Culture: With a Name Like Smucker's...

TORONTO, ONTARIO - On a lazy harvest season holiday such as this one, a certain mood is established. The air has a taste of nippiness, but one can still feel the warmth of direct sunlight. While there's some urgency of the harvest, there is far more anticipation of celebration and feasting, and a feeling that this is a time to savor the beautiful autumn colors and fresh food before the season turns.

I almost hate to admit this, but what captures this time of year most strongly for me is not a piece of folk or popular music, but the commercials of the Jerome Monroe Smucker Company. Throughout much of my lifetime, Smucker's has run radio and television advertisements that perfectly capture the harvest season. With a distinctive piano music background and a voice-over by the legendary Mason Adams, the commercials were fundamentally relaxing and exuded positive emotions not just for the brand but for the fruits that went into their jams, jellies, and other products, and for the season as a whole. Each ended with the well-known tag line, "With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good," first coined by Wyse Advertising in 1961.

The quintessential harvest-era Smucker's commercial came out in 1989, in my opinion. It ran on radio and television, with morning orchard shots (complete with prominent dew) in the television version and just the music and Mason Adams in the radio version:

The sun rises early on harvest day,
Casting lengthening shadows across a ripening orchard.
An orchard filled with sweetening fruit,
Fruit good enough for Smucker's Simply Fruit,
With all the fruit, all the flavor,
Half the sugar of regular jams and jellies,
Only eight calories per teaspoon.
With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good.

Written out, it doesn't seem that special. When voiced by Adams, it sounded like poetry.

Beyond their advertising, I found other reasons to feel good about the Smucker's brand. It supported quality news by advertising in the Christian Science Monitor, the short-lived World Monitor television show, and the CBS World News Roundup. It received ratings as one of the best employers in the United States.

This season, one will not be able to find the old Smucker's ads, even this time of year. In 1994, they switched advertising agencies as the company tried aggressive growth strategies, and Mason Adams died in 2005, with a mention of his voice-over work in his New York Times obituary. The company still advertises, but it no longer resonates the mood of the harvest season.

For me, though, Mason Adams still runs through my head whenever it is time to pick berries or take to the apple orchards--days epitomized by the fall sun, days like today.

Media: Remembering Jingles

TORONTO, ONTARIO - People claiming that broadcast media do not influence them clearly must be very different people than I am. The number of advertising jingles that I know in their entirely from more than twenty years ago is downright scary.

Just as a short list of the top of my head, I remember 30-second jingles used by Safeway, Oberto meats, Cooper tires, and even Ford Motor Company's "Buckle Up!" safety promotions run around holiday weekends, all in the 1980's. Perhaps you consider this to be insane, but if you are at least 30 years old, I bet you can sing the Oscar Meyer jingle.

Furthermore, if you can sing any music that was popular in the 1980's, I fail to see how that is significantly different than remembering a commercial jingle from a cognitive perspective. As a significant listener to commercial radio in that era, I probably heard the advertising spots more than I heard the music, so it isn't surprising that I would remember the ads if I remember the songs.

I can't seem to remember any ads that I've heard here in Ontario in the past few years. There's a simple explanation for that--I listen to almost no commercial radio these days (except through commercial-free podcasts or downloaded files in which commercials can be skipped), only public radio, and hence I don't hear any advertisements. Since I don't own a television, I don't see television ads very often, either.

That fact should be putting a scare into advertisers trying to reach my demographic. There's no sure way to do it anymore--television channels at best reach niche audiences. If television has problems with niches, the Internet is that problem squared. While public radio underwriting in the United States may reach us, the announcement is generally not memorable the way a jingle used to be. Newspapers? You're kidding, right?

No wonder there seem to be billboards on every possible space in this city and wrap ads on everything that moves in this world. They have to reach a general audience somehow--and if my brain is any indication, they'll be trying to belt out noise pollution with jingles at passers-by before long, hoping we'll remember.

Culture: The Oldest Sales Technique

TORONTO, ONTARIO - While the comparative sexual repression in North American culture is well-documented, a billboard that I saw in Cologne, Germany while I was living in the area briefly in 1998 still surprised me. An advertisement for local radio station RPR-1 (Rheinland-Pfalz Radio One)'s morning show displayed a table with breakfast food laid out, with a pair of breasts in the background, key parts of that anatomy barely hidden by a tall glass of milk and a mug of coffee. (Don't think about that too much.) The campaign, seen throughout the area, definitely attracted my attention the first time I saw it, though I was already a RPR-1 listener and I doubt I would have listened to the station as a result of the ad had I not already been one.

As a result of that experience, I was not surprised by the story running through the European media recently of a billboard campaign in the Berlin, Germany area. Christian Democrat (Canadians think "Conservative" and US residents think "Republican") candidate Vera Lengsfeld features her own cleavage and even more revealing cleavage of Chancellor Angela Merkel in the ad, with the slogan, "We have more to offer."

In an interview with the BBC (about eight minutes into the program), Lengsfeld was quite straight-forward about why she had come up with this advertising campaign. Her campaign felt that she needed to attract attention in order to get people to pay attention to her party's policies. Considering that she is running in a district considered quite left-wing, this supposition is probably right--whether she chose an appropriate way to get it or not is another matter. Indeed, in the interview, Lengsfeld wanted to change the subject to Christian Democrat (CDU) policies and the interviewer kept asking about the social implications of the ad.

While my initial reaction to the ad was that it was sexist and inappropriate, after hearing Lengsfeld speak, I'm a bit more sympathetic. Neither Lengfeld nor Merkel is young or resembling a model, so it's not like the ad is actually sexy (at least in my opinion). Making the point that the CDU has female candidates strikes me as a legitimate point to make, even if how it is made obvious that they are female candidates is decidedly low-brow. It clearly has had its desired impact as not only are people around Berlin talking about it, but I'm writing about it on another continent. Furthermore, it's hard to deny that the ad is genuinely funny. (Anyone who doesn't consider completely absurd the idea of Christian Democrat Angela Merkel as a sex object lives in a different state-of-mind than I do.)

It is said that using sexuality is the oldest sales technique in the world, and it has remained in use because it works. The fact that this idea is still controversial in 2009 should be the story here--not Vera Lengsfeld.