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BANANAS
This week, some fruit loop at Apple decided to sue a tiny 5-person start-up called Prepear over its logo. Apple claims the Prepear logo “readily calls to mind Apple’s famous Apple Logo and creates a similar commercial impression.” Yeah, it's a fruit...so?
Apple seems to think it owns the idea of fruit and is happy to sue any company that uses any kind of produce in its logo. Prepear is a food prep firm that is owned by a company called Super Healthy Kids. If it was up to me, I wouldn't sue Super Healthy Kids over its logo, I'd sue them for having such a stupid name.
Meanwhile, Super Healthy Kids says Apple is “abusing their position of power by going after small businesses like ours... It is a very terrifying experience to be legally attacked by one of the largest companies in the world, even when we have clearly done nothing wrong." They have started a petition opposing Apple's bullying and thus far have collected about 220,000 signatures of the 300,000 they are hoping for.
Super Healthy Kids says they will fight Apple "to send a message to big tech companies that bullying small businesses has consequences.” Yeah, good luck.
CCPA Goes Into Effect. Now What?
The details of the much ballyhooed California Consumer Privacy Act were finalized this week and went into effect. In theory, the act accomplishes the following:
- It allows California consumers to know what personal information is being collected about them.
- It allows consumers to have that data erased.
- It allows consumers to bar the sale of that data to third parties.
As a California consumer who tries to pay attention to this stuff, I can tell you that I have absolutely no idea how to accomplish any of this and no one I know has any idea how to do it. At this point it is all a bunch of play-acting negotiated between big tech and politicians. It has a current effectiveness rating of exactly zero.
If this is to be anything other than another privacy charade, the California Attorney General better do three things very quickly:
1. Explain to consumers in simple language how to exercise their new rights.
2. Punish companies that confuse the shit out of people who are trying to take advantage of the law.
3. Prosecute companies who are non-compliant.
Otherwise this will quickly turn into the same kind of cruel joke the GDPR has become in Europe.
Not To Be Missed
Read this NY Times story about how the repressive regime in Cambodia used a campaign of Facebook disinformation and lies to ruin a monk fighting for human rights and sending him into exile.
It is a chilling story of how "...In just four days, the reputation of a Buddhist monk who had spent decades fighting for the human rights of Cambodians was destroyed."
Facebook is the most dangerous company on the planet and is being run by lying weasels who are totally incompetent and ill-equipped to manage such an enterprise. Stop me if you've heard this before...
How Much Actual Advertising Does An Ad Dollar Buy?
Several years ago, in my semi-brilliant book BadMen, I did a dumbass blogger calculation of how much actual advertising value you receive for your online ad dollar. It came to about 3¢.
This week, Dr. Augustine Fou did a similar calculation using his data. Once again, the result is shocking. As Dr. Fou says, "How many 50%s can you subtract before you hit zero?"
Seeya Later, Digi Data
Peter Weinberg is the Global Lead at Linked-In's B2B Institute. In this brief video, Peter does a good job of explaining the problem of what he calls "Sub-Prime Digital Data." In other words, how crap data leads to enormous wastage of ad dollars. (You can feel free to ignore the plug for LinkedIn and the understatement of ad fraud.)
The video is only about 8 minutes long and Peter makes the subject matter so clear and simple even a CMO can understand it.
Valuing Creativity
If you're feeling a little more ambitious, you might want to watch this video hosted by Sue Unerman of MediaCom and featuring researchers/authors Peter Field, Orlando Woods, and James Hurman.
The subject is the evidence that these ad researchers have uncovered for...
- The essential nature of creativity in the building of brands.
- How the industry has forgotten what the hell brand advertising is all about.
And If You're Really Ambitious...
You'll stop laying around like a lox and go over here right now and buy one of my books. Who the hell knows? You might even learn something.
