Seth's Blog

165 Apple commercials

All in one place, all in bittorrent.

Thanks to Christopher Hurtado for the link.

Link: Beyond the Obvious » Apple Commercial Archive .

Warren Buffet on Gratitude

Be Grateful

There are roughly 6 Billion people in the world. Imagine the worlds biggest lottery where every one of those 6 Billion people was required to draw a ticket. Printed on each ticket were the circumstances in which they would be required to live for the rest of their lives.

Printed on each ticket were the following items:

                  - Sex
               - Race
               - Place of Birth (Country, State, City, etc.)
               - Type of Government
               - Parents names, income levels & occupations
               - IQ (a normal distribution, with a 66% chance of your IQ being 100 & a standard deviation of 20)
               - Weight, height, eye color, hair color, etc.
- Personality traits, temperment, wit, sense of humor
- Health risks

If you are reading this blog right now, I'm guessing the ticket you drew when you were born wasn't too bad. The probability of you drawing a ticket that has the favorable circumstances you are in right now is incredibly small (say, 1 in 6 billion). The probability of you being born as your prefereable sex, in the United States, with an average IQ, good health and supportive parents is miniscule.

Warren spent about an hour talking about how grateful we should all be for the circumstances we were born into and for the generous ticket we've been offered in life. He said that we should not take it for granted or think that it is the product of something we did - we just drew a lucky ticket. (He also pointed out that his skill of "allocating capital" would be useless if he would have been born in poverty in Bangladesh.)

From Darren Johnson: Stuff I Think.

It's the list!

By  now, most marketers have realized that in the post-brand, post-tv world, permission (the privilege of marketing to the people who want to hear from you) matters more than just about anything.

Exhibit A: Eziba.com sent a catalog to their worst customers instead of their best ones. Big mistake. They shut down. (but perhaps will be reborn). Link: The New York Times > Technology > After Catalog Blunder, Eziba.com Suspends Business.

Exhibit B: This piece of junk mail from BMW arrived today. The punchline? I don't have a BMW and I have never had one! The astonishing thing is that the cheapest, easiest, most reliable mailing lists in the world are government registries of motor vehicles, usually c/o Ward's or some other company.

The lessons:
1. roll your own. Don't buy, rent or sell lists. Build them with people who want to hear from you.
2. anticipated, personal and relevant messages always outperform.

Juxtapositions on Demand via Mark Hurst

New Harry Potter Books:

Harry Potter and the Mystic Blades
Harry Potter and the Oracle of Acid
Harry Potter and the Platinum Trident
Harry Potter and the Serpent of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Steel Knowledge

Just a tiny sampling of what you'll find at this beautifully understated site. Basically, Steven Savage juxtapospes so you don't have to.

Link: Seventh Sanctum.

Not even close--the worst mission statements...

"To satisfy our customers' desires for personal entertainment and information through total customer satisfaction"

Mission statements used to have a purpose. The purpose was to force management to make hard decisions about what the company stood for. A hard decision means giving up one thing to get another.

Along the way, when faced with something difficult, many managers just punted. Like the one above. But in the pantheon of bad, this hardly ranks. Feel free to send better/worse examples along. Operators are standing by.

Link: GoHastings.com�About Us.

More about words

I went to Stew Leonard's! to do some research on a project for my new book, and came across a sign for some goat's milk cheese they were selling.

The cheese costs $11.99. Not $11.99 a pound, just $11.99. Hard to tell the exact weight, but it looked like about 5 ounces. Figure more than $30 a pound, easy.

Just above it was a little sign explaining why you should buy this sophisticated cheese. The sign wasn't handwritten, so it was less than reassuring or charming to discover that the writer had misused there (instead of their) and it's (instead of its).

When you're selling sophistication, spelling counts. (Unless of course the sign had been hand-written in a way that made it clear that the writer was using her second language--where French was the first language!)

Thinking about words (part 1)

Over the last few days, efforts to change Social Security have revolved around two words.

PRIVATIZATION it seems, has bad test numbers. So those who would privatize it don't call it that any more.

REFORM, on the other hand, is on the march. Reform is a great word in terms of establishing a frame for a debate, because reform assumes something is broken and how can anyone be against fixing something that's broken?

Don't minimize the impact of the right word.

In the blink of an eye

That's how long it took, on the glacial scale of media change, for bloggers to completely change the media equation.

Check out this chart of the traffic to Gawker's various blogs: nickdenton: gawker traffic.

In a good day, almost a million people read one of Nick's blogs. In a month, more people read one of his focused blogs than read Car & Driver or the New Republic or probably New York magazine (if we count readers, not subscribers).

How long did this take? A year? Three?

Are you writing ads to run on blogs yet?

Do you know Arthur Rubin?

Arthur is an amateur critic. Amateur critics didn't used to exist, really. If they did, few people noticed them.

Now, if you make something, sell something, raise money for something or invent something, you need to know about Arthur and the million people like him. You don't have to like him (or what he does) and it often pays to ignore him, but he's there.

Epinions.com - Arthur.Rubin's Profile.

Joi explains it all for you

Of course it's a worldwide meme. What else could it be?

Link: Joi Ito's Web: O-Zone madness.