Cranial Soup

Ad vs. Product

2007-08-13T08:34:00.001-04:00

Imagine if Coca-Cola charged you money to watch a commercial for their product, in addition to charging you for the product itself. It sounds kind of crazy, doesn't it? Would you willingly pay to watch the commercial? Probably not. But in a case like this it is obvious which is the product and which is the ad.

We are being bombarded with advertising every day. In most cases, it's not hard to recognize an ad when you see one, as being an ad. But there are areas where we have been fooled and can't tell the product from the ad. This is because the creator of the product hasn't properly and clearly defined exactly what his product is.

Take music, for example. It's not quite as obvious which is which, and you could be buying the ad as well as the product.

An artist releases and album and then goes on tour playing concerts, which are live performances of that album. One of them is an ad, and the other is the product. Only, unless the artists defines which is which, you really can't tell. What is worse is that unless you know which is which, you will be duped into paying to experience the advertising.

There are artists that have clearly defined which is the product and which is the ad. There are plenty of artists that will give concerts with free admission and sell CD's afterwards. The show is the ad, the CD is the product. (I am referring to the artists that are not hired to perform concerts and receive no compensation for their live performance.)

Then there are artists that will send you a free CD if you add your name & address to their mailing list...or they offer free downloads of their album on their website. But if you want to hear them play live, it will cost you the price of a ticket. In this case, the album is the ad, the show is the product.

But what about the artists that charge you for both? Is the artist releasing the album to promote the concerts, in the hope that by listening to their CD that you will buy a ticket to a show? Or is the artist playing concerts in the hopes that if you hear them play that you will buy their CD? They need to make up their minds and let us know which is the product and then stop charging us for the advertising.

This problem isn't limited to music. There are other types of creative content production where this exists, as well. There are authors that charge for books...and then charge for public appearances, too. Is the 'guru' advertising his seminars with his book or are his seminars an ad for the book he wrote? It's not always easy to tell.

For the majority of authors, the book is the product. They don't make their living from public appearances. They know this and they don't charge for you to hear them speak, nor are they hired to talk about their book. They have defined the book as the product.

But in the cases where the line is blurred, you are being tricked into paying for the ad. Motivational speakers/authors are the most guilty when it comes to charging the consumer for advertising. You buy the book and then pay to hear them preach at you for an hour or two. Or you pay to hear them speak, and then buy the book. Somewhere in there you have bought an ad. Again, the real product hasn't been revealed to you, so you can't tell which is which.

This is just a little food for thought. Something for you to think about the next time you are in line waiting to buy a book, album, or ticket to a concert or seminar.

Is StumbleUpon the Search Engine of the Future?

2007-01-02T22:02:00.000-05:00

Let's face it...Google has serious flaws as a search engine. It is over-run with bogus pages of keyword lists, links to counterfeit sites, links to other inferior search pages, splogs, sites that try to hijack your browser and load your PC with spyware, and generally crappy unrelated results.

What you are looking for is burried in garbage. In order to find anything decent, related to what you are seeking, you have to set Google to show you 100 results per page instead of the default 10, and spend much more time scanning those results for what you are seeking.

What if there was a button on every page that let you vote whether the page was of quality or was crap?

And what if the quality pages moved up in rank as a result of your vote?

And what if the pages you labeled as crap fell in rank as a result of your vote?

And what if you could only vote for a page once, and only once? (you can always change your vote at some point in the future if the site became crap or became good)

And what if you came across a quality page that wasn't in your search engine's database and could add it yourself with just a click of a button?

And what if you could decide what keywords should be attached to pages?

What if StumbleUpon became a search engine?

It's not as far fetched as it might seem. At some point in the future, there will be enough SU members rating pages they come across and adding sites that they like to the database, that SU could actually make the jump from a simple amusement of random pages based on your interests, to a real search engine dishing out quality results based on rankings given by their userbase.

They could succeed where other search engines have failed.

I, for one, would love to see what would happen if SU did make the jump. It might be just the thing to replace Google as the top dog of search engines.

Universal carding, stupid store policies, and raising responsible kids

2006-05-12T07:26:00.000-04:00

I am not against universal carding, but where it isn't law, I have a problem with isolated stores making it a policy of carding people that are obviously old enough to purchase a given product and this policy isn't universally enforced by all employees at all times and isn't posted in any visible place for customers to see.

As an example I will use an incident that occured about a year or 2 ago:

My husband usually picks me up a pack of cigarettes on his way home from work because he can get them cheaper near his job than I can get them here. One night he had some car trouble and he called me at about midnight to say he was going to be a bit late coming home. Then at about 2 am he called again to tell me that he wasn't coming home at all and to go get my own cigarettes. By that hour there was only one place in town still open where I could buy some.

Now I don't drive, so I had to walk a few miles in the freezing cold to get to Wallgreens. The front register was down, so the manager handed me a pack of cigarettes ant told me to go pay for them at the pharmacy counter.

I have purchased my cigarettes at Wallgreens before and have never been carded. I am well over 18 years of age, and well over the age of manditory carding, which in my state is anyone under the age of 27. In fact, I was never carded for a cigarette purchase in my life till that night.

The pharmacist refused to sell me a pack of cigarettes without ID on the grounds that I looked under 40 to him. And he wasn't about to make an exception and wanted me to walk miles back home, get some ID and walk miles back and present it to him. Mind you it was like under 20F that night.

Rather than walking all the way back home and then all the way back, I decided to kill time and wander the aisles and do a bit of shopping. i figured if I killed enough time QuickCheck might be open when I decided to walk back home. And if they were I'd buy cigarettes and a nice hot cup of coffee to warm me up.

Well, It wasn't my night...

When I got to QuickCheck, they should have been open but weren't yet. Somebody decided not to show up for work, and it's their company policy not to open the store unless there are at least 2 employees on the premises. So i couldn't get my cigarettes...or a damn cup of coffee. And it was really cold.

I ended up 'killing time' there too...lol.

By the time I found a place open to buy a pack of cigarettes, it was 7 am and I was around the corner from my house.

Now some of you may say I wouldn't have gone through any of this if I didn't smoke, and I am not going to argue with you about that, and it's not the real point here. And you might even say I should have had ID on me any way even if I didn't think I was going to need it, but that isn't the point either.

The point is, if it is Walgreens policy to card anybody under 40,which differs from state law, it should have been enforced at all times...and some sort of sign somewhere stating that. If that had been the case, I would have been fully aware of their rules ages ago, and definately before I left home and would have brought my ID with me...or not bothered to leave my house till the store around the corner was open.

So now it looks like Tennesee will have manditory carding for all places that sell beer. They think carding 90 year olds will keep teens from buying beer. but since they aren't going to have manditory carding for places that don't sell beer, I think that teens will either get some adult to buy their beer like they do in NJ, or they will start switching to hard liquor & wine where thye have a better chance of not being carded.

Teens will get booze no matter what you do. If they want it bad enough they will find a way.

Take my dad for instance. He started drinking at a very young age. An age that nobody would have sold him anything...age 11.

So what did he do? He built his own still and made his own hooch. Where there is a will there is a way. You can't stop youth when they have made their minds up to destroy themselves. You have to intervene long before that. And I place that responsibility on parents and how they raise their children.

My own daughter, despite having friends that drank and got high, wasn't one of them that got involved in it...she was the anti-peer pressure of her group. With her around, not only was she not drinking, but she had the effect of slowing down thier self destruction and keeping them out of trouble. At least 2 of her friends quit smoking because of pressure from her. She had the nickname of 'Mom'. Other parents knew how she was and worried less about their kids if they were with her.

My daughter finally did start drinking...at age 19, and I don't see a problem with it since she technically an adult and out of school and doesn't drive. The age 21 law was enacted in order to cut down on teenage accidents as a result of drunk driving...which she can't do...and to keep kids from being drunk in school...which she can't do either.

I think if all parents raised their kids and taught them how to make decisions that were good for them, and taught their kids how to think, that the drinking age would never have been raised from 18 to 21 and manditory carding would be unnecessary.

Why is it countries like France don't have the problems we do in the US with alcohol? In France, kids drink wine with dinner...it's no big deal to them...no thrill to go booze it up. If something isn't 'forbidden fruit' it doesn't appeal to a rebellious teen looking to break the rules.

Take away the 'forbidden fruit' factor and a teen is going to have to really think hard to find something to rebel with. For my daughter, who was taught how to properly think, and to take responsibility for her actions, the 'forbidden fruit' was having a messy room...and wearing the most insane clothing combinations. (red & white polka dotted skirt with green & black striped tights and a flannel shirt and purple wig) OK, so she would have been arrested by the fashion police...but that's better than being arrested by the real police.

Maybe I missed my calling...maybe I should have been writing books on how to raise kids. But the parents that would need most to read them aren't the type that buy books on parenting.

Maybe I should write that book any way and sell it on lulu.com. Call it How to raise an intelligent, responsible child that won't make you want to rip your hair out. If I sell it for $5 a copy in .pdf format, would you buy it? If I get enough 'yes' responses, I'll write it. I really will.