SOTB: Thanksgiving food and fights edition

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and here's wishing retailers better success in this year's holiday shopping season than the last two:

1) 10 Awesome Turkey Recipes: BuzzFeed (via Fritinancy)
A couple of years ago, I featured the understated elegance of the bacon-wrapped, turkey-bacon combo, the Turbaconducken. That's nothing compared to this, the TurDunkin: "Turkey brined in Dunkin Donuts coolattas, stuffed with munchkins and served with coffee gravy and mashed hash browns." Yum!

From Unwholesome Foods

2) How to Make an All-Instant Thanksgiving Dinner: Wired Science

As we continue our tour of the culinary depths, let's turn to Wired Science and its quest to make an all-instant thanksgiving dinner. Apart from the canned cranberry in the photo, they were able to find all the other important ingredients in cans from the turkey to the mashed potatoes and gravy.

3) This outta be good: Indexed

4) Turkey Tussle: Slate
Slate's guide to your annual Thanksgiving arguments with three of the hot topics being TSA pat-downs, extending the Bush tax cuts and how/whether to cut the deficit. Quoting Loudon Wainwright's Thanksgiving prayer: "If I argue with a loved one, Lord, please make me the winner," Slate provides the ammunition you need to upset one or more family members around the table.

5) Thanksgiving Seating Chart: College Humor

6) Saks Fifth Avenue: 3D Holiday Windows
A few weeks ago, I linked to a beautiful video mapping show projected on Prague's famous astronomical clock. Now, here's Sacks Fifth Avenue using video mapping for holiday windows on a grand scale.



That's it! Back soon with more stories from the world of brand strategy and somewhat related topics. More thoughts and comments also available on Twitter (@martinjbishop).

SOTB: Guess the brand edition

Pop quiz week:

Question One: Can you match any of these numbers to their brands?

Some numbers are specifically associated with products and brands (like 7-Up). How many can you get?

19, 409, 57, 45, 31, 8, 9, 501, 1, 0, 5, 2, 6, 33, 76, 20, 40, 3, 711

Answers at @issue: (via Fritinancy who has three other non-brand quizzes on her post if you're not all quizzed out by the end of this post.)

Question Two: Which brand came up with an idea that I thought was just brilliant this week?

Homer Simpson Stamp by Mt T in DC on Flickr

OK. You could have had ten thousand guesses and I'm pretty sure you'd never have come up with the United States Postal Service. I'm no big fan. Still, credit where credit's due. USPS is planning to test pre-stamped greeting cards that could be bought at Papyrus, drug stores etc. That's a great idea and could mean I might, just might, buy snail mail cards instead of sending e-cards once in a while. However, perhaps more true to form, there are already signs that it's going to screw this idea up. First of all, it's planning to test the idea for 2 years (and not start in time for these holidays) and it's also going to levy a 48 cent surcharge.

Question Three: Can you draw well-known brand logos from memory?

Austrian art-technology group Monochrom wanted to test the power of brands by seeing whether people could draw any of them from memory. I'm not sure I buy the premise but it's fun to look at the results. (via brandflakesforbreakfast)

Question Four: How many NASCAR Winston Cup tires are equivalent to the weight of an Airbus A380?

According to WeirdConverter, the answer is 26,532. Which seems low to me. This converter created by AVS to promote their video converter tool. (Also from brandflakesfor breakfast)

Question Five: Which brand took the worst hit after one of the Rolls Royce engines of an Airbus A380 operated by Qantas exploded in-flight?

And while we're on the topic of the A380 what about that engine blow-out? From two HBR reports, it looks like Qantas has suffered more than either Rolls Royce or Airbus. Leslie Gaines-Ross talks about how Qantas' reputation has been damaged even though the plane landed safely and the company was pretty fast to react. Stefan Stern talks about the same incident from the Rolls Royce perspective noting that, although it was slower to say anything, it took the time to get all the facts straight and that helped rebuild trust.

Question Six: Which brand did GM kill this week?

Is there no end to this brand carnage at GM? This week, it was Mr. Goodwrench who got the pink slip.

That's it! Back soon with more stories from the world of brand strategy. More thoughts and comments also available on Twitter (@martinjbishop).

Brands in the News: Carnival, Spam and Pop Tarts

A fire in one of its generators left the Carnival Splendor dead in the water and easy prey for the media. Fueled by 4,500 passengers, many of whom have cell phones and can report and elaborate on the gory details of clogged toilets, cold showers etc, the ship has become news story of the week.

Featuring prominently in the story has been Spam and Pop Tarts which have become the diet of the unlucky passengers while the planned feasts have stayed uncooked and rotting. A typical report has been saying something along the lines of: "The passengers are not going to have to survive on Spam for much longer."

For a while, I was wondering how Spam and Pop Tarts were on board in the first place. They didn't seem like there would be much demand for them under normal circumstances. But it turns out that these were some of the products included in the food drops made by the Navy as it brought emergency supplies--and Spam and Pop Tarts were the ones with brand names that journalists could glom onto.

Overall, a bad week for Carnival whose offer of a full refund and a free, future trip is not really stemming the tide of bad press. And a bad week for Spam and Pop Tarts as well. I can't imagine that either brand was looking for this level of publicity associating them with emergency supplies. I know that, when I worked on Coffee-mate, way back when, that's the last thing that I wanted.

Keith Olbermann's suspension foretold

When I saw in the news today that Keith Olbermann had been suspended for violating NBC's code of ethics, I remembered a post I wrote a couple of years ago titled: "Why Keith Olbermann should be fired":

For those who don't know, Keith Olbermann hosts "Countdown," MSNBC's most successful show. Olbermann saw and seized the opportunity for a program that provided a forum for liberal provocative commentary to match the model successfully developed on the conservative side by Fox.

In a recent Men's Journal interview, Olbermann described his goals: "I'd like it to be the accurate counterweight to Fox. My attitude is not to counterbalance them because they're conservatives; it's counterbalancing because some of their stuff is outlandishly in violation of every tenet of responsible broadcasting."

With his success, Olbermann has become the voice of MSNBC (if not, like Regis with ABC, its savior). But here's the problem and why he needs to be fired. MSNBC is not an independent company--it's the cable arm of NBC News and it's not distanced far enough away to avoid whatever it's doing leaching back into the mother ship. If MSNBC had a different name and didn't share staff, workspace and content with NBC, things might be different. But, given the connectedness of the two organizations, NBC does not have plausible deniability. Its reputation as a dispassionate, unbiased news organization is threatened.

Tensions between NBC and MSNBC had already been running high but things blew up at the Republican convention where MSNBC chose to use Olbermann as an anchor for the news coverage. This blurred the lines between news and commentary and reinforced the impression of the channel's perceived shift to the left. When Sarah Palin complained about media bias the delegates on the floor of the convention as delegates started chanting "NBC" (Note: Not "MSNBC"). Although MSNBC has since replaced Olbermann as an anchor, the damage has been done.

There is another option to firing Olbermann. That would be for NBC to follow his direction and position itself as the liberal equivalent of Fox. From a brand perspective, this would definitely be a differentiating strategy and position NBC away from ABC and CBS. In these partisan days where fewer people seem to want unbiased coverage, perhaps it would be more relevant as well.

Edward R. Murrow would turn in his grave, a few of NBC's high-paid headcount who fancy themselves as objective, non-political reporters would probably quit, but putting Olbermann in charge of the whole show might be an even better idea than firing him.

In the two years since the original post, NBC hasn't done anything to resolve this issue. So, to me, this week's developments were almost inevitable. If not a political donation, it would eventually have been something else.