January 5th, 2009, 7 Comments »
For at least a year, Barracuda Networks has been running large ads in Vancouver’s airport. I think I’ve seen their ads in other airports, but can’t confirm that (anybody?). I snapped a bad photo of one of several large display ads in the baggage collection area:
You can see better versions of their ads on their website.
I’m always puzzled when I see these ads. Barracuda makes humming boxes that companies install in their networks to protect against email spam, viruses, phishing and so forth. This one costs about CAN $650:
The Barracuda Spam Firewall is compatible with all email servers and can fit into nearly any corporate or small business environment. It is used by small organizations with as few as 10 employees and large organizations with as many as 200,000 employees. A single Barracuda Spam Firewall handles up to 100,000 active email users. Multiple units can be clustered together for even greater capacity and high availability.
According to YVR, about 4.1 million international passengers passed through their gates in 2007. What tiny fraction of those passengers are potential buyers of Barracuda’s products?
The math gets murky, but according to BC Stats, there are about 81,000 technology workers in BC. Of course, not all of those are potential Barracuda customers. Plenty of those have no interest in the IT concerns of their companies. Others work for companies that have fewer than 10 employees. Let’s be generous and imagine that one third of these tech workers might possibly be or know somebody who could become a Barracuda customer.
That works out to 6 out of 1000 British Columbians who might be the target market for these ads. That fraction is certainly lower for foreign visitors. So–best case scenario–that ad might be relevant to one out of every 200 passengers. In truth, I suspect the number is closer to one in 1000.
And yet this is a sadly commonplace scenario. Most offline ads are incredibly dumb–they’re irrelevant to 99.9% of people who see them. Barracuda runs these ads as an act of faith. That one or two out of the madding crowd of visitors grabbing their bags might take an interest, and start on the long, treacherous path towards an IT purchase. And do the folks at Barracuda Networks have an accurate sense of the return on investment of these airport ads? What do you think?
On a vaguely related note, I saw an enormous barracuda in shallow water in Panama a couple of weeks ago. It was at least three feet long, and just cruising gently by in about three feet of water.
7 Comments »
December 4th, 2007, 22 Comments »
Over at YPulse, Anastasia links to a story about the declining popularity of the communal shower after high school gym classes:
Longtime physical education teachers say the decline began more than a decade ago and may have started when schools cut back on laundering towels to save money. Kids forgot to bring towels, and it spiraled from there to become optional. Nobody complained, and gym teachers found better things to do than monitor the showers.
This is my favourite quote from the article:
“The only person I saw take a shower this year was a Canadian kid that moved here,” said Jack Taylor, a Wilsonville High sophomore.
We Canadians are very clean.
When I was in high school in the late eighties, we almost never showered after gym class. There really wasn’t time in the schedule for it, and the school certainly didn’t provide towels. There was only a shower room, but we mostly used it for soaking our clothed friends on their birthdays. Good times.
Communal showers remind me of the movie Carrie (not safe for work) more than anything. They seem to regularly feature as a backdrop for high school cruelty, actually. I also remember a hokey-more-than-scary scene in Stephen King’s It. Which, speaking of my high school years, featured a scene shot at one of my classmate’s houses in West Vancouver. I remember it as one of the first films I was aware of that was (partially) shot in Vancouver.
Did you take showers after gym class in high school?
22 Comments »
March 27th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Kate links to a very worthwhile local project called ChicTech:
ChicTech pairs a three or four person team of young women with a university mentor to create a website for a non-profit organization. The websites are then judged, the teams are rewarded and hopefully these girls are encouraged to stay in a technical field. Or at least see the potential a career in IT has.
ChicTech is currently for Vancouver-area girls, in Grades 9 or 10. This year’s competition is underway. The organizing team is still looking for sponsors and contributions to the final prizes.
Sounds like a great idea, and Capulet’s going to donate a little money to the cause. I’m also going to enquire (assuming the other organizers don’t mind) if they’re interested in some of our leftover Bloggable shirts from Northern Voice.
The cynic in me did leave this comment on Kate’s site:
I’ve gotta say, there’s no shortage of female web designers out there. In fact, the majority of web designers I meet are women. I can’t help but think that a contest for boys would have been around building a program, as opposed to designing a website.
I’m certainly not calling web design a ghetto, but it’s not really IT or ‘computer science’ per se. I know web designers (of both genders) who don’t code at all–they build mockups and subcontract to somebody else for the coding bits.
Regardless, I’m just nitpicking–it sounds like a great project. I’m sure that for some participants web design can function as a sort of gateway drug to web or software development and related, more technical fields.
7 Comments »
