Zooooommmbbbiiessss!, Media Boycotts and Commercials on Parade

 "The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY.  It can be heard Monday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM.  The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program.  Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice.  WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed.  You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com.  Copyright 2013 by Jay Phillippi.  All Rights Reserved.  You like what you see?  Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of November 10, 2013

(Somehow these got skipped.  Correcting that now!)

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside. 

Commercials on Parade                                                                                       

Feels like I haven’t gone all fan boy on TV commercials for a while.  And at the moment there are several out there that I really like.  In case you haven’t grasped it yet, I like well made commercials.  

There are a couple of alcoholic beverage commercials that recently caught my eye.  Alcohol is a product that can’t actually advertise on it’s primary benefit.  They can not even wander into the neighborhood of “use our product and we will make you feel goooooooooood”.  So it inevitably becomes about other things.  For example, and this is not an ad campaign that I much like it just strikes me as odd, the folks at Coors are currently running a campaign that centers on the fact that their beer is really cold.  That’s it, just that it’s cold.  OK.  Meanwhile Budweiser is spending lots of time putting a human face on their corporate beer empire by introducing us to the regional brew masters.

Neither of these are the ads that caught my eye.  There are two tequila companies that have chosen almost the exact same approach.  To the point that I didn’t realize they were for two different products.  1800 brand has been going with a single spokesman for a while but they were going for a snarky, pseudo cool thing.  Now they’ve flipped that and gone with Ray Liotta who basically just challenges the manhood of anyone not drinking tequila.  Matching that are the folks at Jose Cuervo with Keifer Sutherland challenging the world to “Have A Story”.  Suddenly tequila is a sophisticated yet macho part of life.  With, of course, no hint of what else may come with a sample or three.

The other ad that has really jumped out at me is the T-Mobile “Jeremy” campaign.  Seems that Jeremy is an young adult son travelling in Europe.  Problem is that Jeremy insists on using data as if he were in the United States and the bill on his parent’s plan is getting enormous.  We learn all this through videos from Jeremy’s parents as they try to get their sons attention.  What really grabs me is that the spots take a fairly nerdy concept (overseas data use) and turn it into something that we can all understand and a situation that makes perfect sense.   That’s really advertising writing at it’s best.

Like a good TV series I can hardly wait to find out what’s next.

Media Boycotts                                                                                                    

I’ve maintained from the beginning with this commentary that I wasn’t going to get into movie reviews and the like.  Too many other people out there doing it.  I’d rather try and offer a starting point for the discussion about the media and its impact on our lives.

Having said that I will begin by saying this commentary begins with me going to see a movie.  I saw “Ender’s Game” based on the book of the same name by Orson Scott Card.  I thought it did an OK job of translating the book, which is a favorite, to the screen.  That’s the end of the movie review.

There’s a lot of noise about boycotting the movie because of some really outrageous comments starting with a threat to overthrow the Federal government if Marriage Equality becomes the law of the land to claiming that President Obama is creating a private army to insure that Michelle Obama is the next President of the United States.  There are plenty of people that come down on both sides of those issues.  Personally I think he’s nuts on these subjects.

But here’s the problem.  I also think Orson Scott Card is one of the best science fiction writers of the last 30 years.  “Ender’s Game” and its sequel “Speaker for the Dead” are in the top one percent for me.  

The question becomes are we really ready to start making media decisions based on the personal lives and opinions of the creators?  Are we ready to go all the way with that?

What would that mean?  Well, Ernest Hemingway was a drunk and pretty clearly a sexist.  Shall we stop reading the works of T.S. Eliot and Roald Dahl for the anti-semitism?  And of course that means we stop listening to the operas of Richard Wagner.  I’m not much of an opera fan but I’m told his stuff really rocks.  And along the way we should probably stop buying Ford vehicles because Henry Ford was an anti-semite too.

Is the dividing line that all those other people are dead?  I have many friends in the LGBT community and their supporters.  I would never argue with their right NOT to support an author like Orson Scott Card.  I’m just wondering where the line actually gets drawn.  And why.

Day of the Doctor                                                                                                                   

So I have to ask.  What’s with all the zombies right now?  I know it’s not really a new thing any more but it seems like every time I turn around there’s another zombie TV series, movie or book out there.  Sundance Channel just debuted the American version of the French hit “The Returned” which offers a different view of the undead than the hugely successful “The Walking Dead” on AMC.  It’s clear that zombies have turned the corner on popular culture warm fuzzies.  Like vampires before them we’re seeing more zombies that just want to live their lives.  Add in fun books like local author Lia Habel’s “Dearly, Departed” and zombies are a whole new thing.

Zombies aren’t new and it’s not their first change in PR image either.  Go back before the ‘60s and zombies are almost always shown with some connection with Voodoo.  These re-animated corpses got all the creepiness they needed out of being, well, re-animated dead people.  They were the slaves of the person who performed the rituals to bring them back.  Prior to the late ‘60s and that’s the kind of zombie you’ll see.  Check out the undead working for Bela Lugosi in 1932’s “White Zombie”.

All that changes, of course, in 1968.  You’ve been waiting for me to get here, right?  George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” brings us the zombies we know today.  Shuffling, decaying monsters who want braaaaaaaaaaainnss!  Since then we’ve pretty much dropped the old school zombie.  That is until this new batch of warm, cuddly undead.

So what’s with all the zombies?  The learned folk out there who study this kind of thing seem to have come up with a logical sounding explanation.  in the 1950s when the world was a scary and unpredictable place the movies were suddenly filled with aliens from outer space.  Technology was beginning to suddenly take over more and more of our lives.  People found that scary and the movies reflected those feelings.  Today we live in an age when it seems like there are a lot of people out there who don’t like us, where there are a lot of “things” being done by science that might be doing strange things to our bodies that we don’t understand.  In a time like that what better manifestation of our inner fears than an enemy that can not be reasoned with, who desires nothing more than our grim and frightening death?

So maybe this whole thing of making zombies a little more living friendly is a sign that we’re moving out of that phase of our culture again.  Why not?  Klaatu and Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” morphed into “My Favorite Martian” in only a decade.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

View From the Phlipside Radio - Sofia Vergara

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

I’ve always been amused by the disinclination of many top American actors to do commercials in the United States market.  The idea has always been that you don’t want to get “over-exposed” because then the audience might get tired of you.  As a general rule many of these same stars have absolutely no problem what so ever about doing commercials overseas.  The money is generally great, advertising shoots are short and then you’re back home.  I’ve never really bought that argument.  It seems more likely that in the quick turn around world of advertising the stars don’t to play star the way some of them would like.

There used to be an argument against doing commercials that involved the dread concept of “selling out”.  Now this is more of a ‘60’s generation thing because stars prior to that did advertising all the time.  Even as a child of the ‘60’s myself (meaning that I was in fact a CHILD in the ‘60’s) I’ve found this one to be pretentious nonsense as well.  Selling out is advertising a product or service you actively don’t believe in just for the money.  For most actors it’s mostly advertising products they don’t care one way or the other about.  It’s a job, and I have no problem with that.

But I have to admit I really respect what actress Sofia Vergara is doing.  Vergara is the drop dead gorgeous Columbian actress who currently stars in ABC’s “Modern Family”.  She’s moved her career from hosting shows on Univision to multiple Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Emmy nominations.  She’s reached the point where she probably doesn’t NEED to be doing commercials any more.

And she’s doing a new Pepsi ad anyway.  In fact flying in the face of the old school thinking she’s doing the Pepsi ad in part as recognition of the place Pepsi has had in her career.  Early in her career she did a spot for Pepsi that Vergara gives a great deal of credit for launching her.  So she’s remembering who helped get her here and is staying loyal to them.

That’s selling out in the best possible way, selling out to loyalty.  I don’t think we should ever get tired of seeing that.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

View From the Phlipside - Advertising Tones

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

OK this may be the coolest new advertising idea I’ve heard in a while.  As you can tell from last week’s comment about a recent AT&T ad I’m fairly jaded about commercials.  Too many are boring, badly thought out, poorly executed or simply have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing.  Which is what makes this idea so great.  Plus it’s a completely new approach for a tried and true medium.

A hotel with a restaurant in Amsterdam wanted to do two things - they wanted to raise their visibility and increase the number of reservations at the restaurant.  So they turned to radio and used the particular strengths of the medium to make it work.  The concept is simple.  They take the work out of making a reservation at the restaurant for you - this is the part I love - by dialing the phone for you with the radio ad!  Oh yes they do!  All you have to do is hold your landline phone up to the speaker of the radio while the ad plays and they will make your phone dial the reservation number of the Hotel Arena in Amsterdam.  No tricks, it really works and it’s incredibly simple.  They include the DTMF (that’s dual tone multi frequency) tones right in that ad.  Those are the beeps you hear from any modern phone.  Way back in the day (we’re talking 30 or 40 years ago)this was cutting edge hacker technology.  People could make pay phones dial calls for free using the same basic technique.  It was called phone phreaking.

What I love about this ad is, well, pretty much everything.  It’s something you’ve never heard before.  It’s guaranteed to generate talk about the spot and the advertiser.  It’s interactive, you don’t just sit and listen to the advertisement you need to get up and get your phone to play along.  And it’s inevitable that plenty of folks will do just that, JUST TO SEE IF IT REALLY WORKS!  When it does that generates even more talk and early response seems to indicate that it did generate some more dinner reservations.  So call it a success.

The only down side on this is that the tones won’t work with a cell phone.  But you know what?  When was the last time that the two old timers of electronic media managed to corner the cool factor all to themselves?  The buzz created by the spot would be enough to overcome that small problem at least in the short run.  It would be great if more advertising efforts showed this kind of out of the box thinking while still keeping focus on the primary goals.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010

View From the Phlipside - Pure Imagination

 My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

I always think of it as the “car commercial syndrome” because it seems like the automobile market makes a habit out of it.  It’s those commercials that cruise along, usually with beautiful video and impressive music, without ever mentioning what exactly it is that is being advertised.  At the very end you’ll get a quick look at a logo or a few choice words telling you what wonderful product you should have fallen in love with this time.  The problem is that I usually remember the beautiful visuals and or the stunning audio and completely forget who the spot is for.

Most recently I have been grooving to a TV ad that uses music from a favorite movie.  You’ve probably seen it.  It features what look like children’s drawings of monsters and aliens peeking around buildings at this young guy who looks rather depressed.  The soundtrack comes from the original Willy Wonka movie.  It’s Gene Wilder, who played Willy, singing the song “Pure Imagination”.  I realized recently that I had been watching that ad for weeks now, singing along with the song (which is a favorite from that movie) with a smile on my face.  The spot made me feel good, it made me happy.  The downside was that I had absolutely no clue who or what the spot was actually  advertising.  Turns out it’s for AT&T.  I went back and watched the spot on YouTube just to see if I had just missed something.  Nope.

Having looked at it I’m not sure now what the connection is between imagination and creativity and my fifth birthday (that’s from the commercial) and my cell phone company.   I know AT&T is more than just my provider but that’s how I think of them.  And this ad doesn’t change that.  Except by adding some confusion along the way.  

My bet on these spots is that some clever Melvin at the ad agency really wanted to do something “creative” and then did a very good job selling the benefits of being “creative” to the client.  Plus by the time you finish playing the song they’re probably smiling just the way I did.  And the deal is closed.

Somewhere along the line everyone forgets that the purpose of advertising is simple.  It’s to make the client buy, not smile.  If you don’t know what you’re supposed to be buying then the commercial, no matter how clever or creative, is a waste of time and money.  Commercials that don’t make clear the message and how it relates to the advertiser and the consumer are a dead loss.  Believing anything else is pure imagination.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010