Just the right amount of wrong

It was the music from the above commercial that really caught my ear while I heard it in my hotel room in Houston a couple of weeks ago.

Then I saw the second commercial, and it had the same music, too.



I love the music there, so I went hunting and found a couple of articles about the ad campaign and the past campaigns of The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. Turns out it's an instrumental of the Mos Def song, "Twilite Speedball."

Funny AT&T commercials

I appreciate that AT&T set up these two great commercials with a pretty solid ad campaign and then perfect timing during the NCAA tourney.





The hug is marvelous...

Fringe candidate goes for shock

This week's Odin's Word (the Princeton High School newspaper) had a big spread on the two major party candidates for president and profiles on three more, less-major party candidates for president.

They didn't touch on Randall Terry's candidacy.

Terry - about whom I had never heard before this week - is, however, running for President and has enough support and money to run ads on eleven television stations around the country. Lucky for me, some of those stations are in Cincinnati - WCPO, WKRC, WLWT, and WXIX, admittedly all at fairly awkward times...

• WLWT NBC News 5 @ 4:30A: 4:30 – 5AM Wed 10/31 – Fri 11/02
• WCPO ABC 9 News @ 11PM: 11 – 11:35 PM Wed 10/31
• WKRC CBS Good Morning Cinn @4:30A: 4:30 – 5AM Wed 10/31 – Fri 11/02
• WXIX FOX Fox 19 Morn News @6A: 6 – 6:30 AM Wed 10/31 – Fri 11/02

I haven't actually seen the ads on television myself but have gotten a fairly thorough report from Calen on how WKRC has been handling the ads which are more than a little beyond the pale. WKRC has running a disclaimer before and after the ads. Apparently on Tuesday then, the newscaster even came on before the ad break to explain the intricacies of campaign advertising law in which a station that accepts any political ads has to accept - and offer time at the same rate - for all campaign advertisements. The rates even have restrictions in terms of not gouging the campaigns as the election approaches. It is, honestly, a great law, allowing every candidate to have their voice and positions heard no matter how popular or unpopular they may be - particularly with the station's management team.

According to Calen, though, the newscaster at 5:45 am on WKRC went so far as to explain that the material in the about-to-be-aired commercial and advising people to turn their television off for two and a half minutes, the length of the commercial break. That's a bold step and one that might or might not be legal. I understand the position of the station, wanting to make viewers aware that the about-to-be-aired commercial  doesn't match the station's views and wanting to perhaps protect their viewers from things that might be outside the cultural norms of Cincinnati and WKRC. I also understand that showing an advertisement without comment is vastly different from showing it with commentary.

Fox-19 has also taken a similar position in providing disclaimers around the advertisements.

In other interesting things, I found the WKRC records showing the sale of the television time to Terry's campaign. Interestingly, it appears that a single thirty-second ad in fairly less popular times (12:30 in the morning here) costs only $25 for political ads. Somewhere in my memory, I have it that political ads run at reduced rates as compared to commercial ads.

Oddly it appears that the Cincinnati ads are being run officially by David Lewis, an independent candidate for the House of Reps from Kentucky.

Terry, by the way, also ran his ads during this past January's Super Bowl in some markets leading to very offended viewers in, for example, the Boston area.

If you're interested in seeing the commercial that Calen saw, I'll put it after the jump. There are a number of other, further beyond the pale. Those second ones are available on either of Terry's websites. Be warned, though, that most of them - including the one from WKRC after the jump - have very graphic images of aborted fetuses.

Have a nice trip!

A while back I mentioned Joe Kittinger who - until yesterday - held the record for the highest, fastest, longest skydive. Yesterday, however - in case you hadn't heard - Joe helped Felix Baumgartner break nearly all of those records (not the longest freefall, though - still Joe's).

The words that Joe spoke just before Felix stepped off from his capsule ('and our Guardian Angel will take care of you') were stunning, as were Felix's last words ('I wish you could see what I see...I'm coming home') before he set himself free to do something that no other human - other than Joe - can possibly understand.



It wasn't all sunshine and roses, though, as Felix hit a spin (0:25 above) and had his visor fog up, blocking his view of his instruments (0:42 above). Luckily it looks like everything worked out just fine, and Felix touched down, dropping to his knees.

You can get a feel for what the experience was like thanks to this recreation...



Video of the full ten-plus minute jump after, well, the jump...

I thank you

To my loyal readers...

Grab it by the memes

The newest Vitamin Water commercial seems to have a thing for internet memes. After the jump you'll see my list of the ones I've spotted. Which ones did I miss?

Richard Branson

Funny stuff...

Being social: part 2

If you need to take a moment to look back at my previous posting about all the identities that are officially, unofficially, or absolutely not representing Princeton High School (PHS) (or Princeton City School District (PCSD)), go right ahead.

Now, what's to do about it.

First off, it's not my job to look out for Princeton's online identity. I am, in fact, making a point of divesting myself of some of the non-necessary parts of my Princeton life at this point. Teaching at Princeton High School is my job, and there's a lot of things about PHS and the PCSD that aren't my job. I've also been hired to do a special project in managing the PHS website for the 2011-12 school year, but that special project wasn't defined to include anything like 'watch out for PCSD's online identity', it's a whole lot closer to 'just post some stories from time to time and update some of the stuff if anybody notices it.'

But, in case you wanted to know...

Marketing today isn't marketing in the pre-intertubes era. Back then, a company controlled its image and could sue the living snot out of anybody who tried to take control of that image who wasn't a part of the corporation. Coca-Cola produced ads for Coke. They picked their colors (red, white, black), their images (American, fun, young, nostalgic), their spokespeople (Santa Claus, Mean Joe Green, Selena), their iconography (the Coke bottle). If somebody started making unofficial Coke products (drinks, shirts, whatever), Coke simple sicced their lawyers on the offenders. With Coke's deep pockets, they could simply out sue any monolithic copyright offenders into submission and protect their image that way.

In the interweb age, however, it's far tougher to keep control of an image. Anyone offending that image is likely to be far less monolithic, far tougher to squish like a bug. Parodies, video commentaries, tweets, Facebook statuses are all very quick to spread around the web and almost impossible to remove once they're created and shared. This all means that an organization has far less control and has to be willing to open things up to web users. The best organizations turn this into an opportunity rather than a frustration. The worst thing to do in such a situation is to rant and rave pointlessly at any web user who decides to do something creative.

Steps I think PCSD/PHS should take...

• Have a plan - Somebody needs to have some vision for Princeton's online presence. That somebody used to be the PR director (with varying quality as the position's gone through three incarnations/office holders in my eleven years in the district). Now, with less money, PCSD has no PR director but needs to have the work done somewhere.
  
  This could be a single individual (somebody at central office, I would think, because otherwise an individual building would likely be favored if a person at that building were chosen - this is a skoo district, not a district of skoos, after all) or it could be a group of people (somebody from CO, HS/MS/Elem reps, tech savy parent and/or student maybe). In this case I would suggest most of the work be done by employees. Our district makes a huge attempt to include parents and students and non-parent community folks on every committee, and that has its place. It keeps everything open and allows non-employees to provide important input. In this case, however, there is value in having PCSD folks determine how/what PCSD wants to market themselves.
  
  Then, put together a plan. Figure out what the Viking is supposed to look like (a consistent coloration), figure out what our online red and grey are (this has been done for the new school's interior but not for the web), what the important phrases/graphics are going to be, what the policies are going to be about online Princeton, who's going to search the web once or twice a month to see if a new Princeton persona or website has come into being.
• Centralize the official presences - The PCSD website is already in place. There are aspects of it that I like, and others that I don't like quite so much. It's in place, however, and I don't think it's going away even with the district's money troubles. The central office folks - or the committee or person in charge - needs to tell the entire district (principals, staffers, whoever) that anything put online using the Princeton brand belongs to Princeton. If it has a Viking on it or says Princeton or PHS or whatever - and absolutely, positively if it's being run by an employee - it belongs to Princeton. That means the account info and password and link info for any of the official Princeton things needs to be handed over the moment the thing is created. If it's not given to the committee (I'm going to stop saying 'committee or person or central office') within one week of the site/persona being created, it gets shut down as soon as the district finds out about it. There needs to be some incentive for quick compliance.
  
  I don't know if class-specific websites would be included here. For example, I have a Facebook group for my honors chemistry classes that doesn't necessarily represent Princeton but that I have called PHS Honors Chemistry. If I was required to give the control up to the district, I would rename the group to not include PHS or Princeton in the name, but I recognize that the district has a right to know/approve what I'm doing.
• Reach out to the unofficial presences - Ask every coach to contact their sports boosters, every music teacher to contact the music boosters and communicate to them to district's goals and expectations for any online presence that says Princeton. Ask them to work with the district and be careful about what they do online when using Princeton's name.
• Try to shut down anybody who won't comply - The Facebook profiles that say they're Princeton but aren't Princeton and don't necessarily represent Princeton well should be reported to Facebook. So should any Twitter feeds or anybody else who isn't Princeton but says they are. At the very least, those feeds should be monitored, and the real Princeton personas should be posting there to make sure everybody knows they're not real.
• Be vigilant - Somebody needs to be searching the web on a regular basis to see if Princeton's online presence is changing. Google notifications make this a little easier, but there's no substitution for straight up, diligent web searching. Look for Princeton and PHS and Vikings and Vikes and Evendale and Springdale and Sharonville and PCMS and every other school out there in various combinations.

So, where did I go wrong? What did I forget? 

Being social

So, I'm the PHS webmaster this year. It's my first year back on the job after a hiatus of a year and a half. It's also the first year that PCSD has been without a public relations (PR) director in my eleven years in the district. Perhaps as a result of that latter happening, I've been finding myself more and more interested - and sometimes frustrated in Princeton's various online personas.

Today I'm going to run through the various online presences that exist in and around Princeton City schools. This will be an incomplete list because I'm pretty sure there are other presences out there that I don't know. I'll come back early next week with my thoughts, beliefs, and understandings about our online brand.

There's the district website, redesigned almost two years ago now and managed through SchoolWorld, a website/company that managed school websites around the country. The district website is being managed by our technology director and the secretary of the former PR director. Each of the school websites - all a part of and largely indistinguishable from the district site - is managed by somebody in the building.I'm the high school webmaster, but some of the elementary schools are being managed by the building's principal.

There's the high school's Twitter feed, managed by our principal, occasionally by some of his student interns, and - I think - by our athletic director/principal/fotball coach. The feed is branded as being our principal's, self-described as 'leader; innovator; visionary; change agent." In a weird way this seems to make it less official for me because if the principal leaves, I assume that Twitter feed would leave as well. Two examples of that exact problem is here @PCMSViking where the former principal left the building for our central office or @PrincetonSchool, the Twitter feed of our former PR director. When that happened the Twitter feed died, leaving anyone who relied on it as communication to be lost. Makes me wonder what will happen to Dale Even (@EvendaleLilVike) when their principal leaves or @ImproveSchools when Tim Dugan retires...again.

For a while our principal also had his personal YouTube channel that he was using as the high school's channel, uploading videos and linking them to the official website and Facebook page (that's coming in a paragraph or two). At some point, however, that stopped, and the PrincetonVikings channel - which was created a year and a half ago to post a valedictory speech video. I'm not sure how many people upload videos there, but I know of at least a half dozen high school employees who have the password.

The most viewed Princeton online presence might be the high school's Facebook page. There are six administrators there - a music teacher, me, two principals, our librarian, and our technology director. We have 5217 likes there, and this is the place with the most frequent updates from PHS - especially since almost every Tweet gets reposted here. Somewhere along the way, the choice was made that only official posts show up when people land here. There's also the Princeton Vikings 'person' which simply refers visitors to the main high school Facebook page.

A while back - two years, three years maybe - I created the PHS Vikings PicasaWeb account. For $5 a year, we get 20GB (for now, the amount of space for that price will likely go up) to post photos. There's only one person who has the login info for that account, and that's intentional.

The final online official PHS presence (that I know of, anyway) is a Wordpress blog called Leadership 24/7. There our administrative team and invited teachers post entries about, well, leadership. The blog saw six posts in August; none in September or October; then four more posts in the ten days after I asked our principal if I could go ahead and remove the link to the blog because of inactivity. That was in late November and the first week of December.

Now we get to the less official presences of Princeton on the web, the sites that aren't being run by Princeton employees or at least aren't purporting to represent Princeton in any official capacity.

• Shades of Grey - This used to be an annually-published literary 'journal' but has turned into a tumblr and YouTube account posting student-read and, I assume, written poetry, prose, photography, and singing. This one is run by a PHS teacher and PHS students but does break the district policy against posting student first and last names with images unless prior, written permission fro a parent is obtained.
• Princeton Vikings - This Facebook 'person' says it's PrincetonHighSchool, but it's not run by any Princeton employee that I know of. Instead, it's largely a front for a person/business that sells DVD transfers of Princeton football games from the glory year 80's and early 90's. I have registered a number of Facebook complaints against them as not being any official Princeton capacity. 
• Princeton BoysBasketball (Boosters) - This Facebook 'person' seems to be run by our basketball boosters, which would mean that it's quasi-official since the boosters is an quasi-official Princeton group. It's probably a Princeton parent or two - maybe with the endorsement of our two basketball head coaches, but it's interesting to wonder how the management of the page passes from year to year.
• PHS Pasta for Pennies - This one's mine - with Calen, anyway - and was created as a non-profit entity for our annual campaign for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (speaking of which, it's not too early to sign up for the March 5K.) Princeton certainly didn't authorize the creation of this page in any way. We just made it and have largely shifted forward to our Facebook group instead for most communication.
• Princeton Viking Orchestra - This one is also a Facebook 'person' and seems to be run by a Princeton employee, a music teacher or two. I don't know how many of the music teachers have control of this, but I'm guessing it's not Bob Monroe, the person officially in charge of the district music program at this point but whose name doesn't appear once on the district's website.
• New Princeton Vikings Middle School and High School - This one is weird to me in that it's not run by anyone at Princeton but is tacitly endorsed by the Princeton administration. It's run by Cole + Russell Architecture. They post occasional renderings and photos of the architects in meetings.
• Princeton Vikings  - This is another 'person' page that isn't Princeton in any official capacity. It appears to be somehow football-related just based on the content that I can see, but it doesn't appear to be run by the football coach/athletic director/principal himself. There hasn't been any content change here since July.
• Princeton Vikes - Another 'person' that is neither a person nor Princeton. 
• Princeton Vikings - This group has one post and very few images.It's fully public, so I know that's all there is there.
• @VikesFootball - This one doesn't appear to be run by the football program. I say this mostly because it isn't the kind of quick updates that a coach would be offering to his parents and players. It's more rah-rah, bragging stuff.
• There are also countless YouTube, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts that include Princeton content but don't title themselves in any way that suggests that they are a Princeton organization or person.

Reality Television...oxymoron

This is why I hate 'reality' television.

It's clearly not 'reality' in the least. It's a manufactured, manicured, groomed simulacrum of reality.

It seems painfully obvious to me that the judges (including a thoroughly creepy Randy-Jackson-alike on the left) have been told to open the scene looking angry and dismissive of the schlub in front of them. Handlers have already screened this schmuck and seen that he looks like crap but has a great voice.

A story...a storyline...ratings GOLD!

Everything about this entire scene - the pauses, the edited crowd reactions, the dramatically lit mixing board, the distantly-shot but immaculately mic'ed reaction shots that make us think we're somehow seeing intimate moments between mother and son -  just smacks of so much fakery and image management that it makes me want to throw crap at my computer monitor.

Kind of an odd name to pick

I teach some folks related to that name at 0:16.

Kind of an odd name to pick

I teach some folks related to that name at 0:16.

Legoreka!

Too cute to wait until Saturday...





From TheDailyWh.At



From Neatorama

And also from TheDailyWh.at

Eat mor chiken

One of my students - knowing what a Chick-Fil-A fiend I am - this morning mentioned that you could text CFATCM to 411247 and get an on-your-phone coupon for a free chicken sandwich (coupon good for the next seven days).

I, being the skeptical folk that I am, headed to the web and did a little research, searching initially for 411247 then 411247 and Chick-Fil-A.  From there I found my way to the Boomtext website which is a marketing firm providing text-based advertising, the sort of thing that was exactly what my student had suggested.  Turns out that all over the country, Chick-Fil-A locations are hooked up with this Boomtext thing allowing you to text into the Boomtext line a get back a coupon for...

A FREE CHICKEN SANDWICH

Seriously...you text CFATCM to 411247 and get a coupon for a free chicken sandwich, and - according to my students who have tried it - you can use that coupon again and again.

God help me, I may soon weigh 900 pounds.

(From the quick only searching that I've done, it appears that there are a lot of different Chick-Fil-A outlets with this same deal.  I'd check out your local Chick-Fil-A for some info.)

A little mayhem

I dig this ad campaign.





















And my favorite...

Subtelty? What's that?

I'm neither here nor there in the whole medical marijuana debate, but I would like to think that there might be a little more middle ground to be had than this PSA.

Maybe I'll get a tat...

Dig the ads for Pilot pens...tattooed Lego minifigs...

Oh, and the second round of Lego collectible minifigs are now apparently available in Europe...I want 'em all and won't be buying any of them...

And it looks like 2011 will see Lego expand to include Pirates of the Caribbean...intriguing...

What the Fonk?

Thank heaven for the combination of the intertubenet, YouTube, and low budget, local advertising.

Check out all the Vern Fonk commercials over at their website.  I particularly enjoy Shapoopi!



Thanks to Warming Glow for pointing out these works of cinematographical genius.

Grilled Cheese Academy

Yeah, the sandwiches look great, but the familiar voice is why I'm sending you to the Grilled Cheese Academy website.

I think I know who it is, and I'll leave my guess after the jump (sorry, DanEcht).

Geico?

How is it that Geico has five significant advertising campaigns going right now?











Isn't there supposed to be something called brand identity?