Tag Archives: advertising

Motrin Messes with Mommy-Bloggers and Loses

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This morning, Annie told me about a Motrin ad that a bunch of mom-bloggers were angry about because it was critical of babywearing. She was really upset about it, and convinced that it was an intentional slam on mothers. Since I work in marketing, and Annie majored in Sociology, we tend to have conversations like this where Annie says advertising is evil, and I try to defend it.

In this case, I told her that I doubted it was anything intentional, and that it was probably a case of design-by-committee. Still, I asked her to send me the link so I could check the video out, and figured it would be a good conversation starter at work. Once I watched the video, though, I was startled by how bad it was. I could easily see why people were offended, and as I dug around online to find the details, what emerged was a fascinating story about a big company whose attempt to brand with their target audience backfired badly, and forced them to cancel an entire ad campaign.

To make a long story short (check out this Advertising Age article for all the gory details), the video was posted on Motrin’s website a few weeks ago. Last weekend, at the end of International Babywearing Week, an incredible combination of outraged blog posts, Twitter users, and YouTube replies led to the entire site being pulled offline on Sunday. It was put back up on Monday with an apology.

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I Saw On A Website

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There is a TV commercial for Excedrin Migrane medicine which bothers me. A woman is speaking about the wonders of this miracle drug, and I swear, she actually says this: “I saw on a website that Excedrin blah blah works wonders blah blah…”

Oh yeah. Not “clinical studies have shown that…” or “four out of five doctors prefer…” or even “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Nope. “I saw on a website that…”

I love that she doesn’t even qualify what kind of website. I bet it was some GeoCities fan page. “NUdE PiX of DReW BaRRyMoRe! And Excedrin works wonders!”

Also, there is a new show on Comedy Central called Sports Night, which is really really cool. It’s funny and I’m really enjoying it, but I have to say that Comedy Central does one thing that bugs me. They don’t play the episodes in order. They jump all over the place. Each week, they play two episodes in a row. But the next week, the two episodes might be four episodes in the future, or six episodes back. It’s like a weird trip through time. From the frame of reference of the first episode I saw, I’ve been to the future, into the past, back to the present, to the future, to the far past, back to the future! It’s very confusing.

The Future Looks Good

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Woah… Was just reading on monster dot com about “happiness in the Internet workforce”

and the author is blathering on about how: “sure, Thai food and videos still need to get moved around, but in our increasingly postindustrial world we know the real action is in the keyboard and the cathode ray tube.”

“blah, blah,” I’m thinking; how would he know that the real authentic life is not lived by the native peoples of wherever, who cut wheat by hand with a sickle, and have no electric light… the dot com job market will level out, we’re all doomed… but WAIT A MINUTE…

When we get nanotechnology, we will be able to pipe raw material around just like we do electricity. No trucks needed. And we will be able to construct anything from that raw material, on the spot, on demand. No factories needed. Fashions will move across the material world like weather fronts do now. Change will achieve ludicrous speeds. Clothing, automobile styling, food, PC case design: like cloud shadows moving over the city.

And it will all be driven by computer networks tossing back and forth advertising, opinions, dialogue, money, blueprints, music, image… The Net will be even more important.

But how far can it go? Eventually you’ll have clothing that changes its color and texture at the touch of a (soft, flexible) keypad. (or voice recognition, or neural interface, whatever, I don’t care…) You’ll walk through a crowd and color will bloom on people as they react to what the more fashionable people next to them are wearing… There will be epic struggles at high school dances, to control the dominant color scheme. Blue and green and black and red will flash across the room like flame across a pool of gasoline; clothes will sprout and shed fur, scales, thorns, gossamer wings… All the girls will have reactive makeup with more computational power than the fucking phone company… There’ll be a retro video-gaming craze, and people will come to school blinking like Invincible Mario…

But, eventually, manual control will be deemed passé. Environment-aware clothing will, chameleon-like, change its form automatically to blend with or complement its environment. A crowded downtown street will look like an early-nineties Mandelbrot animation, a vomitous roiling sea of pulsating color, terrifying, utterly epilepsy-inducing. Building-side advertisements will shift hues, twist, melt, and balloon outwards over the street like obscene blind tentacles of commerce. There will be no difference between a high-dose acid trip and snow-pure sobriety.

Indeed… the future looks good for us dot-com workers.