I’ve written before on Dead Tree Media about my proclivity for clipping and using coupons. If you are a new reader or want to relive that glorious rant click here. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I set aside some coupons I got from Macy’s for a potential shopping trip.

As you can see these aren’t huge discounts. Taking 20% off purchases at Macys doesn’t exactly make it cheap to shop there and the two $10 off coupons are only good on purchases of $30 or more to start with.

They were sitting innocently on top of a pile of other papers when the temperature in Chicago actually fell below 1000 degress and I opened a window to finally let some fresh air into the carefully sealed and heavily air-conditioned bio-dome I’ve been living in. That’s when a gust of wind, possibly all the stale air escaping the house,  ruffled the papers and flipped the coupons upside down revealing this ugly mess of fine print.

Intrigued, I started reading through the list of things the coupons CANNOT be used for.  Big ticket items like matresses and furniture didn’t surprise me and my wife was kind enough to explain that not allowing coupons to be redeemed for cosmetics is fairly common.

Beyond that things start to get ridiculous. The most amazing exclusion has to be Sketcher’s Shape Ups, the new line from Sketcher’s that pushes the same gimmick Dr. Scholls did years ago; that walking in these shoes will tone your leg muscles. Yeah, I guess I can see that. If I could take ten dollars off a pair of those over-priced gimmick shoes I might find out they don’t actually do shit! Also excluded are Reebok Easytone shoes. Not sure what those are but I’m guessing it’s a similar thing. Luckily I already have damn fine legs so fuck em.

Also safely excluded from discount are Levi’s Dockers and clothes by Tommy Bahama. Thank god we’ve perserved the price integrity of mediocre clothing for middle-aged men.

Then there’s the list of entire departments or categories that are also off limits. Ready? Here we go:  designer handbags and sportswear, watches, eletrics (What’s an electric?  Does Macys sell toasters?), electronics, rugs, floor coverings and gourmet food and wine.

Next comes a whole bunch of designers who also not included: Armani, Baccarat, Coach, Dyson (Whoa! Slow down, you can’t just go discounting vacuums. That clearly leads to anarchy) Juicy Couture, Lacoste, Ralph Loren and his entire Polo line, Michael Kors, The North Face, Kate Spade, Tumi, Louis Vuitton and all Waterford China/Crystal/Silver. The last really made me laugh because if I can afford to buy Waterford Crystal, I ain’t clipping no fucking coupons, though I guess my butler might.

Just to be thorough here are the other excluded brands I’ve never even heard of: Dooney & Bourke (Aren’t they in the Harry Potter movies?), Ghurka, Henckels, Not Your Daughter’s Jean, Wusthoff (which should have an umlat but I’m not sure how to type one), and William Yeoward.

The coupons are good until October 13. If anyone wants to go on a treasure hunt to find out just what the coupons might actually be good for let me know and I’ll send them to you. Otherwise maybe I can use one to get a discount on a book of matches. That will help me take care of the other three.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. So shame on you Quiznos marketing people. You just keep getting fooled over and over again. If you haven’t already thrown up from seeing it, check out this little gem Quiznos is using to promote their new lunchtime meal deals:

Not only is the offer thoroughly confusing — go ahead, go to a Quiznos and try to figure out what to order, I dare you — the spot is annoying as hell. Who had the idea that shrill cats singing off key while dressed in goofy costumes and ringing a bell would lead to sandwich sales? Then I realized it is probably the same person that came up with this genius campaign:

Ironically, even though using characters that look like rats never seems like a good idea for a place that sells food, I actually like the mole rats, sock puppets or whatever they are better than the shrill annoying cats. For that matter I also like them better than the veiled sexual advances of the Quiznos oven:

Say it with me: mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm, creepy!

I am certainly not privy to Quiznos sales figures and maybe these campaigns are making their franchisees into millionaires but it seems more likely that confusing meal deals and shrill cats aren’t putting a dent into the cultural phenomenon of Subway’s iconic five dollar foot longs. So if fool me once was the sock puppets — shame on the ad people — and fool me twice was the oven of sexual innuendo — shame on the Quiznos executives — who is responsible for Quiznos being fooled a third time?

I am not a parent nor have I ever changed a diaper. I love playing with my friend’s kids — mostly because we are essentially at the same IQ level — right until they need to be changed. Then I give em right back. Quickly!  So this little insert really caught my eye:

OK, for starters it says the word “poo,” which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen in advertising before. That threw me a curve but I don’t actually hate that from an advertising perspective. It’s attention getting.

Then there’s the fact that “on the right side of the wipe,” is in brown on a background that I can only assume is the pattern on an actual wipe. That’s a little distrubing but fairly subtle so let’s overlook that also.

What finally pushed me over the edge was the fingerprint just above the coupon. It’s in brown — poo color — and reads “live poo free.” What the hell is that? A poo fingerprint in my Sunday newspaper? I’m eating Cheerios here people! Don’t make me barf.

What message is that sending? Is it some kind of new salute for parents, like when Iraqi voters had blue ink on their fingers? Do parents hold them up in public to acknowledge each other? I can just imagine two mother’s talking at the park. One says “I don’t really like Janie’s mom.” To which the other replies, “No, she’s fine. I checked, she’s got the poo finger.”

Finally, isn’t the slogan counter-productive to toilet training? Isn’t the message of “live poo free” going to lead impressionable youngsters to try and not poo leading to more accidents and confusion?

I think I’ll go lay down before I throw up.

Is it just me or are birthdays generally known as a time for receiving gifts? I always thought that was the tradition. On my recent birthday my wife, family and friends all were nice enough to buy me tokens of their affection to mark the passing of another year.

So maybe I was caught up in the moment and being greedy when I received an email message from Dairy Queen with this subject line, “Happy Birthday, enjoy a Blizzard on us.” Now I am an unabashed fan of soft serve ice cream. I like it better than the real stuff and have since I was a kid many many birthdays ago. So I opened the email and found this:

At which point I’m pretty happy. Then I read this:

Really? A buy one get one free offer? After twice mentioning a free Blizzard for me this is the best they can do?

Equally frustrating are my friends at Coke, another brand that I am a rabid fan of. I don’t like Pepsi, I’ll drink Mountain Dew if I have to but I’d rather have a Coke. Now because of how many Coke products I consume, I started entering the stupid codes they have at the My Coke Rewards Web site. Frankly, the entire program is stupid. The point values to buy anything are so high I can’t get near them and the chances of winning their sweepstakes seem astronomical. Regardless, I have faithfully pressed on entering the codes from my sodas and periodically attempting to win something.

So when I received an email that says, “A Special Birthday Greeting for a Special Member of My Coke Rewards,” I thought maybe, just maybe, Coke would come through where Diary Queen failed. No such luck. Here’s the text of their note:

Happy Birthday Mike!

We hope that your birthday is filled with little (and big) things that are sure to make you smile. Make your sparkling day shine a little bit brighter; head over to My Coke Rewards and spend some points on exclusive rewards to mark your special occasion.

Being fair, their email didn’t promise me anything for free like Dairy Queen did. On the other hand, it costs them NOTHING to give me some extra points as a birthday gift. NOTHING! To give you some perspective, a single free blockbuster rental costs 90 rewards points in this program. ONE FREE RENTAL!

I know email marketing is still a relatively new discipline, at least compared to drawing on cave walls, but how hard is this? Bite the bullet and give your best, most active customers something on their birthday. It will pay off for you I swear. For example, AMC Theaters has the right idea:

Here’s what their email said:

Happy Birthday, Michael

At AMC^® we know today’s your special day. We even marked it on our calendar. So to help you celebrate, we want you to enjoy a large soda on us, just for being a MovieWatcher^®. Use the coupon below today, tomorrow or even the next day, but don’t wait too long. After 30 days, the candles go out on this birthday celebration. Happy birthday from your friends at AMC.

So fuck it, I’m going to see Predators!

Growing up my mother imparted a few pearls of wisdom to us kids including this little nugget, “For free take! For buy waste time.” OK, I never really got the “waste time” thing and I’m probably horribly misquoting her but you get the point. Free is free! Grab what you can.

In recently came across two “free” offers that are causing me to rethink my mom’s sage advice. The first is from Nabisco who produces the little slices of heaven known as Oreos. When I found this coupon I think I actually sprouted blue fur and rumbled “Cookie!”

I dutifully went to the Nabisco Facebook page only to discover the fine print which reads, “Customer must buy 1 package of Nabisco cookies, 1 gallon of milk and any other size milk and get their second purchase of cookies for free.” Even ignoring the amazingly piss-poor grammar, I was mad. I thought I was getting free cookies which somehow taste even better than cookies you buy.

Reading the ensuing Facebook comments I learned the offer works for people with a bunch of little rug-rats that go through cookies and milk like… well… cookies and milk. Regardless I can’t imagine what possessed Nabisco to piss off consumers like me who have faithfully devoured Oreos for years but have no need for two packages of cookies and an entire cow’s worth of milk at one time. It’s not like there isn’t a free social marketing webinar starting every hour on the hour that would have explained the stupidity of this plan.

Then my faith in free was almost renewed.

I even heard a radio commercial for the offer that explains at length how it’s not a scam. It’s just free breakfast so you’ll try their new product. I should be excited right? I’ll let ABC News explain the problem:

June 7, 2010 (CHICAGO) (WLS) — An outbreak of salmonella illnesses in Illinois has grown. Health officials now report 48 cases.

The cases are linked to Subway restaurants in 18 Illinois counties, including Will County. That was the first county in the Chicago area to report an illness. There are two confirmed cases there.

People who ate at the restaurants got sick between May 11 and May 25. Seventeen people were hospitalized. All are recovering.

So, I ask you loyal Dead Tree Media readers; what’s worse? A free offer that will cost you about $10 or one that might leave you with diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, abdominal cramps, chills and muscle pain?

I remember when Joe Camel, the hip mascot for Camel cigarettes, was shamed out of the advertising game. There were two accusations levied against poor Joe. The first was that the cartoonish nature of the ads, which generally featured Mr. Camel living the glamorous life while smoking, made cigarettes more appealing to kids. Not sure I completely agree with that but I got the point. The other accusation, which I never understood, was that his nose was some kind of a phallic symbol.

OK, now on closer inspection I see it, but at least it only looks like a penis, it’s not doing any of the things penises do. The same can’t be said for this ad I came across on a train platform here in Chicago for Sprite Green, the newest version of the lemon-lime sensation that is sweetened with cane sugar instead of anything artificial.

Apparently faced with a lack of creative ideas the ad agency decided to use the bottle to represent a penis next to a pair of lips. To top it off they decided to put a white spalsh of some sort coming out of the end of the bottle onto the lips. The copy across the top, “100% naturally sweetened” just adds to the fun.

I surely don’t know the product benefits of Sprite that is sweetened with cane sugar instead of whatever Sprite is normally sweetened with, but if I am to gather anything from this ad, it has something to do with oral sex.

Maybe I should go buy some

One often fascinating and frequently overlooked part of advertising are the disclaimers that run, often in a small hard to read font, at the bottom of the screen. You can learn a lot from reading the disclaimers, especially ones that appear after a campaign has already been running.

For example, all of the commercials for Motorola’s smart phone the Droid contain a disclaimer that the word is actually a trademark of Lucasfilm. Granted George Lucas gave us R2D2 and C3P0 but who knew you could own a word. If these disclaimers came along after Droid’s marketing began you can bet Motorola didn’t.

Now a disclaimer has appeared on a series of AT&T commercials. The spots show huge pieces of orange fabric being unrolled over buildings and well-known landmarks to illustrate how completely AT&T’s mobile network blankets the country.

The spots are visually engaging and illustrate the point in a unique way. But now at the very end in small type it says, “The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no direct or indirect association with AT&T.”

Huh?!

Some quick research reveals that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are husband and wife artists who have created giant art installations around the world by wrapping entire buildings and geographic areas in different types of cloth. Sound familiar?!

Amongst other things the couple has wrapped the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; an oceanfront beach in Newport, Rhode Island; and a large part of New York’s Central Park.  You can see pictures at their Web site.

The artists donated the merchandising rights from the New York project to the charitable foundation Nurture New York’s Nature and the Arts which shared proceeds with The Central Park Conservancy. Now AT&T has stolen the idea for an ad campaign.  Silly me! I always thought they called it ad creative for a reason. I’ve never heard it called ad copying.

I realize that modifying someone else’s concept isn’t a new idea, but taking the work of two artists for a cellular network commercial just seems wrong. At the very least the campaign should pay homage to them or make a donation to a charitable organization they have supported.

Instead they get a disclaimer.

I really don’t know whom to be pissed at here…

Earlier today, Adrants reported that Southwest Airlines rejected the new PETA ad which features a hot chick in her underwear thanks to the new full body scanners at the airport  from it’s in-flight magazine because it was, “too provocative to run in our publication.”

First of all, screw you Southwest: Your airline is basically a Grayhound bus with wings that attracts the lowest rung of travel passenger.  I blame you guys for making the travel industry too damn competitive to the point where we’re all shuffling through the airport with sack lunches unless you can trick your boss into letting you fly business class.  The very least you can do is allowing me one x-ray photo of a hot chick in her skivvies.

Second of all, screw you PETA: You know exactly what you’re doing, so don’t try and feed the world quotes like this one, “Our ad is less sensational than many of Southwest’s own promotions. The airline may have canned it because the company is based in Dallas, the heart of the beef belt.”  The ad was rejected because it has a hot chick in her underwear.  I mean, damn, I think you can see ariola and part of an ass cheek.  You fuckers do this every damn time: you make the most outrageous ads just so they get rejected and then you can scream about how you’re being repressed like that peasant guy from Holy Grail.  You’re being a dick on purpose and it’s getting friggin’ old.

Lastly, Adrants… I can’t really tell if you were just screwing around here, so you’re the least of my worries right now.  At the end of your post you say, “PETA may have a point when it claims Southwest might be talking out of both sides of its mouth. One need only take a look at Hostesses in Hotpants and Don’t #$*!% Me Over.”  So, the hotpants one came out in 1972, so no, not an issue.  The Don’t Fuck Me Over one, that’s actually not the same at all… it’s cussing, and it’s fake cussing at that; the other one is a hot chick in her underwear.  Sure, they are both “risque!”, but it’s not the same thing.  That would be like putting up a picture of Richard Nixon and a picture of someone’s junk in an ad and saying, “what? they’re both dicks?!?”

Basically, y’all suck.

Just like many other people trying to stretch their hard earned dollars during this challenging fiscal time, I have become a coupon clipper. Every Sunday the paper arrives and I dutifully recycle everything but the circulars which I then comb through with the intensity of a lion stalking a zebra. Very little excites me like the rare money off baked Lays chips coupon. Maybe I need to get out more but those things are expensive.

Recently though, I stopped dead in my tracks when I came across this little beauty of a deal.

Buy a fifth of Jim Beam and get a free frozen pizza! Could there be a coupon that screams I’m alone, desperate and possibly suicidal any louder than this? Maybe next time they can up the ante. Anyone who redeems the coupon alone on a Saturday night also gets a gun with one bullet.

I really wonder who came up with this concept. Somewhere, buried in a desk, there must be a research report or a focus group tape that indicates the number one culinary choice of Jim Beam drinkers is frozen pizza.

For that matter, let’s consider the other side. Imagine the meeting with Tombstone to persuade them to take part in the promotion. I can hear the discussion now, “Well Jones, you are right. We do need to up our market share of desperate bachelors. Ever since DiGiorno went upscale with their rising crust there’s been a hole in the market you can drive a tank through. OK! Count us in!”

There are boat loads of really smart people over at Accenture, which is why I’m wondering how this commercial saw the light of day.

It’s actually a cute little concept. The surfing elephant gets an easy smile and ties in with their question about “who says you can’t be big and nimble?”

Two things… for one, they used the Kinks song, “Well-Respected Man,” which is one of those deceptive little songs that sounds like it’s being nice, but is really a swipe at conservative businessmen in the UK (and their parents). The first verse is OK, but the second is where you can start to see some of Ray Davis’ classic wit:

And his mother goes to meetings,
While his father pulls the maid,
And she stirs the tea with councilors,
While discussing foreign trade,
And she passes looks, as well as bills
To every suave young man

I guess it could be worse… I once saw a trailer for “A Very Tigger Movie” that used Semi-Charmed Kind of Life and one of the cruise lines used to play Lust For Life by Iggy and the Stooges, both are about drug use. But hey, at least they’re catchy, right?

The other thing I’ve kind of got a problem with is the line, “Who says you can’t be big and nimble?” Well, everybody says that because it’s pretty much true. Sure, there are a few companies that pull it off, but for the most part, any time you’ve got more than 50 people working for a company, you’re more wrecking ball than mongoose.

At least they’re not using the Tiger Woods ads anymore…

- Jeff Ferguson