If you're a fan of the still-addictive Hot or Not (it appeals to the crusher and trasher in all of us, of any gender or gender preference), you might appreciate this. The guys behind it have used their megahits to create IsTheWorldToo.HOTorNOT.com, which supports getting copies of the An Inconvenient Truth DVD to teachers.
It's a great idea, so I'm recycling it. Go here to find out more, or donate now.
How do we know what's cool?
We can let self-defined coolhunters or fashionistas tell us. Or we can make up our own minds.
I like Style.com's new LookBooks feature because I can look at the trends myself and decide what would work for me. Then I can decide whether I'm buying it from Barney's or H&M.
Yes, I know that a flotilla of stylists and editors have screened it before it ever gets to me. Still, it represents the democratization of cool. And of fashion.
Christopher Hitchens' diatribe in the January Vanity Fair on why women aren't funny started me thinking about what we find humorous online.
For instance, I went to YouTube this moring to find Sacha Baron Cohen's Golden Globes acceptance speech, which I'm thinking is guy humor - check the audience reaction shots in the clip.
Somehow I found myself looking at Randi and Jen's "Mac in Your Top" video. It's geek funny, but that works for me.
So what makes us laugh online? Delusions. Snark. Bitchiness. Just like real life. Technology just makes it easier to find.
Ready from some Friday fun? Have a look at this magnificently oleaginous site. Yes, it's Fabio, looking mah-velous, and you haven't lived (or loved) until you've heard him read your buttery magnetic poetry aloud.
A Gawker stalker recently spotted Fabio out and about in New York, and it reminded me that I once handed him a check for $1000. It was 1987, he'd just started his romance-cover modeling career (and looked much the same, except he was blond, with bad roots), and I was judging a "Sexiest Man in New York" contest at the long-gone Palladium.
Why? Because at the time I was the editor-in-chief of Playgirl (site not suitable for viewing while at work, but you knew that), a great way to learn about what women really want. Curious about that? Ronnie Koenig, a recent successor to the title, wrote and is starring in a play about her experiences called Dirty Girl. I saw it last night, and it's funny and rings true.
Playgirl, which really is a magazine for women, has never had the circulation of the major men's magazines. With adult material such a massive force in media technology adoption, I wonder if the reason lots of men in tech-related industries don't take women's potential as early adopters seriously is because they know we don't want to look at what they're, um, glued to?
Four families in four different states are suing MySpace after their 14- and 15-year-old daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site, according to an AP story.
It doesn't change the opinion I expressed in an earlier post . While I recognize that the statement by MySpace's chief security officer that online safety requires users to ''apply common sense offline safety lessons in their online experiences and engage in open family dialogue'' is self-serving, I agree with it. Do cities get sued because they have dark alleys?
This is not off-topic, by the way. Safety is an issue for women and girls wherever we are. Technology simply provides a new place for predators to hide.
As a former editor of Tiger Beat, writer for Seventeen, and captain of and consultant to numerous teen-focused websites, I'm considered something of an expert on the elusive teen girl market. It's not easy, even for someone who recalls her awkward teenage years all too vividly: teenage girls are fickle, fussy and easily distracted. Just ask Elle Girl or Teen People, both of whom shuttered their print editions last year.
But there's plenty of money there; teens spent $169 billion in 2004, according to TRU. While not quite the growth market they once were when their baby-boomer parents were a bit younger (do the math - the youngest boomer was born in 1964), teens are still a huge force. And it's axiomatic among marketers that if you get a girl to buy your brand at 13, especially if you sell shampoo or tampons, you have her for life. (That's possibly wrong, but I'll discuss that some other time.)
Teens also worry their parents in every generation, and for good reason: they're hormone-addled and testing their limits. Still, put those limits somewhere they want to go and they'll make a point of figuring out how to get around them. Which is why the latest MySpace move is interesting.
According to today's Wall Street Journal, MySpace, which now has 60 million monthly visitors, is planning to offer parents free monitoring software, codenamed "Zephyr," so they can keep track of what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The site is under pressure to keep kids safe, and state attorneys general are piling on to try to get the minimum age for registrants raised to 16 from the current 14 and to have MySpace verify claimed ages against public databases, a prohibitively expensive task even if it were possible.
Naturally, owner NewsCorp doesn't want to do that. Though MySpace has a reputation as a teen site, more than half of their visitors are now over 35, according to Comscore, so they're fighting to keep a younger base. And they're already having trouble monetizing the audience they have, which, no surprise, has also become more male (it probably has something to do with all the porn star "friends" they can make).
The vast majority of teens are way smarter online than their parents are anyway. The Journal article points out that only 50% of parents have installed any kind of monitoring software, and it appears that one of the problems with Zephyr may not be that anyone with admin privileges on a home computer can manage it - and chances are that in a household with teenagers, the admin is probably under 20.
A recent Pew study found that teen girls, the group parents are likely to be most concerned about, are particularly protective of their social-networking spaces, making use of existing safeguards to shield their profiles from visitors they don't know and preferring networks that are more closed such as Facebook.
So MySpace is putting on a cute little show. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have seen Zephyr and don't seem to be interested - they have their own security systems, including parental controls. But it makes everyone appear concerned, and puts the onus back on parents, where it belongs.
Teens will maneuver around any restriction. People who run sites where the minimum age for registration is 13, as mandated by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (a.k.a. COPPA), know that the number of 13-year-olds in their user databases far exceed their expected demographic proportions.
I don't want to belittle parents' worries. Kids do stupid things. But the offline world is far more dangerous than the onine, and that's where teens need help and better communication. How many 16-year-olds have been hurt or killed by meeting strangers or driving drunk after using a fake ID to get into a bar? How does that compare with getting a friend request from some geezer?
The point is that the medium isn't the problem. The message, in this case that technology can substitute for parents talking to their kids, is.
So reports The New York Times today, based on 2005 census data. The other 49% often wish they were.
It's often said that the Oscars are the Super Bowl for women. Which would make the Golden Globes the playoffs.
I watched the telecast to focus on the interactive experience. Some of it delivered - most, not so much.
E! started off the evening with a nicely interactive red-carpet fashion extravaganza that included mobile voting and on-air results.
Then came NBC, with a prediction sweepstakes well-promoted on-air that kept me going back to my computer screen - until the damn thing quit on me. The wonders of technology.
The first spot on the telecast informed me that Cingular was the new ATT. Wasn't ATT just the new Cingular? Isn't that a waste of the "Do I really have to switch to Cingular now?" buzz they got around the iPhone? And does the merger site have to be so, um, cingularly dull?
Favorites:
•L'Oreal did a great job on-air of reaching out to different cohorts with spokesmodels Diane Keaton, Andie MacDowell, Penelope Cruz and Beyonce. The site converted the experience well, with Keaton's charm front and center. (Nice clip of her in Reds as part of ex-beau Warren Beatty's tribute.)
•GMC's be-a-star-and-bring-a-friend sweepstakes was well-executed on air, fine online. It created a strong sense of urgency by insisting that I "enter by Wednesday." The "win a car for your friend" component was a nicely pushed emotional button - until I found out that meant I had to provide my friend's phone and e-mail. Ick.
•Cadillac got my attention with Andy Garcia. But when I got to the site it was all Joan Jett. Who I love. But if I'd gone to that site looking for Andy Garcia, I wouldn't have found him anywhere. Why not bring the viewers in even if you've set up the site for a younger demographic?
Unfavorites:
•Cymbalta. Yes, women get depressed more than men. Maybe an all-disclaimer commercial like this during an awards show is even a public service of a sort. But the site, with its depressed-seeming video spokesperson and an interactive body map/quiz about just how depressed you might be made me less interested in the product.
•How does a moody Calvin Klein spot, aired at least twice, NOT have an URL? Oh, yeah, because the boring corporate site is dreadful. What part of marketing in the 21st century don't they understand?
•I got all excited when I heard the Buzzcocks' "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" on the air. Until I realized it was an ad for the AARP, which made me feel old. I felt better when I visited the site (the URL on the endcard was so tiny you needed magnifiers to see it) and saw that it was still my grandma's AARP. Then l I saw the Adweek article explaining that the organization is trying to reach out to future members like me. If they are, why not launch the improved website now instead of waiting until the third quarter?
•As of 7 a.m. today, the Mercedes-Benz site was down. (It's back up now.) Way to make the most of a good commercial.
So enough about the ads, what about the show?
•Apparently, if you're young, enthusiastic and play a character defined as unattractive, it's fine not to be a size 2.
•Hugh Laurie and Sacha Baron Cohen can come to dinner at my house anytime.
•It's good to be the Queen.
Condé Nast recently came out with a lengthy research study titled "C Level Portraits." They interviewed 602 CEOs, CMOs and the like in detail on the way to the conclusion that these busy executives don't read traditional business magazines on their own time. Unsurprising, given that the study was sponsored by The New Yorker, Wired and Golf Digest. *
So I read through the study. I now know a lot about these execs: their household incomes, their home values, what time they get up in the morning and what percentage graduated from college. And there are spiffy graphics and interviews with notable CEOs such as Indra Nooyi of Pepsico.
What I don't know after extensive perusal is how many C-level types are women. How small must that number be for it not to be included? Well, according to a Catalyst study, just 16.4% of Fortune 500 corporate officer positions were held by women in 2005, and women held only 6.4 % of top earner positions in those companies, i.e. the C-levelists.
But that wouldn't be convenient data for Condé Nast to share. They know that advertisers of consumer luxury goods like to reach women, who make the majority of purchase decisions in that realm as they do everywhere else. But the percentage of female readers of Golf Digest is 28%, and of Wired, only 25%. (Females make up 31% of Wired.com's audience, so it seems we prefer our technology punditry convenient too.)
On the other hand, Condé's bizmag Portfolio, which debuts in May, says in its media kit that its audience will be 40% female. I wonder what their study of C-level executives will look like.
*Disclosure: I subscribe to The New Yorker and Wired and have written for Condé Nast publications, including Bride's and Glamour.
Take it from someone who's been reading Vogue since Penelope Tree was the "It" model and who also collects vintage designer clothing: style matters. What we wear is an expression of who we are, and beautiful, well-made garments (and shoes) are exemplars of design and craftsmanship we can live in.
Fashion, however, is a whole different thing. (See The Devil Wears Prada for a sweet-and-sour demonstration.) Style is about wearing the clothes that work for you; fashion is about the clothes wearing you. Like the current sold-out "It" Coco Cabas bag at the top of the page - essentially a giant plastic tote that retails for over $1000.
As women have bought more and more portable electronic devices (57% of electronics buyers are women, according to the Consumer Electronics Association), manufacturers have responded with style-conscious laptops and laptop bags, as well as mobile phones, their cases, and everything iPod.
Some of these products, of course, are more stylish than others. Many manufacturers seem to think that all they need to do is make something pink or sparkly to feminize it. Fine if you're making products for four-year-olds, less so for adult women - though I do have one phone that's blinged, just for fun. But are female-directed tech products and accessories fashionable?
If you define fashion as having to have the latest thing just to have it, then gadget freaks have always been dedicated followers of fashion. And like fashionistas now ruing their Uggs, gadgetistas have a drawerful of castoffs - that white Shuffle is so 2005!
So yes, the latest hot phone is fashionable. Being thoughtfully stylish - as in, is that the right product for my needs? - that's something else.
Over time, I'll be giving you a look at the good ones, and what they've done right.
So Cartesian. So elegant. And yet, so too much.
A great rundown of Apple's iPhone by the New York Times' David Pogue, who actually got to fondle the beloved object for an hour, makes me think that it has lots of fabulous features that will never get used. A study a few years ago (I'll eventually find the source) showed that the vast majority of users of Microsoft* Word never use more than 10% of its options.
When it comes to the iPhone's adoption by women upon its June release, I wonder a few things:
•At $600 for the 8G version, it's pricey. According to the most recent information released by the U.S. Department of Labor, women earn 81 cents for every dollar men do. For educated women, the wage gap is even greater. So there's an economic barrier.
•Women are buying lots of gadgets, owning 6.6 each - almost caught up to men's 6.9 - according to a cleverly named study by TRU for Oxygen that came out last August. But we're practical creatures - that same study asked the 1400 female participants if they'd rather have a plasma TV or a weekend in Florida and 56% opted for the plasma, which I'm guessing is worth at least three times more than a visit to Bubbie (what, only 56%?). Women have shown themselves to be early adopters when products make their lives more convenient. But it's hard to tell if the iPhone really does - just doing what your current iPod and phone do, even if it's a LOT better, may not be enough until the prices drop.
•At 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches, it's bigger (though thinner) than any cell phone or even a Blackberry Pearl (4.2 x 2.0 x 0.57). So it won't fit in our pockets. But will it get lost in the latest gargantuan Chanel "It" bag?
*Yes, I know, I'm comparing Apples to, um, evil empires.
As we all discovered sometime before our fifth birthdays, boys and girls are different. Besides the obvious physical variances, our communication styles are so far apart that we might as well be speaking two separate languages. And then there's that whole "pink is the new wardrobe" thing.*
We also respond to technology differently. Sure, we probably all want Apple's forthcoming iPhone, but men and women might want it for dissimilar reasons, or research it in their own ways.
Historically, women's enthusiasm for technology has been underrated. I should know: I produced the first multimillion-selling computer game for girls at a time when the prevailing wisdom was that "girls are afraid of computers"; back when the Internet was a bunch of Star Trek Usenet groups and was 70% male, I predicted to the now-defunct New Media magazine, to some laughter, that women would become the majority of Internet communicators and turned out to be right; and I started telling clients three years ago that it was time to start developing mobile games for women, and got a lot of raised eyebrows,was right about that too.
But don't take my word for it. Visit early and often to see if I accomplish my mission, which is:
1. To provide lots of information about women and girls, technology, and what women are doing with technology;
2. To give you expert insights into what's next so you can stay ahead of the game, which if you're in media or marketing you always need to do; and
3. To have some fun along the way, of course.
Got news, tips, or comments? Send them to me at nanciesmartin[at]gmail[dot]com.
*Yes, I do know the pink thing doesn't apply to all girls and does apply to some boys, but let me generalize for a minute here, okay?.
