Note to Subaru Marketing: Part Two
Dear Subaru Marketing:
Hello again! It's been two weeks since we last spoke, and I miss you already. As I mentioned then, I appreciate your efforts to market your vehicles in my area and your attempts at regional advertisements. Since that time you've introduced a new ad referring to I-95. While I'm no expert on geography, I'm quite sure that I-95 runs by New York City and just barely touches a corner of our state - the opposite corner from where you are advertising. Here, I've provided a helpful illustration:
I-95 is the red winding line. Rochester is located at the tip of the arrow.
Perhaps you are trying to save money by referring to a 1,927 mile long interstate highway that spans the entire east coast and running the ad in all those markets as "local". While this is ingenius, to reach Western New York you would likely want to reference I-90, or as we New Yorkers call it, the Thruway. It has the added bonus of stretching the entire continental US's northern states.
But those are really just semantics, after all you've discovered a way to make "regional" ads that span a huge swath of the country. Maybe you can subdivide the audience into similar niches beyond region by referencing very specific interests. Targetting such a niche would make the listener feel unique and passionate about your product. I suggest using in-jokes about Seinfeld, or maybe sharply dividing the audience and creating passionate responses by professing a love of puppies and babies.
Sincerely,
A member of your target audience
Note to Subaru Marketing
Dear Subaru Marketing:
I appreciate your efforts to market your vehicles in my area; and I also appreciate your effort in creating regional specific advertisements - it lends a nice local feel to them. Bravo! However, you may want to actually make sure that the region you're airing the commercials within actually makes sense.
There are other cities in New York state besides New York city. Upstate / Western New York is not referred to as the tri-state area. So, your slogan to tell use that we "try everything" and maybe that's why we're the "try-state" area is cute as buttons and puppy dogs - and horribly wrong. The area you're referring to is a 400 mile, 7-hour drive across nowheresville from us. Perhaps you could create one specific for our area: Since we are "Western" New York you may want to mention cowboys and indians. Or perhaps use the title "Finger Lakes region" and talk about rude gestures.
Sincerely,
A member of your target audience
More Real Estate Predictions
Time for yet more of my completely biased and unresearched opinions on real estate...
The general consensus is that the housing hot streak has ended. I would agree with that sentiment. But as I was alluding to in my earlier real estate predictions, the mainstream media has a myopic view of the market and define it by the hot markets - Vegas, Florida, California. These markets may indeed see a significant slowdown in sales, a rising inventory and likely even depreciation in prices. But the majority of the country will weather this slowing period by sustaining current price levels. Housing has been historically resiliant to downward movements in price, and will continue to do so.
Secondary and tertiary markets will continue to have great undervalued investment properties. Being a landlord isn't for everyone, obviously, but with mortgage rates rising and currently high prices which are unlikely to drop, it's expected that rents will inch higher in the mid-term future. In many of these smaller markets it's easy to find rental properties will will easily generate profit with current rent levels, house prices and tax rates - with a lower barrier to entry due to stagnant/undervalued prices.
Update: Here's to some great timing - The local Rochester newspaper has two articles today which fit nicely with the above: Area homes undervalued and Landlords' costs force likely uptick in rents. (Though I would argue that rents will rise because of more forces than costs, the rising rates will help keep renters from buying their first homes, causing higher demand in the rental market).
[For newer predictions check out Real estate predictions for 1Q 2007. To see my back history, check out Real Estate predictions.]
Google Summer of Code
Google has again decided to run it's Summer of Code - funding students to work on open source projects. Unfortunately, last year Ruby wasn't able to get in by the deadline, but this year David Black made sure Ruby Central was a participating organization. We had 14 mentors signup and (last count I saw) 84 student proposals.
The proposal review period is over and project allocations have been announced. Ruby Central received funding for 10 proposals, and the successful projects have been announced.
Among those accepted projects is work by Jason Morrison on RDT! He's a student at RIT (my alma mater) who helped start up our local Ruby/Rails group. I'll be his mentor, and he'll be working on trying to improve RDT to do some code resolution and type inferrence in an effort to improve code completion and other features (such as marking occurences of variables) for our project. Hopefully he'll also be releasing some sort of white paper/documentation to benefit the greater Ruby community beyond RDT/JRuby.
Thansk to Jason for the great proposal, and expect to see some more news about his work here in the future.