I love writing about scuba diving almost as much as I enjoy the escape and mystical quality of diving itself.

On November 2, the Marin Independent Journal featured a dozen “travel nightmare stories filled with cockroaches, sinking ships and the unexpected” by Ann Tatko-Peterson. My story below –– “Where’s The Reef” — about “a dive trip plagued by Murphy’s Law” was one of them. Here’s a screen grab of the story.

I also just had an article published by Dive New Zealand Magazine and it’s featured in their October/November 2008 issue. It’s called “Your Gear May Be Old, But Is It Safe?”. Read it here on the DNZ Website.

Enjoy both of these articles… and if you have a travel nightmare story, please use the Comment section to share it with me.

I’ve had the good fortune of working with many celebrities and locally famous people over my ad agency and freelance copywriting career. These include: Wolfman Jack, Joan Baez, Slim Pickens, Henny Youngman, Paul Winchell, Sally Kellerman, Pernell Roberts, Country Joe MacDonald, Don Pardo, and all the KRON-TV NewsCenter 4 broadcasters in the early 1980s.

Most of these folks were very down to earth and easy to work with. A few insisted on limos and other amenities. A few were real pains in the ass. It all comes with the territory of being a celebrity.

Now, marrying a celebrity to an ad campaign is a tricky issue. First, most of these folks cost five to seven figures per year for endorsing your product. The contracts are very specific — you only have access to them from a few hours here and there, or a specific number of days a year, depending on the contract you negotiate. So choose your celebrity wisely.

Then, there’s the downside of working with someone so famous and so cantankerous that the pain far outweighs the pleasure.

Give a listen to these 5-1/2 minutes of outtakes that I received over 20 years ago from a Los Angeles recording studio containing snippets of voiceovers from Orson Welles, Academy Award- winning director, writer, actor and producer for film, stage, radio and television for clients such as Paul Masson Winery:

Orson Welles mp3

 Orson Welles: Download

Hate going to the dentist? Bored when you’ve got to sit there with your mouth wide open and listen to scraping or drilling? Now, you’ll now be able to view TV shows and movies as you get drilled with novacaine and have a root canal.

Think Outside The Mouth

InChair TV is the company showing patients ads for toothpaste, electric toothbrushes, teeth whitening systems, and more — all while you sit back and enjoy watching movies or TV programs from ABC and The Disney Channel in your dentist’s chair. Is this what you’d call a captive audience? You betcha!

With this special, upscale video eyewear headset — the AV230 from Vuzix — you can watch TV, movies, and other programs, which are sent to your dentists on DVDs and played on a portable DVD player, and heard on built-in removable high quality stereo headphones. But instead of looking like you’re viewing video on a small TV, the technology transforms it into a large, private, virtual 44″ home theater.

Plus, instead of dental product ads, InChair TV is expanding its offerings with commercial breaks outside of your mouth.

To date, only 400 or so dentists nationally have purchased the system for $500 to let their patients escape to watch video. But more are on the way. So open wide and say, “InChair TV.”

Financial District Dental Care

By the way, Dr. Michael Hack of Financial District Dental Care in San Francisco has been using this concept in his cosmetic dental office for over 20 years. Patients love being entertained while having their procedures done. A few of my friends who are his patients actually look forward to their dental visits because they can watch movies on the DVD player without pain — and without commercial interruption!

As a dedicated (some might call it “addicted”) blogger, one of the first things I learned was to add links to each article. This not only helps its search engine ranking, but it upholds the Golden Rule of reciprocal linking for blogs. “You link to me, I link to you…” that sort of thinking is what makes one blog successful with lots of readers vs. one that’s only read by your Mother. (No offense, Pearl.)

So in each blog post, I use at least one link to the product, service or company that I’m referencing. When possible, I add as many links as possible within the blog to give it more credibility.

Here’s a great example of a travel blog article I wrote for Vagablond with both a link and a reciprocal link:
“Dinner And A Thousand Stars: Canyonlands By Night & Day, Moab, UT” was a story I created after my family enjoyed a magical night of dinner, a Colorado River cruise, a sound and light show, and the Milky Way shining above, where the rock walls came alive with Indian legends, history and geography.

This was such a wonderful experience that I literally wrote the article when I returned to our hotel room, posted it live, then sent an email to the company that led the trip: Canyonlands River Tours.

A few days later, they posted their reciprocal link on the Articles page of their site. Here’s what it looks like…

Note that in this particular blog post, I have used three links.

Shakespeare wrote, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

But what if your dessert was named Spotted Dick instead of Steamed Suet Pudding?… What if you offered your guests Lamb Thymus Gland instead of Braised Sweetbreads?… What if your waiter told you of tonight’s special fish dish as one of the 45 species of Grilled Darwin’s Slimehead instead of Orange Roughy?… And what if that famous actor being chased by an airplane in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest” was better known as Archibald Leach instead of Cary Grant?

Branding is critically important for foods, products, services, even celebrities. Some companies spend thousands of dollars for the creation of their company’s brand name through so-called naming agencies, hundreds of thousands of dollars for their company’s logo through nationally known branding agencies, and millions of dollars for their company’s marketing and public relations through ad agencies.

A friend of mine generated dozens of names for a new upscale Japanese car from Honda in the mid-1980s. The name that they chose was “Acura” and the rest is history.

A former client of mine spent tens of thousands of dollars in search of a new name when it wanted to create an online presence for the Arthur Anderson Accounting Firm’s services. But the name they chose, “Accenture”, didn’t come out of an agency. It came from one of their employees in Scandanavia.

Chevy had a successful US car named the “Nova”. But when they tried to market it in Mexico, it flopped. Why? Because “No Va” means “It does not go” in Español.

The lesson to be learned here is that don’t take your branding lightly. Invest in the right name, choose a high end logo designed by a real life graphic artist –- not a student or a relative who can use Adobe InDesign, even make sure that your Website looks like it was created by a professional design firm.

Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with a bad name, a crappy logo, and a Website that doesn’t truly reflect your company’s value or capabilities.

I’m proud to say that I recently became a Green Certified Writer for the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a relatively easy process:
• I completed a Word doc and emailed it to the Marin County Green Business Coordinator.
• She reviewed my application.
• She scheduled an appointment to walk through my office and make sure I was met the criteria of having a small carbon footprint by using CFL light bulbs, recycled paper, an energy efficient computer and peripherals.

If you want to become a Certified Green Business like me, please contact me and I’ll tell you how.

Here’s my pledge:

The economy sucks. Unemployment’s up. Income’s down. Everyone’s scared.

So what should you do?

Believe it or not, now’s the best time to advertise and market your product or service. Why? Because, according to an article in today’s SF Chronicle AllBusiness.com section, “when the economy is faltering, advertising is often the first thing in the marketing budget that gets cut.”

So whether you have a multimillion dollar annual budget or a few thousand, here are some tips to guide your advertising plan:

1) Aggressively reach out to your target market. Be specific in your ads, emails, snail mail letters, newsletters and calls. Target who you’re talking to and what you want them to do.

2) Push your unique selling proposition. Everyone has a competitive advantage. Don’t let creativity mask your best offering. If you don’t know what it is, hire an expert like me to help you define it, refine it and market it.

3) Boldly build your brand. Hire a great designer to create a specialized logo that represents you, your personality and what you stand for. You have to be different to rise above the others and leave your competition in the dust, especially if they’re cutting back on their advertising budgets.

4) Call the media and don’t be afraid to bargain. If times are tough, the newspapers, radio and TV stations are feeling the crunch, too. So don’t be bashful. Ask them to discount the space and time you buy. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, hire a freelance media person who can do your bargaining for you for an hourly fee or a percentage of what you’re spending. It will be well worth it for some real discounts.

5) Set a budget and stick to it. Don’t blow your whole budget in one month, even if November and December are your biggest months. Figure out what you need to spend and do it month after month.

If you want to read more, visit AllBusiness.com for the October 15, 2008 article.

WordPress is best known as an open-source, state-of-the-art publishing platform focusing on aesthetics, Web standards and usability. Launched by Matt Mullenweg, a 24-year-old college dropout, WordPress is now home to more than 4 million blogs worldwide, the software of choice for the majority of mainstream media, and for the blogosphere’s biggest players.

Best of all, it’s both free and priceless at the same time.

All around the globe, all around the clock, blogs are updated 18 times EVERY SECOND. Some other facts that may astound you from Technorati, a blog search engine (as of 10/09/08):

• 133 million blogs have been launched since 2002.
• 7.5 million blogs have been posted in the past 120 days
• 1.5 million blogs have been posted in the last 7 days.
• 900,000 blog posts (articles) have been created in the last 24 hours.
• 184 million bloggers are churning out 570,000 posts (articles) every 24 hours, reaching about 70% of all Web surfers.

Some popular sites that run on WordPress include:

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Time Inc.
• CNN
• Plus some of my favorite sites, such as BNI Embarcadero.com, Vagablond.com, Bradley Charbonneau’s Likoma.com and, of course, Zeimer.com

I’m proud to be a WordPress Copywriter. Since first using it on Vagablond in April 2005, I’ve been a WordPress Writer on virtually all new sites that I’ve create with colleagues like Bradley and other Web developers/designers.

Back in June 2008, a supposedly new airline account landed in the newspapers and across the Web. It touted light blue banner ads in newspapers in Philadelphia, had a Web presence on Philly.com, and cheerily trumpeted its unique policy:

“Pack Less. Weigh Less. Pay Less.” was the slogan for Derrie-Air, the world’s only carbon-neutral luxury airline. Ads stated: “The more you weigh, the more you pay.”

Say what? Consumers were scratching their heads in disbelief. How could an airline possibly charge by the pound? How would they make enough money to buy jet fuel? How could they offer sample rates ranging from $1.40 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Chicago, or $2.25 per pound for flights from Philadelphia to L.A.?

The name of the airline should have been the first clue. Derrie-Air? What ass came up with that name?

But if you were to scroll to the bottom of their home page, you’d soon realize that this was a fictitious ad campaign, designed “to test the results of advertising in our print and online products and to stimulated discussion on a timely environmental topic of interest to all citizens.” That’s when Gyro ad agency and Philadelphia Media Holdings came clean and disclosed that there’s no such carbon-neutral luxury airline as Derrie-Air. It was a media joke with a wink of the eye and a tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Blog, schmog…

Whatever you call it –– and I’ll be calling this Zeimer’s Zlog –– this will be a series of marketing points of view, advertising anecdotes, branding stories, and other examples of what I think are amazingly creative executions as a San Francisco freelance copywriter with over 25 years of experience.

What makes me qualified to Zlog/Blog? I’ve published over 1,500 blog articles to date. About 90% have been under my byline as Editor in Chief on Vagablond.com – an upscale e-zine focusing on travel, shopping, food and wine. Launched in April, 2005, it has a global audience and features a cast of about 20 writers. We don’t let just anyone post a story, so we screen real travel, food and wine writers to make sure they can deliver terrific stories on a regular basis with no hand holding.

The 10% balance have been written for other travel blogs, such as 14trips, which has evolved into Halogen Guides Travel, as well as for other marketing company’s blogs, as their “ghost” blogger, slogging away for no name recognition but a larger financial reward.