Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

A fascinating piece on NPR today introduced me to the problem many public transportation systems in the US will soon face: how to retain the massive influx of riders once the price of gas drops back to 'acceptable'?

They've had a surge of riders because of the rapid increase in gas prices. However, several experts on the show suggested that in history, people have always been quick to snap back to previous behaviors as soon as the prices fall back down.

So, this is the situation. What would I do, if I were the director of marketing for one of these companies? (I'm sure that's the question burning in everyone's minds...)

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What I Would Do
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Money got the people onto the buses in the first place. But it won't keep them there. Especially as gas prices fall again, the financial reasons will fade. But we have a great opportunity to highlight to everyone the other benefits they are enjoying by using public transit:

1. Reduced stress from dealing with 'road rage' and stupid drivers and traffic jams
2. Able to work while they travel
3. Able to read while they travel

I think numbers 1 and 3 are probably the most important -- emotional reasons to choose the bus instead of the car. (Because it will mostly be emotion that pulls them back to their cars.)

So, here are a few programs I would implement:

1. I-Pod Discounts
To encourage people to buy year-long passes (get them to commit now, before gas prices fall!) I'd put an incentive in place. Anyone who buys, gets a coupon for half-off an I-Pod. This is a natural fit, as people can listen to music while they ride the bus. This could lead to addtional partnerships -- kiosks at bus stops for people to download podcasts of the news each day, or featured music, while they wait for the bus.

Speaking of kiosks at bus stations -- in Korea, every bus stop had vending machines with hot chocolate. I'd love to see those here, but I don't know if that would be practical. (Snif.)

2. Commuter Papers
Provide copies of the newspaper or professional magazines on the buses, as is done at medical offices. This would be a perfect channel for distributing any free, community papers or even better magazines. Airlines used to do this (still do this?) with their in-house magazines, but they lose money on that. Distributing other people's content will be much more effective.

3. Read a Book
I think one of my favorite things about this idea is the enormously powerful creative imagery it allows for advertising. Promote transit time as a time for entertaining reading! Again, airlines are an interesting example -- every airport sells books, but at best they are presented as a way to pass unpleasant time in a less painful way.

Let's remind people of how fun reading is!

An example TV spot:

>> A guy walks into work, frazzled and stressed, complaining about the traffic on I-45. His grumpy coworker pipes up about the accident on State Street. Another guy walks in, smiling and happy. "How did you get to work?" they ask him. "I flew on the back of a dragon, fighting off gryphons with my magic sword." They watch, confused, as he walks into his office and sets down his jacket. Then we see his book -- a fantasy, with a dragon on the cover -- and his bus pass.

If the I-Pod partnership is too expensive, a deal for gift certificates at Barnes and Noble would play into this as well. Or even a partnership with the local library, in some places, might be a great approach. Give a $5 discount to people who show their library card when they buy a pass?

I think all three programs would work well together. And everyone would choose to ride the buses. As long as buses are viewed simply as an alternative to paying for gas, ticket prices will never be able to rise to even the level of self-sufficiency.

If we found that the idea of working on the bus really drew people (surveys would be well employed here), sponsoring wi-fi all along the bus routes would be a great move, too.

And that's the end! That'll be $20,000 consulting fees, please. Payable to Dalton Creative Solutions.

I've addressed the marketing of public transportation, but this is slightly different. The ads that fill the London Underground and UTA's bus system and just about every other mass transit system -- do they work?

I still remember a number of the ads I saw on subways in Korea. One about a bald man who found a miracle hair tonic, in particular, struck me because the first time I saw it I misunderstood the Korean text. I thought it said that the woman got a new husband. Months later I saw it again and realized the subject and object articles were different than I had first thought. It just meant that her husband had changed. (Which is still a little ambiguous in English, huh?)

Anyway, the deal with ads on public transit is that you'll see that ad for maybe half an hour. You can't stare at the people across the aisle from you. You probably don't have a good view out the window. So you're going to read every word on that ad. I remember reading even the small text with copyright information on ads.

Video ads are probably the real future of advertising on public transportation, though. Some cities are experimenting with that. National Geographic had a piece about the flat-panel TVs bus drivers are installing across the world.

If they made it cool enough, maybe they could even make public transit more cool.

Maybe.

"Welcome to our store! We're having a great sale on one of our products. Which one? Why don't you tell me what you're looking for, and when you want to use it, and when you'll be done with it, and then I'll tell you if that's the one on sale."

JetBlue is a really great airline. But their marketing falls into exactly the same trap as all other airlines. They announce "Fly Friendly" fares (or whatever the latest promotion is named) from "as low as $39!" I get a few "sample fares" in a list and then a link to their site. The sample fares never include my home airport so I don't really see how this deal benefits me.

But I'm a sucker, so I click the link to go to their site. There, I am confronted with the list:

From where?
To where?
Departure date?
Return date?

And any one of those four answers can throw me out of the invisible range of their promotion. I have no way to know.

And here's the real thing: if I'm looking on their site in response to a price promotion, it's because I'm interested simply in getting out of town. To go anywhere! Sometime!

Just tell me what places I can go to from my home airport and tell me when I'd have to go, to take advantage of your cute sale. I want the email to show me sample fares from my home airport and then the site to tell me when the available windows are. I can take leave whenever -- when's the best time?

This must be harder than it seems, because none of the discount air travel sites do it. Are they really all just missing the boat?

I tell you. It makes me wanna' go work for JetBlue.

That's bios, as in "biographies," not bios as in the low-level computer instructions.

I am about to be luckiest kid in the land. My lifelong dream of having a magazine column is about to come true. The only thing left for me to do is come up with a 10- to 30-word bio for the magazine to include. So what should I say?

Adhering to Tom Dalton Problem Solving Format, I first reach for my back copies of the magazine to look and see what everyone else has done:

"Phil Windley teaches Computer Science at Brigham Young University. Windley writes a blog on enterprise computing at http://www.windly.com and is writing a book on digital identity. Contact him at (email address)."

"Trajan King is co-editor of the FearorGreed newsletter. He can be reached at (email address)."

"Matt Asay is Director of Novell's Linux Business Office, where he is responsible for helping to lay the strategic foundation for the company's adoption and promotion of open source software. Asay is also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, focusing on open source software. Asay received his Juris Doctorate from Stanford Law School."

"Paul Allen has founded several companies including Infobases, MyFamily.com, and 10x Marketing. He has taught entrepreneurship at UVSC and he blogs at www.infobaseventures.com/blog."

So, I don't love any of these. Can I get away with what I really want to say?

"Tom Dalton gets paid to play with computers and marketing for 10x Marketing. Then for fun, he writes, builds, and reads. He also believes strongly in doing good."

That's what I think I'd like my bio to say. What will it actually end up saying?

Find out in a month!

Visiting the mall, I ran across a funny contrast: an Apple store on one floor, a Sony store on the floor just above.

Apple store: lots of space, a few clean rows of incredibly cool, distinctive computers. A theater set up in the back, to showcase sound systems and other technology. Bright lighting. Hip, laid-back employees who walked around answering people's questions.

Sony store: crowded, with bland computers sitting on top of almost random pedestals. The room was dark with little spotlights trying desperately to be cool. Carpet and shiny, riveted metal ran around crazy paths on the floor, with tile and other textures jumping out from every other surface. The Vaio laptops were black, ugly things -- and where Apple focuses on style but still lists all the detailed specs, Sony had decided to post prices and weights ("this laptop weighs only 8 ounces! See a sales rep for a detailed spec sheet") instead.

The kicker: the Vaio's cost twice as much.

When I'm ready to buy a new machine: quite likely a Mac. Definitely not a Vaio.

This is an affiliate link!

Click here!

That's all? That's all. And it's a test of the Amazon Associates program Build-A-Link feature. It seems to work on the front end, but there are some questions as to the backend tracking. I've seen some examples lately of very low clicks being reported.

I'm also working on setting up the aStore function, but having some problems there, too. No search box, for instance. What's up with that? It's beta. The magical word that gets you out of having to fix things

You can view the new aStore in all its glory: http://astore.amazon.com/daltongangfam-20/.

(Update: I fixed it.)

What is wrong with people?

Donna Charlton-Perrin, creative director on the Suave account at the Ogilvy unit of WPP Group, said Ogilvy was looking for ways to “interrupt moms when they are not thinking about themselves’’— say, by putting Suave stickers on food shelves in supermarkets, or running pop-up ads on Internet sites that sell children’s clothes.

“There seems to be this feeling in the culture that moms must be martyrs, that their lives have to be all about their kids,’’ Ms. Charlton-Perrin said. “But the beautiful woman inside that mom is still dying to get out. So we’re saying, ‘A pretty mommy is a better mommy.’ ’’

It makes my brain bleed. Dove can just barely get away with saying "every woman should be beautiful" because beauty carries other meanings that we hope they're trying to imply. But Ms. Charlton-Perrin (clearly in-touch with American moms who have all adopted hyphenated last names and pursued careers as creative directors for Ogilvy) has just placed physical attractiveness above moral worth.

Maybe she was grossly misquoted? And the coloring books Suave published featuring that theme were actually all misprinted? Maybe she's not trying to suggest that $2 Suave shampoo somehow makes people prettier?

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but an unstoppable slide toward consumerism and superficiality.

Thanks for taking the next step, Donna Charlton-Perrin and the sound, creative minds of Ogilvy.

A comedy 3000 years in the making...

I cannot claim credit for this brilliant clip. This trailer has been around for a while on YouTube, but I edited this version slightly for content. We're a family-friendly blog, see.

The quality and utility of Craigslist varies widely by location.

We bought my dream desk from Staples in Utah before we moved. We actually hoped to set it up in our old house; it was part of the plan to reconcile ourselves to living there forever. But then we got word that we'd be moving out here and we decided to just hang on to it. Easier to move in its original packing, you know?

Then we arrive here and the desk dwarfs our little condo. So without even opening it, we decide to sell it on Craigslist. It sells for $450 new from Staples, so we decide to list the desk at $350.

In Utah, the desk would never have sold for that price. April and I wouldn't have paid that price for it new, anyway. We got it on sale for $300!

Here in Northern Virginia, within 12 hours of posting it, it was sold and gone.

We also got three of the exact model of Ikea stools we were looking for from somebody else on Craigslist for less than the price of one, new.

Conclusion: We're not in Kansas anymore. And while that has its downsides, it has a lot of unexpected upsides, too.

Friends, this is a difficult time for me. Recent events have made inescapably clear the truth that I had hidden from myself, behind a veil of shadows and deception. Perhaps I was only fooling myself. Certainly, I was living a lie.

I have sold out to the man.

You may have noticed my blog turning a bit... corporate-y?

It was the filthy lucre! The proverbial dump truck full of money and Nintendo Wii's! I'm not made of stone!

I have sold my blogging soul out to PayPerPost, for a mess of pottage, valued at $79.00 and growing (at a steady five to ten dollars per post, directly deposited into my PayPal account).

Now, I know I've railed in the past against the sins of corporate corruption of the noble Internet. The noble, noble Internet.

So I hang my head (that is, crane my neck forward, not stage a repeat of Saddam's final performance) and ask humbly for your forgiveness. For both my past and nearly inevitable future corporatey blog posts.

For you see, until I reach my goal -- my hastily conceived and highly wasteful goal -- of obtaining a Nintendo Wii, I will continue. I must continue.

Yes, I have found myself wondering if the Wii is worth it. Would I rather have a green laser pointer and that awesome blue LED faucet adapter from ThinkGeek? Or one of those adapters that turns your faucet into a drinking fountain? Mmm...

And those temptations are very real demons I face each day. I can again only ask for your forbearance as I carry this burden.

To you children, especially, who read and set your stars by this blog -- please understand. I'm not forsaking the higher principles, the higher road of blogging. I've just gone into the bushes to collect some of the gold coins. Like in Legend of Zelda, once you get the blue candle?

That's me. I'm like Link. The bushes are like good blog posts. The blue candle is PayPerPost. See. It's a perfect metaphor. A Perfect Metaphor.

So no more sneaky Facebook wall postings. No more dark alleys and daggers. No more daylight robberies of armored convoys and leaping from the top of the bank and running into the stupid escape zone before I can zoom in and find you again because you were at 100% health and it only takes you down to 30% to make that jump that would have certainly broken both of your legs and probably also severed your spine in real life, especially with all that armor and weaponry you're carrying (plus, where did you put all the gold you stole?).

Have we a temporary deal? I promise. Once I have enough money, I'll return to the paths of truth and light.

(Enough money = (enough that my desire not to write corporate blog posts > my desire for the incremental $5-10))

(And I thought I'd never use math as a grownup...)

Hello, simpering Consumer. You are ugly, unpopular, and unsuccessful. Why?

Because you don't have OUR PRODUCT!

But you can GET our product for just SOME OF YOUR DISCRETIONARY INCOME!

Then you will be HAPPY. And HAPPINESS is the most important thing ever.

This vision of your potential happiness brought to you by Advertising. The lowest form of marketing, but occasionally a high form of entertainment.

Here are some beautiful ads that I can never remember what they're for and I'll never buy whatever the products are:

Cabrio - Pink Moon
Creative Mystery Ad

Have fun. Be good.

Microsoft Redmond senior security analyst Steve Riley... fessed up that Microsoft cocked up XP from a security perspective. "We let you down with XP," he said.

(From this article.)

Why would Microsoft ever say such a thing? Have they finally turned honest and noble?

No!

Recent reports have shown that XP still outsells Vista. MS makes less money on XP. It's suddenly in MS's best interest to slander XP. So that's what we get.

I hate it. Manipulative marketing makes me mad. (What a sentence!) And if you think that little 'slip' was anything other than very well calculated marketing, you're a fool.

This guy knows and shares so much amazing insider information about Disney, it boggles the mind:

Jim Hill Media

Why did Disney's America fail? What might the Tarzan musical have been like? Why is Disney So So SO happy about High School Musical 2's great success? (That last one was amazing -- eye-opening, really. Disney is so much more than what I generally think of.)

So go. Read. Now.