Snappy Book Title # 758

There's nothing like a single minded idea.....

I'm not sure which message this rather attractive pack is shouting at me works the best.

I'm intrigued by the nature of anything that's Jet-Puffed - especially marshmallow.

I trust it will make me fatter because it's from Kraft.

I'm unsure about the 'Still 7oz' message unless there's been something in the press that I've missed about Jef-Puffed marshmallow creme potentially reducing its serving size.

I love that it's a shatterproof jar - in my opinions, all jars should be.

'America's favorite' does re-enforce the "will make you fatter" message, so that's good.

Way to go the committee of marketers and pack designers that bolted this frankenstein's monster together.

Doing some research for a project I'm working on and came across this lovely bit of insight into Engineers! Beautiful!!

Engineers Explained

---

People who work in the fields of science and technology are not like other people. This can be frustrating to the nontechnical people who have to deal with them. The secret to coping with technology-oriented people is to understand their motivations. This chapter will teach you everything you need to know. I learned their customs and mannerisms by observing them, much the way Jane Goodall learned about the great apes, but without the hassle of grooming.
Engineering is so trendy these days that everybody wants to be one. The word "engineer" is greatly overused. If there's somebody in your life who you think is trying to pass as an engineer, give him this test to discern the truth.

ENGINEER IDENTIFICATION TEST

You walk into a room and notice that a picture is hanging crooked. You...

A. Straighten it.
B. Ignore it.
C. Buy a CAD system and spend the next six months designing a solar-powered, self-adjusting picture frame while often stating aloud your belief that the inventor of the nail was a total moron.

The correct answer is "C" but partial credit can be given to anybody who writes "It depends" in the margin of the test or simply blames the whole stupid thing on "Marketing."

SOCIAL SKILLS

Engineers have different objectives when it comes to social interaction.
"Normal" people expect to accomplish several unrealistic things from social interaction:

• Stimulating and thought-provoking conversation
• Important social contacts
• A feeling of connectedness with other humans
  

In contrast to "normal" people, engineers have rational objectives for social interactions:

• Get it over with as soon as possible.
• Avoid getting invited to something unpleasant.
• Demonstrate mental superiority and mastery of all subjects.
  
  

FASCINATION WITH GADGETS

To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1)things that need to be fixed, and (2)things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them. Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems. Normal people don't understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
No engineer looks at a television remote control without wondering what it would take to turn it into a stun gun. No engineer can take a shower without wondering if some sort of Teflon coating would make showering unnecessary. To the engineer, the world is a toy box full of sub-optimized and feature-poor toys.

FASHION AND APPEARANCE

Clothes are the lowest priority for an engineer, assuming the basic thresholds for temperature and decency have been satisfied. If no appendages are freezing or sticking together, and if no genitalia or mammary glands are swinging around in plain view, then the objective of clothing has been met. Anything else is a waste.

LOVE OF "STAR TREK"

Engineers love all of the "Star Trek" television shows and movies. It's a small wonder, since the engineers on the starship Enterprise are portrayed as heroes, occasionally even having sex with aliens. This is much more glamorous than the real life of an engineer, which consists of hiding from the universe and having sex without the participation of other life forms.

DATING AND SOCIAL LIFE

Dating is never easy for engineers. A normal person will employ various indirect and duplicitous methods to create a false impression of attractiveness. Engineers are incapable of placing appearance above function.
Fortunately, engineers have an ace in the hole. They are widely recognized as superior marriage material: intelligent, dependable, employed, honest, and handy around the house. While it's true that many normal people would prefer not to date an engineer, most normal people harbor an intense desire to mate with them, thus producing engineer-like children who will have high-paying jobs long before losing their virginity.
Male engineers reach their peak of sexual attractiveness later than normal men, becoming irresistible erotic dynamos in their mid thirties to late forties. Just look at these examples of sexually irresistible men in technical professions:

• Bill Gates.
• MacGyver.
• Etcetera.
  

Female engineers become irresistible at the age of consent and remain that way until about thirty minutes after their clinical death. Longer if it's a warm day.

HONESTY

Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth.
Engineers sometimes bend the truth to avoid work. They say things that sound like lies but technically are not because nobody could be expected to believe them. The complete list of engineer lies is listed below.

"I won't change anything without asking you first."
"I'll return your hard-to-find cable tomorrow."
"I have to have new equipment to do my job."
"I'm not jealous of your new computer."

FRUGALITY

Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization, that is, "How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash?"

POWERS OF CONCENTRATION

If there is one trait that best defines an engineer it is the ability to concentrate on one subject to the complete exclusion of everything else in the environment. This sometimes causes engineers to be pronounced dead prematurely. Some funeral homes in high-tech areas have started checking resumes before processing the bodies. Anybody with a degree in electrical engineering or experience in computer programming is propped up in the lounge for a few days just to see if he or she snaps out of it.

RISK

Engineers hate risk. They try to eliminate it whenever they can. This is understandable, given that when an engineer makes one little mistake, the media will treat it like it's a big deal or something.

EXAMPLES OF BAD PRESS FOR ENGINEERS

• Hindenberg.
• Space Shuttle Challenger.
• SPANet(tm)
• Hubble space telescope.
• Apollo 13.
• Titanic.
• Ford Pinto.
• Corvair.
  

The risk/reward calculation for engineers looks something like this:

RISK: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people
REWARD: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.

Being practical people, engineers evaluate this balance of risks and rewards and decide that risk is not a good thing. The best way to avoid risk is by advising that any activity is technically impossible for reasons that are far too complicated to explain.
If that approach is not sufficient to halt a project, then the engineer will fall back to a second line of defense: "It's technically possible but it will cost too much."

EGO

Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers:

1. How smart they are.
2. How many cool devices they own.
   

The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it's solved. No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the engineer off the case. These types of challenges quickly become personal - a battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.
Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem. (Other times just because they forgot.) And when they succeed in solving the problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex- and I'm including the kind of sex where other people are involved.
Nothing is more threatening to the engineer than the suggestion that somebody has more technical skill. Normal people sometimes use that knowledge as a lever to extract more work from the engineer. When an engineer says that something can't be done (a code phrase that means it's not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these lines: "I'll ask Bob to figure it out. He knows how to solve difficult technical problems."
At that point it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the engineer and the problem. The engineer will set upon the problem like a starved Chihuahua on a pork chop.

Just because you can do something, doesn't make it a good idea!

I haven't looked too deeply into it, but at first glance this seems to be my new most favorite-ist "just because technology allows you to do something, doesn't make it a good idea". I think the Coke brand of late has done some great stuff, this feels like not that. I'm not sure what the idea in general has to do with the Coke brand. I'm not sure how truly interesting getting people to support one of the wacky teams is. I'm not sure how convinced people will be that this is anything other than a pre-conceived group of linked videos and hardly an interactive experience. Judging by the fact the site went down mid-game all round seems like not a great idea. Anyhow, the post game analysis might prove me wrong and I'm sure some of my friends at Coke will put me entirely straight on this too!! They also seem to have upset the Arab community (and I guess cowboys, badlanders and showgirls) at the same time. Doh!


http://www.cokechase.com/index.html

Social Media@work

Lots of interesting stuff here about harnessing social media for business. I think we're going to see a lot more about how social can help businesses communicate and share more freely and usefully in 2013. Email is becoming, in my mind, less and less useful. It's a blunt object given where technology is at. An internal social media network that's always on and allows real time collaboration (what a horrible expression) seems much more human and useful than the ping-pong ball that email's become.

Check out http://hootsuite.com

Blackberry & Apple

I still think BB is a steal for Apple. Take that packet data platform and use it to create new markets for low cost data communications. Please!


BB10 launch

Slightly late New Year Resolutions

I'm not making too many personal New Year's Resolutions this year as I kind of know what happens to those. So my New Years Resolution is to make work resolutions instead.

Here they are, maybe they'll be of interest, to the 3 people who read this!

1. I'm going to try to get back to 2003: I think I've always been a bit on the ADD side of life and the enormous opportunities afforded to my 'distraction' by the Internet - now on ALL your devices - is a real and present danger to my capability to concentrate. As such, to the extent its possible, I'm going to try to turn the clock back a decade. I'm going with the paper calendar/diary, I'm going to try to work on the filofax a bit more, we're painting the office with Ideapaint (brilliant stuff - it's like whiteboard paint) and I'm going to try to compartmentalize thing much better. Which leads me to point 2.

2. I'm going to adopt a page from the Republican primary candidates' book: - stay with me on this. Remember when they all stood on the stage and said they wouldn't take $1 of tax increases for $10 of spending cuts, well my idea is along those lines. Currently, I spend $10 of time looking for interesting things to read and about $1 actually reading them. This reading deficit has to be stopped and to stop it I've decided to not raise the book ceiling - ok, maybe I'm going a bit over the top with the political analogy. Anyhow, I'm going to try to reduce the time spent finding things to go into Evernote and Readability and increase the time spent reading the stuff I send there. The 'waterboatman' (a UK insect - google it) way of skating over stuff has got too much for me. It's that and/or Ritalin.

3. Pomodoro:

4. The Cloud: Right now I lug around a laptop, iPhone, iPad and a separate hard drive because I can't bear the thought of not having that file I need at that particular moment. My solution is to shell out $100 for unlimited cloud space and make that work for me. The problem is (and it's a huge problem that I don't see anyone talking about) is that, as best I can tell, all the cloud providers only let you upload files and NOT files in pre-ordained folders. For me that means all of my files going into one big unmanaged folder where I won't have a clue how to find them. Once I find a solution to this, everything is cloud bound.


5. Evernote: Use it smarter:   HBR on Evernote

6. More face time: over the last few years I've got more connected with people and, at the same time, much less familiar with them. I'm going to make an effort to do less back and forth txt/email and a bit more coffee talk!

7. Stronger lines in the sand: esp. when you work for yourself, the likely hood of work and play mushing together is much higher. What, at first, seems like the freedom to sleep in and work from home of a morning, soon becomes, working (or talking about work) all the waking hours you have. Maybe this is the same working for a big company (I seem to remember it was like that), either way with 24/7 communications it's certainly more likely than it was when we were just at the mercy of that bastard blinking Blackberry light.

8. Stop: I find there's not a moment in the day when I'm not pumping something into my eyes and ears - I used to read a paper, now I read 10 at a time in tiny snippets. I used to listen to music, now I listen to dozens of podcasts a week. Maybe, for an hour a day I could not listen to anything or read or watch anything. Ok, that's ridiculous, maybe for 15 minutes a day, maybe I even give it a name "the dark times' or something and I just go have a diet coke and scribble on a piece of paper.

9. Photography: I love photography and I used to shoot 2 or 3 rolls of film a week. Now, partly because of my laziness, partly because of the lack of darkroom and partly because of the pervasiveness of cameras, photography has lost its specialness to me. I guess when everyone does something it somehow become less special. Anyhow, it's time to dust off the Hasselblad and get back into something I enjoyed so much - I even got a new tripod for Xmas.

10. Can't think of another: and they are all starting to sounds like the same uber-resolution which is to kick the tech/device/internet addiction. That's going to be easier said than done. Off to take my bedtime Ritalin!!!

Now your condition has a name

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes. If only I'd known this a decade or two earlier, much would have been clearer.

Kind of makes sense

Sophie Schmidt in N. Korea

Bit busy so am making up for it with just posting some interesting stuff. Will get more opinionated when I have a moment to vent!


Eric Schmidt's daughter in N. Korea

Jetsons 2030

Thanks to Jonny Lang for sending this to me. A fascinating view on the world in 2030 from the National Intelligence Council in the US. This should be in every planner's Evernote.

Global Trends 2030

We get you there. Fokker.

Well, it certainly says what's in the tin.

For a reasonably retainer we might be able to help!

They say people don't read anymore, it appears the don't write either!

Interesting Media Idea from STCars

Singapore's largest second hand car dealer doing co-op ads with drink and drive public safety announcements.

"If you need to, we can help you sell your car when you have no use for it"....ha ha ha . . . .

Nice

I guess one man's icon of progress is another man's car showroom opening...

If only consumers followed our work like we'd like them to...

What I learned sitting on the client side pitch team

I had the pleasure of sitting on the client side of a big pitch this year. Fascinating. I wish I'd done it years ago as it gave me a birds eye view on the process and let me really see what clients go through. Anyhow, I collected some thoughts over the process and thought I'd share. I don't think any of these refer to anyone in particular, so hopefully no-one will get bent out of shape - it's more of a general set of observations. If you are bent out of shape, tough, this is a blog! Besides, I think we've all done most of these at one point or another. Enjoy.

Here goes, in no particular order.

1. "Bob Smith says hi!" isn't convincing as a post pitch moment of connection.

2. Memorability vs. brevity - you need to think about where you present in the order of agencies and adjust accordingly (go first, be VERY memorable, go last be VERY brief because we're bored already).

3. Even if you think our brief sucks, we don't want to hear your +/- 10% improvement, just suck it up and move on.

4. We have no idea what you mean by your proprietary tools.

5. We like that you're proud of your work, but don't present it like you've just invented electricity or split the atom.

6. Listening to pitches is easier than writing them.

7. We make fun of you a lot more than you make fun of us (and we get to do it while you're presenting).

8. You're not the only ones who decide if people suck in the first 5 minutes.

9. Spit it out man..enough with the set up.

10. Spend a whole lot more time prepping your Q&A - think presidential debate!

11. We know you spoke to consumers, everyone does, just try not to make it so obvious they all happen to work in your office.

12. Now that everyone does a manifesto video, maybe tone down the dramatic setup - we all have iMovie and a camera phone.

13. There's so many new sexy things to talk about, but how about not forgetting 'asking for the business' (which I always find a bit of a cringe) and maybe explaining what you'd do in the first 90 days.

14. Facebook and Twitter isn't a digital strategy.

15. If you're going to wear something culturally connected to the country, don't button it up over your shirt and tie.

16. Don't welcome people back when they come back from the bathroom - there's a chance they just threw up and feel very self conscious (I nearly did on the last day courtesy of a very odd lunch).

17. Be more flexible, if the client is flagging/dying, do what YOU TELL US, bend with the process and listen to your consumer (US). Step it up!

18. Cutesky still works - pitch drama is far too under-used in an increasingly digital world.

19. Leave behinds never get read, BUT, they do make an impression - go big, but go light (size/impact over content).

20. Spend 1% of your thinking trying to incentivize clients to close their FKIN laptops. Gameify the mother! Make it fun and/or a stigma - use your audience to police their colleagues. Same goes for leaving the room for calls and bathroom breaks.

21. Follow up with a 1 page summary of your approach - that way, 10 pitches later when they are struggling to evaluate a presentation they can barely remember they have a 'Cliff Notes' of your work to refer to.

22. Be original - imagine you saw your idea for the first time and think "is this worthy?"

23. Do your homework. If there's a risk that your entire idea is potentially floored, dump it. Don't rely on being able to fend off objections in the 5 min Q+A, it's over, walk away.

24. Stay awake and try to stay off your phones.

25. If you're audience is losing the will to live, think on your feet. Stop. Confront. Change the conversation. What have you got to lose? You were already dead. Change the presentation into an intervention! Who knows, you might make it in as an outlier/a curiosity!

26. Be careful who you’re snippy to in the company cafe checkout queue before the pitch they might be a key decision maker!

27. Tell me much less about what you know about what I already know and tell me lots more about what you know that I don’t.

28.Stop ticking boxes - “we’ve done our homework” - we presume that you’ve got this far by being relatively thorough.

29. Remember many in the room potentially aren't marketing people, so target your pitch to your 11yr old niece - make it understandable and cut the jargon.

30. Start with a non advertising idea and certainly not with a 34 frame storyboard :30 spot.

31. Never, even if you don’t believe it, open with a :60 TV spot. Start with the edgiest “street art” idea and move backwards!

32. Try to de-define your work and position EVERYTHING as multi purposeful content. Everything somehow has to work everywhere.

33. Know the river - ideally know who to give the bound book to before you walk in the room and be careful who you ask for advice - i.e. don’t give it to the oldest man in a tie when it’s the youngest woman in a dress who’s the marketing director.

Sandy Hook: A crazy individual, a congress of weak and scared politicians, an ever powerful gun lobby (NRA), a disappointing president, a population with a generally naively historical view of the constitution and way too many quiet voters. A recipe for absolutely nothing to change except for the atrocities to get gradually worse.

As if this whole thing wasn't bad enough. I hear these slippery politicians calling for "national dialogues" and a "thoughtful debate about the 2nd amendment" and "moving forward together". This is the same BS we heard last time and the time before. If you want a full sense of the shameful, situation listen to Fox News Sunday this week (with the fairly reasonable Chris Wallace - son of the genius Mike). You have senator Dick Durban being a total wuss and some other nameless faceless politician talking about the previous assault weapons ban with 940 weapons exempt. And then you've got Joe Lieberman, getting splinters in his ass as usual.

Here's some of the avoidance of the real issues that I heard.

1. It's all about mental health. Hmm. Well, we have crazy people here in Singapore and in Hong Kong, Shanghai and all over the world. But they don't shoot children by the score.

2. It's all about catching the crazies early - ie. it's your fault mum and dad! This from politicians who are taking a knife to healthcare and especially mental healthcare provisions. Also, how would the right react to the intrusion of the 'state' in determining if a healthy 19yr old was crazy - it's ok to wiretap Americans in the name of counter-terrorism, but don't come after my son who is innocent of a crime etc.

3. It's time to bash video games and movies again. But, remember, they have those in other countries too and they don't slay innocents to this extent. Could there possibly be something else.

Ahhh. Yes. The right to bear arms. Could it be the only common denominator in all this is the ease with which a baddie can get his paws on guns - and pretty serious ones. I think so and most honest people would have to agree.

That said, this debate has been had before and I believe nothing will change. But I do have a solution.

America is all about freedom and the constitution. So, let's go back to the constitution and treat everything else in it with the same amount of literalism, lack of historical perspective and give it the full respect as the second amendment gets.

Off the top of my head.

1. The founding fathers spoke not of the speed restrictions we now suffer from the federal government on our horses (i.e. cars). Therefore, I propose the stripping of all speed limits across the nation. Also, who is the government to tell me which side of the road I should canter upon.

2. Alcohol. Show me in the constitution where there are drink driving laws. Exactly. Drink up boys, strap yourselves in and drive home like maniacs. It's your constitutional right.

3. No mention of airports in the constitution, so, what's the need for security there. We should be free to go where we want without restriction from the federal government.

4. No mention of federal subsidies in the constitution so texan oil guys and mid west farmers, sorry it's over and we want our money back.

5. The right to bear arms is clear, so I'm buying shoulder mounter RPG's just in case. Any problem with that?

I could go on and on.

You get the idea - and I'm sure Bill Maher could do it 10 x better.

How come some of the constitution is iron clad and the rest isn't? How dumb are we not to see and accept that the real common denominator in all this is gun availability? I know crazy people who like train sets and aren't sociable and have sketchy backgrounds but, because they don't have assault rifles, I'm not especially worried.

Anyhow, watch Fox News Sunday and weep - and PLEASE vote Joe Lieberman out of politics, he's an embarrassment to both parties and it's time he tended to his garden more.

Ok. I'm done on this. My thoughts are with the families of the victims and especially those yet to come.

I leave you with Dick Durbin's tepid comments...and he's a democrat!

"We need to sit down and have a calm, quiet reflection on the 2nd amendment. Are there guns that really shouldn't be sold across America? Military assault weapons such as the one used in this horrific incident. Are there high capacity ammunition clips that really have no value whatsoever when it comes to sporting or hunting or even self defense? That a person could buy body armor and use it to protect themselves as they kill innocent people? We need to have a thoughtful calm reflection on these things and do it in the context of our second amendment." 

You know what Dick (I presume that's not a nickname) we don't need a thoughtful calm reflection, we need people like you, weak politicians afraid out of your skins of the NRA, we need you OUT OF THIS DISCUSSION and real compassionate brave people in your place to take action and stand up for the majority.

I fear little will come of all this. Obama seems as weak as ever on this one and his talk of really doing something seems no different from before. What a terrible state of affairs.

The only thing I think I can say in certainty is the founding fathers would be spinning in their graves if they thought the 2nd amendment led to this.

One last point. If I hear another right wing christian say how their prayers are with the families, I would simply ask them "what would Jesus do?". He certainly would't be with the gun lobby and, my guess is, he'd be strongly against the original 2nd amendment and it's dreadful frankenstein-like manifestation today. So, save your prayers until you learn to think about what Jesus would do and maybe take some action in his name.

Ok, I've got that out of my system.

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