Bay Area Women

Transit is a state of limbo; everyone's preparing for the next act. There's a lot you can learn about a person in transit based on books read in idle time, clothes, expression and features.

Here are a few photos of women from a late afternoon on BART. I was traveling from Oakland to Walnut Creek, on the Pittsburg/Baypoint line from San Francisco.

We're Consumers Before Marketers; We're Self-Seekers Before Sympathizers

From Adrants:

After attending the Ypulse conference in San Francisco earlier this week, I've come to realize a few things about teens, tweens and the marketers who want them in their back pocket.

It seems like today's marketers are falling into the same potholes our predecessors did: trying to deconstruct cool, relying too heavily on surveys, and forgetting that before we're marketers, we're consumers.

We've been consumers all our lives. That experience is our biggest trump card.

Another thing we don't realize is that generations of kids, teens and adults also fall for the same potholes their predecessors did. What we need to remember is, no matter what age we are, we all suffer from a bit of age elitism.

Generally speaking, today:

• Tweens, that precious window between 9 and 12, are probably the only individuals that will ever fully buy into our manufactured teen shit. And that's because they're young and want to be teens so badly, they'll swallow anything that looks remotely teen-like.

The problem is, this age window is small. And with the internet changing the way people consume knowledge, it's only going to get smaller as new generations of tweens get savvier.

• Teens have always tried to skew slightly older than their actual age. Fifteen-year-old girls don't read Teen; they read Seventeen, Cosmo and even Maxim - mags that skew more closely to college-level demographic, or so they think.The good thing about teens is, generally speaking, they still follow mainstream music and trends.

Just don't overthink your pitch!

• In a quest to solidify their identities once and for all, college co-eds shed their mainstream media love affairs and start dipping into indie films and music.

But mere love of foreign fare does not a worldly student make. College kids also love - love - their parents' and grandparents' pop music hits. I don't know if this is just an Echo Boomer thing or if it has always been the case.

I think if we can bear in mind that we all share a similar superiority complex (and perhaps that's too strong of a term), maybe it'll help us better address one another. This is something that transcends technology and trends.

Cryptic Marketing Advice

Emotions are only one part of the equation. If you really want to stick, compel your audience to do research, turn over stones, unearth myths. Make them think about you at night.

Anecdotal Effects of MySpace, or Web 2.0 in General

(...it's not just for your kids anymore!)

An older female colleague pulled me aside to divulge some personal problems that have been taking a toll. She explained that she thinks her 50-year-old boyfriend is cheating on her with a woman around my age.

Well, that's an old, familiar story. "How do you know?" I asked.

She leaned over conspiratorially, even as she dabbed at her eyes. "I checked her MySpace," she replied. "She wrote about it there. And he denied it, but he saves all his IMs and I found those too."

Yeesh; that's never easy. I said hang in there. She blames the internet for her troubles; I admitted I'd sooner blame the man.

"The internet makes it more possible to meet somebody and fall astray," she moaned.

I thought about how hard my parents fought to keep me in the house in the angsty teen years when I had crappy boyfriends. No restriction of media could save me or the chastity they imagined I still had.

"No," I answered. "If a person wants to cheat, he'll cheat." I didn't know what else to say.

I think it was silly of me to imagine, however subconsciously, that the social effects of Web 2.0 belong to only a small generation - my generation mostly, and a handful of the early adopters in Gen X and the Baby Boomer stratosphere.

I'd include the kids born in the '90's, but a disparity even there can be felt - they'll grow up thinking this is simply another way to relate to people. It'll never occur to them what kind of impact this Web 2.0 stuff had just a few years prior. When my 8-year-old sister registered for a MySpace, for example, I had no idea what to do and no yardstick for gauging its appropriateness. It's not like I can look back and go, "Well, when I was a kid I had (or didn't have) one..."

The internet continues to break new ground in our personal relationships. And clearly not just for those of us who feel as if we've been personal, active witnesses in the transition from the "a/s/l?" days to the broad universe of MySpace, Flickr, Youtube and Xanga. It's fundamentally shaken the norms of an older generation, like those of the nice older woman who among other things must now redefine old-school definitions of cheating (cybering: faux-pas or innocent pastime on a par with passive porn-watching?). And it's altered what a younger generation will learn to call normal.

But I'm preaching to the choir, aren't I?

Here's some eye candy that I think decently demonstrates the evolution:




In other news, I just saw Pan's Labyrinth with said 8-year-old sister. (Probably not the best film to see with an 8-year-old.) She didn't like it, but she ripped off the storyline to create one of those creepy MySpace bulletins that conclude with, "If you don't send this to 10 people in 10 minutes, you'll end up like this kid."

I felt disappointed. I don't know if she's old enough to play on MySpace, but she clearly hasn't yet learned the etiquette of an older generation: you don't put spoilers in a bulletin, and you don't perpetuate chain letters.

The point this entry is approaching, I think, is the effects of our new webiverse are eyebrow-raising (regardless of how profound people think they are or aren't), and while I won't say they've made human relations any better or worse, I'll say they've certainly added a layer of complexity. And maybe that's not really saying anything. It's possible that this isn't news, it's just the natural evolution of man and technology.

What was that thing Marshall Mcluhan said? The medium is the what?

What's our medium of choice got to say to us lately? *checks MySpace bulletin* Oh awesome. Another one of those survey things.

Is There a Reason to Surrender the Foosball Table?

Hot off the heels of Time naming YOU its Man of the Year, Advertising Age crowns The Consumer Agency of the Year. Looks like we've got a new rock star.

You're hot. You're blowing up. Bask in those rays, then record your acceptance speech on YouTube. We won't just listen in total adoration; we'll even take notes.

It's really great that the mistakenly-named Little Guy is finally getting kudos for being an assertive customer who wants to one-up Ad Man and Big Business, but now that consumers are doing all the work, what are advertisers doing?

Handing over their jobs, that's what.

Everybody from the NFL to Dove is conducting send-us-anything consumer ad contests, presenting their "win a :30 spot!" pitches in a way that's stripped itself of any professional or creative guise in order to pander. It's safe to say marketers are responding to the consumer-is-king backlash by fanning the flames, happily handing over the rights to their mini b-ball courts, paycheques and ... jobs.

You've heard me mention before that you can really only be a great marketer if you know (or for those most lofty, remember) what it's like to be a consumer. I stand by that. I also maintain it's not news that the consumer has power - the consumer has always had power. From the beginning of the value dialogue, when mercantilism created scalable variety in the marketplace, people had the power to choose where to spend their money, and to relate feedback about the quality of our products and services to their friends.

Web 2.0 merely enables today's consumer to wield these same powers in a way that finally shakes businesses so significantly they have to listen. And that's good, because these days some businesses can get so big they forget that they have customers to answer to, with specific needs and opinions of their own.

Today a customer doesn't merely vote with financial capital; they can vote in critique, parody and even their own brand of investigative journalism, then reach an audience of thousands of sympathizers. That's incredible.

And now they want to talk to marketers about marketing. In fact, some marketers appear to think they want to take marketing on completely. That's a dangerous line of thought, and it doesn't necessarily yield the best results. Even the NFL's sad plea for consumer-generated ads ultimately ended with an ad guy winning the pie.

Big shocker? No, not really. The best marketers, like the best anything, have fallen in love with their profession. They can listen to the word on the street and engage it proactively without losing their own identities - and the identities of their brands - in the process. That's what makes them the best.

We're creative professionals. We spent years studying demographic trends and trying to wield emotions with one line, one graphic, one life-changing product. It's our job to generate great ideas of our own that engenders feedback and incorporates it in some way. We're trying to have a conversation with a society, not a master/slave dynamic. That turns our brands into faceless entities with OBO written across their logos.

Our customers, the people with whom we should have the most intimate relationship, are finally able to engage us in a two-way dialogue on a more even playing field - that's cause for celebration. But we've still got our own contributions to make to the big picture. We must still create work and generate interactivity in a way that's provocative and well-executed, because that is our job.

Our customers aren't trying to replace us - they've got their own dreams to follow. They're asking us to tell a story we might be missing, one that might add value to the images of the products and services we represent. Marketing needs collaboration between creative professionals and the people they're trying to talk to. Because marketing is, at its lowest common denominator, a conversation about the customer and about the immediate world. It's a running dialogue about us.

Don't trash your responsibility to your brands and society at large, letting whosoever wishes run the circus. We're trying to establish relationships here, not hand over the keys and the pink slip to the livelihoods we love. There's nothing lamer than trying to hold up a one-way conversation.