Collateral Damage

Marketing has always been a high consideration in the US adventure in Iraq, see Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s comment on the invasion, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Needing to sell this particular product, the Administration ran out a staggering array of ante-bellum reasons for war: WMD, “Saddam is worse than Hitler,” Saddam is linked to 9-11, Saddam will destabilize the Mid-East (isn’t that like making water wet?), “We need to stand up for the UN.” All of these were underpinned by the argument that this has nothing to do with oil. One of the first things you learn in the news biz is that when someone says it’s not about money, then you can be sure it is about …

Current ex post facto rationalizations include spreading democracy in the Mid East (unless, of course, democracy gets the “wrong” people elected. Quoth Lehrer: For might makes right/And till they’ve seen the light/They’ve got to be protected/All their rights respected/ ‘Till somebody we like can be elected), creating a “flypaper” state that keeps all the terrorists in Iraq and I forget what all else.

Along with the ever-changing series of rationales, a key tactic of this marketing campaign has been to claim things aren’t happening that already are. There was the Administration saying the war hadn’t begun when we’d been bombing the Iraqis for weeks. Turns out they meant “ground war.” We had the Mission Accomplished/End Of Hostilities claim followed by more combat deaths than while “hostilities” were under way. And now there is the claim that “Civil War” is in danger of breaking out all over the place.

Last Sunday, Secretary of State Rice made the TV rounds and dismissed an “impending” civil war. And, technically, she’s right: It’s not impending if it’s already here. Her comments sound like Gen. Westmoreland’s December 1967 dismissal of the North Vietnamese’s ability to launch an offensive anywhere in South Vietnam. The following month the North launched the Tet offensive everywhere in South Vietnam.

If this ain’t Civil War, maybe it will do until the real thing comes along. What does it take to get the official imprimatur and make a war Civil? Is it when Iraqis spend more killing each other than they do trying to kill the US military? I think we can check that one off. Is it at some point when we can no longer claim all or even most of the violence is being conducted by outsiders? Now that’s actually tough to measure. Is it when Ken Burns makes a somnolent documentary of it? God forbid. The Iraqis have suffered enough already.

As usual, the Administration is being aided and abetted in its marketing by many in the media, and I’m not talking Fox TV. Last Sunday, the NYT’s Week In Review section lead with an article entitled “What A Civil War Could Look Like” which actually addressed everything but that. The article categorically refused to define “What a civil war does look like.” Instewad it fell back on some of the most hair-splitting linguistic efforts to not call an Antietam an Antietam since Bill Clinton’s famous “is.”

Like a near-death experience, the carnage seems to have shocked Sunni and Shiite leaders into a new realization of what civil war would cost, and new efforts to avoid it. But what happens if such efforts — and frantic ones by Americans — prove incapable of stopping an all-out war?

The greatest fear of leaders throughout the Middle East is that an unrestrained civil war …

If Iraq were to sink deeper into that kind of conflict,

In short, it said, we’ll know it’s a Civil War when the rest of the region falls to pieces. Or when it stops being so damned restrained. Or when someone has the nerve to call it that.

Any experienced marketer knows that you can sell pretty much anything once. Make a big enough claim for the product and someone – maybe a lot of someones – will buy it. The hard part is getting them to buy from you more than once. To do that the claims you make have to have some resemblance to the product you’re selling. When it comes to civil war, the consumer should now really be aware. And expect an official announcement of this product launch very, very soon.

… high tech. Some state lawmaker wants to get rid of the slogan on Idaho’s license plates that currently reads “Famous Potatoes.” Reuters quoths Republican Sen. Hal Bunderson as saying “Other than as a consumer, the majority of people in Idaho have no connection to ‘Famous Potatoes.’” That tag line was put on the tags 46 years ago. Now the tater has tottered from its pre-eminence in the state’s economy. Currently the state’s top export is high tech. The spud also ranks behind milk and livestock as the state’s top-earning agricultural commodity.

Quote of the day honors have to go to Frank Muir president of the Idaho Potato Commission: “We don’t have to be embarrassed by our agricultural roots. Why not be proud of your potato?”

BTW, the story is datelined – I’m not making this up – SALMON, Idaho.

If Idaho passes on Famous Potatoes, I know another state that would be willing to use the name. Tim Nudd over at Adfreak dug this one out of the Portland Press-Herald: “The Maine potato industry got an unexpected prime-time plug Sunday night when Homer Simpson, America’s most famous cartoon glutton, endorsed the state’s spuds. In a subplot that had Homer’s bountiful body sporting tattoo advertisements for various products, ‘Eat Maine Potatoes’ was stamped across one arm. Homer, who was in bed, told his blue-tower-haired wife, Marge, that the tater reference wasn’t an ad, but a reminder. He then reached over the edge of the bed into a bag of—yup, ‘Maine Potatoes’—and started munching on one.”

Live free or die is, of course, the motto of the Granite State. But that’s not what it says on the signs of the state’s borders. Those signs currently have a picture of a small town and the slogan, “You’re going to love it here.” This slogan could not be more out of step with the NH personality type which is so flinty that it makes even Massholes like me look friendly. That’s not just my opinion, either. AP quoths Senate Majority Leader Robert Clegg: “Right now, every time I go past those things I’m embarrassed.” Gov. John Lynch: I want to be there when they take [down] the first one.” So inevitably there is now legislation to take care of said problem (Note to NH & Idaho lawmakers: Can’t you find anything useful to do?).

The Senate passed a bill last week that would require the state motto be used on highway welcoming signs. The bill puts the cost of replacing the roughly 50 signs sat $10K (and who knew there were that roads leading into NH?). A distaff senator tried unsuccessfully to raise the official cost estimate to $100K which makes sens to me once you figure in the cost of hours spend on hearings, costs of publishing these proposals and the cost of having idiots like me waste their time on it. Living free isn’t cheap.

7-Eleven is sick of “The public perception … that you go to a 7-Eleven and grab beer, cigarettes and a lottery ticket. That’s not all we’re about,” CEO Joe DePinto told the San Francisco Chronicle. He sees the company’s future as being connected to sliced carrots and bananas. Speaking at 7-Eleven University, a daylong workshop in San Francisco for Northern California 7-Eleven owners, DePinto said that the key to boosting sales is putting a rack of bananas by the cash registers. Hmmm, or maybe some Famous Potatoes.

Wants change to discourage obesity … DEVELOPING …

The great thing about having 15 hours to kill on an airplane between Saturday night and Sunday at noon is the chance to get to read a bunch of different Sunday papers. Yesterday that meant the NYT and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.*

Herewith a few of the funnier things I found while not wondering when Delta was going to go out of business.

From the thinner of yesterday’s two Sunday NYT magazines comes the story of Ethos Water. The company, once independent but now owned by Starbucks, promises to give “5 cents of every $1.80 (or so) bottle purchased is put toward water projects in underdeveloped regions.” Bless writer Rob Walker for nailing this silliness as well as he does. “You might at least wonder whether it wouldn’t make more sense to donate $1.80 to one of the aid organizations Ethos backs and ask your barrista for tap water. Isn’t this all a bit like an S.U.V. whose profits finance third-world alternative-energy projects?”

My favorite quote comes from company co-founder Peter Thum. Raising money he says

“is only part of that mission; the brand ‘allows people to understand the world water crisis and feel as if they are connected to the solution.’ Sure, Starbucks had profits of half a billion dollars last year and could donate $10 million tomorrow, but writing a check, he says, is less effective in the long run than ‘trying to build a movement to address this problem.’”

I wasn’t aware that giving the $10M or building the brand was an either/or proposition. That said let me hoist both myself and Mr. Walker on our own catty petards. Last year, Ethos’ was responsible for $250K “worth of investments in sustainable water programs in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indian and elsewhere.” This, I suspect, puts them $250K ahead of the combined efforts of myself and Mr. Walker … but it’s so much more fun to curse the darkness than to light a candle.

Despite Mr. Walker’s attempts the cattiest comment in the NYT goes to George F. Will. From a review of the book IMPOSTOR: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy:

And when he says the law establishing the Medicare prescription drug entitlement “may well be the worst piece of legislation ever enacted,” one wonders what consideration he has given to, say, the Fugitive Slave Act.

I don’t care what your political leanings are, as long as you’re funny.

The AJC didn’t score nearly as well on the intentional humor scale as the Times, but it did have this wonderful lead by William Rawlings in the travel section:

“EASTER ISLAND – Like mysterious and exotic places but a little uneasy about suicide bombers on London’s Undeground, rioters in France and cruise ship pirates off the coast of Africa?”

HUH? Let’s play a quick game of all of these things are not like the other, except they happened in places far, far away. And I love that London and France are exotic and mysterious. Sadly, I wasn’t the only one to catch this howler as the web version starts with the second graph of the print article.

But, in the AJC’s favor, it includes Parade magazine, home of the bitchiest and stupidest “Celebrity Column” in the business, “Walter Scott’s PersonalityParade.” The Parade, which I read religiously in the Boston Globe, is written by one Edward Klein – author of the doubtlessly well-researched book The Truth About Hillary. What makes the column such a must read is Mr. Klein’s withering responses to incredibly stupid questions. This week’s winner:

Q: Is there a reason why David Caruso tilts his head and talks hesitantly on CSI: Miami? – Jan L., Saginaw, Mich.

A: Yes. It’s called acting.

Sorry Mr. K., as anyone who is familiar with Caruso’s oeuvre can attest, acting is most definitely what’s not on display. But thanks for playing.

*Having now read the AJC twice (this time and the last time I flew through Atlanta), think I can say authoritatively after a thorough scientific survey that it’s a pretty good paper – certainly well above most of the dreck I read that gets published on newsprint. So my opinion based on visiting Atlanta three times (one real visit 20 years ago and two times changing planes at Delta Central in the last week) is nice paper, iffy city and still the worst advertising motto I’ve come across: “Atlanta: Where every day is opening day.” Here in Boston that translates into a day where everyone calls in sick, gets drunk, prays that the weather will improve and comes up with a rationalization for why starting the season with a loss doesn’t really matter. Maybe that is a good description of Atlanta after all.

By far the best read in yesterday’s paper was, as usual, on the obits page. There we learned the story of Emilie Muse: “98, Daredevil Who Dared Not Discuss Past.” Mrs. Muse kept her shameful past – which included spending the 1920’s & 1930’s “swimming in treacherous waters, wrestling alligators, jumping out of airplanes, and being buried alive” – from her family for fear it would inspire the kids to follow in mom’s parachute. Quoth the NYT:

In an epoch when breaking records and stretching human achievement were national passions, Miss Neumann in 1929 swam across the East River at the treacherous stretch known as Hell Gate and two weeks later swam for 24 hours straight in tidal waters.

Why?

“For no reason at all, except that she wanted to be able to say that she had accomplished such a difficult feat,” The New York Daily News said in the caption to a picture on Aug. 12, 1929.

I would paraphrase the whole damn thing right here, but you really owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. Her life, which includes a fascinating platonic affair with one Alligator Jim, is crying out to be adapted into some other art form.

A Czech company is now selling flavored bottled water that it claims will protect you from bird flu. “Fromin Aktium” comes in orange, lemon and grapefruit flavour and is made by Czech company Aquamat. “The drink is a prevention against all viral-type infections, therefore against bird flu as well,” Aquamat manager Ivan Novotny managed to say without breaking up into laughter. Or if he did, the reporter omitted that fact.

Bottled water is, of course, one of marketing’s greatest/saddest triumphs because it sells nothing but a plastic container. If you are lucky the stuff inside is as good as what you get from the tap. If you live in NYC or Boston the water is actually guaranteed not to be as good as what you get from the tap. The Hub and the Big Apple actually have the best water in the nation, bar none. But try selling NYC-branded bottled water and see how far you get …

The truth is most bottled water is sold in parts of the world with little or no need of it whatsoever. And the stuff that’s sold in the parts of the world with truly problematic plumbing — where having clean palatable H2O would actually be beneficial — is still usually not any better than the swill you get from sink. Ahhh, marketing at its most irritating…

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful … hate me because I’m in Hawaii

There is nothing like Hawaii to really appreciate the absurdity of the human fixation with war. I’m on Maui and it is indeed as nice as everyone says. If it’s not paradise than it will do for now. And I mean paradise in an environmental-there’s-no-snow-here-and-I-live-in-Boston kind of way.

Before the Europeans showed up it was as prone to wars as anywhere else. Which is really odd because most of the reasons we typically think of as causing war – overcrowding, shortages of resources or surfeits of religions – were never an issue here. Pre-whitey, there was always plenty of land and water. The food was abundant, if not exceptionally diverse – plenty of fish and whatever indigenous fruits and veggies there were. Although the locals did/do eat a lot of poi, a purple-ish stuff made from pounding taro root that is to these isles what vegemite is to the UK: really disgusting unless you’ve been weaned on it since birth. But to the best of my knowledge lousy tasting food has never been the cause of armed conflict – although that would explain the entire British empire… They wanted to conquer everyone who had a cuisine with more flavor than they did and pretty soon realized that meant everyone except the Norse and the Germans.

Now you also have to understand what was involved in getting into a battle here in Hawaii. It wasn’t just a matter of getting pissed and running into the other guys and whacking them. No, because this is a chain of islands, you had to get pissed off, jump in your outrigger or other canoe and paddle for like hours on end, get out, run around and find the other guys and then take a whack at them. So it’s not exactly impulse shopping. Oh, and one other thing, you did all this while drunk. That is not unique by any means to Hawaii. People going into battle sober is a very recent development in military history – not gaining wide-scale adoption by the major powers until probably after World War I. During WWI, most of the armies realized there was no way you were climbing out of your comparatively safe trench and walking into a literal rain of gun-fire UNLESS you were soused. In all likelihood, the Russian/Soviet armies still haven’t adopted the idea of don’t drink and use heavy weaponry. Back in the Cold War era one of the big problems the Soviet army faced was keeping brake fuel in their vehicles because the soldiers would steal it to drink. And we were scared of these guys?

OK, wait a minute: a brief moment of research (I promise it won’t happen again) leads inescapably to the fact that there may not have actually been any alcohol in Hawaii prior to James Cook making land-fall here. So scratch that part. Or at least question it. But that actually makes wars here even more irrational. I mean without booze they can’t even blame wars on getting so hammered. Now there’s a moment you don’t want to wake up to. It’s bad enough when you can’t remember the name of the person in bed next to you, but what if you weren’t even sure of what country you had invaded? Actually, that would be a much more plausible explanation for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (or our current imbroglio in Iraq) than anything else I’ve heard.

So despite the drawbacks of enough food and land, sobriety and a shared religion, periodically some genius would rise to the top of a group here in Hawaii and declare that what these islands really needed was one person to be in charge of everyone and convince everyone else of the same thing. What the heck did they need one leader for? To protect them from the whales? The next nearest populated land-mass was/is more than a thousand miles away, so it’s not like there was any threat of invasion. Despite all this, in the middle of the 18^th century, Kamehameha I (also called the great because – like everyone else with “the great” attached to his/her name he managed to kill a lot more people than anyone else thought possible at the time) started out by “unifying” the big island of Hawaii and then moving on to all the others:

To take O’ahu, he built an immense fleet of canoes to transport his warriors. They landed in a two-pronged attack with half the fleet coming ashore at Waialae and half at Waikiki. The united force drove Oahu’s defenders into Nuuanu Valley.

Trapped in the valley, the Oahuans were forced to surrender or be pushed over the steep Nuuanu Pali. The King of Kauai and Niihau accepted Kamehameha as his sovereign.

How bored do you have to be to think this was something that really needed to be done? Couldn’t he have invented cricket or baseball or something? Couldn’t he have use the resources to pay for a national health care plan or something?

But, to give the man his due, I have to say I have some empathy for him. That’s because I, too, have sat on a beach here, my back to the incredibly verdant countryside, looking out across the beautiful bay at several other incredibly verdant islands, watching the humpback whales stick there snouts out of the water and laugh at me for paying to go on a whale watch., And, just like King Kammy the first thing I think of is, “Are we havng poi again tonight? Because if we are then I want to find a really big stick, get in a canoe, paddle for several hours and get into a fight with one of my relatives.”  Which is actually not all that different than Christmas with The Collateral Damages, now that I think about it…

Allow me to express my incredible disappointment in my old drinking buddy Gary Trudeau* for ruining/explaining “Why BD always wore a helmet.”

In a strip earlier this week, GT provides the namby pamby ex-post-facto explanation that BD always wore a helmet because his mom was a safety freak. It is well known that the reason BD was first portrayed avec football helmet was that Trudeau wasn’t a very good artist and that was the only way to distinguish him from everyone else. DON’T TRY AND REWRITE HISTORY, dude. Nothing good ever comes of it.

*By way of an explanation, and yes I am name dropping here, it happened exactly once in 1978 at Collateral Damage Sr.’s second wedding. My memory says we spent some time discussing if one of the maids of honor was going to succeed in picking up the minister who officiated. I believe she did, but I’m willing to be corrected on that point.

Congrats, BTW to the ultimate liberal cartoon for winning

the U.S. Department of the Army’s Commander’s Award for Public Service, Universal Press Syndicate announced Friday. The award — the fourth highest honor the Army can give a civilian — recognizes Trudeau’s “outstanding contributions to the morale and support of wounded service members, veterans, their families, and the Walter Reed family of healthcare providers,” wrote Major General Kenneth L. Farmer Jr. “Your compassionate portrayal of Lieutenant B.D.’s recovery and struggle to assimilate into this environment … has touched our Warrior Family and opened the eyes of the rest of the world to the physical, emotional, and personal challenges our soldiers face.”

This does not bode well for your credentials as a pinko…

Turns out that Google doesn’t actually have the needed license to run its incredibly Orwellian China-only “search” engine. According to an article in The Beijing News, Google.cn “has not obtained the ICP (Internet content provider) license needed to operate Internet content services in China.” Quothing Reuters:

The Ministry of Information Industry, which regulates China’s Internet, was “concerned” and investigating the problem, the paper said.

Question for Das Googlers: What did you expect to happen when you lay down with snakes?

McDonald’s is being sued for having milk and wheat in its french fries. The lawsuits charge the company with breach of promise. Apparently people got angry upon learning that some of Mickey D’s food stuffs actually contained food. 

The reason I always read the obituary pages (or the Irish Sweepstakes, as Collateral Damage’s mother — nee Byrne — always refers to them) is because you find out in death about people you never would have heard of otherwise. Today’s winner: Robert Rich.

Mr. Rich died last week at the fine age of 92. His claim to fame: inventing the incredibly accurately named “non-dairy whipped topping.” In 1945, confronted with a market that wanted something resembling whipped cream at a time when milk products were hard to come by, Rich figured out the perfect thing to layer on your layer cake would be … SOYBEAN OIL! He whipped some together along with a bunch of other ingredients, most of which involved the suffix -glutamate, and voila! Mr. Rich’s invention had three huge advantages over the non-non-dairy whipped topping: It was available, freezable and more stable than its bovine related brethren. It also had the benefit of great timing, coming along in the late ’40s — the start of an extended culinary period in the US so devoid of flavor that it seems as if our collective tastebuds were shot off in the war. The fact that his invention tasted like crap mattered now a whit and allowed him to lay the foundation for what is now a billion-dollar a year company. Said company, if we are to believe the media, is the largest privately held company in the greater Buffalo, NY, area. Which, I must say, is a distinction I wasn’t aware anyone wanted. For his pains, Mr. Rich was inducted into the National Frozen Food Industry Hall of Fame. You just knew there had to be one, right? 

In case you were wondering, last year’s inductees into the Hall were James O. Tankersley of The Pictsweet Company, Rosemary Driebe Olofsson of Pocono Produce Company, Inc., and Earl Smittcamp of Wawona Frozen Foods. I’m sure that information will settle a lot of bets.

The Bush administration has dropped $1.4 billion on 137 contracts with ad agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office study. (Note how I am about to subtly quote my new employer, BTW.) BrandWeek reports (Very stealth-like.) that the six largest recipients of the large$$e were Leo Burnett USA, $536 million; Campbell-Ewald, $194 million; GSD&M, $179 million; JWT, $148 million; Frankel, $133 million; and Ketchum, $78 million. And the president’s approval ratings are where? Gotta say this doesn’t exactly speak well for the ad industry. And who had the contract for what to do when the VP shoots somebody? Don’t everybody raise your hand at once…

Only 1 day at my new address and people are already writing about me ‘n’ the blog.

Dylan Stableford/Folio Magazine have a nice little piece here. Folio got screwed when CMO closed because that was the same month they published a big story on the magazine. At least I think it’s a big story, I’ve never actually seen it. Little help here Dylan?

Paul Conley at Magazine Enterprise 360 — “the blog on magazine blogs” — also says nice things and he writes:

CD has a new home here. I expect the look of this site, which today is using a standard template from WordPress, will soon reflect the design of Brandweek.

Sorry to dissapoint Paul but CD is and its lame-ass design are mine. And, while I expect to be blogging for BrandWeek, this one is and will stay my own.

And Rex Hammock’s rexblog — which has a frickin’ great logo — says very similar things. He even calls it an “award-winning” blog which is nice. And I’m sure as heck not going to disabuse him of that notion by pointing out that I won honorable mention from Marketing Sherpa only as a result of blatant ballot-box stuffing, God, I hope he doesn’t still read the blog…