Not a blog to be tossed aside lightly — it should be thrown with great force
Spice Girl's Cheap Nostalgia Misses Target
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The clothes are ugly. And so is the commercial. Victoria Beckham's snoozer of a hotly anticipated accessible "fashion" line hits Target on April 9, and as the just-changing-hands Us Weekly reports, the ad is just out, dusting off the 20-year-old Spice Girls hit "Spice Up Your Life" to get us stoked about a bunch of weird, monochromatic women's and children's dresses, pants and tops. The set and production values are as cheap as the drab duds—even the models don't look happy to be there. (Then again, do models ever look happy?) It's hard to believe one of the most high-profile names in fashion would put her stamp on this crummy collection, or let this embarrassingly low-budget atrocity of a promotion on the airwaves. (Maybe that's why she didn't appear in the ad? Or maybe, like stores such as Old Navy, Target has tired of employing celebrities in its campaigns, at least for the time being.) Is the Target ad just a singular, creative miss—or is it, as Digiday contributor Mark Duffy recently griped, part of a larger trend of fashion marketing having lost its juice? Marketing trends notwithstanding, what seems certain is that Target has another flop on its hands, the onetime trendy sophistication of its wares a distant memory, leaving shoppers (including former devotee me) bored and staying away. If you've been following the news out of the retail world the last, oh, decade or so, you know that nobody's actually going to stores to shop anymore—making the financial standing of chains like Target wobblier and wobblier. Does anybody think Posh's anything-but rags are going to have people rushing back into those brightly colored, florescent-lit aisles? It is time for a major overhaul for our once-beloved Target—one much more bold and forward-thinking than this phoned-in effort from a 90s pop star.
There are two things nobody looks to the New York Post for: news or facts. (Except when they quote me.) That's why it wasn't a surprise to come across this tweet this morning noting that this is National Napping Day: Only problem is, the story they linked to is from early January . (The tweet has since been deleted.) Insert joke here about the Post and napping.
The news that megabrands AT&T and Johnson & Johnson are the latest in a crush of global giants pulling out from YouTube over concerns about their ads appearing next to offensive content has, naturally, focused largely on the site's owner, Google. On the defensive, Google has promised an "extensive review." But how do you control a robot? The actions of one advertiser or vendor are the least of this, and its getting resolved seems about as likely as our making Bill Gates un-rich or Kim Kardashian un-famous. The larger issue around this mess is that it's yet one more defeat for the inexorable automation of business. And in particular, it is another black eye for programmatic advertising. The Times puts it pretty succinctly: "The issue highlights the continuing risks companies face with programmatic advertising, which sends advertisers' money through a complex web of agencies and third-party networks that resemble a stock exchange before ads
"As agencies have moved more aggressively into the domain of commerce media, one has to wonder about the role of Amazon — specifically, how the holding companies and independent agencies setting up retail units impacted their all-important relationship with the 800-lb. gorilla of the space." (from Digiday's editorial series on the state of retail media)