Pointy Haired Dilbert - Chandoo.org

I have noticed something totally strange while trying to get an auto insurance quote online at GEICO. See it for yourself.

They are showing your password in the URL… OMG

Make sure you don’t use the site for getting new quotes as it could be a potential privacy breach as anyone watching the URLs like network admins, ISPs owning the logs or other users of the computer can see your password and access your account to see your details like SSN, Date of Birth, Accident history.

One of the latest news is that Yahoo has launched BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) using which you can build search based apps. Being a part geek who loves to show off my part knowledge to other part geeks during parties, I went to their website to register for my own app.

The registration process was smooth, and soon they gave me my app id which has 64 case-sensitive alpha-numeric characters.

64 Frigging Characters.

A quick calc tells me that is roughly “5,164,973,859,965,250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000″ combinations possible.

That is even more roughly 5.1 × 10¹¹⁴

Do you know what is less than that? No. of Atoms in observable universe, number of atoms in whole frigging observable universe my dear blog reader, which btw are roughly 10⁸⁰, are less than the number of applications that Yahoo is hoping to create. For the curious out there, the observable universe contains anywhere between 30 to 70 billion trillion stars.

May be they REALLY want to make sure that no one guesses away the app id. I am not sure why they bother to go even way beyond GUID limits to come up with these freakishly large appIDs, I mean who are we competing with here? Some aliens trying to steal away my apps by guessing the appIDs? Huh!

…

Ok, stop scratching, you might loose more hair than the common sense brand managers at vodafone lost.

Apparently these adds convey that Vodafone has solved the unsolvable conundrum of “talk-time” or “validity” by introducing a lifetime valid pre-paid card that also gives unlimited talk time. Wow, certainly a good move given the difficult choice pre-paid cell phone customer has to make by selecting one of “more talk time, less validity”, “less talk time more validity” and “mediocre talk time and mediocre validity”.

But Vodafone choose the most cryptic way to communicate this message across. They created visuals that have very little text and complicated meanings that I am sure not many pre-paid customers can comprehend. Anyone looking at zebra and thinking “is it white lines on dark skin” or “dark lines on white skin” and then immediately correlating that with “talk-time” or “validity” all while controlling the temptation to skip that page (containing the ad) in the magazine / news paper has my kudos.

what do you think? Should brands challenge people intellectually or just indulge in simple and easy to understand messages?

Also see earlier rants on Vodafone and Hutch: vodafone pug, Hutch Hindi ads

PS: Images are from AgencyFaqs

Time for another look at print ads, this time for the most bizarre of them all. Mind you, these are not awful or plain lousy ads, for any column-centimeter worth its area has a fair share of lousy ads, these are simply bizarre ads, the kind that will make you go - WTF?

The first one is from Lenevo slim monitors, they are so slim that you can cut a head off with them, who comes up with this stuff anyway?

This is even more bizarre, kanika digital printers that can print almost life like - really tasteless

Now comes itch guard, subtle and yucky

This classic wtfness displayed by Sahara global, I think they mean that you can visit the place, but.. why create such visually revolting ad for that?

I had post another lenevo ad for it displays intense lack of common sense on the ad designers part

Images Source: AgencyFaqs.

Also see: Best of Indian Outdoor Advertising, Few good Indian Print Ads

Fridays can be immensely fun, as I anticipate 2 days of doing-nothing while sipping coffee working on excel sheets. But nothing can make my day better than this immense suckmanship displayed by Naukri with their job recommendation for me.

All the Japanese I know can be summarized to 1 word - “omurice“, now that I think of it, the rice part of it does look like an English word, that makes me think, how many companies are out there who fail miserably in their area of core competency?

Take a look at the above screen shot of my inbox. Does any thing look odd? Of course it does, the amazing folks at IRCTC have decided to send a tempting summer vacation offer to me, not once but 5 times in the last 14 hours.

Despite having one of the finest Indian online customer data bases at their finger tips, the folks at IRCTC failed miserably in communicating with their customers about the exciting offers they have. (IRCTC is one of the very first and most used e-commerce site in India for making train reservations online) They ran a miserable campaign by asking people who do not understand how campaigning / advertising on internet / email works.

Running an email ad campaign is not distributing pamphlets or buying tv spots in prime time. You can not shove the message down your users’ throats, it doesnt work that way. These days mail clients are smart enough to recognize duplicate messages and they truncate the message automatically, they club similar messages together. So there is really no point repeating the same message every 4 hours.

What instead could work well is, a story, an user experience, a tempting offer customized for ME communicated in as few words as possible and sent out in a frequency that is not intrusive. Customers would love to listen, thats why they have dropped their email id and clicked that little check box on your registration page that says “I cannot wait to receive offers from you”, but that doesnt mean you should hand the list of email ids to your marketing department and order them to “run a campaign, for the next 3 months”. It doesnt work that way…

Also read:
Advertising that can ruin you - Indian Railways Case Study
More online advertising failures

Here is a look at 3 different game controllers.

First the simplest of them all, “wiimote”, easy to understand, easier to use

Then comes the moderately complex “xbox controller”, should a take a couple of minutes to understand, couple of hours to get used, all in all, fun ensured

Then comes the most complex of all, “PS2 Dual Shock Controller”, the name itself makes you wonder whether you have bought a particle accelerator in disguise, the many buttons, and the complicated manual diagrams will tease you to find the button that will start it all, takes a ton of time to learn, when your car finally accelerates (or your boxer actually kicks or your cat actually purrs ) you would feel like you have really earned it.

now, tell me, how simple is your product?

For further thoughts / ideas on user manuals visit this timeless CPU post.

PS: the images are copyright of respective owners, the thoughts however are free, go ahead, flame them