Element Bars have just launched a site where you can make your own protein/power/nutrition bars by picking your ingredients from the website and buying them in packs of 36.
It’s a great idea as I don’t like the commercial nutrition bars available - they are always too sweet and make me feel sick as I don’t like sugar. I’d like to eat protein bars after working out but I don’t as I feel like I’ve stuffed my face with chocolate - sickly sweet flavour overload.
So I love the idea of building my own - I’d make them full of oats and nuts and maybe a bit of fruit, but nothing with any sugar, honey, syrup, sweeteners, or anything else I don’t want.
Unfortunately Element Bars is American, meaning even the base ingredients are overloaded with sugars. You can pick a base (from crispy to oaty to datey and chewy) but you don’t get to say “don’t sweeten them”.
They even mention that they have a touch of honey (meaning overload) or “a bit of sweet, a bit of salty”.
So before you even begin adding anything, there’s 22 grams of sugar. Blechh. According to the internet (source of all truth) a teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams. So 5 teaspoons of sugar in a health bar? Might as well drink a Coke with it.
Then you can add dried fruit (sweetened of course), and then if that’s not enough sugar for you, you can also add maple syrup, agarve syrup (sweetener from cactus), honey, chocolate chips and M&Ms.
So there you have it, 33 grams of sugar, 216 calories and 14 grams of fat. Perfect to shovel into your gob after a workout to completely undo any good effect a run was having on your body, and then wonder why you weren’t losing weight…
Tags: innovation, random thoughts
I’m sure most of you remember the Post-it note Jaguar prank photo that was doing the rounds a few years ago.
Well it turns out that a year later 3M decided to give this whole viral thing a go and contacted the photographer to use the photo in a US-wide campaign they were running. After a bit of back-and-forthing (is that a word?) he told them they could licence the photo for $2,000.
3M stopped emailing him after that and the next he heard of it was when people were commenting on his photo saying congratulations as they saw his photo in Officeworks, Staples, and other places where 3M was running the campaign.
To save themselves $2,000, 3M decided to recreate the photo themselves and try to piggy-back on the fame of the original photo. They’ve also tried to push for social marketing of the campaign, by tying it into Youtube and trying to get consumers to really drive the word of mouth component and send it viral.
I’m not a lawyer so I can’t comment on the legality of what 3M have done. I can comment on the stupidity of what they’ve done from a marketing perspective. $2000 is diddly-squat to a company like 3M. This entire marketing campaign is probably over a million dollars…. and the celebration lunch they went for after they launched the campaign probably doubled the original licence fee the photographer was asking for. I’ve been at marketing celebration lunches that have probably cost half my annual salary, so they can’t claim that $2000 was out of their budget.
The incredibly bad PR 3M is copping over this is going to take a long time to get over. Here’s a hint 3M - you can’t try to capitalise on the viral effect of a photograph if you’re going to blatantly rip off the idea and the photographer. The mob will turn on you and eat you alive.
The campaign was probably approved by a corpulent Marketing Director who doesn’t understand online but it’s no excuse. It’s a shame as I always thought of them as an innovative company. They have lost my trust and my brand loyalty - I used to make a point of buying 3M specific post-it notes as I figured they invented them, but now I have no qualms about buying generic sticky-notes.
Tags: Marketing
I am in total awe of this job ad from Murder Burger in NZ, as photographed by Flickr user Noface2.
The full sized image is here.
I wish that 1) I could write like that, and 2) that I worked there. They sound like fun.
Tags: random thoughts
When we made the t-shirts, we decided we wanted a funky little label sewn on, not anything screen-printed. So we ordered some funky little labels, and the label company asked if we’d like them sewn into the shirts for an extra 95c each.
Photos by Flickr user Passenger57.
Being a start-up, we decided to save costs and we’d sew them in ourselves… into nearly 200 shirts. So we borrowed a friend’s machine and set to it last night.
The last time I used a sewing machine was in 7th grade when I made a wonky pencil-case. But still, 95c is 95c, and I calculated that at 30 seconds per shirt, it would only take us an hour and forty minutes.
Two and a half hours later, I still couldn’t figure out how to get the machine threaded properly. And the problem with Wikipedia is it’s written by experts who don’t neccessarily understand what beginners don’t know, ie it’s easy for an expert to say “Thread the machine” but I need details! Which way does the thread go? Does the bobbin thing go clockwise or anti-clockwise? Why is it tangling over itself?
Sewing with wikipedia. Photo by Passenger57
We called in some reinforcements and a couple of bottles of nice shiraz, and an hour later managed to sew in a straight line.
Anyway to cut a long story (and long night) short, we decided to outsource and called in the experts - a little greek lady that has been a tailor for 31 years (who laughed at us trying to do it ourselves).
So total cost (to save 95c):
- 5 hours from 4 people
- 2 bottles of wine
- $2 per shirt from the little greek lady (we’ve since haggled her down a bit)
- An extra week for someone else to do the work for us
We’ve decided to stick with what we know, so this is a public declaration that at Molt:n Digital, we make websites. We’ll leave the sewing to the professionals!
Tags: random thoughts
