Category: Marketing

New Honda commercial tells people it’s okay to drive their car while sleepy

October 31, 2012 / / 10 Comments

Eff you, Honda.

Partial transcript:

We know you.

[Shows guy yawning.]

We know you have to rise early and work late.

[Shows someone drinking coffee. Shows “Lane Departure Warning” signal and an obscured person driving on a rural road driving their Honda Accord in the opposite direction lane, then swerving back into the correct lane.]

With not enough sleep in between.

[Shows hands of driver moving the steering wheel to maneuver the car back into the correct lane with driver’s shoulders moving dramatically to either show that the steering wheel had to be yanked or that he’s shrugging off the moment.]

The rest of the commercial shows different features and makes stupid comments about your needs and desires.

It’s not okay to drive in that condition.

Customer reviews for my bike map app

July 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Only reviews left for the current version are displayed on the iTunes Preview page, and the default view of the iTunes Store. 

I’m appreciative of the two reviews people have left for my app – it’s a bike map for Chicago stored in your phone, download in iTunes. Their positivity and the slight increase in sales this past week has increased the ranking of my app. I don’t know what the ranking means.

When my app first ranked, in its Reference category, it was 385, then 289, and now stands at 315. I’m not sure on what factors the ranking is based, but I’ve gathered some clues from other bloggers:

[In addition to the number of downloads, other] factors play into the ranking equation such as how long the app is opened as the active app and how often the app is opened.

There’s no mention of reviews on that page, but I found another article that mentions more ways to improve your app, which includes having positive reviews. (Another factor it mentions is frequently updating the app.)

I’d like to hear from my app’s users what their feedback is before they leave a review in the iTunes Store. I can address issues directly with users and discuss how they can (or cannot) be incorporated in a future update to the app. You can send your feedback to me, and your love to the app store. (A major downside of the customer reviews process in the iTunes Store is the inability for the developer to respond.)

My app’s received two reviews (both 5 stars!) so far:

Saw this app being discussed on Twitter and thought I’d check it out. So, on the hottest day of 2012, I jumped on my bike and rode around my area checking out the apps features. Color me impressed! I rode to a few areas that I was not over familiar with and activated the app to peruse my options via my bike (or CTA). I look forward to using this on my far south/far north bikiing adventures soon!

The first reviews about the first version:

Would be great if it could locate on the map with GPS. Also if it could zoom out more. These bike lanes have come a long way recently. There are some really nice new places to ride like the cycle track on Kinzie. But there are also some old routes out there that are great biking such as the Boulevard System (Humboldt, Logan, Palmer Sq) that you could show on your map. And it says it supports German, but it is in English 🙂

The part about my app being available in German was true for v0.1, but I’ve fixed that for v0.2. If you’re going to leave a review, I’d like to leave you with this advice, for I feel it makes for a constructive review:

  1. Describe what is good about the app, and what you like about the app.
  2. Describe how you’ve used the app.
  3. Suggest ways the app could improve.

This was what the first version looked like. It wasn’t very good. 

The Chicago Fire Department has one of the least useful Twitter feeds, but sometimes it’s hilarious

June 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

20 minutes ago, when the Twitter outage probably corrected itself, the Chicago Fire Department’s Office of News Affair tweeted three photos, without comment. I’ve posted them in reverse order.

Tweet 3

The third photo (above) shows a BMW X5 SUV on top of a Jaguar sedan and Mercedes E320 sedan in a multi-level parking garage. The parking garage appears to be a split-level, and it seems the BMW SUV was moved forward from an upper level to the tops of these cars, which you can see in the second photo (below).

Tweet 2

Tweet 1

The photos appear to have been taken with a cellphone, using the flash. The license plates are obscured by their reflection of the flash. The car broke through the cables leading me to ask two questions: What is the level of tension on the cables? How fast did the car travel?

The @CFDMedia account is often cryptic. The Chicago Sun-Times provided more information an hour later:

A 74-year-old man driving a 2012 BMW X5 crashed through cable barriers separating two levels of a Loop parking garage Thursday — and his SUV came to a stop atop a 2005 Jaguar and a 2003 Mercedes-Benz parked on the level beneath him, police said.

Police cited the 74-year-old with driving too fast for conditions.

Updated 16:18 to add a report from the Chicago Sun-Times.

GM hired a transit rider to promote their Volt, I think

May 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A screenshot of the GM Chevy Volt ad I saw on Hulu. 

If you’re like me and most Americans, you probably see an advertisement for a car at least once a day. In an ad I watched on Hulu tonight, it appears GM filmed someone who takes buses and trains (or rides her bike) to sell people on the Chevy Volt.

The woman (the ad’s overlay text makes it seem like she’s a real owner) says, “I don’t event know what it’s like to stop and get gas” and “I am probably going to the gas station about once a month, probably less”.

With a car that only gets 35 MPG city, 40 MPG highway,* and has a range of 379 miles, she must be taking the bus for all those other trips she has to make each month! Or she walks to work each day and bikes to the grocery store on weekends. Or she just rarely leaves the house. But I don’t think the ad implies any of these things: instead it’s telling viewers that this automobile has amazing gas mileage (the ad never mentions it has an electric motor component).

The “average American” makes 3.79 trips per day with an average trip length of 9.75 miles. If this Volt driver was that average person, she would be driving 1,108.58 miles every 30 days. And her car doesn’t have that much range. It has a third of that.

She might have bad memory, though, about visiting gas stations.

The Toyota Prius, for comparison, gets 51 MPG city, 48 MPG highway,* and starts at $7,000 less.

* These are only estimates. The Chevy Volt gets 94 MPGe when running on purely the electric motors.

N.B. The Chevy Volt website shows a photo of the car in the position where it will spend most of the time: parked. I appreciate that accuracy!

Dealing with the four-wheeled foe

February 23, 2012 / / 0 Comments

My comment on the Streetfilms post. 

First, Streetfilms’s Clarence Eckerson posts a video showing Mazda’s support for the movie “Lorax”, which is based on the Dr. Seuss book about destroying the environment.

Then, I commented on Bikes Belong’s partnership with Volkswagen that was announced almost a month ago but I had just found the news yesterday.

It’s about as crappy as Bikes Belong partnering with Volkswagen.
In January 2012 they announced a “two-year partnership to help develop biking-friendly communities, foster healthy lifestyles and create a cleaner environment.”
I thought Volkswagen’s job was to market its cars, but it seems now it will market its goodwill which must have a calculable impact on increased car sales.

Bike Portland and road.cc both wrote about it. One commenter, Hart Noecker, wrote on Bike Portland:

Agreed. They recognize their oncoming irrelevance and are trying to re-image their brand while still promoting unsustainable automobiles that incentivize McStripmall sprawl.

And “9watts” replied:

As someone who has long felt that VW offered some of the most fuel efficient cars available, and was therefore to be lauded, patronized, etc. I’m inclined to agree with Hart. VW is really good at selling cars, and their commitment to fuel economy (which is a far cry from what we need now: a phaseout of car-dom, which isn’t going to come from the car industry anymore than a phaseout of coal consumption is going to come from the electric utilities) is only skin deep.

Crumbs for bikes, and a slick PR move that might even help them sell more cars. Never underestimate the middle class’s eagerness to swallow feel-good nostrums.

Today it seems the pact is getting attention again, brought to the forefront by the Mazda + Lorax (Universal films) deal – at least among a few people I follow on Twitter. Hopefully for its inanity. Car manufacturers, the bull in the china shop as Mikael of Copenhagenize talks about it, have been shutting down bicycles as a mode of transportation for decades. They’ve even thrown support behind making jaywalking criminal.

The Volkswagen deal with Bikes Belong is nothing more than buying goodwill. If there was a store for companies looking to improve their environmentally friendly image, partnerships with cycling advocacy organizations would be in aisle one.

As they are a company interested in making money by selling cars, I’d like someone to help me understand if there are any other reasons they should promote cycling (which they admit reduces congestion and lowers a traveler’s impact on the environment). Maybe they want to start selling bikes?

Car culture is carnage culture. The way out is a balanced transportation system that focuses the highest investments into sustainable and efficient modes, and one that educates system users on the costs and benefits of each mode, for every trip. Photo by ATOMIC Hot Links.