Things That Go Backwards

Yellow legal pads used to be for people who used lots of paper and didn't want to pay the premium for more refined white paper. Now you pay extra for them.

Stinky goat cheese used to be for poor people who couldn't afford the classier cow kind. Now it's a delicacy.

It's easier to play the guitar than Guitar Hero.

Note To Apple

Someone left me a voice mail at 3:30 yesterday afternoon. It didn't arrive at my iPhone until 7:55 this morning. That's 16 hours and 25 minutes later. I'm really getting tired of this shit.

Here's the thing, Steve. I don't need an app that tells me what my fucking sperm count is, or when Jupiter crosses the fucking plane of the ecliptic. I need to get my fucking phone calls and my fucking emails, okay?

Halloween
Christmas for the maladjusted.

Damn right I'm grumpy.

Creative For Carpetbaggers

One ad phenomenon I always get a laugh out of is when Big Dumb Corporations and their Big Dumb Agencies introduce their product or service into a new market. They always try to link themselves to some stupid cliche about the area to demonstrate that they are "homies."

So if some company is moving into LA, they take their icon and put sunglasses on it. Or if they are going into the Pacific Northwest, they say or do something about rain.

A painful example of this is happening right now in the San Francisco area. In the financial meltdown of the past year, Chase wound up owning Washington Mutual, which was a big player in California.

For the past month or so Chase has been running an outdoor campaign that says "You'll always find our ATMs. Even in this fog."

Only one problem.

Anyone who lives in the SF bay area knows that September and October are the best months of the year here. The fog rolls in in June and stays until the end of July. It takes a well-deserved break in September and October and we get mostly glorious clear days with temperatures in the 70's.

Chase might as well be posting billboards that say, "We are overfed bozos from New York who don't know the first thing about this area and are too arrogant to bother finding out."

Brains Falling Out

How To Succeed In Social Media
The smartest thing I've read about social media in a long time, from Monday Morning Memo:

"Focus your attention on your customers. Social media will take care of itself."

Thanks to Mike Hunt for this (c'mon, is that really your name?)

Oh, It's All About Me!
Has there ever been a bigger, stupider, more cliche-ridden campaign than Yahoo's new global "branding" campaign? That's a rhetorical question.

It would be hard to find a campaign that more thoroughly runs counter to my brilliant principles of advertising. What? You haven't read my brilliant principles? Here you go.

Nerd's Eye View
I admit it. I'm a geek. Just about the only things I watch on TV (when baseball season is over) are Nova and Nature and shows about black holes and sea otters.

I love nature and trees and seahorses and cuddly koalas and all of God's and Disney's creatures just as much as the next guy. But I've about had it with every wildlife program ending with the solemn pronouncement that man is the problem. Aren't there any other problems besides us? Aren't tornadoes a problem? And drought? And disease? And asteroids? And earthquakes? And Twitter? Can't we at least share some of the blame?

And Speaking Of Twitter
On March 3, 2009 TAC predicted we would soon have "Twitter: The Musical."

Well, we were close. According to Ad Broad, there was some kind of Broadway/Twitter thing that happened earlier this year. I'm not sure what it was because when I try to read this Twitter crap my brains start falling out.

I predicted that it would mark the beginning of the end of the Great Twitter Scare of '09. Let's hope I was right.