Wiping Out Teen Smoking

Smoking isn’t cool.  Everyone knows that it’s bad for your health, makes you smell nasty, turns your teeth and fingers yellow, and discourages people from kissing you.  It also leaves a big mess wherever smokers congregate, and is increasingly inconvenient because of restrictions on where you may smoke.  It can also lead to addiction, which makes being unable to have a cigarette (say on a long air trip) very uncomfortable.  Even teens know all this.

So why, then, is teen smoking on the rise, even at a time when fewer adults than ever use tobacco?  Some people are blaming the tobacco companies – saying that by making flavoured cigarettes, and selling them in smaller (more affordable) quantities, they are marketing directly at teens.  These people want big tobacco to stop these practices, as well as cease all forms of marketing.  Here in New Brunswick, starting in 2009, stores that sell smokables are going to have to hide them from view.  (They already do this next door in Nova Scotia and PEI.)  And of course it’s illegal to sell smokes to a minor.

This is, of course, ridiculous.  No-one advertises marijuana or displays it in a store front and not only is it illegal to sell it to teens; it’s just plain illegal.  Yet I haven’t noticed a marked decline in pot usage despite these measures.  Making cigarettes harder to get is not going to reduce teen smoking, because as I said at the top, smoking isn’t cool.

But smokers are.

That’s why they smoke.  They are the types of people who do romantic, dangerous, edgy, prohibited, difficult things.  These are kids that skateboard down stair rails or do back flips off cliffs into the water or defy the teacher and get sent to the principal.  They are what every teen wants to be: cool.  So this predisposition to “coolness” in their personality makes them smoke, and by association, smoking itself becomes cool.   Except it’s not.  The proof of that is seen in the adult population, where willfully doing a stupid and expensive thing is NOT seen as cool, and as a result very few “cool” adults smoke.  (Think about the crowd of folks you see clustered around the butt-catcher on their coffee break when it’s -20º out — any of them look like Brad Pitt?  Didn’t think so.)

So instead of making smoking more difficult (and therefore, more desirable) for teens, let’s make smoking more available to them.  So if you’re a teen, you can have unprotected sex with your boyfriend, ski way too fast down a hill, go wakeboarding at 50 knots, do BASE jumping, or smoke a cigarette.  They’re all dangerous, they all give you a thrill, and they’re all discouraged but not (in my new model) prohibited by society.

The only thing different is that smoking is addictive and leads to long term health problems.  So let’s remove that part.  Manufacture cigarettes that don’t have any of the bad stuff in them, but look and taste just like real smokes.  And put ‘em next to the Doritos at the convenience store.   And price them way lower than “adult” smokes, so only those people who are already addicted to nicotine would pay top dollar for the harmful ones.

You can drop my Nobel Prize off at the house.

68

Weekend, Long

No post tomorrow because I’m taking the day off work.  It’s another professional day at school, so we’ll all be home.  I will also be putting the finishing touches on a presentation that I have to give at the Moncton Cultural Forum on Saturday morning.  I will be using PowerPoint.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with my views on PowerPoint, they can be read here.

Here is a screenshot of the “Slide Sorter” view of the PowerPoint deck that was prepared for me to use:

Yes, that is what it looks like.  Seventeen pages of text so thick you can’t even make it out.  I have 15 minutes to present.  I tried reading one of the pages aloud, and it took me 2½ minutes.  Do the math. 

Here is the slide sorter view of the slides that I created to use instead:

Granted, my version will require that I actually speak, instead of just letting the audience read the slides, but, hey – I figure that’s my value-add.

46

Where’s My $#!*ing Paper?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no cheerleading squad when it comes to the Moncton daily Times&Transcript.  I have chastised them in the past for spelling errors, not knowing the definition of words, even mistakes in front-page headlines.  So it’s perhaps ironic that today’s post is about how hard it seems for me to get my hands on a copy of the darn thing.

The home delivery service was fairly good up until a few months ago.  The paper was always in the hooks provided for that purpose under our mailbox, except in rain or snow, when it was put inside the mailbox.  Very nice.  Sure, the occasional mornings when I left for work at 7:00, it wasn’t there yet (even though it’s supposed to be), but I can cut them some slack there.  Then, an apparently catastrophic event in the T&T  world occurred:  our paper-carrier quit.

We then descended into a Hades of random delivery times (almost always after I left for work at 8:00); random delivery locations (side door, front door, end of driveway, front lawn), and random content (sections missing, two copies of sections, sometimes two entire papers).

Well, stoic and embattled media consumers that we are, we soldiered on.  Then, two weeks ago, the unthinkable happened.  Our Friday paper arrived without the TV Times section.  Now, for the most part, the TV schedules are useless, especially when we have the cable feed which offers far more accurate and deeper information about what’s on.  HOWEVER, this section also contains what for me is about 75% of the reason I even subscribe to the rag: the NY Times  Sunday Crossword.

After my screams of horror had subsided, I calmly called the T&T delivery department and was told by their IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that there would be a three minute wait for a live person, but I could use the automated service.  So I did, and was assured by the nice computer-voice lady (complete with background sound effects of a keyboard being typed – very thorough, I thought) that a new (complete) paper was on its way.  This was 9:00 or so in the morning.  By 1:30, it hadn’t arrived, so I called again and used the trick that pays off for me about 50% of the time: after being told about the 3 minute wait, I hit zero about 5 times, and was rewarded with a human answer after one ring.  The lady was skeptical that I had placed a re-order over 4 hours ago, but checked the system and verified that I was not, in fact, a psychopath who got his kicks by lying to customer service people.  So she promised that the TV Times would be sent right over.  It never was.

Fast forward to this past Friday.  The paper was actually there in the hooks at 8:00, but when I got to work I found that the TV Times was missing AGAIN.  (Conspiracy?)  So I called, got the “3-minute wait” message, used my zeros trick again, and spoke to a live person who agreed to send me a new paper.  But I kept her on the phone for a bit to tell her about my last weekend’s experience and the general crappy service our neighbourhood has been getting.  She told me that all that would be over now, since they had finally assigned a regular carrier to our route. Yay!  But she also told me that remedial deliveries are NEVER made after noon, so the lady I called at 1:30 the week before was incorrect in promising me a new paper.

So then I asked her why the IVR always says there’s a 3 minute wait, when she was obviously sitting right there ready to take my call.  She didn’t have an opinion on that, saying she had never heard what the IVR says to callers.  What’s up with that?!?  If I ran a call centre, the FIRST THING I’d do is get newly recruited agents to call the number that they will be answering, and listen to what a real caller will be hearing before they speak to an agent.

So to sum up:  the T&T  lied to me about the post-noon remedial deliveries; and the T&T  lies to EVERYBODY who calls their delivery service number (about there being a 3-minute wait) to push them into the automated system.

ASIDE: For those of you who wonder how I made it through that weekend without my Crossword, that was our trip to St Andrews, so I had distractions to keep my mind off my grief.

28

Where’s My Daughter’s O Canada?

My daughter goes to a great school.  One of the things that makes it great is the respect that permeates its halls: respect for teachers, respect for students, respect for neighbours and the community in general, respect for past and present members of our armed forces, respect for police officers and firefighters, and respect for our nation.  The latter is demonstrated each day by the playing of O Canada  every morning over the school’s PA system, and the fact that EVERYONE, whether they are in a classroom or an office or a hallway; whether they are a student, teacher or parent; stops and stands still during the duration of the song.

Except my daughter’s grade 2 class.

You see, due to expanding student enrollment, the school had to add what we used to call a “portable” classroom — although this one looks pretty permanent.  And that’s my daughter’s classroom.  This addition was one of a series of construction projects that happened over the summer and are still happening.  And to quote Rodney Dangerfield, it seems that this classroom, “can’t get no respect.”  So they don’t yet (a month into the school year) have proper furniture, for example.  Or a connection to the school PA system to hear important announcements or the national anthem.  And, ironically, the room that would have been theirs, but was scheduled to be converted into administrative offices, still sits empty and untouched.

I fully understand that when there are multiple projects being worked on by a finite set of tradespeople, not everything can happen at once.  But wouldn’t you think that the students  would come first?  I have a theory for why this particular class is being de-prioritized:  it has consistently the strongest support network of parent volunteers of any class in the school.  It was true when most of the same kids were together two years ago in kindergarten, and it was true last year in grade one.  I think that the school administration is (likely subconsciously) figuring that that particular class can withstand hardship better than other groups in the school, so they get bumped down the to-do list.

That kind of makes sense on the surface, and is a prevalent theme throughout society – the silent get little attention, while the “squeaky wheels” get greased.  But it’s BAD MARKETING.  You should treat your BEST customers (or parents or students) best.  Then they become even more rabid fans and spread the joy and the message and infect even more people with zeal and excitement.

Think about it – if only complainers and whiners get what they want, soon everyone will learn to complain and whine.  But if the promoters and the cheerers and the helpers and the fans get all the best, soon (almost) all the people will be on the bandwagon.

WTF?

I get quite a bit of spam trying to be a comment to one of my blog posts.  This problem is not unique to me – all bloggers have the same trouble, and most blogging software applications have filters built in to catch it.  This morning, though, this slipped through:

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It’s almost poetic in how it just barely fails to make sense.  I can’t figure out why any person (or machine) would be propogating it.  If you go to that URL, it’s a Romanian porn site, so I guess the idea is to just get the link out there and disguise it in a bunch of prose so it passes through spam filters.  But really, don’t people who want porn know where to go for it?  Why hide the facts about what you’re promoting?  If someone can explain this to me, I’d appreciate it.

Got Some Time to Kill?

I really hate waiting.

I read somewhere recently that people who are poor at time management are that way in part because they don’t want to show up early for things and then have to wait, so they try to shave everything down to the split second and arrive EXACTLY on time.  Of course, life intervenes and they end up late.  So the advice of this article was to arrange your life to be early for everything.  Then, if something happens to delay you, you will still be on time.  If no delays occur, you will be early and have to wait a bit, but you should EMBRACE that time.  You should cherish the free time that has been granted you and savour it in a zen-like state.

The part about planning to be early is great advice, but cherishing wasted time is hogwash.  As I wrote about here, most of us in North America grew up in a culture where sitting idle is nearly a sin.  Whether that’s good or bad, it’s my reality, and I really really don’t like someone else’s incompetence or thoughtlessness or disregard for the value of my time to cost me any of it. 

Two examples of this occurred recently: I was buying furniture on the weekend and my credit card was declined.  (Mastercard noticed that I had made a large furniture purchase the previous weekend, too, and had put one of those cautionary holds on my account.  I was able to get it unlocked in one call.)  When I called to clear it up, the IVR system played me some kind of ad for some new service before it would let me proceed.  Now, someone calling the number on the back of their card is unlikely to be looking for anything other than rapid assistance – why waste their time with an interruption marketing message?  Then, I had to enter my card number on the phone’s touch pad.  Of course, the first thing the human I eventually spoke with asked me was my card number.  Why bother with the touch pad entry?

The other was the first furniture purchase.  They were throwing in a coffee table for free.  (Great!)  Then, because this caused such a kaffufle with their payment processing system, it took about 30 minutes for them to take my money.  Can’t you shield the customer from this sort of systemic inefficiency?  Run my card, get my signature, then figure out how to put it into the computer after I’m gone.

What sparked this rant was a post at Seth’s blog. It’s really bad marketing to value your customers’ time less than your own.

Selling Out

Over at Web 2.0h…really? today, I saw a post about a new service called Salesconx. It is an online marketplace for personal introductions. People buy and sell their friendships and business relationships for anywhere from dozens to hundreds of dollars. Let’s say that you know the VP of HR at a large company, and that that person is (inexplicably) willing to let you introduce them to random salespeople. Someone who sells employee management software might be willing to pay you $50 or $100 for you to set up a meeting with that VP.

Let’s leave the morals, ethics and viability of this concept alone for the moment – it is discussed intelligently at Web 2.0h…really. My question is, why not go to the next step? Instead of providing a forum for people to pimp out their friends, why not let people pimp out themselves?

Attention all salespeople: I’ll sit still and listen to you for 30 minutes if you pay me $100! Or you can take advantage of the weekly special and get a full hour for $175!

I’m semi-serious about this. Marketers pay a lot of money to get their message in front of the right people. BMW pays millions to try and influence only a small percentage of the total population that could realistically afford their products. Multi-tactic marketing campaigns, like the ones I’ve run for big-ticket software applications, can easily mount up to dozens or hundreds of dollars per qualified lead. If someone who had the Need, Authority, Timing, and Budget for my product offered to sit with one of my salespeople for an hour, I’d gladly pay $175 for that privilege!

As a matter of fact, marketers regularly do just that at various executive conferences hosted by the likes of Gartner. The way those events work is, Gartner invites various qualified executive decision makers to a conference where they will learn things valuable to their jobs, often actually paying for them to come. Then Gartner sells sponsorship opportunities to vendors who would like to sell stuff to these executives, and as part of the sponsorship, they promise you a certain number of private meetings with the executives. So Gartner is effectively taking the vendors’ money, then using it to bribe the executives (with a free trip to a conference at a luxury resort) to spend time with the vendors. One event Maximizer took part in, back when I worked there, cost $10,000 and got us a dozen or so private meetings. That’s significantly more than $175 per prospect.

How is that different from Salesconx? All Salesconx does it take out the Gartner middleman and replace it with some guy selling his relationships. And my scheme removes the middleman completely! Someone write up a business plan for this and I’ll split the first year revenues with ya’.

The Customer Is Always Right, Part 2

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I dispute that the customer is ALWAYS right, and gave a specific example of designers and advertising agencies having to bow to foolish (i.e. wrong) client input.  To read that scathingly witty and insightful post, click here.  Notice that I cite Razor Creative as an example of a smart design firm.

Then, this weekend, we went camping on Prince Edward Island with our favourite camping pals, the MacDonalds.  Dave, the dad, used to run an advertising firm, and we were talking about how it is incredibly frustrating to have to ruin good design by including “minor adjustments” from the client.  I told him about a video that I had seen recently that parodies this process.  It is very funny because it is so true.  As a matter of fact, I’m not sure it would be as funny for someone that hasn’t been through this — they would think it’s too ridiculous to be real.  But believe me, this happens every day in corporate culture:

And in an interesting coincidence, after I told Dave about the video and promised to send him a link, Rich Gould, one of the principals of the aforementioned Razor Creative, posted that same video on his blog yesterday, so it wasn’t difficult for me to find for Dave this morning. 

As a completely unrelated aside, Dave had the quote of the weekend: we were beset by the worst mosquito infestation I have EVER seen, all weekend; and also got hit with a crazy-heavy monsoon from Saturday afternoon through Sunday morning.  I’m talking bouncin’ off the ground rainfall and bugs so thick I killed 6 with one hand-slap to my leg.  Now, normally, when it’s pouring rain, the bugs go away and hide, but not this weekend.  They were just as bad even when the rain was heaviest.  So picture Dave, with his rain poncho giving him a vaguely biblical appearance, gazing up into the heavens, water dripping off him, bugs circling his head, saying, “can’t we at least have our plagues one at a time?!?!”

This photo was taken during one of the brief respites – when God was taunting us by making us believe it was over.  Notice the orange Off! can on the table.  It was the good stuff – not allowed on kids under 12.  It was supposed to last 5 hours – we were reapplying it about every 20 minutes.

Why Don’t They Take Credit?

The caption of this print ad is “Well, at least he drives a Prius.”  The obvious joke is that we can forgive even murder if a person is working to save the planet.  This is not an official Toyota ad – it’s a project undertaken by the proprietor of a design firm in order to gain notoriety.  And it’s working – I read about it on the Trendhunter Magazine site.  There are two other treatments of the same concept there: a man soliciting a hooker and a housewife making out with the gardener.

I was originally going to write about this ad being an example of what is happening to interruption marketing – it has to get increasingly funny or sexy or loud or shocking in order to get our attention.  But in the course of researching this example of outrageous ideas being used to sell stuff, I encountered a few roadblocks.

Both the creator of the concept (according to Trendhunter), David Krulik, and the photographer, Luke Stettner, are easy to find with Google.  However, I could find no mention of the Prius ads on either of their sites.  If I were the author of a successful viral campaign designed to bolster my reputation and career, I would let people know they had found the genius behind the campaign as soon as they landed on my site.

Anyway, speaking of outrageous ideas in ads, especially in cultures where they are allowed to be a little more off-the-wall with television ads, check out this spot from Thailand:

 

What is Marriott Thinking?

I stayed at the Marriot Springhill Suites in Danbury, CT on Monday night.  I forgot to hand in my key card when I left, and found it in my briefcase today with the rest of my trip detritus.  Take a second to read what was printed about USA Today  on the back of the little envelope that contained the key card.

I didn’t even glance at it when it was handed to me at check-in.  I didn’t read it until I was about to throw it in my recycling just now.  Marriott just stole 75¢ from me!

This is an example of negative option marketing and it is a very bad idea.  It became famously unpopular here in Canada a few years ago when a cable TV company tried to gouge their customers, and the practice is consequently illegal.

It’s especially stupid in this particular instance.  Marriott charged me $209 before taxes for the room.  Was the 0.36% of that revenue that came from this ridiculous newspaper charge really worth pissing me off?  And they don’t even clear the whole amount: part of getting this three-quarters of a buck is administering the small charge in the system, printing these little envelopes (or sacrificing the message that could be placed in the notice’s place), and handling people’s objections when they encounter this foolishness.

Even the wording is dumb.  “I” have NOT requested the delivery.  Maybe if whatever genius came up with this idea had been forced to see it written out truthfully, he or she would have seen the error of their ways:

The newspaper that every halfway decent hotel leaves outside their guests’ rooms each morning is not complimentary at this facility.  It costs 75 cents.  We will be leaving one outside your door even though you didn’t ask for it, and we’ll be adding the cost to your bill.  If you don’t want us to perpetrate this cash-grab, you must take the time to call us and tell us not to steal your money, or go out of your way to check this box, and return this envelope to the front desk.  Oh, and don’t forget that you’ll have to peruse your bill at checkout to be sure that we honoured your request!  Have a nice stay.