Stay Tuned/Miracle and Wonder

My brother-in-law told me this weekend that he'd been thinking about email and the decline of paper correspondence. He said that it occurred to him how, in a few years, if someone wants to collect the Letters Of [insert luminary of your choice here], they're going to have a problem. He mentioned this to me specifically, he said, "because it seemed to me like the kind of thing you had probably thought about." Indeed, I have, many times.

We also went this weekend to buy another wireless router. Ours had trouble getting signal from the second floor to the first floor in some places. If we ever get our scheme to work, both routers will be on the same network - we will have multiple wireless access points in our house. In our HOUSE. Amazing.

While we were at the mall I looked at prices for digital SLR camera bodies; I'm trying to find one which allows me to use my considerable investment in old-school SLR camera lenses. They're not quite down to a level I consider affordable (given that I use cameras only in occasional fits), but they will be within two years.

These are the days of miracle and wonder. When Paul Simon wrote that, he made it clear that he didn't necessarily mean it in a good way, and I don't either. The nice Apple people sell us good wireless routers so we can have magic running through our house, but they're also trying to tell us we're stupid enough to pay six hundred dollars for a glorified phone, and some people undoubtedly will be, and heaven only knows what all this wireless and cellular signal floating around us is doing to our genes.

The film camera is basically dead and no one sheds any tears (no, not even the pro photographers, who still have film resources we peons do not). Digital cameras offer economy and near-instant gratification. No waste, no muss, no fuss. But it strikes me that my brother-in-law is taking all the pictures of my young niece digitally - to me that implies "no permanent record." Is he going to keep them all on storage media forever? Perhaps he is. I think of digital storage as transient, impermanent, and he may not, which is what an age gap of only a few years can do. I worry that one day he will want a photo album that doesn't exist. Maybe he won't. Maybe we won't care that no one has a legacy of paper correspondence anymore.

The future is such an uncertain place.

What has all this to do with advertising? Well, not a lot. But the days of miracle and wonder are affecting that universe too, you know.

Another discussion that came up in more or less the same conversation this weekend was printers, and my brother-in-law correctly pointed out to another friend that printers are now being sold on the razor-and-blades model, or what Gillette likes to call a "system model" - that is, the razor itself is nearly a loss leader, it is by the blades thou shalt profit. The weblog BoingBoing has been trying to make people aware of the inkjet cartridge scam for quite a while now, pointing out that by volume, inkjet ink is more expensive than Dom Perignon and that most printers in a recent test reported that the cartridges were running empty when they still had a fair bit of ink left. This is a racket that would not have existed only a few years ago.

Speaking of razors, a newspaper article this weekend had some interesting observations about Gillette's renewed attempts to try to sell razors in Japan, where there are some cultural obstacles. Among other things, Japanese men tend to shave less often than American men and their shaving habits are less linked to their showering/bathing times so they often shave dry, and prefer electric razors for that reason. They've also realized - far later than they should - that ads with ubermacho American models will not work and they have to recast them with Japanese men. And of course there are language difficulties. The Fusion Phantom razor, already mocked in these pages, is a name that won't work over there. (The article didn't say why, but I'll tell you my guess: It's because "phantom" only really translates as "ghost" over there, and mentioning ghosts is not going to sell any product in Japan. I will also note cynically that they wouldn't be having this problem if they had given their razor a normal name to begin with.)

The reason the preceding paragraph is relevant to the Brave New World topic is that we have only comparatively recently begun the era when advertising is truly worldwide - that is, where a company could even consider the idea of having one set of marketing materials that were used, essentially unchanged save translation, the world 'round. It wasn't all that long ago that a worldwide simultaneous release of a product was science fiction, and if you'd told a company that one day they would be wondering how to keep people from buying a product from another country before it went on sale in their own, you'd have been laughed out of the building. It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of having a separate campaign for Japan - if, indeed, an American company dared to try to market in Japan at all - would have been a foregone conclusion, because there was not much chance that the Japanese audience would see American advertisements and vice versa. Now everyone sees American advertisements, and more than a few Americans are frequently exposed to Japanese advertisements. And some lessons about tailoring campaigns to audiences are, I think, being forgotten.

In addition to having to figure out how to market and exploit new technology (how do you sing the praises of something as mundane as a wireless router to a not-very-technical public? How do you make a decent profit on something as marginal as printer ink?), in addition to having to figure out the new technology of marketing (how do you simultaneously debut a product in sixteen countries without breaking the budget?), the marketeers also have to figure out how to sell the new breed of products that aren't physical products at all - web services and so on. If you think marketing a router is hard, try marketing a search engine. (Or ask Ask, whose ads are good but don't seem to be accomplishing much for them. Of course, I'm still bitter about their ditching Jeeves.)

I have no idea if this blitz has occurred in other places, but the Boston area has been seeing a deluge of ads in the past fortnight for something called windorphins.com. The ads are very cryptic, they don't identify the product or service, just a few slogans and the URL.

Well, speculate no more (if you were). The site is a marketing campaign for eBay, the scourge of the modern world. I mention this not just as an example of a really stupid latter-day marketing campaign, but also in hope that you will feel vaguely swindled by this knowledge and not visit the site.

eBay, to my mind, is everything that's wrong with the age of miracle and wonder in a nutshell. It encourages compulsive behaviors in the populace. It promotes disposability of culture and the culture of instant gratification. It has no accountability whatsoever, no controls on how it treats people, and the evidence suggests it often treats people badly. It tells its users it can do whatever it damned well pleases, and gets away with it. And it's probably the defining site (along with Google, another company whose hands are none too clean) of the new era. This is why I am a cynic.

Brave new world; hope you like what you get. Often I do. I wouldn't want to go back to where we were before. But that doesn't prevent me from worrying about where this bus is going, especially since I'm not sure anyone is actually driving it.

and now back to our program

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