Babble: Chase wants you to Gt $ fstr
There's a billboard for Chase Bank that I keep driving past on I-90 that drives me crazy. Actually, I'm amazed that there aren't more billboard-related highway deaths, but that's a topic for another time. Except for a tiny Chase logo at the bottom, the billboard simply says:Originally, the slightly dormant FoxPro part of my brain kicked in and I read that as "'Gt' is contained in 'fstr'", which of course isn't true, so the whole billboard evaluated to just "False". Yep, the first time I read the billboard I actually saw "False" - Chase Bank. Not the greatest marketing message. Then, the C++ part of my brain kicked in and I thought that maybe fStr was a file handler. That didn't really help with the rest of the message, but "GT" in ColdFusion is shorthand for "Greater Than" (since HTML doesn't take kindly to the > character), so my cross-language translation came out roughly to "Greater than is contained in [some file]". Sorry, Chase Bank, I'm not buying that, whatever it is.
I have no idea what the moral of this story is, other than revealing that I'm all kinds of crazy. I think the point is that all of us can be a bit too clever for own good sometimes. Somebody in marketing at Chase wanted to get my attention, and they did, but even if I was normal and impressed with their cleverness, I still wouldn't be opening an account there. In fact, I probably had to drive past the billboard half-a-dozen times before I even saw the Chase bank logo. Marketing babble is no better than technobabble, and we could all stand to simplify our messages.
dbmor10
· Wednesday, January 24So, for the less geeky among us, "$" is a symbol used to mean "is contained within" when the "$" is placed between two items?
Dr. Pete
· Wednesday, January 24Sure, put me on the spot :) Unfortunately, a quick bit of Googling suggests that the "$" operator is pretty uncommon. It essentially means "is contained within" and is used for string comparisons in FoxPro, but I have a feeling that it's language specific. It would be better if you continued believing that "$" = "money".
Mike Maddaloni
· Thursday, January 25I bank at Washington Mutual, and now they are calling themselves WaMu. Growing up in New England, I think "moo" as in cow!
Oh, and thanks for adding the checkbox for getting emails on follow-up comments... it's a feature of Expression Engine that I like, and one other blogs should have.
Dr. Pete
· Thursday, January 25Maybe it's just that they're banks, and it doesn't fit the image. I don't want my bank to be clever and cute; I want them to be serious and handle my money. It's kind of like the handwritten signs I've been seeing on street-lamp poles for mortgage refinancing. Sorry, but I'm not going to trust a $200K+ loan to someone who can't even afford a sign (or at least a stencil pack).
Mike Maddaloni
· Thursday, January 25ING Direct has a cute bouncing ball, but after that they are pretty serious - trendy, but serious. They are a Dutch bank, after all.
lauren
· Monday, April 30you are overthinking this Gt $ Fstr thing...
the idea is that it is taking the whole phenomenon of IM-speak (shortening words/using acronyms like LOL) and applying it to a campaign. that's it.
i think it's pretty obvious that it reads Gt $ Fstr and the message is shortened so you're reading it 'ideally' faster as well. there's a new phone commercial, verizon or something that is now jumping on the IM-speak bandwagon too. obviously you're just not the target. it doesn't mean that they are too clever, just that they weren't targeting you.
Dr. Pete
· Tuesday, May 1Sorry, Lauren; I didn't mean to suggest that anyone in marketing at Chase was clever :) Personally, while I agree I was overthinking this one, I just don't see the 14-year-old IM fanatics getting all excited about banking.