Scott Bush

Google’s (un)intelligent AdSense engine decided to show me an ad the other day. It encour­aged me to “exer­cise my right to eat freely,” and dis­played www.EatFreely.org as the URL. “That’s odd,” I thought, re-reading the ad. “There are the words ‘Hot Pock­ets®’ right there; how can this be an ad for a .org domain?” Take a look at the ad:

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear “Hot Pock­ets” is, of course, Jim Gaffigan’s hilar­i­ous stand-up bit from Beyond the Pale. Com­edy aside, I was intrigued by the use of a .org domain for some­thing asso­ci­ated with Hot Pock­ets. So I clicked and found myself look­ing at a very busy, ani­mated mar­ket­ing site for a fic­tional move­ment to “eat freely,” by which they mean the abil­ity to eat nasty meat stuffed inside a Pop Tart with­out hav­ing to be both­ered by incon­ve­niences like chairs and cutlery.

This was sur­pris­ing. I was under the appar­ently mis­taken notion that .org domains were the exclu­sive domain (ha, sorry for the pun) of non-profit and char­i­ta­ble organiza­tions. Hot Pock­ets’ schlocky mar­ket­ing site mas­querad­ing as such an orga­ni­za­tion imme­di­ately rubbed me the wrong way, much the same way actu­ally eat­ing a Hot Pocket rubs my tongue, esoph­a­gus, stom­ach, and intestines the wrong way. This trav­esty was sul­ly­ing the very name of rep­utable .org sites like Peo­ple for the Eth­i­cal Treat­ment of Ani­mals, the Amer­i­can Lung Asso­ci­a­tion, Boys & Girls Clubs of Amer­ica, and even SOTA : The Soci­ety of Typo­graphic Afi­ciona­dos.

As I researched the issue in prepa­ra­tion for my protest to ICANN, I dis­cov­ered this sad fact: Hot Pock­ets are not wrong. At least, not in the sense that their “eat freely” cam­paign site is hosted as a .org; they are wrong in every other sense of the word. The fol­low­ing text is stated on the Pub­lic Inter­est Reg­istry website

When you buy a .ORG, … You’re link­ing your orga­ni­za­tion — your cause — to a world­wide com­mu­nity of mission-driven orga­ni­za­tions that are try­ing to make the world a bet­ter place.

Through the reg­istry for .ORG, your orga­ni­za­tion is linked to a well-established brand of trust and integrity. One of the orig­i­nal top-level domains (TLDs), .ORG became the domain of choice for orga­ni­za­tions ded­i­cated to serv­ing the pub­lic inter­est, and today .ORG is con­sid­ered one of the most trusted domains on the internet.

Non­prof­its, foun­da­tions, phil­an­thropic and cul­tural insti­tu­tions, reli­gious, civic, arts, social and fra­ter­nal orga­ni­za­tions, health and legal ser­vices, clubs and com­mu­nity vol­un­teer groups… if yours is a non­com­mer­cial entity, peo­ple expect to find you in the .ORG community.

Appar­ently the Pub­lic Inter­est Reg­istry has no prob­lem with a brand­ing site for hand-held processed food prod­ucts also obtain­ing a .org domain.

I turned to the font of all true knowl­edge (Wikipedia) for the truth and was sad to read this:

Although .org was rec­om­mended for non-commercial enti­ties, there are no restric­tions to reg­is­tra­tion. There are many instances of .org being used by com­mer­cial sites. .org was also com­monly rec­om­mended for use by indi­vid­u­als, although .name and .info are now alternatives.

(Empha­sis mine.)

So there you have it: any­one can reg­is­ter a .org. That means a lit­tle extra vig­i­lance is required on our part when research­ing things online. Maybe ViagraRules.org or HappyNapsWithAmbien.org aren’t dis­pens­ing unbi­ased infor­ma­tion after all? Caveat brow­sor, I suppose.

In all seri­ous­ness, though, online cam­paigns such as “eat freely” are only going to become more preva­lent. Is the way in which these cam­paigns are branded some­thing we, as con­sumers, should care about? Every ad agency out there is hop­ing to pitch the next Will it Blend phe­nom­e­non (note they appro­pri­ately used a .com domain), and it’s likely that we’ll see more of them wrapped up in .org domains. Sure, it’s unlikely any­one would mis­take EatFreely.org as any­thing but adver­tis­ing. But as I attempted to show with my humor­ous exam­ples above, not all .org domains may be as inno­cent. Drug– or agri­cul­tural prod­ucts com­pa­nies may reg­is­ter a .org domain and put up a site that has all the somber “author­ity” of a gov­ern­ment or true organization’s site, but present only pos­i­tive infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts while obscur­ing their dangers.

With other top-level domains (TLDs) like .net and recent addi­tions like .name, .info, .biz, etc. there seems lit­tle jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in using .org domains to pro­mote or sell prod­ucts. Reg­is­ter­ing a .org domain should require proof of non-profit 503© or char­i­ta­ble sta­tus (or their equiv­a­lents out­side the U.S.) to com­bat this trend.

But in a sense, I sup­pose Hot Pock­ets have made “the world a bet­ter place” for some. Just ask Jim Gaffi­gan.

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?

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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6 August 2009

Scott Bush
Ken­more, WA

Re: No more phone books, please

To whom it may concern:

I’m writ­ing today to offer a gen­er­ous thank you for the years of faith­ful ser­vice you’ve pro­vided by deliv­er­ing to my home—unbidden—thick piles of bound, yel­low paper. Though appre­ci­ated, I politely request that you stop. Please… stop already.

Each sea­son, upon find­ing a fresh stack of these “yel­low pages,” each lov­ingly stuffed into its own plas­tic bag, I would feel grat­i­tude for the sur­prise gift, think­ing of their nearly inex­haustible util­ity. Some of the many uses to which I’ve put your books include:

• Rais­ing the height of my com­puter mon­i­tors, both at home and at my work­place; I’ve even done so for co-workers!
• Wrap­ping them in duct tape to keep them rigid and using them for punch­ing prac­tice, a use I learned from the sen­seis at my local dojo.
• Burn­ing them, a hand­ful of pages at a time, on camp­ing trips, which saves me from find­ing or buy­ing kin­dling. If only my home fire­place didn’t burn gas… think of how many more of your gifts I could use!
• Impress­ing young ladies at par­ties (before I was mar­ried, of course) by demon­strat­ing my for­mi­da­ble power of strength and grip by tear­ing the thick books in two. (Between me and you, though, doing this is more about tech­nique than strength. Shhhh.…)
• Pil­ing them in my car’s trunk dur­ing a snow­fall to pro­vide the addi­tional weight needed for heav­ier, safer driving.
• Wedg­ing one between the garage door and its jamb to pre­vent it from clos­ing while I walk to the dump­ster to deposit the trash. This trick saves me from hav­ing to bring my keys down with me, which is quite handy when I’m in my boxers.
• Apply­ing the afore­men­tioned tear­ing tech­nique to gen­er­ate a con­sid­er­able amount of excel­lent mulch for our garden.

I could go on, but I feel I’ve con­veyed the util­ity of your fine prod­uct. Inci­den­tally, I’ve been told by my grand­par­ents that these cheerfully-colored books pro­vide yet another ser­vice: list­ing the phone num­bers and addresses of local busi­nesses and even indi­vid­u­als! Oh, how I do enjoy my grand­par­ents’ sense of humor… once they told me that stamps cost 23 cents and that the TV stopped broad­cast­ing at 2 a.m. I informed them that no, peo­ple don’t look in at sheets of dead trees for that infor­ma­tion… they use the Inter­net (I even said “the Inter­net” instead of “teh intar­webs,” which is what peo­ple call it these days, so they would know what I meant). They assured me the book had phone num­bers, addresses, and adver­tise­ments inside… and they were right! I checked and there it all was; guess I never both­ered to look before. Teaches me to respect my elders!

Any­way, I wanted to inform you that I def­i­nitely have enough of the “yel­low pages” and to please stop send­ing them. If I need more, I’ll be sure to call and ask. Your num­ber is on the Internet.

Respect­fully,

Scott Bush

PS — I’ve seen your TV com­mer­cials, too. I applaud your deci­sion to cast a real per­son cast as your mas­cot instead of anthro­po­mor­phiz­ing a phone book with a pair of eyes like those ridicu­lous Geico commercials.

I love Face­book because it lets me read what my friends are doing, see pic­tures, share parts of my own life with friends, and play an occa­sional game. I would not do any of these things if it cost me money (well, prob­a­bly; I hope I’m never asked to pay). But I’m not an idiot, either, so I under­stand they need to gen­er­ate rev­enue some­how. That means ads, and I’m okay with that.
You may have heard that adver­tis­ers aren’t lov­ing their returns from FB ads. “Mon­e­tiz­ing” the social media plat­form is chal­leng­ing because peo­ple are there to inter­act with their friends, not adver­tis­ers. Well, that may be true. It does seem more inva­sive that ads are tar­geted to you more pre­cisely based on your pro­file infor­ma­tion, but hey, FB needs to make money some­how, right? TechCrunch posted some leaked info on FB’s finan­cial sit­u­a­tion that doesn’t look too pos­i­tive. Right now, ads are the only way to gen­er­ate income from this sort of site.

They *almost* had it right… not.

But adver­tis­ers aren’t doing a good job, at least those whose ads FB thinks are tar­geted at my demo­graphic. I saw an ad to “Tat­too my wife’s name on my pro­file.” Hmmm… not sure why I’d be inclined to do such a thing. But yeah, maybe Jen deserves to see her name in dig­i­tal lights on my FB pro­file. Oh wait—my wife’s name isn’t Jen, as this FB adver­tiser should know. I’ve Pho­to­shopped the ad next with my sta­tus box so you can see the mis­take. If that ad had read “Crys­tal” instead of “Jen,” I may have been inclined to click through and see what it’s about. (What­ever it was, I doubt it’s really free as they claim.)

I can think of a cou­ple rea­sons this might not been possible:

1. Pri­vacy — FB doesn’t share that level of details from user’s pro­files with adver­tis­ers. Mean­ing, they tar­get me to the level of “male, mar­ried” but not “male, mar­ried, wife: ‘Crystal’.”
2. Tech­ni­cal — The adver­tiser didn’t want to fig­ure a way to dynamically-generate ad images based on the name.

If it’s due to rea­son 1, that’s good; it’s nice to know there are some things FB won’t sell out about me. If it’s #2, then that’s really a missed oppor­tu­nity for the adver­tiser who took the easy way out. Sure, it’d be tricky to do: you’d have to query the user’s pro­file info, ren­der that spouse’s name after address­ing issues of name length (it’s no mis­take they chose a three-letter name), and deliver the image for the ad. It’s a lot of work com­pared to serv­ing up a sin­gle image, but it might be worth it. As it is, the ad came across as half-baked and kept me from click­ing it (though it did get me to write a blog post!).

Am I being too crit­i­cal? Per­haps. But adver­tis­ers need to step it up on FB and other social media plat­forms that offer more ways to tar­get users. Adver­tis­ers need personalization—but done well—to get through to savvy users. This ad missed the mark.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find out who this Jen woman is…

Dri­ving around the last few weeks I’ve seen a num­ber of bill­boards for instant cof­fee. Star­bucks instant cof­fee. But wait… why do Star­bucks’ bill­boards say Taster’s Choice? I’m con­fused. Oh, I see now… they’re Taster’s Choice bill­boards talk­ing about Star­bucks. And that, in a nut­shell, is why Nescafé (Taster’s Choice’s par­ent com­pany) should fire their ad agency.

First, a few definitions:

• Star­bucks VIA (their cap­i­tal­iza­tion pref­er­ence, not mine) is the cof­fee conglomerate’s new “ready brew” instant cof­fee prod­uct. Can’t speak on it, as they never sent me the free sam­ple I requested.  Appar­ently, Howard Schultz and crew decided to offer a cheaper prod­uct for their caffeine-addicted cus­tomers to sip while read­ing their home fore­clo­sure notices.
• Taster’s Choice (TC) is the instant cof­fee brand that’s been around for­ever (check your parent’s pantry for a glass jar of the stuff). It apparently—though I’ve never had it, either—is now sold in single-serving tear-open “sticks” like VIA.
• Adver­tis­ing is the art of cre­at­ing a strong desire for your prod­uct among your tar­get audi­ence. In this case, that audi­ence is cof­fee drinkers, a group also known as “just about everybody.”

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