Daniel Lubetzky

Ken Kunze, former CMO of Heineken and a very impressive guy, shared this very funny and effective guerrilla marketing effort by Coca-Cola.

Useful NYTimes article about how to travel more cheaply in 2010 – good tips to know.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has sent a report to the FDA charging several food and beverage manufacturers with mislabeling their products. CSPI also recommends reforming package labeling format, especially the nutrition information and ingredient lists.

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Yesterday I tried Softsoap’s Pure Cashmere Hand soap.  I was struck by the proposition that a soap could contain "cashmere extract" because a while back I had wondered what "cashmere" really was.  Most consumers just know Cashmere sweaters as exceptionally soft but don’t know where "cashmere" comes from, so I guess the marketing team at Softsoap’s parent company, Colgate, figured that they would make things romantic with the cashmere association. 

The trouble is, cashmere is the fur of a type of goat – the cashmere goat.  Colgate tries to connect to this silly gimmick by using "hydrolyzed keratin" – a protein extract from the goat’s hair.  This ingredient, besides being the least present in the formula (see label), has no discernible impact on the purported features of the product.  It is just used for smoke and mirrors.  Too bad that most consumers have not yet caught up with this deception – though I did find one colorful site that brought them to task on it.

You’d think Colgate would be a bit more responsible with its claims and advertising.

Then again, liquid soap is a modern invention that pollutes water at such greater levels than regular soap, for the sheer fact that it is used in much ampler and less efficient form than regular bars of soap.  The same reason why companies created shower gels and liquid soaps  – because they can command a higher price and accomplish more turns than using regular soap bars – is also the reason why consumers should avoid using such products, which harm the environment and are just wasteful.

This is another in a series  (see prior examples here and here) of magical uses of art in real life situations – which accentuates all that is good about art and about life – and can be a phenomenal marketing tool:

I am often struck at how some of the best people at the best companies make big mistakes just because of lack of attention to detail.  Some wonderful ideas or initiatives can get in trouble because of bad execution.

Small example: I was forwarded by a team member a very cool and innovative program from CHASE to donate $5 million dollars to charities chosen by the community.  Beyond being generous, it also was designed to build the CHASE brand and goodwill by encouraging Facebook users to vote for their favorite charities – nothing wrong with that in my book.

You’d think that when you are donating FIVE MILLION DOLLARS you’d be very careful with how you phrase things and execute.  Yet the home page of the campaign had the following image describing the program:

Can you spot the problem?

They commit to donate $5mm yet their plan only adds up to $4mm!!! ($2.5mm made up of $25k to 100, plus $1mm big gift, plus $500k made up of 5 grants of 100k).

I couldn’t believe it.  I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and deeply-buried in the site’s legalise was an innocent answer – they had failed to include another step through which they are going to give out $1mm more.

The eligible charity receiving the most votes will be awarded $1 million, the top five runners-up will receive $100,000 each and the 100 finalists, including the top winners, will be awarded $25,000 each. Additionally, a special Advisory Board led by prominent national philanthropists will allocate $1 million to the nominated charities of its choice. [emphasis added]

But countless users will be suspicious of CHASE’s generous plan just because of a silly lack of attention to detail.

Natasha Singer wrote a very compelling piece here about the way the pharmaceutical industry aims to turn all of our ordinary weaknesses and human frailties into pathologies in need of a pharmacological cure. 

“PE” or premature ejaculation may be a rite for passage for young people who discover their passion for someone, yet for the drug companies this too can be fixed – for a price. 

The biggest danger, though, beyond trying to turn us all into robots who are sedated and desensitized, is that pop culture and humor would also die with a “cure” for PE.  How else will the next generation otherwise be able to enjoy such risqué gems as this one from Saturday Night Live’s mock video of Boy Bands?

I’ve always enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell, and yet some of his over-simplified discoveries have troubled me because they often ignore some logical alternatives to his explanations.  Now in the New York Times Book Review, Steven Pinker elaborates on this problem. 

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.

In an otherwise interesting (though earlier) New Yorker article on the history of Ketchup, Gladwell naively equates the iconic and amusing Grey Poupon advertising campaign to challenge French’s Mustard with the store-sampling efforts of one Massachusetts fancy ketchup entrepreneur to challenge Heinz Ketchup.  Gladwell frames the story to imply that this Ketchup entrepreneur won’t stand a chance to break the Heinz Ketchup empire because Ketchup is fundamentally different from mustard.  It may well be true that Ketchup is different from mustard, but in this particular example, it is far more relevant that Grey Poupon’s multi-million dollar campaign is different from one guy selling one version of fancy tomato sauce from a truck.

That said, I heartily recommend this article on the history of Ketchup – and how Heinz came to dominate the space so thoroughly.

The excerpt below particularly resonated with me, as it accurately describes a challenge you need to embrace and be aware of when you create a new food product – as when we design new KIND flavors – that the final product must add up to much more than just the sum of the individual components; its notes must join to create a transcendental melody that works magically together as one:

After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth.  "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing ‘Ode to Joy’ on the piano," Chambers says.  "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist."  Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude.  So are Hellman’s mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake.  When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt.  You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi.  But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket.  "The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says.  "They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance.  It’s very hard to do that well.  Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s"— and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—"all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out.  And then the cinnamon.  Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep.  A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."

Further to my earlier post about Apple’s cool ads, I got hooked on the songs in there and tried to find the original videos.  For Chairlift-Bruises I came across the video immediately below and was struck by it.  It seemed so cutting edge and professional, yet so casual and young (uncomfortably so for my wife – and I can understand why as a parent I’d also be concerned).  Was it possible that kids did this on their own? Or was the video director so sophisticated as to make it look so down-to-earth? It turns out it was all done by an 8th grader who is quickly building a following.  And it’s actually far better than the official video! You factor in these considerations and you understand why we are just in the beginning of what will be a revolution in content generation, with repercussions for business, culture and society that we cannot begin to comprehend.

Check out this new ad from Apple for their new iPod nano with video.  How is it that the Apple team ALWAYS gets ahead of all trends and pop culture and sets the tone for advertising coolness and standards? Everything in this ad is so perfect – colors, steps, shots, all.

The song on the ad is Bourgeois Shangri-La from Miss Li.

This earlier ad from Apple – with the song Bruises by Chairlift – is also awesome.