House of Eratosthenes

There is something in the advertising profession that is deranged and misguided, and whatever it is I hope it is staying in Cannes, France. What the advertisers would like to find out, is how you go about selling things to men. Somehow — somehow — the elites at the very tippy-top of the advertising profession, there is some short-circuit in their brains. They turn this question around to “How should we tell men how to behave?” and on this point, it would appear, reality has thoroughly confused them.

Male-targeted ads found to be in no man’s land
Fri Jun 24, 2005 12:53 PM ET

CANNES, France – The Marlboro Man is having an identity crisis.

The Leo Burnett advertising agency, which created the iconic macho cowboy, said a new study it conducted found that half the men in most parts of the world don’t know what is expected of them in society and three-quarters of them think images of men in advertising are out of touch with reality.

Most ads have lumped men into one of two groups — the soft, caring type known as “metrosexuals,” who are comfortable with facial peels and pink shirts, or the stereotypical “retrosexuals,” who remain oafishly addicted to beer and sports.

See here’s the problem I have with this. It isn’t that I’ve gleaned some logical discrepancy between “having an identity crisis” and failure to grasp what is expected of you — the two are not identical, but there is no significant discrepancy there. Trouble is, there’s little correlation between having this problem, and failing to buy stuff. if you need to know what is expected of you in order to go about your day, most of the time, you’re going to go through life being confused about what is expected of you. When an advertising executive wants to sell you something, he’s really not going to have much of a tough time doing it. You’ll be sitting there confused, trying to figure out what people want out of you, you’ll see an ad, you’ll buy the thing, and then go back to being confused — everybody’s happy.

Put another way, your confusion about external goals for your existence, does nothing to help or hinder your consumption of goods. There is no logical reason to believe in such a correlation, nor is there to my knowledge any evidence to support such a correlation.

So no, this isn’t an identity crisis with men, it’s a stereotyping crisis with advertising executives.

“As the world is drifting toward a more feminine perspective, many of the social constructs men have taken for granted are undergoing significant shifts or being outright dismantled,” said Tom Bernardin, chairman and chief executive of Leo Burnett Worldwide.

“It’s a confusing time, not just for men, but for marketers as well as they try to target and depict men meaningfully,” he said this week during a presentation in the south of France where the ad industry is gathered for its annual conference.

Wake-up call for Mr. Bernardin: You don’t need to depict me meaningfully to sell me stuff.

You know, men resemble women in one respect: If you think the subject is so freakin’ complicated that you’re destined to go to your grave, having never figured men/women out, you know what? You’re right. You’re doing it to yourself. Men and women, it turns out, are quite simple once you acknowledge & embrace the politically incorrect but provable fact that they’re different.

As far as being told what to do & think & how to just plain exist, men are simple. They are amazingly simple. You know what? I think I can summarize the lifelong career of every single man, being told what to do, right here & now.

1. Your parents tell you what to do, and you do it.
2. Your parents tell you what to do, and you don’t do it. There. That’ll show ’em.
3. Your friends tell you what to do, and you do it.
4. Girls start to look good.
5. A girl tells you what to do, and you do it.
6. “Your” girl starts locking lips with some other guy who tells her what to do.
7. A lot of years and a lot of pain pass by with this step. Your mother, your sister, your ex-girlfriends, the girl who won’t go out with you, women who don’t like your opinions, strangers, teachers, they all tell you what to do in order to get more women. You try everything. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all between what you do & what gets more girls. Except for one thing…
8. …women have an innate and insatiable desire to be courted by a confident man.
9. You learn a lesson: There is nothing worthwhile to be gained from conforming to someone else’s idea of how you should live your life.
10. This is important. Are you listening, advertising executives? There is no 10. The lesson you learned in 9, you never have to learn again, never, never, never, never, never. You learned it once, you know it, you’re not going back. Can’t put the toothpaste back in that tube.

So when advertisers advertise to men the way they advertise to women — telling them what is “in”, how they’re supposed to dress and look and talk and live their lives — they don’t know it, but they’re advertising to men who are still in that infinite loop in 7 and haven’t yet gotten to that lesson in 9. Because guys who have learned the lesson in 9, aren’t going to respond to this. And they never will respond to it again.

Now the guys who have not yet learned this lesson, there’s a lot of them, because when we’re maturing Lord knows we go through a lot of years of wasted energy. During that time, if we read in a magazine some product will get us more poontang, we’ll buy it.

But what’s happening now, is men are learning the lesson in 9 a whole lot quicker. So the advertisers are losing this demographic. Are men learning quicker because they’re smarter? No, I think what’s happening is men are learning it quicker because they encounter the problem in their daily lives a lot more often.

“You won’t get laid unless you do xxxxx” — it’s one of those last refuges of the dull-witted. Men get told this pretty often. As a man pushing forty, I’d venture to say it’s become fashionable to hand this line to a man, moreso than it used to be. I think men hear this more often, than they did, say, 20 years ago.

It’s simply gotten worn out. Men just aren’t responding to it anymore. Because what works in #8, is the only thing that works, and they know it. A man knows when you tell him this, you either haven’t learned what he’s already learned, or you’re talking down to other men who haven’t learned what he knows, so you’re not worth listening to.

Well surprise, surprise. It turns out the advertising industry is a one-trick pony. This was the only device it had for selling things to men. Threatening their customers with involuntary celibacy.

Hey advertisers. You can’t do what you do without relying on a whole bunch of tools, and software, and fossil fuels, that were invented, built, discovered, explored, and refined by men. Those men didn’t invent your cars, drill for your oil, build your printing presses, write the software that delivers your e-mail, in order to look more Marlboro or metrosexual. They did it to get something done. So why don’t you take a hint: Worry about what we think we want to get done, not what we want to look like. Save the tips & tricks about what’s “in” for when you sell the toe-rings and belly-jewels to the little girls.

I love it. The whole paradigm of what’s “new hotness” and what is “ew, SO five minutes ago” is dying. By its own hand, you might say.

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Men And Women Are DifferentSunday, June 26th, 2005

Men And Women Are Different
Sunday, June 26th, 2005