SHIT THAT ARRIVES AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT

 

 

The Pentagon contains more technology than most buildings on earth.

It is the nerve-centre, the brains, for the richest, most powerful nation on the planet.

So how come people outside, with no access to technology, know what’s going on inside?

Interestingly, the answer is pizza.

Recently, Iran’s nuclear facilities were bombed.

This was top secret of course, but hours before the first bombs fell the local pizza delivery guys knew something was about to happen, they always know.

There is an online website called Pentagon Pizza Report that monitors traffic at the pizza joints around the Pentagon.

Pentagon Pizza Report tracks traffic at: Dominoes, Pizza Hut, Little Caeser’s, Papa John’s, Extreme Pizza, Pizzato Pizza, District Pizza Place, We The Pizza, and others.

Inside the Pentagon there are fast-food outlets but nowhere to get a pizza, so when people have to work late and can’t leave their desks, they order in.

And when every pizza joint in the area is experiencing unusually high traffic, they know some sort of bombing campaign or invasion is imminent.

The other indicator that Pentagon Pizza Report tracks is the local gay bar, Freddie’s Beach Bar.

Apparently, the surest indicator of military personnel working overtime is when there’s a rush on pizzas at the same time the gay bar is empty.

As the Pentagon Pizza Report tweeted: “Dominoes being high and the bar being low is the classic indicator that something is indeed afoot at the Pentagon”.

So, with all their technology, they hadn’t allowed for the human factor.

Similarly, the Americans installed an impenetrable computer system at NATO headquarters in Kabul.

This system had state-of-the-art electronic gateways that meant it couldn’t be hacked.

So the Russians didn’t use technology to penetrate the system, they used humans.

They planted a virus on innocent looking thumb-drives, then simply placed these in the hawker’s kiosks in the street outside the offices.

The secretaries at the NATO building would buy a thumb-drive to put their holiday snaps on, they’d download their photos to their office computer then transfer them to the thumb-drive.

Of course, as soon as they put the innocent-looking thumb-drive into their office computer it downloaded the virus onto the system.

The virus told the NATO system to forward secret information to the Russian computers.

Technology hadn’t penetrated the NATO system, the secretaries had.

Humans trump tech.

I’ve just seen WPP is attacking Publicis over its claim to state-of-the-art technology.

They’ve distributed a report to their clients saying that the Epsilon platform is running low quality ads “below industry benchmarks for attention and viewability”.

Epsilon claims to have data on 255 million customers, and data integration across 14,000 partner companies on websites that reach HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people.

They say they can “reach every customer at the right time and in the right context”.

Wow, all of that and yet WPP say they are performing “below industry benchmarks for attention and viewability”.

In other words, people aren’t looking at all those targeted ads, they’re ignoring them.

So, could it be that it’s not the technology that makes advertising work?

Could it be that people will only look if we give them something worth looking at?

Because all that technology is just a delivery system, like a postman delivering junk-mail to the right recipient, but it’s all so boring it goes straight in the bin.

One of the greatest advertising thinkers ever was David Abbott.

David explained all that state-of-the-art ad-technology quite simply:

“Shit that arrives at the speed of light is still shit when it gets there”.