Sometimes a story is so irresistible that the media can’t stay away from it, even if it’s not much of a story. Consider the following scenario: A. The U.S. is hit by a seeming economic downturn; B. The costs of basic goods like fuel and food begin to rise; C. And so consumers flock to a cheap, old-fashioned staple to . . .
What do American drivers, the children of Lake Wobegon, and termites have in common? They are all above average. Here’s what a regular reader called LLP pointed out in an e-mail: There is a TV ad running here in Southern California for a pest control company. It states that “the average termite eats 24 hours a day, 7 days a . . .
I recently returned from a cool conference in Athens and I was surprised to see the following poster for Silk Cut cigarettes plastered all around the city. Photo: Hetal Thaker, Product Manager-Dimensions, SPSS Inc. We see a bone propping open an alligator’s jaw and a bulldog looking on intently with the slogan “Must-have Silk” written below. The “bone” in the . . .
We hope to have something meaningful to say in our next book about the efficacy of advertising. This is a huge question that impacts everything from commerce to politics to journalism. But for now, let me give one example. My kids were recently watching a Yankees-Red Sox day game on TV, broadcast on the YES network. One of the commercials . . .
Why do brands of whiskey, rum, and gin stay constant, while new vodkas spring up like weeds? Dubner offers one explanation.
“So You Think You Can Be President?” (Related.) From nose to wallet: sellers embrace “scent marketing.” It’s just business: new mob rises in Italy. In MA, minority teacher applicants hurt by licensing test. (Related.)
After Freakonomics got popular, it was unbelievable how many interview requests/invitations I received. I don’t think I’m exaggerating in saying there were at least 10 per day for a year, or over 3,500 in that time. Now I get “only” three or four a day. Needless to say, I got really good at saying no, much to the chagrin of . . .
Do you ever wonder why the media covers election campaigns so vigorously? Is it really necessary to know what each of the dozen-plus major-party early presidential candidates are doing on a daily basis, and what’s going on among their campaign staffs, and what their spouses like to eat and what sports their kids like to play? It may just be . . .
We’ve written often — most recently here — about the fact that just because two things are correlated, it does not necessarily follow that one causes the other. For instance: campaign spending and electoral success; “culture cramming” and childhood test scores; the use of child car seats and the decline in auto fatalities. So it was interesting to see, on . . .
July 16 is National Get Out of the Doghouse Day, a stunt created by a motivational speaker named Heidi Richards to promote her flower business. Let the commoditization of guilt bloom.
In the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Miriam Shuchman writes about the movement in Congress to allow the FDA to block direct-to-consumer ads for new drugs. “There is popular support for a ban: in a telephone survey conducted in March 2007 by Consumer Reports, 59% of respondents ‘strongly agreed’ that the FDA should ban advertisements for drugs that had . . .
A new study from decision scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the RAND Corp. suggests that quality of life may be directly related to decision-making ability (a point further dissected in Dan Gilbert‘s Stumbling on Happiness, which Levitt has discussed before). From the San Francisco Chronicle: A study by credit- and fraud-reporting agency Fair Isaac Corp. reveals that Internet advertisers . . .
A while back, Levitt wondered why the Wall Street Journal charges for its online version while other papers generally offer their content ice for free. Sure enough, we have an answer. Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has an editorial in today’s Journal (available for free!) titled “How to Sink a Newspaper.” It offers a detailed explanation . . .