Sincerity Crucial to Ads, PR, and Social Media

The first rule of getting noticed online appears to be "go comment on a lot of blogs."

I've been trying to increase my online presence this December, so I have been reading all the suggestions that I can find.

Each blogger has a slightly different take on the grand enterprise, but they all agree: comment on related blogs as if you were voting in Chicago: early and often.

To read the rest of this post, please visit the new site for this blog: http://www.commcognition.com/blog

3 Cognitive Tips to Build Your Brand in 2009

Using tools from the basic science of human cognition can help you differentiate your brand and get it off of the long tail (check out Chris Anderson's excellent Long Tail blog here).

In about 10 days, millions of people will celebrate and then crank out their New Year's resolutions. I say don't wait.

Today is the day to begin anew. Yesterday was the winter solstice, and today begins the best six months of the year: Every day will have more sunshine than the day before. What an exciting time to let science help build your brand and reach its potential.

This blog is about where the mind meets the message. In this case, the message is your brand. For many readers, their blog is their brand and their message. Make your brand effective.

1) Ensure that your brand has a personality

Stanford University professors Byron Reeves (my academic grandfather) and Cilfford Nass eloquently demonstrated in The Media Equation that people treat mediated messages just like they treat real people. That is, social rules apply.

Research in my lab and many others confirms that this extends to brands. We treat brands as if they are real people, and we form especially strong emotional connections when we feel that their personalities matches our own.

Seth Godin does a brilliant job with his blog. The blog has a personality, and that matches the personality of his books. It's a mixture of sagacity and informality (see the picture of half his head).

But Godin cannot simply pretend to be a sage, he must live up to it. He provides excellent insight, and he is a talented writer. If he had everything but writing skills, I assure you his pageloads would be far poorer.

His brand's personality is genuine. You have to mean it. As Lovemarks guru Kevin Roberts says, you must respect your customer.

So do some diagnostics. Ask people. If [my brand] were a person, who would it be. What would that person be like?

It may seem silly, but our data are always telling in this regard. Your consumers know your brand's personality. And if seven different consumers tell you seven different answers, you have an identity crisis.

Decide who you want your brand to be, and then make sure that everything that you do is "on message."

2) Pay attention to attention

I spend a lot of time studying human attention, and it remains one of the great puzzles of my lifetime.

William James said in 1890 that everyone knows what attention is, yet it's incredibly multi-faceted and complex to study.

Importantly, you should keep in mind that attentional capacity is finite. Every bit of your brand is competing with the rest of the world for attention.

You need to make brand communication compelling. Your message has to be the most relevant thing in the room, or you have no chance of keeping attention.

In the blog world, ProBrogger had a brilliant post about three ways to engage readers. Enagagement leads to attention. Find ways to meaninfully engage consumers with your brand.

3) Emotion tells your brain what to do

The overly serious ancient Greeks (and philosophers as recent as Descartes) that emotion and cognition were separate.

They're not. They are inseparable, and they are always working in concert.

You need to know that attention is motivated. Your brain may like to read literature, sip a fine French wine, and listen to Motzart, but it's number one job is to keep you alive.

So it is especially attuned to cues related to survival: food, violence, and potential mates.

Imagine that a naked person or a salivating tiger walked in the room right now. Regardless of how you felt, imagine not paying attention. Now look at standard book page with lines of black serif type against an offwhite background. Not so compelling, eh?

Sadly this is why there's so much sex in advertising.

I'm not urging you to add sex, but I do urge you to generate some excitement within your readers. Excitement leads to physiological arousal, which leads to attention (at moderate levels).

Don't be the News Hour of your product category. Be a little bit exciting. Understand that, for example, we like to look at people. So show people, for example. Find the appropriate emotional connection for your brand.

Just don't be boring. Attention is lost.

But don't forget about personality! Sex for sex's sake is stupid, and it draws attention away from your brand. Find a way to add emotion to your brand that is consistent with the brand itself.

Putting them all together

You still have to have a good brand and a good message. But getting your message noticed and remembered is no simple task.

Your brand needs a personality, and you need to be true to that personality. But if you pick a bad one, you're doomed.

Your personality and your message should be constantly engaging. There's simply too much world competing for limited attentional capacity.

Write from the heart, as Glen advises in an excellent post at PluginID about driving traffic to your blog.

Effective use of emotion will help you engage readers. Look at these human connections phrases in a recent post by eminent social media blogger Chris Brogan: "She remembered my name," "she was a book lover like me," "she loved hand-selling books," "She ...had lots of great conversational information," "I had a beer with him," "That is the feeling I want from social media." And finally:

It’s this thing where people can spend a few extra moments to make a human connection instead of an “off the shelf” connection.

That genuine human connection may be the most basic human emotion. Make those connections in a meaningful, genuine way, and 2009 will be a better year for your brand.

Finally, it's your turn to add to the conversation. How does your brand (or blog) make an emotional connection?

Relationship Targeting: Know Your Customer

I'm always amazed when I stand in front of 170 young advertising students and talk about targeting for the first time.

Largely, this is lost on them. Sad, really.

Matching your brand to a small group of consumers may be the most important thing that you ever do.

My lab has done a lot of research of brand personalities, and to me the fascinating bit is just how easily people assign personalities to inanimate brands.

Right now I'm working on an exciting new project with Tim Laubacher. We're using Darwin's principles of natural selections to find out just what personality is attached to a given brand. More on this in coming months (read more on the underlying principles here).

What do targeting and personality have in common? Tailoring your target market. Sure, my last post blasted Burger King for too narrow a target, but most companies aren't Burger King.

In the Dec. 8, 2008, Advertising Age, there is an article amazingly buried on page 4.

Under Jack Neff's byline, "That 80% of sales comes from some 2% of buyers; Study: Package-goods brands' consumers bases very small, yet diverse."

Think about that. Two percent of all buyers make up the lion's share of your sales.

Numbers like those start to make a strong case for broader use of customer-relationship management among package-goods players who've questioned its applicability because of the high cost per consumer.

This means that even the narrowest of traditional markets are likely to fail. This small yet diverse bit is tricky.

Tools such as the one that I am developing with Laubacher will allow real-time diagnostics of a brand's multiple personalities. We can uncover these niche markets.

And then the real work actually begins. How do we reach these people when mass media will terribly overshoot and overspend. Then, how do we keep them among our 2%.

As Neff correctly identifies, relationships are the key. And compatible personalities are key to relationships. Think of this as a brand version of eHarmony: 29 dimensions of compatibility.

And you have to be careful not to drift. Once you establish your brand personality, you have to remain true to it. Google used to be one of my absolute favorite brands, but today I referred to them as the "Wal-Mart of the Web" due to their control of some of the features of this blog (Google owns Blogger).

I'm impressed with some corporate efforts on Twitter (e.g., @Starbucks). However, following 21,355 people (at present), this is more like a casual hook up than a committed relationship.

It's a great time to study communications. I'm counting the days until the word "Mass" is toppled from the front of my college like a statue of Lenin or Hussein.

Brands, Clutter, Web 2.0, & Ambient Awareness

There are some people in the world that I want to know what they're doing.

Not BFFs or anything like that. Just interesting people. So we're friends on Facebook, or I follow them on Twitter.

Since I'm a mass communications prof, I like to keep up with opinion leaders in the new technology field.

Today, one of the almost complete strangers that I follow on Twitter posted (or Tweeted, but I hate that word) this: "Tackling Social Media Strategy :: how do you use social media to create ambient awareness with journalists, publications & influentials?"

And I thought, "ambient awareness"? I was pretty sure I could figure it out, but I direct messaged her to see just what she meant, and she was nice enough to write back.

She pointed me to this awesome story by the New York Times.

Apparently those people about whom I want to know a little bit are those about for whom I have "ambient awareness." OK.

But does that translate to a company?

I talk a lot about Lovemarks (official site), so I know that we care a lot about the perceived personalities of brands. But do we really care about the companies?

I love Tide. But I don't much care what's going on at Tide right now. This may be different for a service company -- especially a Web 2.0 service company, such as Google or Digg. However, that's a pretty narrow sector of the economy to devise a marketing strategy for.

So if you were to reach out to me through the social networks, dear Web, would I care, or would it be yet evermore clutter in the advertising landscape?

So, do you care what's going on with the companies you love? Comment here!

Probably, only Tim will comment. But he has good things to say. So read his hopefully inevitable comment and leave a comment yourself.

Cool Visual Branding Concept Idea

"Built by the Kolbrener, branding experts"


Thanks to Tim Laubacher, brand evangelist.

Thanks, Elvis, for Banana Reese's

Not my cup of tea.

We Love You Brand, But I Love Rival More

As I was speeding out of town two weeks ago to visit the Buchanan&associates advertising agency in Dublin, Ohio, I ran some quick analyses on our brand physiology data.

In this study, we measured psychophysiological responses to brand logos. In previous studies, we had found that self-reported responses to brands look a lot like self-reported responses to other emotional stimuli.

Admittedly, the early August analyses were fast and incomplete. But some of the results looked weird to me.

This first round of analyses compared physiological responses to the most-loved brands and the least-loved brands.

Collectively, we had both. There were brands that seemingly everyone loved and those that seemingly everyone did not love.

When I first saw the "weird" data, I had a thought. Maybe, I thought, we have a bit of a groupthink problem. Sure, the aggregate data suggest that the brands are loved. But some of the people among our 54 participants might not have loved those brands.

Let's take a look at that idea. For Texas Tech students, our five most-loved brands were Disney, Starbucks, Google, Dr Pepper, and Target. They stood alone. We called them Lovemarks after Kevin Roberts' term.

But let's look at the results by person. Every brand had a complement. That is, there was another brand roughly in the product category. When comparing attitudes (self-reported answers to 3 scale items), how many people picked the Lovemark? (Ties are excluded).

Disney had 32 fans, but 16 people preferred 20th Century Fox.
Starbucks had 48 fans, but 5 people preferred Maxwell House.
Google had 32 fans, but 11 preferred Yahoo!.
Dr Pepper had 33 fans, but 19 people preferred Coca-Cola.
And finally, Target had 39 fans, but 11 preferred Wal-Mart.

The majority always wins. However, with the exception of no-real-equal Starbucks, there were no runaway landslides.

You see, the group does matter. The herd defines the trail. But the individual matters a lot, too. Just because most of you love something does not mean that I do. I might like it, but perhaps I love a rival more.

We already had planned to measure responses to individual Lovemarks. In fact, it was a driving motivation behind the entire study. These data just confirm that it is the correct strategy.

If data show that a group feels a certain way, then a (quasi) randomly selected individual from that group is likely to feel that way, too. But that participant has lived her or his own life and has unique attitudes. We'll do a lot better if we give that individual some agency in measuring her or his attitudes.

Discovery Channel Seeks Emotional Connection

Shameless TDF plug from Velo News.

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More businesses are getting it: emotion is what counts!

From an Adweek story:

"The Discovery brand 'is still caught up in the intellectual space,' said Dan Bragg, Discovery Channel client vp and creative director. 'The brand itself is not as heartfelt as our programming. So the marketing will try to move the brand to being more culturally relevant and more emotionally engaging.' "

I'm Done Eatin' Good in the Neighborhood

Update: Chili's chicken ranch sandwich tasty as always.

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So long, Applebee's.

It was fun while it lasted. Reasonable food at reasonable prices. Balloons for my kids. The Brewtus beer when I was an undergraduate.

Applebee's was one of the first chain restaurants in Las Cruces, so we'd eat there as undergraduates. We also spent many happy hours there after working at the NMSU student newspaper.

To tell you the truth, I always liked Chili's better. The food is a lot better. In fact, we may have to go to Chili's for lunch today.

But until this week, Applebee's was a Kansas City (metro area) company. And I'm a Kansas City guy. Born and raised.

[ More fountains than any place other than Rome! ]

So I felt some loyalty to Applebee's. In part, I still have Sprint cell phone service largely for this reason.

Anyway, this week it was announced that IHOP is buying Applebee's for $2.1 billion.

What? IHOP?

I hate IHOP.

Their food is mediocre and overpriced, and their service is worse. And now they want to franchise out most of the company-owned Applebee's restaurants.

Great! Lousy service!

Actually, to be more fair, the franchising means completely unpredictable service.

Take McDonald's, for example. You might walk into a McDonald's and get great service. But if you walk into a McDonald's in Lubbock, Texas, Santa Rosa, N.M., or Roswell, N.M., the service will be awful. In fact, the average jellyfish would provide better service than McDonald's employees in these three cities.

Even worse, IHOP is headquartered in Glendale, California. No loyalty there.

So, my kids' love for your 2 cent balloons and my hometown roots used to get me in the door.

That's over now. Just another corporate takeover killing off the identity of a brand. I get profits. I am a capitalist. But to me, as a consumer, almost nothing good ever comes from these giant mergers.

Indirectly, perhaps, I get some benefit from my retirement mutual funds. But as a consumer, I see little benefit.

I Never Wanted an iPod, but the iPhone ...

Photo courtesy of SFgate.com.

---

From 1995 to 2001, I was an Apple guy.

Then graduate school and statistics programs brought me back to the PC world.

After editing video for the past week ... and having my curiosity piqued by the iPhone, I am contemplating a Mac in my future.

Thanks, Wes, for planting the cognitive "seed," so to speak.

Aluminum Beer Bottle Surprisingly Cool

A little more than a month ago, I was sitting defeated in the Lubbock "International" Airport. On our way to San Francisco, we had taken off for Dallas. Halfway there, storms closed the airport. So we circled back to the LBK.

Already not a fan of flying, I had reached my limit. Along with travelling partner, Wendy, I looked toward the airport bar.

It was packed.

We retreated to the food court. There I spotted a $5 aluminum bottle of Bud Light beer. For airport prices, this was a bargain ... especially considering the full 16 oz. "Tall Boy" quantity.

Before we finally took off again for DFW, we cleaned out the food court's meager supply.

And I must admit that I have been taken by the aluminum bottle. A simple concept, really. But I find it fascinating. And at least in Lubbock, it's a unique selling proposition.

So, thanks, Anheuser-Busch. This Bud's for you.

The Bimodal Attitude World of Wal-Mart

Numerous surveys have shown that Wal-Mart is the most hated and the most loved company in America.

Some people love Wal-Mart for their cheap prices. Some people hate them for their corporate politics and harsh treatment of employees.

For the advertising practitioner, this split opinion provides an interesting dilemma: how do you keep your "base" happy while courting your detractors?

I offer no solutions here, but I do have what I believe to be an interesting observation.

We ran an experiment this year where we collected physiological responses to advertising brands. Although we're still hard at work analyzing the physiological data, I have peeked at the self-report data.

After we recorded physiological responses to each brand, we asked participants several questions about the brand. Most of these question dealt with how positive or how negative their attitudes were toward the brand.

The histogram shows attitudes toward Wal-Mart for the 54 experimental participants. This is the average of 6 attitude-related questions, and the scales range from 1 to 7. Here 7 would represent the most positive attitude possible.

As you can see from the superimposed normal curve, these data are not normally distributed. Instead they appear to be bimodal. That is, they appear to have two most-frequent responses. Just as surveys suggest, we appear to have a group that loves Wal-Mart, and we appear to have a group that hates Wal-Mart.

In West Texas, the pro-Wal-Mart crowd appears larger, but these data are hardly representative. They are from a convenience sample used for an experiment. Nonetheless, I still find it interesting that the split-attitude trends appears present even with the small non-representative sample.

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See our (small non-representative sample) most-loved and least-loved brands here.

Branded: Love and Hate in West Texas

We continue our work into the cognitive processing of brands in the communication and cognition lab. We're just beginning to analyze the data, but in the interim, I thought that I would bring you the most and least loved brands on the South Plains.

Most Loved Brands
1. Disney
2. Google
3. Starbucks
4. Dr Pepper
5. Target (go figure)

Least Loved Brands
28. McDonald's
29. Citibank
30. Abercrombie & Fitch
31. Camel (cigarettes)
32. Marlboro

Most Arousing (Exciting) Brands
1. 20th Century Fox
2. BMW
3. Bacardi
4. Smirnoff
5. Nike

Least Arousing (Exciting) Brands
28. Dell
29. Microsoft
30. Gap
31. Citibank
32. Maxwell House

3 Year Old Gets It: Brands Belong to You

When I was a teen-ager, they opened a new dining establishment out in the southern part of Overland Park, Kan. (an upscale suburb of Kansas City). I believe it was on Metcalf Ave. The novel part of this restaurant involved combining a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Taco Bell, and a Pizza Hut in a single building.

We called it Ken-taco-hut.

This novelty lured me there exactly once.

This is somewhat amazing because my full-time high school occupation was driving. As my grades could attest, I didn't do much studying. If I was awake and not either in school or at my parents' advertising agency, I was driving.

My father was kind enough to supply me with a series of nice vehicles and a gas card (my mother probably thought it unwise). So we drove.

And we drove in the neighborhood of the Ken-taco-hut fairly often. But we didn't stop. Why? Well, then as now, the combination of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC is just not that cool.

As teens, we didn't eat much Pizza Hut or KFC (unless the parents bought it), and if we wanted Taco Bell, there were more convenient ones at which to stop.

Thus, the take-home point is that we were loyal to Taco Bell. That was our brand.

It seemed kind of cool to stick one in a building with two other restaurants (this was years before they started sticking Subways in gas stations), but not cool enough to deal with the extra people.

We were the consumers. We decided what brands were important to us. The brand belonged to us. That's what makes it a brand and not just a stupid logo.

Yum! Brands still does not understand this. Still.

I was watching the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, which is not surprisingly located in Kentucky. Yum! Brands also is located in Kentucky. As I see it, the Derby, KFC, and bluegrass pretty much exhaust the state's potential (I forgot Ashley Judd. My bad). So, not surprisingly, Yum! Brands was a major sponsor. The logos were everywhere.

"Idiots," I thought.

Almost a year ago, I decried Yum! Brands for wasting $2.7 million in Kentucky Derby publicity by using their obscure logo instead of one of their flagship brands.

Free advice. And they ignored me.

Shortly after Street Smart won the race, NBC went to commercial, and Yum! had a montage of their three major brands. About that time, my three-year-old daughter walked in the room.

"Taco Bell," she said. "Mommy, I saw Taco Bell."

She gets it. She cannot read yet. But she recognizes Taco Bell instantly.

Allow me to try to impress upon you how amazing this really is.

We have lived in Lubbock, Texas, for just over 10 months. We have eaten at Taco Bell exactly once in that 10 months. Once! You see, Lubbock also has Taco Bueno and Taco Villa. So there are not too many Taco Bells. There are so few Taco Bells that Texas Tech doctoral student Wendy Maxian threatened not to come here unless we actually had a Taco Bell.

We do not drive by a Taco Bell on the way to my daughter's preschool, and we do not drive by one on the way to my work. We do not see it that often.

And the next-to-last time my daughter ate at Taco Bell, she was barely two and a half years old.

But she had instant recognition for the brand in a video montage.

Imagine the impression that could have been made with a well-thought-out advertisement for one of the brands.

Yum! Brands' logo means nothing to her. Or me. Or you. We just do not fall in love with conglomerates.

I love Ben & Jerry's ... not Unilever.

I love Dr Pepper ... not Cadbury Schweppes.

I love Tide ... not Procter & Gamble.

You get the point. My 3 year old gets the point. Kevin Roberts gets the point. Sadly for stockholders, a bunch of Yum! Brands marketing executives completely miss the point.

This means that I will probably be writing this same post next year at this time.

Dr Pepper: Lone Star Lovemark

Most days I quite love my job. I love going to work every day trying to figure out how the brain works. Earlier this week, I was in the lab running an experiment.

One of the experiments we are doing involves having participants look at brand logos. We measure, among other things, activity in the facial muscles associated with smiling and frowning.

Bored as I was to be in the lab yet again, I was staring at the screen watching the anonymous participant's physiological reactions.

When the Dr Pepper logo popped up ... wow! The blue line indicative of activity over the orbicularis oculi muscle group went through the roof. A huge smile. [We're not measuring zygomaticus major activity this time, which I will explain later].

Huge smile!

You see, Dr Pepper hails from Texas. They pretty much love it here. I love it, too. It is a Lovemark of mine. Theirs, too.

And I think that it is too, too cool that when they see the logo they cannot help but smile. Imagine sitting in an overly warm room with a bunch of wires stuck to you. You're there only for extra credit. You just want to get done and get out of there.

But then you see the Dr Pepper logo. And you cannot help but smile.

Too cool.

Drinking, Getting Drunk on 'Our' Brand

I am working on a independent study with an undergraduate advertising student at Tech. For our meeting Friday, he brought in a bunch of alcohol ads. We began to talk about them: what they were trying to say, their positioning, etc.

Of course I'm eccentric, but I have always found alcohol promotion fascinating. It's as if "getting drunk" is the elephant in the corner that no one talks about.

Last night watching the local news, they were interviewing a motley looking crew of West Texans at area sports bars about their Super Bowl plans. More than one mentioned drinking "a lot."

I'm no hypocrite. We're hosting a lab party tonight. I have a cooler full of beer in the kitchen. But what exactly is the point of alcohol? For most people, that is.

Social lubricant? Stress suppressor?

Walking into the liquor store today (which is in the next county due to archaic blue laws), I was reminded of the now-defunct Desert Sun liquor store in Las Cruces, N.M. It was one of the many bad jobs that funded my undergraduate education.

I started working their on my 21st birthday, and I lasted about a year. It was a long year. I am sure that working in any liquor store, you do not exactly see the best side of people. But the Desert Sun was adjacent to a poor part of town, so I saw a lot of people down on their luck.

We sold half pints of Importer's vodka for $2. This was the alcoholic's drink of choice. And every time I sold one, I felt like some cheap smack peddler. These were not bad men. Most of them were homeless. For them, Importer's was the elixir to make the troubles go away.

Others preferred "fortified" Thunderbird wine. Some would buy both. I always felt bad selling them.

Saturdays were hell, as New Mexico did not allow Sunday sales at the time. I carried a lot of cases of Budweiser on those Saturdays. There was one gentleman from north of Las Cruces that surely "resold" those cases illegally on Sunday. He drove a very nice tan Chevrolet crew cab pickup, and he always bought about 30 cases of beer.

There was some kind of restriction on how much beer you could buy (memory fails me), so he had enough people with him to stay legal. I never heard him speak English, and he never spoke to me. And he seemed to have enough money not to fool with reselling.

In addition to the arbitrary life lessons I learned selling America's only legal drug, I learned a lot about brands and buying power. I learned that putting "5.5%" alcohol on the side of a 12-pack of "ice" beer is enough to catch the eye of many a college student.

I also learned that Americans are fiercely brand loyal when it comes to beer. The regulars always bought their regular. No amount of alcohol advertising would have changed their minds.

It would be interesting to sell liquor today, in an environment where hard liquor is increasingly competitive. Not enough to actually do it mind you, but it would be interesting to watch the choices people make.

How many casual scotch drinkers know what "single malt" really means? They know it is a good thing, but what does it really mean. In Las Cruces and West Texas, we know an "anejo" from a "reposado," but do these terms mean anything in New Jersey?

Time for a Shiner. It's a Texas thing. And, when in Rome ...

Panasonic Viral Video Tacky, But I Laughed

Be warned. This "viral" video by Panasonic is very tacky, and at least PG-13.

You can see the punchline coming well before it arrives. But I laughed anyway.

Red Lobster Placement Almost Clever

I don't mind product placement when it's clever. Tonight I am torn.

Throughout tonight's episode of The New Adventures of Old Christine, there was a running Red Lobster theme. Throughout the episode, Julia Louis-Dreyfus craved their seafood.

Interestingly, the product placement was not entirely flattering. Old Christine kept trying to scam a free birthday cake, and there were no blatant Red Lobster logos. One might even have wondered whether it was a product placement.

Going into the final break, Matthew (Hamish Linklater) offers to buy Christine a "whole bucket of fish."

Fade to black.

Fade to ... Red Lobster commercial.

Almost really clever. But also kind of cheap.

Looks As If You Are an Ad Agency

This week I criticized Advertising Age for naming "you" the agency of the year. Among other things, I felt it was too similar to Time's person of the year.

Yet the general notion persists. Doritos is airing an audience-generated ad during the Super Bowl, and the NFL is running a contest, too.

OK, so be it. But this trend toward free labor continues.

As I pulled up Youtube this afternoon, I see an ad for a Dove Cream Oil contest. You can win a contest if you come up with the best 30 second ad for the body wash. Importantly, however, many of the ads are likely to end up on Youtube, where countless viewers will see it.



It will be interesting to see how this fad pans out. Much of Youtube's popularity is based upon viewers posting response videos. If advertisements elicit this type of competitive creativity, it could be quite lucrative for brands.

Dropping Cingular Brand Still a Bad Idea

AT&T is making news this week for their still idiotic decision to abandon the Cingular brand. I criticized dropping Cingular when first announced, and I still think it is a bad move.

According to today's Detroit News, Cingular is the No. 1 cell provider in the nation. AT&T is old school. It is history. Most importantly, it is irrelevant to today's most prized demographics.

The land line is like the buggy whip. It's going away. They took the land lines out of Texas Tech dorms this year. Gone. No more.

AT&T's brand is not worth much to Gen Y, but Cingular is. Earlier, Advertising Age reported that $4 billion had been spent establishing the Cingular brand. That's billion with a "B."

This is an arrogant decision by a company run by a board of directors that I will bet is predominantly run by old white guys (yup, 11 out of 17 are old white guys; all look well beyond 40; and several look as if they were actually present when Alexander Graham Bell uttered the words, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you.").

Memo to AT&T directors: the world has passed you by. To quote Eminem, "You're too old. Let go. It's over."

Cingular is the future. AT&T is the past. The students in my college class look at your technology much like I looked at two cans connected by a string.

So you're trashing $4 billion to revive a dying brand. Foolish.

Imagine someone buying the fledgling automobile company from Henry Ford, trashing the name and instead calling it the Summers' Buggy Company.

"No," you say.

Yes, sadly.

It's a bad move. To try to undo the $4 billion brand name, AT&T will be using both logos, the orange jack and the deathstar in coming months. They ever have some clever ads that will use themes from past Cingular ads.

In one clever ads, tractors that formed the "bars" image in previous ads will now form the deathstar logo. Albeit clever, it assumes a lot of memory on the part of viewers.

Verizon (No. 2 carrier) says they are not changing their strategy. If I were an existing cell phone brand, I would launch a full out assault. The brand switch will create confusion, and I would attempt to capitalize on that.

If it were me, I'd rename AT&T to Cingular. That's progress. That's future.

I'm not predicting that the behemoth will go under, but it's a huge waste of money. If I were a major stockholder, I would be furious.