TriumphAnt

Have you been “viral marketed” yet?

If you’re a regular internet surfer and e-mail user, chances are you have.

“Viral marketing” is an interesting new concept in advertising in which an ad is developed for a product that is so edgy (the ad, that is, not the product) that it probably will never see the light of day in mainstream media but, instead, winds up in wide internet circulation as like-minded surfers pass it along to their friends with comments like, “You’re not gonna believe this!”, insinuating itself into cyberspace like a disease, but without the file destruction that attends what we traditionally call a “computer virus”. The cost to the advertiser begins and ends with the cost of production but an ad’s impact is multiplied exponentially as it circulates around the net’s bazillions of users.

The ads are also usually quite clever, often with a strong emotional kick and, although many viewers won’t be heard to admit it in public, hilarious. (When advertisers operate outside the realm of advertising standards councils, they can damn the forces of political correctness and strike out the bland.)

Here are two examples, both in wide internet circulation:

1. An ad for the Ford SportKa, a British car that adds a few sporty whistles and bells to its tiny commuter car, the Ford Ka, shows a cat climbing curiously up the windshield of the car. As the cat reaches the roof, the sunroof mysteriously slides open. Curious cat pokes its head in; suddenly the sunroof snaps closed and the shocked viewer sees the cat’s head tumble into the car while its lifeless, headless body slides back down the windshield. The final caption appears, “Ford SportKa: Ford Ka’s evil twin”.

2. An ad for the Volkswagen Polo shows a swarthy type getting into the driver’s seat. A close-up reveals a black-and-white Palestinian style scarf around his neck. He drives to a streetside café, where cutaways show shirt-sleeved business types chatting, a mother nursing an infant. Cut back to the car, just as the driver pushes a bomb detonator button. The scene becomes a long shot of the car just as its interior lights up with the bright flame of the explosion; a muted “whoomph” is heard and the car lightly rocks from side to side, but is otherwise undamaged. The onscreen caption appears: “The VW Polo: small but tough”.

In both cases, Ford and VW officially deny the ads’ authenticity. But inveterate internet junkies have tracked source references and both ads appear to have been birthed in multi-million dollar agencies. For example, an online article in The International Herald Tribune last May reported, “Ford and its advertising agency, Ogilvy Mather, acknowledge creating the [SportKa] clip but insist that it was never meant to be released.” Yeah, right. And the VW ad’s links, apparently, go back to Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), their agency of record for decades. (As one ad industry journal notes, “DDB's ads for VW successfully sold a Nazi car that looked like an insect. No one has topped them.”)

The ads’ obvious production values also bespeak some serious money behind their filming. The lighting in the VW Polo ad, for example, is beautifully professional. And of course, the louder the product manufacturer denies involvement, the more coverage will ensue, in some cases spilling the ad into the even wider realm of mainstream news coverage – and more free advertising.

Googling “viral advertising” turns up all sorts of commentary about the format, including news articles written about a particular ad. The advertiser is consistently on-message, arguing in essence, “The ad is bogus. We’d never advocate cruelty to animals (Ford) / using terrorism as a theme to sell a product (VW).”

Viral advertising. Watch for it. Coming from a friend to your e-mailbox someday soon. As sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. (I oughta know; I’ve already forwarded the Polo ad’s link to one or two friends.)

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The next time you’re on an escalator, take a look down.

Where the edges of the moving steps pass along the side walls, if you look closely enough you will see a tiny, almost immeasurably small, gap. If it’s more than a couple of millimetres wide, I’d be surprised.

Recently at work, I discovered that the “Up” escalator leading from the street level at my office tower’s entrance to the next level has received a structural enhancement. Just above the line where the steps’ edges travel beside the escalator’s side walls, an escalator-long line of brush bristles has been installed. The bristles are thick, and jut out about an inch and a half over the edgeline of the travelling steps.

And as I travelled upwards on those steps, I wondered about the purpose of such a brush. It runs the escalator’s full length, even to the point of curving at the top and bottom to follow the line as the steps flatten out. My only previous experience with anything even remotely similar has been at golf courses where occasionally, anchored to the ground right at the entrance to the clubhouse, there will be a thick and bristly brush on which a golfer can clean his mud- or grass-cluttered shoes before entering. At the better courses, they will even mount one on the fender or running board of each of their golf carts. The English also have a quaint little front-door hedgehog that accomplishes the same thing for the gardener’s home use. A cast-iron rendition of the animal has brush bristles in place of its prickly spikes.

So I had thought that perhaps this new escalator installation offered the opportunity for pant-cuff or boot brushing for walkers who’d picked up some slush spatters in the course of their commuting. But the fact that the bristles are so small, and the almost useless non-cleaning that would result from the incidental contact of a bit of pants or boots that might brush them, made me realize this couldn’t possibly be their purpose.

Fate intervened the very next day in the form of a brace of workers who were installing the very same arrangement along both inside walls of the “Down” escalator.

Fortunately, being in the possession of not only a degree in journalism, but also the keenly incisive, finely tuned and precision-focused razor sharp inquisitive mind that one requires in order to… to… Where was I?

Oh yes. So I asked one of them what the hell the brush was for.

He actually seemed pleased that someone had even bothered to stop to chat; being able to chat about what he was doing was an added bonus. He pointed to the minuscule gap between the immobilized step and the side wall, and said that in the US, that gap supposedly had trapped shoe heels and coat hems, and the brush was designed to keep this from happening.

Then he looked at me. I think he almost knew what my reaction was going to be. After bending down to examine a gap that wouldn’t trap a Barbie doll’s toy stiletto shoe heel and whose only snaggable fabric would have to be something so flimsy that it would register on Richter’s lesser-known “diaphanous” scale roughly where see-through lingerie sits. Hardly the stuff of a government office environment – unless of course they’ve recently moved their exotic dancer research in-house.

I burst out laughing. “You know what I think,” I asked? “I think there are way too many lawyers in the world; that’s what I think.”

He shared the laugh and ended by telling me that usually anything that gets changed in the US eventually works its way up to Canada after a few years.

So of course I did a little looking around the internet for information on escalator accidents and, in one of those hilarious re-affirmations that the world clearly thrives on irony, amid literally hundreds of links to lawyers willing to undertake “escalator accident” lawsuits on my behalf, I found this note in a report of a recent accident involving a group of schoolchildren on a movie theater escalator in Manhattan:

“The Buildings Department issued a stop-use order on the escalator until it completes an investigation, and it issued a violation for failure to maintain the escalator. Department officials believe the student's pants caught on a quarter-inch section of a screw that holds a black protective brush, called a skirt, in place. The skirt prevents material from falling into the escalator's mechanism.” (from Newsday.com, January 13, 2005)

Yep, this escalator accident was caused by a student’s pants getting caught on one of the screws holding in place the brush that’s supposed to prevent escalator accidents caused by pants being caught.

So I guess we can expect to see our brand new escalator skirts yanked off in about a decade or so, once the Manhattan lawyers have finished with the litigation over this one.

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A couple of one-offs:

This one’s too easy, but it’s for posterity (call it another entry in The Perils of Too-Fully Trusting Your Spell-Checker):

A story in the January 25th edition of The Ottawa Citizen was about a new home-based business that assembles “Canadian Student Care Packages” to ship to students at Canadian universities, but far away from home. Several theme packs were described, including a Movie Lover’s box, a Snack Attack box, a Laundry box and a Pantry Box. Of the latter, the reporter helpfully added that it includes “all the stuff you ever stole out of your Mom’s panty when you went home.”

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And in the theme of recording for posterity, this is a personal favourite -- an oldie but goodie from my amazingly astute daughter when she was about 3. After listening to me grumble about the difficulty of grappling with an especially ornery child-proof cap on, ironically enough, a bottle of children’s vitamins, she informed me, “Dad, they call it a child-proof cap because you need a child to prove to you that you can open it.”

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And finally…

I made a passing comment recently in response to a woman co-worker’s query about my perception of her hair style of the day. I told her it recalled the “Brigitte Bardot windblown” look. She looked at me in great puzzlement and said, “Who’s Brigitte Bardot?”.

After releasing the brakes on my walker, I wheeled my aging bones back to my desk, googled up a hair-wild photo of BB “circa 1966” and e-mailed it to her with the admonition that if she ever came to me and said, “Did you know Paul McCartney played with another band before Wings?”, I would scream.

The BB photo search also recalled for me a classic Aislin cartoon from the days when Bardot launched her animal rights activism by helicoptering out onto an ice floe and flinging herself onto a baby seal during the height of that year’s whitecoat hunt.

Aislin had drawn a baby seal being crushed to Bardot’s bosom in an all-enveloping hug. The reader’s view was full frontal, and all you saw was this widely grinning baby seal’s mouth, the rest of its head fully encased between the twin mounds of Bardot’s renowned chestal array.

The caption was simply, “Je suis phoque.”

For the anglo-unilingual among you, “phoque”, as any young tittering French-as-a-Second-Language student will smirkingly repeat forever, is French for “seal”. That, and the discovery that the French for “dandelion” is “piss-en-lit”, kept that class alive for me in Grade 5.

And if a digression might be allowed, just for the record there is no man’s right answer to a woman’s question, “What do you think of my new hairstyle?” Liking it will elicit comments like, “Oh? You didn’t like my old hairstyle?” And not liking it will be even worse because a new hairstyle is not something easily undone.

I find that keeping a half-full (I’m an optimist) water bottle close to hand allows me to take a pensive swig while seeming to be seriously pondering the answer to such a question. Then I can fake a spluttery coughing fit and wave my hands in a helpless “Excuse me…” gesture while escaping to the nearest Men’s room in order to avoid having to deal with the conundrum.

Either that, or I simply shout out, “Shields Up! Red Alert!” when asked such a question, and run to my bridge battle station at Tactical.