Mark Wieczorek

"Tragedy is bad things happening to good people. Comedy is bad things happening to bad people." - Aristotle’s Poetics

Jim Halpert is that loveable everyman from The Office (US). He has two hot girls chasing after him, he has to deal with idiots at work, and most importantly, he always turns to the camera and makes goofy faces. The faces says, "Oh my God, he’s such an idiot, I can’t believe he just did that." It let’s the audience know that they’re in on the joke. It lets them feel superior, and a lot of comedy is about feeling superior - watching idiots do something stupid & laughing at them. It’s what Seinfeld did, Alex Reiger did it in Taxi, however subtly. Seinfeld chose his friend, though - he loved their zaniness. Jim Halpert, like Alex Reiger use the job as an excuse to keep them around these entertaining simpletons.

When the Volkswagen "Zero Ego Emmissions" commercials came out, I said to myself, "they just gave away the keys to the castle. They just said explicitly what’s implicit in every VW ad." But nobody else seemed to catch on, at least, nobody I talked to said something like that.

Nearly every VW ad says "We’re not stuck up, we’re just better than everyone else." What better message for a "German Engineered" car that’s not that German Engineered car to send? You’re better than those that can’t afford German Engineering, and you’re better than those that go for the obvious choice because of their own insecurities.

The Mac vs. PC ads are iconic & by the 2nd paragraph you knew I was going there. Something about the Mac guy just makes me want to smack him around, though. His smug superiority & PC’s sincere attempts at coolness just doesn’t do it for me. If PC was like Dwight and almost malicious in his stupidity I might buy it, but PC is just PC. Mac’s exasperation at PC’s shenanigans quite obviously convey a sense of superiority. It’s not even hidden here, it’s palpable.

If you don’t think Mac is Jim Halpert, take a close look at Mac in the Mac vs. PC Vista ad. Just as PC’s personal bodyguard says "You are coming to a sad realization, cancel or allow?" Mac looks off and makes a face. In fact, he spends much of the commercial making funny faces.

Look at the Zero Ego Emmissions ad again, it happens at least 3 times. They make a face while staring directly at the people who are acting crazy, the female passenger looks at us/the driver and makes a face, and then they shrug as they toss out their megaphone.

This we’re better than you attitude isn’t just the purview of shiny toys for metrosexuals with too much money on their hands, the "we get it, we’re with you, this is stupid" attitude has been around for a while.

I’m not sure who did it first, but I first became aware of the general technique of "letting the audience know you’re in on the joke " during the Sprite "Image is nothing / Obey your Thirst" and "Make 7-Up Yours" campaigns. These were ads that said "Yeah, advertising is stupid, we get it too. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. See, we’re one of you." These didn’t have a Jim Halpert-esque character in them, but like the Peter Stormare "Unpimp Your Auto" VW ads, they’re pure camp and acknowledge that on some level, all ads are artificial.

The Jim Halpert is all over this early Washington Mutual ad (one of the first with "The Banker’s Pen"), and indeed all the WaMu ads. The Geico Caveman is a master at it, but does it more as indignation at the stupidity of those around him. In a clever twist, the Caveman is superior to the people whose product you’re being sold, disarming the Geico folks and making them seem more approachable for their fallibility. This hearkens back to the "Make 7-Up Yours" ads where we’re being told that ads are stupid. Even though it’s a Geico representative that’s being an idiot, he really represents all the old stodgy insurance firms.

Let’s review the ingredients for a Jim Halpert.

1. You have to have a character the audience will identify with.
2. He (or she) has to be surrounded by idiots.
3. He has to react to the idiots. Preferrably by looking aside, possibly even straight at the camera, and making a face.
4. Optional. For "cleverness" brownie points, make the people selling your product the idiots.

It’s a really fun way to make ads - you can have a lot of fun inventing all sorts of idiots, and by putting someone in the ad who realizes they’re idiots, you can make your customers feel superior to everyone else.

This is interesting. People have more confidence in small business owners than in anyone else from politicians to doctors to the religious leaders. Combine that with the fact that more students are or want to be entrepreneurs than any time in recent history & it really looks like this century is going to be the century of the small business owner.

Looking at specific institutions, we have a change at the top this year. Small business was added to the list of institutions in 2005 and tied with the military at the top of the list that first year. Last year, it was a close second to the military, but in 2007, over half of U.S. adults (54%) express a great deal of confidence in leaders of small business.

Read: Harris Interactive | The Harris Poll - Confidence in Leaders of Major Institutions: Small Business Tops the List this Year

Via: Small Business Trends

This is really cool. Similar to How Happiness is Reflected in Blogs, this website creates a map of human feelings from blogs. It can be sorted by age group, gender, geographic region & weather on that day. And the UI is cute too, though I wish it were more useful. Check out the Findings.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Read: We Feel Fine

More about how Gen X will change work, or in this case, Generation Y, many of whom already own or are planing to own businesses by the time they reach college & they’re already planning for retirement. Go Gen Y!

Studies show that about 50% of today’s college students have business ownership as a primary career goal.

Read: Profile of the Entrepreneurial Generation » Small Business Trends

More Seth Godin Goodness. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, create micro hysteria. Remember earlier where he said that people like to talk about the toxic & the trivial? It’s much better, he says, “To find pockets of the population that interact with each other and create” a great experience for them - either so safe everyone can agree with it, or controversial enough that everyone will be talking about it.

Far better to obsess about owning the micro audience, at least for a moment, then to waste your energy trying to be everything to everyone.

Read” Seth’s Blog: Micro Hysteria

Something tells me this isn’t a first. Lexus paid for a series of pulp novels to be published featuring their automobiles. I used to wonder if radio stations could get rid of ads altogether if artists just wrote songs around products… but that would never work, nobody wants to buy an album from a band that too obviously sold out.

Subtlety is one of the keys to placing a product name in media aimed at sophisticated consumers, says Richard Nelson, head of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. “If it’s so heavily overloaded that it’s basically a commercial, people aren’t going to want to read it, and they won’t buy it.”

This has led to the increasing popularity of softer marketing ploys, such as event sponsorships (think: author readings hosted by a local dealership, or an art installation commissioned by a major automaker), “webisodes” and “advergaming.”

Read: Read Any Good Ads Lately? - washingtonpost.com

(Via: AdPulp)

I reported on this before. Even bricks & mortar stores can no longer ignore the call of the internet. A good percentage of people who walk in your front door have already done the research online. Your website has to be not just informative, but interactive too.

Retailers are taking a page from MySpace. They know that customers, especially the younger and more Net-savvy, want to be heard, and they also want to hear what others like them think. So increasingly, retailers are opening up their Web sites to customers, letting them post product reviews, ratings, and in some cases photos and videos. The result is that customer reviews are emerging as a prime place to visit for online shoppers.

Read: Retailers Take a Tip from MySpace

(Via: AdPulp)

This is a really cool ad for Orange phones, all done the old fashioned way - no computers necessary. Watch the ad:

Watch the making of:

(Via AdFreak)

You’ve heard This Ameican Life, right? The story of The Greatest Phone Mail Message Of All Time. Just pretend you have so you can feel cultured. It was on NPR after all and you can go back and listen to it later and use it to intimidate your less cultured friends. Plus, it’s effing hilarious.

Anyway, if you want to learn how to create pieces of narrative gold like that, why not go to the source? Ira Glass tells you how to produce great stories.

Read: Forty - Business Blog - Ira Glass on Telling Stories

This is a really cool approach go designing with restraint. Any decent musician can tell you that you can’t make everything loud and still give emphasis to the beat. There need to be spaces or nothing will have impact. The same goes for design - the more space between objects, the more emphasis each object can have.

This, then, is an exercise in restraint.

The difficult part about designing for attention isn’t deciding what to talk about—it’s deciding what not to talk about. Because you only get a potential customer’s attention for a few seconds (if you’re lucky enough to get it at all) you don’t have luxury of rambling. You have to cover your key points with both speed and strength.

Read: Forty - Business Blog - Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise