AD-versity

Mad Men, hell! This is one Mad Woman, and it's all about the blitz of hideous commercials on TV in the opening days of 2010. I was so sure that nothing could rival the horrors of 2009's Adderol-crazed soccer mom driving a minivan full of cringing kids to Friendly's Ice Cream, and Campbell's gag-inducing single-serving soup ads featuring a blandly handsome young man who seemed to be having an erotic relationship with his soup cup in office settings, moaning with pleasure into the cup that he never detached from his lips. Already I'm wrong.

I'm not a huge fan of the big networks, but I do like the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel, and Goddess knows, the Home and Garden Channel. These rely on advertising just as much as the big guys, so there's no escaping the ghastly commercials I have in mind. The thing that totally bitches me off is that both firms are respected global corporations who can - and have - done so much better. What madness has caused these idiotic lapses?

Let's start with Ikea. Their ads have often been so hip they've gone viral, but I doubt their Winter Sale 2010 will ever make it to YouTube. It shows a suburban front lawn with father and kid. Suddenly, the massive cab of an 18-wheeler jumps the curb and comes to a stop mid-lawn, air horn blaring. The open sides of the trailer reveal that it's packed with boxes labelled "Ikea." The crazed woman at the wheel of the rig shrieks "they were having a sale!!!" As Hubs and Sonny watch in drop-jawed bewilderment, their wife/mother jumps out of the truck and takes off running, yelling "I'm going back for more!!!"

Just when I thought that the "Harriet Housewife's Hallucination" school of advertising had finally been laid to rest, Ikea resurrects it from its mouldy crypt. My objection to this genre is its complete disrespect for the potential customer. It's not just the brainless characters; it's the superliminal message of MASS CONSUMPTION - buy buy buy, and then go back for more, whether you need it or not. Query - isn't the recession still around?

Here's where my Lean Six Sigma training kicks in. In L6S, quality and value are determined by meeting or exceeding the customer's requirements and delivering the product when the customer wants it, at a price the customer is willing to pay, a concept known as the Voice of the Customer (VOC). This commercial has nothing to say about providing value to the customer, and actually depicts the consumer as a complete moron. So much for the Voice of the Customer. No sale, Ikea!

The mention of Lean Six Sigma brings up the other offender on my hit list, the mighty Toyota Motor Company. Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kiichiro, the legendary Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo are pioneers and patriarchs of the Lean movement in manufacturing. In founding Toyota Motor Company and developing the world-class Toyota Production System, they set global standards for the elimination of waste and flowing value to the consumer. No need to go over Toyota's many successes, or even their recent voluntary recalls - they "manned up" and did it right.

But the 2010 Toyotathon commercial conveys a simplistic, almost smug message. It features Punk'd regular Gabe Tigerman being outcompeted at the Toyotathon starting buzzer in a sort of musical chairs game played with showroom cars. Rabid customers dive through open moon roofs and side windows, leaving him standing rideless, whining peevishly that "I didn't get one . . .?" The whine trails off on a rising note, warning that somebody better fix this right now, or else. Mercifully, the ad only has a couple of days left to deliver its snarky message: "We're popular, you're entitled, get some."

Every time I hear that whine, most of the voices in my head scream "Slap him! Hard!"

Hi Grandma!

"Hello?" I said again, not sure I'd heard correctly.

"Hi Grandma!" the young man's voice repeated. "Guess who this is?"

"Is this Michael?" I ventured.

I'd just been thinking about Michael, my grandson, or more accurately, my step-grandson, the child of my favorite son-in-law's first marriage. Michael's birthday was the next day, and I'd just been wondering how I could best honor that event. The truth is that, as with many recombinant extended families today, my orbit rarely intersected with Michael's, and I hadn't spoken with him in months. So, given the uncanny way that thoughts sometimes summon up the person, I was only half surprised to hear from Michael on that particular day.

"Yes, Grandma, it's me, Michael! How are you?"

"I'm fine, sweetie! How are you? And where are you?"

A chuckle came over the line.

"Well, that's kind of why I'm calling you. I'm in Quebec."

"No kidding? What are you doing in Quebec?"

"Well, I came for the wedding of a friend of mine. But I have a little problem, and I can't talk to my parents about it."

"Oh? What kind of problem?"

"I had some drinks, and kind of got in a car accident. So they took me to jail."

"You're in jail??? And you didn't call your dad?"

 "No, no, I'm out of jail. They let me go. But I have to pay for the damage to the car, or they'll put me back in jail. So that's why I called you, Grandma. Can you help me out a little? Then when I get back, we can tell my parents together."

That did it. A little nag at the back of my mind had been pinging almost from the beginning of the call. My Michael calls me Nana, not Grandma. And he's never, ever asked me for money. And his parents have not been together for many years. I've never met his mother, and don't think it likely that he'd enlist me to help him address both birth parents. On the other hand, I can certainly understand why he might not want to face my daughter and his father, but he doesn't refer to them as his parents. Sure was shaping up as a scam. I decided to play along.

"So, sweetie, how much do you need?"

"Oh, Grandma, thank you so much! I will be so relieved if you can help me! I only need eight fifty."

"Eight hundred fifty? American?"

"Yes, that's right - eight hundred fifty American. How soon can you send it? I really need it right away. Can you send me a MoneyGram? Or Western Union? You can send it to my lawyer here in Quebec."

My, my - a lawyer, no less!

"OK, I'll need the name and address to send it."

"Is there a Western Union or MoneyGram near you? How soon can you get there?"

This from a kid who supposedly grew up on this small island and knows where everything is . . .

"I don't know - I'll have to look it up. I can't remember offhand. Why don't you give me your lawyer's name and address."

"OK, you can send it to - wait, I'll spell this for you - her first name is R-I-M, Rim. Got that? And her last name is A-S-S-A-A-D, Assaad."

I repeated the spelling back to be sure I'd gotten it correctly.

"Now I need her address."

"Quebec, Canada."

"Yes, but what about a street address?"

"You don't need one. He can pick it up at any MoneyGram office."

He?

"Grandma? Do you have that? Can you go right now and send it?"

"First I have to find out where the nearest place is."

"Will that take long?"

"Well, a few minutes, anyway. Then I need time to get there."

"I understand. I'll call you back in an hour so you can let me know that you sent it. Can you do this for me, Grandma?"

"Yes, I think so. You can call me back."

"OK, thank you so much for doing this for me, Grandma. Bye bye!"

"Bye bye, Michael."

"I love you, Grandma."

Click.

My cursor couldn't get to the Google query window fast enough. First I tapped in "Grandma phone scam." Oh yeah, there was plenty on it. 625,000 articles, to be exact. I decided to go into the details later. Next, I typed in "Rim Assaad," who also turned out to be real. She has a Facebook account, and doesn't seem to be a lawyer at all.

The phone rang again. It had been, at most, 10 minutes.

"Hi Grandma! Did you send it yet?"

"Dude, this is a scam. Forget it."

Click.

Back to Google. I checked out a couple of the articles, which all related parallel incidents. Sadly, it seems that many soft-hearted seniors have been scammed out of thousands nationwide. I felt almost miffed that my scammer had only asked for $850. Guess he was a beginner. It was heartening to see that many others had caught on before it was too late.

I also discovered that this particular scam seems to be uniquely Canadian. Canadian? You mean, our friendly, likeable neighbors to the North? Like Molson's and Hosers? Yep. So much so that in 1993, the Ontario Provincial Police, together with the Mounties, established PhoneBusters, a clearing house for telephone-based fraud complaints. Originally limited to prosecuting scammers in Quebec and Ontario, PhoneBusters now aids U.S. prosecutors through extradition (visit them here if you're interested).

So I called PhoneBusters, and connected with a genial gent who walked me through his laundry list of a questionnaire. He ran down the list of known scams until I flagged the grandparent one, then after determining that I had not lost anything, and simply wanted to report the incident, he gave me a telephonic pat on the head and told me I'd done the right thing.

Then he asked me to do one more little chore - report the "lawyer's" name to Western Union and MoneyGram, so they could flag any requests to send money in that name to Canada. I won't go into the gory details, but of the whole unsavory incident, fulfilling that request was the most unpleasant part. There seems to be no way to reach either Western Union or MoneyGram except through "customer service" links on their respective websites. And as is so often the miserable truth, it's hard to make those forms work in a friendly manner. In fact, Western Union's screen form only allowed limited punctuation marks, making a coherent report almost impossible. It took multiple tries before I managed to submit the form successfully, if you want to call it that. MoneyGram's was somewhat better, but also inadequate.

I wonder if my PhoneBuster buddy had experienced this too many times already, so laid it off on me? It does raise some questions about how one would effectively report attempted fraud to moneyhandlers who send funds over state or national borders. What the hey???