Archive for March, 2007
Irritation du jour
It started with Google sticking “Beta” next to the names of its services - which was at best a bad joke (everyone’s using Gmail, but it’s beta?) or a warning (”Millions rely on us, but we’re not really gonna support it.”)
Then everyone started doing it, perhaps hoping they’d have a Googlicious IPO as a results [...]
The Marketing o’ the Green
Whether it’s aimed at pushing merchandise directly tied to the holiday, or just dressing up the message with related images and references, I actually don’t mind holiday-related marketing. And that includes marketing related to St. Patrick’s Day.
Here in Boston, which has a pretty high percentage of people of Irish heritage, it’s no surprise that we see more [...]
Sex Doesn’t Sell
That’s kind of a “man bites dog” headline, but it’s what researchers at University College London found, according to this report in the Economist:
Sexual allure is often hinted as being the prize for buying this or that. Yet advertising wares during commercial breaks in programmes with an erotic theme can be tricky: the minds of [...]
Cable Broadband: "All You Can Eat" means "All We Want You To Eat"
Broadband providers promote their services by telling you about how great it is to be online all the time, uploading and downloading large files without headaches, getting music and video online, chatting in fabulous clear video with your pals in Tokyo (you do have pals in Tokyo, don’t you?) and so on. Cable providers, in [...]
USA Today on Apple: What’s Success Got to Do with It?
This rather fawning piece on Apple’s marketing left me wondering what the writer, Jefferson Graham, would pick as a metric for marketing success. Call me old-fashioned, but I think selling products should fit in the definition somewhere.
Apple’s marketing machine has done it again.
While the biggest names in tech were in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show [...]
Jargon Monoxide (It’s Polly Labarre’s term - sure wish I’d thought of it.)
Bob Sutton had a post the other day about a guest appearance that Polly Labarre, co-author of Mavericks at Work, made to his Stanford Organizational Development class. Here’s Bob:
One of the points that [Polly Labarre] made especially well was that mavericks are so effective at inspiring innovation partly because they use authentic and compelling language, not hollow [...]
Fighting Spam the Web 0.0 Way
I can’t blame people for using spam-fighting tools, but there’s one particularly annoying that is, sadly, not yet dead: those “challenge” systems that require an email recipient to approve you as a sender. I sent an email to about ten people this morning (a “reply all” to a group of people on a committee of [...]
Cable and Wireless
I once worked for the big British telecom with that name; our running joke was that we were Cable and Wireless and we didn’t do either of those things. US cable companies, however, want to do wireless, just as telecoms want to do television. The whole merging of all of these companies into similar providers of a broad range of [...]
Flying Fur: Van Messaging
The van was a couple of lanes over, but I saw the name on the side as they flew by, Flying Fur. Pet grooming, I told myself. Great name! (I like cute.) Sure enough, when I caught up with the van at the Weston tolls, Flying Fur is a mobile pet grooming service. The one [...]
The GORB: Bathroom Wall 2.0
It’s rare that I have as visceral a negative reaction to an idea for a web site as what I felt when I read about the GORB.
The site is, essentially, a giant bathroom wall on which you can scrawl anonymous comments about people. Okay, that’s not how they’d describe themselves; they say it’s a place to post [...]
