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.

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.

Sorry, yo.

Check this review I wrote for Yelp D.C. for a good example:

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.

I did enjoy the part of the piece that went into detail on ad networks, particularly when Steve Stup from WPNI was quoted. I think networks are a positive thing for the present online conditions, though I do appreciate the commoditization argument and how that represents a potential danger. But with online display advertising still in its infancy — no shop right now is seeing online creativity the level of which goes into TV or print — this is a good way to go in enticing old advertisers into the new market. As advertisers become more familiar with the online audience and get a grasp of where their ad dollars will be most effective, then that represents a chance for publications to break away from networks and distinguish themselves as an independent inventory opportunity.

Damn, can anybody tell I just got done writing a corporate strategy paper this morning? The MBA curriculum is crowding my brain.

First the letter noted how the liberal media doesn’t care to report the real news that affects people like me, and that the New York Times now has a section of the paper devoted entirely to corrections. (Don’t all newspapers have this? “Section” in this case just means, “A few paragraphs on the back of page one like newspapers have done for decades.”) But the stones were hurled powerfully out of the glass house when the same letter disparaged — not once, not twice, but thrice — the terrorist-loving platitudes of one “Barrack [sic] Obama”.

Sadly for the consumer marketing team at Washington Times, they can confuse the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with military housing all they want and it won’t make much of a difference in my subscription status. After all, the liberal media thing has been working out pretty well for me.

I did learn a nice history of the lending industry from the article, in particular the industry’s shift in focus from demanding repayment to collecting fee-based income off of ever-rolling debt. While the credit-card industry, and certainly the mortgage industry of the past few years, often embodies the term “predatory capitalism”, it does seem that the article shifted too much of the onus for America’s debt problem away from the public. This is similar to media outlets who generally avoid putting any blame on the voting public for America’s political messes, for obvious business reasons. (What audience wants to be told that it’s the proverbial box of dull tacks? I prefer my mental tack sharp, thanks.)

Maybe I’m too harsh, though, because the writers and editors might have been making a point on the sly about the general public by choosing the subject that they did. Ms. McLeod — no relation to Connor, who has a far better repayment cycle with which to work — really makes one unfortunate (read: not well-thought-out) decision after another. From spending her already debt-addled medical recovery cruising QVC, to adding her 20-year-old son onto her second home-refinancing and ruining his credit too, I really don’t understand what made her do what she did.

So that raises the question: What really has made debt-laden ‘Mercans turn away from the admirable saving habits of back in the not-that-far-off day? Why is “I gotta have it” such a seemingly more powerful motivator across society now than it was then? This was the topic of conversation between The Wife and me. We came to one important conclusion that’s both seemingly unrelated but not that surprising: television.

The modern debt cycle really started to germinate at about the time the TV-raised Boomer generation was earning enough money to buy homes, sign up for credit cards and pop out Millennials like your gracious host. Boomers had grown up with TV, which based on its sheer volume of audio and visual stimulation was inevitably packed full of product pitches and brand names. Sure, their parents — the Greatests — were watching TV too, but the Depression experience burned the saving ethic into their parents’ heads for life. Greatests learned back then to do things like wearing the same six velour jumpsuits for 30 years. (Which is smart — over time this actually becomes cool, what with the roundabout cycle of retro hipness.)

Boomers weren’t about to wear velour jumpsuits; velour is too hot in summer, and after a childhood of American prosperity and the enveloping nature of TV advertising, they had to get that fine narrow-lapel suit to go with the Commodore 64 for the kids. Advertisers, too, were well-aware of just how good a job TV had done to implant the “buy stuff” message into America’s collective mind. Over time they shifted from making their products attractive to making access to their products a moral right — “You deserve a break today” and “Live richly”, not just “Our McNuggets taste totally rad” and “Hey, peep out this low interest rate.” This newly created sense of entitlement grew strong until too many people didn’t bother to use their better instincts, and the things they felt they needed encompassed even luxury goods that were previously — and still probably should be — considered impractical on the average income. Cue up many of my generational peeps growing up in this environment, who should nonetheless know better than to spend that percentage allotted for savings on Manhattan rent and cosmopolitans, and the cycle continues. (Also, thank you, Mom and Dad, for teaching me how to save cash and how to avoid becoming a spoiled jagoff.)

In conclusion, if we didn’t have TV, we might not have a subprime mortgage crisis and government bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The end.

Brand or Channel — May ’08 Unique Audience (000) — May ’07 Unique Audience (000)

Yahoo! News — 35,846 — 30,451
MSNBC Digital Network — 35,184 — 28,347
CNN Digital Network — 33,101 — 29,094
AOL News — 22,524 — 17,444
NYTimes.com — 21,340 — 12,775

Tribune Newspapers — 16,238 — 13,300
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division — 14,629 — 12,645
Google News — 11,356 — 9,359
ABCNEWS Digital Network — 11,124 — 10,211
USATODAY.com — 10,785 — 9,528

Fox News Digital Network — 10,132 — 7,594
CBS News Digital Network — 9,225 — 8,620
washingtonpost.com — 9,204 — 8,613
McClatchy Newspaper Network — 9,131 — 9,885
Hearst Newspapers Digital — 7,955 — 8,380

WorldNow — 7,523 — 6,232
MediaNews Group Newspapers — 6,965 — 6,189
Slate — 6,456 — 3,856
Advance Internet — 6,202 — 6,006
IB Websites — 5,943 — 5,203

BBC News — 5,933 — 6,554
Cox Newspapers — 5,826 — 3,949
Belo Television — 5,354 — 3,301
Topix — 5,133 — 4,411
Boston.com — 4,962 — 4,038

Gannett Broadcasting — 4,735 — 3,030
TheHuffingtonPost.com — 4,715 — 1,327
Associated Press — 4,527 — 8,191
Belo Newspapers — 4,462 — 2,417
Fox Television Stations — 4,386 — 3,451

I’m happy to see so many newspaper companies are cracking the list. The audience is there; we just need to use that more effectively to make money and keep things going. It’s also good that the big news sites like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN beat out Google News by so much: the first three still have a human element at play in editing, proving that context really does matter.

So good news to all you editors: for now, you still can’t be replaced by robots.

• This UK Daily Mail profile of John McCain’s first wife. I had always heard about his first marriage, but knew next to nothing about it. Definitely a sensationalist source, but an unflattering new look.
• An article on the prevalence of skulls by Stephen Marche in Esquire. There’s no link to it on their site, so you can just read this other description of it. Who doesn’t like a memento mori?
• This inspiring article from the Chicago Tribune magazine about a woman in Roseland (a nasty part of Chicago) who started her own anti-violence group for the teens in the neighborhood.

Good on ya.

Phorm on its face is obviously bad for individual media outlets, whose perspective I’m admittedly favoring: this all-sites-visited method of advertising prompts advertisers to buy based on users’ web behavior as one singular package, not separate entities grouped by the aforementioned individual outlets. The ability for each individual outlet to tailor its advertising message to its particular clients is thus diminished: this is ultra-individualistic without taking into account what visitors to, say, the New York Times have in common with other visitors to the Times‘ site. But I think this all-the-web approach is inconvenient for advertisers: Instead of buying up space on NYTimes.com based on the common interests of the Times’ audience, advertisers are going to have to do their own aggregating work to design a broad base of characteristics that somehow coincide with each other. The NY Times can provide demographic info on its audience and advertisers can reach that audience by buying on the NY Times, but how is a company wanting to reach a targeted group going to isolate that group based on their visiting tons of different sites? Phorm could probably aggregate packages of user characteristics and sell those, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

There’s also the much bigger problem of having every potential site that the user visits opt into this advertising network — it’s either that or put some sort of ISP-based spyware onto the user’s machine to serve up desktop ads. Serving advertising over top of other sites’ own advertising is a recipe for being sued, and desktop ads always drove me nuts with various file-sharing services. And that was back in the day of 2000, so I doubt users have grown an appetite in the time since.

I’ll leave the very legitimate privacy concerns to other peeps — like the New York state legislature — but I think that Phorm as an ad strategy doesn’t really address the all-important point of finding appropriate inventory for your ads.

On a related note, I think the quadrantONE network is a great idea for newspapers, but what I really want to see the network do is get into local-market ad production and sales. Once newspapers provide effective venues for small businesses to advertise online as they do now in print — the production issues in creating web ads obviously have a different set of challenges from those of print ads — then that’s a big breakthrough for newspapers.

Clearly Guinness — and Diageo, its parent — know that this official-holiday thing, from a political perspective, really isn’t much. If Congress does recognize it, it would likely be just a symbolic recognition and not a federal holiday like Thanksgiving; if they don’t, well, whatever. The idea they’ve planted is to reinforce the predominant idea that St. Patrick’s is a time to take the entire day — particularly nice if it’s a day off anyway — and drink until you’re lying on the floor, which just might involve such Ireland-iconic (and delicious!) Diageo brands as Guinness, Harp or Smithwick’s. Either way, the drinking idea stays sticky in your brain-piece.

But back to the campaign, I would like to point out that St. Patrick’s Day is already a national holiday in — shocker — Ireland, where it is celebrated by taking the day off, going to Mass, and then hanging out at home. Parts of Ireland have imported the Americanized St. Patrick’s, but it’s by and large a day where people just rest up to honor my patron saint.

While I love a good party as much as the next guy, the wilding-out of St. Patrick’s is a trend I don’t much like — call it old-school, but St. Patrick’s Day to me is a day to watch bagpipers in parades and look back at just how far the Irish have come in the past 200+ years of America’s existence. Yes, pub-going is a big part of Ireland, but the whole get-blasted-in-green-hats thing is way more about consumerism than it is about any sort of ethnic pride. (Check out the number of Bud and Miller promos next time you’re out on St. Patrick’s.)

To acknowledge the counterargument, woo! Alcohol! But yeah, take it easy.