marketing
Everyday Hogwash Rolls in Mud
Back in January, we let you know about Everyday Hogwash, a place where people share “rants” about companies and customer service and hidden fees, yadda yadda, it’s like The Consumerist except with prizes.
Do Brands Even Exist?
This Gapingvoid cartoon was inspired by a page on the Oglivy & Mather website, it’s an actual quote.
Marketers Still Hate Blogs, Thankfully
Good riddance: — this article in Ad Week claims that only 13% of marketers are using blogs or social networks in marketing. Not only that, about half say they won’t be stinking up our comments section in the next year.
Burn, Brand, Burn
On August 8th, Neil Borman will gather up everything he owns that has a logo on it.
NYC Anti-Wal-Mart Protesters Are, In Reality, Anti-Wal-Mart Protesters
This has been going around “the blogosphere” lately (like “the Information Super Highway,” I expect that this term will become increasingly embarrassing to most of us as we get older and Al Gore claims to have created it) and it’s not quite what it appears, but it’s worth a post: coming out of Grand Central Station, Mihow from the eponymous Mihow.com encountered a raucous crowd of what appeared to be anti-Wal-Mart protesters. They handed him some literature, which then turned out to actually be pamphlets from Wal-Mart Watch.
Phillip K. Dick’s Aphids Aren’t Morgellons Disease
Morgellons Disease certainly sounds sci-fi: unexplained lesions that never heal open up on the skin, out of which spring strange black fibers and mysterious protuberances. This has caused sites like Adrants to speculate that it’s all a viral movie campaign for the upcoming film adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, since the characters in that film are convinced their bodies have been possessed by aphids. Right, and AIDS was a viral campaign for Philadelphia.
Does The Consumerist Douche?
No stranger to irony and hypocrisy–we’re not sure whether the combo serves as our grist or our mill, a potentially ironic paradox in and of itself–one reader pointed out that in our recent post, “Why Marketers are Douchebags,” we forgot to bag one douche in particular: ourselves.
If Companies Care About Word of Mouth, Why Aren’t They Improving Their Call Centers?
If you can bear to read the meme-saturated twaddle of what Popken likes to call a “marketing douchebag”, Peter Blackshaw asks a crazy question: if companies are so interested in reaching out to their customers by having them make their ads and feel more involved in the business, why aren’t they paying any attention at all to the shameful service of their call centers?
A Knee With a View, Towards Women
A new line of artificial knees has been announced, strong enough for a man, but sophisticated in social nuances and group decision making for a woman.
Talking Bible Dolls ‘Fun,’ ‘Faithful,’ But Can You Wash Them in a Lake of Fire?
We’re always excited by new product releases, especially when they’re graven images of Christian religious figures.
Cingular: We’re So Union
If you’re a union member, you can get 5% off your Cingular cellphone plan. That’s because Cingular is a unionized wireless company, according to this sub-level of their cingularswitch website.
Sic Crocodile Dundee on these Marketers
You’ll need a gator-skinning knife to slice through this hogwash.
UPDATE: Calls From A Stranger
Courtney tips that she’s received a Spanish spam call, this time from 301-392-8219, based out of La Plata, Maryland and registered to Verizon. We’ve also received reports about 305-503-8068. If anyone gets calls from these numbers, report it to your cell phone company and even the police. The police have the ability to access the records to trace these calls back to their source.
