A sign in Chinatown.

Poetry exists in the world. You just need to be on the lookout for it.

I don't u.m.derstand.

One of the things I never have and never will understand is wearing clothing that displays type across your ass. Asses have their reasons for being but I don't think those reasons include being a surface for reading.

Today I went for a run in Central Park and I saw a woman with UMASS festooned across her not insignificant keister. The UM was across her left buttock. The ASS was across her right.

Um, ass.

Truth in ass-vertising, I guess.

Don't bother me, I'm branding.

These days, we hear the word "branding" as frequently as Adolph heard "Heil." "It needs more branding," we're told. "Dial up the branding." "Brand it." "Oh, you could put some branding on that hang tag."

Listen.
Listen.
Listen.

Slathering a logo on a communication like a fat guy swabs mustard on a frankfurter isn't branding. It's slathering logos on things.

Brands are characters, beliefs, stories, truths.
And logos are logos.
Yes, they represent brands.
But in and of themselves--they are just logos.
They can evoke meaning but only if they're imbued with meaning in the first place.

Don't tell me to make something red, or make the logo bigger and tell me that those directives are about branding.

Those directives are about hacking.

Will bing be the thing?

Microsoft's bing--it's 879th Google-killer, is coming. Which, I suppose, is propitious because I have been thinking a lot about Microsoft lately and if, in a sense, Microsoft is the 21st-Century version of the American auto industry.

By that I mean, Microsoft is looking to extend their market dominance if not hegemony by throwing their weight around rather than by building a better, more innovative product.

bing is meant to be Microsoft's answer to something they call "search overload." Throughout their 2:46 video on bing.com they trumpet bing as not search, but decision. The hackneyed video ends with this line: "The world doesn’t need just another search engine, it needs a decision engine."

I dunno. This seems once again like Microsoft is proclaiming something like eminent domain over the world of search. I use Google probably two-dozen times a day. Google, as my 17-year-old pointed out, is a verb. It's that entwined in our daily habits. And it will take more than the "divine right of Microsoft" to get me to change my habits.

bing might very well be superior to Google. Just as American automakers are now saying things like "Buick scores higher than Toyota on Initial Quality Surveys." But, and here's my point, product superiority is not enough. Companies and consumers are in relationships--a relational continuum that stretches from outspoken disdain to fervent advocacy. My sense is Microsoft (like GM) is at the wrong end of that continuum. It will take more than a new and potentially better product to ameliorate the residue of bad feelings that Microsoft has fomented.

--
BTW, I found both the Bing Crosby photo above and the video of Bing singing a wonderful song from the 1942 movie "The Road to Morocco" on Google. It wasn't an issue for me.

The joys of holding companies. Cont'd.

One of the pleasures of being at the top or near the top of the agency food chain is that you get to revel and otherwise cavort in administrative work. So my inbox gets filled with expense reports notifications.

This evening I received this one:

"The above expense report has an expense of $5.46 for toothpaste – our policy does not reimburse for personal toiletry items. Either I can reject this so you can remove OR I can remove when I process for payment. Please advise.

Thanks!
Accounts Payable Specialist"

It doesn't harpoon often, but I am speechless.

Drobkin.

From a site called oldjewstellingjokes.com

GM does it again.

I just noticed a banner ad for GM's Buick, Pontiac and GMC divisions. The ad offers ("to qualified buyers") on ("most 2009...vehicles) 0% financing for 60 months. That's five years.

Now one of those GM divisions, Pontiac, is already being eliminated and GM itself is facing bankruptcy. In other words, GM is at a "green banana" crossroads. As in don't buy green bananas, you might now be around to see them ripen.

Seriously, taking a five year bet on a General Motors vehicle is like painting your house with water colors.

Sooner or later, it's going to rain.

Microsoft and General Motors.

I had a bit of an epiphany this morning, a moment of planner-like insight that rarely strikes anyone, much less planners.

Here's what happened. I have a regular Thursday psycho-therapy (two-word) appointment at 8AM. This week my Thursday appointment was moved to Wednesday. I duly noted that change on my Microsoft Office calendar and when I got the notification this morning that my appointment was looming I ignored it. Instead I blamed the early notification on some Microsoft gremlin. In short, MSFT software is so frequently buggy and incomprehensible that I assumed it was in error.

Here's my point: regardless of all the hundreds of millions of dollars Microsoft spends at JWT, Crispin of McCann trying to let people know that they're human and cool, everyday for the last fifteen years or so people have been daily reminded that instead of cool, Microsoft is buggy, broken and dumb.

It occurs to me that Microsoft's marketing approach is much like that of American car companies. Rather than saying at some point, "we fucked up building rattle-traps and lemons with obsolescence built in. We fucked up blaming everything on unions and healthcare costs. We fucked up maintaining a dealer network that if they're not downright dishonest, at the very least they don't treat consumers with respect." Instead the American automakers stayed a monolith. Hid behind a cloak of "Buy American-ism" and "what's good for GM is good for the country."

Updated to 2009, this is essentially Microsoft's posture as well. Rather than fixing its product, they issue patches (Detroit called those recalls) and try to put one over on consumers by saying they're shiny, new and cool (Detroit said longer, lower, wider.) Never was there any candor. An admission that when you get a "blue screen of death" it's not your fault.

Microsoft today seems as impervious as the auto industry seemed 50 years ago. Then Volkswagen entered the picture--the Apple of its day. Then the Japanese. Then the Koreans. All at once, no more American auto industry.

But don't worry about Microsoft.

JWT, Crispin and McCann say they're cool.

Asiten.

Many months ago I coined the word "asiten" which is one more than asinine.

This morning I clicked on a link from Fortune magazine and I got this message:

"Bad Gateway
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server."

Couldn't someone just have written "this link is temporarily broken"?

There's a sucker born every $100 million.

Just an hour ago or so it was announced that an investment firm called Digital Sky Technologies has bought 1.96% of Facebook for $200 million, which puts the overall valuation of Facebook at $10 billion. $10 billion is still a lot of money, but it's 50% off Facebook's valuation from just two years ago when Microsoft bought a small slice for $240 million.

Here's what I don't get. Facebook making money. Yes, they have 200 million users. But so does Central Park. I've yet to see an ad, hear about a product or even have my curiosity piqued on Facebook.

What's more with the escalation of Facebook security breaches going around, I can't be the only one who's thinking the connections ain't worth the infections.

Finally, I guess there's a rule of thumb. Don't pay a lot of money for a company that has a lot of users who would likely drop the service if they were charged a fee.

I would not pay $10/month for Facebook or even $5. Would you?

Never the less, someone just paid about a buck a user.

Maybe they should call it Faceschnook.