Archive for the ‘universities’ Category

I spent the better part of a decade working at post-secondary institutions in communications. Which means that I did a lot of work around politicians visiting campuses. New buildings, new labs, funding announcements, safety blitzes, policy unveilings… I’ve done ‘em all.

And one evergreen part of the event is the walkabout. This is the part of the event where the politician, accompanied by his or her entourage as well as officials from the institution, leaves the podium and then wanders around an area looking at stuff that’s related in some way to the announcement.

Talking about water purification? Check out this demo: EcoVu water purification.  Announcing new money for education? Hit a classroom or computer lab. Health care announcement? Check out a nursing lab.

This gets done for a couple of reasons. The most important one from my perspective has always been that it’s hard for TV to cover an announcement with just pictures of the politician speaking. You need stuff on tape that the reporter can write over. And in some cases, the politicians are actually interested.

But this morning’s Daily Intel slide show is the epitome of the photo-op: A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things. If you’re a communicator or a political aide, view and chuckle knowingly. Or weep. Or both.

Obama feigning interest in a screw

Marketing VOX has a great story about a campaign that, to quote Robbie Burns, has “gang aglay.”

Victoria’s Secret apparently introduced a line of clothing called “Pink Collegiate” last year (which makes its “A TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE” crest a little silly, but I digress…), and started with a list of about 30 US schools.

Then they asked users to vote for their school to be included in their branded merch. But they apparently didn’t count on creative computer types at various schools gaming the voting.

Then a dude from Drexel University spent three minutes writing a Perl script, and 12 hours later he’d logged 5 MILLION votes for his school. Then a guy at Texas Tech wrote a script that auto-voted Zion Bible College into the top 10 (Not sure there’s a lot of Victoria’s Secret being worn at ZBC, although there are likely a few well-pawed catalogues floating around the dorms.)

Then a mass attack from MIT crashed the Pink system. (favorite quote of the whole story, from an MIT student: “at MIT we are motivated by the ridiculous to do this kind of thing…”

AFTER that, Victoria’s Secret put a captcha in place to limit voting.

Not hard to see that the lingerie folks were a little naked in terms of IT security. A word to the wise for anyone who’s planning on creating an online contest, particularly one encouraging university students (who have time on their hands and a licence to prank) to vote on stuff.

Ciao,
Bob.