Okay, so where am I?

I took a break from the org chart and strategic planning to try and get some Taylor Swift concert tickets for the kid’s graduation. It seems to a traditional to send the kid and her BFF to a Taylor Swift concert during graduation season. Last time is was at Staples Center and the capacity was only only 18,000. This time around it’s at the Rose Bowl and its 100,000 seats. I think my chances are good.

All of this reminded me how I used to get concert tickets. Back in 1990, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 Tour was all the rage covering 113 shows in Japan, Europe, and North America. Getting tickets then wasn’t so simple. In order for you to have had the privilege of plunking down your money to purchase your tickets, you had to wait in a long line at Ticketmaster that was situated inside a record store (or was it TicketTron back then?) for several hours, often even overnight.

“What’s a record store?” you ask. Well, that’s a story for another day…

Yes, before the Internet and technology did everything but spoon-fed you dessert, small villages of music fans materialized the day before tickets for a major artist or group went on sale in your city. Imagine that? The scenes were like little pop-up Woodstocks. People brought lawn chairs and sleeping bags. Some brought guitars and boomboxes dotted the line. There was a strong likelihood that the smell of illegal cannabis would fill the air. Stories were traded and lies were told.

Now, you don’t have to wait in these lines and you can still get lousy tickets even if you buy them a minute or two after they go on sale if you don’t have your special AMEX or Citibank code to get the good tickets. However, most of the time it’s Tap-tap-tap and you’re all set, taking the easy way out in the process along the way.

Don’t get me wrong, the convenience of buying online is unmatched and if you strike out at Ticketmaster, you can always go to StubHub (or another third-party ticket broker) and get the ticket of your choice, sometimes cheaper than buying them from the source. But convenience comes at a cost.

Yes, we had to endure the overnight cold and line cutters, but if you were close enough to the front of the line, there was a legitimate shot you would leave with some really great seats, marching triumphantly with your tickets already in hand. These weren’t just any tickets you could print off in plain bond paper from your laserjet, but real perforated tickets with your event, venue, seat location engraved right there into the paper.

Sometimes you were booed out of jealousy by those still waiting in line and sometimes you were slow-clapped out of the door…the sound of hands supplying the fuel to lift your sleep-deprived legs to your car.

The camaraderie shared by music fans was something to treasure. All of us united with a unified taste and love of the same artist. This is lost today in the soulless, robotic online transaction. But on the bright side, I was about to get my kid her tickets without throwing down with the Swifties telling me that the haters are going to hate, hate, hate.

Back in 1990, my Janet Jackson tickets cost $22 each and what a lovely, enlightening date that turned out to be. Worth every penny. Twenty-eight years later, the tickets were five times that plus a hefty convenience fee charge. But once I see those pictures posted on my kid’s Facebook, it will be all worth it.

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Not that anyone cares, but here was the set list of songs played April 21, 1990:

1. Control
2. Nasty
3. What Have You Done for Me Lately
4. When I Think of You
5. The Pleasure Principle
6. Let’s Wait Awhile

Intermission

7. State of The World
8. Black Cat
9. Alright
10. The Knowledge
11. Escapade

Encore:
12. Miss You Much
13. Rhythm Nation

The post Rhythm Nation appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

…however, I do have just a little expertise on the the subject of cross-culturalism having grown up in Compton and Inglewood in the early and mid-seventies and later working on Middle Eastern tourism accounts in a post-9/11 America. Talk about stereotypes…I lived inside of them! You could ask for a better sitcom setup than being the only five year-old caucasian kid in all-black Los Angeles neighborhood or the same guy as an adult rolling around downtown Damascus leading journalists on tours of the next great world destination.

Mrs. Lee’s husband was some hot-shot…

Soooooooooo, one thing I can spot from a distance is a racism and racist advertising. Even in the 1970s, when no one cared about racist or sexist advertising (well, at least not enough to impact real change) I could spot these ads.

In the seventies, you couldn’t turn on the television without seeing a Calgon commercial. The iconic “Take Me Away” ad, created by Ketchum Advertising, endured for decades in various forms. Take Me Away earned a spot in The Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame (yeah that’s a thing). But it older advertising sibling, “Ancient Chinese Secret,” earned itself a spot in the Media Guy Hall of Shame (no, that’s not a thing).

“Ancient Chinese Secret” takes place in a hole-in-the-wall big city laundry run by a Chinese couple. In the ’70s, Asian-Americans seemingly couldn’t appear on American television unless they were serving up karate chops, walking around in the background as Chinatown gangsters or running laundries at the pleasure of the bourgeois (maybe things haven’t changed much actually). The (probably) very caucasian copywriters who dreamed up “Ancient Chinese Secret” had to have lived in a world where Americans only understood Asian Americans (called then “Orientals”) as people who were extremely adept at getting stains out of bell bottoms. Without a Commissioner of Logic running around checking approved copy, this beauty hit the airways:

Let’s dive into this spot just a bit.

For those of you not aware of the historical significance of the Chinese Laundry, it started with the California Gold Rush of 1849. With the hope of finding gold in “those there mountains,” contract laborers from Southern China scrambled to the Golden State in search fortunes in the gold mines and or working on the railroads. Soon the anti-Chinese sentiment was so strong that immigrants were forced to seek other work.

Myths debunked!

A bit of research showed that in 1851,Wah Lee opened the first US-based Chinese hand laundry in San Francisco. The small storefront in San Francisco had a simple sign: “Wash’ng and Iron’ng.” Quickly, the laundry had expanded to dozens of washermen working three daily shifts. With no special skills or venture capital required, a laundry was an ideal business for Chinese immigrants. By the 1870’s, Chinese laundries were operating in all most western cities firmly cementing the laundry guy as a stereotype that would take a century to defuse.

Chinese laundries have been used in many laundry-related product advertisements, typically in a method that exploits this stereotype. A Lavine Soap trade card showed small, cute, pig-tailed Chinese with the product. The Chinese Laundry Scene, an 1895 silent film5, featured the popular slapstick vaudeville act Robetta and Doretto as an Irish police officer and a Chinese laundry worker quarreling. One print ad for a Hoover home washing machine shows several Chinese men, presumably laundrymen, standing around it with a puzzled look. and on and on.

Back to Mr. Lee. The whole commercial was off from the start. I mean who goes to the dry cleaners simply to get shirts washed? Nobody really did that anymore in the seventies. And the whole “Ancient Chinese Secret” thing? Surely had to be wrong. Right? But month after month, year after year the spot appeared.

I’ve decided back then that if they could get away with that spot, then surely the ad men were some kind of wizards that had the ability to cast a spell on the nation.

The “Ancient Chinese secret, huh?” copywriter? Some hot-shot he must have been!

I mean just a few years earlier, the ad men were crafting dry punch mix commercials that sold out the supermarket with this copy:

“Let’s have some thirsty, tired kids yell, ‘Hey, Kool-Aid!’ 

Then a huge, walking punch pitcher came crashing through a brick wall. High concept indeed. Today, there would be a public outcry that Kool-Aid was promoting wonton destruction of property. Can you imagine the picket signs, pitchforks and angry mob that would descend on Ketchum Advertising today if Mr. Lee was touting that in 2016?

Explain that one, Mr. Lee.

The post The Most Racist Commercial Ever appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.