Just heard ad for service that helps you "connect to a work computer from your kid's soccer game." Ignoring family is now a product benefit.
— Jon Acuff (@jonacuff) May 22, 2012
Technology is like The Force. There is a Dark Side and its seduction is subtle. Succumbing to The Dark Side of Technology is easily justified for dozens of seemingly good reasons.
Don't. Do. It.
"Bad companies can't hide behind great ads anymore."
Can't wait to see this new documentary film, The Naked Brand. Imagine a world…
Via Adverve.
Image by Banksy.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.- Banksy
Via Elle Dark, with some excellent additional commentary by Dave Trott, who says
Personally I’m with Banksy on this. We do come uninvited into people’s lives. If we can’t do that in an amusing, informative, fun way, we shouldn’t do it at all. If we’re interrupting their newspaper, barging our way into their living rooms, annoying them on their laptops, defacing their landscape. If that’s all we’re doing, no wonder they don’t like it. I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.
The times they are a changin'. If we, as marketers and advertising folks, don't stop and realize that we can't market to Millennials and beyond the same way we marketed to their parents and grandparents, then we, my friends, are in for a rude awaking.
Over Logging
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...
Unless you've been avoiding the Internet today, you probably already know that Wikipedia, The Oatmeal, Google, and many others have made public protests against SOPA/PIPA, a nasty little piece of legislation which promises to curb online piracy while secretly undermining the pillars of our beloved InterWebs and a tiny little thing called due process.
What would a world without the Internet look like? Leave it to "South Park" to help us imagine. Kind of ironic, because [enter movie trailer voiceover guy] "In a world ruled by SOPA…" the website you are reading right now could be shut down for posting the video above.
@tsand points to this recent Forbes post, "Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually". There's a lot to digest in the article, but it's a cautionary tale of what happens when a company disconnects with its customers.
One of my favorite parts is the author's dissection of the Best Buy's recent press release concerning their inability to fill online orders at Christmas.
An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the company’s hometown newspaper, reported a few days before Christmas that the company had only just informed some customers that online orders, some placed the day after Thanksgiving, couldn’t be filled and were being cancelled. The out of stock items included the most popular items, including TVs and iPads, “as well as other tablets, cameras, laptops, PS3 games and the Nintendo Wii.”
The company issued a statement that read: “Due to overwhelming demand of hot product offerings on BestBuy.com during the November and December time period, we have encountered a situation that has affected redemption of some of our customers’ online orders.”
Let’s parse that sentence for a moment. The company “encountered a situation”—that is, it was a passive victim of an external problem it couldn’t control, in this case, customers daring to order products it acknowledges were “hot” buys. This happened, inconveniently for Best Buy, during “the November and December period,” that is, the only months that matter to a retailer. For obvious reasons, the statement ties itself in knots trying to avoid mentioning that the “situation” occurred during the holidays.
The situation that Best Buy “encountered” has “affected redemption” of some orders. Best Buy doesn’t fill online orders, it seems. Rather, customers “redeem” them. So it’s the customers, not Best Buy, who have the problem. And those customers haven’t been left hanging; they’ve only been “affected” in efforts to “redeem” their orders. It’s not as if the company did anything wrong, or, indeed, anything at all.
It’s all so passive. It’s also a transparent and truly feeble pack of lies. Here’s what the honest and appropriate release would have said: “Due to poor inventory management and sales forecasting of the most popular products during our key sales season, we can’t fill orders we promised to fill weeks ago in time for Christmas.”
There’s a little more to the Best Buy’s press release: “We are very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and we have notified the affected customers.”
Again, note the use of the passive voice—”this” refers to the “situation” that Best Buy “encountered.” The “situation,” not Best Buy’s poor operations, “has caused” inconvenience to customers. It’s not something Best Buy did wrong. It’s like they’re reporting the weather; something utterly out of their control about which the company is a mere observer. They’ve “notified the affected customers” despite, it seems, no sense of obligation to do so, let alone to find a solution to a problem entirely of the company’s own creation. How sorry are they, do you think?
Again, here’s my rewrite: “Three days before Christmas, too late for the customers to make alternative arrangements, we are just now letting our would-be customers know. We have no excuse for such amateur behavior.”
According to the article, the company refused to answer any questions beyond the release. Here are a few: How many customers were affected? What specific products were involved? How has the company failed so badly to perform to even the lowest standards imaginable for a retailer at Christmas? Did the company expect anyone would be fooled by the ridiculously obtuse statement of non-apology?
