Mad Bad Ad

I don't hate ads. I rather like a well-done ad, and I have sympathy for honest attempts that are nevertheless failures. It's difficult to get out your message in a short and eye-catching way that doesn't distract from your advertising goal.

What I do hate is full-blown, expensive ad campaigns by big companies using big ad firms that nonetheless result in stupid, self-defeating ads. Case in point: Verizon's campaign, currently adorning a ton of San Francisco subway stations and – I'm sad to say – probably other places, too.

The ads feature various statements over photos (that might or might not be stock photography; if they're not stock, they sure do look like the type of "office group, semi-casual" shot from the stock companies with which every editor and graphic designer is very familiar). At the bottom of the ad is the Verizon logo. Most of the statements are innocuous or at least mildly annoying (such as the one, partly visible in the image below, about mad scientists doing bad things and good scientists saving the world), but there's one that is completely ridiculous. It says "When you believe more, you sleep less."

Now, to quote our Battlestar Galactica friends, what the frack does that even mean? And, moreso, what the frickin' frack does that have to do with a telecommunications company? Is there some widespread backlash against the concept of sleep that is sweeping the nation but unknown to me? Are people afraid of Freddy Krueger? And how is believing related – in any way – to sleep of any sort? And what are those five people in the photo doing that is related to either believing (are they in some sort of party indoctrination session?) or sleeping (are they fortifying themselves with lots of caffeine because of some typically boneheaded corporate directive to avoid sleep)? If they'd tied it to dreaming, it might work: When you believe more, you dream more. Or, When you believe more, you sleep less but dream more.

Whatever. They're not paying me to come up with a working statement.

But even after going through the effort to correct their work on this terrible ad, we're still left with the question of how it relates to Verizon. (And the "Powerful answers" tagline below the statement does absolutely nothing to enlighten.) Does Verizon have a belief-based phone service? If you believe your iPhone 5 will give you the correct location for that restaurant, you will sleep less because you'll spend more time driving out of the swamp Apple Maps directed you to? Really? What was the thinking behind this ad? And why is sleep bad? Why is believing good? Any intelligent person is going to say that it matters what you believe in – actually, any intelligent person is going to say that it's more important what you know than what you believe, but I'm sure Verizon's challenged ad team didn't think it through that far.

Again, I don't hate ads. But Verizon has an advertising budget that most smaller companies can't match with their entire gross revenues. And they certainly didn't have this major ad campaign created by a high schooler who just wanted to try something quirky and new.

Advertising is very much like what we editors do every issue: There are no coincidences or unthought parts of a magazine cover. Everything that is there – from the image to the cropping to the state of the person's hair to the colors to the expression on their face to the direction of their stare to their gender to their age to the overlaid text and on and on – is there for a reason, and often the most important aspect is that certain things are not done because if you did them, people would focus on them and undercut whatever you were trying to communicate (which is, usually, "Buy this magazine").

I'm focusing on a bad entry in a weak ad campaign, and I have to occasionally remind myself what company is even being advertised. And then I'm confused all over again, because none of it makes sense.

So, I hate stupid ads. And this is certainly one of them.

100 Most Influential People: Time Blows It Again

I've mentioned on this blog before that I hate magazines running list features; they're usually lazy attempts to create buzz around something that is ultimately useless and devoid of value, not to mention devoid of credibility. Magazines try to come up with them because, first, they are inexpensive to create (no long-term investigative reporting and potential liability involved); second, they make the magazine (or whatever media outlet) look like an authority; and third, they get people to talk about your publication (magazine, website, TV show, whatever) so it does marketing and it fools some people into thinking it's serious journalism. Genius!

Time magazine released its cover story list of the "100 most influential people in the world," and it is a perfect example of these useless lists. One hundred people might sound like a lot, so it might be understandable – even forgivable – if a couple odd choices were included. But when you think about a global population of nearly 7 billion, even the most forgiving observer would have to agree that Chelsea Handler just does not belong in the top 100 most influential people. Even if you say she's one of the top 100 influencers just within the American entertainment industry, you might be stretching believability a lot. And I have nothing against Ms. Handler.

Read the list. It does include a handful of people who should be on any such list. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Tim Cook, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and a very few others. But the majority of the people on the list simply appear to be there for marketing purposes. Seriously, Marco Rubio is on the list? Someone most Americans couldn't identify in a lineup is one of the most influential people – not in the Republican Party, not in Florida politics, not even in American politics, but in the world? No, he's not. And Adele is not the world's most influential person, nor is she the most influential singer. She has a great voice and sells buckets of records, but that's not necessarily the same thing as influence and power. Come back in 15 years, and we'll see how influential she's been.

The pope does not make the list. You might like him, you might not like him. I'm not even Catholic. But I do know that he is one of the most influential people in the world, year in and year out. The leader of China, Hu Jintao, is not on the list. (Really?? Really.) Neither of the Koch brothers is on the list, and we're all living in their world.

Time has managed to do the very difficult task of taking a useless feature – the self-generated list – and make it even more useless, turning it into a parody of the genre. Genius!

T-Mobile Still on the Block for a Purchaser?

So if AT&T can't take over T-Mobile, who benefits (other than Sprint's lobbyists, who probably earned themselves big bonus checks)?

As a T-Mobile customer who dreaded having to put up with AT&T's infamously bad customer service but who very much looked forward to getting an iPhone with the new combo company, I'm obviously split.

T-Mobile has justly famous customer service; I still rave to people about the polite, helpful, friendly customer service reps I dealt with a year and a half ago when I switched my phones with the service. Customer service is something of a telltale sign of corporate intelligence, to me; companies – especially large public companies – tend to treat the front-line customer service staff as expendable, and they pay them poorly. That has always struck me as ridiculous and self-defeating; I likely will never talk to or correspond with the CEO of T-Mobile or Comcast, so their exorbitant salaries improve my service not one bit. But I will talk to and correspond with their customer service reps from time to time, and those are the interactions that determine whether or not I stay with the company and continue to help pump in enough money to overpay the C-suite employees.

And despite whatever the corporate honchos would surely tell us during and after the merger (probably crap like, "We will never cut customer service quality" or "Customer service and excellent customer care are always our top priority" or "We'd rather shoot our grandmother into the sun on a rocket than hurt customer service,"), customer service is exactly one of the places they'd look to get rid of "redundancies" and "excess spending."

iPhone should come to T-Mobile eventually anyway (hopefully before my latest HTC smartphone dies), so if all other things remain normal, I will be a happy customer. But it seems that Deutsche Telekom AG has been looking to unload T-Mobile for some time, so it's probably going to be sold to somebody at some point. And I don't want an iPhone with terrible customer service or coverage. If I wanted that, I'd have switched to AT&T a long time ago.

Watch and wait.

What Do Jay Leno and Google Have in Common?

They're both self-inflicted problems. The Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien debacle was all the result of terrible decisions by NBC management; Google's debacle in its China business is all a result of terrible decisions by its management, which had lowered its moral standards in order to rake in money in an authoritarian country.

Yikes.