fanboygeeks

McCain Rustic Oven Chips "buy" an award.

"Chips so good they've won an award".

That's not *strictly* accurate...

1.  McCain entered their product into the astroturf "Voted Product of the Year" award.  A new category which hadn't existed in previous years, "Home Cooking", was created specially for them.

2.  When Rustic Oven Chips were shortlisted (78% of all products entered were shortlisted in 2006), they were sent a bill for £4,750.

3.  Taylor Nelson Sofres, a market research company who represent the majority of the previous award-winners, conducted a survey with over 12,000 consumers (of which only 60% responded) asking them which of this limited, pre-selected, paid-for-entry shortlist they preferred.  Oh, and there was no need for the people surveyed to have even tasted McCain Rustic Oven Chips to vote for them, they could be judged simply from the accompanying blurb and glossy photo in the voting brochure.

4.  On winning the category they had between a 1 in 2, or a 1 in 6 chance of winning, McCain were sent another bill for £12,500.  Pow, for the next 12 months they can now boast to anyone who will listen about the "Voted Product of the Year" award they bought.

Can I stress, the award wasn't for "best taste" or anything worthwhile - it was for "Best Innovation in Home Cooking".  Oven chips.  Innovation (maybe in 1957)?  Home Cooking ('cause they're so healthy)?

Does this award have any value apart from cynically hoodwinking the public?

FanboyGeek
(précised from a previous post)

So this is what Guy Ritchie has been up to...

McCain's "Evil" Advertising

Some advertising is inaccurate and some advertising is broken.  Some advertising, though, goes beyond wrong and is plain evil.  By evil, what I mean is that it is misleading in a deliberate, knowing and deeply cynical way.

McCain are currently advertising their "Rustic Oven Chips" with the slogan "Eat your greens".  What the slogan is referring to is the four FSA green lights that the product has on its packaging.  What the clear implication is, though, is that oven chips are "greens".

Let's be clear.  It does not matter if McCain have not added the usual fat, sugar and salt to their "premium" convenience food.  They're still just potatoes.  They're not one of your "five-a-day".  They're pure starch.  They're not by any stretch of the imagination "greens".

Let's also be honest here, McCain oven chips are not served in my household, or any household where parents care about their children's nutrition - or are educated enough to know about nutrition.

McCain and their advertising agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay know exactly what they're implying and they should be utterly ashamed.

If the Advertising Standards Agency don't rebuke McCain for this (as they did with Walkers Crisps) they too should be ashamed.

Stu

Page 3 Beer - Not as novel as you may think...

Marketing Week has revealed that The Sun newspaper is planning to dip its toe in the water of the alcohol drinks business with the launch of two beers - a real ale with "The Sun" brand name, and a lager with the "Page 3" brand name.

Scottish readers won't find this as strange as other reader may, though.  I remember the Tennant's Lager Lovelies from my youth.  For a young Scot's lad, finding an empty can of Tennant's was the pre-pubescent equivalent of finding a dirty mag under a bush.

The idea of printing images of scantily-clad women on beer cans came about as a clever advertising ploy in 1959, with images of Scotland being printed on the can to re-enforce the brand's heritage.  Five years and 80 pictures later, the idea was wearing thin and so a series of "Housewives' Choice" cans were produced featuring attractive women and beer-related recipes.  One of the women, Ann, became a "Forces pin up" and demand led to Ann having a series of her own.  The novelty then developed and the "Lager Lovelies" followed.

The early 1990's saw the demise of the Tennant's Lager Lovely, but it looks like they may be returning...

Stu

Thanks to Neil Lawrence's website for the history and images.

Phishy BT email

I received this email today.

It purports to be from BT offering me a deal on a wireless Home Hub and a rebate cheque - but it has all of the hallmarks of a phishing email.

• The email is not personalised to me

• Links in the email lead me to a web page asking me for lots of personal information, yet it acknowledges me as an existing customer (so they'd surely have this information?)

• Links in the email are not to BT's main web site

However, after much digging in the email's Raw Source and just a gut feeling, I think the email is real.

1. If the email is a phishing email, it's worryingly good and likely effective.

2. If the email is genuine, then someone at BT's marketing department should be fired for sending out this incompetent and reckless email.

I searched for "phishing" on BT's web site to find out who to forward the email to for verification - there were no results.  Are BT ignorant of this problem?  Even my useless bank have such a service.

I've emailed a general enquiry to BT.  I'll let you know the result.

Stu

Only?!?!?

My wife and I mortgaged the house the other week so we could afford to go to the local Vue cinema.  I can't believe that anyone in the film industry thinks that a customer being gouged more than a tenner to see a film isn't going to feel resentful and motivated just to buy a camcorded DVD off a bloke on the high street or just download movies from a Bit-Torrent site.  Seriously, every time I go to the cinema I feel like I've been mugged.

To add insult to injury, though, I'm then expected to queue for 10 minutes at the food counter because there's only two bored and un-motivated McWorkers serving, and they want to charge me "ONLY £8.08" for two bottles of water and a large popcorn.  ONLY?!  ONLY!?  Some water (that you get out a tap for free) and a handful of corn kernels that have been popped.

First of all, this is absolutely the biggest rip-off in the history of food retailing.  There must be a crime being committed here.

Secondly, how on earth did they come up with the bizarre price of £8.08?  Is it because the numbers are bisymmetrical?  Not that £7.99 would be more of a bargain, but it at least would have had the illusion of being about seven pounds and thus cheaper!

Stu ;-)

ps  We didn't buy the "Sharer Combo".  We bring our own water...

Broken - in fact ground to a halt

Ah, the great engineers of the North of England, how I *loved* to read about them in my Arthur Mee Children's Enclopedia.  Manchester in particular seemed to be the most exciting city in the world, being home to great inventors such as:

• Richard Arkwright - builder of steam powered mills
• Francis Egerton - designer of the great Bridgewater Canal
• Sir Frederick Henry Royce - inventor of the Rolls Royce car
• Daniel Adamson - designer of the Manchester Ship Canal
• Thomas Kilburn - designer of the first Baby Computer
• and my absolute child hero, George Stephenson, builder of Locomotion No 1

So, they must be swelling with pride in their graves at this idiotic piece of design for Public Transport for Greater Manchester, created by one of the children of the wondrous North of England Industrial Revolution inheritance.  It takes a special kind of ineptitude to create a mechanism that cannot possibly work out of only three working parts.  Not a child who played with Mecanno then...

The irony is, we've just delivered a programme to the DFES aimed at encouraging kids to do STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) at school.

Truly, I despair.

Stu ;-)
Thanks B3TA

HD-DVD v Blu-ray: It's probably all over...

Toshiba have purchased a 30-second $2.7 million Superbowl advertising slot in a last ditch effort to support the flailing HD-DVD format - having obviously noticed that *no-one* is buying their decks or discs.

I reckon that the very act of doing this magnifies their desperation.

In Peter Chippendale's excellent book "Dished: The Rise and Fall of BSB", he reported that BSB's CEO Anthony Simmonds-Gooding said that on the brink of bankruptcy (prior to the merger with Sky) they had spent so much money marketing the enterprise it would have been cheaper to have just given the Squarials away (and thus built up a large and appreciative audience).

If Toshiba are at the stage of desperately throwing money about, have they not considered building up a user-base by giving away their players for free, like Xerox do with printers?  I'd have a free one thanks!  The software business realised years ago how to establish a market by initially giving their product away (eg RealPlayer and Macromedia Flash).  That $2.7 million could have been used to give away 21,428 $126 Tosh decks to anyone who bought an HD-DVD film from Amazon/HMV/Walmart/whoever - all who would have done the marketing of the great giveaway offer at no cost to Toshiba.

I thought that one of the biggest jaw-drop moments of the 15 Jan Macworld was a comment by Jim Gianopulos, Chairman & CEO of 20th Century Fox.  Watch this clip and not only hear Jim declare Blu-ray the winner, listen to the non-partizan audience laugh in mocking agreement.  Very telling.

Stu ;-)

ps  Yes Blu-ray is the better technology, but so was Betamax...

Hasbro's Scrabulous idiocy

So Hasbro is using it's big-gun lawyers to pull Scrabulous off Facebook.

Nice move Hasbro. Scrabble, a dying, minority boardgame played by old people has been given an amazing and new lease of life on the hottest social network site out there, played by around 600,000 people (and the App subscribed to by just short of 2.4 million people).  So shutting it down would be a good move then?!

Didn't Hasbro think of buying the property and re-naming it Online Scrabble?  Or, doing some kind of licencing deal?  It would have been worth just giving them the license for free.  Didn't they see the marketing opportunities, keeping the game alive.  At the very least Scrabulous users could have been offering discounts off the boardgame?

As one Scrabulous fan wrote on the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook page "I didn't have any Scrabble sets when I started playing Scrabulous a few months ago. I got hooked and have since bought two sets."

Scrabulous has surely been the most innovative of marketing for a board game ever, certainly I know of no better example of using the concept of the Social Object to market a product.  This kind of marketing is phenomenal - it cost Hasbro nothing and was driven by fans who have no other motivation other than passion for the game. No-one is making a bean out of Scrabulous (it's a free game) except Hasbro who are selling more more Scrabble board games as a result of Scrabulous introducing the game to a new online generation.

Hasbro are grade "A" idiots, compounded by the fact that, with their marketing millions, they really should have thought of it first.

Stu

"Great" London Underground adverts

I'm bemused by a "Tube Card" advert currently decorating London Underground trains.

The ad proclaims that "a new Underground movement is starting under the streets of London right now. One that will challenge the established thinking of glib headlines or huge phone numbers."

At least that what is says if you stand six inches away from it (on a moving train?!) and have perfect vision.

The ad, suggesting that the reader could become the Next Great Underground Writer is illustrated by two postage-stamp-sized pictures of - wait a minute until I get out my binoculars, no that doesn't work because the train's shaking too much, I'll go up close and get out my magnifying glass, oh it's William S. Burroughs ("Underground" - geddit?!) and, nope I can't read that other guy's name at all, but he looks a bit like Andy Garcia.

First of all, to compare any kind of advertising copy to the literary works of the opiate-addicted beat writer William S. Burroughs is both both bizarre and extraordinarily arrogant.

Secondly, re the mocking of "glib headlines and huge phone number" - you know something guys, at least I can read those headlines and phone numbers.  I'm not saying they're great adverts, but glass houses and all that.

Yes, I get that making Tube Cards is probably considered the job of least stature in ad agencies, which explains why they're generally uninspired and full of typos (my wife's an editor, don't even ask me about her apostrophe adventures with a red marker pen).  However this ad by CBS Outdoor with its big white spaces and miniscule text is the clearest example I've ever seen of an advertiser not understanding the medium.  In the case of a Tube Card, you've got to be able to read it from the seat opposite - a good six to eight feet away.

As opposed to inspiring me, the ad reminded me of those deliberately bad Advertising Standards Authority posters which ended with the caption "We're here to make advertising better, not to make better advertising.  Sorry."

Frankly, it's just a pretentious advert made by an agency who think they're above writing Tube Cards.

Stu ;-)