Poor Guy – this is the second time

Originally posted on “MyChurch”
Fr Vazken
Fr Vazken | 13 Comments |

Today during Super Bowl XLIII, we received the sad news about Jack’s terrible accident. At first, I scrambled for news and it was very limited. Fortunately, there is Tivo and I rewound only to find that our suspicions were true. I couldn’t bear to watch. I kept rewinding over and over, to my disbelief. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqT_5f08Nxs

The temptation was there to slow-motion the event, but I resisted. Finally I found some information – at http://www.hangintherejack.com/

I’m mostly concerned because we went through this some 30+ years ago when they blew him up. Those of you who remember, his face was more defined before the explosion. But this accident was hard – especially the damage to his head. I wonder if its a conspiracy?

Jack has always been too trusting. The people around him have not been good advisers. They remind me of Mr. Hands. (Always ready to bring Sluggo around to take a shot at Mr. Bill.)

Anyway, I signed the card at the website on behalf of all of us. We look for Jack’s full and complete recovery.

Vartan
Vartan February 02, 2009
We’re pulling for you Jack.
Anush Avejic
Anush Avejic February 02, 2009

My thoughts have been with Jack all day. I keep logging onto the site looking for updates but all we know is massive head trauma. : ( When they showed him laying there, his eyes transformed to X’s……:::sigh::: so sad.

Suzie
Suzie February 02, 2009

what about the cracked head? like an egg-shell. poor thing.

you can’t leave us Jack. I’ll never be able to get breakfast after 10am if you do. we need you to get better soon!!

Fr Vazken
Fr Vazken February 03, 2009

Vartan – you are truly a man of compassion.
Anush – I think Phil holds the answers. Something is up and they’re not talking. Check out the ambulance driver’s boss! What’s that all about?
Suzie – your point is well taken. The idea that we may face a world where breakfast is served ONLY until 10 or 10:30 in frightening. He’s a CEO with foresight, vision and briliance – all inside that egg-shell.

Anush Avejic
Anush Avejic February 03, 2009
JACK CODED!!! Last update shows the doctors were going in!!!
www.hangintherejack.com
Fr Vazken
Fr Vazken February 04, 2009

Did I hear right? The the doctor ask for a hot glue gun?

Vartan
Vartan February 04, 2009
I had a Sourdough Jack today. Jack needs all the support he can get.
Fr Vazken
Fr Vazken March 01, 2009

Hey – I’ve been away for a few weeks and just got on line to check out what’s happening. I was very pleased to learn that Jack’s X-rays look VERY good!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ACWXsTXOjU&eurl=http://www.hangintherejack.com/&feature=player_embedded

Anush Avejic
Anush Avejic March 01, 2009
JACK’S BACK!!! I just received an update that Jack is out of his coma!!!
http://www.hangintherejack.com/jacksback/
Fr Vazken
Fr Vazken March 02, 2009
Hmmmm… there are too many factors that parallel other stories of this nature. When I first started the blog, I had a sub-theme of “second time” not realizing how this would work out. So what’s the deal between Phil and Jack? Jealousy? Greed? or??? Push the guy out of the way and then turn the company around YOUR way? Sounds very familiar… Fill in the blanks, or “Phil in the Box”!
Getzes Hagop! Your love for the product kept you alive during the worst days of your life.
Fr Vazken
Fr Vazken March 23, 2009

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/17/business/fi-cotown-neil17
Jack in the Box feeds the social media beast
COMPANY TOWN
By Dan Neil

March 17, 2009
Jack has risen, hallelujah.
After being hit by a bus in a Super Bowl TV/Web commercial Feb. 1, Jack — the grand-tete CEO-mascot of Jack in the Box — emerged from his coma March 4, newly inspired. At Jack’s direction, the San Diego-based restaurant chain will undertake a brand makeover this spring, including a new logo (Duffy & Partners, Minneapolis), redesigned store environments and a new corporate website that launched Monday. Jack, I feel obliged to point out, is a fictional character.
You might have had your doubts if you spent the weekend, as I did, perusing the 81,000 or so Get Well messages posted on the company’s www.hangintherejack.com website, which monitored Jack’s convalescence. You might also have suspected a connection between cholesterol and appalling grammar, but that’s another subject. Although the vast majority of messages were innocuous and inane — “We love you, Jack,” “I wish I knew how to quit you, Jack,” etc. — a fair percentage were darker, weirder and potentially quite embarrassing for the company, which has 2,170 stores in 18 markets and more than $3 billion in annual sales.
Jessica Gallardo in Maine writes: “We so totally love you!!!! Defeat death!!! We would have sex with a mullhawk gorilla & the hobo under the sewer for you. We love you.”
O-kaayyyy.
Alexut in Utah: “Jack in the Box killed people. They have poor sanitary habits and spread disease across the nation. Plus it’s disgusting food.”
And of course a thousand variations of “Jack sucks!,” which is a less than optimum take-away from a marketer’s perspective.
What’s going on here? Call it the search for authenticity.
The six-week “Hang in There Jack” campaign (Secret Weapon Marketing, Santa Monica) was a remarkable document: a 360-degree social media event that mocked even as it exploited the power of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Along the way it leveraged irony to the breaking point with “viral” cellphone and faux-paparazzi videos, ring tones and texting. Among the crowd-sourced content were 27 get-well videos from fans, some quite brilliant. A man in Hawaii bought Jack’s size-14 Bruno Magli shoe on EBay for $910. Now that’s buy-in.
“We were amazed, really,” says Jack in the Box vice president of marketing Terri Funk Graham. The videos have garnered more than 4.8 million views. Graham estimates that to score the same number of impressions solely with traditional media would have cost three times as much (she declined to say how much the total campaign cost). “Given the overwhelming amount of response and engagement, we feel we’ve hit a home run,” Graham says.
And yet there’s huge risk in throwing open company-sanctioned social media to the great unwashed, unlearned public — or, if you will, the troll-osphere.
Just ask Skittles. This month Skittles launched a home page redesign that centered on Twitter. Any tweet including the word “Skittles” was instantly transported to the brand’s online front porch. The hope, obviously, was that the candy’s fans would riff and rhapsodize about Tasting the Rainbow, and for a few hours, they did.
Within hours, however, Skittles’ Twitter feed was vandalized by key-stroking hooligans who proceeded to rain down obscene, racist and generally obnoxious tweets on the site — hundreds an hour.
The mildest of these hacks included comments such as “Skittles causes butt cancer” and “Skittles killed my brother.” Which, you’ve got to admit, is hilarious. Skittles, part of the Mars empire, undertook a hasty reorganization, sticking the Twitter feed under a much less prominent “Chatter” button.
The Skittles incident has become instant lore for social media marketers. And the lesson seems to be this: As eager as companies are to harness the marketing power of Web 2.0 — more than 1,000 companies now have social media outlets — Web-savvy users are a deeply cynical and hard-bitten bunch, having been marketed to since the instant of birth.
If a company appears to “brand-jack” social media, it will likely incur the revenge of the nerds. For social media to be effective, says Mark Avnet, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter, it has to be reasonably transparent and unmediated, even anarchic.
“It has to have authenticity or it loses its social currency,” Avnet says.
And that means allowing your brand to be taken over at times by lunatics.The Web teams at Jack in the Box and Secret Weapon knew what was coming and braced themselves for the onslaught of trolls.
“For the social media portion of the campaign to be successful, we knew we needed to step aside and let consumers drive the online campaign,” Graham says. “While we monitored the postings and videos on the website, we only removed messages that were vulgar or included profanity.”
Or at least they tried. There are still plenty of messages such as Muzzi’s “Your food makes me poop.”
Jack may wish he were still in a coma.
dan.neil@latimes.com

Dn Jeff
Dn Jeff March 31, 2009
Having the distinct and rare privilege of having been a substitute Jack (in similar vain as the substitute Santa Claus that reaches for donations or attends to children’s requests in malls) with the original head and clown outfit during my youth (some 37 years ago!)… and having stood on the sidewalks of Concord, CA in said costume to wave at passing cars in front of the Jack in the Box… I must say I am relieved to see he has not met the final demise.Hang in their guy for all of us alum!Jeff
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