Market to kids? Us? Never!

Remember when Joe Camel has to be retired because the fact that he was a cartoon meant that Camel was inherently advertising to kids?  I’m sure the makers of VapPuro would also deny that they are targeting kids, but when the flavor they push at the front is candy, I don’t believe them.

Bait & Switch: Allergy Meds

Here are the bottles of generic Zyrtec allergy pills at my local Safeway pharmacy.

Notice that the packaging is identical except for a red oval and the small print about the number of pills — identical bottle, identical package design.  (In fact, I’ve seen the display several times and never noticed the red oval until now.)  The only difference is the number of pills — 45 vs. 120 — and the $2 difference in the price.  What an ugly bait &s; switch.  (Which I fell for the last time I bought a refill.  45 pills lasts me less than a month.  The pills hold back my allergies for about 6 hours, not 24.)

(What does that tell you about how overpriced the 45 pill option is, when they can almost triple the number of pills while increasing the price less than 10%?  Makes me wish for a 300 pill option, would probably only cost $30.)

(I’m too dumb to go to Costco or Amazon, I guess.  365 pills for $22.  Sigh.)

Saves water… or invests it?

This little placard (about 4" high) was posted near the urinals at Safeco Field.

I hate messages like this, because they are often used to lie with statistics, using math comparisons to hide the real information, usually to make it seem more impressive than it really is.

In this case, though, the placard is outright wrong!

“This urinal flushes with only 16 oz. of water” — okay, that’s clear enough.

“A standard one-gallon urinal” — points for good hyphenation, but deduction for switching from ounces to gallons.  How many ounces in a gallon?  (I had to look it up to be sure, got it wrong at first: 128.)

But the word after the comma, this is where the placard text is wrong.  If it had said “This urinal flushes with only 16 oz. of water, using 88% less water per use than a standard one-gallon urinal”, it would have been correct (albeit overusing “use”).  87.5% of 128 oz. is 112 oz., so saving 88% leaves 16 oz being used:

x - .88x = 16        (where x=ounces used by a one-gallon urinal = 128)

But they had to try to go green and put the word “saving” in there.  That changes the entire meaning.  It is no longer about using less than another urinal does; now it is about saving more than another urinal (saves).  That unwritten word is the key.  It means that we are comparing this urinal and the regular one to some unspecified third option, a presumed baseline.  But what is that baseline?

The EPA refers to an “older, inefficient 1.5 gpf flushing urinal”, and the state of Alabama mentions “older flush type urinals used 2.5 gallons”.  Or going to sit-down toilets, new pressure-assisted flush toilets use 1.4 gallons, and post-1994 ones used 1.6, while ones before then used 3.4 gallons.  Flushometer toilets like those in commercial restrooms also use about 1.6 gallons.  (Interesting side note there: urinals use less water than sit-down toilets, but still more than 2/3 as much, a far higher percentage than I expected.)

If we were just comparing one urinal’s volume to the other, our math formula would be what I listed above.  But with the mystery toilet involved, it is:

128-16 = .88 y        (where y = ounces saved by a regular urinal)

(additional amount saved by special urinal = 88% of amount saved by regular urinal)

Per this formula, for these special urinals to save 88% more than a regular urinal, a regular urinal saves about 128 oz. (one gallon), meaning that the baseline item uses 2 gallons, which doesn’t fit any of the profiles noted.
 

What Were They Thinking? — To Preserve A Severed Extremity Until It Can Be Reattached, Pack It In Ice

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This ad for a contest at the Telus World Ski & Snowboard Festival was on bus shelters in Vancouver, BC in early April.  Take a peek at that leg’s position.  Poor guy: it got ripped clean off in the avalanche.  He must be in shock and numbed from the cold, since he’s not reacting to the amputation.

Aware of the sensitive nature of the image, they declined to show the severed leg on the contest’s Facebook page.

Yes, this has been submitted to Photoshop Disasters.
 

What Were They Thinking? — Seattle’s Worst Advertising

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Billboards from Seattle’s Best Coffee have started cropping up around Seattle.  A more square version of this one (“Anywhere Great Coffee Is Needed”) has been up above my chiropractor’s office for about a month.

The first time I saw it, I took it for a flat presentation of colored circles, each with a USB drive sticking out of it.  I’m not alone in that: I showed a pic of that billboard to Cliff and he said “What’s that?  Bubbles?”

(What it is meant to be, of course, is stacked coffee cups, seen from above.  Unfortunately, seen directly from above, you lose perspective [ahem] on what you are looking at, and the brain is free to make other connections.)

In the wake of the recent logo rebranding of Seattle’s Best Coffee — where a major complaint was “Why is the ‘coffee’ in the logo red?  This looks like the logo for a blood bank” — you would think they would want advertising that is clear.

And maybe advertising that actually includes coffee.  Because an ad full of clean, empty coffee cups kind of implies that they are waiting for coffee.  Apparently for something other than Seattle’s Best Coffee.

This site doesn’t think they are very good ads, either.
 

Best Inflatable Ad Ever

The seafood restaurant Jake’s in downtown Portland (near Powell’s Books) had this huge inflatable King Crab on its roof this past weekend.

Totally fucking cool!

 

What Were They Thinking? — Sales Resistance is Futile

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

Here is one of the ad blocks from the Apple Store, pushing for Black Friday sales.

Is it just me, or does that thing made of lots of smaller pieces of tech all mashed together look less like a present and more like a Borg cube?

“Resistance is futile.  You will be a-sale-imated.”
 

Taking Aim at Target

I don’t really have anything to say about the Target donation debacle.

For those who came in late: after the Supreme Court loosened restrictions on corporate giving to political candidates, Target gave $150,000 to a Minnesota candidate ostensibly because of his pro-business policies, but without paying heed to his anti-union and anti-gay stances.  Target has issued an apology, which gay groups don’t accept as authentic, but has refused to either rescind the donation or make a matching one to gay groups, which tends to reinforce why people don’t accept the apology as more than boilerplate.

Actually, I do have one thing to say about the deal: Best Buy donated $100,000 as well, and no one is paying any attention to them in this.  Shouldn’t 40% of the attention be going there, since 40% of the money came from them?

Nonetheless, I found it ironic that Target ads ended up on the Seattle Times webpage for the story dealing with the donation and its backlash.
 

Pick a Number, Any Number

You know what annoys me?  (This week, anyway.)  The abuse and misuse of math, specifically in number metaphors.

Lately, I’ve been hearing an add for Seattle-area car dealership Carter Subaru which claims that they are in the Top Three (which means they are #3, because otherwise they would say they are #1 or #2) out of 500-and-some dealership teams in the nation in sales.  All well and good.  Then they go on to brag at least twice in the commercial about how proud they are to be in the top 99.5% of the sales teams in the nation.  SCREEEECCHHH!  Everybody except the bottom 3 or so would be in the top 99.5%; it’s nothing to be proud of.  (What they really mean is that they are in the 99.5th percentile.  Ah, the subtlety of a single syllable.)

Twice in the past month or so, I’ve seen misuse of “360 degrees”.  Once was in The Stranger, comparing something to a drag queen making a 360-degree spin on one heel and going the other way, and once was in the Seattle Gay News (never noted for their skillful editing anyway) about Mary J. Blige’s latest album being a 360-degree change from her previous one.  (Unfortunately, web searches won’t bring up either reference.)  Girls, “360 degrees” is a full circle; you can’t go the other way out of a 360-degree spin, and a 360-degree change means that Blige’s latest album is no different from the previous one!  (What they both meant, of course, was 180 degrees.)

In the same vein, but not using numbers per se, are Disneyland references to when they used to use ticket books for the rides rather than an all-day pass.  (They changed around 1980, I think.  I had been to Disneyland maybe a dozen times as a kid, and I recall being enthused about not having to have a ticket book when I went to Dollywood in 1979.  We had a simple pass when we went to Disneyland again in 1982 or so.)  The ticket books featured A Tickets, B Tickets, and so on up to E Tickets, each type being good for a different class of rides.  The really cool ones (the Matterhorn Bobsleds and such) were E Ticket rides (and you never got enough of those tickets in the booklet!), while the A Tickets were the extremely tame rides like the King Arthur Carousel and Sleeping Beauty Castle.  Today, 20-plus years from the end of the ticket books (and even a decade ago, only 10-plus years out, when I wrote one of my earliest letters of comment on the subject), people forget this and they assume that “A” was the best thing, perhaps like getting grades in school.  And thus, when someone refers in print to some experience being “a real ‘A Ticket’ ride,” I can only roll my eyes and bitch quietly to myself.

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Updated on November 23, 2003

Updated on October 13, 2010

According to the tickets shown on this site, Sleeping Beauty Castle was a C Ticket in 1957, reduced to a B Ticket in 1959.

This site indicates it as an A Ticket in 1972; I would have been at Disneyland as early as 1969 (age 3).

Who cares what mLife is?

A couple years ago, there were billboard ads all over the place, asking “What is mLife?”, but never cluing you into what the product or service or whatever was.  After seeing the umpteenth billboard ad — actually, after seeing probably the third one — I stopped caring.  If they couldn’t bother to tell me, I sure couldn’t bother to buy their service.  (Apparently, it was merely a wireless phone service from AT&T.  Big whoop.)

A couple years before that, I saw a couple billboards in the Bay Area, black text on white, saying “Protect me from what I want.”  Again, no information about what comp nay took out the ads, what the product or service was, whether it was a political statement, and so on.  (A web search on the phrase today finds dozens of sites with lyrics from the band Placebo, but not much beyond that.)

The Seattle gay bar C.C. Attle’s reframed part of itself a couple years ago as “The Men’s Room.”  They led off the remodel with a series of ads in the local gay newspaper, asking “Where is the Men’s Room?”, two or three small display ads per weeks for three months or so.  For the first couple weeks, it was cute — “It’s down the hall and to the left!” — but it quickly grew stale as the weeks dragged by.  (“If you can’t find the Men’s Room by now, just pee in the damn bushes!”)

Currently, there are a series of billboards and bus ads up around Seattle with the tagline “Five As One.”  They feature body parts — an eye, a hand, the x-ray of a foot — split vertically into five strips and reassembled, each one coming from a different person, usually each one from a different race than the one next to it.  Is this a race relations thing?  (Let’s see: white, black, Latino, Asian, Native American…?)  Based on the x-ray, is it something medical, maybe a uniting of five hospitals?  Is it a new nightclub, or somebody’s new wireless plan?  Since there is a city election coming up, does it have to do with the five City Council positions which are not up for election?  Beats the hell out of me: as with the other ad campaigns, not one whit of guiding information on the ads, and even when I go to Google to search on key phrase, nothing comes up pointing to the ads.

(Update: They are apparently ads for the Seattle Supersonics pro basketball team, as one of the billboards — but only one that I’ve seen — now has a Sonics logo on it.  The others are still without any identifying logo or text.  Here’s an article about the ad campaign.)

I suppose you can make an argument that on some level, ad campaigns like this work, since I remember them even years later.  On the other hand, I only remember them because they annoy the fuck out of me and pretty much ensure that I will have nothing to do with the product or service.  Having your ads remembered only so that people avoid the products doesn’t seem like the best tactic.  (Exception: I do go to C.C. Attle’s — aka the Men’s Room — once every three or four months.  The ads didn’t drive me away, but they certainly didn’t bring me in, either.  I go to bars in other states [and countries!] more often than I go to the Men’s Room.)

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Updated on November 21, 2003

Updated on October 11, 2010

Still no luck on the “Protect me from what I want” campaign.  The world may never know.

C.C. Attle’s closed on September 30.  They have allegedly signed a new lease for a location on Olive Way, hoping to be reopened by the end of the year.  We shall see.

Guess the “Five As One” ads didn’t salvage things for the Sonics.

Do You Know about the Purple Pill?

Neither do I.  But I sure hear about it on the radio.  The latest commercials feature someone who interrupts the chatter of a cocktail party or similar event with the question: “Do you know about the purple pill?” The conversation thuds to a stop, as though people are looking at the guy, wondering “Who the fuck is this idiot?”, and then gradually comes back to normal.

In comparison, their previous radio commercial pretended to interview people on the street, all of whom just glowed about how their lives had changed since they found the purple pill.  With both commercials, listeners are then directed to ask their doctors if the purple pill is right for them.

Note that at no time do they offer one whit of information as to what the “purple pill” (brand name: Nexium, chemical name: esomeprazole magnesium) is for.  Depression?  HIV?  Weight loss?  Birth control?  Diabetes?  Puts hyperactive kids into a comatose state?

So I took the bait, and switched.  I asked my doctor if he gets a lot of people asking about the “purple pill”.  He told me yes, and he really dislikes it.  (He doesn’t hate the pill, he hates the marketing message: ask your doctor if random drugs are what you need, whether you even have a problem or not.)

Not that this marketing misbehavior is limited to the marketers of Nexium).  There was a big flak a few years ago with HIV medications which showed the people allegedly taking them doing things like climbing mountains, implying that result for taking their drugs, when more likely would be simply being able to get out of bed and maybe work again.  Since then, I saw an ad for a drug where the ad was a rose in a pair of hands (echoing some Buddhist imagery, I believe), the name of the drug, and the direction to ask your doctor.  By the ad’s placement in a gay bar, I presume it was an HIV medication, but there was no indication of that on the ad itself.

On the side, while discussing people panicking about mystery diseases, I do recommend the comic book (formerly a comic strip, but editorial hassles got too much for the artist) “Liberty Meadows” by Frank Cho.  Among the cast of characters is Leslie, the hypochondriac bullfrog, who periodically goes to the doctor/vet complaining of a host of imagined ailments.  My favorite strip was when he was asked what he was suffering from, and Leslie (who is male) replied, “ovarian cyst.”

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Updated on September 13, 2010
 

Targeted Advertising

You’ve probably heard about “targeted advertising,” where advertising pertinent to specific person viewing it is inserted into a magazine or a television show.  You can see it in its basest form when an ad for a local business airs on a nationally syndicated television show.  You can also see regional newspapers which will have a section aimed at a specific county or city.  They could even use their databases to say “In this zip code, the average income is this high, so put in ads for that luxury car, but in the next zip code, incomes are lower, so include ads for an economy car.”  Or for an extreme, they could (in theory) include ads targeted for the specific profile of each subscriber to a magazine.

Today, while driving to work, I had a bit of targeted advertising shock.  While listening to the local NPR station, there was an ad (oops, a “sponsorship message”) for Wallingford Center, a small shopping complex in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood.  I was stopped at a red light at the moment, and looked over to the left… and there was Wallingford Center.

Spooky feeling.

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Updated on January 28, 2004

In January, 2004, I had a repeat of this, with a Taco Bell commercial coming on while I was sitting at a light in Rainier Valley, right next to a Taco Bell.

Updated on July 22, 2010

I first encountered this idea when I was working for SoftBook Press — an eBook company which preceded the Kindle and company by a decade — in 1998–2000.  One of our projects was to-your-device delivery of e-versions of newspapers and magazines; you would leave the device plugged in to your Ethernet connection, with a device timer set to wake it up at like 4:00 am and do the download, so the newspaper would be there for you to read at breakfast.  As part of this, we discussed but never implemented, the ability to target advertising based on user profile geography or demographics.

I also briefly worked for Classmates in 2000, and they had some implementation of this, working with advertising partners to be able to supply more targeted advertising attached to their e-mail communications to subscribers.

Google, of course, puts content-related ads in their stuff, so you may well see a Kindle ad attached to this very post.