Mad Men and Their Equally Mad Women
So tomorrow night, Maternal Instinct founder Kat Gordon and I are talking about “Marketing to Moms” at the annual Synergos Series sponsored by The Hayden Group in Palo Alto:
Our presentation just happens to jibe with the much-awaited opening of Season 2 of the hit AMC series “Mad Men“. As a veteran of the ad business — albeit many moons after this TV series takes place — I am fascinated by this brilliantly detailed view of the ad agency world Kat and I were once so immersed in, and even more fascinated by the State of Women (and Moms) in 1960. Mad Men highlights women in the workplace but also takes us home to suburbia, to the realm of the 5:31 commuter train, where Betty and her perpetually pregnant buddies blithely shun the local divorcee, reign over birthday parties, cocktails, straying hubbies and vibrating washing machines. All while balancing a Lucky Strike between their Fire and Ice’d red lips.
Nearly 50 years ago, women were sharply defined by their men, especially these Mad Men, who created the pop culture and the products that in many ways, enslaved both office wives and housewives.
Today with the sheer force of 82 million Moms (and growing, with a new boomlet showing up in census polls) plus the power and the preferences of our pocketbooks, we’ve managed to turn the ad world and everything else topsy-turvy.
In the year 2008, women are setting the trends and woe unto advertisers who don’t get The Triple AAA’s:
- Acknowledge
- Appreciate
- Authenticity
In this millennium, we’ve got spaces for moms that Betty Draper could not have imagined even after a pitcher of Daiquiris. In London, private clubs like Maggie & Rose and Cupcake Mom, offer mothers a place to convene and relax, where they’re welcome to come and go as they please, 7 days a week. Maggie & Rose, based in chi-chi Kensington, features play areas and offers children’s lessons in art, cooking, dance and more, as well as a weekend movie club and birthday party services. Parents are catered to with a comfortable and (importantly) quiet café (with wifi access, natch), as well as seminars and access to a a concierge-style service with well-researched info on nannies, tutors, schools, holidays, etc.
Cupcake also aims to provide a grown-up but child-friendly environment but especially for pregnant women and new mothers. In addition to an organic café, Cupcake also offers personal trainers and a spa. The top floor of the club, where the spa is located, is a “baby-free zone” and features treatments tailor-made for pregnant women and new moms, from the “Cupcake in the Oven Massage” to the “Mermaid Wrap.” Cupcake also plans to install a sleep pod for much-needed powernaps, and will offer a concierge service to help busy moms complete their to-do lists.
In New York, there’s Citibabes, the club in Manhattan that offers high-quality services and activities both for children and for parents, all under one roof. The big A — acknowledgement — here is clearly stated by the founders:
We all know that having young children can do one of two things for new parents: it can make them feel isolated or it can bring them together. Our ultimate goal is to build a community for New York families that fosters a sense of identity and fellowship among its members. We also hope that families will appreciate the security and privacy of Citibabes, so that they may feel at ease while their children play freely inside the club—as if it’s a second home.
In the Mad Men era, not only would these special Mom-friendly places not exist, but the need for them would not be acknowledged, either by the Mom herself or by the business world.
Check back for more new Mom trends– and tune into Mad Men for a real education on how far we’ve come.
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Brett Backs Pack Against The Wall, Files For Reinstatement.
I’m wearing my Bring Brett Back T-shirt as I type this latest update (trust me, I look slightly better than the pasty white guy in the photo) : ESPN reports that Brett Favre has officially filed for reinstatement. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is letting the team and the future Hall of Famer tap-dance it out for the next 24 hours in an attempt to come to a resolution.
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The Death of Email. RIP Email.
Email has been ailing for quite some time. I knew it was on its last legs and even with a fresh infusion of retro Rocketmail from Yahoo, things have not been looking good. Then last night on ABC Family’s new “The Secret Lives of Teenagers” the official death rattle sounded. One of the show’s main characters, clearly the series’ resident good girl, stared directly into the camera, opened her perfectly-puffed lips and delivered the final blow: “Email? No one emails anymore.”
Today, mere hours after this chilling proclamation, Facebook launched its new interface, upping its privacy standards and increasing its focus on improved user experience. MySpace has cleaned up its interface as well and has more upgrades in the works. Uber-user-friendly and growing phenom etsy.com, funded in January to the tune of $27 million from Accel Partners and others, is also growing its social networking features.
And just days ago, Hitwise recently reported that traffic to Twitter increased 500 percent for the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That’s a killer jump for a service that’s plagued with technical glitches and perpetually flashes its famous Fail Whale.
A study by the Pew Research Center waay back in 2005 revealed that even then, almost half of online teenagers preferred to chat with friends via IM rather than e-mail. And that was before Apple’s iPhone.
Can email be saved? Should email be saved? Stay tuned.
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Chasing Cool: Shower Yourself in Color
I’m not sure how ‘green’ this is. But it sure is colorful. Manufacturer Crosswater calls Rio ‘a revolutionary ultra thin showering head’ with 96 programmable LED lights. The low consumption LED lamps create a dazzling column of water and light. Plus, if you get bored with the same-old same-old rainbow, the programmable keypad comes with 12 individual lighting settings. Just the thing for that slow Saturday night. And it’ll only set you back a cool 2499 pounds.
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Yahoo! to Microsoft: “I’m Just Not That Into You.”
According to the New York Times, Yahoo has once again spurned an offer from Microsoft. The proposal came late Friday evening from Alpha-Suitors Steve Ballmer and Carl Icahn. Yahoo was given 24-hours to make its decision, which is like really random when it’s so last-minute and on a Friday night (when we usually pretend to be out with Google or maybe Rupert) and feels way like a booty call.
But just hours into the speed-date, spitfire Yahoo decided to play hard to get, bad-mouthing Microsoft to like everybody in the whole entire world, calling the proposal ‘ludricrous’ and like ‘erratic, unpredictable’ and ‘bludgeoning’ and probably even posting on its Super Wall.
Part of Yahoo’s hurt feelings resistance appears to come from the fact that Microsoft now only has eyes for its search business. Rather accept this new pieces-parts strategy, in which Co-Suitor Mr. Icahn, would have taken over the remaining parts of the company, Yahoo insists on being loved truly, madly deeply ‘just as I am.’ Then it went back to lying on its bed with like zillions of pillows and watching old Billie Holiday ‘All of Me’ videos on youtube.
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July 11: More Sinners Than Winners, From The Packers to Silicon Valley to IndyMac to The New iPhone.
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The Week of July 11 is crammed with Sinners and only one (semi) Winner:
- After shoddy treatment from Ted Thompson, Brett asks to be released from Green Bay.
- Single White Female, the sequel. The Mercury News reports that with the ouster of Dianne Green, CEO of VMWare, none of Silicon Valley’s 150 biggest corporations have a single female CEO.
- The Basin Complex Fire ravages more than 103,000 acres of pure, pristine California and moves closer to Carmel Valley.
- Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae tank. Then mortgage giant IndyMac Bank is seized by the Feds. This bank deserved to be outed for its sleazy shenanigans. Who’s next?
- And the obsession with all things Apple grows, with the launch today of the new iPhone3G, released this am at AT&T and Apple stores around the US. It’s faster, cheap, cooler than ever — and also capable of bringing down Apple’s activation system.
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Big Sur News: Monks Flee As Fires Reach Famous Tassajara Sanctuary.
With many of the Basin Complex evacuees returning to their homes in Big Sur, all eyes here in Carmel Valley are turning toward the smoke rising from nearby Cachagua.
With the exception of five people, The San Francisco Zen Center at Tassajara is now evacuated.
The picture above is the view from my driveway.
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Better Than Bossy? Ali Lohan’s Hip-Hop-Hot Single “All The Way Around” Launches.
Passionate fans of Living Lohan got a glimpse of the Linday’s little sister’s song being recorded but they have to wait till July 14th to find it on iTunes. Check it out on People.com’s First Listen.
The big juicy question seems to be: Which is better? Lindsay’s Bossy, which was released in May, or Ali’s Rihanna-style All The Way Around ?
Ali’s sure to be summer hit was recorded at the Maloof Music recording studio at celeb-favorite The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas. It was produced by Emanuel “Eman” Kiriakou, who’s worked with Nick Lachey and Jordin Sparks. ‘Nuff said.
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Pure Hog Heaven For Fans and Marketers: New Harley Davidson Museum Opens This Weekend.
This coming Saturday July 12th marks the opening of a new piece of classic Americana – Harley Davidson’s new Museum guaranteed to get ‘your heart racing’ by ‘experiencing the H-D story from dream to legend.’
The Museum is yet another example of Harley Davidson’s brilliant brand strategy and Customer Experience expertise, as the company continues to fan the flames of its most passionate users with high engagement experiences. From a marketer’s point of view, the Museum is nothing short of a Temple of Ethnography and a field trip to this $75 million new 20-acre complex is likely to generate new insights into how to cultivate the cult, as well as a wardrobe of hot new chappies.
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Moo Just Grew. Moo Launches New Bigger Business Cards.
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The company that turned mini-cards into a mondo success is now going big. Or at least bigger. The mighty Moo now brings its creative customer-centered cool to regular size business cards. Naturally they’re still echelons above those tired generic cards, with extra cool twists like your choice of two eco-friendly paper stocks, one of which is the chlorine-free, 100% recycled, recyclable and biodegradeable Moo ‘Green.’ Then there’s the ‘magic’ technology they’re dubbing ‘PrintFinity’, which lets you have a different photo, logo or design on every card. As they say “it’s a little portfolio in your pocket, a catalogue, a trading card, anything you like.’
Happily, you can even buy your business cards in runs as short as 50. So you’re never stuck with boxes of cards with the wrong address, forcing you to spend the night before the Big Conference making teeny stickers to cover up the old one. Moo really gets that life today is ever evolving and your cards need to morph right along with you. These eclectic cards are $21.99, with the mini-cards still happily available at $19.99.
As is probably pretty obvious, I have long been a Moo fan. And not just because I am originally from Wisconsin and born to worship Golden Guernseys. Moo is a great example of how fresh perspective and imagination plus Web 2.0 tools can transform a commodity business into a whole new industry. Moo Prints, based in London, was the brainchild of Richard Moross, who got bored with the same-old same-old bland of traditional business cards. Moross also noticed that the Internet and its virtual communities were changing the offline world, creating new kinds of relationships and new forms of interaction. There was all that pent-up user-generated-creativity bubbling all over the web. So rather than introduce the mini Moo cards in the same-old, same-old way, Moo invented a new distribution channel by partnering with social networking and community sites like Flickr and Bebo. Now Facebook, etsy, livejournal, Vox and Fotolog have joined the Moo Crew as well.
Here are some ways I’ve used Moo (feel free to add your own ideas here):
*I invented MOOLIGANS Cards for Kids. Because you can add 10 pictures per Moo order, this makes it inexpensive and fast for Moms, Girl Scout troops, teachers, classmates, etc. to create Moo Cards for the group. I set up class, club, activity, school blogs and print that email address or URL on the back of the MOOLIGANS.
* I get teeny Moo-sized envelopes from Paper Source and I put a couple of (different) Moos in the envelope with one of my Guru of New Moo Stickers on the outside. At a conference or event, my teeny envelopes are much less likely to get lost, discarded or neglected, because they’re more substantial, don’t seem boringly corporate and everyone wants to open them and see what’s inside.
*Okay, I'll admit it. I sometimes use pieces-parts-of-myself (or others) rather than my whole face because it's far more intriguing to just show lips or eyes. Mystery!
*I've used Moos as mini event invitations
*For client PR --promoting blogs, books, art, photography, design portfolio
*As very personal and reasonably priced birthday gifts
*I like to buy art when I travel --- I bring it home and Moo-it so I can always have tiny souvenirs of that streetfair in Avignon with me. And it's a nice gift for your traveling partners.
*I tried (but failed) to turn my stickers into cute magnets. I am dangerous with craft supplies.
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