Katrina Tragedy
As my son Sam and I watched Fox News tonight and saw for the first time the full picture of the devastation from Hurricane Katrina we both had the same thought…and we thought being without power for four days a few weeks ago was a big deal.
Sam started school this week and last night his homework included an assignment to list the characteristics that make America unique. Watching the selfless police and rescue workers who no doubt had to leave their own families and homes to assist others, the grim determination of those pushing shopping carts loaded with earthly possessions, the doctors using canoes to bring in medical supplies, the homemade "help" signs made from who knows what, held up by rooftop survivors, the we are all in this together attitude and the every man for himself attitude of the looters…all that captured the American character. And of course, all the bloggers that urged us to donate and provided links to the Red Cross, Feed The Children, and links to links.
Sam said I should add Donate or Die. So….
Claire McCaskill Announces
Claire McCaskill announced today that she was running for the US Senate seat currently held by Jim Talent. This is good. And should be interesting. I have a few suggestions for campaign issues….I may even post them.
Bye Bye Vonage
Vonage has 749,999 subscribers as of today. I tried..I really tried to make it work. It seemed to make SO much sense…I told my friends about it. I told lots of people about it. I overlooked the problems with getting my phone number switched over…after all it was new and they eventually made it right with service credits. I overlooked the problem with my alarm system. I overlooked the continuing impossibility of getting technical support. But, the router problems which of course left us without not only phone service but also Internet access that were still all too frequent after a year finally made it impossible to continue. Hello, Charter!
Not Your Parent’s Cliff Notes
School starts on Monday for my 7th grader which means the summer long countdown to finish the math packet and the summer reading books is about to end…ready or not. It our house it seems not to matter if we actually start early in the summer or late, it just wouldn’t seem like the last weekend of summer if we weren’t still trying to complete it before M-O-N-D-A-Y! To complicate our lives even more, we just got a puppy. So, the other night a frantic call from our house to a friend’s house regarding a puppy crisis found their household in the middle of a summer reading crisis. A quick swap…help me solve the puppy problem and I will help you solve the reading problem. Google, the source of most if not all of life’s problems revealed, PinkMonkey.com. No need to leave the comfort of your own crisis, Pink Monkey had the book in question, the information was FREE and instantly available and they promised hundreds of other titles. You have to pay to download. I was ready to completely write off Cliff Notes, my own personal long time friend and constant companion during junior high and high school as being as dated as the library card catalog when I decided to Google, Cliff Notes. Sorry, Cliff Notes…you too are instantly available on line.
And now for the real question: Are many blogs just like Cliff Notes? You don’t read the story, you read about the story…over and over and over again. I think bloggers should at least add a personal comment or two when they post a "new flash" quickly excerpted from someone else’s blog or the morning news…otherwise what’s the point? What do you think?
Two Kinds Of People
The first time I heard the There are two kinds of people in this world thing was from my MBA school boyfriend. He had gone to Notre Dame as an undergrad, found another alum upon his arrival at B-School to room with and explained it as "There are two kinds of people in this world…those that went to Notre Dame and those that wished they did. Uh huh. Then there was Dee, my good friend in NYC who said, There are two kinds of people in this world, those that wear nail polish and those that don’t. I kind of agree with that one. There have been many other Two kinds observations that I have heard over the years. Probably the most succinct was, There are two kinds of people in this world, those that get IT and those that don’t. Of course that came from an insight gushing ad person who I am pretty sure had a different definition of IT than I did…but I did agree with her concept.
I would now like to officially add my own: There are two kinds of people in this world, those that get blogging and those that never will. I know that many Bloggers like to refer to themselves as Evangelists…and I do get THAT (That=It, in this case) For me suffice it to say, I JUST love Blogs. It was love at first sight. The chemistry was there…the relationship has grown and deepened. The only proverbial rain on my parade is trying to talk to the second kind of people…the ones who never will. Do you get IT? Well, if you’re reading this, you probably do. Oh, and I like RSS and I like podcasting…its just that the connection simply is not as meaningful.
EBay Customer Assistance
Last Saturday when the power went out, on top of everything else, I was trying to sell 2 items on Ebay. One auction ended on Sunday and one would have ended on Tuesday. The auction wasn’t top of mind at first but by Sunday when I finally got to Panera’s Wi-fi there was 1 bid on each item and a number of questions that were of course unanswered. I should have immediately cancelled both auctions but having never been in this situation before I really didn’t know what you could or couldn’t do and since there are no live people in EbayLand in order to navigate their frequently no help answers you have to know the right questions and have lots and lots of time.
So…by Monday when one of the auctions had ended with my item selling for 1/2 of its value I finally was able to figure out how to cancel the other one in the brief moment of Internet access. Well, the one bidder immediately sent me an indignant email referring to my necklace as her necklace….as if her one low bid 2 days before the auction was scheduled to end entitled her to the necklace. In addition, I also immediately began to get email from those who had made inquiries about various things regarding the necklace. All of these people were polite and merely wondering if I was going to re-list the item and if I would be able to answer their questions. I emailed all of them back, including the indignant bidder, and politely explained about the power outage, lack of Internet access, and that my intent was to re-list.
Figuring the various ins and outs of Ebay is an exercise in frustration and of course you can’t just pick up the phone and ask a person…not that being able to ask a person is any guarantee. If anyone has ever talked to Linksys Customer Service you know what I mean…another bonus provided by the power outage from hell was of course having to get my wireless network back up and which required a conversation with the dreaded Links.
Anyway, most people emailed me back and thanked me for explaining the situation to them. Ms. Indignant thanked me for explaining in one email, lambasted me in another, and then another and finally threatened to report me to email. I have no idea for what. And as far as reporting me to Ebay…good luck communicating with Ebay!
I wrote Ebay at least 6 emails in the middle of the whole debacle and each one received an answer…gotta give them credit for that I guess. However, I wondered if any of my emails had been read by anyone that spoke the same language that they had been written in. Or, if they had been answered by some keyword prompted software program. Many of them began with something like this; you are the buyer or seller and may have inquired about or maybe not..but here is an answer to your buyer/seller question blah blah blah.
The truly best one was the one I wrote complaining about the harassing emails I was getting from Ms. Indignant. First of all, they have you attach the email you are complaining about which I did. Their answer made absolutely no sense at all and didn’t mention one time the harassing email situation which was what I was writing them about in the first place. They actually said, we see you cancelled your auction due to a severe ower outage and see that you want more information about the item ..there is no further information about the item. I wanted more information about the item? I don ‘t think so! Then, they suggested I go to Live Chat for help….well, you can guess what happened here, right? "We are experiencing a high volume of requests so please be patient….." Natch!
Not Quite Six Feet Under Yet
Well I could blame it on our recent four day power outage but that would only partially explain my confusion. You see, I thought Six Feet Under had ended two weeks ago with Nate’s death. OK, so I was multi-tasking while watching, which I am slowly accepting is a bad thing. But it seemed to be an appropriate place to end…from Dallas and J.R. to Seinfeld’s Susan, Buffy and who can forget Rosalind Shays’ fall down the elevator shaft on LA Law?? Come to think of it though…I don’t think I remember who did shoot JR and although I always look down before getting in an elevator since watching that episode of LA Law, it may not have been a finale.
But, the good news I guess, is that Sunday August 21st is the Six Feet Under Series finale and Nate is already dead. Certainly, no need to kill off anyone else. Anyway, I will be watching…. thanks to B.L. Ochman’s Weblog for posting the question about why the Six Feet Under characters weren’t blogging. If she hadn’t, I might have missed it. Now, we can blame the power outage for Sam missing the Andy Milonakis season finale…and he assures me that there will not be re-runs. At least Andy blogs.
Target Invades the New Yorker
Maybe the red and white beach ball on the cover of my August 22nd New Yorker should have been a clue. Since I missed that clue….flipping to the content page left no doubt as the familiar red target played ring toss on the Empire State Building. Further flipping revealed the truth: Target was the only advertiser in my
New Yorker. I quickly turned to Google for further investigation.
I must have missed the news! Slate has the James Michener version for any of you Targetophiles out there but the announcement was available from Stuart Elliot and the New York Times, Media Week, Yahoo News, and other usual media suspects. And of course people blogged about it here and there.Even Target Employees were up on it.
OK..now let me just say that I AM a Target shopper…no Seinfeld Tar-zhay pronunciation necessary. Target is fun. Wal-Mart is not. Enough said. And I know that Target now has NYC locations. When I lived in NYC pre-Target I missed Target. I am sure many New Yorkers are happily pushing their carts up and down the aisles at Target at this very moment. No doubt, Target should advertise to New Yorkers and New Yorker Magazine readers. No pun, Target should target.
But, I love reading the New Yorker. I look forward to it. I was just thinking the other day when a renewal notice came for Newsweek that I really didn’t read it any more….that the New Yorker was the only print publication that I still did read. So….all that said, I really found the Target advertising in the New Yorker intrusive. Intrusive. Not artistic, not compelling or interesting. Intrusive.
Back in my early days in brand marketing, someone at Ralston Purina said, if I may paraphrase by memory, that if you wanted a high recall score you could just put a cat through a meat grinder. This came to mind as I was deciding what to read first and kept getting intruded upon by red circles. Or, am I just being a grumpy aging Baby Boomer, again?
And What IS the Everyday Woman?
The New York Times reports the following today: "Madison Avenue is increasingly interested in using everyday women in advertising instead of just waifish supermodels." This new "insight" is attributed to Unilever’s Dove Brand which is of course reassuring since these are the folks that bring us Axe advertising, a topic I have posted about several times. It seems that everyone from Nike to Chicken of the Sea has adopted the everyday woman who is apparently older, wrinkled and has a big butt. Chicken of the Sea was last seen with Jessica Simpson so I am not sure if their new advertising is good news or bad news.
So….why this change you ask? Well, some say because women are the majority buyers of "these" products. Others say "aging baby boomers." Still another opinion was "reality television".
And I say? Puh-leeze! Am I lost in a recurring nightmare of "insights" from ad people? It is comforting to know that it has been a long time since I took home a paycheck from an ad agency. Its hard to decide what is sillier….the campaigns or our worst nightmare, advertisers with insights! As Ageless Marketing’s David Wolfe wrote, "Nike’s Just Do it Just Blew It." Indeed, Nike has "come a long way, baby" from "Just Do It" to "Big Butts"…just in the wrong direction, baby boomer.
Wonder Marketing asks the best question of Weiden & Kennedy in a conference room role play: "Who are you trying to reach with this ad?" I think the answer is obvious: Ourselves of course! We developed this campaign for ourselves because that is the only reality we get.
Paneras Bread Internet Oasis
It all started with a Saturday afternoon trip to Sam’s Club for some baby back ribs. My 12 year old son, Sam was scheduled to get braces on the next week so we were going to grill some ribs and corn on the cob. An offhand comment about the fact that it looked like it was going to rain as we walked in turned into the reality of the biggest rainstorm I think I have ever been in…and that includes 6 years in Florida and 5 years in New York. As we watched the shopping carts hurling across the parking lot it never crossed my mind that the power would go out for FOUR DAYS. Well, it did and that meant no lights, no laundry, no AC, no morning coffee, and for Sam no PS2 or TV and for me….no email,no Internet, no blogs, need I go on? If not for Paneras, aka St. Louis Bread I think we might not have survived. I think many people would agree judging by the army of cell phones and laptops charging in every available plug and the happy faces of the Internet starved and just plain starved people in all of the St. Louis Bread locations we patronized during our ordeal. The Wi-fi is free at Paneras and although the coffee isn’t Starbucks a free port in this storm, plus cinnamon crunch bagels was indeed an Oasis.
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