"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
--William Shakespeare, "As You Like It" (2:7)
"You're gonna like the way you look. I guarantee it."
--George Zimmer, Founder and CEO, The Men's Wearhouse
In what was perhaps the biggest surprise in a campaign season that was full of surprises, Senator John McCain tore a page from the Madison Avenue playbook and asked Americans to think about "Joe the Plumber." Unless you are time travelling backward from the future, or you were asleep in the final weeks running up to the election, you will recall the collective groan from people in the marketing class who quickly read this October surprise as a final act of desperation. It wasn't just that "Joe the Plumber" was being summoned as yet another voice for a campaign that kept losing its voice. And it wasn't just that the character of "Joe the Plumber" didn't quite match with the real Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher. For those of us steeped in the world of marketing, the most amazing thing in the entire affair was that the character of "Joe the Plumber" is, in fact, a character, just like any of the thousands of artifacts that Madmen have created since the dawn of modern advertising. And if the McCain crew had done their homework -- had they done some time travelling of their own -- they would have learned that "Joe the Plumber" actually has an historical precedent. In the late 1960s, when McCain was recovering from his internment as a POW, Procter & Gamble introduced "Josephine the Plumber," the trustworthy, working-class, proto-feminist mascot that would represent its popular kitchen cleanser for years to come.
You don't have to be an advertising geek to know why this ploy didn't work for McCain. But it's interesting to reflect on what might have led his team to even try. Characters have been a staple in American advertising and political campaign work from almost the beginning, and it wasn't so long ago -- not long ago for the McCain people -- that a Democratic Primary contender effectively beat up his opponent by asking "where's the beef," the one-line script written for actress Clara Peller, the mascot for the Wendy's hamburger empire. It might have worked, perhaps, were it not for the many questions that the "Joe the Plumber" episode raised in the so-called age of transparency:
--Why do brands and political campaigns use characters?
--Why we do we -- as consumers, as voters -- ever accept them (we do, sometimes, and yes, there's a reason)
--Why do we reject them (we do, sometimes, and yes, there's a reason)
Over the next two weeks (from now until January 16), I will attempt to answer these and other questions about the use and abuse of character. And to prepare for this end-of-year project, I tried hard to do my homework. With a database of 250-plus characters from U.S. advertising -- mostly from the television era, but dating as far back as ante-bellum mascots that first appeared in print -- I've spent the last two weeks discovering a number of patterns truly worth noting and deserving, I hope, of your time. And at the end of this long journey, I hope to come back to a few final reflections on the Obama/McCain contest, which provides even deeper lessons on "character" and the impact that social media has had on this once very American -- but now very global -- commodity.
COMING UP:
THE ORIGINS OF CHARACTER
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