THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

For a moment, it seemed as though people were going to arm-wrestle for the Thought For the Day honors, but in the end, something resembling sanity prevailed and only Steve Ware and John Fazel uttered inspirational messages.

Steve "Good Hair Day" Ware

Steve Ware started by invoking Albert "King of the Bad Hair Day" Einstein thusly: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we used to create them." (Reporter's note: That's probably true, but it hasn't stopped an awful lot of people from trying to do so, over and over and over again.)

John Fazel then stepped up with a pithy bon mot, and he even gave me the hard copy afterwards, but the proverbial dog has since devoured my metaphorical homework so you'll just have to imagine something pithy coming out of John Fazel's mouth. Oh, come on, it isn't that hard to imagine . . . .

VISITING ROTARIANS

Debbie Roessler - Moraga and Asst. DG for this neck of the woods

Admiral to-be Ware

Becky "Admiral-to-be" Ware - Back for a day from the CSU - California Maritime Academy, where she is majoring in Global Studies and Maritime affairs.

The Usual Lafayette Club Suspects - Bill Eames, Larry Duson, Anne Stevenson, Alicia Cragholm and John Sherry

BIRTHDAYS, ANNIVERSARIES AND OTHER MISCELLANEOUS GOODIES

Held in abeyance for a week. Jeez, Mark Roberts goes away for a week and everything goes to aitch-ee-double-ell in a handbasket . . . .

TIME TO SHOW THE HOME TEAM COLORS

Hays hails HOME Team logo wear

As you will no doubt recall, Hays Englehart took orders a couple weeks ago for Home Team attire - hats, tee-shirts and denim shirts. He delivered them today, and boy oh boy are they spiffy. If you didn't order any, you really missed out.

But you can remedy the situation. Hays announced that he is taking orders for a second go round. You know all the cool kids have 'em, so you better give Hays a holler and get yours, too. Now would a great time to get your order in because . . . .

NEXT HOME TEAM WORK PARTY IS MARCH 10

The next HOME Team work day is Saturday, March 10. We meet at 8:00 a.m. at the Gary Fulcher Man Cave (it's on Moraga Blvd in Lafayette, and Gary can tell you how to get there - it's easy).

If you have not been on a HOME Team project, you should come along this time. Talk about instant gratification - you go to someone's house who needs a hand, you do a few chores that you undoubtedly know how to do (trust me, if this reporter can do this stuff, you can, too), and you get to see and hear the thanks from the person right then. It is a real pick-me-up. And it is a great way to give back to our community.

And isn't that what you are in Rotary for?

LOTS OF ROTARY DOINGS IN THE AREA

Debbie does Night at the Races

Debbie Roessler, Moraga Club Past Prez and current Asst. District Governor, came by to tell us about the Moraga Club's annual "Night at the Races." There are video horse races you can "bet" on (the quotation marks make it all legal), partake of the silent auction, enjoy a great sit-down dinner, and generally have a fun evening. It will be March 10 at the Serbian Orthodox Church in Moraga. This is a fundraiser for the Moraga Club and promises to be a grand time, so come on out.

Debbie also reports that the Reno Train Trip went well. This year's version was organized by the Orinda Club after literally decades of the Berkeley Club doing the honors.  

Brad banks Bowl heist

John Sherry, Past Prez of the Lafayette Club, also had two things to share with us. First, Brad Davis won $125 in the Lafayette Club's Super Bowl Squares wealth redistribution project. John handed Brad the cash, Brad had a few carefully chosen and wildly inappropriate comments. Hilarity ensued.

John also invited us all to attend (and help out with -- hint hint) the first-ever Concert at the Res to be held on the brand-spanking new stage at the Lafayette Reservoir. May 12 is the date, and the Lafayette Club could use a hand with set up the day before and tear-down afterwards. President Alex will know how to contact John if you can help out.

For those who don't know, this stage has been a labor of love for John Sherry for years now - many helped, including Lamorinda Sunrise Rotary, but it is not too much to say that it would never have come to pass without John's efforts. Thanks, John.

TALK ABOUT YOUR OVERACHIEVERS

Gary scores Paul Harris double dip

Gary Fulcher is clearly a man of extremes. He set the record for going the longest as a Red Badger (helped in that by his mentor, a certain reporter of this week's Lamorindan who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty). That has not stopped him from being a major-league, front-line contributor to the success of Lamorinda Sunrise. After all, it was he who was the guiding light in building Tippy the Canoe, only the most unique and one of the most successful fund raising efforts in the Club's history.

Now it turns out that Gary is a major-league contributor in another way. President Alex called Gary to the front of the room to present him with his Paul Harris Award for contributing $1,000 to Rotary International. A noteworthy day in any Rotarian's career.

But that wasn't all. It turns out, according to Paul Harris Guru Cal Lee that Gary is not just in line for a Paul Harris, but has in fact contributed enough to receive his second Paul Harris (or "PH+1" for the cognoscenti). Way to go, Gary. Whether you want to be or not, you are an inspiration to us all.

WE GOT PROGRAMS

Buddy, new program impresario

Buddy Burke, being the shy, retiring sort that he is, is reluctantly resuming the Program reins. Getting him to be the Program Guru again involved much begging, mainly by Buddy.

In any event, our very own pilot emeritus reminded us that we do, in fact, have not just a web site, but a Really Cool Completely Updated Web Site (thanks again, Gary Fulcher) that includes -- wait for it -- a listing of all the scheduled upcoming programs. Check it out.

PROGRAM: SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY

We watched commercials today. Really.

But not just any commercials. We watched the best and worst of the commercials for which companies spent an average of about $3.5 million per 30 seconds in the most recent Super Bowl.

Super Bowl ads: winners, losers

Guiding us through the viewing was Ted Klauber, owner of Ted Klauber Marketing & Advertising Inventor and who has over 20 years experience in the advertising agency world.

You probably knew that the Super Bowl is not just the NFL's biggest event, but is also the ad world's biggest event. This year's game was, for the third year in a row, the most watched television broadcast in history. Seventy percent of all American adults watch. The gender split is more even than you may have thought: 54% of the viewers are men, which means that, assuming I can still do simple math, 46% of the viewers are women. At least as many viewers tune in to watch the commercials as to watch the game. (Mr. Klauber did not tell us how many people tune in to watch over-the-hill pop singers lip-sync at halftime in bloated, self-important production numbers put together with the subtlety of a Three Stooges film.) By any measure, the Super Bowl is a Big Deal in the advertising world.

Before getting to the spots themselves, Mr. Klauber gave a brief look at trends in Super Bowl advertising. There is a definite trend of pre-releasing ads, especially running Super Bowl ads on line in the days leading up to the game. The trend used to be toward shorter ads - there was even a one second ad in the recent past. That is changing - now longer ads with more story telling are making a comeback. And celebrity ads continue to do poorly over all, although there are notable exceptions.

Mr. Klauber noted that there are several different components to ad quality. Among them are the ad's identification of the advertiser, how successful the ad is at appealing to the target demographic, and how creative the ad agency has been in putting out the message. Mr. Klauber also identified some of the various groups out there that measure ad effectiveness.

So on to the ads. First up was the Coca-Cola ad featuring an animated polar bear juggling and ultimately catching a bottle of Coke. This is the latest in a series of Coke Super Bowl ads going back to 1993 featuring animated polar bears, a classic example of an ad campaign that has "legs." It rated highly: #3 in Ace Metrix and #14 in the USA Today Ad Meter (perhaps the single most influential ad rating metric).

Next up was David Beckham posing seemingly forever wearing nothing but his tattoos and his underwear. Whatever else one might have thought of this ad, Mr. Klauber pointed out that it was a bad ad because it targeted the wrong audience. Women, the obvious target audience, don't buy men's underwear -- men do. Add to this that the identity of the advertiser was muddled and buried at the end, and this is an ineffective ad.

Next came three commercials for Bud Light. The first blurred the line between being on the job and being at a party -- a line that, for most of us, is pretty clear - to the point of being kind of silly. The next one featured a dog named "Weego" that would fetch Bud Lights for all whenever someone said "here, Weego." This one took a well-worn idea and made it fresh and funny, with the added kicker of a great tie-in message to support and adopt rescue dogs. A real winner by all measures. But Bud Lite fell flat with a pre-halftime tie-in featuring a band no one knows making a point no one understood. This ad was, at best, confusing. At $3.5 million per 30 seconds, "confusing" equals "failure,"

The Doritos ad featuring a grandmother launching one kid via a jolly jumper to snatch a bag of Doritos from another kid rated highly, although it left some of us a bit concerned about the level of adult supervision being demonstrated.

Next up was a commercial featuring a guy buying a car with a second carbon-copy head sprouting out of his shoulder. Creepy. The point was to show that visiting the advertiser's website had given him confidence when buying a new car. Good idea, terrible execution.

To introduce the next ad from this year, Mr. Klauber showed us the best ad from last year's Super Bowl, the little kid in the Darth Vader costume who "starts" a Volkswagen (actually done by his Dad via remote control, a superb example of this reporter's firm belief that there is no point in having kids if you can't mess with their minds). Cut to this year's VW commercial, which suffered from something of a "Jekyll and Hyde" problem. The first half featured an overweight dog working out to slim down. That worked. But it segued into a recreation of the bar scene from "Star Wars" in which one of the low-lifes gets punished by Darth Vader for saying that the "dog is funnier than Vader." Too much of an inside joke, and it required you to remember a now year-old ad to get the inside joke. The verdict: It would have been better to just run the first part with the dog and leave it at that.

Next we saw a kid who gets out of the pool because he had to go to the bathroom and is thwarted in all efforts to do so. He finally jumps back in the pool and lets fly, to his great relief and to chuckles in the room. What any of this had to do with tax preparation software we are still trying to figure out. Actually, it's a thought none of us really wanted to pursue. Because of this disconnect, the ad did not rate highly, either with the rating services or us.

Then came the "Half-Time in America" ad, featuring Clint Eastwood telling us how Detroit (and, in a lovely piece of understatement, Chrysler) is coming back from the bad times to be stronger than ever. This is the ad that has spawned seemingly endless hot air on Fox News and MSNBC about what political statement is being made. But the larger point, at least for Chrysler, is that this ad is still generating buzz several weeks after the Super Bowl. In advertising terms, this is a huge success.

Finally, Mr. Kaubler showed us the Holy Grail of Super Bowl advertising, the famous Apple Macintosh "1984" commercial. According to the folks who measure such things, this is the most successful commercial of all time. Not the most successful Super Bowl commercial, the most successful commercial, period. Just about everyone has seen it or knows about it. It completely changed how the ad world saw the Super Bowl.

And it ran once during the game. Even that one airing almost didn't happen. The Apple board of directors hated it, but Steve Jobs prevailed.

That Mac ad is the epitome of successful advertising, an ad that promotes brand awareness and influences future purchasing decisions. In the final analysis, these are the factors that determine whether an ad has been successful or not.

Thank you, Mr. Klauber, for letting us see the cultural phenomenon that Super Bowl ads have become with more focused and more understanding eyes. 

CALENDAR 

Friday, 2/24 - Postino, 7am - The FUN part of this year's Superbowl

Friday, 2/24 - TGITLFOTM, Hays and Regina Englehart, 5:30 pm, BYOB/snacks 

Friday, 3/2 - Postino, 7am - Annual 4 Way Test Contest.

Saturday 3/10 - HOME Team, 8:30am 

Tuesday 3/13 - Orinda 7am - Board Meeting

Friday 3/16 - Postino, 7am- Club Assembly, Present and Future Direction