Bedtime Stories: 6 Characters In Search Of A Soft Mattress
In our media-drenched society

Bedtime Stories: 6 Characters In Search Of A Soft Mattress
In our media-drenched society, it’s an article of faith that people seek stimulation at every possible moment. Indeed, the buzzword of the year is “multitasking,” which captures the consumer’s supposed predilection for surfing the net and watching TV while talking on the phone and cooking dinner. There may be something to that, but it obscures the fact that people also yearn for peace and quiet. The results of a survey by Publishers Weekly and BookExpo America hint at the nature of that parallel universe. Asked to describe their book-buying and reading habits, 71 percent of women and 34 percent of men said reading helps them fall asleep. The life of the mind is all well and good, but the body needs shut-eye.
Perhaps this is what respondents had in mind when 92 percent of them said they believe people can benefit from reading the classics. Start stocking Paradise Lost on pharmacy sleep-aid shelves and watch how sales take off. Actually, the survey’s respondents had a loftier view of the benefits of reading: 82 percent of them were “somewhat inclined to find bibliophiles a lot more interesting than those who aren’t avid readers.” And 68 percent wish they had more time to read–a figure that rose to 83 percent among the harried 30-40-year-old women.
Upbeat Rebels: When You’re Smiling
Adolescent rebellion takes many forms, most of them objectionable. But a USA Today story last week suggested that Generation Y has come up with an especially diabolical twist. The article quoted William Strauss, described as a “generational expert,” as saying that today’s kids “rebel by being upbeat.” It’s their way of setting themselves apart from the “fatalistic Xers” and the “preachy boomers.” No wonder their elders find them so annoying. Granted, the sullenness of Gen Xers and the self-righteous self-indulgence of boomers was hard to take, too. But when people aren’t in the mood for it, nothing so maddens them as ostentatious displays of cheerfulness. If you want to shield yourself from such unseemly behavior, don’t go to the mall. Citing data from the International Council of Shopping Centers, the article notes that teens go to “shopping venues” 54 times a year.
Mixed Blessings: A Minor-League Welcome, Resorting To Prozac, Smoking Geography, Etc.
They know what they like, and it isn’t art. Participants in a CNN Interactive online poll last week were asked, “Which mega-exhibit would you stand in line to see?” At press time, Van Gogh and Monet each had 23 percent of the vote, with Picasso and Rembrandt tied at 12 percent and Georgia O’Keefe at 6 percent. But a plurality of the vote (24 percent) went to the artist currently known as “None of ’em.”
Not every client would acknowledge that people are bored to tears with its line of business. So tip your hat to Allmerica Select for having the gumption to do so in an ad created by Boston-based Gearon Hoffman. It addresses financial professionals who’ve glazed the eyeballs of many a listener by merely saying the word “annuities,” so it will strike a responsive chord. Copy hints at the scope of the problem as it enthuses that none of Allmerica’s competitors “has ever before offered such an impressive death benefit guarantee.” And you thought your job had its morbid side.
If Mark McGwire goes into a season-long slump next year and gets sent down to the minors, at least he knows he’ll receive a warm welcome. To commemorate his home-run record, the Memphis Redbirds–AAA farm team of McGwire’s St. Louis Cardinals–ran an ad in the local paper saying, “Congratulations, Mark. We couldn’t be happier for you.” The ad’s visual was a close-up of a baseball, with the photo cropped so that the seam on the ball looked like a smile.
While gratuitous references to Viagra are advertising’s pharmacological gimmick of the moment, we can cheerfully report that they have not altogether displaced gratuitous references to Prozac. An ad for a resort in Hawaii takes the latter approach, complete with a bogus container of the medication. “Take (1) tablet twice daily,” begins the ad’s prescriptive copy. “If depression persists, take a trip to Molokai Ranch.” The Schiller Group of Honolulu created the piece.
All bets are off if the economy tanks. So far in 1998, though, a study finds the media more positive in its coverage of individual companies than has been the case the past couple years. According to an annual survey by The Delahaye Group of Portsmouth, N.H., 21 percent of stories about companies this year have been “positive”–up from 16 percent in 1997 and 14 percent in ’96. On the other hand, the incidence of “negative” articles about companies has increased as well, to 5 percent from 3 percent in both of the two previous years. The rest of the stories were rated as “neutral.”
As governmental restrictions and societal attitudes make it harder for cigarette makers to win new customers, more attention will be paid to consumers who already are heavy smokers. Where do you find them? Data compiled by the feds shows that the incidence of heavy smoking varies widely from place to place. For instance, among Californians who smoke each day, 85 percent smoke a pack or less. The pack-or-less figure is even higher in New Mexico (86.1 percent) and the District of Columbia (93 percent). In Missouri, just 72 percent of the smokers hold their daily intake to a pack or less. (The figures in the report date from ’96.) Texas has the highest proportion falling into the two-packs-or-more category (4.1 percent), with Virginia and Missouri not far behind. At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than 0.1 percent of Utah’s daily smokers have a two-pack-a-day habit.
Literati who mourn the disappearance of complex, abstruse writing just haven’t read a good street sign lately. An ad for a parking-garage company in Durham, N.C., deftly parodies the signs that seem intended more to obscure than to reveal information about when drivers can legally park their cars in a given place. The point is to let people know how much simpler their lives would be if they’d just pay Corcoran Parking’s monthly fee for their own space. Another ad alludes to typical parking-sign typography: “The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.” West & Vaughan of Durham created the series.
Vegetables are nice? Who says? While the animal kingdom takes the heat for all the enmity in this world, vegetables are regarded as innocents who (apart from the occasional Venus flytrap) wouldn’t hurt a fly. Now, a campaign for Ore-Ida potatoes reveals the sordid truth about rancorous radishes, squalling squashes and the like. As if it weren’t enough to show headstrong cabbages avowing that they “hate potatoes,” another ad in the campaign features an envious beet confessing, “Secretly, I’ve always wanted to be a potato.” In still another execution, radishes accuse potatoes of having a “star complex.” Citron Haligman
Bedecarre of San Francisco obviously had fun creating the clever campaign. And if its creatives watch their backs as they hurry past the local vegetable stand, who can blame them?
the color of money: Tracking the Ethnic Shift In Household Spending
Demographic trends in the U.S. are making white households older and smaller than they used to be. As such, the overall rate of growth in spending by white households is nothing to write home about. At the same time, income has been rising for nonwhite workers. These are a couple of the factors contributing to a trend exhaustively documented in a new study: Across a wide range of products and services, the growth in spending by white households is lower than the growth in spending by African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic households.
As you can see from the chart, the disparities in growth are striking in some categories. The statistics appear in the New America Marketbasket Index, a report issued by New America Strategies Group (an alliance of True North’s ethnic-marketing agencies) in conjunction with DemoGraph Corp. Across a marketbasket of 13 categories, the per-household increase for whites averaged 13.7 percent. The equivalent figure for Asian-American households was 17.7 percent, for African-American households 17.6 percent and for Hispanic households 15.5 percent.
(The report calculates its figures on a per-household basis to differentiate the gains from those arising simply from aggregate population growth.)
Among other key points made by the report, “multicultural consumers represented 40 percent of all first-time home buyers between 1995 and 1998.” That helps explain why rental housing was the sole category in which spending by nonwhite households declined.
Going Postal: The Check Is In The Mail, Figuratively Speaking
No wonder companies send out direct mail pieces by the ton. In a Gallup poll conducted for Pitney Bowes among large and midsized U.S. companies, respondents credited direct mail with generating 7 percent of their revenues, on average. As for predictions that use of the Internet would cut into direct mail, the opposite has occurred: “In fact, nearly half of the companies using the Internet as a communications tool report that their outgoing mail volume has increased (by 5 percent, on average) due to the need to fulfill online requests,” says a summary of the findings. All in all, direct mail accounts for 23 percent of the companies’ total spending on marketing communications.
Bon Voyage: Better Booking Online Than Standing On Line
Techno-savvy business travelers aren’t the only ones using the Web to book their trips these days. A new report by Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research says online leisure bookings have become a boom category as well. Amid “broad consumer acceptance” and “aggressive efforts” by travel suppliers to facilitate direct bookings, such business should yield $29.5 billion in revenues by 2003, the research firm forecasts. Airlines will be the biggest players by 2003, but tour packagers and even cruise lines will get into the act. This year, 76 percent of the top 75 airlines, hotels and car-rental agencies will offer online booking, up from 37 percent last year. Meanwhile, a study by NPD Online Research of Port Washington, N.Y., finds nearly 70 percent of Web surfers saying they’ve already visited a travel-related Web site.
Old News: Just Come Back When You’re 5 Years Younger
Good thing there’s no age discrimination in the agency business. Otherwise, our less youthful readers would be disturbed to see a study showing that it’s common for people seeking new executive-level jobs. According to Norwalk, Conn.-based Exec-U-Net, it takes 18 percent longer for a 41-45-year-old executive to find a new job than for a 35-40-year-old. For 46-50-year-olds, it takes 24 percent longer, and for 51-55s, 44 percent longer. For 56-60-year-olds, the search takes 66 percent longer than it would for someone in the 35-40 cohort. Overall, executives who already have a job take an average of 11.1 months to find a new one. For those who are “in transition,” as Exec-U-Net delicately puts it, the search averages 9.2 months.