Archive for September, 2005
Writing jobs at Future Publishing
I meant to post this link ages ago: if you’re interested in staff jobs with Future Publishing, you’ll find a list of current vacancies here.
Blogging = Dogging
A nice wee story in The Register: apparently much of the population believes that blogging and dogging are the same thing. Which is ridiculous: one is blatant exhibitionism, and the other one is dogging.
I thank you.
Men, make-up and marketing
I’m always amused by the way in which firms sell things to men, particularly the cosmetics industry: for example, in the world of razors you have the Mach 3, the M3 POWER, the Mach 3 Turbo and the Wilkinson Sword Quattro. Strangely many of the terms used are from the motor industry: Quattro is the four-wheel drive system on the niftier Audis, turbo is short for turbocharger, the device that boosts the power of a car’s engine and so on. Weird. The packaging is interesting, too: razors in high-tech silver, or Xbox black and green, or Ferrari red. The message is unmistakeable: “I am a MAAAAAAAAN! Der der der der der!”
How, then, to sell make-up to men? King of Shaves thinks it has the answer with its XCD range (”exceed”. Geddit?), which promises to “Enhance. Camouflage. Defend.” The products are given names such as Defender, Reviver, Perfecter, Primer and Mad Shagger. Well, maybe not that last one.
The product information sheets are hilarious; for example, the blurb for Primer - stuff to make shaving less painful - starts off: “Prime: the time when something is at its best. And gentlemen, this is it.” But it’s the various moisturisers and lotions that have the best advertising blurb. Defender isn’t girlie moisturiser; no, it’s “The first line of defence in the war against ageing.” Tinted moisturiser is “your secret weapon”.
War. Defence. Weapons. Brilliant.
Unfortunately, just as the blurb’s getting somewhere with a fairly sensible message - “if you look like crap, put stuff on and you’ll look less crap” - the copywriter blows it. Having successfully turned your face from a blotchy, sweaty, hungover mess into something vaguely human-looking, you’ll find that “women won’t be able to keep their hands off your face - and neither will you!”
Oh dear oh dear oh dear. That one sentence has ruined the effect of all the preceding blurb, and created the mental image of a bloke sitting in a nightclub, stroking his own face. Trust me, you’re not going to pull supermodels (or anybody) if you do that; narcissism is a deeply unattractive trait, and you’re more likely to get beaten up than chatted up.
Road safety
To say the roads round here are bad would be an understatement: some of the potholes are so deep they contain sharks and submarines. To make things more entertaining the council has started putting speed bumps on the roads, which means going to the shops is a bit like driving from the highlands of Scotland to the south of France without getting on a ferry. However, the council’s road budget is brimming with cash, so logically enough they’ve decided to do the sensible thing and fix the roads. Sorry, I mean they’ve gone completely and utterly nuts.
My street is up the hill from a ridiculously busy main road, which is one of the major arteries into the north of Glasgow. Getting from a side street onto the road can take forever, and as a result there are all kinds of near-misses from dawn to dusk. The council has clearly looked at the problem and thought “Yes! Let’s put the pavements right across the side roads!” So they did: when you get to the Give Way sign that joins onto the main road, you now have four feet of pavement between you and the main road.
The result is a major contribution to road safety: where previously you’d sit at the Give Way and wait for a gap in the traffic, you now sit four feet back from the junction, unable to see the traffic at all.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, the same council that pedestrianised the high street but lets disabled elderly drivers zoom around the closed streets, despite the precinct’s obvious unsuitability for any form of motorised transport. The results are pretty much what you’d expect: half-dead pensioners peering myopically through the windscreen, driving like maniacs and scattering children, pregnant women and people in wheelchairs all over the place.
How flops can be big hits
If you’re interested in movies, Tom Shone’s “Blockbuster” is fantastic. It looks at the evolution of the blockbuster from Jaws and Star Wars to today’s big-budget behemoths, and it also covers some of the high profile failures such as Godzilla and Pearl Harbor.
One of the most interesting bits is the section on Godzilla which, Shone explains, was a crap film. Critics knew it was crap, the studio knew it was crap, even the film-makers knew it was crap. It made stacks of money.
Godzilla’s an example of a flop that wasn’t a flop: it was a critical disaster and audiences stayed away in their droves, but it still made money. That’s because massive marketing efforts persuaded lots of people to go and see it on the very first weekend of release; by the time word of mouth started to circulate (”It’s shit!”), millions of people had already handed over their cash.
There’s more to the story than that, of course - DVD sales, video and cable sales also helped make money as people became curious to see just how bad the film actually was - but the lesson is clear: if you can get people to hand over money before word of mouth and critical opinion can circulate, you can’t really lose.
I wonder, does that explain why film magazines are increasingly lagging behind release dates? More and more, the film mags are falling into a pattern. Typically it’s this:
* Cover feature with big star talking about how great the movie is
* Interviews with the whole cast talking about how great the movie is
* Interview with the director talking about how great the movie is
* Intervew with the FX guy talking about how great the movie’s effects are
But no review.
That comes a month later, two or three weeks after the film’s release. By the time the reviews hit print, the reviews don’t matter: people have already gone to see it. In effect, the studios have annexed the movie magazines and made them part of their PR campaign while ensuring that the magazines can’t do their job, which is to let people know whether the movie’s worthy of your money.
There’s a solution, though, which begins with “the” and ends in “internet”. Blogs, aggregators such as RottenTomatoes.com and movie mags’ own web sites can help redress the balance, getting the word out about movies early enough to prevent you paying to see a turkey. In the longer term, electronic paper will bring that immediacy back to the print titles, but for now - in reviews at least - the movie mags need to develop a life beyond the printed page. If movie mags are going to do their job properly, they need to put their words online, immediately.
A brief summary of this month’s music mags to save you spending money on ‘em
John Lennon: still dead.
Christmas is coming a bit more quickly than I’d like
My local supermarket has put out its Christmas stock. On the one hand I’m appalled: it’s still September, for Christ’s sake!
On the other hand… MINCE PIES!
My ‘book is broke
The display on my Powerbook’s packed up. Why do these things always happen when you’re broke?
Update, 28 Sept
Oh dear. After much Googling it seems pretty obvious that the fault is an inverter board, but speaking to my local Apple Centre it’s much less straightforward than that. I have to drop the ‘book into them and after three to five days, they’ll be able to tell me if it’s the inverter or not. If it is, they’ll order one, which takes three to five days. Once it turns up, the actual fitting is an hour (at £60 per hour), but they need three to five days to get round to it. Just as well I don’t use the ‘book every day for work!
*cries*
Razor madness!!!!
Just when you thought it wasn’t physically possible to put more blades on a razor, Gillette has done it. The forthcoming Fusion has not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE BLADES. Count ‘em! Five blades! It’ll deliver a shave so close that if you’re not careful, you’ll saw off your own head.
I need a holiday
I’m going to be away all of next week for a much-needed holiday. The plan is to do absolutely nothing for a week: no laptops, no cybercafes, no mobile phones. Hopefully it’ll recharge my mental batteries, because right now I’m *knackered*.
See you in a bit…