“I Have Seen the Future and It’s Square.” Also Comes with Its Own Missionaries.

Square is the simplest way to accept credit cards. It’s easy to use and comes with a free credit card reader for your phone or iPad. Sign up is quick. When you swipe cards with Square there is just one fee: 2.75%. No complicated contracts, monthly fees, or merchant account.

Fifty words – and a straight-to-the-point picture – make the USP behind Square brand mobile payments as clear as day. Yet because I don’t work with credit card payments I wasn’t immediately aware of the power of this idea that comes from the company headed by Jack Dorsey, who was also the founder of Twitter.

It sure has power, along with key appeal points that have created a dedicated band of missionaries for the new system: convenience and cost containment.

I looked Square in the face at a lavender festival in Blanco, TX. I wanted to purchase some panoramic photography greeting cards from Revealing Light Photography’s Bill Brockmeier, working from one of the many small artists’ booths there. Nice cards. I asked if he took the American Express card; that’s when Brockmeier pulled the Square card reader out of its pouch and attached it to his iPhone.

Transacting – my AMEX, his reader and iPhone, photographing me holding the cards for the receipt, my signing the iPhone screen – took about four minutes. Another 25 minutes passed in the presentation of the whole micro-retailer concept between Brockmeier and me.

Brockmeier is a convert to Square benefits – one of its righteous missionaries for maximum convenience and lower transaction processing fees; much lower than could be obtained with any merchant bank-card program. There’s complete transparency, too: the cost-per-transaction rate is a major selling point featured on the Square website: 2.75% per swipe. You better believe that the app itself is free.

Square has been featured in so many “Best of” lists and write-ups that the only excuse I can make for not having been aware of it sooner is that I’m not a retailer.

It is precisely this small-retail enabling power that is such a game-changer, in my opinion. Its concise, benefit-driven narrative makes it easy for people like Brockmeier to proselytize for new believers. Founder Dorsey has already been credited for fine-shaping Square’s go-to-market story: “Everything we do here is design,” he’s noted as saying in a TechCrunch piece. “It is about the importance of telling good stories through your products and editing them down to their core narrative.”

A good story makes for a good brand; plus makes for easier fund-raising: Square has just finished raising $100 million in new financing. VCs believe in it, too.

PS: The difference between WOM and mission work is probably passion. Thanks and a tip of the marketing mob-cap to Bill Brockmeier for the passionate marketing missionary experience.

Sharp-Edged Beverage Marketing, The Red Bulletin Is a Product Worthy of Its Product.

The new “modern lifestyle magazine focusing on sport, people, art and culture” arrived in the Sunday edition of The Houston Chronicle and I’m real thankful. Otherwise, I would have missed Red Bull’s launch of the US edition of The Red Bulletin.

It’s the second month the sports-and-party drink has put more than a free million copies of the excellent publication in major metro newspapers like The Chron; the intro also included the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald and the New York Daily News.

I wish I could report that I’m squarely in its demographic – I’m not. But The Red Bulletin comes with a terrific range of people-oriented articles that are cleanly written: the edge doesn’t come from a fakey-hip style but from excellent copy. Add vivid photos and a powerful European design concept…this is an arresting property.

As mentioned in the AdAge launch announcement: Red Bull already publishes the magazine in countries including Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Austria, South Africa, New Zealand and Kuwait, with distribution totaling 3.4 million before the U. edition. Red Bull plans to add further editions later this year and in 2012.

I stopped an Outside subscription years ago as the quality of its writing (which was exceptionally high) fell off and the publication turned to full-time product flackery. My sub to Wired will be allowed to lapse because it has become an all-out product-sales hype machine with muddy direction and too many easy, smarmy articles.

The distinction I am pointing to is honesty. The Red Bulletin has been frank as well as smart in publicly owning its mission: support of global marketing efforts for the world’s best-selling energy drink (2010 saw a 15.8% increase in sales, worth US$1.5 billion).

Find and review a copy for yourself. The Red Bulletin is not going to drive me to buy the drink but my already deep interest in its marketing programs has taken another big jump. And the thinking part of Red Bull’s demographic will love it.

Can Radio Still Power Product Sales? When You’re Rush Limbaugh, Absolutely.

There’s some cognitive dissonance seeing Rush Limbaugh dressed up as Paul Revere – even in a cartoon. Yet that’s him on the back of that horse on the front page of his new Two If By Tea website.

If you like, you can forget what I said about radio in the previous post about Pandora:

…isn’t radio, no matter how enjoyable or cleverly wrought, ancient history, biz-wise?

Conservative talk radio, of which Limbaugh is the exemplar, is a broad exception to this thought. Love him or hate him, El Rushbo is one of broadcast radio’s driving forces. Introducing his own line of ready-to-drink (RTD) iced teas is therefore not just a retail play, it’s news. Two If By Tea:

…represents traditional American values of capitalism and the pursuit of excellence. Each bottle is designed to rise above the sameness and mediocrity that threatens our great nation. Just grab a 12-pack and join the fight to preserve the America we know and love. It’s worth it!

The product launch hit the trades big…and polarized yet another market segment. For example, Jeffrey Klineman, editor of Beverage Spectrum, put an announcement up first thing on the BevNet newsletter. Unfortunately, Klineman editorialized about Limbaugh’s “invective;” a number of industry readers came down on his post like a ton of teabags.

That’s the way the past week has gone – lots of hype and a lot more heat about the talk radio host’s political stances. But what about Limbaugh’s business model? Canned or bottled RTD tea’s a hot-and-cold category with a huge variety of packagers, flavors and sizes. Skimming stats from Mintel and Beverage World, new RTD tea product launches in the US doubled in 2009 alone; volume increased nearly 5% in that same one-year period. There are so many options for retailers, in fact, that the marketplace is overstocked; much product is value-priced, which means low margins.

And so what? Limbaugh has got, beside the right to be his own entrepreneur, his own broadcast vehicles. He’s has spent hours (I’m not kidding!) talking about and promoting these buy-online teas. Whether or not he’s paying rate card for the time – and he says he is – his unrelenting, day-after-day brand promotion has got to be moving cartons of iced tea.

Even if ratings research is right about Limbaugh’s audience slip, he still has an large number of loyal listeners (are they still called Dittoheads?) on 600 radio stations nationwide. Not to mention that live camera online.

Few advertisers can afford three hours of radio promotion every day – never mind Saturday and Sunday. Limbaugh is also executing a rather good marketing plan in support of his product launch, with the right stuff on the website, plenty of flanking action not to mention free shipping.

Watch the talking head e-market. He’ll keep generating controversy, maintain Dittohead loyalty and convert many of them to buyers of Two If By Team products. That’s power radio.

Without Panic, Pandora Peters Out – for Now. Can It Revive? Can It...Make Money?

This is an ad for Pandora, the online radio service. Part of its appeal, its money-making business model, has been selling advertising. I get that, looking at the page by Discover Marketing. But I ask you: isn’t radio, no matter how enjoyable or cleverly wrought, ancient history, biz-wise?

Although I’m no bleeding-edge visionary I could never figure out how Pandora was going to make money. Mike Damon of Damon Medical Communications suggested I try Pandora originally even as I told him, I’m not a music guy. “Free radio online” didn’t have the stink of revolutionary.

I read about Pandora’s music genome project – understood how it was supposed to work. Cool stuff, it is true; adventuresome. But how do you build a business model on that?

I couldn’t see the big money. Couldn’t make out the shared-user-experience excitement and participation that have driven other dot.com business models to success. For me, one ad-guy lesson is, beware of geeks bearing gifts.

Is there anyone in this spiral arm of the Milky Way who does not know now that the Pandora Media IPO cratered? (You can say, “Sure, I knew that!” and still sneak off here to give yourself some background.) As the SeekingAlpha.com post points out, there was a visible difference between the sizzle and the steak, especially when investors see cautionary statements revealing accumulated deficits of $92 million bucks.

So what has this got to do with marketing and advertising? Even with the best will in the world, I have found Pandora’s marketing and supporting advertising non-compelling.

In dot-com bubblicious days, the curiosity of geek-founders was hugely rewarded; so were the risk-taking investors of those days. Advertising and promotion, trade shows and PR all contributed to the hype. (We did, we did.) The bubble’s eventual collapse disappeared a lot of ad agencies, jobs and nest eggs.

Of the two different punishments at work in this month’s Pandora Media story, one is hubris – how can any team of entrepreneurs bring such a money-losing offering to market? Who the gods would destroy, etc.

But the leading-edge company whose stock symbol is P is by not yet destroyed. We need for it to reverse its course and succeed, even if it takes a few years. Because, as the author of The Last Olympian has the Titan Prometheus say:

Pandora always gets the blame. She is punished for being curious. The gods would have you believe that this is the lesson: mankind should not explore. They should not ask questions. They should do what they are told.

We need to keep that curiosity in the world. The marketplace will reward the venturesome and the challenging. Maybe all Pandora needs is a better business model. Plus adverts that don’t put you to sleep.

For Father’s Day 2011, “Baron’s Atlanta’s Answer To Italy’s Benevenuto Cellini.”

Anybody in Georgia who has a breakable treasure sooner or later finds himself paying a call to Paul H Baron, 951 Peachtree Street.
 

In the world of restoration, Paul Baron is Atlanta’s present-day answer to Italy’s Benevenuto Cellini. If the cherished object is chipped, nicked, maimed, frayed, faded, rusted or simply has given up the ghost from discouragement, Mr Baron can make it new again. Everything from Doughty birds to iron fountains, from Meissen to fragments of Inca rock ruins, from Imari chop plates to a Yak fat-rendering stove from Mongolia passes through his deft hands as a normal run of business.

With his own specially made glues, cements (guaranteed 120 years), paints, solders, moldings, lacquer, with silks, threads and golden filaments, he takes chips out of crystal, restores antique ceremonial services, reshapes and renews mirrors, reweaves tapestries, brings back old paintings with a matte finish that never checks or blooms, takes cracks out of doll’s heads with an air brush, braises and re-solders silver to mint condition.

Mr Baron’s customers, from two major department stores, once made a path to his backyard garage workshop when his postwar hobby was tinkering with the irreparable. Now his business comes from all over the world, direct from the nation’s principal express service, from international moving van companies, from museums, department stores, jewelers, antique dealers and interior decorators. His services as an appraiser of objects of art are in demand by such companies as Lloyds of London. Indeed, but for a Korean in Washington and a Japanese in Chicago who do mending, his only competition is a woman in Norwalk, Connecticut, who trained in his shop.

“We love nice distant competitors,” he says slyly.

Recently Mr Baron solved the aesthetic impasse between a decorator and his wealthy client who insisted on a television set in his formal French drawing room. Using a Fleetwood chassis, Mr Baron built a set into the chimney above the fireplace and covered its lens with a fine old oil painting. He rigged up a mechanism which moved the painting slowly upward at the flip of a switch, lowering it back gently when the set was no longer in operation.

“I have a field day with this kind of thing.”

Helpers for such a business are almost nonexistent. After trying several European artisans, Mr Baron found his best aides in an untrained man and woman from Rutledge, GA. Now Edna Broughton, her cousin, Ralph Wyatt, and a third woman, Flora Adams, can match any color, grinding it from Japanese lacquer, copy any intricate design, mold porcelain feet, hands, ears to restore crippled statuary – whatever is required. Their employer says they are all marvels of deftness and patience.

The most vital people in the word, Mr Baron says, come to his cluttered shop. The South has more and more collectors every year, some of them with acquisitions valued as high as a million dollars.

The Barons never catch up. “We could close our doors and stay busy for a year. But we don’t want to miss anything.”

…Transcription of an article appearing in The Atlanta Constitution in the early 1960s. It was written by Doris Lockerman. A very long-time reporter and editor, she died recently, on May 6, 2011, aged 101. Her obit is itself worth a read. Undated main photo credited to Paul Robertson.

In Fredericksburg, It’s Not about the Beer – It’s about Marketing and Selling the Beer.

I was in Fredericksburg, TX, this weekend – Barbara and I went for a wedding. It’s been years, maybe decades since I was last in this Hill Country town. It was crowded, a typical summer tourist weekend in F’burg…as with so many towns with their summer festivals.

Thanks to the Internet and the boom in craft-brewed beers, I knew enough to want to stop at the Fredericksburg Brewing Company (est. 1994); have a fresh beer or two. Did that first thing.

Barbara had a pint of the Pioneer Porter – smoked style, good. I coddled a glass of the brewpub’s Maibock which was very tasty. To my mind, it was the weekend’s best beer. The curious part: the same people who own Fredericksburg Brewing Company created the wonderful Hangar Hotel where we stayed overnight, 3.5 miles off Main Street at the airport. Lovely place, great room.

I was saddened to learn the hotel bar does NOT serve the beers from its sister company, the brewpub on Main. Strange oversight; maybe it’s regulatory. Kelly Ayers, Marketing & Events Manager for the associated companies*, confirmed it in a responsive email today:

We would love nothing more than to serve Brewery beers in the hotel bar; unfortunately laws for brewpubs are different than they are for microbreweries.

As a brewpub, we are only able to sell our beer on site; we cannot distribute to other retailers (even our sister businesses). We’ve been crossing our fingers that this law would be changed and have been watching closely Texas HB 660, which would allow brewpubs to distribute their beer.

You can follow updates on the bill on the Texas Legislature website. Right now it looks like it has been left pending in committee. If we can get a bill like this passed rest assured that we will not only have Fredericksburg Brewing Company beer in the Officers’ Club at the Hangar, but also in grocery stores!

By the way, I entirely agree with your review of the Maibock, it is one of my favorite brews!

Now one serious lapse is mine: Why didn’t I leap into the car and speed the 3.5 miles back to Main Street to buy a growler of the Maibock? And get back to the hotel lickety-split with that brew all fresh and cold? Well, I didn’t. My bad.

Passage of Texas House Bill 660, which Ayers mentions, is the consumers’ best hope for allowing craft-focused brewers to more effectively market and cross-sell their beers.

We can all help. It doesn’t even have to include drinking the beer – though that sounds strange. First, get your social media caps on. Go to Texas Beer Freedom on Facebook and sign up. Friend your local microbrewery or brewpub while you’re at it.

If your favorite bar or pub doesn’t carry fresh Texas microbrew, try a few encouraging words to the manager or the bartender. Because this post isn’t just for Fredericksburg and its tourists…it’s for all of us.

Think of this as our summertime “Freedom to Market” mission.

*To complete the set, let me mention that Ayers is also responsible for marketing the third of the sister companies, Fredericksburg Herb Farm. Photo courtesy of TripAdvisor.

“Ripped from Today’s Headlines!” Can Fat Be a Strategy for Healthcare Marketing?

I always wanted to use that famously trite RfTH screamer. Now’s my chance, because if you read Sunday’s Houston Chronicle you may have noted the sub-head in the Charles B Parks Business-section article:

Area hospitals are expanding their services to meet the needs of an older and increasingly obese population.

This article’s whip-round of some Texas Medical Center talking heads reveals how some hospitals are focusing their marketing on their targets – which would be us.

Thankfully the American Marketing Association is on the job! Come to the Houston chapter’s Healthcare SIG event this coming Friday and you could learn if diet is your marketing destiny. Maybe it’s genetics or economics. Or policies coming out of Washington and Austin.

The event panel’s brief: to discuss and present actionable insights into marketing strategy-setting and execution. The panelists come from hospitals, medical technologies companies and healthcare informatics, to help attendees explore “which audiences to target” and what “business segments are ripe for marketing.”

As attendees of previous Healthcare SIG events know, bariatrics (the study and treatment of obesity) can be one very effective marketing strategy. Managing diabetes is another. It does seem as though more flexibility is required today.

Be driven by opportunity – the chance to hear from Jackie Dryden, Jean van Soelen, Bruce Blausen and Kristeen Jones. The chance to participate with other healthcare marketing colleagues. Even the chance to ask why Signalwriter can’t take a decent photo with his first-ever iPhone, since I will be moderating the morning’s panel.

I’ll have a copy of the Parks article with me at Houston Baptist University on Friday. I’m big enough to say thanks to the Chron for providing me with this timely crib. I hope you will join us (because otherwise it’ll be lonely in the Dillon Room…with just five of us). Sign up right here, right now.

A Decent Graphic? From the Government? (Unbelievable but True.)

Here’s my two cents. The new plate icon for the US Department of Agriculture’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans is pretty good. I suspect that there’s going to be flack from some quarters over the new dietary representation. The USDA press release said:

MyPlate is a new generation icon with the intent to prompt consumers to think about building a healthy plate at meal times and to seek more information to help them do that by going to www.ChooseMyPlate.gov.

In fact, I have included the url in the ‘graph above so you can explore what’s going on for yourself. The plate is (IMO) better than the old 1992 nutrition pyramid; bushels and pecks better than MyPyramid, the most recent 2005 iteration of that shape.

There are already disgruntlers; the “literalists,” for example, are represented by Andrew Weil on The Huffington Post. I suggest that the new MyPlate icon is intuitive and straightforward. It’s fresh and it’s got a budget!

According to William Neuman in his New York Times article, the USDA funded the new effort to the tune of $2 million. That covers developing the graphics, plus research and focus groups; and marketing efforts, including the web site and going-forward promotions.

The introduction is fresh so it will be a long time before anybody knows if the icon really works. Literalists aside, I call it a well-focused effort, info-graphical enough to deliver messages but not on the bleeding edge of design. Way to go, Ag.

“Comic Verse Composed in Irregular Rhythm…Badly Written or Expressed.”

Making bits of rhyme improves the time.
It isn’t doggerel but catterel.
There’s insouciance for you, and subtlety.
There’s quirk for you, and some for me.
Is Hello, Kitty societally sly or merely wry?

Improve the time. Make bits of rhyme.

Copyright © 2011, Richard Laurence Baron.

Service: May 30, 9.30AM. National Cemetery, 10410 Veterans Memorial Drive, Houston.

“Z” – Signalman Lewis aboard USS Hancock. December 20, 1944, supporting operations at Luzon, Mindoro, Salvador Island, Masinloc, San Fernando, Cabanatuan and Manila Bay, Philippine Islands. HistoryLink101.com and Naval Slide Collection at the National Archives.

Illustrator Elwood Smith Amuses as Mixed-Messaging Parade Magazine Confuses.

Resistance to Elwood Smith illustration is futile for me. He’s been one of America’s leading commercial artists for years – I got to involve him on a strong Baker Hughes print campaign in the ‘90s. His work is so distinctive I couldn’t ignore his cover and text drawings for Parade’s May 22 issue; the magazine makes a usual appearance in our Sunday paper.

The title article was “Hungry? Eat Your Way Across America. The subtitle: “50 states, 50 fabulous food festivals.” Smith’s spot illustrations are wonderful. I began to read through the piece but realized...

Parade is highlighting this compilation of festival food so you can “have it all.” Festivals are indeed for eating; the magazine doesn’t hold back. Sample the world’s largest peach cobbler (75 pounds of butter) in Georgia. The giant strawberry shortcake feeding 15,000 in Oregon. The Fat Elvis peanut butter, banana and bacon biscuit in Tennessee.

The content is all about the numbers – 100 cheeses from 40 local creameries (Vermont), 200,000+ brats (Wisconsin), 100 tons of BBQ ribs (Nevada). It all sounds phenomenal. Don’t you want every plateful?!?

If you are “still hungry for more” the Parade website has plenty. The editors have salted these scrumpdillyicious descriptions with an occasional rarity for the health-conscious consumer:

Go ahead and indulge, then burn off the calories in the polka dance-off.

You press on, I’ll rest here with my buffalo wings (New York). I am amused, though. The magazine page count is 24. There are about 14 pages of ads. Of these, 3 are for fruit and meats; and 6-1/2 pages of ads for…drugs – 4 of those pages are for Zetia and Lipitor.

The Parade summer fun focus is great. But as the Lipitor slogan says, “Don’t Kid Yourself.” Happy Memorial Day.

A Tootsie Pop® Role in AMA Deliberations? Try the Banana. No, the Mango!

I didn’t realize: Tootsie Pops come in Wild Mango Berry. The AMAHouston Communications Committee* is sitting around this morning in the Savage conference room, sucking on candy…particularly the headlined Tootsie Pop.

Given our “business” focus today, the fact that some of the confections come from a company called Tootsie Roll Industries is reassuring to those of us who grew up to be captains (or maybe just sergeants) of industry, too.

The source of dentists’ profitability since 1896, you may (or may not) be old enough to remember original Dots and Charms. Or Sugar Daddies – that one drove our parents nuts ‘cause the chewy caramel thing could pull a filling out of your mouth just by taking off its bright yellow wrapper.

There were Tootsie Rolls themselves, naturally (boyhood sniggers continue to this day). Years ago though, the jewels in Tootsie’s crown were the Pops:

What goes into the world’s number #1-selling candy-filled lollipop? Start with a chewy, Tootsie Roll center; cover it with a delicious, hard candy coating; and you’ve got a simple, delicious treat, a Tootsie original that was the first lollipop providing an embedded candy “prize.” And at only 60 calories per fat-free pop, it’s the perfect guilt-free, sweet tooth-pleasing treat that everyone can enjoy.

Like the website says, that chocolaty center was and still is yummy. In my schooldays, the flavors were standard: Orange, Cherry, Grape, Raspberry…and Chocolate, the double whammy of the line-up. Sometime after I stopped being a customer, Tootsie Roll added a “…new sixth flavor that alternates among Pomegranate, Banana, and now Green Apple” but this website bit is misleading because over three or four decades, there were plenty of different flavors added and subtracted from the line-up. (An easy start on Tootsie Pop lore is Wikipedia.)

Like any modern CPG outfit, Tootsie Roll keeps on changing its line-up. Recently I’d heard there’s a Peanut Butter Tootsie Pop – that turns out to be wrong. Tara Johnson told me this morning that there’s a Caramel Pop, which I discover is a “Limited Edition.” I’d like to try one of those.

In the mixed bags on the conference table this morning were also some of the Banana sort plus these bright orange-and-purple Pops titled Wild Mango Berry. It turns out this one’s part of the company’s “Wild” series…currently with five flavors.

I like Mango. It’s amazing what you can learn from a dedicated group of professionals.

*This subset of AMAHouston volunteers must not remain nameless: Marketing Communications VP Johnson I’ve already mentioned. Also out for the workshop this morning were Jen Pearsall, Michelle LeBlanc, Robin Tooms, Tillie Nutter, Tom Richardson, Allyson Bandy, Amy Dionne, Erika Waters, Shanthi Subramanian, Jared Houser…and me. Now somebody please pass the Whoppers.

Cliffs Natural Resources: The Case of the Bush-League (or Incompetent) Ad Agency.

As an advertising professional, I'm not happy with “lazy.” Especially when you're going to run your campaign as full pages and digital placements in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail and other business and trade media across at least four continents.

Read about this new “Together. It Starts Here.” ad campaign for yourself online. In a nutshell, though, it's announcing that Cliffs Natural Resources has completed its immense expenditure in acquiring Consolidated Thompson Iron Mines Limited:

The advertisements feature a dramatic photo of two identical mining trucks, one bearing the Cliffs logo and the other bearing the Consolidated Thompson logo. The advertising campaign is designed to reinforce Cliffs' brand as a growing, dynamic global industrial company supplying raw materials to steelmakers around the world...

Now here's the sloppy part: The trucks are NOT identical, they're the same truck – the same photo of an immense mining dumper that's been flopped – reversed – and incompletely retouched.

Look closely, starting with the backwards image of the badge on the trucks' grills. Even though the company has spent $4.9 billion Canadian dollars on this acquisition, it apparently decided it couldn't stretch to a few hundred C-bucks for its ad agency to get the retouching job done proper. Or maybe this campaign is the production of an in-house marketing unit?

As was said in The Princess Bride: “Boo. Hiss.” Send this outfit back to the bush league where it belongs.

We Don’t Need No Trademarked “Seal Team Six” – We’ve Got Gurkhas.

Reality comes to the rescue of blogging again, even about advertising. So, first, if you didn’t share a huge guffaw over Disney’s application for a trademark on “Seal Team Six,” you missed a great chance to laugh at the company…again. And the company did this the day after the Abbottabad raid.

(Honestly, some days they’re worse than D Trump.)

Now you cigar smokers, current and reformed, will recognize the ad format here. It’s from the latest Thompson Cigar catalog and it’s touting Gurkha Special Operations Churchills. Since I’m certain that the catalog was in production before the US raid, serendipity is obviously at work. In fact, the king of mail-order cigars has had this offer floating around since last year:

The Gurkha Special Ops Gift Set takes Gurkha brand-owner K Hansotia’s support of our men and women in uniform to a whole new level. The Gurkha cigars are full bodied, but surprisingly sophisticated and employ a top-secret blend of well aged Dominican long fillers finished with a zesty Dominican wrapper.

On the one hand I’m charmed by the coincidence. On the other, Thompson (Since 1915) is  presenting its own special blend of silliness, starting with the inclusion of a 12-inch long knife instead of the kukri, the traditional long knife of the Gurkhas and other Nepalese hill people.

Even considering the historical use of Gurkhas as a special unit of the British Army (to this day: the Royal Gurkha Rifles); and their fearsome fighting reputation; the last time I can recall any sort of special operations being undertaken by the Gurkhas was in Hollywood’s “King of the Khyber Rifles,” in 1953.

So it goes: marketing will find a way. This is what drives the creator-cartoonist of “Dilbert” nuts. Plus the cigars are good, insofar as I remember them. Anything is better than one more over-reaching Disney exploitation.

Remember what these monsters did to “Winnie the Pooh.”

From GE Trolleys to METRORail Trains, “Carfare” Is Still Required.

This will sound so last century but I do remember when Atlanta replaced its streetcars with trolley buses. The electric trolley supplier, which happened to be GE, advertised about it in magazines like The American City.

My granddaddy, Max Baron, took me on at least one remembered ride on the streetcar that ran down Piedmont Avenue near our house of the era. So there was a jolt of flashback after I climbed onto METRORAIL at a parking lot at Bell and Travis, headed to OTC 2011 at Reliant Center.
 
I started riding the cars again last year for events in the Medical Center and in Reliant Center. Taking the train down to the Offshore Technology Conference this year (as in 2010) was a doddle. (That’s an informal British phrase meaning easily accomplished, a piece of cake.) Drive downtown. Find an easy parking place. Walk half a block to the METRORail stop, get your ticket and climb aboard. Fifteen minutes or so later, get off just 100 yards from the door to OTC. To get back, simply reverse the process.

It’s a buck-and-a-quarter fare one way. And that’s where the flashback comes: I wrote the $2.50 total cost into my expense-tracker as “carfare.” Even when you Google this phrase, you won’t find much about it, or its forebear “streetcar fare.” And I have no idea what mental attic corner I pulled it out of.

I do know that streetcars and trolley cars are gone (mostly) with the wind. Richard Layman, whose blog also supplied the photo of the ad above, is a bit whiny about the subject of public transportation but enough of a good sport to say:

I wrote recently…about how GM, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Firestone led a conspiracy to replace streetcars with buses. The fact is it’s way more complicated and nuanced than that – just how history most often is, nuanced and more complicated than at first glance.

Whatever all the reasons for America’s cities eliminating seemingly more efficient means of mass transit, advertising about it was a staple of certain trade magazines; 50 and more years after the GE ad appeared, I was still creating print campaigns for transit bus motor oils like Exxon’s…and running them in American City and County…the modern name for The American City.

Subways and trains are fun, flashbacks and all. I wish we had more of them. Because despite downtown Houston’s empty buildings, riding the train to and from the center of our city is exciting and easy too. Even a little sexy. Just remember to bring carfare.

R&B@OTC: Along with 78,000 Other People, We Came to See and Be Seen.

We forget. We all forget – and fast, too. When I wrote here about the 2008 Offshore Technology Conference, oil was $128/barrel. Today, after the close of this year’s OTC, the price is $97.30 – down from a high of $113 a month ago. In the middle, there have been ups and downs, spills and chills and drilling moratoria. Plus constant predictions of “the end of civilization as we know it” in terms of a bleaker, far more expensive energy future.

So why, in the face of so much negativism and angst, did more than 78,000 of us go to OTC 2011, generating another record-busting year? One reason is our recognition (at least as far as I can tell) that oil and gas aren’t the end of us; but rather, they’re Western civilization’s guarantor.

That’s a big word but no less true. Hydrocarbons not only fuel our present lives, they assure the quality and durability of what we have achieved financially and culturally.

This is not to say our industry doesn’t have its tin ears and big mouths. Transocean’s boneheaded safety bonus announcements a month ago are just one example of how to make an entire business segment look real bad.

OTC is energy – the thrilling buzz of making things happen, of participating. It only took me and Brian Bearden sitting together in the PSR Group booth for five minutes, getting this caricature drawn, to also draw a cheerful crowd of lookers…and sitting ducks for the PSR people working the booth. (Thanks and you’re welcome to the PSR gang!)

George Foster of Foster Marketing answered me this: “What’s the marketing value of exhibiting at the Offshore Technology Conference?”

Trade shows are the last bastion of building personal relationships in this digital age. The opportunity to reacquaint with clients and prospects from all over the world at OTC is  phenomenal. Not only the relationship-building, but to know that making one sale pays for the show makes OTC well worth the expense.

I have pushed the same query to other colleagues, veterans of working in or visiting clients at this year’s OTC. When I get more answers, I’ll post them and let you know. Meanwhile, newly headlined Barrett-Wehlmann-Proctor principal Jim Proctor splits being seen five ways:

From the optimist’s perspective, it’s keeping your brand relevant in the context of the global industry’s biggest event of the year.

From the pessimist’s point of view, it’s not being conspicuous by your absence.

For the salesperson: “I can see 40 customers in a day, not get on a plane and it only costs $1.7 million.”

For the marketer, it’s accumulating those pesky exhibitor points and improving location – year after year.

And from the CFO’s perspective: “What else are we going to do with all these profits?”

Thank you to Tuesday’s wingman Bearden, principal of web design consultancy Upstream Marketing. Thanks to Signalwrite clients here and abroad, and to everyone who made a great OTC 2011 possible…nothing cartoonish about any of ‘em but great colleagues all.

Out of Australia: How the Beer There Becomes (Briefly) the Beer Here.

The opening line of Wikipedia’s Beer in Australia entry makes joyful reading: “Beer arrived in Australia at the beginning of Western colonisation.” Kind of reassuring, too. In fact, the first paragraph neatly outlines the relationship of Ozites and their beers, like Australia’s ranked fourth worldwide in per capita beer consumption – though far lower in terms of alcoholic consumption. Like Aussies like lager best.

When Yanks think of Australian beer, it’s likely to be Foster’s because it’s a brand much advertised here, on and off. But the lager is made for this market by SAB Miller, Foster’s US licensee. And even though there are, in Australia, a huge number of different beers, they have all tended to be lagers as well…celebrated in song and story and even Mambo Loud shirts like the Reg Mombasa item above.

New Oz-beers and brands do make it across the Pacific, even though they’re more likely to be available in closer-to-Australia markets such as Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. Harder to come by in Houston although one brewery in Melbourne, Barons, caught my attention for name-related reasons. I’d mentioned it a time or two on Facebook…but no distribution here. I have wondered what its signature beer, Barons Black Wattle Original Ale (an “herbed, spiced beer”), tastes like since Rachel Baron and Alison Bond brought us some wattle seed from their last visit to Australia.

Everything is so connected – as you will see in just a moment.

Comes a ringing at the front door, which I posted to Facebook:

An AMAZING package from Susan Tapper, from Australia: four beers! By mail. Shipped end of February. Susan wrote: “So glad you actually got them — Who? What? Beers from Australia?? You would love it here — beer is the beverage of choice of Aussies young and old! The national ‘water’. (I actually travelled to Melbourne where I found those...)” What a gift - thank you, Susan. I swear to drink them only for good. Watch for reviews...

It’s a miracle, this gift from this long-ago Quest colleague who went off to Australia, married and raised a wonderful family while keeping in touch from time to time. Email, and then Facebook, made it even easier…especially in the shipping-of-the-beers department. Susan’s card also noted:

I so enjoy your beer reviews! I hope this (shipment – ed.) encourages you to look at some Aussie brews! A country filled with beer drinkers!

The miracle: four glass bottles of beer came regular post, all the way from Australia, without losing a precious ounce of beer through breakage. Susan used bubble-wrap (wonder what that’s called in Oz?) and foam rubber – even our postal person was amazed that the beers arrived intact.

What did Susan send thisaway? Not one but two bottles of Barons, one the Black Wattle Ale; the other the brewery’s Lemon Myrtle Witbier, 5.8% and 4.5% respectively. There’s a single bottle of Pale Ale – 4.7% ABV – from Kooinda Boutique Brewery (Kooinda means “happy place”) also in Melbourne. And one bottle of 6% Temptress Chocolate Porter from Holgate Brewhouse (think “brewpub”), out of a beautifully maintained 19^th Century commercial hotel in Woodend, Victoria.

In the past year, we have heard from a lot of people who would like us to visit Australia. Susan Tapper’s tempting us with actual beers is the best offer we’ve had so far. Note the use of the word “briefly” in the headline: the Oz-beers won't last very long here in Spring Branch.  

NOTE: Thank you so much, Susan. Thanks as well to Australia Post and the US Post Office for getting these beers to Houston.