Posts tagged as:

tv commercial

MBA Joke – FedEx Commercial

September 16, 2010

in GWU School of Business

I know that everyone who watches TV has already seen this FedEx MBA commercial long ago. But I hardly watch any TV, which has been especially true ever since I started my part-time MBA program at GWU a year ago. I found this video (dated ~ 2005-06) on YouTube incidentally just recently and I think it’s a great addition to my favorite MBA jokes list that I posted back in January.


Speaking of  TV watching habits. Do you remember even some 15 years ago the educators on all levels were clamoring about students not reading enough books, newspapers, and other printed media?  The culprit of this unfortunate trend was TV. Kids were watching too much TV at the time. Guess what? My professor in Business and Public Policy class this summer was frequently expressing his disappointment with the fact that nowadays students (college and grad) don’t even watch TV for news and information. Now the culprit is internet, of course. The idea is that internet has way too many biased and unverified sources of information, especially bloggers of all kinds and shapes (yours truly is one of them), so that TV with more stringent framework for collecting and verifying their information and sources is appearing now as the lesser of the evils.

I would not be surprised, if in a few years the public outcry is that the students use their smart phones and other mobile devices for getting information from the internet, instead of the standard notebooks or netbooks. The stance could be that they rob themselves of the richness of the established internet technologies not available or not as effectively rendered through the mobile devices due to their size/technology or whatever other conceivable constraints. The funny thing is not even how the standards change over time, but how rapidly it’s all happening.

So, for those of you who, like myself, don’t watch TV and may have missed this commercial from four years ago, here is the video. If not for the internet, we would never have a chance to enjoy this great clip from the dinosaur TV era :-)

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Super Bowl 2010 TV Commercials and Biases

February 8, 2010

in MBA experience,Side Notes

On Friday morning I checked out my co-workers on their preparedness for the Super Bowl Sunday. I am not following any sports (not even soccer, chess, ice hockey, or cricket), so my main interest was if they were prepared for a good party time. Turned out both of them for one reason or another were not planning on having a big party, just watching TV at home. With a couple of friends (best case scenario). Family circumstances and such. One of them also complained he could not buy meat for the party because of this snowstorm shopping frenzy that started already on Thursday.


For me the only value of Super Bowl is that it is a showcase of new TV commercials. But even then the breaks between the commercials, when they are showing the actual game I don’t understand, are too long. So I prefer to look up the new commercials on the internet the next day. Today on Time.com there is a full collection of all commercials that were run during airing of the Super Bowl. If you by chance missed them, take a peek. There is some pretty cool stuff to be found. By the way, Super Bowl is not the single biggest sports event watched by most people in the world, as one of my co-workers tried to argue. The rest of the world outside North America does not even know much about it. They live in blissful ignorance of this game, honestly believe that soccer, ice hockey, chess, cricket, gymnastics, or whatever else, you fill the gap here with your opinion ………………… , are the most popular, most watched sports events in the world.

And some of them are actually right, as it turns out the Soccer World Cup is the most watched sports event in the world. Of which popularity most of the people in the US are blissfully ignorant. Just a little example on biases and importance of minimizing their effect in decision making. Something I learned in my MBA class on Decicion Making\Judgement & Uncertainty.

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