While standing in Oft-Maligned Big Box Store today, I noticed that they're pushing compact fluorescent lights quite heavily. I'd read some time back that they're striving to push consumers in that direction. They're making a good effort, including informative signage and packaging. Stores selling CFL have a lot to gain. If it's true that a $3 bulb can save the consumer $57 in energy bills and another $6 in replacements over the life of a CFL, that's theoretically $50 more the consumer has to spend at OMBBS!

I've been using CFLs in my basement for a while now, and they're fine there, but I have a few outstanding issues before I deploy elsewhere. If anyone has prior experience, please enlighten (ha!) me.

1. CFLs aren't suitable for applications which require dimming. That's at least five places in my house. Has anyone used anything else? Has anyone seen dimmable CFLs?

2. Apparently, phosphor technology is improving to the point that CFLs are no longer undesirably harsh or blue. Has anyone found applications where the color temperature difference is unacceptable? I'm thinking in particular of bathroom vanity lighting, for example.

3. Can anyone think of a reason I shouldn't use CFLs in my garage door opener? I think it uses a relay so the lights are always full on or full off.

In the car this evening, I was tuned in once again to an Entercom Marketing Results Group station. I heard an ONDCP public service announcement, which I now see is called "Computer Jenny". In it, a teen girl talks about the peer pressure she experienced trying to fit in. Specifically, she listened to music she didn't like and laughed at things she didn't find funny. Now, though, she's realized she can be her own person.

Now I'm not pretending to like indie rock or anything like that. And people think that's cool.

She transcended peer pressure by listening only to major-label music. Ha! Did the RIAA chip in the copy? Upon further consideration, I'm sure radio conglomerates love this; indie is probably their biggest threat after satellite.

Several of the radio stations in Rochester are owned by the Entercom Marketing Results Group. The name alone always blows my mind. Nowhere is the true business of radio better explained than in that name. Anyway, one of their stations is random. Excepting the stretch of the morning with talkers, the only thing connecting the music is advertising and prerecorded bumps. They don't need to pay anyone to sit in a studio for any length of time, and they don't even need to pay someone to pick songs! What could be better for profit? Besides, does anyone listen closely enough to notice?

Wednesday night, one of the bumps highlighted the perils of eschewing living, breathing humans in the booth. It started out with "When it's this cold out . . . " This cold? My car was showing 59F. This may be mid-March, but we were in the second day of a warm snap. Call me crazy, but automating sensitive phrases like that calls for a thermometer, not a calendar!

I'm marveling at Google's willingness to give away money just to bolster the use of Google Checkout. They're offering big discounts for online purchases at supported stores. Think $20 off of a $50 order. It's not one per user. It's not even one per user per store. I've already taken advantage to the tune of $60, and I'm planning to do another $20 momentarily. This is indicative of a customer acquisition budget crazier than even the most profligate seen in the late 1990s. I find this particularly funny and disturbing because Google is the kind of company to which I want to give money. I don't trust advertising, even the very finest advertising, as sufficient to maintain them forever. I'd rather give them $100 a year to be sure services like Google Mail stay the way I like them. I quake at the thought of Yahoo Mail's descent into ad-saturated madness befalling my beloved GMail. I continue to ask Slate.com to offer a Salon.com-style premium subscription . . . all of the content with none of the ads. It's a bargain compared to the aggravation of dealing with all of the maddening animation trying to get me away from my reading.

I once had a great excuse to visit Las Vegas. I had a terrific time, and have often thought it would be fun to go back. Among other things, I'm waiting for them to finish the monorail expansion. Actually, that's almost done. Hmm . . .

Anyway, I have my TiVo set to record any documentaries mentioning "VEGAS". Tonight I saw a program on finding deals, including comps earned while gambling. The narrator breathlessly announced that Vegas takes in thirty-five billion travel dollars a year. He then segued to an anonymous casino executive who declared that casinos give away one billion dollars worth of comps in a year. The narrator returned to say "You'd think the casinos were in business to lose money!" No, I don't think I would ever think that. Spending hours a day playing $50-per-hand blackjack strikes me as a spectacularly bad way to get comped for a room whose rack rate is less then two hands of that gambling. Of course, if I was really into the gambling aspect and willing to flush money down the toilet, I'd take the comps as consolation. In the meantime, I'll be the guy hanging out in front of Bellagio waiting for the fountains to get started.

A New Jersey company called Beach 'N Billboard (har!) pays coastal municipalities to attach a roller to the back of their beach grooming equipment. The result is a tiling of 4' x 12' ads that completely cover the beach each morning. Each imprint also includes the phrase "Please Don't Litter".

I'm not sure if I approve of this or not. Certainly the sand isn't harmed by being shaped just a little bit more. There has to be a small increase in the amount of energy needed for the beach combing, but that probably gets canceled out by the reduced litter. It's the visual noise factor that would bother me. I read about BNB in an article about an unusual new advertising practice (Company pays homeless workers with pizza).

Can't we get some content with the advertising? I'd really like to see art projects. Let artists come up with some plates. Maybe 10% of each imprint for the anti-littering, 45% for art, and 45% for the ad? Even better, have artists do cool anti-littering art that takes of almost all of the plate. Leave a little room for a "brought to you by" sponsorship.

Seen in jwz's journal: Clear Channel founder Lowry Mays, from the Fortune Magazine article Not the Bad Boys of Radio:

As long as his broadcasts sell ads, he's happy. "If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company," says Mays, 67. "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."

I would think that Mays intended that to be "customers' products" instead of "customers products". Most media consumers think that they are the customers. They don't understand that the audience is the product, and the product is sold to the advertisers. I'm surprised that a business magazine would imply that the audience are the customers.

Of course, some other companies are a little more blunt. I remember being shocked to hear WBZA mention that they were part of the "Entercom Marketing Results Group". They're now just known as Entercom Communications, which is far less insidious.