An Ugly Truth, or a Beautiful Lie?

There are times when I’m out wandering around the Web, looking for business news to mock, ridicule or praise, when I come upon a story that makes me wonder if someone is having a joke at my expense – if I am being trolled, to use the current expression. Some of these are fairly obvious (like the genius that was PenguinWarehouse.com), and some are actually disappointing, like the site that claimed to be offering “pirate hunting” cruises off the Horn of Africa (complete with your choice of gun and ammo!). But some just aren’t clear, like the one about the dating web site catering exclusively to visually attractive subscribers…

I’m not going to link to it; even if it’s not actually a scam or a practical joke, I don’t really think they should be encouraged. But you’ve probably seen the story, or heard about it some other news source. Unlike most dating sites, which will generally accept anyone who swears they aren’t a sex offender and lets their membership work out who is attractive enough for whom on their own, beautifulpeople.com claims to screen applicants for aesthetic quality before allowing them to join, and promises to de-list anyone who is found wanting by a significant percentage of their members. How they do this profitably isn’t clear; nor is how they keep people from sending them doctored photographs or re-applying with one if they have been previously voted off…

The story which broke this week and eventually percolated up into the MSN Nowwebsite indicates that this stunt (or joke, if it is one) has now been taken to the next level: the site is now offering a recruitment service as well. Prospective employers who specifically want to hire the most attractive people available to fill an open position can use this service to select applicants for interview based on their appearance. Again, it isn’t clear from the news stories what recourse you would have if the applicants you called in for interview were not as attractive (or skilled) as advertised – or, for that matter, what recourse the applicants would have if someone asks them to come to an interview solely for the purpose of propositioning them…

Whether any of this would actually be legal isn’t clear either. Visually unappealing people are not a protected class under Federal law, and the company behind this site isn’t imposing any standards about what is or is not attractive in the first place. If your interviewees included people from all ethnicities, ages, backgrounds and so on (all of whom happen to be visually attractive) it would be difficult to claim discrimination on any of those bases; it would be even harder to prove if you actually hired a diverse cross-section of demographics. And even if discrimination on the basis of attractiveness was actionable, there really are jobs for which visual appearance is a factor...

A more immediate question would be whether you can get the best employees for any particular position if you are limiting the applicant pool to this extent. The popular image of attractive people being less capable because they get by on their looks is a myth; I’ve met some exceptionally talented good-looking people, and some completely incompetent ugly ones. But if you are only interviewing the top 10% of all applicants based on their appearance, you probably aren’t interviewing the top 10% of all applicants in terms of ability. Unless looking good is their single most important duty there is a non-zero chance that you are deliberately impairing your company’s performance by doing this…

Of course, this whole concept is also questionable from a moral and ethical standpoint, both for the hiring manager who uses this service and for the applicant who posts a resume (and, one assumes, a picture) to this database. But that’s a discussion for another day…

Naming Rights

Anyone who has ever attended a sporting event at the Staples Center, or Comerica Park, or any one of a thousand other venues – or, for that matter, has attended a named school like the Eli Broad College of Business at MSU – already knows about naming rights. Most of the time it’s a harmless way to raise money for the school or make back some of the cost of building an expensive stadium and attracting a professional team to your city, although there have occasionally been incompetent uses of this concept – as in the case of the ballpark in Phoenix, for example, where Bank One was given the naming rights for $1 million a year. Arizona politics are a sewer, and the fact that a friend of several senior officials had been given a price for the naming rights that would have required 400 years to make back the cost of the building might have caused a bit of fuss if the governor hadn’t been indicted (and eventually imprisoned) in the same year…

If you were wondering how long it will take for somebody to sell the naming rights to an entire town, you can stop wondering. The town of Altoona, PA has gone through with the stunt that several Midwestern cities were threatening to do last year (when Google was supposedly looking for a new headquarters, and several places were supposedly offering to change the name of their whole town to “Google, Kansas” or whatever). You can find the original story from the Associated Press by way of MSNBC , but basically Altoona is going along with a publicity stunt being staged by Morgan Spurlock, the independent filmmaker best known for the documentary about living on junk food called “Supersize Me.” Spurlock’s new project lambasts the current state of advertising in America, and apparently he’s found a sponsor willing to underwrite re-naming the town for a week…

Of course, this isn’t a real case of buying the naming rights. Altoona will go back to its original name as soon as the promotional week is over and the headlines have been duly recorded and the fees paid. That doesn’t change the fact that for a certain period of time, over 30,000 people will be living in a town called “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." I can’t speak for anyone else, but it makes me wonder how long it will be before someone tries this on a larger scale. Detroit already is something of a huge 3D billboard for Chrysler, but imagine the possibilities of Denver as Presented by United Airlines, or Roto-Rooter Presents Cleveland. And if you could get the various studios bidding over who gets the rights to Los Angeles, you could probably balance the state budget in California, not merely the City or County finances…

I kid, of course, but there is a very real issue here with pushing back the boundaries of what is acceptable – and what is outrageous. I don’t know how the people of Altoona feel about their town and its traditional name, but I can tell you that very few people actually like the town I grew up in, let alone feel any attachment to its twice-recycled name – but there’d still be rioting in the streets if you tried a stunt like this there. Unless, of course, this sort of thing becomes commonplace, in which case we might very well be destined to witness a World Series or an NBA Championship series in which we see Microsoft versus Apple, or perhaps Nike versus Gatorade…

In which case, just remember: You heard it here first!

Republic of the Easily Offended, South American Edition

We’ve had a lot of cases pop up recently where the line was hard to draw, where the slope was slippery, or where the principles of the case were sound enough, but we still wouldn’t have wanted the exact events described to happen on our block. But there are also those events where we find ourselves shaking our heads at the antics of people who seem to have nothing better to do than take massive offense at every utterance that they think has the potential to cast them in a bad light, saying to ourselves “Come on, people; it was just a cream pie!” These are the events that make me want to re-name the society we live in as “The Republic of Nice” – as in we’re all required to be nice at all times or else! – or, less sarcastically, “The Republic of the Easily Offended…”

Although apparently we’re just the North American Republic of the Easily Offended; it would appear that other continents have their own version of our society. A story being reported today in The Associated Press online details a lawsuit being planned by The Colombian Coffee Growers Federation against a U.S. cartoonist and his syndication group over a cartoon that they feel "attacks the national dignity and the reputation of coffee from Colombia." The cartoon was one of a series printed last week that riffed on the story of the inventor of the Pringles can being buried in one, and included the comment that given the levels of violence observed in Colombia, perhaps the old sales slogan “There’s a little Juan Valdez in every can” should be taken literally…

The Federation is going to be seeking at least $20 million "for damage and harm, detriment to intellectual property and defamation.” Why, exactly, they feel that $20 million in harm has been done to them will be quite interesting to observe; why they feel they should be immune to the satire that every member of our society is subjected to should be even more so. There is no chance that any reasonable person would actually believe that Columbian coffee cans contain the slightest trace of human remains; there is also essentially no chance that anyone who has ever heard of Columbia doesn’t already know about the drug cartels and ongoing violence that have plagued that country. It is thus difficult to understand how this unassuming newspaper cartoon could actually harm the Federation’s business. And if there has been no damage to your business, you can’t demand money in compensation for that damage…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the Federation has no right to be irritated. Consider, for example, how you would feel if someone implied (even in jest) that your company’s products were tainted with traces of human remains. More to the point, the Federation has spent a vast amount of advertising establishing Columbian coffee as a brand, and we all know what happens if you don’t defend both your brand name and reputation against anyone who implies that it’s not worth what you’re charging for it. If the Federation ignores this once, it will be harder for them to quash the next joke made at their expense, and eventually their carefully-built (and expensive) brand name will just be another mixed-media joke, resulting in heaven only knows how much lost sales and lost revenue…

Clearly, the cartoonist in this story did not intend to create an international incident, let alone touch off a $20 million lawsuit naming both him and his syndicate as parties. As his response in the AP story makes abundantly clear, he merely thought it was an amusing reference to other world events during this same time, and did not expect anyone to notice, let alone take massive offense. But, just as clearly, this mostly harmless and certainly non-malicious joke was taken quite seriously by the people whose business, country, brand, and tag line he was mocking. Given the way U.S. civil laws regarding satire of public figures/groups are usually interpreted, it’s unlikely that this case will amount to much, even assuming the cartoon syndicate doesn’t just settle the matter and make it go away quietly. But it’s still something you might want to keep in mind before you make your next public joke at the expense of somebody’s business…