Thursday 4/8

Your Ad Here

Chances are, if you are alive, and perceptive to the cultured world, you are being advertised to.  Everywhere you look, someone or something is trying to persuade you to take action, whether it be buying a product or believing an idea.  As a matter of fact, you don’t even have to look.  Your ears are just as bombarded.  Those who are deaf and blind should be safe, right?  Wrong.  You can walk down the street in a shopping district in just about any big city and smell each store as you pass them.  Yes, some stores and brands are even developing signature scents to waft your way.  What will they think of next?

Want to make a buck?  Find a new place for businesses to advertise (and be prepared for others to copy you because good ideas aren’t proprietary for long).  Think of some odd places you see ads.  Here’s a few:  the little bar thing that separates your groceries from the person’s in front of you in the checkout lane, shopping cart handles, fortune cookie paper, toilet paper, the sides of the phonebook, on the garbage truck, popsicle sticks (under the ice cream), and with a tattoo.

On of my all-time favorites is the ad within another ad.  I wish I would have been the one to come up with this.  Some supermarket ads on TV tell you how nice it is to shop there and how they carry certain brands.  They’ll show a particular maker of paper towels or ice creams and maybe even tell you the price up front.  Why is this so genius?  Well, advertisements cost money.  And what better way to pay for them than to sell advertising space within their own advertisement?  I guarantee those highlighted items aren’t being shown for free.  Those paper towel and ice cream companies cough up some serious dough to be featured.

I’m ok with advertising until it hits me in places I can’t avoid, like the gas station.  At some pumps, a microphone starts blaring ads at you as soon as you start the pump.  Other stations even have TVs squawking at you!  And you can’t get back in your car to ignore it, either (or at least you’re not supposed to.  Read the sign).  I mean give me a break.  Can’t people just peacefully pump their petroleum purchases?

Want to escape the every day ad blitz?  Well, you could try visiting the vacuum of space, but good luck with that.  I hate to break it to you, but that sweet ride is gonna cost you upwards of $20 to $100 million.  (Maybe you can sell all the ad space on your rocket to fund the trip. . . Just a thought.)

By: S. Cole Garrett

Wednesday 4/7

Layout

Have you ever noticed how the beer and wine aisle at the grocery store is right next to the diapers and formula?  If you don’t drink or you’ve never had a baby, maybe you haven’t noticed, but look again next time you go grocery shopping.  It seems pretty obvious to sell peanut butter next to jelly, maybe even on the bread aisle.  The potato chip and other-greasy-but-oh-so-good snack aisle does well right next to all of the sodas.  Someone, somewhere has to decide where to put things in a store, but diapers and beer?  Believe it or not, they thought about that, too.

There is a dual-sided argument to why things like diapers and beer are next to each other at some stores.  One side says that they put all the food groceries together and then all of the non-food stuff together and beer just happens to wind up next to the baby aisle in coincidence.  I suppose, but I’ve been to a lot of grocery stores and I don’t think all of those coincidences are, well, coincidence.

On the other side of the argument, marketing people have a little tool called data mining.  It is a relatively recent development, too, within the last few decades.  Basically, all the information from all receipts for a grocery store go into a ginourmous spreadsheet.  Then, computers can sift through all those transactions and see what shoppers tend to buy together, like noodles with sauce and hot dogs with buns.  Data has been analyzed for centuries and been used to produce research support and such.  But with computers getting faster and databases becoming unfathomably large, data mining is finally becoming widely practical.

Well, in the process of searching for the obvious things you buy together, researchers sometimes stumble upon correlations no one would think of.  Lo and behold!  There exists a strikingly high percentage of purchases including both baby products and alcohol. 

If you drink and also have babies, it isn’t hard to see why.  After a long day of dealing with a teething infant, sometimes you just need a drink, something to relax with.  Children, even though you love ‘em, can bring you to your last nerve and alcohol, for a vast majority, is the ultimate unwind at the end of a long day.  And multiple children just compound everything.  If one cries, they all cry.  One wants something, they all want something. 

So next time you buy dog food and turn around to find air freshener or pick up some bagels “conveniently” located right next to the cream cheese, remember, someone decided to put them there.  After all, the store wouldn’t want you to forget to buy something (*wink, wink*) while you’re there.

By: S. Cole Garrett

Tuesday 4/6

Ode to the Pothole

Oh, pothole, how devious you are!

In youth, you are unnoticeable and hardly felt under the suspension of our advanced vehicles.  At first, you do little more than gnaw our tires.  Our course remains undeterred and our conscience unmarred.  You are present without presence.  You, pothole, are but an acquaintance to be forgotten.

You grow in girth and in depth.  Your rubber appetite is becoming unquenchable.  Drivers avoid you like it is a game.  For now, you are avoidable, but nonetheless, our cars are built to sustain your bite when necessary.  We know of you, heard your name.  On a clear day, people evade you easily.  You are hungry and patiently waiting for your accomplice: the rain.

Under torrential rain, you wait under puddle, to claw at each unfamiliar driver.  You grow deeper with each strike, too, like gossip, adding fuel to your fire!  You are indiscernible among both pounding rain and sunny aftermath.  You hide like a chameleon, reflecting the world around you when filled, your most dangerous state.  Feast while opportune, pothole, because when you become well-known, you become problematic.  Then, the war begins.

We patch your gaping jaws, but you know it is temporary.  The next rain or freeze has all the potential to un-gag you, rip the tape from your mouth.  Rain equals wrath and the longer it rains, the longer you eat.  Enjoy.

Ironically, man built the roads you infest.  Construction neglect and failure to know the porous soil beneath roadways are your loopholes.  We indulge you with asphalt patchwork on which you gleefully feed.  You are a weed, unable to be nipped in the bud, a recurring nightmare, a cicada outside the bedroom window. 

We cover you, again and again, but you will never cease to exist, as long as red tape barricades solutions, as long as you are economically unviable to repair correctly, and as long as rain falls on this green earth. 

In other words, until the planet dries up, you will forever plague our streets.

By: S. Cole Garrett