Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

It’s the Readathon month, which means kids are commanded to read as much as possible to raise money for the school. Last year they raised over $160K. Yes, that much. So the pressure’s on to top that number, just like a telethon, although the principal doesn’t slump in a chair with a cigarette and bawl while singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” – which seemed a curious choice for the MD Telethon, because, well, you know.

So the child is reading a lot. She prefers to write. I asked her why: she said there’s more imagination involved in writing. True, in a sense, but also a dodge. Get Reading! Stop writing, and get reading! She has quickly turned this into a clever cudgel: time to practice piano. But I’m reading! Clean your room. But I’m reading! You want me to read, don’t you? Sigh.

At night she sketches a bit before bed. This may be my favorite, ever: the dog.

(Yes, she has a proper sketch book, but she likes to use this book when drawing in bed)

Good day – got up at o-dark-hundred, got the paper. Thin, as Monday papers usually are, but it’s odd to start your day with a weight-based evaluation of your employer’s situation. Snow and lots of it – nothing like the pounding the East Coast got, of course, and it’s fluffy as a kitten. A 900 ton kitten fed to a giant industrial fan. No, there would be blood. Well, you know what I mean. Drove to work with the wonderful calm feeling you get when you know everyone’s going to be late. First order of business:

Go outside and stand in the snow and talk about how it’s snowing. Don’t misunderstand me: I love to do this stuff. I love to do weather. If all goes well I’ll be doing a short weather segment for the Strib site every day, complete with big graphics and forecasts and all that stuff. Not that I’m a weather junkie with all that stuff about baronometrical pressures: no. I just want to be a TV weatherman.

Then I banged together a script about the Superbowl TV ads, ran down to the studio; miked up, stood in one place while the lighting was adjusted with great care, faced the TeLeProMptErs, and here you go.

The stats are in for last month, and the newspaper had (Dr. Evil voice) 100 meeeelion page views. That is sweet. Seriously:100 million. So, YEAH. This doesn’t mean we’re heading into our third century with eff-u cash in the vault and vats of caviar wheeled through the newsroom, but for a local media company it’s very nice news. I feel better working for a newspaper than a magazine, since a great number of large famous titles have done a header off a cliff: Newsweek (or Newsreek, as we called it in high school) had single-copy decline of 41 percent. FORTY. ONE. PERCENT. The total number of copies sold was 62K per week, which is smaller than the population of the Fargo-Moorhead area. Imagine the country. Now imagine the Upper Midwest. Focus on a small blip of humanity in the empty prairie. Imagine that half the people are buying your magazine. Not reading it all: just buying it. Now zoom out to the entire country again.

Now imagine you have a more venerable competitor who’s doing better.

Now imagine you’re US News and World Reports. (Or “Useless News and World Distorts,” as we called it in high school.)

A shakeout is coming in the next year, to state the obvious, but it’s not the first time. Every horrid economic contraction brings a die-off, as bad economics combine with shifting tastes to winnow the herd. The last big die-off took away Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post – each of which was a staple in the magazine rack by Father’s Chair or the coffee table. I think part of it was self-inflicted, though – for magazines devoted to graphics, they got ugly in the 60s and 70s, and coupled with the uglification of the ads they lost their snap and pizzazz. I wonder: if someone put out a magazine like Life today, but gave it the feel of the 40s – hand-drawn ads bursting with color that seemed to contain real people purchasing and enjoying real products, as opposed to static conceptual illustrations of a product, would they do well? I may be a romantic, but I believe that good graphic design can save a product or bring it back, and it’s not as if there’s a shortage of talent. There’s a shortage of inspiration in the MadAv world, as evidenced by the Superbowl ads. Make every issue a McSweeney’s Panorama.

No, we can do it on the web! True, but some web ads that are really, really attaining subcutaneous-irritant status. They’re not as ubiquitous as the ads that tell you how to avoid paying for white teeth by following one rule about akai berries, but oy. The first:

Since we have a small rodent in the house, I can assure you they’re mostly unaware of government refinance initiatives, and hence require the occasion prod. But leaving side the use of this creature to snare your eye, what’s the deal with the date? 9/10? Is that in The Future, or is it a reference to September 10th, and hence a suggestion that you’re locked into a bad mortgage because you have a pre-9/11 mentality?

We move on:

The reason this guy drives less than two hours a day is because he is locked up in a security facility, the result of a government program to create multiple clones of Steve Wozniak using electro-stimulated bio-putty. Never could get the mouth right; doomed the whole thing.

There’s this one, which prompts me to posit one simple idea: your nipples should not be equidistant between the top of your shoulders and your belly button.

Hipster men with bohemian grooming standards! APRs have never been lower!


Since I’ve been collecting these, I’ve noticed a fall-off in the ones that employ the hortatory invocation of the President. Wonder if there’s a program that swaps ads in and out based on daily tracking polls among independents. Hey: it’s the future of advertising. Everyone has to be nimble now.

Speaking of which, click on the ads! Can’t hurt. Later today: Comic Sins, and an update of 1930 Magazine Ads. See you in a bit.

Meet Uncle William! Go HERE.

Yes, it’s one of those days that’s Bleat-poor but link-rich. Fridays sometimes turn out that way. Thursday had the spirit and mood of Friday, though – I’m working at home on Friday, as I did often in the now-distant Golden Age – but it didn’t include any of the things I usually do Friday, like redesign sites, scan stuff, watch the B&W World movie, and such. As I’ve said before, I love Fridays because nothing is due on Saturday. Ever since the Bleat began, I’ve had a weekday deadline at the end of the night. I wonder if I would have started this if I’d known what it would mean. Probably. Was amused to read that Kids Today have stopped blogging, more or less; they’ve moved the blurtage over to Facebook, which makes much more sense. The web is the Great Heaving Sea; Facebook is an auditorium. Tumblr is a flea-market. Blogs will either be for writers, or communities gathered around a particular ideology or subject, or ace aggregators who can spit out 30 unique links a day. I can’t tell you how many times I hit a link on Twitter, only to find it’s a link to a site that links to someone else’s site that copies something someone else said, then says “these people are insane” or “that’s a point more people should be making.” Drives me NUTS.

But I expect some people have set up automation routines that spit tweets when they update. They’re not alone. Today at the paper I was amused to see our website note that unemployment had gone up, “unexpectedly.” This is something of a jape in certain circles; any bad economic news about joblessness or housing seems to be “unexpected.” Since I sit right next to the tireless crack web-conductors who mediate the gush of the wires, I noted how “unexpected” is a rather . . . perennial term these days, ot derided for its inevitability, and doesn’t it constitute a wee bit, a tiny dram, of editorializing, no? Because in the back of my mind I’m thinking there will be bloggers who will say the paper is part of the TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED cabal that furthers this meme. As was explained: the program automatically scrapes the AP heads, and puts them on the page – and since AP constantly updates stories, any attempt to remove “unexpectedly” from one story would be countermanded in a tick, as soon as AP sent along another version. I did not know that. I learn things every day. Which is why it’s always amusing, and somewhat depressing, to hear people on the gauche and the droit make Wide Sweeping Assumptions about things they see on the site.

It’s excusable from people who’ve never worked in the media, but amusing from those who have. Especially if they’ve never worked in an actual daily paper.

Okay, I’m rambling. Here are the links for the day.

Comic Ads!

Sears 1934!

100 Mysteries!

The newspaper column, HERE.

The Diner! HERE. (It will explain the Pizza Hut matchbook above.)

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to listen to Beethoven’s 6th and replace some halogen bulbs. Be right back.

Back. As highminded as that sounded, it’s like this: I am writing in the kitchen on a laptop whose iTunes I barely stocked, and haven’t touched for two years. Good thing: the more choices, the more you’re paralyzed. This is okay, but I could be listening to something else. The laptop has the Fantasia soundtrack, which hits that rare nexus of childhood / Disney / Classical / Thirties, and is hence occasionally irresistible. The Beethoven led into “The Dance of the Hours,” playing now; it’s fascinating to hear the Fantasound mix bouncing between the two speakers on either side of my hands. I love that sequence – low comedy and middlebrow music, combined with backgrounds that look like a deserted vision of the World’s Fair: ostriches and alligators and elephants, oh my. But since this was the first time I heard the music, and since I listened to it again and again on the soundtrack (yes: bought it as a teen, at Broadway Music, a record store that inhabited a former movie theater where I’d first seen “Fantasia” during a previous re-re-release; the theater was a porn house that periodically showed Disney flicks as some odd form of penance. The soundtrack album was beautifully packaged, the disks thicker than usual, the paper sleeves so creamy you could slide out the album without a single static pop) I came to expect the real music to be the same as the edited or enhanced Disney versions. There’s a timpani thump in the “Dance of the Hours” sequence to indicate a hippo has fallen on her arse. If I’m listening to a version of the piece performed by an orchestra, I know where the thump is, I expect it, and I usually whap an imaginary mallet.

If my neighbors are watching from across the broad yard of Jasperwood, they just saw me imitate Chernobog at his moment of triumph in “Night on Bald Mountain.” The last part of the piece is really Sympathy for the Devil; you feel for the guy. Dawn is  a buzzkill when you’re uber-evil. Then the genius of “Ave Maria,” which I will always remember as the source of one of an embarrassing moment: standing in the Pantheon on Rome, arguing with a high-school classmate about whether Schubert or Schumann wrote it. She was right. I was wrong. I will always remember that I was wrong, in the Pantheon.

I am damned certain I have written all this before, how the movie begins with primordial abstractions, ends in divinity, and evaporates in the last bright brazing sunset of the last summer night of 1939. As much as it may pain some to admit it, the end of the Old World was directed by Walt.

Actually made it down this far? Congrats, and thanks! Now head back up and hit the links, and I’ll see you Monday.

What are they selling? Besides a regrettable argument for not finishing art school. Yes, this was a major ad for a major product in a major newspaper. Answer later today.

She’s not in this week’s assemblage, but she will be. Go HERE for cigarette and clothing ads from the zesty 30s.

It’s a big one, a full-page ad. To boil it down: the wife learned that this spicy-sounding magazine was actually True to Life and Wholesome and not at all a wedge through which Bolshevism could enter their house.

Given the following – 1924 ad / family newspaper – what could they possibly be selling? Answer later today.

In case you were wondering. I found this in my archives, and present it here as a public service.

There used to be a site in the Institute of Official Cheer devoted to old magazine ads; it’s gone away, as I divvy up the material elsewhere. This marks the start of the 1930s site. All-new material so far. Go HERE!

Never have you experienced so many conflicting emotions in the course of one short bit. Prepare yourself for a moment of wondering what we have come to that we use this to sell cheese! And then . . . well.