www.cbc.ca/thenational/ : online advertising, now at triple the volume!!!

Yep, that’s right, CBC is more desperate than ever to covet advertisers, so CBC has really stepped up to the plate by ensuring that advertisers who are spliced in every few minutes will be able to ensure that their volume is a minimum **three times** as loud as the regular broadcast.

CBC has not expressed any concern about whether or not people could watch The National online; advertising, they know, is much, much more important.  One CBC correspondent, who declined to be named, fumed: “I go to all this trouble to file solid reports, and even I have to convulse away from my computer every few minutes when the ads come on.  I can’t watch this show, and I work for it!”

The Report, having verified by basic computer functions that CBC is now cranking the advertising to 3X regular broadcast levels, attempted to reach CBC officials for comment, but those officials kept saying “eh, eh?  What?  What?” or gestured via live cam at their ears, as if to say there were some problems in communicating.

Nevertheless, advertisers will be sure to jump on this serious CBC The National bandwagon—a chance to have their ads played online at fully 3X the volume of regular broadcasting.  This will make the ads so deafening (see above re: CBC employees) that even potential clients beyond the basic contracted catchment area (next door, around the block, etc., will be able to hear the advertising), too.  No word from advertisers yet on whether or not they want their products to be associated with extreme discomfort, having to disable/click off websites, and/or the known health risks and quality of life issues scientifically linked with hyper-volume and its debilitating long-term effects. 

Can’t Get a Decent Sandwich? Blame Subway’s Advertising Budget

Man am I getting sick of saturation Subway advertising.  There is no nook or cranny they can’t squeeze themselves into.  Canadian radio, American radio, TV, shows on my computer, you name it.  One ad trumpets how healthy they are, the next shows you a new cholesterol bomb they’re pushing.  That bloody annoying monkey.

What always has blown my mind about Subway is the truly stratospheric and stunning prices they charge for. . .a sandwich.  Why do they charge such prices?  Well, duh, look at the advertising budget.  I can’t believe anyone would pay $10 for a sandwich, but, well, obviously people do.  What is it that people in general find so hard about making a sandwich?  Let me give that a couple more ??.  People who eat at Subway are just driving up prices for anyone else who wants to eat.  It’s irresponsible consumerism.  Dorks who are willing to pay $3 for a Coke, when they could just go to a grocery store and buy a 12-pack for that price, put pressure on everyone else and hurt everyday people struggling to get by.  We all know how expensive staples like bread are getting, and sure I know about grain shortages and prices and so on, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the prices charged by a massive advertising conglomerate like Subway weren’t having a knock-on effect on the upwardly spiraling price of bread.  A lot happens, from field to store, to a kernel of wheat, but if you know that someone is going to pay 10 bucks for. . .a sandwich. . .at the end of the line, well, there’s gotta be room for lots of people to take profit along the way.

Now, of course I can’t cite actual prices for Subway, because, duh, they’d never publish them online.  If people knew how much they were going to have to pay for a sandwich, they’d be stunned.  I could make sandwiches for a scout troop for the cost of one Subway sandwich.  I suppose Subway would say, oh, well, we sell billions of sandwiches all over the world (and our prices are always trending up), so we could never offer a stable price quote beyond a very local area.  –but still, think about it:  what kind of business makes a specific practice of never revealing its prices online?  How does a producer sell a product if the producer won’t tell the consumer the price?  Just bizarre.

Obviously, I have had Subway sandwiches.  It’s been years, but definitely I have had them.  I remember a dismal little narrow Subway shop I went to in Toronto a few times.  It was situated next to two thriving pizza slice operations that I usually frequented.  Subway did have some seating upstairs, though (the store really was shaped and laid out just like a truncated Subway car, or a half Subway sandwich).  I’d usually use a coupon or something so I could get two sandwiches and have food for later on (I must say, though, that Subway sandwiches just do not travel well—put one in the fridge for a couple hours, and it sure doesn’t come out like a sandwich you’d made yourself—odd).  The Subway restaurant was a good place to go if you wanted total peace and quiet to maybe read or do some work on the upper level—you’d sure never encounter any other patrons, and you definitely didn’t have to wait, like you did at the pizza places.  I remember one day I read a certificate on the wall there, and it actually said that that franchise had received an award for being the most popular in Canada.  Well, that was another stunner.  I don’t know if I ever saw another customer in the tiny, dull place, but apparently it was #1 in sales.  Go figure.  Maybe everyone who gets a Subway franchise gets one of those certificates.  Who knows. What I figured was, I guess, was that because it was so comparatively outrageously expensive, no-one went to Subway.

And I suppose I hoped that was the case, and that the Subway blight that has become so universal would be removed from the landscape.  You see, I had bought sandwiches before, from the venerable Canadian Mr. Sub chain.  When a competitor in Subway appeared, I was intrigued and willing to give it a go, but the prices were so stunningly sky-high (gotta pay for that advertising) that it was a relationship that could not last.  And it broke my relationship with Mr. Sub.  What with Subway charging astronomical prices for. . .a sandwich. . .Mr. Sub got hip to that trip pretty quickly; they added a couple ingredients and just about doubled their prices and that was that.  If I went to a Mr. Sub today, I could get my sandwich on about 15 different breads (which, curiously, all taste the same anyway), but the money I’d have to pay would leave a bad taste in my mouth—so it’s probably been years since I went to Mr. Sub, either, and I did at one time like to hoover a regular assorted fairly frequently.  And with Subway boldly showing the way, through advertising to drive up the price of their products, other $10 sandwich chains, like Quizno’s, have been popping up like bedbugs.

Speaking of bread, there’s also the sheer stench of Subway restaurants.  I don’t know how they do it.  If you walk down an alley near one, or park near one, or go to a convenience store they’re attached to, you are assaulted by that peculiar and gross odor that emanates from Subway restaurant locations.  There’s a convenience store near me that I’ll go extra blocks to avoid just so I don’t have to face the horrible smell when I go into it.  I really don’t know how Subway gets that smell.  It’s as if somebody took some loaves of bread and threw them in a well used public pool and then rescued them and put them in a towel and kept them under heat lamps for hours on end.  Subway has always liked to tout its bread, but, well, if you’ve ever made bread yourself, you surely sure as hell do know that it does NOT smell like that.

Well, it’s all too bad.  Once upon a time, a person could get a decent sandwich just about anywhere for a price commensurate with what actually goes into the preparation and sale of a sandwich.  But Subway has helped to wreck that option, and they’re making sure you know, using every conceivable marketing platform available.  So the next time you feel cool for spending $10 on a sandwich you could make yourself for a fraction of the cost, just remember, you’re not just buying a sandwich, you’re buying ad space.

Necrescent Rex Murphy Slams NDP for Seeking to Replace Leader

View here:

http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/rexmurphy/story/2011/11/24/thenational-rexmurphy-112411.html

You would almost think his privately ordered Sea King dropped him off at the wrong port.

Still, good to see Rex really back.  Cough, cough, dribble.  Rex sure did take that opposition to task (never one to touch sitting Conservatives, Rex), calling out the NDP for having too many people in the leadership race while they should have been making hay in the House.

Oh, I see.  The NDP should have had a dessicated, candidateless “race” like the one that brought Jim (who’s got a chair, give me 50, give me 100, who’s got a, there’s a 200, who’s gonna give me 3?) Prentice, and traitor Pete and electric Steve together.  Or a Liberal coronation in which, in the end, a looney-tune candidate named Martha Hall-Findlay actually did use her ludicrous candidacy as a springboard to being a respected, durable MP.

Or maybe Rex, the Conservative fartcatcher, knows something we don’t know.  Rex’s boy, Harper, promised fixed elections (anyone who doubted Steve wasn't bilingual. . .).  No matter to you that Steve cut and run from that promise before the ink was dry (just great strategy, in Rex’s mind), but the next election is supposed to be _some years off_ (save another prorogation, which would give Rex another opportunity to exult at the genius of his paymaster).  If the next election is many years off, and if the Tories have a majority, and if the NDP is the opposition, then why would the NDP not want to have a big wide-open race right at the beginning?  In his desperate ideological attempt to heap calumny upon the NDP, Rex said the NDP was leaving the field open to the Liberals.  With an election years off.  That Rex, he *does* know something simple non-Conservatives don’t know—Rex clearly has it on the inside that Steve-O will prorogue again at first chance to shore up the fake “election dates” promise, a la Putin.

Triumphally touting the Conservatives, Rex observes that the NDP, by having a leadership race, gave the Liberals “oxygen” and “centre stage.”  So comical is Rex’s evidenceless assertion that, when one looks around in vain for support for it, one can’t even find his Tory cohorts sifting his excreted husks for repacking.  They were all a bit lost on that one, studying the ground for traces though they might.  By having an actual leadership race, Rex concludes, the NDP (years from an election), have given the Liberals a “critical break” at a “crucial time.”  Those resurgent Liberals, united behind everyone’s favourite, Bob Rae.  Makes you wonder what Rex would think up if the Liberals were the Opposition.  No doubt makes Rex, too, after a fifth of Jameson’s.

I guess the amazing thing about ideologues is that they never have to account for themselves.  Let’s set it up, here and now.  Today is early December, 2011.  Next time we have an election, I invite everyone to reflect on Rex’s reference to a “critical break” at a “crucial time.”  Again, of course, Rex is just mailing in his pure ideology; his public pay stub probably reads: “Tory hack: hired for Harper.”

It’s true—there have been so many entrants into the NDP leadership race that it does start to look a bit silly, and opportunistic.  One can clearly see that the NDP is thinking, “hey, we’re the govt in waiting, and I (insert candidate name) want to make sure that I’ve got a high profile when we stand on the promised land.”  Kudos to those veteran NDP caucus members who have stayed out.  But look at the NDP field so far: there really aren’t that many also-rans.  The race as it stands now shows a vibrant, eager party with intriguing and ambitious and talented people jostling for position, just like the ’84 Liberal race (the fog of that actuality would find Rex on a dory, facing outwards, desperately yanking at himself for Tory inspiration).  Still, when you look back on the ’84 Liberals (Chretien, Whalen, Munro, Macdonald, MacGuigan, Turner, etc. etc.), they do seem a rather seedy and opportunistic and old and male and establishment bunch.  The cherished right-wing media where Rex finds his home criticizes the NDP candidates for all singing from the same hymnbook, but strangely neither Rex nor his media pals ever apply that reasoning to their own treasured favourites.  Could it be that Rex wants to go up in a government ‘copter to shoot fish before he passes on?  Heaven knows he’s given enough service, on his knees.

*If* Rex could set aside his partisan politics for just an instant (he can’t, of course, for he was bred into it from diapers, and he’d never eat for free at Ruth’s Chris again), and set aside for even an instant his slanted, triple-hooked morality, then he might actually hail an engaging leadership race.  Anyone reading will note, for example, that I have been able to refer to several, just in this post alone.  No matter which party they involve, leadership races, for better or worse, often provide some of the best and only fora for contemplation of our nation’s present and future policies.

The Tories have clearly shown that they are driven by ideology and ideology alone—build the prisons, and those who have uncommitted crimes will come—so why not see what a host of aspiring politicians, astonishingly younger and more diverse and more gender-balanced than the Tories—have to say? 

Rex would never eat really high on the hog again, despite being pensioned off on the public CBC teat.  Oh Rex, we pay for your rants you probably wrote when you were a curly-headed rowing lad.  You’ve got your pension and you are not well, not well.  Go away and let someone capable of latitudinal thought take over. 

zr

Rogers, Nissan Lead in Christmas Crassness Sweepstakes

Oh, I like Christmas.  I’m lucky to live in a place where there’s often snow at Christmas, and I like the lights, the crowds, and so on.  Sure, the commercialism is soul-destroying, but for anyone with a long historical perspective, one knows that it was ever thus.  I see no point in fighting it.  I remember being a kid and wanting the newest toys.  What can you do?

Still though, this Christmas I notice a peculiar phenomenon, led by major marketers like the above-mentioned Nissan and Rogers.  Rogers has arguably been doing it for a few years.  What they are specifically doing is running ads saying “hey, buy something for yourself.”  Everywhere I go these days, marketers are saying: “buy a present for yourself.”

This does bespeak a new level of crassness.  Once upon a time, marketers did try to sell the old-timey peace-on-earth goodwill-to-all things as they got their ads going in November.  But now just about every ad seems to be NOT about buying something for someone else, but about buying for YOU.

Why?

Well, our selfishness and disconnectedness from others, even as we stare ever more deeply into our electronic devices—that’s obvious.

Or could it be something else.  Like most people, I used to shop at stores.  Now, as time goes by, I shop increasingly online.  When I used to go out to stores at Christmas, it was a weird, heady, different experience, and try as I might, I inevitably found things to buy for myself.  Now that I shop online, it’s much more targeted, with only the people I want to buy for imagined.  Oh, sure, the online marketers constantly try to make you buy for yourself, but maybe I’m just old or things have changed or whatever, but actually that doesn’t have much effect on me.  I tend to be a much more efficient shopper now, in the online world.  I know what I want for others, and I go out in search of it and buy it; there is little collateral commercial damage involving me.  Do TV and radio, and, I guess, online, marketers grasp this, and are they recalibrating to tell us to get gifts for ourselves accordingly?  I wonder.

Hey, I’m not anti-Christmas commercialism.  It just is what it is and has been for about 150 years.  But these new ads—everywhere—targeted almost exclusively at getting people to buy things for themselves—that *is* a new development. 

Well, Nissan and Rogers have really lost me.  They say in advertising, as in all other things, that all bad press is better than no press.  Fine.  But you can make a decision.  For example, my family pretty much only ever used Michelin tires.  They always did make good tires.  But then they came out with their ad campaign with babies in tires, suggesting that failure to buy Michelin meant that you were trying to kill your kids.  Well, bingo dingo, that was it.  Whereas I would have been the first person to buy Michelins for life, I now never will.  I’ve been buying tires for decades now, and whereas I would have bought many Michelin sets by now, I never have, and I never will.  I’m willing to pay more for inferior tires, just to not have Michelin.  So sometimes bad press is bad press.

Nissan, Rogers, all those other companies advocating buying for yourself above all before others, well.  I’m sure they’ll do fine as time goes by; Michelin sheds no tears over my non-patronage, I’m sure.  But I wonder.  I wonder if enough people just said: “Christ, this is enough.  This really is enough.”

Well, happy buying, anyway.  Yeah, buy something for yourself.  But if you really get more of a charge out of buying something for yourself than buying something for someone else, then maybe buy yourself a gun and put us all out of your selfish misery.

Update: November 2014: The Source is advocating that you buy for yourself first and has spent countless thousands on updating the Canadian Tire scrooge motif.

zr