Tag: branding

I try not to wish death unto others

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As we get older, sometimes we try to be a little more cognizant of the things we say, even in knee-jerk reactions or the heat of moments.  When I was a moody teenager who hated everything, I was pretty quick to wish death unto others, for the most minor and inconsequential of circumstances.  Cut me off in traffic?  I hope you blow a flat and crash to your death.  Take my parking space?  I hope you become collateral damage to an MS-13 drive-by.  Beat me in Street Fighter by chip damage?  I hope you have heart attack and keel over you fat cheap fuck.

Yeah, death is a little bit extreme when it comes to momentary lapses in judgment of gauging the value of life.  I’d really be kind of disappointed if I ever wished death unto another human being, and then it actually happened.  And although the chances of such are microscopically minuscule and would obviously be the perfect storm of freak circumstances and not because I mentally wished it upon them, it really does make me think twice about even absent-mindedly, wishing death unto others, especially for overall trivial matters.

These days, I just wish diarrhea unto people who piss me off.  Like, really bad liquid shits, that alter an afternoon, or ruin a night’s sleep; just a temporary dull pain with inconvenient side effects.  It seems like an adequate amount of comeuppance to mentally wish to inflict on other human beings who piss me off.  Take too long to order at Willy’s?  Clog up the self-checkout at Publix?  Aggressively whip around four lanes of traffic to ultimately end up one car length ahead of me?   Be the shitheads sitting in row 25+ on a flight that rushes up to row 23 to get off ten seconds sooner, and ruin the entire deplaning process?  Yeah, I wish diarrhea unto all these asshole motherfuckers.  The more severe shits depending on how insufferable their actions are.  One really bad episode, or nuclear shits that come back several times.

However, there are admittedly still some instances where my frustration bubbles over, and I still fantasize about some horrific death occurring, as much as I don’t really want to admit it.  One is very specific, to when the perfect storm of human beings all spawning on every single toilet in the gym/office when I really have to go; seriously I rarely feel as enraged as I do when I feel the need to relieve myself, but every single stall in the numerous bathroom options I have are all occupied, regardless of the fact that it’s sometimes very early in the morning at times in which I deliberately choose to workout, banking on the early time reducing the amount of people that are present.

The last time this happened, I wanted to a meteor to fall onto the building.  If I can’t use a crapper, then nobody should. 🙁

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I guess someone had to jump off the cliff to pioneer some change

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m at the gym and in between some dumbbell presses, I look up at the television and see a headline scroll across saying “Tesla Truck Breaks the Internet.”  And then suddenly, this thing shows up on screen, and my knee-jerk reaction is something that looks like a cross between the Pyramid Head helmet with wheels, and one of the numerous one-trick wedge-shaped robots from Robot Wars that won matches solely by wedging themselves under the competition and upending them.

But ultimately, my eyebrow scrunched and I mouthed “what the fuck” at what I was seeing, because it was without question the most radically designed automobile that I’ve seen designed that wasn’t CG from Test Track in Disney World.

Look, I get that I often fall into the category of being reluctant to accept change, and I often police myself to try and be open-minded to new and radical things that come to fruition these days.  But seriously, Tesla’s Cybertruck is pushing the boundaries of accepting change for the sake of change, or because they really think that they’re making something that is going to make a difference in the long run.

I mean, as an automobile manufacturer, I think Tesla is really cool.  My wife wants a Tesla Model 3/S/X like nobody else’s business, and from an environmental standpoint, it’s incredible that there’s a car that’s 100% electric, produces zero emissions, AND doesn’t look like a glorified Mario Kart, AND gets outstanding performance.

But the Cybertruck takes a lot of that equity and flushes it down the toilet.  Although the internet wasted zero time at all making the comparison, it really does feel like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer finds out he has a long-lost brother Herb, who’s a successful automotive mogul, but then entrusts Homer with designing the car of the future, which results in this abomination, and to make matters worse the production costs of it ended up bankrupting the company.  It’s like Elon Musk entrusted his long-lost American brother Jimbo Musk to create the pickup truck that Americans wanted, and they ended up with the Cybertruck.

Seriously, “special” is really the only way to describe the Cybertruck, but now without one of those pregnant hesitations before saying the word special, as if to imply that what you’re really trying to say is retarded, but can’t because it’s politically incorrect to be using the R-word these days.  Based on how difficult it is to delineate what side is front and which side is the back, it reminds me of the Tyco Rebound RC cars that could go in either direction and could even flip upside down and still function.

The bottom line is that I understand that someone needs to be the first, when it comes to attempting to break new ground, but I would’ve thought Tesla would’ve been a little more conservative when it came to trying to make waves than this.  The Cybertruck not only doesn’t even look like a truck, but instead it looks like the kind of imaginative fantasy vehicles that children draw on construction paper with crayons.  But actually rendered and built in reality, it’s a cringey abomination of a turd on wheels that really makes me wonder what Tesla’s strategy is; no press is bad press, or do they actually think this actually has a chance of exploding in the market?

When the venue becomes more notorious than the team

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Apple News seems to know to look more for stories that have the capability to entertain instead of just depress me with the shitty way the world is.  That being said, I came across this story about how the American Airlines Arena in Miami were foregoing their partnership with the venue, and that the naming rights for the building were up for grabs.  And among the numerous companies that would love to slap their name on a building and be THE home of the Miami Heat, one rose to the top of the heap, in terms of intrigue, interest and sheer entertainment potential.

Bang Bros, the pornographic website, has apparently put together a very serious proposal and ponied up a ten million dollar bid in order to acquire the rights to the venue, hoping to name the place the Bang Bros Center.  To which it doesn’t take a 17-year old to realize that that would make it the BBC, which most certainly doesn’t represent the acronym for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Needless to say, despite the fact that there is probably a 100% chance this will never happen, no matter how seriously and legitimately Bang Bros presents their proposal, I have to say that this one of the more funny and classic attempts for a pornographic company trying to crawl out of the dark and dirty recesses of the internet and into something physical and tangible, and in this case, really, really huge.

The funny thing to me is that there aren’t a ton of cities that could probably be more likely to get away with smut like this, but I’d have to put Miami up there as one that could.  It’s a city full of vapid and superficial people, a ton of men and women who look like they’d be in Bang Bros’s library somewhere, and the general culture of Miami is pretty loose and probably where a ton of porn is shot anyway.  And the majority of people who go to Heat games are probably a more concentrated sample of the culture, considering the ludicrous price of going to NBA games, and that they’re places for people to show off more than actually watch basketball.

But of course this isn’t going to happen.  No city in their right mind would sell out their treasured sports venue to a pornographic website, no matter how much money they’d offer up.  Primarily due to antiquated beliefs like “for the kids” and general integrity, and not just the fact that aside from Bang Bros, there are probably other, more boring and square companies with deep pockets are probably more than willing to +$1 anything Bang Bros comes to the table with.

But let’s be real here; there is a rare opportunity in this where a venue could become way more newsworthy than the team(s) that play in it.  Like, it wouldn’t matter if the Miami Heat had the 1992 Dream Team starting or the shitty roster called Team USA that just lost two straight international games, the product on the court wouldn’t come close to garnering the attention that the name outside the building would.  And in that regard, that’s about the greatest blessing a franchise could possibly want, where it wouldn’t matter if the Heat had to hit the ceiling of the salary cap or not, people would still show up to the BBC, just because all dudes and their bimbo dates just want the kick of going to a place called the BBC.

Shit, even I’d considering actually going back down to Miami and foregoing a baseball game for a night, just so I could go to the BBC and take a hundred sniggering Boooker T mugshot face selfies, just so I could boast on social media and/or my brog about how I visited the BBC.  And surely, I can’t be the only dude on the planet that would feel the same way.

As far as I’m concerned, the fact that this is all but guaranteed to fall through, seems like one of the more tragic decisions of foregoing great profitability in the name trying to operate business with a modicum of integrity.  Last time I checked, I didn’t realize those things were so mutually exclusive.

Unsurprisingly lame

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BB&T and SunTrust banks choose their united name: Truist.

I mean, I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised that this ended up being something as lame as this.  Fewer things in the world are as square and soullessly uncool as the entire banking industry.  I mean, it’s an industry that’s basically built on storing the money of people that are not themselves, and finding every single possible way to take cuts and slices from them in order to profit.

I even yawned heartily while typing out that line, that’s how lame the whole concept of banking is.  I can’t believe I worked in the industry as long as I did, and in some degree of retrospect, I kind of have to thank them for being the tools they are and laying me, as well as my entire department off, because they kind of did me a favor of getting out of the banking industry.  I mean seriously, it paid the bills pretty well, and I would’ve have free parking for years during Dragon*Con, but I have to say that it wasn’t a whole lot of fun saying I worked for SunTrust; as large as it was in Georgia and the eastern seaboard, it was still a regional bank and it was the equivalent of saying that I worked for like, Habib’s Fuel & Automotive in the grander spectrum of the world.

But back to the point at hand, with the name of the unholy union being established, that means that without any further question, the home of the Atlanta Braves is soon to become Truist Park.  I had to wiki it to make sure that it was going to be the de facto lamest name in all of Major League Baseball, but since I’ve completed my quest to visit all 30, I’ve fallen a little to the wayside when it comes to ballpark names.  And as gargantuan-ly lame as Truist Park is, I think there is some stiff competition when it comes to comparing to Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago White Sox, replacing “The Cell” US Cellular Field (the worst park in MLB)) and RingCentral Coliseum (Oakland A’s, who are always plagued with bad names).  Ultimately, it’s like comparing herpes to chlamydia and gonorrhea, because no matter which name you have, it sucks.

Given the propensity of the Atlanta Braves to always go in the direction of profit > style, it’s no surprise that they’re going to be perfectly at home playing at a place called something as boring, vanilla and lame as Truist Park.  But damn if they aren’t going to get rich cashing in on those naming rights, despite the fact that the product on the field isn’t going to benefit one iota from said proceeds.  A bunch of old white guys need to take their slice of the pie first, as well as their seconds, before the Braves have any chance at possibly getting a little bit of forward investment to maybe succeed. 

I hear winning is pretty lucrative, but the risk-averse Braves don’t really seem the type to risk possibly finding out.  But misery loves company, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that pretty much any team not the Houston Astros seems pretty content on sitting on cruise control and cashing in on revenue sharing, and if they happen to win, great, but if not, that’s perfectly okay as well.  Fuck that, and fuck Truist Bank.  Need to figure out a simplistic and punny name for the new park, because “ScumTrust” is running out of time.

I’d be all in if this actually happened

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

All.  In.  If the Braves were to rename the ballpark after Waffle House.  100%.  Maybe even get a season ticket package of some sort.  It would be the perfect catalyst for anyone to go balls deep into, or back into Atlanta Braves fandom, because the time couldn’t possibly be more appropriate given the talent movement going on with the club right now.  I just need a little push, or a little nudge.. or just that slight positive association of the greasy spoons where I’ve never had a bad meal in my life where I could feel comfort knowing that the restaurant I like to go to the most after drinking is partnered up with the sports franchise that makes me want to drink.

Although the possibility of something like Waffle House Field coming to fruition is like as likely as my job not sucking any time soon, the logic behind the really is a solid.  I didn’t think for a second that upon the collection of ScumTrust by BB&T, that the conglomerate would even consider for two seconds to give up the naming rights to ScumTrust Park.  I just, and still assume that whenever the transition is complete, it’s just going to remain something as soulless and corporately square like “BB&T Park” and continue existing as the vanilla mass of land in which baseball is occasionally played while they soak in accolades and praise from equally square and vanilla white people who think they know something about architecture with character.

But imagine a world in which the Scum&T blob decided that paying the Braves millions of dollars to slap their name on a stadium that exists outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.  Or the Braves actually growing a spine and deciding that it would be nice if their ballpark were named after an actual Georgia company, instead of a banking company that turned tail and ran towards the money.  What better business would there be to take the keys to the ballpark than Waffle House?  Sure, Coca-Cola comes to mind, as does Delta Airlines or The Home Depot.  And as Oprah-rich as those businesses are, they’re still businesses that some people still have to stop and think about to remember that they’re companies based out of Atlanta.  Waffle House is definitively, a symbol of the south, which is something that the Braves often try to declare themselves, regardless of the cultural clash between representing the south versus hoarding money like a true Wall Street grub.

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Bless your heart, Pepsi

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I get the whole “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” adage, and to a degree it’s not wrong.  But one of the more modern trends of today that I think is often times stupid and ultimately pointless, is the ideas of brands using social media to communicate amongst each other as if they were sentient individuals.  Sure, it can be amusing for two seconds to see McDonald’s take swipes at Burger King, Burger King take swipes at Taco Bell and Wendy’s taking swipes at everyone, but when the day is over, it’s still a person behind a keyboard roleplaying as an entire company, trying to get personal with another person roleplaying as another company behind another keyboard somewhere out there.

I accept that this is the world we live in now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to agree or care about the shenanigans that are necessary in order to justify everything as “advertising.”

In all fairness, there are plenty of examples out there of brands doing good on social media, that are admirable and creative means of utilizing the medium.  However, there are plenty of others, like Pepsi shoe-horning themselves into a lame attempt at a narrative with Coke, while they’re in Atlanta, as the official soft drink sponsor of Super Bowl Leee.

In no world would Coke ever bother trying to do this shit if they ever found themselves in whatever place happens to be the alleged home of Pepsi; they’re so irrelevant that people like me have no idea where that even might be.  They know they’re the top dog globally when it comes to the soda industry, regardless of what the numbers in America might be, Pepsi can’t touch Coke when it comes to the rest of the world as a whole.  And because Coke is the king of the mountain, they know they don’t have to resort to cheese and social media faux-viral fluff in order to get their name out there, because they’re simply in a position to where their name is practically engrained on the lips of everyone on the planet already, as the default software brand everywhere.

When it comes to tactics, Pepsi has evidently resorted to stealth and drive-bys in order to deploy their lame statue for a painfully forced narrative that a truce could possibly exist between the rivals; and I use that phrase loosely since Pepsi is so far beneath Coke, they could hardly be called rivals, but for simply lack of a better term.  There’s no way Coke would even bother doing something like this if the situation were reversed.

The bottom line is that I don’t know why this has triggered me to write at all, because I’m having a hard time formulating words other than “there’s no way Coke would bother with Pepsi if the roles were reversed,” and when the day is over, I don’t really drink much soda anyways.  I’m apt to drink Diet Pepsi in places where I can’t get a Diet Coke and ultimately I don’t care that much.  I guess my beef is with social media in general, and the fact that it Twitter was used as the virtual battlefield for sissies to slap fight, and it just kind of makes me roll my eyes that this is the world we’re living in these days that this isn’t just the norm, but is considered acceptable entertainment.

Oh, Atlanta #877

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

To quote an internet commenter who was quoting any brand consultant:

the best diversion to consistent mediocrity is new branding and messaging.

That being said, you know what that means!  A new logo was made for something that didn’t need it!  And not only was a new logo created for something that didn’t need it, it also cost $590,000 to “make!”

Man, I am absolutely in the wrong business.  I totally need to find a way to get back onto the agency side that somehow has entire cities in their back pockets, to where they can charge over half a million dollars to rip off the Airwalk shoes logo, and then package it in 75 words of fluff and bullshit that could sell water to the ocean.  Because I’m pretty sure I could plagiarize one thing a year and be completely satisfied pulling in six figures for doing such and then calling it a year.

I mean I don’t even know where to begin with this perfect example of federal waste and in all likelihood crooked Atlanta politicians spoon-feeding their bedroom buddies.  But I think the most succinct place to start is with just the symbol itself:

  • The shapes that form the “star” in the logo are a series of “A’s” – or arrows – that spiral around a central axis, “symbolizing the freedom of movement provided to the region.” 
  • The arrows point toward and away from the center, “creating pulse-like movement.” 
  • The shape is reminiscent of a star, “and stars have provided guidance to travelers for thousands of years.” 

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