Author: Angelo Fernando

Miley Cyrus embarrassed? Give me a break!

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

Last weekend I accompanied my daughter to a birthday party of a six year old, where it was wall-to-wall Hanna Montana. I have seen worse, with the now (hopefully) waning Princess craze, so I kept my comments to myself.

But I nearly lost it when I heard the must-have Hannah Montana doll (that sang a few seconds of her songs) say “this is fricking awesome!” over and over again. The five- and six-year olds in the room then began trying to decipher the sentence.

It’s no accident when you lend your name, (image, voice, hairstyle..) to a marketing machine aimed at very young kids, and agree to say “fricking awesome” at the push of a button. I began to wonder when she would crash and burn; when there would be a parental backlash.

So now that the news has broken about poor Miley had been duped into a soft porn photo shoot by evil Anne Leibowitz , I have grounds for being cynical. Miley Cyrus “embarrassed?” Ann Leibowitz apologized? This was all part of PTE marketing, wasn’t it? Push The Envelope –and hope people get slightly offended — because that’s the shortcut to media attention. “Miley Cyrus photo shocker. Details at 10!” This formula that’s worked over and over again.

Said a reader on ValleyPRBlog, it’s a “Big coup for the PR Team. They aren’t going to get fired, they’re going to get huge bonuses.”

‘Scarlet’ wordplay, an old tactic

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

When you see the trailer for a “hit new TV series” what do you expect? Entertainment of course! But that’s because we have allowed our brains to associate ‘TV’ and a trailer with something to watch, not, some hardware.

But that’s just what LG Electronics did — fooled ya! The trailer had a character named ‘Scarlet’ and had all the stereotypical fast cuts and slow motion, a kick-boxing vixen. The Scarlet Series micro site, reveals all. There is a ‘Directors Cut’ where he says it was really hard pulling off the deceit with a recipe that included celebs, Hollywood, PR gurus, and reporters. All in the service of launching a line of flat screen TV’s.

Some have called it a hoax and deceptive. Well, it’s nothing new, is it –word play and visual puns in advertising? The stuff of teasers, when marketers did have money to tease the audience, and audiences did have time for time for word play.

What’s more disappointed in the attempt to stretch a me-too concept into something that pretends to be viral. Odd coincidence here. The folks behind it are from Agency.com –the same agency that thought it was cool ‘going viral’ when pitching for a Subway account with a dumb YouTube experiment.

There’s also a post launch microsite. Someone probably made a killing on turning one microsite project into two.

Will high speed slow us down?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

In my line of work, I meet many young people, some of whom have never known dial-up. For them, having to wait a few seconds for a web page to load seems like “ages.” But as we speed things up, I have begun to sense people are actually slowing down, unable to cope with the torrent of data coming at them.

So the lure of a much faster internet, while it sounds wonderful, could rev up our lives more than we need, eliminating the need for quiet pauses, the “white space” in our thinking process. Getting past the ‘world wide wait’ is one thing. Being paralyzed by TMI and TMI (too much information, too many inputs) is another. A new word ‘exabyte’ is being tossed around. One Exabyte (EB) being one quintillion bytes. Never mind what quintillion means, it’s way too much!

In the UK, they are looking at “super-fast broadband” piped into homes through underground water pipes. Some years ago, Caltech developed a protocol called FAST –a geeky acronym for “Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)” Basically a new way of routing around congestion.

A warning cry is going out: “The exaflood is coming.” Maybe we should voluntarily slow down, before we are compelled to do it by other means.

Is this ambush marketing? Impossible is nothing.

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

There is some speculation about an ambush marketing tactic by Abercrombie and Fitch, placing people with their logo behind Barack Obama.

If they did, it’s a smart move. A&B said it was no more than a coincidence. The New York Post commenting on these ‘three mystery men’ with Abercrombie logos, note that campaign records reveal that an A&B employee has donated $500 to Obama’s campaign.

Nothing is too far fetched, with so much media attention given to the two Democrats. Let’s just hope Adidas shows up on the Clinton campaign with the “Impossible is nothing” slogan. Beats the generic “Yes we will!”

Quotes for the week ending 26 April, 2008

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“He’s getting his ass kicked.”

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, on the ‘credibility’ of Jeff Immelt, GE’s present CEO

“Nothing, nothing, nothing is as disgusting to me as some old CEO chirping away about how things aren’t as good under the new guy as they were under him.”

Jack Welch, on CNBC, making up for his previous criticism Jeff Immelt.

“Don’t pollute Earth Day with irrelevant advertising.”

Editorial in Advertising Age about marketers’ attempt to saturate the day with “Hey, look at us! We love trees” type of advertising.

“No happy label on toxic or wasteful product will ever change its contents.”

Abby Strauss, NY, a reader of Fast Company, commenting on Green Business practices article (“Another Inconvenient Truth“)

“Change everything…except for your wife and children.”

A 1993 quote attributed to Samsung chairman, Lee Kun Hee, to his chief executives. He now under government investigation.

“For the iced coffee drinks. Make them with ice cubes made from coffee.”

A consumer-generated idea on MyStarbucksIdea.com, that received 13,050 votes

“Phoenix is sprawling at a rate that seems to rival Moore’s Law.”

Matthew Power, in WIRED magazine in an extensive article (Peak Water) about ground water.

Paying it forward at Southwest Airlines

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The concept of ‘paying it forward’ has been used in in various ways. Often it is a random act of kindness that someone does and it gets carried forward –or backward in this case.

So it is interesting to see it used as an expression of corporate culture, as we hear from Mallory Messina, an employee of Southwest Airlines, posting on the NutsaboutSouthwest blog. It involves paper towels in the restroom! Employees had noticed that paper towels were being left (dispensed) in restrooms, eliminating the need to touch the “germy lever.”

“every time I washed my hands in the ladies’ room, paper towels were magically waiting for me,” Ms. Messina noted.

She later discovered that this random act of towel dispensing had been happening in the men’s restroom as well. One more reason to fly Southwest: friendly folks + clean hands on deck.

Encyclopedia Britannica’s social media play

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

Lest you think Encyclopedia Britannica is to Wikipedia what moleskin notebooks are to blogs, check out what Britannica has been up to. It embraced widgets, Twitter, RSS, and is now introducing WebShare –a way for for bloggers and editors to link to content in the paid areas of Britannica, letting the blog’s or publication’s readers access that piece of content free. It’s still in a soft launch mode.

Why free, when everyone else is paying ($ 69.95) for the privilege? Britannica says it wants to give a blogger’s readers “background.” And no, the service is not aimed at A-list bloggers –those with low traffic qualify. Meaning, I suppose, that EB has realized the value of social media and has moved past the Wikipedia vs Britannica debate.

If you’re a content manager for your agency, give it a shot. Register here.

Britannica’s own blog and forum are very well managed. It covers topics such as Web 2.0, books, media, etc. I found an interesting piece on its nemesis, Wikipedia, titled Am I my brother’s Web 2.0 gatekeeper (the truth about Wikipedia.) OK, so it’s forcing the comparison, but it is really good to know that knowledge seekers now have two strong choices.

We don’t have to choose between old media and new media, between a flawed one and a poor also ran.

Arizona’s water asset not promoted

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Unlike rivers and dams, aquifers are not something we think about. After all, they are a few hundred feet below. But in Arizona, these constitute our back-up plans in the advent of a drought. They are also the intangible benefits of a desert state.

Unfortunately Arizona doesn’t market its water advantage enough. Water is framed as a crisis, rather than an asset because it’s the damn easiest thing to do. The media don’t help either, focusing on the problem not the solution.

This month WIRED magazine has an extensive feature called “Peak Water” by Matthew Power, covering the US, England and Australia. It leads with water management strategies in Arizona –Chandler in particular. “Thanks to this so-called recharge, the local aquifer is actually rising a few feet a year.” he says, illustrating it with a program between one of Intel‘s fabrication plants (Fab 32) which uses 2 million gallons of water a day, and pumps back 1.5 million gallons a day into an aquifer six miles down the road.

Peak Water is a topic close to me, by virtue of where I work -at the Decision Theater. Among other ways of addressing issues through visualization, we have a sophisticated supply and demand model of water called WaterSim. We are also right next to DCDC which plans for these precious resources. I mean assets.

To some the aquifer is either half empty. To others the aquifer is half full.

In Arizona, what story do we like to tell?

The scarlet letter in PR: B for bias

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

Let’s talk bias. Who deems something one-sided, slanted, and sometimes even libelous?

How about your press release? What’s that you just said about your CEO? Is your product really a “the world’s most advanced…?” (insert “battery,” “fiber optic solution,” “online file-sharing…”) Is your corporate blog verging on spin, and do you let people join the conversation?

And then there’s what you’d like to maintain on Wikipedia, if not for those pesky editors.

Solomon Trujillo’s PR people are not happy. You probably may not have heard of Mr. Trujillo, unless you were in the telecom space, or peeked behind the curtain on Wikipedia now and then. On the Wikipedia entry for the new Telstra boss, there is what we now call an ‘edit war’. Someone seems to have an axe to grind about Trujillo, going back a year. “It’s hard not to have a NPOV when he has not done nothing positive,” the person says. NPOV refers to Wikipedia’s ‘Neutral Point of View’ policy. Meaning, you cannot slip in hyperbolic statements or snide attacks. If they find out you get called out. In Wikipedia’s terms, the statement:

“This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards.”

It’s the equivalent of the scarlet letter that screams “Bias!” I have found many Wikipedia entries with these stamps of disapproval.

Two weeks ago Tarnya Dunning, a senior PR person at Telstra tried to fix the mess, staying away from the edit war mentality saying: “I’m here to contribute information that will improve the quality of Telstra-related pages. I am aware of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and I will abide by them. My edits will be restricted to talk pages, and I will not engage in editing directly any Telstra-related page. Instead, I would volunteer information on the talk pages, and ask for Wikipedians’ help.”

So far no one in Wikipedia has responded. Is Wikipedia the ultimate arbiter of what’s neutral, and what’s biased?

On the other side of the coin, Telstra has had its share of social media criticism. Its blog, Nowwearetalking, which encourages a “lively informed debate” is a moderated blog. They do have a wikipedia-like policy, though which says.

“If you object to a moderator modifying your posting then it may be rejected.”

Which sound a lot like “your post may need some cleanup to meet our quality standards.”