The FJP

Likes Don’t Save Lives

UNICEF Sweden has a new ad campaign reminding people that while social media Likes are nice, what they really need is money to fund their vaccination campaigns.

As The Verge points out, “Facebook likes aren’t treated as currency in other commercial venues, so they shouldn’t be equated with charitable donations.”

And via The Atlantic:

In the beginning, organizations wanted you to like the heck out of their Facebook pages. Why? You know, community-building, awareness-raising, general “engagement”-upping…

…But one thing clicking “like” doesn’t do is, say, get malaria nets to African villages or boost funding for charity groups. And now that Facebook is nearly 9 years old and Twitter is 7, we’re seeing the inevitable backlash against social-media “slacktivism.”

Back to The Verge:

The campaign, created by ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors, takes a rather bold stance against the awareness campaigns that often spread across Facebook and other social media platforms. UNICEF officials acknowledge that such efforts can help introduce issues to a wider audience, though they fear that for most users, the action stops with the click of a button. To further stress this point, UNICEF Sweden released a bold poster alongside the video clips, saying that every like it receives on Facebook will result in exactly zero vaccinations.

That’s not to say “slacktivists” are a bad thing. Liking, sharing and reblogging do serve their purpose in bringing issues to a wider audience. But then what?

Last year, The Atlantic notes, Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, had this to say:

What is called commonly called slacktivism is not at all about “slacking activists;” rather it is about non-activists taking symbolic action—often in spheres traditionally engaged only by activists or professionals (governments, NGOs, international institutions.). Since these so-called “slacktivists” were never activists to begin with, they are not in dereliction of their activist duties. On the contrary, they are acting, symbolically and in a small way, in a sphere that has traditionally been closed off to “the masses” in any meaningful fashion.

The goal then for those working in social media is to simultaneously help the “slacktivist” set help you by building out ambient awareness of an issue through the messaging you create, while also giving activists and more consistently loyal proponents direct calls to action be it donations, volunteerism, network building, etc.

Meantime, if you’re moved to Like a cause, consider volunteering your time and/or other resources to it as well.

The other two commercials in UNICEF’s campaign can be viewed at The Verge. — Michael

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World Press Freedom Day, Redux

Additional imagery from Reporters Without Borders to go along with our earlier post.

Select to embiggen.

A trade group says that newspapers like the New York Times have seen large increases in circulation, but that’s partly because they are allowed to count their readers multiple times. The industry needs to do better.

Via paidContent:

The latest circulation gains for the NYT and others came courtesy of the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations), an industry group composed of advertising agencies and publishers. The group noted that the numbers are not really comparable to the previous year’s results for a number of reasons, including the fact that some newspapers have launched new subscription formats, stopped printing every day and so on.

As Edmund Lee at Bloomberg points out, the AAM survey — which is somewhat ironically locked behind a paywall — also allows publishers to count their readers multiple times, according to rules adopted recently by the group. In other words, newspapers can count someone who reads the newspaper in print, on the web and on their Kindle as three separate readers. But doesn’t this inflate their readership numbers unreasonably? It sure does. The bottom line is that no one really knows what the “real” readership numbers are for newspapers.

Some argue this has always been the case with newspapers, which is true: publishers have routinely engaged in all kinds of shady tricks to boost their circulation — including special discounts for bulk purchases by hotels and airlines and other giveaways, and even dumping large quantities into ravines or pulping them after printing. On top of that, many papers have inflated their readership numbers for years by claiming that each copy gets read by as many as five people, an estimate that borders on the ridiculous.

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Old Timey Computer Ads

Behold the computer in a briefcase, the $3,398 10MB hard disk and the 16k of RAM that turns your computer into a working giant.

For more, visit io9, Hilarious and Awesome Computer Ads from the Golden Age of PCs.

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Newspaper Advertising

bostonreview:

Why the Washington Post and other newspapers need pay walls. (Via The Atlantic)

FJP: Interesting to see since we we were just having a conversation about it.

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Blogs Rule, But Brands are Ignoring Them

Technorati’s Media’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report is an important read for brand and marketing folk. In it, the authors write that consumers trust blogs more than social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

The disconnect here is that brand marketers spend more time and resources on social networks, and vastly more dollars on display advertising, search and video.

Via Technorati (PDF):

Currently, the bulk of brands’ overall digital spend goes to display advertising, search and video, with spending on social, including influencer outreach, making up only 10 percent of their total digital spend. Within their social budget, more than half goes to Facebook, followed by YouTube and Twitter, with the remaining 11 percent of their social spend going to blogs and influencers…

…In short, where brands are spending is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value and being influenced. This has much to do with an essential hurdle faced by most content creators: a lack of metrics and the fragmentation that leads to their complexity as a purchasable medium.

The report’s authors argue that brands need to refocus their earned media strategies on direct engagement with influencers.

Image: Detail of digital and social budgets from Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report (PDF).

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If advertising is meant to be aspirational, these ads [in men’s magazines] are presenting a pretty sad version of what American men can aspire to be. And advertisers aren’t selling this hyper-masculine ideal to just any man: They’re specifically targeting the younger, poorer, less-educated guys in the supermarket aisle. In the latest issue of the journal Sex Roles, a trio of psychologists at the University of Manitoba analyzed the advertising images in a slate of magazines targeted at men, from Fortune to Field and Stream. They counted up the ads that depict men as violent, calloused, tough, dangerous, and sexually aggressive—what the researchers call “hyper-masculine”—then indexed them with the magazine’s target demographics. Hyper-masculine images, the researchers found, are more likely to be sold to adolescents, who find higher “peer group support” for manly-man behaviors. They’re also sold to working-class men, who are “embedded in enduring social and economic structures in which they experience powerlessness and lack of access to resources” like political power, social respect, and wealth, and so turn to more widely accessible measures of masculine worth—like “physical strength and aggression.

Amanda Hess, Slate. How Men’s Magazines Sell Masculinity to Young, Low-Income Men.

So God Made a (Latino) Farmer

fjp-latinamerica:

One of the most popular ads during the Super Bowl was for the Dodge Ram. The spot took a 1978 speech by the late Paul Harvey and played it against images of American farmers.

Something was missing though. We let Latino Rebels take it away:

Do you notice anything about the farmers being featured in the commercial?

Yeah, 100% Americana. An America that seems to be stuck in another time. Last time we checked, the commercial overlooked a few other farmers, the over 3 million workers who contribute to the country’s $28+ billion fruit and vegetable industry. Or what about the fact that “the majority (72%) of all farmworkers were foreign-born, with 68 percent of all farmworkers were born in Mexico?” We are guessing that displaying the REAL FACE of farming in the United States would that have been way too uncomfortable to show? By the way, we know you showed only two Latino faces for a second, but that didn’t cut it, Chrysler.

So, a remake is in order. Doing so above is the award winning investigative reporter Issac Cubillos,

The Millennial’s Learning Dilemma

Digiday came out with an interesting compilation of perspectives on millennials (aka Gen Y, born in from the ’80s to the 2000’s) who comprise the new crop of working professionals in ad agencies.

The ad exec’s perspective seems largely to be that millennials feel excessively entitled, are at times over-payed and are inclined to having big ideas but no mastery of a craft. Example: an agency executive talking about a millennial he hired and then let go (via WTF Millennials: Managing Agencies’ Newest Generation:

He didn’t know how to do anything. He could talk about stuff and criticize what agencies were doing but really added no value. At one point, I walked by his desk and saw Facebook on one monitor and Tweetdeck on another. I told him that he’s so good at social media that he’s totally unproductive. We let him go a few days later. In his mind, he nailed the task and moved on to help get the ad industry back on track. Sigh. The overconfidence, zero accountability and zero remorse is 100 percent millennial. They don’t get the concept of learning.

The millennial’s perspective seems to be one which struggles to reconcile with one too many contentions: old-school divisions of labor, integrating digital and traditional advertising, and harder, bigger questions like how to maintain (idealistic?) values of openness, honesty and social good, while working in an industry that isn’t exactly reputed for these things. They’re left unable (and perhaps unwilling) to master a craft because of a lack of the bigger picture, and at times a lack of mentorship to get there.

FJP: I thought about using Tumblr’s chat-post format to excerpt these pieces as a conversation between millennials and ad execs, but in my mind, the perspectives don’t really speak to each other. Though I don’t work in advertising, the conversation touches on adjacent industries just the same. The problem seems to be that many of us (millennials) view “learning” as a very intentional (and arguably selfish) affair. I’m certainly victim to the big ideas and not enough craft dilemma but it’s because I want to master a craft if I’m driven to on a personal level, and that drive entirely comes from having a clear vision of the big picture—confidence that my efforts today won’t lead to another future in which social good is at the bottom of the priority list, and profit is at the top. This attitude won’t work well in the average entry-level position, but it’s often our only entry point. I’ve been lucky enough to receive an education and professional mentors who encourage me to go long with my big ideas, which in turn makes me want to be accountable. Not an easy environment to create but much gratitude to those who’ve done it. —Jihii

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digg:

A Connecticut newspaper ran an ad for a gun show next to a story about Sandy Hook today.

FJP: In December we noted a gun ad on the Miami Herald’s home page. At least in that case you could chalk it up to an unfortunate case of contextual advertising algorithms doing their thing.

Here, not at all. Just plain mailing it in.