The discussion over Super Bowl ads continues days after they aired. Of course, we Canadians are sheltered and can’t see the ads during the event itself, but they are a still a hot topic of conversation. (The game? What game? Oh, yeah, the football game, we did see that, too.) It took me until Monday [...]
Tag Archives: Marketing
Big bro is watching
Big Brother was watching me this weekend, and it kind of creeped me out. OK, so I was being nosy. A neighbour’s house was up for sale, and I was curious to see how much it was listed for. So I went to the real estate company’s site, scrolled through the listings and found the [...]
Lovin’ Lee Valley
Christmas catalogues are starting to drop into the mailbox about as fast as the two maple trees next door dropped all their leaves last week. Today’s specimen: Lee Valley Tools. The company is based in Ottawa, but they have a dozen locations across Canada and a thriving mail-order business. I love these guys for two [...]
Breathless excitement about aging
A flyer in today’s newspaper is trolling for subscribers to a new magazine, and I’m kind of creeped out. Founder Moses Znaimer, the new executive director of the Canadian Association for Retired Persons (CARP), replaced the old CARP magazine with a glossy lifestyles publication called Zoomer. The CARP web site is rebranded as “brought to [...]
Telemarketers, please don’t call
Hooray, Canada finally has a National Do Not Call List! Have you registered yet? If you tried and got a “service not available” message, try again in a few minutes. The site seems to get bogged down, no doubt in the huge numbers of people trying to register. (Update: “unexpected” high volumes crashed the server. [...]
Make it easy to do business
Jakob Nielsen’s September 15th Alertbox talks about store locators on web sites, where he says “it must be not only possible to accomplish the task, but also easy and pleasant to do so.” Good advice. I’ve run into sites before where it’s easy to find the locator and it pulls up all the necessary information [...]
Weed out weasel words
Having just edited a client’s news release, I found David Meerman Scott’s recent post on weasel words, gobbledygook, jargon and other baloney quite topical! (Check it out for some awful examples of what not to write.) The release I worked on started out in the classic dreadful style: “[Client name] [stock symbol], [standard long, jargon-filled [...]
Keeping up with the Joneses
Marketers are going after another supposedly influential group these days: Generation Jones, a term coined by Los Angeles “culture expert” Jonathan Pontell. This is the group within Baby Boomers born between 1954 and 1965. It probably tells you something that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are high-profile Jones members. The distinction here is not age, [...]
Talking ’bout my generation
I had an interesting experience that followed up a session at the IABC conference on generational differences in the workplace. Exhibit A. My husband (baby boomer) was looking for the phone number of a local golf course. He turned first to the closest print phone book and then the Yellow Pages. No listing in either [...]
Dads get less love?
According to an article in Sunday’s Toronto Star, Father’s Day seems “like an afterthought” compared to Mother’s Day. Writer Sara Barmak says, “Despite the concerted efforts of greeting-card makers everywhere, compared with the emotional behemoth that is Mother’s Day, the more recently invented holiday celebrating our dads still doesn’t carry the same symbolic weight.” She [...]
