Target Invades the New Yorker
Maybe the red and white beach ball on the cover of my August 22nd New Yorker should have been a clue. Since I missed that clue….flipping to the content page left no doubt as the familiar red target played ring toss on the Empire State Building. Further flipping revealed the truth: Target was the only advertiser in my
New Yorker. I quickly turned to Google for further investigation.
I must have missed the news! Slate has the James Michener version for any of you Targetophiles out there but the announcement was available from Stuart Elliot and the New York Times, Media Week, Yahoo News, and other usual media suspects. And of course people blogged about it here and there.Even Target Employees were up on it.
OK..now let me just say that I AM a Target shopper…no Seinfeld Tar-zhay pronunciation necessary. Target is fun. Wal-Mart is not. Enough said. And I know that Target now has NYC locations. When I lived in NYC pre-Target I missed Target. I am sure many New Yorkers are happily pushing their carts up and down the aisles at Target at this very moment. No doubt, Target should advertise to New Yorkers and New Yorker Magazine readers. No pun, Target should target.
But, I love reading the New Yorker. I look forward to it. I was just thinking the other day when a renewal notice came for Newsweek that I really didn’t read it any more….that the New Yorker was the only print publication that I still did read. So….all that said, I really found the Target advertising in the New Yorker intrusive. Intrusive. Not artistic, not compelling or interesting. Intrusive.
Back in my early days in brand marketing, someone at Ralston Purina said, if I may paraphrase by memory, that if you wanted a high recall score you could just put a cat through a meat grinder. This came to mind as I was deciding what to read first and kept getting intruded upon by red circles. Or, am I just being a grumpy aging Baby Boomer, again?
And What IS the Everyday Woman?
The New York Times reports the following today: "Madison Avenue is increasingly interested in using everyday women in advertising instead of just waifish supermodels." This new "insight" is attributed to Unilever’s Dove Brand which is of course reassuring since these are the folks that bring us Axe advertising, a topic I have posted about several times. It seems that everyone from Nike to Chicken of the Sea has adopted the everyday woman who is apparently older, wrinkled and has a big butt. Chicken of the Sea was last seen with Jessica Simpson so I am not sure if their new advertising is good news or bad news.
So….why this change you ask? Well, some say because women are the majority buyers of "these" products. Others say "aging baby boomers." Still another opinion was "reality television".
And I say? Puh-leeze! Am I lost in a recurring nightmare of "insights" from ad people? It is comforting to know that it has been a long time since I took home a paycheck from an ad agency. Its hard to decide what is sillier….the campaigns or our worst nightmare, advertisers with insights! As Ageless Marketing’s David Wolfe wrote, "Nike’s Just Do it Just Blew It." Indeed, Nike has "come a long way, baby" from "Just Do It" to "Big Butts"…just in the wrong direction, baby boomer.
Wonder Marketing asks the best question of Weiden & Kennedy in a conference room role play: "Who are you trying to reach with this ad?" I think the answer is obvious: Ourselves of course! We developed this campaign for ourselves because that is the only reality we get.
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