A correction has been made in this column. See details below.
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You think this job is easy?
Walk a mile in AdReview's shoes. Try to find something different to
say week after week for 20 years. Try to be simultaneously serious
and entertaining. Try to keep a level head. Try not to damage any
careers along the way.
Oh, and if you happen to be an incredibly macho and worldly
51-year-old man, try putting yourself into the head of the many
demographic target cohorts to which we, strictly speaking, do not
belong. Not only are we not in the bull's-eye -- 18 to 34 years-old
-- we're also not a skateboarder/gamer, a soccer mom or, to the
best of our knowledge, Japanese.
But depending on the ad at hand, we have to play one in front of
the TV.
This week it's teenage and preadolescent girls and boys. And, we're
like, that is soooo gay. This is totally the hardest thing
ever.
Two thoughts
And not just for us, it seems. It's also apparently so the
hardest thing ever for Wal-Mart, which has created a website that
aims to create a dialogue with precisely that audience. We have two
thoughts on the subject:
1.) It's a perfectly reasonable idea. If well-executed, such an
effort might cultivate individual users, gather market intelligence
on the group, destigmatize Wal-Mart as a declasse purveyor of
unfashionable clothing and establish a beachhead on the web for the
fast-approaching digital future.
2.) It's not well executed.
In fact, it's totally not well-executed. It's the most
not-well-executed ever. The site -- schoolyourway.walmart.com -- is
called The Hub. It's a hybrid of an ordinary webpage and a
social-networking engine ... a la MySpace.com. Little Tyler and
Kayla can customize their own pages to declare their own styles and
see what Justin and Madison are up to, too. Here's a sample:
Dude, is there anything more excruciating than some lametard
adult trying to speak to teenagers in their own language? To see
this stuff is to cringe, and to wonder -- if we're cringing -- what
are actual children doing? Once again, we are handicapped by our
age and staggering sophistication, but "snorting and laughing" is
our best guess.
We have put ourselves in the head of the target audience, and we
want to get out fast.
Furthermore, though The Hub looks like a social-networking site, it
heavily restricts content and does not permit any actual social
networking. You can't expect a chain that bans racy books,
magazines and albums to let a free-for-all take place on its
servers. But mimicking MySpace and delivering oursandoursalonepsace
is just asking for derision.
In the FAQ section of The Hub, one of the supposedly frequent
questions is "WHO'S BEHIND THIS GENIUS WEB DESTINATION?"
Whoo! In an attempt to damage nobody's career, we will not tell you
the answer.
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Review: one star
Ad: Wal-Mart
Agencies: GSD&M,
Austin, Texas; Tribal DDB,
Dallas; and @RadicalMedia, New York
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CORRECTION:The original version of this story said that the young actors appearing in Wal-Mart's website had ghostwriters. In fact, the children came up with their own lines.
