Everyone you follow on Twitter didn't like it. Gap thanked Twitter for being Professor Advertising, and removed the logo from gap.com.
"Thanks for spitting on us, non-customers." - Gap
Well that was easy. Some have speculated that it was social media theater. That Gap never meant to actually use the new logo. That they were teaching us a beautiful life lesson. That the new Gap logo was like It's a Wonderful Life, except instead of being glad we weren't dead and grateful to have our families and loved ones, we were happy we had a big blue square, instead of a little blue square.
(Short version of the It's a Wonderful Life theory of the new Gap Logo:)
LIFE!!!!!
Please give me The Kick before this bad dream incepts me.
Did Gap mean to do that?
Nah. It was real.
For over a year, Gap has undergone a radical rebranding. Muy post American Apparel.
Below, from August 2009. Produced by Laird and Partners.
The influence of rival retailer American Apparel, undeniable.
The new logo, produced by the same agency, Laird and Partners.
October 2010
The aesthetic connection to the now year-long campaign is pretty clear.
If this was theatre, Gap certainly brought a lot of bus ads into the orchestra pit.
Sidebar: Even if you don't care about retail or clothes, there's a pretty cool guy most of us can learn form, Mickey Drexler.
He ran the Gap in its heyday. He created its heyday. He got kicked out during tough times. Steve Jobs was on the board and called him to warn of his firing. Right after he left, merchandise he arranged arrived and did well. Oops, Gap. FACE.
Not saying he was perfect. But doy: Redemption Drexler.
If you caught any of the Superbowl commercials, you know there was a theme: Domesticity sucks, and you can escape by buying stuff. But don't think too much, bro. That's a total drag." (It got a bit Fight Club. But instead of urging you to reject all consumerism, they had the tricky task of asking you to be annoyed by your wife's materialsm, but not your own. )
But this is America, and there's room for more than one zeitgeist.
Ladies and gentlemen. The anti-Superbowl ad: The Swagger-wagon. In this universe, domesticity doesn't suck. It's crazy.
[update: Toyota made the commercial (video second down) private (!?!). The internet-length videos remain embeddable.]
.
And there is a lot of thinking. You're not boring, you're cool. But you know you're not really cool. You laugh at yourself. But also at everybody else.
META-Meta-meta.
Toyota has covered every psychological angle. On the YouTube campaign page, they even call the couple "self-absorbed," in case anybody is annoyed by cloyingly likable people.
We're living in a post Arrested Development world people. (Which if you want to get meta, is a post-Office world). Which if you want to get meta-meta, is a Toyota Sienna world...
I thought the advertising/information overload angle was a lil forced. But the over-dependence on supplemental information idea was subtle + provocative. Plus, duh. Electric visually. Nice.
You guys. I think maybe we gotta stop using "rockstar" and "ninja" in job descriptions.
No more Python ninjas. Adios Rails rockstars.
I'm not sayin' that if we use these terms it makes us big jerks or phonies. I'm saying if we use these terms, it's harder for folks to separate us from all the big jerks and phonies out there also using these terms.
There's a ninja-rockstar backlashout there, and we gotta acknowledge it.
But I'm not leading this backlash. I'm an observer, an ambassador.
I'm here to deconstruct the backlash, and help you work around it.
(Spoiler Alert: There is a way you can still say Ninja + Rock Star in job descriptions. But you gotta be careful).
But first... the backlash. To understand it, we gotta start with Rapping Grandmas. (record-scratch sound.)
More specifically, the incongruous grandma. It can be a videogame-playing grandma, a snowboarding grandpa. The main thing is the twist:
Grandparent doing un-grandparent-like behavior.
Bet you didn't expect grandma to act like this:
(You guys. Please tell me grandma is not doing the limbo.)
We've all seen commercials or movies where a bunch of dismissive little kids get suddenly shown up in some extreme sport or heavy metal guitar shredding contest by a just-moments-ago meek grandma/grandpa/nerdy cousin. It's a common construct that gives your brain a bare minimum to do while it learns about KFC Sadness Bowls (NSFW language). But it doesn't work so well creatively. On paper, maybe it does (who doesn't love underestimated grannies?). But it's such noise, your brain is just like, "blah blah extreme grandma... next."
It wasn't always like this.
The very first rappin', skateboarding, video-game playing grandma was fresh. Like all archetypes, it was for a short moment, an original idea (or at least an original execution).
Let's imagine the first time somebody saw a skateboarding grandma. I wonder what they thought...
"What a surprisingly skilled elderly skateboarder! What a delightful incongruity! I will never, ever forget this commercial. Surely the product is just as whimsical as that athletic grandmother."
But we're way past that first extreme grandparent. People have achieved rapping grandma fatigue. Some advertisers, knowing this, turn up the rapping grandma volume to 11. They make the same rapping grandma commercials, but with aliens or robots or something.
Here, Skittles tries to compensate for Rapping Grandma Fatigue, by adding some EXTREME.
(Apologies for the horrible Skittles commercial you are about to watch.)
We don't just have Rapping Grandma fatigue. We have Ninja Rockstar fatigue.
Like rapping grandmas, putting Ninja or Rockstar in your job description was once a fresh idea.
Let's imagine the first time somebody asked for "Rockstar" in a job ad.
Wanted: PHP Rockstar
Are you a PHP Rockstar? Do you shred at the keyboard? Code for thousands of screaming fans? We want to meet you! If you're serious about kicking a$$ at our intense start-up, hit us up.
"A rockstar?!?! In a place of business?! What a delightful incongruity! I will never, ever forget this job ad. I must apply at once. It appeals to my innate individuality."
I know, right! What a cool place to work that must be. With all the rocking. Usually work is boring, but that place sounds pretty different.
All kidding aside, I really do think at some point that using those words was effective and helpful to all parties.
All job description, and employee self-description, employs a code. This isn't deceitful, but efficient... initially.
Saying you wanted a "rockstar," could have implied a few helpful things. It probably meant you weren't a stuffy enterprise. It possibly meant you were courting creatively frustrated financial-industry programmers, looking to "let loose." It possibly meant the employer respected technological talent enough to consider them "the star," despite their non-executive status in the organizational.But that was then.Now, "rockstar" is just a rapping granny. It's usually a vacant expression used to temporarily occupy people's brains while they read through even the most mundane of job descriptions. It rarely tells us anything meaningful about the person/organization writing it.
Banks want rockstars.
$15/hr internships want rockstars.
Even if your place of business is the coolest place ever, it's probably time to find some new language.
While those on the hiring side are probably more guilty of this lexical shortcut, there's a backlash against the talent side of the house using it as well:
I've personally never seen technical people use it to describe themselves, but I have seen it in bios for other industries. Anyway, I'm not singling out employers. We can see the talent side of the house might be abusing the expression as well:
But there is a workaround...
How you can keep using Rockstar & Ninja guilt free. The Golden Rapping Grandma.
Now you need to pay attention to the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law.
You can still use Rockstar and Ninja IN SOME CASES.
I'm about to show you a commercial that does GOOD JOB with a videogame-playing grandma.
There are a bunch of reasons why this commercial works. One is that the grandma is not the incongruity. The twist is the customer service interaction (among other things...customer support is not sympathetic, etc.)
They kinda flipped the script, and, they didn't rest on the archetype. They kept going. They wrote dialogue and rhythm that mattered a lot more than just a grandma double-take.
In the same way, I recently came across an employer, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo.com, who used the word "ninja" in a job description. But I didn't roll my eyes. I've read his job descriptions before, and he doesn't rest on archetypes. He fully describes the subculture of Mahalo and the job description in detail, the good stuff and bad stuff, in a way that actually illustrates things, and what he expects from contributors. It's up to you whether it's appealing. But it's highly illustrative. And that's the point.
The point of using incongruous language (visual or text) is to actually illustrate an idea. Not just to temporarily stimulate you, and stop there.
These days "rockstar" and "ninja" rarely illustrate anything. Partly because the wrong people are using the term, and partly because even when the right folks use it, it's used in a "standalone" mode that illuminates nothing else.
I'm not the boss of you
I've got no dog in this hunt. I'm not here to prescribe a Rockstar-less, Ninja-less world. But I notice patterns. And I've definitely noticed an uptick of anti-Ninja, anti-Rockstar snark. Whether you agree with it or not, you can't deny a Rockstar fatigue has settled across the land.
Do with this information what you will.
(I really wish I had an animated gif of a rapping granny right here.)
