Great breakfast last weekend at The Bristol in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. Try the Cuc-cai cocktail, that green thing in the glass.
Spent the afternoon with son Dan & Lauren at IKEA — meat balls and furniture.
This is what happens when your dad gets an iPhone.
One of my favorite email newsletters is from the Federal government. It’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture food recalls list, and it’s both eye-opening and frightening. The companies that make the food we eat screw up all the time.
Sure, there’s a lot of recalls for scary stuff, like millions of pounds of ground beef exposed to E.coli O157:H7, the kind of bug that can kill you if your burger isn’t cooked. But the reason I subscribe is for the rare hilarious recall.
By far my favorite: On Jan. 28, 2004, Hormel Foods recalled 104,000 pounds of canned Stagg Chili, “Hearty Beef with a Kick of Green Chilies” variety. Why? Because they were “contaminated with plastic and other parts of a handheld calculator.”
“The company discovered that the contamination had occurred after receiving complaints from consumers who found a calculator button and a piece of plastic in chili they had purchased,” the email read. Awesome!
I first found out about the USDA recall newsletter from Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation. You can sign up here.
From my flight Sunday morning. Click over here for larger image. Photo shows the North Side of Chicago and some suburbs from about Newport Avenue (near Belmont). Note Wrigley Field, bottom-center.
Thanks for reading SAI!
Much has been said about the issues facing publishers and advertisers particularly when it comes to branded advertising.
My head always hurts when I hear people say that at least with television, brands can safely advertise their brands.
Yes, television has been a success story when it comes to branded advertising. The dollars are big. Forget big, they are enormous.
But I’m convinced that it’s a fragile business. First, it’s not growing. And our attention is shifting. Even if Nielsen says we are all watching 25 hours of TV per day we know it’s not true in our hearts and our brains. The second the TV commercial comes on we whip out our mobile phone or we turn our eyes to our laptops. Or we just click thru the ads on our DVRs.
Yet online branded advertising has real challenges. The current search business doesn’t deliver branded advertising. The classic banner ad if targeted works well for many things — except branding.
To make display advertising ads friendlier to brands, new formats are being introduced like this super sized banner ad I saw on Alley Insider today.
To give you an idea how big that Mercedes ad, that photo is my 15” MacBook Pro which has a 1440x900 display!
I’m not sure this format is the best for publishers, advertisers and consumers. I have a feeling it’s not.
But I am optimistic that there will be more compelling solutions for branded advertising. I’ve seen a number of creative ideas & technologies over the past few months and I’m sure we’ll see others too.
Leaving San Francisco. Shot from the plane yesterday. Click here for bigger shots.
