What The . . . ?

One of the other reasons for my hiatus has been this:

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When short on time, not near a machine, or witnessing something interesting on the spur of the moment I'd snap a shot with my phone's camera and send it to the QA. Every picture on this blog, with the exception of a few that I've bounced in from elsewhere, is a camera phone shot. It was an easy way to blog, and add some visual interest to my posts. Easy, that was, until I noticed, while in Atlanta, that Verizon was appending the above junk to my photos. The last time that I checked, they were not paying me to drive traffic to their site nor to Apple's; nor have I added them to the contributor's list of this blog. This appendage has curtailed my use of my camera phone to do mobile picture blogging and really annoyed me.

The real drag of this whole thing to me is that some marketing wiz at the above mentioned phone company must have figured that this was a god idea. Sadly, it sort of is. By appending this garbage to an emailed photo they get instant "viral marketing" (all the rage these days with marketers). Even if the emailed shot does not go to a blog, it can still be passed around via email, so either way this nets them free publicity. For photos sent to blogs, the appendage increases the number of links extant on the web, and thus makes them more visible to spiders; virally sends itself through feed readers and is basically a cheap (free) way to get some rather large text ads. Now, my blog, with its three readers is certainly not going to do them much good, but it's still annoying and, I believe, improper for this phone company to do this. If they asked my permission and paid me, it might be a different story, but this is my blog, and I don't want to do any marketing for my wireless provider -- they are merely a vehicle for data transmission, not a contributor, or participant in this space.

Tree Service

Earlier this week the remnants of some named-tropical-depression (Barry, I think) came through the area and brought some funky, humid air, lots of rain and some moderate winds.* Moderate though they seemed, the winds, took down a large chunk of a tree in my neighbor's yard. The felled-section landed on his house. It didn't seem to do much damage but the tree whole needed to be removed. This morning, a tree crew showed up and began cutting.

Twenty years ago (wow!), as a callow youth, my first job was working on a tree crew. My Mother's, first cousin's in-laws (if that's not a Boston-familial connection chain . . . ) owned a tree company in the Boston area. I remember being too young to work, but people telling me that when I turned 16 I'd go work for that crew -- and so I did.

It was hot, dirty, dangerous, hard work. It brought me in touch with some unsavory types (gun charges, manslaughter charges) and afforded me the opportunity to drive trucks (when legal), use chainsaws, chippers, stumpers and bring my lunch to work in a cooler. One summer I got hit in the head and got 30 stitches. I was tanned. I was strong. My hands were hard and my arms were covered in scratches. I earned $8/hr, $12/hr for overtime. Basically it was the best job that any 16 year old could ever ask for.

It also taught me the value of a buck, how hard it is to earn a living and what it means to work. Some days, like this morning, I miss that job even though it would be unrealistic for me, at this point in my life, to go and do that work. But it was honest labor, with tangible results that got me outside, kept me active and put cash in my pocket. Working in advertising, you play a big game, all the time -- jacking your salary by moving from job to job producing disposable paper and electronic deliverables. It has its moments, it can be hard in terms of stress, and it can be fun, sometimes, but it's a service based industry with few tangible results.

Of course, when we are successful our clients move units, post profits, see their stock go up, spend more money with us, we profit etc. etc. but it's all, on many levels, theoretical. I take pride in successfully executed campaigns that move the needle; but, I guarantee that I'll remember the day we took down about 360 feet of White Oaks (6 trees on a piece of property -- and the only day I ever felt bad about how I earned my money because the trees were healthy and beautiful) longer than I'll ever remember some campaign selling servers. Am I glorifying my teenage work experience? Of course I am, but it has stood me in good stead, and taught me some of the most important lessons of my life.

*How we can have a named storm already, prior to Hurricane Season, is beyond me. I think it's the result of people with an axe to grind over global warming who start naming every moderately strong tropical system that blooms anywhere near hurricane season, but that's a post for another time.

Convergence Culture Talk

Yesterday morning (3/14), for work, we attended the morning session of an advertising symposium in Boston. We heard a few speakers the most interesting of whom was Henry Jenkins -- co-director of the center for comparative media studies at MIT.

His area of focus is fans, and fan culture, particularly how fans influence, and alter a brand. He had a great series of dichotomies in a string of his slides that highlighted the change in the media-scape and that create challenges for the marketer and the brand manager.

Interactive
Participation

Individual Consumers
Collective Intelligence

Mass Markets
Brand Tribes

One Size
All Size

Attraction
Activation

Sticky
Spreadable

The most interesting insight that he provided, however, was that "we [marketers/brand managers]don't control the whole brand and that we've already lost control." Rather than try to control it we need to find ways to embrace this fan participation and use it to our advantage to improve both the brand and the brand's communications.

This loss of brand control was also echoed by Jim McDowell, VP of Mini Cooper USA. There is opportunity in the ambiguity -- always.

Feeds

To all three of our readers, we're sure that you'll notice that we've added a new feed features to this layout. We've made a move to FeedBurner, partly to see what sort of action this site gets, and partly to play around with FeedBurner for professional reasons. If you have a feed to this site we'd appreciate it if you replaced the old Atom feed with the new FeedBurner one. It will be interesting to track stats and see what happens with this site. We have no visions of grandeur, just a desire to play around with the technology available to the hobbyist and professional alike.

Boston Chaos

So, in the wake of the stupid marketing campaign that snarled traffic and unsettled Bostonians over a wide swatch of the city, we are left with one question: what was TBS thinking?

Obviously, they weren't thinking. As advertising industry workers we wonder how that campaign made it from concepts through final client approval. Throughout the chain of command outrageous decisions were made that lead to this past week's upheaval. The pair of buffoons who are now on trial in Boston are not solely to blame for this and we think that the creative, account, and production teams on the agency side as well as the client-side chain of command should be prosecuted . In essence, this was a conspiracy.

We think that the response of the city of Boston and the Coast Guard was admirable and impressive. They were able to deal with multiple suspicious devices across the city in a seemingly coherent and effective way -- however, if they had been actual bombs then who knows what would have happened had they detonated. The performance of the defendants, yesterday in court, give ample evidence to both their childishness and their attitude towards the terrorist threat (what terrorist threat?). Is there any doubt about how they vote, and how they regard the war on terror?

It should come as no surprise that this campaign was approved by TBS. After all, TBS is but one more brand in Ted Turner's leftist broadcasting empire. Obviously, the anti-war/Bush/conservative/American editorial bias of CNN -- the official broadcast-organ of the Democrat Party -- permeates the other properties in Ted and Hanoi-Jane's media conglomerate.

For us, this incident underscores the lack of seriousness amongst members of the left about the real threat that stands before this country. While many a liberal says there is no threat, and that we are less safe today than we were four years ago (Bush's war-mongering and all that) the appearance of the marketing devices obviously struck a raw nerve. People are on edge whether they admit it or not -- even in liberal Boston, debarkation point for the two planes that felled the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Given the attitudes of the Solon's of Atlanta towards the country's anti-terror efforts, it's not surprising that this campaign "went live."