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Advertising With Character -- Part VI: Clowns

Advertising With Character:  an exploration into the use and abuse of characters in marketing -- from Aunt Jemima, to Josephine the Plumber, to Joe the Plumber -- running December 10 through January 16.  

Note -- 12/24:  Though I originally expected to finish this series on Christmas Day, I have decided to extend this series with a number of new entries.  The extra work will take me through the beginning of the new year.  Bear with me -- I hope to make it worth the wait.

Today:  Clowns

OK, let's start with a quick recap of the series to date.  I opened with a post about the origins of character -- namely, the recurring character.  The origins are ancient, but most recently they came to us at the brink of the Industrial Revolution by way of the theatre (the Victorian stage).   I then looked at the transition from character making to mass character production and the role that Hollywood, broadcast media and TV played during that transition. I then looked at the question, "Why Brands Need Character," with a general overview of three characters types -- slaves, clowns, and heroes -- that have enabled brands to relate with consumers in an "almost human way."  I looked at the earliest type, slaves, concluding that it's a precursor to a contemporary type -- the CEO as corporate servant -- which would develop even further in the social media era.   After a brief look at some of the methods and tools that advertisers have used to introduce these characters into every part of our lives -- they are in your kitchen, in your bath, in your toilet, in your pants. -- I am now ready to look at the second character type, which I call "clowns."

The first thing you need to understand about clowns is what they are not.  Again, it's helpful to look at the theatre for illustration.   The clown is not the slave in ancient comedy.  But he could be.  In fact, one might argue that slaves make the best clowns, as in the case of Pseudolus, the slave character in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," the Stephen Sondheim adaptation of stories from ancient roman comedy.  The role of the slave is to serve the audience -- by providing access, a window, into the story.  Nor is the clown the hero in the play.   The role of the hero -- as I will show in tomorrow's post -- is to drive the events of the story.  And the role of the clown?  In simple terms, his role is to try to subvert the whole thing -- the story, the hero, even the slave if necessary (whether or not the clown happens to be a slave).

It's easy to see why this works in comedy.  There's an old saying:  tragedy is when a bad thing happens to you; comedy is when bad things happen to other people.  So we are quite OK with  characters who work to subvert the whole thing.  That's what makes comedies fun.   But how do they work in advertising?   To get to this, I have divided the lot of my of clown-like characters in advertising -- which total 86 of the 250-plus characters I have collected (more than a third) -- into three general groups:  clowns who distract, characters who distance, and characters who serve the role of making the hero look good (foils).  It's this last category which really help me to make the point of this post -- that, fundamentally, the clown's role is a subversive one.  But what's being subverted is the big question, because while all this drama is happening, brands are getting built, goods are being sold, and you, the consumer, are buying those goods.

I.  DISTRACTORS

My business partner Peter Hirshberg -- who knows a thing or two about theatre himself -- likes to refer to people in our world (the world of marketing) as "merchants of distraction."  Of course, this is the kind of thing that social media folks should be working against.  Someday, we believe, it will all end.  In the interim, we're in the business of gaining, earning, or otherwise capturing the attention of consumers who, frankly, have little time for us.  We understand that the social-media revolution, to some extent, has made matters worse.  We are all -- marketers and consumers alike -- busier than ever.  But attention has been a problem for quite some time, at least since the days when food and toy brands first learned to fight for the attention of children -- the chief "lobbyists" in the home that Sut Jhally often talks about -- on Saturday mornings.  Chances are that you first encountered many of the clown characters when you were a child.  But you are surrounded by them to this day.  And their first job is to distract you and get ... your ... attention.

Who are they, and how do they get the job done?  There are characters who are loud (Crazy Eddie, The Wiz, the Cocoa Puffs bird).  Characters who are colorful (Froot Loops Toucan Sam, Gillette's Sharpie the Parrot, M&M's, the Fruit of the Loom guys, and of course, "real clowns" like Kedso and Ronald McDonald).  Characters who are hyperactive (again, the Cocoa Puffs bird) move funny (Mr. Six for Six Flags), seem odd or nerdy (Burger King's Herb).  They amuse us because they they are too small (Sprite's Miles Thirst, the Little Caesar slave/clown, and Nike's Lil Penny and Mars Blackmon), too large (Geoffrey the Giraffe for Toys R Us), too young for their roles (Quizno's Baby Bob, and the controversial Jell-O Chinese baby), too old for their lines (the Wendy's "where's the beef lady").  We like them because they are bad (the Foster Farms chickens, the Bud Ice Penguin, the Raid insects, the Bardahl Bad Guys, the Frito Bandito) because they are smartasses (the Capitol One "no!" guy), because they are annoying  (Expedia's Cooper, and Ernest, the clown in countless commercials in the 80s),  lazy (Western Airline's Wally the Bird), disingenuous (the "I love you, man!" Bud Light guy).

We like all of these qualities in clowns.  But most of all we like to be surprised -- the reward for distraction -- and the best clowns in advertising are designed to do just that, using the plasticity of the media that's available to make the oddest juxtapositions between character types and products -- angels and toilet tissue, barbarians and credit cards, cavemen and insurance, gorillas and luggage, monks and copy machines, aliens and pizza, frogs and beer, lizards and beer, dogs and beer, bears and beer, ducks and bubble gum, and an incredible menagerie of animals, elves, monsters and freaks for children's cereals (Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Boo Berry, Quisp, and Quake, just to name a few).  The freakier the clown, the better the ad, which might help to explain the success of the infamous Quizno's Spongemonkey spots, the epitome -- in my opinion -- of advertisement as distraction.

As I said above, the chief attribute of the clown is what he is not -- he is not a slave (not always), and he is not a hero.  Which is another way of saying that he is not you.  Unless, of course, the character inspires you to feel clownish.  A few characters in advertising have managed to do that, and when they do, advertisers get the prize they always strive for:  a character who the masses will mimic and whose lines they will repeat.   (This is the world of word-of-mouth, a place many advertisers never get to see.)   The best examples of this type of character?  I have two nominees.  First, there's Wendy's Clara Peller ("Where's the beef?"), which not only became part of the common vernacular in the 1980's after the commercials first played but also played a role in the 1984 Democratic primary race.  But a better and more recent example is the stoner-type Dell Dude.  "Dude, you're getting a Dell" not only became a famous catchphrase for the budget PC manufacturer but it also -- however briefly -- helped the company to shed its stodgy image and appear smarter, hipper to a new generation of consumers.  And it did that with a touch of irony, which, as I will show in the next section, was becoming at least as important as slapstick, the obviously distracting style of humor which had long dominated these types of commercials.

II.  DISTANCERS

The attention game got tougher as people got busier.  And people also got smarter, too.   By the late 1950s, simple slave and clown characters were not enough to keep Americans tuned to their sets.  Advertisers began weaving ironic characters and themes  into their scripts.  An early example of this was an animated character for Chevron named Hy Finn.  Actor Paul Ford provided the voice for the urbane man with the "disinterested voice."  The humor in these spots was the inside joke with the audience -- a wink-wink/nod-nod understanding that "yes this is funny, but it's an advertisement alright."  It was around this time that the husband-wife-team Mike Nichols and Elaine May were recruited to do a series of ads for a little-known beer called Jax.  The sophisticated, deadpan Nichols/May style was the trademark of these spots which played more like miniature, sophisticated dramas than straight-up commercials.

The shift to irony came with a growing recognition that for some consumers, it was important to acknowledge the wizard -- Madison Avenue -- behind the curtain and acknowledge the artifice of the commercial.  But it wasn't until the late 80's -- after 30 more years of TV advertising experiments, that we began seeing a lot more of this type of commercial/entertainment.   This was the age of Spuds McKenzie (the randy canine mascot for Budweiser), the Old Milwaukee Swedish Bikini Team (uh-huh), and perhaps the most obviously ironic character from this era, Joe Isuzu, the ironically dishonest car salesman.  The joke about Joe, of course, was that he was the exactly we should expect from a corporate mascot; we had already reached the conclusion that they were all dishonest.  But Joe Isuzu was different.  He was an official corporate liar.  And because he was a character, not a real person -- an important point which I will come back to later on in the series -- consumers loved him. 

At the start of this decade, we began to see more of these characters, and it was no surprise  that most came out of the "sin" industries who were learning that irony is an effective tool for using sex, drugs, and rock and roll to sell (from the Coors Light Twins early in the decade, to the more recent Bacardi & Cola parodies on 80's-era crime shows).  The irony here is that their earlier attempts at irony -- e.g., Spuds McKenzie -- look rather straight and obvious in retrospect.   Knowing this, the Anheuser Busch, in 2006 (the owner of Budweiser) launched a campaign to re-introducing the Rolling Rock brand which it has just recently acquired.  The campaign was nothing but wink-wink/nod-nod. Here was the brief for the ad guys:  Rolling Rock has a regional (East Coast) brand that appeals to a more earnest crowd than, say Budweiser, which the earnest crowd associates with the cheesy days of Spuds McKenzie (see where this is going?).  Solution:

*Make an intentionally bad, 80's-vintage, Budweiser-style commercial, complete with a Spuds-like character (in this instance, "the Beer Ape"), scantily-clad women, and a hair-band soundtrack.

*Post the commercial exclusively on YouTube, but pretend that it aired on TV and apologize for it.

*Create a fictitious VP of Marketing ("Ron Stablehorn"), and have him continue making apologies on a Web site and paid media (billboards and ultimately, yes, on TV, where the original commercial supposedly aired). You can read more about the Beer Ape here, my attempt at adding an additional layer of irony to this campaign).

How successful was the campaign?  Hard to tell, but the Rolling Rock Beer Ape was the number-one video on YouTube in November 2006.   Yet the real takeaway here is how far brands have progressed in testing the limits of irony.  In an age where transparency and honesty are the watchwords in marketing, a large contingent of Web-dwellers responded positively to this massive inside joke.

III.  FOILS

Which brings me to the final section of this post -- clowns who serve the role of making the hero look good.  We've seen this character over the years in different forms and disguises.  One is the comic villain (think of the scheming insects in the Raid commercials, foiled every time, whatever they do).  This follows a tradition in theatre and film that later found its way into TV storylines, cartoons, and advertising (think of the coyote in Road Runner).   But a purer form of this clown type comes another comedy tradition:  the pairing of the "straight man" and the clown.

If you are a fan of sitcoms, you know the straight man.  He, or she, is the one who stays sane while everybody else spirals out of control.  As the label suggests, he stays straight, while others lose their balance.   In sitcoms, the straight man works well with a team of clowns (e.g., Seinfeld), or with just a single clown (think Sanford & Son).  In stand-up, he works better in couples (think Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis, Penn & Teller).  In commercials, of course it's difficult to pull this off except in couples.  But when it happens, the result can be quite effective.   

Most obvious example of this?   I would have to vote for the Mac/PC commercials.  Both characters are played by established actors (Justin Long plays the Mac guy; John Hodgman, of Daily Show fame, plays the PC guy).   As the clown, of course, the PC guy gets the best lines.  So much so, I've heard people complain that the commercials can't possibly be effective "because the PC guy is funnier."  But both the logic of the spots and the commercial success that Apple has had suggest otherwise.  No matter what the PC guy does, no matter what he says, the Mac guy stands straight and looks cool. Of course, Apple is betting that a fair number of consumers are projecting themselves onto the Mac character -- in fact, by having the two characters stand side-by-side, occupying an equal amount of space (on the clean screen that Apple commercials are famous for) suggests that the market is equally divided -- an audacious statement for a company that owns such a small slice of that market.  But it appears to be working.  Just today I read that  Mac OS X now enjoys a 10% market share, the first time since Net Applications began tracking the use of operating systems on personal computers. 

In the meantime, behold the PC guy, who's standing right here, looking like a cool Obama next to the PC guy's McCain.  And for the first time in this series, we have a hero on camera, though you wouldn't know it because he's saying little, and moving even less. Of course, he's been there all along.  What I will look at in the next post is why we didn't notice.   

Advertising With Character -- Part V: Ancient, Animal, Anthropomorphic ... and yes, Animated

Advertising With Character:  an exploration into the use and abuse of characters in marketing -- from Aunt Jemima, to Josephine the Plumber, to Joe the Plumber -- running December 10 through January 16.  

Note -- 12/24:  Though I originally expected to finish this series on Christmas Day, I have decided to extend this series with a number of new entries.  The extra work will take me through the beginning of the new year.  Bear with me -- I hope to make it worth the wait.

Today:  Ancient, Animal, Anthropomorphic, Animated

Tonight, I am posting a short reader's guide for the remainder of this series, which kicks into high gear tomorrow.  In the last installment, I provided a general overview of one type of character which has figured prominently in modern advertising.  I have dubbed this character type, "the slave."  And in that last installment, I purposefully narrowed the discussion to naturalistic, human characters to make a point:  namely, that this character type is the ancestor to one of the most compelling -- though still somewhat unsatisfactory -- characters in 21st century advertising:  the real CEO -- not an invention, but the real guy or gal -- as corporate servant.  As I will attempt to show at the end of this series, the CEO as corporate servant would soon beget yet an even more contemporary character type.  

But before we go there, it's important to recognize how advertising has never limited itself to naturalistic, human characters.  That would have made the jobs of advertisers impossible.   After nearly 100 years into this experiment, advertising characters are everywhere:  they're in your kitchen, in your bath, in your toilet, in your pants.   Of course, there are really just in your head.   And the way they got there has a lot to do with three things that advertisers have traded in:  the ancient, the animal, the anthropomorphic, the animated.  Pardon me for the obvious mnemonic here.   I do believe that these qualities are related.

Ancient:  So let's start here.  As I argued earlier, the most dominant character types are traceable to theatre, where storytellers of a different kind -- actor/playwrights -- were the first to learn about the benefits of inventing recurring characters.   But in this installment, I am not looking at character types.  I am looking at attributes.  So when in the next two sections we look at clowns and heroes, it's also helpful to note that these character types had other qualities.  Many, for example -- and this is especially true in older advertisements -- hearken to the very ancient past, or a mythical past that holds sway over us.   Often, it's easy to spot them.    They come in the form of elves and pixies, which coincidentally are slave characters (think Keebler, Hotpoint, Rice Crispies, many others); cavemen, angels and barbarians (think Geico, Angel Soft Tissue, and Capital One); cowboys, ascetics, old men of the sea (Gortons), and the many other walks of life that no longer really exist, but that tug on our heartstrings nevertheless.  Let me make sure I have stated my case clearly:  the primary attribute of the ancient character is that it no longer exists in reality, but surely exists in our minds because we want it there.   And as long as it exists there, we will see it in advertising.

Animal:  Sociologist/media critic Sut Jhally often speaks about how our consumerist society has transformed children into amateur lobbyists against their parents.   I believe that large parts of the animal kingdom have been recruited to do the same.  We have lions, tigers, and bears (oh my) coming after us, of course.  But it doesn't stop there.  We have rabbits, frogs, elks, ducks, horses, koalas, beavers, and apes -- and a zoo and aquarium full of other creatures too many and too different to analyze here.   Many, of course, stand for the attributes we most associate with these animals, regardless of whether they are used as slaves, clowns or heroes.   And it's for this reason, perhaps, that the most often used animal in modern advertising -- the most often recruited lobbyist against man, as Sut Jhally might put it -- is man's best friend, the dog.  The dog has been invoked to sell everything, it seems, from cars (Ford), to clothing (Old Navy), to beans (Bush), to beer (Budweiser).   They inspire us to enjoy street life, and they urge us to fight crime.  And they are able to do all these things this because this animal -- more than other animals -- holds a place in our minds that many people would envy.   It's a place called trust.   Remember the old saw about Washington DC  -- if you want a friend, get a dog?  Well, in this tough town called marketing, if you want customer today -- and you don't have trust -- you too might want a pooch.   

Anthropomorphic:   In my analysis of slave types I purposely omitted the sundry anthropomorphic characters that have been invented to persuade consumers that the product would work tireless for them to make their domestic dreams come true.  What better way to say this than to make products or their attributes come to life?   Thus was born the soapy bubble dedicated to cleaning our toilets; the mitt to help us pull out that tasty food out of the oven, and avoid the burn; the indefatigable toy bunny, marching without end with the superior batteries inside it.   But as I will try to show in the next two installments, products can come to life in other roles besides servants.  They can entertain us, instruct us, cajole us, inspire us.   But in case it's not obvious, they have come to life to sell us in a way that is almost human.  I have been saying this all along about characters in advertising.  But never has it been so obvious as in the case of anthropomorphic characters.   

Animated:  Which leads me to the last category -- animation.   If it wasn't obvious before, we now now we it's important to tap the ancient, the animal, and the anthropomorphic in advertising.  But, practically speaking, how do you do it?   Not easy to make render an elf in an interesting way, particularly given the fact that we don't really believe in them.  Or how about animals?  How do you make a dog funny without giving him lines?  Or  how about anthropomorphic characters?   Not easy to get an oven mitt to do stuff ... unless of course he were animated.   Out of the 250-plus characters that I studied for this series, 3/5ths (about 150) are animated.   Given the burdens of production for animated versus non-animated characters, that's a pretty staggering number.  

Yes, I just made a case for why advertisers need animation, but there are other things worth noting:

*Animation taps a part of us that is special/sacred.  It's about the universal need to create.  We appreciate it and respect it ...  even if we cannot do it.  I am reminded of the trippy commercials of the 1960s which featured artists like Peter Max, whose art, in part, was about making art.   There's a long line of animated commercials that carried on this theme.

*Animation also enable brands to tell complex stories that often elude advertisers.   There's a United Airlines commercial that uses animation to this effect -- telling the story of business man under the duress to get a contract signed -- and he is aided, of course, by a tranquil UA flight.  It would have been difficult to do this without animation, and a George Gershwin soundtrack that would have sounded weird in a naturalistic setting.

*Animated characters can be used, reused, and reimagined in any number of ways.  Potentially, they are the most strategic assets a brand can own.   Think how often the characters of cereal brands have been reimagined and reused without any need for further casting.  Once minted, the characters become the property of the brand.  Hard to do that with people -- i.e., actors -- who (1) age, (2) grow disenchanted, and (3) otherwise move on.

As I said at the start, the mnemonic for today's post has meaning.  Each of the categories has to do with giving a product a personality, which -- outside of its media -- has no personality.   And the history of advertising shows that brands have taken this challenge very seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that we have to regard commercials in the way we think of other media -- as another form of entertainment.  As my series draws to a close (just four more posts), I'll look at the implications of this development.   It might help to show why commercials will persist long after we have deemed them irrelevant.  

Advertising With Character -- Extending the Series Through New Year's

A special note on Advertising With Character:  I originally expected to finish this series on Christmas Day, but I have decided to extend this series with a number of two new entries.  I also decided to build out the sections that I intended to post today and tomorrow (on "clowns" and "heroes").   The extra work will take me through the beginning of the new year.  Bear with me -- I hope to make it worth the wait.   As I expected, I am learning a great deal more while writing than I did in the research phase.

The new schedule:

December 30:   Ancient, Animal, and Animated

Wednesday, December 31:  "Clowns"

January 14:  "Heroes"

January 15:  The Case Against Character

January 16:   The Impact of Social Media

In the meantime, happy holiday!

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Advertising With Character -- IV: "Slaves"

 

Pseudolus

Advertising With Character:  an exploration into the use and abuse of characters in marketing -- from Aunt Jemima, to Josephine the Plumber, to Joe the Plumber -- running December 10 through January 16.  

Note -- 12/24:  Though I originally expected to finish this series on Christmas Day, I have decided to extend this series with a number of new entries.  The extra work will take me through the beginning of the new year.  Bear with me -- I hope to make it worth the wait.

Today:  "Slaves"

So, at long last, today I go into the details of my 250-character survey.   I have set the stage by looking at the following:

--the origins of "character."  Generally, I looked at where characters come from (ancient sources) and specifically I looked at where recurring characters come from (theatre, most recently the Victorian Music Hall stage, which stood poised between the ancient world of character-making to the modern world of character production.

-the character factory.  I then looked briefly at the beginnings of the Hollywood/Broadcast/Madison avenue complex, and the creation of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, which takes us into the modern era of character production.  As I noted in the first installment, the recurring character enabled storyteller to scale their reach, and the early days of modern media transformed a Victorian theatre archetype into an object of mass production.

--why brands need character.  I then looked at the reasons brands went to work at the character factory, noting that -- among other things -- the factory enabled brands to scale their reach to consumers in the new industrial era, and -- more importantly -- it enabled these brands to relate to consumers in an almost human way.  I looked specifically at one commercial character -- the Sun Maid -- who was based on a real fruit picker from the depression era.  She belonged to a class of character -- framed broadly and deliberately as "slaves" -- which would become a mainstay in modern advertising.

I'll looking at two other classes of characters -- dubbed heroes and clowns -- tomorrow and Thursday.  And the question I want to ask for each of the three is, "what does a brand get from this type of character?"  But I will also try to demonstrate -- as we go along -- that these three archetypes provide brands with a simple yet flexible framework for engaging with consumers across of broad spectrum of values, tastes, and levels of sophistication.  Each of the three character types speaks to a universal human condition.

Slaves

I hope I do not offend anyone by choosing to call this first category slaves, and not laborers, drudges, or whatever.  I thought about it a great deal, and was inspired once again to go to the origins of comedy.  But we don't have to dust off any books to get a close look at Roman theatre.  In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a fantastically funny modern rendition of comedies by Roman comedians such as Plautus, the character around whom the entire story unfolds is Pseudolus (played originally by Zero Mostel, revived most recently by Nathan Lane).  Pseudolus is many things.  He is funny.  He is cunning.  He is dishonest (though we love him for it -- more on that later).  Most of all he is a servant, and as a servant he is able to provide that thing that storytellers have always tried to provide since the entire enterprise of storytelling  began:

a character type that the audience can not only relate to, but also identify with 

a character type that stands in relation to other characters types that are central to the story

a character type that can adapt to evolving notions of servitude

For most of our history, the human condition has been a struggle over varying degrees of servitude, and for the masses, the slave is the character that most directly speaks to them.  He is the window, so to speak, into the story.  Like Ismael, the narrator in Moby Dick, he speaks directly to the audience -- a big thing, as I will show later -- from the perspective not of the captain of the ship, but as "a simple sailor, jumping from spar to spar like a grasshopper in a May meadow. Very much like a slave. But who isn't a slave? Tell me that." 

But it's not as simple as that.  Again, the character of the slave is one that gives the audience a way to identify and relate.  And, of course, it's a lot different to be a slave than to have one in your life.

Phase I:  Familial and Familiar

Of course, in the U.S., the word slave can be used too loosely.  Our own history with real slavery ended not too long ago.  But if you look at the history of characters in advertising, you will see a direct progression from characters that were in fact based on American slaves.  Perhaps the most visible of all these characters has been Aunt Jemima, inspired from a minstrel by the same name.  (In fact, the first Aunt Jemima, Nancy Green, was born a slave,  in 1834).  As the Wikipedia entry on this character notes, she is

depicted as a plump, smiling, bright-eyed, African-American woman, originally wearing a kerchief over her hair. She was represented as a slave and was the most commonplace representation of the stereotypical 'mammy' character.

Anyone who grew up watching movies from the golden era from Hollywood -- from films as different as Gone With the Wind to Holiday Inn (the film that actually originated the song "White Christmas," and features a controversial minstrel/blackface number which often gets cut from showing on TV) -- will recognize the 'mammy' character.  The name of the character is telling; the role of this real "mammies" was in part maternal, therefore earning a place -- sort of -- in the family.  Which draws an interesting parallel to Uncle Ben, the mascot for the rice company.  Again, Wikipedia:

When white South Carolina planters were unable to make their rice crops thrive, “slaves from West Africa’s rice region tutored planters in growing the crop.”  In the American South, whites once commonly referred to elderly black men as uncle even though they were not blood relatives.

The article adds, "during the later 20th century, this was considered patronizing and demeaning and was widely deprecated."  No doubt  -- recall the fictional character, "Uncle Tom," which Ralph Nader used recently -- and disastrously -- in reference to Barack Obama.  Dangerous words, to be sure.  But the point is that these pseudo-familial characters were quite prevalent in advertising, and some still remain (like Rastus, the mascot of the Cream of Wheat brand).  The characters may have been modified (slimmer, hipper, more contemporary), and the roots to slavery may not be at all visible to a generation unfamiliar with the ways in which we used words like aunt and uncle.  But here they are today in our supermarkets and in our pantries.

But without dwelling too much on the roots of these characters, it's important to see the connection to later characters -- they invoked the idea that the brand is there to serve the consumer (yep -- it looks ugly when seen in its most extreme form).  The fact that the U.S. permitted citizens to force others to serve them might obscure that connection.  At the time that these brands were launched, the double-duty nature of the slave character -- permitting the consumer to identify and relate with the servile characters -- enabled brands to connect deeply with consumers, many of whom never had and "aunt" or "uncle" in the home.  With these brands, they could.  Slaves would go away, and the industrial age would introduce a motley range of paycheck-earning types that advertisers would begin to use to communicate the same idea:  we are here to make your life -- dear drone -- just a little bit easier.  But perhaps the best transitional character was the servant for hire -- the butler.  We've seen him often -- in the 1950's, in the form of Kleenex's Mr. Manners, and more recently, with Ask Jeeves.  But for most people, the butler as character can only work in the abstract -- too comical a conceit for the kind of grounded connection that brands seek with slave characters.  There are all sorts of jobs and professions that fit the idea better.  

Phase II:  Working Stiffs

Fast-forward to the TV age, and the slave as slave character gets a complete makeover.  Starting in the early 1950s, and over the next few decades, and consumers would be introduced to a long line of everymen and everywomen from practically every walk of life.  

There were plumbers (Josephine the Plumber for Comet), repairmen (the Maytag repairman), supermarket manager (Mr. Whipple for Charmin). There were cops on the street (the Karl Malden character for American Express), cleaners in the kitchen (Mr. Clean), captains in the toilet (the Ty-D-Bol man) and a wide assortment of busybodies whose sole job, it seemed, was to help you solve every domestic challenge in your life (Aunt Bluebelle for Scot Towel, Madge the cosmetologist for Palmolive ("you're soaking in it.").  

Unlike their antecedents from the real slave era, they were more like you and me, assuming we're from the working class (a huge new market for brand advertisers in the post-war economy).  But just like their antecedents, their vocation was to serve, and Madison Avenue used characters to serve in practically every domain in what was undoubtedly becoming an increasingly busy life for consumers (though some would argue that a lot of busy-ness was being manufactured by the brands).  From this light, they seem less like servants than companions.  But it was an esprit de corps that formed the bond between these imaginary working stiffs and the real working stiffs that advertisers targeted.

Phase III:   The Corporate Servant

 

Betty Crocker -- Through the Years

But perhaps the most significant development was the idea of the CEO as servant.  The idea here was as simple as it was elusive.  Was not so long ago that brands felt they needed to invent their corporate mascots (Ann Page for A&P, Betty Crocker for General Mills).  Then a few brands began trading on the personal brands of real people with real reputations (for example, Duncan Hines, a  super salesman who rose to fame as an amateur critic of roadside eateries).  And while leaders in the modern PR profession have always looked for ways to elevate the visibility of businesses by elevating the visibility of the CEO (John D. Rockefeller's campaign to give everyone he met a dime? Supposedly the work of proto-PR guru, Ivy Lee).  You simply didn't see much of this on TV, and when you did the characters seemed so contrived that one had to wonder if in fact they were real (e.g., Colonel Sanders and Orville Redenbacher -- both real, both founders of their companies).   They worked beautifully in an earlier era, but survive less as characters and more as logos.  But as we edge closer to the current era, you begin to see brands doing more and more with their CEOs, and  -- as if for shock value -- the idea is that the CEO has replaced the servant in the kitchen, the busybody in the toilet.  Now, the CEO is the brand, and to connect with you he has promised to make your life easier, better.

Who best represents this trend? 

There are a few good candidates.  

There's Dave Thomas of Wendy's, who spoke directly to the camera and promised a good deal at his establishment.  There's George Zimmer, founder and CEO of The Men's Warehouse, who, also spoke directly to the camera, and promised that "you are going to like the way you look," the kind of line I use to hear when shopping, say, at Moe Ginsburg, the famous cut-rate men's store (they got great remainders from other stores) in New York City.  There's Charles Schwab, who has run many speak-directly-to-the -camera campaigns and now is marketing his company with a  campaign called "Talk to Chuck."   Mr. Schwabs's new campaign seems like the one most in keeping with the philosophy of the conversational era, complete with talk balloons in the campaign artwork.  But my favorite example does not qualify as advertising per se.  Perhaps it comes closer to PR, but as a veteran from that world, I would argue that calling it PR does the man a disservice.  I am talking about Craig Newmark, the founder and boss at craigslist, who does not carry the title of CEO, but instead calls himself "chief customer service rep."  If you ever met the guy, you would know that he is not kidding.  And for that, and other reasons, craigslist has an amazing brand and an amazing bond with its customers.

But there's another reason to end today's post with a note about Craig.  In the next two days I will explore two other archetypes in advertising, then close with a look at how the character-in-advertising tradition is faring in the new world of social media.  What Craig has done is, in a way, revolutionary.  Brands have attempted to relate to consumers by humanizing  -- sort of -- the way it engages with them.  They have done that with characters.  And one type of character that has been very effective is the servant.  Now what if the guy or gal running the company spoke AND acted like a servant, albeit a corporate servant.  You are going to like that gal or guy.  But are you necessary going to like the company?  That depends of course on who you really interact with at the company.  That, folks, may be the next evolution of this character type I have loosely termed "slave," and I vow to go deeper into that subject at the conclusion of this series.  But not until we look at an equally dominant character type.  As I said near the start of this post, one of the three things that are important about the slave character is how it stands in relation to other characters.  You can say that the next character type  -- the clown -- has emerged as a constant companion.

NEXT:  Ancient, Animal, and Animated  

Advertising With Character -- Pt. III: Why Brands Need "Character"

Advertising With Character:  an exploration into the use and abuse of characters in marketing -- from Aunt Jemima, to Josephine the Plumber, to Joe the Plumber -- running December 10 through January 16.  

Note -- 12/24:  Though I originally expected to finish this series on Christmas Day, I have decided to extend this series with a number of new entries.  The extra work will take me through the beginning of the new year.  Bear with me -- I hope to make it worth the wait.

Today:  Why Brands Need "Character"

So, in the first two installments of this series, I covered two topics:  (1)  the origins of characters in advertising (ancient sources, but they come to us most recently via the world of theatre), and (2) the "character factory," the Hollywood/Broadcast/Madison Avenue complex that transformed the creation of character into the production of character.  As I said in my first piece, the concept of the recurring character provided storytellers with at least three benefits for the development of their business and craft.  Not the least of those benefits is that storytellers can extend the value of their work beyond a single unit of entertainment.  My friend and social-media colleague Deb Schultz likes to say that "people don't scale."  Tis true, but characters do scale, and that's why so many storytellers -- including advertisers -- like them so much.

But there's another, more critical reason why brands like characters.  As the character factory began to crank in early Hollywood -- and the industrial age began to transform popular media -- it became nearly impossible to reach and engage people in any way that resembled the past.  Gone were the days of the singing fruit pickers in open-air markets, and in came the days of the images and voices of vendors.  It's interesting to note that the Sun Maid mascot, one of the most enduring characters in advertising, was modeled Lorraine Collet Petersen, a planter and picker from Fresno.   But the Sun Maid folks benefited not just because the character of the Sun Maid was scalable.  They benefited because the character gave the company -- which otherwise would have been faceless in the new industrial economy -- with an almost human  way to relate to the public.

It was an idea that had challenges from the very beginning.   And it puzzles people today even more that brands continue to invent characters to make a human connection with the public.  But in the remainder of this series, I'll attempt to explain why the experiment has lasted so long, and why it is unlikely that characters in advertising will ever go away.   I'll start down this path by taking a close look at the many brand-based characters that have hit the American stage since the dawn of the industrial era -- culled from a concise database of 250-plus characters that I will share at the conclusion of this series.  As we'll see, the roles that the best characters have played over time have almost always spoken to the public in a way that conforms to contemporary views and tastes.   And, of course, what was acceptable yesterday in terms of sophistication and taste may no longer be acceptable today.  But if you look at the history and patterns, you'll see that most of these characters belong to three general archetypes that, over time, have refused to go away, even if they can only persist in continually modified forms:

Slaves -- by this, I mean everything from real slaves to the very contemporary but real idea of corporate servant.  This is perhaps the most persistent archetype in the history of storytelling, and modern advertising is no exception.

Clowns -- and by this I mean everything from real clowns to the sardonic characters that have come on gone on TV brand advertising.

Heroes -- and by this I mean everything from heroic characters in the traditional sense of the word to the more modern sense of hero as the protagonist of the story.

Of course, this is a vast oversimplification of the advertising character pantheon.  But the organization enables us to do three things:  answer why and how brands have succeeded with characters, why characters in advertising may never go away, and why social media -- whose many adherents generally loathe devices like characters -- might ultimately fail to push characters aside.   If brands have relied on characters to relate to the public in a scalable way, and characters are rooted in ancient/universal ideas about people, it's a safer bet that social media will modify, not end, this practice.   I believe it already has.  But first, let's take a look at slaves, for this group  -- which includes the Sun Maid -- has perhaps provided the greatest inspiration to the social media crowd.

NEXT:  SLAVES

Coal Carolers

There was  a time when you got coal on Christmas only if you were naughty.  What have we done to deserve this?  Not that it matters anymore ... the little guys got the heave-ho-ho-ho on Friday.


Thanks to Rob Perks for the tip.

Advertising With Character -- II: The Character Factory

Advertising With Character:  an exploration into the use and abuse of characters in marketing -- from Aunt Jemima, to Josephine the Plumber, to Joe the Plumber -- running December 10 through January 16.  

Note -- 12/24:  Though I originally expected to finish this series on Christmas Day, I have decided to extend this series with a number of new entries.  The extra work will take me through the beginning of the new year.  Bear with me -- I hope to make it worth the wait.

Today:  "The Character Factory"

In the last episode of Advertising With Character, we set the stage.   Victorian popular theater stood poised between the ancient world of character making and the modern world of character production.   And as I suggested, there would be implications for both entertainment and commerce (assuming that these two categories can ever be separated).

Now let's look at how one of the earliest of characters  from the modern era was actually made.   The character was born in film, but he would live later on in many other forms, including television-and-print brand advertising.

The creator of the character, Charlie Chaplin, was in fact born in the Victorian era.  In fact, you can say that he was born into the Victorian theatre tradition -- both parents were performers in the kind of Victorian theatrical entertainment -- dubbed "Music Hall" -- that featured things like the The Harlequinade, the Victorian version of a very old tradition in comedic entertainment.  Practically everything that Chaplin did in his career echoed his theatrical roots to Music Hall -- archetypal characters, acting that was based on the elements of pantomime (not mime, but the more subtle and reality-based pantomime), and an elegance in movement that today you would only see in dancers.   Chaplin was the film era's biggest successor to the Victorian era's Music Hall comic.  And his most successful creation was a character known as "The Tramp."

Too much has been written about this character to say anything entirely original.  But what I'd like to focus on are the needs of the original storyteller who gave us The Tramp, and the needs of the "creatives" who would later render The Tramp in advertising.

I've laid out three things that recurring characters provide to the storyteller (be it a stage artist, a filmmaker, or an advertiser):

--the most successful, memorable characters represent universal truths.  

--as archetypes, they enable the storyteller to connect profoundly with the audience in ways that other characters cannot.

--as archetypes, they enable the storyteller to extend the value of their work beyond a single unit of entertainment.

The Tramp does all of this, and this is perhaps one reason why it has endured so long as an American icon.  But it does something else.   Though Chaplin was born in the Victorian era -- and inherited artistic traditions of the past -- he lived and worked in the modern era, and his creation found a far bigger audience than his parents ever could by virtue of the tools of mass production.   The film era -- then the radio era, then the television era -- gave storytellers a way to scale production to create thousands, then millions, of virtual Music Halls for global, mass consumption.

And then, there was the character itself.   One thing that made the The Tramp so great was the storyteller's understanding that the means of production would have a profound effect on how we experience life.  In Modern Times, which many critics have hailed as Chaplin's greatest film, The Tramp is temporarily consumed by the cogs and wheels of a modern factory.

Of course, what was happening was not just the creation of the generic modern factory, but also the beginning of the modern character factory, the Hollywood/Broadcast/Madison Avenue complex that would grow up learning how to engage with the masses by producing sympathetic characters through the means of mass production.   But before we look at how advertisers learned to ply their trade the modern way, we should pause a moment to remember the roots of Charlie Chaplin's most successful experiment.  The Tramp was just one of several archetypes that would be imagined and reimagined over and over again in advertising.  It even became the mascot of one of the most revered technology brands in the post-modern era -- I.B.M., which used the tramp in what arguably were its final hours of world domination.  Looking back, you might feel the same kind of nostalgia you feel when reading about the Victorian Harlequinade.   But before you get too choked up, keep in mind that this character kinda persists in marketing today, though you may be hard pressed to know him by his original name.

NEXT:  WHY BRANDS NEED CHARACTER

Whopper Virgins

Pretty sure this will make the cut for Advertising With Character -- I know a guy -- but I couldn't wait to post it. Thanks to Ellen Leanse for sending. Reactions to this ad from bloggers? Not good, for reasons I will explore, later.

Advertising With Character -- Part I: The Origins of "Character"

Advertising With Character:  an exploration into the use and abuse of characters in marketing -- from Aunt Jemima, to Josephine the Plumber, to Joe the Plumber -- running December 10 through January 16.  

Note -- 12/24:  Though I originally expected to finish this series on Christmas Day, I have decided to extend this series with a number of new entries.  The extra work will take me through the beginning of the new year.  Bear with me -- I hope to make it worth the wait.

Today:  "The Origins of 'Character'"

 

Before we get started, let me set the stage.

Before I got into the marketing biz, I worked as a producer, director, and -- my favorite role -- dramaturg in the world of small professional theatre.  It was at this time in my life -- in the mid-90's, when Silicon Valley was beginning to reinvent itself around something new called the World Wide Web -- that I was spending most of my time thinking about old stuff.  I was in theatre, the most ancient of the communication arts, and it was as a dramaturg -- a researcher/interpreter of old plays -- that I got  a brief opportunity to learn something about the ancient craft of comedy, which I can confidently say -- after considering lots of contradictory evidence -- is the origin of "character," as we know it.

I got a gig as executive producer/dramaturg of the SF Revels, the Bay Area chapter of a national organization with a very simple mission:  to celebrate the Winter Solstice each year as it was celebrated historically in a different time and place.  The year I worked for SF Revels (1996), the time and place was London, in the Victorian Era (can't get more Christmassy than that -- at least that was my perspective, at the time).  Directed by David Parr (former artistic director of the famed Eureka Theater Company), the show was extraordinary, featuring lots of things you may have heard of, and several things you may not have heard about but would find familiar.  For example:  a Harlequinade, a Victorian era theatrical production which was a combination of contemporary music/dance and the already old tradition of commedia dell'arte comedy.  Commedia is the thing you may find familiar (think "situation comedy").  Inspired from the ancient Greek and Roman comedies (notice how we keep moving backward, then forward), commedia was an Italian Renaissance reinvention where the drama was not so much about the story as it was about the characters.   With little more than a handful of well-known archetypal characters that reflected both timeless and contemporary values -- e.g., the miserly father (Pantalone), his ingenue daughter (Columbina), and his comic servant (Arlecchino, or, in the English translation, Harlequin -- thus the Victorian name, the Harlequinade), Commedia theater troupes would roam the countryside acting out situations that brought out the most comedic aspects of the characters. 

By character, of course, I mean two things:  it is both (a) the invention of the storyteller in a theatrical performance ("the character, Harlequin, appears in this play") and (b) the moral fiber of the kind of person the character portrays ("oh, Harlequin -- he has such poor character.")  But what's really important to note here -- as the Harlequinade stood neatly poised before the ancient craft of character making an the industrial-era production of characters for mass entertainment -- is that the recurring character had already evolved as a storytelling device to meet the evolving needs of the storyteller:

--the most successful, memorable characters represent universal truths.  They are not just stereotypes (though many are).  The best ones are archetypes.

--as archetypes, they enable the storyteller to connect profoundly with the audience in ways that other characters cannot. Example:  the recurring character of Jack Falstaff, who appears -- always as himself --  in several of Shakespeare's plays.

--as archetypes, they enable the storyteller to extend the value of their work beyond a single unit of entertainment.  

This last point is the most poignant, if you consider what the world was like before the turn of the century.   The characters of the Victorian Harlequinade seem like sad, beautiful, nostalgia-inducing relics, like the Victorian street vendors who actually sold their goods in song -- and in character -- outside the theatre, and on the streets of London (see below -- a clip from the 1968 film, Oliver, recreating the real deal, Hollywood-style).   Sad not just because we can no longer really experience them, but sad because they are the forgotten ancestors in entertainment and commerce that would soon be replaced -- at an increasingly furious rate of production -- by filmmakers, TV producers, and yes, advertisers.    

NEXT:  HOLLYWOOD AND THE CHARACTER FACTORY

Advertising With Character: Prologue

 

"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