Scott Bush

After over 8 years, we’re sell­ing our condo in Ken­more, WA. Never one to rest on my lau­rels, I cre­ated a web­site to high­light the incred­i­ble pho­tographs taken by our good—and extremely talented—friend Dylan Greene. What started out as a sim­ple site to dis­play some pho­tos quickly grew into an oppor­tu­nity to flex some web-development muscle.

Take a look a the site (and if you’re inter­ested in buy­ing, let me know!): http://scottbush.net/condo/

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Since the famous Burma Shave bill­board cam­paigns began back in the 1930s, adver­tis­ing has been creep­ing into more and more aspects of our lives. Con­sider just a few examples:

• Bill­boards have pro­lif­er­ated to the point where many cities have insti­tuted bans or strict reg­u­la­tion (one of the worst exam­ples is the drive from Las Vegas’s McCar­ran air­port to the strip; its absolutely cov­ered in them).
• Tele­vi­sion show content-to-commercial time has fallen, with some esti­mates as low as 2/3; the same report says an aver­age child watches 20,000 30-second com­mer­cials in a year.
• Most web­sites rely on ads to “mon­e­tize” their free con­tent, whether they be taste­ful text ads or gar­ish, flash­ing pop-ups. “Free” stream­ing con­tent (Pandora.com, Hulu.com, and even YouTube videos) inter­rupt con­tent with adver­tis­ing “gates” or overlays.
• Prod­uct place­ment is on the rise to coun­ter­act the pro­lif­er­a­tion of DVRs, which allow view­ers to zip past com­mer­cials. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Amer­i­can Idol you’ll know that Coke, Ford, and AT&T are mas­sive sponsors—even if you skip the commercials.

From these and many other exam­ples, I shouldn’t have been sur­prised dur­ing a recent trip to see that the inescapable adver­tis­ing mon­ster had found new, obnox­ious ways to annoy us:

Seat-tray adver­tise­ments

Ver­i­zon ad plas­tered on my seat tray

What bet­ter way to build brand loy­alty than to asso­ciate it with the expec­ta­tion of a bev­er­age and a snack? At least that’s what the mar­ket­ing genius who came up with seat-tray adver­tis­ing must have thought. Only she was wrong.

I already found Verizon’s “can you hear me now?” guy and his posse of insane “in-network” groupies sort of annoy­ing. Hav­ing it stare up at me most of my plane flight did noth­ing to endear me to the brand; in fact, I’d say it did the oppo­site (hence this post).

Who knows what this cost Ver­i­zon but with what they must spend on their mas­sive TV, bill­board, and mag­a­zine ad cam­paigns, this buy prob­a­bly seemed like peanuts. (Now, if only US Air­ways had given us some peanuts on the flight…)

Baggage-carousel adver­tis­ing displays

This screen help­fully showed me the same three ads for like 15 min­utes. Thanks.

After endur­ing the seat-trays, I was dis­mayed to find another novel way to cram ads into our “mind­space”: a giant screen directly atop the bag­gage carousel. You’ll see from the photo that it’s right next to the ramp dis­gorg­ing the bags onto the con­veyor belt. In other words, you can’t help but see it.

Ads for taxis, hotels, local tours, restau­rants and enter­tain­ment in air­port arrival areas are noth­ing new. In fact, I have to admit those ads are more use­ful than most oth­ers because they relate directly to trav­el­ers’ needs. So what’s the big deal with another one?

First, place­ment: every­one stands around wait­ing for their lug­gage and looks at that very spot as they wait for their bags. The ads are there­fore vir­tu­ally unavoidable—a fact the air­port mar­keters make very clear to adver­tis­ers, I’m sure. Its dis­re­spect­ful to me that adver­tis­ers creep ever closer and become that much harder to tune out. Yes, I under­stand that’s the pur­pose of adver­tis­ing but that doesn’t mean it’s good or acceptable.

How do I fight back? Well, other than ignor­ing bill­boards and mut­ing (or skip­ping; thanks TiVo!) com­mer­cials, there’s not much else I can do other than write blog entries rail­ing against the inevitable. What about you? What sort of adver­tis­ing do you find most annoying?

Con­gress shall make no law respect­ing an estab­lish­ment of reli­gion, or pro­hibit­ing the free exer­cise thereof; or abridg­ing the free­dom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the peo­ple peace­ably to assem­ble, and to peti­tion the Gov­ern­ment for a redress of griev­ances. (empha­sis mine)

That’s just good stuff. I thought I would post the First Amend­ment in honor of Con­sti­tu­tion Day. Don’t know about Con­sti­tu­tion Day? What? Are you some sort of hor­ri­ble Communist/Socialist/Marxist/other-ist? Just kid­ding. You can be for­given for not know­ing about it, it’s not exactly as pop­u­lar as the lat­est goings-on of the Octa­mom. (more…)

The Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s Office of Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment (OIM) invited me to be a guest blog­ger on their On the ROA blog*. My post, titled “One developer’s per­spec­tive on the SWS’s course search resource,” appeared there today. It was an honor to be asked to write a sum­mary of my expe­ri­ences lever­ag­ing the UW’s Stu­dent Web Ser­vices to build a web application.

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This beauty of a sign caught my eye while on a walk in Seattle’s “Tan­gle­town” neigh­bor­hood (oth­er­wise known as just south­west of Green­lake) recently. I just had to share it.

What I love about this sign is its absolute ded­i­ca­tion to its pur­pose. There’s no mis­tak­ing what’s going on here (unlike the “drug-gun” sign I wrote about recently). The pic­tured crab is, in no uncer­tain terms, lost! The lit­tle details in the sig, like the crab’s name—Oliver, of course; what else would you name a crab?—and the “10$” reward just scream of a child’s sin­cer­ity. I can just imag­ine a dis­traught six– or seven-year-old stand­ing next to her par­ent at the com­puter writ­ing up this sign, which would soon be plas­tered over nearly every tele­phone pole in the area.

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Recently I pur­chased a Dell Insp­iron Mini 9 with the sole pur­pose of cre­at­ing a “Hack­in­tosh,” a com­puter run­ning Apple’s OS X oper­at­ing sys­tem on non-Apple hard­ware. I could (and may) write an entire post on that sub­ject, mostly about how (sort of) fun it is and that a 9″ net­book key­board is this close to unus­able. Instead I’m going to illus­trate a per­fect exam­ple of how a com­pany can infu­ri­ate its cus­tomers through poor marketing.

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