Not in the bull's-eye
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: