Entries from May 2005 ↓

A Bell South competitor, Dialog Teleommunications, has set the old belle ringing with its “take the BS out of phone service” campaign.

The campaign in several media including outdoor, newspaper, TV and direct mail, has ads headlined “Ell Outh.” The copy further states “no hidden fees, no extra charges, no BS.” The work was created by BOONE/OAKLEY, of Charlotte, N.C.

The reaction at Bell South was immediate fury. The campaign broke April 29th, and that day Bell sent Dialog a request to stop running the ads. (It is believed that someone tipped Bell South to the upcoming campaign.)

The phone giant has already gotten a cease-and-desist order. Moreover, Dialog, rather than digging deep for litigation fees, has begun pulling the ads.

Because the full campaign broke on May 2nd, maybe it should be called the 11-day ” give em ell” campaign.

The expert on Amazon Prime, Omar, has joined another consumer group: American Airlines frequent flyer’s group, called Million Miles.

The DM stuff he received looks cool. But you can’t see the eight elrectronic upgrades, each good for 500 miles of US travel.

Oh, rats! He didn’t just ante up a few hundred for those 4 system wide upgrades. Heck, no, he flew 1 million miles as an American Airlines Frequent Flyer.

That’s gonna take a while for me to build up.

Maybe, that’s not so bad as one of the comments says the program provides regular upgrades that are diificult to use, due to limited availability of upgrade seats. The poster comments it’s just the Million Miles reward is just a fancy logo tag for your well-travelled luggage.

Adbusters, the anti-ad magazine, likes an ad so much it not only runs it, it runs free! (Adbusters does not accept paid advertising.)

It’s by Equal Exchange, and it supports Fair Trade coffee, about as lily white as business can get, I think. (Their products arefrequently sold by churches.)

The ad headline is is “Power to the Farmers” and was created in-house by Equal Exchange.

There are a lot more comments about this on the web than I ever realized. Many Amazon customers view the $79 annual fee as excessive, but others defend it including Omar who thinks of it as $6.58 a month, as he orders something from Amazon at least twelve times a year.

Yet, here’s a man who shops at Amazon, but paid nothing in shipping fees for a whole year. He bought three dozen items, too.

I think that the charges for shipping one book are high, especially on a percentage basis, about $4.00 if you buy one item. But if you add other items to get the Super Saver uber-$25 rate, you have both bought more stuff, maybe something you didn’t want or need, and you get slower shipping for it.

I run the numbers with a random hardcover book. At first, I save 30 percent, but I add on the shipping. Suddenly I’m saving only 12 percent. I can almost match that at my brick-and-mortar Barnes and Noble with their 10-percent-discount membership card, and I have it now.

The overwhelming advantage of Amazon over brick-and-mortar coompetitors is the incredible range of their offering in any department, and — doggoneit — their community.

Face it. Once you start reading the reviews, you can’t stop. (The best reviews are salty, like classic potato chips.) And frequently I decide I don’t want that brand-new bestseller anyway, after a few scorching 1-star comments.

But once you join Amazon Prime, you are no longer an independent customer, you become a member. Now you have that $79 fee to think about. Do you want to buy a title at Barnes and Noble’s site, where you have to pay more shipping? (This is in a Wall Street Journal article.)

So, in fact, the fee may not only cover Amazon’s costs, but be set high enough to make the average consumer move their shopping from lots of other places, whether online or off. One blogger notes they now buy their drugstore items online, using Amazon Prime, which is anecdotal evidence that the new program is working. (This is starting to sound like those online grocery-shopping schemes of last century, a creepy locked-room life.)

I just read an older article in Fortune magazine.

We all know about the growth of its stock with a lofty 65 (no! 95) PE ratio that make conservative investors blanch.

But what is stunning is that webmasters with a good idea, fresh content, serious traffic and a Google AdSense account have work-from-home businesses. Not stuffing envelopes or medical transcription or even clearing out their attics on eBay.

No, if you can get droves of people to visit your site, you don’t have to market the latest widgets. You sell Google ad clicks. AdSense places ads on your site for your visitors to see and click. And every month Google sends you a check for the use of your advertising medium.

OK, maybe a few hundred dollars , if you’re good?

No, try $5,000 a month for the clicks from visitors to mobiletracker.net, a popular site about cell phones. It gets about 200,000 visitors a month, as the owner updates a few items every day. From his parents’ livingroom by laptop.

The owner of the site is Jon Gales and he lives with his folks, because he’s only 19.

Or another site started by an engineer tired of cruddy airline seats. He designed the brilliant seatguru.com. Then he set up Google AdSense for of course, travel ads. (That’s a very cutthroat category, so there are lots of deep-pocket advertisers waiting for a busy site to showcase their ads.) He started the site as a hobby and now generates mucho traffic. Zap! Google AdSense made the site a $120,000 a year business.

Got a new idea for a website that will bring in the crowds? Watch your big traffic stats click you to a Google fortune.

Amazon earlier in the year began offering prepaid 2-day shipping for an annual fee. I was going to call it a low annual fee, but this is debated all over blogland. It’s $79 per year for up to four Amazon customers in the same household.

So the fee’s cheapness depends on how much you buy at Amzon in a year and how much you succumb to the get-it-instantly urge. For that fee, you would get free, 2-day shipping — now about $10 or even faster overnight shipping for $3.99.

Apparently, some Amazon people are making this seem affordable by buying household goods like toothpaste at Amazon, saying with zero added shipping, this makes good economic sense. (The toothpaste and other items I checked, had no “you save 32%” marked on them, so I’m guessing this may be comparable to a reasonably priced local store.)

For example, the big sellers in Health and Beauty are electric shavers, electric toothbrushes, and baby things. While the electronics are “Amazon priced,” the diapers and baby formula sometimes are reduced by 7% — not a big bargain. Still if you want to skip the hauling, maybe even that makes sense.

Investors and the cynical have questioned whether this is a rather desperate measure to gain sales. One shopper even noticed that things sittinng in his shopping cart to buy later have been creeping up in price. Maybe that’s how they make certain that Amazon is on the right side of the “free fast shipping” deal.

I have been watching a documentary made years ago about the Clinton-Bush campaign. It’s The War Room, and it takes place in the nerve center for the Clinton campaign.

After all this time, it looks even smarter than it must have when it first hit the movie screens. The first topic to be shown is the Gennifer Flowers scandal — a foreshadowing of the Monica nightmare many years later that so tainted Clinton and his presidency. (Even the filmmakers Pennebaker and Hegedus are surprised how many things they got right. They filmed Carville “who looked like somebody’s drunken uncle”* just because he was so interesting (and outspoken) without realizing at first that he was the number one man running Clinton’s campaign.)

You get an upclose view of the backroom pols fighting to win the White House. The stars of the movie are James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, as they are put to the fire over by the latest stories in the newspaper. (Stephanopoulos, of course, later became Clinton’s first press secretary.)

Whichever way you voted or however you feel about Mr. Bill, this is an eye opening film about the political process in America.

For more edetails, see Sephanopoulos book All Too Human.

* This is a direct quote from D.A. Pennebaker.

The Smart car sold in Europe, where small cars have a long tradition, may be imported into America. Zap, a California importer of electric vehicles, is promoting the car in America. While the car is made by a Mercedes Benz subsidiary, you won’t get MB lovers to convert to this car.

It is not merely small; it is tiny — about one-half the length of the gas-sipping hybrid Toyota Prius. It’s only 8 feet 2 inches long and it weighs about 1,600 pounds. For comparison, the bantam weight Mini Cooper is a hefty? 2,700 pounds.

The European version achieves 60 miles per gallon, but the EP says the US version will get 37 mpg. The car maker has asked for a retest.

See all the Apple commercials you may have missed. Lots of them are stored happily here.

See further comments at this blog (And be patient for those slow downloads.)

A new commercial which airs tonight actually has that memorable Aflac duck talk. This is the 22th Aflac duck spot done by the Kaplan Thaler Group.

After five years of only quacking “Aflac,” the spokesduck finally talks. The commercial features Melania Trump.

Dan Amos, chairman and CEO of Aflac says, “The commercial gives the duck a voice in a very clever and entertaining way.”