Yesterday, Kevin told me that I was the most brand-loyal person he’d ever met. Which was funny to me, because I’d been thinking about the very same thing recently.
Indeed, I am an incredible brand-loyal person. I blame (in a good way) my family for this. A few of my family members worked for Westinghouse, back in its heyday, and ever since I was a small child I was always attracted to Rand’s ‘W’ logo. Next was Coca-Cola, the only soda we drank, accompanied by Volkswagen — there was only one in the family, but there’s a story behind my love for the car and brand (part of which could be the shared ‘W’ with Westinghouse). Other brands I’m particularly loyal to include Panasonic, Microsoft, Dell (despite the exploding laptop incident), and Wonka Candy.
One brand that I’ve never been particularly loyal to is AOL. For those of you that don’t know me, and may not know that I worked at AOL for six years, you may not find anything strange about this. But for those that do know me and do know that I worked at AOL, you probably also won’t find this strange. My modus operandi was to subvert the norm and push the products I worked on to be the industry’s best, rather than the AOL average of lame and boring.
Well, I don’t know if anything I did at AOL ever worked (see today’s NY Times article, but I can say that they’re now doing something that I can get behind… they’re putting old TV shows online at In2TV! You can catch one of my all-time faves, Max Headroom online. (Max was sort of a brand, too, wasn’t he?) Other oldies-but-goodies include Wonder Woman and Welcome Back, Kotter. Now go watch some TV!
