Churbuck.com

In the grocery store on Friday evening, right in the middle of the pre-weekend, pre-dinnertime crush, negotiating my cart down aisles cluttered with plodding, aimless shoppers, and there, in front of the meat case, was a long table/bin sort of thing filled with remaindered beach toys.

This obstacle was causing an incredible traffic jam of head-on confrontations, ooching and banging of handles. The complete assholishness of the table prompted me to stop, walk over, lift up one end and move the table out of the way. The aisle cleared, people were on their way.
This scheme was doubtlessly hatched by a grocery store consultant who wrote about “impediment” marketing techniques for Bain, the same jerk who came up with the astonishing insight that most people turn right when they enter a store, or the milk should be tucked in the back. The scheme was taught in a regional grocery store management seminar and became posted in the operations manual of the Northeastern Region, replete with diagrams, maps, traffic flow diagrams, and the wisdom to park the obstacle right in front of the meat.

This is the marketing consultant I was happy to defeat yesterday at Ikea, when my wife and I bought three bookshelves in about 15 minutes by swimming upstream and entering through the exit, through the checkout lines in reverse, and into the furniture warehouse without having to navigate a forest of candles and picture frames that greets every Ikea shopper who arrives looking for furniture-in-a-box but leaves with Lutefisk napkin rings and enough votive candles to power a cathedral for a month.

I get the whole “slow-em-down and up-the-attach-rate” model of marketing. This is why, when you authorize a new credit card, you get to hear a recitation by the customer service representative who tries to sell you credit report services, and lost card registration, and identity theft insurance.

In media, this is also known as jumping pages. Why blow a perfectly good story on one page? The reader may find it convenient to read it all in one place, but hey, “click here to continue” and tah-dah, another page view more ad impressions.

I guess, as I ramble, that the table in front of the meat was the retail equivalent of the pop-up ad or the interstitial. Get in the consumer’s face, force them to go around, and hope they are dumb enough to get distracted and on an impulse buy that ham.

I have a choice in grocery stores. One makes it aisles obstacle courses, the other does not. Guess which one I go to more often, even if it is a little farther away?

Will The Ad Slowdown Reach The Web? « GigaOM

The housing boom hasn’t turned into a bust quite yet, but it is losing steam fast. In the meantime, the impact of the credit crunch is being felt in other areas of the U.S. economy, including advertising. A new report released today by TNS Media Intelligence shows that overall spending on advertising declined for the second quarter in a row.

Um, we’re seeing CPM and CPC auction prices spike. Sure, gross ad spend may be down, but it’s also migrating to online where there are a lot of dollars chasing a finite amount of opportunity. Heck, Forbes.com is quoting a $100 plus CPM for display. Try buying rich media/online video impressions. Nothing is cheap, yet top management wants to believe if it’s web it is cheap, measurable, easy and fast.

Only measurable applies.

China allegedly has the highest number of blogs in the world, and the highest ranked according to Technorati. I tend to focus on English voices blogging from within the country (because I can’t read nor speak Mandarin) and have four favorites I want to share. Some are marketing focused, some very funny, one is thought provoking, etc.. I am open to suggestions of other ex-pat blogs worth following.

My hat is off to these bloggers, particularly those blogging from inside the country, anyone who has tried to read, comment, or otherwise operate as a blogger with tools as diverse as Flickr to Technorati will attest to how hard and annoying it can be.

1. Will Moss: ImageThief. Moss is a PR pro now blogging from Shanghai. His work is syndicated by CNET Asia and he has been kind in his links to this blog in the past. He would be a top pick if I was asked who I would want to have dinner with during my next trip to China.
2. Kaiser Kuo: Ogilvy’s China Digital Watch. I almost did have dinner with Kaiser during my last trip, a meeting set up by our China marketing team. The man’s personal blog is very good, but his professional blog written for Ogilvy (our agency of record) is the best analysis of digital media trends. Period.
3. Michael Mann: Mann in China. Mike is a colleague running our production teams in Beijing. His diary of life as a twenty-something single guy in Beijing is very funny. His post about his driver — nicknamed “Dale” after Dale Earnhardt — is a classic
4. Rebecca MacKinnon: RConversation. Former CNN correspondent, now the leading voice on freedom of speech and expression issues for Chinese bloggers.

Kiva.org – Loans that change lives

Public service announcement. Last spring I was introduced to Kiva.org by Bill Stevenson at Lenovo, the gentleman who manages the company’s social responsibility activities. Bill was passionate about Kiva — sort of the Napster of philanthropy and micro-finance. Here’s how it works. You go to Kiva.org, you open an account, you transfer $25 into your account, you review the loan applications from hundreds dozens of people in emerging markets, select one, and loan them the money

They pay you back, via Kiva, and once the loan is done, you get the money back in your account and then you can re-loan it to another entrepreneur.

Here’s who my loan is supporting, Lily Kindeka Biyela. She borrowed $1,000. I lent her $25

“Lily is 44 years old and a mother of two children, and she takes care of three others. Lily began her business in 1992. Over the years, Lily has acquired solid experience selling both kitchen utensils and charcoal. Through her determination and hard work, she has been able to build a loyal customer base that has begun to pre-order utensils. Lily is asking for a loan of $1000 to help increase her working capital and buy additional goods. This will enable her to generate additional profits, which will allow her business to grow and change.”

Lily has paid back half of my loan already. I think this is cool and regard Kiva as one of the most important web applications I have ever seen.

News – Vineyard Gazette

Off to Martha’s Vineyard for ten days of fishing beginning 9.22 (with a one-day interruption to speak at an event in NYC).

“Opening day at the 2007 Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby was a smash, including the recording of a first day grand slam by Capt. Tom Langman of Menemsha likely a first day record. Derby president Ed Jerome said of the slam: “We don’t keep records for that but I don’t ever remember it happening on the first day. Certainly we’ve had one-day grand slams before but they are rare.”"

The Derby is one of the most venerable fishing events in the world, and the subject of a great book that was recently republished, Reading the Water by the late Bob Post.

Corporate Journalism and the Benefits of Authenticity « Magnosticism

Rob O’Regan riffs on “corporate journalism.” This is where PR is headed.

“The content can take many forms: white papers (reported with real-person interviews, not made-up quotes), articles, blog posts, video, etc. – all the stuff you’d see on a typical media site. The content development work is also similar to traditional journalism: understand the target audience (customers vs. readers), identify the experts (internal and external), and get them to help you tell the story (through interviews or direct contributions). The result is more engaging, more believable marketing communications. (And it’s a good next career step for disgruntled, aging journalist types.)”

The yacht club pulled its dock and racing buoys out of the water on Labor Day weekend, but a good fleet of skiffs remains in the cove, ready to sail if the urge hits on an Indian Summer day. We raced Saturday and Sunday morning( and will try to do it again next weekend) very informal affairs with my son running the motorboat, Chris Jackson whistling the starting times, and  moorings and channel cans standing in as turning marks.

Saturday was very windy, so we reefed — or shortened sail — and I had my step-sister from Beijing crewing for me. We finished in the middle of the ten boat fleet in the first race, and came in fat last in the second race because she urged me too close to the line and so I was over early and fouled another boat in the process, forcing me to perform the dreaded 720 maneuver (two consecutive circles) which is very, very hard and dangerous on a windy day.

Photo by Charles Lowell
Afterwards we met for chowder and beer on the bluff with agreement to return again on Sunday for another two races.

Once again Fisher was the race committee, but the wind was much lighter and everyone sailed without crew, expanding the fleet to 13 boats which was just enough to make it competitive and interesting.

In the first race I nailed the start and sailed to the left of the course, catching a very nice breeze, enough to round the first windward mark in first place, and again around the second reaching mark a comfortable six boat lengths ahead of the fleet. Alas, fat man and light wind conspired to throw the anchor over the stern and I finished that race in the middle of the fleet in sixth place.

The second race … let’s not go there. The abbreviation on the results sheet says it all: DFL. Dead Fat Last.

We’ll try again next weekend, and perhaps the weekend after that. Life is quiet here now, no one is around, Main Street goes minutes without a passing car, and everything from the flower gardens to the crickets seem to know fall is coming. I need to go dig up a perennial bed and level some footings for the chicken coop. Whereabouts this week:

Cotuit – 9.10

Cotuit-North Carolina – 9.11 (this is a bad day for me, for everyone for that matter, but I will try to not think about it as I fly out of Boston)
North Carolina – 9.11 to 9.14

Cotuit 9.15-16

*(new headline courtesy of Con von Hoffman)

I drove in the driveway last night at 8:30, returning from North Carolina, and there, in the darkness, was a chicken coop.

The coop had been across the street in Cousin Pete’s backyard for the last 40 years, carried there by several strong men with cross timbers. I remember because I helped carry it from here to there and disaster struck me when we arrived across the street and my foot plunged through the ground into a nest of ground wasps. There, the coop stood, on the other side of the Chatfield compound, chickenless, for four decades, the preferred crash pad for many a teenager who wanted some privacy and was willing to sleep on the mattress that is still crammed inside.

Before the migration from here to there and back again there were actually chickens living in the chicken coop. My father wouldn’t eat chicken (nor fish) as a result of being tasked with the chicken duties as boy in World War II when rationing made things like chicken coops and Victory Gardens a fact of life in rural America (which Cape Cod definitely was until the 1960s). Maybe it was the head chopping, feather plucking, gizzard gutting mess that turned him off, all I know is the man was not a chicken eater.

I would like to add chickens to my many diversions. I am jealous of my colleague Mike Etherington,who introduced egg-layers into his English backyard this summer with risible results. However, it is simple for me to say I want to get into poultry husbandry as I am traveling more than half of the time and would abandon my wife to the task of cleaning the coop and defending it against marauding critters and raptors.

My favorite part of the county fair is the chicken shed, where the different breeds are on display — about as many as there are dogs in the AKC list. I think I would raise the New England classic, the Rhode Island Red.

Reality? I will re-roof and re-shingle and my daughter will claim it as her boudoir next summer.

Postscript: The Magazine: vanityfair.com

In the current issue of Vanity Fair, there’s an update on the saga of Stephen Glass — the most notorious hoaxster in journalism. Sure there was a movie — Shattered Glass — and yes, Glass even wrote a weird novel called The Fabulist — but what the piece omits is the fact that Glass was uncovered by Forbes.com, by Adam Penenberg and Kambiz Faroohar, and the piece marked the end of the early debate that online journalism was less responsible, less ethical, and less accurate than traditional print.

“In 1998, a 25-year-old journalist named Stephen Glass was the hottest young star in the competitive orbit of Washington journalism. An associate editor for The New Republic, he routinely managed to find the pitch-perfect quote and the trenchant observation in every story he wrote. He was earning more than $100,000 a year and also attending Georgetown Law at night. Glass seemed too good to be true, which of course he was. As contributing editor Buzz Bissinger chronicled in Vanity Fair (“Shattered Glass,” September 1998), Glass’s spectacular rise was outdone only by his even more spectacular fall, in which it was discovered that 27 of his 41 stories for T.N.R. contained fabrications.”

My wife, the decorator, lives in a world of precise measurement, where fabric can cost literally $1,000 a yard and there is wallpaper that you don’t want to know about. Remember when Dennis Kozlowski, the Tyco CEO, went down in court and there were accusations that he spent $6,000 for a shower curtain? My wife says she’s made more expensive ones. Anyway, before I invoke the — “but-I-digress” line — let’s just assume that when you are designing window treatments (never call em curtains) you can’t screw up or you wind up eating the mistake. Measure twice, cut once. Etc..

My house is furnished with expensive mistakes. This is not a bad thing. I get nice furniture out of the deal, but someone had to pay for them and it wasn’t the client.

One of the subcontractors that my wife works with is a company called Terranova. They do stone work — installing kitchen counters, marble floors, etc.. They mess up and they earn the nickname “Do-It-Over”

In the advertising world, a “do-it-over” is known as a make-good. Let’s look at the circumstances that result in a make-good. First off, the advertising agency buys the media — this is their life’s blood — they get a 15% commission and they tend to monitor their buys very carefully. Let’s say they represent a vodka company and they buy a full-page ad in a magazine. The magazine’s ad trafficker books the insertion order, slots the ad in the appropriate place in the magazine (front of the book, back of the book, rear inside cover, etc.). The editorial team, which is zealously separated from the ad side, writes a story about Mothers Against Drunk Driving and as chance and Mr. Murphy would have it, that story runs across from the vodka ad. Oops. Do it over, client wants a make-good. Run an ad for an airline on the same page as a story about the tragic plunge that killed 300 people flying over Dubuque. Make-good.

Agencies live to detect make-good situations. They can pull the wings off of a publisher like you would not believe.

I need to back up and look at some make-good scenarios.

1. The ad was badly trafficked. In other words, it showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Client wants it day-parted, ie shown only during business hours in Europe, but instead the impressions happened in the middle of the night. This is why you see lots of ads for laxatives, adult diapers, and the AARP during the evening; fast food and dating hotlines at 2 am; pampers and cleaning products at 10 am. Show a Viagra ad at 10 am during the prime mother’s hour and you won’t be nearly as effective as you would showing the ad on Sunday afternoon during the ball game. So — mess up the insertion order, and make-goods happen.

2. Bad proximity. This is the bane of the news world. This is the scenario above. Book a Ticket on the Airplane ads don’t do well next to plane crash stories. Booze and stories about rehab and cirrhosis don’t mix.
What inspires this post? Can’t say, only to note that I had a fire in my inbox at 6 am involving an online ad appearing next to unclad women thanks to a screw up in an ad network which shall go unnamed. The make good was an additional 4 million impressions which is like offering another serving of mussels to the guy who just claimed the restaurant nearly killed him with food poisoning.

Avatars, I’m full of em ….

There’s the Oddcast Version:

The Simpsonize Me version:

The Second Life version, Horace Clutterbuck:

And finally, my favorite, my level 65 Dwarf Hunter, Hruntings (350 leather worker, Horde Hunters Guild, Akama server) and his pet, Mister Bigglesworth:

There’s something to be said for doing things the hard way. While progress and innovation have eased our lives and given rise to the leisure class, emancipating women from the tyranny of housework, harnessing steam to conquer the frontier, and channeling the electron to bring light to darkness, there are times when a dinner by candlelight is better than one by fluorescents.

So it goes with fixed-gear cycling which is best defined as bicycle riding without gears. I got into it three years ago when I stumbled upon the Fixed-Gear Gallery and began to fall in love with the classic, stripped-down look of an Italian racing bike reduced to its most basic essentials. With a retired Bianchi steel-framed bike rusting in the garage, I did some research, found the legendary Sheldon Brown’s compendium of online cycling knowledge, and placed an order with Harris Cyclery for bullhorn handlebars, a leather Brooks saddle, a flip-flop rear hub, and new Mavic wheels with extra stout spokes. I had the frame powder coated in International Harvester Green, then asked the wrench (mechanic) at the Bike Zone in Hyannis to build it up. He thought the green was very ugly, but did me proud.

Today I waited until my wife was out on her morning constitutional, before sneaking out for a fast Tour de Cotuit on the fixie — nicknamed the “Snotrocket” because of the time I tried to clear my nostrils one cold winter morning and thought I would coast while blocking one nostril with my index finger. Since coasting is out of the question, when I sat up and stopped pedaling I was nearly thrown off the bike, leading me to the rule that one can never, ever stop cycling while aboard the bike.

Fixed gears are very old school, from the day before derailleurs and freewheel hubs. The first Tour de Frances were ridden on fixed gears. Velodrome track racers ride fixed gears, and urban bike messengers ride fixed gears. In the past few years the subculture has exploded, becoming the in thing in urban centers. A few weeks ago I spotted a beautiful specimen chained to a parking meter next to Manhattan’s Bryant Park — it had a Park Tool bottle opener fixed to the seat tube.

My route this morning was ten miles on the nose, and since it didn’t cross the very dangerous Route 28, and since I don’t want to press my cycling luck with a pan-Cape ride, I confine my pedaling to the village. Here is my 10 mile loop.

Tuesday 9.4 – Cotuit AM, RTP late PM

Wednesday 9.6-Thursday 9.7 – North Carolina

Friday 9.8 – Sunday 9.10 – Cotuit

Plan is three consecutive weeks in North Carolina, last week of the month is vacation.

Daphne and I camped out last night, beachside, at the prettiest spot in Cotuit. Tent, air mattresses, sleeping bags, Coleman lantern, campfire. The whole deal. We went to sleep, or tried to go to sleep to the sound of crashing surf, but …

…We brought the dog. The dog, who is smaller than a cat, was in a complete and utter frenzy of outdoors paranoia, running laps around the tent until 5 am when it finally collapsed in a ball on my head. The dog is now banned from future camping expeditions. It may be cute, but it lives on a couch from now on, not a tent. It’s also a perfect coyote snack. Live and learn.

Yesterday was the last skiff race of the season, I sat it out and watched it from the beach, not wanted to wallow in a sea of poignancy as the summer winds to an end. As a townie I get to keep my boat in the water for another month, but reality says I’ll only use it one or two more times and lose sleep over it when I am in North Carolina and start tracking the September hurricanes with the obsession of someone who lives in a place overdue for a Big One.

As sailing ends, fly fishing takes over. These are the days when it sucks to be bait, as the gamefish ferociously feed on the juvenile herring and menhaden before making their southern migration in late October. Big balls of bait get corralled off the beaches, and the feeding frenzies are a sight to behold. So yesterday morning I cleaned my reel, sorted out my gear, and got ready for a month of fishy weekends. I tried to cast at some false albacore running off of Osterville, but they were skittish and mixed in with pesky adolescent bluefish, so I worked on my casting and my sunburn and enjoyed an hour of solitude before returning to the beach to watch the final parade of skiffs and the twilight of the summer.

Another – “Among the Funniest Five Minutes in Film”

“My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery.”

September first, the wind is blowing out of the north, a bit chilly, but the gardens are at their pinnacle.

So, some morning glories for a glorious morning. They’ve taken over this year and I love it.

Climbing up the strings to the gutters and then back down again, wrapping around everything. Amazing these are considered a nuisance in California, down there with weeds. Daphne and I would could these among our favorites. Next spring I’ll run the strings to the roof and see what happens.

The hummingbirds are going nuts on these.