The Flip Flop Girl

(Tylenol Packaging from Yesteryear)

Random Asprin
I'm not saying this is doing anyone any harm. I just gravitated to the word "random"--and so has marketing. Ask yourself, if you're young, healthy, and active, do you really need asprin in your life? Do you ever think about asprin? Well, Tylenol would like to get your attention if you're in the much-coveted 18-35 year-old demographic. So, the marketing gurus decided to mix in some "extreme sport" mentality along with an "underground" vibe to make Tylenol hip and cool. They hired "pain partners" to infiltrate hipster hangouts and they funded a skateboard park in Brooklyn without calling attention to themselves except for word-of-mouth or tiny branding placed on promotional swag. This sort of covert marketing is featured in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

But I can go further for you. I'll take a few steps back and show you the real source of this cute little story: These are "the marketing gurus" that I'm referring to. Call them what you will. I think they provide a service to some extent but, in the end, they are also playing with deception and manipulation. Of course, they would say otherwise. They would say they're the "good marketers." Well, whatever. You can decide that one for yourself. Never heard of Faith Popcorn? Now, you have.

And here's the story by Fortune magazine, Sept. 7, 2004, that explains it all quite well. I start in where some hipster wannabe yells out something like, "It's so random!" The full story is here for your reading pleasure.

"Wow, totally random and supercool," says a nose-ringed twentysomething, picking up a white box emblazoned with "Great pain leads to great art" as she walks out of the New York Underground Film Festival's audio-visual event in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She sifts through an ironic goody bag for artsy kids: a mini Etch A Sketch, an aromatherapy candle, a CD with soothing music, and a sketchbook--all emblazoned with "Ouch!" The small red "Tylenol" on the corner of the box is the only hint that the brand is sponsoring the music videos projected on a makeshift screen in the dank nightclub.
Outside, Tobin Yelland, an urban photojournalist with a digital videocamera, interviews smoking hipsters. Responding to his call for "pain stories," they gruesomely recount Rollerblading accidents, split fingernails from art projects, and head-splitting all-nighters. Yelland doesn't volunteer that he's a Tylenol pain partner.
Over in East Los Angeles, at the ninth annual "B-Boy Summit," Tylenol is also quietly hanging out. Pain partner Asia One, a muscular 32-year-old in camouflage pants and a blue skin-tight tank, is a B-Girl (breakdancer to you squares), a key player in this hip-hop subculture offshoot. She is known for a head-spinning move that has earned her a quarter-sized bald spot. She emcees the breakdancing contests in a parking lot. Members of the multiethnic crowd shoot pictures of the dancers against a graffiti-covered canvas. They're using disposable cameras emblazoned with "Ouch!" that the company is handing out at a little table off to the side.
In New York City's first indoor skateboarding area in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Tylenol downshifts to a no-key approach. There's not a single "Ouch!" in the unheated, crumbling brick industrial space that holds an amoeba-shaped skateboard bowl Tylenol helped fund. (You'd think the company would worry about lawsuits for backing a locale reached only by going down a dark alley, over broken bottles, and under an unmarked, half-open garage door.) Swishing around the undulating sanded wood are Buddy Nichols and Rick Charnowski, pro skateboarders cum indie filmmakers, who shoot 8mm movies of the underground skateboard scene and are Tylenol pain partners. "Awesome," says Nichols to the bowl's creator and gate-keeper, Dave Mims, another pain partner who owns a skateboard shop in Manhattan's grungy East Village. He charges about 20 of his insider friends a fee for a key to the space but always welcomes hard-core out-of-town skateboarders. He doesn't advertise that Tylenol pitched in.
Yet the three unshaven thirtysomethings refer to the raw space as the Tylenol Bowl. It doesn't make sense. There's no sign of the company, nor was there any formal announcement or press release indicating a connection. Charnowski reports that the brand's unannounced affiliation is paying off. Skateboard magazines have made a number of unsolicited references to the Tylenol Bowl and skateboarders in Seattle and Denver have asked Nichols and Charnowski about the Tylenol Bowl without knowing that they are pain partners.
It's implausible, but Tylenol's calculating whisper has been heard. It's in a song by rocker Ben Kweller, which went on sale this summer in Apple's online music store. Called "Tylenol," it begins:
I need some Tylenol Give me some Tylenol To kill that headache you gave me.
And earlier this year, Saturday Night Live did a 60-second fake ad for an imaginary product for X-Games addicts: Tylenol Extreme, designed to "relieve testicular trauma." Classic SNL mockery, rife with raunchy humor, the spot was twice as long as a commercial and mentioned the product seven times. That kind of exposure is priceless: It can't be TiVoed out.
FEEDBACK jboorstin@fortunemail.com

Labels: corporate deception, futurism, madison advenue, marketing, pain, pop culture, skateboarding, tipping point, trends, Tylenol, Tylenol Bowl

Random Nation, Part 4

You know that tired old phrase, "Think Globally, Act Locally"? Yeah, well, Seattle is just the sort of overly-polite ostentatiously-progressive community that embracing such pap. Seattle is front and center on the Flip Flop Girl radar at the moment. So, I will take my Random Nation rambling onto local concerns, namely Seattle's ongoing growing pains as it struggles to become the "big city" it may never have been meant to be. I mean, of all the West Coast cities, Seattle still retains much of its quaint and backward ways which actually can be attractive. It's by no means a sleepy nowhere town but it does lack the infrastructure of better planned cities. The main problem? A backward and limited public transit system. We have buses, of course. It's an aging fleet of buses and, depending on the bus route, you'd have to wonder how a city like Seattle gets away with it. We have no rapid transit system and who knows when we will. We've had numerous voter referendums which have led to voters asking for both an elevated and a light rail system (we want it all!) but the details are still very murky as to how all this will come about.

Currently, the big issue has been what to do about replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct which is a long stretch of elevated freeway overlooking the Seattle harbor and which provides something of a backup for the main interstate highway. Since our last big earthquake in 2001, the concern has been growing about replacing this entire rickety structure. The mayor, who is in the hip pocket of developers with the classic "big city" dreams for Seattle, had been strongly pushing for a "big city" concept, a tunnel. The state wanted a new viaduct structure similar to the old one. Hybrids of the two were considered. And then there was talk of a third way: getting rid of the viaduct and creating more surface traffic, basically adding more lanes for cars. Supposedly this would open up the view for everyone of our beautiful Puget Sound. This whole debate finally came to a head and the matter was put up to the voters to decide and they decided they liked this "third way" option. Little is known about how this third way would be implemented since it came in late to the debate but this is typical about how things get done in Seattle.

As I was waiting for my daily buzz of java, I overheard a couple discussing another less flashy but very relevant aspect of our traffic problems. They were saying that it's sad that Seattle, a software capital of the world, should have such an antiquated traffic light system. And I think they're spot on about this. They think it hasn't changed any since World War II. I wouldn't be surprised. One guy was telling the other, "It's a very simple electrical system, not much different from the on and off technology used to turn on your light in your home. I mean, why can't Seattle have a computerized system like cities in Europe have been using for decades?" That's a good question.

Don't get me wrong about Seattle. It's a very pleasant place to be but you have so many interests bent on exploiting it from investors and developers to all the creepy marketing people trying to suck out the soul of everything they touch.

Labels: blogs, buzz, marketing, politics, pop culture, random, Seattle, trends, viaduct, Writing

Flip Flop Girl Delivers

Hello there everyone, this is your Flip Flop Girl reporting again. Well, I can't quite let go of the Anna Nicole story because I spotted something in today's New York Times that really made me scrunch up my toes and pay attention. As I said, I keep thinking there might be a worthwhile story yet to be told about Anna Nicole and I kept wondering how that might come about: what author would step up to the challenge of spinning gold from mere thread? So, we'll still have to wait but it turns out there already is one book out and its little known and little regarded publisher has hit pay dirt. The book is Great Big Beautiful Doll, first published in 1996, as a hardcover and priced at $16.95. Barricade Press, puts out a paltry 20 titles a year but its publisher, Carole Stuart, had already decided before Anna Nicole's death that it was time to reprint the book as a trade paperback.

As biographies go, it appears that Great Big Beautiful Doll is a glowing, and likely trite, tribute to Anna Nicole as told by a couple of her former managers when she was still struggling in Texas. But that's enough for French and Japanese publishers to want to buy the rights in their languages. And apparently that's enough to create a desire to buy the film rights. Meanwhile, there is also a mean-spirited, and probably more interesting version, coming out by Anna Nicole's half-sister, Donna Hogan, entitled, Train Wreck: Anna Nicole Unauthorized. That too, unfortunately, will likely be only mildly stimulating. I'm not trying to be a snob. I'm asking for quality. And I think Anna Nicole deserves it.

As my toes released their clench mode from reading about the Anna Nicole books and relaxed as I pored over the rest of the paper, I spotted this little item: Among the "Newly Released" Books, is Because She Can by Bridie Clark. I think this type of book is all too typical of what you find in the book publishing world: more fluff; but maybe fun fluff all the same. Instead of a tell-all in the form of The Devil Wears Prada where we are treated to a behind-the-scenes look at the fashion world, this time around we are treated to a behind-the-scenes look at the book publishing world, specifically the low-end trashy book publishing world reminiscent of the recent O.J. Simpson book that Regan Books attempted to foist upon us. Anyway, it sounds like a fun take-to-the beach sort of book but, based on chats I've had with friends, the act of reading alone is often mistaken as worthwhile. I mean, someone could read that book and actually feel they've engaged in a literary activity when, in fact, what they've done is something akin to watching the E! Channel.

So, all I'm saying is to be mindful of what you're ingesting, be it nutritious or junk. And I do like my junk too.

Labels: Anna Nicole Smith, Because She Can, books, Bridie Clark, buzz, flip flops, Great Big Beautiful Doll, marketing, media, news, pop culture, press, publishing, words, writng

Flip Flop Girl: Another Pop Culture Snapshot

Hello there, I was just thinking again about the mess we seem to be in regarding our collective mindset, full to the gills with pop culture, at least in western society, specifically American. Still pondering poor Anna Nicole, the latest victim of our tabloid nation feeding frenzy. Good that we have artists that help us see the big picture. A perfect example is Charlie Chaplin who remains quite relevant in his world view.

I just saw a film that seemed to put our perpetual pop culture circus in its place. It is A King in New York. This was Charlie Chaplin's last film in which he also stars. I take this straight from Wikipedia: "A King in New York is a 1957 film directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin in his last starring role, which presents a satirical view of certain aspects of United States politics and society. The film was produced in Europe after Chaplin's exile from the US in 1952. It did not open in the United States until the early 1970's."

How interesting that this film wasn't allowed into the US until 1973. It took that long, a whole generation, before the United States was ready for the sort of satire that Chaplin delivered which is not heavy-handed but quite sensible! Nice how a mild approach can still sting some people! And those same sorts are still among us today--just take a look at the Bush White House and the right wing blogosphere! Basically, Chaplin is asking for tolerance and understanding during the McCarthy Communist witchhunt. What makes this film so beautiful is that he is also doing so much more than that!

Get this: The plot really takes off when Chaplin's character, the exiled King Shahdov, is the victim of a reality TV prank!

King Shahdov is forced to leave his country after a revolution and makes it to New York only to find his assets have been stolen. Broke and desperate, the king is forced to become a spokesperson. Clumsy and befuddled, his mistakes make him more and more popular to where the public will buy anything he endorses.

To look good for television, the king is willing to try plastic surgery which distorts his features and leaves him unable to form real expressions. Lucky for him, the procedure is reversible and he gets his old face back!

Meanwhile, Americans are caught up in a patriotic frenzy that leaves them suspicious of each other and vulnerable to government and media manipulation.

As a leader of a small and struggling nation, the king feels that atomic energy might prove the key to improving his country's fortunes but he is forever being suspected of actually wanting to create weapons of mass destruction.

Despite it all, the king is still optimistic about America and can see a time when the balance of power will return.

What do you think?! See this film! And totally as an aside, there is even a little scene where Chaplin is engaging in a little foot play with Dawn Addams! Very cute.

Labels: blogs, Bush, Charlie Chaplin, Communists, criticism, film, foot fetish, journalism, marketing, McCarthyism, media, politics, pop culture, reality tv, right wing, sex, terror, war, witchhunts, Writing