Year: 2005

Blogger made L’Oréal pull ad

Swedish blogger Sara thought that an ad from L’Oréal could be interpreted as being pedophile-like. She reported it to ERK (The Trade Council Against Sexist Advertising) and sent out a press release. A TV station commented on the story and it didn’t take long before L’Oréal had responded and promised not to use the ad again. The reason the photo looked like a man holding a child was that the breasts of the woman had been retouched (read removed). Well done Sarah and a swift and correct response from the advertiser.

Before and after retouching the photo:

First year statistics

The end of the first year of blogging is approaching and I thought I’d post some stats from my blog.

I have two RSS feeds:

http://www.kullin.net/feed/atom.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MediaCulpa

The first feed currently has 88 subscribers in Bloglines. The second feed has 70 subscribers, according to my Feedburner stats, of which about a fourth are from Bloglines. I’m guessing (dreaming?) that the Atom feed in total has between 250 and 350 subscribers based on current research that indicate Bloglines market share to be between 25% and 33%. That would mean a total of 320-420 subscribers, which isn’t that bad actually. But that might be too optimistic considering that many readers don’t read Atom feeds. My reader stats from Feedburner:

A further analysis of the most popular posts, clearly showed that information related to the tsumani tragedy drew considerably more attention than other posts, the top post more than 12,000 click-throughs. Stats for the Feedburner feed:

Rank/Click-Throughs/Content Item

1/12388/Ministry for Foreign Affairs finds missing Swedes with SMS

2/75/Swedes: “What is a blog?”

3/61/Newsweek about participatory journalism

4/59/Check out Global PR Blog Week 1.0 next week

5/58/Timbro in the blogosphere #4

6/55/PR blogging in Iran

7/54/BitTorrent video files from the tsunami

8/48/RSS to be included in Apple’s browser Safari

9/42/Accusations of plagiarism at Dagens Nyheter

10/42/Mother in photos survived tsunami

Unique visitors/page views on the web page (stats from April 2004 and onwards:

April: 274/299

May: 1,696/2,221

June: 1,829/2,410

July: 1,653/2,028

August: 3,021/3,737

September: 3,602/4,675

October: 2,952/3,847

November: 6,389/8,955

December: 12,194/14,919

January: 9,797/11,586 (Jan 1 – Jan 25)

Total: 43,483/54,780

Average per day: 119/150

Top referrers:

PR Opinions 113

Technorati 79

Micro Persuasion 59

2005: The Year of the Lawyer

Giovanni Rodriguez, vice president at Eastwick Communications predicts that lawyers will be the focal point of 2005 due to the unknown territory that new media constitutes.

With the rapid emergence of new media (blogs, wikis and other tools), marketers are now confronting an unprecedented number of questions about the law, technology and marketing reform. […] More than anyone, the American lawyer will take center stage in 2005, sweating and vetting the biggest questions of the year — and taking and receiving the biggest rewards and punishments.

His top 10 predictions for 2005 include The rise of citizen journalism, Marketing gets transparent and Open-source marketing. I second that.

The tyranny of choice

Commuter reading: more on the tyranny of choice.

“Maximizers,” people whose goal is to get the best possible result when they make decisions and “satisficers,” people who seek only “good enough” results from their choices, are the ones that are most troubled by an abundance of choice. [From Feb, 2004]

MoJo: the press aren’t connecting the dots

MotherJones.com writes about George W. Bush’s inaugural address and apart from the political comments, the article is a ruthless dressing-down of the American press.

“In a world where Gaia — the Earth as a single throbbing organism — is already a cliché; where “globalization” remains a buzzword; and where we happen to be ruled by the greatest geopolitical dreamers and gamblers in our history, our demobilized media treats the world, if at all, as a set of hopeless fragments and just doesn’t consider puzzling them together part of the job description. If you want to grasp our world as it is, you might actually have to click off that TV, use your local paper to wrap the fish, and head for the Internet.”

The Swedish Language Council dilutes the Jeep brand

The Swedish Language Council call themselves “the official language cultivation body of Sweden” and it has “no legal powers but fulfil their task through recommendations”. That means that whatever use of the Swedish language the Council recommends, most official bodies and media will conform to it. However, one of the Council’s recommendations on how to use the Swedish language is very unlucky, namely the translation of SUV to Swedish, which is translated to stadsjeep, or “city jeep”.

One could argue that it infringes on a company’s immaterial assets, in a way that might degenerate the Jeep brand name. I’ve been posting about this before, without much reaction.

On the Council’s website there is a FAQ section which contain the very question on how to translate SUV.

In Swedish:

Fråga:

Hur skriver man biltypen SUV så att alla förstår vad som menas?

Svar:

Skriv stadsjeep.

SUV av eng. Sport Utility Vehicle är onödigt att införa.

In English:

Question:

How do you write the type of car called SUV so that everyone will understand what you mean?

Answer:

Write stadsjeep/city jeep.

SUV from English Sport Utility Vehicle is unnecessary to introduce.

I think they are wrong for two reasons. First, regarding the word “stad” (city). A survey by Bil Sweden showed that SUV’s are predominantly not bought by people in the city, so the term city jeep makes little sense. Second, Jeep is a registered trademark by DaimlerChrysler and it can’t simultaneously be a registered trademark, and a generic term in the same product category.

Recently some Swedish media have started to use the term suv (pl. suvar) which is more appropriate. I could learn to use that term and hopefully the Swedish Language Council could reconsider before SUV Expo in Täby in april when a lot of media will report about “suvar”.