Overload in Packaging

A New York Times story, titled "Product Packages Now Shout to Get Your Attention" written by Louise Story, is most revealing about the direction of information overload in society:

"In the last 100 years, Pepsi had changed the look of its can, and before that its bottles, only 10 times. This year alone, the soft-drink maker will switch designs every few weeks. Kleenex boxes used to be square or rectangular, but no more. Kleenex, after 40 years of sticking with square and rectangular boxes, has started selling tissues in oval packages."

"Coors Light bottles now have labels that turn blue when the beer is chilled to the right temperature. And Huggies' Henry the Hippo hand soap bottles have a light that flashes for 20 seconds to show children how long they should wash their hands."

"Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers' attention. The shift is mostly because of the rise of the Internet and hundreds of television channels, which mean marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials. ...So they are using their bottles, cans, boxes and plastic packs to improve sales by attracting the eyes of consumers, who often make most of their shopping decisions at the last minute while standing in front of store shelves. "

Does this mean ever-accelerating product packaging changes and accompanying bombardment? It appears so.

Junk Mail over the Top

This story in Newsweek, “Dear Junk Mailers: Leave My Son Alone,” speaks volumes about the junk mail industry in our society. Thirteen years after the death of a seven year old boy, advertisers still target him with offers of tuxedos and snack cakes.

Gary Wiener, writing in Newsweek: “When his 18th birthday arrived, my son, Jacob, became awfully popular. The U.S. Navy wanted him. "Before you find your place in the world, maybe you should see it first," it urged. A local menswear shop offered him 50 percent off a tuxedo package for high-school graduation. And a razor company sent him a free razor, hoping, I suppose, to make a lifelong customer out of him. Their only miscalculation was that Jacob didn't shave. Nor was it likely that any of the armed forces would gain Jacob's services. And he certainly wouldn't graduate from high school. Jacob, you see, died in 1993. He was only 7 years old when a cancerous brain tumor stole him from us.”

“As much as we loved Jacob, that period of our lives is still incredibly painful to remember. Yet, years after his death, letters addressed to Jacob find their way into our mailbox. Early on, I was driven almost to tears by these inducements for our son to attend a ritzy local private school or to sample a particular snack cake. I knew my wife would be devastated by such mail, and I tried to get to the mailbox first so that she would never be affronted by envelopes addressed to her dead first child. Much later, I realized she had been doing the same thing, hastily throwing out mail addressed to Jake so I wouldn't have to endure the epistolary abuse.”

The Spam Plague Heightens

“Spam is back – in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone's minds. Of late, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide, spam volumes have doubled from last year,” according to Ironport, a spam-filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mails sent over the Internet.

“Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 percent to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day,” Ironport says.

Is Your PC a Spam Slave?

The website ThisIsLondon.co.uk reports that “image spam” could bring the internet to a standstill. “At first, they seem like your average junk email, containing share tips or an advertisement for Viagra, along with a small, slightly garbled picture.But this, experts say, is the spam that could bring the internet to a virtual standstill this year. To bypass anti-spam software, the emails use an image instead of text.”

“In the past six months, this image spam has seen a massive increase and now represents 35 per cent of all junk email, according to security software firm F-Secure and image spam is taking up 70 per cent of the bandwidth bulge. The emails, generally containing stock tips, come from gangs and even bored teenagers in the United States and Russia trying to inflate prices in a swindle called ‘pump-and-dump’".

“They promise that a cheap, usually American, stock will take off. The perpetrator then dumps his stock as buyers leap in before it collapses. Dmitri Allperovitch of computer security company CipherTrust said: ‘They're niche companies with no profit and no products, so when you see a spike from almost no trades to two or three million when the spam is sent out, you know there were a lot of people who fell for it.’”

Is your PC a slave unit to such schemes. Are you unwittingly passing bogus information to millions of other people?

Sexy Images and Decision-making

Valerie Iancovich, writing for the DiscoveryChannel in Canada says “It's not shocking news that a bikini-clad woman will affect many men's judgment. But now, a recent study suggests that a man with high testosterone levels is more easily-influenced by a scantly-clad lady than guys with lower levels of the hormone.”

“Once the men with high testosterone were exposed to the photos of the women, they were more willing to settle for a poorer deal. As a matter of fact, just touching a bra prior to playing the game seemed to squander the resolve of the testosterone-heavy men.”

So, macho guys, be careful what type of information (photos, graphics) you’re exposed to. It might render your contort your decision-making capacity.

Search Engines Aid in Purchases

Where do web surfers get information on potential purchases? According to Hitwise.com, an online competitive intelligence service, Google is by far the top U.S. search engine in terms of driving visitors to shopping sites, accounting for 14.9% of visits. Yahoo! Search was found to be the second most popular search engine, accounting for 4.7% of shopper visits, followed by MSN Search and a rapidly-gaining MySpace.

Junk Mail May Never Die

Louise Story, writing in the New York Times, sheds light on why in the age of the Internet and email, junk mail is proliferating:

“United States Postal Service says marketers sent more than 114 billion pieces of direct mail, increase of about 15 percent from five years ago; volume of bulk mail, which is all direct mail, exceeded first class in last year; advertisers like it that mail ads, which do not get snagged in spam filters, can be aimed at just right customers and be monitored for effectiveness; those traits are increasingly important to companies as they target American public into finer and finer categories; some advertising executives comments.”

Info that Nobody Wants

A study by conducted Commtouch indicates that most spam originates from websites hosted in countries outside the U.S. Pharmaceutical drugs are most advertised, with Viagra the leading the way.

The recipients of these largely unwanted messages are nearly all in the U.S. Meanwhile, despite filters and spaminators, the pace of spam is accelerating . The aggregate number of unique spam outbreaks per day has been rising for for more than five years.

Too Much Catalog Information

In this age of high-speed Internet connections, catalog companies in the U.S. annually mail more than 19 billion catalogs, consuming nearly four million tons of paper. The quality as well as availability of recycled paper has improved, but the majority of catalogers, among them J. Crew, J.C. Penney, and L.L. Bean, still use only virgin paper. What a waste, for everyone and everything.

Info Overload to Max

This appeared in today’s news and is either an indication of capitalism run amok or simply the inability of management to contribute to passengers’ sense of breathing space.:

“US Airways to place ads on barf bags”

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- US Airways wants to make the most out of a nauseating situation. The Tempe, Arizona-based airline plans to sell advertisements on its air-sickness bags -- those pint-sized expandable envelopes tucked between the in-flight magazines and safety cards.

"They're in every back seat pocket," said spokesman Phil Gee. "We figure while it's there, why don't we make it multipurpose?

– what’s next? Toilet paper rolls with ads on each sheet?

Ad Clutter Abounds

Did you know that the typical fall fashion magazine requires readers to flip through 128 pages before finding the first feature article? How about this: In 1965, the typical news sound bite lasted 45 seconds. By the year 2,000 it had dropped to 8 seconds. Ad clutter has increased annually since 1985 and has now exceeded the over-whelming level for many viewers.