Anatomy of an Ad: Fred’s New Job …

If you’ve watched TV lately you’ve noticed that Fred Flintstone has a new job … pitching Geico. Yup, Fred and Wilma have joined the ranks for the gecko, Little Richard, and, of course, the ubiquitous cavemen (soon to be seen in primetime).



Geico has always been a great case study of communicating a consistent message in creative ways to different market segments. In the end, they have a parity problem. Their message is the same as other insurance companies — they save you money. So they rely on clutter-cutting advertising broken out by market segment to get people’s attention. The cavemen focus on the much sought-after young male demographic, the gecko (for some reason) tested really well with women in their 40s, and boomers and up are the target of the Little Richard/Peter Graves-assisted customer testimonials.



The new wave of spots trades the cavemen (they’re busy with their sitcom after all) for the Beverly Hillbillies, The Flintstones, and Cabbage Patch Kids. All are presented in faux E! True Hollywood Story fashion and position Geico as a money-saving solution that rescued them from their wayward lives of being a celebrity has-beens.



Note the segmentation at work here. I would venture to say that between the shows/dolls listed above, one or more of them recalls a nostalgic feeling in you. Flintstones and Hillbillies for boomers and Cabbage Patch Kids for Gen X and Y. A fun character from your childhood being parodied in tabloid fashion? You’ve just gotta watch it.



The point? Segment your communications. And as confusing as it sounds, be the same but different. By that I mean, at the heart of your strategy should be a very simple message (Geico saves you money — painfully simple, almost too simple if that wasn’t something that appealed to everyone!). Then, identify who you want to target and wrap this simple message in a creative vehicle that (a) gets their attention and (b) makes them stick around long enough to internalize your brand’s message. Easy, right …?



P.S. You can view all of the Geico creative here.

How This Changes Things ...

[This is a bit more than the ubiquitous iPhone blog posting. But, yes, I got one and I love it. And, yes, it was a brilliant move to drop the price — only way to grab some healthy market share plus I’m sure research indicated that there was a glacier sized chunk of people that would break free if the price was lower. And, yes, it would have been better if Jobs would have rolled out his $100 gift to the early adopters at the same time he announced the price cut. But enough of that …]

I was in an impromptu meeting the other day with a client talking about their website. It was a casual conversation and no one had laptops out. Someone asked about the website and the one of them got out a smart phone and we all passed it around and were using this manifestation of the internet to guide our discussion.

It suddenly occurred to me. More and more people carry the internet in their pockets in this crazy, fast-paced world of ours. That means more and more the internet is being downsized to someone’s small handheld screen.

How do smart phones change things?

- What does your site look like on a smart phone?
- Do all of the features work? Can you shop? Does the media work right?
- What about your HTML email? Chances are more and more people are viewing them on smart phones as well.
- Back it out a step, how can you more actively market to people with smart phones?

As we always say, it’s better to have some of the questions than all of the answers. And this is just another slice of new media that we’ll have to look at and think of some great questions for how to reach our customers on this new, pocket-sized digital frontier.

The Southwest Business Model

If you don't already know the story of Southwest Airlines, you should. Take a quick minute at the beginning of a post-holiday week for a quick refresher courtesy of a segment from last weekend's CBS Sunday Morning - you can read the text or watch the video here. Basically, it all comes down to a seemingly simple business model projected by the airline's former CEO, Herb Kelleher. He asserts that if you focus on your employees then all of the rest will fall in to place. Because if you take care of your people, then they project their pleasure onto your customers, who in turn have favorable experiences and continue buying, which in turn pleases your stock holders or whoever your business serves. Herb's also responsible for one of my favorite quotes: "We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things!" No bull. Just a remarkable company.

Cutting Through the Clutter

Because believe me, the clutter is coming. Especially if you live in an early battle ground state such as Iowa or New Hamshire (plus the clutters earlier than it has been in past year). I have no intentions of making this a poliical blog but I had to post Bill Richardson's recent "Job Interview" campaign ads because they're a perfect example of defying the convention in a particular market.

Political advertising, despite all of the money thrown at it, its influence, and its lack of regulation, is surprisingly uncreative. Every season Ad Age has a story after story on which agency is taking sides yet pays almost no attention to the fact that despite the involvement of industry's best creative minds, the same head and shoulders, baby-hugging, family-man, chore coat-wearing drivel is produced and takes up (too much) good air space.

Richardson has done one thing that none of the other candidates' advertising has yet - he got my attention.

Advertising 101 - you have to get people's attention so that they'll listen to you and (hopefully) have the desire to take action.

Again, this isn't a Richardson endorsement. It's an endorsement of creativity and telling stories. And it's not just a political message either. Think you're in a buttoned-down industry or space that can't do creative and engaging messaging? Do you or your peers say "we're not Apple or Nike, we're just in the [INSERT YOUR INDUSTRY HERE] business." Actually, you need to totally flip your perspective if that's the case. Be like Bill. If everything else in your industry is business as usual then they are just waiting for you to jump to the head of the pack with a clutter-cutting message.

No Means No

I'll get to a more meaningful post very soon. Apologies for not keeping up. It's been a busy March/April. More on that later. I had to toss these two screen caps I found recently as examples of unintuitive web design and really ... just general online avoidance and trickery.

The first offender was when I was creating yet another online account. I get cranky about account creation. I have SO many. Right now I'll do anything that Google offers so that I can just use my Google account. Anyhow, I got to my email preferences and didn't want their newsletter and it came back at me with the red text below.

Yeah ... I read your offer the first time. Leave me be! No means 'no.' Don't question my choice because it tells me that you think I'm stupid and I can't read. I made a decision. Move on. Now I'll never subscribe.

Second offender - slightly worse in my opinion. I was on a site and confused this particular online merchant committed a two-tier no-no. First, they didn't have a phone number. Call me old-fashioned but I think every site needs a number where you can reach someone if everything goes wrong. Worse yet, I go to fill out the email contact form and after I click 'Submit,' it gives me this little message:

Grrrrr. I'm basically lost in your store and you won't let me ask for directions. This was extremely aggravating. In my personal opinion it never should have made it this far because they should have covered the phone number thing and at the very least had an easy-to-use contact form.

I guess both of these are pretty good reality checks for your next site design. They seem like no-brainers but go back and check your potholes. Can users easily sign up for an account without being guilted into you spamming them? Does this sound like a real sturdy opt-in to you? And, can a user ask for help easily at any point throughout your site and get some form of immediate response? A dedicated phone line or some sort of live chat would be ideal. A contact form that didn't try to get you lost further in the site would do also ...

Again, more on other things very soon.

The Injustice Ends!

In case you haven't already heard, the caveman from the GEICO ads is getting his own pilot on ABC. Is this a surprising development? Not really.

In a time when marketing is content and content turns to marketing, this actually isn't that surprising. Hopefully the clever neanderthal will fare better than CBS's failed attempt to serialize Baby Bob. Poor kid ended up hocking sub sandwiches after that ...

Right Message, Right Audience

Forgive the lack of posting. Just digging out from a winter storm.

Anyhow, if you're a movie lover and you hunkered down last night to watch the Oscars like I did, I'm sure you had a chance to catch Apple's new anticipation-building iPhone ad. This 30-second spot is a perfect example of the laws of context and relevancy of message. On its own it's a cute commercial but fairly unremarkable. If you look at it in the context of the Academy Awards - when everyone's huddled around fetting the legacy of cinema - it sparkles and adds another heart-warming montage to the evening (thankfully short and sweet -- hint, hint Academy).

It's the Big Things Too ...

... that can save you from certain doom. We all know about the week JetBlue's been having so I'm not gonna bother to recap. How do you come back as a business from a nightmare like this? Today JetBlue announced their Customer Bill of Rights. Nothing real exciting on paper but remember the old adage of "it's not what you say, it's how you say it"? Well, what's gonna save JetBlue is how they've said their Customer Bill of Rights.

Go to their website and they've posted it clearly on the homepage (big duh after a bad PR week - you do NOT want to hide your response). BUT what they've posted isn't a document stating the rights. In fact at a cursory glance I can't find any webpage or pdf that lists them in writing. No, this link takes you to a YouTube video nested in the site of JetBlue founder and CEO David Neeleman telling you the Bill of Rights. Not a typical CEO standing at a podium addressing the troops. It's an intimate setting with Neeleman in a open-collared shirt talking about their FUBAR week and his promise (the company's too - but the implication is that he's personally vouching) on how their going to make it better. And the cherry on the sundae - he closes by asking for your business. Well played, JetBlue.

And it didn't stop on the website. Neeleman was all over TV this morning making the rounds. They responded quickly enough to get into the news cycle and may end up changing the story. My prediction? JetBlue is going to come back from this. They're a remarkable business that is working to handle a terrible misstep remarkably.

Speaking of which ... do you have a Customer Bill of Rights? If so, is it on your website? If it's on your website is it buried?

It's the Little Things ...

... that transform good marketing into great marketing. This morning, The Lion in Winter was on and I had to go to the endlessly-useful Internet Movie Database. (BTW - Wasn't this one of the first viral sites that all of your friends told you to bookmark?) Anyhew ... I got into the individual movie page and noticed a dramatically tweaked page layout (the movie poster is on the left hand side now!). As always, it was a little jarring but pretty soon I got the lay of the land. Helping me in this endeavor was the small bar below the top nav shown above. If you can't read it, it simply says 'Questions about our new look? See our Redesign FAQ for answers.'

This link takes you to a comprehensive FAQ that if you take the time to read you can see that this wasn't just a cosmetic redesign. Everything was changed based on research and user feedback and testing. Wow. As if I needed another reason to like this online geek-cylcopedia - now they have to go and run the very model of a user friendly site. And the kicker? The FAQ makes it clear that nothing is permanent yet as they are still testing the redesign. A+ IMDB! (P.S. You'd be surprised how many times you have to remind people to test.)

Throwing the Brand Out with the Bathwater

This week at the Chicago Auto Show, Ford announced that - just months after they retired the model - they would be resurrecting the Taurus/Sable nameplate. This summer when they release new models of the Ford Five Hundred sedan, the Freestyle crossover, and the Mercury Montego, they will be rechristened as the Taurus, Taurus X, and Mercury Sable respectively. I think this is an important step in helping the recovery of this particular Detroit giant. How big of a step it is I'll get into in a bit.

I also had occasion this past week to hear Jack Welch speak before the National Automobile Dealers Association. When first asked what he thought GM and Ford were doing wrong he sighed exhaustively and said "Jesus ..." More impactful, though, was when he took an informal poll of the audience. He started by asserting that he thought Detroit was getting better but they were still in the process of brand recovery so it's still an uphill battle. He then asked the crowd if they thought the current cars were better then peoples' perception of them. A majority of hands went up - mine included.

See these are the issues: perception, brands, story.

The product is on an upturn but they've squandered most of their equity so most of these early-recovery innovations will be spent getting their brands out of the black. So if admitting you have a problem is step #1 and making some immediate course corrections is step #2 the next questions have to be How did this happen and Is what they're doing now enough?

In the case of Ford, I think resurrecting the Taurus is a smart tactic. Who in their right mind thought it would be a great idea to kill the model for middle America - your average apple pie sedan? I think it's safe to say that most people have at least ridden in this classic at one time or another. How many models can you say that about? But I think Ford's using the wrong 'r.' I think they would have been better off reinventing the Taurus rather than slapping the nameplate on a slight redux of the model's less-than-popular successor. It seems everyone - especially Ford - has forgotten the legacy of the Taurus brand.

Before the Cadillac and Nissan design renaissance there was the Taurus. In a sea of boxy, post-seventies aircraft carriers, Ford birthed an automotive design revolution with the original jelly-bean inspired '85 Taurus. It looked like "the car of the future" (this was reinforced with great product placement as the police cars in Robocop - this helped Ford tell the "car-of-the-future" story). And everyone wanted to emulate the design of this innovative vehicle.

What followed was the most dangerous spoil of success - brand stagnation. It's so successful we shouldn't change it at all. And they didn't. Not significantly for the next decade. Even then it was, at best, a slight update with the jelly bean model making way for the late '90s "bubble" Taurus. This changed little also and only for the worst with all of the design funk being squared out and leaving a large, average-looking sedan. Ironically, the car had evolved into the very thing that the original had rebelled against.

So, again, I make the case that what they should be doing is reinventing the brand. It may sound crazy but if I was Ford I would make the new Taurus about reinventing the design of the American sedan again. That's the right way to be a good steward to a powerful brand like the Taurus.

As for Detroit recovery, I put more stock in broad strokes like GM's new electric car the Chevy Volt. This could be a crazy move and it could indeed fail. But as Tom Peters points out "crazy times call for crazy measures" and every now and then you have to blow up what you've worked forever to create and reinvent it in order to ensure your organization's staying power in the years to come.

Do you see the nuance? You have to risk blowing up what you've created but not at the cost of your most valuable asset - your brand. See, it's not enough to do something 'good.' You have to jump in the deep end and either triumph or fail fabulously. But being 'good enough' is clearly no longer good enough. And you need to be a steward to a brand and help it grow and develop. You can't just leave it alone for years thinking that times will keep supporting your product because they always have. A steward helps your brand change with and for the times.

Brand Rx for Professional Services

Some things you don't want to see at the doctor's office:

• An old, rusty exam table
• A scary plastic apron hanging on the back of the door
• A random cart left in the exam room with an old machine on it that looks like something they punished Randall McMurphy with in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Your doctor using his Palm Pilot to assist in your diagnosis

To be fair, I encountered the items on the above list at two different doctors' offices recently. The kicker? Both are competent, smart physicians but they left around a bunch of warning signals that scared the bejezus out of me as a consumer. (Yikes! A PDA?!? I came to you because I couldn't diagnose myself on the internet.)

The good news? All of these are simple things to correct because they are the kind of branding issues that the business world deals with every day. You wouldn't want folding chairs in your waiting room, right? Make sure you check for potholes throughout your customer experience - especially if you provide a professional service and even more so if you're in a mainstay industry that you think doesn't require marketing (like medicine).

Case in point - I went and got my haircut at a new place a couple of weeks ago. After we were done, the stylist said, "We offer free touch-ups to all of our clients every two weeks so you should definitely stop back and take advantage of it. AND it's free." How crazy-fun is that? You bet I'm gonna come back in for a free touch up (I had to ask for a definition - it's sides and back - basically, everything below the top of your head - between 4-5 week haircuts). And the chances are pretty good too that I'll fall for setting a follow-up appointment (the non-free kind) after my touch-up.

Branding isn't just for soda and sports cars anymore. And there are other ways of building great brands beyond taking out Super Bowl Ads with a huge budget. Actually, the book I'm reading defined it best by saying a brand is "shorthand for a complex set of commercial attributes, emotions, and stories." And there are lots of ways to tell stories about you and your business. Try adding a bit of extra care or zaniness into the experience of doing business with you. It can come in the form of a garbage man who always walks the cans back up to the house or a doctor who paints his exam rooms an interesting color and has free Wi-Fi.

No Reason Not to Do It

20 degrees out and I'm getting gas at 6:40 AM before a business trip. I'm freezing as I gas up my car. I go through the motions at the pump and - as always - I trip over the car wash question. You know what I'm talking about - the mid-purchase 'Car Wash Yes/No' prompt.

Now in warmer weather, I like the option. It's nice to be asked. Give the car a quick wash. It's a fun impulse buy that makes you feel good about yourself. But when it's butt cold and you're trying to gas and get back in the car ASAP this prompt becomes the source of much aggravation. I'm by no means any kind of technical genius but it seems that it wouldn't be hard to throw in a quick customer-centric feature of a thermometer in each pump. Not rocket science, right? Then the thing only asks you if you want a car wash if it's 45 degrees or warmer.

There's two schools of thought on this. If you go by the numbers, there's no reason to have this. There's no direct contribution that it's making to the bottom line. It's an added expense. Thus there's no reason to do it. Or there's the other way to look at it. This is a great little customer centric feature that adds to your customer's experience. It's a nice little comfort that comes with doing business with you and, over time, adds to customer retention and brand loyalty. There's no reason not to do it. Which person are you ...?

Move Over Oprah

I loves me a good book list! Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer takes a stab at one for business leaders in '07. I can personally speak for several of them while others are on my hit list. (You hear that Team of Rivals? I'm comin' for you!) As you can see, I've also added my own list - The Marketer's Bookshelf - to the bottom of my righthand sidebar here on the WesterBlog.

Food for Thought

An oldie but goodie with a slight addendum in light of the impact of social media.

• A customer who is pleased after doing business with you tells one person
• A customer apathetic to your experience tells no one
• A customer who has a bad customer experience tells approximately nine people OR ...
• ... they blog about it and you experience the online firestorm that Kohls has had after someone's cell phone camera met up with a messy dressing room

Thinking of the Whole Picture

The following message from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was distributed to all team members on November 2, 2006. On the same day, the company warned that sales growth would be slow in the year ahead and that its stock had just plummeted. [To be fair, I lifted this from this month's issue of Fast Company. You can also read the full text here.]

To All Team Members,

I want to announce a couple of significant changes regarding compensation at Whole Foods Market.

First, as you know, we have a salary cap policy which limits the total cash compensation that can be paid to any Team Member. The Board of Directors has voted to raise the salary cap from 14 times the average pay to 19 times the average pay, effective immediately ... We are raising the salary cap for one reason only—to make the compensation to our executives more competitive in the marketplace ... Everyone on the Whole Foods Leadership Team (except for me) has been approached multiple times by "headhunters" with job offers to leave Whole Foods and go to work for our competitors. Raising the salary cap to 19 times the average pay has become necessary to help ensure the retention of our key leadership ... This increase to 19 times the average pay remains far, far below what the typical Fortune 500 company pays its executives ... The average CEO received 431 times as much as their average employee received in 2004, while the Whole Foods Market CEO (me) received only 14 times the average employee pay in cash compensation.

Most large companies also pay their executives large amounts of stock options in addition to large salaries and cash bonuses. However, this is not the case at Whole Foods Market. As the chart below indicates, the average large corporation in the United States distributes 75% of their total stock options to only 5 top executives ... At Whole Foods, the exact opposite is true: the top 16 executives have received 7% of all the options granted while the other 93% of the options have been distributed throughout the entire company with all Team Members eligible for a grant after 6,000 hours of service to the company.

The second part of today's announcement has to do with my own compensation ... The tremendous success of Whole Foods Market has provided me with far more money than I ever dreamed I'd have and far more than is necessary for either my financial security or personal happiness ... I am now 53 years old and I have reached a place in my life where I no longer want to work for money, but simply for the joy of the work itself and to better answer the call to service that I feel so clearly in my own heart. Beginning on January 1, 2007, my salary will be reduced to $1 per year and I will no longer take any other cash compensation ... The intention of the Board of Directors is for Whole Foods Market to donate all the future stock options I would be eligible to receive to our two company foundations.

One other important item to communicate to you is, in light of my decision to forego any future additional cash compensation, our Board of Directors has decided that Whole Foods Market will contribute $100,000 annually to a new Global Team Member Emergency Fund. This money will be distributed to Team Members throughout the company based on need ... The first $100,000 will be deposited on January 1, 2007.

With Much Love,
John Mackey

Hunker Down with the Internets

I say 'hunker down' because the weather's supposed to get ugly here on the prairie this weekend. Anyway, today I found so many treats online that I just had to share.

• A great podcast interview w/Seth Godin. I like that this program calls itself a commentary on 'social media marketing'. I hope that term sticks. I think it fits better than the comparably square moniker 'online media.' Thanks Brand Autopsy for the initial link that pointing me there.
• AdCritic.com has a great site set up that features face2face interviews with contemporary ad creatives like Jeff Goodby, Lee Clow, and Alex Bogusky. Very cool.
• Oh, yeah. And everybody is talking about this post re: the not-so-tidy state of affairs at Kohls. Yikes! Or rather ... Hee-haw! Clean up your act. 'Social media marketing' means if you piss a customer off the world has a pretty fair chance at finding out.
  

Enjoy!

Sprinkles the Wonder Dog

Today I had lunch at Panera. After ringing me up the clerk said, "What can I call out when your order's ready?" What an opportunity! What can you say? How about "Hoochie mamma." Holler out hoochie mamma when my order is up! Or some other bit of nonsense. How fun would that be?

Now I know this was all the accidental result of this guy's phrasing but I've always wondered why they just ask for your name at a lunch counter. Why not ask for something fun like your pet's name? Or your wildest dream? When your soup and sandwich is up they shout out "I wanna be spaceman!" or "Sprinkles the Wonder Dog!" Insane? A little bit. Remarkable? Oh yeah. People wouldn't forget your company's service and the treat it is to do business with you.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about maximizing your touchpoints. In a roundabout way I guess this is just a little reminder to look for all of the pockets in your customer communications where you can sneak in a bit of remarkability. A lot of time it costs nothing and pays off in exceptional brand loyalty.

The Swing Marketing Advertised

If you haven't seen this already, check out this hilarious take from Project Cartoon. Jaded or frighteningly realistic? You be the judge.

This site is also a fun example of letting users under the hood to play around. If you click on the 'Create' link you can modify the 'toon and save it to a unique url that you can give to your friends who in turn will send it to their friends and ... I guess it's also an example of viral marketing. The real kicker? The cartoon's content itself isn't original to the site. It's a pretty prevalent cartoon. What's original here (beyond the funky Simpsons-esque design) is that it's user based and can truly grow like an open source project. The cartoonist is even adding new cells from users to subsequent versions.

Presentation Anticipation

Someone recently pointed out that business schools don't teach courses on how to give a presentation. Well, tomorrow you can get a masterclass. Take a sec and check out Steve Jobs' address to the troops tomorrow at Macworld. Apple will probably have it posted somewhere afterward. And for a bit of fun you can even play bingo along with Steve.

Mike points us to some behind-the-scenes shots of the Macworld expo hall from Wired. Pretty good article too. Arrogant, yes. But you can't beat the simple allure of putting up a curtain. You have to know what's under it.

P.S. Bill went today. Remember last year?

Bulb Addendum

As Tevye would say "On the other hand ..."

Before we go canonizing Wal-Mart, my friend (and frequent supporting player in my blog posts) Larry reminded me that this CF bulb push is a very simple way for Wallyworld to appeal to a market segment that has historically - um, told them where to shove it. People like me, with a bit of a chip on their shoulders about the house that Sam built, are also people who are trying to spread the word about CF bulbs and know that environmentalism desperately needs Wal-Mart's distribution. So take your pick - shrewd business decision (touche, Sam) or concerned business stepping up its social conscience.

Whatever the motivation, the issue just keeps tipping as this bit of news out of Detroit shows us.

CF Bulbs Are Tipping

[Note: This is part of a webwide series of blog posts about compact fluorescent light bulbs. January is the darkest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. To fight off the darkness, bloggers everywhere are invited to create a post with their own riff on why CF bulbs are cheaper, better politically, harder to market or just plain cute. I heard about this project from the remarkable Seth Godin.]

My riff on compact fluorescent bulbs? Yeah, I've replaced all of the standard bulbs in my house with energy-saving CF bulbs. Yeah, I did it after I saw An Inconvenient Truth. Yeah, I tried to spread the good word by giving CF bulbs as stocking-stuffers to friends and family this holiday season. I disclose this up front just to be clear: I am the demographic. I would be labeled as a "tree hugger."

But last week something interesting happened. Wal-Mart announced their commitment to selling more compact fluorescent bulbs. The full disclosure here: I am the last person that would pay Wal-Mart any kind of a compliment (I won't go into it - everyone knows why and most dislike them for the same reasons). But with their "Change a Light. Change the World." campaign they are helping to educate the masses (which they certainly have access to) on the big difference these little bulbs can make. Plus you can't argue with the marketing behind that campaign slogan. Sums it up pretty good.

A great part of the Wal-Mart story is that they are so committed to this that they are moving faster than CF bulb manufacturers like GE and Phillips, who aren't ready for a ramp up of this scale (think if your major distributor proposed that users switch from your cash cow to your niche product that lasts several times longer).

For those who don't know, here's the executive summary. Compact Fluorescent Bulbs ...

• Use at least 2/3 less energy than standard incandescent bulbs to provide the same amount of light, and last up to 10 times longer.
• Save $30 or more in energy costs over each bulb’s lifetime
• Generate 70 percent less heat, so they’re safer to operate and can cut energy costs associated with home cooling.
  

For more info, check out the CF Bulb page on the government's Energy Star site.

My first observation is - damnit it just makes sense! In the unlikely event that everything else turns out to be wrong - what do you have to loose by switching?

Second, if the logic above defies you, then go with them because they're cheaper. If serving the greater good doesn't motivate you, how about your inner-miser? You could save $30 per year, per standard bulb replaced. And the things last up to five years! More on the full disclosure front - my inner miser is as vocal as a my inner environmentalist. So the $$$ did help sway me.

Finally, if none of that (PUN ALERT) flips your switch, it should majorly freak you out that Al Gore and Wal-Mart are on the same side of an issue. What are you waiting for? The four horseman of the apocalypse? All kidding aside, I think it's safe to say that this product - which has been around for nearly 30 years - is finally tipping.

The Point? I think it's pretty clear but ... replace a bulb. Just one. Give it a shot. If you like it, go through and replace the rest. If every American home replaced just one standard light bulb with a CF bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

Did you know ...

... that marketing campaigns can sponsor events? I knew companies could but I got introduced to this concept just now on the Rose Bowl where viewers will be treated to the "Built Ford Tough Postgame Show."

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I mean, I understand where they were coming from - "We need to embed our messaging into the sponsorship, etc" but it doesn't seem like a good fit. First, "Built Ford Tough Postgame Show" does not flow trippingly off the tongue. Second, a slogan/idea/positioning statement/sentence fragment (!?!) is a confusing descriptor for a postgame show. It's like Home Depot sponsoring it and calling it the "You Can Do It. We Can Help Postgame Show."

On the other hand. They're Ford. They've been dropping huge chunks of change on big sponsorships and advertising for years. I think it's safe to assume that most people know who they are. So why not use this opportunity to communicate something about the brand? Good so far but where the Motor City giant veers off track is in it's messaging.

"Built Ford Tough" is more business as usual and in case anyone has been living under a rock, the landscape in the automotive industry has been changing dramatically - especially for the Big 3. One idea would have been to take one of their new models that they are pinning their '07 hopes on and have that sponsor it. Like the "Ford Edge Postgame Show." Or the "Bold Moves: The Ford Postgame Show." That is their current slogan and actually sounds exciting and is relevant to the event.

Just my thoughts. You got any? Oh ... Happy 2007.