It engenders a sense of pride. Yet, it is war at its worst…and, given the courage of those men, at its best, if there is such a thing.

This is how a powerfully produced commercial that I saw last night, starts. Film rolling, the voiceover says,

We didn’t wait for someone else to storm the beaches at Normandy.

Cut to footage of a civil rights march in the Deep South in the sixties and then to the Washington Mall and the “I had a dream” speech by Martin Luther King.

The music is dramatic, compelling. The voice over continues,

We didn’t wait for someone else to guarantee civil rights,

Or, footage of the first moon landing

put a man on the moon.

And, shots of a toxic sky,

we can’t wait for someone else to solve the global climate crisis

We need to act and we need to act now.

Join us. Together we can solve the climate crisis.

The ad is part of $300 million advertising campaign promoted by Al Gore and sponsored by The Alliance for Climate Protection.

This is positioning at its most brilliant: position global warming with the three most revered occurrences of the twentieth century – the invasion of Normandy, Martin Luther King’s I had a dream speech and the first man on the moon.

Truly inspired.

There is just one little problem: the advertisement, in all its positioning glory, promotes a falsehood.

Global warming is a myth; temperatures have been cooling for over a decade. And carbon dioxide is what helps plants grow. Don’t get me wrong, environmental problems abound on this planet. But carbon dioxide is not the source of them, and this is becoming increasingly evident to the public as a growing hit parade of studies that made that claim are now being exposed as fraudulent.

But my point here is this: if there’s one cardinal rule in advertising, it’s don’t lie to your public. Look what happens when you do. The following graph was taken from a poll by Gallup.

From 2008, when the above advertising campaign started, to March of 2010, the percentage of people that think the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated has increased from 35% to 48%. The uptrend starts before that, but the major upswing is in the last two years.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature (even if you’re Al Gore.)

The rule holds even more stringently in public relations. A current example is playing in the headlines as I write this: Connecticut Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, who is running for Chris Dodd’s U.S. Senate seat, has often spoken about his service in Vietnam and how he and other troops were mistreated when they returned home.

Enter the New York Times, which turned up an inconvenient truth, Dickie Boy never served in Vietnam – in fact he managed to acquire 5, count ‘em 5, deferments.

His poll numbers have crashed.

I am not a fan of Bill Clinton. But let’s be honest, he presided over the longest period of economic expansion in American history. Still, Arkansas’ favorite son will always be remembered first and foremost for his sexual escapades in the White House and then lying about them.

Clinton was known to be a philanderer and was still elected. He was impeached for perjury, not for violating his marriage vows and embarrassing Hillary to the rest of the planet.

Several of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies have been sued by state and federal regulators and have had to pay billions in fines and penalties because they lied about their drugs’ uses or effectiveness.

Notice, by the way, the use of the politically incorrect verb, “lie.” When Blumenthal, caught on video tape saying he had served in Vietnam when he was never within thousands of miles of the place, he held a press conference and apologized for having “misspoken.”

No, Dude, you lied.

“Misspoke” is the euphemism du jour when someone is caught on a live mic (thought to be off) or on “film” lying or saying what they really think.

The real message is this, it doesn’t matter how good your positioning is if it is false.

But as long as you are promoting something that you can deliver, when surveys are done that enable you to craft a unique position for your product, the clouds part, the angels sing and the cash register chimes like the bells of Saint Mary’s.

And that, of course, is exactly what we have been doing for nearly a quarter of a century. We conduct surveys that drive sales.

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your marketing, call us directly or visit us on the worldwide web at the address below.

Best,

Bruce
Bruce@ontargetresearch.com
www.ontargetreseach.com
818-397-1401

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That’s right.

Some years ago, when our offices were on the Sunset Strip, right across the Boulevard from a soaring billboard of the Marlboro Man – that advertising icon who has since been charged with crimes against humanity – our next door neighbor was Jay Ward Productions.

The Sunset Strip avoids the frenetic flash of the Ginza and the hordes of Time Square. It is the Haute Couture of hip; it is the front window on the world of entertainment. Awash with high-end hotels, ultra-chic restaurants, billboards of the lush and sensuous and rock’s most legendary clubs, it pulses with the very heartbeat of creative culture.

And in the middle of this sandbox of sensation sat Jay Ward Productions – creator of Rocky, Bullwinkle, Dudley Do Right and Crusader Rabbit. Ward’s studio was a small cement building at the East end of the Strip. Perched on a pedestal a few feet in front of the entrance as if he were addressing the United Nations on the subject of animal rights, was a six foot high statue of Bullwinkle.

Our offices were next door above an English pub that served a stilton cheese salad that made me want to play soccer.

So, yeah, Bullwinkle was my neighbor.

But Rocky, Bullwinkle and friends were not Ward’s most famous creations. Few people outside of the advertising world know that it was Jay Ward who took Quaker Oats from the stodgy second tier cereal company to front ranks the lucrative children’s breakfast market by helping them develop a world class brand: Captain Crunch.

In 1962, Quaker was looking to expand their cereal line. Not a walk in the park competing against a triumvirate of 900 pound breakfast gorillas – Wheaties, Cherrios, and Kellogg’s Corn flakes – the ad guys at Quaker turned to their customers and conducted extensive market research and surveys (can I get an Amen?).

A key finding was that kids wanted cereal that would stay crunchy in milk.

Who’d have guessed.

Armed with this key bit of market intelligence they turned to the creative brilliance of Jay Ward and the rest, as they say….

I tell the story not to reminisce about our digs on the Strip, but to make an important point about branding: Your brand should say what your product is … or does.

Yes, there are exceptions, but if your brand is explanatory, it will meet with your customer’s understanding and acceptance much faster than if you try to be cute. And you won’t have to spend the extra advertising dollars trying to drive your brand into the mind of your public.

Here are a few industry leading brands that are illustrative. Some, having matured, have been “minimized” to their initials by customer use or corporate strategy, but the original names tell the story.

The Wall Street Journal

Toys R Us

Kentucky Fried Chicken

YouTube

Bank of America

Petco

Etrade

Cable News Network

Pizza Hut

Playboy

In each case, the brand tells the public what it is or what it does.

Companies that carry the founder’s name have been exceptions: Ferrari, Forbes, Marriott and Dell come to mind. And the information age has spawned some beauties: think Yahoo! Google and Blackberry.

But America On Line, Internet Explorer and Netflix are all descriptive and remain category leaders.

A trip through the latest issue of Business Week makes the point. I am pouring through the magazine in search of ads that grab my attention and get a message across. Some people would call this activity a mental disorder, but it is how I spend many a dinner on the patio of the Daily Grill in Studio City.

I stop at a full page, four color ad. There is a picture of a large pill in the middle of a field. My first thought is that it’s one of the ubiquitous pharma ads: a treatment for fear of open spaces, perhaps. Wait, it’s not a pill, it’s a close up of a pitcher’s mound.

What are they selling?

I look at the bottom of the page to see whose ad it is. What’s the brand?

Unum.

Ah… sure, Unum. And they are selling….

Now I have to read the very fine print. I discover that the pill cum pitcher’s mound is neither; it’s a base pad, like second base. And Unum, well they sell employee disability insurance. And the base pad…that was something that a professional baseball player might trip over and hobble the “Entire organization for the rest of the season.”

Eh….

Show of hands: how many of you CEOs out there would spend $104,300 for this ad in the international edition?

How about the California edition, just $24,000?

Thought so.

So for any of you agency VPs that are looking for an account that needs advertising help….But be gentle.
___________

Not far from our friends at Unum is a two page story about the challenges of a Silicon Valley startup. It is a interesting story and my money would be on the company being a huge success. They have a unique product, which lets users of different IM services – AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, talk to each other – way cool. Add to that a dose of serious PR savvy: not only is the coverage in the Business Week article highly positive, someone had the public relations chops to get the article placed in the first place, a serious coup.

So I’m thinking, these guys will are going to make it; they’ll do well. But it won’t be their brand that drives their success, because the name of their company is – stay with me here – Meebo, which, even according to the founders, means… exactly nothing.

That’s right. The Gen Y founders were at a restaurant discussing what their name should be. They wanted a brand with two syllables. One of them favored names starting with the letter “M.” It was a short trip from there to doodles on a paper napkin and then to Meebo.

The Meebo story highlights a critical point: the foundation of a company’s success is rooted in a solid product that is needed and wanted by some market segment, the larger the better. A good product and great service puts you on the fast track to the options candy store. But what keeps you there, what fuels the sales and income, is marketing that drives that brand into the mind of your public. And a brand that tells your public what your product is or does, greases that track in an almost mystic way. The right brand flies into the mind of your prospects like a metaphysical frisbee.

Weekly magazines have done well at this: Sports Illustrated;

Newsweek; The National Enquirer; Reader’s Digest; Cigar Aficianado; Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ); Woman’s Wear Daily and Ebony, to name a few.

So have non-profits that work to better social conditions, environmental problems, and civil rights: The Sierra Club; The Earth Organization; The American Civil Liberties Union; Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

How much easier is it to remember Hotels.com than it is to remember -or even spell – Orbitz?

Which brand better communicates a product that handles spam, Cloud Mark or Spam Arrest?

If you were looking for a software program to help you design your new home, which brand would best communicate to you; Broderbund or Chief Architect?

How about software to help you with your income, which would most attract your interest to purchase; TurboTax or Tax Gaga?

Which is a better name for a GPS system; Nuvi or Street Pilot?

Some of these names sound like an off-planet law firm: Nuvi, Meebo Orbitz, & Gaga, LLC.

Marketing is about communicating with your prospects. Communication involves understanding. If you have to create that understanding from whole cloth (e.g., Nuvi means GPS), it is a harder sell and a more costly branding program. It can be done, but why make it difficult?

Modesty aside, I can’t tell you the number of people that have commented on how “spot on,” the name of our company is: On Target Research.

I can’t take all the credit. We simply did for ourselves what we do for our clients: we conducted a branding survey. We created a number of potential names that communicated what we did. Then we surveyed corporate Sales & Marketing Directors as well as account executives in advertising agencies – both key publics that need and use market research and surveys. On Target Research won hands down.

We encourage anyone starting a new company, rolling out a new product or considering rebranding an existing one, to select a name that reminds people what you do every time it is spoken, written, printed, or communicated in any way.

And if you really want to create a brand that makes the angels sing and the cash register ring, give us a call, or send us an email, to discuss a branding survey, because at On Target Research we conduct surveys that drives sales.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
Bruce@brucewiseman.net

C 818-397-1401
F 800-680-1452

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The Hustler was Paul Newman’s greatest film.

Yes, yes, I know some of you will plead the case of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting. Others will call for Hud, The Color of Money or Cool Hand Luke.

But Fast Eddie Felson is one of the greatest characters in the history of American cinema. Newman’s performance was spellbinding.

I first met Paul Newman at a popular restaurant in Anaheim.

Perhaps “met,” is not the exact right word. I was a busboy at Carnation on Main Street in Disneyland and he and his wife, Joanne Woodward, came into the restaurant with several kids. I bused the table when they were done – cleared the dirty plates and cleaned the ashtrays. This was the first of two intimate connections with the man.

The second has its roots in the community of Toluca Lake, a small enclave next to Burbank surrounded by some of the largest movie studios in the world – Warner Bros, Universal and Disney.

Toluca Lake is also home to a high-end burger and salad hangout called, Mo’s. I moved to Toluca Lake in the nineties and was stunned to discover that Mo’s used to be called Hamptons. And Hamptons was owned by… that’s right, Paul Newman.

See? You gotta’ love that serendipity.

Which leads me to a point about marketing, a point that will bring us back to Mo’s and some of the most exotic hamburgers on planet Earth in just a moment.

But the point I want to make here has to do with whether or not you should use price as factor in your marketing strategy.

A client came to us wanting to market a telecommunication system to government entities. There were several big players in this market and the common wisdom was that pricing factors were the primary motivating factor in getting the purchasing agents by buy the system.

But the client wanted us to survey this public and see if this was true. We conducted the survey. The client was stunned. So were we, frankly. Money was not the issue. The overwhelming desire of this public was for durable, well-built telecomm systems.

The client created a PR and marketing campaign around this attribute and was extraordinarily successful.

In point of fact, in the vast majority of surveys we conduct, price is almost never the top “button.” People will often pay extra for something they want if they know it is of a finer quality.

We find this in survey after survey. The exact wording isn’t always “quality”- it depends on the product or service – but most buyers know that excellence has a price, and many are willing to pay it.

I will shop at Nordstrom knowing that I am probably paying more than I might pay elsewhere, because they have an excellent selection of high quality clothing, good service, and a liberal return policy, if I wind up not liking the apparel I bought.

And Mo’s, of Paul Newman fame, is another excellent case in point. They have, as I said, the world’s most exotic selection of hamburgers. Here’s just a few so you get a sense of the burger menu.

Baja Burger
Salsa, sour cream, and Swiss or cheddar cheese

Bleu Cheeseburger
Covered with fresh bleu cheese

Foggybottom Burger
With peanut butter and sour plum jam

Frank’s Fantasy Burger
Sour cream and black caviar

Menage a Trois
Avocado, bacon, and Swiss or cheddar cheese

Mo’s Veggie Burger
Homemade blend of mixed vegetables, nuts and grains, no dairy

Nelly Burger
Creamed horseradish and bacon

O-Solo-Mio
Mushrooms, marinara sauce, mozzarella, and Parmesan cheese

Rose street burger
Blue cheese and caramelized onions

Slam Dunkburger
Spread with sour plum jam and Dijon mustard

White Delight Bacon covered with bleu cheese dressing

There are more.

But it gets better: you can get anyone of these burgers made with Kobe beef. Kobe (the actual name is Wagyu) is an exceptionally fine breed of organically fed, Japanese cattle. It is the most succulent beef in the world. I realize this is dinning pornography to the vegetarians in the audience, but I say unto them, you can often cut a Kobe steak with your fork, and the taste is…well, it’s sinful.

Kobe burgers at Mo’s go for a few bucks more than the regulars, but I also spend the extra because they taste so damn good.

You don’t have to have a Kobe burger at Mo’s to know that customers are willing to pay extra for something they want. Whole Foods markets started in Austin, Texas with one store in 1980. Today, they are the largest organic and natural grocery store in the world with 292 stores, 53,000 employees and revenues of $8 billion a year.

Awesome growth.

All this while, Whole Foods has been the highest priced major grocery chain in the country. But that is not to say price doesn’t matter – of course it does. The point is that it isn’t always the hottest button in the marketing oven.

There are certainly those that take a “low price” position and thrive. Motel Six, which was actually $6 a night when it started in 1960, is the largest hotel chain in the United States and Wal Mart is still the largest food retailer in the country. Price is a position for these two companies. And it has worked for them, just like Nordstrom and Whole Food have their niche.

But my point is this: I find a lot of clients that think they must push the “price” button in their marketing… they think this until they see the results of the surveys we do for them.

When they have a chance to look at what their customers tell them is important, marketing strategies change.

This is not always the case, but it happens enough, that I wanted to make sure you weren’t just throwing “price” into your marketing programs without at least checking with your customers.

And that is what we have been doing for nearly a quarter of a century, finding out what our client’s customers and prospects think is valuable about their product or service and what will motivate them to buy it.

If these are questions you feel you need to have answered, or if your marketing programs simply aren’t biting the way you feel they should, contact us via phone, email, or Internet and we’ll let you know what we can do, what we charge and how long it will take.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce@brucewiseman.net
www.ontargetresearch.com
C 818-397-1401
F 800-680-1452

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Yeah, the one in China. Sometimes life is serendipitous: CCTV, the government owned television system, is doing a 5 part documentary on the financial crisis – why it occurred and what to do about it. They had heard about my new book, Crisis by Design, the Untold Story of The Global Financial Crisis  HYPERLINK “http://www.behindthewizardscurtain.com” www.behindthewizardscurtain.com and flew me over there to discuss global financial matters.

No joke. It was quite a trip. There is legitimate concern there about the financial coup d’ etat orchestrated off by the Bank for International Settlements last year.  More on this later, but you can catch a glimpse of me here as CCTV promotes past and upcoming interviews (and if you think Fox News has a large viewership, these guys own the airwaves in the most populated nation on earth).

http://you.video.sina.com.cn/m/1112850533

But the point of this little missive is a marketing one, not financial.

I checked into the Beijing Hilton and this bright Chinese kid helped me with my luggage up to my room: nice space, great work area, big HD TV screen on the wall. And he says, in good English, “Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles,” I say.

He goes from cheerful to ecstatic, “LA. Wow. I love Kobe. He’s my favorite.”

It is sincere enthusiasm, not a ploy for a bigger tip, because you don’t tip in this country – which is why this is a little odd to me. You see, Yao Ming, the 7’6” giant center with the Houston Rockets, who is from Shanghai, is a virtual God in China.

A couple of nights later, I am walking down Wangfujing and find what may be the reason for my bellboy’s enthusiasm. Wangfujing, by the way, is Rodeo Drive on mega-steroids.

Every major brand in the world seems to be represented on this street which is as wide as a freeway (no cars allowed in most parts) and runs into the distance as far as the eye can see.

And it is packed with Chinese shoppers – I mean packed. The above is not a picture from my trip, but Wangfujing was only slightly less crowded the night I was there. It was a Sunday night and it was freezing – literally the temperature was freezing or below – and you could hardly move on this street due to the crowds, which go on and on and on.

And then I saw it…up to my left was perhaps the largest billboard like display I had ever seen: Kobe Bryant charging down the court like a wolf chasing a fleeting prey, but he has the ball and the basket looms. Behind Kobe, up in the left hand corner of the piece, is what has become one of the most successful brands in the world – the Nike swish.

Cold as it was, I paused and admired the positioning. Nike has become the biggest name in sports equipment (worldwide sales = $18.6 billion) by positioning itself with many of the world’s greatest athletes.

This is positioning at its simplest and yet most powerful. Positioning is achieved by tying your product, your service, your brand to something that is already in the mind of your prospects. In sports, tying the brand to the top athletes in a sport is a no brainer.

But Nike has done it with power and panache like no one else in the history of sports advertising (there was a smaller billboard further down Wangfujing with a picture of Yao Ming. He was standing stoically holding a basketball wearing his Reeboks. Yawn.)

We didn’t create Nike’s position, but our clients do include some of the largest brands in the world: from Saatchi & Saatchi, to Hilton, Courtyard by Marriott and Hitachi Consulting. We have also serviced hundreds of smaller and medium sized companies. If your marketing isn’t biting the way you think it should, positioning might make all the difference.

At On Target Research, we have been creating unique positions for our clients for more than 20 years.

“The positioning that grew out of your research was nothing short of stellar. We now have a strategically researched, laser-like position that will dramatically assist us in rolling out our new brand.” Jeff Donner, President.

If you want to discuss positioning for your brand, or any survey needs, feel free to call me at 818-397-1401 or visit us on the web at www.ontargetresearch.com.

Have a spectacular 2010!

Bruce

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I can’t tell you how surreal it felt standing under a large and oh-so-imposing image of Lenin while giving a talk to senior officers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs just after the fall of Communism.

The Ministry, Russia’s Federal law enforcement body, is based on a military structure, so the room was full of uniforms hosting dazzling displays of medals and combat ribbons and hats adorned with more gold braid than a university marching band.

They were all Russian officers, most of whom, until a few months previously, had been Communists, or at least had paid it lip service. I later found out that I was the first American to ever address this group, which is probably why my initial reception was…oh, let’s call it “chilly.”

But they warmed up, actually. And by the time I was done with the talk, the room was abuzz with interest.

See, for 70 years, the primary communication line between the Russian police and the country’s citizens was a night stick. When Communism fell, the citizenry started to turn on the police.

It happened that I had gone to Moscow at this time to help open up a business college. The grand opening of the college included a conference and I’d given a talk on the use of surveys in marketing and public relations to a couple a hundred Russian entrepreneurs (a very new breed of Russian at the time). A lieutenant colonel from Ministry happened to in the audience.

After my talk, he approached me and asked if I might discuss the survey technology I had spoken about with his superiors at the Ministry.

I have always made it a habit not to turn down a request from a colonel of the Russian Internal Ministry when hanging out in Moscow. So the next morning my wife (who had accompanied me on the trip) and I found ourselves in a meeting with Colonel Stanislov Pylov, the Director of Personnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. All police in Russia are federal, so this man oversaw the lives and fortunes of a million Russian Police.

We discussed many things that morning, one of which was the invitation to speak to the senior officers of the Ministry. Thus the talk beneath the visage of the Founder of the Russian Communist Party.

The other subject we discussed was the fact that the Ministry was having recruiting problems. Could the survey technology I had spoken of at the conference help the department improve its recruiting results, he wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said. It could. Pylov stood up with such fanfare I thought Yeltsin had entered the office behind me. He walked over to a closet in his office and carefully removed a beautifully crafted wooden clock. He handed it to my wife as if it were a new born child and said, “This is a new day in the relations between the United States and Russia.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I briefly considered a career as a diplomat. But Reagan and Gorbachev had left things well under control, so I let the moment pass.
But a great deal came out of the relationship with Colonel Pylov, who became a good friend and ally, as well as an important partner in bringing important management skills to the Russian government.

But I digress.

I agreed to help Pylov with his recruiting problem. I won’t bore you with all the logistics of getting these surveys done, but trust me when I tell you it was a world-class challenge without a Russian speaking crew there; without any crew there.

But here is the punch line: you never know what your prospects need or want until you survey; until you ask them.

We needed to survey high school seniors, college students and returning military (the Ministry’s primary recruit pools). But we needed to train surveyors to do that, which was going to take some time. Pylov needed answers now and so I figured out a way to survey existing ministry staff to find out what had motivated them to choose a career in law enforcement in the first place.

This could give us enough initial information with which to start promoting, while we worked out the logistics of surveying others.

Why did people join the Ministry?

The answer will floor you. At least it did me. Even though I knew the only real answer would come from the surveys, in the back of my mind I thought it would be something like, “Catch bad guys,” or “Serve Mother Russia,” or even, “Protect our citizens.”

But remember this is just months after the fall of Communism. Almost no one owned anything. The state owned all. The general population certainly didn’t own cars, for instance.

The number one reason people joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs was because… they could ride the Metro for free – cops didn’t pay. That was it.

I don’t have the time to tell you the whole story, which rolled out through the early 1990s. But I usually end these short vignettes with a success story.

While this one is a bit unusual, and sounds rather self-aggrandizing, I tell it to make the point. And it was kind of fun.

One my second trip to Moscow, a few months after our initial work with him, Pylov picked me up in a Ministry car and drove me to the studio of one of Russia’s preeminent sculptors, Sergei Bychkov. I was ushered to a chair in a studio surrounded by huge statues of famous figures from Russian history. And Bychkov proceeded to sculpt a bust of me, which was cast in bronze and later placed in the Hall of Heroes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

This is not the kind of thing you wake up in the morning and think, “I ought to get my bust done in bronze and have it placed in the Internal Ministry’s Hall of Heroes today.” It’s just a little out there. But it shows you what a happy client can do (especially one that is highly placed in Russian law enforcement).

Busts aside, the moral of the story is a simple but important one: don’t guess at what your prospects think is valuable about what you sell; survey first. I promise it will pay big dividends.

I should know, our survey company has been getting these kinds of results for almost a quarter of a century.

If you need to know what is going to motivate your prospects to buy from you, call us at 818-397-1401 or visit us at www.ontargetresearch.com

Dasvidanya.

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO

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White sandy beaches. Water so pristine it laps at the shores like liquid topaz. Lush, verdant foliage that blankets a nearby mountain where parrots in brilliant, multi-colored plumage await a Kodak moment.

And then the invasion starts.

Charging out of the rain forest at the bottom of the mountain are dozens of gorgeous young women in bikinis.

Cut to a semi-nerdy guy in a bathing suit standing on the beach spritzing himself with a bottle of we don’t know what.

Back to the babes, whose numbers are growing as they charge senor nerd like it’s the first day of the  semi-annual Nordstrom’s Sale. The camera pans to the other side of our hero where another contingent of bikini-clad marauders are stampeding across the sands from the other direction.

Okay. They have my attention. It’s an ad for some kind of men’s cologne I figure, but the girls, now numbering a hundred or so, are making a fashion statement that those of us concerned with matters of…eh…style cannot possibly ignore.

They have reached him now. Our guy is surrounded by swarms of beautiful women. The camera switches to the viewpoint of the guy, whose vision is blurry. He puts on a pair of glasses. His vision sharpens only to see the girls frowning at him now. Some are disgusted.

They all turn and walk away as the screen displays the message that he “Should have gone to Specsavers.”

Specsavers is a discount vision chain and the glasses the guy put on were dorky, not, we assume, from Specsavers. Of note, this ad is a takeoff of a similar commercial for a deodorant (Lynx) of a few years earlier.

But here’s the deal: The Lynx commercial ends with the guy getting the girls. The deodorant attracts the women and they stay. The guy is in seventh heaven.

The Specsaver commercial ends on a loss. The women are  disgusted and have turned away from him; our hero is bummed out. Yet, the creators of this advertisement think that this toxic ending will motivate viewers to want to buy the brand of glasses that the guy isn’t wearing.

Are they brain dead?

Why in the world would you associate your brand with a loss? The commercial must have cost some serious coin: it was shot in Columbia and there were 100 bikini-qualified gals in this spot. (My heart goes out to the poor casting director.)

But, you get my point. They transport more than 100 cast and crew members to South America and shoot a commercial that associates the sponsor’s brand with…paradise lost.

The company’s marketing director should be water-boarded with the spray the nerd was using on the beach.

Let’s take a quick look at something that is much simpler, costs next to nothing and communicates a message instantly.

It’s a print ad.  A picture of a french fry, one end of which is charred to a crisp and smoking. In the corner of the ad is the familiar Heinz label which says “Hot Ketchup”.

A piece of simple marketing brilliance, says I.

A good ad does not tell the message, (He should have gone to Specsavers) it shows it, (burnt French fry); the visual delivers the message in an instant.

That said, the good, the bad and the ugly are not always this obvious.

Sometimes a professional eye can help polish the message and increase the response. On Target assists companies to fine tune their marketing so that it sings to their customers like Tony Bennett on a summer night in Central Park

We bring 25 years of marketing and PR expertise to a review of your marketing materials, websites, and proposed press releases for their ability to communicate to your public and drive sales and income.

This service is fast, dreadfully inexpensive and will help ensure that your marketing materials are doing their job – creating interest and reach for your product or service.

Call or email if we can be of service.

Best,
Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
www.ontargetresearch.com
818-397-1401

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I’m talking about the Doritos’ commercial on the Super Bowl last Sunday. Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division (owner of the Doritos brand) ran a series of Super Bowl ads which cost them some serious coin.

CBS charged $2.6 million for a 30 second Super Bowl spot this year (up just a bit from the $37,500 for Super Bowl I). If Frito-Lay paid the sticker price were talking $10.4 million for a couple of minutes of air time. But with 106.5 million viewers– the largest in television history – they had an historic opportunity to sell some chips.

So with about $10 million invested and 106 million prospects to talk to, they communicated a message of great clarity: eating Doritos will bring you physical pain.

I kid you not.

One of the ads takes place in the exercise room of a gym. One guy – headband, sweat pants – offers his buddy – tank top, gym shorts – some Doritos, which he takes.

Then headband tells gym shorts that he got the Doritos “out of Tim’s locker.” This comment strikes such fear in the heart of gym shorts that he spits a partially eaten Dorito from his mouth and delivers this line, “This is bad. Tim loves Doritos.”

Gym shorts is then struck in the side of the neck by a Dorito in the incarnation of a steel, ninja throwing dart, and falls over.

Cut to Tim: a psycho, covered in Doritos like the creature from the Black Lagoon with orange splotches, who attacks headband screaming.

Fade to black.

Makes you hungry, doesn’t it?

There was another commercial in the series that has the young son of an attractive black woman sharply slapping his mother’s suitor for checking out his mom as she walks into the kitchen and then taking a Dorito from a bowl on the coffee table. Junior is peeved and the sound effects of the slaps are loud and vicious.

Yet another shows a man sitting on a bench eating Doritos. A dog approaches and looks at the man longingly. The man won’t give the dog a chip unless he barks for it. The dog, unknown to the guy on the bench, is wearing a bark suppressing collar. The clever canine somehow gets behind the bench, removes the electronic device, straps it around the man’s throat, who falls to the ground spasming from a series of agonizing electric shocks to his larynx.

See, here’s the deal: ads are supposed to sell something; they are supposed to create a want for the product in the mind of the viewer.

Maybe some people were amused by Fiddo’s electric revenge or the attack of the Dorito-maniac. Maybe.

But the question is, did these ads increase the desire for a bag of Doritos? Sorry. No sale.

I later found out that these particular ads were the winners of a contest created by Frito-Lay for consumers to shoot home based commercials for Doritos to be played on Super Bowl commercial breaks.

Clever marketing idea on Frito-Lay’s part, and well done to the budding filmmakers for winning the contest. But the marketing executives that approved the multi-million dollar ad buy should be ordered to read Positioning The Battle for your Mind by Al Reis and Jack Trout on pain of having their corporate Blackberry account canceled – because they sure as hell don’t have a clue what positioning is.

Newsflash: associating your product in the minds of your prospects with slaps, electric shocks, and steel darts might be better suited to promoting a new psychiatric hospital than a snack food.

Google’s Super Bowl ad, on the other hand, was piece of marketing simplicity and effectiveness. It’s called Parisian Love.  It starts with a picture of the Google search box. You don’t see the person, but he types in “study abroad paris france.” And it rolls from there. The viewer watches a love affair develop between the searcher and a woman in Paris, all played out in the sequence of terms rapidly typed into the Google search box.

When the commercial finishes, the viewer knows that he or she can find anything on Google from cafes near the Louvre to how to assemble a crib.

The ad works – just like Google.

Frito-Lay didn’t ask for this assessment of their Super Bowl commercials. Neither did Google. And while the pluses and minuses of these advertisements may seem all too obvious, some of the nuances of many marketing strategies are not so glaring.

This is why corporations large and small have us conduct analyses of their marketing materials. They get a professional, external assessment of the impact and communication value of their websites, brochures, direct mail pieces and public relations messages.

The service is fast and inexpensive and provides them with an external perspective as to how they are communicating to their customers and prospects.

If you think we might be of assistance to you in this way, please contact us at 818-397-1401. Or via our website at  HYPERLINK “http://www.ontargetresearch.com” www.ontargetresearch.com

Best,

Bruce

President & CEO
On Target Research

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If you look with your understanding, the crimes against humanity are written across the rotting visages of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Like a couple of aging prostitutes, these leading architects of twentieth-century evil still sell their wares to those with an insatiable lust for the power of the crown.

THE CLUB OF ROME
Birth Mother of the Environmental Movement

The moldy twosome have something else in common. Both have been active members of an international think tank from the dark side of the force called the Club of Rome. Founded at the Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, in 1968, some of the other fraternity brothers and sisters include Al Gore, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there is no one better to give you the short version of the Club’s agenda than Gorby himself:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

Who let this guy out of Lubyanka?

Their more precisely stated goal is population control. The solution? Create an environmental catastrophe like, oh, say, “global warming” and blame it on the planet’s most heinous villain—man himself.

But I should let them tell it:

“In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for cause. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Sounds like a good plan . . . if you’re Darth Vader.

In 1972, the Club took the world stage with the publication of a book they had commissioned to be written by a group of MIT scientists. It was called The Limits to Growth. Examining the planet’s population growth in relation to available resources, the report concluded that the planet would run out of resources sometime in the next 100 years, resulting in a catastrophic decline in population and industrial production.

As one reviewer put it, the authors examine

“. . . the impact of humanity on the world ecology and of steps taken toward remediating the accelerating approach to a train wreck that is mankind’s ill-managed and uncontrolled ‘footprint’ on this planet’s environment.”

Still, these trends and their consequences could be altered, it argued; we had to be less, do less and have less. The brand for this Orwellian path to planetary salvation was sustainable development.

Heavily promoted, the book reached opinion leaders in political, scientific and economic circles as it exploded around the planet like the Harry Potter of environmentalism. It sold 12 million copies in thirty languages despite the fact that the research had all the scientific rigor of a plagiarized term paper for a freshman biology class.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” —Mohandas Gandhi

Assailed by top scientists, the research was shoddy in the extreme. Population expert and author Professor Julian Simon said, “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.”

Yale economist Henry Wallich reviewed the book saying, “. . . the quantitative content of the model comes from the authors’ imagination, although they never reveal the equations that they used.”

But it is a PR world and with the publication of this book, the modern environmental movement was born. Midwifed to life in a blanket of deceit, it was yet hailed as the savior, not of mankind, but of the planet it claimed was being fried to a crisp by humanity’s toxic binge of carbon dioxide.

The scientific fraud is its own malice, but few were able to see the underlying strategy—that the book would serve as the foundation of a global public relations campaign that would mesmerize legislators, educators, and countless organizations of goodwill and would eventually set the stage for the biggest rip-off in human history. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This then was Con #1: The scientific basis of the book that launched the environmental movement calling for “sustainable development” and a reduction of man’s leper-like carbon footprint on the planet was, and is, a scam, a hoax, a falsehood—environmental snake oil.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which leads us to the second piece of the puzzle, Con #2. Who’d have thought that . . .

OIL Is Not a Fossil Fuel

The immigration officer at Sheremetyevo took my passport and studied it for some time. He didn’t say anything; he just thumbed through the passport and then looked at a computer screen for a couple of lifetimes before stamping it and grunting me on to customs.

The KGB was still manning the borders the first time I went to Moscow shortly after the fall of Communism. Letting Americans walk freely into Mother Russia without official surveillance was driving the man crazy but he had to keep a lid on it.

In fact, Communism had been officially dead for only a few months when the shock troops of capitalism started storming the gates of opportunity in the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin stalked the halls of the Politburo in horror as entrepreneurs from the United States, Japan and Western Europe tried to cut deals for every asset in Mother Russia that wasn’t nailed down. Banking, hospitality, timber and precious metals came under assault by peculiar partnerships of western capitalists and thugs from the once mighty KGB. During those early years, when Yeltsin (God love him) and his vodka were in office, it was a free-for-all.

The Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s had nothing on Moscow in 1992.

But even then, the oil industry stayed under control of the state—directly or indirectly. In fact, as recently as 2003, the bare-chested former KGB colonel and current premier—soon to be president of Russia . . . again—Vladimir Putin squashed a buyout deal between Russia’s Yukos and Exxon, the largest company in the world.

To understand the reason for this, we return momentarily to the early days of the Cold War when an isolated Soviet Union tasked their top scientists to identify the actual source of oil. Not a weekend homework assignment. After considerable research, in 1956, Russian scientist Professor Vladimir Porfir’yev announced that “crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial [originating with the earth’s formation] materials which have been erupted from great depths.”

If your eyeballs didn’t fall out when you read that, you might want to read it again.

He said oil doesn’t come from anything biologic, not, as conventional wisdom dictates, from the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and/or ancient plant matter. It comes from very deep in the earth and is created by a biochemical reaction that subjected hydrocarbons (elements having carbon and hydrogen) to extreme heat and intense pressure during the earth’s formation.

Russians referred to this oil (any oil, really) as “abiotic oil” because it is not created from the decomposition of biological life forms, but rather from the chemical process continually occurring inside the earth.

I know, easy for Porfir’yev to say. But it turns out it was more than just a theory.

Because shortly after the Russians discovered this, they started drilling ultra-deep wells and finding oil at 30,000 and 40,000 feet below the earth’s surface. These are staggering depths, and far below the depth at which organic matter can be found, which is 18,000 feet.

Interesting, eh?

The Russians applied their theory of abiotic deep-drilling technology to the Dnieper-Donets Basin, an area understood for the previous half a century to be barren of oil. Of sixty wells drilled there using abiotic technology, thirty-seven became commercially productive—a 62 percent success rate compared with the roughly 10 percent success rate of a U.S. wildcat driller. The oil found in the basin rivaled Alaska’s North Slope.

Let’s say they had a good hair day.

But it doesn’t stop there, not by a long shot. Since their earlier discoveries, the major Russian oil companies have quietly drilled more than 310 ultra-deep wells and put them into production.

Result? Russia recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the planet’s largest oil producer.

Maybe they are onto something.

Though there were papers written on this early on, almost all were in Russian and few made it to the West. And those that did were laughed at.

No more. With Russia’s rejection of the Exxon-Yukos deal (Putin did not want this technology and their abiotic oil experts exported to the West) and the access to information now available on the Internet, the word has begun to spread rapidly to the West. Still, it hasn’t taken hold yet.

Why not? This is huge. Oil is not a fossil fuel! And it’s renewable! Wow!

There are a couple of factors at play here.

Big oil has a vested interest in pushing the idea that oil is scarce, hard to find, and thus costly to produce—all of which, of course, means increased revenues and profits. This is a story in itself, but not the primary focus here.

More relevant to our story is the fact that a cornerstone of the environmental movement is this: oil is a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel that is scarce, and is in limited and ever decreasing supply. Moreover, its production creates carbon dioxide. Therefore its use, for virtually all productive purposes—agricultural production, real estate construction, auto, truck, train and air transportation, utilities, heating, cooling, communication, ad infinitum (all of them)—must be curtailed.

According to the thirty-year update of the book The Limits to Growth,

“A prime example of a nonrenewable resource is fossil fuels, whose limits should be obvious, although many people, including distinguished economists, are in denial over the elementary fact. More than 80 percent of year 2000 commercial energy use comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal. The underground stocks of fossil fuels are going continuously and inexorably down. . . .
“Peak gas production will certainly occur in the next 50 years, the peak for oil production will occur much sooner, probably within the decade.”

Scary stuff. Frightening. But as false as a hooker’s smile.

Oil is not a fossil fuel.

And it is “renewable.”

While I have never been a fan of Putin the Macho, the Russians have demonstrated the accuracy of their theory in the only place it counts—the oil field. Oil is not only abiotic, it continues to populate fields that were understood to be as dry of petroleum as a desert wind. In fact, some scientists believe it is the centrifugal force of the planet’s rotation that forces abiotic oil toward the planet’s surface on a continuous basis.

“There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” —the late Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post

So Con #2 is that oil is a fossil fuel (which it isn’t), that it is scarce and being depleted (which it isn’t), that it is nonrenewable (which it isn’t), and that, as a result, catastrophe looms (which it doesn’t) unless we drastically curtail our use of petroleum.

Lies one and all, which lead us to the granddaddy of con—Con #3:

GLOBAL WARMING—CLIMATE CHANGE

The heart-wrenching icon of a lone polar bear hovering in solitude somewhere in the rapidly disappearing Arctic has become the environmental movement’s most poignant pitchman.

The pitch, however, is bogus. The bears are booming.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Nearly everyone agrees that there are more polar bears now than when scientists first started counting: Estimates put the population between 20,000 and 25,000, up from several thousand 50 years ago. In Canada, where two-thirds of the world’s bears live, most populations have grown during the past two or three decades. Arctic residents say they are now bumping into bears wherever they turn.”

The polar bear “debate” cuts to the heart of the foundation on which the environmental movement rests: global warming.

While the Club of Rome’s clarion call for “sustainable development” in The Limits to Growth turned out to be more than a little thin on scientific credibility, and the theory that oil is a scarce and rapidly depleting fossil fuel is untrue, the holy grail of the environmental movement is Global Warming or, as they have renamed it due to the last eleven years of embarrassingly cooler temperatures, Climate Change.

It is the creed upon which the movement is built.

The scripture is as follows: The burning of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide. This and other “greenhouse” gases create global warming, which will destroy the planet.

To wit, the production of these gases must be “capped.”

Legislation to suppress their use is a first step. Population control, a reduction of the planet’s population, is the real answer because man makes these gases. Fewer people mean less greenhouse gas. Less greenhouse gas means less global warming. Less warming means the earth is saved.

Amen.

Greenhouse gases, by the way, are any of the atmospheric gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is a name for the phenomenon outlined above whereby the earth’s atmosphere traps solar radiation and thereby overheats the planet. According to the theory, these gases in the atmosphere allow sunlight to pass through to the earth, but then absorb the heat radiated back from the planet’s surface.

Shazam! Global warming.

Sounds good. Cut CO2 and you save the world.

A clearly identified evil with an action plan to handle it.

Kind of like the Inquisition—fry the heretics, purify the faith.

Today, global warming heretics are burned in the media not at the stake, but the dogma is no less strident, no less authoritarian, and no less despotic.

SCIENCE SETTLED

Al Gore is the Moses of global warming. He, along with the high priests of the movement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has pronounced that the science regarding man-made global warming is “settled.” There’s nothing further to discuss: global warming is real; man-made CO2 is the cause; carbon production must be capped. Done deal.

Al and the IPCC are simpatico on this—which is cool. Harmony in the ranks.

THE OREGON PETITION

But here’s the deal: 31,486 scientists have signed a document called the Oregon Petition lambasting the shoddy research behind global warming, stating quite simply that “. . . any human contribution to climate change has not been demonstrated.”

This is not a gang of political hacks, or George Soros–funded “activists.” No, the signatories include 3,667 atmospheric, environmental and Earth scientists; 4,796 chemists; 2,924 biologists and agricultural scientists; 903 math and computer scientists; and 9,992 in engineering and general science.

Of these, 9,029 have PhDs.

The petition states that there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause global warming.

It goes on to say that there is substantial scientific evidence demonstrating that atmospheric carbon dioxide produces countless beneficial effects on the plant and animal populations of Earth. (In one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular touches of environmental magic, plants convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into oxygen—you know, the stuff we breathe.)

SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

In March of 2009 the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works posted a report of more than 700 international scientists dissenting on the theory of man-made global warming. Several of those joining in on this report were current or former IPCC members.

Several other groups of scientists have issued statements blasting the lack of credible science behind the theory that man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to global warming. Examples include the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change, and the Heidelberg Appeal.

THE IPCC COOKS THE BOOKS

You will notice, if you read articles about the environment, that “facts” regarding global warming invariably cite the IPCC as their source

In short, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the planet’s opinion leader on the subject of man-made climate change.

Or at least they were.

On November 19, 2009, one of the largest scientific scandals in history exploded across the international media when thousands of internal e-mails were leaked exposing the organization’s blatant manipulation of climate data. The e-mails revealed that the IPCC had skewed bucketloads of climate information to promote the idea that global warming was a result of an increase in man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This wasn’t a bunch of stoners in a frat house passing the filched answers to the Geology 101 midterm around. These guys were recognized as the world’s leading “authorities” on climate change, caught red-handed in an intentional plot to mislead environmental groups, governments and the public at large about the current and future state of the planet’s temperature.

This brief excerpt from Canada’s National Post rather tells the story.

“The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

“The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

“The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world—Wikipedia—in the wholesale rewriting of this history.”

THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD

Like a cheap Las Vegas lounge act, the pernicious cult of climate change ideologues at the IPCC desperately tried to hide the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—ditch it, make it disappear. This was the warmest period in modern recorded history and is very well known by climatologists.

Trying a page from Houdini’s playbook, the IPCC created a phony graph of historical temperatures that made the MWP—presto!—vanish.

Cute.

You see, during the MWP temperatures were much warmer than they are today. Agriculture flourished and the Norsemen, taking advantage of the ice-free seas, settled Greenland. There is no evidence of a rise in sea level at that time. None. And ice sheets around Greenland were largely absent. Greenland, get it?

Temperatures soared, but where was the man-made carbon dioxide? Oil had yet to be discovered, factories had not been constructed, and the first Model T was centuries into the future.

There followed a mini ice age, and by 1500 the settlements in Greenland were gone and the Thames froze all the way to London.

There was no “man-made” factor in any of this. These ebbs and flows of the earth’s temperatures were all a product of naturally occurring phenomena, which is discussed in detail below.

But as to the IPCC,

“Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.” —The Oregon Petition

FEARMONGERS

In fact, the same mindset that is now promoting the catastrophic consequences of global warming were using the same arguments, almost word for word, to promote the dire consequences of global cooling just a few decades ago.

In 1975, Reid Bryson wrote in Global Ecology:

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.”

Yeah, baby! CO2 is causing global cooling.

Or consider Kenneth Watt, writing on Earth Day in 1970:

“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. . . . This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Good call, Ken.

There are more, but you get the idea.

These people, then and now, are fearmongers. They get some kind of perverse joy out of frightening people—in this case, frightening them into acceptance of the greatest con job of all time.

Listen to the climate chaos merchants reviewing a book by a global warming jihadist named James Hansen, who subtitles his book “The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity.”

“Dr. James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“With urgency and authority, Hansen urges readers to speak out—taking to the streets if necessary—to protect the Earth from calamity for the sake of their children and grandchildren.” —Kirkus Reviews

Calamity, chaos and catastrophe: the cocaine of the global warming media extremists.

STATS

The crisis and catastrophe crowd don’t like to talk about the fact that water vapor (not carbon dioxide) accounts for 95% of all greenhouse gases. This is naturally occurring water vapor—99.99% of “greenhouse gas” water vapor is natural. Only .01% (one-hundredth of one percent) of greenhouse water vapor is man-made.

But carbon dioxide is the anointed villain of the piece. It must really pack a punch, because CO2 only makes up 3.6% of greenhouse gases. And here’s the kicker, only 3% of the carbon dioxide—3% of the 3.6%—is man-made. This means .1% (one-tenth of one percent) is man-made CO2.

This, according to the harbingers of climate doom, is what is driving “climate catastrophe.” International conferences are called, governments allocate billions, and corporate PR departments gush over environmental agendas in a universal tsunami of green.

It’s as if someone had turned a programmed cult of global warming druids lose on the planet to shriek the horrors of carbon dioxide to a populace that doesn’t know or can’t confront the blatant lunacy of what they are saying.

In turn, the lapdog media regurgitates the chaos and calamity to millions. Their sole aspiration is to shovel as much death, destruction, filth and depravity into the public’s mind in the shortest possible time. Except somewhere in their collective soul they know . . . and they are sick with shame.

“We allow the most atrocious lies uttered by political and moral prostitutes to go unchallenged. These lies are endlessly recycled in the commercial media until they become ingrained in the public conscience as truth.” —Charles Sullivan, author and philosopher

Can I get an “Amen”?

THE SOLAR CONNECTION

I’m a California boy. I love the sun. During spring break in college, some friends of mine and I would body surf our way down the west coast of Mexico, turning coffee brown in the process, and return to campus as sun-baked bronze gods. The co-eds would swoon. . . . Okay, maybe not swoon, but getting dates was definitely easier.

It never occurred to me in those halcyon days that the sun might play a leading role in an article I would later write about global warming. But it does.

The fact is that Earth has experienced natural warming and cooling cycles all throughout recorded history—cycles that have driven temperatures much higher than anything we are experiencing today.

And what is the source of these fluctuations in the earth’s temperature? Water vapor? No. Carbon dioxide? Eh . . . sorry. Hair spray? You’re joking.

What causes temperature changes on the earth is . . . the sun.

Scientists have discovered that the sun has regular cycles of sunspot activity. Sunspots are regions on the sun’s surface of intense magnetic activity; the more sunspots, the more “active” the sun is.

Sunspots and solar radiation activity virtually parallel temperature changes on Earth. That’s right; it is the sun that is the source of global warming and cooling cycles—not mankind’s “carbon footprint.”

If greenhouse gases were the cause of global warming, how is it that from 1940 to 1975, when there was a dramatic increase in the production and release of CO2, the earth experienced a significant cooling period?

Warming periods on Earth are a direct result of an increase in solar radiation, which prevents cloud formation. Cloud formation has a cooling effect on the planet. This is further borne out by the fact that other planets in our solar system all appear to heat up at the same time. But they’re not driving Chevys on Pluto or burning coal on Mars.

This, then, is Con #3: Global warming is a vast, strategic PR campaign, nothing more. It is not a planetary temperature phenomenon. Sorry, Al.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” —Bertrand Russell

So, what gives? Why all the misleading information and climate change hysteria?

Let me introduce you to Con #4. . . .

BIOFUELS

A friend of mine drives around to restaurants late at night and collects used vegetable oil. He uses it in his diesel Mercedes that will qualify for Medicare next year. He has converted the Mercedes to burn vegetable oil as fuel.

One of the solutions to the “carbon crisis” is biofuels.

Biofuels are essentially fuels produced from plants.

There are two basic types of biofuels. Ethanol, which can be used as petrol and is made from corn, sugar cane, beets, wheat and other grains, and biodiesel which is made from oil seeds, tree nuts or waste oil (à la the Medicare Mercedes above).

Biofuels are supposed to be clean, convenient and carbon neutral. But don’t look too closely because the environmental consequences of their use are something out of a Stephen King novel.

DEFORESTATION

The planet’s tropical rain forests are being obliterated as if some frenzied Jolly Green Giant were running an immense weed wacker through the Amazon.

Biofuels are broadly promoted as a solution to the production of carbon dioxide. But a closer examination reveals that they damage the environment on two fronts: the first is massive planetary deforestation.

Tropical forests are the most powerful carbon reservoirs on the planet. In other words, they sequester and store carbon dioxide more effectively than any other resource.

Cutting forests down not only releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it eliminates them as both a carbon reservoir and a generator of oxygen. (Again, for those of you that slept through high school biology, or, like me, never had the guts to take it, plants use carbon dioxide and sunlight to make oxygen.)

But government mandates and corporate greed are pushing the cultivation of biofuels so intently that tropical forests are vanishing from the planet at an appalling rate.

The European Union, for instance, has mandated a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. This is to be partly achieved by mandating that 10 percent of vehicles be powered by biofuel. Financial incentives, which we examine in detail below, have driven global investment in biofuels from $5 billion in 1995 to an estimated $100 billion in 2010. Everyone from George Soros to British Petroleum and Shell Oil are players in this market.

As a result, vast amounts of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil have been destroyed for soybean and sugar cane cultivation. Brazil proudly announced last year that deforestation was on track to double that year.

A report by Friends of the Earth revealed that between 1985 and 2000, the development of palm oil plantations in Malaysia was responsible for the deforestation of 87 percent of the country’s forests. Eighty-seven percent! In fact, palm oil is now referred to as “deforestation diesel.”

In Sumatra and Borneo, 4 million hectares of forest were lost to palm oil farms (9.8 million acres—almost twice the size of the state of New Hampshire).

As an added sucker punch to Mother Nature, biofuel-driven deforestation has also led to Holocaust-like species extinction. The forests in Malaysia and Indonesia are home to the orangutan, Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species, many of which are under serious threat of extinction from habitat loss.

And then there is this troubling little fact: while biofuels generate less carbon emissions than oil, they are doing so by replacing vegetation and soil that suck up even more carbon. In other words, the carbon absorption lost by razing the wilderness to cultivate biofuels is dramatically more than the gains achieved by using the cleaner-burning fuels.

The “inconvenient truth” is that the biofuel craze is destroying nature, and, incidentally, adding to the carbon dioxide on the planet, not decreasing it.

OCEAN POLLUTION AND DEAD ZONES

If you have ever walked by a body of water and noticed an acrid smell, felt your eyes burning or saw that it was blanketed by a thick red, blue or green plant covering, you’ve probably had an unfortunate run-in with an HAB, Harmful Algal Bloom.

In almost all cases, the production of biofuels is accompanied by the use of nitrogen, phosphorous, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, etc.

Nitrogen, along with other toxic materials, filters downward to the water table and finds its way to rivers, streams and eventually the ocean. There, the nitrogen and, to a lesser degree, the pesticides generate massive, abnormal and very toxic “algal blooms,” which rapidly decay into huge areas of oxygen-sucking dead algae. This is highly destructive of marine life.

Corn cultivation utilizes the greatest application of fertilizers and pesticides. No surprise, then, that the heaviest concentration of these toxins occurs in the U.S. corn belt. The result? Nitrogen and other toxins in the Mississippi River system have mercilessly poured into the Gulf of Mexico creating a dead zone of 22,000 square kilometers (8,492 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey). It’s not just the Gulf of Mexico. The number of oceanic dead zones has spread around the planet like an environmental cancer.

Since the onset of the biofuel craze in the 1980s, the number of dead zones has increased 450 percent.

But that’s not all.

Species Extinction

There are currently about 405 dead zones on the planet, the largest, 70,000 square kilometers (27,020 square miles—larger than the state of West Virginia), in the Baltic Sea. Species extinction is a direct effect of these zones. In the last ten years, 14,000 dead seals and dolphins have washed up on California’s coast and 650 gray whales have been found beached. In Florida, hundreds of manatees have been killed and 80 percent of the coral reef in the Caribbean has been smothered. Seventy-five percent of California’s fish-rich kelp forest has been ruined and the problem is beginning to affect the availability of seafood for human consumption.

About 1.7 million plant and animal species have been identified on the planet. According to some reports, species extinction is now occurring at the rate of about 20,000 to 30,000 annually. Whatever the number, the endangered species list increased 150 percent last year alone. The single largest reason for this is habitat destruction and pollution, most of which is a result of biofuel production.

Makes you feel warm all over, doesn’t it?

Oxygen Depletion

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown rather partial to breathing. It brings a certain awareness to life.

So the fact that biofuel production is depleting the planet’s oxygen is more than a little troubling.

Sounds alarmist, doesn’t it? Perhaps even a bit conspiratorial. How could one of the most prolific solutions to global warming be destroying the planet’s supply of oxygen?

The oceans are the planet’s largest carbon sink. (The rain forests are the most effective carbon sinks; oceans are the largest.) It is the algae in the oceans that absorb the bulk of the earth’s CO2. That’s right; the earth’s primary CO2 sponge is the algae in the oceans.

The algae then convert sunlight and the CO2 in the ocean into oxygen.

Seventy to eighty percent (70%–80%) of this planet’s oxygen is produced by the algae in the oceans. Yet the nitrogen, phosphates and other chemicals pouring into the oceans around the world as a result of biofuel production are destroying the very element that produces the bulk of that oxygen—the algae in the oceans.

This is Con #4: Biofuels don’t reduce carbon; they destroy the rain forests and are depleting the very air we breathe. Which begs the question, have these people forgotten to pay their brain bills, are they just plain evil or . . . is there something else at play here?

And that brings us to the last piece of the puzzle and the final con.

CARBON CREDITS

I know you are going to be shocked when I tell you that the banksters have their teeth in the climate change agenda like a pit bull on crystal meth.

You have heard the mantra “the planet is a space-borne oven that is melting the polar ice caps, destroying the polar bears and turning Des Moines into beachfront property.”

The solution? Pass laws that “disincentivize” the production of carbon dioxide by taxing its use. Oh, and turn the tax into derivatives so Goldman Sachs and friends can pig out. (See the chapter “The Goldman Connection” in my e-book Crisis by Design at www.behindthewizardscurtain.com.)

The marketing folks have branded this scheme “carbon credits.”

Kyoto Protocol

The skyline of Kyoto, Japan, is dotted with many of the country’s oldest Buddhist temples. One of these ancient shrines is built on a lake. The water in the lake is so pristine that the best way to tell the real temple from the reflection is to throw a rock in the water and see which of the images ripples.

This, an introductory allegory, is to make the point that things are not always as they seem, even in the land of many Buddhas.

In 1997, an international agreement was signed in Kyoto seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions. It was named after the host city and carries a handle better suited for a Robert Ludlum novel: The Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol and a subsequent agreement called the Marrakech Accords set “caps” or quotas on the maximum amount of greenhouse gas a country could emit. In turn, each country was to then assign carbon emission “caps” or quotas to its own businesses and other organizations, which are referred to as operators.

Thus, every business in every country that signed the Kyoto Protocol is supposed to have an allowance of “carbon credits.” Businesses that exceed their allowance must buy some carbon credits. These can be purchased from “green” companies that have not used their allocation of carbon, or they can be bought on a “carbon exchange.”

Let’s take, for example, a furniture factory. The factory is emitting 125 tons of carbon dioxide per year, but its allowance is 100 tons. The factory must now cut its production to bring it into alignment with its 100-ton quota, or buy 25 credits from, say, a biofuel company that is producing “carbon neutral” fuel—an entirely different view of the biofuel craze.

As the population grows, as new companies are created and existing ones expand their productivity, the use of energy (and thus carbon-based fuels and emissions) will increase. The quotas for a country, however, will actually be lowered.

Of course, as carbon quotas (or caps) are lowered, the value of carbon credits increases.

You get the picture: the rules of supply and demand will prevail and the cost of carbon credits has a built-in price increase.

Cap-and-Trade Legislation

Moreover, while the U.S. did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, and Copenhagen turned out to be little more than a cacophonous blizzard of press releases, President Obama has committed to a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 17 percent below the 2005 levels this year and reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

This is exactly what the “cap-and-trade” legislation that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June of last year mandates. That’s right, the same circus act that brought you last year’s $1.5 trillion budget deficit has passed a bill to force you to use less energy—because CO2 is creating global warming.

Except, there is no global warming, temperatures have continued to cool over the last decade, and even if they hadn’t, man-made carbon dioxide has nothing to do with any kind of harmful climate change—nada, zero, zip.

Can you imagine what this kind of legislation would do to American industry and commerce?

To get the full magnitude of where this insanity is going, consider the British. The UK Secretary of State for the Environment has promised legislation there that will set legally binding lower carbon emissions of 60 percent by 2050. He has also conducted a feasibility study to issue carbon “credit cards” to every citizen under a nationwide carbon rationing system.

Under this plan everybody would get an annual allowance of carbon they could spend on products such as food, energy and travel. Individuals would have to swipe their carbon card every time they bought gas, paid a utility bill or booked an airline flight.

Go ahead, read that again. The words won’t change.

The British Parliament, which appears to be a collective mental disorder, has gone so far as to give local bureaucrats the power to enter a person’s home without a warrant to, among other things, check for refrigerators that do not carry eco-friendly energy ratings.

We have here a system literally going mad before our eyes.

Carbon emission limits, and the buying and selling of “credits” to deal with them (called Cap and Trade), are a solution created to deal with a catastrophic—though nonexistent—problem created by what is arguably the most well-orchestrated PR campaign in history.

The solution not only establishes a system of planetary economic control by setting carbon emission limits down to every business (and in the UK down to every citizen) but will make its creators and their allies rich beyond all imaginings.

On a tactical level, Cap and Trade does three things: it suppresses productivity and thus increases unemployment; it drives a biofuel agenda (for carbon credits) that is destroying the earth’s ecosystem, and, if continued, will destroy the very air we breathe; and it creates a massive new international Ponzi scheme that has the international banks orgasmic with delight.

Five “climate exchanges” have already been set up that deal in the buying and selling of carbon credits. The two larger exchanges are the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which is the only U.S. firm that claims to trade carbon credits, and Europe’s European Climate Exchange (ECX), which is half owned by CCX.

There is the stock market, where stocks and bonds are traded, and a commodities market where things like gold and silver and corn, wheat and soybeans are traded. Now cometh the carbon exchanges where carbon credits in the form of derivatives will be bought and sold.

And derivatives sure did a nice job for us last year, didn’t they?

In short, derivatives are essentially contracts that package up some kind of product into a financial instrument that can be traded—bought and sold. A contract for 100 ounces of gold is a derivative, because the contract isn’t the gold itself.

Banks and other entities will be buying carbon credits, packaging them up, and selling them by the trillions. This is already well in motion in Europe, where carbon offsets have been being traded since 2005.

The carbon market is projected to be in the trillions, and will be turned lose in the U.S. the moment the Senate passes a cap-and-trade bill. That bill will have to be reconciled with the House bill and sent to President Obama, who has made this legislation a key policy initiative second only to health care.

Everyone is set up and ready to go. The big banks have been investing in carbon friendly enterprises—Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup are some of the players. Not to be outdone, the World Bank has joined the CCX and now operates a Carbon Fund for Europe that helps countries meet their Kyoto Protocol requirements.

Isn’t that special?

Major corporations, including the large oil companies, are strong supporters of cap-and-trade legislation and are members of these carbon exchanges as well. Why would an oil company be interested in this game?

As generators of lots of CO2, oil companies will have to buy a lot of carbon credits. If the price of oil skyrockets, they make handsome profits from the oil business. However, as the price of oil rises, so, too, will the price of carbon credits. You see, as oil gets expensive, people turn to less costly coal-fired energy. Coal generates roughly twice the CO2 of oil—which means the demand for carbon credits will increase to offset the coal emissions.

So the oil company scores both ways. Profit on their oil and profit from the increase in value of their carbon credit portfolio.

You see, this is a market that is created only if governments (or international bodies with the authority to do so) mandate emissions standards. By doing so, they instantly create a carbon market because many businesses will have to buy carbon offsets.

If governments impose a limit on carbon emissions, the market will come. If not, it won’t.

The carbon markets in Europe crashed after the Copenhagen conference failed to establish legally binding emission caps for the major industrialized nations.

You see how this works?

And remember, the emission standards do not increase with population growth or increases in the number of plants or factories or their output. They are capped and are then lowered. Therefore carbon credits will continue to rise in price, as the supply will steadily decrease, driving higher demand. Escalating profits are built in if governments mandate the standards.

And standing on deck to become the first carbon billionaire is none other than . . .

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

It is not hard to imagine Al Gore in a minister’s collar.

After all, he went to Vanderbilt Divinity School when he was a young man—an act of “purification,” his wife would later say.

And he has called greenhouse gases “a moral issue . . . deeply unethical,” which must be why he warns of environmental Armageddon with such a religious zeal:
“. . . unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina. . . .
“Today, we are hearing and seeing dire warnings of the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization: a global climate crisis that is deepening and rapidly becoming more dangerous than anything we have ever faced.”
What do we do, Brother Al? How do we solve “the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization”?
“Cap and trade, my son, cap and trade.”
There’s just one little point that should be known about Brother Al’s sermon: if governments mandate the cap-and-trade legislation he is advocating, Al the Righteous, Al the Moral, Al the Ethical, stands to make billions.
You see, while he is pushing governments around the world to cap carbon emissions, which will force companies to buy carbon offset credits, he is also the chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM), which invests in . . . you guessed it . . . carbon dioxide offsets.
Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone lays out the structure beautifully.
“The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the `cap’ on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.”
A World Bank Private Sector blog regularly gushes about Brother Al, whose partners in GIM are those priests of Wall Street propriety, the suspender-wearing bankers from Goldman Sachs. Co-founder of the company is David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management; other former Goldmanite big shots include Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Assisting with the creation of Al’s ethical investment house was none other than the godfather of the Wall Street derivatives that fueled the global financial crisis and the star of the trillion-dollar bank bailout of 2008, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hammering Hank Paulson.
Goldman has long sought cap-and-trade legislation, having spent $3.5 million lobbying climate issues in 2008. And the bank owns a 10 percent interest in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), mentioned above. The CCX is the only U.S. firm that claims to trade carbon credits, and, as noted above, also has a 50 percent interest in its sister carbon exchange in Europe, the European Climate Exchange (ECX).
Members of the Chicago Climate Exchange, besides GIM, include Ford Motor Company, Amtrak, DuPont, Dow Corning, International Paper, Motorola and other tier-one carbon emitters. This gives them a “home” from which to buy their offset credits, but also the ability to invest in credits for the purpose of speculation.
If cap-and-trade legislation passes, the CCX’s business and income will soar. Its members will profit gluttonously.
And the biggest shareholder of the Chicago Climate Exchange? That’s right, Brother Al’s Generation Investment Management.
Amen, Brother Al. Amen.
People know that it is greed that runs through the veins of Goldman Sachs. They are in a class by themselves, plundering the financial markets like pirates of old. But what about Al the Ethical?
Do you think there’s a conflict of interest in his incessant warnings of the greatest catastrophe in human history if Congress does not legalize carbon restrictions, when his investment company is the largest shareholder in the only U.S. carbon exchange and that same company invests only in carbon offset opportunities?
You think perhaps that Al has taken on the color of his predatory partners?
Another one of Gore’s partners in GIM (this one, silent) is Maurice Strong, a man many credit with being the godfather of the environmental movement. Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange and is known to have—what shall we call them?—extreme environmental views.
Strong once told a reporter the plot to a novel in which the rich countries of the world refused to sign an agreement that reduced their impact on the environment. In order to save the planet, a small group of world leaders decide that the only hope for mankind is for the industrialized civilizations to collapse.
Strong’s allegedly fictional plot is echoed in real life by extremists of the environmental movement. Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, said, “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
And Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund, said, “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
Fortunately, these are not the views of most environmentalists. Most environmentalists are caring people who see our waterways turning toxic with chemical poisons, our rain forests being annihilated, species going extinct by the thousands, and are concerned enough to want to do something about it.
The problem is that they have been fed deceitful and highly misleading information and are seeking to implement solutions to a problem that does not exist, solutions that are making things infinitely worse.
There ARE critical environmental problems on this planet which, if not reversed, can cause devastating consequences. But global warming is not one of them and the solutions being pushed by vested interests are not only bogus, they are causing the very problems real environmentalists are concerned about.
This, then, is a brief summary of the key elements of the con job:
The Club of Rome’s theory of global warming and their deceptive call for “sustainable development” is based on junk science.
The global anxiety over depletion of the planet’s fossil fuels is based on a lie. Oil scarcity is a myth. Oil is not a fossil fuel and it is a renewable resource.
Global warming is an invention. The planet has been cooling for more than a decade, has experienced much warmer temperatures long before industrialization and man-made carbon existed—and carbon dioxide is what plants use to create oxygen.
Biofuels are not a solution to the planet’s environmental problems, but rather are highly destructive of life on Earth.
Carbon credits are a vicious scam. Financial products made possible only by political mandates, they are based on a nonexistent problem and will destroy the economies of the world while making international bankers and the global elite rich beyond imagining.
While real environmentalists do not hold the draconian views of Michael Oppenheimer or Paul Ehrlich, if cap-and-trade laws are allowed to pass, their visions of an industrial apocalypse are all too possible.

SOLUTIONS

1. All effort should be made to nullify carbon credits on an immediate basis. This holds true whether on a local, national or international basis. For example, there is a cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Senate that is high on the administration’s agenda.

Misinformed environmentalists or “environmentalists” that benefit from the carbon credit agenda are pushing this legislation with a passion born of ignorance or a blatant thirst for power and wealth.

“This system, which may sound market-friendly, is something only a bureaucrat could dream up. The twist is that the carbon market exists only because the government’s imposition of a cap creates an artificial scarcity in the right to produce energy.” —Deborah Corey Barnes, the PoliReport, Washington, D.C.

The damaging effect of such a law on the U.S. economy or the economy of any nation that adopts similar legislation is blatantly obvious and it should be derailed, or, if already passed, repealed. California, for example, has already passed legislation that mandates a 25 percent cut in emissions by 2020. No one has been corny enough to brand the legislation the state’s “economic terminator,” so I’ll do it here.

2. Countries should opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and nullify it, along with any actual agreements that were made in Copenhagen.

This similarly applies to all underdeveloped countries, though from a different perspective. The simplicity is that carbon credits destroy—economies, environments, and life. But third-world countries hold considerable leverage: if they opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and forbid carbon credits, it does not matter what laws are passed in the U.S. or EU, the carbon credits system will fall flat. It requires developing and underdeveloped countries’ cooperation, as they have the carbon offset resources (rain forests, etc).

It is important for them to understand that if they join the system and go for the quick buck now, they will make some short-term money selling credits; but as they gradually industrialize, they will have to buy them back—and what will the cost be then? The African Union has the capability to enforce this.

3. Biofuel production should be legislated against, as it is meaningless as a viable energy resource and because it creates more environmental destruction than all prior conventional causes.

4. Effective action is needed to actually protect the environment: Reduce the use of harmful fertilizers and gradually replace them with nonharmful products. (Eliminating the production of biofuel would cause the most dramatic and immediate improvement.) This would rapidly improve the condition of our rivers and oceans.

5. Deescalate deforestation by prohibiting biofuel production, which would also bring about the most immediate environmental improvement and species preservation.

It doesn’t take a great deal of insight to see the amount of control any governmental body could exert over a planet, a national economy, a business or a household by enforcing a system of carbon emission standards. This is, as one observer noted above, nothing less than complete control of the production of energy.

When Gorbachev, speaking for the Club of Rome, said, “The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order,” carbon credits are exactly the kind of NWO he meant.

Because, in the final analysis, global warming is nothing more than a PR campaign for global government.

We must act quickly and decisively. The Club of Rome has a massive head start and control of much of the media. But neglect of our responsibilities here is not an option. Not if we value the power of choice, the freedom to produce, and economic self-determinism.

Let’s put this joker back in the box and keep it there. Civilization doesn’t need him.

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Good advertising should create a response – a call, a click of the mouse, a response card mailed in. Something – interest, a reach back. At this point, Marketing has done its job and Sales takes over.

That said, it is appalling to watch the growing number of television commercials that seem to be dedicated to driving the customer away from the advertiser or their product by use of disturbing emotions or themes.
Dairy Queen has been running a commercial that opens with a customer sitting at a table in one of their restaurants taking a bite of a hamburger that is obviously burning his mouth. He quickly exhales uncomfortably. In quick succession, his napkin catches fire. The fire spreads to the table as the customer and then Dairy Queen staff go into full blown panic mode trying to put out the spreading fire.
The footage finally cuts to the man standing on furniture drinking from one of the sprinkler heads on the ceiling, the fire now extinguished.
The commercial ends by showing a Dairy Queen hamburger and telling the viewer that they have a very hot Tabasco sauce.
This commercial is supposed to make viewers want to come into Dairy Queen to eat. Hellooo…?
More basically, the message is that you can get super hot Tabasco sauce on your hamburgers at Dairy Queen. Okay. I don’t know the size of the hot sauce loving demographic, but I’ll acknowledge that there are people who like hot food. My wife is one of them. Raised in New Mexico, she can devour a jar of hot chili peppers in a sitting. You would think she was noshing on chocolate-covered strawberries. Would this commercial make her come in to Dairy Queen? Eh… afraid not. The ad positions Dairy Queen with a freaked out, panic ridden staff trying to put out a fire with a customer who NEVER shows the slightest enjoyment from the meal. Only pain. This attempt at humor, exaggeration or hyperbole is completely lost in the frantic emotion of people putting out a fire.

In another Dairy Queen winner, a young father has his infant son in one of those baby carrier / slings strapped to his chest. Exiting the restaurant, dad is trying to eat one of Dairy Queen’s new desserts when junior, fusing (presumably because he doesn’t get any goodies) accidentally kicks dad in the groin. Dad goes to his knees in pain. The kid then snaps his head back catching dad smartly in the nose. The video cuts to a close up of the dessert and a voice over that promotes how wonderful it tastes. Have these people lost their ever-loving marketing minds? How much money did they spend making and airing a commercial trying to sell ice cream by showing a child kicking his father in the _____.
Miller Lite and ESPN have been running a soap operaish commercial, which has two thirty-somethings watching a baseball game with their uncle who gets up from the couch to answer the doorbell at a tense moment in the game. At the door, he lets in another nephew, who, if you look closely, has some Miller Lite in a bag. The game turns positive and one of the guys runs out to tell uncle Matt only to find him dead on the front porch from a heart attack. The story / commercial, it says, is “to be continued”.
The acting is quite good. So is the directing. Does commercial sell beer? Not on your life. Does it make you “like” Miller Lite, want Miller Lite? Nope. In the first place, the beer is hardly a factor in the commercial. But despite the attempt at subtlety, they associate the product with the death of a sweet old man. Apparently the idea is (and this is just a guess) that the men in the family drink Miller watching ball games. The creators of this ad seemed more interested in getting a writing gig with Stephen Bocho (NYPD Blue, LA Law, Hill Street Blues) than selling beer.
A recent commercial for Mervyn’s, the low end clothing chain, shows women coming out of one of the stores with their hands so full of bags – fingers wrapped around the little rope handles – that they were in pain and their hands were badly crimped. The message is supposed to be that there are so many good deals at Meryvn’s, the shoppers leave loaded with good buys.
But what sticks in the mind as one views the commercial is a woman grimacing at her crimped, arthritic looking hands. You’d think it was an ad for Advil.
Surely there is a way to position Mervyn’s superior values with something other than women with twisted, painful hands.

A Toyota truck commercial has a Gen Y female screaming psychotically at her boy friend as she has his pickup pushed off of a cliff. The truck winds up “on its feet” and looks fine and we are now supposed to want to go buy a Toyota truck because it is sturdy instead of remembering the screaming shrew. Sorry.
There are plenty of fine commercials that deliver a compelling sales message. I have picked on this growing trend because it is just that, growing. It gives the industry a bad name. It is truism of twenty-first century marketing that the competition for consumer attention is beyond fierce.
But that does not change the basic truths of how to communicate a message that will be received and accepted. Positioning rules, and when you try to drive a message into the mind of your prospect with negative and disturbing emotion, the right communication does not take place.
The commercial may win an award, but sales and income suffer. Some forget that is our responsibility – marketing should drive sales.

There is also a self-serving truism here, which is simply this: now more than ever your marketing messages must be based on truly accurate surveys; your positioning laser-precise; your graphics aesthetic, powerful and appealing.
Cut waste, by all means. Get lean and mean for sure. But look at these times as an opportunity to reach out to your prospects with marketing messages that make them sit up, take notice and reach for their phone or browser. Do this and you may just come out of these times with a higher market share than you had when they started.

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The same issue carries an article about brand credentials, brilliant in its simplicity, by none other than the Godfather of positioning, Al Ries.

“Most advertising is mush, especially TV advertising. Thirty expensive seconds wasted trying to proposition the viewer with out providing enough of the brand’s credentials for the consumer to take the offer seriously.”
I ponder this nightly while perusing the Wall Street Journal over dinner as if searching in vain for the meaning of life.
How do US advertisers spend $250,000,000,000 a year (that’s a quarter of a trillion for the mathematically challenged) with the ostensible purpose of selling their products and services using ads that do anything but?
Yes, the agencies create and produce the ads – that’s its own subject – but presumably the CEO or someone in the client’s senior management approves them. I realize I speak heresy of the most inexcusable kind to agency Creative Directors, but here’s a news flash – ads are suppose to sell something.
Branding, the mantra of the last decade or so is fine, so long as it is not done to the exclusion of getting your message across and motivating the prospect to go to your store, or pick up the phone or click the mouse.
A review of ads running in national magazines and print media these days calls to mind the moving and powerful scene portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the great Stanley Kramer film, Judgment at Nuremberg. Lancaster, playing one of several judges who sat on the bench during the Third Reich, on trial for crimes against humanity, sits in stoic silence throughout the trial as Maxamillian Schell, whose academy award winning performance as the group’s defense counsel, tries to convince the Tribunal (chaired by Spenser Tracy) that the judges were not aware of what the Nazi’s were really doing.

During a highly inflammatory cross-examination of Judy Garland’s character (who had fraternized with an old Jewish man) by Schell, Lancaster has finally had enough and stands, his face a visage of fury.
In what may be his most prized performance outside of Elmer Gantry, Lancaster, his voice rising with intensity and volume with each word, tells Schell and the rest of the court that he and the others were aware, and asks in rhetorically outrage…
“Were we DEAF, DUMB, BLIND?”
It is a stirring performance.
Lancaster I am not, but the question applies…are they DEAF, DUMB, BLIND?
I am thumbing through Forbes scanning the offerings like a parent in search of a lost child. There is a picture of a red brick wall that takes up most of the full-page, four color ad. It’s a home builder or construction company, I think, but this is a wild guess. I look more closely because I am writing this newsletter. At the top of the wall is the word Elevate. Perhaps it’s some kind of self-improvement program. I look at the copy that would best be read with the Hubble telescope (Okay, it’s not that small). But I read it (which I would never do under ordinary circumstances). It’s an ad for Conoco Phllips, the oil giant explaining how “…where others see an obstacle, we see a chance to elevate.”
Huh?
Did they have some recent failures and now feel compelled to tell people that they can overcome them? In short, what in the name of John David Rockefeller has this got to do with selling oil and gas?

I have subsequently seen this ad in other business publications- it’s somebody’s brilliant idea for an advertising campaign. Unbelievable. Who signed off on this… this…metaphorical brick wall, this Tony Robbinsesque PR ad? I’m sorry, but what a waste. It may be this kind of executive brilliance that, according to the July issue of Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connection, has seen the “…company’s share price decline 20% last year and generate the lowest return on capital (in the industry) employed over the last three years…”
Come on, this isn’t rocket science. Your advertising dollars should be getting you a reach, a response, a sale.
I don’t care how sexy the girl, how elegant the design, how sophisticated the message, if it doesn’t generate a response that leads to increased sales and income, it hasn’t done its job. Sorry.
I close with what is a self-serving note that nevertheless happens to be true. Your ads should forward a message and a position that have come from the mind/s of your public – not the boardroom. That way they resonate, and generated reach for product or service.
This is the kind of research we have been conducting for clients for almost twenty years. If you want your ads to communicate and generate response. Call us.

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