Month: May 2018

Trending from G/L: GQ Nails Comedy With Cover

Melissa Ross
Digital Content Producer

Trending from G/L: GQ Nails Comedy With Cover

Design

In recent years, many brands have vowed to reject photoshopped images of women in their advertisements to help combat Hollywood’s beauty standards. Brands such as Dove, Arie, ModCloth, Old Navy, Nike and even Seventeen Magazine have all made pledges to represent and celebrate bodies of every type. But one brand that seems to have missed the memo about the anti-photoshop trend is Vanity Fair.

Earlier this year, Vanity Fair received a lot of backlash for their Hollywood 2018 issue. The cover of the magazine featured many A-list celebrities, including Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman, Michael B. Jordan and Robert De Niro, among others. But what had people talking the most were the three-legged Reese Witherspoon, and a three-armed Oprah Winfrey pictures inside, which showed just how “out of hand” rampant photoshopping has become.

Vanity Fair acknowledged via tweet that Oprah’s third hand was a mistake on their part, but reasoned that they believed Reese Witherspoon’s third leg was the lining of her dress. Whether they were truly accidental or simply ignorant, both actresses laughed at the mistakes.

Now, the gaffe is being brought back into the light – GQ seized the opportunity to poke fun at the incident on the cover of their 2018 comedy issue, released this month.

Featuring comedians Kate McKinnon, Sarah Silverman and Issa Rae, the cover blatantly mocks their sister publication (both GQ and Vanity Fair are a part of Condé Nast Media). They even added in an online post titled “Mistakes Were Made:”

“GQ would like to apologize to Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, and Sarah Silverman for the egregious mistakes made in the process of creating the cover for our 2018 comedy issue, the latest in our pantheon of mostly annual love letters to the funniest humans we know. Our intention was to celebrate the three super-funny superstars, who are all that is smart and perceptive and riotous and necessary in comedy right now. We deeply regret that the results violated GQ’s rigorous standards of editorial excellence and the laws of nature.

In an effort to ensure that an error of this magnitude never happens again, and because this sounds like the right thing to say, GQ will be conducting a thorough internal audit of our cover-development process. To demonstrate our commitment to transparency, we will release the results of the review, quietly, in 17 months, on Medium.”

According to a Condé Nast source, “There is mass fury at VF today, the staff and editors are really upset. GQ is spoofing the VF cover which came out with all the Photoshop mistakes, the mysterious extra legs and hands attached to Oprah.” The source goes on to say that the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair was never informed of the GQ cover, and feel that they are being mocked.

Whether you call it mocking or satire, the GQ cover certainly hits a few key points:

  1. They made the cover timely in light of the recent Vanity Fair cover
  2. They’ve brought the messaging of the issue (comedy) to the forefront of the conversation
  3. They’ve brought attention that photoshopping, if used at all, should be done with consideration and deliberation.
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Trending from G/L: Making Your Marketing Memorable

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: Making Your Marketing Memorable

General

When it comes to advertising, the most important metric is “memorable.” Not memorable like the family trip to the Grand Canyon, but memorable like something that your target audience will simply know. Memorable is what keeps us singing a silly jingle from 20 years ago. Memorable is what makes the difference between marketing and communicating.

Memorable means something that you know without thinking about. Take GEICO, for example. You know who they are, and you undoubtedly know their tagline too, but when’s the last time you thought about what GEICO actually stands for? Or what ESPN stands for? (For the record, it’s Government Employees Insurance Company, and Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.) But beyond the obvious advantage of being shorter, the names we know these companies by are quite simply more memorable.

Think about it – how did you memorize the order of operations in elementary school math? It may have been decades since you had to find the value of X, but you still remember it – Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally! Is that shorter than “Parentheses, Exponent, Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract?” Not much. But is it a hundred times more memorable? You bet.

Everything around your marketing communications, from tagline to design, needs to be memorable. When your audience sees your product, they immediately know who you are. When they hear your name, they immediately remember your tagline. With a strong brand and message, any company or group of letters can become memorable for every person.

A great brand is what makes a group of letters take on a bigger meaning than the words they stand for. If you told someone a product was from “International Business Machines,” they probably wouldn’t have much of an opinion or reaction. But if you told that same person that “International Business Machines” is “IBM,” they’d hold the product in extremely high regard. A brand that’s communicated – and named – with a focus on being memorable is why cooks everywhere “spray some PAM in there” and don’t “spray some Product of Arthur Meyerhoff in there.”

If you’re looking to create a brand that’s more memorable, G/L can help with that. If you’re wondering what other companies you never knew the full names of, enjoy this article, then give us a call.

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Trending from G/L: The Changing Workforce and Making Good College Decisions

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications

Trending from G/L: The Changing Workforce and Making Good College Decisions

Advertising

There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? / The Graduate

While pursuing a bachelor’s degree and an executive position at a corporation is still a good option for many high school students, some may want to think their route to employment a little differently.

NPR recently ran a story about high paying trade jobs sitting empty while high school grads line up for university classes. The article discusses the perception that a bachelor’s degree is the fulfillment of the American dream, and the path to a good job.

Unfortunately, the reality right now is that a lot of college grads are having a rough time landing a job while industries are on the hunt for employees with different skill sets. Industries across the board are talking about a “skills gap” that exists as they struggle to fill mid-level technical positions.

For decades, parents and high school counselors have placed an emphasis on guiding students toward colleges for economic reasons, and in some cases, because of an outdated image of non-degreed workers being unskilled. Those attitudes now may be shifting. Many students who obtain certifications and mid-level skills and experience at technical schools have plenty of job offers, at good salaries, without needing to attend four-year programs, or incur large student loans.

These mid-level skills can be used in the electrical industries related to control systems or automation. The IT world, for example, has tremendous opportunities in application web development and computer network technology. They may require certifications and hands-on training but they don’t require a four-year degree.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) quotes a report from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute that says over the next decade, nearly 3½ million manufacturing jobs will likely be needed, and 2 million are expected to go unfilled due to the skills gap. 

Not every high school student wants or needs a bachelor’s degree to gain entry to a successful career. Let’s hope that we accept the needs of our changing economy so that we can help students make good choices. There are great technical schools that are using state-of-the-art technology to educate students in companies and fields where they will excel.

Ranken Technical College in St. Louis is an outstanding example of how schools are preparing students for a changing world. Ranken is focused on aligning its programs with industry needs so it can provide skills-based learning and job placement. Approximately 80 percent of their students are involved in work-based learning at any given time which pays off for them and for their future employers.

The future doesn’t have to be in plastics – there are lots of choices in lots of different areas. We might just need to think a little differently about how we approach them.

Geile/Leon Marketing Communications is a brand-driven marketing agency based in St. Louis, Missouri that specializes in higher education marketing. If you’re looking to update your university’s branding or enrollment outreach, please call 314-727-5850 or by clicking here.

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