Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Inventor of Doritos to be buried with ceremonial snack chips
The man credited with creating Doritos will be buried along with some of his beloved snack chips…
Arch West died September 20 of natural causes at a Dallas hospital. He was 97. His remains were cremated, and the family plans to bury the urn inside a burial box at a local cemetery on Saturday.
The family requested that friends and relatives who attend the graveside service be allowed to toss Doritos around the box as a tribute.
“He would think it is hilarious,” said his daughter Jana Hacker, a resident of the Dallas area. “The cemetery does not mind because they are biodegradable…”
West, a marketing executive for the Frito-Lay, as eager to produce a salty snack chip after sampling a crunchy, “tortilla-type chip” at the roadside stand while on vacation in Southern California in the early 1960s, Hacker said.
“The company didn’t really like the idea, but Dad managed to direct some (research and development) money into the project,” Hacker said.
The rest is crunchy, tangy history…
Global sales of Doritos were about $5 billion in 2010, Gonzalez said…
Rock on, Arch!
And he maintains the tongue-in-cheek tradition of folks like Fredric Baur the inventor of Pringles. When he died in 2008 at 89, his family honored his wishes by placing his ashes in a Pringles can before burying them…
Upset over an invasive species? Try eating it.
With its dark red and black stripes, spotted fins and long venomous black spikes, the lionfish seems better suited for horror films than consumption. But lionfish fritters and filets may be on American tables soon.
An invasive species, the lionfish is devastating reef fish populations along the Florida coast and into the Caribbean. Now, an increasing number of environmentalists, consumer groups and scientists are seriously testing a novel solution to control it and other aquatic invasive species — one that would also takes pressure off depleted ocean fish stocks: they want Americans to step up to their plates and start eating invasive critters in large numbers.
“Humans are the most ubiquitous predators on earth,” said Philip Kramer, director of the Caribbean program for the Nature Conservancy. “Instead of eating something like shark fin soup, why not eat a species that is causing harm, and with your meal make a positive contribution?”
We’re already at consideration of three questions at this point in the article: 1. Ready access to the invader?; 2. How easy and cost effective is it to harvest? 3. Any cultural barriers to overcome [back to the marketing department folks].
Freed Google exec cheered upon his return to Tahrir Square
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
Thousands of protesters crammed Egypt’s Tahrir Square on Tuesday, hoping to catch a glimpse of a Google executive whose detention by secret police has made him a figurehead for anti-government demonstrators.
Wael Ghonim’s arrival in the downtown Cairo square was met with loud cheers from the massive crowd, according to the CBC’s David Common…
Ghonim, 30, who heads Google’s Middle East and North Africa marketing divisions, was released Monday after nearly two weeks in custody, during which he was blindfolded and interrogated.
“When you don’t see anything but a black scene for 12 days, you keep praying that those outside still remember you,” Ghonim tweeted Tuesday. “Thanks everyone.”
In an interview following his release, he acknowledged he had helped set up a Facebook page that set off the massive protests that have gripped Egypt since Jan. 25.
He called the protests “the revolution of the youth of the internet and now the revolution of all Egyptians.”
Ghonim went missing on Jan. 27, when he was snatched from the streets of Cairo by three plainclothes officers. His whereabouts were not known until Sunday, when a prominent Egyptian political figure confirmed he was under arrest and would soon be released.
Ghonim dismissed accusations of treason by security officials.
“Anyone with good intentions is the traitor because being evil is the norm,” he said Monday.
“If I was a traitor, I would have stayed in my villa in the Emirates and made good money and said like others, ‘Let this country go to hell.’ But we are not traitors.”
Bravo!
Part of having a conscience is acting upon the guidance of that guidance. One of the earliest existential dichos I try to respect is that recognizing evil, a crime, a need, a solution – requires you to act upon that recognition. Those who sit back and whine – and do nothing constructive – provide no value to their own life or the lives of those they affect.
‘Dear Mr. President, I need a freakin job. Period’
A Buffalo billboard displayed a succinct message when President Obama visited the economically distressed city Thursday, according to reports. The billboard read “Dear Mr. President, I need a freakin job. Period.”
The president was scheduled to stop in Buffalo – a city that had fallen on hard times long before the recent recession – as part of his “Main Street” economic tour.”
The billboard was part of a media campaign known as the INAFJ Project, organized by a local businessman who saw his own small business go under 15 months ago.
“We employed 25 people and it was the most heartbreaking situation I’ve been through in my life” Jeff Baker told CBS News. The ad – and a video posted on YouTube – features college students.
Baker told the Buffalo News that the banks had refused to work with him and his brother Scott, according to the Washington Examiner. The men rented the billboard space for $5,500 a month ago, before they knew that the president would be visiting their town.
Timing couldn’t have been better.
I heard a radio interview with Baker – and it’s not like he’s uptight with Obama or the programs that are in place. Like a lot of areas, like a lot of people, it’s just that more is needed.
Baker is brighter than slackers like the teabaggers who figure that blaming the people who are trying to pick up the pieces after two terms of dumbo is what working people and seniors should do.
Clicks for tricks: Is this Twitter’s first brothel?
House of Divine in glamorous Milton Keynes tweeted to say that Lucia and Karol were working on Sunday while another message offered a “Twitter Discount”. The operation has been exposed in The Sun newspaper, which trumpets: “A BROTHEL is touting its services via social networking site TWITTER.”
Since “adult services” have previously managed to use other communications systems — postal services, telephones, shop windows, email, the web, advertisements in tabloid newspapers — this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, but brothel stories are probably good for raising your circulation (fnar fnar).
Whether Twitter is good for business is another matter; the @DivineMK account only has 72 followers at the time of writing, and some of them don’t look like potential customers. Since any Twitter user can see who is following an account, this is hardly private. An email circular would provide a more useful and more confidential information network…
The Sun briefly conveyed its outrage with a quote: “Lib-Dem MP Julia Goldsworthy labelled the brothel’s use of Twitter ‘cynical and inappropriate’.” However, @jgoldsworthy — MP for Falmouth and Camborne, which is some way from Milton Keynes — wasn’t outraged enough to comment on her own Twitter account or, so far, her own web site. Nor has she taken up my invitation to DM me.
Har!
O’Reilly says – Amazon must open the Kindle
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon’s successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.
It’s a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.
O’Reilly writes: (Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to discover. While Apple maintains tight control over what goes into the App Store, there’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: Any Web page can act as an application for the iPhone.
O’Reilly then explains that the Kindle doesn’t provide this same loophole (i.e., allowing open-formatted e-books to be read on the Kindle in the same way that the iPhone enables Web applications to run on the iPhone, and in which the iPod encouraged MP3s and other free formats to flourish on the iPod).
I don’t think I agree. On my Kindle, I read a variety of books that I downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, and I suspect that this will only increase as more and more free content is formatted for the Kindle.
Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins.
“Open wins?” Baloney! Open wins in the small and parochial world of the hobbyist.
Every year I hear about Open this or that getting ready to rule the world. Real soon now – as a certain sage would say. In practice, if you disallow an opportunity for market forces to interact you end up with the [late] Soviet Union instead of China.
Comparison in the article based on Sony and Apple are patently absurd. Apple knows how to sell good stuff. Sony doesn’t know how to sell anything.
