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Advertising: Best Left to the Professionals?

Scene from Dan Burke’s Heinz Ketchup ad, in which he uses ketchup as toothpaste.

The New York Times article The High Price of Creating Free Ads covers Heinz’s contest in which its customers are challenged to create their own television advertisement for Heinz Ketchup. The subtext of the article seems to be this: Leave this kind of work to the professionals.

Note that while advertising execs and a couple of contest entrants are interviewed in the article, there isn’t a single quote from “the audience”. Perhaps the constraints of a press deadline would’ve made it too hard to gather some “average person” reviews of some submitted ads, but it would’ve been informative. Remember that the original ads for HeadOn (“HeadOn! Apply directly to the forehead!”) were created by professionals and apparently passed focus group muster.

In my opinion, at least one of the customer-submitted ads is quite good. I laughed out loud when it hit the punchline, and I thought it would work perfectly in “edgy” time slots, such as Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim (or in Canada, Teletoon’s The Detour):

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Lara Croft, Then and Now

Courtesy of my friend Miss Fipi Lele: click on the image below to see how Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft has evolved from game to game:

Preview image showing the evolution of Lara Croft.
Click to see the full image.

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Why PR Doesn’t Work for High Tech (or: Guy Kawasaki is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!)

Cover of the book “Toxic Sludge is Good for You!”

Back during those heady dot-com days, George and I worked for OpenCola, a start-up that was spending US$40,000 a month on the services of a PR firm that shall remain unnamed. I got the feeling that OpenCola was getting more PR bang for the buck from me and OpenCola founder/Chief Evangelist Cory Doctorow. We were based in the San Francisco office, pressing the flesh with as many geeks and tech press as we possibly could, and we had a much better idea of what OpenCola could do than the people to whom we were shoveling 40 grand a month.

I suggested that we could cut our PR budget by having me and Cory holding a monthly “chicken run” a la Rebel Without a Cause. We could jump into a cheap used car with the OpenCola logo plastered all over it, and drive it towards a cliff, bailing out at the last second. Spectacular, far cheaper than the PR farm, and by the standards of those days, a not-too-harebrained publicity stunt. Like any good idea in those days, it was ignored.

My dot-com era experiences have caused me to generally have a dim view of PR firms and the people who work for them — my feelings run the gamut from “necessary evil” to “waste of space” to “waste of ammo” (and sometimes “waste of skin”). The book Toxic Sludge is Good for You has only served to reinforce this opinion.

Hence I cannot help reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog entry, The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work with a jaundiced eye. Guy could’ve saved me valuable seconds by boiling his list down to the single opinion from which it stems: It’s the client’s fault.

Guy, I’ll see your list of 10 items and counter you with a simple two-item list as to why PR doesn’t work:

  1. PR companies suck.
  2. PR companies are stupid.

Much better, and far truer.

(This pains me. Guy’s one of my role models.)

I far prefer the items in the list provided in the article Top 5 (or 6) reasons PR doesn’t work. if you’re a geek., an article written in response to Guy’s:

  1. The PR firm doesn’t understand the product or technology.
  2. The PR firm is seen as a spinner, blocker, or gatekeeper to access the CEO/CTO/braintrust.
  3. The PR firm hasn’t been properly trained on how to communicate with bloggers or social media.
  4. The PR firm prefers doing a few big traditional media over lots of smaller online media & online channels.
  5. The PR firm doesn’t understand SEO, SEM, widgets, blogs, tags, social networks, pictures, video, or other online & viral methods, aka “all that Web 2.0 stuff”.
  6. Most PR folks have no clue what the hell TechMeme is.
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Dialog Box of the Week

Worse Than Failure asks: in the dialog box below, which button do you click to reset to the factory default settings, and which one to you click to cancel the reset operation?

“Reset to Factory Default” dialog box featuring two buttons: “Apply” and “Reset”.

Even this redesign featuring CB radio slang (I watched Convoy and many episodes of BJ and the Bear as a kid) makes more sense:

Improved “Reset to Factory Default” dialog box featuring two buttons: “10-4 good buddy” and “That’s a negatory”.

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iPod Amnesty Bin at Zune Headquarters

Microsoft may not always crank out the best products, but I will have to hand it to them: they certainly can tell jokes. The best part of any Microsoft keynote is the spoof video — consider their parody of VW’s “Da Da Da” tv spot, their Matrix spoof and the “Bill Meets Napoleon Dynamite” clip. If their stuff worked as well as their spoofs, my Vista laptop wouldn’t be relegated to second-banana duty.

Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz recently experienced some Microsoft self-promo humour when paying a visit to Zune headquarters. Here’s what he saw near the entrance: an iPod amnesty bin:

“iPod Amnesty Bin” at Zune headquarters
Click to see the photo on its original page.

The Mac fanboy/fangirl reaction seems to have largely been one of amusement, and as one commenter on The Unofficial Apple Weblog puts it, the Zune Amesty Bin is the store shelves.

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Makin’ the Gas Smell Like Ass

Harold and Kumar Go Huffin’

I once had the honour of having lunch with a Nobel Prize Winner: Frank Wilczek, who won the 2004 Physics prize with two of his colleagues (I knew him through Betsy Devine, whom I knew via blogging). All sorts of topics came up during lunch, from “What book do you think was the most influential, ever?” (I answered Principia Mathematica, to which Frank replied “Now do you mean Newton’s or Whitehead and Russell’s?”) to favourite television shows. Frank and Betsy were big fans of CSI, and they were telling us about the episode with the furries, which they’d just seen.

“And here I thought I’d seen everything!” said Frank, who confessed that he’d never heard of furries before. “I must be getting old.”

I’m getting that same feeling now. While I knew that kids huffed no-stick cooking spray and aerosol furniture polish, I had no idea that they did the same with that compressed-air-in-a-can that you use to blow dust out of computers and circuitry. It makes sense, though: it’s got the propellant to get you high, minus the butter scent that comes with Pam or Pledge’s sickeningly strong lemon smell.

(Another sign I’m getting old: my first reaction to hearing this was “Damn, kids today are morons.”)

Apparently aware of this fact, Memorex — a company that lives in my mind’s “Where are they now?” file — has added some kind of Bitrex-like agent to their compressed air duster products to keep the kids from huffing them. Their press release includes some slang terms for inhaling aerosol vapours for the benefit of parents who want to get hip to their kids’ lingo: “huffing”, “bagging” and “dusting”. I can imagine these terms being read out by my local out-of-touch news anchor, emphasizing the words so that you can almost hear the quotes around them.

While I am glad that it’ll probably save a number of kids’ brain cells, I am concerned that it’s going to make my computer smell like ass. Have any of you gotten a whiff of the new formulation?

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Spam’s “80-200” Rule

Laptop computer with Spam clogging up the floppy drive.

You might refer to it as The Law of the Few, the 80-20 rule, the Pareto Principle or — if you’re angling for serious math geek cred — the principle of factor sparsity. All these names are used to describe a major factor in epidemics or epidemic-like phenomena: widespread effects are often caused by a few key players. Malcolm Gladwell cited all kinds of examples of this phenomenon in The Tipping Point: the transformation of Hush Puppies into a trendy shoe brought about by a few “influencers”, the success of the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood thanks to devoted fans with personal networks and how an gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs was traced to a small number of people in a half-dozen bars.

It seems that the same principle applies to spam and spammers. According to The Spamhaus Project’s ROKSO (Register Of Known Spam Operations), 80% of all the spam out there is being created by a mere 200 operators. To make it onto the ROKSO, you have to have had your services terminated by at least 3 ISPs for spamming.

A snippet from the sidebar of the ROKSO page:

80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations (“spam gangs”), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database. These spam operations consist of an estimated 500-600 professional spammers with ever-changing aliases and domains.

For those of you who really want to stay on top of the spam underground (or maybe you’ve got a fascination for things like the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list), Spamhaus also publishes a “10 Worst Spammers” list, updated weekly.