4.5.02
Lego My Good Sense
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Serious Ploy
Kids are so into video games and computers these days, one wonders how old-school toy companies manage to stay in business. It seems the only way they can sell their retro wares is by appealing to nostalgic parents. Why should toy manufacturers limit sales by selling children's playthings when in reality, mommies and daddies are buying the toys to please themselves?

That must be what Lego asked before conjuring up their latest play set. No, it's not a Lego golf course, home and garden store or divorce court set. It's Serious Play, a daunting collection of Legos meant to assist business strategists. As noted in a 3/18 Fortune brief, Serious Play is a marketing division of Lego that is promoting specially developed theme packs of the brightly colored building blocks to "use as tools for critical thinking in business."

What's next -- a sexual intimacy tool called "Play-With-Me-Doh"?

The story quotes Serious Play's COO and creative director, Robert Rasmussen as inquiring, "Here's a Lego elephant, a racecar, and a house with no windows…. Which one of these is like [your company]?"

After investigating the Serious Play website, I hope the Lego set contains an ostrich with its head in the sand because that would serve as an appropriate icon for the execs who actually buy into this lego re-purposing ruse.

Lego organizes Serious Play sets for two main applications, Real Time Strategy and Real Time Identity. The play sets contain such items as "megaboxes" of over 5800 Legos, 3-D landscapes and "Imaginopedias" (workbooks that guide serious players through various "challenges and concepts").

According to the site, Real Time Strategy "empowers everyone in the enterprise to continuously strategize no matter what" while Real Time Identity "offers you the skills and insight to become a more effective member of your enterprise, enhance your value to the company and generally enrich the quality of your life at work." If those descriptions seem nebulous, perhaps the explanation that Real Time Strategy "provides everyone in the entire company with quick access to the shared awareness that is required to act with strategic intention in day-to-day operations" will clarify things -- or maybe not.

This is a surefire way to guarantee that all business meetings are entirely fruitless as opposed to the usual somewhat fruitless outcome. I mean, c'mon. Picture yourself and your co-workers in a serious play strategy session. You'll spend the first hour and a half bickering over who gets to be the guy with the black cowboy hat. Everybody who doesn't get his first choice will end up whining like Steve Buscemi in Resevoir Dogs for the rest of the meeting. "Why do I have to be pink shirt guy?"

And that's just the beginning. We all remember how impossible it is to keep track of Lego pieces. Just imagine trying to deal with 5,800 of the damn things. I can hear the apologies now, "I'm sorry my paradigm shift module is a little stained. My two-year-old accidentally swallowed it a few days ago."

Well, even if nothing constructive comes of Serious Play, the Imaginopedias are sure to provide the investor relations department with some new phrases for Serious Spin. They'll need it when they realize how much time they've wasted trying to keep the Lego bridge to profitability from tumbling.

A Fool and His Sanctimony
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Let Them Read Smock!
From the beloved ad poster designs of Toulouse-Lautrec to the pretentious schlock of Intel's TV spots featuring The Blue Man Group, highbrow art has stooped to the uncouth level of the commercial throughout the ages. The real reason for this arguably shameful shift (cash) is often justified with the over-used "exposing culture to the masses" excuse.

Apparently the slack-jawed plebes who read Smock, a trendy art mag with "a modern art attitude," are in need of an introduction to the finer side of creative expression. The print publication's audience is comprised of "the ultimate art enthusiasts - fashionable, creative, upwardly mobile, affluent, well-travelled men and women who define themselves through a strong sense of design and style," according to its Web page aimed at advertisers.

Still, as featured in a 3/25 Ad Age story (On easel street: Canvas counts are up, by Adages author Richard Linnett), Smock is now expanding the horizons of its otherwise ignorant readers through a series of full-page "brand expressions," i.e. works created by "legendary artists" that center around an advertiser's brand. The advertiser pays for the media placement, the art is commissioned by Smock and the artist is free to sell the original work if desired. I guess that set-up keeps the artists from directly lining their pockets with the impure funds of advertisers.

A 60x48 oil-on-wood enamel rendering by Graham Gillmore entitled "Strike Out on Your Own" was included as a Lucky Strike brand expression in the Winter 2002 issue, for example.

The Smock staff is not attempting to disguise the reality of the situation: this is a good way to sell ads.

You can leave the idealism up to the artists. Take painter Anh Duong, creator of a full-page brand expression for the Diane von Furstenberg fashion-line. She denies the notion that, in Ad Age's words, "the expressions kill the integrity of the art and the artist." Instead, she contends, "Art tends to be too elitist. It is better to be more commercial and expose art to a larger audience."

Man, it's a good thing we commoners have kindly folks like Duong to guide us towards enlightenment. If it weren't for people like her and all those selfless Absolut ad artists, I may still be mistaking the cover of Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy for tasteful art.

Truthfully, I don't have anything against artists who do commercial work to supplement their income, just as I don't have anything against full-on commercial artists. Many people believe that art is art no matter the muse, be it a nude model or this year's Jaguar model. What gets under my skin is when artists like Duong are dishonest about why they're crossing into the chasm of commercialism. Obviously the trend-setting readers of Smock magazine don't require initiation into the world of art and culture. Why is it so wrong to acknowledge the need or desire for the extra money?

It's a good thing when "fine art" that is created for commercial purposes and actually targeted towards an otherwise ignorant audience opens up a few minds to artistic expression (barring anything done by Peter Max, of course). It's just so easy to mock artists who try to hide behind the drop cloth of evangelism.

I just wonder whether these sorts of artists would change their minds about the importance of exposing culture to the masses if approached by truly mass-market advertisers. Then again, maybe some of this so-called higher art is better left to be embraced by the Soho set. I don't think any of us needs to see the Pillsbury Doughboy nailed to a cross and suspended in a vat of urine.

Nervy Nerds
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Comics Heroine Dabbles in Coke
Creating non-commissioned ad campaigns for particular brands is a common practice in the highly competitive advertising business. Agencies and other marketing related firms often develop ad creative centered around a particular brand in the hopes of wooing that advertiser to give them work. There has even been a rash of fake ads created specifically for entry into prestigious advertising award contests, like the Cannes Lions. Ad shops create outlandish or ultra-edgy ads (the kind that would never fly with advertisers), run them once or twice on TV or in print for legitimacy, and them submit the ads to various contests, realizing that often it's not the selling ability of the ad that counts in the judging, but the overall appeal.

A couple of unauthorized ads have run recently, created for the purpose of coaxing Coca-Cola to align with a new marketing partner. This time, however, it's not an ad agency or Web consulting company that's the creative culprit. It's a publisher -- a comics publisher.

As submitted for his reader's approval in his 3/17 All the Rage column on Silver Bullet Comics, Rich Johnston floats a rumor about a presumptuous ad action taken by comics publisher, CrossGen Comics. The company behind titles including Mystic, Sigil, Sojourn, Crux, and The Path created Coke ads featuring Sojourn character Arywyn, who appears to be some sort of futuristic, female Robin Hood. And talk about innovative: the Arwyn character is a blue-eyed Barbie Dollish blond with well-honed skills (she's got superior marksmanship capabilities) and a vendetta to make them worthwhile.

In one ad she's offered a crisp, refreshing bottle of Coke after splitting an arrow (effortlessly, no doubt). Below, the tagline reads, "Coke always hits the spot." All of the ads state that they are not paid advertisements.

Gossip monger Johnston notes in the item, "I understand that CrossGen are playing such a risky game on purpose - they're gambling the chance of getting a Cease And Desist from Coke, to getting some attention within the company and kick-starting some future co-operation. And the word is, they just might have found it."

So far there doesn't seem to be any word as to how Coke's responded to CrossGen's brand glom-on. To me, it seems like one ballsy move. I mean, Coca-Cola's brand managers probably have to get their doots signed off on before they flush for chrissakes. One would assume that Coke will be so resentful of CrossGen's unsanctioned use of its logo, not to mention the inclusion of an unapproved tagline, the company could do more than serve a cease and desist letter.

Could it be that the CrossGen staff is living in a dream world? Hey, I've scoped out their site, and it seems as though they all must be really rational. On a daily basis they immerse themselves in fantastical worlds where hot blonds with good aim avenge their husbands' deaths, "where ground is up and ships float on waves on wind" and where "medieval trappings are merely a façade hiding stunning technological achievement." Who'd have thought a bunch of guys like that could be so out of touch with the dog-eat-dog world of business?