I like weird music that no one has ever heard of. I listen to bands that don’t even exist….
…We interrupt our regularly scheduled boring blog post for an even more boring Public Service Announcement:
46 days from now, I’ll be participating in the Cincinnati edition of the Cystic Fibrosis Cycle for Life Event.
This is my third consecutive year riding and raising funds to fight CF. I’ll be doing the 32-mile route because that’s all my ancient bike and my even-more-ancient knees can handle.
Don’t worry, I’ll wear a helmet with my bowtie.
If you feel so inclined, please considering making a donation to help find a cure for this insidious disease. You can do so at my page. Your contribution is fully tax-deductible, and more importantly you’ll have my undying gratitude. I will name my first son after you (provided your name is Gabriel).
Thanks for considering it.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…
It made my heart so happy (in a fake Kelly Ripa way) that Kelly Ripa decided to replace one overexposed co-host (looking at you, Michael Strahan) with another overexposed co-host (Seacrest…in).
[Sidebar topic: Kelly Ripa is the black widow of TV hosts – discuss amongst yourselves.]
Seriously, are Strahan and Seacrest on a not-so-secret mission to take over every airwave that exists? Michael Strahan is a host on Good Morning America, and an analyst for FOX NFL games, and hosted the reboot of $100,000 Pyramid. Before he got the heave-ho from Kelly, he was basically on the air about 12 hours of every day. And Seacrest covered the other 12, with American Idol, E! News, all those E! red carpet shows, the annual New Years Rockin’ Eve… in addition to his daily four hour radio show and the weekly American Top 40 countdown. I hope they own stock in 5-hour Energy.
Actually, I kinda hope they get laryngitis.
I’m not a regular viewer/listener to any of the shows listed above — in fact I barely watch any TV at all — but even I can’t escape the two-headed host-beast named Stracrest.
All that on-air time must be cutting into their prep time:
A bank based in Cincinnati — Fifth Third Bank — unveiled their new tagline about a week ago. If you already put your socks on this morning, apologies in advance, because they are going to get blown right off by this gem:
This is banking. A Fifth Third better.
OK, you can pick your jaw up off the floor now. What an amazing, stupendous… piece of garbage.
“You know the saying: ‘He gave 110 percent?’ We give 167 percent,” said chief marketing officer Matt Jauchius.
The ads quickly make a point of explaining that five-thirds equals 166.7 percent, then pledge to serve customers that much better.
Yes, that’s right, while customers are expecting Fifth Third to take care of their money, Fifth Third (aka 5/3) is asking their customers to do fractions. Welcome back to 4th grade.
https://youtu.be/BE6EaVcf0gc
The Fifth Third name is rather unwieldy, coming from the merger of the Fifth National Bank and the Third National Bank way back in 1908.
So I’ll grade on the curve. But their slogans have gotten progressively worse over the past couple of decades. They used to be “the only bank you’ll ever need.” That morphed into “working hard to be the only bank you’ll ever need.” Then came the decidedly lame “the curious bank”…
Customer: “Where’d my money go?”
Bank Teller: “I’m curious about that myself.”
It would be hard to lower the bar from that curious slogan, but somehow 5/3 found a way. If my math is correct, they lowered it 166.7%.
“Wow, they really make banking seem simple and not at all intimidating!”
Thanks to my contacts in the Cincinnati ad agency community, I was able to find the runner-up slogans:
Turning fractions into actions
4 is between 5 and 3, and we are working 4 you
Invert your divisor and multiply your savings
Fifth is really Third if you subtract the illegal voters
1.666 – the number of the beastly bank
You’re gonna need a Fifth of whiskey when we take a Third of your money
I’m 166.7% sure that I’m not going to be banking at Fifth Third anytime soon.
I’m part of a dying breed: I still get a Sunday newspaper. And the first section I read is always the comics. Probably because my brain is so feeble. But you can find some profound wisdom in the funny pages too. Here’s a Pearls Before Swine strip from last year that I found very enlightening.
It puts the rat race in perspective, doesn’t it?
If you don’t get a newspaper but still want to keep up with the comics (an underappreciated art form, sez me), you can check out some decent ones at GoComics.com. A list of popular strips is here. They just re-ran the great week of Calvin & Hobbes daily strips where Calvin finds a hurt baby raccoon. Start here and read six days’ worth and you’ll see how Bill Watterson could convey more about the human experience in three black-and-white panels than most folks could do in a thousand-page novel.
Simply by rearranging the words on the card to create a better “priority of communication” and giving more visual weight to the key words, it would’ve been much more clear that Beatty and Dunaway had the wrong card.
You could tell that Warren Beatty knew something wasn’t quite right, but with “best actress” buried at the bottom in tiny type, it was certainly an honest mistake for Faye Dunaway to call “La La Land” up to the stage.
I think Benjamin Bannister deserves a lifetime achievement award… and the old typography should only show up in next year’s Academy Awards show in the “In Memoriam” segment.
Marketing guru Seth Godin really nailed it in his recent post about the growth of commercial media. And “growth” in this case means it’s spreading like a cancer. You should read the entire thing, and subscribe to Seth’s daily blog because he always offers some tasty food for thought.
But here (in italics) are a few excerpts I found particularly insightful:
They sow dissatisfaction—advertising increases our feeling of missing out, and purchasing offers a momentary respite from that dissatisfaction.
Much of that dissatisfaction is about more vs. enough, about moving up a commercial ladder that’s primarily defined by things that can be purchased. It’s possible to have far more than your grandparents did but still be deeply unhappy believing that you don’t have enough.
Hence a new iPhone release every year.
The media likes events and circuses and bowl games, because they have a beginning and an ending, and because they can be programmed and promoted. They invite us into the situation room, alarm us with breaking news and then effortlessly move onto the next crisis.
Hence the stories about shark attacks every summer, even though you have a 1 in 63 chance of dying from the flu and a 1 in 3,700,000 chance of being killed by a shark during your lifetime.
And now they’re being gamed at their own game, because the artificial scarcity that was created by the FCC has been replaced by a surplus and a race to the bottom, with no gatekeepers and with plenty of advertisers willing to pay for any shred of attention.
Intellectual pursuits don’t align with the options that media would rather have us care about.
A walk in the woods with a friend or your kids does the media-industrial complex no good at all. It’s sort of the opposite of pro wrestling.
Books are the lowest form of media (too slow, too long-lasting, no sponsors, low profit) while instant-on, always-on social networks are about as good as it gets. For the media.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Hence “click bait” headlines, fake news and trolling. In the 60’s Timothy Leary encouraged us to “turn on, tune in, drop out” but now it should be “turn off, tune out, drop back into the real world.”
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
Thomas Kuhl on We’re alive, because nothing happened.: “That is why we should celebrate every day when our feet hit the floor. Another to enjoy and share with…” Jun 25, 04:33
Thomas Kuhl on We’re alive, because nothing happened.: “This simply explains why we should celebrate every day our feet hit the floor. Another day to enjoy and share…” Jun 25, 04:31
You done said…