Blog #2: Dirty Advertsing, how Pearl Izumi muddied the message waters...

Pearl Izumi is an outdoors athletics company that specialize in running shoes, climate control outfits for use in variable running conditions, and extreme sport accessories. They have industry experience in an industry that is littered with weekend warriors and paper tigers. And it is in this partition of outdoorsmen that they miserably fail with this ad campaign.


The advertisement above is dirty, filthy, grimy; it wreaks of hard work, sweat and perspiration, and days where the only thing the people wearing this shoe looked forward to was sitting at a desk listening to the rantings of a customer in Canada who couldn't find out how to plug in their microwave over a headset that doesn't quite fit sipping coffee that is three hours too old. Until they could finally escape their reality and find a dark, wooded trail where for a brief instant in their life they felt like wild, uncivil beasts as their legs pumped furiously back and forth to cover that last 200 yards of hill.

But those people are few and far between. Most people jog, bike, row, or sprint to stay in shape, to ward off high cholesterol and pounds of extra belly fat that has been directly linked to high incidences of heart disease, the number 1 killer in the civilized 1st World. An advertisement is meant to solicit a buyer's response from those that it targets in order to drive up the bottom line, so that companies can make money and promise a high return on investment to their stock holders.

Pearl Izumi doesn't do this. They alienate their consumer base by making it seem that most of them aren't serious about running. The "wearenotjoggers" website is a collage of negativity towards people who spend an hour a day on treadmills trying to look like Brad Pitt or Christian Bale, the very people that Pearl Izumi should be appealing to. Perhaps they are trying to motivate the treadmillers into becoming more extreme about their sport, to learn more brand recognition and to take pride in their sports wear, but as a runner, I do not see any success in this tactic.

The story on the advertisement is one of melancholic discovery. The kind of people who should wear these shoes are the ones that happen upon grizzly crime scenes where serial killers dump their victims. Perhaps the serial killers themselves wear these shoes: that is how truly extreme these shoes are. Perhaps the campaign should be "we are not crimes of passion," but instead they are cold, calculated savages that take everything to the ultimate.

I'm a little insulted by this ad. I run on a treadmill, usually 5-10 miles a day, and I listen to my iPod and watch ESPN because where I live is ugly and traffic riddled. There are few paths to speak of, and those paths are very short and journey to streets packed with cars steered by horrible drivers and the anarchy of the DC metro area. I can't run around in a small circle and pretend I am hardcore. So what is it that Pearl Izumi is trying to tell me? Am I less of a man because I don't live in Montana where running trails stretch for ten or twenty miles? Am I less of a man because I don't run during the dead of winter when black ice covers the pavement and temperatures reach below zero? Perhaps the people wearing these Gortex Pearl Izumi tops are not real runners because real runners would run naked over the arctic tundra barefoot--Now that is extreme running.

I received a very strong emotional response the first time I read the ad and a further emotional response from reading the pages of the website. The campaign appeals to one of my most intense human emotions-disgust. I am disgusted that I never run through three feet of snow or traverse chaotic mudslides on my way through a 5k. I can only imagine what types of emotions they stirred up in the viewing public. Pathos is by far the strongest of the three elements of persuasive writing in this campaign, though ethos is strongly represented. They are, after all, a sporting goods company specializing in extreme outdoor sports. They certainly know what type of person makes the ultimate Pearl Izumi consumer. I doubt I received the message that Pearl Izumi hoped I would receive from their campaign, but I have to admit that at least they got me thinking about upping my running intervals and finding a group of elementary school children to leave my footprints on in the near future.

Despite the ad campaign's misgivings, it is still much more effective than the Reebok campaign. While most people really are casual exercisers, and while most of us prefer to sit on the couch and watch fictional runners find dead bodies on CSI rather than actually stumbling upon a lime pit in the middle of the Appalachians, none of us actually want to be that guy that is happy with mediocrity. We want to be the person that doesn't let a little physical pain or mental anguish from long, intense workouts stop us from performing at our peak. We aspire to be billionaires, to date supermodels, and to be the center of attention. With that in mind, Reebok is telling us to be happy with being nobodies, while Pearl Izumi is telling us to "stop eating an entire pizza on a Friday night all alone while watching reruns of One Tree Hill, get up and lace on a pair of extreme running shoes, and go solve a murder mystery by yourself, Superhero."

Blog #1 : The US Army's Desperate attempt at making war fun.

The United States Army came out with a game several years ago titled "America's Army", which is now in its 3rd edition. The game is meant as a pre-enlistment preparation tool that people thinking about joining can use to "prepare" themselves for combat situations, or it is just a fun, free game reminiscent of Call of Duty or Medal of Honor.

The website is laid out fairly well, as I was expecting a preponderance of military propaganda to assault my eyes before visiting, but when I visited there was very little that someone could call propaganda on the website. While there is a glaring large rectangle detailing the heroic antics of some of America's finest, it doesn't pop out as anything more than a side note to the overall professionalism of the site. "America's Army"'s site actually quite reminds me of classic gaming websites like Blue's News, the Warpcore, Gamespy, etc, that pander to the gamer in American children. While propaganda is noticeably missing, the appeal of subtle persuasion for adolescents seems obvious on 2nd viewing.

They splatter each of their pages with real military jargon, while also throwing in instances of "exciting" or "action" to entice the people who visit the website to delve deeper into its pages in search of adventure and glory. Each page is a recruiting poster waiting to happen. Other than that, they use some simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) tricks in order to make the pages interesting visually, like you are sitting at the controls of NORAD waiting for instructions from the President to implement DEFCON 1.

The target audience appears to be teenagers, as first person shooters appeal most to this generation of Americans. Teenagers happen to be the easiest target for recruitment, as many of them are looking for college scholarship money and a chance to get away from their parents upon completion of High School. Should the web page statistics ever be made available, I'm positive that most of the people who visit the site
fit in the 14-19 age range. The rhetoric of the website definitely works more to indoctrinate people susceptible to the types of language found there.

Noticeably missing from the pages of the website are the horror stories and realities of any war. Pictures of soldiers missing limbs or the lifeless bodies sitting in pools of blood do not coincide with the stories of heroism and the game's specifications. Also missing are the stories from soldiers over in Afghanistan or Iraq right now about the long periods of waiting they must do between assignments, followed by the brief moments of absolute terror they experience while orders are being yelled in their ears and bullets are whizzing past their heads. As such, I agree with Navy veteran Boyle in that this website glorifies what can subjectively be discerned as the good aspects of war while remaining silent on the reality of those who must fight in them.

My good friend Lance has been to Iraq twice, and each time he came back a different person. His stories detailed long droughts from fighting in which he had to find some way to keep himself occupied, where the others in his unit horsed around trying to stay entertained by pulling stupid stunts, the shortage of ready and willing women to play around with, and many times where they just sat around staring blankly at dirty walls rife with nude centerfolds that further desensitized them to reality. This, coupled with the hours of patrolling his unit had to go through where danger lurked around any corner, their sweeps of abandoned buildings in sectors heavily damaged by bombing and street fighting, and interviewing suspected insurgents or people who could be hiding them, the dismal experience he relayed to me tells a very different story from the one detailed on the America's Army website.

While the website may be a nest of misinformation and persuasion, I do not believe that video games or mere words written on a website will incite children to violence. Violent people are violent, regardless of where they were raised or what they are taught. The fact that some people play video games and then sack their schools with automatic weapons is not a testament to the influence of violent games, but instead a testament to the inadequacies of the human genome. People are violent, they have been for thousands of years, and they will be for thousands more. Video games certainly didn't make Hitler, Stalin, or Che Guevera kill thousands or millions of people, so I am sick of hearing this argument that video games created these monsters.

Until we begin to implant computer chips in baby's brains that control hormone levels, synaptic firing, and neuronal growth, and we can control them with a few strikes of a keypad, we are going to have people killing each other seemingly senselessly. As a species that has seen this play out over and over again, it is about time to accept it as a fact of life and stop blaming things that are only secondary factors.

This is a test

"This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions. This station, Life Circuitry, serves the DC Metro area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System."