Timezoneone Blog

If this is the damage we can do to adults (via subliminal messaging) imagine the damage we are doing to young children who have trouble distinguishing the difference between TV programmes and commercials. They don’t realise when someone is trying to sell them something. Children as young a 3 recognize brands, and David’s 2 year old girl, Lily, knows who Tony is Tony’s Tyre Service from the commercials here in New Zealand and from the free car window cloth!

The Chicago Sun Times recently reported, Are your kids McDonald’s brainwashed?
The article follows research by Stanford University’s associate professor of pediatrics, Dr Tom N. Robinson. The study, involving 63 children aged 3–5, had the kids taste the exact same McDonald’s food, wrapped in branded and un-branded packaging.

Every time, the food in the un-branded wrappers lost the taste test.

Blogonista Liz

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I recently saw this post on YouTube which I found quite alarming. I suppose most of us advertising folk at TZ1 consider ourselves cynical and adverse to advertising and marketing tactics. But here in this video it is proven how influential what we see affects the way we think without even realising. We’ve been duped! Click Here  to view the video. 

Even though subliminal advertising was banned in the United States in the 1970’s, here is a snippet from an episode of Iron Chef America where a 1 frame containing the McDonalds logo has been snuck in. View here.

Blogonista Liz

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We have a new colleague in the New Zealand office as of last week. We just wanted to introduce him. All we can say is… he is super… and amazing. SNAP hasn’t stopped working since the moment he arrived and funnily enough he hasn’t said a word. David & S.N.A.P. are now BFF’s (as of last week) and together they make a great team! Thank you David for taking him under your wing.

 Blogonista Liz

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The Last Word

The Taste of Chicago, the world’s largest food festival, starts today. For the next 10 days over 3 million people will converge on Chicago’s lakefront to eat, drink and listen to free music. The Taste kicks off with the cutting of a 2,000 lb Eli’s Cheesecake. Popular food staples include Chicago-style pizza, Chicago hot dogs, barbequed ribs, Italian Beef and Polish sausage. On July 3 the city holds its Independence Eve fireworks display. This takes place on the shore of Lake Michigan and is often ranked the best fireworks show in the nation. This year’s music line up includes Drive by Truckers, The Wallflowers, Counting Crows and one of my favorites, Chicago’s own Buddy Guy.

Simon  

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Milo is a stunning brunette with irresistible brown eyes and a come hither look. She is extremely athletic and appears to have boundless energy. She is also a very good swimmer. Milo has been known to levitate.

Chesapeake Bay Retrievers are very loyal to their owners. They exude the unconditional love we humans crave. Milo has been a part of the family for 5 years.

Last summer we were down at the lake playing frisbee. Milo leaped in the air to catch the frisbee and landed with a yelp. She began to hold her foot up and limp. A week passed and she was still limping. I took her to the vet and was advised she had a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). New treatment had recently been developed and for a mere $3,000 Milo could be back on deck in no time.

The vet gave Milo pain pills to help with the inflamation and a large plastic container of Glucose tablets to build up her strength. I would coat the pills in peanut butter to make the medicine go down well.

Two days later we left for a weekend in Michigan driving 300 miles north of Chicago. Milo was at home resting with her limp and in the care of the dog sitter. Sunday night I got a call. Milo had jumped up on the counter, chewed through the pill container and eaten 30 pain pills and half the jar of Glucose tablets.

Essentially she had OD’d. My friend Dan asked is she left a note. Several frantic calls to the vet and Milo was rushed to the dog ER where she spent two nights being treated with charcoal and IV fluids to rid her system of the huge amount of narcotics she had swallowed. $800 later Milo returned home and has been playing frisbee ever since. She occasionally limps but is otherwise in great health.

Simon

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The Chicago Cubs are the most popular baseball team in America. Unlike most TV stations in the USA, Chicago’s own WGN Channel 9 is called a Super station, broadcasting Cub’s games across the country. People living in small towns across America, places like Little Rock Arkansas, where Bill Clinton comes from, do not have a national baseball team in their state to cheer for. So they become hard core Cubs fans hoping one day the Cubs will win the big prize, The World Series.

Watching a Cubs night game at Wrigley Field (named after the chewing gum) is one the better ways to spend a summer evening here in the Windy City. It’s a bit like the rugby except it’s much warmer, beer is delivered to you in your seat, you get to sing during the 7^th inning stretch and there is 82 home games to watch from April through October.

Simon

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Checking in from a sweltering Chicago where the air is thick and the mercury is hovering around 90.

When I arrived at TimeZoneOne I immediately identified a serious problem. Tea and more specifically the quality of the tea the Zoners were imbibing. I returned the next day with a box of PG Tips, England’s No. 1 Tea. Since then morning tea has taken on a whole new experience,and like me, the rest of the Chicago team are converts. For those weaned on Choysa and Bell, it’s time to experience the new enlightenment.

In 1930 PG Tips launched in the UK as “Pre-Gest-Tee”. Grocers and van salesman soon abbreviated the name to PG. The company adopted this as the official name and added “tips” to highlight that PG takes only the top two leaves and a bud to make its tea.

PG Tips is famous for the chimpanzee commercials made during the 70’s.

 Time to put the jug on.

Simon

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The first TimeZoneOne Blog from the new guy

My taste in music is a mix of old and new but as a child of the 70’s it is a little biased towards the old. My top 10 Desert Island albums are:

1. Veedon Fleece - Van Morrison
2. Time and Tide  - Split Enz
3. Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan
4. Natty Dread - Bob Marley and the Wailers
5. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells Play the Blues (highly recommend for classic Chicago Blues)
6. Crosby, Stills and Nash (1^st album)
7. Hejira - Joni Mitchell
8. Woodface - Crowded House
9. 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 - Midnight Oil
10. Pretenders - The Pretenders

I like a lot of other music and mark me as Stones versus Beatles although Lennon and Co. did write some stuff. Tom Waits is an American icon with possibly the roughest growl in all of music. Check out his take on advertising in “Step Right Up” from the album Small Change. 

Simon Tankard

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This is the question: Can we ever have some decent weather in Chicago.

Please show us the sun!

Folksey

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Chicago is the third largest city in the United States, with a population of nearly three million people. Its scenic lakeside location, world-class cultural offerings and unique architecture are just some of the reasons why Chicago is a great place to live and visit.

Chicago is home to…

• 237 square miles of land
• An estimated 2,896,016 residents
• Dozens of cultural institutions, historical sites and museums
• More than 200 theaters
• Nearly 200 art galleries
• More than 7,300 restaurants
• 77 community areas containing more than 100 neighborhoods
• 26 miles of lakefront
• 15 miles of bathing beaches
• 36 annual parades
• 19 miles of lakefront bicycle paths
• 552 parks
• United States President Barack Obama

Did you know…

• More than 45 million people visited Chicago in 2007!
• Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837.
• Chicago’s nicknames include: The Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders, the Second City, and The City That Works.
• The “Historic Route 66″ begins in Chicago at Grant Park on Adams Street in front of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• The Chicagoland area contains nearly 10 million people in three states - Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana - and is the 22nd largest metropolitan area in the world.
• Chicago is home to eleven Fortune 500 companies, while the rest of the metropolitan area hosts an additional 21 Fortune 500 companies.
• McCormick Place, Chicago’s premier convention center, offers the largest amount of exhibition space in North America (2.2 million square feet).
• The first Ferris wheel made its debut in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Today, Navy Pier is home to a 15-story Ferris wheel, modeled after the original one.
• Chicago’s downtown area is known as “The Loop.” The nickname refers to the area encircled by the elevated (‘L’) train tracks.
• The game of 16-inch softball, which is played without gloves, was invented in Chicago.
• In 1900, Chicago successfully completed a massive and highly innovative engineering project - reversing the flow of the Chicago River so that it emptied into the Mississippi River instead of Lake Michigan. Each year, the Chicago River is dyed green to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
• The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the largest and most extensive collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world. 
• Chicago was one of the first and largest municipalities to require public art as part of the renovation or construction of municipal buildings, with the passage of the Percentage-for-Arts Ordinance in 1978.
• The Chicago Cultural Center is the first free municipal cultural center in the U.S. and home to the world’s largest stained glass Tiffany dome.
• When it opened in 1991, the Harold Washington Library Center, with approximately 6.5 million books, was the world’s largest municipal library. 
• The Lincoln Park Zoo, one of only three major free zoos in the country, is the country’s oldest public zoo with an estimated annual attendance of three million.
• The Sears Tower is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at 110 stories high.
• The Sears Tower elevators are among the fastest in the world operating as fast as 1,600 feet per minute.
• Four states are visible from the Sear Tower Skydeck (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan & Wisconsin).
• The first steel rail road in the United States was produced in 1865.
• The first mail-order business, Montgomery Ward & Co., was established in 1872.
• The world’s first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Company, was built in 1885.
• The original Ferris wheel was built on the midway of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
• The Adler Planetarium became the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere in 1930.
• The nation’s first blood bank was established in 1937 by Dr. Bernard Fantus at Cook County Hospital. 
• The first drive-in bank opened in 1946.
• Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1949.
• The remote control was invented in 1950. 
• The first Democratic National Convention televised coast-to-coast was held in 1952 at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. (The first televised Democratic National Convention, in 1948, only reached viewers in the Northeast.)
• Maria Callas made her U.S. debut at the Lyric Opera in 1954.
• The first televised U.S. presidential candidates’ debate was broadcast from Chicago’s CBS Studios on September 26, 1960, between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon.
• Sen. Carol Moseley Braun became the country’s first female African-American U.S. senator in 1992.
• The late Mayor Richard J. Daley and current Mayor Richard M. Daley became the first father-son team to head the United States Conference of Mayors in 1996.

Folksey

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