RSS feedMost, if not all shareholders in public companies, do it to make not just money, but more money that they’re gambling on the stock. We’d all like more money, and unless you’re already set up for life, don’t even think of emailing me to say you don’t. But traders, particularly day traders, tend to sit more at the greedy end of the spectrum. Having said that, when public companies are answerable to shareholders, it is usually the short term gains that take priority, with the losers being more often than not, morality, human rights and the environment.
So it is refreshing whenever I stumble across a public company which has managed to debunk the myth that doing what is right is the antithesis of a profitable business.
Visit the L’Oreal web site (yes, they make hair colour products, so don’t start OK), and the first thing you see, apart from all their Flash crap, is a picture of a wooly mammoth and a news story about how L’Oreal researchers are doing fossil hair research. In fact, the four news items currently on their home page are: the wooly mammoth; a story about how L’Oreal’s Welsh CEO, Mr Lindsay Owen-Jones made Time’s most influential 100 business people list; a story about the company’s sponsorship of a business student contest; and a piece on L’Oreal’s commitment to socioaesthetics, which they explain is…
the practice of aesthetic care for ailing and weakened persons weakened for psychological, physical, or social reasons.
The only explanation I could find for socioaesthetics by the way, was this:
- The entirety of a set of internally codified aesthetic values as perceived by most members of a society.
- That which is created through the verbal and noverbal communication of one’s everyday experiences, in relation to the level of positive consensus one’s community has amongs its members, regarding that experience.
…which is not exactly the same thing.
Regardless, 50% are business related stories, and 50% are, at least at face value, good deeds.
The other interesting thing you notice on their site is a complete subsite for their 5 Exceptional Women of Science award, in conjunction with UNESCO, sitting next to the news stories, just under the main left menu panel.
All up, it looks like these guys are doing good science, caring for people, and promoting their morals and good will as the most important aspect of the company. This seems even more significant by the fact that they were recently voted as the number one company in Europe that people would like to work for (subscription required). They’re a French company by the way.
Compare this with their competitors’ web sites: Goldwell, although they do support the Young Survival Coalition with “promotional activities”; Schwarzkopf; and Clairol (turn your sound down).
I don’t claim to know if L’Oreal are doing everything right, but based on the relatively small amount of research I did, when a company both talks up and is proud to put their ethical, environmental and scientific achievements at the top of their web site, you can’t help but sit up and take notice. It bodes well for the future of publicly owned companies and the future of our planet. And completely by accident, they also make the Blue-Black hair dye I used when I was a good corporate citizen. Small world indeed. Now, if they only did a plain blue…
While finding a hyperlink to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point for my previous post, I read through some of the more recent (May 2004) reviews for the book on Amazon. Most were 5 stars, except one review of 1 star which said that Gladwell was simply stating the obvious, and that the book did not really shed any new light on what we already know. It’s interesting that as time goes by, newer generations benefit subconsciously from the research of their ancestors, without realising that there was a time when the idea was still unknown.
Apart from the fact that this reviewer is too stupid to give an objective and contextually fair review of the book, and should realise that at the time it was published, this was a defining work in the domain, it reminds me of what I call “the duh factor”.
The duh factor is when you explain to someone how something works, why something is the way it is, a new piece of research, or some other piece of insight and they just look at you and say “Oh duh. Didn’t you know that already?” The problem is that this may have been the first piece of research to actually prove this most obvious of insights, but the person you’re speaking to is too busy trying to “one up” you to notice.
As at today, in the U.S., G.W. Bush is more unpopular than he is popular. “Yeah, of course he is!” says the person you’re speaking to, before you mention that this is the first time official polling results show the actual percentage of unpopularity being above 50%.
The duh factor. I find the best reply to someone giving you the duh, is to just punch them in the face. Your mileage may vary. Oh duh!
Here’s a great article on undercover marketing, utilising ideas from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and related research.
SCENARIO NO. 4: The Hasbro company recruited 1,600 cool kids, aged 8 to 10, in Chicago and paid them each $30 to play a new hand-held video game called “Pox” and tell their friends about it.
I read about this when it happened back in 2001, and when the initial anger about brain washing minors subsided, I started to wonder to what depths marketers would sink to, in what they’re now referring to as peer to peer, or p-to-p marketing. This article gives a few examples, but the marketers are saying that they only use people who are genuinely excited about the product they’re promoting, or to put it more directly:
“When I’m running a program for a car company, I want that guy out there to be the living, breathing embodiment of that brand.”
So where does that put us ethically? The line between marketing and enthusiasm starts to become blurred, and when people are rewarded or awarded free goods as opposed to monetary payment for their excellent promotionalenthusiasm skills, what does that mean for us advertising cynics like us? The lines between advertising, promotion and enthusiasm are about to get a lot grayer (U.S. spelling courtesy of the Macquarie Dictionary’s anti-Australian conversational English stance).
Maybe it’s just me and too many bitch sessions in the Synop back room, but I’m still amazed at the support RSS gets from people in the industry, particularly A-list bloggers, as a method for control of the content pipeline. I understand the excitement about RSS as a simple unstructured publishing mechanism or “data tap”, I really do, but not as a method of controlling the publishing pipeline.
Jon Udel for example (whose writing I enjoy and usually find insightful) implied today that with RSS, he had control of the channel. Jon was referring to the ability to opt in to a feed, which is arguably having some control of what he sees, but this is not actually having control of the channel from a publishing of content perspective.
RSS is like buying a hardcopy edition of InfoWorld. I have control over whether I buy it, but I don’t have any control over the content, the opinion, the focus, or the emotional or financial interests of InfoWorld, the authors, the editor or the publisher. I can turn the page if I want, but only when I see content I’m trying to filter out, such as adverts etc. Keeping the InfoWorld analogy, with RSS, I can only buy the last few issues, and if I miss an issue, well, I miss an issue. And yes, aggregator clients are starting to allow filtering and searching across feeds, as well as archiving, which alleviates some of these problems, but really they’re just making up for RSS’ inability to give us what we really want, better control of content.
Without reiterating this earlier post too much, we’re still consuming what the publisher has decided to push to us. I agree that the push vs. pull argument depends mostly on perspective, but when faced with a choice between media companies pushing me their selective content vs. my pulling from them the content that I’ve decided I’m interested in, there’s really no choice in the matter.
With Reuters and other big players now publishing RSS feeds, the big question is whether the big media outlets will let go of their traditional audience as product to advertisers business model, of which an RSS feed changes little except consumer perception, or whether they can finally embrace a business model where the actual content is the product, not people. Some will resist, because they know no other way, but the smart ones will make the shift, and consumers will speak out with their cheque books.
In the meantime, RSS is a safe bet. It protects the big media companies from having to change a thing. A couple of buzzword compliant data streams, push some advertising content down the pipe to compensate and invalidate the consumer’s move from the web to a reader client, and they’ll be safe for another few years. Safe as houses, so to speak.
However, give us access to their entire content database, with a good content focused business model, and then we’ll start to see the control people are talking about.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)
I wrote that last post in a bit of a dream state, only to wake up and find that sanity has prevailed yet again in that Australian voters aren’t falling for John Howard’s selfish budget. No, they want better services, not tax cuts, and about bloody time too! Perhaps there is hope for us after all.
It was Ayn Rand in one of her essays from the 1966 book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, that really ended my rather naive idealist preference for socialism, when she explained that the idea of capitalism, is the optional materialist advance of the individual, but not at the expense of others. This not at the expense of others has been a semi-guiding principle for me ever since I can remember. Yet it seems to have limited adaption by most of the world’s population.
Why are people such selfish arseholes?
I found myself in a situation recently where a person had the opportunity to gain from an interaction with me, without any loss on my part, but at the expense of others who were not aware of the opportunity. This person had to improvise a story that I would believe, but fortunately I was able to see through it.
Although sanity and equality prevailed in this case, what makes people want to fuck over other people for their own personal gain? I don’t care whether it is as simple as jumping a queue at the cinema, or who gets served first in a store, most people seem to take the opportunity if they are able to do so. I don’t. If I see someone waiting to be served for example, and I see someone pushing in front, even if I have no position to gain and the store keeper didn’t realise the customer order, I can’t stand by and let it happen without saying anything.
Selfishness is a character trait, and dare I say it, a character flaw. It helps build the fucked up greed driven world we live in, and will contribute to our ultimate downfall.
So, if you’re thinking of pushing in front, or adapting your story to suit yourself, please think again, or you may just in invoke one of my particular character flaws, revenge.
And just to piss people off, my RSS 2.0 feed has changed its URL one more time. I’m amazed at the dumb decisions you can make in the early hours of the morning, and with all my ranting and raving about how the XML logo is just plain stupid as an RSS feed icon, what do I do? I go and call my feed blog.xml. So, to future proof it, I’ve changed it to: ?c=customiseFeed”>customised feed changing appropriately.
I have this rant that I pull out my backside every so often — well I have a lot of them actually, but this one in particular is a favourite — about how surely by now they would have invented the indefinitely sharp razor blade. The point of course is that the spare parts trade, the selling of disposable blades, would collapse over night.
The Gillette Company for example claim that they have 1.2 billion consumers each day, a fair majority I’m guessing are purchasing razor blades. They’re the guys who invented the 3 blade disposable razor by the way, which I’m sick and tired of telling people is a degree of magnitude more efficient than double blade razors. Are you listening Andrew? Gillette, in case you didn’t know, also own the Duracell battery brand.
Wilkinson Sword on the other hand, actually do make swords. But they also make razor blades and gardening equipment (under the brand Fiskars, which we don’t have in Australia, maybe because it sounds like fisters), and together with Schick, managed to nab the www.shaving.com domain name before anyone else did. Wilkinson Sword, Schick (named after Colonel Schick) and Fiskars are all brands of the Eveready Battery Company, who no longer make Eveready batteries, but serve as an umberalla company for these brands as well as their famous Energizer battery brand. Schick, by the way, are now bragging about inventing the first four blade disposable razor. Bit I digress…
So the rant goes like this, surely someone has patented the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and there’s a conspiracy amongst the blade manufacturers to keep it quiet and out of other companies’ hands, so they can keep on selling us disposable blades into eternity. You can take the conspiracy one step further if you like and suggest that they’re in cahoots with the cosmetics companies, who surely by now have invented the indefinitely dilapidating cream, but I’ll leave that one up to you to explore. So I went looking for razor blade patents, and boy was that… fun.
The first disposable safety razor was patented in 1904, by King C. Gillette (for his American Safety Razor Company, which was soon after renamed as Gillete), so they’ve had more than enough time to invent and forget. Anyway, there’s 257 U.S. patents with razor and blade in the title, so that doesn’t include patents pending, other countries, or where the title isn’t exactly indicative of its use. But the interesting thing is that this is only patents registered after 1976. Modern razor blade engineers have been busy!
Several months ago I spent a weekend reading pretty much every patent I could find on razor blades, and while there’s many thousands of ways to design and manufacture the head mounting and handle, there’s surprisingly few patents on a breakthrough chemical or metalurgical reconstruction of the actual blade. There’s a fair amount of blade patents, but nothing that gets close to the covetted holy grail of disposable blade shaving, the uber blade, the blade that will render the phrase “disposable razor” completely redundant.
Perhaps it is just too hard to construct the perfect blade? Now there’s a challenge for Gillette and Eveready. The perfect blade. Think of all the waste that would be saved. We tend to think that computers and technology will make the biggest change to the way we live, but friends, think of the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and a utopian world without unsightly body hair.
Stepping out the front door this morning, after a wonderful uninterupted sleep, I couldn’t help but notice, lying motionless off to the side of the garden under some at least to me unknown variety of shrub, a man with a length of 4 by 2 nailed to the back of his head. Ahhh, my partner left me a gift, how nice, and good to know she’s handy ’round the house.
Update: first…
spangled drongo, a blog by my friend Nigel, instant expert, every-sport-which-involves-a-wheel-a-rope-or-something-very-high-up extremist, and currently U.N. W.F.P. dude, blogging about technology we like and used to like. (I was going to ask what the fuck is T r a n s p a r o n i c s, but that would violate guideline d. of my blogging manifesto, and anyway we’ve all moved on from that boom bonding experiment)