Sclerotic Tex?

In the 24 years I’ve lived in Texas, I have not been to the State Fair. I remedied this yesterday, having seen an article in the Houston Chronicle about low attendance at this year’s event. I imagined, “Here’s an opportunity to show support for a long-time institution.”

No. I really thought, “Great! Small crowd, Monday visit: Terrific time to visit Dallas and see Big Tex without a huge crowd of pesky people.”

Today, the State Fair of Texas® is more myth than reality. Its marketing has outrun its appeal. (Great graphics, in fact.)

After so many, many years of attending the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, I found our State Fair shopworn; not at all the marquee event our state deserves.

The reviews have been good. Example? Mary G, writing on Judy’s Book, said: Wow what a venue! This state fair is unlike no other state fair in the world, why you ask??? Because it’s TEXAS! Put your best pair of walking shoes and come with an empty stomach! So much to see at this fair, from freak like shows, the midway, animals, shows, people, retailers and so much more.

The State Fair blogger of The Dallas Morning News, Eric Aasen, praises the food to high heaven. And so he should. While eating at the State Fair is the fastest way to a coronary, it’s difficult to resist the overtly sinful temptations you only get once annually when you attend the Fair (or twice if you also include the Rodeo). Sadly, I’m alive in the Age of Angioplasty.

I ’fess up to sausage-on-a-stick and fudge; I shared these with Barbara. We drew the line early, though. We did NOT sample…candied apples, caramel apples, “All-American” fried grilled cheese sandwiches, fried banana splits or fried chocolate truffles. Neither did our lips touch the deep-friend s’mores, funnel cakes or chicken-fried bacon (named “Best of the Best,” for God’s sake!).

No. In the end, I judge our State Fair to be…less…than the hype. Even undeserving of its marketing.

The iconic Big Tex doesn’t feel right – and frankly appears to have severe orthopedic challenges. Corporate names endorse everything that isn’t nailed down and many things that are, from the Coca Cola Food Court to the Chevrolet Main Stage. Although I’ve seen this coming for years, it still seems subtly wrong.

Want a challenge? The State Fair makes it really, really hard to avoid the Kitchen Craft hucksters. I admire them for raising the art of the pitch to undreamed-of levels of wonder – but there must have been three dozen or more of these scattered throughout the Fair grounds. Really, $1,400 for a six-piece set of pots and pans? And those quite small? On top of all this, the company sponsors the Fair’s “Starlight Parade.” (TXU underwrites the “Energy Arena.”)

There were plenty of blue-ribbon arts and crafts and canned goods but most of the animals seem to have come and gone the first week of the Fair. Possibly there’s something I don’t quite understand about how a State Fair ought to work. But the sense of closeness to the agricultural side of Texas life is so diminished there on the old Dallas fairgrounds.

The commercial hype now overwhelms the idea, the mission of a State Fair founded in 1886. Since the Fair is a private, non-profit organization, it has to generate its own funding, after all.

Still, it’s the people in Dallas who make the State Fair of Texas worthwhile – we always got a big smile from every worker, every volunteer. So I repeat what Pat Kochan wrote on the Dallas Historical Society blog about it:

Loved the bird show. Fascinating. Just walking the fair on a fall evening with lights and sounds and smells of good fun, was so much excitement for me growing up. My son and his wife had their first date to the fair and go every year after.

There is hope for this event. It’s buried somewhere in the hearts and minds of Texans, though – not necessarily to be found at the Fair itself.

Inflatable Gorillas?

I can hear Oz’s Wicked Witch now: Don’t make me send my inflatable gorillas. My outsized Elvises. My fat yellow duckies. Nevertheless, while we’re trying to recover from the effects of the Ike, so is Jim Purtee.

A Sandra Bretting article in today’s Houston Chronicle, identifies Purtee as the owner of Houston Balloons & Promotions LLC. And sure enough, there he is on the company website.

He’s the marketer who makes certain there’s an inflatable pink gorilla or an immense Yosemite Sam-like figure on top of every car dealership, tanning salon and independent insurance agency between Texas and Florida. (You can see the full line-up, gorillas, ducks and all, here – hurry before they’re gone.)

As the article points out, Purtee’s company earned some $1.2 million from 400 inflatable balloons and banners – all in support of small businesses. Purtee makes a good point about it: Small-business owners can’t afford to create and run radio or TV commercials. But for about $1,200 they can get four weeks’ worth of drive-by attention with, say, a 30-foot luchador complete with mask.

While the Ike cost Purtee about a million bucks worth of business, the City of Houston would like to cost him his entire livelihood. It wants to ban the entire category of cold air inflatables from our highways and byways. So this is a billboard controversy…only with really strikingly ugly (or charming) balloons.

It’s no secret how Houston feels about large-scale outdoor advertising: Utterly indecisive.

No matter what side you take – beautification of our city’s highways or freedom for free enterprise – someone’s going to be upset. Is the government right to ban this form of outdoor?

Professionally, I wonder about the medium’s effectiveness. According to the only US trade group, the Inflatable Advertising Dealers Association, “The products of IADA members command attention, standing out in the crowd of other advertising messages. They increase the visibility of your business, promote name recognition and aid in brand awareness.”

Absent real metrics (documented increases in walk-in traffic, for example), I take the IADA claims with a pound of air. Furthermore, most of the inflatables are so…banal. (That’s one of Purtee’s appeals, I think: Generic inflatables that are cost-effectively repurposed from real estate agent to discount furniture store.)

While seeing a big blue elephant on an NTB store is whimsical, I confess to being puzzled by the large purple coyote (I think) appearing for CITGO. Appearances by a random selection of generic critters, all 20-30 feet tall, is silly.

When an inflatable is strikingly designed or fits an unusual purpose, I know it can have a heck of an effect. Swiss ad agency ET&H created a giant, three-dimensional inflatable of its client Tilsiter Cheese’s logo years ago: Two dairy cows side-by-side. Quite striking and much used throughout Europe. it rightfully generated a huge amount of attention. (The cheese company has since turned to an ordinary hot air balloon, something of a letdown.)

Since Purtee is litigating with the City, I wonder how the courts will rule. Purtee maintains that it’s his right to deliver an advertising tool like his giant inflatables “as long as it’s not vulgar or untrue.” I suspect – no, I damn well know – that we’re into the realm of the subjective. As the article inquires, how will the green gorilla atop a cellular telephone store be perceived?

Is beauty, or cleverness, in the eye of the beholder? Or the inflator?

Novopelle’s Lip

Now appearing in the Houston edition of Envy: A sharp ad for Novopelle® laser hair removal clinics. Using a stock photo, an ad agency named C&G has taken credit for the work. Those initials could stand for “Carlos” and “Glen,” since an adsoftheworld.com website posting credits Carlos Cortinas (art director) and Glen Day (copywriter). What attracted me, an occasional reader of this hip lifestyle magazine, was the careful, sans serif type across the upper lip of the attractive young woman in the photo:

A closet full of low-cut blouses. Countless hours at the gym. A small fortune in pushup bras. And he can't stop staring at my upper lip.

What an excellent, contrasty way to direct attention. The stock photographer’s shot helps: The young woman’s eyes looking up and to the right. In its cleanest version, there’s no more than the photo, the lip-contoured headline, the Novopelle logo and website. In the version pictured here, jpegged from the magazine itself, you can barely see Novopelle’s services: Fire, Air, Water and Earth. These packages describe the body parts from which hair would be removed and range from the under arm, bikini and upper lip ($587) to the “full” deal – arms, legs, face ($1,945).

In a magazine like Envy, wherein there’s plenty of food/drink/expensive fashion accessories, the C&G ad stands out big time. So you may or may not need hair removed (I could benefit from some transplanting myself). But you’d have to be blind if you don't “get” this one.

The Restoration

Praised be forever the Lord of heaven, who onely dost wondrous things, because thy mercys indure forever. That's what John Evelyn said when Charles II regained the throne of England. Royal Charles himself never said anything like, “Whoa! Really glad I've been restored to power – thanks, Centerpoint!”

But we, whose electricity was restored yesterday, feel like a king now that our air conditioning is back on and electricity is flowing to vital systems like freezer and refrigerator. Now this doesn't mean that there's connectivity – the electric's back but the Internet isn't. I hope Comcast comes through with the cable connection real soon.

That being said, many many thanks to Centerpoint and all the other people who worked so hard getting out Spring Branch neighborhood restored to civilization. It was easy to lose one's cool in the two-week interval between The Ike and yesterday's re-electrification. But anyone with a brain can work out how well off our area has been compared to so many others throughout Southeast Texas.

Coming soon: More blog posts about genuinely interesting subjects, including marketing Commie cats (I swear). Meanwhile, here's to...The Restoration!

The Ike

“I survived the Ike!” That's what I'd put on the t-shirt if I really got into the t-shirt thing. Which I don't – but if I did I'd sign on to CafePress to create what's on my mind – then sell it. Or perhaps not: Coming soon is a post about someone who's marketing via CafePress. This past week, my own marketing and advertising work has come to a standstill due to disconnectivity issues.

Meantime, perhaps you noticed the article? Not just plain Ike but “the Ike.” The article elevates the tone of the whole thing, don't you think? We have a dry roof and good health, even if we're headed into our second week without electric power. Electricity outages also make me forget what a calendar is for; and who's running for (what is it?)...President. I hope to be restored to power soon – my followers are getting restless.

To press on, I'm not going to duplicate the thousands and thousands of words that have been written about the recent hurricane's impact on Houston and Southeast Texas. You've seen the photos and the videos, listened to the commentators and the storm victims – so much, so much.

Instead, here's a public appreciation after “the” Ike. Mostly too many to name individually, but you've supported us in so many ways: Gasoline, foodstuffs, connectivity (well, Panera Bread's free WiFi and fresh coffee deserves a spotlight). A generator, courtesy of Doug, Donna and Maddy Nytes in Sugar Land – quite a gas-powered hoot after posting about the same subject before Hurricane Ike arrived in town; see below. The many, many smiles and – above all – patience!

Many thanks to everyone who helped us “survive the Ike.”

Generating Awareness

There’s nothing like a walloping great hurricane to generate awareness. It’s like your impending execution: “The unusual thing about the headsman’s ax is that it focuses the mind wonderfully.”

Yesterday, Alison Bond went to the nearby Home Depot to pick up a few things. She saw an extraordinarily well-dressed couple who, she could tell, had never, ever been in such a store. In their lives. They were shopping for emergency supplies against our coming Hurricane Ike. The man had the most expensive flashlight stocked by Home Depot. He held it gingerly, like it might explode and get…battery stuff…all over his nice suit.

He and his wife stopped by the largest portable generator on the floor, perhaps this AC Delco Model AC-G0005 with electric start. It’s 6,500 watts, “a real warrior,” according to the website write-up. (All Alison remembers, in passing, is that it was big and blue. She herself was not in the market for a generator.)

The man asked his wife, “We should buy this? Is this what we need?” His lady shrugged her shoulders. Looked totally blank.

Clearly, had there been time, the couple would have called someone to select an auxiliary generator for them, a professional generator picker of some sort.

Ad guy Tom McElligott told me once that people don’t notice advertising for tires until they need a new set. That’s when they finally see those newspaper ads. I know the same thing is true for what’s needful during hurricane season.

Proving once again that people do plan ahead – just not far enough. And when they do begin to pay attention, they have to repeat their climb up the learning curve. Or, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him water-ski,” as Roger Edmondson says.

Knowing now that Home Depot will still be stocking generators in October and November: $199 (Sportsman) to $4,200 (Xtreme Power 5000 Watt Professional).

Knowing the same thing last June? Priceless.

PS: Who manufactures these AC Delco portable generators? The brand name’s on the equipment, but the equipment’s not on the brand website. Just wondering.

Hurricane Waiting

“Hurricane Ike poised to slam into the Gulf,” in case you’ve missed this. As a good blogger, I should help you understand that it’s entirely motivated by politics. True fact. Otherwise, why would the liberal-leaning media label this 100-mph blast of hot air Ike? Remember? Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of these United States? A Republican. Well!

The timing is dadgummed suspicious: Right before the presidential elections…okay, not right before, but really, really close. And let’s not overlook Ike’s target which is Texas, a Republican stronghold if there ever was one (not counting The People’s Republic of Austin, which I don’t). Well.

I don’t want to add to the general ruckus. It’s the car manufacturers who will benefit most from this season’s string of “uncontrollable” hurricanes and tropical depressions. Toyota has already started its guerrilla marketing campaign with a Bizarro cartoon – I noticed the company’s promoting its Prius, of course, for gas efficiency in case you are evacuating the area. (Thanks to Barbara, we’re already covered there, don’t you worry about us.)



Well. We’ll just have to see who’s laughing on Sunday, eh?

Cartoon © 2008 Dan Piraro. All Rights Reserved.

LifeFormulae™ Brandwork

Today’s horrid cliché: There are no small clients – only limited imaginations. Exceptions, though, disprove this rule; Lee Jones, Executive Vice President of LifeFormulae LLC, is one of them.

Thanks to Jones, I’ve been working to establish a brand around a software-as-a-service – called SaaS – for the third time in as many years. SaaS is a delivery mechanism for software, more efficient in many ways that purchasing a software package and installing it on your computer. In this case, the effort is for LARTS, the LifeFormulae ASN.1 Reader Tool Set. (In the world of bioinformatics, it’s safe to say LARTS is delivered by SaaS. Got that?) LifeFormulae is a new company…but that isn’t holding Jones and the rest of the team back.

With Jones’s encouragement, a brand has been built around the company itself, rather than its products. Seems straightforward: LifeFormulae, the toolmaker for life-science researchers worldwide, helps investigators shorten the time from research to results.

It’s really not so simple, not when it comes to the complex and challenging world of life sciences. The principals of LifeFormulae have built a better computational mousetrap that speeds up the unraveling of the secrets of life. Outside any perception of brand is a metaphysical platform captured in part by Jay Lake in his latest book:

And so Creation worked, the planet spinning like the hands of a watch, meshing with the ring of its orbits as it transited through the sky. Everything danced around everything else, advancing in a mechanical sarabande that told the story of God’s craftsmanship more eloquently than words in any book to talk…

At its most abstruse, LifeFormulae software aims to help life scientists breach the wall of God’s craftsmanship at speed: To provide them with the quickest route to the genomic and proteomic answers they need.

Beyond any brand communications the company is likely to develop, the motive for the stopwatch visual (discovered and deployed by website development manager Rachel Sandrock) is the intricate construction of life. What lies beyond this boundary, for researchers, “is another Creation.”

Whoa! All the foregoing is way too philosophical.

Look: There’s a new logo for LifeFormulae, created by Griffin Creative. The new look for this small bioinformatics company is provided by Sandrock. Her stopwatch visual could stand for “nonstop solutions;” instead, it emphasizes the time-sensitive deconstruction of life’s secrets.

And the new branding, from brand story to words, comes from me: LifeFormulae is the resource for researchers – the one that can deliver what they need for a shorter time to a result, a critical product…a cure. Everything’s on line to support Jones’s forceful sales and marketing initiative.

A small company may not have the time to explore every possible interaction with its stakeholders. It might have to start from scratch, inventing a position based on product attributes. Despite all the theory in the world, that’s not a bad place to begin branding. And it’s going to show up first at the Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s “Data-Driven Discovery Summit” in Providence, RI, September 21-25.

There’ll be more to this story. I’ll feed it to you as we go. Meantime, thanks to the LifeFormulae team – Ira Crain, Bill Eaton, Pam Culpepper, Jones and Sandrock – for the opportunity to help build another Creation.

Vagrant Wireless

Or perhaps it's “wireless vagrant.” Any road, here I am trying out the free WiFi connection at the nearby Panera Bread store.

While a lot of people highlight Starbucks (and the coffee is good), I wanted somewhere less cramped, more relaxed for my first away-from-home-because-the-cable connection-is-cut outing. This is it, the Memorial City bakery-cafe. The joe is a fresh-made Guatemala Antigua, I had the basic egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich, then plugged the laptop into the wall and fired it up.

A little work, a little more coffee. The soccer moms and accompanying players are stirring, just about the only ones. Did I mention that the Panera Bread wireless connection is free? Yep, it's free. Just sit down, open up your laptop and you're ready to go. Send an email as you munch a warm bagel. Read the news as you sip a latte. It's a nice alternative to the office, isn't it? Please relax, do what you need to do, and enjoy our WiFi. It's free all day long.

Says so right on the website. For a hotspot, it's pleasantly laid back. Just the thing for a disconnected hobo on a Sunday morning.

Comcast Amputation

It is the shame of the world that September's first post has to come from a random wireless network – my apologies. I'd intended to have a neat write-up about a CafePress marketer but a funny thing happened on the way to Saturday.

Having a tree trimmed of a honking great limb yesterday (a hedge against hurricane-force winds), the efficient arboring team also took the Comcast cable connection with it...it put paid to the TV service but – more critical – cut us off from the Internet. For a man that's used to feeling connected, this is something of a problem.

I'm filing this under “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” Comcast has been responsive, but there's no help for an intervening weekend. More later.

Advertising Immaturity?

In case you were genuinely concerned, it’s official (according to author Michael Kimmel and MSNBC): Career aimlessness and beer and porn culture define ‘Guyland.’ Our latest crisis, brought to the nation via smart marketers and advertisers, is men’s failure to launch, to mature, to grow up.

It’s the subject of anguished musings among social scientists. Include parents who are burdened by the sons who either won’t leave home or have moved back in. Include women of certain ages who cannot seem to find a suitable relationship partner. (You can tell that this cyclically historical “debate” is becoming charged again because what one commentator calls pornography may be another’s healthy interest in the opposite sex.)

There are just as many smart marketers and advertisers who long ago recognized that boys will be boys – for as long as they can. Whether the product is beer, hotels or magazines with “mature” content, advertisers go all out to appeal to guys who, goldurn it, just don’t want to take on adult responsibilities. And yes, if you’ve clicked through the links in this ‘graph, you may notice a preoccupation they have in common – why do you ask?

As a marketer, I recognize that there’s significant opportunity to advertising to the guys who don’t want to grow up. As an older marketer, I regret that I didn’t take more time 30 or 40 years ago to delay the onset of responsibility.

Concerned social commentators, this agonized focus is a waste of time – mainly yours at this point, although if it becomes a real crisis like childhood obesity (right), then the government is going to get involved. Wait, that may be a good thing: Special programs for guys who haven’t matured, teaching them how to be responsible adults. Federal funding! I love the smell of Federal funding.

Even Kathleen Parker has waded in on my side of this growing debate, I think. At least that’s one way to read her latest book, Save the Males. Heck, I’d settle for a woman who can tune my Caddy’s 32V Northstar engine. I can barely find the latch for the hood (hence my constant enjoyment of the Brad DeGroot-Toni Daytona plotline in “Luann”).

Advertisers have a job to do and it’s not selling immaturity. It’s to help sell their products and services in a way that creates positive interactions between their stakeholders and the brand. Remember that – and the name of the brewski – every time you laugh at a beer commercial.

“Luann” Cartoon © Greg Evans, 2008. All rights reserved.

Spicier Print

When Procter and Gamble added actor Neil Patrick Harris to its list of pitchmen for its tried-and-true Old Spice deodorant, it took the brand makeover one more step onward and upward.

Old Spice has become more hip and more current by enlisting comic actors like Will Ferrell and Bruce Campbell as pitchmen – Harris is the latest with the quite nice TV spots you can watch (carefully) here on YouTube: “You DON’T have to be a doctor to recommend it.” An entire bloat of bloggers have commented on the Harris commercials, not least because Procter has reversed the manly play by adroitly enlisting this particular actor.

Better than the TV commercials, go to the Old Spice website and attend the brand’s TV School of Medicine…really outstanding. You can get your own hospital doctor’s badge by answering just a few questions. (Well, really you only have to answer one question – but it’s sorta hard.)

What’s most enjoyable, though, is the supporting print ad that’s running in leading-edge magazines like, say, WIRED. Most of the time in Ad-Land, the broadcast is hilarious while the print work just sits there. The art director for this ad, though, managed to get the hilarity of the TV spot condensed to a single page and you have time to really look it over. Harris’s casual hand-in-pocket look, stethoscope neatly placed on the patient’s nose – what better way to highlight “the torment of chronic body odor and wetness.”

Harris’s badge reads: Health Center Medical Hospital Center. (It must be a great place.) The Old Spice script is cut off at the bottom of the ad like old Cutty Sark advertising. And the copywriting’s not too bad, either.

The agency’s still Wieden and Kennedy. Want to enjoy the perks of being a would-be TV doctor? This ad’s perfectly tuned to help you get there. Seriously.

Webb Revisions

It’s really too much fun: The graphic designer at Zephyr Salvo who created my revamped Signalwrite website is Michelle Webb. Here’s a shout-out to her, as well as John Philippe and Brian Bearden (prime mover), with my thanks. This new-fangled site came from a lengthy process which involved virtually no work on my part but some solid re-engineering on Zephyr Salvo’s.

Those of you who are intimately familiar with my old website, created by Paul Leigh, will find the content similar. But the key elements have been redesigned by Bearden and Webb to promote better searchability. At the same time, there’s a new way of looking at my samples which I really like and I hope you do, too: Please stop by for a visit.

Yes: my semaphore guys are still on-site. So is the yellow color, which I’m thinking of trademarking (somehow) – although I like what Michelle did with the subtle patterning at the top. And the familiar smiling face of yours truly – that’s still your basic awkward presence.

Thanks again to the Zephyr Salvo team and everyone else who’s kept the signals flying these past four years. All the best for a great weekend!

Russia? Respect?

My pique at the article in this morning’s Houston Chronicle, “ Give Russia respect it’s due,” has more to do with the Outlook section’s editor or headline writer than with the article’s author, Gale Stokes. Pictured below right, Stokes is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History emeritus at Rice University – a long-time observer of Soviet and Russian history and one of its most prolific chroniclers.

Now you know I hardly ever blog about politics – marketing is my life. But this article’s title has got up my nose; and the current condemnations of President Bush’s statements about Russia have reached their tipping point.

First: Dear headline writer, I suggest Russia will get the respect it is due when this “great country with an educated workforce just starting to feel its economic oats” does something worthy of respect. I don’t see Russian ships arriving in far-flung regions of the world with emergency supplies after a tsunami strike; I don’t see Russia stepping up to the plate to halt the slaughter of civilians in Darfur. What I mainly see (through the eyes of the Western press) is Russia being [a] the biggest bully on the block and [b] a thugocracy of the first magnitude.

Let’s see. When did Russia invade Ossetia and Georgia? Oh yes: During the opening days of the 2008 Olympics. That’s right out of the historical poke-them-in-the-eye playbook, isn’t it?

Second, fair is fair. Professor Stokes doesn’t use the “respect” line himself. In fact, his opinion piece offers a proposal that’s reasonable on the surface and that’s all the attention I’m going to give it today.

Third: I do wish the USA was a perfect place with perfect leadership. It is not. But we (as a political entity) come closer, I think, than most others to being the world leader that has to stand up and say things like “Bad dog, bad dog – drop that country right now.”

I’m heartily tired of two methods of condemnation much practiced against America right now: Historical blame-gaming and moral relativism. The first is a great favorite of Islamists; the second a big-time weapon in the liberal arsenal. Right is right – wrong is wrong. If we (America) sometimes get it wrong, I have great confidence that we’ll get it right sometime later down the road…that’s one thing we do really well.

I don’t think anyone else can say quite the same thing about their own track record, in a national, historical sense.

Well – I was wrong to say I’m not paying more attention to Professor Stokes’s article. It seems to bear further thought after all – the role of a good opinion piece whether I like it or not.

Professorial photo: University of Wisconsin.

Bottle Mate®

On behalf of water carriers everywhere, thank you, Tom and Nancy Shebesta.

Tom Shebesta is the General Manager of Bottle Mate in Lake Isabella, CA, northwest of Bakersfield. You may not remember as far back as February. I wrote about Ozarka Water screwing up its chance to do a good deed. (Read about that fiasco here.)

But I remembered. And so did Tom, who’s in charge of the “entire” Bottle Mate operation out there in the West.

He called me to ask if I’d ever gotten ‘round to getting a Bottle Mate XL from the Pittsburgh Water Cooler Service. When he found out I had not, he made certain he got one into my hands…and it arrived courtesy of the US Postal Service: Your basic great invention. Patented (1991 317.843). Useful as all get-out. And made to last forever – in fact, it’s guaranteed for life.

Paul L Gagnon invented it back in the ‘70s, from a sand-cast mold…made in his backyard with a hair dryer and casting sand in 1971. His daughter Nancy (see above) used to help him in the product development phase when she got home everyday from high school. The original company was called Port-O-Clamp, Inc.

The original Bottle Mate was made of cast aluminum. The company went to plastic injection-molding in the early 1980s. The Bottle Mate XL, my own pride-and-joy, came out in 2000 because of requests for a larger handgrip.

Now along with my blue nylon Bottle Mate came some sales literature. After reading it, I don’t really know why Ozarka (and its owner, Nestlé Waters North America) don’t follow the simple marketing instructions which Bottle Mate has gone to the trouble of including:

What are your marketing tools? One free Bottle Mate handle…Satisfied customers boast to their neighbors and friends for years.

Tom manages the company founded by his father-in-law and he thinks it’s because these large-scale water companies don’t want to go to the trouble. Okay: Lauren Barack of MSN Money says bottled water is one of those “unnecessary necessities” we can live without. You know it’s true; so do I. Maybe – just maybe – the large-scale bottled water companies will do what smaller, local firms are doing to compete more effectively for our increasingly less disposable dollars. A Bottle Mate promotion could deliver a customer-winning edge.

BTW, I have a family member who prefers the taste of Ozarka to our municipal water supply. So we continue to purchase those 44-pound plastic bottles (without the fancy molded-in handles, too). Fortunately, the Shebestas have been there for me. I used the Bottle Mate XL just yesterday to transport those monster jugs from the front porch to the back.

Thanks to Nancy and Tom, I felt the very model of a modern Gunga Din!

Expanding Branding

We could have called it “Manifest Destiny,” I suppose: This upcoming AMA-Houston Healthcare Special Interest Group seminar. We could have stressed the potential value of brand expansion with a title like, “The Promised Land of Brand Expansion.”

Still, here’s your chance to register early for the SIG’s 26 September seminar which is really called, Community Marketing: Expanding your “brand” outside your backyard. (Think of the railroaders and teamsters in this mural as role models – political correctness aside – taking your healthcare brand out into the wider world.)

Look at this from our SIG programmers’ POV.

Healthcare marketers can’t expect patients to come to a central location any more. We’re moving beyond the need for marketers to think outside the Texas Medical Center, to move providers and facilities outside that geographic box. In fact, even “early expanders” are losing patients to sister facilities newly established in farther suburbs, according to gossip heard among professionals in one of the suburban hospitals.

We believe your brand has to be effectively transported as well. The more stakeholders you involve deeply in your brand the better, whether it’s a local, a regional, or even a worldwide effort. Your hard-won brand facets help carry your value propositions beyond your original facility’s doors.

So we’re willing to put our seminar where our thoughts are. A panel of “expansion experts” from three different healthcare practice areas to discuss the marketing value of expanding your brand outside of your own backyard.

Come that Friday morning at The Health Museum (the SIG’s fortunate home base), you can hear from Edgar Vesga, International Attaché at Texas Children's Hospital; Les Mann, US Oncology Vice President of Marketing; and Suzanne Jarvis, Executive Vice President of healing sciences organization Esocen.

Each professional has a different brand; each has a different set of challenges expanding outside their core markets. You’ll have the opportunity to see how each story applies to your own challenges – and how to measure the success of your brand extension efforts, too. Sharon Lore of UTMDACC (which knows a thing or two about branding) will moderate.

Here’s a few good guides to help get you to where you need to go brand-wise…without a lot of mishaps. We aim to help show you the way come 26 September. So sign up now and avoid the rush, because this past year the Healthcare SIG’s managed to pack the trains for every trip. And O Pioneers! There’ll be a light breakfast for you, too.

State Capitol Mural by Charles Banks Wilson. Photo By David Fitzgerald with thanks.

We're Booking!

It’s really coincidence. Yesterday’s AMA-Houston luncheon (speaker: Karen Hooper, Director, Marketing Communications and Strategy, KBR) was so well attended, it felt like the Houston Rodeo. But I still had time for a short chat with Colin Hageney. His company, Bullpen Marketing, uses advertising specialties to create high-impact marcomm programs for clients.

He asked me if I’d read his latest blog post; I hadn’t. So I went there this morning and discovered he’d put a fresh face on a classic idea: Using books to help send your marketing messages. He calls it, “Something New Is Old Again.”

I can affirm that this kind of program is very effective and said so in a comment to his blog. Then I went to our library shelves and collected the books I used for Sperry Univac Defense Systems (old, old company name) as part of a book-based direct mail series.

Aimed right at the System Project Officers (SPOs) who were managing US defense and weaponry programs in those days, we chose books because we could send them to the officers but position them as donations to their units’ libraries. As I commented in Colin’s blog, we sent a series of books. One was a terrific coffee table tome about antique scientific instruments. There was a detailed historical examination of fast torpedo boats published by the US Naval Institute. And one I am surprised to find still in print: A biography of Elmer Sperry by Thomas Parke Hughes from Johns Hopkins University Press. (My original copy has a green rather than this blue cover.)

Sperry was one of the great turn-of-the-century US inventors, that tranche of original American tinkers that included Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford and Hiram Maxim…you probably don’t recall more than a couple of these names. I grew up with their stories.

A quarter of a century back, we could send books about these geniuses to people who still remembered who they were and what they contributed to America’s growth.

I’m guessing here – but Colin’s examples are, perhaps, a bit more timeless. Thanks for the reminder, Hageney. Ta for Thursday.

“Streisand Effect”

From today’s The Gazette (Montreal): Reporters are still chafing over the issue of blocked websites, only two weeks after Beijing and the International Olympic Committee went toe-to-toe over the issue and the Chinese seemed to back off.

Plenty of websites are still blocked, such as Amnesty International, Free Tibet, and a YouTube video showing the 1989 protest and aftermath at Tiananmen Square.

Aren’t the Games going swimmingly? Seen the nice commercials, have you? Notice how the sports reporters refer to the “haze” in Beijing? Catch the announcement by the officials of the International Olympic Committee are giving China a pass on this one?

Don’t mean to be political, but still, I wonder if China’s blocking action will come back to bite ‘em. It’s been generally proven that trying to block access to information on the Worldwide Web is self-defeating (at least most of the time.). This has been called the Streisand Effect, after an attempt by Barbra Streisand to get photos of her Malibu, CA, mansion removed from the Internet. There’s even a website devoted to the concept now.

William Shakespeare said it first (or best): “Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.” You can certainly count on the IOC to avoid offending totalitarian regimes. Let’s wait for a bit and see if the Games’ advertisers pay the piper, eh?

File photo by Frederic J Brown.

Telling “How”

Clients have wanted to tell a variety of stories recently. I’ve had the chance to help them identify those stories, trying to come up with new ways to tell their stakeholders about various facets of each brand.
We learn by example. Click on www.lockheedmartin.com/how and you can find out how one major corporation is doing it…online, with video, with TV commercials. (Not each one is equally successful: The “Environment” commercial doesn’t measure up to the company’s far more interesting story; its print advertising is consistent but not as compelling.) Every element of Lockheed Martin’s “How” campaign is structured around 12 words.

Between the idea and the achievement, there is one important word: How.

One of the site’s newest videos explains the development of the F-117A Nighthawk, the world’s first operational stealth fighter….again, based on the word “How.”

I know not every company has Lockheed Martin’s wealth of stories, especially about things that go bang. I also know Lockheed Martin has been in the news lately in a not-so-great way. Still, weapons systems are hardly the only arena in which Lockheed Martin is involved and branding efforts are even more critical when other, more positive stories need to be told.

For a large company like Lockheed Martin, it doesn’t matter whether the focus is on it first-class environmental efforts or US military airpower research. What’s key – from a marketing perspective – is consistency of brand messaging and story-telling style.

It is observable that the company has kept to an unswerving brand story. (And the stock price is up about 20% in the past year, too.)

So: How do you marshal your own brand stories? How do you commit to presenting them in a variety of ways? How do you keep the pressure on your own organization to help you deliver the many facets of your own corporate narrative?

Lockheed Martin notes: It is the how that makes all the difference.

Nighthawk photograph © 2008, Lockheed Martin Corporation.

Keep Emotion

By accident, I’ve ended up with a neighbor’s magazine. Have to say, though, I’m not really getting much out of the August number of Journal of Accountancy. What I learned is that there’s a dichotomy between what CPAs might want to sell me and how they intend to sell it.

Take the case of a perfectly nice, competent accountant like Theodore Sarenski, pictured at right. In the publication, he’s bylined a short article about “Taking Emotion Out of the Decision” to purchase long-term care insurance.

He carefully cites numbers to reinforce the fiduciary benefits of this kind of insurance (which the Lord forbid I’ll ever need, uhuh). He’s all about facts and figures in this short piece, reinforcing the emotionless approach – until he comes to the last sentence:

Isn’t it worth the peace of mind to know that a lifetime of work and saving will be preserved to benefit future generations?

In trying to eliminate sentiment from a buying decision, Sarenski falls back on “peace of mind” at the end. Life is emotion. Attempting to wall yourself off from it – making a logical buying decision – only works if one is a stereotypical accountant (I suppose there are some) or a machine. And as WALL-E has proven, even machines can have souls.

I don’t know the writer. He doesn’t know me. Without any prejudicial intent at all, I say, TAKE IT ALL WITH YOU, Sarenski! Don’t leave a sou for anyone.

Railean™ Rum

The end of 5th Street in San Leon, TX, is about as far as you can go before you run out of solid land. Beyond it sail shrimp boats and freighters. This is where Matt and Kelly Railean founded their distillery. This is where they make “original” Handmade Texas Rum™.

I wouldn’t blame you if you think I’m a sot, not after writing about Louisiana rum in a previous post.

In the blogosphere, though, one thing does lead to another. So I found myself with an invitation to visit one of the two rum-makers in Texas. Railean Texas Gulf Coast Rum is hand-crafted in a different style than Old New Orleans Rum and the brand is marketed differently, too. (Yes, there’s been a certain amount of tasting going on – this helps me differentiate among brands. Really.) Why miss a chance to observe this brand effort on the basis of the Four Ps* of Marketing anyway? And it’s just down the “Highway of Death,” I-45 South.

These Texas rums are new. The Raileans got their financing in the Year 5 and their permit in the Year 7: Their clear White Rum came out in December last year, the first marketable liquor off their shiny German-made column still. Railean Reserve XO (the amber rum) has just been introduced. Matt Railean is the distiller; in fact, he’s Texas’s first “Master Distiller.” Kelly Railean is the marketer – her background as a First Level Sommelier, with more than a decade’s experience in wine and spirits, means she knows how to go door-to-door.

The initial, Four-P decisions, though, have been joint ones.

One: Product. They wanted to match their product – the rums – with the audiences they saw on the horizon. They believe there will be a market for fine-tuned, hand-crafted rums just as there is for single-barrel bourbons and aged tequilas. In creating the product, they went for “dry” rum recipes. There’s no sugar left in the specially created 720 molasses when it goes in the still. The two varieties are less sweet than most rum – the flavors are rich though not syrupy (the Reserve XO has some sherry-like overtones). So far, bartenders and restaurant owners say they like the Railean rums because they’re different, with an up-market feel and taste that’s distinct from mass-produced rums.

Two: Positioning. The brand name – Railean – is the family name. The makers experimented with different name options, using both friends and liquor-industry colleagues as sounding boards. I’d say there’s no more vanity here than any other entrepreneurs; and a good deal of realism. If you can’t have the brand equity of a Bacardi or Captain Morgan, you have to build your own. They also understood from the get-go that San Leon doesn’t have quite the throw-weight as New Orleans. Rather than load up the rums with pre-conceived notions, “Railean” is neutral…so Matt and Kelly are willing to let their stakeholders help build brand loyalty and image. (I think the jury will be out for a while yet on their brand positioning effort.)

Third: Presentation. In this case, that’s the label design. Look behind any well-stocked tavern bar, or the “Rum” section of a good liquor store. You’re going to see a lot of labels showing black bats, pirates, sugar cane and more pirates. After considerable thought and a huge number of designs, Matt and Kelly looked out the window of the Buccaneer Tavern in San Leon and saw the hundreds of monk parakeets flying around the power poles and palm trees – the little green parrot ended up as the Railean mascot and the anchor of the product labels.

Fourth: Promotion. Kelly Railean is convinced on-premise sales will build the Railean brand and that’s where most direct tasting and promotion efforts are concentrated. I wrote in a previous post about “marketing one bottle at a time;” bars and restaurants are where the 30-to-50-year-old professionals nurture their liquor brand devotion. The company wants to foster this personal relationship with the brand; admits it’s hard work and intends to follow through with it all the same. In the absence of a million-dollar budget, the Raileans will use word-of-mouth to foster brand loyalty.

Forty-plus years back, John C Aspley wrote about the advertising manager of a large manufacturing company who said: Sales promotion moves the product toward the buyer, while advertising moves the buyer toward the product.

The Raileans are using sales promotion – and sweat equity – to construct their brand’s success. Their achievement will be handmade, for sure.

*There are about as many “Ps” in marketing as there are markets – three, four, five, seven…you name it. One 4P set (not mine) can be found at The ABCs of Small Business. I’m grateful to the Raileans for the great chance to see a new consumer brand take its first steps. Their brandsite also features plenty pix.

No Joking

Let’s turn to the not-so-ordinary-people category. There are probably a few (hundred) CMOs and Sales VPs shaking their heads right now about the boodle being generated by “The Dark Knight.” The actors’ names alone seem to be key drivers.

Why can’t you spend six months or so creating a product; hype it for six months or a year, and then generate $314 million in just a couple of weeks…wouldn’t that be one spectacular sales trophy to hang on your mantelpiece?

Writing in the current Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris is pretty certain that, despite the exceptional magnetic performance of Heath Ledger as The Joker, the latest Batman installment may be top of the world right now. But it will never beat “Titanic” for long-lasting financial performance:

People kept going. And going back. And then more people went. The movie, which opened at No. 1, stayed there not for weeks but for months…In the decade since “Titanic,” studios have just about perfected their ability to get masses of people into theatres for the first weekend or two of a movie’s release…But staying power? A three-month run at the top? That’s so 1998.

This is no movie review – it’s a review of marketing performance. As far as its stakeholders are concerned, “The Dark Knight” has quite a limited record so far. As Harris notes, in a decade “Titanic” has earned $1.8 billion…no other film’s coming close to that number so far. And “The Dark Knight” has a lot of stakeholders.

There isn’t a marketer that wouldn’t like a slice of “The Dark Knight” magic for his or her product/service. One option: Since your stakeholders aren’t always the most patient of souls, use short-term marketing feedback and/or sales performance as a benchmark, a set of early indicators.

Then think about what impacts this early performance (good or bad) will have on the returns you’ll get from a long-term marketing run. Staying the course may not always be the right answer…but you could end up with “Titanic” gains in the end.

The Heath Ledger/Joker photograph is copyrighted like you wouldn’t believe. I acknowledge its ownership by Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Films, DC Comics and Syncopy – all rights are reserved and likely engraved on steel plates.

Ordinary People

Here it is Saturday and I’m wondering if business-to-business advertising is the last refuge of normal human beings? Unless you’re looking at a trade magazine, you’re seeing handsome, cool, good-looking people flacking products and services these days.

‘Course, this has been going on for years and years: Mary Pickford, one of the most famous movie stars of her day (which would be about 90 years ago) appeared for Everywoman’s World in 1919.

Celebrities both are and are not what they used to be. You can see one of the world’s largest advertisements for Maxxim featuring Eva Longoria here. Form-wise, this is a substantial mental distance from the famous Ms. Pickford; functionally, it is the same.

Reshaping spokes-celebrities continues among the brand icons, too.

Writing in Funny Times several months back, Lenore Skenazy bemoaned the glamorization of our advertising icons: “In Mr. Whipple’s day, there was no shame in being paunchy or plain or punching in at the kind of job you get straight out of high school.”

Another example: The old Dunkin’ Donuts guy is gone. But the younger, cuter, phenomenally richer Rachael Ray is gone as well – she was removed from the Dunkin' Donuts website some months back; her endorsement TV spots are off the air. For why? It seems she didn’t like the famous Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and wasn't shy about saying it out loud.

Fortunately, there’s Oil & Gas Journal or Offshore – just to name a couple of “regular” magazines. There’s nothing overtly glamorous about seeing a West Texas tool-pusher in these pages, an Asian pipeline engineer or a Scandinavian ChEng. None of them are too likely to let their star turns go to their heads, either. Still, I live in hope: “I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. deMille.”

The classic Chevvy-Mary Pickford ad is from www.adclassix.com with thanks.

Celebration Distillation

The last time I had any real truck with Demon Rum was ’63: A post-Marist graduation visit to what was then British Honduras helped me to an acquaintance of the locally produced product which was pretty raw.

Now, thanks to a tasting with Philip Cusimano, I’ve re-made rum’s acquaintance with a higher caliber product. And wandered again into the world of audience-building for artisan products. Here, the heavy lifting’s done by skill and heart and one-bottle-at-a-time marketing.

Phil (and our hosts at Mo Mong) let me taste three different versions of Old New Orleans Rum, from the Crescent City’s Celebration Distillation. The Crystal is your basic light-bodied rum that’s probably good for mixed drinks. The Amber is fine for sippin’. But the Cajun Spice, the one with the red label – it’s just outstanding…like the website says, “with the kick of cayenne & cinnamon…hints of nutmeg, ginger & cloves…”

My but it’s tasty. Every single-barrel rum is distilled and blended the old-fashioned way at 2815 Frenchman Street in NOLA by James Michalopoulos, a well-known local artist.

One of the “country virtues” of marketing artisanal foods and beverages (cheeses and breads, beers and wines, barbeque sauces and handmade pâtés) is that you can succeed without lots of money. You substitute lots of sweat equity and smarts. Boys and girls, Michalopoulos’s marketing the hell out of this stuff, mano a mano.

Michalopoulos doesn’t have the Bacardi USA ad budget, say, or the Captain Morgan “Morganettes” (Caitlyn, Megan and Whitney, no less).

What he does have is a finely honed sense of local color – the Red Hat Society ladies come to lunch at the distillery, e.g. He manages a comprehensive website and maintains an active blog. Old New Orleans Rum has pages on Facebook (I’ve joined up as a fan) and MySpace. You can purchase bottles online and have them shipped…from New York.

If – or when – Michalopoulos succeeds, he’ll have done it with continuous and clever promotion on a local and regional level, slowly building the rums’ audience through brewery tours, event participation and broadening distribution sites. You can find Old New Orleans varieties in Spec’s here, for example, right along with the shelf-hogging Bacardis and Ron Ricos.

Rum, like wine, is an amazingly available product…it comes from just about everywhere. But hard liquor distilled from sugar cane and byproducts is a genuine New World invention. It played a significant role in the European and African colonization of the American continents.

That these rums remind you of beignets and coffee with chicory is positively part of the brand’s image. The appeal is local (where Elysian Fields crosses Abundance), like Shiner Bock and St Arnold beers instead of Budweiser here in Houston. You gave it up for Tito’s Handmade Vodka, right? Made in Austin, right?

Well, you can buy your rum one of the great big labels and watch your money go offshore. Or you can offer up your drinking dollars and sense of style to NOLA, where artisanal branding is alive and well.

Steen’s Passalong

Yeshiva University decides to field a rowing team. Unfortunately, they lose race after race. They practice and practice for hours every day. Still, they never manage to come in any better than dead last.

Finally, the team decides to send Morris Fishbein, its captain, to spy on Harvard, the perennial championship team. So Morris schleps off to Cambridge, MA, and hides in the bushes next to the Charles River, where he carefully watches the Harvard team at its daily practices.

After a week, Morris returns to Yeshiva. “Well, I figured out their secret,” he announces.

“What? Tell us! Tell us!” his teammates shout.

“We should have only one guy yelling. The other eight should row.”

Thanks for this old goldie to Michael Steen, who writes novels like The Barnabas Nickel under the pen name “Michael Sea.” Good Shabbos.

Guarding Trademarks

For brand marketers, there's a good, quick briefing on the proper selection of trademarks: Read the “What’s in a Name?” article from BevNET Innovation, Issue 2, by lawyer Gregg R Sultan, here.

Long-form, though, it struck me that it’s relatively rare when information technology and copyright protection intersect. Today’s one of those days.

We’re at the dawn of what WIRED is now calling the “Petabyte Age.” That’s when there’s so much information available to us, the sheer mass of data demands what WIRED editor Chris Anderson says is an entirely different approach. He further pronounces: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world.

Very cool thinking, yes? Except that one of the examples in the WIRED feature article is a DOD program called Essence – the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics. Though “100 megabytes of data come in every day,” the government can’t nail down the source(s) of the current salmonella outbreak that’s clobbered 1,000 people.

Big data may well become miraculous. But mistakes will still happen if your project is “untouched by human thought.” So we come back to creating and protecting a trademark and Sultan’s article. Here’re some snippets:

Businesses tend to pick names which describe a product to immediately alert the consumer to the product’s nature (e.g., “Lemon Lime Soda”)…in the long run, you probably won’t be able to distinguish your beverage from others or protect the name.

Sierra Mist for lemon-lime soda…is considered a suggestive mark because it doesn’t describe the product, but conveys the idea that it’s refreshing. Marks like these are easier to protect and enforce…

As I said up top, the entire article is concise; worth your reviewing as a “best practices” reminder. Radio Corporation of America was fine in 1919. Now, 90 years later, it wouldn’t hold up as a corporate or brand name. This is what lawyers are for in our day and age, along with creative people who understand what makes one brand name more powerful, more useful and more protectable than another.

It doesn’t matter how much data you crunch (and there are software programs that’ll invent brand name options by the thousands). Creating a great brand is a human endeavor; guarding its IP value is up to human beings every time. Every time.

Appreciation to Gregg R Sultan, Esq., for his white paper, © 2008, BevNET.com, Inc. Post art by Prism Design, Inc. Many thanks to Susan Reeves and Stacy Allen. The art is the binary (data) form of a client brand name – a free bottle of wine to the first person who identifies it.

Wood’s Rebuke

I don’t know Bertha Jean Wood of Katy, TX. I’m gonna talk about her, though. First, note what Don Markstein says on his excellent ToonpediaTM website: “There was a time when Americans thought it was okay to poke fun at people about their cultural heritage.”

All too often, this habit took the form of mascots for very well-known brands. Markstein calls them commercial spokestoons.

The clichéd Frito Bandito© brand mascot was created for Fritos Corn Chips in 1967 by ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding. The character, animated by the genuinely famous Tex Avery, lasted about five years. Then in ’71, pressure by Mexican-American groups, accusing Frito-Lay and FCB of playing up racial stereotypes, forced the Bandito into permanent retirement.

Thirty-plus years later, the shoe is on some other foot. Or is it possible you’ve been asleep while the latest Wal-Mart kerfluffle’s been going on in Houston? It’s about the “much beloved” Mexican cultural icon, Memín Pinguín – again.

There’s so many blog posts, so much information on this flap, you can Google it all for yourself. What you do need to know is that Mexico’s past president, Vicente Fox, said back in 2005 that he didn't understand what all the fuss was about over Memín Pinguín. He insisted that Memín’s image was not racist, but a beloved character embraced by all Mexicans.

Out of the smoke of the cultural battlefield comes Ms Wood’s letter to the Houston Chronicle (Saturday, July 12, 2008, page B6). It would be a succinct 44 words if she didn’t have to refer to the paper’s overlong headline. She wrote:

I am glad to read that former Mexican President Vicente Fox sees nothing offensive about the Memín Pinguín character. (Please see “Comic draws charges of racism/Customers ask Wal-Mart stores to remove book,” City and State cover, Tuesday.) The right to free speech should never be compromised. Since we all agree on that, can we have Speedy Gonzalez and the Frito Bandito back? Please?

Thank you, Ms Wood. I hope and expect that you will extend that same incisive judgment to cultural stereotypes, whether they’re good or bad.

When is it time to put aside some beloved icon? Maybe it’s when your stakeholders transform themselves. Or when you’re no longer selling in “your” market. Trick is, discovering when that time comes before everything blows up in your face.

PS: Review some familiar brand mascot makeovers here.

Big Show

Brief note on the annual Lawndale Art Center Big Show, which opened last evening; Barbara and I attended. For this year’s event, the organization received 1,014 submissions by 407 artists and showed just under a hundred of them, from Adelman (John) to Zeigler (Paul S).

It was a full house, livened by people we knew: Hugh McDonnold had two paintings selected; the aforementioned John Adelman; Garland Fielder, Larry McEntire, Howard Sherman, Frances Thiel and many more; way more we did not know at all of course.

I thought two Allen Rodewald pieces were particularly fine – similar to the one pictured above. In fact, I thought this year the Show demonstrated a higher level of technical accomplishment overall. Still, with such a crowd, such an array of art, there’s no doubt that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s not comprehensively eye-popping (though some pieces are). It is a damned good overview of the state of art in Houston. I suggest a visit to 4912 Main Street. Then out for a couple of drinks to absorb the images. We did; used a 2006 Argentine Malbec for this purpose. No advertising - lovely evening.

Painting: “White Black,” acrylic on canvas, 42” x 68” – Expressive Design Studios.

We, together...

Last Wednesday, a colleague of mine was sworn in as a new American citizen. She told me about it on Thursday and I couldn’t have felt prouder at the news. She’s not from around here, you see – and I wasn’t even aware that she was undertaking this step.

Most of us are not “from around here.” That makes me an unabashed fan of the American melting pot. Unless you’re an American aborigine, all Americans come from someplace else, or their ancestors did.

Last Wednesday, hundreds of new US citizens added to the mix that is so uniquely American. In fact, US Citizenship and Immigration officials indicated that they conduct one such ceremony every month – usually about 2,700 people are sworn in as new citizens.

It’s a continual wonder to me and I don’t take the commitments of a US citizen lightly. Neither, I think, do new American citizens. Each of us, in our time, has the opportunity and the responsibility to make our nation better, to enrich the lives of our fellow Americans through good citizenship and good works.

You may or may not believe that the French cynically gave our nation Bertholdi’s Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World as a tourist promotion. To imagine seeing it for the first time from the deck of an immigrant’s ship is spine-tingling. To actually visit it is humbling.

If you read history, you are not necessarily condemned to repeat it – yet that’s what’s happening in today’s divisive debate about immigrants. Yes, the US ought to secure its borders. Yes, many immigrants are here illegally.

But so many are not – and so many take up citizenship and responsibilities which many “born-here” compatriots do not. This is one thing that makes us great: This amazing nation, this melting pot of cultures and languages and rancorous wrangling among left, right and center.

On this day after the 4th of July, remember the arresting sonnet penned by Emma Lazarus in 1883, which appears on a bronze plaque inside the Statue’s pedestal:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset- gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin-cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she,
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

On Wednesday, in Houston alone, several thousand people became new citizens. They’re joining us – or we are joining them. Together, we make up everything that is America.

Instead of complaining, what have you accomplished that is good for your neighborhood, your city, your country? Have you lifted your lamp beside our golden door lately?

Since I was on this particular kick, and because Glitzy has such an arresting collection of jewelry, I took the liberty of using another photo of an Amazing Adornments brooch – a 1940s-era Accessocraft pin made for the Kay Dunhill dress company. It bears the Latin motto E Pluribus Unum: “Out of Many, One.” That’s what the melting pot is all about.