Art Meets Commerce

If you haven’t seen this ad for CW’s teen show, Gossip Girls featuring the Parents’ Television Council’s scathing review yet, you will now: they are everywhere.

Gossip Girls could have responded to the Parent’s Television Council with a “very special” episode showing teenagers the consequences of risky behavior. Instead, the show created an entire advertising campaign around negativity. There’s two other ads in the campaign featuring the quotes “every parent’s nightmare” from the Boston Herald and “a nasty piece of work” from the New York Post.

Is the ad campaign itself “nasty?”  Sure, but I think it’s clever and different enough to break through to the target demographic who want to do everything their parents find “inappropriate.”

Irony of ironies, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point almost did not make the tip from failure to success.

The Tipping Point is a book about how “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do” (Gladwell, page 7).  It discusses how specific changes, such as the person spreading the message or the format of the message itself, can effect how, or even if, the ideas, products, messages, and behaviors spread across a population.  Gladwell cites numerous examples, including Paul Revere’s fateful trip warning that the British were coming, hush puppies as a fashion trend, and the downward spiral of crime in New York.

According to Robert McCrum, the former literary editor of The Observer (via Kottke.org), it was Gladwell’s US-wide lecture that truly tipped The Tipping Point from failure into success.

The Tipping Point was almost a flop. It was published to mixed reviews in the US, did no serious business in the UK and was saved by — yes — word of mouth. After a dismal launch, and as a desperate last resort, Gladwell persuaded his American publisher to sponsor a US-wide lecture tour. Only then did the book ‘tip’. Eventually, it would become a literary success of its time, turn its author into a pop cultural guru and spend seven years on the New York Times bestseller list. This was one of those pivotal moments that illustrates the story of this decade.

A friend of mine really, really likes Sex and the City and is devouring all reading material about the upcoming movie. She was uber-excited to see those fabulous 4 on the cover of this week’s Time Out …

Even though there was duct tape over the actresses’ mouths, and a pink banner draped across the magazine’s front cover that screamed,

“NO SEX! Enough already. We love ‘em, but it’s just too much.”

Nope, my friend was undeterred. I observed her as she opened up the magazine and skimmed the table of contents for the Sex and the City article, but did not see the article listed.

Then she skimmed the entire magazine.

Then she looked carefully at each and every page of the entire magazine.

Finally, she found one lonely little poll, which asked readers if they were truly tired of Sex and the City.

Time Out had performed a marketing coup: The absence of an article made a potential reader look closely at each and every page of the magazine.

Too bad it wasn’t the April 1st issue …

Human beings have always loved stories.

First it was cavemen sitting around the campfire watching a reenactment of the latest cavemen fight. Now it’s modern man sitting around a flat-screen TV watching Brad Pitt and Edward Norton beat each other up in Fight Club …

Technology aside, the love of a good story lives on.

In the book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath discuss how marketers can tap into this innate love of stories and characters. They give the example of Jared, the guy who lost over 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches every day. Despite initial skepticism from Subway suits, Jared’s story became a fixture on Subway commercials.

Subway’s sales went from flat growth to 18 percent the first year and 16 percent the following year.

Even Oprah came calling.

Why? Because, as Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out, stories like Jared’s are inspirational and “put knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence … being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside we’re ready to act.”

Consumers take action: that’s a story any marketer likes to hear.