‘All that you are’ campaign

This advertisement featuring Peter O’Toole is intriguing on a number of levels.  Noted for taking a colourful, rebellious and devil-may-care approach to life and the living of it, Peter O’Toole – in spite of his advancing years – is still able to lay claim to being ‘cool’.  Given the spread of readers the Sunday Times is pitching to, O’Toole’s iconic status has obvious advantages in appealing to both  ‘old-as-you-feel’ and  ‘rebellious youth’ segments of the market.

But just taking advantage of O’Toole’s iconic status is not enough.  The ad demonstrates with its ironic twist that the Sunday Times is laying claim to being cutting edge and contemporary, strongly independent, still challenging, still able to spring a surprise, in touch with and part of life’s rich tapestry of consuming experiences.

But the ad takes the irony a stage further, featuring O’Toole  as a person of many parts not just in his acting career but in real life.  This of course neatly opens the way for the Sunday Times to pitch its strapline: ‘The Sunday Times: for all you are.’

On this point the ad is interesting because it reveals something of a trend in what might be called postmodern marketing.  No longer is it a case of knowing who you are, but of making ‘play’ and experimenting with multiple personas.

But  rather than asking whether this offers a more nuanced understanding of our psychological make-up and priorities in a postmodern world, perhaps it would be more productive to think about such discursive stratagems in terms of possible consequences.  One obvious consequence is that  disseminating and ‘taking-as-read’ the  individual constituted by the trying-out of multiple identities and desires, at one stroke, exponentially expands the market .

There only remains the simple matter of rewriting the psychology textbooks to account for this change.

 

Best thing since sliced bread

Fascinating video by Seth Godin. What he has to say about idea diffusion isn’t that remarkable. Differentiation is a well-established part of marketing. What is remarkable is the way Seth captures your attention and makes you think. His image of Pope John Paul II reminds us religion used its network of churches to spread ideas. TV used another form of network. The final word on what ideas spread lay with Popes or TV magnates. The www network has changed all this, but I think Seth is being a bit optimistic as to how far power has shifted to the consumer.

 

Talking ’bout my generation.

Talking ’bout my generation. But whose generation, is clearly relative to who we are. An intriguing story about how graduates and older members of staff have a somewhat different take on workplace communication methods. It seems that recent graduates (seen as part of Generation Y) want more innovative and modern methods of communication available in the office which they commonly use outside of work. Seventy plus percent of recent graduates think IM (instant messaging) and webcams a good thing, while only twenty per cent of older managers think so. However, both groups think face-to-face is the best form of communication – if only they had time!

A similar story appeared in the Telegraph.