Why Toilet Paper Needs Advertisement

I was looking at my Facebook feed last night, normally a great way for me to keep up with friends and it also provides a great sources of reading material I try to follow regularly, when I came across a picture that wanted to know why toilet paper needs to advertise. I know everyone reading today has seen it. My first reaction, like most of y’all I can only assume, was to smile and agree. Why indeed? After all, everyone is buying toilet paper because they need to buy toilet paper, right? Companies need to advertise things like Android phones, so people will buy them instead of iPhones, Galaxys, or nothing at all, but who, in a modern, in a developed country’s economy, will go without toilet paper? Is it you?

Let’s take a more in depth look at toilet paper advertising. Y’all understand that a company actually does need to advertise for toilet paper as do all the other products, its all about supply and demand sprinkled with a little business economics. Let’s start with the assumption that the marketing staff at Company X, who make Brand X, are properly compensated, and are not out there wasting money on television, radio, Facebook and Google ads like some kind of raging group of fucktards. Company X must have a good reason for spending all that money on advertising. What is it?

Advertising actually serve several distinct purposes. I’m sure the picture of the toilet paper with the overlay joke confused most of the marketing zombies, with everyone else just ignoring it or just not getting the fucking joke altogether. Perhaps there are more important reasons to advertise toilet paper than appears on the surface of this mystery. All companies who produce products need to sell those products to make profits. Companies are not still open today because they lose money now are they? The answer is a big fat fucking no, so they need to advertise to get their products in front of as many consumers they can, like you and I. Advertising serves many purposes, let’s look at them together now.

Product Awareness: This is critically important when you have a new product, either new to the industry or new to your company, and want to make customers aware of it. If we still lived in the days when people wiped their asses with stones or leaves, and you had this amazing new product called “toilet paper”, then the purpose of advertising for toilet paper would be to make consumers aware that a much better alternative exists for your sensitive little bottoms.

Market Share: This is important when the products are generally known, but alternatives exist in the market. To return to our Android phone example, just about everyone in the US knows about cell phones, but they can choose from many brands besides Android. So, the makers of the Android phone advertises its cell phones to drive potential customers to buying an Android over the alternatives.

Increase Consumption: Even if you know of the product, and you prefer a particular brand, you can be brainwashed into purchasing even more of it. If you already know about cell phones, you even have an cell phone, but now you’re considering one for your teenager who is in school. Commercials featuring cell phones in a setting filled with school aged children can again brainwash you to convince you to increase consumption.

In developed markets such as the United States, absolutely everyone knows about toilet paper. Company X doesn’t advertise Product X for product awareness, since everyone knows it exists and we are going to buy it (hence the joke picture). Similarly, no one will increase consumption beyond what they would otherwise. People from Company X use the shitter as often as you and I do, clean themselves with toilet paper, flush the soiled toilet paper, and are done. Unlike cell phones or oranges, no one will buy more than they normally would. Unless you are a prepper, then you have an 8 years supply of it that you guard like gold bars. Maybe, one day in the future, scratching paper will replace paper money like cigarettes did in prisons.

But there is fierce competition among the brands. Company X wants you to really believe in the benefits of their band of toilet paper; while Company Y wants you to prefer their brand. They battle for your market share in toilet paper via commercials and advertisements.

In the end, these competing companies always need to understand why they are advertising a particular product and for whom. The original joke image (not shown in this post) is almost correct. It just needs to end with: “Who is not buying toilet paper to wipe?”

Let’s let this post serve as my good deed for the day. This particular Public Service Announcement (PSA) has been brought to y’all by The Sting Of The Scorpion Blog (T.S.O.T.S.B.) and is in no way affiliated with Company X, Company Y, or the toilet paper industry. I’m merely a consumer of toilet paper as I can only assume many readers here are as well so I wanted to explain the joke, not that y’all needed it explained, but it just shows how money, even money we wipe our ass and flush with, still drives our market. Understanding the economics of toilet paper might get us to think about how and why we spend our hard earned money. The day may come when we need to ration toilet paper or even use it as currency. Enjoy your next trip to the toilet and remember that underpaid workers depend on you flushing as much toilet paper as possible so they have a job tomorrow.

Reverse Psychology In Marketing

Sex Sells Snickers Candy Bars

Is The Price Of “Sex” Getting Cheaper?

I was strangely surprised to see the following message as inline text from a long time information donator to T.S.O.T.S.B. from a long time personal friend of mine. Normally she sends me links, pictures, and/or ideas to pick and choose from once or twice a month. But this time, this time she sent “words” from some place and did not reference a source of any sorts. Meaning, therefore I didn’t have an opportunity to see where all this came from. In the end, she used it to ask me a question about the strip club industry, she wanted to know if the “economy” determines how much money I make as a bartender or how much money a stripper is paid.

I wish I had a simple answer. Just as well, she was only trying to help me to tie into my “Sex sells everything” experiment I have been doing here and she just wanted to “show” that sex sells sex sometimes. As a bartender in a full nude strip club I tend to see many things the “average” person isn’t even aware is going on in the first place. To begin with, I see the flow of money, the exchanges that happen casually to “purchase” that special experience. A trend I have seen and heard is that there has became a new meaning to the arts of negotiation because, let’s all face the facts, people want more bang for their buck while paying as little as possible, so hard core economics comes into play. Strippers have a bottom line, of course, but they have the skills to never have to accept bottom dollar for anything they have to offer, they will not sell themselves short for any reason since they are there to separate customers from as much of their money as possible.

“They keep talking about recovery, but for many folks, work doesn’t pay what it used to. According to a recent report, Manhattan and Los Angeles counties lead America in falling wages. In the counties which contain Dallas, Phoenix, and Chicago, workers are also seeing their paycheck shrink. We can add sex workers to the list of people dealing with falling income.

Th Economist examined over 190,000 profiles of female sex workers on websites that feature customer reviews. Based on that data, which covered 84 cities and 12 countries (with the majority of workers in the United States), an interesting trend was revealed: the price of an hour with a female sex worker has been plunging. The average cost nationwide in 2014 is $260, down from $340 back in 2006.

What’s going on? What a sex worker charges depends on many things, including what types of services are involved, the location, and the physical attributes of the worker. Sex workers who conform to Western standards of beauty can charge more. Blondes get a premium, as do those with slim (but not too skinny) bodies and ample breasts. Getting fake boobs can really pay off in sex work: “For those not naturally well endowed, breast implants may make economic sense: going from flat-chested to a D-cup increases hourly rates by approximately $40, meaning that at a typical price of $3,700, surgery could pay for itself after around 90 hours.”

Other ways sex workers can charge more is to provide niche services like having sex with two men at once, or providing S&M role-playing. Big-city sex workers in places like New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and London can charge more, too.

According to the Economist, the reason behind the drop in price is partly the 2007-’08 financial crisis. Other factors, like the migration of poorer sex workers into richer areas can also cause a drop in prices. This trend has been happening in Europe since the European Union expanded to include poorer eastern European countries, which has sent workers across borders. A 2013 article in Time magazine noted that Germany had become the “Cut-Rate Prostitution Capital of the World,” with thousands of brothels and “hundreds of thousands of prostitutes,” many from places like Romania and Bulgaria, dealing with intense competition and pushed-down prices. (Prostitution became legal in Germany in 2002.) In Berlin, oral sex from an Eastern European sex worker can reportedly be had for as little as $13.

The Internet is to blame, too, as more people are selling sex online. Because it’s easier and more discreet to sell sex online, women who in the past may have avoided such work are signing up. “More attractive and better-educated women, whose marital and job prospects are therefore better, are more likely to consider sex work easily if it is arranged online,” notes the report. Technology increases the efficiency and speed of matching client to sex worker: there are even apps which allow customers to filter sex workers according to specifications like breast size, age or height. A new German app even promises that you can order a sex worker the way you would order an Uber car, using GPS to connect client to worker.

But changing attitudes toward sex work in our society are also part of this trend. The stricter a society is about casual and adulterous sex, the more sex work will be in demand. The acceptance of premarital sex and divorce mean that men are less likely to be driven to sex workers because they can’t get their sexual needs met anywhere else.

It’s a bummer to be a sex worker when prices are falling. But interestingly, it looks like incomes may not have fallen as steeply as the decline in prices would suggest, because sex workers have been able to cut expenses.”

Sex Sells The Tom Ford Collections

Looking For The Deals To Die For?

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The Effects Of Healthcare Dot Gov

With nearly half-a-billion dollars in government funding put behind promoting a product relatively few people seem interested in purchasing from a website that doesn’t work, Obamacare is perhaps the biggest marketing flop the world has seen in a very, very long time. The cost to build Healthcare dot gov is estimated at $319 million so far. The total amount to be spent nationally on publicity, marketing and advertising will be at least $684 million, according to data compiled The Associated Press from federal and state sources. As the Washington Post reported on Obamacare’s infamous website Healthcare dot gov, when the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step.

As time went by, things did not much improve. Fewer than 107,000 people had enrolled in Obamacare as of early November, even though more than 4.8 million Americans were notified their health insurance plans were canceled as a result of the new Obamacare rules and regulations. There were only 23 people per day that enrolled during the first month in the Federal Exchange. And the latest polls show growing opposition to the program, with 57 percent of Americans now opposing the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare”. President Obama candidly acknowledged what millions of Americans had concluded after trying to use the new HealthCare dot gov website: it was not working: “The rollout of the new health care [website] has been rough, to say the least… We always knew that that was going to be complicated and everybody was going to be paying a lot of attention to it,” he said. “We should have done a better job getting that right on day one — not on day 28 or on day 40.”

A significant part of the response to Healthcare dot gov’s failures, however, has been an intensifying ad campaign. ads based on research about the uninsured have already been popping up on radio, TV and social media. The pitch: If you don’t make much money, the government can pick up some of the cost of your health insurance. If you can afford a policy, by law you have to get one. The unintended punch line is the ads direct the uninsured to sign up for a plan on the website. One health insurance company executive questioned “why would you spend $1 million sending people to a website that’s broken.” A very good question since administration officials were warned by consultants in March that the healthcare dot gov website was “at risk of failure.” Yet the Administration went ahead and signed lucrative contracts with a number of big name Washington PR firms for more than $60 million to promote the site anyway.

In July, HHS (Health and Human Services) inked a $33 million contract with PR giant Weber Shandwick. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid had already signed a $3 million and $8 million contracts. Porter Novelli also has a $20 million contract with the agency. As one Washington PR veteran noted, “you can have the greatest PR program imaginable on all different platforms — social, media, advertising and earned media — but you have to have a product that is functioning”. The states setting up their own health care exchanges “will receive proportionally more federal money for outreach, advertising and marketing than” the states where the federal government is running the program. In those states, “community groups with federal grants will lead the effort” to convince people to sign up.

ABC News showcased what it labeled “The Strangest Ads to Promote Obamacare Sign-Ups.” Topping the list is Minnesota’s ads “using legendary folklore hero Paul Bunyan (and his blue ox Babe) to show Minnesotans that the land of the north is also ‘the land of 10,000 reasons to get health insurance.’” The two appear in a series of ads  “in which the famous lumberjack suffers some kind of typical Minnesota injury — an axe wound, a water ski collision”. Nearly $28 million will be spent promoting Obamacare in Washington. One of the state’s ads has a woman playing “paper, rock, scissors” to escape the attack of a rabid raccoon.

Oregon is spending $10 million advertising Obamacare with advertisements that don’t even mention the program or how to enroll in it. One of the television ads, produced by the Portland advertising agency North, Inc., does not mention the word “insurance” or how or why to enroll in the program. Another Oregon ad does not mention the word “insurance,” but features what appears to be Gumby riding on the Beatles’ yellow submarine. Between Oct. 1 to Nov. 30, however,  just 44 residents were able to sign up for private insurance through Cover Oregon.

Colorado is spending more than $20 million to promote the program hoping to enroll 136,000 patients in health exchange network by the end of March. So far, fewer than 4,000 have been enrolled, though one of the enrollee’s turned out to be a man’s pet dog. The state’s ad campaign compares enrolling in Obamacare to winning at a casino and features an Elvis impersonator. In Kentucky, outreach workers attended a number of bourbon festivals and visited college campuses across the state to make young people aware of the program. California is spending $94 million on its Obamacare enrollment campaign, including “radio and television commercials, highway billboard advertisements, and a number of Twitter and Facebook posts” and promotion at county fairs and street festivals.

Healthcare dot gov features a tool to search through health insurance providers in your area to see how much Obamacare can save you. The catch? The catch is, those prices are all AFTER maximum subsidies are calculated into the price by the website. This is apparently the lack of insecurity you can expect from the folks at HHS and healthcare dot gov.  A level of incompetence and lack of common sense programming I didn’t even think were possible for government until today. Want to see what the prices are without subsidies? Well someone forgot to password the database the prices are fetched from.  If you want to see it in all its glory head on over to data.healthcare.gov and see it for yourself but be sure to hurry before the government shuts it down for showing the truth.

Why do we find ourselves in this healthcare pickle?  How did the federal government get the idea they could insert themselves into our health insurance industry?   People forget that government is force; and that it is force at the point of a gun.  A model for the Obamacare law can be found in the federal seat belt law, requiring car manufacturers to install seat belts in every car, just as the Obamacare law requires insurance companies to place Obama’s requirements into your health insurance policy.

Information found for this “Your Tax Dollars @ Work” post was done by using a Google search. Information compiled from multiple public websites & media outlets.