February 1999
s m u g
target audience
by Leslie Harpold

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Dear Ad Agency Guy:

Want to create an award winning ad strategy for your clients and save money at the same time? Bummed that your basketball endorsements aren't worth the paper they're printed on this season? I have a suggestion for you and I suggest you listen up. This stands to be the pinnacle of the spectacle, simulacra at it's finest, and the natural conclusion to all your hard work thus far.

To recap, so far, you've created antiheros, hired celebrities, and created spokescharacters out of nothing. You've licensed animated characters in order to leverage a brand against another, and you've created lifestyle scenarios we couldn't hope to live up to in our wildest, most unbloated of days. You've created fictional real life people, a la Bartles and Jaymes, and taken us through long relationships with them. But celebs get pricey and fantasy is the real currency. I'm not sure I want to be like Mike, or Madonna anyway. I want to really identify with my spokesmodel, on a more holistic level.

Find a couple actresses and a couple of actors.cute, but not scary cute, and dripping with charm. I'm thinking someone like that girl in "High Art", Radha Mitchell, someone who I find attractive, non threatening, slightly younger, but not totally inaccessible. Furnish her my dream apartment - funky, oft like then totally sell it out. Have her be the spokesmodel for all your clients, as long as those clients are relevant to my life. To avoid any confusion here's how it would work:

Late 20s Girl and Guy are never shown with a partner, which leaves it open to interpretation and never do anything in the name of love that points to a certain gender. Then you have them advertise not things like cars, clothes and shoes which carry their own identity ideals with them, but rather things like toilet paper, toothpaste, margarine, furniture polish, vitamins, aspirin, cookware, long distance service, VCRs etc. In other words, items that aren't used (yet) to help members of social groups self select as peers.

Clearly these would have to be products with half decent ad budgets because you'd have to create similar ads featuring the early 40s woman in the nice house, the mid thirties guy with the half empty new home, the unkempt teen with the vaguely cluttered room etc.

These fictitious characters could spokesmodel across brands, across parent companies buy out whole blocks of highly targeted ad time. We'd get to know the quirks over time, and a slightly verite cinematic style would give it that real people feeling that sells so well. No fakey announcer guy to remind us this has all been created for our advertising pleasure. Over time we'd feel we had relationships with the people and after a couple of years, we could be expected, as consumers to take more adventurous leaps of faith with regard to product choices. This is the final step before ads are passe and product placement is all we are left with the finest of lines between advertorial and advertainment and I just know it would work.

leslie@smug.com

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