On Advertising and Aspiration

It's Super Bowl week, which means it's ad season.

For my first eight years out of college, I worked in advertising. To agency people, the Super Bowl is Christmas. The people creating the ads you see during the game are industry rock stars and it's always entertaining to see what clients are dropping gazillions of dollars on.

It's been twelve years since I was an agency employee, but having worked in the industry still colors my worldview. When I look at ads, I automatically try to figure out the strategy behind it.

Kenny MF'ing Powers: Shiller of Shots

That's why I found this short blog post so intriguing. It's a quick comparison between two current liquor promotional campaigns: one for Jack Daniels' limited edition Sinatra Century whiskey, which draws on Frank Sinatra's affinity for the brand, and one for Southern Comfort, which stars comedian Danny McBride.

As a general rule, liquor advertising is an exercise in aspiration. When you're trying to convince someone to buy your booze, you appeal to who they want to be. During my advertising heyday, the power of aspirational cocktails was obvious every time I walked into a bar filled with wannabe Carrie Bradshaws spilling their cosmos on their Forever 21 going out tops.

But back to the present. That post about the Danny McBride Southern Comfort campaign mentions that the brand's sales are on a downward slide - in fact, net sales dropped by 7% in the first 6 months of 2015 and the brand is currently being sold off by owners Brown-Foreman. On one hand, I'm sorry for SoCo's soon-to-be-former owners - and for Wieden + Kennedy, the very smart agency behind the campaign. I'm sure they're disappointed. But should they be surprised?

While I think that Danny McBride is super funny, I certainly don't aspire to be him. Yes, I realize I'm not the target market. I also realize the  campaign does its best to gussy up McBride as SimCity James Bond and spin him as an off-kilter Most Interesting Man in the World. But underneath it all, he's still Kenny Powers. And does anyone aspire to be Kenny Powers, even if he's wearing a tux or hanging out with a flamingo?

My guess is that while SoCo's target demographic - likely 18-34 year old guys - think he's funny and would like to hang out with somebody like Danny McBride, they don't want to personally be him, the same way they'd aspire to be Frank Sinatra. Again, even if he's in a tux, with or without a pink bird.

Southern Comfort's advertising didn't always miss its mark. As soon as I read that post, my mind wandered back to the mid-90s, when the brand ran a campaign I absolutely loved, including one of my favorite ads of all time:

The original ad. Source.

I connected with this campaign, built around the tag line "Take It Easy," so completely - and at the time, I was the right age for the brand. 

Even then, I laughed a little at the notion that anybody would order Southern Comfort on the rocks at a bar. I have done too many SoCo and lime shots to think that's a reasonable drink order. But what I think is so smart about this ad is that it manages to be aspirational without overpromising. It doesn't suggest that SoCo drinkers will become Sinatra - but it does communicate that they'll live lives that are both fulfilling and laid back. 

For shots-doing kids in their 20s, trying to figure out their lives, that's some pretty powerful stuff. The McBride campaign delivers on laid back, but it misses in terms of fulfillment.

Now, I don't know the metrics. Maybe the "Take It Easy" campaign didn't do well - I can't find any sales data old enough to find out - and even if SoCo was selling like hotcakes back then, liquor sales are of course driven by more than advertising. 

But ads do matter. And ads that make us want something more...I think they matter most.

Trend Mapping

On Facebook this morning, I discovered an infographic - courtesy of Kathy - that was absolutely calling my name. Put together by a British company called thefoodpeople, it's a graphic representation of 2015 food trends, including several fairly specific food trends (things like the rise of fermentation and multiple condiments on the table), how broad food trends fit with larger consumer trends, flavor markers (smoke, hay, spice, etc) and how national cuisines fit as overall influencers. Needless to say, I am all about it.

Trends have been on my mind lately, as they often are at the end of one year and the beginning of the next. In past years, I've made my own predictions and written summaries of others' predictions. I didn't get to that this year...but I did just write an article about McCormick's flavor forecasting efforts. (It appears in the Sun today.)

I found one piece of thefoodpeople's infographic, the cuisine influence map, especially interesting. The map charts different cuisines in terms of trend influence and market appeal - it seems very useful for people thinking about food marketing and product development:

It caught my eye, in part, because I'd just spotted this map, also someplace on Facebook:

Many of the above findings are no-brainers. Steak in Wyoming? Yes. Southern food in the South? Tex-Mex in Texas? Who could've guessed? But Maryland and Virginia are more into Peruvian cuisine than the rest of the country. That was a bit of a surprise. I'd noticed an uptick in Peruvian joints around Baltimore...but I didn't realize it was a regional phenomenon.

So it's interesting to me, then, to see that on the cuisine map above, Peruvian cuisine is about average in terms of trend-setting but it's fairly low on the market appeal scale. The cuisine map is not about the US - or at least not all about the US - and doesn't deal in any regional cuisines, so the two maps don't sync perfectly. But still, the overlap is interesting.

Food for thought, as they say.

Everything Old Is New Again

On Monday night's No Reservations, Tony and company visited Prague, a city I've wanted to see for a while (because of the architecture, not the food). In between helpings of goulash and streetside sausages, Tony dined at a restaurant called La Degustation Boheme Bourgeoise, which updates Czech classics for the modern palate.

The restaurant clearly aspires to be modern in the most global definition of the word. They're the first restaurant in Prague to serve a tasting menu and the food is prepared and presented with all the care of a strong Top Chef contender (like a Voltaggio brother). And what they're doing is thoroughly modern...in that it's steeped in history.

The dish that really caught my eye was Prague ham aspic with chopped egg. Even Tony admitted that it sounds kind of gross, but he insisted it was good. I'll take his word for it (but seriously - it sounds gross to me). Taste wasn't what struck me about the dish, though. What I found most interesting was the word "aspic."

When I think aspic, I think Julia Child. I think the old restaurant that used to be part of the Woman's Industrial Exchange on Charles Street in downtown Baltimore. I think grandmothers and doilies and out-of-date preparations, not fine modern dining.

That's silly, though. After all, what's the difference between a gelee and an aspic, except for fancy French pronunciation? Nothing, as far as I can tell. And gelees are modern enough, if a little overdone.

Right now, I'm reading Mike Steinberger's excellent book about the decline of the French gastronomic scene, Au Revoir to All That. At the start of the book, Steinberger walks through the evolution of French cuisine, from Careme to Bocuse. Reading this, I found myself wondering what really could be next, and assuming that somebody smarter or more creative than I am had some ideas.

But now I'm thinking, maybe there are no new ideas. It's all about reinvention, right? Reinvention and repositioning (aspic becomes gelee).

Does everything, then, boil down to marketing?

[Photo credit. Travel Channel.]

Mmm...Ketchup (and other stuff)

From Lileks.

For some reason, I always thought that the Heinz "57" referred to herbs and spices or the number of ingredients in the ketchup. I can't find a current list of products because they vary so much from region to region, but I bet there are more than 57 these days. Just not in every state.

Which, I think, suggests something good about the state of the food industry - that they customize and regionalize so local flavors and preferences are preserved. Then again, the differences might mostly be in marketing and they might be economically-driven, not forced by taste preferences. But who knows, besides the Heinz marketing team?

The Role of Marketing

Interesting comment from Toby Young's Top Chef blog on Bravotv.com:

But in the real world, a food critic will never base a review on food and service alone. They’re worth, at most, 50 percent of the final rating. And even that overestates their significance when it comes to assessing the overall experience. Whether you have a good time at a restaurant is dependent on many other factors, some of which are difficult to quantify. What’s the ambience like? What stage is the restaurant at in its life cycle? Has it captured the Zeitgeist? How many celebrities hang out there? These considerations may sound superficial, but make no mistake, they’ll dictate whether the restaurant succeeds, not the food or the service. To a large extent, launching a new restaurant is all about marketing (and there may be a case for having marketing experts write the reviews rather than food critics).

It's that last little bit that really gets me. So...you're saying that MBA I got is worth something, huh Toby?

Yellowtail, Maipe and the Evolution of a Region

Last week, I had a conversation with my mom about how delicious and cheap Maipe malbec is, and how funny it is that it, and other Argentinian wines, are suddenly everywhere. She mentioned that she'd read something about Argentinian wine makers turning to the US market because domestic wine drinkers got bored with the very common, very cheap grape. Sales in Argentina started falling flat, so the industry looked a little to the north and next thing you know, every wine store around is sporting endcaps full of malbec.

When I hung up the phone, I started to worry, just a little, that Maipe has the potential to be Argentina's Yellowtail (minus the critter label). Just like the Australian wine, Maipe burst onto the scene and all of a sudden, all my wine-drinking friends are all over it. It's like 2001 all over again. (My first sip of Yellowtail was, BTW, at work. Our kickass PR guy, Tom, brought a bottle to the office one day and my department, good trendspotters that we were, shared it.)

I'm not feeling much better about Maipe's situation after reading this really good Mike Steinberger article on Yellowtail's role in the decline of the Australian wine market. The argument is, in a nutshell, that thanks to Yellowtail, Australia's brand as a wine-producing country is stuck firmly in the "cheap and fruity" space, so wine drinkers looking for more sophisticated products (either because they really like them better, or because they want to seem like they know what they're talking about) avoid Australia. The key sentence:

As a result, consumers came to equate Australia with wines that were flavorful but also cheap and frivolous, a perception that became a major liability when those same consumers got interested in more serious stuff; rather than looking to Oz, they turned to Spain, Italy, and France.

I am one of those consumers - somebody who, in 2001, was just starting to get into wine. And I drank a lot of Yellowtail. So much that at some point, I just couldn't take it anymore (Steinberger refers to this phenomenon, aptly, as "fruit-bomb fatigue"). When Cooper and I started getting serious about wine, we looked mainly to France, Spain, and Italy, with a touch of California thrown in. And recently, to Argentina.

What I wonder now is whether knowing why we've been avoiding Australia will make me give the country another chance? I'm not sure. And will I slow down on the Maipe, so I don't ruin it for myself. Unlikely, honestly.

But it doesn't seem fair, somehow, that wine makers should be subject to marketing-driven trends.

Then again, life's not fair. So I'm not sure why wine-making should be any different.

Trendy Monday: Baltimore, Again

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a couple of major national press mentions of the Baltimore food scene, speculating that we might actually be getting some of the recognition the city deserves for its interesting and diverse food community.

Last night, I came across a couple of things that may explain some of the newfound (and very warranted) attention. Sometimes it takes me a long time to finish a magazine, as is the case with this month's Baltimore Magazine. It's the Best of Baltimore issue (look for my name in the contributors list!) and in addition to the usual BoB stuff, includes an article on the tourism and marketing efforts of BACVA Pres and CEO Tom Noonan.

By all accounts, Noonan is a creative and capable tourism professional, and it sounds like Baltimore's lucky to have him. What caught my eye in the article were the several mentions of "the city's thriving restaurant scene". In fact, the Baltimore Mag article opens with a discussion of a recent event hosted by Noonan. He traveled to NYC, taking with him some of the stars of the local restaurant scene (Spike Gjerde and Timothy Dean) and cooked a meal for a bunch of food and travel writers. The event resulted in at least one article that's already in print: a Michael Schulman Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker. Not exactly shabby placement.

Based on the New Yorker article, I'd say that Noonan and crew did a good job conveying Baltimore's quirky and fun personality. We're lucky to have John Waters, of course - invoking his name paints such a crystal clear picture of what this city's about. I'm glad, though, that the people in charge of marketing the city aren't stopping and starting with the Waters iconography...and that they're tapping into the food world to flesh out Baltimore's story.

As I've said before, it's about time that we get this sort of credit.

That Whole Rachael Ray Scarf Thing

After several days of trying to avoid it, I've started to feel compelled to comment on this Rachael Ray scarf drama (if you don't know what I'm talking about, read this). I can sum up my comments in one word: DUMB.

I've made no secret of my dislike for Rachael, but come on. She's not a terrorist. She's not even pretending to be a terrorist, unless you define terrorist as "really lucky and annoying faux-chef." I gather that the issue with the ad is less that RR is a proponent of jihad and more that a symbol of holy war has subtly creeped into fashion...but I still think that's silly. Don't get me wrong, I take cultural creep very seriously. I do. But I just don't think this particular situation represents an actual problem.

So that's one side of my complaint: everything's been blown out of proportion.

But the other side is similarly annoying to me. Dunkin' Donuts actually pulled the ad? For real? I have no words.

I'll grant that the stylist involved could've been more sensitive to potential misinterpretations, but can't we all just be grown up about this?

Sigh. This is why I didn't want to write about this whole deal to begin with. I can't even write coherently about the subject, plus now I'm going to spend the rest of the day rolling my eyes involuntarily.

In happier news: It's beautiful out. Perfect Belvedere Square weather!

Quotable Tuesday: Lifestyles

Dean & DeLuca co-owner (he is also Joel Dean's partner) Jack Ceglic, on the beginnings of the couple's friendship with Giorgio DeLuca:

Joel and I liked a certain style of living and we shopped and ate and did things a certain way. Giorgio seemed to fit right in with what we did.

I'm still reading The United States of Arugula (I'm devouring it, really, but it's got so much detail that I'm reading very slowly). It continues to kill me, I think it's so great.

This quote, which I just read last night, fits in with an overall theme in the surrounding chapters - the emergence of "lifestyle" as a marketing tool and frame of reference. In retrospect, I suppose it's obvious that at some point, marketers and journalists were going to latch on to this idea of "how you live", and it also makes sense that people weren't always defined by their lifestyles. Even thinking in terms of lifestyle is really a luxury afforded only to those who feel relatively safe and are beyond subsistence living. Even in the US, that's still a relatively new phenomenon.

But from my perspective - not only was I born in the mid-70's, as the lifestyle train gathered steam, but I'm also in marketing - it is kind of hard to image the world before Dean & DeLuca peddled uber-expensive olives to rich city people, knowing that even if they didn't like olives, their aspirational approach to life would encourage them to buy.

TV Spot: Chester the Cheetos Cheetah Grows Up

I generally think that Slate's Seth Stevenson gets it right when it comes to ads, and his highly positive review of the new adults-targeting Cheetos spots ("Orange Underground") seems dead-on to me. I'm the target (I'm assuming they're looking at an 18-35 demo, probably somewhere in my lifestyle group) and the spots resonate with me. I think they're funny. (Full disclosure: I've always kind of had a thing for Goodby Silverstein ads, ever since, way back when, I read Truth, Lies and Advertising by John Steel.)

No, I'm not going to actually participate in their little YouTube experiment, but maybe I won't feel so bad about sneaking some cheetos now and then. I may even buy a bag for the next time we have people over, and blame it on a need for kitschy retro.

But I do have one complaint about the Stevenson article, and it's this:

As one food blog writes, "Who in their right mind is actually going to go out and buy 20 bags of Cheetos to pull pranks with?" Good point.

Hey, Seth, nice quote. How about a clearer link, or some attribution? This is where you can find the original post. And it actually is linked in the text, but it's kind of confusing. Why not directly attribute the quote, at least?

Maybe I'm sensitive on behalf of food bloggers?

More Reasons Why Rachael Ray Sucks

I haven't been overly vocal about this lately, but really, really, really dislike Rachael Ray. Her food, her voice, her weird way of wearing too-tight shirts.

Some celebrities I wish I could be friends with. Barefoot Contessa. Anthony Bourdain. Even Reese Witherspoon. Ray-Ray brings out the opposite in me. I kind of wish I'd gone to high school with her just so I could've said mean things about her at a time when it was socially acceptable to be cruel.

Anyway. I like her even less today than I did yesterday. She accepts money from Dunkin Donuts - but refuses to drink their coffee.

My issues with this: a) How wildly hypocritical. It's not like she was starving before she got that endorsement deal.. She could've turned it down if she wasn't into the product; b) Has she tasted all of her OWN cooking? I'm sure some of her recipes are good, but she dishes up a lot of crap, too; and c) Dunkin Donuts coffee is delicious. I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I will take down a cup of their liquid crack any day.

OK, that's it. Heart rate's back down. Rant is over.

UPDATE 2/12/08: I realize that this is an old post, so it's possible that nobody will see this update, but I just have to note something funny. I got a new comment here tonight - an ANTI-Rachael sucking comment that mentions that if we don't like her we don't have to watch her. Obviously, but she's also pretty ubiquitous these days.

But I digress. What's funny about the comment is that I had a hunch, so I looked up the web search that sent the reader here. And I was right - it was a Google search for "Rachael Ray sucks".

I'm the one who needs to "Get a life!!!"? The minute I start googling contrary blog posts just so I can post anomymous comments is the minute I will, officially, worry that I don't have enough going on in my non-internet world...

UPDATE #2 2/22/08: Her husband is so icky - and I kind of thought they were splitting up? But I do sort of think her dress is cute...

UPDATE #3 9/11/08: More of an announcement than anything else. Comments are great, even when they're slamming me. But I will delete comments with lots of bad language. It's not how I write, and it's not something I want on the blog.

Marketing Makes Me Hungry

Despite my years of employment in advertising and market research, apparently I am outrageously susceptible to marketing ploys.

This morning, Trader Joe's tricked me into buying a head of very special romaine lettuce that I do not, in any way need. I already have three heads of romaine PLUS a bag of baby romaine in my refrigerator. And yes, lettuce is a highly perishable good.

How did they trick me? Simple. By naming it "Rockstar Lettuce." So cute I couldn't help myself. Unfortunately, I'm not kidding.

Then, at lunchtime today, I wanted to kiss whichever genius came up with the Yoplait Kids/Dora cross promotion. Yes, I did have to take a break from feeding Dixon every ten seconds so he could make out with the yoga container, but Dora's smiling face and oddly compelling eyes did convince him to eat something other than guacamole and string cheese. So mommy is happy.

And now I'm convinced I'm on the verge of a gigantic Indian food kick, all thanks to Wes Anderson. I probably won't even see The Darjeeling Limited until it's on HBO, but my embarrassing addiction to Anderson's quirky and preening aesthetic all but guarantees an immediate uptick in curries chez Pollard.

I'm such a sucker.