Jesus Christ is MY Personal Savior, Not Yours

He's mine, I tell you, mine!

I've decided to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior. So back off, Jack. What part of  "personal" don't you understand? Get your own personal savior. This one's taken.

Netflix Takes My Advice

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
"Oops, my bad! Jeff,
The Beloved Leader
was right, as usual."

I'm so glad to see that Netflix took my advice and withdrew the Einsteinian plan to spin off their DVD mail program (Qwikster). However, they still managed to keep following the Piss Off Your Customers Rule by letting stand the 100% fee increase on their customers. Way to go Netflix! Very subtle way to slip in the gouge. That's the way to keep customers: Don't improve service but charge everybody twice as much for it.

Since it evidently doesn't take anybody with great intelligence to run a multi-billion dollar company. I've gone onto the Netflix corporate site and applied for the job of CEO under "Jobs at Netflix". I think I'm more than qualified. I should be a shoe-in since the board is obviously going to be looking for another CEO soon. I hear they're whip smart. Or maybe it was just "whipped." I don't have the facts to back this up.

I also applied to for the job as CEO of Bank of America quite some time ago. But for some reason I haven't heard back from them. Dicks.

Marketing Rule: Don't Forget to Piss Off Your Customers

Somebody's gotta pay
for this BofA Tower.
And it ain't gonna
be the shareholders.

So we're all wondering what is going on at Bank of America, Netflix, and Name-on-Request Airlines. Lately it seems like big, successful companies have come across the little known marketing rule: Make sure you really piss off your customers.

Bank of America, in announcing that it's going to start charging its customers to use their debit cards to withdraw their own money from their accounts, has probably congratulated itself on finding the glaring loophole in the dreaded Dodd-Frank Act that restricts usurious bank fees on merchants who offer debit payment to their own customers. The drafters of Frank-Dodd, being the unholy hybrid of Congressional watering-down that it was, probably didn't expect the big banks to blatantly say, "Okay, well somebody's gonna pay our usurious fees and it's gonna be our own customers." I guess we customers are just supposed to get angry at Congress for forcing them to do it. Right? How could we possibly get mad at our bank? Especially the same bank who was caught (but not  yet punished) for widespread foreclosure fraud. The same bank that was bailed out with our tax money and handed Merrill Lynch as its chew toy. The same bank convicted of municipal bonds fraud in 2010. It isn't their fault. It's Congress! Write your Congressbeing and tell him/her to get off your bank's back.

But come on! Do the marketing idiot savants (minus the "savant" part) at BofA think that their customers won't just pull their deposits out and go to the hundreds of little banks and credit unions in their hometowns? I've noticed that some of those more astute little banks and credit unions are already running ads announcing that they have no intention of charging their customers to access their own money.What a concept!

It's all part of the proven marketing principle of making sure your customers storm out, really angry.

Or take Netflix's recent bonehead move to infuriate their own customers by spitting their service into two monthly bills (one for downloading movies and one for the traditional DVD-by-mail service). Did anybody there think this through? Or that they just handed struggling Blockbuster an early Christmas gift? Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall of that meeting where they came up with that brilliant idea? And naming their new spinoff Qwikster? Really? You mean like Napster or Friendster or one of those other Disasters? They must have spent all afternoon coming up with that stupid name.

I certainly hope Blockbuster sent them a nice thank you note (with an Amazon gift card).

This trend of pissing off your customers started with the airlines, of course, who decided a few years ago to start charging their own regular customers for things like water, pillows, and privy privileges. Suddenly, loyal business customers started looking for airlines that didn't nickel-n-dime them. And the unforeseen consequences of charging for baggage? More fights over the overhead bins in the cabin. Couldn't have seen that coming.

Of course, we know that airlines are struggling financially--what with the speculator-driven price of fuel and the costs of maintaining aging aircraft (thank you FAA!). But instead of simply burying those added costs into the ticket, which they inflated anyway, the airlines decided to add insult to injury by charging for baggage, pillows, and water. Pissing everybody off. It's bad enough that you have to pay extra to have your knees in your chin, or that you have to bring your own bag lunch on board. It's bad enough that ticket pricing is so chaotic and--dare I say it--deregulated. But to make me pay for a flattened pillow that somebody else drooled on? Brilliant. I think I'll drive to LA. At least it's cheaper. And I can bring my own pillow, thank you.

But Bank of America (and soon Wells Fargo, Chase, and the other too-big-to-bail banks) takes the cake for idiotic marketing decisions. They probably figured that nobody would notice. Also, according to BofA, because they aren't allowed to gouge merchants quite so much (thanks to that socialistic Dodd-Frank law), those same merchants will, out of the goodness of their hearts, pass their savings on and lower their own prices. They will. Just you watch.We'll see that little $5.00 fee deducted from our checking account every month and we'll think, at least I'm saving big at the retail level.

Also, I'm sure Bank of America customers are all getting letters that begin with the sincere phrase, "As a loyal Bank of America customer, you're important to us..." That ought to take care of damage control.

Besides, the debit card charge is legal. Dodd-Frank doesn't say the banks can't. This is what you get for shoddy legislation.

And what are you gonna do? Take your business to a little bank that doesn't charge you to withdraw your own money? Yeah, right! Have you seen their quaint headquarters? It doesn't even come up as high as BofA's lobby.

World Cup Mad...(yawn)...ness

I want to start right off by admitting that I'm not a soccer fanatic. I'm not even remotely soccer literate. I watched the last game of the last World Cup in South Africa, and the last game of the last Women's World Cup in Germany between the US and Japan. I have a few friends who qualify as soccer (or "futbol" to them) fanatics and know the nuances of the game enough to scream obscenities at the officials. Also I stood around in the rain on the sidelines of my daughter's games (I mean "matches") when she was in middle school...mostly not paying attention. So I want to get it straight before I go off with authority on this rant about how hypnotically dull and pointless soccer is; I don't know what I'm talking about.

Oops, I tipped my prejudice.

 I, American patriot and  loyal friend to my soccer aficionados that I am, watched every grueling second of the interminable final match between the women's US team and Japan on Sunday in the FIFA World Cup. I wanted to participate in my friends' critique of the game--er--match. I wanted to be able to make sage points about the effervescent playing style of Lauren Cheney versus the relentless attacks of Abby Wambach.

But even I could see that the American team were playing rings around the Japanese, in every way; ball handling, play finesse, aggressiveness, discipline, stamina. But they just couldn't score. Though the US team spent most of their time threatening the Japanese goal, the quirks of chaos theory just kept deflecting all of their shots from the net, never once being touched by the Japanese goalie, who might as well not have been there. It was like there was a force field around the goal. And it got to be very frustrating, almost ridiculous.

The dull thing about soccer is that, regardless of the skill of either team, goals are so rare that it is, as the saying goes, like watching grass grow. Literally. When goals are made, they seem to be entirely weird; not a solid crack of the bat signaling a home run, not a relentless and unmistakable drive to a touchdown, not that satisfying swish of the basketball net--just a strange happenstance of bounce in which the ball happens to ricochet off of someone's head and just happens to sneak into the corner--instead of an inch to the outside. It's as if the whole point of soccer were for each side to keep flipping a coin and a score happens when the coin lands on edge.

So rare are goals in soccer, and so unexpected, that it's no wonder announcers sound like squealing 12-year-old girls whenever somebody makes one. "GOAL!!!! GOALGOALGOALGOAL!!!" (be sure to roll your "l's" when you scream this.) It's soooo exciting.  But about as exciting as watching a piece of ground for a lightning strike. On a sunny day.

For this particular game (or match), even though the Americans, for whatever reasons, were technically outplaying the Japanese, each side made two of these quirky goals and after a tedious extra thirty minutes of overtime play were still tied. Can't have that. So, instead of playing forever until one side definitely wears the other one down (as they do in tennis, baseball, and war), the whole thing devolves upon a mindless ritual called a penalty kick shootout, or something. Each side gets a chance to take five shots at the net from about twenty feet.  The goalie has to decide, "What's she gonna do? Go right or go left?" This is the game theory equivalent of Rock Paper Scissors. It's really unsatisfying and you get the feeling you were gypped. The whole thing is about as thrilling as watching someone chuck a softball to dunk a clown in a church carnival. The commentators were saying that if the two teams were still tied after this little exercise, that they'd move on to an even more inane tie-breaker, the "sudden death" penalty kick, in which the first one to make a goal wins.

And if this didn't work, I'm sure that the clever minds at FIFA had an even more foolproof method of determining the winner; "I'm thinking of a number between one and two." Or possibly the dreaded staring contest.

But it worked. The Japanese got in more free kicks than the Americans, proving that they were the best soccer team in the world. Glad that was cleared up.

Much debate has gone on about why soccer has trouble catching on in the US. I don't know why. It has to be the dullest game ever thought up. The reason it's so popular around the rest of the world must be because you don't need much to play it. Any bunch of kids can wrap a wad of rags together into a soccer ball and start kicking it around the street, or minefield. You don't need special equipment. You don't need a net or a backstop or ice or helmets or skates or bats or mitts or even shoes. But cheapness doesn't make it good. Rock Paper Scissors is cheap, too.

Another reason soccer may have trouble catching on in the US is the nature of its play. There aren't time outs, downs, or innings. The clock keeps ticking even when the ball goes out of bounds. So, consequently, you better have gone to the bathroom before the game (or match) starts. And, even more consequently, there are no places for commercial breaks. What advertiser is going to want to buy a spot on either side of a game? Or in the middle? It's just not commercially viable. The brilliant design of American sports is that they are just made for commerce, with built-in advertising breaks. Soccer was designed by socialist regimes who see no need for advertising...or bathroom breaks (just go in your pants, like we do).

As I said, I don't know what I'm talking about. I come from a generation that only played soccer in gym in high school (when it had the same status as dodge ball). But watching last Sunday's World Cup, I kept thinking that this was a metaphor for something. I couldn't think of what. So I decided to go the easy route and whine about the game. Or match.

Panda-monium

SEO Priests, beware!
Google knows where you live.

For some nerdy reason (and I think it was Jean Jacques Rousseau who said--in French, of course--that nerds have reasons that reason knows not of), I've been following a lot of online discussion in the SEO (search engine optimization) community about the new Google search algorithm called Panda. They hate it. For one thing, it attempts to undermine all of their little search engine gaming tricks, like links to lots of other sites, repetitive keywords, meta-tag subterfuge, and some really arcane things that none of us lowly carbon-based lifeforms can fathom. Panda's a revolution. And if you you believe these Old World Chicken Littles, it is upsetting everything the orange-fingered clergy of SEO know about how to make a website turn up at the front of the line, regardless of whether it's what you were were actually looking for.

Now I'm not going to even pretend to understand this debate. I'm a writer, a branding guy, not a programmer. All I know is that for the past several years I've been having to suppress everything I know about good writing and persuasion in the interests of making sure my "content" has enough buzzwords to make a search engine salivate--mostly at the cost of fun--or interest. But from what I can understand, what Google has done is to finally make an algorithm that comes closer to how actual human beings would prefer to browse for something, instead of how a robot would. The implications are, for me, wonderful. It means that the search engine is looking for interesting, original, cool content. It gives greater weight to well-known brands and trusted sites. It ignores sites with lots of ads and stupid links to nowhere. It requires that the content be relevant and well-written.Yippee! Or maybe, Yahoo!

One SEO blogger lamented that Panda is unfair because it means that big, well-known brands will have an advantage over small, start-up companies. So? An old colleague of mine, Amanda Mailey, used  to say, "The best keyword is a strong brand name." That's the way it should be. And Panda, by its quirky mathematics, looks to make that true again. It means that there are no wise-guy, programming shortcuts to racing to the top of a search list; you're going to have to do it the old fashioned way, by building a strong, well-known brand. And do it creatively.

What Panda promises is that we are getting closer to a time when the web is more human. A website will be more visible because a lot of people find it interesting or entertaining, not because it's been "gamed" to make it pop up at the front of a search query. And for those of us who long for the days when creativity and entertainment ruled branding, Panda is our friend. Anything that overthrows the Lords of SEO is our friend.

At least that's what this Luddite thinks. I probably don't understand it at all.

Bad Science

1.2% Prefer Death by Eels

I've been following all of these marketing blogs and news feeds because, well, I don't know, I guess I think I'm supposed to because I'm in advertising? I really don't know. But one yesterday caught my eye because of its provocative headline: "Study Reveals Why Consumers Fan Facebook Pages," followed by the confusing subhead, "Nearly 40% of Consumers 'Like' Companies on Facebook to Publicly Display Their Brand Affiliation to Friends." After I tried to decipher the ambiguous sentence construction of the latter (which is always fun in headlines), I read the article in hopes of finding out the Why that was promised in the banner heading. I was disappointed. There was no why, it merely stated that, of all the ways consumers are hit by branding messages, 40% said in a survey that they prefer it when there are promotions attached and that 39% of those say they would be inclined to "fan" that promotion to friends on their network. There was no Why. And it didn't say they did actually fan their friends when there was a promotion, they just answered that they would be inclined to do so. They were probably thinking, "Yeah, sure, why not?"

You've participated in these mindless surveys. When you are sucker enough to start, you'd like to think that there is a mechanism in there to complain about something, but the questions are always so patently skewed to support the biased hypothesis that there is no real study; it's just trying to push a conclusion so they can push whatever it is they're trying to sell. It's bad science. Here's an example:

Q: Of the following forms of dying, which method would you prefer?

1. Decapitation by a dull, rusty saw
2. Sliding down a fifty foot razor blade into a pool of alcohol
3. Being slowly lowered into a cauldron of bubbling lava
4. Eaten alive by ravenous eels
5. Peacefully in your sleep

The results? 96% choose #5
Therefore, this study shows that most people would like to die in their sleep. 

"That's why 96% of your friends recommend Go-Ezy, the sleep aid that takes you to paradise." 

But, as you take the test, you search in vain for #6 "Wait minute, nobody said anything about dying!"

It's the same with these loaded surveys that ask which method of social media advertising you'd prefer to see, or whether you'd fan somebody about a promotion. There is never the choice: "I'd prefer not to be bothered by advertising on Facebook, thank you."  But be honest, given a choice about being hectored by constant e-mails alerting you to a new promotion based on your "likes," or not having to empty your inbox 60 times a day, how pathetically lonely are you to pick the former? You need to get some sunshine.

I do worry about the 1.2% who selected death by eels. Are we sure they were taking the survey seriously?

Why I Unlike facebook

The f -bomb

Have you ever noticed that it's not possible to be negative about anything on Facebook? The only structural choice you have is to "like" something. You can "unlike" it (an unword if there ever was one), i.e. change your mind and take the little thumbs-up icon off. But you don't have the option of sticking a thumbs-down icon on anything. I think this is insidious. It reminds me of the part of Orwell's 1984 where the Ministry of Information is in the process of devolving English so that it is impossible to have certain ideas, like freedom or justice, for instance, because there are no longer words for them.

Ironically, this sunny lack of negative editorial options on Facebook doesn't prevent vicious little adolescent snots from tormenting one of their peers to suicide. They figured out how to do that without an icon. This is the second reason I'm not so ready to stick my thumb up for Facebook. It can be lethal. Instead of promoting human interaction, as was Mark Zuckerberg's noble, original goal, it has been perverted by some as a convenient power tool of sadism. There may not be a convenient "hate" button to click, but bullies find a way to slip the shiv into their victims anyway. I guess it's the social network equivalent of nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. But mostly evil.

An Online Insane Asylum
The third thing that fails to plus me about the Big Little f (aside from the fact that you're supposed to render it in self-consciously pretentious lower case) is that it seems to encourage banality. People, especially people born after 1985, tend to share every eruption of a bodily function with everybody. The net result, even if you don't have that many people on your "wall," is a large, digital dumpster full of inane comments, pictures, and "likes."  Like who cares? I know it feels good to announce to the world that you like Lady Gaga, and that it feels like you're famous for a microsecond because your post goes up there on that ever scrolling ticker-tape of important announcements, but it's just an illusion. Nobody cares. Everybody's talking at once and nobody's listening. That's not human connection. It's the Social Room at the Sunny Valley Mental Hospital.

That's not exactly true that nobody cares. Prospective employers care, of course, looking for embarrassing pictures of you with your top off at a party, so they can send you a "thank you for your interest in our company" letter. And you don't even have to post those pictures onto your FB page; your friends (so-called) will do that on their pages and tag your name, so it shows up on your page anyway.

Meanwhile, for those people who would actually use their wall to inform family members and friends about important events in their life--say a wedding or death or a sex change--those messages get buried in with all the other junk about who's now friends with whom.

Where's the Love Button?
A more famous curmudgeon than me, Jonathan Franzen, in a piece in the NYT, says that Facebook is insidious for another reason; that it commoditizes human love, reducing it to a commercial relationship on the same order as your "like" of a brand soft drink. To love someone, he says, is a dangerous, lifelong undertaking. To merely "like" something lets you off the hook. You can "like" something or "unlike" something with the click of a mouse. There's no commitment. At least not like there is when love is involved. You can love someone, he reminds us, without necessarily having to like them all the time. That's real life; sticky, risky, painful, but also euphoric, transcendent, fulfilling, and fun. Of course, Facebook doesn't pretend to be a substitute for the sticky, risky, painful, euphoric, transcendent, fulfilling, and fun. But it does tend to keep you on the couch instead of going outside to play. Sort of like writing blogs.

The daughter of a friend of mine was--momentarily--my hero because she went off grid. She called her mother and said she was getting off Facebook because it was a waste of time. I was inspired to follow her lead. But another trusted friend talked me off that ledge by saying, "Yeah, do it if you want to commit professional suicide." (Of course, I think it's far too late for that; I committed professional suicide when I started a career in advertising.) And then my friend's daughter got back on Facebook after all. You really can't live without Facebook, anymore than you could live without GPS. Or clip-on mosquito repellent.

So I stay on Facebook. I check it every once in a while (as well as my Linked-In account, Twitter, my four e-mail accounts, my voice messages, a dozen blogs, my post office box, and my jeans pockets). Besides, if I didn't, I wouldn't get all this material to make trite observations about the banality of humanity, so I can feel superior--for a microsecond.