Status-Q

When I'm ruler of the world — something which is, by the way, on my list of retirement projects, but keeps getting usurped by urgent tasks like booking an MOT for my mum's car, so I haven't got around to it yet — one of my first actions will be to ban the phrase 'up to' from all marketing materials.

Last year, I complained here about our bathroom cleaner, which announced that it removes 'up to 100% of bathroom grime and limescale', presumably to avoid disappointment for customers who thought it might remove 120% of either. It might actually only remove 80%, but that's fine, because they said 'up to', and it's still clearly a superior product to any competitor which did the same but only claimed to remove up to 90%.

Then a week or two ago, I was sent something that said, if I remember correctly, "Did you know your toilet could be costing you up to £581?" Well, I did, because it might be leaking through the floor, one drip at a time, into the dining room below and the water could seep from there into the secret trunk full of lost Gainsborough paintings that I have hidden below the floorboards. Oh, but, wait... then, it would be costing me much more than £581. So, no, I didn't know it could only be costing me up to £581. Perhaps I was the target market for this advertisement after all.

So I read a little bit further, where I discovered that what they meant (but hadn't said clearly) was £581 per year, but they made no mention of damaged masterpieces, and were really talking to people about the water bill incurred if their WC had a perpetual leak from the cistern into the bowl... people who presumably had previously assumed that this could only be costing them up to £580 per year!

So what I want to know is who came up with the precise £581 figure, and how they could be confident that the cost could never be, say, £600? I couldn't find the notice just now, and, doing a Google search for similar warnings, I discover pages stating that my loo could be costing me up to £200 per year, or up to as much as £1000. But, of course, it could be costing me 5p per annum, and all of their claims would still be valid.

So do watch out for these dubious phrases, but you only need to be on your guard for the next eight months or so, because by the end of this year I shall be ruler of up to 100% of the entire globe.

I wrote a post back in July called 'The AI Heat Pump', about how AI systems can expand small amounts of text into larger amounts and condense larger amounts back into small amounts again, simply burning energy and introducing the odd inaccuracy as they go.

So my thanks to John Naughton for introducing me to Tom Fishburne's site 'Marketoonist' via this cartoon:

A couple of years later, everyone's talking about 'agentic systems', and he has a nice update on this theme:

It's a great site, especially if you've been involved in technology, or marketing, or both.  Take a look at more of the cartoons here.  

And they're not just pictures, BTW, there are posts behind them, if you click through.

Back in January I wrote about how Microsoft had increased their Office subscription prices by a third, but you could still get it for the old price by saying that you wanted to cancel, and then selecting the 'Microsoft 365 Family Classic', which comes without all of the AI features that lead to the extra cost.

Well, our subscription just came up for renewal... and I found that they've now removed that option from the website. In fact, there's nothing on the website to suggest that writing a letter without the aid of AI is something you might want to do... or appreciating that you might not want to pay for it.

Undeterred, though, I used the online chat system. It was AI, of course, but, to be fair, I was able to get through to a human pretty quickly. She had some standard auto-generated responses about all the wonderful things AI could do for me, and a set of questions she needed to ask me about why I didn't want AI to improve my productivity in my Office suite. I said, roughly:

• (a) It costs money.
• (b) I'm concerned about the environmental impact.
• (c) Im concerned about the privacy implications.
• (d) I've used the the tools, and know that the supposed productivity improvements are mostly a myth unless you're writing stuff that nobody would want to read... in which case, why bother?
• (e) We went to school, so we already know how to write.

I could have added that:

• (f) I almost never use Microsoft Office, so wouldn't look there for any of this stuff anyway, and
• (g) Modern Microsoft apps are quite bloated enough without wanting to add anything more, and
• (h) The only things I might want to use AI for I can get for free from chat.bing.com or chatgpt.com or aistudio.google.com or claude.ai, so I'd rather spend my 25 quid on fish and chips and beer at a nice waterside pub, thank you very much.

But even without those additions, in the end she admitted that she could actually renew my Microsoft 365 Family Classic subscription for the old price.

So it's still possible, if you can manage to talk to a human. But I wonder for how much longer...

I seem to be seeing more and more of those pop-up windows that, within seconds of you first visiting a website, ask whether you immediately want to fill in your email address so they can send you spam.  

Usually, it happens before I've even read the first sentence, let alone the first paragraph, so my reaction to "Would you like to receive updates from us?" is generally, "How the hell should I know? I've only seen your URL so far!"

So my curmudgeonly questions of the morning are:

• Does anyone, anywhere, ever fill these in?  My basic respect for human intelligence would suggest not, but I suppose roughly half the world has below-average IQ.

• Who are the fools who, when planning a shiny new website, decide that immediately obscuring it with one of these, and simultaneously annoying every new visitor to your site, is a good idea?

• Are people who work in marketing actually the kind of people who would fill these in themselves?  Or do they just think everyone else is an idiot?  Either option would not reflect well on them, which leads me to an inevitable conclusion and final question.

• Why do so many of those people with below-average intelligence work in marketing?

I'm somewhat confused by one of our recent purchases, which proudly proclaims on its packaging that it hasn't been tested on animals.

Jolly good, I thought. Always keen to do the right thing if I can.

There's just one problem.

It's dog food!

What's more, it's made of chicken! So it's made of animals, and fed to animals... but at least you can rest assured that it's not tested on them. What sort of a daft marketing department...?

Ah well, never mind.

Well, Arden Grange, I can report that Tilly, on being given it, wagged her tail enthusiastically and wanted more. So that's good news for your marketing.

But I'm afraid this means that it has now been tested on animals, so you'll need to remove the label.

This publicity stunt for the movie Chronicle is nicely done, I think.

More info here .