Dentsu NYC Blog

The assumption that so many East Coast media professionals wore black as their go to color a la business attire was because we were all Manhattan fashion conformists who subscribed to the kaleidoscope of blacks, grays and an occasional deep blue is wrong. Actually the answer is a lot more colorful then that. We all were actually dressed for a funeral. Yes, we’re all a bunch of white collar Goths who planned not just media, but death as well.

We were all patiently and in some cases if you were a digital rep, impatiently waiting for the demise of newspapers. Like the second coming of Jesus, we’ve all heard about it but wasn’t really sure when, so we just dressed for the part. Magazine reps shuddered in the back room realizing that if their newspaper brethren fell, logically they would follow soon thereafter. Newsstands and subscriptions were Jurassic concepts that we would soon all tell our grand kids about as they telepathically read their own magazines at corner mind control centers. (“Grandpa, what’s a newsstand?”) Newspapers were on the front line and we all knew they were just about dead.

But it never happened.

Newspapers, albeit some of them, saw the writing on the wall and some smartly decided to stop walking that way to avoid reading the bad news (pun intended). They stopped investing as much in the physical newspaper (staff, color & afternoon editions) and diverted funds to putting out a more aggressive and slicker digital version of their offering. The revenue from digital all lathered up to the same corporate master anyhow and at the end of the day, the bottom line is all that mattered.

Disaster avoided. Everyone can go back to wearing pastels. Uh, no.

Along comes death himself or as Jesus calls him, Mr. Rupert Murdoch. And instead of bringing his four angels of the apocalypse he just brought one; The Daily. Lauded as the first iPad newspaper, it’s the first journalistic information based outlet to take advantage of the iPad technology. A subscription based model available to the public at a measly 99 cents per week should convince, even the lowest paid media planner to, at the very least, give it a shot. And if they’re not opting to giving it that shot, each edition will be automatically pushed to subscribers as soon as it comes out. Think of it as the mean nanny who’s nice to you in front of your parents but chases you around with a wooden spoon the second the door to the elevator shuts and your parents are out of sight.
For 99 cents (and no wooden spoon) the subscriber will receive video, collusion with Twitter and Facebook and the cache of being labeled an early adopter. It’s cool, man!

Or is it?

It doesn’t take a lot of media school to figure out 99 cents a week at 52 weeks a year adds up to one Air Jordan sneaker. (Obviously a two year subscription puts you in line to have the whole pair). Of course that also means you’ve shelled out the entire paycheck on buying an iPad in the first place which means you won’t have any money to eat which means you will be entirely too weak to press any keys on the iPad to actually read the paper.

But let’s say you do have big pockets (or you’ve just budgeted for that blasted must have iPad) and now you have the option of God’s…I mean, Rupert Murdoch’s Daily. Would you actually subscribe to it?

I imagine for the first two weeks many of us would. It’s the same practice of getting an iphone and immediately downloading applications we regret later. Did we really need that McDonald’s application to tell us where the local yellow arch institution is? Sure, if you’re in hell and all they serve is White Castle but seriously… (Pause)…No, seriously. The cache of The Daily being new and the fact that we just paid for it would prompt most people to interact with it for the first two weeks. We would have bragging rights to paying for a service that our friends still don’t pay for with their traditional and probably equally quick news services. Our sharing notifications on Facebook will be extra cool because ours will say it’s from our iPad newspaper The Daily and for the first two weeks we’ll be the toast of the funeral…I mean the town.

Did I neglect to mention the first two weeks of The Daily are free?

Look, let’s face facts here, people. The writing is in the tweet. Inevitably The Daily is the future and that’s not a bad thing. What is bad is how long it will take for others to follow in The Daily’s footsteps. Mass consumed media is rapidly becoming more and more customized and immediate. Delivery services like The Daily won’t be relished; they’ll be expected in this new urgency of now culture. Because Mr. Murdoch however was futuristic enough to forecast a product like The Daily, let’s hope he’s as adept as planning its own funeral because those same dead newspapers that Mr. Murdoch helped lay to bed, are patiently waiting in their graves to do a Lazarus and re-imagine themselves as versions of The Daily. By the time they do, they will have watched the glitches in Mr. Murdoch’s model and corrected it for themselves and just like that, we’ll be wearing pastels again.

Uh, no.

It’s just a big funeral but it seems no one’s really dying. I guess I was wrong. We’re just all wearing black because we’re all Manhattan fashion conformists.

Dentsu NY recently launched Toyota’s new corporate campaign with this TV spot.  It captures the pride and hard work of Toyota’s people all across America. More specifically, the spot follows the creation of the Sienna minivan, and the people behind it, from Newport Beach, California to Ann Arbor, Michigan to Princeton, Indiana. Directed by Josh & Xander from radical media.