It’s time to remember what once was. The marketing group that lived and breathed together. I could go into how it will forever surprise me how work ethics differ, how GPAs can range, talents vary, but somehow things always line up efficiently by the end of the day. It was a group project, as any, riddled with complications. Anyways, could, but wont discuss that. Instead, I’d like to talk about how after 3 months, the only MEC product I’ve ever owned is a backpack, but I’m officially the biggest advocate on the planet.

I don’t know if its the sustainability aspect, the general style and culture of the brand, or the fairly affordable bikes that I’ve grown obsessed with, but I’m actually checking the website pretty well everyday. I’m still a believer that it could be improved, but the sheer amount of information available, and the selection of products, makes a the christmas-list-making-boy in me swoon and sigh. MEC doesn’t side step around anything; maybe its the fact that its a Co-op, or just the culture, but 20 minutes on the website and you know that they want to save the planet, but that their also outsourcing their product and sorry about that. They want to stay true to their mountaineering roots, but tough sh*t, preferences change, they have to  address the yoga loving new world order. Their honesty isn’t in your face, but its certainly where it counts – their hearts.

Now, I did have my problems with the project. Mainly, I don’t know anything about editing films, and I had to take quite the youtube crash course in apple software. I don’t necessarily think its fair that I had to somehow learn how to do that, but I do like that I didn’t have to use up class time to watch a series of presentations. There’s always a plus side and a negative side. On that plus side, the fact that the project was spread throughout the term was pretty well the best thing ever.

Anyways, as I let songs slip into my first posts, I feel that I should sign off with the song that I regularly made my group listen to (either by singing it myself or playing it on youtube). Everybody, I hope you enjoy Diane Young….

(if you wanna hear another great track, HERE YOU GO!)

Nadia Gunderson raised a couple questions, in her recent blog post, about privacy policy and advertisements social media. I could write an epic about my thoughts, mostly in agreement, I’ll condense them to two main points.

The first is that its recently come to my attention that “false likes” have been popping up on facebook. Though I can’t prove it myself, I’ve recently noticed a continuous stream of “Advertised Likes” that my friends apparently promote, many of which are entirely unlikely (from Shell, to Mitt Romney). Its fascinating that not only are likes being monitored, but they may be tampered with.

The second thing is really just an idea I’ve had, just a little bit of a kick in the pants for any of the many who steal glances regularly at facebook friends. What if, I’m just saying, they switch the search bar with the status bar. Every single time I was write the individual I’ve been creeping on into the status bar, it instead becomes my status update. Pé Tolfo “Nadia Gunderson”. Pé Tolfo “Ali Vanderkruyk”. Pé Tolfo “Emma Warren”.

I feel like that would keep people on their toes…. Possibility of everybody knowing your latest crush. Possibility of those company reps scanning liked pages to be exposed. I don’t know if it would work, but it would certainly make things more interesting.

In a post that casually plugs his newest book, Brian Solis admits to using the free website LTTFY to spam his twitter followers feeds with fake mentions by everybody from Lady Gaga to Ellen Degeneres. I wont even get into the irony of using fake tweets to plug a book called The Art of False Modesty, only to apologize and plug your book further in blog, but I did think that a couple points were particular was interesting.

The first point is that he admits to not knowing about the website until just recently. Now, I don’t know much about social media marketing, but I assume that if you write regular blog posts about marketing, you are aware of the trends that are breezing through the web; I feel like Mr. Solis might have been a little bit late on that there train.

Also, in the post, he mentions that readers and journalists need to be careful with sites like this running wild and rampant. What people are saying might not actually be true; we have to be careful about what we believe. We have to check our facts. To pull a line from his article: WTF

At what point did the average reader stop being critical of the words they read. At what point was it okay for a journalist to read one sentence and take it as fact. Why is a tweet made on this website any different than any other tweet, than any other sentence, than any other story. I’m surprised at you sir; I for one hope most people are still looking at the world with their eyes wide open.

Imagine it’s Valentines Day.

You get a kiss form your girlfriend/boyfriend, a hug from your mom/dad, a high five from your best friend, and a salute from everybody else. This salute can take many forms, whether it be in words, a card, or a type of chocolate, but each one shows a level of appreciation for another that’s gone silent for the rest of the year. Valentines day, that fictitious Halmark marketing ploy, makes people say the things that they hide year round, and everybody gets one step closer to becoming a teddybear – warm and fuzzy. In fact, it’s the only day of the year that anybody can walk around handing kisses and hugs off to everybody they want, without any notion of craziness, and that’s exactly what I’d like to talk about.

Everybody in North America has been given a Hershey’s kiss and hug [the hugs are the ones that are striped with white chocolate, while kisses are either one or the other], but I want to know if anybody has ever noticed the segregation that goes on with in these treats. Where hugs are allowed to combine both milk and white chocolate, kisses are designed to be one colour through and through. Where hugs promote integration, kisses promote segregation! If this is the time of year that we are supposed to be true to ourselves, say the things to those around us that we honestly feel, what is it that Hershey is trying to say? Do they want America to return to those dark days? These are my questions….

[This entire post is meant to be sarcastic and satirical… if that wasn’t clear in the tone, and the song choice at the beginning…]

It’s time for a product review! Picture your favorite moment of the day: Yup, the shower, but I don’t mean the shower that wakes you up and drags you kicking into the day, I mean the one that calms you after the days activities, and swells into relaxation. Picture your second favorite moment of the day: Yup, that cold beer flowing, that moment of perfection – nothing could be sweeter. As you can probably tell, I’m in perfect agreement, so much so that I began a summertime ritual that I’ve since called “The Shower Beer” [I prefer the highest pressure setting and a Rolling Rock, but it is open to interpretation].

Laugh you might, but why shouldn’t man be able to enjoy the refreshing cool taste of beer on the inside, while being slammed by scorching water on the outside. It gives complete rebirth, and does so at a fairly affordable price. Forever the stereotype has been a elegant lady in bath tub with a glass of wine, so I vote that we create the dapper man with a Shower Beer.

Now for most of the summer I thought that I was alone on this battle; everybody I told looked at me with disbelief. Every trek I made to the shower was one of loneliness, but no longer. Due to some hefty research [googled Shower Beer], I’ve found that the battle is being fought on more than one front. Meet: The Shakoolie. If I could describe the product in the fewest words, it’s a beer koozie, with a piece of Velcro, and launch pad to attach to your shower wall.

Now, they advertise the product as the way to make “Your shower more PARTY,” but it works just as well as a relaxation tool. With the Shakoolie, gone are the worries of the day, gone are the worries that your Shower Beer might grow warm, and gone are the worries about where to put the beer can while you wash your hair. Just relax, and enjoy.

This was a big weekend.

Musically, you have Justin Timberlake’s first performance in 7 years. To put that into context: the last time he was touring, I was just getting into high school, desperately grasping for some “indie cred,” pretending I didn’t spend every night dancing to SexyBack, and every morning trying to hit the high notes in My Love. You also have the release of My Bloody Valentines first album in 22 years. To put that into context: The last time they released album was only 5 months after my birth; flash forward and I’m drinking beer, writing a marketing assignment, and a million years away from the guitar that I used to call my home. But enough about that.

This was also a big weekend because of the Superbowl, and I, like the rest of the western world, tuned in for a couple of reasons: I rather like the 49ers (20%); the commercials are the bomb (20%); the perfected excess that is the half-time show has always served as a little bit of metaphor for consumer culture (40%); and any excuse to share a twelve pack with my bro is worth sacrificing a the lifespan of an apple battery product (can you do that math?).

Anyways, I was disappointed by the final score, but also by the turn out as far as commercials go this year. I don’t think I can blame that on any one ad in particular, or even say that the quality inferior to past years, but because nothing could hold it’s own against my favorite ad this year. Chrysler made me understand the pride and toils of a farmer, but I dont want to be one. Doritos made me laugh, but I still don’t want any. Godaddy made me cry, but for all the wrong reasons. Anyways, without further ado…

Every once in a while I find myself making my way through Walmart. It’s normally a decision I regret, in fact, maybe even one I pregret, as it is almost always fueled by some consumerist desire to accumulate an even vaster DVD collection. Anyways, last week I found myself wandering the aisles, when I spotted a young boy looking through the posters. For whatever reason – perhaps I was curious to know his poster of choice, or simply a good Samaritan, questioning where his wandering mother might be – I watched to see what poster he would pick.

The pickings were slim, an updated versions of what Walmart stocked back in my day: modernized Pokémon, ACDC, “Keep Calm Carry On”, Hunger Games [aka Jennifer Lawrence (aka my pick)], and the forever current Elvis Presley. The boy passed them by, even making short time of a One Direction poster. As he whittled down the options, a pack of pre-teen girls shooed him off and had their way with the posters, stopping specifically at the One Direction. Each one of them called dibs on a certain boy, and after swooning uncontrollably, left with a sigh and a giggle. The fascinating thing is that as the boy wandered up the second time, he stared up at One Direction, as if for the first time.

His mother walked up, he asked if he could get that poster, and I turned to walk away. Who knows if his mother caved, who knows if the boy missed the poster the first time, but I assume he had, and the girls changed his mind.

You hear a lot of talk these days. You hear that our attention spans have eroded, that the twitter generation needs a headline in 20 characters or less. We’re lazy; we have music, books, and information at our fingertips, maybe even complacent towards how much the world has to offer us, but some things don’t change. That boy, whether he knew it or not, got what I can only assume marketers are forever attempting to capture: the perfect promotion, at the perfect time – so subtle that he wasn’t sure what happened.

It’s easy to look on the kid and think he’s unaware, but it’s more than that. It happens for the same reason that every time I hear David Bowie sing “Heroes” I want to be in suit and holding a cigarette. Despite all I’ve learnt about their impact on my health and the environment, it’s a pure accident as far as desires go, and I love it. Sometimes there’s nothing else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sP-tjQ71Ei4

(except for this one, this one has two faces!)

In the early 1800s, Thomas Malthus proved that the planet’s resources would be unable to supply a growing population with sustainable food. He used the diminishing marginal returns to explain that as the product of our labour grew less effective, the growing population would be left with starvation. Though it’s easy to look back at him with disbelief, one of his assumptions remains quite true: our labour would have been unable to sustain population growth, had we not made technological advances since then. Better fertilizers and harvesting techniques  but also the disease resistant strands of seeds chemically developed, and the pesticides that make growing in humid climates possible. Fast forward 200 hundred years and there’s a growing trend: a return to the past in our food market. “Out with the processed munch-ables!” scream the people, and to them I say: You guys make no f**** sense!

……

Now I could spend hours describing the plethora of things wrong with these “food-conscious” arguments, but I’m just going to focus on one of the issues: the information they spread, and the general mentality of this generation to remain uncritical of what we hear and consume. There’s two different sides to every coin!

There are so many movements within the food industry that people need to think twice about. The first, I’ve mentioned, is the idea that we should sacrifice the lower prices of processed food in order to eat organic. That’s all fine and dandy, except that charging lower prices wasn’t the original intent of our food experiments – feeding a growing population was. Lower prices are just a happy accident; they exist as proof of the advancements we’ve made. The real sacrifice isn’t the prices, but the ability to produce food on a global scale, in environments that would normally grow callous over time. The real trade off, than, is eating an apple you’re pretending tastes better, so that other people can’t eat the ones that you deem unnatural. What does it matter, if one apple’s better than another, if everyone gets one?

I’m no expert, just a regular chap that holds an issue with the ethical movement behind organic eating. It’s not that I don’t see benefits environmentally to not producing with as many chemicals, but I just don’t see it as a realistic solution to our current environmental predicament. For that matter, I don’t really see the benefit of producing an organic apple in New Zealand, because their climate is appropriate, and shipping it across the world to be enjoyed – at least from an environmental standpoint.

Anyways, as I said, there’s two sides to every coin. If you can’t see the other side, look harder: It has a habit of showing itself eventually…