I don't care if you do think it's effective - only a sick person, removed from the reality, would be "proud" of torture http://bit.ly/aincKU3 hours ago
While smart from a marketing and strategy perspective, Apple’s first-to-market launches always lead to a lot of bugs, so I await the list of flaws when people really start to buy this thing. (Yes, I’m still angry about my iPod dying exactly one month after the warranty ran out. And that one wasn’t even a new product.)
I still think products like this or the Kindle need to be physically flexible, i.e. soft instead of rigid, before they’ll really catch on as a commuter / on-the-couch reading device. So it’s unfortunate that this isn’t the salvation of media that so many outlets want it to be, even if it’s cool.
I still would rather have a really solid smartphone than a cool tablet device — Nexus One, please.
While running for the border, time to take a detour:
And the 3-minute version:
The tone of these is really strange — in the 3-minute version, at first Taco Bell seems to be going for a Popeil-esque infomercial parody, but then they bring out Christine the now-hot woman and Ruth Carey the registered dietician (who clearly made a conscious choice to sell her professional soul) and things take a turn for the health-oriented. We end again on an upbeat and optimistic note that leaves our parody question totally unresolved.
Looking at this from the b-school marketing perspective, Taco Bell is clearly trying to horn in on Subway’s fast/healthy territory, which the other fast-food dudes have thus far been unable to do. T Bell can bring the dynamic competitive variable of being hella cheap — nobody sparks the image of cheap food better than the Bell, and that’s an added edge over Subway if both are competing in the space of healthy, quick food. This is also a smart move to expand their gender demographic — when’s the last time you saw a woman in a Taco Bell commercial? Their target market is the classic “dude”: 15-34, with an appreciation for cheap, filling, tasty food in a pinch, healthiness being a more secondary consideration. In a word, me.
But from an ethical advertising perspective, it gets my cringe on. If you come at this like that sad girl and her mom in “Supersize Me” who thought they could only follow Jared’s weight-loss example by buying Subway every day, this grabs you right by the sizable haunches and tells you, “Now you can finally afford to follow the fast-food-only diet and get a hot body like this chick.” Note the huge caveat that Taco Bell themselves provided — results aren’t typical, particularly when you consider that Christine reduced her caloric intake to 1,250 calories per day. That means your entire daily intake is a mere 3.67 fresco chicken burritos. I have a feeling I’m in the minority for grasping the meaning of that 1,250 figure and not merely thinking, “If I eat more fresco burritos, I’ll be totally hot,” but maybe I’m not giving the food-buying public enough credit. (Or am I?)
In the end, I have to appreciate this campaign on its evil-marketing-genius merits. I stopped at Taco Bell on my drive Monday back to campus, and the fresco chicken burrito was indeed quite tasty, so I can’t fault TB there. Despite that, I’ll continue to cheer those well-intentioned squares at Center for Science in the Public Interest in their Sisyphean fight for healthy food, because the sooner we stop providing material for People of Wal-Mart, the better.
Damn, I felt today like I was in the boat scene from The Dark Knight.
Most of you dudes know I split my time these days between school in Ann Arbor and home in Chicago. The best way to get back and forth is Megabus, which I took yet again today.
(For anyone interested, here’s a quick cost-benefit analysis of the transportation links between Ann Arbor and Chicago:
1. Megabus – Cost averages $25, mostly comfortable, takes 4.5 hours including stop for food — though sadly, only at Hardee’s. Nasty. 2. Amtrak – Cost is $29 on weekdays but $75 on weekends. Most comfortable option, but delayed so often that it averages six hours per trip. 3. Driving – Cost depends on MPG (about 3/4 tank when I take the VW) but you can’t really do any work. Takes about four hours, and you then have to find parking. 4. Greyhound – Hellz no.)
To finally get to the point of my post, today we hit the food break at the Love’s truck stop — the one with the Hardee’s — at mile marker 110, which not only has just one fast-food option but also plays Fox News in the dining area. (Megabus used to stop at the truck stop in Sawyer, Mich., which has a Popeye’s, BK, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut Express. Now that is a quality junk-food spread. I think Love’s must have started paying them to subject us to Hardee’s.) I ate a Thickburger anyway and we left 30 minutes later.
Next up was the exercise in group morality: The driver came on the intercom about 20 miles past Love’s and announced that a passenger was left behind at the truck stop. Whoops. The driver had made several announcements when we stopped that everyone had to be back on by 3 p.m. EST, but whoever this person was somehow failed to note the time. The driver initially said he was going to turn around despite his anger and pick up the person, which would have resulted in us being about 40-50 minutes late in arriving. A bunch of passengers told the driver to keep going anyway — because hey, screw that anonymous guy — so he then announced he was not turning around.
I and the passengers around me found this a bit heartless — anybody who plans an urgent event based on a bus’s on-time arrival is an idiot — so I went downstairs and told the driver he should go back, and despite us both being pissed at the passenger, I could tell he felt the same way. He went on the intercom one more time and said he was turning around, but then enough people howled in protest that we ended up heading to Ann Arbor as scheduled, leaving the unknown passenger to fend for him/herself until the next Megabus comes through. With that bus not leaving Chicago until 4:45 p.m. CST, that comes out to an almost six-hour wait at the truck stop if there isn’t some other ride available. Ouch.
So what was the right course of action? After all, the passenger was at fault for not paying attention to the multiple announcements about being back to the bus on time. How would have you voted? Drop some ethical knowledge in the comments section and let me know. Also, give me a ride next time so I can avoid these philosophical quandaries.
I assume I’m not the only one who’s noticed that clothing sizes have totally changed in the past 2-3 years or so — what used to be an XL is now only a large, what used to be a large is now a medium, and what used to be XXXL is now somehow listed in the normal-sized range at XL. G confirms that this is the case for women’s clothing too — a size 4 now fits what used to be size 6, size 8 fits a former size 10, etc.
This is pretty clever on the part of marketers, but I have to burst your bubble, you-who-think-you’ve-dropped-a-size: You may fit in a size 6, but unfortunately, you don’t actually fit in a size 6.
Last week I was reading some online commentary about a piece by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, this one about Goldman Sachs. I first read Taibbi in Spanking the Donkey, and I usually like the dude’s cynical, New-Journalism-style writing, even when it’s a bit sensational.
The Goldman Sachs thing — at least the parts I could read, since the whole thing isn’t available online (very Time Inc. circa 2003 move by Rolling Stone) — so then I started reading some of the criticism. One of the articles I read mentioned that Megan McArdle (who I haven’t read before) from the Atlantic wrote a big response to the article, so I decided to go try and find that. I typed this into Google:
We all know search-engine listings are important, so how did HuffPost pull this one off? When I look at the source code, it seems like The Atlantic is missing some simple SEO best-practice stuff that could have helped them out here. HuffPost isn’t kicking ass at SEO coding, exactly, but they’re doing enough of the small stuff right that it’s likely that was enough to get Google to list them over The Atlantic. Running down the basic-level SEO checklist:
Friendly URLs: Sort of a wash; both URLs contain the keyword strings “taibbi” and “atlantic” at some point. Header tags: Running into some trouble here — HuffPost has the page title “The Atlantic: Taibbi Is ‘Becoming The Sarah Palin Of Journalism’” in an h1 tag, while “Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On” is an h3 tag on The Atlantic. That’s a weird one, particularly because there’s no other competing h1 tag on the Atlantic page and we’re looking at an individual post here, not the main page of the blog where you might use the h1 for the blog title. Meta keywords: Keywords are one of the few meta tags that actually count for search engines, and while they’re downplayed a lot in best-practice techniques compared to the days when people would put 200 keywords into the source code, they still serve a contextual purpose. The Atlantic didn’t even use any — not good, not even as good as the cursory list on the HuffPost page.
Plenty of SEO-consultant advice is voodoo, as Google’s algorithm is a mystery to most, but low-level code tactics like URL structure, meta and header tags make a difference.
HuffPost gets some flak now and then for not doing enough original stuff (or sometimes going beyond that), but in cases like this, they’re grabbing the traffic in a perfectly legal way. Even if they do link through in the end, this is a tangible example to pay attention to best-practice coding when you’re building a site, because otherwise, web dudes will come and G up even those readers specifically looking for your stuff.
As a kid, the only person I knew who ate Grape Nuts was my grandpa. Looking up at the white box on the top of his fridge, I always wondered what the hell a Grape Nut was, and to this day I still don’t really know. But I will say that they make an excellent breakfast food, particularly mixed with raisins (a.k.a. actual grapes). Favorite part of this story: “It tends to break your teeth sometimes.”
I’m curious to see who will buy AOL and what they think is valuable. They have a decent development team down there, so I’d imagine that gets some interest, but otherwise it’ll be interesting to see.
If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in.
There’s a lot of validity to this article, and perhaps the naturally occurring grad-school process of divorcing theory from reality is more harmful in the business world than in other disciplines. But I promise, I do not find it awesome to destroy value.
Though my motto is indeed “Mediocre But Arrogant”.
There’s a been a rash of new Comcast ads in the past few days, featuring a bunch of people in three-quarter view singing a really strange and monotonic rhyme about Comcast and all the ninjas and explosions it offers. But that’s funny, because when I think “Comcast”, I don’t think “funky and hip” so much as “they care more about customer satisfaction at The Wiener’s Circle.”
I haven’t had the same bad experience with customer service; the people on the phones are mostly friendly. I do, however, rate this place only one star for its ridiculous service plans.
Here’s the best: if you call to cancel your service say, three weeks from the date you call, they turn your Internet service off IMMEDIATELY. I had to schedule a pickup the day before moving, which was, yes, three weeks from the date I called. Next thing I know, my Internet stops working. I call them up and they tell me it’s company policy that as soon as you request a service stop, they turn your modem off no matter how far out the actual end date may be. So I had to cancel that end of service, call again today (the day before we move out of town) and find out they don’t have a tech to come out today, so now we have to drive to the ass-end of NE and drop off the stuff ourselves.
Buy from RCN, whatever you do!
There you have it. Comcast: Truth in advertising is a bad idea.
The government is finally about to start buying up the garbage assets that all the big banks are holding. From the WSJ, still owned by the same people who brought you When Animals Attack:
This one is going to be a public-private partnership, wherein the government will pony up a lot of the capital ($500 bil to $1 trizillion) and private investors will pick up the rest. Ideally I assume this would make a portfolio of 2,000 distressed credit-card receivables cheaper than current prices, such that someone out there would still be able to collect on enough of them to make it worthwhile.
I think this is what needed to happen all along, and for all the correct arguments about moral hazard — I met enough arrogant bankers in New York to know that they completely disregarded the idea of consequence long before this debacle — the Republican preference to let the national ship sink for the sake of principle is callous and stupid. I don’t know about you, but if I was just some working-class Detroit guy chillin’ homeless and broke in the event of a complete financial crash, I wouldn’t be telling myself, “Dude, I really showed those bankers.”
And as for tax increases to fund the spending, there’s always the Chinese and Japanese, who will keep lending us money as long as we buy their stuff and maintain a favorable exchange rate for their exports. That fact worries me more than the rest of this, but hey, one thing at a time here!
There’s a been a rash of new Comcast ads in the past few days, featuring a bunch of people in three-quarter view singing a really strange and monotonic rhyme about Comcast and all the ninjas and explosions it offers. But that’s funny, because when I think “Comcast”, I don’t think “funky and hip” so much as “they care more about customer satisfaction at