With Election Day upon us, I must admit I’m relieved. Not because I think a new legislature will necessarily remedy all of our nation’s problems but because I’m so unbelievably annoyed with the political ad campaigns I want to run alright… For the hills!

I’m in marketing, I understand advertising; it’s about getting the message out… And I hear ya – LOUD AND CLEAR!! My mailbox has never seen so much action, my phone rings at all hours and I can’t get through an hour of television without at least 5 commercials bashing one politician or degrading the other. Not to mention ALL the media coverage – articles, debates, polls… OH MY!!! What information are we even getting from these slanderous ads?! Just give me a good reason to vote FOR you, not a million reasons why I shouldn’t vote for your opponent. I’m all for freedom of speech but this, my fellow Americans, is ridiculous!

Just think, with all the wasted money they sink into these obnoxious campaigns, they could fix the budget crisis AND save the rain forest! In the iniquitous words of Abraham Lincoln: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

Happy Election Day!

We’ve all seen the lovely fail whale a few too many times…or like yesterday, watched the Facebook server crash. So, what do you do if one of your beloved social sites goes down?

Here at Motor Creative, we have put together just a few ideas:

1. Complain about it going down on any site that is still up.
2. Start commenting on every post that is talking about the outage.
3. Continually hit refresh until you have carpal tunnel.
4. Start a conspiracy theory that Myspace is taking out all other social sites.
5. Stock up on water and food, because obviously, this is the first sign of the apocalypse.
6. Actually call your clients.
7. Decorate your office with sticky notes and paperclip art.
8. Do real work – any real work.
9. Play minesweep.
10. Write a list of the 10 things to do when your social media sites go down.

What other ways can you come up with to spend your time when twitter and facebook go down?

If you received bad customer service in person, would you go back? Probably not, right?

But what if you just had bad customer service online or over the phone? What would you do then?

Maybe it’s just me, but I have never understood the point of automated systems. You go through 18 steps to get to an actual person who then asks you all the same questions you just pressed 3 to get through. I have never, not once, had a automated system make it easier to get my question answered – nor shorten the time I was on the phone. And, more often than not, going through an automated system has greatly decreased my mood, which means by the time I get to a real person, I am a lot less jovial. This can be especially problematic if I am calling because I am already upset about something – it just gets worse and worse the more times I am asked to press 2.

With the addition of twitter, facebook and online chatting – automated customer service has gotten a lot worse. When you are looking for help with a problem, wanting to ask a question or just get more information – humans want to talk to humans – even online.  A computer doesn’t understand idiosyncrasies, and can’t provide the answers to every question. More and more people are using the web to find the businesses they want to visit. In turn, more people are also reviewing businesses live on twitter and facebook. This means that one wrong tweet or bad phone conversation with an automated system could end up as a rant to thousands on the web.

No matter the channel, when it comes to customer service, it doesn’t mean anything if your customers can’t talk to a real person.

What do you think?

Personally, I hate most commercials. They annoy me to no end (I’m looking at you Jack in the Box, pretty much any bank and At&T), aren’t that clever and some are just downright ridiculous.

But, every once in a while, a company will put out a beaming ray of hope – a commercial that makes me laugh or pay attention! Just recently, Dodge did just that. Their new Challenger commercial is phenomenal in so many ways. Not only is it beautiful in it’s cinematography, but the messaging, the imagery, everything about it was perfect. They captured the feeling of American better than I have ever seen – and did it with class and a bit of humor. I loved it.

What is your favorite ad campaign running right now?

We all know about the iPad – the poorly named tablet from Apple that is basically a large iPod touch with a bit of Mac power added in. But, just today, Samsung unveiled their new tablet – the Galaxy – which they are hoping will not only be a strong competitor, but the iPad Killer.

Haven’t heard about the new Galaxy? Check out the launch video:

I think if everything they promise actually works, and you can get it with Verizon service, there is a very good chance that the nickname “iPad killer” will be true!

So what do you think? Is the iPad untouchable or will the Samsung Galaxy have a chance of taking over some of the market share? Which would you prefer

Last week’s article from the Washington Post on the new 6 bladed razor from ShaveMate was one of the funniest (and most ridiculous) articles I have ever read. Luckily, it wasn’t the Washington Posts fault. The humor and laughter can all be blamed on those who were interviewed – The Tomassetti brothers who created this razor and Damon Jones of Gillette. Let me share with you some of the best pieces of the article…

WP asked why they felt the razor needed 6 blades (the most blades on any available razor), and the Tomasetti’s responded,

“It’s not just the blades,” says Lou Tomassetti who, along with his brother Peter, invented the Titan. “It’s really everything you need in one.” The Titan, he explains, also comes with shaving cream in the handle and a moisture strip.

“If you go out and try to buy equipment for shaving today,” Lou continues, “it’s very complicated.”

“You might have to buy batteries,” Peter adds.

“ShaveMate is really a lifestyle change” from all that, Lou says. “It’s a shaving revolution.”

Really guys? Shaving supplies are so complicated that you had to put everything into one? I’ve seen my husband shave…it really doesn’t look all that tough. So, maybe it’s just these guys thinking shaving is difficult. Certainly the Gillette gentlemen, the ones who first started the trend of adding more blades did it for a better reason? Nope…apparently to them, it is very technical science!

“It’s a scientific approach called ‘progressive geometry,’ ” says Damon Jones of Gillette. “It’s scientifically proven that multiple blades” will cut closer than just one. Shaving with a three-bladed razor is equivalent to shaving three times with a single blade — but, Jones says, even smoother.

“We use technology that’s used in the semiconductor industry and the automotive industry to get the spacing just right between blades,” he says. (Note: Maybe this is why the Mach ads featured cars?) “We’re talking microns,” Jones says. “It’s a very deep technical science.”

Okay, now you’ve got to be screwing with me…you use the automotive industry to get the spacing right?! Now I am really laughing.

Chime in guys – what do you think? Do you really need a 6 bladed razor?

Well, the simple answer would be to avoid doing anything that these 10 brands did this year!

Using data from the two largest brand-valuations firms as a reference, 24/7 Wall St. chose 10 big-name brands operating in the U.S. that have lost substantial chunks of their brand valuations in the first half of this year. They then mixed in a whole host of other criteria, and ended up with a list of “The 10 Biggest Brand Disasters of 2010″ — those on the list have lost well over $100 billion in brand value since Jan. 1.

The list includes brands like (BP (of course), Dell, Adobe (Blame Apple), Sony, Johnson&Johnson and Toyota(recalls will do it). Each company in the list was once a giant in the industry, well respected and definitely ahead of its time. But, with new changes to other brands, huge disasters with their products or problems with their services…these brands have lost serious footing.

The question is: How can we avoid the same fates as these once-giants?

Think, then react. Almost all of the above companies either reacted to problems before they thought them through (resulting in more problems) or thought about it a lot and did nothing (resulting in nothing). There are so many ways that many of these companies could have pulled themselves out of the holes they were in if they had only reacted the right way and been involved and honest with their customer base.

Let’s look at Adobe (the least controversial on the list, but still one worth looking at). Adobe took a huge dive this year because of a few harsh words from the Apple man, Mr. Steve Jobs. At a press conference, he started his tirade against flash…and continued it in writing: “Flash was created during the PC era for PCs and mice. The mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open Web standards, all areas where Flash falls short”. Big words from a powerful man, and in one fell swoop, the Adobe stock took a dive.

So how could they have fixed this problem? Possibly by admitting that Jobs was right…partially. Yes, mobile interfaces may not need flash, but there are still many sites that use it and so having it as an option for your users is a positive – not a negative. Adobe needed to also reach out to its users and talk with them…who knows, they may have had a great way to help! At the end of the day, Adobe did nothing to combat the words, nor to rally their troops around their product.

Don’t let this happen to you.

75 years ago your marketing was entirely based on print and word of mouth. There was no internet, no TV commercials, no billboard advertising. If you wanted people to know about you, you had to run newspaper or magazine ads, go door to door meeting people and hope that others would spread the good word about your business. This meant that your customer service had to be top notch. Every detail of your business needed to be perfect so that you didn’t miss the sale for a slip of the tongue or a mistake in marketing. You had to understand your ideal client so you didn’t waste time or energy marketing to the wrong people. You attended events in the hopes to meet the right people – and when you did, you didn’t ask for their email or cell number, you planned a face to face meeting at an office to discuss how you could work together. There were no shortcuts, no simple ways to reach somebody, nothing that made business easy at all. And yet, thousands of businesses grew, improved and became huge successes. Why? Because they worked their butt’s off, understood what it took to  succeed and never let laziness or short cuts inhibit their success.

Fast forward to today – the land of laziness in business. You can send an email from the road, tweet in bed and cold call from anywhere in the world. It doesn’t take much to create a website, and there are tons of places you can market yourself for next to nothing. And all this has led to disaster for many companies. It is  more important now than ever before to make sure that every detail of your business is perfectly in order, because your customers can reach you faster and in more ways! Companies who don’t remember the past  – or don’t appreciate how to really connect with customers – are letting social media tools run their marketing and are hitting a brick wall. Social media is not the answer to marketing, and it is definitely not a solution to save your business. In fact, unless you already have a steady marketing strategy based on the old ways of actually having quality products and customer service, social media will bury you alive.

Is your business being lazy or are you using these tools to capitalize on the changing market?

Yesterday, I received this auto DM:

Really? You sent me an obnoxiously impersonal message  and apologized for sending it in the message?? That’s like saying “sorry for kicking you” while you kick the person you’re apologizing to.

The really scary thing? This person’s bio claims them as a personal branding expert…which means he probably gets paid a lot of money to tell people to send these awful messages.

Come on people, where is the common sense? Where is the logic? Where is the brains behind this?

Unless your auto dm is giving away free money with no strings attached (ha!), stop sending auto DM’s, now! No one wants them, no one likes them, and most of us want to (and will) unfollow you the minute we get it.

What do you think of auto dm’s – is there any valid reason for them?

Hey Huggies, You have got to be kidding me. A jean diaper? From personal experience, jeans are tight, not comfortable and definitely not something I would stick immediately next to the skin of a baby. They do not move, and definitely don’t seem like they’d serve their “purpose” well.

But, maybe they do. Maybe it’s just a normal diaper that looks like it’s made of jean. If that’s the case, then okay, fine. It’s slightly clever and gives parents something else to buy. I’ll give you some credit (small credit, but credit none the less).

But then you paired them with this slogan?

No, Huggies, this I just can’t accept.