Takes

No Offense Paying a Price for Our Knee-Jerk Irreverence How should we react to ads that are in dubious taste but also very funny? Sims Snowboards presents us with that dilemma as it mimics the post-Tiananmen incident in which a lone man confronted a line of tanks. The ad's image is clever-- all the more so because it ties in with boarders' disdain for the unnaturally smooth slopes that skiers prefer. In a category beset by "extreme" oafishness, it brings unexpected wit. Still, I can't help regretting my enjoyment of the ad. It would be pharisaical to pretend not to find it funny, but I also feel guilty in laughing at a joke that erodes the awe we should feel toward that man in Beijing. It's not that Sims or its agency (Hammerquist & Saffel of Seattle) intend to demean his bravery, but that's what happens when it's reprocessed as a sight gag in a sales pitch. The problem isn't that we're offended; the problem is that we're not offended. After all, we inhabit an era in which "irreverent" is invariably a term of praise, so there is no jolt in seeing an ad make such a jest. On the off chance we do take offense, we'll be instructed to "lighten up." But what if our culture already has lightened up to the point of near-weightlessness? When we're reflexively irreverent toward things that deserve reverence, our range of human experience is diminished. If nothing else, we ought to feel bad about that. Gifted Youths Just What I Needed! Considering how appalled teenagers are by parental taste in clothes, it's a tribute to the forbearing spirit of the holidays that teens will trust a parent to buy clothes for them. A survey of 12-17-year-olds by Channel One finds clothing the gift most often requested by teens. And what do teens themselves buy when they're purchasing gifts for others? Clothing again tops the list, with 72 percent saying they give apparel to the folks on their shopping lists. Reflecting the old buy-mom-a-baseball-glove syndrome, 65 percent of respondents buy music and videos as gifts. Evidently hoping to improve the aroma of their social circles, 44 percent give fragrances. All in all, the research finds teenagers planning to lay out $4.6 billion on gifts during the three weeks leading up to Christmas. The Food of Love It Sounds Like Cupid Is Not a Vegetarian Nothing like a little red meat to grease the skids for a romantic evening. Such is the opinion, anyway, of respondents to Parade magazine's annual "What America Eats" survey. Given a menu of choices and asked to pick the one food they'd be sure to include in a romantic dinner, 36 percent opted for steak. Pasta was a distant second (14 percent), besting shrimp (13 percent) and lobster (12 percent). Perhaps we don't look our most alluring in lobster bibs. But is there money to be made with a line of sexually provocative lobster bibs? Just call it Frederick's of Penobscot. Meanwhile, if you're still hungry after your romantic exertions, you might eat another steak, since respondents also picked it as the food best suited for celebrating a happy occasion. 'Length of Lifestyle' Surprise: Maturity Lasts Longer Than Immaturity Among the excuses marketers make for ignoring older consumers, one looms above all the rest: The geezers won't be around long enough to buy much of my brand. An article in The Journal of Consumer Marketing rebuts that notion by divvying up our lives in terms of "length of lifestyle." Our first 18 years are classified as childhood, and our next 17 as early adulthood. Then come 15 years of middle adulthood. Given current data on life expectancy, the period of "later adulthood" (beginning at age 50) is likely to last close to 30 years for women and well over 20 years for men. In other words, we spend far longer in that lifestyle than in any of its predecessors. That ought to get marketers' attention. Titled "Creative strategies for connecting with mature individuals," the article was written by John Nielson and Kathy Curry, both principals at the Sandcastle agency in Minneapolis. Site Seeing Nobody Said the Web Would Be a Cheap Date Have you got $6.3 million? That's what it will cost to run a "high profile" content site on the Web in the year 2000, says a report by Forrester Research. The figure is more than double the current tab of $3.1 million, says the Cambridge, Mass.-based firm. But the additional expenditures should pay off as Web traffic increases during those same years. Indeed, Forrester forecasts that what's known in the biz as the cost-per-page-view will fall sharply, from 4.3 cents now to 1.7 cents in 2000. And that will put ad-supported Web sites (drumroll, please) "within striking distance of profitability." Ups and Downs Adding Up Adweek's Classified Ads for Jobs The market for jobs in advertising, marketing and media was mixed last month, judging by the volume of help-wanted ads running in Adweek. For several years, every part of the country had been going gangbusters, month in and month out. At least for the moment, we're now seeing the return of a more normal situation in which some regions spurt ahead in availability of jobs as others stall. Clothes Call Gauging the Horizon Of Kids These Days If the world ends tomorrow in a nuclear conflagration, at least kids will be nattily dressed for the occasion. An online poll queried kids age 8-12 on what concerns them most, with choices ranging from "what to wear to school tomorrow" to "nuclear war." Naturally, "what to wear" was the chief worry, cited by 55 percent of the participants--more than nuclear war (14 percent), world hunger (13 percent) and health (12 percent) combined. The poll was conducted as part of the KIDecision series on Curiocity's FreeZone Web site, operated by Chicago-based Thomson Target Media. The figures offer a useful corrective to the punditry that declares today's kids to be a socially conscious bunch. So they may be, but their interest in issues such as global warming is tepid compared to their concern over their personal lives. In other words, kids are a lot like adults. Another poll in the series asked kids which household chores they do most often. Cleaning their bedrooms was the top vote-getter, cited by 34 percent, with dishwashing (24 percent) the runner-up.

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