Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
Self Deprecating Marketing
Few companies can truly pull off great self-deprecating marketing. Volkswagen’s “0-60? Yes” ad comes to mind. The trick is that the attribute/flaw you are drawing attention to must be something that customers shouldn’t really care about, given what the product is designed for.
If you pull that off in the mind of the potential customer, you’ve just convinced him that the other guys are somehow pulling a fast one on them, and he’d be foolish to fall for it. And people like to feel smart.
Here’s a great example I just learned of. Buckley’s is a company that makes cough syrup. Thier slogan? “It Tastes Awful. And It Works.” They even have a gallery of people making showing their “Buckley faces”. Genius.
Webmonkey Quickie – Fill your database with states and countries
Need a table of U.S. states and/or countries for your database? Go here
Riding the Rails (Finally)
So, almost three months ago, I said I was starting to “explore” Ruby on Rails. Well, I was kind of exaggerating. I never actually RAN anything on it. Today, I seriously sat down to run through the wonderful O’Reilly tutorial for getting started, and damned if it didn’t nearly make me break down and weep.
When developing any serious web application, a huge, huge, HUGE amount of time is spent building basic functionality for creating, reading, updating, and deleting database records. Even though this framework (often referred to as “CRUD”) is the backbone of nearly every web application out there, you’ve always had to manually build it yourself, often involving especially ugly and arcane database access code.
Sometimes this process would get so frustrating that I’d abandon a project before I even finished the basic CRUD interfaces. Then, no matter how clever my idea was, all I’d be left with was a dead pile of code that does stuff every other web application out there does. How depressing!
Enter Ruby on Rails. Rails is the first application framework to acknowledge this. With Ruby, once you set up your database, the code required to develop a complete user-friendly CRUD frameworks is literally ONE LINE OF CODE. Read that again – ONE LINE OF CODE. With one line of code, you are immediately are able to add, change, list, and delete the contents of your database, within your web site.
Of course, every site is unique, and you may want the interface to operate a bit differently than what Rails automatically spits out. That’s no problem. You can easily override each piece of the CRUD puzzle with your own modified UI – when you’re ready. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting to beautify the interface of some interesting application AFTER you’ve got it doing something cool, rather than slogging through tons of database code before you can even decide if your idea is even worth the effort.
If you develop web applications, run through this tutorial. You will want to use Rails for everything and never want to look back. I guarantee it. Rails fans are an obsessively fanatical lot. Use it and you’ll see why.
The Movie Theatre Problem
Earlier today, I was reading a blog posting about the decline of the cinema in America. It got me thinking about what exactly could be done to stem the tide of Americans out of the movie theatres.
As with many marketing problems, they key to turning around a situation where you are losing customers to your competitors (in this case DVD’s, video on demand, and movie piracy) is to distill down to the barest essence what your product offers that your competitor’s product does not, and mold that difference into an unique advantage. What movie theatres need to do is turn their greatest liability into an asset. It can be done, and it should be done.
Dear Guy Who Sent Me a Death Threat for Spamming Him…
> jeff@chaxxxxxxx.com wrote:
> > If I get another spam message from you I am going to hunt you down and kill you, I am completely
> > fucking serious.
> > —– Original Message —–
> > From: jeff@chausse.org
> > To: jeff@chaxxxxxxx.com
> > Sent:
> > Subject: Your lady will be enchanted by your sexual powerViagra Pro.
From: jeff@chausse.org
To: jeff@chaxxxxxxx.com
Subject: Re: Your death threat
Dear jeff@chaxxxxxxx.com,
If you’re “completely fucking serious” about hunting me down and killing me, then I’ll “completely fucking seriously” contact my state police department. Think twice before sending death threats. They’re quite illegal, even if you’re just trying to be dramatic, which is obviously the case.
It’s common knowledge that spammers use fake email address senders. They got my email address the same way they got yours – by harvesting it off of web sites via automated robots. Look at my email address then look at yours. And also consider the fact that I currently have spam from “jeffchavez@[---.com]” and “jeff@ch[-------].com”. This should give you some insight into how spammers decide what name to slap on their spam mails.
Every month or so my email address “wins the lottery” and I have the “honor” of having my name attached to thousands of these mails. I then have to weed out hundreds of returned emails and, if I’m lucky, a few death threats.
The spams aren’t even going through my server. I know this because I reviewed the headers of the ones that bounced. Even if the spams WERE going through my server, it wouldn’t be my fault. It would be the fault of my hosting service. Contact them via www.hostgator.com if you think it would do any good – which it won’t. The mail did NOT come from their servers.
Have you looked at my web site? Does it give the impression that I’m desperate to make a quick buck by spamming? I’m a senior level engineer at Microsoft. Microsoft is known to pay their senior level engineers quite well. I don’t need to peddle \/1AGrA to get by, thank you very much.
I’m sorry that you were inconvenienced, but I had nothing to do with it.
Jeff
Incidentally, I don’t use jeff@chausse.org any more for this exact reason. It somehow propagated through every spammer’s mailing list in the world and I now receive (and SEND, apparently) over 100 spams a day. If you need to contact me, there’s a link at the bottom of the page. If you’re nice, you’ll receive my super-secret new email address for future correspondence.
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon has launched a site called “Amazon Mechanical Turk“. Yes, really. What is it? Well, it’s a service that lets people earn money by doing things that people can do better than computers. They call it “artificial artificial intelligence”.
For example, the first task that I checked out involved determining the artist and title and of CD based on an image of the CD’s cover. This is absolutely trivial for a human to do, but nearly impossible for a computer. So, they set up an easy way for you to take on the task, and they’ll pay you 2 cents for each image you process.
I did exactly this for about 15 minutes and made 52 cents. Obviously you won’t get rich by “turking”, but it’s probably more cost-effective than collecting aluminum cans.
What does “Mechanical Turk” mean, anyway? Well, just ask Wikipedia.