You Sleep When You Die

We used to have no choice when it came to our phone provider. If we wanted to call people, we used our home phones. And we paid whatever astronomical charges the phone company charged. Local calls were reasonable. But long distance calls? Forget it!! When I moved to Florida as a teenager, it cost me an arm and a leg just to keep in touch with friends and family back home in New Jersey. Phone companies back then took advantage of you because they knew you didn’t have a choice…

The signs had been there for awhile, but the announcement finally came last week: Borders filed for bankruptcy. The 40-year old retail giant will be closing 200 of its more than 650 stores and laying off of a large portion of its nearly 20,000 person workforce.

Did anyone NOT see this coming??

Zimmerman Advertising lives and breathes in the retail world of our clients. We relentlessly pursue solutions for them, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are never satisfied, never content to rest in our successes, but instead are always pushing forward towards the next idea.

Sometimes the ideas are small. Sometimes they’re big. And sometimes they’re game changers. Those game changers are the solutions we push for the hardest. They are the ideas that should be recognized and celebrated, both on behalf of our clients and on behalf of Zimmerman as an agency.

The iconic Alan Greenspan once said to the American people, “tap your home equity.” What he was really saying was to borrow against your home because your home is your personal bank. So use your ‘bank’ to get more money. Refinance! Consolidate your bills! The problem, of course, was all of the hidden clauses that allowed the real banks to raise your interest rate later and basically steal your home from you.

It might not come as a shock to know that Alan Greenspan changed his stance on the housing market after the bubble burst. If you guessed that the largest category of real estate loan loss for U.S. banks is mortgage loans, you’d be wrong. Lenders wrote off $31 billion in home equity loans and home equity lines of credit last year. That’s more than the losses on primary mortgage loans!

The New York Times app is awesome. It’s actually my favorite right now – I use it multiple times a day. It’s well designed and user-friendly – unlike a lot of other newspaper apps currently available – and it’s FREE! It’s obvious that the NYT recognizes the importance of having an outstanding app. Instead of just slapping something together for the sake of saying they have an app, they went ahead and invested a significant amount of time and money into developing an outstanding one.

This makes me wonder why more companies aren’t doing the same…