Via Sullivan, a description of how Maxwell House Coffee got its brand on 50 million Passover tables:
Maxwell House decided to publish a book, specifically a Haggadah, and offer it to customers for free with the purchase of a can of coffee. (A Haggadah recounts the Exodus from Egypt, comprised of prayers, songs, and stories which guide the Passover Seder.) The Maxwell House edition was an instant hit. Today, it’s the most popular Haggadah in the world, with over 50 million printed.
Why has this piece of branded content endured generation after generation? Four underlining principles make the Maxwell House Haggadah the perfect case study in branded content:
1. Branded content must serve a consumer need.
Maxwell House wasn’t distributing content for the sake of distributing content; most likely, the agency lead didn’t have a secret ambition to be a translator (or rabbi!). Instead, it began with a simple insight: Jewish families spend quality time around the Seder engaged with a Haggadah.
Also the branding didn't intrude, like having Moses "descend Mt. Sinai with the tablets in one hand and a latte in the other."
Yeah, it's Passover. Time for this:
Same people who brought you this last year:
Quick time-out from my generally useless day (long overdue and appreciated): A sign of a good book is that you spend more time thinking about it than actually passing your eyes over the pages. More on which book in a later post.
The female half of Pomplamoose, Nataly Dawn Knutsen, played a venue four blocks from my house yesterday, so I just had to go.
She and her touring partners Lauren O'Connell and Ryan Lerman were as charming and talented in person as their music makes them seem. Dawn is also tall (178 cm in flats), which isn't readily apparent from her videos.
The tour moves east through April before going back to California at month's end. Also, Knutsen assured me that Pomplamoose will continue.
Too much going on:
Now, I will go back to drafting documentation while I wait for AT&T to reconfigure my DSL and kill my landline. I've had a POTS ("plain old telephone service") twisted-pair line longer than most people on earth have been alive. After today, no longer. I don't think I'll miss it, either. I only have it because I have a business-class DSL, which I don't need anymore, and the only people who call it want money from me.
Via Sullivan, imagine if we could watch natural selection work on our ancestors:
That's the problem. People inhale and exhale mentally, and right now, I'm exhaling. This means I get a lot of work done, but not a lot of reading. This, in turn, means more lists like this:
Lunchtime!
Principally, it means not having to commute in 15 cm of snow. It also means several uninterrupted hours of working on stuff. And, unfortunately, not reading all this yet:
Now to walk Parker in the snow, and keep working...
Exhibit 1, yesterday at 4:58pm:
I'm just a day from losing my mind (or "loosing," to all you Facebookers out there), a day from my workload returning to normal levels, and a day from deploying Weather Now to a test instance in Azure. Then, maybe, I'll have time to take all these in:
Watch this space for a sneak preview of Weather Now 4.0, possibly tomorrow. The GetWeather utility has run with only minor hitches for a week, and with two more (quick) bug fixes it's ready for production. That just leaves about 6 hours of work to move the ASP.NET application up to Azure...and then, you get to beta test it. If all goes well I'll cut over to Azure on the 9th or 10th, and finally—finally!—retire my last two servers.