SPAMINATOR SLAMS (you know who!)

SPAMINATOR SLAMS (you know who!)

The Earthlink National ISP TV ad campaign, ìWe donít sell your information,î aka, ìThe Spaminatorî is a splendid example of excellence in advertising. Despite absolutely no mention of the competitor, the ads in the campaign are a great attack on AOL. Hereís the basic content of the two spots running on TV here in the NY Metro:

1. Guy walking down the street ñ everybody seems to know a little something about him and engages him in conversations as though heís shared his life with them (ìLooking for a job, eh?î ìGirlfriend not working out, eh?î ìThinking of buying a Digital Camera, eh?î). They just somehow seem to be so clued in about his habits, his interests, his life.

2. Guy talking to woman at bar. Gets her card, with her home phone number on the back. Agrees that he should call her, maybe they should get together. He then offers her phone number to another guy at the bar and to the bartender. They cough up five bucks apiece, he passes on the information.

Then comes a catchy orange ìSPAMINATORî graphic, and a voiceover asking, ìTired of all your information being sold?î The message is clear: Earthlink, unlike AOL, is not selling every little fact and sharing cookies-for-money about the habits and surfing customers of its users.

Another point that comes through very clearly: why pay for access when the service is actually using your habits to make money, selling the information it gathers about you to advertisersÖwho reach you through the very service you pay for.

And, as though icing on the cake, Earthlink offers [1] the Spaminator to its customers on an opt-in basis. Touche!

On the Earthlink.com home page [2] thereís a striking ìYou Are Not FOR SALEî fingerprint graphic to support and cross-promote the campaign.

Part of the beauty of this campaign is that it never mentions AOL by name. Yet it is so clearly an attack on the way AOL commercially exploits is subscriber base! It takes the high road, offering protection and service, all the while refraining from name-calling or a smear on the competitor. It also manages to clearly illustrate the faux pas of the competition, and position Earthlink as above and beyond the fray. No, they not only do not stoop so low, they offer protection from such impingement. Great stuff.

Major Huge Kudos to Earthlink for The Spaminator campaign. Who is the agency, I wonder. They, too deserve kudos.

One little itty bitty complaint about Earthlink: they absorbed Mindspring, yet there seems to be some confusion as to which name they will ultimately use. I suspect the Mindspring name is on the way out, but it is unclear as one surfs and navigates throughout the combines sites and search engine hits. When one clicks on the ìReturn to Mindspringî link, it goes to the Earthlink homepage, with no explanation. This must be very confusing to users who are unaware of the merger or even the name of the other service. There are a great many more dial-up users totally unaware of the net biz and the computer biz than there are clued-in web-biz types.

Perhaps Earthlink should engage the agency that came up with the Spaminator creative campaign to do an image and name development project. Or, as some might call it, branding!

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Cheshire Holiday Moon Birthday

The Man In The Moon seemed to sport a Cheshire Cat grin as I rode across the George Washington Bridge into The City on Friday. It was the eve of Susanís birthday, the beginning of the holiday weekend. This grin, not quite a smirk, caught my eye, as though the Man In The Moon was giving me a little wink, a nod, a shared inside piece of information: it is going to be a good weekend.

Birthday cards hidden in various places, some edible surprises awaiting Susanís discovery, and a full weekend of Yankee Baseball for us to enjoy. What could be nicer?

Labor Day Weekend

Labor Day, although this year 19 days before the changing of the season, is always considered the End of Summer, the Beginning of The Fall. Of course, in many places it is also the final weekend before returning to school, so that gives some credence to the ìend of Summerî connotation.

Amazing how the holiday weekend brought about a change in the weather. The evening and the night temperatures have been in the 60ís, even dipping down to the 50ís. Another sure signal of the change of seasons. The humidity dropped from oppressive to simply present, and seems, also, to be on the wane. All good signs. Indications of relief and good things ahead, or so it seems to me.

There were more colloquial and official tip-offs to Summerís end, and to what is around the corner:

An ad on TV for tickets to the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Show.

The Yankees crushing the last gasp of hope out of the Red Soxí pennant hopes (an annual event, one we Yankee fans come to expect. Some, frankly, even come to savor this annual American League East moment).

School-supply ads weighing down the Sunday paper.

Fleece jackets and such showing up in the stores.

The new TV Season not only being advertised and promoted, but the actual days that some shows return being touted in the promos.

Our Trip to visit Kermit, still fresh in our minds

In Doc's weblog [3] today, I note he offers kudos and a link to The Cold Spring Tavern. We missed that spot in our little Santa Barbara interlude with Kermit last week. Doc calls it a ìa hippie/biker/beer/dining/historical/nature intersection of the highest order.î My kind of place! Next time in Southern California we will visit this establishment.

In the same vein, when we were visiting Kermit in the LA area last weekend, we ate at Neptuneís Net [4], which is apparently a famous and beloved clam shack and biker hangout. Susan, Kermit, and #1 son of Kermit all enjoyed the raw clams. I find eating clams rather like chewing on rubber, and choose to forego this, er, pleasure. The chowder was nice (a little creamy for me, but no complaint), and the corn-on-the-cob was so sweet I feared instantly going into a Diabetic coma. Thankfully, that didnít happen.

RageBoy, Vanishing Blog Pages, and maybe Witchcraft (?)

In this blog a day or two ago I mentioned RageBoyís return to Blogging. Hmmm. Now the blog link [5] still turns up a blank page when clicked to from the Rageboy homepage [6]. From the stranger than strange, why-does-this-stuff-happen Department: on my main PC there is nothing but blank space (and IE telling me ìDONEî at the bottom of the page). Yet on another machine, on the same network, with the same connection, the page appears, all there, like nothingís wrong. Hmmm. Is there some Wicca connection [7] to our beloved Rageboy? Gonzo Page Vanishing? Another book, maybe, for which RB is doing research and planning?

Blogularity

In the next appearance of this blog, which I hope to return to a more regular update schedule, some thoughts on vocabulary, vernacular, the meanings of words, and so forth. Also comments on a tremendous ad campaign currently running. This stuff is still in the planning/draft stage.

Leave That Horse Alone!

Here's a blog oddity, one which brings great humor (to me, anyhow): From time to time I check the referrers page to see what links bring readers to this space. A while back, in a rant [8] about Bill Gates and Smart Tags and Microsoft attempting to become the Big Brother, I used the title phrase, ìFuck Bill Gates, Fuck Microsoft and the horse they came in on.î Apparently, ìFuck Bill Gatesî gets a lot of search engine action. Even more curious: horse-fucking (!!!) gets a lot of hits! So it would seem that some of the readers of this space are apparently looking for some bestiality [9] or inter-species-animal-husbandry or porn such stuff. Something tells me that when the developers of Google were hard at work on the software, they never imagined that fucking Bill Gates and horses would be a popular and repeated search entry.

I like to think in this space we serve all of our readers, equally and without bias. So, to make those who found their way here via some horse-fucking search happy, here goes:

The Bill Gates Horsefuck search engine compendium: click here [10] to see it!

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Your Thoughts?

Remember: all comments are welcome, and I really do answer all the e-mail [11].

Woe is me, Challenged html'er

One last thing: there is a neat random-weblog linking service, webloggers-ring http://www.jish.nu/webloggers/ [12], which this blog joined and subscribes to (that may be a complete misuse of the word subscribe, but what the heck?). (can a blog subscribe, as opposed to a human?) This creative fellow by the name of Jish [13] came up with the concept and keeps it going.

Jish asks the member blogs to post a teeny little link. After all, to be a participating member it only makes sense to post the link. It is supposed to look like this: >>webloggers<< and be a hyperlink. In blogs past I have copied the script, the how-to for getting it in, the whole shebang. Call me challenged, call me stupid, call me a Luddite, I canít make it work. So hereís the whole thingÖif you can instruct me on how to make it work properly in this space, please feel free to do so!!!!! Thanks.

<!-- webloggers webring code - visit www.jish.nu/webloggers--> ´ webloggers º <!-- end webloggers webring code -->
Maybe it should look like this:
webloggers webring code - visit webloggers [14]webloggers webring Hmmm. That one gets an error message. Try the next one:
www.jish.nu/webloggers [15] www.jish.nu/webloggers [16]

Whatever....check it out!