What more can I say?

That is all.

I've got big ideas, I'm out of control (Commented on "A VC")

Fred Wilson has an interesting short piece up this morning on failure. After reading it, I left the following comment:

I was doing a review of a (young but brilliant) guy on my team recently, and as we were discussing the feedback he said to me "You know, the thing I worry about more than anything is making mistakes."

I looked at him blankly and said "That is like fretting that the sun might come up tomorrow. Guess what? It's going to happen! Don't worry about making mistakes, worry about things you can actually have a positive impact on. If you spend your time worrying about the possibility of mistakes you're not going to get anything done."

Now, being Australian (living in Canada atm), there's a fair amount of a "no worries" attitude that is ingrained in us, but Fred I think you hit on something really crucial about the States - the fact that success is rewarded and if you fail you are encouraged to give it another go; as fortunate as I feel to be from Australia we don't have the latter as part of our psyche. I've benefited from tremendously from growing up in Hong Kong among other places, and I think a willingness to get it wrong is one of the best things any society can have in its DNA.

It's probably also the reason I'm a long way from home right now :)

Originally posted as a comment
by davidgillespie
on A VC using DISQUS.

Now, I adore Australia and it will always be home. We do have an odd relationship with success and failure though, born no doubt from a myriad of cultural sources others I'm sure have written long and eloquently about, and which I don't want to get into right now. Instead I'll just say, as I did the other day when someone asked me what this blog was about, I said "big ideas".

"Are they the right ideas?"

I laughed and said "That my friend, was never the point."

So, here's to the big ideas today. Wherever they lead us.

All I wanna do is to thank you

Readers who recall my 5 step marketing mantra will remember point 5 stated the most remarkable thing you can have is exceptional customer service. We're sadly still in a place where a number of organisations don't get this, due in large part to the customer service departments being seen as a necessary evil, a cost of doing business. As a result, the people staffing these roles are not empowered to simply solve problems and instead are hamstrung by rules designed to elicit the bare minimum of support; enough to keep the customers at the table but not nearly enough to actually make them happy to be there.

The contrast between the great and the not so great was rammed home for me recently thanks to a lousy experience with one of the world's largest magazine publishers and one of the world's smallest cafes. Those who know me know my love for coffee is wholly unbridled, bordering on obsessive. They will also know the outright contempt I hold for the Starbucks of the world, suffice to say North America is not David-friendly when it comes to my dark master.

[caption id="attachment_714" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Reach out and touch somebody"][/caption]

Thankfully here in Toronto I have found Balzac's, an independent coffee house which roasts its own beans and makes, quite simply, the best coffee I've had here so far. Having fallen in love with the store-bought goods I began ordering online, and when the first batch showed up, I was greeted with a hand-written card, offering up a 15% off code for my next order and a note about their Facebook application.

Let's review that people:

• I already love the product


• They're making it cheaper for me to get


• AND they're offering me another way to interact with their brand.

Contrast this with Conde Nast, who told me, when my issue of Wired failed to appear (while my co-workers waltzed around with their's) that I needed to wait 2 weeks before they could fulfill a missing order. Having waited patiently, I contacted them at the appropriate time to be told:

We are sorry to inform you that the issue you requested is no longer available.

To be fair, they then told me my subscription would be extended by an issue, but this is not the point. I understand magazines are having a hard time of it lately.

Can I suggest though the ways to innovate in your business model are not to deprive people of the thing they desire in the interests of saving a couple dollars.

I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my...

My Gmail inbox was out of control. I had over 1300 unread emails in it. Part of that is due to poor email handling habits on my end, but it's also due to a lot of people sending me information I don't want or need.

My Google Reader is also overflowing, but it's full of content I have asked for, stuff I want and, very occasionally, need. in catching up on my feeds over lunch just now though, I came across the below video from Gary Vaynerchuk.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.838623&w=425&h=350&fv=]

posted with vodpod

I have a lot of friends working in PR, I hope they watch the video. More than that I hope their clients do too.

Standing on the rooftops, shouting out

I think I need to start a competition amongst readers to see who can pic the song each post's title is from. Here's a hint:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5pmwhd_MfA"]

Anyway, your friend and mine Tim is fond of saying "To understand change, you have to be part of it." Now, he perhaps didn't come up with that himself, but I am always reminded of him whenever I think of it, which is as good an exercise in branding as you'll find.

With this in mind, I have spent some time this morning trying to bring my own silos of conversation together. My marketing self tends to exist only on this site, but my musician self is spread across Facebook, MySpace, iLike, YouTube, and God knows where else. Oh, not to mention another website of his own. Now, I do my best to keep my two selves separate, but bear with me for the purposes of this conversation.

It goes without saying that nobody working full time has the means to update all of the above sites, let alone engage the way we all insist we should. On top of that, there's a requirement for authors who establish these sites to get a little more versed in the nuances of the technology than they're otherwise compelled (or able) to do. What it means is more time spent tweaking the various underpinnings of a site or service and less time doing the things you started a site for in the first place. Cue frustrated creators and audiences in silos.

David Jones (a person, not the store) is a guy I've come across here in Canada. I spotted him tweeting one day "Don't tell me what you would have done, tell me what you did." - and that really struck a chord. Talk of best practices is all well and good, but evidence of how you've implemented it for yourself and others is much better. For the time being, until the big players in this space decide to make their platforms talk to each other, we all get to take part in a zero-sum race to a dead end.

Now I can understand each platform's desire to control the artist dashboard, as the eyeballs are currently what gives them value. The reality however is if the smaller players don't make it easier to pick up syndicated content, they're going to see a reduction in usage.

I want to make it easy for people to consume my content in whatever manner best suits their existing habits. Turning that into a reality however currently means an ultimately unsustainable adjustment to my own. Something's gotta give.

I could never take the place of your man

When I made games, every now and then I'd see a project underway where all the code was written by a single individual. That individual would invariably write it in such a fashion that it was only decipherable by them. This became an issue when the project got sufficiently far along that there wasn't time to re-write the core code (it became, in other words, "too big to fail". Har har). The company would then be in an interesting position - they could fire the programmer and lose the work, they could assign someone else to work along side the programmer who would no doubt have the most miserable job in the whole building deciphering and documenting the spaghetti or they could...? I don't know.

I was thinking about this as I reviewed the top 100 brands on Twitter. Upon investigation there should be a massive asterisk which leads you to "In April. Over a few days." - but this is not the point. The list itself is a collection of the usual suspects, and where possible their Twitter name is included and linked to.

What I find interesting here is at #21 Ford appears. Not just Ford though - Ford's social media evangelist, Scott Monty. Nowhere else on this list does an individual appear alongside a company listing, in fact nowhere else does an individual appear at all.

[caption id="attachment_667" align="aligncenter" width="373" caption="Is Ford or Scott Monty doing well here?"][/caption]

We can assume, at some point, Scott won't work for Ford. This creates an interesting dillemma wherein an individual not tied to the company potentially takes the good will built up with them when they leave. We've seen this previously with community managers, but it has for the most part remained within the confines of tech companies. Less risky strategies have been seen from the likes of Southwest Airlines where they encourage their employees to blog and engage in social media, but do a good job of tying it under a single site.

Personally, I'm a big fan of putting a human face on this sort of initiative, in fact I don't think it works without it. It will be interesting to see however how it plays out once Scott no longer calls Ford home.

I really believe you can't pay someone to engage, you can only reward them for it. In this case, the reward is a job.

But this is why you can't just pull in the new recruit from the marketing team to take up the mantle. If they don't already engage, they're not going to do it because of a paycheque, not in a way that resonates.

Because that can't be bought.

This is the great adventure

Every time I play a gig, people ask me if I'm nervous, which I almost always am. And I think that is the way it is supposed to be - if I'm not nervous then nothing is at stake. If nothing is at stake then why am I here? What am I going to learn I don't already know? What will the audience experience if I'm not pushing myself to some place I haven't been before; if I know I'm not going to fall, there is simply no elation in flight.

Your friend and mine Sean Howard touches on these points in a recent post, The Scariest Thing I've ever Done. In it heleverages an eBook he published called The Passion Economy (rockstars Gavin Heaton and Katie Chatfield contribute as well). It's a candid assessment of his work, and he's honest about fis failings. More to the point though, he makes a case for purposefully putting yourself into those awkward and unknown territories. He's preaching to the choir with me, and, I hope, you as well.

If he's not, then why are you here?

Do androids dream of these electric sheep?

Just found the below via Crackunit, which is a lot of fun. Watch.



Your friend and mine, Julian Cole, said the key to going viral is friendship. Which is nonsense. Even if Jules and I are friends (which we are).

The key to going viral is having something interesting to share, and finding it interesting or amusing regardless of whether you're somehow attached to it or not. And as we all find different stuff amusing and/or interesting, that is harder than it would seem.

For instance, if you had told me yesterday I was going to blog about sheep with LED lights strapped to their backs, I would have assured you you were quite mistaken.

And there you have it.

More than skin deep

Image by Capitan Giona via Flickr

So a while back I got up on a high horse (I know I know, say it isn't so) about story-telling in advertising. I identified the three ways stories get told in advertising, and was making a case for the third way (giving your consumers tools to tell their own stories) as being by far the most powerful. I want to get side-tracked for a second on this and look at two Dove commercials. One made by them, another made by Greenpeace.

The first: Evolution.



Everyone agrees (I think...) it's a great piece of work and the conversation is continued over at The Campaign For Real Beauty which doesn't seem to have an Australian presence but is all over Europe and the Americas. It's a play at talking about something much bigger than the products they produce, which should really go without saying these days. Two years on and it is still a compelling piece of work.

How hollow does it ring though when followed up with this: Onslaught(er)?



Onslaught(er) brought such incredible public pressure to bear that Unilever, Dove's parent company, had little choice but to work with Greenpeace to help save the very forests they had been destroying to create their product. They began a 6 month program in May of this year to work together to bring the plight of the forests in South East Asia to all companies that were destroying the forests for palm oil.

So here there are two very different stories being told, one the company wants to push about its products and one someone else wants to push about the company. Admittedly the former offered up a platform for consumers to have a discussion about beauty, but when the message is re-framed with the second piece of footage, the whole exercise falls pretty flat for me.

Perhaps it is a cheap or easy shot to take, but it has been repeated this month in the US with a company called Motrin whose light-hearted poke at baby slings backfired out of sight. The first move was a company telling its own story, the next was the community telling one entirely different.

Anyone else have some good examples of this sort of thing?

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Make your problem somebody else's

Experiences facilitated by brands but not about brands - David Gillespie (broken record).

Entertainment, content of all shapes and sizes, offline, online, anywhere you like it. The problem could be a lack of conversation, and when you give the community around your offering the tools and platforms to make themselves heard, you take a step towards something much bigger than where you've been before. As I said when I called social media out, the exciting thing about where we are in our digital evolution is for the first time in our history it is as easy to create content as it is to produce it.

So what are you doing with this opportunity?

User-generated content was the first ham-fisted attempt to do something creative in this space, but it is only going to get better as organisations get more comfortable with the conversation going on about them. There is no silver bullet when trying to harness the enthusiasm of your tribe and align it with an organisation's goals, this quote from Henry Jenkins though will steer any effort in the right direction:

The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do…I don’t have to control the conversation to benefit from their interest – Henry Jenkins - MIT

If your problem is nobody knows about you, make that the community's issue and give them a reason to talk. Rally the tribe and give them purpose, make your anonymity their problem, let them solve it in their way. If you've been good to them along the way, they will reward you more than your own efforts ever will.

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Image courtesy of paf triz, with thanks to compfight.

Three of the best for Marketers

My friend Matt put up a great post - The Ten Best Marketing Tips Ever. I'm not crazy about all of them, but these three are gems:

1. Make your customer service truly remarkable. No, seriously, you don’t understand. Not good. Not brilliant: remarkable.


2. Find time to get active in your industry association. Offer to be secretary and do an amazing job. Do extra stuff that no one wants to do and do it really well. You’ll be a captain of industry in six months.


3. Engage your customers properly, start conversations with them online and offline (you know, like, when they’re in your store) and do it because you want to, not because it’s the latest fad. Smile like you mean it.

Some thoughts:

• Remarkable is such a good idea, and so under the radar still. Take it, eat it for breakfast. Own it. Be it.


• I was telling my new friend Lisa, there's always an opportunity to be a thought-leader, and she's reaching out to small businesses on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and making a really positive impact by just being good. If you're in that area and need a hand, get in touch with her.


• Passion counts for more than degrees and experience and networks combined. Full stop. Look at my friend Jules for proof of that.


• Matt references Gary Vee's brilliant talk from the Web 2.0 conference, which is required reading watching if you're a reader here ("Stop watching fucking Lost!"). The other great insight from that talk is (and I'm paraphrasing) "Listening is one thing, giving a shit is a whole other thing."

OK. Go enjoy the weekend.

I know what you're about to say like your hype man

I was going to spend the week talking about story-telling in interactive mediums and the ways brands can leverage it, and I'l get to that, but I've woken up with something on my mind that I want to get to first.

Over the weekend when not lying in the park or dining with friends I was working on my latest (overdue) column for Marketing Magazine. It will be out in their December/January issue and I was talking about brands finding their voice online, which I'm quite excited about, I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts when it comes out.

I feel though like that's the running part, and we're struggling to get the walking right; we're doing that because the fundamentals of success in business and marketing are shifting and we're not keeping pace with it. I harp on about it, but only because I think it is important enough to do so: intent. Intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent.

While you're at your desk this week, in each situation I want you to ask yourself "What's my intent here?". We make sales calls under the guise of building relationships, we dump on other agencies under the guise of offering advice. We put energy into things that distract us from our main purpose in the hopes that people won't really get what we're on about.

And then we go do it with the brands we're supposed to be building.

Let's all agree, week beginning Monday October 13th, 2008 to gut-check what the intent is in the work we do this week. Let's not discuss "new ways to talk to our customers" when the reality is we need email addresses added to a database. By stripping away the stuff we cloak our actions with, we get to the heart of the matter much faster.

And I promise, the campaigns you run are going to be all the more effective for it.

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Image courtesy of The Alieness Gisela Giardino, with thanks to compfight.

You and me, and the games people play

Content. Engaging content. Stories being told. Experiences facilitated by brands but not ABOUT brands. The logical extension of "This program was brought to you by..." in life after the 30-second spot is entertainment created solely for or by a brand. Entertainment that doesn't ram a message home, but simply offers it up on a plate and says "Hey, yeah we did this. Hope you dig it." The goal is of course still re-enforcement of whatever your brand's values are, but there are better ways to do it than to just spit out a tagline.

The below quote from Henry Jenkins sums it up for me. I'm trying to figure out where it came from, it's been sitting in my drafts folder for quite sometime...ahh here it is. I <3 Google.

The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do…I don’t have to control the conversation to benefit from their interest

That ties in nicely to something I read over on Slideshare the other day (found by way of my friend Tim's Insight + Ideas blog) that I liked so much I wrote on a Post-It and stuck it to my screen at work:

Autonomy (the ability to make a choice) plus Competence (a feeling like you have the necessary resources to make that choice) plus Relatedness (a sense you are working together towards a common goal) equals Happiness.

Maybe even a good deal of love for your brand.

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First image courtesy of via, with thanks to compfight.

Second image courtesy of my own bad self.

Brand tags

Note: not Brand Tags.



So the above isnt really all that clever, but I quite like it none the less, spotted it yesterday in Carlton as I walked to the park (yay for Spring).

Most people would know French Connection for shirts with lines like "Too busy to fcuk" or "Cool as fcuk", this kinda takes that campaign and gives it a bit of a twist.

If it was actually part of something French Connection were doing on sustainability as opposed to just vandalism that would be even more interesting.

In fact there's an idea - that one is free guys, special Monday gift from me to you.

21 Questions - part one

Earlier this year I had some trouble with Vodafone. In fairness it started when the great southern ocean danced with my BlackBerry and came off best. Then the troubles came whcih manifested itself in my Open Letter to Vodafone. I posted it one evening and woke up the next morning to find Vodafone had spotted it and responded, wanting to help. The only catch was Vodafone UK were the ones coming to the rescue, Vodafone Australia were none the wiser.

Eventually the issues were sorted and in the aftermath I got the chance to pose some questions to the Vodafone UK team. The were great about it, if perhaps a little heavy on the marketing speak at times (I've removed the offending questions). Have a read below and let me know what you think, I'll also be speaking to Vodafone Australia in the near future, if you have something you'd like to ask them, leave a note in the comments and I'll follow up with them.

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This is the first part of an interview I did with Samantha Bottling & Aileen Thompson who heads up the Group Consumer, Enterprise and Brand Media Relations for Vodafone UK.

A lot of consumers have fairly lukewarm feelings towards phone carriers, it seems to be something that transcends borders fairly easily. The forum you have seems a positive first step, how far do you think companies in this space are truly willing to go in terms of transparency?

Customer service over the last 10 years at Vodafone UK has focussed on giving the customer a choice about how they deal with us as no two customers are the same. Customers also expect that choice, which traditionally has been in the shape of help and advice over the phone, in a retail store, through help centres on a web site or by contacting us by email.

However, web 2.0 has moved the expectations of customers on. More and more customers are using forums to get help from other customers or mobile phone users be it about a particular service or a handset or advice on what decision they should make when choosing a price plan. This has generated a very interesting customer service phenomenon for Vodafone UK.

The early adopters of web 2.0 were in fact those looking for more technical specialist help. Two years ago the dedicated technical services team who take the calls of people who need technical help began to notice a trend online for using forums and decided to monitor the activity. Gradually they began to intervene on the forums helping out customers who were having difficulty getting a mobile to perform a specific function for example - making it clear that they were from Vodafone and a credible source of help. The activity has grown over the last two years as more and more customers grow familiar with the web for help and as more and more forums spring up.

The response to the help the team was providing on forums was extremely positive and has helped to forge a very strong reputation for concise clear help from Vodafone. But not only is there an appetite for this kind of help so the breadth of topics on the forums has also grown - no longer is it just technical handset help that is required. The natural step for the team was to set up a Vodafone hosted forum, which would allow the team to help with very specific technical queries right through to queries about Vodafone services, as well as more general mobile questions.

Another reason for having our own forum is that we can use the content more effectively by linking to and from it – using the forum content cleverly to maximise value to customers. So in the Help Centre if customers need more specific help we can direct them to the forum, and in the forum we can link to existing help content, inter-linking the content and making it more valuable overall than two stand-alone areas.

ROI on social media and blogs is pretty hard to justify in traditional terms. How was that tackled at Vodafone? Is it something that requires a constant effort to justify the existence to the bean counters or have you managed to find a way around it?

We can measure it in relation to how the service is used, frequency and the strength of the 'customer delight' it brings. Since launching the forum last autumn, Vodafone has seen a steady growth in registrations and page views. Around 3,000 people visit the site each day and use the forum as a database for help.

The forum runs like any other forum in that customers are helping each other out, sharing experiences, solutions and tips and also recommending services and products. The forum has some guidelines and Terms & Conditions for use and is monitored and moderated 24/7. The forum team is always on hand and very quick to respond because it is managed around the clock. The team intervenes to help when a customer's query can't be answered by another customer and if necessary make factual corrections to posts. If the query is sensitive and shouldn't be discussed in front of other customers - like a billing query - then the forum team arranges to contact the customer another way.

What we have also found is that this is not necessarily replacing calls to the contact centres – though it does replace the calls that are complex. In fact we believe we are helping customers who might not have otherwise contacted us and would have struggled on or just not used a service properly or at all. We are filling a customer service gap.

It is also giving customers more confidence to try new things because it is a safe anonymous place where they can share their experiences. The forum is also a place where people can either quickly find an answer using the forum as a database or can post a question and come back to it later in the day if it's not urgent and they don't have the time to make a call to us - the forum is simply a new way for customers to get help but with minimum effort, which is just as customer service should be.

It is also very cost efficient for us. We can answer a question that perhaps 1000 people will view and find useful because it saves them the time having to post a question and wait for an answer.

I was talking to the MD of a digital agency recently, and he said quite candidly that we're still figuring out what "digital strategy" really means. How much of your approach is to throw it at the wall and see what sticks?

We do have a strategy in place for CRM and for online. It is executed according to what suits the local market. For example in Spain forums and blogs are set up in relation to particular campaigns on music for example and run the length of the campaign. In the Netherlands Vodafone has a combination of forums for campaigns,  as well as monitoring external forums to help out customers and blogging on new editions to the handset range, adding handsets to Flickr, blogging on news service. The Dutch online audience is so great in Holland that this blend of activity it is expected of them.

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I'll post the second part tomorrow, thanks to Aileen and Samantha for their time.

Step by step

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Step by step"][/caption]

This is something I touched on in a much earlier post, but never really dug out and gave it the attention it deserved. I shared it with others over a beer, Julian gave it a good "shit-test", and Scott Drummond even stole my thunder and quoted me on it. So, here it is, David Gillespie's Marketing Mantra. Five points, 2 of which are mine, the other three are linked to their authors who you should absolutely take the time to read.

Try it on for size and let me know what you think.

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Conversations happen around social objects.

3. Social objects are products or services that are remarkable.

4. Remarkable is not just something special, but something worth being remarked about.

5. A great product, and even better customer service are the most remarkable things you can offer.

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Image courtesy of Pensiero, with thanks to compfight.

One bourbon, one scotch, one beer

Julian Cole and I have been going back and forth a bit lately on social objects offline and some of that chatter is making its way online. He put up a vlog yesterday which Scott from Marketing Magazine chimed in on. Not wanting to be left out, I added my 2 cents. I hadn't actually uploaded anything to YouTube before, brought back some of the initial terrors that come with blogging (the world will see this, oh no!).

Anyway, the videos are below. Watch them (Scott's alone is priceless for the shots of his afro, little children may turn away in fear, you've been warned) and then leave a comment, or better yet, add your own response! While you're at it, give Julian some stick for the video responses needing to be approved by the owner - Jules I thought the whole point of social media was acknowledging you couldn't control the conversation right!?! :)

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=jhXSR4q1cMY]



[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvFVzSMg2OQ]

As she rises to her apology

Somewhere early Sunday morning (sober, I swear Mum!) I was talking to a friend about intent, and the revelation of intent through actions. She suggested action wasn't enough, that consistency was required. Consistency then perhaps becomes the actual revealer of intent - or at least of priorities.

You can have the best intentions in the world, but your priorities will always one-up you with a slow reveal (or sometimes not so slow) of what your true intentions were.

This is no where more prevalent than corporate intrusion into social media spaces, where increased sales is the intent, revealed by the lack of consistency (which itself a form of consistency I suppose). I've actually been talking clients down from the social media ledge recently on account of so many other aspects of their online being fundamentally flawed. I'm always amazed at an organisation's willingness to drop $50,000 on a "viral" campaign while being happy to ignore things that are fundamentally wrong with their main website.

The fact is we used to call social media "community management", and much the same way that had a dedicated employee playing that role, social media requires the same. Companies who want to get involved have to ask themselves how much they want to get involved, and how much they're willing to invest in it. It will only work if you are consistent, you can only be consistent if it is somebody's job to handle every day.

If you're not willing to hire someone to do the day-to-day on your organisation's social media, to deliver consistency, you need to pick a different game to play.

Tomorrow we'll look at why the barrier to entry is more than a 30-second spot (and why that's a good thing).

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Image courtesy of spud murphy, with thanks to compfight.

Am I not your girl?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="...talk about wide open spaces..."][/caption]

In almost the only thing I do that can be classed as "fiscally responsible", I have an ING savings account. Money goes in and it doesn't come out for any reason (except maybe the Galapagos Islands which a friend recently suggested we visit...).

One of the things I like(d) about ING was the lack of correspondence - their involvement in my life is at exactly the level I wish it to be. They haven't pushed for a single thing more, content to hold my money while it earns a little interest and leave me be. I thought we had an understanding.

A few days back I got hit with the "latest" issue of their newsletter called The Juice. I say "latest" because I don't remember them ever sending me one before. There's a brief note from Vic Wolff Executive Director, Marketing and Communications who gives me the only thing remotely interesting to me: the interest rate has gone form 6.90% or 7%. Great - if that means what I think it means, truth be told I have no idea how that impacts my savings day to day, it's like telling a homeless person they could offset their carbon emissions by 25% if they begged on the sunny side of the street.

• They tell me they've paid out $5 billion dollars in interest since starting. Not to me. So I don't care.


• Why using Billy Connolly in their commercials is such a good fit for their brand. I do not care.


• A note about donating $50k to a research project to better understand the snubfin dolphin. I do not care - understand I'm all for marine conservation, I'm just a bit more concerned making some fundamental alterations to the way we live in order to make sure my kids (when I have them) can see any dolphin somewhere other than a textbook.

ING, know you want to have a chat with your customers, but your opening salvo was a bunch of stuff you wanted me to know about you. And I don't care what you look like, that doesn't get a drink bought, and it certainly doesn't get a conversation started.

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Image courtesy of refractionless, with thanks to compfight.