete with the usual Hollywood intelligence clichés.

Wisdom of the Crowd

Crime dramas are hot; crowdsourcing is hot; let's put them together! Here you have a crowdsourced crime-solving app, and that's the premise. It begs the question: if you have that idea, why would you write a show about it? I'm sure you're there in Los Angeles thinking that it could be a popular show and make you a millionaire, but if you had taken the idea a little ways up the California coast you could have created the thing in real life and become a billionaire.

I'm thinking that the fact that it's only a TV show is kind of an admission that WikiSherlock wouldn't really work. Can you imagine if everyone on the Internet who considers themselves an expert were to try to solve crimes? You'd get false accusations all over the place. If the creators of this show are clever, they'll make that problem part of the show: Rather than your average whodunnit, you also have to wonder if the investigators can be trusted. That could be interesting, though I suspect that this is going to be like watching a CSI episode written by Malcolm Gladwell.

Me, Myself and I

This is a sitcom taking place at three different eras in one man's life. I'm sure I had the same reaction as a lot of people:

• That could be an interesting concept depending on how they execute it, and
• Isn't John Larroquette about a foot taller than Bobby Moynihan? How can they be playing the same person?

Okay, according to IMDB, it's only 9.5 inches. Since that portion of the show is in the future, maybe they'll have cosmetic growth surgery. Really, the whole show comes down to that one question. If they have a wacky/creative explanation, it will probably be an entertaining show, but if they just hope we won't notice, then it's likely just a half-assed hack job.

Young Sheldon

Speaking of time shifting, there's this show about the childhood of Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper. I don't know that there is anything like that before. There could probably be a lot of characters in TV history that could have had the prequel treatment. Speaking of John Larroquette, I would have loved to have seen Night Court's Dan Fielding as a teenager coming of age in the sixties. It just writes itself.

But seriously, I don't see how Young Sheldon can possibly work. Watching a grown up intellectual misfit trying to navigate the world is funny, but watching a child do that is tragic. I know, they probably won't show Sheldon actually getting bullied - except during Very Special Episodes - but that will just be unrealistic even by sitcom standards.

Self-Busting Ads

It seems that the in-thing for TV ads is calling your own bluff. Old Spice is doing it with their latest ad which essentially uses a dog like some sort of latter-day Spuds Mckenzie, to personify their over-the-top ads, and hiking mothers to represent the overwhelmed viewer. I have to give them credit, I liked having the dog promise things like “free wi-fi” like some out-of-touch exec trying to sound cool. That cut a little closer to their own bones that I would have expected. So Old Spice has gone from ads aimed at your parents, to ads aimed at your kids, to ads making fun of themselves. I have no idea where they go from here.

I'm trying to imagine the thinking going into this.

“It’ll be ironic. You know how those millennials love irony.”
“I think that was Generation X, actually.”
“Close enough.”

And then there's the Charmin Bears. In their most recent ad, they finally acknowledge that their family-wide love of soft toilet paper is a little weird. It's the sort of ad that wins over the costumer by demonstrating that the advertiser knows what the audience is thinking, and understands where they're coming from. Or at least, it would if the ad had run five years ago, which was when the rest of us started getting creeped out by adorable bears that have a semi-sexual toilet paper fixation.

Okay, I just went to Wikipedia to double check that I had the correct brand, and discovered that:

• the bears have names
• the bears are used in 70 countries
• they’re colour-coded based on whether they’re emphasizing softness or strength (never noticed)
• and most alarming of all, they replaced George “Don’t squeeze the Charmin” Whipple

But back to the point. Seeing ads crack jokes at their own expense just emphasizes how behind the times they are. You can’t really get on the audience’s side by being self-deprecating, because the audience has already torn them to shreds years earlier. Saying that the Charmin Bears are weird is like doing a joke on a trend that everyone’s forgotten about: it actually makes you seem more awkward than taking yourself seriously.

Tweet Dreams Are Made Of This

You've probably seen Apple's current ad campaign where they show people holding up oversized tweets.  The narrator then tells them how their problems will be solved by getting an iPad. Some of them are kind of entertaining, though they're no "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" or "1984".

But I noticed that the tweets they hold up have actual Twitter handles on them.  So I thought I'd look them up. I figured they would be too smart to just use random names that might belong to real people.  They'd probably create Twitter accounts for each of the characters in the ads, to make sure no one else takes those names. And Apple is an inventive enough company that they might do something fun with the concept,  like have fake Twitter feeds for each of these characters.

What I found was quite surprising:

• These are all real people, and the Tweets are real.  But...
• The people in the ads are not just actors, but in most cases they're totally different from the actual people. For instance, the gothy teenager who hates everything is actually an African-American woman who doesn't seem particularly nihilistic. 

So I'm wondering what exactly the point of this campaign is.  I can understand you might want to involve real people, that will get you viral guerilla marketing tactics to access key influencers and other buzzwords. But if you're not going to use the actual people, why not just make up the Tweets as well.  Instead of trying to associate your product with some random kvetch, why not give yourself a nice convenient set up. @who_needs_MSOffice says, "I wish my tablet weighed 0.17 grams less." "You're in luck..."

So really, using real Tweets is just a creativity exercise for the ad creators. They say sometimes you need to give yourself arbitrary constraints to get the creative juices flowing; taking a bunch of Tweets as the starting point is just their way of seeking inspiration. 

This Post Is Keyboard Approved

There's a car dealership in the area, Barry Cullen Chevrolet in Guelph, that used to advertise heavily on local TV. All their ads were built around the idea that he was "The Regional Dealer." That might take the form of a simple slogan ("Come down to Barry Cullen Chevrolet, The Regional Dealer!") or claims of superior service ("When you're The Regional Dealer, you can offer the biggest rebates.") I found all this curious because he never actually explained what the hell a regional dealer was or what was so great about it.

I was thinking about this because Nissan has been running ads bragging about things being "factory approved." Their rebates, technology, option packages: they gleefully exclaim that it's all factory approved.

I have no idea why this is such a selling point. You sometimes hear the term "factory approved" when referring to replacement parts, just to assure you that they aren't some warranty-voiding knockoff. When you think about it, it's an anachronistic term; really, you need approval from the designers and engineers, and presumably their lawyers. The factory in a struggling right-to-work state where robots weld together parts freshly trucked-in from Mexico probably doesn't have the clout to approve anything in the company.

But is there really a problem with non-factory-approved sales prices? Have you ever received a thousand-off a car price, only to later find out that the factory didn't approve it? Even if the factory didn't approve, would you really have a problem with it? If anything, I think I'd be a little more inclined to buy a car if they could assure me that my deal is just between the dealer and me, because the factory would be real pissed-off if they found out.

But I'm being naive, what surely happened is that a focus group stumbled across the fact that "factory approved" really resonated with the demographics that buy cars, and they overreacted, and tried to call everything "factory approved.” Really, we should just be glad they weren’t claiming everything is “chocolate covered.”

Who Sells Out

I'm not really comfortable when the music business mixes with advertising. I lived through the alternative music era of the early nineties, when any musician not busking for the money to eat was considered a sell-out. Of course, the pendulum swung back the other way, and by the end of the decade, people were congratulating Moby for licensing all 18 tracks from his album Play. The pendulum hasn't swung back to anti-commercialism again, so we're still in an era when there's little consequence for musicians selling their soul to the ad biz. But even if fans and journalists don't punish artists, there are still some things to consider.

Level 1

Selling your song

This is when you let someone use your song in an ad. This seems like a harmless thing to do, and in the modern world, it's probably the best way to get your song heard. The problem is that the ad will now be by far the number one way people hear your song. So it's no longer your song, it's the song from the Nissan commercial.

This used to be considered selling out, but it's now acceptable to anyone not hanging on to their 90's flannel. The argument in favour of selling your song for commercial use is that you have the song, what harm does it do if you let someone else use it? My response is to ask, how sure are you that selling this song won't influence how you write your next song? Which brings us to...

Level 1b

Selling your next song

X Ambassadors really cashed in when they had the luck to write a song called "Renegades" just as Jeep was introducing a new SUV called the Renegade. I wonder how many struggling bands have started reading the car mags to find out what models are coming soon.

This is also the level Fitz and the Tantrums are going to for their song, "HandClap," which is quickly infecting stadium playlists everywhere. I mean, it's great that it's displacing DJ Casper's "Cha Cha Slide" who's "Everybody Clap Your Hands" soundbite has been a crutch for hack stadium DJ's for years.

Level 2

Letting them change the lyrics

At this point you're really tarnishing your song's memory, since you're making the song literally about the product. This means that people will forever hear the commercial version in their heads when they think of your song. This still happens to me for "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" (Minute Maid) and "I Can't Help Myself" (Duncan Hines) even decades after those ads were on the air. My point is, you only resort to this when you are truly done with the song, and never expect that you or anyone else will use it for its original intention ever again.

Level 3

Changing the lyrics to something completely different

A few years ago I heard them play "Your Love" at a baseball game. It's one of those songs you know you've heard, but you can't place it, so I had to look it up on to identify it. It's by The Outfield, which I discovered is a British band, even though they're named after a baseball term. That's weirdness I can appreciate.

But in the Glee aftermath you're allowed to like eighties music as long as you pretend you're only liking it ironically, so the song has a huge value to advertisers. That's how "Your Love" becomes a baseball anthem, and how advertisers get interested in putting it into a commercial, thus looking hip and appealing to old people at the same time. But by allowing an ad to re-write the song to tell the story of a loser with a wrinkled shirt to sell Bounce sheets, the song becomes a punchline.

At this point, you're not merely damaging the song, you're turning it into a joke. I can talk about "Sunshine of My Life," and you may remember it as a great song, as long as you don't try to hum along with Stevie Wonder and find yourself singing about orange juice. But once your song is a punchline, people can't even remember the existence of the song and take it seriously. To put it another way, changing the lyrics is like killing the song, this is like killing the song and then erasing all evidence it ever existed.

Some Women Just Want To Watch The Fuel Burn

This Esso commercial has been running a lot, where the guy wonders what the cleaning ingredients are, and the scientists pop out of nowhere to tell him. Apparently it's a Mobil ad in the U.S. (all part of the ExxonMobil empire.)

I'm worried about the detergent #2 scientist.  She seems to have an enthusiasm for her work that no one -  not even her oddball colleagues - can match.  It seems that she's destined to be disappointed that others don't share her love of internal combustion cleanliness.  I see her shaking her fist in the air late one night at the Esso lab, saying "I'll show them the importance of removing deposits from fuel injectors!"

And I'm dreading what she'll do next.  We know that she's a master of disguise, since she was she was also detergent #1 developer.  And that leads to the next problem: she's obviously a chemistry genius, since she developed two fuel additives in the time everyone else needed to develop just one.  What I'm getting at is, she just has to steal the flying chair from the Marker Molecules guy and she'll have everything she needs to be a supervillan.

I'm not sure what sort of name she'd choose.  The Solvent? Dr. Fluid? Ms. Clean?  I think she'll have to depend on some sort of lab accident to create a persona for her.