Monthly Archives: March 2015

March 4, 2015 · 12:32 pm

Bloatware

Do you use an app to clean up the digital flotsam and jetsam on your phone?  I do and it’s constantly telling me I have files I don’t need or use.  I have 16 gig of storage on my device and quite a bit of that storage is taken up by software I didn’t install – it came with the phone.  I can’t remove it either, not without gaining root access to the device which might cause other issues.  Call it bloatware, crapware or whatever.  It’s unwanted and some of it runs in the background, eating up battery life.  There is some here from the device manufacturer and even more from the carrier.  It is a constant annoyance.

This issue is only going to become a bigger problem as newer devices do not have expandable storage.  In addition to the built-in device storage I have an SD card inserted to give myself another 16 gig of storage.  Without this, my phone would be full.  Yes, I know how to use cloud storage to keep my device clean but you can’t run apps from the cloud nor do apps cache data there.  More importantly, when consumers buy a product which is advertised to have 16 gig of storage (or 32, 64 or whatever) there is a reasonable expectation that the product will have about that amount available.  Both Apple and Microsoft have been sued for promoting devices with far less storage available than advertised, and in their cases it was actually just the operating system that was taking up space.

Why do I bring this up?  I don’t like the vision of the world in which you don’t own or control the goods you buy, and the company who made it has embedded everything possible to give them access to your information.  That seems to be the attitude of the manufacturers and carriers.  Yes I know about unlocked phones (they still have crapware) and how to disable (but not remove) this stuff, but it seems to me that the negligible revenues taken in by adding some of this bloat are negated by consumer disdain.  Put aside the potential data vulnerabilities – and fallout – each of these apps pose.  They are annoying at best and harmful at worst and there is no reason for them.

Ask yourself this – is my business doing anything similar?  Am I trying to make an easy buck while annoying my customers?  Think about how people feel about their wireless carriers as you do.  Is that how you want your customers to feel about you?

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March 3, 2015 · 11:39 am

Too Much Coffee?

Sometimes brands do things that are so dumb it’s hard to know if they’re satire. This one comes right out of a bad joke on “Weekend Update” and it courtesy of the folks at Dunkin’ Donuts. They are an official sponsor of Liverpool, a legendary team in the Barclays Premier League. The club’s hands aren’t clean in this stupidity either.  

As you can see from the graphic, Dunkin’ altered the club’s official shield to sell coffee. They replaced the two eternal flames you see with coffee cups. Unfortunately, no one, either at the club or in Dunkin’s marketing depratment, pointed out that those flames memorialize the 96 people who died in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.  They replaced the club’s motto – You’ll Never Walk Alone – with America Runs On Dunkin’.  Fans openly weep as the song is sung before club matches, as it has been for half a century.  I’m not sure the Dunkin’ slogan has quite the same meaning.

You might expect there to have been a backlash.  That’s an understatement.  The response was so widespread and overwhelmingly negative that Dunkin’ issued the following statement:

“We apologize for any insensitivity regarding our tweet supporting an LFC-themed promotion featuring the LFC Crest,” said the statement. “As a proud partner of LFC, we did not intend any offence, particularly to the Club’s supporters. We have removed the tweet and halted the campaign immediately.”

Nice job responding and doing damage control.  However, some genius at Dunkin’ thought this was clever.  Another genius at LFC had to have approved it – my years in sports remind me that every team-related campaign required an approval.  Of course, these aren’t the only tone-deaf folks in marketing.  I’ll remind you of The Gap, Urban Outfitters, American Apparel and others who blasted out emails and tweets after Hurricane Sandy full of hurricane puns and special Sandy Sales.  Who can forget Kenneth Cole‘s saying the Arab Spring riots were over one of their sales?

We can be edgy in advertising.  We can’t be tone-deaf.  We can’t make fun of tragedy nor can we try to exploit it to make a buck.  Maybe everyone at DD headquarters had too much coffee that day and needs to switch to decaf?

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March 2, 2015 · 1:55 pm

Misplaced Problem Solving

A new week and another bit of news that has me shaking my head.  Today it comes from the folks at thePlatform which is a widely used video streaming service.  thePlatform announced that it has been working on a feature to defeat ad blockers and they have something that protects against ad blockers, making it easier to get ads onto new devices with minimal client work.

Diagram of Unicast Streaming

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like thePlatform and have worked with them so please don’t misconstrue what follows as anything but me trying to a little wider perspective.  I’ve written before about the challenge of ad blockers for the ad-supported digital community.  To quote one article on the subject:

There are stats out there that say nearly 28% of users have some sort of ad blocker installed, a percentage that has spiraled by nearly 70% in a year. Ads that are blocked, combined with all the other ads that aren’t seen because of viewability issues, makes for pretty bad business.

Indeed.   In this case, thePlatform is looking out for the businesses that support their services.  I applaud them for that even though it’s a misplaced solution that doesn’t cure the underlying problem.  It’s fine to defeat some of the ad blockers for a short time and to help your clients with generating advertising revenue.  However, when you have 70% annual growth in something that runs counter to your business model, maybe the answer is to examine why people are using ad blockers in the first place.

Ad blocking is most popular with younger users – 41% of American internet users aged between 18 and 29 used ad blocking software, rising to 54% when only young men are counted.  Those are the prime years for developing habitual customers.  Yet rather than figuring out how to get product messages across without being annoying and intrusive the industry is figuring out how to thwart customers’ technology.  “We’ve been extremely diligent about making sure that ad blockers can’t find patterns in our URLs they can block on” says thePlatform’s CTO.  Hmmm…

I believe in the ad-supported business model.  I also believe that you can’t force-feed consumers.  Defeating ad blockers is a band-aid and a misplaced one at that.  We need to focus on how to make ads that don’t tax computer resources and crash web browsers.  We need to respect privacy, which is another reason people install blockers.  We need to stop producing band-aids and focus on real solutions.

That’s my opinion.  Yours?

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