A simple idea, well produced, and perfectly delivered for Tiger Bear, New Zealand. I wonder if I can find Tiger Beer in San Francisco?

http://tigerbeer.co.nz/tasteitinthislife/

Unfortunately, their corporate sites, while beautiful and rich, are slow loading confusing. Find the one nearest you at www.TigerBeer.com.

Technorati Tags: advertising, beer, viral

It turns out that the “Who would you give a Volvo to?” campaign is not a contest, and no cars are being given away. In retrospect, it should have been obvious by the omission of the “lawyer-on-speed” mandatories at the end of the spots and the “*” on the billboards.

What makes it awful is that Volvo and their agency are standing their ground.

From Adweek - Volvo Defends Purported Giveaway :

“[John] Maloney [, VP of Communications for Volvo Cars of North America]. acknowledged that some of the entries looked like overtures to win a car, but said, “We have no intention to suck anybody in.”

…

“We are comfortable going forward and there is no intent to deceive,” Maloney said. “It’s very clear from the ads that this is about love. It’s about who do you want to protect in your life.”

Come on! If it’s so clear, then why were 11,000 people confused? Why did they then add the following disclaimer to the site:

What Volvo should have said:

“We’re sorry for the confusion, we never meant to mislead anyone, but we are happy that the campaign has resonated so well with all of you. To make things right, Volvo is making good on our perceived offer, and we’ll be give away a brand new S40 or XC90 every month for a year.

Everyone makes mistakes, but just like people, companies should be judged by how they respond to them. We hope this won’t impact your trust of the Volvo brand to keep your loved ones safe, and we’ll try hard in the future to avoid mistakes like this.”

The missed opportunity:

People LIKE this campaign. It’s advertising GOLD for the target audience. For the wholesale price of a few cars, Volvo could have appeased everyone and shown that they were a bold company, responsive to consumer feedback, and not afraid to admit when it’s wrong.

That last issue is becoming more and more important to consumers. The irony is that you can’t establish yourself as accountable and honest until you have a suitable screwup. Volvo did, and Volvo blew it.

Technorati Tags: advertising, missed-opportunity

I’m an SF-dwelling motorcycle rider, so when I buy furniture on Craigslist, or need to pick up 300 T-shirts in Mountain View, I get a Zipcar.

For those of you not familiar with it, Zipcar is part of the growing car-sharing movement where you pay a membership fee and can rent cars in your neighborhood by the hour or by the day. The fee includes all gas, insurance, maintenance and parking. It’s great. Other car-share organizations include CityCarShare and Flexcar. Rates and terms vary slightly, but the best reason to pick one over the other is proximity to where you’ll want to pick a car up. Zipcar has two locations within 0.5 miles of me, the others are at least 1.5 miles away. For me it was a no-brainer.

I climbed into a Zipcar a few weeks ago and I found a cool DVD set in the glovebox. I figured someone had forgotten it and I would report the loss to lost-and-found later. But then I found one in each of the back seat pockets, and 5 more in the trunk.

What a great idea, I thought. Zipcars have a certain audience, with certain needs, living in a certain neighborhood. If you want those people to know about you, leave it in the car.

Other reasons I love Zipcar:

• A super-friendly, helpful, and playful attitude apparent in everything they do.
• whenever there is a new one, there is a contest to name it (Mini McEvoy, Matrix Miros, Tacoma Tokias, xA Adrian to name a few).
• “Under the Hood” is one of the best email newsletters I receive as far as design, tone, information quality, and entertainment.
• They make you feel like part of a community, and turn their members into advocates (just like me =)
• They ask for help. Whenever they need something, are having an event or have a cool idea, they ask for their members help. It makes all the difference.
• Killer discounts. Check out http://www.zipcar.com/sf/partners for stuff your “zipcard” will get you.
• $50 of free driving on signup.
• XM Radio in every car.

Technorati Tags: advertising, carshare, disruptive, guerilla media, zipcar

Tangerine is a new Mac program from the Potion Factory that will analyze the music in your iTunes library for BPM (beats per minute) and beat intensity. It also has a gorgeous, intuitive interface.

This is great because most music files don’t come with this information, but once you have it, there is all sorts of cool stuff you can do with it

A few things I’ve been playing with is finding the best BPM combo for computer work and for run workouts. You could also use it to find just the right dance music, or the perfect soundtrack with the right flow for your viral video or student film. Once you get going, this is a huge asset in music selection. It also syncs iTunes so you have access to the data there to sort with or to create Smart Playlists which Tangerine does not seem to support.

Another thing it encourages is serendipity. I have 30GB of music in my library, statistically, I rarely listen to most of it, but when I make playlists from beat levels, I hear music I haven’t heard in a while, often juxtaposed perfectly with another song from a completely different genre, something that I would never have thought to put together before.

Here is a sample from my “Working Mix” demonstrating the variety of music that can share the similar characteristics. By matching BPM and intensity, you get a seamless vibe and flow with a variety of music.

Tangerine’s controls allow for you to do alot very easily, and has a cool interface for displaying artwork, and relative BPM.

While I recommend it for current use, there are a few things I’d like to see before it comes out of beta:

• Better Error Messages/Handling: I originally had some problems getting it to load my iTunes library. It loaded it, processed 5000 songs in about 3 minutes and errored on every single one of them. I told it to reanalyze, and after 8 hours on my 2-year-old Powerbook, it had analyzed my whole library with only a few errors. Making this more intuitive or having more informative error messages or logging besides “Error.” would be helpful.
• An “Analyze songs without BPM/Intensity Data” option: Currently if you add more music or have errors, the only option is to reanalyze the whole library. If there is a way to do this already, please let me know.

{Tools, Technology}

Technorati Tags: art, inspiration, music, software, tangerine, technology, Tools

Bob Cringley, of PBS.org column “I, Cringley” lets loose what he’s been up to with two titans of hard disk design:

Next year we’ll see hard drives that use metal foil platters that are smaller, more heat resistent, more shock resistent, and consume 30% less power for roughly 50% the current cost.

Tree huggers will love what this will do to power consumption, decreasing fossil fuel usage and global warming by decreasing the amount of carbon in the air.

Everyone else will enjoy longer battery life, and more memory in their newly impact resistent laptops, mp3 players, and digital cameras.

The loser here? Flash memory. Flash was good because it is faster, more bulletproof and less power hungry than current hard-drives. Take that away and for anything For anything over 2GB, these drives are just too cheap.

Aside from flash manufacturers (most of whom also manufacture disk drives) this seems like one of those odd advances in technology that has no real downside.

Read the whole column here: Shameless Self-Promotion: Bob’s Disk Drive

Technorati Tags: disruptive, energy, harddrives, technology

How agencies are really run:
Small Agency Diary:Three principals give you the skinny on the battles they fight, the clients they win, the questions they ask themselves and how they maintain, motivate, and grow a creative workforce and clientbase.

Profound and immediately useful in 1 minute or less:
ksblog: If you plan on talking to anyone or making money during your life, especially as a marketer, KS is worth a read. She’s smart, witty, profound, and BRIEF. If brevity is the source of wit, she’s got it in spades.

[Update: K now has her own blog at clientk.com. This is still the only blog that I read and star almost every entry.]

Proof that advertising podcasts don’t suck:
American Copywriter: Two guys in Kansas City. Fun. Human. Hilarious. Feel like I’ve known them for years. Good blog. Great podcast.

Technorati Tags: advertising, rss, toread

www.jacksonpollock.org

“Maybe the best creative you’ll do today.” via American Copywriter

Technorati Tags: art, inspiration

I have a 12″ Powerbook. About two months ago, it started acting really slow. It was taking 45 seconds to register a mouseclick. It stopped booting up on the first try. Not good. I booted from the Mac OS X install DVD which lets you run several utilities, including Disk Utility and Terminal.

When I launched Disk Utility instead of:

SMART Status:Verified

I was greeted with:

SMART Status: Failing. Backup any unsaved work if drive not totally failed yet.

Luckily, I had backups of almost everything already. What wasn’t backed up already, I was able to copy to my external hard-drive via the Terminal. I have Applecare so I took my computer there and they replaced the drive, took them about a week. If I didn’t have those backups…years of work would have been lost.

So all you Mac users, here are some steps to ward off disaster:

1. Install SMARTReporter .It will proactively monitor your hard drives and alert you to any problems, maybe even in time to avert disaster. Disk Utility only runs when you ask it to.
2. Print My Mac Won’t Start - A Tiny Troubleshooting Guide. It will tell you what to do when your Mac is acting funny. I keep mine in my laptop sleeve and it saved me by telling my how to boot from CD, External Drive, how to check a disk, etc
3. Backup. Backup. Backup. Have more than two copies of your photo library. Email yourself important documents. Burn CDs and DVDs. Just think about if it was gone.
4. Be Redundant. You can mirror your hard drive to an external drive with a free program called Carbon Copy Cloner or the commercial and very good SuperDuper! or Chronosync. Both are well worth the $30 they cost and provide more functionality and a friendlier interface. If your drive dies, you can boot from the external drive and continue like nothing happened. (Just hold down Option while your booting and it will let you pick which drive to boot from.)

Note: Hard drives are mechanical devices. Given enough time, they will all fail. I have seen drives fail straight out of the box, and I see others still running fine after 10 years. Some fail slowly, others in the blink of a power surge. You can’t predict when they’ll die, so you had better always be prepared for the funeral.

Technorati Tags: technology

A few months ago, I was listening to a lecture and looked down to to jot something in my notebook. When I looked up I was half a beat behind and had missed the first part of what seemed to be a rather important statement.

My mind said, “Just hit the replay button.”

What is alarming is not the 1/2 second thought, but that for the next 1/2 second, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable course of action. The DVR replay button does not, of course, work in “real” life, but having a DVR has so changed my relationship to media and information consumption that it had worked itself into my subconscious.

A few weeks later, at home watching TV with my two roommates and a friend, we caught up to the DVR “tape delay” (when you start a show late and can thus fast-forward through bad commercials). There was a moment of awkward silence as we endured a cheesy commercial for god knows what. Our friend whined loudly “I HATE Live TV, why can’t you just fast-forward it, you have DVR!”

She didn’t even have a DVR and she had DVR angst. I related the story of my DVR moment. Instead of the expected laughter all three replied, “Thank GOD, I thought I was the only one!”

You’re not alone.

Technorati Tags: dvr, technology, video

Verizon Wireless has framed the debate for the last several months that wireless service is all about the network and we’ve been bombarded with armies of technicians following families around. Features and phones are important, but “The only reason to pick a wireless company is the network.” This works nicely with Verizon’s overall reputation of crappy customer service, but the best overall coverage.

Cingular responded, betting that research claiming it has the fewest dropped calls would resonate. The specify this both nationally and at the local level. (”Fewest Dropped Calls in the SF Bay Area”). Depending on user experience, this could tip the scales in the direction of Cingular using Verizon’s own toolbox.

Sprint has stayed out of the voice debate in this area (although in the Bay Area, my experience is that Sprint will work where nothing else will). Instead, they have upped the ante, going after higher value and earlier adopter users with mobile internet.

In SF Sprint claims to have the “Strongest Wireless Broadband Signal in SF” which is a claim that’s probably more important to more people in this market than elsewhere. Separate, but part of the same campaign, they use print and TV to slam Cingular’s EDGE as slow and outdated.

Verizon and Cingular are unusually quiet on the subject, which is especially odd given how they are pushing their EDGE and EVDO Smart Phones and PC-Cards.

Is Sprint poised to take over this emerging market? Are the others willing to stay as peripheral players given that they know WiMax is just around the corner and their networks won’t be able to handle it without huge capital outlay whereas Sprint is good to go?

I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see more focus on wireless broadband in the next month or so, and for a Christmas-season firesale on EVDO, EDGE, and other Wireless Broadband devices.

Technorati Tags: advertising, cingular, sprint, verizon