Many thanks for coming on here to comment.

It’s unfortunate that your basic message got obscured by those who discounted your concerns and those who got caught up in the idea that the company didn’t respond.

Kudos.

I do hope so. But my guess is that they’ll probably bring a consultant on board who will tell them why it’s necessary to engage certain types of blogs/bloggers and how to measure the significance of blogs overall.

I view this, to use Wall Street terms, as a “correction in the market” as opposed to a “crash” for Target. What will be interesting to see is if Target publicly comes out with a new policy regarding blogger relations. One that is visible and one that we can understand. As opposed to a once-in-a-while engagement (often behind the scenes) with certain selected bloggers because they seemingly carry influence.

Of course, they could do something like their competition did, (Wal Mart) and create a flog.

When a customer *calls* with a serious concern, you should respond. Whether they have a blog or not. Whether they have thousands of readers or merely hundreds.

Bottom line, I don’t care about the power of the blogosphere, whatever the hell that is.

But I do know about the power of the customer. Guess Target knows a little more about that today too :-)

“Objectification is a worthy discussion, but NOT this one ad alone, by ANY stretch of the imagination…The banter on this to date has been misinformed minutiae, like one of those bad games of ‘telephone’ as a kid where the message keeps getting further tweaked out of context to become ‘parenting crazies over-reacting’ in a diluted dialog of “one-ad” focus.”

“The larger issue of normalizing objectification via mass market retail and Web 2.0 being dissed is being skewed into a thumbs up/thumbs down UGC opinion-style vote for ‘snowangel vs. spreadeagle’ which trivializes the entire conversation.”

If you’d like to e-mail me a few questions that haven’t been covered already I’ll be glad to shoot ya some answers, meanwhile, I’ll comb through my prior blogosphere responses (I’ve tried to reframe point by point…) and get you the facts you’re seeking…(for starters, I never even sent a complaint to Target! Still haven’t even filled out one of those forms, and have had ZERO contact with them ever since the generic e-mail response!)”

Anyway…you can see how these things get skewed a tad, but for the record, I do feel Target can raise the bar on their appropriateness and not add to the mass market retail default of ‘sexualized ad slop’…from the usual categories in our industry (liquor, lingerie, beer billboards, fashion, etc.) where it’s everpresent and fouling up kids’ self-worth, per the APA adolescent studies on early sexualization.

Over and out…thanks for helping set the context straight. Best, Amy

http://clinky.blogspot.com/2008/01/people-have-right-to-know.html

Thanks for reminding people Shaping Youth is a centrist, non-partisan, non-religious-based, non-censorship, voice of the massive middle. (who simply left a voicemail asking for a callback).

This wild brouhaha has been a time-sink for our org having to ‘reframe context’ time and again in the blogosphere as both our brands have been hammered with misinformation.

If you want the verbatim words sent to the NYT (and I was reticent to even send those) they’re right here: http://www.shapingyouth.org/blog/?p=1063

Meanwhile, the academics, pediatricians, child advocates and such ensure me that this will NOT be a ‘one-off, one-ad’ context, but the opening of a larger conversation on corporate responsibility/awareness of what we all put out there in our media/marketing messages.

Like you said, “we’ll see.”