George Lois asks: Can you do better?

---

George Lois was a real Madison Avenue adman from the 1950s and 1960s, and after. He wrote a book some years ago called DAMN GOOD ADVICE, which is a memoir / self-accolade / idea book.

It’s a good read, and a funny one. I recommend it.

(Incidentally: if you watch “Mad Men,” you will be interested to know that George Lois is rumored to be the model for Don Draper, the main character in the series. George, in his book, hotly denies it. “And besides,” he says, “I was more attractive!”, and shows this picture:

(So what do you think of someone who says: “That’s not me! And besides, I was more attractive than that!”? Hmm. I know what I think.)

Anyway: the book is full of good stories.

This one nags at me frequently:

A bigwig goes into a bar and says to the bartender, “Give me the best Manhattan you can make.”

Bartender does so, and gives it to Bigwig. Bigwig tastes it. “It’s good,” he says. “Can you do better?”

Bartender tries again. This goes on for several repetitions. Finally, after sampling Manhattan #5 or so, Bigwig says: “This is excellent!”, and then he glares at Bartender. “Why the fuck didn’t you make it like this the first time I asked?”

I have no answer to that.

What does “best” mean?

And why don’t we do it all the time?

---

Logos Quiz

---

I was browsing drearily on my iPad the other day, looking for some new diversion, and found something called the “Logos Quiz.” Stupidly I assumed (for various reasons) that this was a Bible quiz. And I’m just a fool for Bible games and such.

 

 

But the game is far more insidious than any Bible quiz.

 

 

You are presented with a table of several dozen advertising logos: images, typography, color schemes. None is complete. You must identify them.

 

 

At first I was sniffingly scornful. Some ad agency put this together, I thought; product placement as a game.   Hmm. Starbucks, of course. Firefox. Barbie . . .

 

 

Then: goodness, I thought. This is harder than it looks.

 

 

There are (I think) eight levels; I’ve only made it to Level Five. The brands aren’t just American, but worldwide. Some are achingly familiar; others are almost-but-not-quite obvious.  (Quick, describe the insignia on a Saab!) Sometimes it’s just a font, or a combination of colors.

 

 

I was amazed when I opened the Financial Times on Monday and found that the redoubtable Lucy Kellaway had  written this week's column on the Logos Quiz! (I was angry, a little, because I’d already made up my mind to write about it, and Lucy stole most of my thunder by making most of my points before I could. But she writes so much better than I do, so there’s no real harm done on the cosmic scale.)

 

 

Here are some of her points, and mine:

 

 

Point One: Advertising / logos are insidious. They dig into your brain and nest there. You will be amazed at what you recognize viscerally. (Quick! Sketch me the Nike logo! I know you can!)

 

 

Point Two: Things that are obvious to me as a fifty-four-year-old are not obvious to a twenty-year-old, and vice versa. (Lucy, close to my age, recognized the Kodak logo right away, but her young son didn’t; he recognized the Xbox logo right away, but was scandalized that his mother didn’t.)

 

 

Point Three (Which Lucy Didn’t Make In Her FT Article): The companies must be giggling about how this game is working in their favor. People are actually Googling their logos and corporate branding!  (My first thought, when I saw the game, was that it was somehow sponsored by a corporation or group of corporations.  I still think that this might be true. Who knows?)

 

 

Postscript: I don’t know if you read Thomas Gibson. He’s a little too FutureWorld even for me. But I read one of his novels, “Pattern Recognition,” a few years ago, and it made a little impression on me, mostly because its main character is a media consultant who reacts to corporate logos on an instinctive level.  You know the Michelin Man? She has a reaction to him that resembles anaphylactic shock.

 

 

I think I understand that. I used to feel the same way about Speedy Alka-Seltzer.

 

 

(Now: can someone explain to me the logo with the letter “N” shooting a laser beam off into space?)

---

 

 

Groupon

---

Only a few months ago, Groupon sent me interesting offers. Good restaurants. Nice things. Things I actually bought into from time to time.

 

 

Now I get Groupon offers for helicopter tours and photo montages and day-spas. These are things I will never spend money on.

 

 

The Groupon business model, so far as I am concerned, has collapsed, in something like record time (and certainly much faster than Tulipomania). And just in time for their initial public offering, which will be mega-brilliant!

 

 

The Times saw it coming. Groupon mostly focused on restaurants at first, but even then, the restaurants realized they were losing money on Groupon customers. It was money that would have been spent on advertising – but most restaurants do very little advertising anyway. (Think about it. Where do they usually advertise? High-school yearbooks! The Penny Saver!)

 

 

Then there is the whole issue of the Groupon Voice: the nastily “funny” mode in which the Groupon emails are written. They joke around, they make stuff up. (They talk about the riding stable that's “closed on Horse Christmas.” They talk about the “meat surgeons” at the steak restaurant. Haw haw!) This is hipsterishly amusing, but can backfire when one lives in a non-hipster world, i.e., this world right here.

 

 

Last February, Groupon splashed some television commercials, in one of which Timothy Hutton spoke of the plight of the people of Tibet – and then of its delicious cuisine. Segue to Groupon logo.

 

 

Funny, right?

 

 

Lots of people thought not.

 

 

Groupon gives a quiz to writers to determine if they understand the “Groupon Voice.” You should take it. It's all wrong. For example: which of the following is the most interesting description of a 4700-pound chandelier? Choose one:

 

 

• A: Really big and shiny

• B: More brilliant than a studious Christmas tree

• C: A death trap

• D: Blinged out

   

 

For me, the funniest answers are C, D, and A, in that order. B has too many words, and is too labored.

 

 

The official Groupon answer is B.

 

 

I understand Groupon's unwillingness to call something they're advertising a “death trap.” But there's a little thing called “litotes,” which is furiously at work in both A and D, and which makes them both very funny. B is stuffy. B has too many words. Shorter is always funnier, Groupon people!

 

 

Groupon will be dead soon. Other (and cleverer) companies will have analyzed their business model, found work-arounds for its flaws, and taken over Groupon's territory. Groupon will join AOL and MySpace soon, no matter what happens with their IPO, which (I'm sure) will be more brilliant than a studious Christmas tree.

 

 

You just wait and see.

 

---

 

 

Better jerkitude through technology

 

Have you seen these television commercials?:

 

 

• An obnoxious neighbor taunts his neighbor's holiday decorations, using text, email, and phone.

• A guy in a car pool receives an emailed joke seconds before his coworkers receive it. He reads it, laughs shrilly, and puts his phone away. When his coworkers catch up with him a few seconds later and try to share the joke with him, he feigns boredom.

• An obnoxious girlfriend (see example #1 above) breaks up with her boyfriend via text, email, and phone, while sitting at a restaurant table with him.

   

 

What is the subtext here?

 

 

Evidently that technology is a great way for jerks to enhance and improve the quality of their jerkiness.

 

 

It reminds me of a incident in Graham Greene's “Travels With My Aunt.” Henry, the narrator, is treated very rudely over the intercom by his aunt's live-in lover Wordsworth. Later, in person, Wordsworth is surprised that Henry is miffed at him. “'Man, it's jus that little mike there,'” Wordsworth explains. “'Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street where no one sees it's only old Wordsworth. It's a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when he spoke to old Moses.'”

 

 

Anonymity allows people to be stupidly mean. Go check out the messageboards on the New York Times or New York magazine sometime; they're trolled regularly by a few anonymous people who say things they know will be inflammatory, who enjoy getting people riled up.

 

 

It's a sort of power, man.

 

 

And apparently the vendors of smartphones and such are now encouraging you to get in touch with your inner jerk, using their new technology to be an even bigger and better jerk than you already are!

 

 

As commercials go, I much prefer those Allstate ads with Dean Winters as Mayhem. He's very cute in his suit, and he has the perfect smile/snarl for someone representing a chaotic force of nature, and he winks as he leaves the scene of the crime.

 

 

If you have to be a jerk, you should at least be a sexy jerk.

 

 

 

 

The electrical-tape solution

 

---

We were visiting Partner's mother a few years ago when Partner noticed a wide strip of black electrical tape blocking the bottom three inches of her TV screen.  "They're always running some stupid thing down there," his mother said.  (I am editing out some of the more colorful language.)  "I hate that stuff.  I don't need to read anything at the bottom of the screen."

 

I know what she means. 

 

I don't mind news feeds on news shows, or business feeds on business shows. But the stupid little logos that walk around and wave at you and generally distract you from your program - I really loathe them.  (I make an exception for the football-player robot on “NFL on Fox.” He's cute and bouncy and weirdly attractive. But I digress.)

 

And is it just me, or are the bouncing logos getting bigger and bigger?  More than once lately, they've actually obscured the action in the TV show. 

 

It's based on the paradigm of the browser window.  When I log into Yahoo!, I get all kinds of dancing imagery - ads, animations, notifications.  (Actually I don't, because my Firefox browser blocks advertisements.  But when I'm using other computers or browsers, I still suffer through them.)

 

The browser window is, in turn, based on the paradigm of the newspaper layout.  Newspaper articles are layouts in space, not in time.  They are surrounded by little boxed advertisements, and your eye bounces around and through them.

 

TV is not (I should say was not) based on the paradigm of the newspaper layout.  TV is a layout in time.  If you want to insert an advertisement, the standard method is to interrupt the program at given intervals and add a few commercials. 

 

But we have all that space! someone thought.  Why waste it?  We can advertise new shows.  We can do self-promotion.  Maybe we can even do product tie-ins. 

 

TV used to be a unique appliance.  It did one thing: it showed broadcast programming.  Nothing else in the house could do that.  Nowadays, of course, kids look at TV and see a big screen, just like any other screen on any other device in the house.  It's bigger than the other screens, and it has better picture quality, but that's about it.  TV programming is no longer sacrosanct; it's something you can play with and reformat, like browser content.

 

I have noticed that, when I get on these topics, I get Andy Rooneyish.  I don't mean to.  I suppose it's partly my advanced age, which makes the past seem magically perfect and very quaint. 

 

But I still haven't taped up the bottom of my TV screen. I like watching that football-player robot bouncing around. He's sort of hot.

---