[branding] Colonel Sanders Wants To Wrap You Up In A Cocoon Of Internet Protection and It Just Got Really Weird

3520.

I picture it happened this way:

Wendy's: We have the best most surreal social media strategy out there. Nobody can beat our tweets.
KFC: Hold our Extra Crispy $5 Fill-up and watch this.

In the world of social media and branding, it's hard to tell what's real any more. But KFC, so far the master of surreal TV commercials featuring a round-robin of edgy stand-up comics playing The Colonel, has decided to really up the weird. It's hard to tell if it's a troll right now, but for the sake of the joke we'll concede the point for now: KFC is, right now, on their website, selling an Internet Escape Pod.

Since the link is probably destined to die soon (it's a Cyber Monday thing) here's a screenshot for posterity's sake:

It's 10-kilobuck price tag is apparently them selling it at-cost.

There are so many things about this that are just really too weird. The Colonel, shielding you with those long, long arms like some fast-food version of the love-child of Stretch Armstrong and Reed Richards; the drumstick that's the door-handle. But perhaps the funniest (and I'm speaking cosmically here) thing about it all is that a modern, armed and fully-internet-operational fast food company is selling, even as a joke, a Faraday cage (look it up) to protect you on Cyber Monday from the internet.

I mean, here in Portland, we DIY that shit every day of the week.

Twice on Sundays (we don't go to church around here, so we got the time).

And so it goes.

[liff] @SJKPDX, Now With Extra Added Facebook

3072.

I was finally allowed to shift my Twitter profile to the new Facebook-esque style. I did this because I love not being able to tell if I'm on one or the other, apparently.

Twitter me at @SJKPDX. 

[branding] Bodyform: The Best Feminine Hygiene Advertising … Period.

2870.

There's a joke I learned as a kid. A version went something like this:

Did you hear the one about the kid who found a fiver on the street? He went to the drug store and bought a box of Tampax. When his friends heard, they made fun of him, but he said "Don't laugh! With Tampax, I can go horse-riding, water-skiing, bicycling …"

Yeah. I guess you had to be there.

I kind of wish I was in the room when the Branding Zen Masters™ came up with the following thing …

It's said (can ye believe everything that falls out of the intertuebz?) that a person who we shall regard as "Richard Neill" posted a rant to the page of Bodyform, manufacturers of a line of things we used to call 'sanitary napkins', which gave my mind no end of fits as a kid, because I know what sanitary is, and I knew what napkins were, but … well, anywhozzle … It was a soliloquy apparently on the reproach of a man who, upon learning the ins and outs of living with That Special Someone™and hoping to see the joy of woman from a closer vantage, instead, feels wronged. The whole rant is here, and it ends on the plaintive note:

Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving , gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger

Damn you, Bodyform! A pox upon your house (but just a small one, understand). 

Added venom and 360 degree headspin, it must be said, at no extra charge. Such a deal.

Forging ahead: the trajectory of the thing seems to be thus; the Bodyform company saw the rant and decided to embrace it with humor and aplomb befitting the finest in fine comedy. As the company said here, Unfortunately Bodyform doesn't have a CEO. But if it did she'd be called Caroline Williams. And she'd say …

Well, she'd say this: 




Yes, my friends, we have finally learned how to joke effectively about when Aunt Flo comes to visit. To think that I'd have lived to see the day. But it's an effective lesson in social marketing, and great comedy to boot.

The rant spread to Mashable, as did the reply, and the rest, as they say, is hystery. 

There are some, though, who wonder at the timing and the quick, highly polished response to the rant. Some of the posters at AdWeek, in the reply stream, think the whole thing is a bit pat. And maybe it is. I myself am torn about advertising these days. It's true, as Orwell has said, that advertising is "a stick rattling in a swill bucket", but another side of me says If you're going to waste my time, at least entertain me.

Well, I'm entertained.

Well played, Bodyform … well played. You earned a "like" from me.

I'm Fashionable On Facebook

2080.I haz naow one of the new Facebook vanity username URLs that are all the rage. Mine is:

http://www.facebook.com/samueljohnklein

Please make a note of it!

Technorati Tags: Facebook, vanity URLs, net liff, Facebook User Names

It Was All For Nought, Apparently

2073.Looks like I joined Twitter just in time to see it collapse like a house make of Scottissue in an Oregon rainstorm.

The upcoming ginunnga-gap is known as the Twitpocalypse (which, sadly, has nothing whatsoever with actual human twits meeting deserved doom) and is apparently going to happen because the number of Tweets (that is to say, unique Tweet identifiers) is zooming headlong toward the number 2,147,483,647, the limit of unsigned integers supported by computers. After this, they go negative and the center does not hold, things fall apart, the Beast slouches toward Jerusalem, your neighbor becomes an Amway distributor, the dog gets rabies, Victoria Taft gets a clue, all sorts of madness. Oh, and any application that depends on Twitter might digitally pancake, unless it doesn't, but who can tell?

Y2K? Whynot2K? I donno.

The time is estimatied sometime on the morning of the 13th, and we are closing in on that on an estimated rate of 170 tweets/second.

Actually it's kind of a bogglement that so many people are using Twitter so much, so fast.

The site to keep track of is: http://www.twitpocalypse.com/

Check in later, when we find out whether or not to care about it.


Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitpocalypse, net_liff