what i learned today

This is kind of funny. Throughout the midterm election campaign, Obama made a joke about Republicans “standing, watching us, sippin’ on a slurpee” while Democrats did all the work for the country. He later joked in a press-conference about Republicans and Democrats meeting for a “Slurpee Summit,” saying “they’re delicious drinks.”

Now 7-Eleven is planning a new campaign, offering to cater a Slurpee Summit between key Democrats and Republicans at the White House, offering red, blue, and bipartisan purple slurpees.

They’re also slated to place a national ad campaign that shows how slurpees bring people together. 

Robert J. Croak, the founder of Silly Bandz. Not only is he the luckiest guy alive right now, he may be the most overly optimistic.

A few years ago, Croak spotted some animal shaped rubberbands at a tradeshow in Japan. He thought, if they were a little thicker, they could make a great fashion accessory. So he went to work and created what he now calls “the hottest toy, the hottest fashion product on earth.” They started selling online and apparently gained popularity in Alabama, then spread to the east coast. 

This guy sounds like a trip, and a bit overly enthustiastic, I would say. “I’m the luckiest guy alive right now. I don’t think you’re going to find anyone who has a reason to be happier than I am. Everyone asks who my publicist is. I don’t have one. We don’t advertise. All we do is viral marketing. This is happening on its own.”

Regarding product creation, he says, “You know the Dyson vacuum guy who says in his commercial that he had 180 prototypes before he got it right? With Silly Bandz, we got it right the first time.” Um, maybe that’s because Croak’s is a silicone rubberband, not a functioning vacuum.

Granted, he has all the reason to be enthusiastic — he become a millionaire from some silly bands. His company, which two year ago made $10,000 in annual sales, has made over $100 million in annual sales according to the WSJ.  Per USA Today, “one year ago, the company had eight phone lines. Today, it has 48. One year ago, the company had 20 U.S. employees. Today, it has 400 in the USA and 3,000 in China, where Silly Bandz are made. One year ago, it was selling 100 packs of Silly Bandz a week. Today, it’s selling 1 million.”

And Croak doesn’t think that’s it. Rather than a fad, he thinks this is a trend that has a solid five years to go. It hasn’t hit much of the West Coast, let alone the rest of the world.. “It will,” he says. He says, ”we’ve been planning some new products that will make Silly Bandz a household name for the next 5 to 10 years.” Doubtful, but I suppose we shall see.

Oh and I’m currently wearing four bandz. And I can’t really tell you why.

That’s an email sent by Brett Cocales, a BP official on April 16, regarding an insufficient number of centralizers that would be used during the cementing process of drilling.

It appears that BP officials performed a series of cost-benefit analyses and basically got them all wrong. We’ve seen a number of reports of the egregious shortcuts that led to the disaster. And now Congress has released their investigation.

It is in letter form, from Waxman and Stupack of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, addressed to BP CEO, Tony Hawyard. In it they cite five crucial decision made by BP that seem to be shortcuts to speed finishing the well. They are

1. the decision to use a well design with few barriers to gas flow
2. the failure to use a sufficient number of “centralizers” to prevent channeling during the cement process
   (“It will take 10 hrs to install them…I do not like this,” per an April 16 email from John Guide BP’s well team leader.)
3. the failure to run a cement bond log to evaluate the effectiveness of the cement job
4. the failure to circulate potentially gas bearing drilling mud out of the well
   (This option “saves a good deal of time/money,” per a March 30 email from BP drilling engineer in Houston. It will add an additional $7-10MM to the completion cost.”)
5. the failure to secure the wellhead with a lockdown sleeve before allowing pressure on the seal from below

The entire letter is pretty incredible and worth a read. 

Should the brand managers at Smirnoff be “holding their faces in their palms” or rejoicing over the amazing hand they’ve been dealt?

By now we all know about Bros Icing Bros, right? If not, learn about it here and here. (That was mainly for my mom.) It has turned the too sweet, too repulsive, and too wimpy beverage into an all too beautiful irony. And it’s more than the brand managers could have dreamed of.

The best part of it all, and the only reason it is sweeping the nation, is they didn’t dream of it. At least they deny doing so. While it does have a “suspicious amount of marketing architecture,” says BrandChannel, and per ad agency friends of Gawker, the meme is succeeding at “re-introducing the Smirnoff brand to an entirely new demographic in a new, insanely stupid way,” apparently it’s totally consumer-generated. It is a bit unrealistic to expect that Smirnoff itself would urge people to “try and buy the most disgusting flavored ice or a 24oz ice. Pineapple, mango, and grape are top of the list for the most gut wrenching, mind numbing, throw up in your mouth, Smirnoff ice flavors.” The Awl even caught up with a Senior Director of Corporate Communications at Diageo, parent company of Smirnoff, who denies any part of it. 

OKAY. THANKS FOR YOUR TIME. YOU SWEAR YOU’RE NOT BEHIND THIS?
Yes. We were as surprised as everyone else.

So how good is this for Smirnoff? From a profit perspective, a quick search shows claims of “increasing sales” all over the web. Even the NYTimes is on board with such speculation. But we don’t have the numbers. And though we can see an uptick in Diageo’s share price since late May,

likely this fun little game has little to do with it. The same rep from Diageo says, ”that would require an awful lot of icing…It would have to be much bigger for us to notice anything in terms of sales.” Even the Village Voice took a survey of some of New York bodega’s, which claim little increase in sales.

But sales aside, this could be great for Smirnoff.  It’s a classic example of a brand hijack - when the consuming public commandeers a brand and reshapes it. It happened to PBR, which we all know and love. It happened to Doc Martens, which used to be a gardening shoe for women. And it could happen to Smirnoff if the branding folks can play it right. Who knows, Smirnoff Ice may be the next PBR - equally as ubiquitous and ironic.  While some believe that “the perceived disgusting nature of Smirnoff Ice as part of the gag offsets any brand-building campaign,” others think they could have embraced the “quasi-ironic enjoyment of their product” long ago. I’m so curious to see how they handle this, what they will make of this, and if and how they will be able to carefully adapt the Smirnoff brand to this. So far, by pretty much staying out if it and letting the bros do what they will, I think they’re doing it right. 

That buzzing, that drone, the sound of an ”elephant in distress” during the World Cup matches. It’s the vuvuzela, of course.

The vuvuzela is a plastic blowing horn, developed in the 1990s by soccer fan Neil van Schalkwyk. In South Africa, sports fans used to bring homemade tin blowing horns into the games until van Schalkwyk, with a grant from South African brewer SAB Miller, developed a plastic one. It is now a $6.5M industry.

In 2008, FIFA had ruled that the vuvuzela would be banned at the 2010 World Cup because it could be used as a weapon. But the South African Football Association argued the vuvuzela was integral to the South African soccer experience, and FIFA dropped the ban for the Confederation Cup and World Cup. The vuvuzela has come to be a symbol of support for the South African team, and has even been referred to as a “12th man” in their match against Mexico. 

I don’t think it’s too bad, from a spectator’s view of course. For those that can’t stand it, the South African Earplug Co may have the answer - an earplug in the shape of a vuvuzela. Now that’s great.

That’s Rep Edward Markey in the BP congressional hearing last week.

I’ve been fascinated by this oil spill and the lack of solutions to stop it. You can watch the recently released videos of oil and natural gas just spewing out of a big hole in a pipe on the ocean floor. An estimate of 200,000 gallons are leaking each day. And they don’t know how to stop it? It seems unfathomable, doesn’t it.

And meanwhile we have all involved parties blaming the other. The reason for the spill was an accident - a well blowout which caused an explosion. There is a “blowout preventer” that is supposed to clamp down and cut off spilling oil in the event of such an accident. BP’s internal documents show their blowout preventer was broken - there were at least four significant problems on a device that can have 260 possible failure spots. How is there no backup plan for a device with 260 possible failure spots? So now BP is blaming the manufacturer of the device, Cameron, and Cameron is likewise blaming BP. More props to Obama here - he was angry at this blame game, stating “I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter. You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else.” Right on.

So how is it that there is no solution? BP’s plans to stop the leak have proven unsuccessful - a huge dome to cover the leak, a smaller top hat to capture escaping oil and siphon it to a ship, heavy chemicals to break up the oil. They’ve come up with a “junk shot” of golf balls or old tires, or a pipe inserted within the broken pipe to divert the oil backwards. They even have a suggestion box, and have received 60,000 calls and over 10,000 tips, 700 of which have moved on “to the next phase.” One of which was a project backed by Kevin Costner, who since 1989 has been funding a project led by his scientist brother to create a centrifuge that separates oil from water. BP just yesterday agreed to test six centrifuges. If you build it..