Whose Faulty Vision

“Something Good”

WTC Plans

Apparently people are all up in arms because someone found a copy of the blueprints for the “Freedom Tower” that’s replacing the WTC. The big deal is that if terrorists got their hands on the blueprints, they could plan an attack.

Look, this is ridiculous. Too many people are involved in designing and building a project of this scale for you to be able to keep details like “thickness of concrete” secret. If all the terrorists need in order to take down the building is a copy of the blueprints, then they’ve already won, it’s just a matter of time.

This is the worst kind of “security through obscurity”, and the Port Authority needs to hire some better security experts.

Focus Group

I just moderated a focus group myself for the first time! I’d watched and filmed a lot of focus groups before, and I’d conducted one-on-one interviews, but I’d never run a group myself before.

It went well. Nothing earth-shatteringly brilliant, but some good conversation. I asked the right follow-up questions, and kept the conversation going, and made sure that everyone spoke, and generally did what a moderator’s supposed to do.

Running a focus group is a basic account planner’s skill, and I’d always felt that it was a big gap in my experience. Well, I’ve done it once now, and I’m confident I’ll be able to do it again without any trouble when I need to.

Link: “Mister Softee” lyrics

This may be of interest only to New Yorkers…it’s the only place I’ve lived that has “Mister Softee” trucks all over the place, anyway.

Did you know that the tinkly little tune that the “Mister Softee” trucks play has lyrics? I had no idea. “The creamiest dreamiest soft ice cream, you get from Mister Softee.” Full lyrics here.

Link: GLaDOS Duet

And speaking of GLaDOS and Portal from the other day, here’s a link to a nicely-mixed duet by GLaDOS and Jonathan Coulton (who wrote the song) singing “Still Alive”. I love living in the mashup era.

We’re Number Ten!

Advertisers love to proclaim that they’re “number one” in their category. Sometimes they even have to invent categories to be number one in–for instance, movie ads that say something to the effect of, “Road Trip is the #1 non-animated family comedy in America!”

But in this era of the Long Tail, and narrowcasting, and niche marketing in general, it seems like being number one doesn’t have the same cachet as it used to. Advertising, especially by big companies, can be very tradition-bound at times, but I’d love to see a company break from this tradition in a big way.

I don’t mean something like Avis’s famous “when you’re #2, you try harder” campaign, but really celebrating being a niche player. Saying “we’re #10, and proud of it.” Getting across the idea that we know that our brand isn’t for everybody, but it’s for people who know quality when they see it. That we don’t want to be number one, because to be number one we’d have to dumb our product down for the masses. But of course inviting each audience member to become one of the ones “in the know”.

Now, there are certainly ads that get across the general idea of “our users are the ones in the know, unlike the rest of those ignorant fools”–Ketel One comes to mind, among others–but I’ve never seen one explicitly embracing its status as #10 (or whatever), and I think that would be really cool.

Airline Miles

Thanks to some business travel I’ve been doing lately, I’m a Gold Medallion member on Delta. Which means that I get double miles on any flight on Delta or any of its partners.

As it happens, my flight to Thailand was on Korean Air, which is a Delta partner. I didn’t choose it for that reason–it was the cheapest flight by hundreds of dollars–but that means double miles from NYC to Bangkok and back.

Upshot is, I’m up over 50,000 miles now. That’s two trips within the US, a trip to Europe, or getting close to a trip to Japan. How cool is that?