Plenty of people can claim ties to celebrities. Wylie Aitken can too, and, like a good lawyer, he has the records to prove it.
“All paths cross,” Aitken, the founding partner of Santa Ana’s Aitken Aitken Cohn, said in a recent LinkedIn post. “My wife (Bette) and I attended Santa Ana College. So did Diane (Keaton),” the famed actress who died on Oct. 11. Keaton, who was 79, also attended Orange Coast College as an acting student before moving to New York and finding fame.
“Years later, we had the opportunity as a Trustee of AFI to meet Diane when she received the Lifetime Achievement Award,” he said. Aitken joined the American Film Institute board two years ago.
Aitken also re-posted a program of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Carousel,” which was performed in 1964 at Santa Ana College.
Keaton (then known as Diane Hall) was the star of the performance, and listed as a stagehand was another Santa Ana College attendee, Steve Martin. Yes, that Steve Martin, who would later go on to star with Keaton in the 1991 film “Father of the Bride.”
“I believe Steve Martin attended (the AFI event),” Aitken said. “Small world.”
Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol wants to use AI to build a better barista.
Niccol, speaking at the annual Salesforce Dreamforce event in October, noted the ways the coffee giant (Nasdaq: SBUX) is looking to add AI technology to its operations, as part of its goal to become the “world’s great customer service company again.”
Predictive ordering, voice-driven ordering experiences, and a new virtual assistant initiative designed to “help baristas in real time” are among the AI efforts, the Newport Beach exec said.
Don’t expect your latte to be served by a robot any time soon; Niccol said the goal is to deliver a “great, not robotic” in-store experience.
While previously serving as CEO of Irvine’s Taco Bell, Brian Niccol drew plaudits for introducing the chain’s “Live Más” slogan, among other brand changes.
Another restaurant chain’s recent attempts at updating its look didn’t go as well: Tennessee’s Cracker Barrel (Nasdaq: CBRL) had to walk back a brand refresh this August after conservatives took umbrage to the removal of an old, white man from its logo. The stock fell in half from July to October and the company’s now valued at $800 million.
The CEO of the chain is Julie Felss Masino, who, along with Liz Williams, ran Taco Bell following Niccol’s departure to Chipotle (NYSE: CMG) in 2018, before the arrival of Mark King.
Masino said in late October that the short-lived change wasn’t ideological, but rather an attempt to make the Cracker Barrel logo easier to see on highway billboards. There’s no Cracker Barrels in OC, and only a handful of locations in California for the 650-store chain.
Williams, who took over the CEO role at Costa Mesa’s El Pollo Loco (Nasdaq: LOCO) last year, also is in the early innings of a brand refresh for the nearly 500-store chain, which counts a market cap of about $280M.
