Tag: marketing
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Shower thought for the morning was: why is cream cheese spread 'Philadelphia' called that? Is it from Philadelphia? (My box isn't, of course: it came from Ireland.)
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Dan, a white man with blue hair and a goatee, wearing a purple t-shirt, stands in a spacious residential kitchen holding a 'Family Pack'-sized tub of 'Original Philadelphia'.
Nope, it turns out that it was originally invented in New York in the 19th century and named for Philadelphia because Philadelphia, PA was at that point famous for its dairy industry. Just another bit of parasitic branding leveraging a borrowed association, like the Quaker Oats guy or the Rolls Razor. Now I'm wondering how many other examples I can find!
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The biggest problem with “AI” is probably that it’s used as label for two completely different things: 1. Specialized neural networks trained to do highly specific tasks (e.g. cancer screening) which often work reasonably well as a tool to support human experts. 2. Generative AI which thoroughly produces the most mid bullshit. It doesn’t help that neither are intelligent in any way, they’re both statistical pattern matching. - Thomas
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Crowdsourced Burger Photography
If I were crowned Burger King, I'd try to distract people from the marketing lawsuit farce by crowdsourcing my food photos...
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Parcel Delivery Scammers Could Try Harder
Dan dissects SMS parcel fraud scams and suggests four ways in which tomorrow's fraudsters might be smarter and more-dangerous than todays.
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Wix and Their Dirty Tricks
Dan shares a post by Matt about Wix's awful new advertising campaign, and adds his own summary.
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I Don't Watch YouTube (Like You Watch YouTube)
A recent YouTube video by Veritasium helped Dan understand some of the quirks of YouTube's algorithms. Why hadn't he understood them before? Because he uses YouTube in an unusual way...
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Signs Seen in Service Stations
After a few motorway service station visits, Dan wonders how to drink alcohol in a parallel dimension, and whether its okay for Costa to make light of addictions.
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All Noise, No Product
After coming across a product called SonicNotify, Dan discovers that it is possible after all for somebody to invent a protocol that he's not interested in trying out. Perhaps if it weren't so full of fail...
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Ask for What You Want
There's a psychological concept called the anchoring effect. If you apply it to successful polyamorous relationship strategies, you get an unpleasant result. Dan justifies how he ignores that result.
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Vulva
Just when I think that I've gotten the hang of humans, they do something even stranger than ever before.
There's a new fragrance for men that's about to be hitting perfume counters around Europe: Vulva Original [NSFW]. Just... click the link, and watch the video that appears. Your first thought will almost certainly be: "They're selling … -
Open-Source Shaving
Recently I saw a Basic Instructions comic in which the author/protagonist, Scott, weighs up his shaving options. You can read the full comic here, assuming you don't read Basic Instructions already (and you should).
As the folks leaving comments on that comic quite rightly note, the comic covers only two of a number of different … -
Monday Morning
Another new week. I'm surprisingly jolly about it. Spent the morning so far discussing corporate image with my boss.
[quiz results removed]
Gotta love Mondays.
I won at Mario Party 4 again last night. But Claire didn't come second... she came third, beaten to it by Paul. You'd think she'd be pleased. But no.
She kicked all our asses …