Tweet!

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

I may not have come to New Media with an open heart, but I tried to keep an open mind. Our intrepid MEIER Media Team (Leah and Evelyn, Tara and Ben) were proving themselves in front of my eyes with brilliant Tweeting ideas for Frank – like: A Writing Tip a Day. Frank took to it like a duck to water, and the Twitter followers dove right in after him and followed @FDByTheWord. Within weeks he had a thousand followers, and many of them engaged in conversation more provocative and interesting than I would have believed 140 characters could have allowed. The point was further driven home with contests -– “Twallenges,” that built community and shared some v clever fun. I was beginning to see a glimmer of light. Frank’s Re:Joyce podcasts, on their own, are brilliant. I’ll write about them soon, because they deserve their own spotlight.

So okay! Bring on the Twitterers! My Twitter Name is - @dianemeiernyc. Not very creative, but unmistakably (I hope) me. I tossed around a number of themes, and last week, launched the first of a series of my very own Tweets! I've based them around a few platforms:

Marketing: Ideas for and about promotion – from “how-to’s” to “how-not’s”, to my comments on things we see waving in front of us everyday that, as a consumer make me pause, but as a marketer either make great sense, or completely bewilder or horrify me. And since I don’t think the creation of a persona is all that different than the creation of a brand, you don’t need a product to find it useful. In a bow to my early (v early) beginnings in The Trade, I'm calling this Twitterline, #MadGirl.

Style - or more specifically, Authentic Style: It’s something our office really identified in our first non-fiction book, The New American Wedding, and, I hope, reinforced with the novel, The Season of Second Chances – the idea that Fashion is definitely not Style and that finding ways to communicate your own unique position in this world is an exercise in self-discovery and creative expression, open to everyone – and very much worth the effort. I hope to help a bit by presenting an expanded deck of options, tools, contacts, examples – and a little cheerleading. This tag is called #AuthenticStyle.

Practical Magic: The third is a little more amorphous, but even closer to home. In our office, Evelyn Frison may be the kind of young woman I believe I probably was – always asking – Why do you do this that way? Where did this come from? How did you make this? And I’ve been tossing off answers – some of which go back, in my house, for generations – without much thought. But in doing so, it’s just occurred to me that in our house, we did a lot of things other people never thought to do! We didn’t shy away from using a 19C spittoon as a planter, or dressing a kid’s party with the Sunday funny papers. Once my father got a handle on the proportions of “wet to dry to meat”, he made up his own meatloaf recipes at will. Learn the thinking behind something, and then just go to it – was their creed. Our creative parents were far more interested in style than cost. And so, Evelyn has lobbied for: “Things no one ever tells you---” like how to paint your sofa, turn an extra bathtub into a closet, cook a fillet of beef perfectly every time, or recondition a pair of vintage leather boots (or jacket or handbag) with olive oil. It’s a unique blend of style, process and common sense - and some of it, not so common, all under the banner of #NoOneEverTellsYou.

I hope you “tune in” – or whatever one says about Twitter –. In other words, I hope you catch and enjoy the Tweets. And if you do, please comment, Re-Tweet, or come back here and leave a longer message! If I’m reading Ben, Tara, Leah and Evelyn right, the point is communication. And long or short, I’m very much for that!

The Role Model

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

This weekend we traveled to and from East Haddem, CT, in one of the worst days of rain I’ve ever seen, to sign some books at Burgundy Books. Against all odds, these plucky independents maintain a sense of intimacy with their communities, allowing far more than just the delivery of books – offering the gifts of contact, of personality, of sharing, of listening and, of course, finding just the right book for just the right reader. How can you not love independent booksellers?

Frank drove through the deluge. Never complaining, only supporting me. This is your public, he said. You owe them your attention and I’ll get you there. And so he did. And so he always has.

Weather or not, since we were in the town of the Goodspeed Opera House, we decided to make an evening of it and see the show; as it happened, Annie Get Your Gun, which won’t surprise too many of you to learn was my high-school starring role. Annie is a marvelous role model, for all kinds of reasons. She was a champion of women’s suffrage, taught more than 15,000 women to shoot, because she believed it developed focus, stamina (and certainly acted as defensive protection). Oakley sued a newspaper who launched a paper-selling celebrity lie about her, and won -- without taking a gun from her holster. And she did, indeed, fall in love with her first shooting rival, the marksman, Frank Butler, whom she married when she was just twenty-one years old. They built a career together that included the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. She performed and won contests right up until her death, in her mid-sixties. Butler, inconsolable, died eighteen days later. Their real love story, far beyond the stage performance, seems all the more wonderful when you learn of the actual ways they crafted and protected their ”brand” and how they donated what was, in those days, a literal fortune of earnings toward women’s rights and charities.

The play was revised for the 1999 Broadway revival to correct the blatant racism in its portrayal of Native Americans and the level of sexism that might have made characters unsympathetic. In the original stage-play, Annie threw a contest because Frank’s pride wouldn’t allow him to lose a shoot-off to a woman. In doing so, she won her man. The new version has them each fake a loss to create a shared end to the shoot-off, winding up in each other’s arms as they recognize the generosity of the gesture. A far kinder, gentler landing, but interestingly, none of it as supportive as the real Frank Butler was to the real Annie Oakley. The true partnership and solid commitment that sustained them for more than forty years – the kind of love you hear people say will only happen in the movies – must have seemed too good to be true to Herbert and Dorothy Fields, the brother and sister writing team of the original 1945 play.

What a missed opportunity. We don’t get much direction in the mythical or instructive ways women can be supported as leaders, while loved as partners. In the world of entertainment, we nearly always have to pay for our gains. Usually on the home front. “The woman who has her career, but an empty life to come home to”. We’ve seen all of those movies. All of those plays. I think they’re meant to scare us – and they do!

Wouldn’t it have been just great to actually see how Butler and Oakley managed it – forty years of maintaining a woman’s professional reputation in a job very few women would ever have attempted, and ending up more in love than ever? Wouldn’t you pay to see that show?

Naturally Zeitgeist

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

The collective on-line fashion site from Condé Nast is called “style.com”. And while I might argue about the wisdom of their losing their CN brand identity under such a masthead, it is undeniably consumer-easy. Click on www.style.com, and you see what the professional culture of Fashion and Beauty is talking about right now.

That’s why it was such a zeitgeist-surprise when, just days after we posted my last blog entry – with the Charlie Girl ad so prominently featured, a headline on their website caught my eye. The Charlie Girl’s Back, it read. And the story featured the idea that the soft, sleek, natural looking make-up we used in the 1970’s Charlie Fragrance campaign was back in style on the runways and in the fashion books.

The feature tells you how to get the look for yourself, piece by piece. But the idea behind its resurrection interests me even more. There may be a lot of art in looking like a million, while looking as though you’re not trying – but that was the message of the New Women of the 1970’s. There was no status in actively, apparently or obviously trying to get men to notice them. Women needed to be naturally terrific. Their hair should appear naturally beautiful, thick, shiny and soft. Their skin should look naturally dewy, not masked with powder or paint. And most of all, it should look effortless. The color of the lipstick used in this piece says it all: Freckle.

I hope it’s a good sign. I hope it means that the moment of the street-walker fashion and the six-inch-drag-queen-heel and the Girls Gone Wild behavior is coming to the end of its rope. Not that I didn’t appreciate some of the flash and wit of it, but a culture that confuses applied layers of sex, with style, doesn’t strike me as a healthy bit of self-expression -- for women or men. But I’m naturally optimistic.

The Worth of Women

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Maureen Dowd’s op-ed New York Times column on May 18th, added to the cache of speculation about Elena Kagan’s sexuality, but it was less a question about gay or not gay – which, given some of the issues (Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell and Gay Marriage) might at least beg the debate. Instead, it seemed to be about whether or not Kagan was ‘desirable’ to men. Veiled in the question of whether she’s considered “single” or “unmarried,” it carried reference to her weight, her haircut and her “shlumpy wardrobe”.

To the best of my knowledge, John Roberts’ wardrobe never raised an eye in any debate, media or otherwise. Neither Scalia’s waistline nor his balding, Brylcreamed hair-do have a caused us to question his allure. And if we don’t choose to consider Clarence Thomas the Cary Grant of the Supreme Court, neither do we think of him as an object of desire. In fairness, we never heard a lot about Ruth Ginsberg’s clothes or Sandra Day O’Conner’s headbands, but they were protected. They were married. Some man had, apparently, found them “desirable,” and therefore, a significant part of their worth was verified and measured. Fascinating and kind of horrifying, but it’s not as though I haven’t seen this before.

Back in the 1970’s, I pulled together a few concept boards about the way women were portrayed in advertising for The National Organization for Women. I pasted up a series of ads selling cigarettes, cars, booze, gum – things not specifically related to gender. The men in these ads were usually portrayed as individual characters. Were they single? We didn’t know. They gave us no hint to their value in the rest of the world – they were there to act as The Purchaser or the End User. Whether they were riding into the sunset with a lit Marlboro, buying a pack of Trident or test-driving a Corvette, they stood in for ‘us’. Except for a suggestion of a ‘hunky he-man’ cowboy (although his smoking friends were as varied in age and girth as Gabby Hayes or Andy Divine), these men were not chosen on the basis of unusual attractiveness. They weren’t ugly, they weren’t dishy; they were meant to be ordinary men. Human men. Everyman.

On the other hand, women in ads were always identified as something other than Everyman. Something in reference to him. A girlfriend, a mother, a wife, and most often, a temptress – flirting with the seller or the audience. Identifying the audience as male, or suggesting that we could be just as alluring if we too used the shampoo, mouthwash or cake-mix. Rarely do we ever see a woman in advertising where the story of her importance within the culture is not spelled out in regard to her position to boyfriends, husbands or family. Is she Single? Is she Married? Is she a Spinster? Somehow, in advertising, we always know. And if it’s important in advertising, it’s because those of us who create those images understand that it’s important to you.

Nearly a lifetime ago I worked on the positioning and launch of Charlie, the Revlon fragrance designed to appeal to “a new breed of young women” emerging in the early 1970’s. The task was clear: we were to appeal to the New Woman; self-actualizing, self-reliant, healthy and happy. We showed no male escort in any of these visuals, we didn’t even show men appreciating the Charlie girl. This long-striding young woman was full of energy, determination, and while she was undeniably attractive, we were careful to create an image of her appeal that was not directed at (or about) men. It wasn’t easy. No flirting with any other character in the shot and no flirting with the camera. No flirting at all! I remember noting as a brief to Bill King, the photographer who shot the very first stills for Charlie. Is she connected to a man? It’s not just that we don’t know – it’s that it isn’t important. It’s not the point of the campaign. She is just a girl – a happy, ambitious, energetic, self-contained human being. And that’s the way we thought women were going to want to be seen from then on.

It seems a sad joke now, exactly forty years later. Here is Dowd’s comment:

“White House officials were so eager to squash any speculation that Elena Kagan was gay that they have ended up in a pre-feminist fugue, going with sad unmarried rather than fun single, spinning that she’s a spinster.”

Dowd seems a little huffy about the missed opportunity of Kagan and Sotomayor being portrayed as gals about town, looking for a fix-up with “geek-chic Washington bachelors,” instead of as aging, heavy old-maids, resigned to a “cloistered asexual existence”. But given her callous comments on the hair and the weight and the dumpy wardrobes, these seem to be the only two choices Dowd can imagine. And one has to wonder, not just what’s “off limits” in terms of unnecessarily hurtful remarks, but -- far more telling – what Maureen Dowd considers important when adding up a woman’s value.

Speculating that a woman of real quality has been “passed-over” by choice or design in the romance column is, we know, none of our business. But we may not realize that when we do speculate, we add to the weight of thought that keeps women forever bound to a value system intent on the fact that our attractiveness to men is seen, in this culture, as our first and best commodity.

And whether striding up an avenue alone or joining the highest court in the land, women who come up short when measured on the starlet/model/trophy-wife scale, had better understand that their value as a human being will amount to only a fraction of their worth. The worst part of the story, thank you Maureen, is that it isn’t only men who do this to us.