AT&T
This one is just charmingly funny. Someone made a serious booboo at AT&T recently which resulted in every customer getting an email announcing new store openings in the midwest. It’s nice and all that there’s a new store opening in Michigan, but I live in Philadelphia. Oh, okay, wait, there’s another store opening somewhere else I can’t easily get to? La de fuckin’ da. Twitter is abuzz about this snafu. Will AT&T send yet another email apologizing or come up with a more creative way of harassing their customers to apologize for harassing them? keep reading »

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In college, the focus was brands – brand identity, brand strength, branding branding branding. Never mind my professor could have moonlighted as Super Douche, or that I did little to disguise my complete disgust with him and his chosen subject matter (devotion to all that is Brand. We are the Brand. You will be assimilated).

As an American, a consumer and someone who spends far too much time thinking about such things, I could have told you two years ago (and, wait, I did tell people two years ago – they laughed), that the day of the Brand was coming to an end.

We’ve seen the folly of Brand management, where the brand identity is all-powerful and all-important – to the exclusion of all other things. Protecting the Brand is priority number one, whereas the customer and his/her experience is not really much of a priority at all. keep reading »

It’s nice to know I’m not the only person who’s totally weirded out by the fast food ads that arbitrarily mix sex in with their sandwiches. When I think of sex sandwiches, I think of that as a euphemism for a threesome, or, conversely, a serious and disgusting food safety violation.

In Dan Neil’s LA Times article, he talks about just how bizarre these ads get – you’ve probably seen some of them: keep reading »

A coworker excitedly approached me today, the dollar signs literally visible in his eyes. He informed me that dooce makes about $40,000 a month in ad revenue from her blog.

I’ve set up the new blog site for the boyfriend, and at every opportunity, I nudge him and say, “Blog.”

He’d make a great online celebrity. He’s had some experience with it before. I, by contrast, don’t do too well. Take this blog as a for instance. I’ve been blogging for eight years. I’ve had ‘blog’ type websites for over twelve years. My street cred alone should have earned me a serious fan base by now. Instead, I turned the most interesting of my fans into friends, and deleted blogs. Repeatedly. keep reading »