Tag: Duane Jones
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Sure enough
I’ve wisely avoided paying attention to beer since I stopped drinking in 1990. Today, just for curiosity, I walked down the beer aisle in Safeway. Sure enough, most brands are half taken, while Bud Light is untouched. Last week I observed one of the few Bud buyers, who is precisely the exception that proves the…
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Gotchapower
Listening again to a 1950 Hollywood gossip show called Hollywood Byline. This episode is valuable because it’s uncut, including the offstage chatting and negotiating among the actors and producers. You can tell easily when the onstage parts start and end; all the voices are clear and organized and grammatical. I was comparing this on/off variable…
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Hindsight?
Timothy Calkins, associate chair of the marketing department at Northwestern Kellogg, told Fox Business: ‘I think we’ll see more brands be very cautious about getting into the middle of some of these really controversial issues. I think in hindsight a team would say, you really don’t want to get involved in that controversial an issue.’…
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Duane does Bud
Duane Jones dealt with the Bud Light problem. I cited it before, in a discussion of AI misunderstanding human motives: = = = = = START REPRINT: The Jones agency had produced a successful magazine ad for Heinz ketchup. A painting showed an elegant waitress holding a silver tray with a single bottle of Heinz,…
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The one thing
Duane Jones’s base phrase is Repeats when sampled. A product must first sample the customers. Sample is a transitive verb meaning send or offer a sample of the product. Repeat means that the customer wants to buy more than once after being sampled once. Both steps are necessary to sell the product. So far DeSantis…
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Who’s the bedbug 2
Latest pithy point from Kirn: It takes only moments for AI to “write” a book, but it will still take hours, even days, for a person to read one. It used to be the other way around; the writer labored far longer than the reader. It made reading books feel worthwhile, to know that. Now?…
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Who’s the bedbug?
Earlier I talked about Marx’s real purpose. He was a scholar, not a politician, and he was trying to disprove the economist theory of marginal utility. In theory every product is identical except for price, and consumers choose products SOLELY on price. The real world doesn’t work that way. Every product is different, just as…
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Wrong sense?
This morning’s paper mail included an envelope with an interesting visual texture, which turned out to be a tactile texture. The paper is very slightly corrugated, so the fingers vibrate when handling this envelope. Rumble strips. Was the ad aimed at old folks losing their vision? No, it was from Beltone Hearing Aids. Makes sense,…
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More Jones
Continuing from previous item. There’s a more important factor. It’s not just the asking, it’s the location of the ask. The DeSantis campaign hasn’t appeared in my email, AND the DeSantis campaign hasn’t been using Substack. Haley used both. The Haley campaign seems to understand that their buyers are disgusted with mass media. The DeSantis…
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She asked
I swore I’d never donate to another politician. Just now I donated to Nikki Haley’s campaign. Why? She is a neocon, but she’s firmly on the right side on NAZI TORTURE, and has a good governing record on industry vs finance. DeSantis has a MUCH stronger record on the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS, but he…
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Marx is the real ledger 2
From Wikipedia: Marx was a scholar, not a politician. He was primarily concerned with disproving the concept of marginal utility. He didn’t want to publish volumes 2 and 3 of Capital until he could disprove the concept to his satisfaction, which he never did. Engels and others saw the power-mongering potential and published the rest.…
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Fractal exploration
From the Twitter of Bitsavers, one of the Blessed Preservers of this world: Book that doesn’t exist that needs to: “The Fractal Geometry of Writing” The thought actually started out that whenever I start writing something, I end up going down ratholes that each turn into something that would end up being the length of…
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Refunders vs hoarders
This is completely irrelevant and overly nuanced, but it’s what I want to write about today…. Duane Jones, in his wonderful little book about advertising and human nature, gets hardass at times. He talks openly about forcing a purchase. Here he’s discussing the money-back guarantee: = = = = = Mr Burke was silent for…
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If it’s a trend…
The folks at TheFederalist are still trying to claim a trend toward genuine populism on the R side. They claim that the defeat of Liz Cheney marks a pulling away from Bush/Cheney neocons. I doubt it. A much simpler explanation is the Trump personality cult, which is pretty much the only thing in Repooflican minds…
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Immersion is the key
Looked again at the Austin “free” university, which is still waiting for accreditation so it can say the same things all the other universities are saying. The website had an article by Boghossian, one of the big Cancelleds. This led to his Youtube channel where he “challenges” the beliefs of the wokesters in Socratic style.…
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