Mysteries of Marketing

Yeah, I guess I'll never be a marketer. When the Budweiser ad ended, we looked at each other and said, "Are you kidding me?"

Emily Flake, cartoonist-of-the-month at the New Yorker's Daily Cartoon site, has four ideas that would have been less cloying and more original.

But I'm hearing it was everyone's favorite. Then again, I'm not into American Idol music either, so there ya go. Vox populi, vox deo.

Budweiser also had an ad pointing out that people who like craft beers are douchebags, so I guess they anticipated my response to their hackneyed little puppy saga.

They're the professionals. They understand this stuff.

 

Speaking of not quite original

Sean Kleefeld posted a few Socko the Seadog cartoons the other day, saying that he had written an article on the subject of how Jack Kirby ended up inking this ... um ... "homage," and the article will appear in The Jack Kirby Collector in a few months.

I'm not familiar with the fanzine, but I gather from a little more sleuthing that Kirby toiled for a time at a little syndicate at which he was tasked with this. And the response from his base appears to be that, well, we've all had crappy jobs in which we had to do stuff we didn't want to.

Which is true, and I'll admit that, while I quit one of those jobs and ended up testifying in front of the FTC against them, I hadn't been making any money there, so my motivation for quitting can't be entirely based on my Superior Moral Standards, can it?

Also, he did well subsequently, so I guess it fits in with Sam Rayburn's famous dictum, "If you want to get along, go along."

Then again, what I did do that he didn't was to get, in writing, an agreement that the copyrights for the children's serials I was producing for use in the newspaper where I was working were in mine and the artists' names and were specifically not "work for hire."

It was a couple of decades later and the issue was a little more out there, but there's still an element of knowing how the industry respects rights that might have been more instructive, I think.

I still agree that he got ripped off by his later partner/pal, but I'm a little less sympathetic to the shock-and-surprise element.

Maybe someone who knows more about it will comment.

Meanwhile, Kleefeld also had this insight into comic strip collections recently, which I've also thought of, but maybe only articulated by implication.

Some comic strips don't make good books, because they need to be read and savored 24 hours apart.

Gag-of-the-day strips in particular often rely on a particular style of twist that becomes way too predictable when it's not seen in isolation.

Strips with sustained, continuity-rich, character-driven arcs do better in books: Stone Soup collections are practically graphic novels.

Though, like beer, YMMV.

Far Side collections were marketing gold, and I feel Larson pulled the plug when he should have, when his style became so predictable that, even with a 24 hour buffer between panels, you knew where he was going before he got there.

So there's one more thing I don't understand about selling.

 

I know this mileage varies ...

I concede that Stevie Wonder is kind of a generational genius. To me, he was "Little Stevie Wonder" who played "Fingertips, Part Two" and was totally killer doing so.

To someone a bit younger, and particularly in the African-American community, he was a solid base from which to build your identity and taste. Keith Knight has an appreciation of this ground-breaking album over at the Medium (in a different section than the Nib) that even a lukewarm fan like myself will find well-worth going to.

The catch is that he depends on you "recommending" the strip in order for the Medium to let him do more of these pieces.

So I guess you should do that, because this is brilliant stuff, well-suited for his combination of wide-eyed, personal passion and solid musical knowledge. He should do more.

 

Follow up:

To those who donated in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo riots in Niger, Africa, much thanks. Esther is returning home from Paris with $675 (40 kg) of new books to at least make a dent in the loss when the town's library was burned down.

Freedom of the Press doesn't mean books are free. Or that actions, however protected in theory, do not have consequences, however regretable.

Well done, folks. Thanks again. (Hopefully, these kids still had those books checked out when the riots struck, adding a few more volumes to the new collection.)

 

Now go read this

Boulet blows me away. Here's a story he could well have made into a book. It's funny, it's intellectually challenging, you will be glad you read it.

It not only features a puppy, but a kitty, too. Perhaps not as heartwarming as in a beer commercial, but I've established how little I know about stuff like that.

 

 

Comments

[Mark Jackson]

Making it into a book would have taken more than one day.

[Mike Peterson]

Ah, but he doesn't post daily. (And anyone following the progress of his project with Zach Weiner, "Augie and the Green Knight" knows how little he minds taking the time to get it right.)

[Hildigunnur]

heh - I hadn't seen the commercial so I looked it up. Way to go soppy! But then again I also like craft beer and don't drink the tasteless p***.

(you have heard the story from the big beer convention with the heads of Budweiser, Coors and Guinness went together for lunch, haven't you?

And by G*d - the Proclaimers must have gotten a load of money for this sellout!

[Mike Peterson]

I hadn't heard that, but I won't make others Google it, since I forgot to link the puppy commercial (about to fix that):

The presidents of Coors, Budweiser, Miller, Guinness and a few others were at an international beer conference. The first four above all go to lunch together and the waitress asks what they want to drink. The Coors guy proudly asks for Coors, the Bud president asks for a Bud, the Miller president asks for a Miller. The guy from Guinness says, "I'll have a Coke." The others look at him like he has sprouted a new head. He just shrugs and says, "If you guys aren't drinking beer, then neither will I."

[Mark Jackson]

Note what it says at the bottom of the cover, and see

http://www.24hdelabandedessinee.com/spip.php?page=liste&lang=fr

And Gav has the definitive word on Budweiser:

http://www.nukees.com/d/20000731.html

[Brian Fies]

Thanks for the Boulet, puppy-hater.

[Bob]

Mark Jackson - thank you for the laugh!

Mike - Budweiser may have essentially called a lot of us beer drinkers "douchebags", but the hypocrites own nearly a third of the common stock of the Craft Brewer's Alliance. They've been fighting for years to take back the small (but still growing) percentage of volume they've lost by buying small breweries (e.g., Red Hook a couple decades ago), making a variety of Michelob "craft" beers (Honey Lager, Marzen, Porter, et al. 5-10 years ago), selling "craft" beers "incognito" (e.g., ShockTop Brewing Company). Most of these efforts have not produced the successes A_B (now InBev) hoped for. (Why buy fake craft beer when there are so many good ones available?)

I usually like their commercials (They're better than their beer.), but these were pretty lame.

[Murdoch]

InBev is a Belgian conglomerate that's bought about half the beers in the world. Try to avoid their brands without a program! We stopped drinking Bass Ale when we found that InBev had started brewing it in the US, not importing it from England. They claim to use the original recipes of all their brews; rumor is that they use cheaper ingredients.

Last year's Budweiser commercial was enjoyable, IIRC, but this year's didn't make sense.

[Lost in A**2]

Years and years ago, Lowenbrau was all the rage. The Washington Post did a blind taste test with some folks who knew beer. The Lowenbrau rated with Mexican beers (which, at the time, were some of the worst available). It turned out that Miller had licensed the name and was brewing the swill.

I no longer drink Guinness, because the only Irish stuff comes with plastic toys in the can. And, to put a twist on another slogan, "Fosters. Australian for Canadian beer."

[Bob]

Lost in A**2 - I remember that. I occasionally drank Lowerbrau (one of the first beers my older brother provided me in the early 70s) - "occasionally" because of its "imported" cost. One day I saw 6-packs of it in the store for about $2 cheaper than normal. That should have been a clue, but I was so excited, I bought some.

Only after I got home and drank one, did the rancid taste prompt me to look closely at the label and see that it was really Miller-brau. Huge disappointment, but another lesson learned that "you get what you pay for."