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EGR: Don't Forget to Pick Up Some Half and Half
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Christopher Locke
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Jun 29, 2001 14:19 PDT
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Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
the amazon sales ranking is way down
in the shitter. and it's YOUR fault!
chapters on the cheap:
http://www.gonzomarkets.com/intro.html
http://www.gonzomarkets.com/8mileshigh.html
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Valued Readers:
Yeah, I know it's been a while. People are starting to gripe at me
again. Nonetheless, I wasn't going to write anything today. Just to
prove who's boss around here. But I had to send this:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0966891627.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
Oh shit, I forgot. I'm out of half-and-half, so this will have to be
brief. Not a problem, really, as I have nothing to say. Like that's ever
stopped me before.
Fuck, is it ever hot. How about where you are?
Oh, that's better. I just pulled my head out of the oven.
I have decided that my real role in life is channeling Thorstein Veblen.
He wrote this thing back around the turn of the century called
Theory of the Leisure Class
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140187952/entropygradientr
This cover is also worth examining in greater detail:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0140187952.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
Look at that fucking guy! He's wearing a monocle for christ's sake! And
what is that, a goat in the back seat? These people were something
weird. I once heard that some French poet used to walk his pet lobster
around Paris on a silver chain. I guess if you were hip, you just
ignored it. You didn't say, "Hey man, where'd you find a fucking LOBSTER
in this heat? By the way, got any hash?" I dunno, maybe it was that they
were all smoking too much hash and there never was a lobster. You never
know. Hell, there wasn't a lobster in this paragraph when I started it,
either. Where do these things come from? Anyway, Veblen was a
motherfucker, trust me.
Also, I've been researching prehistoric rock art lately, for which I
have found no better reference than the
Handbook of Rock Art Research
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742502562/entropygradientr
It just arrived this morning and oh my! Sure it's $99 but it's only
money and we're all going to die someday. I figure, what the fuck, you
know? The cover isn't funny, but the insides include many pages with
writing on both sides, so I thought it was a pretty good deal overall.
Rock art. What started that, I wonder? Jesus, this heat is awful. Shades
of Alfred Bester. Reet reet, beat the heat. Some bad craziness with that
dude. Forget the name of it though. Oh yeah, Fondly Fahrenheit. What
would I do without Google? I've taken to looking up my own phone number
there. Here, try it yourself: (720) 304-8077. How embarrassing. Nothing
is hidden. I sound like such a geek. Anyway, fuck Norton Ghost. It
didn't work. Nothing ever works!
See? I have nothing to say. Can't say I didn't warn you. It's like this
often. But you already knew that. Say, have you got air conditioning
over there? Or any rocks? I'm getting into an arty mood. I better watch
it though. I'm on probation for carving a giant erect penis into the
face of the Boulder Justice Center. What can I say? These women judges.
No sense of humor.
OK, OK. So I'm stuck with this fucking Harvard Business Review article
I've been stuck with for four fucking months now. It's real important.
It's about some real important shit. About rock art and graffiti and the
relevance of The Dreamtime to e-fucking-commerce. Ah crap, I don't know
what the fuck it's about. This is as far as I got last night.
The gulf between personal and corporate communications has become a
yawning abyss. Despite the huge costs and lost opportunities this
obvious truth entails, the situation shows little sign of
improvement. Some chasms you can cross. Some you can't. Not and
remain as you are in the process. In the past several decades,
business has shown great courage and enthusiasm for reinventing
itself. But the current challenge is for business to deconstruct
itself. Consciously. Voluntarily. Some chasms are deeper and more
terrifying than business likes to admit.
Denial is always a comfy defense. "Your ‘truth’ is not ‘obvious’ at
all," some reader will inevitably respond. "And besides, we're using
Permission Marketing now!" Uh-huh. And how long, precisely, have you
been entertaining these delusions? Look, the proof is simple and
requires no advanced degrees. First, clip a dozen random paragraphs
from email you've received from friends. (Note that you must have
actual friends for this to work. For those who may not remember,
friends are those people you would not normally address as "Valued
Customer.") Then clip a dozen similarly random paragraphs from online
"offers," press releases, and annual reports. Now put all two dozen
clippings in a hat, give it a good hard shake, and hand it to Granny
-- who, let us assume, has never been online in her life (no, not
even on AOL). Ask her to sort them into two piles: one from human
beings, the other from corporate androids. Unless she has
Alzheimer’s, Granny can accomplish such a sort in approximately 9.3
seconds. So you see, we're not talking rocket science here.
Like yourself, I get lots of email. Not unlike yourself, I get too
much. One recently arrived with a subject line that read, "On the
subject of Intellect and it's definition." I braced myself.
Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. "Shall we go directly
into the nature of thought," it asked, "or just get close enough for
government work?" That was the whole thing. Mercifully brief.
Naturally, I chose the latter option and ignored it. Another began:
"As many of you know, I have been attempting to blow out the top
score on the Social Readjustment Rating Scale with various personal
and professional transitions this last year."
Unfortunately, most of my mail is not half so amusing. Take this one
for instance. "If you're like most people, you're already using the
Internet to help get things done faster and easier. That's why you'll
be excited to hear about two FEE-FREE online services from American
Express® that are designed to help make life a little simpler." I was
excited to hear that, yeah -- though I couldn't help thinking it
would make my life a LOT simpler if the sender would simply Drop
Dead®.
It’s not that I'm averse to paying bills online or checking up on my
ever-dwindling financial resources. No, that’s hugely useful (even if
terminally depressing). What makes me delete the Am-Ex email -- and
its increasingly bountiful like -- is its predictably humorless
sterility. It is immediately clear, halfway through the first
sentence, that the writers of such messages are bored with their own
ideas. Dead already. In contrast, my Intellect and Social
Readjustment correspondents, are playing with me, trying to lure me
out. They know I'm smart enough to know how smart *they* are. It’s a
game. It’s a hoot. It also represents a change in business so
profound, so huge, it’s invisible.
However, I haven't yet figured out what this change is. It's invisible
to me too. HBR keeps telling me the article has to be relevant to their
readers. How am I supposed to know what's relevant to their readers.
What? Like I'm a fucking mind reader? I guess if I took a cold shower I
might feel better. At least I'd smell better. Some days it really
doesn't pay to get out of bed. Maybe I'll go buy a lobster. Or at least
some half and half.
fuuuuck,
The Management
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