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This UPS Ad Has it Backwards
March 27, 2008

Time to pick on UPS again (see the "UPS" link at the bottom of the post)... Has anyone else seen the UPS "whiteboard" ad (the ones with the annoying long-haired business-casual corporate hippie guy) that's running during almost every NCAA basketball commercial break?

The ad talks about globalizing your business and it shows boxes flowing on a conveyor from a factory in the east coast to rest of the U.S. Kind of a quaint old "we used to build stuff here" supply chain. Once the business is enabled by UPS, supposedly, boxes are now flowing from that factory to the entire world.... including TO CHINA.

Since the UPS website is maddening to navigate, I'll save you the virtual waste of motion, embedding the stupid ad below (kicking myself for giving them free publicity):



Really? That's the most accurate supply chain they could have portrayed? Our trade imbalance with China, in the month of January 2008 alone, was $20 Billion dollars. Don't most executives watching basketball want to send tons of boxes the opposite direction, from China's cheap labor to the U.S. and global markets? I'm not encouraging that myself, but I would have expected the UPS globalization ad to be reasonably accurate for this decade, that's all.

Posted by Mark Graban on March 27, 2008 | Comments (1)