Tag: advertising

Shop talk

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t happen, by design, that I talk about my job.  Frankly, most of the time it’s nothing particularly interesting, and probably not really any different from anyone else who works a fairly normal corporate job anywhere in the world.  But lately, my work has been a little bit more encompassing in my daily life than I’d really like it to, and I feel like I’m in a not-that-great position currently, and I feel like everyone I’d vent to is kind of tired of hearing the same old stories about my job, but I still have a lot of thoughts and words that I’d like to get out of my system, that writing about it, seems like the only viable option in order to accomplish that.

Imagine . . .

  • You’re an auto mechanic. You fix cars and motorized vehicles for a living.  You use tools and work with your hands in order to fix said vehicles, day in and day out.  One day, a chef walks into your shop, and gives you a bunch of forks, spoons and spatulas and tells you, these are your tools now.  Please fix my car.
  • You’re a chef. You cook food for a living that feeds all sorts of people.  You use an arsenal of knives, spoons and various utensils in order to prepare all the food that you cook.  One day, a graphic designer walks into your kitchen, plops and laptop and a mouse on your counter and tells you, these are your tools now.  Please make me lunch.
  • You’re a graphic designer. You make shit on computers, using a variety of artsy software, specifically made to make shit.  Sometimes the shit you make ends up on the internet on websites and sometimes it is manifested into something tangible.  One day, an IT guy walks onto your floor and installs this shittily-made, outsourced, glorified data entry program and tells you, this is your primary software now.  Please resume creating advertisements at a high volume and high quality.  Except there’s no please, because this IT guy is a fucking asshole

That’s my life at work, in a nutshell.

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Bless your heart, Pepsi

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I get the whole “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” adage, and to a degree it’s not wrong.  But one of the more modern trends of today that I think is often times stupid and ultimately pointless, is the ideas of brands using social media to communicate amongst each other as if they were sentient individuals.  Sure, it can be amusing for two seconds to see McDonald’s take swipes at Burger King, Burger King take swipes at Taco Bell and Wendy’s taking swipes at everyone, but when the day is over, it’s still a person behind a keyboard roleplaying as an entire company, trying to get personal with another person roleplaying as another company behind another keyboard somewhere out there.

I accept that this is the world we live in now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to agree or care about the shenanigans that are necessary in order to justify everything as “advertising.”

In all fairness, there are plenty of examples out there of brands doing good on social media, that are admirable and creative means of utilizing the medium.  However, there are plenty of others, like Pepsi shoe-horning themselves into a lame attempt at a narrative with Coke, while they’re in Atlanta, as the official soft drink sponsor of Super Bowl Leee.

In no world would Coke ever bother trying to do this shit if they ever found themselves in whatever place happens to be the alleged home of Pepsi; they’re so irrelevant that people like me have no idea where that even might be.  They know they’re the top dog globally when it comes to the soda industry, regardless of what the numbers in America might be, Pepsi can’t touch Coke when it comes to the rest of the world as a whole.  And because Coke is the king of the mountain, they know they don’t have to resort to cheese and social media faux-viral fluff in order to get their name out there, because they’re simply in a position to where their name is practically engrained on the lips of everyone on the planet already, as the default software brand everywhere.

When it comes to tactics, Pepsi has evidently resorted to stealth and drive-bys in order to deploy their lame statue for a painfully forced narrative that a truce could possibly exist between the rivals; and I use that phrase loosely since Pepsi is so far beneath Coke, they could hardly be called rivals, but for simply lack of a better term.  There’s no way Coke would even bother doing something like this if the situation were reversed.

The bottom line is that I don’t know why this has triggered me to write at all, because I’m having a hard time formulating words other than “there’s no way Coke would bother with Pepsi if the roles were reversed,” and when the day is over, I don’t really drink much soda anyways.  I’m apt to drink Diet Pepsi in places where I can’t get a Diet Coke and ultimately I don’t care that much.  I guess my beef is with social media in general, and the fact that it Twitter was used as the virtual battlefield for sissies to slap fight, and it just kind of makes me roll my eyes that this is the world we’re living in these days that this isn’t just the norm, but is considered acceptable entertainment.

Everyone could use some emotional support chicken

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just when you think Popeyes is onto something potentially legendary with their unveiling of Emotional Support Chicken, they have to shoot themselves on the foot and only make it available in a shithole like Philadelphia.  And not just the city itself, but instead the fucking airport, which is already, much like the rest of the city it’s in, one of the biggest blights within the country.

However in spite of my general ambivalence for Philly, I still have to tip my cap to Popeyes for such a hilarious and creative idea, that just tickles my fancy and makes me green with envy that it’s not available everywhere else, or at least Atlanta, so I could get my hands on a box of emotional support chicken as well.

I fly enough to have plenty of aggravation at the current state of the world, where the concept of emotional support animals even exists.  The airline industry has morphed into this hideous symbiotic orgy where the carriers have carte blanche to fuck customers left and right with price gauging, shrinking seats, antiquated boarding procedures and a myriad of things that makes flying amongst the worst occasionally necessary experiences there is, but because there’s an endless demand for travel, passengers are now allowed to get away with shit like emotional support animals, which is basically a bastardized ruse for people to be allowed to fly with their pets.

And frankly, as with most nice things in the world, selfish shitheads ruin and abuse the small pleasures by lying their asses off and proclaiming every Tom, Dick and Harry dog and cat as emotional support animals, or even more offensive, service pets.  There’s no secret that just about anyone can buy on eBay or just make their own service vests for their pets to futilely deceive the world around them that they’re more important than the average pet, and they most certainly capitalize on such inefficient enforcement, by trotting their very-much-not service animals into airports and acting surprised when they defecate in public or on the plane or bite people or attack other fake-ass service animals.

But because the world today sucks, nobody’s really allowed to call out any of these fake fucks, because everyone’s afraid of the one person that actually is legally and medically cleared to have a service animal and their service animal is actually a service animal, and then getting sued, or worse, made viral, because any scene will inevitably be caught by someone’s phone and then put on YouTube.  So despite the fact that there are hundreds of miserable lying fucks, nobody can really stop them.

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How United Airlines got their groove back

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If I had to pick an airline, I’m a Delta guy.  I’m pretty cool with Southwest too, even though I kind of resent that they absorbed AirTran and 86’d all of their low fares to Virginia.  Spirit isn’t terrible as long as you plan well and understand you are literally taking the MegaBus of the skies. 

But I can’t really say that I’ve given much thought to United Airlines as an option, even when there was that period of time after they kept tripping over themselves repeatedly, and I figured they’d have to drop their fares aggressively in order to regain some customer equity, but that never really happened.

Not to mention, being in Atlanta, the land of Delta, United doesn’t really have that much of a presence here, but they are still an option for most continental destinations.  But since I don’t really feel like being racially profiled and I’m pretty sure the settlement of letting them kick my ass and throw me off a flight won’t be as good as that first Asian guy who got owned, I never really saw any advantage to considering flying with United.

That is, until this true story of heroism came out, where a United flight attendant told a woman with a crying baby that it was prohibited for her baby to cry for more than five minutes, which resulted in the following:

Bala wrote that her family “will never fly on United again.”

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lol, idiots are so predictable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR – Nike makes Colin Kaepernick the face of the company; right wing extremists react predictably by burning their possessions

I think of all the tropes that exist in busted-ass America, I think one of my favorites is when a notable company takes a liberal stance on a divisive topic, and people who disagree don’t just disagree, they disagree with fire.  Literally.  As in they set fire to said company’s products that they’ve presumably paid for, owned and used at some point in their lives.  Because they disagree with them politically.

Sometimes it’s not just fire, or fire at all.  People shot their YETI coolers with actual ammunition, and then some people good old fashioned spiked their Keurig coffee makers onto the ground.   But the end result is still the same, that things end up destroyed.

Things, like Nikes and YETIs and Keurigs, that at some point, someone paid money for; money that went into the coffers and accounted into the annual reports of millions and billions of dollars for companies as the aforementioned.

Yeah, people destroy their shit when any of them take a stance on something that not everyone agrees on.  As if destroying them will magically get their money back, which of course is not the case.  So people end up angry and bent out of shape, and on top of that, now have to go out and buy some new sneakers or workout apparel, or a new cooler, or a new coffee maker.

All because they’re attention whores who feel required to make videos of themselves demonstrating their eagerness to waste their own money and resources, all because some people don’t agree with your line of thinking.

Real intelligent reactions, there.

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So savage, you have to respect the tactic

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A week ago, I got a horrible email in my inbox: Chick Fil-A was shutting the door on their wildly popular cow calendar promotion.  Citing after 20 years something something, I couldn’t really make out the rest from the rage that welled up behind my eyes but the point is, Chick Fil-A was ending their calendar, which meant no more monthly free shit ever again.

Obviously, a company like Chick Fil-A doesn’t become go-zillionaires without watching every single nickel and dime, and somewhere in some analytical study, it was deemed that the free shit given out every month on top of the sales of the calendars themselves, don’t really match up to the money is expected to come in as a result.  So regardless of how popular the calendars are, although everyone and their mother knows people only get them for the 12 months of free shit, they’re closing the door on the promotion.

But amidst the outrage caused by Chick Fil-A killing off their calendar, Bojangles swoops onto the stage to announce the launch of their calendar.  Except Bojangles’ calendar is free to join, completely digital, but still offers coupons of free or discounted shit.

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When changing the terminology makes things acceptable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not long ago, my department at work sent out emails for people to sign up for the departmental Slack channel.  Prior to starting working here, I’d never even heard of Slack.  I figured out quickly that it was a chat client, but the most substantial use for it that I’d heard of it prior to receiving my own invitation to join was that people on campus had a specific channel that sent notifications if there were any free leftover food up for grabs anywhere on site.

I didn’t feel that a chat client was remotely conducive to work productivity, so I ignored the invitation and didn’t have any intention of signing up.  Frankly, in my career, I’d been admonished in the past and conditioned to think that chat clients were counterproductive in the workplace.  Seeing as how I like my job these days, I decided to not join in on something that I thought would be counterproductive, so I just let the invitation go ignored.

And then I got a follow-up email a few days later from management, that was sent directly to only the individuals who had not yet signed up for the departmental Slack channel, imploring them to do so.

This was my reaction to being told that I was supposed to join Slack.

Upon logging into the client, I started toggling around the work-sanctioned channels to see what all the fuss was all about.

I saw more gifs than I did human-written words.

I logged off Slack, and haven’t opened it since.  I do not feel at all that I’ve missed out in any capacity of essential information or anything pertinent for me to do my job.

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