Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

In season 2 of Better Call Saul, Jimmy— that's Saul, pre-name change— gets a cushy job at the prestigious law firm Davis & Main. It's even more prestigious than HHM. Jimmy gets perks like a Mercedes-Benz company car and a swank office decorated with fine art and a custom desk. And he gets all that not by scamming his way in but by earning it through hard work.

Jimmy uncovered a retirement home fraud case in season 1. On his brother's advice he brought it to HHM because it was too big for the two of them to work alone. Jimmy expected HHM would hire him as lead attorney on the case, but instead his brother, Chuck, once again thwarted him from getting hired at HHM. Revealing just how much of a dick move that was, HHM later turns to D&M for assistance on the case, and D&M reaches out to Jimmy to hire him because he built such rapport with his elderly clients. So it's kind of sweet revenge for Jimmy that he gets hired at D&M after Chuck blocked him (yet again) from HHM.

Anyway, in the first part of season 2 Jimmy is put in charge of client outreach. The fraud case is a class-action thing, and the firms need to find as many members of the class as they can. Jimmy's great with talking to prospective clients— the elderly residents at care homes in this chain that operates multiple retirement communities across several states— but the retirement home company is making it hard for lawyers to connect with its residents.

Jimmy gets the idea to go around the roadblocks the company creates against sending mailers or trying to visit in-person and instead reach residents through a well-placed TV commercial. His assistant— yes, he gets a dedicated paralegal assistant at this cushy job—shows him a past TV ad D&M ran. It's one of those frankly terrible lawyerly TV ads you've seen if you've ever watched daytime TV. A stentorian voice-over reads block text that scrolls over a swirling color background.



This isn't the exact text from the TV show. It's a slight tweak I made to the text of an actual ad for mesothelioma lawyers. D&M's fictional ad was very similar. Either way, it's as if the memorable opening crawl of the original Star Wars movie were written by, well, lawyers.

Worse, Jimmy's assistant recounts how the partners agonized for days over the swirling color background. It had to be just right: right shapes, right color, right speed. Of course, that's absurd trivia and is part of what makes their commercial awful; but the whole firm seems to regard it with the reverence of biblical scripture.

Jimmy goes back to his team of UNM film students and creates a more personalized commercial. It's a bit schlocky but not obtusely alarmist like the classic lawyer TV ads. Jimmy, doing the voice-over himself, speaks in approachable language while the camera zooms in on an actual elder client of his (though not one who's a member of the class action suit).

Jimmy buys one airing for his ad. It's on a local TV station at the first commercial break in an afternoon rerun of Murder, She Wrote— which Jimmy knows enjoys high viewership among his target clientele. Jimmy even primes the bullpen of paralegals and other assistants for a deluge of incoming calls.... And the phones start ringing off the hooks! For a cost of under $1k for paying the film students and buying one ad airing, Jimmy has successfully signed up dozens of new clients.

When managing partner Cliff Davis of D&M learns about the ad, he is pissed. Jimmy is hauled in to a meeting with Cliff and two other senior partners the next morning. They are outraged about the ad. It's not up to their "standards". What those standards are, though, they doen't say. Except they specifically finds fault with Jimmy doing the voice-over himself. The other partners want Jimmy fired over this, but Cliff tells Jimmy he has one last chance.

What's amusing to me about the lawyers reading Jimmy the riot act over his ad is how they wring their hands and clutch their pearls over how much damage Jimmy has done to the firm's reputation. Damage the lawyers' reputation? Of all the widely perceived awful things that lawyers do to earn such a low perception in the minds of the public, they think this, some stupidly benign TV ad, is the problem. That's the problem right there! These lawyers have no clue why people hate lawyers.

As of last night Hawk and I have new iPhones on the way.

We weren't really in the market for updating our phones. At least I wasn't. I updated 2.5 years ago, buying an iPhone SE 3. It's fine for me still. I figured I'd upgrade sometime next year, when the next gen comes out. Hawk's phone is older. She's got the SE 2, and it's about 4 years old. So it's getting creaky enough that it's time to upgrade. For example, the SE 2 doesn't support 5G. And the battery life has deteriorated to the point that it's annoying.

Both of us were kind of inspired by Verizon's recent TV/streaming ad campaign showing people's phones flying to the Verizon store for free upgrades.



At first we rolled our eyes. We hate ads and prefer not having to watch them. But streaming services have stuck ads in to what used to be their ad-free subscription price-points and made their new ad-free tiers hella expensive. We hate ads but we also hate seeing our monthly cost for TV shoot over $100 again because that's what it now costs to get a few streaming services without ads.

So as I said, at first we rolled our eyes. Then we thought, hey this ad's kind of amusing. It got our attention and wasn't offensively insipid. Then we thought, Hey, free phone upgrades— that sounds like something for us!

Moral of the story? Advertising: It works, bitches! If it didn't, companies wouldn't have spent bazillions of dollars on it for the past 100 years. Even anti-advertising curmudgeons like us aren't immune.

So we made an appointment at the Verizon store last night to talk to a consultant and make sure the offer in the ad wasn't just a con. It was legit! They gave us a $1,000 credit toward buying new iPhone 16 Pro phones. And it was $1,000 each.



Of course, all you get for $1,000 is the base model of the 16 Pro. I wanted 256GB storage (base is 128GB), and Hawk wanted 512GB in hers. Those upgrades cost $100 and $300, respectively. I ordered mine in Natural Titanium color (pictured above); she went with the classic black color. Except it's Black Titanium now. 😅 I don't mind the black color. I've actually always had black for my iPhones, since 2009. I simply decided to try something different this time.

Even with the upcharges from the base model this Verizon deal is a steal. Hawk was looking at a cost of at least $100 just to replace the battery in her old phone, and for that money she'd still have a 4-year old phone. Updating to an SE 3 like I have would have cost $400. For $400 it'd be a new device but one with 3 year old technology. Now for just $300 she gets a brand new device with brand new technology. And for $100 I get the same. That is a legit bargain.

It struck me a week ago: the spam I get on my work email account— all the ticklers from all the companies I've had to give my email address to to sign up for a webinar, and all the companies that have scanned my badge at trade shows— is timed.

Last Tuesday I checked my work email early in the morning (6:30 ~ 7am) then was OOO for a few hours and didn't check email again until noon. At 7am I had maybe 3 ads in my mail queue, lighter than normal for my first-of-the-morning check. By noon another 20 ads waiting for me. Eyeballing them all together, I noticed they were pretty much all timestamped between 7:50-8:50am. That's when it struck me: junk mail is timed. It's timed to maximize the chance a person reads it. Thus it's clustered in the 8-9am hour in your local timezone, ostensibly so that it's at the top of your backlog when you're logging in for the first time, or arrives after you've cleared your backlog.

BTW it's not at all surprising that junk mail is timed. Corporate social media systems are timed to maximize engagement. Dropping a tweet, say, at 11pm in a target market isn't effective. Most people are offline for the night, and by the time they check their feeds in the morning over breakfast that 11pm tweet will be so far down few people will see it. Time that tweet to drop at 7am or 8am, and a lot more people will see it.

Once I spotted this pattern last Tuesday I made a point of looking for it again— to test how much of a pattern it is. Oddly I didn't get much spam Wednesday through Friday. Yesterday (Monday) morning I had some, but not quite as much as last Tuesday. Then I logged in this morning— and BOOM! Huge load of spam. So these common marketing tools are not just timing it to the 7-8am hour but also picking Tuesday as the day likely to get the most attention.

Two weeks ago I tried Domino's Pizza. It had been years since I'd last ordered from them. They keep making noise about how they're better now (hint: it's a fake advertising ploy), though, and they had a 50% off sale, so I figured I'd give them a try to see if anything's really different.

The simple answer is, despite all their advertising about how they've improved their pizza, they really haven't. Their advertising message the past several years of "we suck, we're sorry, we're getting better" was purely a marketing ploy. It was a high risk ploy that a lot of people expressed worry about at the time, but it has paid off nicely for Domino's. Meanwhile, their pizza is actually... apparently worse... than before.

I remember ordering Domino's a lot in high school. Classmates at my school and I realized we could get Domino's to deliver to the flagpole at the front door after the final bell rang. We pick up pizzas there, run to the buses, and enjoy pizza on the long Friday bus rides home. Okay, maybe it was the taste amplification from doing something that seemed borderline illicit, or the joy it brought to a grinding ride in a school bus, but those pizzas rocked.

Hallmates and I ordered Domino's a bunch my first year at college, too. That was until I discovered there was way better pizza from a local shop. Domino's wasn't bad; they just weren't awesome compared to strong, local competition. Of course, that was in New York!

Domino's today just isn't that good. The sauce flavor is bright, same as it ever was. That alone cast my memory back to those halcyon Fridays in high school. But the cheese and toppings were bland. Domino's today isn't so bad I'd refuse to eat it.... It just isn't good enough that I'd choose it if any kind of reasonable alternative is available.

I continue to get a lot of email from airlines, hotels, car rental agencies, and travel portals advertising promotions. Most of them are deals encouraging super-spreaders I roll my eyes at. Today I got a reminder about a promo with Southwest Airlines I didn't roll my eyes at. ...Well, actually, I did, but for a different reason. I rolled my eyes because this one's just laughably bad.

Before I explain what's wrong with this offer I'll describe what good looks like. That will make it more obvious why this one's such a fail. Here's a behind-the-screens look at how companies should put together promotional offers for their customers.

A promo offer can be designed to serve any of three basic goals. A really good one serves all three at once. Within the travel industry I routinely see all three of these components in offers from Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) so it's definitely possible to do this right.

1. Incentivize Activity. It's a competitive market. Customers are always at risk of taking their business somewhere else. Likewise, some prospective customers may be engaging with your competitors but not you. A good promo gives customers a little bonus just for engaging, like a "Stay/Fly once and earn 1,000 bonus points" deal.
2. Incentivize Continued Activity. Offering deals to your customers costs money. It's unwise to put a big discount or rebate on things the customer would've bought anyway. But at the same time, competitors are trying to lure customers away. Hence, part of a well structured promo should offer customers a bonus for continuing at the same level of engagement as in the past. Years ago this was expensive to track and compute, but with today's automated digital systems it's trivial. A company can check its records of your past purchases, see that you've traveled with them, say, once a month in the past year, and offer you a deal like "Stay/Fly 3 times this quarter and earn a 5,000 point bonus." It's targeted to keep you engaged at the same level.
3. Incentivize Increased Activity. While it's good to keep customers engaged at the same level as before it's even better to get them to bring in more business! These promos give stretch-goal targets in exchange for typically the richest bonus offers. Continuing on from the example I gave above, a stretch-goal offer would be something like, "Stay/fly 5 times this quarter and earn 10,000 bonus points." 

So, those are the basics of how insightful companies put together incentive offers for customers with today's available technology. Yes, that's different from the past, when simple, one-size-fits-all offers were the norm. Today's technology makes it easy for companies to tailor offers that are wins for the vendor (incentivizing profitable behavior) and wins for the customer (offering meaningful deals for achievable targets). Now, let's look at the offer Southwest Airlines reminded me about today.



Notice that it's just a single bonus target. Spend $12,000 or more to get something. That means that out of the three goals I articulated above it meets at most one. At most, because it actually meets none of them!

The problem with this offer is that the $12,000 minimum spend requirement is completely absurd. My travel and spending with Southwest Airlines is way down across almost all of 2020 because of the pandemic. If they'd looked at their records for the past 9 months they'd see that my spend in any given 3-month period was barely $1,200... yet they think an incremental 30% bonus is going to get me to spend ten times as much?? Ha! This absurd bonus offer only serves to remind me to leave this credit card in the sock drawer.

"Now is a great time to travel!" countless ads from airlines, hotels, and other travel companies breathlessly advise me from my inbox every morning.

"No it's fucking NOT!" I hiss in reply at my computer screen. Now is NOT a great time to travel. The risk of infection is an elevated danger not just for the traveler but also for all the prudent people they inflict their traveling ways upon. Everyone who plays it safe and smart and only goes out for essential trips is placed at higher risk by each of these super-spreaders gadding through.

"Especially with today's sale of 30%//50%/70% off!" continue the ads.

"Would you PLEASE stop offering discounts to super-spreaders! " I seethe. Sheesh, it's bad enough some people have chosen to bury their heads in the sand against the reality of this pandemic and cannot think outside the envelope of their own gratification anyway. We don't need profit-seekers encouraging antisocial irresponsibility with sales.