Observe Business

LoJack Ad

Notice how it says ‘Apply Here’ not ‘Order Here’. They are creating the illusion of a membership instead of a product. Very smart.

Amex has a ‘Black’ card that all the rappers get giddy over. So Visa, in its attempt to move itself from Toyota Corolla status up to a BMW status, has come up with a ‘Black Card’. They call it being exclusive. How exclusive is it? Not very.

Here is the ad:

Not very exclusive...and a waste of money.

So where does the 1% come from? They promise to limit it to 1% of the USA population. That’s about 3 million people.

If they get 3 million people to accept this card, their marketing team will be garlanded in gold and bathed in caviar. It will never happen.

Why? Let’s analyze their marketing.

1. To catch your attention, they have a pretty woman say she likes being in the 1%. But she is a no-name model/actress/whatever. Her IMDB shows her as doing NOTHING. Could they not get anyone better? With better name recognition?

2. 1% of the population is 3 million. That is a huge amount for a card. It also shows that they prey on people’s ignorance to apply for this card.

3. Exclusive Rewards Program: They offer 1% cashback or airline points. Nothing exclusive about that.

4. Patent Pending Carbon Card: This is the biggest joke of all. Patent Pending means nothing, it just means someone scribbled on a sheet of paper and sent $1,800 to the patent office. Anyone who thinks this is cool is a total tool.

Anyone who ponies up $500 to get this card, should have their brain examined.

I like it that Citibank is accepting that not all of us are blond and blue eyed with perky smiles:

Citibank landing page Indian couple

So, here we have someone who ostensibly was able to get student loans to STUDY. And they can’t even figure out how to find out, with a few Google searches, what to do?

I also find it completely unbelievable that any collection agency would make an actual threat like that. Most of them just don’t care…they try, they fail, they write you off, and move on.

Student loans are a multibillion dollar business subsidized by the taxpayers of the United States. And like most government run programs, they rate little more than a C-. In this case, they rate an F. This person should never have received a student loan.

So I tried to upload a pic to my twitter account…and it says that my tiny little favicon is too big. I expected more from a company that could have squeezed half a billion out of Facebook.

MSN says someone loves me

Microsoft Messenger has always been my least favorite IM app. I hate them all actually, with their two hundred buttons, endless ads, etc. But MSN Messenger is the worst because it has no antispam protections. Everytime I log in I get one or two of these popups.