A Better Course

• I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community | Only selected advertising » Pedigree: Beware of the dog
  "He's about to explode"
  (tags: dog pedigree ibelieveinadvertising advertising funny )
• swissmiss: love-growth-cash triangle
  There’s a certain joy that comes from doing what you love, getting compensated for it and constantly learning new things in the process. Your goal should be to maximize each experience and try to cover as many new areas of the bigger triangle as possible.
  (tags: swissmiss career visualization )
• Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis | FlowingData
  Mint (the financial management app) and Wallstats (the guy who does the Death and Taxes poster) put together a "visual guide to the financial crisis" - or a flow chart, rather - to clear up some of those cloudy details. It goes back to 2003 after the dot-com crash up to the recent government bailout.
  (tags: flowingdata visualization recession america economy finance data )
• Bob Sutton: More on the Broken Culture in the Auto Industry: How Dysfunctional Power Dynamics Cause Bad Decisions
  I played a dirty trick: I gave the lowest ranking person at each table the answers ahead of time, saying that when it came time for the group ranking, their job was to everything in their power to convince the table they had the right ranking, short of revealing that I had given them the answer. Not a single table (about 15 tables of 10) got the right answer.
  (tags: management bobsutton corporateculture ford )

• Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough
  Nike told McDonough the time had come to share the details with its thousands of vendors. To the company's shock, McDonough responded that he owned the list — it was proprietary. "He wanted to charge us for every supplier we rolled it out to. We didn't own it after we paid all this money, which made no sense," says the person from the Nike team. "You can develop lists until you're blue in the face, but if you don't have effective ways to roll that out to the supply chain, it's not going to change it." — Yes
  (tags: fastcompany williammcdonough cradletocradle sustainability design nike )

Nivea advert
Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

One of my most hated adverts of the moment is this one, for Nivea moisturiser. It is unreadably bland - what is actually going on? How does it relate to the tagline, “Look ready to face the day”?

There are some conclusions that we can draw about what’s going on here. There’s a guitar, and the only thing in the ad that isn’t flesh tone or product is blue, so it’s clearly the room of the man pictured. (Blue, in case you lost that memo in primary school, is the boy’s colour.) The man’s suit (and shirt with cufflinks) and tie places him in a position of some responsibility, probably client or customer facing, in a traditional industry. It seems safe to conclude that we are looking at a successful male, between his mid twenties and mid thirties, in his own bedroom.

The girl in the bed, however, complicates the picture. There are two quite separate conclusions that we can draw about the man - and by extension, the product that he uses - from the presence of a blonde woman in the bed.

In the first reading, the woman is his girlfriend, fianceé or wife, and the product is the reason why she - along with the other symbols of worldly success - has come into his life. Having, thanks to Nivea moisturiser, been ready to face the day every day for the last decade, the man has a good job, a stable relationship, and a ground floor flat in a leafy suburb. The guitar, too, hints at a wide variety of expensive toys elsewhere in the flat. In this scenario, the moisturiser functions as The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People.

In the second reading, the woman is essentially a stranger, returning to his home following a night out, probably a heavy night out, probably with co-workers. Thanks to Nivea moisturiser, the man need not show this signs of last night’s debauch on his face at work the next morning; he is as together as he always is, and ready to face the day. The guitar, in so many cases more fun to play than to listen to, points to a life lived entirely for the self. The moisturiser, far from the trusted friend and counsellor of the first reading, is The Picture of Dorian Gray.

It’s obvious that I’m not the target market for this product. But I don’t think the story an advert tells should be quite this obfuscated.

• The Screens Issue - If You Liked This, Sure to Love That - Winning the Netflix Prize - NYTimes.com
  Customers pay a flat monthly rate, generally $16.99 (although cheaper plans are available), to check out as many movies as they want. The problem with this business model is that new members often have a couple of dozen movies in mind that they want to see, but after that they’re not sure what to check out next, and their requests slow.
  (tags: netflix nytimes modeling statistics mathematics recommend )

• potlatch: Westfield attacks Tower Bridge
  Why have they replaced Tower Bridge with some leather boots, belts and bling chains? No, honestly, why? Perhaps even their advertising drones were struggling to capture the full gaudy scale of Westfield, recognising that there is no neat or simple way of conveying quite what the place is all about.
  (tags: westfield potlatch advertising towerbridge )

• Mmm, Chocolate Pie… Chart | FlowingData
  "Mary and Matt kick it up a notch with some design and 5.5 ounces of chocolate. It's a chocolate pie chart of 70% milk chocolate, 20% dark, and 10% white." Christmas is coming, all!
  (tags: chart stats statistics visualization chocolate flowingdata )
• Big Contrarian → You’ve missed your chance.
  “lucky” people tend to see themselves as lucky, whether they are or not: I asked my subjects to imagine being in a bank. Suddenly, an armed robber enters and fires a shot that hits them in the arms. Unlucky people tended to say this would be their bad luck to be in the bank during the robbery. Lucky people said it could have been worse: “You could have been shot in the head.”
  (tags: luck lucky bigcontrarian )
• brand new: Not so much of a long tail?
  80 per cent of the revenue came from 52,000 songs. What's eye catching about the number? Well, the typical inventory of a conventional high street record store was around 4,000 CDs. Or … around 52,000 songs
  (tags: brandnew online longtail stats music musicindustry )

• Bob Sutton: A Compilation of Euphemisms for Layoffs
  although the language is obfuscated, he is implying that the people he is letting go are the weaker ones, even though many of Tesla's problems clearly stem from errors made by senior management (including Musk) and from the the economic environment.
  (tags: bobsutton leadership layoffs management tesla )
• Big Contrarian → It all went our way.
  Exit polling suggests that there was no statistically significant increase in voting among either group. Black voters made up 11 percent of the electorate in 2004 and 13 percent in 2008, while young voters comprised 17 percent of all voters in 2004 and 18 percent four years later.
  (tags: bigcontrarian politics statistics )
• Big Contrarian → Fuzzy math.
  This recession seems stranger the more I look at it. We’re not seeing a decline in work, and I know few people curtailing their spending habits. Quite the opposite. I know more than a handful who are spending more than normal, capitalizing on many of the unfathomable bargains available.
  (tags: bigcontrarian recession oil )

From Big Contrarian (specifically this post):

I know few people curtailing their spending habits. Quite the opposite. [...] Anecdotes are of course useless, but the disconnect strikes me as something to think about.

The anecdotes here are, I think, interesting data points - are people spending less and consciously not talking about that? How long is the time laspse between spending less and talking about spending less? There’s already been an increase in adverts that don’t have any kind of message other than “This will save you money” - and I wonder if this is based on actual customers talking, and how much more nuanced these conversations actually are.

• McCain Camp Retools, Targets Obama | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com
  Early that summer, the campaign made the unorthodox decision to announce its vice presidential pick via text messages sent directly to supporters. It wasn't just a trick to do something flashy with technology and attract media attention. The point was to collect voters' cell-phone numbers for later contact during voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. Thanks to the promotion, the campaign's list of cell-phone numbers increased several-fold to more than 1 million.
  (tags: politics america campaign directmarketing newsweek )

• Zoilus: Fan Dance:<br>Fandoms & the 2008 Election
  Fandom feels like a highly inappropriate way to relate to political life: In my book I discuss the troubling tone of a lot of cultural-taste conversation, the way that it's used to sharpen social distinctions, but at least there the stakes are relatively low (at least in the short term); in politics the consequences feel more dire.
  (tags: zoilus election fandom america )