Fritinancy

April Linkfest

So many links, so little time:

Everyone's talking about those UPS whiteboard ads. Slate.com ad critic Seth Stevenson analyzes why they're so compelling. (If you haven't seen them, he includes three videos in his article.) I hadn't known that the ads were directed by the brilliant Errol Morris or that the guy at the whiteboard is The Martin Agency's Andy Azula, who's the campaign's creative director. And I was surprised to learn from Morris's web site that he knows a lot about graphic facilitation (sometimes called graphic reporting), a technique that's about a zillion times more amazing to watch than the very simplified UPS version.

So you've written a novel and you want to know whether it'll be a best-seller? The mojo's in the title, says Titlescorer, which claims to "scientifically" predict your book's chances of success. Not sure how well it works with nonfiction, but it's worth a shot. (Via The Marketing Minute.)

Gimme that old-time, one-size-fits-all religion: Someone apparently believes the world needs Faith Heels, white athletic socks with words like Hope, Grace, and Blessed printed on the ankle ribbing. Wait--shouldn't they be called Faith Ankles? Actually, on the In-Souls ("Stand on the Word of God") web site the socklet is described thus: "Your Faith is displayed just above your heals" [sic and emphasis added]. I think this is not a parody, but I'm not entirely sure. I'd love to see someone counter with Seven Deadly Sins socks. Wear your Pride! (Via Short Takes, a BrandWeek blog.)

The Internet of tomorrow, as envisioned by AT&T in long-ago 1993 and revisited on Paleo-Future. Picturephones? Natch! Link is to Part 5; scroll down for links to previous installments. More are in the offing. (Via BoingBoing.)

Breakfast of the Gods, created by Brendan Douglas-Jones, is a "totally unauthorized, 'Lord of the Rings'-sized epic starring breakfast cereal mascots" such as Cap'n Crunch and Tony the Tiger. Chapter 1, "The Last Good Morning," has been posted; the next two chapters ("O Cap'n, My Cap'n" and "Apocalypse Yum") are in the works. Go here to read about the making of the epic. (Via The Trademark Blog.)

Goes grrrreat with breakfast cereal: Andrew Davidson's corporate gibberish generator. "Think customer-defined. Think out-of-the-box. Think cutting-edge. But don't think all three at the same time."

I've saved the best link for last. Gather round and read the tale of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel as told by the prodigiously talented Maciej Cegłowski. Never heard of the tunnel? Oh, what you've been missing. When you come back, I'll tell you about the time I toured the Alameda terminus (or is it commencimus?) and was filching a burrito from the pneumatic tube when all of a sudden... (Via Mike's Web Log.)

Beautiful

How does a cosmetics company let passers-by know that a new store is on the way?

The far side of the sign reads "Give Your Career a Makeover."

Perfect synchronization of vocabulary and brand.

The Skinny

Here's a tale of the left hand (editorial) not knowing what the right hand (advertising) was doing, and the discomfiting consequences.

On page 42 of last Sunday's New York Times T: Style magazine ("Beauty Spring 2007"), journalist Holly Brubach takes a thoughtful look at two books about dieting, anorexia, and distorted body image. Her story--"Starved to Perfection: Why Are We Not Entitled to Take Up Space?"--ends with this sobering insight:

Over the course of the past three decades, men have been pursuing unnatural bulk and women exaggerated thinness, as if the world were such a small and symbiotic place that the weight they gain is the weight that we must lose, as if we need to minimize ourselves to make room for them.

Directly opposite Brubach's column is a full-page ad for Not Your Daughters [sic] Jeans (spelled correctly on the company's web site). The main photo depicts a woman from the (naked) waist down, holding a tape measure around her jeans-clad hips. The headline and subhed read:

Instant Gratification -- Look One Size Smaller

"Flatten Your Tummy, Lift Your Butt, Feel Younger" reads the copy.

I'm actually OK with the jeans; if some women want to subject themselves to denim bondage, so be it. It's the weird juxtaposition. Whose idea of good judgment was it to place an ad for corsetry--isn't that what a "criss-cross tummy tuck panel®" implies?--next to an article with "starvation" in its headline? An article that asserts that "dieting has become so commonplace that the skeletons on the catwalk simply strike us as more expert at it than the rest of us"? It's not as though there weren't other full-page ads to choose from: perfume, sunscreen, Cartier watches.

On the other hand, the double truck double-take might have been some clever, underpaid production artist's subversive idea of poetic justice. In which case: A+ for conceptual art, D- for marketing impact.

Word of the Week: Tingle Table

Tingle Table: An 18-bin table used by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to sort paper tax returns. The table was named after James Tingle, the IRS employee who invented it in 1961. (UPDATE: See the comments on the Double-Tongued Dictionary entry for some Tingle family history.)

Tomorrow is the deadline for filing tax returns in the United States. (It was extended by two days because the traditional filing date, April 15, fell on a Sunday, and April 16 is Emancipation Day, a legal holiday in the District of Columbia.) Last year, 73 million returns were filed online, 20 million of them from home computers. So far this filing season, almost 72 percent of all returns have been e-filed, up almost 6 percent from last year. But you can't e-file directly to the IRS, which has declined to set up a portal. According to National Public Radio, Intuit--maker of the popular TurboTax software--lobbied hard to keep it that way. Intuit is one of several companies that collect a fee for each e-filed return.

Tingle Table in action (PowerPoint slide 5).

Taken...

...from the annals of real life, as transcribed by Scott Adams:

Getting There

Nothing to do with names, brands, writing, or words: just a rainy-Saturday diversion.

While you're waiting for Ryanair to start offering cheap flights between the United States and Europe--as cheap as 10 euros, or $13.50, from New York to London--here's an alternative strategy:

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Select "Get Directions."
3. Type "New York, NY" in the first field.
4. Type "London" in the second field.
5. Click "Get Directions."
6. Be sure to follow step #23.

Hat tip to fellow Dolphin Club member Shane.

I'm Huge in Moldova

And by "huge," I mean "modestly popular in a very small country if you believe the web traffic statistics."

Still, I find it fascinating and mystifying that according to Alexa, which tracks such things, 25 percent of Away With Words' readers log on from a little landlocked country between Ukraine and Romania. That puts Moldova, population 3.4 million, in second place among my readers, behind the United States (40.6 percent) and well ahead of the United Kingdom (9.4 percent).

Why Moldova? Who knows? I've never visited the country (although now that I am a virtual culture hero--author of the 2,297th most popular web site being read by the glorious Moldovan people--I am of course available for personal appearances and factory tours), and everything I know about it comes from Wikipedia. I will say I'm quite taken by Moldova's shape on the map, a sort of Italian boot in miniature. And I'm sure the Moldavan language controversy (is it really just a dialect of Romanian?) would be a terrific topic to explore if only I knew something about it. Any country whose national anthem (Limba noastră) translates to "Our Language" certainly has a big investment in words, and that's OK by me. (Ukraine's anthem, by contrast, is titled "Ukraine's Glory Has Not Yet Perished"--nice touch, that yet--and Romania's translates to "Wake Up, Romania!")

It's not as though I have no connections at all with that part of the world. My maternal grandmother's people, the Rabinowitzes, claimed to be from Romania, and in the late nineteenth century, when they boarded a ship for the United States, Moldova and Romania were pretty much the same thing. For all I know my ancestors lived near Chişinău (formerly Kishinev) or Bălţi (formerly Beltsy), or even Ungheni (whose sister city is Winston-Salem, North Carolina, another locale I've never visited).

So, greetings, my possible-distant-kinfolk! Thank you for honoring me with your readership! Put your feet up, have a cup of coffee (surely not as robust and satisfying as Moldovan coffee, but what can I do?), and let me know how I may amuse and enlighten you.

This Is Why

Resolved: that New York rapper Mims is hot. Can there be any debate? After all, he tells us so himself, over and over, in This Is Why I'm Hot, which a few weeks ago was #1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100. E.g.: "I'm hot cuz I'm fly/You ain't cuz you're not." Res ipsa loquitur.

But can we assess Mr. Mims's hotness using science and logic? That was the challenge Rob Harvilla of the Village Voice took on a couple of weeks ago. His graphical dissertation on the song is both a brilliant parody and the best use of graphs in the service of a hot topic since An Inconvenient Truth.

Consider just one of the Venn diagrams in Mr. Harvilla's piece, an explication du texte of one line in "This Is Why I'm Hot." (I've chosen it for reasons of shameless geographic chauvinism.)

More than merely an elegant bit of visualization, the diagram displays an intimate and affectionate knowledge of the San Francisco Bay Area, so very rare in a New York writer. How many Voice readers, I wonder, know the identity of Bruce Brugmann? (Answer: the publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian since approximately the mid-fifteenth century.) And you gotta give the man props for hella, which originated right here in Oakland and is honored in many fine products.

Mr. Harvilla is, without a doubt, hot.

Hat tip to Seth's Blog.

Defining Our Terms

Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language has been compiling some wickedly good definitions of marketing clichés. Check out his Devil's Marketing Dictionary parts one and two, and feel free to add your own contributions.

A sampling from the Book of Matthew:

• Return on investment. An imaginary number that is equal to or greater than the cost of purchasing a solution.
• Best practices. Don’t do as I do, do as I say.
• Call to action. The mating cry of a salesman in written form.
• Synergy. The mystery factor that will balance the books, make the solution work and get the project done on time. See Kryptonite, Philosopher’s Stone, Unobtainium and XYZZY.
• Web 2.0. A website where readers do most of the work for you and you don’t have to pay them a penny.
• Survey. A series of carefully crafted questions that generate the answers the PR company had in mind when they pitched the idea to their client.
• Passion. Used by PRs and copywriters when they have their sincerity simulator dialed all the way up to 11.

To which I'd add:

• Corporate DNA: "How we do things around here." Fuzzy science for the cubicle set.

The original Devil's Dictionary was the work of the American journalist Ambrose Bierce, who published it in weekly installments between 1881 and 1906. (He disappeared, probably in Mexico, sometime after 1913.) Bierce's lexicon is as timely as ever, as these definitions prove:

Self-esteem, n. An erroneous appraisement.

Friendship, n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

Erudition, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Ho Ho Ho

Great post by Barbara Ehrenreich on the Don Imus "nappy-headed ho's" flap:

My first thought, when the Don Imus scandal broke, was: What gives a guy with a full-frontal comb-over the right to criticize anyone’s hair? Don, Don, don’t you remember I am rubber, you are glue…? I had no idea what he looked like until he insulted the Rutgers women’s basketball team and got all over TV, but now that I know, and now that the discourse has descended to comments about people’s appearance, I see why he’s been confined to radio all these years.

Of course it’s the ho, not the hair, part of Imus’s comment that hurts, with its suggestion of unlimited sexual availability. Dream on, dirty old man, but there’s no amount of money that would win you the favors of these strong, smart, athletic young women. It was the senile lechery of his “nappy-headed ho” remark that creeped me right out. What did he think-- that it was Bring Your Dotage to Work day?

Ehrenreich goes on to analyze the argot of hip-hop and the way in which an insult, "used often enough, becomes the exclusive property of the insulted." Read the rest of the post.