Mark Dolliver's Takes

All we are saying: The Hopes and Fears of Post-2000 Years What do we want? World peace. When do we want it? In the next millennium. At least, that's what 38 percent of respondents to an ABC News poll said they want when asked to name their "greatest hope for the next millennium--the thing you'd most like to see humankind achieve." (The results were summarized on the Polling Report Web site.) Does this mean people fret about the prospect of war? Not really. When the poll asked them to pick "the greatest remaining problem that people will have to deal with in the next millennium," war ended up in sixth place, with 5 percent of the vote. One gathers there's an asymmetry between people's hopes and fears--a notion supported by other nuggets of the data. For example, the runner-up on the "hope" list was a cure for such afflictions as AIDS and cancer (13 percent). On the "problem" list, though, AIDS polled 2 percent of the vote, as did miscellaneous diseases. The vote was generally more scattered on the "problem" list, with only the top choice ("racism/prejudice/hate crimes," at 14 percent) in double digits. In part, the results are a tribute to the durability of World Peace as a brand name in people's minds. The odds of global annihilation may have fallen with the end of the Cold War, but the phrase "world peace" has such an aura that it outshines hopes for everything from advances in space exploration (4 percent) to an elimination of hunger (2 percent). ----------------------------- It's Alive! Adding Up Adweek's Classified Ads for Jobs After sagging badly earlier in the year, the market for jobs in advertising, marketing and media has strongly revived, judging by the volume of help-wanted classifieds running in Adweek. There have been fitful signs of life since the spring, but the robust September numbers have the virtue of demonstrating that August's rebound was not a fluke. One more month of this upturn and we'll have a certifiable trend. And, if it happens, we'll also see some of those unsightly negative numbers in the chart's purplish columns turn positive. ----------------------------- Uncovered: Skip Insurance and You Can Buy Very Good Wine When policy makers speak of Americans who lack health insurance, they naturally focus on the people who can't afford coverage. But statistics released last week by the Census Bureau make it clear that the ranks of the uninsured include plenty of people--millions, in fact--from higher up the income scale. As you can see from the chart below, the percentage of people without health coverage is a sizable minority even among those with annual household income above the $75,000 mark. No doubt some of these people are so overextended by other expenses that they can't easily afford health coverage as well. But we can surmise that others among them have simply chosen to allot their money elsewhere and hope for the best as far as health is concerned. They see all the commercials the rest of us see for health insurance, but they're unmoved to buy it. Marketers in the category proceed (reasonably enough) as if they're competing with one another. In the case of the prosperous uninsured, though, we might say insurers are competing unsuccessfully against all the other things money can buy. One wonders how they might fare with commercials preying on the anxieties of that group--suggesting, for instance, that a consumer might get more peace of mind from buying health insurance than from buying a bigger sport utility vehicle. ----------------------------- Mixed Blessings: For the Love of Bratwurst, The Writing Stuff, Etc. America's shipboard romance has run its course. So we infer, at any rate, from a poll conducted by The Knot, which bills itself as "the pioneer of the online wedding category." Brides- and grooms-to-be were asked to pick the popular wedding songs they'd like to see banned. Celine Dion's Titanic hit, "My Heart Will Go On," won handily, garnering 41 percent of the vote. Elton John's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" ran second (18 percent) and Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings" was third (15 percent). You've got to admire a brand that's got the gumption to compare itself favorably to caulk. Sure, some consumers won't believe the claim in a billboard for Johnsonville Bratwurst. But the ones who do will be indelibly impressed. Another ad in the series (via Clarity Coverdale Fury of Minneapolis) trades on the brand's fame among tailgaters by saying it's "Served in finer parking lots everywhere." "I'm not a nurse, but I play one on television." Pharmaceutical ads like to invoke the authority of doctors to convey a brand's efficacy. But they might do quite as well to feature nurses. In a poll commissioned by a professional organization of nurses and NurseWeek Publishing, people were asked how much they trust healthcare information provided by various sources. While doctors were trusted "some" or "a great deal" by 93 percent of respondents, nurses were just a single percentage point behind--and a healthy 41 percent ahead of journalists. Looking for a few good copywriters? It's not going to get any easier. A study of school kids by the Department of Education finds about one in four is "proficient" in writing. The figure is based on writing tests given students in the 4th, 8th and 12th grades. Girls fared much better than boys, notes the department's summary of the study: "Girls did so much better in writing that, nationally, there were twice as many scoring in the proficient and advanced categories as boys." Moreover, boys were twice as likely as girls to fall below the "basic" level at all three grades. Beer Belly of the Week honors go to an ad for an industrial device that senses whether a container (preferably non-human) is properly filled. Innerwest Advertising of Reno, Nevada, doubtless went on gut instinct to create the ad for Stedham Electronics. Ads that tout a brand's "official" link to a sports team are generally a dull lot. So, let us tip our football helmets to the Ingles Markets supermarket chain for being an exception to that rule. Spots by The Alpha Group of Asheville, N.C., take Atlanta Falcons game footage and substitute groceries for footballs to tell viewers the 1999 Super Bowl team is "still hungry." If you're not impressed at seeing a roast chicken kicked for a field goal, you'll go for the running back who bursts through the line with a bunch of bananas tucked under his arm or the receiver who catches a bottle of soda in the end zone. Cynics will say the team should be hungry, since it went winless in the first month of the season. ----------------------------- Just Hangin' Out: Your Dinner With Al or Bill Americans have little interest in voting. But they like to have dinner with people and hang out with pals. So as the presidential campaigns ready their commercials, they'll glean the nonpolitical findings of political polls. Time found more New Hampshire Democrats would choose to have dinner with Bill Bradley (50 percent) than with Al Gore (38 percent). Asked whether Bradley or Gore would be "more fun to hang out with," respondents to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll picked Bradley by 41 percent to 21 percent. (Thirty-eight percent were unsure, perhaps puzzled to see "fun" in the same sentence with those names.) George W. Bush beat Gore in the fun-to-hang-out-with category by 52 percent to 26 percent. ----------------------------- Looks at Books: Then There Are Those Who Just Read Opinion Polls Bad news for the publisher of that oddball biography of Ronald Reagan: Americans prefer nonfiction to fiction. Asked which genre they "mostly" read, 46 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll cited nonfiction, 35 percent picked fiction and 17 percent said they read equal amounts of the two. As the chart indicates, the Internet has yet to become a major force in shaping Americans' reading choices. Nor, for that matter, do ads make a big impression. It's not that people are insensible to the charms of a good book--or a bad book, as the case may be. The poll finds Americans to be "fairly avid readers," with 38 percent saying they've read more than 10 books (in part or in whole) in the past year. Another 16 percent have read six to 10 books in that period, and 30 percent put themselves in the one-to-five range. Thirteen percent confessed they haven't read a single book in that time--down from 16 percent in a 1990 poll but up from 8 percent in a 1978 survey. Women outnumber men among heavy readers: 64 percent of the former have read more than six books in the past year, versus 42 percent of the latter. Not surprisingly, the polling also found a correlation between reading and education: 78 percent of those with a post-graduate education fell into the six-books-or-more class, as did 71 percent of college graduates and 58 percent of those with some college. Even among those with a high school education or less, though, a respectable 42 percent had read six or more books in the past year.

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Mark Dolliver's Takes

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