What's Up With... MTV's Wack New Ad Campaign

Just when you thought MTV was as weak as it could possibly be, it goes and gets weaker. The channel's new ad campaign was recently introduced in the streets of New York: a series of posters each featuring a made-up slang word and its supposed definition, as in "bingo" equals "sex," "salt" equals "money," and "round" equals "cool." The MTV logo and a tagline ("Stay Tuned") complete the design.

When we first saw the posters, we thought, "What? We never heard of that." Then, with a rush of embarrassment for MTV, we figured out the advertising agency/creative brainstorming session-type logic that produced the pairs. It would hard to overstate the queasiness this campaign has produced among 14-to-29-year-old we've talked to-- young New Yorkers who, until now, had accepted MTV as a harmless spot to rest when they're flipping through TV channels and need to drop the remote to pick up a slice of pizza. You could practically feel the MTV brand slipping down on people's mental lists from "Can Tolerate" to "Must Actively Screen Out."

The new campaign couldn't be good for business, could it? Well, it seems that MTV thinks it could. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Brian Bacino, a creative director at Foote Cone & Belding/San Francisco, the advertising company that helped MTV dream up the new campaign, noted that the ads were not even aimed at viewers, but at the "media buyers and decision-makers" who buy advertising there-- folks who are supposed to get the message that since MTV is so very buzz-o-genic, it makes things cool: sneakers, jeans, movies, iced tea beverages, phoney slang words.

"If I'm running a big company I don't have to understand these people-- I can rely on MTV to do it for me," chirped Brian, confirming a major reason why advertising is fading off the radar of younger consumers: corporate cynicism and detachment from reality.

The campaign won't appear on TV, because, as the New Yorker's Leslie Savan delicately puts it, "the artificial argot might be... something that the MTV audience could make fun of." Too late, guys. Everyone's already making fun. So ya better put away the market research, quiet down that creative team that thinks it's "so young we can kind of focus-group as we create," and start hyping your programming in a way that isn't all tragically hip. (Oh yeah, and get some cool programming, too.) Unless you want the slang word "MTV" to mean "dangerously wack on a planetary scale," instead of just "amusingly lame."

P4M SINGLE REVIEW: Raven-Symone "With A Child's Heart"

We're not mean, but we wanted SO BAD to hate the new single by Raven-Symone we were sent, "With A Child's Heart." Our policy, you see, is kinda neg on the "uncontrollably cute and adorable," which is how Raven's character Nicole, on "Hanging With Mr. Cooper" was described in the press release that accompanied the single. You remember Raven, right? "America's most adorable granddaughter to television's best loved dad, Cosby" (also from the press release)? An album, Here's To New Dreams released at the age of six?

But we listened to the single, and you know what? "With A Child's Heart" is... cute. Not hard to listen to at all. Like a really expensive soft-drink commercial. No, even better. The musical scientists who cooked up the ditty (Jerome "Rome" Jefferson, Vickie Basemore, Henry Cosby, and Silvia Moore) and the production scientists who are serving it up (Ray Blaize, Paul K Walker, Tom McGee, Rogelia Wilson, Tony "T.W." Williams) have done a fine job of crafting a nice property for their now 13-year-old star, even if they did freight the song unnecessarily with emotional blackmail in the form of a musical quote from a nursery song ("sol-sol-mi-la sol mi") and lyrics like "Nothin's gonna get me down," "A child's heart needs love," and several lines from the prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep..."

Moreover, Raven's voice is promising. A bit of Brandi, a bit of Madonna. But behind those influences-- and behind the potential gothic horror of trading on youth-and-innocence, a la Michael Jackson and Jon Benet Ramsey-- is something deeper, wiser, more honest; something un-sugarcoatable that we're gonna be looking for when Raven's new album, Undeniable, arrives in April.