Category: Media & Marketing Matters

The Glenn Beck Machine Manufactures a Christmas Story for Children

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The cover of The Christmas Sweater lists Glenn Beck as the sole author.  It’s only when you get to the second title page that you see that this children’s book is adapted by Chris Schoebinger from an original story by Glenn Beck with Kevin Balfe and Jason Wright.

The story is a dramaless tale of a boy around 10 who wants to get a bike for Christmas until he has a dream in which he gets a sweater that unleashes a wave of family love.  When he wakes up, he wants the sweater more than the bike. Of course he gets both.  Seeming to orchestrate both the dream and Christmas day is a grandfather who resembles a very buff Santa Claus.

A curious thing about the book is that this blissful, happy family Christmas is completely devoid of any religious element.  We never even see the top of the Christmas tree, which would likely have a nativity star on it.  Everything for this possession-rich white rural or suburban family revolves around the material.  The two symbols in the story are the sweater whose warmth becomes a metaphor for the warmth of family life, which in this story is something that is received, not given: the boy receives the emotion by getting a gift not by giving one.  The other symbol is a candy cane which the author (authors, manufacturers??) uses to suggest in an oblique way that grandpa knew he was inside the boy’s dream.

The illustration style and other design elements are fairly standard:  finely drawn but airbrushed realism in bright contrasting colors; a nice selection of points-of-views for the illustrations.  Little paragraphs on each page covering the “white space” of the illustration.  All pretty standard for hard-cover children’s books.

The book looks like a piece of fabricated art, that is a work of art or entertainment that is put together by a committee for the sole purpose of creating a product to sell (as opposed to being the passionate response to life that real art is supposed to be, whether it’s a movie by Fellini or a children’s story by Ezra Jack Keats.)

Most examples of fabricated art nowadays come from the world of movies and popular music. 

Here are some of the traits of fabricated art that we can see in The Christmas Sweater:

  • Multiple authors or a muddied authorship situation in which you don’t really know who did what.  The promotional material may say “Glenn Beck,” but in the book no one is listed as the writer, although we have an adapter.  And we have no idea if the two people who figured out the original story took stenography while Beck spun out details or if Beck sipped tea while they pieced the story together from little snippets of images and plotlines from other books.
  • The work extends a brand and depends on the brand, which certainly is the case with The Christmas Sweater.
  • The work pulls together elements of its art form in a way that is purely imitative as opposed to breathing new life into these old forms.  Fabricated art will not create original content, but instead throws out stock characters.  It will tell you something that seems as if you heard it before.  In The Christmas Sweater, some of stock Christmas story elements used without even the injection of a new twist include wanting a bike, an older guy who could really be Santa Claus and a prance through the snow.
  • There is a sense of great distancing between the audience and the story, as if we’re looking in from the outside as opposed to being in the middle of the action.  In the case of The Christmas Sweater, the distancing is created through the sketchiness of the vignettes which constitute the plot, the lack of any emotional dynamic in the characters and the creation of symbols that do not really refer to anything.

The back cover notes that The Christmas Sweater is a best-selling novel.  That means that children and families everywhere are reading this lifeless artificial book product instead of A Christmas Carol, ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, My First Christmas and other classics.  I guess that’s similar to eating fruit rolls and drinking corn syrup-rich fruit drinks instead of eating a piece of fruit.

Is YouTube the reason for all the Christmas carol parodies in TV commercials?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Has anyone else noticed how many TV commercials for this holiday season revolve around the singing of a traditional Christmas carol with substitute lyrics which tout the products or benefits of buying the advertiser’s wares?

Some examples of song parodies (or perhaps travesties) driving TV commercials this year:

  • T.J.Maxx/Marshall’s puts new lyrics to “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”
  • Best Buy parodies a number of carols, but the one that comes to mind is “God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen”
  • The Pennsylvania Lottery has a game for every day in its version of “The 12 Days of Christmas”
  • For Outback Steak House, “Jingle Bells” becomes “Lobster tails, lobster tails, lobsters all the way…”
  • Rohrich Motors, a local car dealer, does its own version of “Jingle Bells” dedicated to financing a car purchase, which goes “Zero down, zero down, zero all the way…” 

The question is why has this advertising style invaded TV all of the sudden? I believe the answer is that the song parody represents the confluence of two trends:

  1. The song parody is a form of consumer-produced art that has become so popular in the age of YouTube and Facebook.
  2. The song parody is in essence adolescent humor, which has also become increasingly popular in advertising, especially in any non-jewelry commercial targeting men (and even some of the jewelry ones as well).

Now for a little personal history of song parodies leading to a unified theory of why they have invaded the public psyche lately, and especially this Christmas:  When I was a kid, song parodies were a kind of weak-kneed rebellion in middle school years.  There was always one person in every group of kids, usually but not always a boy (and in my group it was me) who would cleverly turn popular songs into something funny.  In my case, we were 12-year-old Jewish boys rebelling against singing Christmas carols in the holiday assemblies of our public schools, so we would sing my words to “Noel”: “No ale this morning ‘cause Piels is on strike.” Turning “Silver bells” and “Jingle bells” slightly obscene took nothing more than a deft change of one vowel.  In fact, most of the song parodies I wrote, to such varied material as “Carolina in the Morning,” “The Singing Nun” and “Stuck on You,” were pretty blue.

These parody songs, sung in such male-bonding environments as scout camps, school assemblies and dances, moved from group to group or died out when the creators grew up, but for the most part were marginal cultural artifacts, much like graffiti before pop artists discovered spray paint in the early 70’s.

Of course, there have been infrequent mainstream and near mainstream “stars” who depended primarily or exclusively on song parodies.  Alan Sherman had a series of albums in the early 60’s, with such gimmick titles as “Ma Zelda” for “Mathilda,” “Harvey and Sheila” for “Hava Nagilah,” and the incomparable masterpiece of the genre, “Oh Boy,” a cultural dictionary set to “The Ballad Of Pepe Pinto (Mexican Jumping Bean Song)” which both Billy Joel and REM may have used for inspiration for their own list songs, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “The End of The World,” respectively. 

Calvin Trillin is our most distinguished current practitioner of song parodies in the pages of Nation, but he never sings his material (to my knowledge), only writes it down.

Nowadays, our up-and-coming Lorenz Harts get a video camera and perform their songs for the Internet, that is, the entire world.  The song parodies have thus become part of the do-it-yourself trend in entertainment launched by reality TV and the Internet.  Beyond that, they are also part of the larger trend to sacrifice quality for accessibility and portability: sound quality, image quality and quality in production values.  Such tradeoffs have been made before in cultural history, e.g., in Byzantine art and post-Charlemagne letters.

Trends such as these are ever the font of advertising inspiration.  In fact, a history of advertising reflects a history of short- and long-term trends in popular culture as a whole.  

I’m going to close with a moment of self-indulgence with the lyrics for my favorite among the song parodies I have written.  I did this one as a 21-year-old graduate student in comparative literature, sung to Jimmy McHugh’s melody for “I’m in the Mood for Love”:

I’m in the mood for geometry

simply because you’re near me.

When we are lying parallel

I’m in the mood for geometry.

 

Staring into your parabolas

sends me into hyperbole.

I think your cosine’s the same as mine,

I’m in the mood for geometry.

Buy now, pay later turns infantilization into debt slavery.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

After signing off yesterday, I realized that I forgot to mention one of the most subtle forms of infantilization of American adults, one that has led to the current deep recession (which I won’t believe is over until there is some job growth).

It’s the “buy now, pay later” mentality that makes people use high-interest credit cards or take loans on their houses to buy something now instead of saving up the money and not having to pay interest later.  Let’s amend the phrase and call it what it really is: “buy now and pay more later” because of what are sometimes exorbitant interest charges.

Infants and children can’t wait.  One of the signs of adulthood is being able to delay gratification.  Buy now, pay more later is about instant gratification.  It’s about behaving just like a child.

Yet the “buy now and pay more later” ideology permeates our culture more than any other ideological principle, more than even the superiority of the free market or the blessedness of monogamy.  And it has all happened since the end of World War II.

Most advertising is about making people want something right now so people will buy right now!!  If people stopped behaving like children when it comes to satisfying urges, many of which television and other mass media artificially inseminate into viewers, the U.S. economy would come unhinged.

On the other hand, when sub-prime mortgages brought down housing values, literally millions of people who had solid jobs and good mortgages suddenly owed more money than their houses were worth, all because as the value of housing had become inflated, they had borrowed more on theirs so they could buy now and pay more later.

So indeed, the U.S. would be better off if we weaned ourselves off the “buy on credit” mentality completely, except when it comes to buying (not fixing up) homes and paying for college for kids who deserve to be in college.  The economy would shudder if we all woke up one morning and decided to become adults, and then it would adjust.

Target misses the target with a traumatic holiday ad.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Target is a very savvy marketing company, and like all large marketers, it conducts a lot of consumer research and pretests all its commercials.

Yet after all of that, Target has come up with what I think is a very negative TV ad, one in which they get connected to a traumatic moment in the life of a dysfunctional family.   

Here’s a précis of the ad (and I may have some of the words in quotes wrong, but not the thoughts of those quotes nor the underlying emotional tenor):  Mom, Dad and Daughter are around the Christmas tree and Mom unwraps a large flat-screen TV.  Dad says something like, “I thought Santa was watching his pennies this year” through clenched teeth to which Mom answers, again with clenching of teeth, “Santa thought we could afford it.”  Back and forth it goes, each time a tad more hostility in the voices, back and forth between Mom and Dad, with a shot of Daughter listening, a little terrified.  The last shot is of Mom, an odd mixture of happiness and terror on her face, saying, “But what if Santa got a good deal.”  Then the screen cuts to the Target logo.

The cut to Target is ambivalent, meaning it could signify two things.  But both are bad for Target, as follows:

  • Either the ad is saying, avoid this tense scene about money by buying at Target.

OR

  • Target has turned this mom into a heroine (but the heroine is near tears and the family seems to be falling apart right underneath the Christmas tree).

Christmas is an aspirational holiday.  We aspire to show our loved ones that we love them, which in the United States means buying them something that they really like.  There is nothing aspirational about a thinly veiled argument over money in front of the kid on Christmas morning in which both parents bandy about a symbol of childhood happiness, Santa, as if it were a symbolic rapier.  Not waiting to talk until the kids are off somewhere is certainly a sign of a dysfunctional family.  Why would Target executives think that linking to this disturbing family vignette would make people feel warm and cozy inside about buying at their stores?

The Daily News does a classic bait-and-switch using Tiger bait.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The low point of the unfolding coverage of Tiger Wood’s alleged multiple affairs has to be the December 4 article in the New York Daily News about the reaction of a man who would have been the father-in-law of one of Tiger’s purported playmates if the man’s son had not died in the 9/11 attack. 

The headline, “Almost father-in-law of alleged Tiger Woods mistress Rachel Uchitel: She’s a stranger to me now,” strongly implies two pieces of information:

  1. He’s angry at her
  2. The link to Tiger is the reason he’s angry.

After essentially repeating the “stranger” headline in the two short opening paragraphs, the article continues: “O’Grady said the sexy siren accused of being one of Tiger Wood’s mistresses is not the wholesome woman his son was planning to marry when he was killed on 9/11 – and when she became a national symbol of grief over the terror attack.  ‘She was a nice person.  She is not the same person anymore,’ O’Grady said.”  (Blogger’s note: while there were a few articles about Uchitel mourning her fiancée, she never became a “national symbol of grief.”)

When you read further down in the story, though, you learn that the potential dad-in-law has not seen Ms. Rachel since the 9/11 attack.  In other words:

  • “She’s a stranger to me now” is a statement of fact and not an expression of anger related to the Tiger link
  • The guy can reasonably have no idea what Ms. Rachel is really like now since he has by his own admission had absolutely no contact with her in eight years.

So what you have is an old-fashioned “bait and switch” of the kind that has always populated tabloid newspapers.  There is no news here except for the absolutely trivial fact that one of Tiger’s alleged girlfriends once was engaged to a 9/11 victim.  The Daily News report “beefs up” the story by injecting the emotions of a basically uninvolved third party in a misleading lead and opening.

Walmart commercials are becoming the new reality TV

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I saw another new Walmart commercial that seems to be based on the new realities of the great recession and the 21st century family. 

In this one, the announcer says that it costs $45 on average to take a family (of four?) out to dinner.  Instead, the announcer suggests, with that Walmart mix of aggressive friendliness and friendly expertise, that mother (since it is a woman in the commercial) uses Birdseye frozen foods as the basis of a home-cooked meal once a month!!  The narrator concludes by triumphantly announcing that you’ll save $345 a year (the difference between the home-cooked meal and eating out times 12, I assume).

The Walmart message seems to have changed quite recently from the long-time exclamation to be happy because what you’re buying is cheap to a more nuanced plea: Walmart can help you deal with your family’s challenges.  The “you” is a woman, as there has yet to be a man shown in the two new commercials I have thus far seen.  (For an analysis of the other one, on Christmas without dad, see my November 25 blog).

But let’s peel away the explicit message, “we’ll help you save money while feeding your family” and see the underlying subtextual conversation.  I call it a conversation because Walmart is not trying to sell something.  Instead, it is responding to a reality, and in this case, the reality is the large extent to which U.S. families, especially in the middle class, eat meals out.  The storyline—once a month you cook in instead of eating out—reflects the trend of eating more meals away from home.  The average American now eats away from home six times a week.  Although the NPD Group reported in July that restaurant trips in 2009 are down almost 3% over 2008, Americans still spend 50% of their food dollars in restaurants and on average, eat out six times a week.

I’m going to end with an archetype, which is a kind of argument by anecdote.  The archetype is a generalized version of a group of people who share a number of characteristics, e.g., “he’s an archetypal first baseman—slow with power in his bat and a weak arm.” The classic archetype in politics over the past 40 years was Reagan’s “Welfare Queens.”  

The archetype I am imagining is a middle-class family in which both mother and father have professional jobs or a single mother is working and making a very good living, let’s call it six-figures in income in either case.  I have known a lot of families that fit this description and have the following weekly dinner menu: pizza one night; McDonald’s or Wendy’s on another night; some family style restaurant a third night—could be Eat ‘n Park, Denny’s or even Olive Garden.  Then there’s take-out Chinese.  We still haven’t gotten to mom and dad having a night out alone at Chez Fourstar.  Just as the subtext of one of the Walmart commercials is an appeal to the single mother, so is this one that mentions Birdseye meant to appeal to families that eat out all the time.  Otherwise, why the stress on not eating out once a month?

In its subtext, Walmart has begun, I believe for the very first time, to segment the marketplace and try to appeal to specific subgroups that have special concerns and needs.  That makes the new commercials a form of reality TV.

You always hurt the one you love: Why I pick on the New York Times.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In reviewing the first four months of my blog, I have noted my tendency to pick on the New York Times.  Why, you may ask?  Even if you don’t care, read on and make me feel good:

  1. The Times is still the national newspaper of record and its articles end up in hundreds of other newspapers and on hundreds if not thousands of websites.  Even in the age of radio demagoguery, that makes the Times one of the most influential voices in our various national dialogues.  The Times is still one of the very few media that define the terms of our national conversations.
  2. The right-wing of the news media typically hold the Times up as the number one example of the liberal-leftist bend of the main stream news media.  My analysis, however, consistently shows the New York Times as right of center, especially in ideological subtext. 
  3. I’ve been reading the New York Times daily since before Barry Bonds, who shares my birthday, was born.  Reading it over a cup of tea or coffee has been one of my morning rituals for decades.  It saddens me to see the Times chase the right-wing as it has done over the past 10 years, and it saddens me to see its standards of journalism decline in both large ways (do you remember Judith Miller’s false evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?) and small ones (all of the pop science articles that are cluttering up the Tuesday “Science” section).
  4. Although I have picked it on occasion, the Wall Street Journal is inherently less interesting because you know where it stands on issues.  The Wall Street Journal uses many propaganda tricks in its writing, especially in editorials, but you already know they are supporting conservative positions in economics and the right wing on values issues.  The Times has a greater reputation for fairness and impartiality, but to a large degree that reputation is unearned.

Wal-Mart presents a realistic picture of fatherless childhood

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Holiday commercials are starting to appear in TV and radio.  I love to look at them for clues to the current state of things. 

For example, one of the TV commercials that Wal-Mart is running for the 2010 holiday season is a cross-cut between two families Christmas morning, the kids opening the presents under the tree to the sound of Andy Williams’ 60s version of “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”  In both families there are no fathers, only mothers. 

Wal-Mart hit the nail on the head of course.  Across the country, almost 50% of all children under 18 live without fathers in the home, and among the working poor (you know, people who work at Wal-Mart) and the poor, the percentage is even higher.  

You have to commend Wal-Mart for publicly recognizing this demographic group, which is so large as to beg the question, what represents normal in the contemporary family?  Of course, the good feeling that the single mother is able to create for her fatherless children on Christmas morning all depends on buying things, another example of the attempt of the U.S. news media to turn our emotional lives into a series of commercial transactions.

Another holiday commercial that reflects American trends in a very twisted way is a radio spot for proflowers.com that recommends in a very ordinary radio voice with not even a hint of campiness that men who want to watch football this Thanksgiving should give their wives or girlfriends a dozen roses and thereby weasel out of the requirement to help prepare the meal and clean up.  It must be meant tongue in cheek, but the announcer sure sounded pretty serious.  To those who have heard the spot and are considering buying the flowers, let me suggest that whether you buy them or not, you would be prudent to help your significant other in the kitchen.

Before signing off, I wanted to recommend Katha Pollitt’s essay in the November 30 issue of The Nation on the Democrats’ craven capitulation on abortion funding in the health care reform bill.  Exactly my view. 

From a news plotline trend, a practical tip for both journalists and PR writers.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I know I’m late to this trend, but it seems to me that there has recently been an enormous increase in the number of news stories in which the essence of the plot reduces to someone caught doing something very bad or very good on video or cell phone camera, which then goes pandemically viral on the Internet.  I know this trend started a decade ago with the infamous Paris Hilton videos, but I think that there has been a sudden uptick recently in the number of these stories that the media finds of interest.

Take the November 18 New York Times, which has two stories in which the scenario involves a video of someone doing something offensive going viral:

  • Lead story of the international section is the racist video of South-African blacks eating stew that some college boys had pissed in, which happened last year and led to riots.
  • Lead story in the sports section of a female soccer player caught on video two weeks ago yanking an opponent’s ponytail and seeming to throw a punch at another’s head.

In both cases, the news is of a feature variety, which means that it is not absolutely necessary to cover these events, just as it is necessary to cover hard news, such as, let’s say, President Obama’s trip to China or Sarah Palin’s chat with Oprah.  And in both cases, the event is not the news, but the reaction that came through a storm of downloads.

Are these stories a permanent part of the landscape? Or will the newsworthiness of a viral video end up a fad, much like the following generic stories which for very brief periods of time dominated feature news coverage:

  • The fact that a celebrity started tweeting.
  • The launching of the website of a prominent organization or company.
  • A celebrity communicating with people via Facebook.
  • A Ford vehicle driving over another previously unblemished part of the Amazon. (For more on this media phenomenon, see the recent Fordlandia, Greg Grandin’s very intriguing book on Henry Ford’s plantation city in the heart of the Amazon.

My prediction: Although the frenzy will die down, the story of the video gone viral will remain a staple for journalists for as long as people can post and watch home-made and bootlegged videos and photographs.  Although the plot uses technology, it is not about technology, but about grassroots outrage or delight, and that’s always newsworthy.

Following the generic plot lines of media stories may seem like an academic pursuit, but it has very practical applications in the world of both public relations and journalism. The job of the PR professional is to figure out how to make the story and messages of the organization attractive enough for the news media to want to cover them.  If you recognize a trend in media plotlines and can fit your subject into one, you have a better chance of success than a less strategic arrangement of the information.  And imagine yourself a journalist, with a deadline and no idea how you are going to cover the company or the event to which you have been assigned.  If you have a bag of plotlines, you can always ask questions until an answer fits one of the trendy (or even tried-and-true or homiletic) scenarios, and then write away.

It looks like a magazine, but it’s a 12-page ad

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Last Friday’s USA Today, which my mid-town hotel placed outside my room the day before Halloween, held a Parade-like newsprint magazine called Health & Wellness.  This self-styled “practical guide to healthy living” has an October 2009 date on it and looks like a quarterly special of USA Today.

Except it’s not part of the newspaper. It’s one hundred percent an advertising circular produced by an organization called Media Planet, which must also purchase the positioning inside of USA Today.

Health & Wellness consists of a series of articles about nutrition, exercise and other aspects of staying healthy, in each of which only one or at the most two experts are quoted, typically executives of large organizations.  Each article is in fact an advertisement for the product or service of the expert quoted or of their organizations.  Every article starts off in a general problem-solving way so it doesn’t look or feel like a phony article that’s really an ad until about halfway in.  In most cases, there is a print ad for the product or service of about the size of the article on the same or facing page, which is always a sign of what PR and advertising professionals call “pay-for-play,” in which you buy an ad and get a story. 

I have always advised my clients not to pay for coverage because it’s really an ad and everybody usually can tell.  PR involves convincing the news media that a story is newsworthy, not paying them to cover it.  Virtually no responsible media outlet, including USA Today, is involved in pure pay-for-plays, although a lot of media have paid advertising sections that look sort of like the rest of the publication, except for the advisement on every page that it’s only an ad.

But nowhere on Health & Wellness is there any sign that it’s just an advertising supplement and not a special section of USA Today.

Want to have some cheap cynical laughs? Peruse this chart of the headlines, topic and organizations quoted for some of the articles in Health & Wellness:

Headline Topic Expert Quoted
“Focus on Food and Nutrition” Get advice from a registered dietician President, American Dietetic Association
“Dessert Fans Rejoice: The Benefits of Dark Chocolate” Health benefits of dark chocolate Director of Nutrition, The Hershey Company
“Healthy Snacking: Ignorance is not Bliss” How to have snacks but still stay healthy Chief Marketing Officer, The Snack Alliance
“Eating for Your Health Doesn’t Have to Mean Missing Out” Meat is a good part of a well-rounded and healthy diet No expert quoted but on the facing page is an article on corporate responsibility and the hero of the case history is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
“Managing your Pain Without Drugs” How to overcome back and joint pain with heat and exercise President, Battle Creek Equipment Company, which makes therapeutic heat relief systems.

Media Planet describes its strategy for it customers thusly: “Your advert, placed in an environment in which the reader already has an interest, will incite a stronger impulse to buy…” Translated into English that means, “We’ll make your ad look like a real story and thereby give it greater credibility and fool a lot of people.