I love the smell of Play-Doh in the morning

Few smells are as evocative of my childhood as the unmistakable smell of Play-Doh.

In the latter stages of the 1950s Play-Doh became available, and my parents - no one's idea of early adopters - glommed on to it, and Play-Doh quickly became a staple in our house, showing up in everyone's Christmas stocking.  (Interesting, I just found out - thanks, Wikipedia - that Play-Doh began life as a putty used to remove coal soot stains from wallpaper. Demand dropped off when folks switched from coal to natural gas or oil for heating.)

Ah, the smell of Play-Doh. 

And I'm apparently not the only one that finds an olfactory Rosebud moment in Play-Doh. In fact, in 2018, Play-Doh maker Hasbro trademarked the smell, which the company:

...formally describes as a unique scent formed through the combination of a sweet, slightly musky, vanilla-like fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, and the natural smell of a salted, wheat-based dough. (Source: Hasbro)

I couldn't have come up with anything quite so wine-loverly. All I know is that my appreciation of the perfume that Play-Doh emits is the nose version of what a judge once said about smut. He couldn't quite describe it, but Potter Stewart said "I know it when I see it." Well, Play-Doh-wise: I know it when I breathe in that delectable aroma, an aroma that:

...makes the PLAY-DOH brand one of the few active and certainly most famous scent trademarks in the country.

On beyond the wonderful Play-Doh smell, I loved the fact that, when modeling clay came in dull, muted colors, Play-Doh was vibrant. Back in the day, it came in three colors: red, yellow, and blue. But as anyone who held a color wheel in kindergarten knew, with those colors you could make orange, green, and purple. Alas, you couldn't unmake the colors, so once you'd committed to those extra colors, you had less of the basics. 

Another advantage of Play-Doh over modeling clay was that it was more flexible, more pliable than clay. 

The only downside of Play-Doh was that if you didn't get it back into its cardboard container pdq - and if the jar wasn't hermetically sealed - it hardened up and got all crusty. You could quasi-restore it with a bit of water, but Play-Doh got stale fast. 

Play-Doh has, of course, morphed over the years with all sorts of brand extensions. For one thing, there are a lot more colors to work with, including pastels and sparkly ones. You can get all sorts of accessories, like cookie cutter molds, and there are kits along a lot of different themes: cooking, playing vet, etc. Inevitably, there are tie-ins to other kiddo brands, e.g., Peppa Pig Play-Doh kits. 

The company has also been climbing up the age ladder, with themed kits - Star Wars, Mandalorian - aimed at older kids and "kidults", 13 on up. 

And now "Hasbro is unveiling its most grown-up brand to date."

The new line comprises a series of modeling compound kits that guide users through the process of turning putty into floral arrangements designed to be displayed. (Source: Wall Street Journal)

Unlike the Star Wars and Mandalorian, Blooms - the new product line - is aimed at crafters. Female crafters. 

Hasbro's CMO, Jason Bunge, has this to say about the market:

“We’re not manufacturing a new need state...We feel Blooms is meeting something that consumers are looking for.”

I'm only putting this bit in because of the term "new need state," which I guess is what we used to call a manufactured need. Anyway, Hasbro's marketing plans include:

...enlisting more than 200 creators, from professional influencers to niche fans of pottery, crafts or flower arranging. It’s also planning a full-day creator event in Brooklyn and hosting a hands-on crafting experience at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to stoke media buzz.

With Blooms, Hasbro may well be on to something. A lot of folks I know - including adults young and old - have taken up crafting with a vengance. It's engaging, stress-reducing, and entertaining, and, if the makers don't feel compelled to Insta everything they make, gets people away from their screens. (A while back, Legos launched a line of bouquet-crafting kits that are pretty pricey and have been pretty popular.)

Although I won't be buying a Blooms kit, I hope that Hasbro succeeds. As long as they don't try to tamper with the wonderfully evocative smell of Play-Doh. Reminds me of victory childhood, and I absolutely love it.

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Image Source: Smithsonian Mag

The Gambler

From the long list of possible vices, gambling was never going to be my vice of choice. 

Oh, I'm still capable of yelling 'wanna bet?' when some factoid is in question - and I'm 100% sure I'm right. Of course, other than the small smug satisfaction of winning the bet, nothing material ever materializes. But other than buying an occasional lottery ticket, betting has no appeal to me whatsoever.

I've been to casinos, but my limit was always a roll of quarters for the slots - or whatever the electronic equivalent is these days. But once that ten bucks is exhausted, I'm out. In my twenties, I went a couple of times to the track (Narragansett, Suffolk Downs) with friends, where I'd make a couple of two-dollar bets on some nag, based on whether I liked its name or the jockey's colors. 

But gambling to me is one big meh, and I'm about as likely to get sucked into playing one of those betting apps as I am to go skydiving. Is there a probability that's less than zero?

Gambling, however - whether micro wagers on Fan Duel or other sports betting apps, or in the 'when's the next forest fire' prediction makets - has become a huge industry. And what it's doing in the process of growing the businesses, the industry, is getting a whole lot of folks ensnared in gambling. I.e., becoming addicted. And their lives can be pretty much ruined when they go into big, hideous debt. 

One ruinee is a fellow named Terry Thompson, whose road to financial perdition was via FanDuel. 

He began innocently enough, betting on the Philadelphia Eagles to win, but soon found himself "placing microbets, which are in-game wagers on something as small as whether the next play would be a pass or run."

Soon enough, he had wagered $18.5 million on the app. This figure does not, of course, represent total losses. Thompson was making his bets, rewagering his winnings, and (mostly) covering his losses. While FanDuel was taking their cut. 

Meanwhile, having been identified as a Big Spender, Thompson started getting comped. Tickets to Eagles, Flyers, and Sixers games. A couple of fully paid for trips to the Supoer Bowl with perks like invites to swank parties and pregame field access. 

Thompson was assigned a FanDuel relationship manager, Bryttanni Morgan, his VIP host for events like the Super Bowl. She also stayed in contact with Thompson via text, pretending to be his friend - with convos about family, etc. - while always turning the encounter around to urging Thompson to place more bets. 

But the house always wins, and the losses were getting steeper. 

Thompson was losing big time, mortgaging his home. Mortgaging it again. Selling share in a business he ran. He was desperate for the funds to keep fueling his addiction.

Then, one afternoon [in November 2024], he flicked open his phone and received a FanDuel reward that momentarily distracted him from his debts: a personalized video message from Philadelphia Phillies superstar. (Source: Philadelphia Inquirer)

Bryce Harper is a very big deal. He's a future Hall of Famer, playing his way through a $300M plus multi-year contract that nets him about $25M a year. He has a ton of endorsements as well. But there's never enough money, and if you can earn some extra coin by making a bunch of personalized video calls for your fans while you're sitting around with nothing to do but Scrooge McDuck count your money, why not add to the pile o' lucre?

So Harper recorded a video that Morgan sent Thompson that name checks Thompson's son, thanks Thompson for his support (support for Harpef? for FanDuel?), and wishes him a Happy Thanksgiving. 

The video was made through Cameo, the outfit that sells celebrity greetings. You can get an Englebert Humperdinck vid for $345. (Didn't know he was still alive. He's 90, and will be performing in the Boston area in December. Who knew?)

Red Sox great (and Hall of Famer) will give you a shout out for $600. And the price for Kevin O'Leary, Shark Tank ahole supreme, starts at $1,500. 

So Harper wasn't doing directly promotional work for FanDuel. It was via Cameo. But:

Harper mentions that he was reaching out at the request of Thompson’s VIP manager, “your host Bryttanni at FanDuel.” 

So he kinda shoulda known that Thompson was a pretty big gambler to have a FanDuel "host" looking out for him.

You'd think so, no?

Anyway, Thompson ended up owing over a million bucks and spending time in "a psychiatric facility to undergo treatment for gambling addiction."

He's suing FanDuel and Morgan, and I hope he wins big (and that the winnings go into a trust that someone else manages for him). Sure, there's such a thing as free will, but these rotters knowingly prey on those who've become addicted to gambling. 

As for Harper, he's not named in the suit, but he's getting some heat for working with a betting outfit. He's blah-blah-ing about not doing anything directly with FanDuel, but since his message mentions the company, it's not as if he should be "shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in here," as Inspector Renault famously says in Casablanca, while accepting a bag of loot from the croupier at Rick's. 

Oh, FFS. Nothing he did was illegal, but we're sure on the border between ethical and unethical here, no?

I can understand the lure of doing Cameo videos. It's almost free money. And I looked on the site, and a lot of the videos are offered for lesser lights than Bryce Harper. Plenty of them are for "celebrities" I never heard of. And I can understand why fans of celebrities would get a kick out of receiving a "personal" video, even if they know it's hooey.

But especially for the rich folks making these vids, why don't they do it through a charity? Let the Make a Wish Foundation, Saint Jude's Hospital, Habitat for Humanity make some money peddling these videos. They need the money more than Bryce Harper does. 

Sheesh.

Meanwhile, if it's okay wish best of luck to a gambler, best of luck to Terry Thompson. 

As for Bryce Harper, why not pay closer attention to what you're doing in your free time to make even more money than you'll ever possibility need.

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Image Source: Fantasy Costumes

Johnny we hardly knew ya!

There's a pub not far from where I live called the 21st Amendment, afer the amendment that provided for the repeal of prohibition. It's on Bowdoin Street, just across the way from a side entrance to the Masschusetts State House, and I haven't been there in years. Back in the day when I dropped in once in a while, it was called the Golden Dome, named after the golden dome that crowns (if that's the right word, given No Kings) our lovely, Bullfinch-designed state house. 

The Dome was a nothing fancy pub, but it was a fun and convivial place. 

When I was an occasional patron, the Dome was frequented by state workers and state and local pols. Not that I'd recognized most state pols, but sometimes I'd spot a familiar face in there. One time, I saw Ray Flynn. Ray had been a state rep, but at the point I saw him there, he was a member of the Boston City Counil, and was running for mayor. Ray was in his cups, and walking from table to table schmoozing voters up. When he got to us, my BF (later husband) said to Ray that I had told him that Ray was an honest pol. Ray's answer: "I am honest. I just drink too much." 

Ah, Ray. 

Anyway, he went on to become the mayor, and held that office until Bill Clinton appointed him Ambassador to the Holy See (Vatican). 

The big kahuna pol who had supposedly frequented the Golden Dome was JFK, whose Boston apartment was a couple of doors down on Bowdoin Street. Or so it was rumored.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I spotted this sign on the sidewalk on the corner of Bowdoin and Beacon, inviting passers-by to stop in for a libation at JFK's local tavern.

This raised a couple of questions in my mind.

First off, just how much time did Congressman (and later Senator) John Fitzgerald Kennedy spend in Boston? His parents were native Bostonians - his maternal grandfather had been the mayor - but JFK was born in Brookline, just oustide of Boston. The family moved to NY when he was still a child. He went to prep school in Connecticut. And Harvard is in Cambridge. The Kennedy family spent their summers in Hyannis, so Massachusetts, but not exactly Boston. 

JFK was famously in the South Pacific during WWII. 

JFK was someting of a war hero, and in the absence of his golden boy older brother, who was killed during the war, he was designated by the family to get on the path to the presidency. First step: Congress.

In order to run for Congress, JFK had to establish a residency here. Thus he rented a pied a terre on Beacon Hill. 

Once elected to the House, and later the Senate, his center of gravity was Washington, DC. Not Boston. 

So did he ever really spend any more time than necessary here?

Oh, I don't doubt he popped in occasionally to his local for a pop, especially as a couple of his inner circle were boyos, not fellow Harvardites. And his grandfather had been a tavern owner. (As was mine, btw.) But was it truly his watering hole?

Rather than hanging out at an Irish-y local pub, I could see young JFK - rich, handsome, well-educated, well-traveled, sophisticated - at the Ritz or at Locke-Ober. Not at whatever the Golden Dome 21st Amendment was called back in the way back. 

But, hey, JFK may have been anticipating the advice Robert Frost gave him on the occasion of his inauguration: Be more Irish than Harvard. Which translates into local pub, not Locke-Ober.

Still, there's a question of whether that sign is false advertising or creative marketing. Little of both, I suspect. And just plain fun.

But I'm also wondering just how much the JFK name still resonates with young folks - the prime constituency for the 21st Amendment - or with tourists, even. He has, after all, been dead for a good long time. It reminds me of the "George Washington slept here" signs of my youth - there was actually one on a house near where I grew up that had been a tavern  - that were sort of interesting, but didn't really drawn you in. More of a good to know, shrug sort of thing. 

Or are people (young folks, tourists) still drawn to JFK. 

I suppose tourists may be. After all, Cheers, which takes place in Boston, has been off the air for 30+ years, and there's still a line out front most of the time. And I guess JFK would and should be more of a draw than Sam, Norm, or Carla. 

Anyway, when I spotted the sign there, I was curious. And I did find it amusing. A few weeks after I first saw it, the sign was down. 

Maybe it didn't work. Maybe it just kept blowing down.

Did JFK really hang out at the 21st Amendment? 

I don't really see it, but Johnny we hardly knew ya!

Not quite Gwyneth Paltrow nutty, but still...

I had heard of Sydney Sweeney, of course. But I really had no idea who she is. Blonde? Young? Actress? Hotty? 

All of the above, I guess.*

And all of the above is what makes for a new soap from Dr. Squatch, a natural body care brand, that uses Sydney's bathwater in its mix.

Apparently, the soap-consuming public (Male Division) had been clamoring for it, so on June 6, Dr. Squatch brought out a limited edition "Sydney's Bathwater Bliss." 

Nearly a million folks signed up for the opportunity to win a free bar. (One hundred bars available, so your odds weren't great.) And the remainder of the lot - I've seen lot sizes of 5,000 and 8,000 - were available on Dr. Squatch for $8 a bar. Whatever the number available, they sold out instantly. And were instantly available on eBay for $40, $80, $250, $375, $420...

You don't need me to tell you that people are nuts, that's for sure.

It all started last fall when Sweeney did some promo for Dr. Squatch, posing in a bathtub. What to do after the photoshoot? After all, you don't want to throw any bucks out with the bathwater now, do you? 

“When your fans start asking for your bathwater, you can either ignore it, or turn it into a bar of Dr. Squatch soap,” the 27-year-old said in an official press release for the product.

She continued, “It’s weird in the best way, and I love that we created something that’s not just unforgettable, it actually smells incredible and delivers like every other Dr. Squatch product I love. Hopefully, this helps guys wake up to the realities of conventional personal care products and pushes them towards natural.”

Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss is a medium grit exfoliating soap made with sand, pine bark extract and "yes, a touch of Sydney’s real bathwater." As for what it smells like, the soap bar delivers notes of pine, Douglas fir and earthy moss that brings users to the forest, as well as Sweeney's actual bathtub. (Source: People)

From a marketing standpoint, this is all, of course, brill. 

A million people looking to win a free bar? A million emails for the Dr. Squatch mailing list? 

Articles in People, Adweek, Newsweek, and - natch! - Page 6. 

The limited edition selling right out, at a reasonable gag-gift price of $8, and then popping over to eBay for orders of magnitude beyond the gag-gift price. (Not that anyone IRL is going to pay $420 for a bar. It's just that someone is asking that. Which creates mo better buzz.) 

Marketing genius!

Yet still weirdly disturbing.

No, it doesn't quite rise to the nutiness level of Gwyneth Paltrow's selling a candle that smelled like her vagina (sorry), but still.

We are one crazy-arsed culture, that's for sure. 

Unfortunately, I don't see where there's any turning back other than going the Handmaid's Tale route.

Sigh...

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*Turns out I kinda/sorta knew (shoulda known) who Sydney Sweeney is, as she was in White Lotus Season One playing the snotty college girl daughter to some rich folks. And I do watch White Lotus. Still, she didn't register with me, other than vaguely.

Image Source: Sydney Sweeney's Insta

No, Madam

It's probably a pretty good rule of corporate thumb to approach HR surveys with more than a bit of wariness and skepticism. Just how anonymous is anonymous? And will employees ever see the results of the survey. (In my experience, probably not.)

Still, I was not prepared for the ardent stupidity of Yes Madam, an Indian startup that provides beauty salon services in the home. 

The company recently surveyed its employees to gauge the level of stress they were experiencing. Then followed up with a social media post that showed a supposedly authentic email supposedly firing the 100 or so workers who said they were stressed. Here's the email (email of sorts, anyway).

"Recently we conducted a survey to understand your feelings about stress at work. Many of you shared your concerns, which we deeply value and respect."

"As a company committed to fostering a healthy and supportive work environment, we have carefully considered the feedback. To ensure no one remains stressed at work, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with employees who indicated significant stress."

"This decision is effective immediately and affected employees will receive further details separately. Thank you for your contributions." (Source: Comic Sands)

As things do happen when haphazardly applied social media posts appear, the wonderful worldwide web was soon abuzz with rumors that the company had fired stressed out employees. 

Not so fast! No one was fired! It was all just a marketing thang promoting a policy that lets employees take "De-Stress Leaves," i.e., what we used to call a Mental Health Day. And the company's employees - one of whom, by the way, posted the supposed email on LinkedIn for all the worldwide webbers to see - were, Yes Madam, all in on it. 

"The social media posts were a planned effort to highlight the serious issue of workplace stress. And to those who shared angry comments or voice strong opinions, we say Thank you. When people speak up, it shows they care - and care is at the heart of our business."

The company claimed the employees in question "weren't fired; they were given a break to rest," "weren't let go; they were encouraged to release their stress," "they weren't laid off; they were offered a chance to relax," and that they "weren't sacked; they were urged to rest and recharge."

Oh.

No mention on whether the stressed out time-off-ers were paid or not for their "chance to relax...rest and recharge." And no word on whether the marketing folks who thought it was a good idea to post the 'hey, you, stressed out survey respondent: you're fired" fake email still have their jobs. Seriously, how dumb is dumb?

In any case, it does sound like the company did identify its stressed out workers. (So much for anonymity.) But at least Yes Madam published something of the results, for all the worldwide web to see. 

Anyway, although I find this colossally stupid marketing, it there's no such thing as bad publicity, then Yes Madam's marketing team succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Certainly, I would never have heard to this company if Yes Madam had been a bit less wacky with their social media. 

Maybe they'll even expand into the US market. Maybe I'd even sign up for a housecall haircut and blow dry.

Ready for your closeup, Mr. Parisi?

The standards are different from one to the other, but if you want to run officially in one of the major marathons - Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, New York, Tokyo - you have to qualify. And everyone who wants to run doesn't get to run, even if they've completed another marathon in a qualifying time for their age group and gender. 

There are ways of getting around it, for Boston at least.

Local charities are awarded bib numbers - getting those bib numbers in itself is highly competitive - that they can give to runners who will raise money for them by running. Obviously, no one who's not at least a somewhat accomplished runner and/or pretty fit and/or a glutton for punishment is going to sign up to run 26.2 miles. But if you're willing and can raise the required amount of dough, you might be able to run Boston.

Even though it has a colossal number of runners (over 50,000), the New York City Marathon- which seems pretty cool, as the course takes you through all five boroughs - is one of the most difficult to get into. One path to getting a number for New York is entering a lottery. There aren't a lot of numbers available for lottery-ites. And this year, the New York Road Runners (which organizes the NYC Marathon) sent out 160,000 rejection emails.  

Even if it's part of an impersonal, mass rejection, getting turned down is never easy.

Why, this coming Saturday, the Savannah Bananas (a barnstorming baseball team; think basketball's Harlem Globetrotters of baseball) are playing a game at Fenway Park. Both my sister Trish and I put our names into the lottery hat for the opportunity to buy tickets to this game. And we were both rejected.

Oh, they tried to let us losers down easy:

Well, Friend... There's no easy way to say this... Your name was not one of the ones drawn to grab Banana Ball tickets.

No need to sugar coat it - there were WAY more people on the Ticket Lottery List than tickets available. We were hoping to see your name on the lucky list of randomly drawn folks, but it just wasn't in the cards right now. We know that this news is a bummer, but we still think you're a really, REALLY cool person. Tell you what... We will love you forever and always...WE PROMISE

Boo-hoo! I'm sure the Bananas were inundated by local baseball fans who, like Trish and I, are pretty much boycotting the Red Sox, but still like to take ourselves out to an occasional ball game.  Still, we were plenty bummed out. Rejection is painful.

If you're a reasonably good runner who wants to run New York, getting the turn down email is going to hurt. 

Like the Bananas, the New York Road Runners tried to let its huddled mass of losers down gently with an attempt at humor. In this case, using a picture of a prior year marthoner by the name of NICK (according to his singlet) giving the world a couple of finger guns. 

As it turns out, one of the rejectees was Nick Parisi, who was a bit taken aback when he saw that the rejection letter used his very own image, finger gunning at the finish of the 2023 New York City race - his very first marathon -  to tell him and 159,999 other runners that they were out of luck. 

And all of a sudden, one of the 159,999 rejected runners decided to create a meme out of it. And all of a sudden Negative Nick was a thing. 

The story has a happy ending for Parisi, though. The viral photo reached the NYRR marketing team, and they felt they had to make it up to him. NYRR CEO Rob Simmelkjaer showed up at Parisi’s club Front Runners NYC ...apologizing for the mix-up and offering him a guaranteed spot at the 2024 TCS New York City Marathon start line with the bib “Positive Parisi.” (Source: Running Magazine).

Parisi, by the way, is already running Berlin in September, so he'll probably be plenty tired if he also ends up doing NYC.  When he runs Berlin, he'll be doing so in honor of his mother, who died in 2022 from skin cancer - and raising money for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As a sign of good faith, the New York Road Runners will match the amount Parisi raises. 

Which I bet will be plenty after all of this. Serves them right. Kinda sorta stupid to use someone's picture without permission. Maybe they should have AI'd it. Of course, that would have meant the possibility of an AI screwup, and a picture of someone with eight fingers doing that gunning. (Too many digits seems to be a somewhat common AI tell.)

Anyway, I hope that Nick Parisi has a great run in Berlin, and an even better run in New York City. 

I'm sure he'll be ready for his next finish line closeup.

Stanley Cups Overfloweth. (Not THAT Stanley Cup!)

As usual with consumer fads, I've missed the boat - or the cup - with the Stanley Tumbler, the resuable water bottle that is apparently the current "it" bottle, designed to replace the disposable plastic water bottles that are gunking up our fragile environment. 

Hundreds of billions of plastic bottles full of water are sold every year, and most of them aren't recycled once the water is drunk. Instead, they end up incinerated, or in landfills, or - worse - in the ocean, where they make up a goodly portion of sludgey waste islands like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In another few years, I've read that there'll be more discarded plastic water bottles than fish in the sea. 

So any effort to replace all those Poland Spring et al. bottles with something that's built to last is a good thing. And that's why I bought a Hydro-Flask stainless steel bottle to carry with me on warm/hot day walks, which I try to remember to do so I won't be tempted to bop into a convenience store and buy a bottle of Poland Springs when I'm thirsty and a couple of miles away from home. 

A good thing, no? One less bottle in the Atlantic Garbage Patch. One less dead polar bear. One less swordfish with a body riddled with nano-plastic particles that will never decay.

Well, not so fast, especially when the virtuous reusable bottle is part of a whirling, swirling fad. As is the case with the Stanley. 

...the craze has sparked some less-than-sustainable behavior. People boast about owning dozens of them. When Target released special editions, including a much-coveted Starbucks version, it caused a mini stampede. (Source: Boston Globe)

2023 was the year of the Stanley. Thanks to clever marketers (sadly, I missed out on the marketing), spurious influencers (sadly, I missed out on the influencing), and super-exposure on TikTok and other social media platforms (sadly, I missed out on the TikTok-ing), Stanley sold an awful lot of tumblers last year. Revenues reached $750M - this in a company with revenues that were under $100M back in 2020. 

Whilereusables might seem like a good, eco-conscious investment - use it for three years and you've replaced 1,000 daily plastic water bottles. Sure, that sounds like a drop in the bucket. But when you multiple it by the 10 million Quencher water bottles that Stanley sold last year...

Alas, the popularity of the Stanley cups has a downside. People fall in love with a product, and they want more and more of it. (Ask me about Allbirds sneakers, why don't you.) And that overconsumption can negate the eco blessings if folks start collecting all the color and other versions of them. Remember, it takes materials and energy to manufacture these suckers. Steel plants burn coal...

Stanley is trying to putting more sustainable manufacturing processes in place. While the popular Quencher tumblers are "made with 90% recycled steel," the use of recycled steel is far less for its other products. "It aims to raise that to at least 50% by 2025."

Production costs aside, there's the time it takes for the purchase of a sustainable product to be worthwhile, environment-wise. 

Researchers have coined a term to measure the amount of time a person must reuse an alternative before it fully offsets the single-use product it replaces: the environmental payback period. A 2020 paper found that for straws, coffee cups and forks, metal alternatives had to be used the longest — anywhere from a few months to a few years — in order to break even.

No mention of bottles, but it probably takes a while for payback to start paying back. (What's the expression about payback being a bitch?)

Then there are other good-for-the-environment products that tend to proliferate. Sure, I no longer take bags at the grocery store or CVS. I use one of my backpacks - I swear, I only have two and one's heavy duty while the other one's for smaller loads - or one my many nylon tote bags (which do tend to fray over time...)  

As for Stanley:

Some trend forecasters say the fad is already over. “Some millennials or Gen-Z are already embarrassed to carry a Stanley,” said Casey Lewis, who writes the trendspotting newsletter, After School. “And we know what’s going to happen,” she said. They’ll sit unused, gather dust on a shelf or in a basement, or “worst case scenario, they’ll end up in landfills.”

There's a new "it" water bottle on the horizon for the influencers to start guzzling from. Owala bottles are said to be taking off on college campuses. 

The good news, of course, is that people are growing more conscious about the use (and disposal) of those odious plastic water bottles. This is good news for the environment, even if we do end up with a bit of overconsumption of the new and shiny objects that replace them.

Swagbaggery 2024

Having managed - quite amazingly - to see all ten of the films nominated for Best Picture this year, I had more of a vested interest in this year's Oscars than usual. Oh, not enough of an interest to actually watch much of the show - I tuned in in time to see Al Pacino shortchange the Best Picture nominees by not rattling off the list, but just opening the envelope and announcing Oppenheimer - but enough of an interest to read through the list of winners. And enough of an interest to see what was in this year's swagbag.

The swagbag - "Everybody Wins" - is not quite given to everybody. In the past the distribution included presenters et al. (Fans of The Sopranos may recall Christopher Moltisanti weaseling his way into the Oscar party where the goodie bags were being given out and making off with Lauren Bacall's bag o' loot.) This year, the bags will go to the five Best Director nominees, the twenty nominees in the acting categories, and to host Jimmy Kimmel.

What's in the swagbag varies from year to year, but the value is always pretty high. This year's bag - actually multiple bags: there's an awful lot of stuff - is worth nearly $180K, and includes items ranging from a 50th anniversary retro Rubik's cube that costs all of $15 to a luxe vacation in the Alps:

The priciest gift in this year’s bag is a three-night stay at Chalet Zermatt Peak, the reigning winner of the “Best Ski Chalet” from the World’s Ski Awards. Nominees who redeem the $50,000 invitation will have private use of the entire chalet for themselves and up to nine guests.

The six-floor chalet boasts floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the Matterhorn, a spa, in-house massage therapist and celestial observatory roof. Guests will dine on multi-course dinners prepared by a gourmet chef, have access to a fully-stocked wine cellar as well as a chauffeured car available 24 hours a day. (Source: CNBC)

Leave the gun Rubik's cube. Take the cannoli Zermatt trip. (And if you're wondering, yes, you do need to pay taxes on the gifts, but trips and services won't be taxed if you don't make use of them.)

In addition to the Zermatt jaunt, there's a more local vacay as well: a week-long wellness retreat at the Golden Door spa in Souther California. The value of this getaway is $24K, but it does include hiking trails and mindfulness classes. 

There's a Schwank grill that heats up to 1500 degrees. I'm trying to think of something that needs to be grilled at 1500 degrees. Hamburg? Hotdog? Asparagus? 

I'm having visions of a marshmallow instantaneously incinerated to a crisp, a Graham cracker spontaneously combusting, a Hershey's Bar melting completely down. No Smores for you today!

As a companion to the grill, there's a wine fridge. (What's not to like?) And some fancy, pricey, fluffy Canadian sugar made from maple sap. (What's not to like?)

There are a couple of skin-related gifts. There's a package of skincare products, and:

A $10,000 micro needling treatment from Cynosure “designed to tighten and revitalize” skin and “minimize the common signs of aging or reduce blemishes.”

Don't get me going on "common signs of aging." I will say that most of mine have nothing to do with wrinkly skin.

If I were a betting woman, I'd bet that the gift that will be least taken up is "a $25,000 live show from mentalist Carl Christman which 'combines magic, mind reading, hypnosis and comedy.'”

Leave the gun mentalist live show. Take the cannoli  Rubik's cube. The 1500 degree grill. The needling treatment. The fancy/pricey/fluffy sugar. 

Lash Fary - can this be his real name? - runs the company that pulls together the swagbags. Here's what he has to say:

"For someone who says it's overindulgent to give these nominees a six-figure gift bag, I would simply tell them to enroll in a marketing class at their local community college," Fary tells NBC. "It's so straightforward what this is."

"These are folks who get paid millions of dollars, if not tens of millions of dollars to be in films, not because they need the money, but because they are the biggest names in the world and they can sprinkle stardust on whether it's opening night of a film or whether it's something like overnight travel bags and they are seen using this bag when they're at the airport and it changes the trajectory for that business," Fary says. "So it's a really, really powerful win-win." (Source: NBC NY)

Marketing 101 for sure, for consumer goods, anyway. (And Life 101 in terms of "one thing we're sure of, the rich get richer...")

Anticipating that Greta Gerwig of Barbie fame would be among the nominees for Best Director - she wasn't - Fary had a special Barbie pillow designed for inclusion in the bag. He will be sending one along to poor Greta. Better luck next time!

And to all the beneficiaries of all that marketing largesse: enjoy!

There's mountains, and then there's molehills

I like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups as much as the next guy. After all, it combines two of my favorite food items: peanut butter and chocolate. What's not to like (even if the peanut butter doesn't actually taste like real peanut butter, at least not any brand I use)? 

And if I bought one of Reese's seasonal offerings - say, the Halloween pumpkin edition - I really wouldn't care if, when I opened the wrapper, the piece of candy I uncovered didn't look like a grinning jack-o'-lantern. Even if that grinning jack-o'-lantern was what was depicted on the wrapper. As long as I got the key ingredients - a chocolate something-or-other full of peanut butter.  

But I'm not Cynthia Kelly, a Florida woman who is suing Hershey's - maker of Reese's - for $5 million, through a class action suit, because she feels she was tricked into buying the "cute looking" candies, withe their "artistic designs," lured by a bogus picture on the bag. The pumpkins, she claimed, were:

...falsely advertised since the actual treats don’t have details seen on the packaging, like mouths and eyes... 

She submitted photos that compared the chocolate to the packaging. “Reese’s, what are you doing,” the lawsuit reads. “Look at the picture on the packet. It’s like a pumpkin with faces and a little mouth—then you open up the packet and you are presented with that monstrosity.” (Source: Yahoo)

Not that I looked all that hard for a jpg of it, but "that monstrosity" looked like an uncarved pumpkin. But, to Cynthia Kelly, it was $5M worth of aggrievement. (The Yahoo article, btw, reported that Kelly was seeking $5B worth of damages. As in $5 BILLION. But the correct - but still mountain-out-of-mole-ish amount - is $5 MILLION. And it's not clear whether a judge will accept this case.)

According to some of those commenting on the articles I've seen, the fine print on the packaging states that the purchaser needs to do the carving to get the cute little face. But who reads the fine print on candy packaging? And, truly, who has the time, interest, and skillset to carve a face in a Reese's pumpkin? Even if you have the toolset - in my case, that would be a lobster pick, trying to carve the small squishy Reese's pumpkin surface would result in a tortured mess, far uglier than Cynthia Kelly's "monstrosity." But is this issue worth $5M?

FFS.

Yes, the packaging is a bit deceptive, but the normal reaction should be rolling your eyes and proceeding to bite in. Whether there's a cute little face on the piece of candy or not, it all ends up in the same place in your stomach, no? In fact, it can be argued that, absent the carve outs, you actually get more chocolate. 

The level of harm isn't even equivalent to what someone would experience upon buying a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken only to take the lid of and realize that the bucket is NOT overflowing - filled to way beyond the brim - with gorgeous, greasy KFC drumsticks. 

Surely, there are more important things to fight for. 

Not so fast, says attorney Anthony Russo, who's bringing the suit on behalf of Kelly and every other duped Reese's buyer in the state of Florida.  

"Today, it's a $2 item — tomorrow it's your vehicle, the next day it's your home," he told NPR. "It could be your life savings or your nest egg that you're saving for your retirement. It could be anything if it is not kept under control." (Source: NPR)

First, they came for your candy money, then they're killing your 401K.

Yet again, FFS!!!

Aren't there more worthy causes that Russo's firm could be working on, rather than tying up the courts with this nonsense? 

Guess so!

Russo's firm is also representing the plaintiffs in a class action suit against Burger King, claiming that the company uses misleading advertising to represent its food items as larger than they are.

Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce!

Whatever happened to caveat emptor?

Only connect!

Other than Twitter/X, where I mosey around, occasionally commenting but rarely tweeting, I'm not really part of any online "community." But I think if I were still working, I'd be inclined to join - and actively participate in - a high-tech marketing community. 

Pre social media, I was, after all, something of a half-baked expert on core messaging, product positioning, product marketing, etc. I wrote a series of articles for Pragmatic Marketing, the mag of the Pragmatic Marketing Institute (now renamed the Pragmatic Institute) which were turned into a eBook. And damned if it's still out there. The overarching theme was that there was a set of timeless rules that product marketers live by. The cover design of the ebook showed the title carved in stone. I never liked it, but given how old - and old-school - that ebook is, the ancient look is kind of appropriate.

On occasion, someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn because they just read my book. At least one marketing professor out there used it in his class at one point.

So, yeah, I do like to share what I know, and if I were still a marketing professional, I might take part in an online community. 

But since I'm no longer a professional anything, there's no need and little interest in my doing so.

Nevertheless, I do have a residual, teensy-weensy bit of interest in reading about online communities. 

So I was residually, teensy-weensy-ly interested in an article by Scott Kirsner I saw in the Boston Globe last month. 

The article centered on HubSpot, a local marketing software company which I have long thought would be an interesting place to work. If I were a professional anything interested in any place to work. (Among other attractions, one of the cofounders is a fellow MIT Sloan School alum, although way, way, way after my time.)

HubSpot owns an outfit called Connect.com, which provides a forum where marketing pros are invited to:

Grow your career by joining communities of like-minded professionals where you can connect with others, all on a network that lets your expertise and personality shine.

I might not have been drawn to a forum that explicitly said that I could let my personality shine there, but, come to think of it, why not. If I were going to join, sure, let that shining personality rip. And, of course, my expertise. What's not to to like about "spend[ing] time chatting and answering each others' questions."

Turns out that getting Connect.com to actually start connecting folks hasn't been all that easy. 

Most of the forums on Connect.com are as quiet as the halls of the convention center on Christmas morning. The bulk of the messages are written by HubSpot employees, except for one forum, “Talent Match,” where people post in search of jobs or freelance work.

Connect.com has about 30,000 members, but hopes to grow that number by an order of magnitude in 2024. (Order of magnitude? Let that MIT freak flag fly!) 

There are doubters out there - one who posits that Connect.com is too generic, and that the communities that take off tend to be more niche focused. 

Case in point: the most active forum on Connect.com is niche-y: focused on using AI. 

Hmmmm.

As I said, if I were still a professional, I'd be inclined to take a look. And I'd be inclined to take a look at what's going on with AI.

Over the next decade, AI is going to upend a lot of professional, knowledge-worker jobs. I do believe the survivors will be those who don't resist AI, but learn how to exploit it.

Just sayin'.

And if I were still a professional, I just might be over on Connect.com just sayin'. After all, wasn't that what E.M. Forster advised us to do? Only connect?

Did we really need something else to worry about??? (Part Two.)

Just yesterday I was doing my not-so-friendly-skies fretting about the lack of air traffic controllers.

Today, it's windows - or doors, or kinda-sorta doors - popping open. (Note to self: never sit in a window seat next to one of those kinda-sorta doors, and keep that seatbelt buckled.)

Frankly, this is something that, in all my years of flying, I've never worried about. 

Not that I shouldn't have been worried about it. 

In 1989, a door blew off a United Airlines flight, sucking nine passengers out the hole. What a ghastly way to go, but I'm guessing that the death would be pretty instantaneous.

In the 1989 case, the plane was a Boeing 747. In the most recent incident, which was on a Alaska Airline flight, it was a Boeing 737 Max 9.

Fortunately, in the recent incident no one was sucked into oblivion. One passenger's shirt was ripped off his body but - thanks to his having his seatbelt on - he didn't follow it.

One of the reasons no one was sucked out the door was that the seats in that row were empty. As my friend (and Pink Slip regular) Valerie noted in an email, "When was the last time you were on a domestic flight that had two empty seats near a window .. or anywhere?"

Good point.

The blown out door follows other problems for the 737 Max line, which is Boeing's best seller.

In 2018-2019, 737's were involved in two fatal crashes in which nearly 350 people were killed. Boeing lost billions, and all kinds of questions about the company's commitment to quality and reliability were raised. 

And now this.

The entire situation is, of course, a fiasco for Boeing. Financial. Employee morale. Marketing. 

Boeing's stock price has plummeted.

Whether they were directly involved in design or production of the 737 Max 9's, Boeing employees have to feel terrible.

And I'm guessing that there are plenty of airlines rethinking the orders they've placed for 737's - a complete sales and marketing nightmare. How'd you like to be a Boeing salesperson in negotiations for a big sale, or about to go knocking on an airline's door. Or a marketing professional working on a new campaign. Who needs a reliable airplane, anyway? Yowza. 

But one company with wares that played a minor role in the Alaska Airlines' debacle is coming out looking pretty good, and that's Apple. After all, along with the teenaged boy's shirt, a passenger's iPhone was also sucked out the hole in the fuselage. And it survived a 16,000 foot plummet to the ground, where it was found in Portland, Oregon.

The iPhone was lying on the ground, in airplane mode, with its battery half full. The screen, fully intact, showed a $70 receipt for two checked bags on Alaska Airlines flight 1282. (Source: Washington Post)

The phone was found by fellow who posted about it on Twitter. Another phone that was on flight 1282 is also in the hands of the National Transportation Safety Board, but there's no word on what type of phone it is, and whether it, too, survived the fall. Whether Phone #2 was an iPhone or not really doesn't matter. An iPhone survived a 16,000 foot fall! 

This would no doubt surprise many smartphone owners, iPhone or other, given that "nearly anyone who’s owned a smartphone has had the experience of dropping one and cracking the screen." (Been there/done that.)

No one (including iPhone marketers - so far anyway) is claiming that this translates into the survival superiority of the iPhone. 

Here's what the iPhone user guide says:

“Handle iPhone with care. It is made of metal, glass, and plastic and has sensitive electronic components inside...the iPhone or its battery can be damaged if dropped, burned, punctured, or crushed, or if it comes in contact with liquid.”

The iPhone survived not due to any special design, but thanks to physics.

...though smartphone screens have become a lot stronger over the years, this phone’s survival is most likely because of physics.

“The basic answer is air resistance,” said Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. “I think the counterintuitive thing here is that an iPhone falling from the sky doesn’t end up moving that quickly because of air resistance.”

Any object falling through toward Earth will reach a point, known as its terminal velocity, where the force of gravity can’t accelerate it anymore because of resistance from the air in the atmosphere.

“If the phone is falling with its screen facing the ground, there’s quite a lot of drag, but if the phone is falling straight up and down, there’s quite a bit less,” Watts said. “In reality, the phone would be tumbling quite a bit, and get quite a lot of wind essentially giving an upward force.”

That's about enough physics for any one post. I also read that it helped that the tumbling iPhone may have had its fall broken by landing on a bush, and from there, soft ground, and not the pavement. 

Still, it's interesting to think about what iPhone marketers could make of its survival. Here's what my friend Valerie - a highly successful, long-experienced tech marketing professional - had to say:

...the  iPhone that fell 16,000 feet landing unphased and uncracked fully operational? Visions of 'takes a lickin and keeps on tickin' [a long-ago Timex ad campaign] or an ape using a samsonite suitcase like a jungle gym ...

I could only imagine what happy dance the marketeers at Apple did on hearing the news. Talk about campaigns that write themselves... Never mind all the people who've tanked their iphones by a dip in the toilet or a 3 foot slip to the floor.

As a committed non-Apple person, I usually don't pay much (if any) attention to iPhone ads. But I'll be on the lookout for any ads showing the iPhone being sucked out the hole in an airplane. (Which should, of course, include the David Bowie music from The Man Who Fell to Earth.)

Still, the issue of the day isn't the survival of the plummeting iPhone. It's the worrisome issue of getting sucked out a hole in the fuselage of a Boeing 737 Max 9...As if we need something else to worry about.

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Thank you, Valerie, oh content queen, for your timely and crucial contribution to Pink Slip.  

Meatheads!

Don't get me wrong. I eat beef. But most of the beef I eat is consumed outside of the home. 

I'll order the hamburger. And I'll enjoy it. I'll order the steak. And I'll enjoy it. 

But mostly, I'm just not all that much of a meathead. Unless my meat-and-potatoes brother Rich is coming to dinner, I'm not apt to cook anything beefy. Chicken, fish, shrimp, scallops. Yes, indeed! Beef, ah, no.

So I wouldn't be in the market to have ButcherBox deliver me up a box o' beef. They do offer other "mains:" chicken, pork, seafood. But I'm just not a candidate for a monthly subscription to meat. (I am not, but could easily be, an in-house vegetarian. Unless I'm cooking for my bro.) And to me, subscriptions are for magazines, not meats.

Still, ButcherBox is a local company with a pretty good story to tell.

For one thing, the company is a Kickstarter success story. In its eight years, it's gone from zero revenue to well over $500M. And it's done so without requiring any infusion of funds from VCs. Not to mention that they've been "consistently profitable" pretty much since they were Kickstarted in 2015.

But all is not 100% humanely grass-fed golden at ButcherBox.

In fact, 2023 will be the first year that their revenues haven't increased. And in November they laid off 15 people. 

The company says that the layoffs aren't, despite a no-growth  year, due to poor financials. The company is still profitable. Instead, the layoffs were motivated by a desire to operate more efficiently. Pre-layoffs, the company had some managers who "were only managing a single employee." (Which having been-there, done-that, is not entirely as crazy as it sounds.)

While 2023 hasn't been death-knell dire, ButcherBox didn't experience the success they were used to. 

From the jump:

...ButcherBox had incredible timing. First, it tapped into the paleo and CrossFit trends, which advocated a meat-heavy diet. Then COVID came, pushing many consumers to get groceries delivered, rather than going to the store. (At one point in 2020, demand was so intense that ButcherBox had to temporarily stop accepting new customers.) (Source: Boston Globe)

So now they're coping with the new reality of people eating out more - hey, it's where I get my steak - and also, given inflation, more given to scrutiny of where their grocery spending is going. Plus, there's more (inevitable) competition.

So ButcherBox is thinking a tiny bit outside the box, and they're now selling dog treats. Next year, they're going to bring out a dog kibble product.

This makes marketing sense, in that they'll be able to upsell (or is it sidesell?) their customers who have dogs. If I'm recalling my Marketing 101 correctly, it takes a lot less money to sell something to an existing customer than it does to acquire a new customer from scratch. 

But dog kibble, not a box of meat? After all, dogs - those greedy little carnivores - love meat, so why not give them what they want. Which in a blind taste test is not likely to be kibble. 

The company chose to launch a dry food for dogs rather than a frozen food, because “we didn’t want to compete against ourselves” for space in the freezer, Salguero said.

Aha! These guys are good!

And I wish them continued success.

After all, one of these days I might get me a dog, and if someone (such as the pooch itself) could convince me to feed it kibble...

Well, you never know...

Take my ad, please! (Oh you kids!)

My career was in marketing, and during my time in marketing, I wrote plenty of advertising copy. The products I was marketing were dreary, boring, techie. They were B2B (business to business). B2T (business to techies). Or, when it came down to it, T2T (techie to techie). 

Sure, sometimes I used a bit of wordplay, or a teensy-tiny bit of fun-poking, hoping it would grab enough interest to get someone to read the copy. But there was no getting around the fact that the products were dreary, boring, techie.

In many ways, I always enjoyed advertising. 

That said, although I was a mad magazine and newspaper reader - including the ads - I can't for the life of me remember any print ad that I thought were especially clever or amusing. They may not have been as dreary, boring, techie as the ones I wrote, but...

Oh, the ads of the 50's and 60's were generally more interesting than the earnest and preachy ads of an earlier age, but there were still plenty of holdout ads which were still plenty old school.

I loved the beautiful ladies in their gauzy gowns in the Modess...because ads, even though I didn't have a clue what the "because" was for Modess sanitary napkins.

But many ads of the my childhood and beyond were full of iconic brands, iconic images, iconic taglines (more iconic than Modess...because, anyway), iconic "characters." These inconics were memorable - even though none of them were all that clever, and few if any were funny (at least not intentionally: is there any Baby Boomer who never uttered the words "Mother, please, I'd rather do it myself.")

Everyone knew that Coca Cola was the pause that refreshes. And somehow, when it came to December, there was a strong association between Santa Claus and Coke.Didn't Santa ever want a Pepsi or a 7-Up?

But it was the Jolly Green Giant, not Santa, who gave us Ho-Ho-Ho. 

One of the few truly interesting print ad campaigns I remember was for Levy's Jewish Rye Bread, where folks of all races, religions, and ethnicities were shown happily chomping on sandwiches made with Levy's. 

TV ads weren't all that clever, either. Like print ads - and campaigns used the same imagery and taglines across all media - they relied on what they hoped were catchy taglines and characters. 

But we knew our TV ads even better than we knew our print ads. After all, there were only three channels - one for each of the major networks: ABC, CBS, NBC - and the same ads ran on all of them.

So we all knew the midget bellboy hollering "Call for Philip Morris" cigarettes. We all knew that the essence of masculinity was the Marlboro Man. That the essence of femininity was avoiding  "dishpan hands" or using Clairol to wash away the grey hair you hated. We all knew Tony the Tiger. Bucky Beaver. Speedy Alka-Seltzer. 

So many ad images are embedded in our brains, indelibly ours forever.  

What was most memorable, the catchiest about TV ads was often the background music (Marlboro Man used the theme from The Magnificent Sever) or the jingle (Plop-plop, fizz-fizz, oh what a relief it is.) 

I'm sure the advertising bombardment of my youth had plenty of impact on consumers in terms of what products everyone purchased. If you'd heard of a product, heard of a brand, you were probably more likely to reach for it on the shelf as opposed to buying something generic. That's the theory, anyway. 

But advertising didn't save brands, either. 

Everyone knew that Braniff flight attendants wore zany space age uniforms, but Braniff didn't survive. And there's not a person my age who can't sing the Ipana Toothpaste brusha-brusha-brusha jingle. But does Ipana even exist anymore? (Sorry, Bucky Beaver.)

It must be so much more difficult for today's advertisers to navigate the waters, especially if they want to reach the young folks/young spenders market. Nobody that age reads print magazines or newspapers. That's for us old fogies, and we pay a lot more for the privilege and pleasure of indulging in print, because mags don't have as many ads as they used to. 

Nobody watches TV shows the way they used to, either. Especially young folks. Most of the TV ads I see are on the news shows or baseball games I watch. And most of them are for drugs and financial services aimed at the olds (or the getting olds). 

We are still, of course, bombarded by ads - many directly aimed personally at us, based on past searches/purchases - that pop up whenever and wherever we're online (other than email, where we don't have ads incoming, but where our spam folders are chocked full of attempts at engagement). 

The name of the game for advertising is, of course, engagement. 

I suppose this has always been the case, but in the old days engagement just meant getting us to buy something, but not getting to know us personally so they can sell us more.

But today, advertisers are engaging via social media.. They want influencers to push their wares. They want non-influencers to share their thoughts by responding to and sharing TikToks and Instas. (Facebook is not the way to reach youngsters. Twitter/X, which, thanks to Elon Musk, seems to be in a self-inflicted death spiral, is still at least marginally relevant for the young folk - but that relevance is fading fast.)

To engage with their potential customers, many brands have been, for a while - since the while of social media, anyway -  "using slang and snark to appeal to younger consumers."

But, the New York Times asks, whether the jokes are "wearing thing...the tactic falling flat."

In the comments on a recent TikTok post by RyanAir, an exuberant traveler posted about flying the airline for the first time. In the past, the typical corporate response to this might have been something like, “We’re glad to have you!” or “Thanks for joining us!”

Ryan Air went with: “Do you want a medal?”

It was quirky, except not. Being weird on social media has become standard practice for corporate brands.

This has long caused some older people to recoil. And there are signs it is no longer working with millennials or Gen Z customers — people like Priya Saxena, 25, who works in digital marketing in Atlanta.

“I roll my eyes,” Ms. Saxena said. “A lot of them are trying too hard. I think sometimes they’re trying to fit in and reach out to my generation. So it’s not very natural.” 

Ron Cacace, a 33-year-old former social media manager for Archie Comics, said the brands are now in a “race to the bottom.”

“When you see that everyone is kind of doing this lowercase funny, sarcastic posting or outlandish slang-based advertisements, what happens is you have to continue to one-up it,” Mr. Cacace said. “The quality is kind of dropping across the board.” (Source: NY Times)

Increasingly, the targets don't find all the memes, slang, and attempts at cool-via-humor all that engaging. 

Still, if a brand gets it right:

“When a brand can allow you, the audience, to play it, make it your own, that’s when you see things really transcend,” said Ariel Rubin, a 38-year-old former communications director for the Iowa-based Kum & Go, a convenience store known for cheeky social media posts.

Kum & Go? Really? KUM and Go??? I'm guessing they're open to all sorts of meme-ing. 

Anyway, quirky/funny/cheeky/LOL ads are running their course. 

Gen Z, it seems, is more interested in buying from brands that are strong on corporate ethics and morals, and that share their values (environmentally conscious, committed to diversity and inclusion, etc.).

Hmmm. Maybe we'll see advertising return to the just the facts pre-war acts. Or to the dreary, boring, techie ads of my career.

We'll see.