Badvertising Bill

Back in 1993 the American public still hadn't heard the name Monica Lewinsky. But Toronto's Mayor Mel had already pegged Bill Clinton as a Bad Boy. Mel Lastman was the first mayor of the amalgamated Toronto, and the owner of a chain of furniture stores called Lastman's Bad Boy, known for its gimmicky ads on local television. 

The best of these is an ad staring a Bill Clinton impersonator named Tim Waters. In the ad, posted above, Bad Boy's Hillary even foreshadows the current health care debate--"Free? They even have free health care! Don't you think that's a good idea??" Hillary exclaims. 

As it turns out, America's not crazy about  health care--or Hillary--and after a blow-job blown out of proportion in 1998, the Bill Clinton brand couldn't even help Lewinsky  sell handbags. It's been a decade since this ad ran and Bad Boy is now in the hands of Lastman's son, Blayne, who recently hired a new ad agency to upscale the brand's image--which means, sadly, no more mock-endorsements. 

Cherish low-budget local ads while they last: with the economy returning to track the budgets for the big name brands will return, and with them national advertiser's monopoly, pushing the little guy's media buy right off the air. That means fewer informercials, less retail-tertainment, and a dwindling number of shots of your local used car hyperventilating in front of the camera. So it goes.

I'll miss the flashy, trashy, over-the-top local ads that characterized the last year of low-brow communication. 

2009, you really were the  Best Recession Ever.

Yours truly,

Russ Martin

*My article on the latest Bad Boy advertising campaign and the brand's new ad agency can be read  here

Revolutionary television from before, well, the revolution

Mad Men mania has taken over the media. Here in Toronto the face of Mr. Don Draper is plastered on the cover of the alt-weekly rag     EYE. Vanity Fair also has an essay on the show and a photo spread of the set. The Toronto Star, the L.A. Times, the Huffington Post, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Globe & Mail all have respective news stories, episode reviews, blog posts, columns, and feature length articles.

The ink spilling out of everyone’s pens seems to sound the same. As the show burst onto the screens of middle-America Sunday night with record ratings, everyone wanted to see, obviously, what would come next. The writers of the AMC blockbuster have long had a challenge looming in the distance: the second half of the sixties.

As Joshua Ostroff writes in EYE about the set of Mad Men, “What it doesn’t feel like is the 1960s…in 1963 America was still stuck in the 1950s.” And though the show’s popularity rests squarely on its decidedly 1950s un-politically correct, pre-feminism, pro-capitalist outlook on a world that still allows smoking indoors; in the years the show is approaching, the times are a’ changing.

All the talk about the small screen’s cinematic end to this golden age of 1950s-style advertising reminded me the of a retrospective on 1960s advertising I wrote last summer, titled, “The Revolution Will Not Be Advertised.”

What I had learned from 1960s issues of     Marketing was consistent with what turned up on the editorial pages over the weekend as culture reporters prepared for the first of this TV season’s major debuts. “In the 1960s, advertisers remained blissfully ignorant of the societal upheaval around them,” the tagline read.

“The 1960s were all about revolution. Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones spread counterculture throughout a new, unconventional generation: the baby boomers. The anti-establishment movement, however, meant trouble for marketers. They had to reach young freethinkers without alienating older, more conservative consumers.”

The imagery in advertising still carried the utopian postwar imagery of the 1950s, I wrote. And thus, the writers, art directors, set designers and, of course, stylists of Mad Men have the same challenge the marketers of the ‘60s had. They have to move past everything they know, and everything that has made them a success.

The charm of Mad Men undoubtedly lies in nostalgia, and any changes the show makes are going to receive outcry from viewers longing for the simpler times of earlier seasons. But change is coming, and they can either worry or prepare. And if the producers have reason to worry, Mr. Draper should be even more concerned.

As my former editor Rob Gerlsbeck wrote in Marketing two issues later, “In the 1970s, advertising was under the microscope, and legislation threatened to kill it outright.”

Things aren’t looking so swell for Draper, but he’ll no doubt deal just fine—he always does. Still, stay tuned. This could get ugly.

Ugly, and entertaining.

Six inches from perfection

I'll admit it, I'm a Subway guy. The resident sandwich-artist at the Subway across the street from my office knows my sandwhich and my schedule (if I come in on a Saturday, he'll comment). But this morning I came across a steamy foot-long short from Quizno's, and I couldn't help but re-post.

The first nine seconds of this video are a marketer's dream. The video is branded content, likely created by an in-house Playboy team to advertise Quizno's. There are tits, ass, and solid-coloured bikini's; all the Playboy staples. Then comes the product placement: girl number two enters with a matching bathing-suit-and-take-out Quizno's red combo.

Next, is the text. Finally, you get it. It's a pop-culture reference to that video everyone thought was gross, but watched twice, and then forwarded to all of their friends. It's a clever invasion of the social media space, and it's sure to spread across the blogosphere (a quick Google reveals it is already getting web-ink), but will it entice sub-eaters?

The video is funny, but the implications are less than appetizing. Associating a food brand with a poop-tease, and what we collectively agree was the grossest internet video of 2007? Yuck.

I'll take my toasted double d's at Subway, please. More cheese, less poop culture.

Update: According to AdAge (and a tip-off from Corey Allen) Quizno's had nothing to do with the production of this video, nor did it pay for it. Guess Playboy is shitting on Quizno's marketing plans on its own accord. Solid criticism by Allen, in the comments.