Ken Wheaton's Blog, page 12

From Zero to 270 (Smoker): Trial Run

In the course of getting married, Cara brought up the subject of wedding gifts for each other. I’m sure most men out there could spend a good half an hour ranting about this need women have to exchange gifts for every occasion, and often multiple times for the same occasion. This can get particularly crazy when the Wedding Industrial Complex is involved. Many a man might even think of saying, “Isn’t getting married to me gift enough?”

Of course I’m not stupid enough to say that. Okay, I am...

Nothing to Worry About: Your Data Is Perfectly Anonymous

If you follow technology and marketing news, I have to question your life decisions. But if you do, you probably notice that the tech and marketing worlds are in love with the promises of Big Data — and small data and your data. Every time they make an announcement about an awesome new advancement in tracking consumers’ behavior, purchasing habits or favorite color and targeting ads and sales pitches to them, they always make sure to point out that there’s nothing to worry about, though, in t...

I Ran the New York City Half Marathon and It Was 13.1 Miles

If my calculations are correct, this past weekend I ran my 16th half marathon, the New York City Half, put on by New York Road Runners. This is different from the Manhattan Half, also put on by NYRR, which I was signed up to run back in January or February or whenever. But I skipped that one this year because I only run it if the temperature isbelow 20 degrees.

Anyway, the NYC Half is a great race, if you can get in. It’s a lottery system. I got in because I ran all of NYRR’s other major race...

Behold! A Symmetrical Watch Band!

Last week, Apple officially revealed its watch. As an employee at a publication that does some tech coverage, we were all herded into a dungeon where we were forced to pay attention to this nonsense.

I’m typing this on an Apple product. I have an iPhone and owned a bunch of iPods. I like Apple! But, as I wrote in the wake of this watch wave:

Watching an Apple promotional video is enough to make me want to take a hammer to my Apple products and beat on them until I no longer feel shame.

One of...

#GETOFFMYLAWN You Damn Dirty … Marketing Consultants

Location, location, location, they say. Well, some folks are currently located on my lawn and need to move.

Also, this week, I moved from the interior pages of Advertising Age, where I reviewed ad campaigns, to the primo real estate on the back page, where I can write about a broader range of topics. (I also got a cover line.) This is both exciting (for me) and frightening (for everyone else involved).

The back page! I’m a back-pager. When I do pick up print magazines these days (yes, I’m part...

Sick of the Super Bowl? Too Bad

Three things.

1.How much did it take me to sell out and start pulling for the Hate-riots of Bill Bellicheat? $500, which I won in the office pool thanks to the final score.

2. Which Super Bowl ads did I think were best and worst? Find out here, my��professional review of all the national ads that ran in the Super Bowl.

3. Here’s me flapping my gums about the advertising over on Yahoo Finance.

Dr. No: Four Tips to Having a Bad Attitude at Work

“This idea is so stupid, I can’t even look.”

The eye-roller. The stop sign. The “Pffft” person. The guy who refuses to say “Yes, but…” and instead says “Let me stop you right there.” Or just: “No.”

Every workplace has one. Every workplace needs one. In a world of yes men, kiss-asses, “we are family” types and the like, there has to be someone who stands athwart the bridge to doom, shouting, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS.”

It takes a very certain personality type to pull it off, but there’s also an art to...

Mais! How You Say Dat Word?

Don’t want to wait for the audio book? Buy the real thing!

Louisiana words are hard, yall. Even if you grew up there, you still struggle with some of them. If you’re from Louisiana, remember how you felt after years of being tee-tiny and hearing people talk about Nack-uh-tish and then seeing the word for the first time: Nachitoches. CONFUSED! That’s how you felt. Like the world and the English language no longer had rules. Hooked on phonics LIED. (Of course, Nachitoches isn’t English, but you...

In Which I Manage Not to Crack Up on National TV

Uhhhhh, as I was saying, uhhhhh. KNOCK IT OFF BACK THERE!

I appeared on CBS This Morning yesterday for a segment about emotion-recognition software being used to test advertising and the like. Why me? Because I am awesomely brilliant, work for an ad magazine and was willing to wake up at 5:30 on a Saturday morning.

Here’s a link to the video. (Because WordPress won’t allow me to embed the stupid thing here.)

You’ll notice that when I first start talking, I’m kind of rambling, perhaps losing my t...

Fired Old Man Angry at World, Ranting About Something or Other

Leon Wieseltier, recently run out of The New Republic as a gang of Silicon Valley nitwits took over and tried to fix it, has a piece in The New York Times Sunday Book Review that starts thusly:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent...