The big blog

We kid, of course, with our headline. Unless you’re looking to add election fraud to your resumé, voting once this coming Tuesday should be quite sufficient. Still, that one vote is imperative, so make sure your voice counts. Not that you really need us to remind you—media spending for this year’s midterms is expected to exceed $4.2 billion. Yep, that’s “billion” with a “b.” It’s a new record, no doubt reflecting the new level of divisiveness in our nation. But regardless of your feelings on campaign finance reform, your party affiliation, or whether you’re attending John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity tomorrow, all of us in the ad biz can celebrate the fact that media placement rates will now return to normal.

Very few of our clients’ (or anyone’s) marketing efforts are targeted at America as a whole—there’s typically at least a little demographic slicing and dicing going on. Still, it can be instructive, from time to time, to step back and consider our teeming masses in general, especially as we compare to other nations in the world. Fortunately, there’s a great online tool for doing just that—Nationmaster, a massive compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, the United Nations, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Also fortunately, Huffington Post recently used Nationmaster’s data to discover a few things in which America ranks first. Before you start chanting “we’re number one,” though, you might want to look over the list—not every contest is one you want to win.

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We’ve blogged before about the potential perils of logo redesign—specifically, about the challenges in developing a well-articulated rationale that can verbally explain the visual. How do you justify in words the value of a visual expression to which everyone has a visceral, subjective, and certainly not always positive reaction? Especially when so many people are ready and eager to turn that reaction into their own verbal two cents?

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Advertising may have unleashed any number of minor annoyances on the world at large (how much junk mail do you get?), but there’s one pet peeve that’s always seemed particularly insidious and unnecessary. To wit: you’re comfortably ensconced in your couch or easy chair, perhaps at the end of a long day, unwinding happily (maybe drowsily) in front of the TV with a favorite show, when said show cuts to a commercial that is about 18 times the volume of what you were watching. As you fumble for the remote to subdue the sonic assault, you curse the lazy marketers who resort to such tricks to get your attention (heaven forbid the spot actually be creative and engaging on its own merits). At the same time, you might find yourself wondering how the jerks pull it off (it has to do with normalizing the signal when the spot is produced). But what you really want to know is why they’re allowed to get away with it in the first place.

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