Who Buys These Things?

Previously in this space, we’ve discussed a number of the advertising stunts pulled by Burger King – or, more precisely, on behalf of Burger King by the loonies they keep hiring to handle advertising for the chain. The ads aren’t really remarkable in themselves; a lot of firms try out experimental advertising techniques every day, and some of them are even more bizarre and distasteful than the ones with the “Freaky King” or a woman contemplating an elongated hamburger. What makes the Burger King spots so unusual is that the product they’re advertising is neither edgy nor appropriate to a demographic that would be receptive to avant-garde advertising; it’s fast food targeting primarily families and young adults (as fast food traditionally has), and the fact that most Burger King stores are franchise operations, where the owners are forced to chip in for the national advertising activities but are given no input into what those activities will be. This makes the most recent television spots even more bizarre than usual…

It’s possible that these ads may not have made it to the market you’re in, or may have been pulled before you read this post, but you can find the description, complete with pictures, on The Fox Dallas affiliate website if you want to. Basically, the ad is a mock infomercial about a Burger King pillowcase which is printed with the company’s new breakfast menu. Burger King has not fared well against the McDonald’s breakfast offerings, and has been losing ground since the very successful “McCafe” line of coffee drinks has been offered to the public. As previously noted, they’re trying to fight back by offering “Seattle’s Best” coffee (a Starbuck’s product) and, apparently, by expanding and promoting their new breakfast line. All of which is perfectly reasonable, of course, except for the nature of these new ads…

In the television spot, an actor makes use of the new pillowcase and goes to sleep dreaming of the new breakfast menu. When he wake up, however, we learn that the opposite side of the pillowcase has an image of the plastic-faced “Freaky King” advertising figure – the overall image being of the actor waking up face-to-face with the King’s smiling image. It’s a remarkably creepy sight, which has been widely mocked over the Internet and generated a number of complaints from franchise holders, who once again feel left out of the loop by a market choice they would never have made on their own. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine how this will contribute to sales of the new breakfast products, let alone help the local franchise holders to take market share away from McDonald’s. But there’s another aspect to the story: the company was actually selling these pillowcases on the Internet for a few days, and in just that short time 4,450 people appear to have purchased one…

Personally, I have to agree with the franchise holders: the ad is creepy, and its utility in getting people to switch brands of fast-food is questionable, but if the purpose of this effort was to make more people aware of the new Burger King breakfast menu, it appears to be working: people all over the Internet who would normally have no interest in either fast food or advertising are talking about this ad campaign. Whether you regard the “Freaky King” as a misguided effort to create a memorable advertising image or a satiric parody of the competition’s iconic spokesclown, it’s had to deny that the various ad spots – and this new campaign in particular – are drawing attention to the brand. For example, were YOU thinking about Burger King’s new breakfast menu before you read this post?

The Ethics of Emotional Trauma

There’s an interesting case that’s sprung up around the most recent Sea World fatality. I’ve written in this space about the human resources aspects of having one of your star attractions – which happens to be an eight-ton killer whale – casually kill one of your employees, and the ethics of having puny humans swimming around in the orca tank in the first place. This case, however, has been filed by some of the customers affected by the accident – specifically, by a family who says that their children were traumatized by having to witness the brutal killing…


You can pick up the story from the the MSNBC website if you’d like, but the basic idea is that the Connell family from New Hampshire were watching when the trainer was killed, and their young son has been permanently traumatized by the spectacle. The Connells are suing for a very large amount of cash, while the company is trying to defend themselves by noting that if this litigation is allowed to go forward, anyone who every witnesses any traumatic event in any public venue will be able to sue the venue, the people involved in the event, anyone who made or installed equipment in the venue, advertisers who carried ads about the event or the venue, or the relevant government which failed to sufficiently regulate the venue. To me, of course, it seems more like a question of ethics – or rather, a series of questions…


First of all, does an entertainment venue like Sea World have an obligation to prevent any visitor from seeing anything that might upset them? Granted that seeing a human being get killed by an animal is rather extreme, this is still a slippery slope; there is no way to be certain what sights will or will not traumatize any specific visitor, and having every customer sign a waiver seems impractical. Clearly, when you take your family to look at animals, there will always be some risk of the animals behaving in some unpleasant, frightening or disgusting manner – can you reasonably expect the owners to sanitize every possible aspect of a zoo or aquarium?


Secondly, how badly does someone have to be emotionally traumatized before you can sue over the event, and who gets to decide that? Leaving it to an industry of paid expert witnesses doesn’t really sound like it would be in the public interest, but just letting anybody who wants to sue for whatever they like is clearly impractical as well. Do two mauling episodes equal one drowning by an orca? What about three smaller fish being eaten by a larger fish? Alpha males fighting with Beta males? And if you do permit such actions to go forward, should the family be allowed to sue for punitive damages and emotional pain and suffering, or just the cost of the affected members’ therapy bill? For that matter, would the kid even need therapy if the parents didn’t keep dredging up this episode over and over, or would he have gone on to other heartbreak by now?


Granted that in the case where any customer has been materially harmed or damaged by any action of the company, deliberate or negligent, they have a right to sue for compensation and the company has a duty to make them whole, does that apply to every upsetting experience you will ever have with that firm? For that matter, should every company be allowed to display disturbing, upsetting, disgusting or traumatizing spectacles without any potential consequence, or should they be held accountable for what goes on in their facilities, whether they intended those displays or not?


It’s worth thinking about…

Maybe They’re Right…

I haven’t had much to say about the widening foreclosure scandal, mostly because there hasn’t been much I can add to the stories you’ve probably already seen in the media. You can pick up the AP story by way of Yahoo News if you’re not familiar with the situation, but the basic story is that various large mortgage lenders have been attempting to grab up every piece of real estate that is, or could possible be considered, in default through various foreclosures. Normally, these are complex legal activities that require the services of a paralegal, supervised by an attorney, but according to the stories that have been coming out of the Florida test cases, several of the major banks have been assigning anyone they can find to process these foreclosures, regardless of whether it is legally or financially appropriate to do so…


This may account for the cases that have been popping up in the media over the last few months, such as the story about the man BofA foreclosed on even though he didn’t have a mortgage (with them, or anyone else). There was also the case of the folks whose vacation home was foreclosed on who also didn’t have a mortgage with anybody, or dozens of similar reports from all over the United States. There have been cases of banks sending people to seize houses, sell off furniture and appliances, turn off the power (leaving huge amounts of frozen food to spoil), and even (in one case) break into a home where somebody was living in the middle of the night and try to throw the owner out into the street…


I don’t mean to pick on Bank of America, although they’ve been getting a large share of the news stories about this – and their PR has been unusually bad, in that they keep trying to blame the victims, especially in the case of the unqualified mortgage functionaries (called “robo-signers” in the media). Certainly, all of the other large mortgage lenders seem to have followed suit, and if you wanted to comb through the news aggregation cite archives, you could find dozens of similar stories. What really concerns me is that you will find these stories right next to the ones about bank officials receiving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, termination packages, and retirement benefits. Which may be legal, in the case of those companies which have paid off their TARP loans, but certainly isn’t right in any sense I understand…


For years now, social activists have been claiming that our society is no longer a republic (it was never really a democracy in the original sense) but rather a plutocracy, run by the very rich for their own benefit. Given the recent developments in the banking, real estate and health care industries (to the extent that there’s any difference between them anymore), it’s starting to look more and more like we’re being governed by a kleptocracy (a system in which the crooks at the top take everything they can grab). I’m not one to start railing about “robber barons” and right-wing conspiracies and all of the rich and/or successful people in this country being criminal oppressors of the poor and/or downtrodden; I never have been. But there are times these days when I read this sort of news and see the lives being destroyed, the dreams being trampled, and the good people who have done nothing wrong suffering to enable a handful of genuine plutocrats to make another billion dollars of personal fortune, and I just have to wonder…

Losing Your Miles

Most of you have probably encountered frequent flier programs at some point in your travels; they’re customer loyalty programs that offer rewards for flying a certain number of miles on a specific airline – thus motivating you to book all of your travel on that same carrier. If you travel a lot – in excess of 100,000 miles per year, for example – most airlines will also give you membership in a special rewards club, which entitles you to special benefits, in addition to the free tickets and ticket upgrades you can earn with your flyer miles. In some companies, frequent flyer miles have become a perk all by themselves, and we’ve seen cases of the IRS ruling them to be income (under the non-monetary compensation rules) and requiring people to pay taxes on them, but all such programs have an inherent problem: they cost the company money…


To combat this, most of the airlines that still have frequent flyer programs have imposed limits on when the free tickets can be used, and on how long you can keep them. There are a few exceptions – Capital One is making a major selling point out of its “never expire, no blackout dates” airline miles cards, for example – but for the most part, it’s a “use them or lose them” proposition. This, unfortunately, has the side effect of lowering how valuable these “rewards” points are to the casual user, and thereby undermining the effectiveness of the entire program. The truth is, the airlines are attempting to have it both ways, and are annoying their customers into the bargain. The new program being offered by American Airlines, however, may have reached a new low…


Called the buyAAmiles program, this handy little offer allows you to purchase additional miles on American for cash. Now, this isn’t a new operation; most of the airlines that have frequent flyer programs have been doing this since the beginning, so that people who want to use a “free” ticket but are short a few thousand miles can make up the difference out of pocket. The new wrinkle is that since buying miles counts as “account activity” it can also prevent your account from going inactive and your existing stock of miles from expiring. American is sending out emails to their infrequent passengers (like me) saying that your miles are about to expire, but for under $60 you can buy a few new ones and some time…


I find this annoying for at least two reasons. First, having the miles expire in the first place is blatant cost-cutting measure; it’s good for the company and comes at the expense of the customers, and is therefore not a good choice. Second, my frequent-flyer miles do not expire until April. Yes, as I write this, it’s six months before the expiration date on the email I got yesterday. As with magazines sending you “Your Subscription is About to Expire!!!” letters half a year before your end date, I expect to be getting these messages every week until the due date comes up or I send them money. All of which is made even more absurd by the fact that I’ve only got 2,416 miles in my account to begin with; to actually get a free ticket I’d have to spend at least $250 on more miles, or fly cross-country seven more times…


Long-time readers (assuming I have any) may recall that I’ve been avoiding American ever since the episode when they refused to sell me two tickets (for me and my wife) because the departure date was less than 72 hours away; we each had to purchase our own ticket with our own credit card, and the airline also refused to guarantee that we’d be able to sit together on our cross-country flight. I generally only use American when there is no other way to get where I’m going, and even then preferably when somebody else is paying for the tickets. I can’t say I’m any more likely to avoid them after this stunt, but I’m certainly no more likely to fly with them. Of course, you could argue that having a spam-bot send me a spam email doesn’t cost the company much, and I’d agree with you – but that’s not the same thing as not costing them anything. It seems unlikely that they’re going to make much money doing this, whereas the extortionary nature of the offer may anger some potential customers enough to quit doing business with the airline for good…

Circular Hotdogs: A Fable

From time to time I’ll try to document the story about the round hotdog, just because I’d like to teach people about it; it’s such an appealingly goofy idea that it seems like there should be a lesson about it in business school. Unfortunately, there’s very little to be had, either from library or Internet sources; I only know the story because many years ago I had the privilege to meet and talk with one of the company’s R&D people, and he swore that this was true. I’m going to recount it for you here, because even if this tale isn’t altogether true, it still contains a valuable lesson…

Unless you’ve read Ray Kroc’s autobiography (I can’t really recommend that you do; it’s difficult reading in places), you may not know that Kroc himself was dead-set against McDonald’s ever selling hotdogs, and actually forbade the company to sell them, even if there was a demand for such products. This was because he regarded them as unhygienic; even today, most hotdogs are made out of scraps and odds-and-ends of meat that end up on the slaughterhouse floor, and back in the fifties and sixties the FDA regulations were even more of a joke than they are now. Food snobs may look down on McDonald’s food quality, but the truth is the company has been obsessed with food safety and consistency since the beginning; it’s one of the keys to making a product that is uniform and uniformly better than the competition. But the company has offered a limited number of hotdog products over the years; mostly at locations where hotdogs are traditional fare, such as ballparks and zoos. They’ve even experimented with bratwurst and corn dogs…

This led somebody to suggest that the company produce its own hotdogs, using its own suppliers, processors, factories, and so on. To make them look unique, and to keep from having build bun warmers in different shapes, the new product would be circular, like a doughnut. Prototypes of the new sandwich had been created, and the company had actually progressed to the point of looking into a slightly different bun for the new product (asking if its bakery supplier could make these) when several members of the management team actually saw one of these, and declared it the dumbest-looking thing every produced by a fast-food kitchen. Even more to the point, the same managers realized that if they marketed the new sandwich it was unlikely to bring in any new customers; sales of the McHot Dog would just cannibalize sales for their burgers – not to mention what would happen if people started questioning the quality and safety of the company’s primary product lines…

Now, I’m not trying to be critical of the R&D people at McDonald’s. The fact is, the company has sold (and continues to sell) some fairly strange food products around the world, and many of these do not bear even a passing resemblance to a hamburger. No one would have thought much of the fried chicken morsels known as “McNuggets” if they’d seen the way those are extruded into shape (and in fact it did take a while for the market to accept them), but that product has worked out quite well, and led to development of other big sellers like the McChicken sandwiches and the Chicken Snack Wraps. It’s possible that given the right market, and the right marketing support, that the McHot Dog would have been a winner as well. It is even more likely, however, that a single focus group discussion would have terminated the project’s development with howls of derisive laughter…

The lesson here is twofold, I think. First, just because a product is technically possible, that doesn’t mean there’s a market for it. Just because you can make a revolutionary new round hotdog, that doesn’t mean anyone is going to buy it. In this case, going to market with the product you need, rather than the one you have, is probably not an option. And secondly, keep a close eye on what product needs your R&D people can meet. After all, if there’s ever a market for circular extruded-meat products anywhere in the world, McDonald’s will be ready to roll before the competition has stopped wondering why anybody would ever want to eat such a thing…

Behold the Power of Typos

If you ever get a job as a teacher – and I am not for one moment suggesting that you ought to – you’re probably going to end up dealing with typographical errors in work that is handed in for credit. If you’re a reasonably conscientious teacher, you’ll probably have some standards for writing quality, whether that means taking off points for spelling and grammar errors, or taking off points after a certain number of errors, or taking off points if you can’t actually decipher what your student is trying to say, or what have you. And if you impose any standard above “you turned it in, therefore you get full points” you will probably have someone argue that your standard is too strict sooner or later. “After all,” your students will whine, “What harm can a single typo do?”

If you’re ever asked that, I suggest you bring up a story that turned up in the Canadian news online over the weekend. According to the C-Net News page , a situation developed in the Canadian version of the McDonald’s Monopoly game this year, when the web page for McDonald’s Canada Division mistakenly said you could win the $1 million grand prize with the Park Place token. In reality, you need the Park Place and Boardwalk tokens, just as in the original game, but whoever wrote the copy for the web page apparently left out the “and Boardwalk” out of the critical sentence. A minor typo; the omission of only two words, but with a potential multi-million-dollar consequence…

Now, I don’t pretend to be a particularly good writer of English; I’m one of those people who consider the invention of the spell-checker to be more important than fire OR the wheel in the rise of human civilization. But in many ways I think those low standards make me less tolerant of sloppy editing, rather than more: if I can do better than the level of proficiency being displayed, I always think, the person writing it certainly could have. I’ve never handed in a major class assignment without getting at least one additional pair of eyes on it, for example, and I’d certainly never sign a contract without getting a lawyer’s opinion on it. Yet every day we see people embarrass themselves in public by not taking any such precautions; Jay Leno has built an entire comedy institution around this principle (the highly successful “Headlines” feature on the Tonight Show) and it has been the source of much humor, not just in the Internet era, but in fact for hundreds of years of history…

The real problem is that people do not think about the scope or importance of their actions. If I leave a typo in a blog post there’s a good chance that no one will ever know; only a few people ever read these things, and all of you are much too polite to start mocking me because I misspelled something. On the other hand, if a lawyer puts the wrong word or phrase in a contract his or her client could be sued for millions or billions of dollars, and his or her career could be effectively over. And if a major corporation puts an incorrect contest rule on the Internet for all to see, the results could include lawsuits, humiliation, and being mocked by millions of scruffy bloggers…

Which is why teachers like me are going to go right on marking off points for blatant misspellings and other technical errors in the assignments we receive – even if none of us could necessarily do any better…

Self-Publishing and You

Since e-books first started appearing in mainstream sources, I’ve been wondering when we’d see vanity publishing – or legitimate self-publishing – versions of these products arriving on the market. Vanity publishing seemed unlikely, since in most cases the whole point is to have a book you can show people, give people to read, and so on; a vanity-published e-book wouldn’t confer any more status than any other computer file. Self-publishing is another matter, though – in a world where more and more of the publishing industry seems to be devoted to sensationalist crap and ghostwritten autobiographies, an increasing number of serious authors have been arranging to have their own work printed and distributed for sale as the only means of ever getting it published. For that purpose, self-publication in electronic format would probably make sense, especially if there was some established on-line retailer who would handle the nuts and bolts for you – and especially if you had some prospect of actually getting paid for doing so…

I got an email about it this morning, but you can pick up the news story from the Gizmodo website if you want the details. Basically, if you had anything you think people might want to download and buy, you can post it as an e-book on the Barnes and Noble site, and they’ll split the proceeds with you (you get 65% of the sale price for anything under $10 and 40% of anything higher than that). It costs Barnes and Noble almost nothing to create a product page for you – since there’s no publisher information, Library of Congress information, trade journal notes, book reviews or cover art to post – and the only potential downside is having to process credit cards (and prosecute fraudulent ones). And it certainly could be used for vanity publishing, if you’re the sort of tech nerd who thinks having your own e-book is cool, and if there’s anyone who would pay for a copy of it. But I think the real potential here is probably for authors with small but real communities of readers…

Let’s suppose that you’re a blogger and you get a few hundred hits everyday, maybe a few thousand on days when your post is particularly funny, well-written, or risqué. Let’s also suppose that you have written a book that might be of interest to your readers, and you put it up on the new Barnes & Noble “Pubit” service, with a cover price of $9.99. If 200 people download it, you’ve netted a cool $130, which is probably a lot more than your getting from letting your web host put banner ads on your page. If your book is successful it will probably draw more interest to your blog; if the blog grows in popularity it could also create additional sales for your book. If the process cycles through enough times, you might even make enough doing this to quit your day job…

Of course, there’s a reason that most of the world’s 100,000,000 bloggers have fewer than two dozen readers each – it’s essentially the same reason that somewhere between 35% and 85% of the world’s 100,000,000 bloggers have given up on the project and stopped updating their blogs more than very occasionally, which is that most of these people have nothing of general interest to say, even on the rare occasions when they actually say it well. Amazon has had a similar service – called the 70/30 program for some time now, and it doesn’t seem to have created any new bestselling authors out of the blogosphere. Producing enough e-book sales to make a living at it is hard enough for established authors, let alone somebody whose total readership could hold their annual convention in my living room. On the other hand, all great changes begin with small ones; all fundamental shifts in a civilization begin with tiny ones. If this really is the trend that begins the information-based society predicted by Heinlein and Clarke – well, remember folks, you heard it here first…

Now where was that novel I was working on?