Topic: Marketing & Advertising
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π Don't Mess with Texas
Don't Mess with Texas is a slogan for a campaign aimed at reducing littering on Texas roadways by the Texas Department of Transportation. The phrase "Don't Mess with Texas" is prominently shown on road signs on major highways, television, radio and in print advertisements. The campaign is credited with reducing litter on Texas highways roughly 72% between 1987 and 1990. The campaign's target market was 18- to 35-year-old males, which was statistically shown to be the most likely to litter. While the slogan was not originally intended to become a statewide cultural phenomenon, it did.
Beyond its immediate role in reducing litter, the slogan has been popularly appropriated by Texans. The phrase has become "an identity statement, a declaration of Texas swagger". Though the origin of the slogan is not well known outside of Texas, it appears on countless items of tourist souvenirs. Since the phrase is a federally registered trademark, the department has tried at times to enforce its trademark rights with cease and desist letters, but has had very limited success. The slogan is the title of the book, Donβt Mess With Texas: The Story Behind the Legend.
"Don't Mess with Texas" has been awarded a plaque on the Madison Avenue Walk of Fame and a place in the Advertising Hall of Fame, a distinction given to only two slogans annually.
"Don't Mess with Texas" is also the official motto of the Virginia-class submarine USS Texas.
In 2011 the result of a public vote for the best "Don't Mess with Texas" ad over the last 25 was revealed, the winner was one created by the Commemorative Air Force (then called the Confederate Air Force). The ad involved the CAF's Boeing B-17 "Sentimental Journey" pursuing and retaliating against a truck from which trash was thrown.
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- "Don't Mess with Texas" | 2020-04-21 | 218 Upvotes 190 Comments
π Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
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- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2023-12-03 | 37 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2023-08-25 | 17 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2020-05-20 | 170 Upvotes 118 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2019-07-15 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Gruen transfer
In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer (also known as the Gruen effect) is the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making consumers more susceptible to make impulse buys. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen, who disavowed such manipulative techniques.
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- "Gruen Transfer" | 2024-06-11 | 134 Upvotes 76 Comments
- "Gruen transfer" | 2018-04-15 | 105 Upvotes 58 Comments
π Thought-Terminating Cliche
A thought-terminating clichΓ© (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or clichΓ© thinking) is a form of loaded language, commonly used to quell cognitive dissonance. Depending on context in which a phrase (or clichΓ©) is used, it may actually be valid and not qualify as thought-terminating; it does qualify as such when its application intends to dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic. Its only function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, in other words "end the debate with a cliche... not a point." The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, who called the use of the clichΓ©, along with "loading the language", as "The language of Non-thought".
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- "Thought-Terminating ClichΓ©" | 2023-07-08 | 40 Upvotes 25 Comments
- "Thought-Terminating ClichΓ©" | 2021-08-20 | 138 Upvotes 138 Comments
- "Thought-Terminating Cliche" | 2020-06-14 | 18 Upvotes 10 Comments
π 2007 Boston Mooninite Panic
On the morning of January 31, 2007, the Boston Police Department and the Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards depicting the Mooninites, characters from the Adult Swim animated television series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), leading to a massive panic. Placed throughout Boston, Massachusetts, and the surrounding cities of Cambridge and Somerville by Peter "Zebbler" Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, these devices were part of a nationwide guerrilla marketing advertising campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.
The massive panic led to controversy and criticism from U.S. media sources, including The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, CNN, and The Boston Herald. Some ridiculed the city's response to the devicesβincluding the arrests of the two men hired to place the placards around the areaβas disproportionate and indicative of a generation gap between city officials and the younger residents of Boston, at whom the ads were targeted. Several sources noted that the hundreds of officers in the Boston police department or city emergency planning office on scene were unable to identify the figure depicted for several hours until a young staffer at Mayor Thomas Menino's office saw the media coverage and recognized the figures.
After the devices were removed, the Boston Police Department stated in its defense that the ad devices shared some similarities with improvised explosive devices, with them also discovering an identifiable power source, a circuit board with exposed wiring, and electrical tape. Investigators were not mollified by the discovery that the devices were not explosive in nature, stating they still intended to determine "if this event was a hoax or something else entirely". Although city prosecutors eventually concluded there was no ill intent involved in the placing of the ads, the city continues to refer to the event as a "bomb hoax" (implying intent) rather than a "bomb scare".
Reflecting years later, various academics and media sources have characterized the phenomenon as a form of social panic. Gregory Bergman wrote in his 2008 book BizzWords that the devices were basically a self-made form of the children's toy Lite-Brite. Bruce Schneier wrote in his 2009 book Schneier on Security that Boston officials were "ridiculed" for their overreaction to the incident. In his 2009 book Secret Agents, historian and communication professor Jeremy Packer discussed a cultural phenomenon called the "panic discourse" and described the incident as a "spectacular instance of this panic". In a 2012 article, The Boston Phoenix called the incident the "Great Mooninite Panic of 2007". A 2013 publication by WGBH wrote that the majority of Boston youth thought that the arrests of two men who placed devices were not justified.
Discussed on
- "2007 Boston Mooninite Panic" | 2024-11-24 | 201 Upvotes 128 Comments
π Diderot Effect
The Diderot effect is a social phenomenon related to consumer goods. It is based on two ideas. The first idea is that goods purchased by consumers will align with their sense of identity, and, as a result, will complement one another. The second idea states that the introduction of a new possession that deviates from the consumer's current complementary goods can result in a process of spiraling consumption. The term was coined by anthropologist and scholar of consumption patterns Grant McCracken in 1988, and is named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713β1784), who first described the effect in an essay.
The term has become common in discussions of sustainable consumption and green consumerism, in regard to the process whereby a purchase or gift creates dissatisfaction with existing possessions and environment, provoking a potentially spiraling pattern of consumption with negative environmental, psychological, and social impacts.
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- "The Diderot Effect" | 2023-03-25 | 183 Upvotes 88 Comments
π Decision fatigue
In decision making and psychology, decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making. Decision fatigue may also lead to consumers making poor choices with their purchases.
There is a paradox in that "people who lack choices seem to want them and often will fight for them", yet at the same time, "people find that making many choices can be [psychologically] aversive."
For example, major politicians and businessmen such as former United States President Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg have been known to reduce their everyday clothing down to one or two outfits in order to limit the number of decisions they make in a day.
Discussed on
- "Decision fatigue" | 2020-03-04 | 184 Upvotes 82 Comments
π Banner Blindness
Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information. A broader term covering all forms of advertising is ad blindness, and the mass of banners that people ignore is called banner noise.
The term banner blindness was coined in 1998 as a result of website usability tests where a majority of the test subjects either consciously or unconsciously ignored information that was presented in banners. The information that was overlooked included both external advertisement banners and internal navigational banners, often called "quick links".
This does not, however, mean that banner ads do not influence viewers. Website viewers may not be consciously aware of an ad, but it does have an unconscious influence on their behavior. A banner's content affects both businesses and visitors of the site. Native advertising and social media are used to avoid banner blindness.
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- "Banner Blindness" | 2024-03-29 | 133 Upvotes 112 Comments
π The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle (French: La sociΓ©tΓ© du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.
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- "The Society of the Spectacle" | 2019-12-16 | 125 Upvotes 69 Comments
π BonziBuddy
BonziBuddy, stylized as BonziBUDDY, (pronounced BON-zee-bud-ee) was a freeware desktop virtual assistant made by Joe and Jay Bonzi. Upon a user's choice, it would share jokes and facts, manage downloading using its download manager, sing songs, and talk, among other functions.
The software used Microsoft Agent technology similar to Office Assistant, and originally sported Peedy, a green parrot and one of the characters available with Microsoft Agent. Later versions of BonziBuddy in May 2000 featured its own character: Bonzi, the purple gorilla. The program also used a text to speech voice to interact with the user. The voice was called Sydney and taken from an old Lernout & Hauspie Microsoft Speech API 4.0 package. It is often referred to in some software as Adult Male #2.
Some versions of the software were described as spyware and adware. BonziBuddy was discontinued in 2004 after the company behind it faced lawsuits regarding the software and was ordered to pay fines. Bonzi's website remained open after the discontinuation of BonziBuddy and was said to be a virus, but was shut down at the end of 2008.
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- "BonziBuddy" | 2019-06-20 | 111 Upvotes 80 Comments