Every once in a while I’ll get an email from my father drawing my attention to some online advertising campaign that he thinks I’ll find interesting. I imagine it’s his way of encouraging me: “Hey, son, it’s not only your crazy company trying to promote itself on YouTube – real businesses are doing it too!”

Thus was I recently directed to FedEx’s new YouTube campaign starring Fred Willard (whom you know from movies like Waiting For Guffman and Best In Show, and of course as the CEO of Buy N Large). Willard stars in a series of mock infomercials (directed by Bob Odenkirk, of Mr. Show fame) called 1-2-3 Succeed!

They’re pretty funny.

Despite being covered in the business section of the New York Times, the campaign hasn’t exactly caught fire. As of Tuesday evening, none of the videos has been viewed more than 10,000 times. These are Spokesmonster-like numbers; it’s nice to know I’m competing on the same plane (if not quite at the same salary) as Odenkirk and Willard. But despite the slow start, I hope the ads are a success. Not for FedEx’s sake, but for the sake of the advertising biz.

I’m not saying the future of the advertising industry rests on the success or failure of this one campaign. I just think they’re good ads, and I’d like to see more like them. But take a look at some of the comments on FedEx’s YouTube page:

[T]his type of humor is low-brow and incompatible with the sophistication that consumers expect from FedEx.

Throw it away and start over. Not funny or informative. Worst FedEx ad campaign ever….

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. The marketing group at FedEx that put this out should be on the chopping block. Dumb, stupid, boring, and won’t bring any customers to FedEx so is therefore a waste of money. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth these are so bad.

…Not that it’s hard to find YouTube commenters to say mean things about your video. But the early response reminds me of other innocuous ad campaigns that backfired – like those Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld that everyone hated so much. Or this reviled Motrin ad from last year. Why is it that when advertisers try to be a little inventive, they often enrage as many customers as they amuse? Meanwhile, there’s no penalty for being dull and predictable. We don’t even notice the boring ads – they pass through our buzzing brains like busboys through a fashionable restaurant, eyes down, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Every once in a while one of the busboys dares to give us a smile, and we respond by lashing him with our walking sticks.

I can understand why people dislike Microsoft, and I can therefore understand how those people might dislike the Seinfeld Microsoft ads. What’s strange to me is that those same people seemed to dislike the Seinfeld ads much more intensely than they did all of the far more banal ads that came before and after it. You’d think Microsoft would have gotten some credit for trying something different, but it seems that people resented the attempt much more than they resented the ad itself.

“How dare you try to entertain us,” they said. “Go on about your unseemly business, just don’t make us look at you.”

We citizens of the mass-consumer age have a fraught relationship with the advertising industry. It surrounds us – we swim in it like the ocean – and maybe these ads frustrate us not because we really think they’re that bad, but simply because we notice them at all – and for a few seconds they remind us how far we are from dry land.

Springtime is here – even in the Canadian prairies. It makes a big difference, waking up to sunshine rather than chilly darkness. This morning my alarm went off at 7:30 and I was glad to see that it was already full daylight outside. I lay in bed for a while and thought about the word “sunrise”.

The sun doesn’t really rise. It stays where it is, and the rotation of the earth causes us to fall out of shadow and into the sun’s light. The word “sunrise” reflects an ancient, intuitive, pre-Copernican conception of how the universe works. But it’s the perfect word. You couldn’t possibly do better.

Let’s say you’re in marketing and your boss asks you to develop a pitch for a new feature. “People on our side of the planet are tired of this constant darkness,” your boss might say. “Electricity bills are through the roof. Plants aren’t growing. We’re always bumping into things. So we’ve decided to rotate the earth once every 24 hours, so that for 12 hours out of every 24, this side of the planet will get direct sunlight.”

“What a great idea!” you say. “What are we calling it?”

“Well,” says your boss, “that’s where you come in.”

So you sit there spinning your globe, trying to come up with a good, concise, marketable description of this new feature.

Hemispheric illumination shift?

Rotational shadow escape?

Sunward earth turning?

Ugh. A PR campaign can probably be built around sunward earth turning to convince people of its benefits. But who’s going to get up at 5 AM to watch it happen?

There are two components to marketing. First, you need to make a complicated new thing seem straightforward and familiar to an audience that probably isn’t paying much attention.

Second, you need to make it – for want of a better word – beautiful.

I’ve been trying, in the Spokesmonster cartoons and on this blog, to get across the benefits of a service that offers a lot of great features – some of them hard to explain in ten words or less. Hopefully I’ve been making a bit of progress. But I still haven’t come across that magic phrase that makes everything clear and beautiful.

Nothing to do but keep trying. Meanwhile, I’m convinced that, like sunrise, StepRep sells itself – once people experience it for themselves.

Over at the StepRep blog, Jeff has a link to an interesting news item: Twitter has made a small change to its profile pages which might make a big difference in future Google results.

I should start by saying: I don’t really “get” Twitter. I suppose I might come around. I’m one of those cats who won’t eat his food when it’s served in a new bowl. I resisted joining Facebook for almost a year, to the exasperation of my friends. Then I joined, and now I…well, I still don’t really “get” Facebook, actually. I think it’s clunky and poorly organised. And I really didn’t need to reconnect with that old high school acquaintance who now spends his days SuperPoking everyone he ever met. But thanks to Facebook, I have enjoyed some rousing games of online Scrabble, and at least my friends don’t crack jokes about what an old man I am any more.

It’s funny. Twitter is getting a reputation as a place where loud-mouthed narcissists blab about watching TV and cutting their toenails. As you’ll recall, when blogging first emerged as a fad a couple years ago, it got the same rap. But in spite of all the bad press, I embraced blogging easily while I’ve resisted Twitter.

Why? It’s simple. Twitter demands brevity. I’m a windy writer. I exhale in complete paragraphs. If I have something to say, it probably can’t be said using less than five hundred words. A hundred and forty characters? What can you say in a hundred and forty characters? It takes me a hundred and forty characters just to furrow my brow in preparation for writing.

Trying to sell me on Twitter is like trying to sell a fat guy a Smart Car. He might be able to squeeze himself behind the steering wheel, but he’ll never be comfortable. He needs a minivan or an SUV – something that leaves room for him to fan out his flab.

I need a blog to fan out my flab.

I’m not dissing Twitter, any more than I’m dissing Smart Cars. If you’re comfortable with that 140-character limit, great. If you can find ways to be interesting within that limit, better still: you’re a far more disciplined writer than I am. As Blaise Pascal said, apologising for the length of one of his letters: “I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter.”

Perhaps I could compress this blog post to 140 characters. But I’m too busy.

There’s an old saying and I don’t know where it came from and I’ll probably quote it wrong. It’s a piece of advice about how to structure speeches. It goes something like this:

First, tell them what you’re going to tell them.
Then, tell them.
Then, tell them what you’ve told them.

You could paraphrase the above as: always assume your audience isn’t paying attention.

I think it’s pretty good advice, whether you’re giving a speech or marketing a product. Even when they’re looking right at you, people’s thoughts are often far, far away – as far away as Mars is from Earth. If you send out just one probe, it might get lost in space, or burn up in the atmosphere, or crash in the mountains. Better to send out two or three probes and hope one makes it to the surface safely.

Sadly, a marketing career based on repetition, repetition, and more repetition can get a little…well, repetitive. As one of those fancy-schmancy tea-drinking corduroy-wearing “creative” types, I get bored with writing assignments that merely require me to rearrange last week’s sales pitch. Haven’t I explained StepRep often enough? Can’t I move on to something different?

This week I’ve had a few “rearrangement” assignments sitting on my desk, and I’ve been having a hard time getting into them. I’ve been trying to come up with a different angle. A friend of mine called up and left me a voicemail where he outlined an analogy he thought I could use. I’ve paraphrased him quite a bit, but here’s what my friend had to say:

Remember the popular girl in high school? It didn’t matter what she did – it didn’t matter how boring her life was – people couldn’t stop talking about her. Maybe she broke up with her boyfriend, or crashed her car. Maybe she just chipped a nail. Somehow, whatever she did, no matter how mundane, word got around. She was at the center of the conversation. People flocked around her.

Meanwhile, the uncool kids wandered the corridors, feeling invisible and isolated. Their tastes were a little more obscure – they were into opera, or poetry, or model trains. Without hangers-on to gossip about them and spread the word about what they were doing, it was difficult for the opera buffs and the poets and the model train enthusiasts to connect with one another.

What the popular girl had, what the unpopular kids lacked, was brand name recognition. In effect, gossip did for the popular girl what billboards and TV ads do for Coke: made her ubiquitous. If you’ve got an appetite for a soft drink, the word Coke is never far from the front of your mind. Maybe if you stopped to think about it, you’d decide that you’d much prefer a bottle of Boot Hill Sassparilla. But you don’t stop think about it. The waitress asks you what you’d like, and you name the first drink that comes to mind, and Coke is it.

Now, ubiquity is not something that can be acquired on the cheap. Coca-Cola spends a fortune keeping its brand in the public eye. But you probably don’t want to be Coca-Cola. You’re content to be Boot Hill Sassparilla – provided that the people who like sarsaparilla know where to find you.

StepRep can’t make sarsaparilla as famous as Coca-Cola. But if you’re a sarsaparilla maker, you can use StepRep to help ensure that people see your brand when they’re searching for sarsaparilla.

StepRep can’t make poets as popular as cheerleaders. But if you’re a high school poet, you can use StepRep to help build your brand name recognition within that small circle of high school poetry fans.

There! That’s a pitch I haven’t tried before.

I feel refreshed.

–

PS. I tried Boot Hill Sassparilla on a visit to Santa Fe a few years back, and thought it was pretty good. I think it’s local to the southwest – you can’t get it where I live. I hope they’re still making the stuff.

Wait, is this Part III, or Part IV? I’m already losing count.

Anyway, this video helps to explain the third tab in StepRep, the one marked “Referrals and Quotes”. These functions are still a couple months away, but the video should give you a pretty good idea where the product is headed.

It has come to my attention that the single most popular post on this blog was one I made just before Christmas titled Monster evolution.

I couldn’t figure out why, until I tried Googling the phrase, and discovered that there’s a stylish and addictive Flash game by that title. It seems that most of these visitors are more interested in the game than they are in our silly promotional cartoons.

I suppose the polite thing to do would be to go back and change the unintentionally deceptive title of that post. Instead I’m going to exploit the coincidence and use it to draw still more attention to our silly promotional cartoons. Also, I promised to post more of my monster concept sketches but I never got around to it.

By the way, just because I’m posting these pictures, don’t think I’ve deluded myself into believing I know how to draw.

Cagey Camel

(Cagey Camel is the code name VendAsta’s developers used for the second iteration of StepRep. I pictured Cagey as a surly tough in a leather jacket, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.)

Bartleby the Scrivener

(Obviously Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener isn’t a monster. But I identify with his lazy stubbornness, which is probably why I decided to put him into the cartoon. He looks a little like me.)

We’ve been winding up for the official release of StepRep and it’s been hectic around here. I pass by guys crying in the corridors all the time. And right at the peak of the hecticness, Brendan and Jeff – our CEO and main marketing guy, respectively – have buzzed off to the annual Real Estate Connect conference in New York City. Well, they say they’re at the conference. More likely they just going to Broadway shows and taking long hansom cab rides around Central Park.

I hope Brendan and Jeff are meeting lots of interesting people and having a good time in the States. It should be a little warmer there anyway.

Meanwhile, StepRep Beta is now live. You should try it out. It’s pretty shiny, and getting shinier every day as the techies hunt down and exterminate the remaining bugs. And it looks swank, thanks to the design work of my office buddies Marie-Louise and John (left).

But don’t worry, the monsters are still there to ugly things up a little.

So the third Spokesmonster cartoon is finished. Finally. After seven weeks.

By way of comparison, the previous cartoon took me about three weeks to create. Although the running time is only a little longer, the new cartoon – measured in terms of file size – is almost three times as complex. My working file for the second cartoon was 35 megabytes; the new cartoon came in a little under 90. (Garson Hampfield, which is almost seven minutes long, took up only 43 megs.)

MyFrontSteps house exterior

There’s a lot of little pieces in there. For example, this drawing of a house took me over an hour. In the cartoon, the house flashes by in about five seconds. It’s pretty small to begin with, and by the time it gets shrunk still further and compressed by YouTube, virtually all the detail is lost.

In addition to the house there are drawings of a kitchen, a bathroom, and three views of a living room. Each drawing is onscreen for only a couple seconds. Each took about an hour. So that’s almost a day of work right there.

What I’m saying is, I’m an idiot.

But apart from spending an inordinate amount of time on tiny details, the main reason the new cartoon took so long is that for the first three weeks I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. Flailing around for a direction, I spent most of my time drawing monsters.

Since I’m between animations, back in flailing mode, I thought over the next few days I’d post some sketches showing how these monsters evolved, starting with…

The Reichschancellor

Frenchy the Bartender

I’ve got a funny job. For the last two weeks I’ve been doing nothing but drawing cartoon monsters. I’ve spent entire days with my feet up on my desk, pad and paper in my lap, doodling snail ladies and lizard rappers. For the longest time I had no idea where this was taking me. Maybe I was using the doodling as an excuse to avoid doing more productive work. But all these monsters will be going into the next Spokesmonster video, so I figure I haven’t been totally wasting my time.

I just did a tally of my completed monsters. I’m up to eighteen now. (Many of these are just drawings that will be flashed onscreen for a moment or two, but some of them have been broken down for limb movements and facial expressions.) Here’s the thing: I’d like there to be roughly as many girl monsters as there are boy monsters. But I’m already out of whack. I’ve got twelve boy monsters, only six girl monsters.

Why is it so much easier to come up with male characters than female characters? I’m not the only animator with this deficiency. Look at the old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons. Disney had Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, but they were stuck in minor supporting roles. Warner Brothers had Bugs Bunny in a dress – that’s about it. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park all have girls in them, but I’d reckon there are ten male characters for every female one.

Why aren’t animators more interested in drawing female characters? Perhaps they’re limited by a sense of decorum. You needn’t have seen too many episodes of the Simpsons to summon up examples of Homer being dropped from great heights, having heavy weights dropped on him, or losing his pants. Those things just don’t happen to Marge or Lisa. If the definition of comedy is inflicting pain or physical humiliation on your characters, and if our culture is uncomfortable with seeing women brutalised in those ways, that’s a powerful disincentive to drawing female cartoons. Why use Daisy Duck if we can’t clunk her over the head for laffs? We’ll just use Donald instead.

But I wonder if the gender disparity doesn’t derive from something more fundamental. Look at the design of the male and female icons on bathroom doors. The male icon is a simple stick figure. The female icon is a stick figure with a dress. Boiled down to their most basic forms, the woman requires more lines to draw than the man.

I’ve noticed in my own drawing that it takes longer to design a female character than it does a male character. With a girl monster I have to worry about hips and boobs and hair and making sure the facial features look feminine – I don’t mean attractive, I just mean that you want your girl monster to actually look like a girl. The cheap way to do this is to give her lipstick and long eyelashes. Or you can be a bit more subtle in the shaping of the jaw and the placement of the eyes, so that makeup is unnecessary. Either way, it takes a little extra work. And I’m a fundamentally lazy guy.

With a boy monster, you just hack out your basic human figure and you’re done – it’s a boy.

For some reason, by default, cartoons come out male.

Why is this? Obviously, there’s a long and complicated history behind the iconography of maleness and femaleness, and much of that history occurred back when women weren’t in a position to complain about what the men were painting on bathroom doors. But those bathroom icons reflect something other than centuries of sexism. Maybe stick figures are assumed to be male for a reason: the basic male shape really is composed of simple straight lines, while the basic female shape is made up of more complicated curves. Maybe it’s not just sexism that skews my monsters male by a ratio of two to one, but physiology.

If my speculation is correct, the pro-male bias appears at the very earliest stage of the creative process – the stage where the cartoonist, chair leaned back, feet on desk, idly doodles on a scratchpad. If every doodle starts as a male, then of course the cartoonist will wind up with a gallery of male characters.

Maybe I’m making an assumption, though. When women doodle, do their doodles come out female?

Babywearing?

A co-worker emailed me a link to this article about the Motrin “babywearing” controversy. (And here’s the ad that touched it all off.) I guess Motrin has erred in the same way we did with our first cartoon a few months back – by underestimating the touchiness of the ad-watching public.

I have no advice for Motrin or for parents who wish to wear their babies. But I, and the Spokesmonster, feel their pain.