Last week, I wrote about how the owner of Washington’s National Football League team promised to never change that team’s derogatory name, and that the only thing that may cause change is a trademark lawsuit that could make calling a team the “Redskins” far too costly to tolerate. A new study, however, suggests that Snyder may already be costing himself money by not changing the name.

The arguments in favor of keeping the name “Redskins” stem from tradition and nostalgia — the team has been the Redskins since 1933, when it still played in Boston. It would make sense for Snyder to worry, then, that changing it would have negative economic consequences. Team names are brand markers, and changing up the brand isn’t usually a recipe for financial success — estimates say the cost of changing the brand for an NFL team could be as high as $10 million to $20 million.

In the case of mascots that utilize Native American imagery, though, reshaping the brand identity may actually be good for business, according to research from sports marketing experts at Emory University. Emory’s Mike Lewis and Manish Tripathi studied the economics of college teams that dropped Native American imagery — either team names or actual mascots — and found that the negative effects are muted, limited to only a one- or two-year time frame. After that, the costs subside — and may even turn into benefits:

In terms of financial impact, the model results suggest that school’s experience a very short (1 or 2 years) negative impact and then quickly recover. The results also suggest that in the long-term the shift away from a Native American mascot yields positive financial returns. As a follow up, we used the brand equity measures created here as a dependent variable and regressed this value against the previously defined variables related to the school’s use of a Native American mascot. In this analysis we found NO significant effects. The key implication is that switching away from a Native American mascot has no long-term negative effect on brand equity.

Lewis and Tripathi caution that the study isn’t perfect: they had to predict revenues based on winning percentages and other variables, so there’s a fair amount of guesswork involved. And men’s college basketball and professional football aren’t a perfect comparison, as they note, because football teams are more likely to be identified primarily by their mascot (“the Cowboys” or “the Redskins”) while colleges are identified by school name (“Maryland” or “Oklahoma State”).

Still, they’re confident that their “findings have a great deal of face validity.” As they wrote: “While some fans may complain, it is not clear that these fans actually change their behavior or their shopping habits. It might also be that merchandise sales become more appealing to segments that did not like the previous Native American mascot.” So even if the biggest estimates are right, the losses could be temporary, and dropping the name Redskins could ultimately cost Dan Snyder less than any number of bad contracts he’s handed out in recent years.

It’s television upfronts this week, the time every year when the broadcast networks announce which lucky shows have earned subsequent seasons, which unfortunates are getting cancelled, and most importantly, which of the many new projects in development will be going forward—and then try to convince advertisers that they should be excited to buy ad spots in these new and returning shows, and to be part of a new, rearranged schedule.

The enthusiasm the network executives will display at their presentations to advertisers, and the amusing site of actors like Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman dressing up as their dueling liberal and libertarian characters from Parks and Recreation to do schedule announcements, is deceptive. Many of the shows that are being presented as the next great thing will prove to be creative or commercial failures: NBC, for example, cancelled almost all of the shiny new shows it offered up to advertisers and to viewers with such great hope last fall, and is starting over with shows like a sitcom from Michael J. Fox and a drama starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Dracula. And the fancy presentations and celebratory air at the upfronts disguises that the process by which the networks select which new shows they’re moving forward with is hugely expensive and exhausting. The networks may put as many as 100 shows into development, going through the process of writing the pilots, casting actors for them, pulling together sets and wardrobes for those actors to work with (or investing in special effects), shooting said pilots, testing them extensively in front of audiences, and then making their choices. It costs an awful lot of money, and leaves a lot of people waiting a long time to learn if they’ll have jobs.

Last week, when I spoke with Kevin Spacey, who stars as villainous Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood in Netflix’s adaptation of the British series House of Cards, one of the reasons he mentioned for wanting to work with Netflix rather than another outlet was the way Netflix approached the development process.

“What was great that they were the only network that said ‘You don’t have to do a pilot,’” he said. “Because David Fincher and I really didn’t want to do a pilot, because when you do a pilot, you’re kind of obligated to spend 45 minutes establishing all of the characters. And we didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to get on with telling a story, and tell a story over a long period of time. And they said ‘We believe in you, we believe in David, we love this series from Britain. How many do you want to do?’ And we were like, ‘Um, two seasons?’ And they were like ‘Okay!’ It was a risk on their part, but they’ve been great partners.”
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Last week, a controversy exploded over a new Mountain Dew ad created and directed by the rapper Tyler the Creator, one of the most visible figures in the hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, which Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins—who is himself black—suggested was one of the most racist bits ad spots he’d ever seen:

If anything, I think the ad is nominally anti-racist. The cop initially tries to steer the victim to identify a black man in a do-rag as her attacker, which seems more like criticism of him for getting it wrong than an embrace of the idea that black men are criminals. And the entire joke of the spot is that a goat in a suit is much more threatening than a lineup of large black friends. I don’t think necessarily think it’s reasonable for Tyler to expect viewers of a Mountain Dew spot that’s aimed at a broad audience rather than at Odd Future’s core audience to know that the men he cast in the lineup are his friends, or that the goat is, in fact, Felicia The Goat, a bit of ongoing schtick. Even without that, I think the text of the add is reasonably clear, and while not that racist, it’s not particularly uproarious, either.

But what it does provide is an interesting exercise in interpretation and intergenerational communication. Tyler, in a long and intriguing interview with Billboard, said that he believed his differences with Watkins, who later said he believed Tyler’s intentions had not been malign, stemmed from a generation gap. “The things that he had to experience with racism and stereotypes and being a black man in this country, is different from mine,” he told Billboard. “I grew up in a generation where there’s white kids listening to rap and black kids playing hockey, breaking the norms and everything.” And he suggested that he was disappointed by Watkins’ negative interpretation of his work, in part because he believed that it would make it harder for black artists to get access to the kinds of opportunities that Mountain Dew gave him:

He has to realize that it’s a different generation now. He’s way older than me; he’s old enough to be my father. So I totally get why he would think that, but I also don’t understand why in life are you trying to point out the negatives. It’s a young black man who got out of the ‘hood and made something of himself, who’s now working with big, white-owned corporations. Not even in front of the camera acting silly, but directing it. I’m trying to be one of the directors. But instead of looking at the positivity from that, he’s trying to boycott Mountain Dew. Now that he’s doing that, not only is it messing up opportunities for me, but also maybe opportunities for another young black male who maybe looks up to me and wants to do that in the future. It’s ludicrous.

He’s not necessarily wrong that seeing creatively challenging partnerships attract negative attention may make it harder for artists to work with large corporations in the future. But one of the things I find intriguing about Tyler’s arguments is that they reflect a generational gap that I don’t think he’s acknowledging. Watkins may have experienced more direct racism that Tyler has personally. But it might also be that Tyler is less skeptical about corporate interests and corporate power than older people, and more willing to view corporate investment as a sign that racism is irrelevant or non-operative in this case. Making money is nice, but a corporation’s willingness to write a check to a woman or a person of color isn’t necessarily proof positive that said corporation is definitively anti-sexist or anti-racist. And whatever Tyler’s intentions were in making the ad, his interpretation of what he was giving Mountain Dew isn’t necessarily the same as the corporate interpretation of what they were getting from him.

I’m with Tyler that getting more women and people of color in a position to get money from large corporate interests, in part so they can finance their own products and win more freedom from the corporations who govern their day-to-day creative lives. But I also don’t see much of a problem with asking questions about why those corporations want to be in business with certain artists and what the results of their collaborations are. Writing a check buys you product. But that money doesn’t go to the general public. And it doesn’t buy anyone the ability to opt out of the critical conversation.

Susan Patton’s ur-Jewish Mother letter to the editor, published last week in the Daily Princetonian, in which she tells female students that “By the time you are a senior, you basically have only the men in your own class to choose from, and frankly, they now have four classes of women to choose from. Maybe you should have been a little nicer to these guys when you were freshmen?” has had its awful gender politics dissected to death, significantly by Maureen O’Connor at the Cut. But one thing I’ve been struck by is how little discussion there has been of the decision to publish this particular letter by the Daily Princetonian staff. It’s true that alumni with all sorts of nutty opinions write into their former college papers all the time, with all sorts of advice to offer the students who came after them. But Patton’s letter seems to exist at the crux of a number of trends that are a reality in publishing outside of the Ivory Tower.

The Daily Princetonian seems to be crashed by traffic to the site, so I can’t check to see if they serve ads on the site. But assuming that, like their competitors at the Yale Daily News and the Harvard Crimson, they do, the decision to publish Patton’s letter was a demonstration that college newspapers aren’t just a place to learn the basics of reporting and opinion writing: they’re glomming on to the business realities of online publishing as well. Patton’s letter is exactly the kind of thing that is tremendously clicky, to the extent that it was probably worth it financially to the Daily Princetonian to publish it even if the site ended up offline because of the massive influx of readers. And it seems to have been worth it because of that traffic even though Patton’s letter was likely to embarrass her son, who is an existing undergraduate, and wasn’t presented as part of some sort of larger debate, but rather published on its own. Its value as perspective on the Princeton experience, or even on larger work-life balance issues, is extraordinarily minimal. But the letter does represent a particular kind of trolling of young women about their career and family choices that’s done extraordinarily well online, both in terms of the traffic to the primary stories themselves, and in creating a secondary market to discuss and dissect those stories. And while some criticism has tended to focus on publications that rely heavily on these stories, as The Atlantic has in recent years, in this case, the blowback was aimed squarely at Patton, rather than the Daily Princetonian itself.

All in all, it’s a very successful, cynical execution of a well-established strategy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with students coming out of college newspapers—particularly those who want to get into the journalism business for real—knowing what it takes to be successful in the news business. But it does depress me a little bit to see those realities trickle down to publications that have the enormous luxury of being supported by alumni endowments. Why not take advantage of the one time you’ll likely be free of traffic and metrics pressure and just put out the best college paper you can?

Buzz Bissinger’s long, strange chronicle of his shopping addiction, particularly to Gucci, which was published yesterday in GQ makes the case for many things, including higher taxes on anyone who can afford to blow $638,412.97 on luxury clothes, mostly from Gucci, over a period of three years, and gag orders to keep parents from hopelessly embarrassing their children. But in between Bissinger’s tossed-off mentions of the medication he’s taking to treat bipolar disorder, his meandering and inconclusive discussions of his evolving sexuality (some of which seems shockingly at the expense of his wife), and his cluelessness about the extent to which his Gucci personal shopper must be having a high old time taking him for a very expensive ride, there’s a kernel of an interesting idea, particularly appearing in a magazine that does a lot to set the standards for men’s fashion.

Bissinger writes:

Some of the clothing is men’s. Some is women’s. I make no distinction. Men’s fashion is catching up, with high-end retailers such as Gucci and Burberry and Versace finally honoring us. But women’s fashion is still infinitely more interesting and has an unfair monopoly on feeling sexy, and if the clothing you wear makes you feel the way you want to feel, liberated and alive, then fucking wear it. The opposite, to repress yourself as I did for the first fifty-five years of my life, is the worst price of all to pay. The United States is a country that has raged against enlightenment since 1776; puritanism, the guiding lantern, has cast its withering judgment on anything outside the narrow societal mainstream. Think it’s easy to be different in America? Try something as benign as wearing stretch leather leggings or knee-high boots if you are a man.

Whether stretch leather leggings look good on Bissinger is one question. But the other, more relevant one, is how does men’s fashion relate to men’s bodies and men’s sense of their own sexual self-presentation? And how will men’s fashion and male body image issues change, particularly as men start to have an experience that’s been most squarely the provenance of women: being objectified?

There’s something fitting about the fact that Bissinger’s screed dropped the same day as these new Gillette spots which, in the interest of getting men to buy new shaving products, is encouraging men to start acting rather like women. Specifically, the company wants men to start worrying about how much of their body hair they can retain and still be sexually attractive to women like Kate Upton, who apparently doesn’t like back hair, New Girl’s Hannah Simone, who likes a smooth stomach, and a third lady who wants her gentleman friends to go completely bare:

This is a natural expansion of Gillette’s business, of course. Once you’ve got women removing as much hair as is humanely possible from their bodies, you’ve got to start targeting other people, and other body parts if you want to crete new markets.

These business interests have real consequences, of course. Hair removal is one thing—razor knicks and skin irritation aside, it’s not as if there are long-term health consequences to shaving your legs or chest, or a lot of Olympic swimmers would be in a fair bit of trouble. But what about steroids, or heavy lifting regimens among teenage boys who are still growing? Men’s sizing for things like suits is more nuanced than sizing for say, women’s dresses, but how will more off-the-rack sizing, and popular cuts of clothing, shift to accomodate new expectations of male body size?

Body image expectations and grooming requirements have long been more stringent for women than for men, but women and women’s fashion have responded with a great deal of innovation, and flair, and fun. Men seem to be at an earlier point in this cycle, when the standards are rising, but fashion norms haven’t yet broadened as dramatically as they are for women. Someone other than Buzz Bissinger will come up with something more insightful to say about what it means for men to get pulled more aggressively into an alternately enamored and antagonistic relationship with fashion and their bodies—and what it means for that relationship to expand to include men who aren’t worried about trying to fit into tight-fitting made-to-measure Italian suiting. But Bissinger is not wrong to argue that there’s powerful, unexplored territory out there when it comes to men, fashion, and the presentation of their sexuality. He’s just missing the fact that it’s not just his personal style, but powerful business interests, that are going to push that discussion forward—and in ways that he and other men might find as difficult and uncomfortable as women have for years.

The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas has made a splash in advertising circles with a racy new print spread that portrays bellhops as a symbol of a very different kind of quality and service:

I’m all for the general recognition that heterosexual women like to look as much as heterosexual men, and that as consumers, we’re not necessarily going to be satisfied by the idea that, say, gorgeous women should settle for funny, schlubby guys who don’t have their lives together. But what struck me most about this ad wasn’t that the bellhop was naked below the waist—it was that we don’t see his face at all. It’s one of the most literal transfigurations of a man—and in particular, a service employee—into an object of consumption that I’ve seen. Men, when they become sex objects, are not generally considered to have handed in their brains in the same way that gorgeous women are often expected to behave as mute objects. Channing Tatum may take his clothes off in Magic Mike, but the whole point of the movie is that there’s a brain and a heart somewhere to the north of that gyrating pelvis. Giving heterosexual women eye candy may seem like a form of third-wave equality. But if the form of that eye candy becomes a race to the bottom where it’s not clear whether women or men are treated worse or presented as more powerless or unrealistic, that doesn’t seem like much of a win.

Much of the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Project report is dominated by concerns with demographics. But throughout the report there are concerns about how Republicans can better engage with media and popular culture, from the suggestion that Republicans be more willing to go on programs like The Daily Show, to questioning how the party can better use its celebrity surrogates, to arguing for better use of data in determining ad buys. But wishing for these things to be done doesn’t make it so, and the Republican party faces some fundamental challenges trying to rebrand itself, among them these problems:

1. Republican celebrities are less appealing than Democratic celebrities: One of the first suggestions in the report is to “Establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry to host events for the RNC and allow donors to participate in entertainment events as a way to attract younger voters.” The problem is that the most visible conservative celebrities aren’t particularly engaging one on a broad scale. Ted Nugent is useful for firing up a small base of gun owners. Hank Williams Jr. appeals to conspiracy theorists who think that President Obama is secretly Muslim. But I can’t think of anyone with the Q score of a Jay-Z or a Meryl Streep who’s solidly identified with Republican values. The party may have to figure out its platform before it can even begin to recruit the kinds of celebrities who would be a draw.

2. Self-deprecation is a difficult skill to instill in politics: The report says that “Republican leaders should participate in and actively prepare for interviews with The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, MTV and magazines such as People, UsWeekly, etc., as well as radio stations that are popular with the youth demographic.” The idea of “radio stations that are popular with the youth demographic” is kind of funny given the state of commercial radio. But beyond that, the structures of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are set up in a way that makes it easier for liberals to succeed in those venues than Republicans. How do you respond when the person interviewing you is a parody of your own values, or when the person interviewing you is regularly outraged by the kinds of thing you’re trying to sell them? Are you prepared for the kinds of mass reactions liberals get when they venture into conservative media? It’s not just about being willing to accept invitations. It’s about doing the right kind of preparation, both for the interview, and for the news cycle after it.

3. Matching television spots to the most popular television content isn’t easy: The report notes that “On television, Obama ran at least four separate media schedules, each with a different series of creative executions. Pollsters, ad producers, and media buyers working together can determine the right mix of creative executions and media weight.” The ambition to run different ads for different settings is a good idea, of course, but that means you’ve got to have arguments, first, and find content where it might be a good fit. It’s one thing to roll out a traditional message about, say, opposition to gun control during Duck Dynasty, but what’s the pitch during NCIS, a show that’s succeeded in part by being somewhat politically neutral? Or how about 2 Broke Girls—are you going to pitch self-reliance for people in debt at the same time party leaders are attacking federal student loans? Are you going to be able to make fun of yourself, rather than simply trying to mock Democrats, given that self-referentiality and self-deprecation are often valuable tones in advertising, particularly to younger viewers?
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AdWeek reports that Comcast, which is purchasing the rest of NBC Universal, will begin using that company’s rules for advertising across its whole enterprise. And that includes a ban on firearms advertisements:

In a statement, Comcast said it decided this month it would adopt the advertising guidelines used by NBCUniversal, which will not accept ads for weapons or fireworks. (Last week, the cable giant announced it would acquire the 49 percent of NBCU it didn’t own for $16.7 billion.) NBC’s ad policy, last updated in June 2012, reads: “NBC does not accept advertisements for weapons or fireworks. Commercials that include weapons or fireworks as props will be approved on a case-by-case basis.” News of the policy change was reported by the local ABC affiliate in Flint, Mich. Williams Gun Sight Co. was outraged that its 30-second spot could no longer run on cable. A Comcast spokesperson didn’t know how long the NBC policy banning ads for firearms and weapons had been in place at NBC. “It’s a long-standing policy,” the spokesman said.

Voluntary restrictions on gun ads are relatively common in the wake of gun violence. In 1999, President Clinton asked representatives of the entertainment industry to eliminate advertising that included images of guns and gun violence. In 2003, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune decided it would only accept for ads that were antiques or collectibles after a man murdered his wife with a weapon that he purchased from the Guns & Rifles section of the classifieds. And this January, ESPN refused to renew an advertising contract with East Coast Guns on the grounds that its advertising criteria had changed to exclude ads that featured hand guns and ammunition for those weapons.

Comcast’s decision seems more likely to be the product of standardizing corporate practices as part of the acquisition than a direct response to the Newtown massacre. It would be a public relations problem for the company for a sales representative operating under one set of standards to accept an advertisement that local affiliates are unable to run. But it’s also probably a good call for the company given the current environment. I’ve said this before, but I think one of the most reasonable steps the entertainment industry could take in response to concerns about the impact of violent media would be to align the ratings of products that are being advertised with the ratings of the products they’re being advertised during. It would be labor-intensive to place ads that way. But making sure that viewers who have turned into general-interest or all-ages programming aren’t surprised by images of graphic violence would at least help consumers make viewing choices, even if it wouldn’t address the concerns of people who are worried about the desensitizing impacts of media violence.

The Super Bowl comes just once a year with its orgy of wings consumption, its highly-anticipated halftime show, the football, and the multi-million dollar ad spots. The latter are a fascinating exhibit of whatever America is thinking about gender—or what advertising executives think America is thinking about gender—at any given moment. And as is always the case, there were babes, beers, and Danica Patrick chipperly selling out the rest of her fellow women for a lot of GoDaddy’s money. But for once, it wasn’t all apocalyptically terrible. Here’s what the Super Bowl taught me about gender in 2013, from best to worst:

The Good:

1. Ladies? We’re just as capable of being passionate sports fans as men—and just as capable of being devious if we think we can snag our team an advantage. Bonus points for turning household chores into a tool of team loyalty:

2. Princesses can lead armies:

3. Real men play princess with their daughters rather than blowing them off to hang out with their bros—even if they need Doritos as incentives:

The Bad

1. Ladies: overly-attached to their mothers: