Snacking with Adel

(First published on 09/23/2009 12:37 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

Unlike most people, I’ve always been fascinated by ads, and sometimes instead of tuning out, I actually sit down and focus more when the commercial break comes on. For me, ads are fun and educational, at least the first time you see them. When I’m abroad, I pay special attention to the TV not just to watch the shows, but to see what passes for advertising in that country.

I look for two major reasons. One, for the creative aspect. Making a commercial is the equivalent of writing a short story. Contrary to common sense, making something short, and making it good is much harder than making something long; the ability to convey many ideas and concepts and be stylish and artful at the same time is easy when you can do it at leisure, like in a 1000-page novel or a two-hour movie. To do the same thing in a three-page short story or a 30-second commercial is way harder to do by far.

The second reason is I like to find new ways to be effective in conveying the message, whether it be to sell a world-changing idea, or to sell panty shields. Being in the business, it’s of special interest to see how everyone’s doing (or not doing) it.

So now I’m going to ask you guys what seems like a totally unrelated question: How much toothpaste do you put on your toothbrush in the morning?

If we are to believe our TV ads, to make our breath fresh and our teeth sparkling white, we’d need to put a generous squeeze on that tube and create a long glossy couple of inches of paste stretching the length of the toothbrush, ending in a artsy upturned flourish at the end.

But think about it—how much is really enough?

A colleague of mine mentioned he’d gone to a workshop where they were taught how to make the most of their resources, and he mentioned that you actually just need a tiny amount of toothpaste to do the job. Just a little dollop, a tiny pea-sized lump on your brush can just as effectively make your breath fresh and your teeth sparkling white.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never bought into that consumerist myth of more is more. Instinctively, I knew I didn’t need that much damn toothpaste, and my whole life I had been squeezing pea-sized dollops from the tube. Not just because I wanted to scrimp and save and draw out as much use out of a tube of toothpaste as I can, but I felt a whole caterpillar-long amount was really excessive. And, I suspect, a lot of you do too.

Of course, the ads would show the pretty model squeezing out as much as she can fit on the brush. Traditionally, they’ve been squeezing with abandon since TV ads were invented. Of course it’s a no-brainer to realize they do this not only to make the shot look more attractive, but in the process increase consumer consumption, and subsequently increase sales. More is more.

So much for truth in advertising.

As far as the amount is concerned, according to the Chicago Dental Society, there is an actual word for the proper measurement. It’s nirdle, which means a very thin layer of paste roughly the length of the bristles on the toothbrush. A nirdle should be just right for that sparkly white teeth and fresher fresh breath.

Most resources say, in reality, toothpaste is just an aid in dental hygiene, and for adults, a simple dry brush and rinsing with water would be just as effective cleaning the teeth, while children and older people would do better with a wet brush. Additionally, just using dry or wet brushes without paste would reveal potential problem areas such as bleeding at the gum line, locations of which would be lost in all that foam in the mouth.

Admittedly children could be coaxed to brush more easily with the various pleasant fruity tastes of the toothpaste marketed for them (and more often than not would make them swallow rather than spit). But without supervision, children would tend to imitate what they see on TV and put that much on their brushes. The copious amounts shown in ads are certainly too much for kids, and their inadvertent swallowing would introduce excessive amounts of fluoride into their young bodies.

They can argue that toothpaste may have some cosmetic use as an abrasive whitener or breath freshener, but the abrasion would eventually erode the tooth enamel, and the alcohol in the freshener would dry the mouth. They can say it functions as a convenient delivery system to add fluoride, but since nowadays we get fluoride from drinking water, it’s largely superfluous. Additionally, research shows a lot of the other additives tend to be harmful in the long term.

In point of fact, it’s not even clear that toothpaste is as essential to dental hygiene as much as a toothbrush and water are, much less the question of how much toothpaste to use.

And the misleading ads aren’t confined to dental products.

You see models pour generous quantities of shampoo into their hands and massage it into their hair for gloriously rich, foamy lather. Looks great on TV, right? In truth, the recommended amount of shampoo is a tablespoon’s worth for long hair, even less that for short. Mix the amount into a bit of water and lather it into your hair. After shampooing, also know that using two teaspoons worth of conditioners is more than enough, otherwise it’ll weigh your hair down.

Two teaspoons would also be the right measurement for mouthwash when you gargle, not half a glass, and remember that next time when you’re at the beach, a shot glass worth of sunscreen should be enough to cover your whole body, not half the bottle.

We’ve all grown up with these ads on TV. Generations of us have gone through life accepting them as gospel truth because no one’s told us any better, so we never give them much thought. If we let them, manufacturers and advertisers will of course always try to get away with whatever they can. It’s the nature of the beast. I think it’s up to us to say when enough is enough.

You can write to Adel at Adel_Gabot-CTL@abs-cbn.com, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/adelgabot.

(First published 0n 09/16/2009 12:00 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

Who would have thought graphic, disturbing pictures, like those showing a dead fetus lying amidst cigarette butts, or gangrenous feet, or ugly, bleeding mouth sores, or throats bulging with massive red tumors or black lung tissue would be so widely distributed, and even legally mandated?

I’m talking about cigarette packaging, of course.

Those of you smokers who travel have seen these pictures on cigarette packs abroad. In Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, everywhere. These caring and enlightened governments have long ago made it a law that cigarettes packaging must carry graphic images of diseases and the effects of tobacco on our health, in an aggressive effort to scare people off smoking. The more graphic the pictures, the better to convince people to kick the habit.

Canada, which started doing this in 2000 with a picture of mouth cancer, is now contemplating upping the ante by putting the actual deathbed photos of anti-smoking activist Barb Tarbox, as she looked, emaciated, and withered just before her recent death from cancer.  Their research has shown that the photos elicit an even more intense response from smokers than the usual diseased body parts.

More recently, the United States, which had limited health warnings on cigarette packaging to a short, small text-only message from the Surgeon General on the side of the box, is now about to implement similar graphic pictorial warnings on 50% of the front and back of the pack. President Barack Obama, who is a smoker himself trying to quit, signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act last June 22 that imposes this law on tobacco companies, in addition to a cigarette “sin tax” he imposed in April that raised the tax from 39c to $1.01 per pack to discourage smoking.

I don’t smoke, and I never have, but my father, a soldier who fought in the Korean War and is a retired military officer smoked like a chimney when he was young and in the army. A two-pack-a-day Lucky Strike man, it nearly killed him, until he quit cold turkey. As a child, I remember sitting on his knee, fascinated by the smoke coming out of his mouth and nose, like it was some cool parlor trick, and thought to myself, when I grow up, I’m gonna do that too, yes I was. But I saw the agony he went through recovering, and then dealing with the withdrawal.  I never picked up a cigarette.

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(First published 0n 09/09/2009 12:11 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

In our country, buying a computer system is a weird concept—it means buying hardware. Period.

Yes, I can imagine you agreeing and nodding your head. So why is that weird again? It’s weird because that’s just half the purchase. A computer system is hardware and software. One doesn’t work without the other. And the last time I checked, most software isn’t free.  It isn’t?

The conflict is rooted in the old-fashioned belief that if it isn’t tangible, if it isn’t a material thing, it’s hard to ascribe any financial value to it. It’s the whole crux of the concept of intellectual property. Pay for software? Really pay for it, not get pirated copies in the basement of Makati Cinema Square for P90 each? Why? It’s not like they’re processors, or RAM, or hard disks, or flat-screen monitors or gaming video cards or anything real like that. It’s just …software! Pakopya na lang!

People in most third-world countries have this deep-set idea that software is an afterthought, an accessory for the computer, and consequently should come “free” with the hardware. (Sure, open source is nice, but face it, the good stuff is in the commercial apps.) With branded computers it’s factored into the cost. But that makes the whole package expensive so we just assemble our own and get the software from MCS, or borrow installers from the office geek.

Fact is, hardware and software are often separate commercial enterprises, and hence separate purchases, with software often costing more. And to a lot of people the idea of “one copy, one install” is patently ridiculous and impossible to swallow. What? Whaddaya mean one per computer? I bought one already! Ok na yan for the whole company!

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(First published 0n 09/02/2009 2:18 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

When I wrote about Avatar last week, I got a few comments chiding me for writing a kinda/sorta movie review when this column is supposedly for consumer issues. Worse yet, it wasn’t even a review for a real movie, it was a review of a preview for a few minutes of something that is still in production.

Why, a movie isn’t a consumer product anymore? Everything is, these days. I won’t even get into the argument that the Avatar preview was a glimpse into the direction that movies are heading, which is a very important point. Products don’t have to be material things like canned food or cosmetics; they can well be novels, plays, TV shows and movies. I’m actually doing research for a consumer review of our presidentiables, which you’ll probably get to read sometime in November when they actually file for candidacy and I get a more definite product line-up.

That said, at the risk of being perceived as an entertainment column, I’m doing another movie-related thing today. Not exactly a review, but a criticism of certain practices involving film releases in this country. (I would love to get into a full-blown discussion of ratings and censorship, but this space would hardly be adequate for something like that.)

I speak about the very provocative and intense District 9, a science-fiction movie directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson that manages to criticize and skewer everything that’s wrong with us. Basically the movie is about how humans deal with a refugee flood of aliens derogatorily called “prawns.” It talks of discrimination, apartheid, poverty and squalor, avarice, corporate greed, prostitution, crime, gun control, weapon production, immorality, perversion and human atrocities, and features wholesale murder and extreme scenes of butchery and violence.

Which the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, in its infinite wisdom, ratesPG-13 and banners in print ads that it’s been released without cuts. And then cuts out scenes anyway. The wrong ones.

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(First published 0n  08/26/2009 12:05 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

When the Avatar title card faded in in big letters hovering in the air in front of the screen, right after James Cameron spoke to the audience, a friend who was with me at the preview, a big, strapping, mature, serious man with a wife and grown-up responsibilities and not given to silly childish utterances at inopportune times, loudly and audibly …giggled. The rest of the audience tittered at the sound, but didn’t begrudge him the reaction. James Cameron does that to people; I wanted to giggle myself; there, but for the grace of God, go I. Crazy, right?

But it was a crazy event we were at. It was part of a simultaneous worldwide screening in IMAX 3D theaters all over the globe of 15 minutes of Cameron’s new film Avatar, a science-fiction adventure done in ground-breaking (people say game-changing) new three-dimensional film technology. Fifteen minutes. Crazy! Who’d do such a thing? And who’d watch it?

We would. And millions would, across the world.

We waited a full hour-and-a-half in the lobby of the new IMAX Theater in SM City North Edsa last Monday to catch a free preview of just 15 minutes of footage from the first half of the film, and for which we waited gladly. We’d waited years for any morsel of info about Avatar, any precious few seconds of advanced footage from this legendary production. Fifteen minutes of it was a feast. Sight unseen, except for the quarter-hour of selected scenes we were giggling over in anticipation of, we have might have as well declared it a success then and there, for all the objectivity we tried to muster.

The hype for Avatar is unmatched in the annals of cinema history. For years, people have been chattering about it online and endlessly theorizing and speculating about James Cameron’s next project since his Oscar-award winning film Titanic 12 years previous. Cloaked in impenetrable secrecy, fans waited hungrily online for tidbits of info, casting details, bits of behind-the-scenes gossip and (often-fake) leaked photos about Avatar. They didn’t get much.

If there was a category for it, whoever is handling the viral marketing strategy for the film deserves an Oscar this early. For the campaign’s first major salvo, lucky attendees of the San Diego Comic Con last month were treated to the same footage we were about to see, but I’d venture to say seeing those scenes in a conference hall, without the plush theater seats, polarized 3D glasses and Dolby Digital sound systems couldn’t have been as impressive as what we were about to experience.

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(First published 0n  08/19/2009 12:23 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

In recent tech history, there hasn’t been a more liberating gadget than the USB modem internet dongle.

It’s finally allowed the regular Juan to cut the umbilical internet network cord and wander with his laptop, even way beyond the comfort zone of the wifi router at home and still remain online anywhere. Today’s HDMA speeds practically make this kind of surfing indistinguishable from surfing on a wired connection. The unprecedented freedom it allows us to update our FaceBook page from the backseat of the car in heavy traffic, or amidst the mayhem of the mall food court with near impunity is incredible.

But it’s a double–edged sword; the reasonably equipped 21st century drone now has no more feasible and defensible way to dodge responsibilities. No more excuses. You can write that report your boss is demanding and send it in from the department store’s toilet stall if you had to, thanks to that dongle.

Unless of course you run out of prepaid load, and even if you wanted to reload your account, the service won’t take your money. This highly improbable incident happened to me last week, courtesy of poorly designed customer-service procedures and a dead-end call center setup from one telco.

I got myself a SmartBro dongle soon after the launch of the service at an expensive rate (nearly twice the price today; rates usually plummet soon after launch). Just like a cell phone, you can keep using it as long as it has credit, and you just need to top it off by transferring load at the store, or by buying a card and loading it up.

Last Tuesday, my SmartBro dongle ran out of credit and promptly quit working, which usually happens during times I need it the most, like sending an important file to the boss. No sweat, I thought. I got myself a P500 Smart Buddy card from a store and tried to reload the account from my postpaid Smart number. I got thwarted each time and got a message that the PIN was invalid. Which was ridiculous, because I had just scratched off the backing from the card number with a coin and the grit was still fresh on my desk. Of course it was valid.

So I figured I needed to go call the Simply Amazing World of Smart at 888-1111, go through the tedious button-mashing until I found a human I could talk to. The human I found said the long and short of it was I had to verify the status of the PIN. And to do that I needed to call a different number for Smart Bro – 672-7277.

Fine. With patience, I wade through all the prompts at that number. Many minutes later the robot voice tells me to enter my SmartBro number. I do, then I am told in order to proceed from there, I have to enter my TPIN, or Telephone PIN, and that in the event I did not have one, to please go to the website at http://smart.com.ph/connect, register and make one, then come back and enter my TPIN.

TPIN? WTH? If I could get online to make a TPIN, I wouldn’t be calling them in the first place, would I?

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(First published 0n 08/12/2009 12:56 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

A friend of mine loudly expressed a considerable amount of cynicism about a line in my first column, when I wrote about the things this space will be about that went, “Less often, we buy something so phenomenally wonderful that we turn into evangelists for the damn things.”

Do such things still exist, she asked? In this world of poor quality control, shortsighted vision, substandard materials, programmed obsolescence, uninspired innovation, cost-cutting and lack of originality, do “phenomenally wonderful” products still get made?

Great question, really. Conventional knowledge says, after endless disappointment, empty promises and overstated advertising, we’re hard pressed to think of something, anything so good that it’s worth that most mythical of appellations “A Good Buy.”

As the nature of things in commerce go, I will certainly have a surfeit of things to bitch about here in the future, but as often as humanly possible I would like to write something positive in this space rather than negative. In point of fact, I recently came in possession of such a rare creature: an espresso maker.

No, not a shiny European steampunk copper contraption with bells and whistles and hissing valves that cost as much as a new car and requires two semesters of barista training and weeks of tamping practice to make coffee. It’s an inexpensive hand-operated plastic-and-rubber gizmo made by an American company that makes frisbees, but a gizmo that brews coffee better than nearly anything else on the planet.

It’s called the Aeropress, invented in 2005, made by a company called Aerobie, which makes toys. The official name on its birth certificate is the Aerobie Aeropress Coffee & Espresso Maker. The device it comes closest to is a French Press, but that would be like calling McGyver a handyman.

What it does look like is a big fat syringe. It’s a thick and tough transparent polycarbonate tube with a big polycarbonate plunger with a rubber stopper at one end. You put ground coffee in the tube, add hot water, mix it up, stick the plunger in, and push the mixture through a paper filter at the end where the needle would be if this were a real syringe, straight into a mug. A perfect espresso, without fuss or French horns.

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(First published 0n 8/06/2009 12:27 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

A large part of this column is about user/consumer experiences and your stories about how things go down in your adventures in free enterprise. I hope to get first-person accounts as to how your after-sales experiences turned out, if you tried to return something or have it fixed or replaced (in most instances, merchants will no soon return your money after they get it then they would part with their first born.)

I figured, where best to start than a story of my own?

FULL DISCLOSURE. I am an Apple nut, a Mac evangelist and long-time fan and apologist for the company, not because I own stock, but because I am a part of that rarest of consumer breeds, the Thoroughly Satisfied Customer. I began my Applehood with the Apple II in the early 80s, and worked my way up the ladder to a Macbook Air today. My fandom extends even to my extracurricular activities, being a longtime moderator of the Philippine Macintosh Users Group, and have been a member of the Board of Directors and chairman of the organization for two years straight. Yes, I drank the Kool-Aid. Wherever I go I tend to be known as the Mac Guy, the Walking Wiki and Mac Hardware and Software Troubleshooter Extraordinare. Everyone in the office comes to me for advice in the office. Everyone. Even ABS-CBN CEO and Chairman Gabby Lopez asks me stuff. I kid you not.

BACKGROUND. I currently own a year-and-a-half old Macbook Air; that’s the impossibly thin, incredibly lightweight laptop that never fails to turn heads at Starbucks. It’s not cheap, it cost me an entire term’s teaching fees and more to pay for the darned thing, and despite it being underpowered compared to the latest models, I love it to death. Which of course means I take care of it.

THE SYSTEM. Before I go on with my adventure of going toe-to-toe with Apple Inc. Here’s how laptop warranties work with them. All portable units have a one-year international warranty, which is a good thing, because parts and services are notoriously expensive for Apple. One of the advantages of being a Mac user is something you can avail of called AppleCare, which is an extended comprehensive two-year warranty, as long as you purchase the insurance plan and activate it within the first year. So when something goes wrong, just bring the Mac to the Service Center.

MY PROBLEM. No big deal really. It was just a loose, wibbly-wobbly hinge. When you open up the lid the LCD screen lifts up a little off-kilter. Must’ve come loose somehow. Otherwise, everything worked fine. I was just afraid it might worsen, so I brought it in.

REPAIR 1.Yes, the warranty covers it, and yes, it can be fixed, said the repair center. No sweat. Took a week, which wasn’t too bad because I requested for, and got, a service unit so I wouldn’t have too much separation anxiety and could continue to work—I’m as dependent on the Air as much as I am with air in my lungs. (Props to PowerMac Center for acceding to my request for a temporary unit.)

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(First published 0n 07/29/2009 5:37 AM http://abs-cbnnews.com)

I recently started a new online column every Wednesday called Beware of Buyer (particulars below) for the ABS-CBN News Online website. Nice feeling. I used to write a couple of weekly columns for The Manila Times for a couple of years in the mid-90s. I hadn’t realized I missed column writing, which in essence is old-fashioned, formalized and institutionalized blogging. Only difference, really, is accountability.

In case you’d rather not go to the site on Wednesdays, I will reproduce the full text here on my blog on the following weekend after it appears. The link to our news site is in my blogroll, if you want to visit it.

Here is the first one:

Time Apart

[Beginning today, I'll be writing about that eternal quandary we find ourselves in: whether or not to fork over hard-earned cash for something. And after much agonizing, once we do, to find out if we got the short end of the deal or not, whether or not we were treated properly and fairly in the process, and if we will be so treated after the purchase. Many of us have been screwed over buying something not worth getting in the first place, and to add insult to injury, treated like crap when we complain about it. Less often, we buy something so phenomenally wonderful that we turn into evangelists for the damn things.

This column will examine the whole consumer experience from soup to nuts. We'll snipe and shoot and study and praise and condemn and muse about all manner of consumer issues, from services to all manner of products, all from the point of view of the ordinary person.

Let me quickly introduce myself then. My name is Adel Gabot. My day job is Chief of Copy for ABS-CBN Publishing, which makes me Style and Grammar Police for a couple of dozen magazines ranging from gossip and entertainment rags to fashion and society titles. I am also a regular contributor of product reviews for a major newspaper, and a former editor of a tech magazine and a men's lifestyle magazine. I have also been a guest editor-in-chief for a variety of titles, including Golf Digest Philippines, PC Magazine Philippines and Maxim Philippines. More to the point, I am also an inveterate consumer with a snarky attitude, which I guess makes me suited to this task.

So before we begin this bumpy, snarky journey together, I'd just like to hit the ground running and encourage everyone to tell me about your particular experiences with commerce, capitalism and free enterprise in general. You can just vent and complain, or share your comments, suggestions and violent objections. You can reach me via email at Adel_Gabot-CTL@abs-cbn.com, and you can follow and respond to me at twitter.com/adelgabot.

Ok. Let's get this show on the road.]

I was recently at an event all about wristwatches. The expensive kind.

I’ve always been appreciative of timepieces, and have been watching watches my whole life. I don’t ask much, I just hope to have something classy, reliable, respectable and vaguely ostentatious adorning my wrist someday. Aside from being able to tell the time, a good watch is a status symbol, a mark of success, and in the rarified air of boardrooms and high-end social events, practically a dress requirement. At this stratum, when meeting someone, you check out his business card first – and then his watch – before he passes muster.

I don’t come from a background where I would eventually inherit a Rolex or a Patek Phillippe if I lived long enough. Neither are my resources of late such that I could just pick an Omega or a Breitling up at the shop, say, this weekend. For now, I must content myself for now with a respectable-looking Swatch. But at least I can say with pride that in my life, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of gawking at the very best, and last week I was not to be denied.

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