Fried vs. Ground

As Howard Schultz takes over the reigns of Starbucks once again, The Wall Street Journal is also reporting that McDonald’s is preparing to open its own coffee bars in an attempt to take on Starbucks. It seems McDonald’s plans on having espresso makers and actual “baristas” in a special section in the front of the store in order to sell their high-end coffee drinks.

And while most analysts are treating this as a head-to-head competition, I’m not really seeing it that way. To me, it’s a questionable move by McDonald’s to sell overpriced coffee drinks to the vast blue collar market that’s unserved by Starbucks.

Let’s face it: in January 2008, the presence of a Starbucks on the corner is as good an indication as any that you are in an upper middle class neighborhood, or a business district favored by white collar professionals. I mean I’ve even read articles about towns pleading with Starbucks to open a store there so as to advance their efforts towards gentrification. And while Starbucks has expanded way too rapidly in recent years, there are still vast swaths of the country where the words “venti soy latte” are never heard.

The McDonald’s coffee bars have their best opportunities in those areas where Starbucks are few and far between and in business districts where speed and convenience are far more important than brand preference. That said, I’m still not convinced that your average McDonald’s customer is going to want anything to do with a $3 caramel macchiato or that the competing smells of brewed coffee beans and deep-fried fast food will be anything other than noxious.

Starbucks may have to close down stores in some of the more downscale areas where they probably shouldn’t have gone in the first place. Maybe even give up on the Starbucks McMuffins. But the market for the two behemoths seems to be wide open: each will take a different end of the market. The bigger question, to me, is will McDonald’s be able to sell high-end coffee drinks to anyone other than harried office workers, high school students and road trippers?

Status Not So Quo

The front of today's New York Times Style section has an article entitled "The Falling Down Professions" which is all about how lawyers and doctors have suffered a major slippage, both in status and in relative income. (Relative to Wall Streeters, that is.) It's a topic the Wall Street Journal (among others) has been harping on for several years now, but I still find it to be a fascinating, albeit disconcerting, window into our society.

For while it's hard to work up a whole lot of sympathy for lawyers and doctors, whose main complaint seems to be that they no longer get the kind of money or respect they once did, one can argue that both professions are at some level beneficial to society. Now of course not every doctor and certainly not every lawyer is in it to help society, but both professions have traditionally employed at least some people whose main priority was nobly advancing the common good.

That's something you can't even begin to claim about the new "hot" professions: hedge fund manager, management consultant and internet entrepreneur. And that's what disturbs me: what does it say about us as a society that our "best and brightest" are now drawn to professions that can't even claim to be about anything other than selfish motives and large, easy financial rewards? What's worse, all the aforementioned professions operate away from the community-at-large (last time I checked, there were no storefront hedge funds) so they are not functioning as role models of any sort.

Not sure whether this is just a blip or a lasting sea change, but it doesn't reflect well on 21st century America.

There's an interesting parallel to advertising too, which is that our loss of prestige (okay, coolness factor- we never had prestige) combined with dropping salaries, means that we no longer attract the best and the brightest either and that we have a lot of people feeling they bet on the wrong horse. And while society is clearly no worse for the lack of advertising executives, it's an interesting parallel nonetheless.

Well, to me, anyway.

No Experts, Please

There's an article in today's New York Times about marketing to seniors that's one of those odd pieces of marketing journalism I can never figure out.

The piece, which will be read by a great many people, since it is featured in the popular Week In Review section, goes on for about a half page without ever once quoting someone who works for an ad agency, marketing consultancy or actual client. Instead, the reporter relies on quotes from professors at MIT and Quinnipiac as well as some folks over at AARP. (American Association for Retired People).

Now the article is rather broad and makes some very unsurprising conclusions (old people don't like to be referred to as "old") but still-- you'd think someone would have bothered to consult someone who actually works in the business. And while I can't recall any other specific examples, this is certainly not the first time I've read an article in a well-known national publication that relies on a bunch of college professors for insight into marketing issues. So either we have no perceived authority on our chosen profession or the reporters are really, really lazy.

The Real Digital Revolution™ In Action

So there's a room in the Toad house that was originally a porch and thus doesn't stay as warm as the rest of the house when the temperature drops below 30º.

We have a fan-style space heater in there now that works fine, but I was intrigued by something called the EdenPure space heater, which has been heavily advertised on TV and in the Wall Street Journal. If you click on the image above, you can see the ad in its entirety, but if you're too lazy, the claim is that it's safe/cool enough for a child to sit on it and that it heats the room from floor to ceiling. This was intriguing to me because (a) I have kids and (b) since there's no basement under it, the floor of this room often gets cold.

Now the ads certainly make the product sound great and the web site has lots of rave reviews. But before I shelled out $300 for one (easily three or four times the price of other space heaters) I did a quick Google search online.

Which proved to be a wise move.

Consumer Reports, it seems, was not a fan. Neither were dozens of people on a site called "InfomercialRatings.com" (and they all seemed to have similar complaints). I found a whole mess of other links that led to message boards and blogs and the like, none of whom seemed to have anything good to say about it. (Though to be fair, I did find this one positive review.)

I saved $300 and much grief. The makers of the EdenPure have a bigger problem, however, because the word is out that they are selling an inferior product that doesn't live up to the claims they make in their advertising.

For those of you new to the blog, this is what I call The Real Digital Revolution™, the fact that people no longer rely on advertising for product information, that they can find out the truth about products from a variety of sources- expert and amateur- online, and that this forces advertisers to be honest and to strive to create better products and services.

It's Not Brain Surgery, Though It Might As Well Be

One thing that continues to amaze me is how difficult it is for many people in the business to actually understand how the interwebs work as an advertising vehicle.

I mean the most basic of all interweb ad concepts-- that people need a reason to come to your site-- is seemingly lost on many of my colleagues, who seem to think that like TV, putting something online guarantees viewership and that any video posted to YouTube automatically becomes "viral."

But back to the first point.

I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years where I find myself saying some variation of "But why would they go there? How would they know the site existed?" only to be met by blank stares or a comment to the effect of "because it's on the internet."

And no, the usual suggestion of placing the url at the bottom of the print ad or end of the TV spot (without any indication of what you'll find when you get there) is not a valid option.

Especially not in 2008.

Happy Anniversary Bill

So CNN reports today that William Shatner and Priceline are celebrating their 10th anniversary together.

I hadn't realized how long it had been since Shatner first appeared on TV, singing his campy renditions of current pop hits.

The campaign's success is one of those advertising paradoxes: badvertising is often every bit as effective as great advertising. Especially when the product in question has low price as its main selling point. For some reason, we seem willing to accept that a brand that's selling us on its low prices- be it a car dealership, an online travel resource, or Crazy Eddie- is best served by over-the-top, in-your-face ads that manage to stick in our respective consciences far longer than charming, strategic ones.

Even More Toad

I'm also going to be posting on "Beyond Madison Avenue" a blog run by The Talent Zoo.
In case my rantings on here don't satisfy your daily dose of me.

Fashion Holds Steady

I found this image on a site called liketotally80s.com- it's not anyone I know

As fast as everything else has changed these past 8 years, the one thing that doesn’t seem to have undergone a sweeping change is fashion. People today pretty much look the same as they did in 1998 – I mean maybe pleats have become less common on men’s pants and things like Ugg boots and Crocs didn’t exist back then, but overall, the way people dress and wear their hair hasn’t radically shifted since the mid-1990s. Compare that with the shift between say 1968 and 1978 (or 1978 and 1988) and you’ll see what I mean.

The only theory I have on this is that the interweb has made it that much easier for trends to move across the country and so nothing’s stuck around long enough to make an impression. I mean if you think back to the 80s, it took Big Hair a couple of years to make its pouffy way inland from the coasts. Today, it would happen in a matter of weeks and be over with just as quickly.

It may also be a reaction to the rapid change the interweb has engendered in other areas of our lives: the changes in how we communicate, view media, buy things, etc. have left us a bit unmoored and so not changing our fashion sensibility may help us feel more grounded. (Though to argue the other side, the 1960s were an era of great change and fashion changed just as rapidly. Though the 1960s was about social change, rather than technological, so perhaps that's the difference.)

What set me to thinking about all this, in case you were wondering, was something I saw about an 80s party. I was wondering what an ‘00s party would look like and all I could come up with was someone manically typing on their Blackberry.

Happy 2008.