Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category
Persuading Surfers’ Eyeballs
posted by Dave Hoffman
It’s a grim season for Americans who own homes (or, shopping malls). Luckily, casual blogging for mediocre stakes is quickly filling the gap as the ultimate backstop for the American economy. Well, sort of:
[W]ith the right mix of compelling content and exposure, a blog can draw a dedicated following, making advertising a low-hanging fruit.“This is really a continuation of how the Web in general has enabled smaller businesses and individuals to compete if not at a level playing field, at least a more equitable level,” said David Hallerman, a senior analyst with the research group eMarketer.
AdSense is an automated program that places targeted advertising on sites big and small. Other programs such as PayPerPost are just as user friendly; bloggers sign up and advertisers cherry pick where they want to place ads based on categories and the number of impressions a site captures.
Getting paid might even help validate what may otherwise seem like a silly or obscure obsession.
For Samuel Chi, BCSGuru.com started as a way to demystify the convoluted universe of college football rankings.
Chi, a former sports journalist with training in statistics, posts his calculations every Saturday night during the season before official results are released Sunday. From Saturday night to Monday, about 4,000 sports fans log on daily to check out the “guru’s” forecast.
This season, Chi made about $8,000 from the blog; ticket brokers contacted him directly after word about his site got out. AdSense brought in another couple hundred dollars for Chi, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast in Amelia Island, Fla.
A few things. First, it is very hard to imagine that $8,000 is going to validate what is, let’s be frank, a silly and obscure obsession with college football rankings. But putting that aside, it strikes me as odd that the article paid so little attention to the potentially pernicious consequences of running targeted ads on a niche website. With evidence growing that online advertising works, even when it isn’t clicked on, there are, I think, two sets of issues to think about.
First, privacy law. As a commentator to Dan’s earlier post noted, even Concurring Opinions, which has relatively few ads, runs lots of javascript hosted by third-parties. Obviously, sophisticated readers can opt out of this collection regime, but the percentage of readers with this level of know-how is small. I’m not in the group.
Second, total persuasion. As I argued here and more extensively here, we should be troubled by a world in which it is impossible to walk, or surf, “without feeling like a targeted consumer.” In a world where ads are generalized, like T.V., you can a) feel confident in your ordinary defenses to advertising – skepticism, caution, disbelief – will work; and therefore b) you will feel the freedom of being unpersuaded, and in making consumer choices that maximize your well-being, broadly defined. This is not true with targeted advertising. Thus, although it is nice that small blogs like ours can monetize themselves – indeed, I pushed and continue to support the decision to take on advertising – we should acknowledge the cost paid by our readers. Targeted advertising on a blog means that readers become consumers, subject to the most persuasive speech money can buy. Ultimately, I imagine that almost every blog with non-negligible traffic streams will take on advertising, if only to defray hosting fees. And folks can be persuaded from cradle to grave. Even during lunch!
(Image Source: Wikicommons.)
December 27, 2007 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Advertising
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The Brutal Attack Ads Begin
posted by Nate Oman
(ht Marc Bohn)
December 13, 2007 at 9:05 am
Posted in: Advertising, Humor
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Lessons in Irony: AMC’s Mad Men and the Advertising World
posted by Deven Desai
Many have noted that cable networks produce some of the better if not the best shows on television of late. The Sopranos arguably started this trend but other shows such as The Larry Sanders Show and Dream On opened the way for more creative shows. Recently Battlestar Galactica and The Wire (possibly the best show in the past 20 years although it and similar shows owe a small debt to Wiseguy, a network show, as a pioneer of the season-long story arc) have shown what can be done with good writing and a dedication to developing complex characters and story arcs. This past summer one show, Mad Men, joined the list of excellent television fare. (Irony hors d’oeuvre: Apparently the term, Mad Men, was coined by none other than the advertising world).
The series focuses on the world of Madison Avenue advertising in the late 50s. The set and costume details alone justify watching a few episodes, but what sets the show apart is the way it captures the highs of American corporate life after World War II and the seeds of the lows to come. The advertising masters drink, smoke, and screw as they manipulate words and images to sell cigarettes, alcohol, cosmetics, and vibrating weight loss devices that happen to have a sex-related side effect.
Irony first course: When the Mad Men must overcome the first wave of restrictions on cigarette advertising the main character who is more than lost and unsure about the changing world offers, “Advertising is based on one thing happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car, it’s freedom from fear, it’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing it’s O.K. You are O.K.” And one is not sure whether he believes he is O.K. or because needs that reassurance at all times he is a master at his game.
Irony Main Course: Unlike shows on HBO or Showtime, Mad Men is on an advertising supported network. So after a scene where characters develop ad copy designed to hide smoking’s harms, one watches the modern advertising created by the characters’ descendants. Of course with DVRs the ads would be missed but even here the show and AMC have a solution. As one clicks–one, two, three–to zoom past the commercials, a frame in the show’s opening credits’ look and feel appears. One stops thinking the show is back. But no, instead the interruption offers trivia about the advertisement and/or the company behind the advertisement about to air. Brilliant.
The person who watches the show in part because of the historical aspect of seeing how the advertising world grew now stops to learn more about advertising and specifically the advertising of the advertiser supporting the show. The move also captures the popup video and factoid culture of the nineties. Perhaps the strategy is perverse, but one can admire the irony of watching a show about how advertising manipulates an audience and then being manipulated into watching the advertising. Of course one could ignore or avoid the trick but then again if the advertiser gains just a few more eyeballs or manages to have the product stick just a little longer the advertisement has done its job. Besides did you know that Jack Daniels never revelaed the meaning of Old No. 7? “The first Friday’s Restaurant was in New York City”? “L’Oreal has designed and patented over 120 molecules” “Heineken was first sold in the US in: the 1880’s”? Well stop and watch and you will learn that and much more.
There are many other ways to commend this show, but I would have to indulge in spoilers to do so.
cross-posted at Madisonian
December 8, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Culture
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Roberson for the Social Networking Generation?
posted by Neil Richards
The New York Times has reported on an interesting case involving the alteration of a photograph for advertising purposes. According to the article, a girl was photographed by a friend at a church car wash, who uploaded the photograph onto photo-sharing site Flickr. The photo was then downloaded and altered by an Australian mobile phone company, and used for billboard advertising. The girl was portrayed in the ads as an example of the kind of “loser” pen pal that cell phone subscribers could finally “dump.” The girl has sought legal action against the Australian company under a number of theories.
This is a complex case involving a number of legal issues, including creative commons licenses and copyright law, and the application of U.S. law overseas, but I’m most interested in it as a privacy case, because the facts are strikingly similar to the seminal case of Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co., 64 N.E. 442 (NY 1902). In Roberson, a company used the photograph of another young woman to advertise its flour under the terrible slogan “flour of the family.” Although the New York Court of Appeals rejected the young woman’s claim that her right to privacy had been violated, the controversy that the case created resulted in the New York legislature creating a statutory right to privacy shortly thereafter. The privacy tort advocated by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their influential 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy” was adopted in a variety of related contexts, but this dimension of privacy — the appropriation of likeness for commercial purposes — has been the most numerous and the least controversial. Dan Solove and I talk more about these cases (including Roberson) here, in an article that is about to go to press.
Assuming that some version of the appropriation tort is applicable to the Australian company (and that’s a fairly big assumption, I think), this case looks to be a straightforward application of the appropriation tort. The basic theory of the tort is that it is unreasonable to allow businesses to use photographs of unwilling subjects for advertising or other commercial purposes. The injury remedied is an emotional one – the hurt feelings stemming from the unwanted exposure of one’s likeness to the public, especially where (as here) it is an unflattering likeness. There are two points worth noting, though.
First, the theory of the appropriation tort contains a good helping of gendered notions of separate spheres. I think it’s no coincidence that most of the early successful privacy litigants were female, as courts recognized the cause of action to preserve Victorian and Edwardian notions of women as delicate beings whose sensibilities could be hurt by too much publicity. I think that even if we put archaic notions of separate gender spheres to one side, the appropriation tort is justifiable, but under a theory about what sorts of commercial activities are reasonable and unreasonable.
The second point is the lurking spectre of the First Amendment in all of this. Courts in 1902 (indeed for most of the twentieth century) rejected any idea that there was a First Amendment interest in commercial activity or even advertising. But with the rise of commercial speech doctrine since the 1970s (ironically first as an offshoot from the constitutional right of privacy to protect abortion services advertising), the commercial world of advertising has become enmeshed with the First Amendment. Although there are First Amendment issues raised by the other privacy torts, the appropriation tort in its core case does not threaten First Amendment values. The right of commercial advertising is founded not on notions of individual expression but on the need of consumers to receive potentially valuable information about new products. Misappropriation of pictures does not threaten that interest at all. If we take First Amendment arguments seriously in this context, it will become difficult to see how there is not a First Amendment right to engage in other kinds of commerce – we will have created (as I argued here) a kind of First Amendment Lochner.
In any event, the Flickr photo case shows that there seem to be legs in the old appropriation tort yet, and it will be interesting to watch this case as it develops.
October 2, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, History of Law, Privacy
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Why Advertise Here?
posted by Dave Hoffman
So we’ve decided to take some advertising. Now that we’ve disclosed what we’re going to do with the ginormous revenue stream, no doubt other ads are on the way.
Now in my view, you should absolutely click through to our advertisers’ webpages. It will help make this site better, and it doesn’t cost you much time. But I have the nagging suspicion that click-through rates for most blogs are quite low. So, why would rational businesses spend their marketing budgets here?
There is some literature on this problem. The answer seems to be something called the “exposure effect.” As John Timmer explains:
There is a long history of experiments that show that repeated exposure to a stimulus that’s barely perceptible can enhance a person’s feelings towards what’s otherwise a neutral object. These feelings can include a liking or more subjective things such as “fame, truth, duration, loudness, stimulus brightness and darkness.”
Timmer is summarizing the findings from Xiang Fanget al.’s An Examination of Different Explanations for the Mere Exposure Effect, in which the authors noted that banner ads are a great candidate for increasing brand strength. They tested the hypothesis, and found that
“repeated incidental exposures to banner ads resulted in increased perceptual fluency without increasing recognition. Consistent with past research, we found increased perceptual fluency to be accompanied with more positive evaluations of the ad but not with negative evaluations, suggestive of a positive affect.”
Thus, the article tartly notes that a “practical implication of this research is that online advertisers might be placing excessive emphasis on the click-through rates—the primary metric for measuring the effectiveness of online ads. Our results suggest that even when there is no overt sign of effectiveness, such as recognition or click through, the banner ads may still impact ad liking.” Even more interesting, from the perspective of some who might be worried about overkill, “consumers tend to have a relatively high level of tolerance for repeated exposure to banner ads—the wear-out effects of banner ads did not kick in even after 20 exposures in this experiment.”
I’ve got to say that I find this research both fascinating and frightening. On the one hand, it hooks into my total persuasion hypothesis. On another, it suggests an inefficiency in the market for online advertising dollars, which allocates money based on click through rates. Perhaps as this research is replicated, that inefficiency will dissipate. What metric for online advertising’s efficacy is on the horizon? Change in Q-Scores?
(Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons).
August 7, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Behavioral Law and Economics, Blogging
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The Marketized Epistemology of Not-so-Random Ads
posted by Frank Pasquale
Via Brian Leiter: Scholars including Michael Fischl and Angie Littwin are disturbed by the Google-served ads that appear next to their papers on SSRN. Littwin states:
I would strongly prefer not to have ads for credit cards running next to my paper arguing for major changes in the credit-card market. And that subject-matter mismatch will often be the case.
The ads raise a number of interesting issues addressed by both Leiter and Lipshaw commenters. On the one hand, I agree with Hal Varian’s point that marketing in general can create a great deal of value by connecting people to products in unexpected ways.
On the other hand, I think it’s important to realize who is permitting these “potential rebuttals” and who is not. Many have called for a “norm of trackback” on newspaper editorial pages that would give some small platform to critics of their contents. But it’s not really catching on. By and large, the people who will have to give a “right of reply” to critics (via served ads) are people that can’t afford to run their site without such funds.
So though we’ve gotten a bit beyond Liebling’s old bromide “freedom of the press belongs to one who owns one,” inequalities of influence persist in unexpected ways. The credit card companies can easily afford to saturate served ads with their content by, for example, bidding up the price of adwords like “loan” or “luxury splurge.” I very much doubt Prof. Littwin could buy her way onto the MBNA site….though ISP-inserted advertising might provide a way around that.
July 21, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Posted in: Advertising
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Hillary Taps Into Soprano America
posted by Dan Filler
Hillary Clinton’s featured in a new video playing off the Sopranos closer. It’s fun to see Bill and Hil acting, and there’s a nice guest appearance to boot. Remember Bill playing his sax on Arsenio Hall? These guys understand that you need to position yourself in the true American heartland – TV – if you want to connect with voters.
Watch it here. (You’ll have to pass through a fund-raising machine to get there.)
June 19, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Culture, Politics
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Appropriating “Organic”
posted by Dan Filler
It appears that the titans of the food industry are having their way with the USDA and the feds may soon approve a list of 38 non-organic items that may be included in foods marked “organic.” All of this interesting regulatory play is inidicative of the fact that organic foods finally hit the big time, and thus became worth of Big Food’s attention. We see a several different things happening here.
1. The public is becoming more concerned about the contents of its foodstuffs.
2. With more interest in organic food, Big Food decides to buy into to the industry.
3. Once bought in to the industry, making money off of the public’s (perhaps legitimate) fear of the current foodsupply (that Big Food created and aggressively markets), industry immediately sought to make organic foods cheaper, more attractive, or tastier (or perhaps all three) by adding non-organic ingredients.
4. With its meaning diluted (and I’m not taking a position on whether this dilution is meaningful – whether these 38 ingredients make items more or less healthy), the term organic may slowly lose its value as an indicator that a food product is distinctively more natural.
5. This will open new opportunities for creative small food marketers to create new language signifying the concept that “organic” once conveyed.
In the end, Big Food is simply doing with “organic” what it does with so many of the food products it markets: taking the underlying item (usually things like wheat, but in this case the word organic), processing it until it is a first cousin to its natural state, and serving up this not-quite-real but plenty alluring product to a waiting public.
Is this an example of markets working? Or of the vices of regulation? I’ll leave that question for people who actually spend money on this stuff. And I’ll have a Snickers and a Coke.
June 11, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Culture, Food
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Politics, Private Space, and Total Persuasion
posted by Dave Hoffman
A lunch today with a colleague at another school, coupled with an article in the Wall Street Journal, has brought me to back to a topic I blogged about back in January: Total Persuasion. As I suggested, there are analogies to be drawn between the government’s defunct secret possibly ongoing program to gather reams of information about its citizens and corporations’ desire to grab consumer mind-share by every persuasive avenue possible. Indeed, we’re rapidly approaching a time when it will be exceedingly difficult for the law to draw lines between advertising and not-advertising; between fraud and persuasion; and between censorship and consumer protection.
These claims are easy to overdraw, so let me give you an example and a theory to help set the stage for the discussion. In today’s Journal, John McKinnon has a interesting article about Sara Taylor’s decision to leave her job as the White House’s political director to join the private sector. Taylor is an expert in microtargeting, a marketing technique developed by corporations to segment their consumer markets by mining data to learn more about the structure of consumer’s preferences. According to McKinnon, microtargeting was “honed” by political operations to “more effectively zero in on voters’ emotion triggers,” and uncover groups of voters that are susceptible to future efforts. Taylor sees a “big future” for taking such political lessons back to the corporate world by “helping corporations focus on potential customers’ . . . feelings about buying a product or service.”
There are some roadblocks in this prosperous path, as the article points out. Most salient, businesses are “more constrained in the claims they can make” than politicians, presumably by the law of fraud (in its various guises). But there is a solution to this problem: encourage consumers to make their own persuasive advertising by creating “social networks around products and brands . . .” In the future, we should anticipate that such social persuasion will become an increasingly prevalent aspect of corporate marketing efforts, just as politicians have worked to co-opt social networking sites for their own ends.
Why? Because consumers have fewer defenses to social persuasion, and aren’t cynical about it yet. Moreover, social persuasion is probably less subject to legal sanction in the general case (indeed, it may be immune under circumstances where the same language if spoken by the corporation would be actionable). It is also, obviously, cheaper to produce. The downside (loss of control over message) is probably something that corporations will learn to live with. (I thank my lunch companion for pointing this problem out to me!)
What’s wrong with a society in which most speech that you hear is designed to persuade you to consume? When framed that way, some might immediately respond: nothing! After all, no one is being compelled to any particular purchase. If the consumer market is efficient, and consumers had a taste not to consume, wouldn’t savvy marketers satisfy the taste with a unpersuasive campaign? (The idea is silly on its face, but isn’t it sort of what Saturn and Berkshire Hathaway were/are up to?) Even assuming that the consumer product market is somehow irrational, marketers would presumably compete to satisfy whatever inefficient desires are extant.
But I doubt that market rhetoric is going to provide satisfying answers to whether the law should work to hinder a total persuasion society. I haven’t fully thought this issue through, but my starting point is an essay by Jonathan Franzen called Imperial Bedroom, in his book How to Be Alone. Franzen attacks privacy advocates for focusing on privacy as just problem of being from free from others’ (corporations, the government, space aliens, the U.N., etc.) prying eyes and grasping hands.
May 21, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Behavioral Law and Economics, Consumer Protection Law, Contract Law & Beyond, Culture, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Psychology, Politics
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Stanford and Cal Cooperate over Big Game
posted by Alfred Yen
As a loyal Stanford alum, I don’t think I ever thought I’d see the day where Stanford and Cal would link arms over The Big Game. Thank goodness for the NFL, which has applied for a trademark on “The Big Game,” a title that has been applied for many decades to the annual football game between Stanford and Cal.
I’m hardly the first to think that the NFL’s behavior is ill-advised and heavy handed. A quick Google search turns up blog after blog making fun of the NFL’s behavior. That having been said, I’m curious…..Is there anyone other than NFL counsel who’s out there supporting this behavior or the asked-for result?
The NFL’s explanation is that they want to stop people from piggy-backing on the goodwill of the Super Bowl — you know, selling TV’s for “your big Super Bowl party.” In the story linked to above, the NFL says it sells sponsorship rights to Samsung, and suggests that the value of those rights would dissipate if they didn’t get the trademark. I’m a little surprised that someone isn’t defending this outcome as “correct” because it allows internalization of all social value from the Super Bowl to the NFL, thereby giving the NFL the proper market signal to invest in putting on its annual extravaganza. Perhaps I’ve missed it? Heaven knows I don’t read the whole blogosphere. Or, has the NFL taken us past the limits of the “internalize all externalities” policy?
March 5, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Culture, Economic Analysis of Law, Intellectual Property
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Best and Worst Internet Laws
posted by Eric Goldman
[Preface: I've already overstayed my guest visit, but before I go, I want to say thanks to the Concurring Opinions team for the opportunity to blog here, and thanks to all of you for the great comments and stimulating dialogue. A complete index of my guest blog posts. Meanwhile, I'll keep blogging on technology and marketing law at my main blog and on all other topics at my personal blog. Hope to see you there!]
Over the past dozen years, the lure of regulating the Internet has proven irresistible to legislators. For example, in the 109th Congress, almost 1,100 introduced bills referenced the word “Internet.” This legislative activity doesn’t always come to fruition. Still, in total, hundreds of Internet laws have been passed by Congress and the states. This body of work is now large enough that we can identify some winners and losers. So in the spirit of good fun, I offer an opinionated list of my personal votes for the best and worst Internet statutes in the United States.
[Keep reading for the list]
February 15, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Consumer Protection Law, DRM, Intellectual Property, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Technology
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Thoughts on Marketing
posted by Frank Pasquale
Inspired by Ellen Goodman’s fascinating article on “Stealth Marketing,” here are two random thoughts on ads and such during this frenetic shopping season.
First, from the Economist, on the relevance of postmodern theory to modern business:
Modern retailers are only just getting to grips with two of the consequences of the breakdown of authority and hierarchy that [pomo theorists] hoped for half a century ago: the “fragmentation” of narratives and the individual’s ability to be “the artist of his own life”. Modern business uses a different language to discuss the same ideas. In “The Long Tail”, an analysis of the impact of the internet on the music industry, with wider ramifications, Chris Anderson describes the “shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards”. The post-modern “fragment” becomes a “niche” and the mass market is “turning into a mass of niches”.
This is a bit abstract, but I highly recommend reading Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code to see how it works in action. Rapaille uses extremely simple narratives to get at the subconscious wellsprings of consumer behavior.
December 22, 2006 at 10:12 am
Posted in: Advertising
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Scentvertising, Bubbles, and the Battle for Mindshare
posted by Frank Pasquale
I serendipitously encountered two bellwethers of commercial culture today. The WaPo looks at retailers’ increasing use of fragrances to enhance consumers’ moods. Is this effort to get people in a buying mood a bit like subliminal advertising? Some unexpected nuisance issues arise:
The American Lung Association has received several complaints about scented stores, spokeswoman Janice Nolen said. The fragrances have triggered flare-ups for asthma sufferers and those sensitive to certain chemicals. “I don’t want to sound like the Grinch,” Nolen said, but “sometimes these fragrances can be a barrier to people.” Evelyn Idelson . . . is one of them. She first noticed that her laundry detergent was scented. Then her dishwashing liquid. Now, she said, everything smells. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I think it’s an invasion of personal space.”
The California Milk Processor Board has responded to such complaints, removing ads that smelled like cookies. “Taunting [the obese] with the smell of off-limits cookies was just cruel, they said.” Given the parlous state of many Americans’ finances, perhaps Debtors’ Anonymous should launch a similar campaign for all luxury goods.
But then again, we’d never say the same thing about images of products, would we? Perhaps it turns out that scent is more visceral than sight:
“You smell a rose, and your brain doesn’t go, R-O-S-E,” said Charles S. Zuker, a researcher with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Your brain recalls what a rose is like.” Daniel Lieberman, an associate professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, called smell the most “primitive” of the senses. Odor receptors in the nose are actually brain cells, he said.
So I suppose scent is in a category of its own.
But for those frustrated with all-pervasive commercial culture, there is another alternative: self help. Harvard’s Berkman center recently had a panel on “culture jamming,” including many leaders in cyberactivism. I was intrigued by Ji Lee’s bubble project, which encourages renegade “taggers” to scrawl commentary, in bubbles, on ads:
Our communal spaces are being overrun with ads. . . . Once considered “public,” these spaces are increasingly being seized by corporations. . . . Armed with heavy budgets, their marketing tactics are becoming more and more aggressive and manipulative. The Bubble Project is the counterattack. . . . Once placed on ads, these stickers transfom the corporate monologue into an open dialogue.
I suppose many will deem the Bubble Project illegal art, or mere graffiti, and may even think Ji guilty of inducing copyright infringement. But I think it’s worthwhile hearing his side of the story, and thinking about the ways in which ordinary citizens can try to avoid (or undermine) a barrage of commercial messages. As Hannibal Travis notes, there is a “battle for mindshare,” whether we like it or not.
PS: This is a very interesting disclaimer from the FAQs of the Bubble Project:
Q: Is it legal to place bubbles on top of ads?
A: No, it’s illegal. It’s consider[ed] vandalism to deface any public or private message. If you are caught, you may be subject for fines and even get arrested. You figure it out on your own. I’m not responsible for your actions.
Art Credit: Aric Obrosey, The Symbolic Lotus of a Thousand Colonels [Sanders]
December 19, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Anonymity, Privacy, Property Law
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When Will Skadden Finally Get Its Own Stadium?
posted by Dan Filler
I love that the Utah Jazz has sold their stadium naming rights to Energy Solutions, a nuclear waste storage company. The Times reports a series of great nicknames that savvy Salt Lake sportos have suggested for the facility. The Tox Box. The Glow Bowl. The JazzMat. And of course, my own personal favorite, Radium Stadium.
We have become so accustomed to commercialization of just about everything that this story, while humorous, is entirely plausible. And that’s lucky, because it’s true. I wonder if a stadium naming opportunity can be created for any legit company in America. How about Jack Daniels Stadium or the Marlboro Center? (If these names don’t play in Utah, perhaps they’d work in a place like Chicago.) Perhaps Howard Dean should have ponied up some cash and taunted Jazz fans by renaming the place Democratic National Party Hall. (Would locals derisviely call it the Dean Dome? And if t-shirt makers emblazoned souveniers with the motto, could Carolinians sue?)
Which all leads nowhere, except to ponder whether law firms will ever get into the biz. Surely Skadden, Arps would benefit from having the firm’s name surface regularly on NBA-TV and ESPN. I’m convinced there are some great nicknames a law-firm-titled stadium could generate, but for now I’m somewhat stumped. MoFoField just doesn’t knock my socks off. Anyone have suggestions?
November 29, 2006 at 12:00 am
Posted in: Advertising, Culture
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Discount Caskets Online? Shop Costco!
posted by Dan Filler
I was feeling in a shopping sort of way this afternoon when I wandered over to Costco.com. There I discovered what others may have long known: the big box discount house sells caskets. What a lift for the spirits! The funeral business has always been notorious for its attractive business environment. Who wants to shop around for the best funeral value? And who wants to be seen as skimping on cheapo casket for a dead loved one? As a consequence, the industry hasn’t been subject to widespread discounting. (But see this.) And now, with the rise of the funeral home chain, the marketplace is amazingly seeing an INCREASE in funeral prices. Yet this situation clearly creates opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to take on the taboo and sell their product based on price (rather than, say, Dignity.) Somehow, I never saw Costco as such a niche player. Clearly, I was naive!
This discovery has led me to ponder a number of questions.
Do people skimp more on the box when they’re buying on the web, in the absence of sales pressure? Or do they buy fancier caskets because they’re more affordable? And who exactly skips overnight delivery, preferring to get their casket via “standard shipping”? (Do some people prepare for the big day, sticking the casket in the garage until it becomes necessary?)
How many people join Costco for the sole purpose of a buying a casket? Maybe Costco doesn’t even try to make money on this segment. Like discounted plasma TV’s and cases of Bounty, perhaps it’s just a loss leader, a way to drive business to the site.
“I came for the casket, but I stayed for digital videocamera.” Or something like that.
November 27, 2006 at 12:00 am
Posted in: Advertising, Culture
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Great (Parody?) Commercial
posted by Dave Hoffman
I find this really funny, especially the weird reference to antitrust law.
November 14, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Posted in: Advertising
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Gmail’s Stunned Silence About Child Molestation
posted by Dan Filler
After reading Belle Lettre’s interesting critique of Gmail’s email advertising, I decided to do a little IRB-unauthorized research on my own email collection. I figured I’d look at recent messages sent to my Gmail account and see what curious ads popped up. But I found something even more intriguing. A whole category of emails met with silence. Gmail either couldn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t, match me with a single advertiser for this group of missives.
Regular readers may have noticed my recent post on the subject of child porn and sex offender notification laws. Some might say I’m “a child porn apologist“, but I prefer to see myself less dramatically as a skeptical crim law commentator. In any case, the post generated some active discussion in the comments. I receive an email (to my Gmail account) notifying me each time a comment has been added to one of my posts, and these notices include the full text of the comments. It turns out, that – unlike pretty much every other piece of email I’ve received recently – each of the emails containing comments to this child pornography/sexuality post came with absolutely no ads running along the side.
I am quite certain that there are advertisers who’d love to approach someone emailing about child pornography and the like. Some are obvious problem advertisiers – child porn distributors. But what about religious groups trying to reach out to addicts? And what about anti-molestation advocates who do their fundraising on the web? I discovered both of the prior links as advertising to Google searches like “stop molestation” and “fight pornography addiction.” These groups do advertise with Google. Perhaps our exact terms weren’t enticing to these advertisers. Or perhaps the Gmail advertising algorithm exludes advertising based on these terms. Personally, I was hoping for one of those quirky connection ads – like when I got a comment on my Judge Luttig resignation post that said “Was Luttig the jurist using his position on the Circuit Judicial Council to cover up a felony conspiracy of a District Court judge?” And Gmail reponded with an ad for the myspace page of Gil “The Crab.”
September 15, 2006 at 12:31 am
Posted in: Advertising, Culture
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Ain’t Them People Funny!
posted by Dan Filler
It’s been an awful long time since I booted up and got blogging. A lot has happened in the past month. Lets see: there was that vacation in Seaside, Florida. Then there was my final week in Alabama, during which Isadly packed up my office at UA and made my last, long drive home from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham. Next came the move to Philadelphia and Drexel University College of Law. I took a detour to the fabulous National Association of Sentencing Commissions conference where I visited with favorite crim profs Doug Berman and Ron Wright and gave a talk about the rebirth of rehabilitation in the juvenile justice system. And then back to the mines.
I haven’t had the inspiration to blog – or even to navigate to the “create new entry” page of MovableType – until I stumbled upon Stuart Elliott’s Advertising column in yesterday’s NYTimes. Nothing gets me stoked like hearing about a New Yorker discover culture in the Sticks. Elliott shops at a SuperTarget. (Hello! Is there any greater joy? Can you believe that, now that I’ve moved, my nearest SuperTarget is 193 miles away?) He’s impressed that folks in Alabama and Florida quaff Starbucks and Wal-Mart shoppers buy organic. He’s inrigued that a Super-8 motel would offer free WiFi. He’s also tickled by all the religious billboards.
The article wasn’t explicitly condescending, and perhaps wasn’t condescending at all. But if not, it certainly evidenced the kind of narrow world view that people in the various cities he visits – Birmingham, Tallahassee, Indianapolis, and the like – expect of Northeasterners. Because in the end, most New Yorkers probably read the column and thought “very interesting.” And readers from the 42 (or so) not-so-cosmopolitan states probably thought “only a New Yorker would be surprised to discover that Starbucks has drive-throughs.”
It reminded me of a classic opinion by Federal Judge Samuel Kent, writing in Smith v. Colonial Penn Insurance Co.:
Defendant should be assured that it is not embarking on a three- week-long trip via covered wagons when
it travels to Galveston. Rather, Defendant will be pleased to discover that the highway is paved and
lighted all the way to Galveston, and thanks to the efforts of this Court’s predecessor, Judge Roy Bean,
the trip should be free of rustlers, hooligans, or vicious varmints of unsavory kind….
.
As to Defendant’s argument that Houston might also be a more convenient forum for Plaintiff, the
Court notes that Plaintiff picked Galveston as her forum of choice even though she resides in San
Antonio. Defendant argues that flight travel is available between Houston and San Antonio but is
not available between Galveston and San Antonio, again because of the absence of a commercial
airport. Alas, this Court’s kingdom for a commercialairport! The Court is unpersuaded by this
argument because it is not this Court’s concern how Plaintiff gets here, whether it be by plane, train,
automobile, horseback, foot, or on the back of a huge Texas jackrabbit, as long as Plaintiff is here at
the proper date and time. Thus, the Court declines to disturb the forum chosen by the Plaintiff and
introduce the likelihood of delay inherent in any transfer simply to avoid the insignificant
inconvenience that Defendant may suffer by litigating this matter in Galveston rather than Houston.
Defendant will again be pleased to know that regular limousine service is available from Hobby
Airport, even to the steps of this humble courthouse, which has got lights, indoor plummin’, ‘lectric doors,
and all sorts of new stuff, almost like them big courthouses back East.
August 15, 2006 at 11:00 am
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New Postal Wonders
posted by Dan Filler
As many of you know, I routinely look to the U.S. Post Office (as well as church elections) to see exactly what’s happening in America. Today I noticed two interesting commemoratives: “Wonders of America: Land of Superlatives” and “Amber Alert”. The Wonders series features 40 stamps, each boasting of a “highest”, “hottest”, “windiest” or otherwise super-est American landmark or feature. (Not surprisingly, the largest delta is the Mississippi River Delta. But did you know the largest flower is the American lotus? Or that the windiest place is Mount Washington? And did our representatives lobby to have features of their own states included? Why was there no “deepest mine”? Or “furriest peach”?)
The great thing about this series is that, with its subtitle “Land of Superlatives”, it seems to be tongue-in-cheek or at least a bit ironic. This is indeed the land of superlatives and hyperbolia. And so in this vein it seems appropriate to celebrate? commemorate? acknowledge? the Amber Alert, one in a series of initiatives produced as a result of moral panic about child abduction. The media has been relentless in flogging the issue of child abduction and murder, generating near hysterical fear among suburban parents. In reality, of course, there are probably fewer than 400 serious abductions of children by strangers each year. (There are far more child kidnappings in total, but these are almost all by non-custodial parents. Amber Alerts can address these crimes, but the creation of Amber Alerts was hardly inspired by concern over custodial disputes.)
As Eric and Dan have discussed, our media live and breathe overheated rhetoric. Is that really something to commemorate and celebrate? The USPS apparently thinks so, but whoever created that Wonders of America: Land of Superlatives series probably knows better.
June 22, 2006 at 12:36 pm
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Stampvertising – Disney Makes Our Five Years Go Postal
posted by Dan Filler
Today I noticed that the U.S. Post Office is selling a new commemorative series called “Romance”, featuring various Disney characters – most notably several of their princesses. The 20 stamp sheet includes Belle and the Beast, Cinderella and Prince Charming, Minnie and Mickey, and Lady and the Tramp. There are many interesting aspects to this marketing campaign but one that struck me immediately was the fact that, with this series, stamps have been fully hijacked as a component of a major national marketing campaign.
As any parent of a young girl would surely tell you, Disney 2006 is all about Princesses. The company has figured out one hundred different ways to package Belle, Ariel, Mulan, Pochahantas, Cinderella, Aurora (i.e., Sleeping Beauty), and Snow White. (Am I missing some?) DVD’s, stadium shows, dress-up clothing. The Disney Princess is the ultimate cultural icon for the (pardon the product allusion) American Girl. What is Disney World, after all, but simply a place one goes to see – and hopefully snare autographs from – Princesses. How often need I repeat this? Disney = Princesses.
So whatever excuses the USPS might have for offering these stamps – nostalgia (for the old days of Beauty and the Beast?), a nod to artistry (fair enough, but doesn’t Walt get enough of these?), whatever – the bottom line is that they must be producing serious money for both Disney and the Post Office. For Disney, these stamps are phenomenal advertising. (I wonder if the USPS pays licensing fees for use of the images. I doubt it.) It’s good for the Post Office because the sheets are dandy collectors’ items. What five year old girl, spying these stamps in a display case, would not demand their immediate purchase? Mine did! And the scary thing is that the price is downright cheap. I’d probably drop six bucks for twenty stickers at Disneyland. With this sheet, the kid comes home happy AND I can use them as stamps (once she forgets about them.)
But once you’ve signed on to supporting the current Disney marketing blitz, how do you justify stopping there? Does it really make sense to promote only media properties, when there’s so much other advertising money out there? I expect to see much more stampvertising in the future. The Swoosh seems like an innocuous next step. But how long can it be until the stamp screams “GoDaddy” or “Motorola Razr” or perhaps “Mission Impossible 5, Opening June 5.” We’ll know the PO is in trouble with the arrival of the first FedEx stamp.
May 15, 2006 at 1:05 am
Posted in: Advertising
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