My Own Tomorrow

Groan tomorrow
So, AMP wants me to ‘own tomorrow’ and they want me to own it today. They’ve made it that bit harder by trademarking ‘own tomorrow’ meaning AMP legally own own tomorrow. I don’t think I can own tomorrow if AMP already do.

I bet they were surprised when the intellectual property lawyers came back with ‘no, there have been no requests to trademark ‘own tomorrow’, it’s all yours, you utter buffoons'.

Maybe there’s just some words missing, like ‘we want to own your tomorrow, today’, or ‘give us your super now and whoever came up with this ad will probably be dead by the time you need to use it, and have to deal with someone forty years younger who doesn’t give a monkey’s about what you thought you bought yesterday’.

Bone tomorrow
The other difficulty with owning tomorrow is that it never comes. So if I do manage to own tomorrow today, by tomorrow, all I own is today, and the next day, I own yesterday, meaning I’ve been sold something that’s actually something else (not unusual for financial services).

Their website asks the question ‘what do you want for your tomorrow?’ It’s a link, click on it and it takes you to a form asking you to say what you want for tomorrow. Genius. Free market research and the chance to ‘leverage’  that new-fangled craze called social media.

Done tomorrow
Sure, KillGobbledy gets what they’re trying to do. The research came back saying people feel they don’t have ownership of their money, especially super (compulsory retirement savings).  It’s because they don’t. Here in Australia, it’s taken from your pay and given to a bank until you’re old and even then you can’t get your hands on it that easily. By then, owning tomorrow means having your funeral planned and a will in place.

But what the hell, here at AMP, we’ll try to get ‘cut-through’ with this clever campaign that takes the concept of ownership and the future. We’ll call it ‘own tomorrow’ and everyone will go blind with apathy.

Scone tomorrow
Somebody at AMP is paid a lot of money to push this tripe on the public.  What I want from my tomorrow is for them to stop. All of them, the financial institutions that want me to ‘engage’ with my money, or to have a ‘relationship’ with my super. It's like being constantly pestered by a sleazy man with bad breath and bag of licorice.

They are banks, they want to make money, lots of it. They want to make obscene amounts of money, nothing wrong with that, just don’t pretend you give a stuff about what I want from the future.

KG

The role of snowballs in business

KillGobbledy was supposed to focus on efficiencies today (23/05). Operational efficiencies, organisational efficiencies, efficient efficiencies, in short, many different ways to let people know they're going to be sacked. 

Unfortunately KillGobbledy was sidetracked by the rare sighting of a business snowball. 

'Our snowball is just going to keep on growing' stated Gabby Leibovich, co-founder of CatchOfTheDay.   

Scary white balls

This slightly sinister statement had KillGobbledy worried. Is this a business dedicated to building a giant snowball? If so, where do they keep it and what hellish purpose does Leibovich have in mind? How is it growing? Organically? Or do an army of snowmen willingly sacrifice limbs to the cause? Who else has one? Is this some strange ice-based arms race? What the hell are we going to do when Leibovich decides to leverage this obscene snowball?

Orwell?

It all seemed too much this single-snowball-focused-business. There had to be another purpose to Leibovich's strange statement, so KillGobbledy hit on another theory. Revolution.

Was this the moment a neo-communist movement emerged from under the heel of rampant capitalism? In the guise of an online grocery store, Leibovich had issued a coded call to arms with an oblique reference to the Trotskyite pig Snowball from Orwell's Animal Farm. This Snowball, however, will not be hounded into the wilderness, or turned into bacon. It will keep on growing until it becomes a gigantic communist pig grinding the machinery of capitalism to dust, with its immense trotters.

Tyrolean disaster?

Then again, maybe it was just a bad metaphor. All Leibovich wanted to say was 'we think our business has momentum'. Unfortunately he thought we were all a bit too stupid to understand a big word like 'momentum' so he felt compelled to 'paint a picture' for us simpletons. A snowball that rolls and rolls getting bigger and faster until it's bounding down an alpine pass, an irresistible white force.  

Unfortunately with this metaphor, KillGobbledy can only see the picturesque alpine village in the path of the massive online-grocery-store-snowball, and the subsequent Tyrolean devastation. Or perhaps that village is supposed to be Coles or Woolworths, in which case who is the mountain and what happens when it's summer and all the snow melts? Are we left picking over the wet sludgy rubble of a place we quite liked, trying to find a new home for the cows?

So please Mr. Leibovich, stop growing your scary white balls.

KG