virtualeconomics

"Eating out Giles Coren"?

Loyal VE readers will recall my habit of buying the Times on a Saturday solely for the pleasure of reading Giles Coren's alleged restaurant column. Not, you understand, because I have any particular interest in restaurants - given that much of the pleasure of the column comes from his regular reluctance to mention having visited one - but simply because (with the possible exception of Larushka Ivan-Zadeh's film column) it is probably the best and most amusing thing written in English every week.

Recently it got something of a revamp (again, loyal readers will recall that I do not read anything else at all in the Saturday Times so cannot enlighten you how much further, if at all, this revamp extends - a quick skim reveals mainly that a column on the back page called Beta Male is written by a man called Robert Crampton who is the spitting image of my mate Silk) and is now rather oddly entitled "Eating out Giles Coren". Sure, the "Eating out" is in bold pink and the author's byline is italicised in a completely different font and colour but mere typography is hardly enough to disguise the fact that in the absence of any punctuation the column's title is now unambiguously "Eating out Giles Coren". If the thing was penned by Nigella Lawson I would have considered this outcome inevitable - as it is not, this new double entendre merely bewilders. 

Detargeting

Here's a fascinating idea - adding banner ads to corporate emails. Let's briefly think through what's wrong with this. Take a highly targeted, personal, one-to-one comms medium (email) and dump a mass-marketing branding solution on top of it (banners). You've got all the elements of an unstrategy right there: a wasted opportunity (if you want to send commercial messages out with your corporate emails it's possible the sender knows a little bit about the recipient, at least enough to tailor the message), a nuisance cost that diminishes the utility of a previously adequate channel and a fairly serious chance to harm the credibility of both the advertised brand and the email sender. Best result I can see - corporate email gets used a bit less because it's slightly less useful and people spend a bit more time face to face. Or we get an AdBlock add-on to email that strips the banners out. Anyone working on that yet? You could probably sell it as an enterprise solution...

It is now safe to turn off your ATM

One of the minor perils of trying to use Microsoft to do, well, anything - an ATM at Tottenham Hale station earlier today bearing only the message "it is now safe to turn off your computer".

 

That's two quid a month saved

Excellent news today - Giles Coren's weekly restaurant review, which I buy for £1.50 every Saturday from my local newsagent (inexplicably padded though it is with literally hundreds of other pages that, annoyingly, I have to carry home before I can ignore and recycle them) is now available for a mere £1 a week. That's a definite £2 a month that the credit crunch is saving me. I've yet to so clearly identify any other positive benefits of this recession but since it has yet to inconvenience me either I'm currently counting the recession as a net win.