When will the rest of the world get a cool genital jingle?

When I was a teen, I stumbled upon an old book about sex education in Sweden in a used book store. To be honest, I probably bought it for the boobies. But I was also impressed by what I saw as an attempt to give kids and teens positive messages about their bodies, their physical autonomy, and their right to choose what was right for them.

I was reminded of this when the "Snoppen och snippan" video appeared in my newsfeeds.



Catchy, isn't it? With dancing penises and vulvas.

According to Metro, as made for Swedish children’s programme Bacillakuten, using childish words for the organs, ‘snipp’ and ‘snopp’

Some of the lyrics translate as: ‘Here comes the penis at full pace’, and: ‘the vagina is cool, you better believe it, even on an old lady. It just sits there so elegantly’. (They reportedly sound much less weird in Swedish).

I don't think it's weird, and I'm not even Swedish.

The admin of the DosFamily Facebook community explains further:

This is the trailer song from a children's Tv show currently showing in Sweden at the moment. The show is about the body and things that happens with it. Different doctors explains about what happens when you get ill or how do the food system works or colds or what happen when you break a leg... Every episode get an own song for the things they talk about and apparently soon it will be about Snoppen & snippan.

You can see the original post and discussion (in Swedish) at the SVT Barnkanalen page.

Now I just wish they had something like this for English-speaking kids.

(Thanks to Bé for sharing additional info)

Four five six, it's a health mnemonic

My mom was a teacher, before she ended up staying home with four kids.But she never lost the spark for teaching. So, in addition to our regular schooling, we all got tutored at home. One of Mom's favourite teaching tactics was the mnemonic device. In fact, just last weekend, she successfully taught my 5-year-old son how to memorize a licence plate by making the letters and numbers into words in a sentence.

Since the days of oral history, many different mnemonic devices have been used to help people remember important things: structured verse, allegory, metaphor, and of course the simple rhyme. But as we became a literate society, the simplest of these powerful cultural devices was relegated to song, bad poetry, nursery rhymes... and... oh, yeah! Advertising:



Having a child now, and watching how easy it is for him to memorize AC/DC lyrics (I'll never forget when he burst into "Let's Get it Up" in the grocery store) I have been re-evaluating old ad methods that I once thought played out. And so when the City of Ottawa challenged us to come up with a campaign to brand the local promotion of Environment Canada's Air Quality Health Index, I drew inspiration from my Mom, Schoolhouse Rock, and Canadian songstress Feist:



(Let's pause for a fanboy crush moment.)

Anyway, the AQHI is a new measure of air quality and how it affects health. From EC:

It is a health protection tool that is designed to help you make decisions to protect your health by limiting short-term exposure to air pollution and adjusting your activity levels during increased levels of air pollution. It also provides advice on how you can improve the quality of the air you breathe.

This index pays particular attention to people who are sensitive to air pollution and provides them with advice on how to protect their health during air quality levels associated with low, moderate, high and very high health risks.

One of the chalenges of this campaign is that there is another index, the Air Quality Index, that also measures pollution levels. It goes to 100 and above. But our job was to differentiate AQHI as a simple tool to help people in general — and especially people at risk — plan their daily activities. We took the scale of ten, and broke it into four easy, colour-coded pieces, and started planting the scale all over town:



This is a fairly modest-budget campaign, so your tax dollars are working quite hard on this one. Now, we're working on a social media strategy to help spread the word over the summer. While it is still in development, you can visit the AQHI Facebook Page and "like" it to sign up for AQHI updates and news.

So, hopefully, people will know what to do the next time manmade smog, climate, or Quebec forest fires cause the air to look like this:



That was a nine, my friends. A NINE.

Next time that happens (hopefully not soon), I'll heed the AQHI number and take the bus instead of burning out my lungs by walking to work.

Raised on commercials

When you have kids, it can be a little scary just how influential TV commercials can be to their growing minds. My five-year-old son, who loves the Discovery Channel, has suddenly started hounding his mother and me to buy everything — EVERYTHING — he sees advertised.

"You should get a Highlander. It's really powerful."
"Mom? You should buy this shampoo. It smells really good!"
"Dad, you would like to play poker. It's a man game."

And, despite every locavorous, artisinal, foodie meal we make him he sees one spot with beauty shots of kids piling into hotdogs with Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" booming in the background, and:

"My favourite hotdogs are Maple Leaf."


Sigh. But I'm not going to take TV away from him. In my opinion, mass media are part of our modern consumer environment. Rather than censoring, I prefer to watch with him, do my best to counteract the pitches, and use my insider knowledge to give him age-appropriate media awareness education.

But despite the short-term brainwashing, I also wonder if the long-term effects of this exposure will really be all that negative. I turned 40 today, so I guess I'm in kind of a nostalgic mood, but I also consider my Gen-X childhood spent in front of the electronic babysitter part of what made me what I am today.

For example, much of our PSA work here at Acart, as well as the campaigns I cover on this blog and at Osocio, has to do with road safety. And what was an early influence?



Seems negative, but we actually based a two-year Transport Canada safety campaign on toys called "Safety is No Game". Look familiar?

This next commercial is just a reminder of how far we have come in child safety. Check out these kids doing bootlegger turns, helmet free, on these awesome death cycles. My friend Keith had one of these. I think I still have a piece of gravel in my elbow from a wipeout when I tried to emulate the stunt kids:



The biggest influences on us as kids, though, were the consumer jingles and slogans that we sang in the schoolyard every day. Remember any of these?






Sometimes, it was jingles for the "adult" products that didn't target us whatsoever that really stuck in our heads:



But it wasn't all consumerism. The '70s was the golden age of PSAs. Many of them seem awkward and clunky today, but if you're of a certain age, Iron Eyes Cody's "crying Indian" pollution spot is iconic:



Who cares if the actor was really Sicilian? There really used to be that much garbage lying around — especially in the U.S. I believe that a whole generation of environmentalists was influenced by the "noble savage" myth of this ad.

And for Canadian kids, another big environmental icon was Hinterland Who's Who:



These ads gave me my lifelong love of nature. It outlasted all the toys, and all the fast food cravings, that I ever had as a kid.

Now my son is the nature freak, feeding off of the endless varieties of documentary available on cable and DVD. So perhaps he'll turn out okay too.

Bring Back the Jingle!

Like many hipster parents, I'm always trying to get my son to watch vintage kids' programming, because I think it's cooler than what they make now. I've actually had quite a bit of success with Sesame Street Old School and Schoolhouse Rock. My son has started walking around the house singing "J Friends" and other classics.

These shows have always been interesting to me because they use advertising strategies to get kids to learn — especially jingles. Schoolhouse Rock was famously conceived by adman David McCall when he noticed that his son could remember Beatles lyrics, but not multiplication tables. It ended up being funded by a "sin tax" on advertisers for targetting kids during Saturday morning cartoons.



Sesame Street, of course, was known for creating short, snappy segments with high production values — many of them now-famous songs. With each episode "sponsored" by a letter or number, it used advertising's language, clichés, and strategies to infest generations with incurable earworms like this:



Having grown up with educational jingles, ironically, made us more susceptible to real advertising. The '70s and early '80s were perhaps the last hurrah for the traditional jingle.

We all knew how a Big Mac was made:



And Canadian kids all knew that "Molson Light has got heart" (whatever the hell that meant):



So, why did the ad industry drop the jingle? Sure, it still turns up in cheesy infomercials and other low-end campaigns, but what about the major consumer brands? I suspect that, although we loved jingle as kids, my generation of admen take ourselves too seriously. Not many jingles win awards. (With some very notable exceptions):



The other problem is that we're a creatively lazy generation. We're consantly borrowing interest from existing pop culture to create instant likability for ads. Why write a jingle of unknown success, when you can just buy a real Beatles song?



I don't know if there's any hope for a jingle renaissance in the future. Especially in my field, where I'm more involved in social than consumer marketing.

Although, I have to say that during a recent strategy session for a health-based client, our research into successful vintage Canadian social marketing campaigns ended with a Participaction sing-along:



So there's that. Does anyone want to give me a bouncy "C"?