Why ‘American Idol Gives Back’ is creepy
1) Why can’t viewers just call in and vote to end the war?
2) Oh, wait. Major Sponsor Exxon Mobil wouldn’t be thrilled. It also wouldn’t be able to “give back” so generously if not for the googillions it’s made on the war. Maybe that’s where Ben Stiller got the term — from checking EM’s financials.
3) By sponsoring images of African and American babies, it can say, “War? What war? I don’t know nothin’ about no war.”
4) So can Major Sponsor News Corp.
5) And Ford Motor Co.
6) Don’t forget Coca-Cola. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” And a bunch of peace and stuff.
Right. (Got $45?)
7) And AT&T.
8) Robin Williams. What … is it 1985?
9) Toothless grandmothers and dilapidated shacks juxtaposed with painted, airbrushed celebs, who packed their camera crews and left. Because they could.
10) Those painful fake smiles on the Appalachian children’s faces.
11) The politician who appeared on American Idol? British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
12) Paula Abdul, who’s had an eating disorder, stood next to Randy Jackson, who’s had stomach-stapling surgery, and talked about obesity in American children.
13) How many others — besides Miley Cyrus — had stuff to plug?
14) Did anyone else who saw Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman keep thinking, “Where is Matt Damon?”
Just me, then?
Updated: Deus Ex Malcontent posted random comments from watching the show.
Posted by Becky @
3:12 pm |
But the emporer has nothing on at all!
I was discussing the Gates of Hell chapter of the Nightmare in Norway with someone the other night.
“I would have said, ‘I want to speak to your boss, and your boss’s boss and your boss’s boss’s boss, NOW’ … you know … go up the chain of command,” he said.
Chain of command. Yeah, the military does that to a person, I guess. Maybe that works in that world.
But, really, how much latitude does a customer-bot (we’re not human beings anymore) have in an airport before going from concerned about service to a security threat? I mean, how many times could I have told Haris, “I want to speak to your boss,” before he felt “threatened” by me and sent me spiraling into the Circles of Hell to, you know … stun guns, shackles, detention, jail … that sorta thing? I mean … really?
Besides, who’s to say Haris the employee-bot (they’re not human beings anymore either) wouldn’t have just said, “No.”
Then what?
It’s happened before. I called a “customer service” line to ask for, well, customer service. (Oh, silly me.) When I got nowhere with the employee-bot, I asked to speak to his supervisor. He put me on hold. He came back and told me his supervisor refused to speak to me.
Refused to speak to me.
I asked for the name of the president of the company. He said he didn’t know. “Well, could you check?” I asked. He put me on hold again. He came back and said, “It’s against company policy to give you that information.”
It was against company policy to tell me who runs the company.
He was right. I couldn’t find the president’s name anywhere on the company Web site. In fact, three companies were involved, and none of their contact information was available through any of the companies. I had to look them up by other means. But, hey, I found them. (I need to write a love letter to the Internet.) I sent an e-mail to all of them and the customer-service department. To their credit, they actually resolved my problem. Very satisfactorily, even.
Apparently, though, it’s become standard operating procedure that employee-bots (and their CEOs) do not work for customer-bots — even if they are in the service industry. Hell, employee-bots don’t even work for their CEOs anymore. They work for the computer screens in front of them. They can only do what their computers tell them to do, which — when it comes to customer-bots — usually isn’t much.
I suppose PR bullshit goes way back, and none of this is new. Am I the only one who can remember things like “the customer is always right” … or was that just PR bullshit too? I couldn’t help thinking about The Emporer’s New Clothes, which I recently grabbed off the shelf for my son. (I got the Virginia Lee Burton pictures from a 1968 version of the book by Scholastic Book Services.)
You call your employees co-workers and expect them (and us) to believe it?
No clothes!
You say you “work hard to earn my business every time I fly”?
No clothes!
You say, “They’ll hold the plane for you”?
No clothes!
You say, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do”?
No clothes!
It’s not like I’ve never gotten good customer service. I got incredible service yesterday, in fact. More than once. (I’ll write about it one of these days.) But when I get excellent or good or, heck, even fair-to-middling customer service, isn’t it a shame that it makes me want to weep with joy? Why should it be the exception and not the rule?
I ran across a few examples of suckass non-service just skimming through my feeder this morning. Matthew at Childs Play x2 warns his readers not to shop at Home Decorators. Planet Nomad writes about inexplicable weirdness at Starbucks. CrankMama has a few choice words to say about Verizon. Updated: I just found this priceless exchange on Hotfessional. Updated2: Wow. They just keep coming. Karen at A Deaf Mom Shares Her World was denied service at Steak ‘n Shake.
What’s your suckiest non-service experience? Who deserves the “No clothes!” seal of disapproval?
Posted by Becky @
7:54 pm |
Icelandair might want to watch the news
A 33-year-old woman from Iceland, Erla Ósk Arnardóttir, blogged about being detained by U.S. security when arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York recently. Alda at The Iceland Weather Report tells the story. The gist is that the woman overstayed her welcome in the United States in 1995. Even though she had traveled to the United States since then with no problems, this time, she was detained, shackled and driven to a prison cell in New Jersey, interrogated and finally — after 14 23 hours — put on a flight back home.
Update: Thanks to a link from Iceland Review in my comments, here is an article in English. Iceland Review also has an update to the story, saying that Iceland’s Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún GÃsladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador to Iceland Carol van Voorst and demanded an apology from U.S. authorities.
Other coverage
About the only thing about Iceland in the news here is the story of a teen-ager who posed as Iceland’s president and almost got put through to a telephone meeting with President George W. Bush. Police in Iceland intervened, though, and took him in for questioning. It makes me wonder if the two stories are related. Was U.S. security on “high alert” for anything out of Iceland because of the teen-ager’s prank? That doesn’t explain or justify anything … I just wonder.
Anyway. Morgunblaðið has a video with interviews from a government official and the woman who was detained. Go watch it. Maybe you won’t understand the news report, but keep an eye on the advertisements before and after the clip.
Memo to Icelandair PR department: Dude. Drop everything and check your online ads. Travel to New York? Really?
Update: The Wall Street Journal published an article, Land of the Spree, Dec. 15, 2007.
How do you say ‘Victoria’s Secret’ in Icelandic? With the dollar having hit new lows against currencies around the globe, America is becoming the world’s discount store.
The reporter spoke with two women from Iceland.
Josefina and Carolina Hallström flew to New York for a few days of shopping on Icelandair from Stockholm. The pair, ages 21 and 25, were on the lookout for a Victoria’s Secret store. “We go for the lotions and perfumes,” said Carolina, as she lugged a shopping bag with eight pairs of shoes in it (she’d already pitched the boxes). The underwear retailer’s annual fashion show airs in Sweden, even though there aren’t any stores there, she says. Plus, “shampoo is also much cheaper here.”
The article even mentioned Iceland again with shoppers arriving at the Mall of America in Minnesota on direct flights from Iceland.
But not a word about anyone from Iceland getting detained in New York. Hmm.
Posted by Becky @
3:11 pm |
And the winner is …
Rhonda Van Diest!
One signed copy of The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression by Tracy Thompson is on the way. Thanks, Rhonda, and thanks to everyone who played along. Big thanks to Tracy, too.
Posted by Becky @
9:51 pm |
Miss Landmine Angola 2008
“Everybody has the right to be beautiful.”
And how do we prove that? Why, you silly goose. With a beauty pageant! (Isn’t that the answer to everything? Well, yeah. Up next? Afghanistan! I kid you not. Look it up.)
Norwegian Morten Traavik’s latest “art project” (photos are on display at museums in Norway) is Miss Landmine Angola (in its second year). He received 500,000 Norwegian kroner (about $80,000) from the Norwegian government’s Arts Council Norway for the project. The “winner” gets a prosthetic leg from a Norwegian company.
Traavik insists that “Angolans love beauty pageants” and that his intentions are purely humanitarian.
… one shouldn’t allow oneself to be paralysed by fear of appearing imperialistic. I can’t free myself from the fact that I’m white and Western, and I’ll just have to live with the risk of being interpreted in that light. I think it’s time to rid ourselves of collective Western guilt. To the extent that I’m going to play a role, I’d most fancy being cast as the naive Norwegian with his rucksack going out to make peace in the world. I don’t mind being him.
The women participated “of their own free will.” They were paid $200 each for the photography sessions, and they “got to keep the clothes, shoes and accessories from the sessions. For most of the women, it was the first paid work they had had in a very long time.”
I don’t know. Why not use the $80,000 to buy each woman a prosthetic leg?
Here’s what others had to say.
Hey, I know. Before Traavik gets his “art” displayed anywhere, why not make him enter a beauty contest for White Western Males with Rucksacks to determine who wins a spot in the gallery? We’ll let him keep the G-string and accessories he gets to sport in publicity photos. Ooh. And I bet the Norwegian government would pay for it.
Posted by Becky @
9:44 pm |
Working Mother sells diet to captive audience
Remember how Working Mother “teamed up with” Medela to sell more breast pumps make sure companies support breastfeeding employees? Well, Working Mother also is “in partnership with” Kraft Foods Inc. to sell diet food offer employees “nutritious food.”
Kraft (a “100 best” company and major advertiser) and Working Mother held the “first-ever Office Kitchen Takeover” at SC Johnson‘s corporate and manufacturing facilities in Racine, Wis. (SC Johnson is a “100 best” company and major advertiser.) They stocked the company’s kitchen for a day with Kraft’s South Beach Diet prepackaged foods on Sept. 18, 2007, for a captive audience of some 2,500 employees.
“SC Johnson is on our ‘100 Best Companies’ due to its family-oriented culture and its commitment to helping employees strike a good work/life balance,” says Tammy Palazzo, Vice President of Research and Women’s Initiative, Working Mother Magazine. “The South Beach Diet(R) Office Kitchen Takeover awards the company even further by providing healthier food options for busy employees — from the convenience of their own office cafeteria.”
Touted as healthy, convenient, nutritious and delicious, the South Beach Diet is a weight-loss plan, according to Kraft’s own press release, with three phases that couldn’t possibly have been implemented in one day. What’s next? Weekly weigh-ins?
If they were really interested in providing employees with healthy snacks, why not “take over” the kitchen with baskets of fruits, vegetables and nuts? But where’s the selling point in that?
Not only does Working Mother offer its 2.2 million readers as a target audience for advertisers, it now uses employees of “100 best” companies/advertisers as a captive target audience.
Posted by Becky @
2:53 pm |
Canon ethics
I wrote a few days ago about Canon and the yuck factor of E&P’s magazine cover. It seems some professional photographers think Canon stepped over the ethical line in other cases.
Posted by Becky @
6:53 pm |
Focus group tests language to sell war against Iran
According to Mother Jones, Martin Focus Groups of Alexandria, Va., paid participants $150 to answer questions about what language would best sell military action against Iran to the American public.
How would you feel if Hillary [Clinton] bombed Iran? How would you feel if George Bush bombed Iran? And how would you feel if Israel bombed Iran?
Mother Jones first reported that the focus group was sponsored by Freedom’s Watch (whose literature accompanied the focus group), but it turns out it was commissioned by the Israel Project and designed by Public Opinion Strategies.
What does this mean? Probably a lot more stories in mainstream media via press releases and other means.
Stay tuned.
Posted by Becky @
2:04 pm |
E&P photos of the year cover
The November 2007 issue of Editor & Publisher showcases its “Eighth Annual Photos of the Year.” The magazine (not the cover posted online)Â has a yellow sticker:
Also on the cover is a photograph of the grand-prize winner, camera in hand. Clearly a Canon. Yeah, yeah. He won a Canon camera as the grand-prize winner. But, well, yuck.
“Turn the camera a little to the right. We can’t see the logo.”
Yeah, yeah. It’s a magazine cover, not a news photo. But still. Yuck.
In other E&P news, “What Do Women Want?” [Scratching head.]
Newspapers are losing working mothers and time-pressed single women even faster than they are losing readers overall. Adult newspaper readership has dwindled from more than 80% of the total audience in 1964 to 49.9% last year, according to Scarborough Research and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). But in 1964, only about 2% fewer women read newspapers than men. That gap stood at nearly 5% in 2006, with readership among men being 52.3% and women 47.6%. This gender gap is not just a U.S. problem, but shows up in nearly every nation, the World Association of Newspapers reported last year.
While I would dearly love to pick apart the numbers (a 3 percent gender-gap increase in 42 years … stop the presses!), I just don’t have time. I skimmed the article because, well, apparently I’m a “habitual skimmer.”
Some of the most powerful themes for women are the health and wellness of their children. Women are “habitual skimmers,” so stories should be short to attract female readers, says Skoloda. Research shows they like brief and bulleted formats, but they also want personal stories. “USA Today certainly has a format that has been very appealing to women,” she adds. Another favorite: The Wall Street Journal’s “Weekend Journal.”
So keep the stories short, bub. Hey, here’s an idea. Why not make everything pink? I hear girls love pink.
Posted by Becky @
12:26 am |
What Working Mother magazine won’t tell you: Global gender gap
If things are going so well for American working mothers, why did the United States fall from 23rd place to 31st place on the Global Gender Report?
Posted by Becky @
10:26 am |
