You've seen the "Drive-Thru Diet" commercials from Taco Bell, right? It's a perfect example of what happens when a company loses its brand focus.
What is it that people love about Taco Bell? Words like "late night," "delicious," and "guilty pleasure" come to mind. According to Zeta Buzz, the most common words surrounding Taco Bell in the online space were once "favorite," "delicious," and "love." (AdAge source). Then the Drive-Thru Diet happened.

A Lack of Brand Focus

A company that has brand focus knows what it's good at, and what it's not. Taco Bell has never been about healthy food or dieting, and by introducing the concept of "dieting" into this brand you're asking it to be something it isn't. As Jim Collins puts it in his book Good to Great, "Focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness."

"Dieting" is not the path to greatness for Taco Bell.

Furthermore, by putting the spotlight on health and dieting, Taco Bell is practically begging customers to dwell on, and comment on, the weakest part of their business (the part that destroys arteries). 

The Sleeping Giant Awakens

In the aftermath of this new initiative, the most popular words surrounding Taco Bell are now "fat," "joke," and "stop." (AdAge source).

The Taco Bell YouTube channel hosts the above video, and the results are telling.

• Two star rating
• Ratings have now been disabled
• 127 comments and I can't find one comment on the video that isn't scathingly critical (haven't looked at every one though). It's really harsh:

"Fast food companies are so evil. Shame on you Taco Bell!!"

"Wow, total bullshit."

"This is THE BIGGEST JOKE ever-No wonder most Americans are walking around obese and riddled with disease. Seriously!?!?!"

Did customers suddenly awake from their grease induced coma? Did they just realize Taco Bell is unhealthy? I don't think so. I'm pretty sure customers knew that all along. The problem here is that customers thought Taco Bell knew that too.

It Feels Dishonest

Perhaps the new Taco Bell Fresco menu isn't terribly unhealthy; but this just looks dishonest. Everyone is jumping on the health band wagon, the ad is littered with fine print, and the before and after photos look like a bad banner ad. Regardless of it's validity, it just doesn't feel honest. Customers now feel like Taco Bell is trying to pull the ol' switcheroo.

It Discredits Advertising

I hesitate to criticize another agency's work, and I hesitate even more to call it "harmful to advertising", but I can't get around it. This type of advertising is what gives the industry a bad rap. Ridiculous claims about weight loss, partial truths, fine print, and capitalizing on a bandwagon movement. Not to mention the fact that it looks an awful lot like the Jared campaign from Subway.

The Lesson

Big companies keep learning the hard way. When you lose brand focus, when you try to be something you're not, your customers will notice. Back in the day, the extent of their "noticing" took the form of complaining to a few friends. Now, however, they have a giant digital megaphone to hold companies accountable.

Taco Bell could have avoided this whole thing by recognizing what they're good at and sticking with it.

If nothing else, they could have just made a campaign that had a more realistic vibe: "Yeah, you might want a slightly healthier version of fake Mexican food, so here it is." Maybe customers would have been ok with that. But, when you claim to be a company who condones dieting and you insinuate customers could lose 50lbs by eating food that has made a name for itself by being anything but healthy, you've lost your brand focus, and you've lost customers.

Embedding videos in Joomla content can be a little tricky sometimes; with a stock Joomla site you really just have one main content area to bung embed code into, but you usually have a wysiwyg editor installed so that code gets messed up in html translation mistakenly or otherwise doesn't display whilst editing your content etc...  Of course, to make the job easier, extensions have emerged as plugins that let you use special tags in your content (such as Allvideos), but well, who wants to remember how to properly reference a 3rd-party hosted clip right?

I've been excited about Kaltura for some time - its an Open-source video platform which works just like some of the major commercial ones (eg. Brightcove.) - only its cheaper (free?) and has some cool tools to let your community remix videos right in your website - using a huge assortment of samples; from your collection to anything hosted on Kaltura member sites.

Kaltura just released an extension for Joomla and it looks pretty amazing; with it, you can:

• upload/embed videos,
• embed flickr/myspace video/photo/audio media in your articles,
• manage media in a central control panel,
• customize the embed player on your site,
• edit and remix video to embed in your site and much more!

Now, Kaltura still doesn't solve the issue of embedding content from 3rd party hosts like youtube, vimeo, etc..; it seems to offer myspace video embeds (ahem, what?) and thats about it.. so you're still going to have to use somethign like the Allvideos plugin to easily embed them, but Kaltura can be a very easy way to upload and embed original video - you can upload video files or record directly from your webcam...

When you encounter a website that has accessibility problems, it can be a good idea to contact the organization behind the website to let them know about the problem and encourage them to fix it. To help make this a little easier, the W3C WAI has published a draft document called Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites.

The document contains tips, discusses different approaches, and includes a few sample e-mails to show you what a message describing an accessibility problem can look like. Shawn Lawton Henry talks about the initiative a bit more in Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. You can make a difference. on the W3C Blog.

I think it’s very important to contact organizations with inaccessible websites. They might not be aware of the problem. Even if they are, the more feedback they get about it the likelier they are to fix it.

In her blog post Shawn says this, which is something you should keep in mind:

Just yelling at your computer isn't going to get the accessibility barriers fixed. Just complaining on a blog or other place where the organization won't see it isn't likely to help.

I know from personal experience that it can be hard to stay calm and avoid making your message more confrontational than it needs to be (which I have been guilty of more than once), but I think you are more likely to get the results you want by being as positive as the situation allows. This is emphasized in the WAI document:

When contacting an organization about accessibility, consider what approach will get the results you want. The tone of your emails, phone calls, and other communications will impact how people react and respond.

…

Often it is best when you first contact an organization to assume that they don’t know about the accessibility barriers on their website. Based on their response and what you learn about the organization's position on accessibility, you can adjust your approach and choose follow up actions that are likely to be most effective.

Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites is currently a draft published for public review. If you have comments or suggestions, either post them to the W3C Blog entry or send them to wai-eo-editors@w3.org by February 3, 2010.

As a number of people have stated, there are some accessibility issues in HTML 5. Hopefully the HTML Accessibility Task Force will help straighten those out:

The objective of HTML Accessibility Task Force is to help ensure that HTML 5 provides features to enable Web content to be accessible to people with disabilities. This includes review of existing features for potential accessibility problems, and proposal of new features where needed.

Material related to accessibility in HTML 5 can currently be found at the HTML ESW wiki, the PF (Protocols and Formats) ESW wiki, and the PF wiki.