June 29th, 2009
Last week Kodak announced the end of the line for Kodachrome, a color positive film often associated with it’s vibrant and saturated colors. While my preference for film shooting lies in black and white (I’ll shoot an occasional roll of expired color negative film) it’s a shame to see these photographic hallmarks (Kodachrome, Polaroid) going the way of the Dodo. A major factor for Kodachrome’s discontinuation can be attributed to the complex process required to develop the film, however, one cannot help to correlate the loss of these analog mediums to the advent and exponential development of the “digital age”.
Available on Kodak’s website is this tasty gallery of images taken with Kodachrome film. The photograph featured at the top of this post was taken by Steve McCurry who has created world renowned photographs with the film.
In no way am I saying film is better then digital, but give me film over digital any day. That’s just me. I prefer the quality, the imperfections, the process, the patience required, the darkroom and the knowledge that I can hold and inspect my film in a physical space far away from a computer, I cannot do that with 1’s and 0’s.
Regardless, hopefully Paul still has his Nikon camera and can find some other film to shoot with for some time to come.
Posted by: David Posted in: Art, Culture
June 12th, 2009
A $100 million advertising effort on behalf of MicroSoft’s Bing has made a huge number of people in the U.S. aware of the new search engine.It’s still being experienced, used, assessed and positioned for it’s place in the “Internet Experience”.But how does the structure of adCenter, the “adWords” equivalent from this giant of computer innovation fare?
Initial results of the new software and information repository seem to be positive overall; good feature set but some things such as the control panel/desktop need to be refined.Check out the following article and, by all means, add your comments especially if you have first hand experience with using Bing and/or if you have run any PPC through adCenter. Liquid inc wants to have all information available so that we may serve our customers with the best advice possible.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3634056
Posted by: John Posted in: Things
Tags: adCenter, adWords, Bing, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, PPC
June 11th, 2009
My wife and I recently came back from our honeymoon. We went on a 6-day Western Caribbean cruise on the Carnival Freedom. What an awesome ship by the way - the food, staff and entertainment were great! The experience as a whole was amazing, but there were some things that stuck out in my mind probably because I work in advertising and marketing. They have to do with their brand image and how it doesn’t completely match up to the expected customer experience.
Carnival came out with their new ‘Fun Ship’ campaign a little bit ago consisting of such tactics as TV commercials and web ads. It positions themselves apart from the competition by focusing on how they provide fun all ages. One of their supporting taglines is ‘Fun for All / All for Fun’. I don’t know if they are too focused on the ‘fun’ aspect of their image and are forgetting about the smaller things but some of them seem to be slipping through the cracks. These small things can really affect how people will rate their overall experience. That can be bad for Carnival because they take their customer ratings pretty seriously. Anything less than an ‘exceeded expectation’ score is a failure in their minds.
Each evening you receive an itinerary called the ‘Carnival Capers’, along with a pretty sweet towel creature, outlining everything you will need to know for the next day of your trip (i.e. eating times, activities, on-board specials, etc). I kept finding mistakes with spelling, grammar, layout and some of the listed information. This may be a sign that they really need some on-board production artists and proofreaders. Those would be pretty sweet gigs, cruising the open seas and visiting some gorgeous places while working. Anyways, the majority of people might not have even noticed all of the mistakes like I did or they did and just didn’t care. In our line of work you usually always make an attempt to cover the ‘what ifs’ since people aren’t always 100% predictable.
You’d think that Carnival would want to continue the great customer experience by making sure everything from soup to nuts was presented to their customers in an acceptable manner. The mistakes really made the itineraries look cheap and like they were an afterthought. They are sort of your lifeline while aboard the ship if you want to take advantage of what is being offered. Another thing was the debarkation process, the how to de-board the ship if you will. The instructions they initially provided you during the briefing meeting the day before were a bit different from what was delivered to your stateroom later that evening. This caused confusion the morning you were to leave the ship. People really get antsy and frustrated on this morning. I just think that they need to have all of their plans more solidified especially since the company wants to exceed everyone’s expectations.
I’m pretty easy going so these issues really didn’t affect my experience but you could tell some of the issues really frustrated a lot of others. I completely understand that vacations are supposed to be fun and relaxing but there are always certain things that come up. These things can really end up being a deal breaker for those who want to cruise again, that customer loyalty won’t be there. Especially since Carnival always wants to exceed every customer’s expectation, it just doesn’t add up for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll definitely cruise with them again. I can’t get the melting chocolate cake desert out of my head. They have a good thing going and I just think they are missing out on a great opportunity to really come full circle with their overall customer experience.
Posted by: Greg Posted in: Things
June 1st, 2009
Although Liquid inc. donated goats to needy families during the holiday season of 2008, it appears that the idea of goat donation is catching on globally. What better than to receive a free goat upon the purchase of a new car?
http://tinyurl.com/l92s8g
Posted by: Dave Posted in: Uncategorized
