Web Wednesday: Dog Meets World

Carolyn Lane, founder of dogmeetsworld.org, has created an interesting website with an interesting purpose -- to lift the hearts of underprivileged kids and others by having travelers take photos of them with a little stuffed dog mascot, named Foto, and printing out a hard copy to give them on the spot. The goal is to help the subjects, who may have never seen a photo of themselves, 'see their potential more clearly and that they count.'

According to Carolyn,

My dream is to establish a movement to photograph the children of the world. To seek children in their own settings, print their image to keep for a lifetime. We have replicated Foto, the stuffed dog, to enable scores of world travelers to participate with this intentional project. The dream of Dog Meets World is to empower travelers to make real connections to people in other cultures, in essence to become photo-diplomats. A picture makes anybody a “somebody”. Dog Meets World clothes people in acknowledgment and affirmation and feeds their souls, which indeed is priceless.

The goal of the website is admirable, though it does cost money to participate, and you need a portable photo printer, not something most people take on vacation. Still, it's worth checking out.

Toy Tuesday: Happy Meals = Happy Kids

I've come across a lot of comments on The Center for Science in the Public Interest proposed lawsuit against McDonald's over their inclusion of toys in Happy Meals, that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Whoever they are, they sure know how to get media coverage, but it tends to refute their point of view.


From Bruce Lund on Facebook:

Take toys out of Happy Meals? Whatever is the benefit of that? Toys entertain, inspire, educate and invite thinking and doing. Toys change the world. Frank Lloyd Wrights toy blocks inspired him to become an architect. What if those blocks had been a Happy Meal toy? or not?

Also on Facebook, Jennifer Strauss Richmond adds:

Sadly, McDonald's is able to quote a very high percentage of kids in the US and probably higher internationally that the only toys they have ever had are happy meal toys....

Meanwhile, The Consumerist quotes McDonald's CEO:

CSPI is wrong in its assertions and frivolous in its legal threats... CSPI's twisted characterization of McDonald's as 'the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children' is an insult to every one of our franchisees and employees around the world.

Time Magazine concurs with my view that the whole issue will probably boil down to parental responsibility.

After all, 5-year-old kids aren't driving themselves to the McDonald's pick-up window. Little Stevie and the "unpaid drone army of word-of-mouth marketers" are a powerful force, but should McDonald's be liable for their pestering ways? "The solution is not a lawsuit," says Wilson. "The solution is a two-letter word: no."

Toys make kids happy. It's perfectly appropriate that McDonald's calls them Happy Meals.

The last word should go to Bob Cutler of Creative Consumer Concepts, which makes toys for fast food restaurants, who correctly says "you can't teach a child about making good choices, if you just take away the choices."

Marketing Monday: Microsoft Recreates Online Scam

Just came across this very clever video from Microsoft, where they show how easily some people can share their personal information online, created a fake bank in the Manhattan area that worked just like any other online phishing scam.

Unsuspecting customers handed over their credit card numbers, SSNs, ATM Pin numbers and even their hair samples for DNA tests to the “fake” bank authorities.

Microsoft followed up with with another scam, an “inheritance store” that works like those Nigerian email promising millions of dollars in inheritance.

Their points about online security are compelling, and they try to tie it all to Internet Explorer 8. While Microsoft's story is strong and entertaining, the connection to IE8 eludes me. Still, it's fun to watch.

Marketing Monday: Oil Spills, Google, and You

The Consumerist reports that BP isn't too fond of people using search engines to check up on its Gulf of Mexico misadventures. The company has bought up some Google and Yahoo phrases in order to scuttle efforts to find news reports using such words.

Here's what they learned from a detailed piece from ABC News:

A simple Google search of "oil spill" turns up several thousand news results, but the first link, highlighted at the very top of the page, is from BP. "Learn more about how BP is helping," the link's tagline reads.

A spokesman for the company confirmed to ABC News that it had, in fact, bought these search terms to make information on the spill more accessible to the public.

I suppose I might have done the same thing if I was in BP's situation. On the other hand, I can't imagine that I'd ever be involved in anything like BP's situation. I'm proud of the ethical approach to safety that has been part of my work in product marketing from the very beginning.

Web Wednesday: Wordle

Here's an entertaining website that lets you express your creativity. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I quickly created this word cloud by asking Wordle to select words from this blog.

click to enlarge

Tip: To save the word cloud as a jpg, use "Print Screen" and paste into a graphics editor. Then crop to remove all but the word cloud itself.

Toy Tuesday: Unhappy about Happy Meals

Today's Globe and Mail reports that a Washington-based "consumer advocacy" group is threatening to file a lawsuit against McDonald's, charging that the fast food chain ‘unfairly and deceptively' markets toys to children through its Happy Meals.

As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing unfair or deceptive about McDonald's approach to marketing to kids.

Kids are bombarded with all types of messages from an early age, and with technological advances, the frequency and sophistication of these message is growing enormously and quickly. Early in my career, I learned to trust the judgment of parents in making decisions about the media their kids consume and the products they use. While there are no doubt some parents who don't always make the best decisions for themselves or their kids, we're fortunate to live in a society where governments, courts, and lawyers aren't usually making decisions for us.

Toy Tuesday: Monster High - A New Approach for Mattel?

An interesting story in LA Business Journal talks about Mattel's upcoming launch of Monster High, a new toy line and intellectual property that features characters based on teen children of werewolves, zombies and other creatures "which the company has described as 'Grease' meets 'Addams Family,' because it’s a combination of the gothic-inspired 'Twilight' movies and Disney’s tween-friendly 'High School Musical' franchise."

Mattel seems to have done a good job putting the program together, but I agree with industry analyst Sean McGowan that the line could be either a huge hit or a huge failure.

Interestingly, the article makes several references to the fact that Monster High is "the first in-house toy brand the company has launched since Hot Wheels in 1968." I don't know where LA Business Journal got their information, but I can remember several brands from my time at Mattel in the late 1980s and early 1990s that were developed in-house, though none of them exist today. Just to check, I contacted toy consultant Lynn Rosenblum, who is quoted in the article and worked at Mattel when I did. She verified that many brands from Cherry Merry Muffin (a small doll line) to Masters of the Universe (a hugely successful boys' action line) were Mattel in-house initiatives. Looks like somebody is rewriting toy industry history.

Cherry Merry Muffin

Masters of the Universe

Regardless of whether it was created in-house at Mattel or came from elsewhere, Monster High's success will depend on how it resonates with kids. By the end of the year, we'll all know if it's a hit or a miss.