It's a fine, fine line

between a passionate agency and a pompous one.

This post is teetering right on the brink.

Wanted: More Passion Brands

It's admirable that Ms. Olson and Amazon Advertising do not want to create misleading advertising for dishonest clients. But this sounds like ignorant knowingness:

How can we work for a client who would misrepresent itself this way, the creative team asked? Ultimately, we bowed out. It didn't fit our growing desire to work for "passion brands."

Whew, it does narrow the prospect list. Out with our unequivocal embrace of the Fortune 500. No lusting after big car companies (unless they're rolling out fleets of hybrids).

It does not occur to her that car companies can only sell what customers want to buy. If millions of customers still choose conventional cars, car companies will them. What "principle" demands that good agencies must shun those companies who sell fewer hybrids?

Four smart guys look at the future of newspapers

David Warsh is somewhat optimistic:

Traditional print journalism, rooted in newspapers’ semi-monopolies on advertising and information, has been teasing apart, becoming dis-integrated, for nearly a century ever since the first radio station broadcast the news and accompanied it with “commercials.” The advent of television was another inflection point, but posed no threat to newspapers’ help-wanted and classified advertising; the advent of the Internet has been quite another matter. The best newspapers seem certain to survive the onslaught of the World Wide Web. Probably they will retain their primacy at the top of the explanatory chain their presentation can’t be beat; they come out only once a day; paper-and-ink corporeality means they can’t be changed; and printing presses, delivery networks and reputation all form formidable barriers to entry against competition. But newspapers of the future will be slimmed-down versions of their former selves, web-savvy, their print editions aimed mostly at elites.

Nicholas Carr is more pessimistic:

As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

R. S. McCain is extremely gloomy:

You can talk about online news until you're blue in the face, but it won't change the fact that Americans now read much less than they once did.

What is happening to newspaper circulation is simply this: As older readers die off, they are not being replaced by younger readers.

The reason for that is that young people -- and by that, I mean, people under 40 -- don't read nearly as much as do their elders. And it has nothing do with print vs. online. If you are under 40 and reading news online, you are an exception, a rarity, among your peers.

Why has the reading habit declined among those under 40? First it was cable TV, then it was the VCR, now the DVD -- and you could add video games to that list -- the increased availability of on-demand video has accustomed young people to process information that way. Just as reading is habit-forming, TV is also habit-forming, and the TV habit has flourished at the expense of reading.

American Digest is as gloomy as McCain, but also wildly happy:

Of course, the real elephant drooling in the room of newspapers like the Seattle Times these days is "the forgotten reader." These are the potential readers who, because of the unremitting liberal tone and slant of the Times in both the news hole and on the editorial page, loathe the Times and the whole sector of Seattle society it represents.

Now you may say, in a town as overwhelmingly liberal as Seattle, "Screw those troglodyte, Republican morons!" Well, you can say that but then you will, sooner or later, fire 200 of your employees. And that will be only the start.

Why? Because in an "overwhelmingly liberal town" you are talking about, at most, around 55% of the potential readership that agrees with you. This means you are leaving about 45% of potential readership out of the equation altogether. King County has about 2 million people. That means that 45% of potential readership is not at all a trivial number, and yet the Seattle Times takes every opportunity to alienate them. Result: Mass sackings and many millions lost.

And yet the Seattle Times, as well as numerous other newspapers now dying in the US, never ever cops to its point of view as the reason why it is failing.

FWIW, I hope Warsh is right, but I fear that McCain is on to something when it comes to the death of reading.

I do disagree with one point he makes:

Having been in the newspaper business since 1986, I have unfortunately had a ringside seat to watch the industry's decline. And the reason I know that liberal bias is not a sufficient explanation for this decline is the fact that small "hometown" newspapers -- which have never reflected the liberalism that plagues the major metro dailies -- have suffered equally, if not worse, from the decline.

I’ve lived in a bunch of different places over the years. Some were liberal communities (Madison, Wisconsin) while others were conservative (Carlisle, Charlotte). In every city and town, however, the local paper was and is more liberal than the community it serves. In Madison, the papers were very liberal, Here in Carlisle the Sentinel is only a little to the left of center. This is a striking stance, though, in a community that voted for Bush 60/40 in two elections.


The fact that newspapers tilt left is not the only reason they are declining. For a large part of the market, however, it is a net negative. It is one more hurdle that they have to clear in order to convince the non-reader to buy their product.

The biggest problem is that technology and social trends have destroyed their raison d’etre. Much of the “news” that fills their pages is not NEW when the reader gets to it. It has been on cable TV, radio and the Internet for hours. The headlines are familiar while the wire copy adds little depth.

A newspaper might have value as a trusted aggregator of stories. It could deliver value by providing more depth than competing media. Both “solutions” run into internal barriers in newspapers, as they exist today. Their liberal tilt undercuts their trustworthiness so that many readers do not trust their news judgment. The endless rounds of cut backs in the newsrooms leave them with few resources to upgrade the quality of their content.

Perhaps their greatest weakness is that there are no great editors trying to create something new and better.

Readers are important, but advertising revenue is the key to newspaper viability. There are two areas the industry could address in order to shore up their long-term position.

1. Develop better online advertising. One reason that web revenue cannot offset losses from the print side is that many advertisers cannot use it for brand marketing. The click-through, direct response model works great for cheap car insurance and male enhancement supplements. It is less effective for cars, beer, clothing, etc. As readers move to the web, some of the biggest advertisers cannot follow: they have to advertise in other venues.


It is incumbent on newspaper publishers to find and promote online advertising method/styles that will work for a wide range of products. Agencies will not do it because they are agnostic when it comes to media platform. If newspapers want better advertising they have to find and promote it on their own.

2. The self-referencing “professionals” in the advertising industry overvalue people like themselvesyoung, urban, single, childless, iconoclastic. They undervalue those who are different. Advertising spending is shaped by this prejudice. Marketers believe that commercials have to target young, hip influentials while older suburban consumers are a lost cause.

Newspapers and broadcast television are penalized because their readers/viewers are discounted. Agencies expect to pay less to reach an older audience.

There is very little hard data to bolster this advertising conceit. It makes sense for newspapers to attack this idea and demonstrate that their print readership is a valuable target market for a vast array of products.

They cannot expect the advertising industry to do it for them. That runs counter to the industry’s self-image. Further, it would also reveal the fact that the typical agency is a one-trick pony that hasa no idea how to reach people over 40.

See also:

The newspaper: Today and tomorrow

UPDATE: R.S. McCain comments further here.

Wendy's comes to its senses

Wendy’s: No Longer Red All Over

A new rule at Wendy’s: only Wendy can be coiffed like Wendy.

Wendy’s, the third largest hamburger chain, is jettisoning a campaign it introduced amid much hoopla last May. The fast-paced campaign showed consumers in pigtailed red wigs that emulated the hairstyle of the chain’s familiar female mascot.

See also:

Marketing Malpractice

Marketing malpractice

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article on the troubles at Wendy’s.

AFTER DAVE ($)
How Wendy's Faltered, Opening Way to Buyout

The latest wave of TV ads for Wendy’s leave me scratching my head. The slacker/stoner dude in red pigtails looks like he belongs in a Saturday Night Live parody of Wendy’s, not in a real commercial. There is smart edgy and then there is stupid and pointless pretending to be edgy. Apparently, the people at Wendy’s and at Saatchi and Saatchi cannot distinguish the two.

The commercials are more than bad. They consciously mock the pillars of the Wendy’s consumer image. Hence, they undermine the brand.

The mind boggles. Companies spend millions to build a brand. Then there is Wendy’s which spends millions to destroy a brand that was cultivated over thirty years.

The CEO is now “embattled”. Big surprise. You have to wonder about her leadership ability and basic people skills. What kind of idiot approves an ad campaign that mocks a family member of the beloved founder? A family member, moreover, that the company is named after.

The advertising business

A couple of key points jump out of this Fast Company post.

First, more evidence that agency consolidation and integration is less appealing to clients than it is to agency CEOs. (See here.)

Second, client loyalty is well and truly dead. If Nike is moving away from Weiden+Kennedy, then no agency can trust that their past performance has earned them the loyalty of the guys who pay the bills.

Metros, retros, and that Super Bowl ad

I see the Snickers ad has been deep-sixed. Mars got the buzz it was hoping for, but discovered that not all buzz is good buzz. A few million dollars thrown away because some creative guys wanted to be edgy and no one in marketing had the guts to tell them "no".

The commercial itself was stupid and offensive in so many ways it is hard to know where to start. So, like all good pundits, I'll ride my pet hobby horse.

The two guys in the ad fit the media stereotype of retrosexuals. They were paunchy slobs, dull-witted, without charm, grace, or style. Similar caricatures appear on most sit-coms. They are the preferred "spokesmen" in ads for products that aim to appeal to retrosexuals-Dial soap, Miller beer, TV dinners, pizza, etc.

That's how TV advertising works. Everything gets viewed through a metrosexual lens because metros are over-represented in the advertising racket.

Marketers waste a ton of money out of ignorance and fear. No one wants to be a "suit" with no sense of humor and no grasp of "great, edgy creative." Peter Drucker said marketing and innovation were the only real functions of a corporation. Yet all too many companies have marketing departments that lack the courage and strategic mindset to live up to their responsibility.

Super Bowl ads

I just remembered that i haven't posted anything about the SuperBowl ads. Which, in a way, is a pretty good verdict on the lot of them. By and large they were lame, lame, lame.

With the exception of the Budweiser ads of course. No surprises, but good execution on their usual themes.

Can't quite figure out what Chevy is trying to do with their ads with all the fuzzy emotion and the celebrities. OTOH, The Toyota Tundra ad was dead solid perfect "We're a big, tough truck that works hard." I drive a GMC but the Toyota commercial gave me a reason to check them out.

Anheuser-Busch decides to mess with Texas

First a confession. There is a tiny little part of me that wishes i was from Texas. That might make a good future post but anyway, there it is. I also don't think i'm alone in that sentiment.

Scott Chaffin is the real thing and he has a post up about the new Bud Light ad-- part of their Forgotten men of Genius series. This time out A-B "salutes" Mr Way Too Proud of Texas Guy. Scott thinks he might qualify.

It's a funny ad but like all of the FMG spots it's "salute" is in the form of gentle mockery. That is par for the course for advertising aimed at non-metrosexual males-- people like Bud Light drinkers.

Watch any TV at all and you notice a sharp split between the portrayal of males and females in the commercials. The women drinking the crappy flavored instant coffee are slim, sophisticated, intelligent, and beautiful. The father in the cell phone ad is a pudgy doofus. The woman going to Home Depot is hyper-competent. Husbands who do home repair in ads are dolts who always screew up.

So where is the research that shows that mocking the customer is the best way to earn their loyalty?

The invisible blinders of advertising types

This Business Week article takes a look at VW and their new advertising campaign. It touches on a couple of points near and dear to my heart.

First there is this from their ad agency:

Says a habitually cool Bogusky, wearing a Kiss T-shirt and stabbing his fork in the air as he scarfed banana pancakes at Greenstreet's, a café near his Miami office: "I like that they are talking about the work. If they aren't talking, then your brand is dead."

He does not mean the cars when he says "the work". He means the commercials his agency creates for VW. Talk about that work is good for him and his agency. But buzz does not sell cars and that is the key thing to VW.

Then there is this:

In launching the GTI and reviving the Volkswagen brand in general, Crispin faced two challenges. First, since the debut of the New Beetle, the VW brand has become feminized, says Keller. Loyal young males who were hanging on to VW by a thread needed to be reassured. Too many men had come to view VW as a "chick's brand."

[Snip]

Can Crispin's edgy playfulness go over the line? With the suggestive content, charges of sexism have followed. TV ads for the Winter Olympics depicted young men so into their GTIs that one refused to roll up the window to shield his girlfriend's wind-blown hair and told her to stop "yackin"' so he could enjoy the engine's growl. Another refused to take his girlfriend on an errand in his GTI because her weight would slow him down. Ouch. Nissan's Wilhite says he's all for shaking up VW's message, "but I can't go along with ads that marginalize women like beer commercials often do." Suzanne Farley, a Boston education consultant and owner of a 1999 VW Passat, agrees, saying the ads "made me feel weird, like they were talking right past me."

Turn on network television any night and you will see commercials that depict men, especially married men and fathers, as clueless, stupid, helpless dorks. No one is worried that fathers and husbands are marginalized. When a company creates ads aimed at men, however, the PC scolds and women of the furrowed brow show up in five seconds flat.

Blogs and Brands

Pete Blackshaw of Intelliseek has a letter in the 22 November 2004 Ad Age that discusses the impact of blogs on conventional branding:

Far beyond their role in various forms of journalism, blogs are empowering real consumers to offer real-time narratives about issues and themes that touch their lives-narratives often grounded in real, meaningful experiences with branded products and services. Consider the tens of thousands of blog entries on LiveJournal by women and teens talking about buying their first car. Did somebody say "who needs a focus group?"

And deep consumer insights are just the beginning. The 'archiving' of consumer opinion on blogs is having a major, unmistakable 'advertising effect', and most marketers and PR professionals are dangerously oblivious to it. Blogs represent one of the fastest-growing sources of indexed content on search engines-a growing percentage of which now includes high-impact 'reason to believe' photos, video and audio.

See also

Another butler throws a hissy fit

Nothing to see, just move along

MSM pilot fish strike back

Nothing to see, just move along

The 9/27 Ad Age was the first issue to weigh in on the Rather/forgery scandal. It decided to dismiss the whole matter in a snide little column on page 75:

UNDERSTAND THIS: If the CBS News Bush-National Guard piece was factually inaccurate, there would be screaming from Bush-Cheney '04 on that point out the ying-yanq. It's not. And there isn't. As it stands, we're now-finally!-past marveling about how we're debating electric typewriter functions from 35 years ago. Credit the bloggers for uncovering the screw-up.

We'd whack CBS for not reading the fine print finely enough, but it's so busy fending off the frothing hordes, we will likely not be heard. Now, perhaps, our "friends" at the likes of FreeRepublic.com can get off the off-with-his-head stuff and get back on the important stuff, like cleaning spittle off their computer screens.

Does Rather go? The Buzz is a terrible predictor, and for all we know Rather will have fled to Guam by the time you read this. And we can extrapolate nada in terms of future response from an institution that seems stuck in 1974, judging from CBS's slow, grudgeful trudge of a walk-back, or the now-famous comparison of its' 'layers of checks and balances'' with' 'a guy sitting in his living room in pajamas" courtesy of former CBS exec Jonathan Klein

But forget this docu-drama for a moment and consider, instead, the bigger issue fa the network news-what The Buzz likes to call the France Problem Despite overweening self-regard, no one notices 'em until they infuriate the Western world-or at least the right-wing blogosphere.

It is hard to come up with a better example of ignorant knowingness. The factual accuracy of the story has been disputed from beginning to end-by TANG officers, by Killian's family, and by bloggers and journalists. All CBS had was the word of a Kerry fundraiser and some forged documents.

It is easy to make fun of the debate around fonts and typewriters. But the real story remains the fact that CBS News put its credibility behind a source and some documents that could not withstand twelve hours of public scrutiny.

One would think that advertisers should worry that the tarnish on CBS might rub off on their commercial messages that appear on the network. Given the high cost of brand building, even a small amount of blowback would be enough to make shifting to other networks and other media prudent.

Ad Age is wholly uninterested in that question. It prefers to slap at conservatives who are outraged at a blatant political dirty-trick masquerading as news. This bears out the point made here that the insular media/advertising world will ignore the crumbling foundations of their revenue model and the problem posed by the rise of new media. The ratings drop will be explained away-the lost viewers are not all that attractive, Republican truck-buyers don't care that Ford funds Mary Mapes's liberal adventures, bloggers don't have influence.

They are determined to test the viability of denial as a survival strategy.

Knowability Paradox

In the 6-21-04 Ad Age, Randall Rothenberg identified the Achilles heel of our large media companies:

Our entire media-spindustrial infrastructure is undergirded by what I called the "Knowability Paradox." The less we know about how advertising and the media works, the more advertising and media there are.

The closer we come to being able to measure not only the real size but the exact composition of the audience, the more we subvert mass media owners's ability to persuade marketers that black, if not white, is at least very gray.

The lack of good information, coupled with inertia, ensures that money keeps flowing to CNN, Newsweek, and the New York Times.

The media business model rests on the foundation of customer ignorance. It is dangerously unstable because it frequently places media companies at odds with their customers (the big advertisers). The customers want more and better information; media companies fear that better information will hurt advertising revenue.

Zero Defects and Branding Services

Frozen North (permlink not working, look for 18 March) discusses the role of quality in the marketing of services. He is quite right to emphasize that the customer service experience is a critical component of the brand image and that service firms err if they ignore it in favor of advertising and PR.

The long-term problem is that CS quality isn't a sustainable point of differentiation. Your competitors can copy your zero-defect call center. At that point, bad service hurts your brand, but good service doesn't help: customers perceive it as par for the course.

Good service, then, is a necessary, but not sufficient factor in branding success. The firm needs something else to claim a premium position. Strategic management requires that leadership keep its eye on two goals at once: the short-term objective of zero defects and the long-term goal of being distinctive in a way that is meaningful to customers. It is a mistake to believe that the latter will flow automatically from the former.

Super Bowl Fallout

Ad Age has a couple of reactions to the Super Bowl ads and the half-time show. This one is not surprising:

PR FIRMS PRAISE JANET JACKSON BREAST STUNT
'It Raises the Bar for All of Us,' Says Executive

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- For those in the business of masterminding public-relations stunts for marketers, Janet Jackson's big expose during CBS's airing of the Super Bowl has raised a serious issue: how to top it.

I also like this reaction to the ads by Ad Age's editor:

AN ADVERTISING SUPER BOWL OF NON-IDEAS

Sophomoric Humor Fails as Compelling Entertainment

A flatulent horse. Tens of millions of Americans open their doors, and this is what marketers drag into their living rooms. A farting horse.

Yeah, thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Entertainment bowl

The Super Bowl, more entertainment spectacle than sporting event (despite this year's nail-biting finish), is a perfect platform for marketers to demonstrate how their messages can break through in a cluttered, fragmented and viewer-controlled media universe. As advertising moves from unwelcome intruder to invited guest, it is more likely to be cloaked as entertainment, as something viewers choose to spend time with because of a perceived intrinsic value.

The expectation is there with the Super Bowl that the ads will enhance the experience -- viewers have been conditioned by breathless segments of morning shows, newspaper stories and cable news reports to tune in as much for the ads as for the game. But there's a sense of artificial, forced frivolity that surrounds the event, and the mediocrity of the creative reminds that the ad business won't be saved merely by turning up the volume on 30-second commercials.

Super Bowl Ads

A thirty-second spot in this year's Super Bowl is going to cost $2.25 million. That's a record and is up 7% over last year.

Given their high cost and the intense scrutiny they receive, breaking commercials on the Super Bowl is a high risk proposition. Get it wrong and you've tossed away a big chunk of this year's advertising budget.

There is also the danger of hyper-awareness. Viewers watch, evaluate, and discuss the commercials as commercials. The underlying product can easily get lost. Often advertisers end up making a "great commercial" rather than one that most effectively conveys their message.

Some companies have to advertise on the Super Bowl. Budweiser commercials are almost a tradition. New movies, because they have to build awareness quickly, can benefit from the huge audience. Most of the other advertisers are rolling the dice in the hope that they can catch lightening the way Apple did with the "1984" spot.

UPDATE: Justin Katz comments here.

The Young and the Pointless

This is a great article on how advertisers over-value the 18-34 demographic.

Advertisers have their reasons for targeting teens and 20-somethings. First among them is the belief that long-term brand loyalties are set when people are young and impressionable. The problem is that the belief is based on market research that is 40 years out of date. "It's a cliché and a fallacy to think you can build a customer for life," says Al Ries, a longtime New York ad exec who is now a marketing consultant in Atlanta. "As people grow up, they change brands."

This isn't just a problem for advertisers:

Why should we care if advertisers have been duped into paying extra for teenage eyeballs? Because it's one big reason that so much of the dial--and the broader culture--is filled with dreck. "Network executives lose a lot of sleep trying to figure out what will hold fast the slippery attention of people in their late teens, 20's and early 30's," writes Jonathan Dee. "It is the principle by which a great deal of our popular culture--not just TV, but music, movies, radio--comes into existence." Take away the unearned premium demanded by shows that skew young and there might be more room for entertainments that aren't embarrassing to grown-ups.

One major hurdle to correcting this over-valuation is that the people who create advertising and buy advertising time tend to be 18-34 college-educated urbanites. They will still tend to advertise on programs that appeal to and flatter them (Friends, Seinfeld).

The author overstates his case here, however.

The "customer for life" cliché isn't the only blunder behind advertisers' youth fixation. Mr. Cracknell tells of a gin brand he worked for that would panic every few years when research showed the average age of its customers to be 50. They were acting on the "my customers are all about to die" fallacy, which leads companies to look for replacement customers on the playground. (This strategy may work for cigarette manufacturers, but is not widely applicable otherwise.)

Sears and GM (especially Buick, Olds, and Cadillac) were badly hurt when baby boomers failed to behave as their parents had. The advancing age of their average customer was an indication that their assumptions about customer lifecycle behavior were out-of date.

Advertising Metrics and the Problem of Interpretation

One common metric used by marketers to evaluate advertising effectiveness is "recall". After their ads run with sufficient reach and frequency, research firms survey the target audience of the ads to see how many remember seeing/hearing the ad, its central message, etc.. If those numbers don't come in high enough, the usual response is to blame the advertising for being unmemorable and the agency for insufficient creativity.

That line of reasoning assumes that the advertising was seen and heard. In the age of the remote control, Tivo, impatient viewers, and proliferating commercials, that assumption is not tenable. The radio program may have 500,000 listeners, but how many sit through the six or seven or eight ads thrown at them during commercial breaks? The best ad in the world will look ineffective if it is slotted fifth in an eight spot block. Too many people will have zapped away.

Advertisers demand that their agencies "cut through the clutter" of competing ads. It is time that they look at media outlets and ask why they create clutter by putting together massive blocks of often insipid ads. While the eighth commercial does increase marginal revenue for the TV or radio station, it probably reduces the impact of the other ads.

Similarly, advertisers are going to have to come to grips with the impact of recording technology on viewership. It may be that technophiles are a lost cause for broadcast commercials. But advertisers can at least stop paying to "reach" an audience that is unreachable. NBC et. al. will not do the necessary analysis; that would take money out of their coffers. But any company serious about marketing ROI has to pay attention to this problem.

Advertising as a commodity

Once the heads of advertising agencies dealt with the CEOs of their clients. They were seen as counselors, not merely people who wrote ads. Bill Bernbach did not just make clever commercials for VW. More than anyone, he defined the whole marketing position for the Beetle and allowed VW to compete with General Motors on GM's home turf. (Mary Wells's A Big Life in Advertising gives an insider's' view of the era.)

Paradoxically, despite the fact that "building strong brands" has become a key strategic initiative for most businesses, the role of the agency inside the client company had been downgraded. Senior management rarely confers with anyone at the agency. According to Ad Age 3 out of 4 top advertisers now involve their procurement people in the purchase of advertising. Apparently, they no longer look to agencies for strategic advice; today, they see ad creation as analogous to buying gasoline and janitorial services.

It has always been difficult to measure the return on advertising. It seems that corporations have decided to simply focus on cost reduction and hope that equates to improved performance.

Men Marriage and Advertising-- Follow-up

Several bloggers commented on this post and they make interesting points:

Snooze Button Dreams is one of those who are watching less TV because of "men are dumb" stereotype:

I don't watch things that irritate me and the ever growing "guys are lovable losers/bumbling idots" thing has pretty much trashed television as an entertainment vehicle for me.

The Desert Light Journal is another blog that thinks the portrayal of men on TV could account for the decline of male viewership


Snippy offers a woman's perspective that cuts to the heart of the matter:

That second one is, in fact, far more important to me. I'm in the middle (or possibly by some definition near the end) of trying to raise my sons to be men who are valuable and cherished members of our society. These insidious attacks on their value as human beings, and on the images I've tried to present to them of worthwhile manhood, mean more time spent fighting negativity and less time spent building important values like respect, self-reliance, confidence, generosity, and kindness.

The Man without Qualities makes a provocative point:

But there seems to be another force at work: American television increasingly presents a tolerant view of homosexuality, and increasingly presents images of gay interaction itself. I am not interested in condemning or condoning that development here. But it is simply a fact that the development has happened and is continuing to happen.

In my opinion, while tolerance of gay lifestyles may (or may not) be increasing in the United States, it is also a fact that the great majority of American men do not feel comfortable being directly or indirectly involved in or witnessing or having their attention drawn to any aspect of gay interaction.

I'm not sure i agree completely. I don't doubt that the increasing gay presence on TV may turn off some viewers. But gays on TV are themselves often caricatures--- urban, swishy, smart, bitchy, witty, girly. Will on Will and Grace is simply the other side of the coin, the antithesis of the doofus clod husband on a dozen sitcoms. On Queer Eye the opposition of gay to straight men is made explicit. But all of it is rather a set-up, the gay characters are used to mock conventional males.

Men Marriage and Advertising

One of the targets of Kim du Toit's now famous rant was the way men are portrayed in commercials. On this he was absolutely right. The middle class guy as doofus is one of the most popular themes in advertising. Chevy uses it to sell cars, Circuit City to sell electronics. Frozen pizza, cereal, cleaning supplies-- all of them use men as the butt of their jokes.

To go further, while men of all types are on the receiving end, husbands are the ones who get it worse

I don't doubt that if you totaled all the spending on these commercials you would conclude that "husbands are dumb" is the most popular advertising message in America. If TV commercials can shape the image of a sneaker or beer, what is it doing to the image of marriage.

Miller's advertising competes with with Budweiser's. But there is very little advertising which portrays the husband/father as an attractive, respected figure.

Women, most of them, should be concerned about this cliche as well. Implicit in the message is the wife as ball and chain. Husbands are clearly guys who have no fun. The only men enjoying life in commercials are single. The point is neither subtle nor nuanced and it is repeated over and over in prime time.

Jane Galt thinks this trend simply reflects the fact that women make the buying decisions for most consumer products. This is unsatisfactory. The anti-husband commercials are not only used to sell cereal, paper towels, and diapers. They also promote cars and beer where the target market includes men.

I wonder if these ads are part of the reason that men are deserting TV, especially broadcast TV. (See here and here). The barrage of disparaging commercials just make it a little less appealing to the male demographic.