Ad Wizards, Part II

Some weeks ago I published this post, wherein I asked why local companies don’t couple their ads with national TV broadcasts that are applicable to what they do.

You know that State Farm Insurance commercial where the woman brings a bunch of pizzas and wings and ranch dressing to the agent because he allegedly did something special for her but it turns out that’s just their rates for everyone? Over the last few nights I’ve been noticing that at the end of that commercial, a local agent’s picture is splashed upon the screen along with a little blurb about him and what he offers.

So I can only assume one of three things has happened here.

1. There have always been local agents featured in this commercial and I never noticed.

2. State Farm Insurance follows Dailey Freelance and saw the advantage in what I was proposing.

3. This is just the natural progression of things and it was only a matter of time.

I doubt very much that the first one is true, and my wife confirmed that it seemed new to her as well. The second one, though appealing to me, seems leaps and bounds less plausible. So chalk it up to synchronicity and timing. In any case, this was just a national company mentioning the local franchise, much like when they get the star of a network TV show that’s now in syndication to record a spot mentioning the local station and what time the reruns come on.

As I suggested in the initial post on the topic, there is still room for a lot of creativity in this area. Surely there is already a lot of subliminal or at least subtle couplings of advertising with programming. Pizza commercials with a sporting event, for example. But that’s an appeal to the impulses. I’m talking about more of an appeal to logic. Something more out in the open.

“You’re watching this show, so obviously you could use or would probably like this product and we’re the local place to get it!” Just flat-out cutting in and saying it rather than planting the suggestion and waiting for our lower nature to intervene. Small, local businesses are going to have to get not only more creative, but more bold in the way they inject themselves into the conversation.

As your freelance writer, I look forward to boldly breaking new ground with you in the way you present yourself to your public.

A Golden Age of Commercials

We are living in a Golden Age of television commercials. More and more often, I find myself quoting commercials – even more so than sitcoms and movies. While traditional television ads went for emotional appeals (what will happen if you don’t use this product) or appeals to logic (how this product will improve your life), a lot of ads now don’t even have anything whatsoever to do with the product they are actually selling. People used to get most of their advertising from TV. But long gone are the days when the television was the only screen in town. Advertisers have to find a way to make the name of their product/company stand out if they are going to spend money on TV ads. They do that with a jingle or a catchphrase of course, but otherwise some commercials are a lot of nonsense.

Remember how “Seinfeld” was known as the “sitcom about nothing”? These commercials, while memorable, and debatably even funny, are sometimes like a dadaist vignette, leaving the viewer wondering what they just witnessed.

It seems like insurance companies are most commonly implementing this strategy. And it’s not difficult to see why. Having worked in insurance for years, I know that even people in that field will tell you “insurance is boring.” Meaning it is difficult to advertise. It is difficult to make the subject exciting even to the target market. It is even more difficult to demonstrate how what they offer is different from the competition.

So what do you do?

In this case maybe you make bizarre commercials with people and animals doing and saying goofy things. From the Geico cavemen and the gekko, to Flo the Progressive lady, to Liberty Mutual’s “LiMu Emu” the ads have almost nothing to do with insurance. But they differentiate one company from another, somehow, in the minds of the viewer.

If you’re in an industry that is a similarly hard sell, or is “boring” then we should probably talk. You need a writer who can produce content that will grab attention while putting your name and/or product in the spotlight. I’m not saying I am a comic genius who can produce something on the level of Liberty Mutual’s “Wet Teddy Bears” spot. It doesn’t even have to be funny, though humor tends to go viral most often.

I’m certainly not going to deliver “a lot of nonsense” prominently featuring your company or product name. If I can deliver a line that sticks with people, though, and it makes them want to meet you, and makes them want to come see what’s going on in your shop/store/what-have-you, that can be the start of something beautiful. That is truly golden.

Action Trackchair and My Delusions of Grandeur

I recently visited Oxbow Park and Zollman Zoo in Byron, MN with my wife and two of our friends.

When we first got to the park, inside the main building, we were greeted by two employees who, noticing me in a wheelchair, offered me the use of a device called an Action Trackchair, to assist in my stroll through the park.

I am invariably the type of wheelchair user who will listen politely to such offers and then say “Nah, that’s okay, I got this.” And that is what I did, or was in the process of doing when one of my friends leaned over, put his face right in front of mine, and aimed it at mine, and practically shouted my name as if to try to snap me out of whatever reverie I was caught up in, and said “Take it!”

I took it.

Good thing too, because the terrain was bumpier than it first appeared, and because I had the chair, after we finished the zoo portion of the park, we went up a hill into the woods and saw a couple deer in the wild, close up. We would not have went up there in my own chair. The Trackchair is a motorized chair operated very simply by hand. There is a knob to steer, two buttons to tilt the seat forward or backward, and a gauge on the other side to adjust your speed. Before I got into the chair, I said I was going to “crank it up to 11.” They told me the speed gauge went from one to five, so I said “Okay, six then.”

I started off at level one and ever so gradually sped up as we went along. Within the first few minutes I’d already bumped into the fence in front of the owls and eagles a couple times, and I’m still amused about the curious, if not concerned gazes those birds gave me as I tried to master my vehicle. There were some hilly areas at the park and it took me a while to realize that it was a much smoother ride if I tilted back a bit before going downhill and tilted forward before going uphill. It also took me a while to realize that if I didn’t go over the lip between pavement and grass at level five speed, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place!

After a while we were far away from the main building where I’d left my wheelchair (safely locked in an office by the staff). I remembered that earlier on someone in our group had mentioned that we had no idea how much juice the machine had as the woman at the office had said it didn’t get used much. So on our way back, I took the opportunity to stop, and, pretending to be pressing the “gas” as hard as I could, I told the others the battery went dead. I don’t know if they believed me or not, but they went as far as to say “are you serious?” and “stop playing around.” A subtle smirk was already starting to betray me, so I eventually said “just kidding” and continued on. I’m never good at taking a joke as far as I really should.

As its name suggests, Action Trackchairs don’t have wheels except for the little ones in the back to keep you from tipping over. It’s more like a tank. Needless to say, before too long I was telling my wife and friends “I’m not gonna lie, this machine is giving me delusions of grandeur.” But I ask you. If you are aware of the delusions, are they even delusions?

One fun feature is that to turn around, you don’t have to do a U-turn. You just crank the steering knob in the direction you want to go and the machine spins in place. So when one of my friends, walking behind me, made some snarky comment about my driving, I stopped, slowly swiveled all the way around to face him, made an equally snarky remark, then continued my swivel, and having completed the 360-degree turn, continued on my way. By now, I kind of felt like Dr. Evil.

My first experience with the Action Trackchair will very likely not be my last, one way or the other. They go for about $12,000 so either I’ll get my insurance to buy it for me, or I’ll start convincing every one of my Facebook friends to pitch in the roughly $54 it’ll take to get me in one of those beasts for my next birthday. We’ll see.

If you have a disability of any kind that impairs your mobility, if you ever visit a place that offers this type of assistance, you should do it.

Summer Home, Summer Not, and Other Word Play

We recently crossed the threshold of summer, and I don’t know about you, but somehow I missed marking the occasion. I think, with all of the talk of Father’s Day, the recently federalized Juneteenth, and the 175th anniversary of organized baseball, the Summer Solstice sneaked by me.

One of the first things I thought about when I realized the season was here, was how, when I was a kid, my sister would answer the phone by saying “Dailey summer home…summer home, summer not.” It’s ridiculous how long it took me to figure out what was so damned funny about that.

No matter. I was just a kid.

I had the same problem when “The Price Is Right” announcer Rod Roddy would say “all these fantastic prizes could be yours IF the price is right!” or whatever his spiel was. I thought of “the price is right” only as the name of the show, so my kid brain said “IF the Price Is Right….what?”

And when other kids would call me “such a stupid,” I’d smirk back at them and say “stupid what?” I always felt like I won those exchanges when the other kid would walk away not knowing that I just told him that “stupid” was an adjective, not a noun. In retrospect I probably didn’t win, because then not only was I “a stupid” but now I was also “a dork.”

When I figured out that my sister was saying “some are home, some are not”… well, I thought that was clever. It may have been a formative moment in my life as a writer. To this day, I enjoy throwing in some goofy wordplay into any piece I am writing. I’m a big fan of homophones – words that sound the same but mean something completely different – and all of the amusing possibilities that they present.

I love a good pun. Some of my favorite people are those with whom I can fire off a volley of puns back and forth on a single theme until the joke wears out its welcome. And then we just keep doing it until we’ve reached the point where nobody else in the room knows what the hell we are talking about.

And then there’s movie quotes. I’ve often said that finding out someone you know is a Monty Python fan is like going to another planet and running into one of its inhabitants who speaks English.

But really I just love wordplay. It can be a language of its own, or at least a dialect of one’s own native language. It’s like instead of taking an off-ramp, swimming to your exit, or teleporting to it, and somehow making that totally logical. It’s like going from that 8-piece box of crayons to the 120-piece super-duper deluxe set.

I like how Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer in Green Day will throw things like “the credit report for duty calls” or “Molotov cocktails on the house” into his lyrics. He’ll totally screw with the structure of a sentence, but you kind of know what his word salad means. Each word is a link in a chain but eventually the leash connects to the dog, you know what I’m saying? Or he’ll just toss you a double entendre to chew on. Either way, it’s fun. And it guarantees that he’ll never run out of ways to say something that otherwise might be sort of simple and mundane. Or maybe he says things that way because the idea behind it is not at all mundane and can’t be said simply.

Anyway, happy summer! After what we went through last year, here’s to a summer of….not…. being home. Be well!

Who Are the Ad Wizards Who Didn’t Think of This One?!

My wife and I have some very productive conversations when we’re just sitting around watching TV. Last night she said something that left me dumbfounded.

We were watching “Crime Scene Kitchen” on FOX. If you haven’t seen the show, various two-person teams are taken to a messy kitchen, and based on what’s laying around they have to (1) guess what was just baked, and (2) bake it themselves.

So my wife thought why don’t local businesses (in this case, bakeries) team up with (in this case, the local FOX affiliate station) to run ads during the show saying something like “If you liked what you saw on the show tonight and it made you want to run out and get one and eat it immediately, come to our bakery and we’ll fix you up!”

Something like that.

This is a huge advertising opportunity that is going wholly untapped. It would come with some risk of course, because not having seen the episode ahead of time, the advertisers do not know what desserts are going to be featured and whether they can, in fact, execute such a thing. No matter. There is something to be said for showing a little confidence.

And it’s not just bakeries. Wedding shows? Dress shops. Car shows? Dealerships. Marvel Universe movie? Comic book store. Home improvement show? Hardware store. Any sports event? Sporting goods.

You get the idea.

I don’t pretend to know how it is decided when local ads get played. But it is stunning to me that this very thing isn’t done. I mean maybe you’ll see an ad for a local auto dealer during a movie, but you’re not going to hear them say “Hey! You see that sweet ride the hero is driving? We’ve got that! Who knows, maybe you take tomorrow afternoon off and come take a test drive. Why not?”

Something like that.

As a commercial freelance writer, I began to dwell on the many possibilities that this presented to me, and more importantly, to my clients. If there is a show coming up that happens to showcase what you do, we can get ahead of it and put out a blog post making a connection between that show and your business. If you saw it, odds are a lot of like-minded people in your area did too. We can present your business as the place to get whatever was on that show. Ideally anyone in your area Googling that thing will be directed to your blog post, and naturally, straight to your door.

If you are a business owner and want to take a crack at it with me, reach out at daileyfreelance@gmail.com or DM me right here.

Broadway Blues

If you own a business you’re likely about fed up.

You’ve rode out more than a year of varying degrees of restrictions on your capacity, hours of operation, and the manner in which you could conduct business.

If your business is in Rochester, just as things were really opening up, a major road construction project began on Broadway, and it looks like that’s going to be going on for a while. You’ve had to find new ways to keep the steady flow of commerce going. ‘Tis the season for road construction, so it is likely business owners all over the place can relate. Frustrating but manageable. Rochester has a great capacity to respond to adversity though, and I am sure you do too, wherever you are.

And now, while business owners are ready to get back to business-as-(maybe not quite)-usual, we are finding that there are jobs to fill, but not enough people who want them. All of these things combined make for an entirely unique situation. One that requires a unique approach. Something beyond the run of the mill employment ad, no matter what format you’re publishing or posting on. Something beyond the hours, wages, basic requirements and job description.

In short, you want to give them something they will not respond to with “Proficient in Excel, detail oriented, and all that stuff.

So let’s talk about some ways that you can ensure that you attract more talented, dedicated, and engaged people to fill your staff so you can take on all of the work that is going to come your way.

It’s going to require a more detailed approach, and a personal touch.

Your staff – Speaking of that personal touch, start by telling a potential newbie about the people they will be working with. Let’s be honest. Often, one of the things that makes going to work every day tolerable is the people you work with. Years ago, I held onto a job longer than I should have because I liked working with my teammates. It literally meant more than money. Give them a little slice of life in the office, help them imagine themselves taking their place on your team.

Opportunities – For some, taking the long view will be effective. Show how coming to work for you is the best way to get back in the saddle. Depending on the type of business you have, temporary employees with heavy turnover may be the norm. If, on the other hand, you are looking for your forever employees, show them what their future there could hold. Show them where the available job may lead within the company.

All of the good you can do – You may not be saving the world. Not that you know of, anyway. But let’s not get philosophical. It is a FACT, however, that no matter what your business does, no matter what goods or services you crank out, you are an essential part of our local economy, and likely beyond local. Regardless of the definition of an “essential worker” that we all learned in 2020.

What is unique about your industry? – For many, that’s all it takes. Just the feeling that their purpose is not just cranking out….stuff. When people ask “What’s new with you?” people want to be able to say more than “Oh, nothing…just working.” Not that their friends and family expect or want a whole monologue when they ask “What’s new with you?” but when a person finds themselves responding to that question with something that is actually interesting and engaging, they realize they are spending their days purposefully. They can’t wait to go do more of it. Ideally.

Use all the tools that you have available to you, whether it be social media, and especially a blog to help find your ideal crew. Think of it as spring training, or putting a band together or selecting your own “Ocean’s 11” if that’s your thing. But, you know, with more legitimate goals, obviously.

You Don’t Mess with a Dailey with a Pen.

One St. Patrick’s Day back in the early 1980s, I came home from school in tears of shame because “Everyone else is Irish and I’m not!” My mother had to explain to me that a “Dailey” is about as Irish as one can be without being an actual leprechaun.

As a freelance writer, I toyed with different business names, but I am glad I chose to slap the name “Dailey” on it. Because as it turns out, down the ages, the name Dailey, O’Daly, O’Dalaigh or Ua Dalaigh has been inextricably linked with the literary arts in Ireland, and among Irish people everywhere. It is the Emerald Isle’s greatest export, and contribution to the modern world.

Not just writers. Daileys.

Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Bram Stoker were Irish. But they weren’t Daileys.

The first Ollamh of poetry in Ireland was Cu Connacht Ua Dalaigh in the 1100s. The Ollamh was the royal poet who was just beneath the King on the social ladder. They apparently held their own court! The name means “Son of Dalach” which suggests descent from the mythical figure, Dalach, but more generally refers to the descendant of a councilman or professor. They were teachers, and founded schools, and throughout the later Middle Ages and Renaissance period, a string of Ua Dalaighs were Ollamhs, or Chief Poets of Ireland, the royal poets. That person, of all of the members of the O’Dalaigh family, was known as “the O’Dalaigh.”

As in, you may be a Dailey, but are you the Dailey?

These poets were perhaps given such a high position of power because of their reputation for vicious satire. One poet, Aonghus Ruadh O Dalaigh, reportedly reamed a rival so badly in verse that the guy packed up his life and moved to another county. The Irish are a superstitious people, and legend has it that if an O’Dalaigh took aim at you poetically, it would physically manifest as boils on the victim’s skin.

You don’t mess with a Dailey with a pen.

Aonghus O’Dalaigh, grandson of Cu Connacht, is the common ancestor of all Daileys today. By his time, the name was usually “O’Dalaigh” since English rule outlawed Gaelic names. It seems names like Ua Dalaigh or Ui Dalach were a grave threat to the Empire. So the prefix O’ that we associate with Irish names today came from a decidedly anti-Irish attitude. It is a contraction of the English “of Dailey.”

By the mid 1400s the names O’Daly, O’Daley and O’Dailey were starting to show up and eventually some dropped the “O” altogether. Being that “Ua Dalaigh” referred to the son or grandson of Dalach,” the change symbolizes a line of poets bent on making a name for themselves.

Poets struggled to find steady employment by the 1600s. When Angus O’Daly was commissioned by the British to satirize Irish Chieftains of the day, sadly he went where the money was. The acerbic Dailey wit being what it is, he quickly raised many of the wrong eyebrows. He was murdered for his efforts. Around the same time, Lochlann Óg Ó Dálaigh was writing poetry lamenting the loss of the old culture of Ireland to the constant waves of invasion. His work inspired a new wave of affinity for Irish cultural identity in Ireland, hence the incredibly Gaelic name.

The bardic O’Dalaigh tradition is a legacy to be proud of, but even a millennium of family history does not make one a good writer. Maybe it is in the blood to some degree, but one has to put in the work. You know, actually be a good writer. Anything less is stolen valor. So all of my writing is just a humble offering to the memory of the Ua Dalaigh poets of old Ireland. Call it a humble pride.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

“Log On To Our Presidents’ Day Blowout Server-Crasher Sale!”

If you were an actor, I might tell you to break a leg before you got on stage. I wouldn’t, but I might.

Way back like a hundred years ago or whatever it was when people still expected crowds in their stores, they might hold a big “door-buster” sale. Those were big on and around Presidents’ Day for reasons I’m not clear on. But they went over well, because…I mean, what else are people doing on Presidents’ Day? Name one Presidents’ Day tradition.

While you’re thinking about that, though:

With the rise of the dreaded Covid-19, those door-buster sales have largely gone online. Maybe it hasn’t been long enough for the Presidents’ Day Blowout Server-Crasher Sale to be a thing yet. But it’s not literal, anyway. Just like you wouldn’t really want your actor friend to break their leg, the owner of the local mattress store is not really hoping their door will be bashed in by rabid comfort seekers. And even if it were literal, having your server crash is much less of a problem than having a hole in your building. Because if your online traffic reaches such a level that the whole situation comes crashing down, odds are you’ve done pretty darn well already that day. You’re going to come out ahead, after the tech comes in, after the ensuing down time. Meanwhile down at the mattress store, they broke your building before they even bought anything, and now maybe they won’t because it’s a whole scene and the local news is there and everything…

I always wanted to write something for a client that would result in such a surge in traffic (in-store or online) that they didn’t know how to deal with it. Freelance isn’t free, but that would be its own reward, in its own little way. To know that I created just a little problem for my client that isn’t really a problem at all. In fact, quite the opposite.

By the time this post hits the streets, maybe you business owners will still have a Presidents’ Day sale lingering. Or maybe you’re already gearing up for your St. Patrick’s Day Blowout sale. Good luck with that. But even luck needs a little nudge.

That’s where I come in. You tell me what you need them to know, and I write it. With your loyal existing fan base, you can depend on the shares on social media that will boost your clicks, multiply your sales, and….oh I don’t know, maybe crash your server. But again, by then you’ve already done some business.

Literally.

Let’s see what we can do. Contact me today. I look forward to working with you.

Hey, Long Time No See.

Well, hello.

Some time ago I mentioned I might be moving. And then I just carried on posting here as usual. And then I stopped. So if you missed that “I’m Moving” post and you don’t follow me on Facebook you may wonder what happened to me. Short story shorter, because I ended up writing here on a wide variety of topics, I started to feel like I wasn’t reaching anyone. I am passionate enough about a few specific things to write about them often, so I have started (so far) three different blogs.

One is about baseball. It’ll be about current events in Major League Baseball, the game’s history, the intricacies about the game itself, maybe some book reviews, or whatever else I feel like spouting off about relating to our Grand Old Game.

Another is about music. Depending on what day you catch me on, I will be a dixieland jazz know-it-all, a punk, a Beatlemaniac, or I may decide I have to talk about something weird like zydeco or something. Probably some music reviews sprinkled in there. You just can’t know until you read it.

And the third one is all about the city I live in, Rochester, Minnesota. Like the others this one is probably going to be a lot of history, some current events and a healthy helping of “did-you-know?” type stuff. As you can probably see from the blog’s title, “Not Just The Med City” it is an attempt to put the spotlight on this town beyond what it is world famous for, being the home of the Mayo Clinic.

Stop by. I’m just getting started.

McCartney III: The Album Fans Have Waited 40 Years To Hear

As you can probably tell from the title, when I decide I like an album, I tend to overstate that fact. I do. I remember going around for a short time in 2002 or so, telling people that “By the Way” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers was the greatest album of all time. We all probably listen to new releases from our favorites with rose-colored ear buds.

But let’s not do that with McCartney III.

I will say that for me it is about III times better than McCartney (1970) and McCartney II (1980) combined, but really the title of this post comes from the fact that it’s taken 40 years for the third installment. Critics felt the same way I do upon the releases of the first two, but over time, both of eponymous records have achieved cult classic status, the first among the lo-fi crowd, the second with electronica fans. McCartney III is a more complete album for me, in that there are no instrumentals, and it isn’t a niche album in the way it’s two predecessors were. It’s a very straightforward Paul McCartney pop rock album. The only thing that makes this album “McCartney III” is that it’s the first time he’s recorded totally alone since 1980. In 1970 he did it because he didn’t have a band anymore, with the Beatles’ recent demise. In 1980 he went back to the drawing board as a solo act because Wings had recently broken up. With McCartney III, we find Paul going it alone because with Covid-19 raging, he’s had nowhere to play this year with his current band.

“Long Tailed Winter Bird” is almost an instrumental, aside from a droning vocal bit at the end. The musicianship on this song is fresh and exciting, but still a few minutes into it I began to wonder if this album was going to be heavy on the guitar jam sessions, like McCartney (1970).

“Find My Way” sounds, at first, like the story of an old man wandering around his house at night, celebrating knowing where he was. But the more I listened, the more it sounded like a spiritual guide who’d come and gone before and knew the way. But if my first interpretation of “Find My Way” were correct, then it was amusing to think that “Slidin’ ” suddenly found him skydiving. At least at first glance. Really, “Slidin'” is about taking risks and the rewards for doing so, along with the obligatory nod to caution. Take it for what you will.

While “Lavatory Lil” is one of those character sketches McCartney has been doing since “Eleanor Rigby”, this one about a gold digger/groupie type hurtling toward her expiration date, “Pretty Boys” too is a scathing if generic condemnation of materialism and superficiality.

“Kiss of Venus” has the feel of “Calico Skies” from McCartney’s album Flaming Pie mashed up with the reprise to “Venus and Mars” on the Wings album of the same title. Inspired by a book about the flight patterns of celestial bodies in our solar system, if anything “Kiss of Venus” is a love song to the cosmos.

I thought “Seize the Day” may turn out to be a sappy song about making every day count regardless of / because of 2020. I think it actually could be about the end of the world. I suppose at times this year, the differences between the two have been negligible. Casual observers may not realize that McCartney’s lyrics are often more complicated than they appear, and this and other McCartney III tracks demonstrate that.

“Deep Down” is a repetitive, bluesy groove, more like anything on McCartney (1970) than anything else on this new set. And oddly, for a fleeting moment it reminds me of “Rock of Ages” by Def Leopard. It’s sort of a return to McCartney’s “Dance Tonight” from 2007 in some ways, so it’s nice to hear Sir Paul still likes to party. “Deep Deep Feeling” is not just similarly named, but just like “Deep Down” it’s a long, sprawling meditation of a track. This one tackles the subject of devoted love, and mortality, and how the two intermingle. It’s like the more and more he considers both, the more they become a mashup in his mind.

“Women and Wives” is a cautionary tale about the choices we make, the legacy we leave behind and how they are connected. Similarly “Winter Bird / When Winter Comes” after a brief instrumental reprise of the album’s opening track, picks up on that same theme – preparation and planning ahead – not just for ourselves, but to leave something behind for others.

Ever since 2007’s “Memory Almost Full” McCartney has been dropping tracks here and there about how he and his listeners might be remembered when we’re gone. Themes that may not be quite as relevant to younger listeners. In that time he has always tried to reach across the generations with each successive album. Though this album could be enjoyed by anyone, it doesn’t feel like he went out of his way to do that on McCartney III. Maybe that is due to the fact that, he claims, he started laying down these tracks without the intention of an album. Maybe that’s the best way.