Continuing in the series (1, 2, 3) of inexplicable marketing images, here we have a variation: an inexplicable marketing lifeform.  This is the official mascot for the 2010 IAAF World Junior Track & Field Championships here in Moncton.  You can read all about it here.

It has no name yet; there is a city-wide contest to decide that.  I’m hoping that when it is eventually named, the moniker will give me a hint as to what it’s supposed to BE.

Let’s consider the elements.  The basic body shape appears to be a carrot.  Then there are the bunny ears, a quite shocking sky-blue hue.  Next, the face, which features Bonhomme Carnaval’s eyes and nose, cheeks that look very chipmunky, a gaping maw reminiscent of the Joker from the Batman comics (not the movies), and a suspiciously lascivious tongue peeking out (but no teeth!)  And there’s an odd strap-like thing that appears to be hold the face to the head.  The appendages appear to be whale flukes, and are the same shade as the ears – it’s odd to see such an abrupt change of color in an animal’s coat, so I guess there is clothing implied.

There is a tonne of great stuff going on in Moncton these days.  We have a mayor who is committed to the promotion of arts, culture and heritage.  We have so far avoided the international economic turmoil.  We stand a good chance of being named the world’s most intelligent community in New York this week.  We have all kinds of regional, national, and international events on the horizon.  And yet the best we can come up with to greet the world’s athletes next year is this mutant vegetable-animal cloths-wearing sexual deviant.

Sheesh.

* Peeved Consumer.

Yesterday we gave our daughter a new iPod Shuffle.  It was partly to replace the generic MP3 player she used to have that died, and partly to celebrate (another) excellent report card.

So we already had a bunch of MP3s that I had purchased over the past couple of years (yes – purchased).  I blithely thought I could just transfer all the High School Musical, Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana, and Lenny Kravitz(!) songs from my hard drive onto her new Shuffle.  So I did, then let the four hour charging period elapse.  When we took it off the charging station, presto!  Nothing!

My first thought was that our ancient home laptop (it only has ONE  USB port!) was incapable of delivering the charge to the Shuffle, and that’s why it wouldn’t play.  It never ocurred to me that there was no music there to play, because I could see the files that I had transferred sitting on the thing in Explorer.  So I brought it to work today to try my “real” laptop (SIX USB ports) on the job.  Nope – after four hours, the little “I’m not ready” indicator light was still blinking.

So I broke down and RTFM.  RTFM is short for “Read the f***ing manual,” which is what tech support people all over the world want to yell at DFUs every day.  DFU is “DumbF*** User,” the type of people who often have I.D. ten T problems.  Anyway, page 1 was “Download and Install iTunes.”  And one of the final steps was to “Click Eject before disconnecting” – the Eject button is in the iTunes interface.  I didn’t really want iTunes, since I buy my music elsewhere, had tried iTunes before and didn’t like it, and didn’t think you should need special software just to load files onto a peripheral device.  But whatever – it was for my daughter.

So I dutifully downloaded.  During installation, it made me reboot my machine, which I always hate, but again, whatever.  Upon startup, the wizard asked me if I wanted to automatically import any music file it found the the My Music folder on my machine.  I said sure, because I knew that the only files in the My Music folder were the ones I had just put there for my daughter.  Then I noticed it was actually grabbing EVERY MP3, WAV and other sound file anywhere on my drive.  This includes every Beatles song, a whole bunch of system alerts, a few dozen podcasts, the audio to some of my hour-long marketing lectures, etc.  So I had to spend the next 20 minutes deleting (one by one) every file that wouldn’t be to her liking.

Finally I was ready to push the music onto the device, and the manual helpfully said to click the “Autofill” button, and even had a simple drawing showing me where in the iTunes interface I could find it.  Except it wasn’t there.  Nor was it an option in any of the menus (basic interface design rule:  EVERYTHING should be available through a menu).  I finally found the right screen and the Autofill button, and 2 minutes later was listening to music.

I’m not anti-Mac or anti-Apple by any stretch – the first 4 years of my professional career were spent on Macs, and they were great.  But now I see how this whole zeitgeist that Apple has about simplicity can be annoying.  Sure, the close integration between the player, the download tool, and the store filled with available music is elegant and rich, but what if I don’t want/need one or more of the components?  They each shouldn’t REQUIRE the others to be there.  It’s like saying if I want to drive my Audi, I need to use Audi gasoline and drive on Audi streets.  I predict this model will not last.

…with the sound of mooing.  This is a full page magazine ad that ran last year in People.  (I was in my doctor’s waiting room, OK?)

What the heck is this?  The “Land of Lean Beef”?!?!?!     Who’s the agency genius that came up with that idea?  And then someone said, “Yeah!  We can build a beautiful landscape out of cooked meat!  Ooh ooh wait - we could make mountains!  With a broccoli forest surrounding them!  And for the snowy peaks we can use some vague whitish sauce reminiscent of semen!”

I LOVE beef.  About the only way you could make it unappealing to me would be to overcook it, make it look really stringy, surround it with the world’s most disliked vegetable, and masturbate on top of it.

Who do you suppose at the Beef Marketing Board gave final approval to this?   I mean, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to recognize an unattractive (almost nauseating) image when you see one.  What was it that over-rode common sense?  Was the aforementioned Stephen Hawking at the ad agency cooing in the beef executive’s ear, “mountains are manly and rugged and strong –  just like what our target demographic of 30 – 49 year old males want  to be.  And since the readership of People is mostly female, and they do most of the food shopping, and they want their husbands to be big and strong, too, it’s a no-brainer!  Cows will be getting slaughtered at a frantic pace!”

From the other end of the quality spectrum, my favourite  bit of meat marketing is from a steakhouse billboard campaign I saw a few years ago.  I can’t remember the brand now, but their slogan was, “There’s plenty of room for all God’s creatures… right next to the mashed potatoes.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate the telephone.  However, I actually have a cell phone anyway, for emergencies and the like.  As my stated goal is to never actually use the thing, I believe I have the cheapest plan in the galaxy – $10 per month.  That only gets me about 20 minutes of talk time, but I use it so rarely that in the 15 months I’ve owned it, I’ve banked over 7 months worth of minutes.

Anyway, only a very few people know the number to this little phone: my wife, our babysitter, and a few neighbourhood friends who in the past we have had to co-ordinate arriving somewhere with.  And it’s not listed anywhere that I know of.  I’ve never entered it as contact info anywhere.  It rings (or at least used to ring) so infrequently that I have at times not recognized my own ring tone.  It’s only when everyone’s looking at me with a “Why aren’t you answering your phone?” expression that I realize it’s mine.

But suddenly all that has changed.  In the last couple of weeks, I’ve received about 20 calls on my cell phone.  One, I answered even though I didn’t recognize the number, because it came from my area code — it was a wrong number.  But all the others are from area codes I don’t even recognize like 310, 510 and 909 (all California).  I’ve answered 3 or 4 of them out of curiosity, and as you’ve already guessed, they are all phone spam.  Recorded messages that I don’t listen to long enough to even learn what they want from me.

So I am intrigued as to why it took the spammers so long to find my number.  If there is some computer somewhere trying every possible phone number and flagging the ones that don’t answer with ”this line is not in service,” or a fax or modem signal, and it was  just a matter of churning though all the possibilities?  Let’s do some math: there are about 375 area codes in North America, and let’s say that that the average one uses about half of its available exchanges.  So there are 500 × 375 = 187,500 possible 4-digit extensions.  So we have 187,500 × 10,000 = 1,875,000,000 possible phone numbers on the continent. 

If I set up 10 PCs calling one of these possible numbers each every 10 seconds, it would take me 59½ years to try every one.  If I used 100 computers, 6 years.  1000 computers = 7 months.  Is that what happened?  Is there a phone-spam funded server farm somewhere testing possible phone numbers all the time?

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I accidentally clicked on a banner ad today and was taken to one of those ubiquitous “Find out if you’re smarter that George Bush” IQ test sites.  They work by taking you through the typical IQ-test-type questions, then asking for your phone number and saying they’ll text the results to you.  Of course, the fine print mentions that they’ll also charge you $3.99 on your phone bill, but whatever.  Some people buy  ring tones – whatever floats your boat.

Anyway, when I hit the Back button to return to the page I had accidentally left, I got this message.  I thought it ironic that the people hosting an IQ test site would have so many errors and inconsistencies crammed into so few words.  (BTW, the average IQ is, BY DEFINITION, 100.)

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If you had to guess, what would you say this logo represents?

If you use your imagination, it could be a running human figure, or maybe a star.  And it has three elements, all wavy, which I suppose denotes motion.  They could represent letters: U or V, C, and A or lower-case N.  And the colors are surely significant: blue could mean water; green could be nature or agriculture or “go”; and red might be fire or anger or love or warning or “stop.”

So maybe it’s the University of North Carolina’s steam research center’s jogging club logo.  The fire and water combine to make steam, and it’s a green form of energy!

Nope.  It’s the logo of my home town, Moncton.  It goes with the city’s tagline, “Our Tide is Rising.”  Don’t ask me.

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Apparently, PETA wanted to put this ad in the Super Bowl, but it was deemed too raunchy.

Um, PETA?  Yeah, I’m talking to you.  You know who watches the Super Bowl, right?  They’ll love the ladies, but you’d have to pry the BBQ ribs from their cold dead hands.

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Once again, I present you with an image that defies comprehension.

I’m fairly certain it’s supposed to be some sort of animal.  Beyond that, I’m going on pure speculation.  I first thought “rabbit,” but the tail is wrong.  Then “dinosaur with mouth open facing backwards,” but that doesn’t explain the pointy thing sticking out of its belly.

Let’s try seeing it in context.  It’s part of the logo for MacDonald Auto Source.  So perhaps it represents and animal that is fast like a cheetah or reliable like an elephant.  No, neither of those work.  After having given it serious thought (seriously), I think it is a kangaroo.  The tail and rear legs are right, and the two things extending to the left from its head could be very large ears.  The three protuberances on the right might be, from the top, a long, narrow face/snout; two front legs; and a pouch either gaping open or with a pointy joey’s head sticking out.  Let’s go with that theory.

Now the trouble is to try and explain why an automobile dealership would want to associate itself with a mammal that is not exactly the model of smooth, elegant transportation.  “We hop to your service.”?

I think I might make a habit of ridiculing strange or stupid logos.  It doesn’t take much effort, and it guarantees me a steady stream of W titles.

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No time for a real post today – slammed at work.  But I saw a TV ad last night that made me wonder: Electrasol (the dishwasher detergent) is changing its name to “Finish.”  So if you go to http://www.electrasol.com, you get an Electrasol welcome screen.  But once you enter, BAM! – you’re in “Finish” land.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no big proponent of the importance of “branding,” but why the heck would you take a name with decades of equity and ditch it?  Any ideas?

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Everyone look at the image to the right and take a guess as to what it is.   Medical instrument?  Medieval torture device?  Map of the first few metres of the yellow brick road?

No?  Well maybe seeing it in context would help: click here.

Still not sure?  By now, some New Brunswickers may have figured it out, but for the rest of you, I’ll end the suspense: it’s a fiddlehead.

Fiddleheads are very young ferns that are just starting to unroll.  They are considered a culinary delicacy here in New Brunswick*, and people gleefully tromp out into boggy forests every spring to pick them.  They are steamed or fried or sometimes (shudder) boiled, and served with butter and lemon.   You can read more about them, and see pictures of what they ACTUALLY look like, here.

They are being used as part of a NB Tourism plan to designate certain scenic drives around the province.  To me, this makes about as much sense as writing our highway exit signs in Farsi.  I can hear the conversation now:

Texan tourist to tourism employee:  “Where would ah go to git a look at that there Bay o Fundy ah hear so much about?

Tourism employee, brightly:  “Just follow the fiddlehead signs, sir!”

TT:  “The WHAT?”

TE: “The fiddlehead signs.  The signs with the fiddleheads on them!”

TT: “What the goldarn heck is a fiddlehead?”

TE:  “It’s a young fern, sir.  We eat them.  They look like the ends of violins, (sheepishly) …kind of.”

TT:  “Now yer jist pullin mah leg.”

TE: “No, honest!”

TT: ”OK, Ah’ll jist look for the sign with the plant that looks like the end of a violin, then.”

TE: “Well, actually, sir, the signs don’t really look like that.  They look like a medieval torture device.”

Hilarity ensues.

Even people who live here are confused.  I don’t know how we expect tourists to figure it out.

* Of course, we also eat seaweed, so…

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