Well, it is 10:30 pm on the first night of the make a blog post a day for 30 days challenge that I am doing with Jason and John. First lesson I have learned so far during this challenge is that I forgot to let these guys know I was participating. Opps.

So lets see if I can pull this off. I have a lot of content since the last two months I have been very busy. Let see, there has been the losing my job, getting a new job, closing on my first house, moving into my first house, and 12 hour road trip to Idaho. This month doesn’t slow down either. I fly to Wyoming on Friday, my college roommate Toby is in town the following weekend for his bachelor party, the weekend following that I am off to Utah to see the University of Wyoming play BYU in Provo, Diane’s birthday is the following Monday and she will be at Monday Night Football in San Diego, the weekend following that Diane and I fly to San Jose for my cousin’s wedding. Hmmm looks like a full month, again.

Yes the following weekends are going to be busy with work filling in the week, but I had an idea that I wanted to bring out during this 30 day blog challenge. I am an Advertising geek and one thing that I can’t stand is advertising efforts that are not thought out and done simply because a company thinks they need to be “seen”. Also, being a new home owner I am receiving solicitations that are everything from funny to down right rude. For the next 30 days I am going to post a blog a day about an advertisement that I receive through any form of media. I want to post what I feel is good and bad.

Tonight’s critique: Kinetico Home Water Systems

I have seen the add for Kinetico in a small direct mail catalog that is sent out called “Getting to know you Savings Guide” and I had a person put a post card in my door. The first thing is that, I can’t stand having things slide into the door jams of my front door. It is a waste of time for me and as a consumer I think any company that does that is sub par. However, I also know that it works and makes companies a lot of money.

But back to the advertising piece at hand. The first thing that I noticed on both pieces of print material is a very poor photo of a little girl drinking what should be a glass of water, however it looks exactly like a glass of Scotch! I am not kidding, why would give the little girl a “rocks” glass to drink out of for your main advertising image, much less allow the class to have a shadow so that it doesn’t look at all like water she is drinking?

Is that Blue Label?

Next, there are at least 8 different fonts on just one side of their post card. I don’t need to explain to you why this is annoying. What I need to explain is the bonus font that was put on the post card by the door to door sales person who wrote their name and phone number on the post card in a nice felt pen. Urgh, it is like they aren’t even trying. What I think this company is doing is hoping that through some luck they can convince some poor individual that they need treated water and some way it will save them money. What is even more amazing is that Kinetico is paying people to go door to door. I have first hand experience doing this type of selling and there is no way this can pay enough money to the people going door to door to make it worth their time.

Suggestions – Please spend the money for a great design for your advertising, rather than sending someone to my door to sell a product that is far from an impulse buy and read your own advertising, it says ” no pressure “.