It's Steve (now in blog form)

Let’s play a word association game.  I’ll say a word.  You say the first word that pops into your mind.  Ready?

Nuggnuts

What word did you think of?  That’s pretty bad right?  It’s definitely something you wouldn’t say in front of your grandma.  I imagine it in contexts including:
“Hey, nuggnuts, get off my lawn!”
“He had nuggnuts, but the a round of penicillin cleared it up.”
“Nuggnuts is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Nuggnuts is actually the new massive marketing campaign from McDonalds around fans of Chicken Nuggets.  They are driving folks to nuggnuts.com.  They’ve set up a nuggnuts Facebook group (another example of poor decision making on this campaign). They are running tons of tv spots around trying to coin this term.  This is all dumb.  Until they showed the url in the commercial, I was pretty sure they were advertising numbnuts.  I am definitely not in the market for numbnuts.  This is not good.

This is an example of the agency system run amok.  Generally, bad campaigns like this are born on a “storyboard” (note: a storyboard is a tool for when you run out of good ideas and are trying to dress up a bad one).  The storyboard is then presented by the agency to the client. Usually the client is initially uncertain.  The agency then says things like:
“Don’t worry, we’re experts.”
“But this tested really well.”
“We’re co-opting youth culture.”
“Let’s get some cocktails.”

At this point most clients fall under the hypnotic sway of the agency and spend money they shouldn’t  on a campaign that isn’t going to help their brand. Or, in this case, on a campaign that sounds like a venereal disease/racial slur.

Here’s the part that blows my mind.  Not only do they think this is going to work, McDonalds+agency think people are going to love it to the point of buying t-shirts and bumper stickers.  Are they insane?  At what point do they think people are going to be sitting on their couch and say, “Holy crap, I should buy a Chicken McNugget mug!!”

Don’t get me wrong, I love Chicken McNuggets. I was practically raised on them (may have something to do with my never hitting my growth spurt).  But if continuing to order them forces me into the nuggnut category, I may have to reconsider the Fillet-o-Fish.

I admit it, I like Disneyland.  Ben likes to run around like an insane person, and I appreciate highly engineered experiences.  I thought I’d point out a couple of things that struck me the last time I was there.

These people are very sad- The Disney newlyweds are not uncommon. They are, however, tragically sad.  Thank god they found each other.  Now if only we could keep them from propagating…

This is brilliant- When I was in high school we had a class trip to Disneyland.  It was one of those overnight events.  The evening was notable on two fronts: gross misbehavior and the opening of the Indiana Jones ride.  Let’s talk about the Indian Jones ride.  While we waited in the two hour line, we all got special decoder cards.  They associated to the hieroglyphics throughout the ride.

Here’s the crazy part.  Do you remember the scene from “A Christmas Story” when he decodes the radio message and gets “Don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine”?  These are exactly the same.  AT&T was the launch partner for the ride.  All of the script decodes to messages about choosing the right long distance provider.

The amazing bit is that when AT&T obviously didn’t renew the promotion agreement, Disneyland just stopped handing out the cards.  They didn’t remove the ads from the ride.  They just stopped having them be decodeable.   So brilliant.  I wonder if AT&T wanted to cut another check if they’d start passing them out again.  Now that is a cool integrated marketing program.

Last night I rolled  up on the American India Foundation’s black tie affair.  Amit was being honored by the foundation for excellence as an Indian so we turned up in force to support (For those of you aware of the general rule with me and suits, don’t freak out when you see the pics.  Everything is cool).  Check out the album and shoot Amit a congrats.

I can’t begin to tell you how well my LA to NJ flight went today. And I owe it all to World of Goo (thanks for the tip Roy).  This is easily the most fun game (a) since Portal and (b) that I have ever played on a laptop.

The game play was excellent.  The puzzles were challenging.  And I spent a good part of the day alternately giggling like a Japanese schoolgirl and swearing like a sailor with tourettes.  For $20 you just can’t go wrong with this one.

As I appear to be in the middle of freakin’ nowhere New Jersey, I’m going to grab a bit and play for another few hours.  Hurray!

I don’t dislike Palm Springs, it’s just kind of a weird place.  Some quick observations from the 12 hours I’ve been here:

- Stucco is lame.  It is even more lame in great quantities.
- Golf courses are normally a wasteful use of space and water resources.  They make even less sense in the desert.
- These people live in the desert and play golf all day. How is it none of them have a tan?
- They do have an innate sense of neon here that I appreciate.

- The sunsets in the desert are amazing.

I want to take a moment to discuss hotel rooms with 2 twin beds and the fact that they keep giving them to me.  It sort of freaks me out when I wake up and there is another empty bed in the room.  Something terribly unnatural about that.  What do they think I’m going to do with the extra bed?  Do I look like “that guy”?  I’ve started having them move me.  Bah.

We had a little shindig in San Francisco on Thursday during Web 2.0 to celebrate the launch of MySpace Music.  The event was really awesome  The old San Francisco Mint has been turned into a venue.  Check it out.

I love facilities like this.  The interior was even cooler than the facade.

Lionel Richie turned up and did a set of his hits (Why yes, Lionel, it is you that we were looking for. Time to go on stage).

The whole thing got me thinking about my situation these days.  There are moments when I still can’t believe the people I get to meet and the places I get to go.  I mean, I still feel like that dorky kid from Fresno and I’m getting to work with some of the smartest folks in the world.  I’m a pretty luck guy to do what I do.

Ok, enough of that.  Check out my sister’s triplets dressed like chickens.