[branding] While You Eat McDonald’s, Its New Mascot Will Consume Your Soul

3090.

McDonalds, that symbol of the modern age, has a new mascot intended to encourage kids to eat healthier versions of its Happy Meals™. I’m sure it will encourage them to eat something, but it will either be Burger King, or their own hopes and dreams in some sort of existential terror.

They call it “Happy”. And what it’s happy from, exactly, I don’t want to know.

Where to begin? Those eyes, those dead, dead eyes, devoid of emotion? The arms, like animated strands of pasta horror, waiting to grasp you? Or that mouth, that entry to the utter void of ravenous nothingness, seemingly torn from the living, with a darkness within that seems to be struggling to come out, like some poisonous misama driven to smother the living?

Gaze upon the horror, if you can:

Say hello to our newest friend, Happy! http://t.co/CuR3hU8Chj #HappyMeal pic.twitter.com/xgluLaHfcY
— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) May 19, 2014

Say hello to their little friend. They say it’s popular in Europe.

There are a lot of things that are popular in Europe that don’t have legs here.

Not even legs like those.

I’m not sure which horseman of the Apocalypse this is supposed to be, but it is one.  I know it!

[branding] John Oliver Shoots Messenger, Runs Them Over, Looks Behind Car, And Backs Over Them, Just To Make Sure They’re Down

3077.

Thus spake ZehnKatzen: this is what comes of being the face of an initiative and, naturally, leading with your chin.

It’s writ large in more than one place: success has a million parents; failure, an orphan. And, when something huge pancakes like Cover Oregon did, a failure that’s going to be talked about for years after the last lawsuit is settled, it sits at ground zero of a field where every nuclear-tipped satire missile has its gimlet-eyed guidance trained on. So, perhaps it’s something we should have expected when the ads for Cover Oregon … which just begged to be called totes adorbs … became, essentially, the face of failure for those looking for the cutting gag.

The ads, which featured a sort of living diorama of Oregoniana and were peopled by members of the Portland Cello Project and folk singer Laura Gibson, were kick-ass and I enjoyed them. Easy and delightful on the eye as well as the ear, and as Oregon as f##k, had Cover Oregon been the success it ought to have been, would have been fondly seen as the face of a great, good thing.

But Cover Oregon … well, what didn’t go wrong? The State of Oregon will have to assemble several new agencies to invent things to mess up just to even out the shambolic mess. Of all the state Obamacare exchanges, only Oregon’s never worked. Never signed up a single person. Of course, the alternative, the paper application route, did the yeoman’s job … and had the CO site worked, they would have been more than half-way to their enrollment goals within the first week. The problem with, and the reason the media let us way down about all the state Obamacare exchanges, is because the narrative was kept stupidly simple: it was all about the website. Websites, websites, websites. Obamacare is a failure because website website website.

This should not be seen as a high point in American journalism. The reportage from just about every outlet was shallower than a children’s wading pool, insight-free, and only grudgingly seemed to accept that anyone was getting access to health care at all. But for every minute of reporting that progress was getting made, we seemed to get a half hour of how the IT sucked. And since Cover Oregon never worked, well, we got poster kid right here in River City. Governor K and Oracle are pointing so many fingers they have to rent extra hands just to get the job done.

Recently, it is writ, John Oliver, who made his satirical bones as Jon Stewart’s relief on The Daily Show, got enough notice that he was given his own satirical news show on another network. And, judging by his performance, Cover Oregon was low-hanging fruit that was just too good to ignore. His show produced a spoof commercial that  … well, to call it acidic would be gilding the lily.

I’ll be honest, at first, I giggled a bit. Some of the humor is dead-on. We do get a bit too twee for our own good out here; if the Olympics are ever held in Oregon, count on Oregonians taking silver, gold, and bronze in smug patting-ourselves-on-the back.

I thought that dude carrying the spinning beach-ball cursor across the set was genius.

But if we Oregonians are a bit too smug about our adorableness, I’ve got to point out that Oliver’s commentary got a bit too smug about pointing out how smug we all are.

Welcome to honorary Oregonianship, Mr. Oliver.

Doubling down on the perception-as-reality tip, it really went to town on mixing up the idea that the commercials promoted Cover Oregon with the idea that the commercials were Cover Oregon before going in for the delicious, gory, satirical kill. In the end, it was clear that he was enjoying calling the entire state of Oregon idiots maybe just a little too much. 

Here’s the sort of news that gets lost when the satire is as shallow as the reporting (emphasis mine):

You may think it’s especially unjust because our work helped delivered the numbers: awareness of Cover Oregon through advertising increased nearly 70% in only four months prior to the first enrollment window in 2013. And on that first day of enrollment, a third of a million people came to the website to sign up. Had it been working, it’s a safe estimate we would have been more than half-way to enrollment goals within the first week. Relative to the marketing budget, along with the many efforts of the Cover Oregon marketing team, we created real return on taxpayer money.It’s also never mentioned that as portal delays and bad press persisted, we hunkered down, responded with ads that were transparent, honest and informative. We worked especially hard with the Cover Oregon team to move people toward paper applications through agents and sign-up fairs.Most importantly they fail to mention that, despite the broken portal, more than 250,000 Oregonians who previously had no access to health insurance were still able to shop for, apply for, and obtain coverage. Even with no online portal, Oregon is in the middle ranking for state enrollments. Remarkable, given the circumstances, and also a tribute to the tireless efforts of Cover Oregon’s communications and marketing staff.

The agency that produced the ads is North, an agency that did a very effective job with your tax money, Oregonians. You should be proud; they took it seriously, did a sincere job, and got the word out effectively.

But failure is an orphan, and North gets the blame for being the bad parent, even though it ain’t so.

But if you insist on sticking them with the blame, then nobody gets to complain when they own the good parts, too … people are right to be upset that CO was such a disaster, and now North has to live with the fact that their honest, passionate deft work is going to be permanently associated with a broke website, but that’s life.

North is proud to be stupid f##king idiots, given the world today.

More power to ’em, I say.

[pdx] Juanita vs. Josefina: A New Chip Tries To Block Off The Old Chip

3071.

Josefina is out to get Juanita.

This could get ugly … but we hope not.

In this corner, Juanita’s yummy-a$$ tortilla chips … an Oregon original, made in Oregon, by Oregonians of Latino descent. Hood River produces more than apples, beer, spirits, windsurfers, and charming train rides.

In this corner, the challenger … Cocina de Josefina, produced by a plant off Fruit Valley Road in Vancouver. Local? Kinda …  as Willamette Week has revealed …

But while the chips are indeed made in the Northwest, they’re manufactured at the Vancouver Frito-Lay plant at 4808 NW Fruit Valley Rd., the Columbian first reported, and Frito-Lay is listed nowhere on the packaging because, in the words of a spokesperson, “this is a specialty brand in the Northwest. We wanted it to have that local feel.” Some stores display the chips with “Made in Vancouver” signs.

Remember these commercials?

Now, it’s true that Cocina de Josefina brand is made in Vancouver, but since the initiative doesn’t seem to come straight outta Vancouver, it makes us think of a trend in marketing that makes us pretty sad, and that’s this compulsion the big players seem to have to horn in on every single market they can make an excuse to compete in. Life is homogeneous as it is, and Frito-Lay is hardly hurting for customers. Cocina de Josefina … whose bags, while not identical to Juanita’s, has a design resonance which seems more than coincidental … is apparently going up against Juanita’s, and, well, those are some great chips. You can’t really improve on what’s already good and satisfying.

The best you can do is reinvent the wheel. An the wheel’s rolling pretty good as it is.

Well, they’re going to do what they’re going to do, regardless of what lil’ol’ me says. So, for me and my house, we’ll stick with Juanita’s.

When you have a choice between the fake-local and local, I recommend going with the local every time. 

[brand] Spearmint Rhino Is a "Gentlemens Club". No, I Wouldn’t Have Guessed Either.

3044.

Living in Portland, one develops a certain blasé mien toward strip clubs. Not that they are necessarily something that one welcomes to a neighborhood, really. More a recognition, much as the seashore recognizes the tide is coming in whether it likes it or not, that it’s coming … like it or not.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with strip clubs as such; I don’t patronize them, I don’t like a lot about them, but people are going to want them and others are going to set them up for those people. Sex sells, and almost everyone’s buying. ‘Specially here in PDX, where the reputation for such establishments is nothing short of legendary.

We can, each one of us, I suppose, differ on whether or not there are are too many of them. I don’t think Portland needs any more, really, and I have proof that they’re getting a little too common (if that be possible; they’ve long since run out of names for them that are impossible not to mock.

I figured we were in a dark place when a local Division Street dive bar of long standing, the Peanut Farm, at 12646 SE Division Street, became yet another strip club … but called itself the Pitiful Princess. That’s the most depressing name I can think of for a strip club. Pitiful Princess. It’s like naming a strip club Daddy Issues. 

Well, the sun rises and sets, the tide goes in and out, and, like the ticking of some sleazy clock, another strip club has opened in Stumptown, and it’s called …

Spearmint Rhino. 

Wait … what?

Yeah. Spearmint Rhino. It doesn’t seem to be code for anything, it isn’t some bizarre and obscure name for a hitherto little-known bit of male or female intimate anatomy. Spearmint Rhino. A name designed to leave you scratching your head. The logo (right) isn’t particularly brilliant or inspired, but at least it looks like someone spent some time on designing it. If you really want to say something for it … hey, nice font, I guess.

Give it that.

So, Spearmint Rhino, a name that will come to signify something in the annals of something somehow, has opened its doors in PDX. Yayz. And you know what else? Hey, it’s an international chain! Yayz again! According to Wikipedia, the club opened in 1989 as a supplement to the existing Peppermint Elephant Restaurant. So, there’s that.

So, we missed out on the Peppermint Elephant, but we do know that it took supplements.

Stay tuned for what are sure to be newer additions to the panoply of being able to see naked women in Portland:

• Vanilla Zebra
• Raspberry Giraffe
• Licorice Bison
• Habañero Hippo
• Butterscotch Buffalo

Oh, we could go on.  But we won’t.

No, I ain’t giving you directions. You got Google. Find in yourowndangself.

[design] Q: What Do A Major Liberal Poliblog Site And A Famous Conservative Tycoon Have In Common?

3042.

A: The same illustration. And it’s crazy.

By now, the Daily Kos should need no introduction to anyone liberal (or anyone who finds us suspicious). One of the kings-of-the-liberal-blogosphere, it’s been going strong since the early days of W, when a vet named Markos Moulitsas Zúniga created a liberal blog of his own. It grew and grew and grew, and now innumerable users post thousands of posts in discussions daily. It’s a community in the sense of the thing; not only are there message boards, but each user can maintain an on-site blog, a diary. It’s become fairly sprawling.

And, to anyone who reads the political news with any depth, the name Charles Koch has resonance as well. He is part of a family that’s so wealthy they could probably buy and sell the Waltons a handful of times over, and whose company, Koch Industries, owns enough industrial power than it’s downright tough to avoid all the products that they produce. Notably for this narrative, they donate and support conservative causes enthusiastically.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that a Koch is pretty much nearly the opposite of a Kossack.

So, when the WSJ decided to publish an op-ed by Charles Koch, what with patriotic feelings appertaining and all , it was felt reasonable to come up with an illustration … well, like this:

Some of you who visit DKos on a regular bases (amusingly, I’m not amongst that – no hating, I’m just more a Democratic Underground sorta guy, kind of like Yale vs. Harvard) will recognize that image, because, for a very long time, here was DKos’s virtual logo:

It’s not kinda the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing.

Now, I’ve got to hasten to point out that this is clearly not a case of copyright infringement; as the notation at the WSJ notes, the image was licensed from Getty Images, which is undoubtedly where DKos got it as well. Anyone can pay for a license, and with Getty Images making a great deal of its library free for use, we can probably expect to see a lot more of this. Also, DKos has refined the idea; it’s not exactly the same thing any more:

… but still it’s something that makes you go hmmmm … was it sort of a jibe? Was the person who chose the illustration ‘taking the piss’, as the Brits say, out of the idealized typical Kossack? Did they think they were ‘reclaiming’ an image for one side or another in a great Manichean struggle?

Or was it just a coincidence?

Either way, it’s a thing that makes you go hmmm …

[brand] Branded With a Life Sentence

2905.Being a national brand’s spokes-face carries dangers of its own.

One can read any number of tales of an actors’ stereotyping due to a strong character identification … Adam West and Batman come to mind. But what of those who become so strongly identified with a brand name consumer product?

Like Enzyte’s “Smilin’ Bob” … Joe Isuzu … The Dell Dude?

They’ve handled the fame and stereotyping in different ways. Joe Isuzu (David Leasure) kept trying until he got a sitcom role. Andrew Olcott (Smilin’ Bob) went into production. Ben Curtis (The Dell Dude) is trying to be a filmmaker and trying to get roles as an actor … and, in the most folorn way, hoping that the Dell dude can make a comeback somehow.

Businessweek Insider has the most interesting story here. Call it a most unexpected dark side of the branding equation.

I’m betting Stephanie Courtney can probably find life after Flo the Progressive Girl, whenever that happens … but it’ll probably touch and go, for a while.

[logo] The Biggest Bimbo You’ve Never Heard Of

2846.One of the niftiest and funnest things in language as well as design is when a foreign firm or company translates itself into American English terms without changing the name that made them famous, even if that name picks up baggage in the translation.

For example.

If I asked you, without Googling, now, what the largest bakery in America would be, what would you say?

Hostess?

Guess again … Bimbo.

Via Kristi Turnquist’s yfrog stream

Portland newsie Kristi Turnquist peeped this on the back of a delivery truck, and it struck her as funny, presumably because the word bimbo has a historic association with women of a certain perceived character.

The real funny thing about it, though, is that the word Bimbo … pronounced in its native Spanish, “BEEM-bo” rather than the American English “BIM-bo”, means nothing in that native tongue. Research indicates its a made-up word. In Latin America, however, it’s a market titan, and in some countries, it’s pretty much a synonym for bread itself.

Like many companies these days, it’s a multinational; it has a huge subsidiary in the USA called Bimbo Bakeries USA which, during the last decade, has merged its way into becoming the single largest baked goods producer in the nation.

Had a Boboli pizza crust? Oroweat bread? Thomas’ English Muffin? You’re having a Bimbo for lunch, bucko.

Now, that’s one big Bimbo. 

[branding] Whither And/Or Whence Oak Grove, Oregon?

2799Seen in The Oregonian today:

The sign just appeared. If anyone knows where it came from, they haven’t come forward. But there it was — the white and green “Welcome to Oak Grove” sign nailed below the green state signs on southbound McLoughlin Boulevard alerting drivers to the next towns coming up.  

That was April 4. Two days later, Milwaukie crews took the sign down because it wasn’t actually in the unincorporated Oak Grove area, but one-third of a mile north, inside Milwaukie’s city limits. Instead of trashing it, Milwaukie staff turned it over to Oak Grove resident Fred Nelligan. 

As it would happen, Oak Grove is a community laying roughly in the northern part of the unincorporated area of Clackamas County between Milwaukie and Gladstone. It doesn’t include the whole of that area, of course; if you go to the corner of SE McLoughlin Blvd and SE Oak Grove Blvd, right by the Oak Grove Fred Meyer store, and draw a circle about 1.5 miles in radius about that point that’ll pretty much take in most of the community. While some definitions have it between the Willamette River and Oatfield Road, others are a little more generous going east. And I’ll be frank; I don’t know what the neighborhood association’s definition is.

But it’s a pleasant enough place. I know several people there and they’re very happy with the area; there’s always been a banked fire of pride about being from Oak Grove. But never a strong sense of that thing we can’t do without any more, ‘brand identity’.

What is Oak Grove? Well, it’s a bit of land in Clackamas County with a community that has a shared identity. It’s got all sorts of incomes and lifestyles, from high to low; its axis is one of Oregon’s oldest highways, State Hwy 99E, also known as McLoughlin Blvd, named for Oregon’s most notable European pioneer. Follow that road south just a couple more miles and you land in Oregon City, where Oregon (and most of the organized American West) began. There are prosperous middle-class residents off either side of McLoughlin, even if some of the properties along that old road seem rather distressed. And there’s a panoply of opportunities to spend your money on the main drag; chances are, if you can’t find it along McLoughlin, you can get by without it for a little while. There is some local history, if one considers the famous “Bomber”, which has a quirky history of its very own.

What Oak Grove is really doing right now is growing an identity. Up until now, that identity was pretty much a place you passed through either just after leaving or just before you get to Milwaukie. There’s bound to be some basic human “you had to be there” silliness, like an unknown signster putting up a “Welcome To Oak Grove” sign up on a state milepost sign that’s actually 1/2 mile inside the Milwaukie city limits.

But Oak Grove is a nice place with a whole lot of nice people, and community is a good thing, and they have a right to be proud as they build that community.

More power to them.

Just put the right sign in the right place, next time. Remember, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission, as someone once said.

You should probably try getting permission next time though.

[branding] Dollar Shave Club Proves Cheeky Humor Still Sells

2791… well, at least it still sells if you pitch it just so.

In a conversation last night, I overheard someone talking about Dollar Shave Club, that it was apparently a dotcom that sent you just your basic, two-bladed razor for a dollar a month. Skeptical? You bet. But I’ve seen sillier things sold seriously (Artisanal Pencil Sharpening, anyone?) and anyone who’s been on the intertubez for any length of time knows that it really does allow you to fuse things that weren’t really ‘fusable’ before into something that works.

According to this article at Huffington Post*, the entrepreneur behind it, Michael Dubin, was able to mash up direct importing form China and Korea** with the savings that strictly-internet commerce can provide to deliver a free handle, five blades/month of a basic two-bladed men’s razor for $1/unit, or $3/month.

What really gets this over-the-hump, however, is the cheeky, dry humor that seems to borrow as much from the sensibility of The Daily Show as it does Saturday Night Live with a dash of National Lampoon. The video, of course, has gone viral. Touching on such things as the quality-price-value proposition, men’s grooming over the 20th Century (you’re handsome Grandpa just used one blade, and he had polio) lampooning of some trite ad-speak, and even works in how he’s improving the economy. Just watch.

The three models offered show a similar wry humor. The DSC’s basic model, ‘The Humble Twin’ boasts that it ‘does not front’; the middle-range model, ‘The 4X’, is good enough for you and your girlfriend; the Cadillac of the line, ‘The Executive’, ‘comes from the future and lives in Outer Space’.

But this startup does exist and will send you blades at prices that make buying your shave at the variety, grocery, and drug store look kind of look a little extravagant. And I enjoy the humor.

Even though I wear a beard. Makes me wish I preferred being clean-shaven.

*I refuse to call it HuffPo. I cry and die inside whenever anyone I know does.
** I, too am a bit conflicted about importing from China and Korea but, on the upside, Alejandra wasn’t working last month, and this month, she is. So that’s something right there. 

[logo] Four Blue Screens: The Windows 8 Logo

2782Software brand identities, they be funny things, yarr.

Software enthusiasts tend to fly these things like flags and they begin to feel as though, merely by looking at a symbol and identifying it it becomes, in a certain real way, theirs. I remember the minor uproar when the icon for the Mac Finder got changed just a little; the big collective point-and-laugh when Quark debuted a logo that was all but exactly identical to that of the Scottish Arts Council; and the wistful sigh of regret when Apple shifted from a rainbow to a cold, glossy sheen.

Didn’t know so many people felt that way about Alar. So 1980s.

Anywhoozle, it struck me as odd that Microsoft should even want to update the Windows logo. I thought it rather keen. The original logo, back along about Windows 1, was very straightforward and functional. Showed what it did. Didn’t mess around.

Yup. Pretty nifty. But it went from that, evolving, to this:

The accent for me isn’t so much on the type (though I enjoy it muchly) but the evolution of the graphical representation of the idea of windows. It was obvious up top, and here in the middle it has the flag-like wave the world has come to know and love in the design. 

There is a thing in design called dynamic tension. Anything squared off and balanced or aligned or symmetrical expresses a sort of ‘locked down’ feeling … all energy balanced, all bases covered. Giving something a slant visually suggests unbalance, and we all understand potential energy on a primordial level, so we imbue the unbalanced logo with a sort of energy. Dynamism. Tension. Dynamic tension. And despite it sounding like a damnation, in Logoville, dynamic tension, artfully managed, can visually energize a logo.

But MSFT has a habit of not leaving well enough alone. And thus, and so, and here, courtesy of the design giant Pentagram is the new look of Windows 8:

The four blue screens. 

I don’t place a whole lot of emotional value into the Windows logo, actually; there are other logos I care much more about. But I thought, in its 7 incarnation, with the warm color and the reduction of the wavy-flag look, it had arrived at a certain good place. And then MSFT took it elsewhere.

I don’t think it’s a failure, per se; Windows 8 is going to live and die on whether or not it’s a great OS. I can’t believe that MSFT doesn’t have a few more tricks up its sleeve; with the formerly-beleaguered Apple now well resurgent and on its way to the top of the IT heap, MSFT isn’t the computer-gawd it once was, but is still a Titan, with human experience worth, as the MCP might have said, worth ‘millions of man-years’. The personal computer of today isn’t the same as the personal computer of 2003 (or even 1993) and that’s where the battle is to be waged.

But in the side-skirmish that is graphic design, the Windows 8 logo is kind of blah. Nothing to get too excited about. Flat. A bit uninteresting. But it does synch-up nicely with MSFT’s Swiss-influenced “Metro” design language, emphasizing simple, clean typography, simple shapes for thumbnails and straightforward design. 

In that way, it is a success.

But the logo? I think they should have left well-enough alone. The flag? It was kinda cool.