Customer Love

My wife had been out of town all of last week, so when she got back on Friday, we took the chance to do something we don't do too often: watch a few movies. We went and picked up two of them from the local store, one of which was National Treasure 2. Put it into the DVD player, fired it up, and got treated to eight and a half minutes advertisements.

The best part?

There was no way to skip or fast forward through them. (Even more fun when a pillow fell off the couch an onto the remote, causing the series to reset back to zero after going about a third of the way through).

I don't understand the reasoning behind it. We chose to pay for the movie. We are then forced to watch a preview for Snow White NOW ON BLU-RAY!!!! Followed then by further re-dredges from their vault, now on a brand new format. However, if we would have viewed the movie through an alternative means, we would have watched the movie, and just the movie, and not have been subjected to a bunch of marketing tripe.

Companies whine and whine about how their distribution rights are being infringed upon, and yet, they are the very one's who can't deliver a product that people want to pay for. Is anyone surprised here?

Blog-smchlog! I'm Too Busy to Blog

Too busy to blog? Count your keystrokes. « Jon Udell Annotated

Was the email message you wrote to three people possibly of use to thirty, or three hundred, or thirty thousand? If so, consider blogging it — externally if that’s appropriate, or internally otherwise. Then, if you want to make sure those three people see the message, go ahead and email them a pointer to it.

This is a very good article, especially for people who feel that they are too busy to blog, or even that there is very little business sense in doing so. All too often do I see people write some great peace of marketing advice and send it off to a client. Then a few days later, they are looking for it in their email so that it can be copied and pasted, and then sent right out again.

Getting your name or your companies name out there, especially in relation to your specific field, is never a bad thing. Why not practice keystroke conservation?

This is the NEWS

I was talking with my wife yesterday, and she mentioned that she had turned on the news to just catch up as to what was happening in the world. She turned it off when all that was being shown was non-stop coverage of the funeral of a young athlete that was killed last week (it's always sad when someone dies, but especially at such a young age).

That was the news, that was all of the news. Despite the fact that it was a very tragic and local event, it highlighted the very reason that I have not watched the news in a very long time: You will be informed of what they want to inform you about, and you will like it.

One has no control over what they see. You get the commercials, and stories are drawn out. Either a little bit of everything is covered, or in the example above, one thing is covered very well, but nothing else. Certain news stories that may be of interest will be teased at but not actually covered until well into the broadcast (no doubt trying to hold the audience for as long as possible). Obviously there is a better way. It's no wonder that the industry can hear their own death tolls. The general trend over from hard hitting to newsertainment is a clear indication of this.

A side note: I knew things had gotten bad when the local channel here had a section called "cyber-corner" where they basically read word for word headlines that were posted online earlier that day. I don't want to hear what a website reported on from the newscaster on TV, what do you think Digg is for? No thanks.

Personally, I'll stick to my radio (during the commute into work), and various RSS feeds. I get the news, both in quality and in quantity, the way that I want to.