Mediaboss Marketing

By: Willy E. Arcilla

Now that Filipinos here and overseas have embraced the new DOT slogan Its More Fun in the Philippines, allow me to offer some comments and suggestions possibly to enhance the campaign.

First of all, I join the entire nationhood in congratulating DOT Sec. Hon. Ramon Jimenez (Mon J to friends) for his leadership role in guiding BBDO Guerreros Tony Harris to craft a very promising slogan.

At the same time, I wish to offer the following with the intention of helping strengthen its effectiveness.

Test it also vs. other competitors advertising campaigns and comparative costs of a vacation. Testing will validate, or show areas of improvement. If we worry about costs, let us remind ourselves of the words by educator Derek Bok, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

This begs a question, Do we really need to claim superiority vs. others to promote tourism? The Top 10 countries by destination are France (77M), USA (60M), China (56M), Spain (53M), Italy (44M), UK (28M), Turkey (27M), Germany (27M), Malaysia (25M) and Mexico (22M). I dont recall any one of them claiming superiority over the rest of the world in attracting those millions annually. Even our more successful neighboring countries never claimed More Amazing Thailand, More Incredible India, More Remarkable Indonesia, or Kingdom of More Wonders for Cambodia. In translating IMF PH into a domestic campaign, how can we now claim IMF Cebu vs. IMF Bohol? IMF Boracay vs. IMF Palawan? IMF Banawe vs. IMF Taal? without sparking regional conflict?

As the saying goes, theres no place like home, so no home nor country is better than ones own.

Could this be why IMF PH has also been a subject of cynical fun in executions showing kidnap victims under Vacations, hostage-taking under Pictorials, massacres under Elections, and even colonies of illegal settlers built on stilts by the coastline under Waterfront Properties as IMF PH?

Perhaps we can also ask in the research study even more fundamental questions like, Is FUN the only thing prospective foreign tourists are looking for in tourism? Is FUN all that Filipinos can offer foreign tourists? How do they/we define FUN? Is FUN all that we want PH to be known for? Are tourists willing to pay several thousand dollars to experience More Fun than other choices?

Follow this link:
It’s More THAN Fun in the Philippines: It’s the Republic of Happiness

PODGORICA, Montenegro--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

.ME Registry, the provider of the personalized domain name extensions and ccTLD for Montenegro is partnering with GoDaddy.com, the world's largest provider of Web hosting, domain name registrations and new SSL Certificates, to offer 10 eligible students $10,000 each for college tuition. This is the second annual .ME Scholarship Program for technology focused students and the March 30 deadline is fast-approaching.

We feel that there is nothing more important or valuable than education, said Predrag Lesic, Executive Director of the .ME Registry. We are excited to partner with Go Daddy again to offer the dot-ME Scholarship in order to help technology focused students get the resources they need to further their knowledge and skills.

"Go Daddy is stepping up to support the future of the technology industry," said Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman. "By investing in these tech-driven students, we are investing in the future of Go Daddy. These scholarship recipients may well be our future employees the next generation of Go Daddy technologists.

Last years Go Daddy .ME Scholarship winners are close to completing their freshman year in top-ranked universities, nationwide including Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

In the days leading up to the application deadline, the .ME Registry will feature interviews with several 2011 scholarship winners on the .ME blog. These students will share how winning a Go Daddy .ME Scholarship has contributed to their personal, technical and academic development.

To apply for the Go Daddy .ME Scholarship, applicants must be pursuing an undergraduate degree in fall 2012, have a minimum 3.0 GPA and have scored higher than 1000 on the SAT or 21+ on the ACT. Applicants need to submit two letters of recommendation and write a 500-word essay describing how the Internet or Internet technology has helped them in the course of their studies, and how they envision benefiting from it in the future.

The final submission date is Friday, March 30, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) Winners will be announced on or around April 25, 2012.

For more information about the Go Daddy .ME Scholarship program, please visit http://www.GoDaddy.com/MEscholarship.

To learn more about the .ME Registry, how to develop a .ME business idea through non-auction allocation of a .ME Domain, or to find out how to register a .ME domain, go to http://www.Domain.Me.

Read the rest here:
Go Daddy & .ME Partner for 2nd Annual Scholarship Contest

What if the city built a huge public park in the heart of Midtown, stretching half a mile over seven city blocks, about as big as the first phase of the High Line? What if that park already existed, dating to the 1980s, largely ignored but for the most knowing New Yorkers?

Were basically building a new pedestrian avenue in the heart of Midtown, one of the densest, busiest places on Earth, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said during an interview last week.

Call it 6th Avenue.

As Midtown began to creep West toward Times Square in the 1970s, a quirk in the zoning between Sixth and Seventh Avenues led to a string of towers in the middle of the block, all with public plazas, atria or arcades running through them. Everyday, thousands of people traverse this secret boulevard stretching from 51st Street to 57th Street, according to Department of Transportation data. They wind their way between parked cars, oncoming traffic and other obstructions, all in the hopes of shaving a few minutes off their walk and maybe avoiding the crowded avenues on either side.

Now, in an effort to create safer connections between these spaces while encouraging their use and also unclogging the avenues along the way, the Department of Transportation is creating a series of traffic interventions to link up these disparate shortcuts. The result should be somewhere between the Brooklyn Heights Promenade (though the Brooklyn Bridge may be more apt, given the crowds) and the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. It should be a nice place to pass through, but also possibly to stop for a coffee or lunch, without fear of being mowed down on the way back to the office.

Weve been working very hard on the spaces between buildings and now were working very hard on the spaces within buildings, Ms. Sadik-Khan said. Were reprogramming underutilized road space while enhancing pedestrian spaces we already have and encouraging their use.

The plan calls for creating new pedestrian crossings between these public spaces, which generally are directly across the street from one another. Stop signs will be installed in front of new raised crosswalks. Warning markingsBUMP, STOP, chevrons and stripeswill all alert drivers to the new intersection while curbed cuts and painted street space will make crossing easier and prohibit parking. The goal, as with so many Sadik-Khan-era projects, is improved pedestrian circulation and traffic calming. The plan is currently parking neutral.

A tiny piece of the plans was implemented last fall, when a crosswalk was installed in the middle of 57th Street, with a traffic light instead of a stop sign. Commissioner Sadik-Khan said the results have been positive, with fewer illegal crossings and a reduction in accidents.

If it seems strange that all these public passageways should line up, that is how it was always meant to be. These spaces are a legacy of the same era that brought us Zuccotti Park. Privately Owned Public Spaces, or POPS, as they are often called, have been much in the news lately, thanks to Occupy Wall Street. The spaces in Midtown are at once similar and different. While none are as big as Zuccotti, they were all built to add precious square footage to the towers to which they are connected.

Sometimes this meant little more than opening up the lobby to the public, while other times developers would build soaring open air arcades. The stretch contains one of the greatest POPS in the city, the UBS Gallery at 1285 Sixth, the southern anchor of 6th Avenue, which houses works from the Smithsonian and not only runs north-south but also east-west. These spaces were not only created through POPS bonuses but also The Special Midtown District, codified in 1982 but in the works for almost a decade, that actively encourage developers to have their POPS line up with those of their neighbors. Without this provision, 6th Avenue would have been almost impossible to create.

More:
Meet Me on 6½th Avenue: DOT Planning Public Promenade Through Middle of Midtown Towers

Q Would it be appropriate to honk at a person who is clearly distracted by their cellphone while driving? I saw a person who was clearly texting while driving. He was continuously looking down at his phone as he drifted out of his lane and was going at least 5 mph below the speed limit. I thought about honking at him but decided not to as I didn't want to scare him too much and cause him to suddenly swerve and cause an even greater hazard.

Greg Esch

Santa Clara

A I honked at a young woman who was texting and creeping along Hedding Street when we arrived at a red light not too long ago. To put it mildly, she became enraged -- at me. She gave me the single-finger salute, was mouthing nasty words (thankfully our windows were up) and had the scary "I'm going to clobber you" glare of an NFL middle linebacker.

So I was going to say don't honk and cause a road-rage incident, but then I stumbled across this story from a Washington, D.C.-area radio station:

"I drive around on the weekends in Washington," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said, and when he sees what he describes as "my biggest source of irritation" -- somebody on a cellphone, LaHood takes action: "What I've been doing is kind of honking at somebody if I see him on a cellphone."

LaHood says it's his way of "taking personal responsibility" to reduce driver distractions. Hey,

Q I was driving down Highway 85, and I wanted to move into the carpool lane. I look over and there is a guy in a small car staring at his cellphone or iPod or something like that. Either way he was totally distracted. He was changing speeds all over the place while getting very close to drifting out of his lane. The entire time I could see him he was on his phone. He was definitely not paying attention for at least a few miles.

What should I have done? Call 911 or 311 or something like that? This seems comparable to drunken driving. He was endangering his and everyone else's lives on the freeway that day.

Matt Katawicz

Continued here:
Roadshow: Guess who honks at drivers talking on cellphones: DOT boss Ray LaHood!

by admin on March 25, 2012

After that brief abbreviation of rain last week, we are back on the Pho Ba Co patio for Dot Com Pho in the hot California sun. We had a nice turn out of a dozen people making it out to the weekly Orange County meetup, which is infinite times more than the attendance at the Vancouver Dot Com Pho. Anyone is welcome to join us.Follow me on Twitter to find the time and location of the next one.

On this edition of Dot Com Pho OC, we check out the supercars at Irvine Cars and Coffee, Sally Chow tries to resize me, Braker The Brand reviews my book, and three gadgets of the week that will turn you into a video superstar. This edition of Dot Com Pho was filmed using the gadgets featured in the video. Enjoy!

Dot Com Pho Vancouver No More Happy Pho Edition

Original post:
Dot Com Pho – Supercars and Video Stars Edition