Remembering Our Icons

You know them. You love them. They’re the people that have driven commerce in America for decades: Ad icons. Wallet Pop recently remembered its Top 10 icons of all-time. Sadly, no mention of the "Dude, you’re gettin’ a Dell" guy. Here are a couple of gems:

6. The ‘Where’s the Beef’ Lady
"Where’s the beef?"
This campaign for Wendy’s fast-food restaurants starred an 81-year-old played by Clara Peller who was used to highlight Wendy’s massive amounts of meat in their burgers. By 1985, Peller was fired from Wendy’s after declaring that she had "found the beef" in an advertisement for Prego Plus spaghetti sauce. She then made a few guest appearances on television shows, but died at the age of 85 in 1987.

7. Life Cereal’s Mikey
"He likes it. Hey, Mikey!"
From 1971 to 1987, Life cereal ran an ad starring three young brothers, the most famous of which was Mikey, played by John Gilchrist, who portrayed the usually-picky eater as loving Life cereal. Gilchrist also appeared in more than 250 commercials for such products as Pepto Bismol, Skippy peanut butter, and Jell-O. Today, contrary to the popular rumor that he died from a diet of Pop Rocks and Coke, he works as a radio advertising executive.

10 E-mails to Delete

Not all e-mail scams start with the easy to detect con: “I’m a rich Nigerian prince who needs your help moving millions of dollars. And guess what – I’ll give you a hefty sum of money if you just help me out and provide your bank account number.”

Cnet’s Tech Republic (a site for IT pros) recently blogged the top 10 e-mail scams to watch out for. And some of them look remarkably similar to legitimate messages.

Here are a few to be wary of:

  1. Fake Facebook “friend” messages mimic the real deal. Pay attention to the text in the “to” and “from” fields – if it doesn’t look right, don’t click on the links. Also, make sure the URL is facebook.com (or whatever social networking site the message claims to be from) before clicking. 
  2. Virtual holiday cards are a nice way to send friends or clients an inexpensive greeting (the Chamber started creating its own two years ago). Scammers quickly picked up on the growing popularity of these though. Bogus holiday cards likely won’t tell you the name of the sender; instead it will say something like “A friend sent you a card.” Tech Republic recommends doing a web search of the card service before clicking on the greeting.
  3. If you’re not expecting a package, be leery of e-mails from what appears to be a delivery service. Scammers are sending messages from what appear to be FedEx, UPS and others that say a package could not be delivered because of a problem with the shipping address. The e-mail asks you to fill out an attached form so the parcel can be delivered. Instead of a package, you’ll end up with a computer virus from clicking on the attachment. 

Others on the list: fake admin messages; fear-mongering messages; account cancellation scams; threats from the government; "you’re a winner!"; census survey says…; and in Microsoft (or Apple or Dell or HP) we trust. Read the full list and details on how to avoid these scams on the Tech Republic web site.