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August222005

Letters to emdashes: The Target ads

Filed under: Letters & Challenges

A crossed letter for cross times

Good morning! Before you read this, do something for me:

BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE.

I'm serious, my dear readers. I care about you, as a group and as individuals, and having been though a harrowing loss of data this past weekend as a result of the untimely death of my whirring, alarmingly hot, unhappy-sounding hard drive, I would not wish it on anyone, not even my worstest enemy. And since I'm trying not to have enemies these days, I wouldn't even wish it on...the worst person you can think of. Please back up! Right now! I'm going to be posting informative and encouraging articles about this all week so you don't forget.

Really, please do it! I know most of you are at work and you can't, but you can make some plans for later. Print out, save to your external hard drive, buy an external hard drive, make some data CDs, get a .mac account, upload to your university server (it's easy!), send yourself a ream o' gmails, put it on your iPod, do anything to preserve your precious stuff before it's too late. Because it could be too late, any day, and then you won't be able to make plans anymore. You'll just weep. And then you'll sell a kidney, because that's how much you'll need to pay the experts to attempt a data recovery. Trust me. You do not want to have to make those decisions, or have those unsightly scars on your abdomen.

Do you love your novel, your beautifully organized iTunes, your photos, your notes for future projects, your mushy emails, your sonnet sequence, your spreadsheets, your college papers ("Spewing What's Digested: The Handbook of Epictetus"), your scans, your resume, your myriad lists, your handy files of passwords and phone numbers, your programs, your links, your downloads—all that work and history you'd be lost without? Save yourself the excruciating agony of seeing it all vanish in a single push of the start button and back up RIGHT NOW.

All right, on to the letters to the editor. I solicited readers' opinions about the Target ad controversy (about which Jon Friedman has just added his comments; NPR's Marketplace also did a story), and here are two of your responses:

Tom writes from Yokohama, Japan:

I received my copy of the issue on Saturday—they usually come on Friday; sometimes I receive my copy in Japan before my father gets his in California—and the Target ads didn't bother me at all. It is obvious that they are advertisements, and they are a lot less obtrusive than the usual motley ad mix. The Chicago Sun-Times article you link to goes overboard: The "sacred wall between editorial and advertising" can be said to have collapsed only if it turns out that The New Yorker's editors decided to alter their editorial content because Target took out all those ads. I've seen no evidence of that, and I don't see why a one-time full-issue buyout would be more likely to corrupt the editors' integrity than would repeated advertisements from car makers or whisky distillers.

And Kristin from elsewhere in cyberspace writes:

...I start a lot of sentences with "I was reading this article..." and everyone knows it was from The New Yorker, every time. I've read every issue, cover to cover, for about fifteen years, missing only a few right after Sept 11.

Anyway, I like the Target ads. I think they're kind of cool; it's artistic, it takes advertising to a whole different level. We're not going to get rid of ads, so might as well experience them in a new way. (Not unlike the ironically pretentious ad-but-not-an-ad Ketel One ads, but considerably more visually interesting.) It was fun to see what the different artists did with it. Frankly, I liked it. If there's anything weird about the ads, it's that Target doesn't seem to be the right demographic for The New Yorker. Technically speaking, as I learned from a New Yorker article some years ago, they don't even have a Target in Manhattan.

But perhaps they're right after all, if I'm any indication; I'm a huge New Yorker fan, and I, frankly, love Target. I like it that Target did something that sophisticated—the ads, the artists, The New Yorker. Funnily enough, the article—possibly a Talk of the Town item—about Target was one of the few times I thought the magazine was just off. [I'm pretty sure Kristin is referring to this 2002 Talk by Nancy Franklin about Christmas shopping at Target's temporary Chelsea Piers shop.) Struck me as a urbanite's misunderstanding of life outside the big city; they were mixing the benefits (if any) of big box stores like Sam's Club with those of, literally, Target. You don't drop money at Target because you buy in bulk—as the writer stated—but because you buy a wide variety of things there, all well designed and reasonably priced.

Update: Bright and early this morning, Kim from London adds:

Love your blog.

Re the Target ads and the Sun Times: I've never heard such a load of precious crap in all my life.

I'm moving to Chicago and looking for work as a reporter in a couple of months. None of this improves my opinion of the holier-than-thou U.S. press. Stick it up yer punter!

You can print that, if you want.

Agree? Don't? Your opinions are always welcome. As it says over there in the upper-right-hand corner, no correspondence or conversation is printed without permission, and everyone is guaranteed anonymity (that goes for you paranoid big shots, too; you'd be surprised how often this comes up). But links, letters, and miscellany sent as signed contributions are also warmly welcomed. As in other publications, your letter may be edited for space and clarity, but mostly I'll just leave it be.

This seems like kind of a silly disclaimer, but some bloggers (like me) really are journalists, and so I'll disclaim that my childhood pal Jonah works for Target as an industrial designer, and...that's it. Despite the store in Brooklyn, I've only been to Target once—in Minneapolis, to find an outfit for Jonah's wedding a few years ago, as a sartorial homage to his fabulous design-career rise from Lego salesman at the Mall of America to top-secret Lego genius in Denmark to Super-Target Man. Good thing he wasn't still at Lego when he got married—in what I would have worn, dancing would have been tough.

Did you back up yet? Did you make some plans? I'm counting on you.
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