Category: Advertising

Advertising news from all over

Reading Around on November 9th through November 10th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected November 9th through November 10th:

  • What’s Alan Watching?: Mad Men, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat”: We’re putting the band back together – “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” felt very much like a caper movie: the jazzy piano music, the intrigue, the plan unfolding perfectly as Lane walked in, got fired by St. John, and walked out happily, leaving a dumbfounded Moneypenny in his wake. Specifically, though, the episode felt like my favorite part of any caper (or other kind of ensemble adventure) movie: the gathering of the team. I have been, and always will be, a sucker for those sequences in movies like “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Magnificent Seven” where the two leaders (there are always two guys at first, aren’t there?) travel around to assemble the perfect team of experts, explaining their value and using various tricks of persuasion along the way to get them on board.

  • The Watcher: Checking in with Conrad Hilton: ‘Mad Men’ actor Chelcie Ross speaks – I think [Conrad Hilton is] a zealot, and his zeal was focused on one particular area — his business. They don’t get into it on the show but Conrad Hilton’s private life was just about as rocky as Don’s. He left behind women, he worked all the time. But his zeal for what he’s doing relates to his business and his belief in God and America and what it can bring to the world. He feels that’s his mission — to bring America to the world, and he has bought into it 100 percent.
  • Mad Men Postmortem – The Daily Beast – It’s so unambiguous to me that this marriage is over, but the audience seems to cling to the idea that they should be together because we want to believe in those things. The marriage was not good. It was built on a lie and the lie was exposed. In the end, Don coming clean really damaged his relationship with her, more than the lying, her seeing who he actually was. I do believe when he says his mother was a 22-year-old prostitute that Betty is looking at something that is very far from what she had planned for herself… That was the whole story of the season. When Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley) came on to her… a switch went off in her head of what was missing in her life, which was a true, romantic attachment. In the end, that combination with her gut feeling that something wasn’t right in her marriage and finding out the truth, they don’t belong together anymore, kids or not. You’ve got to take it pretty seriously when someone’s flying to Reno to get a divorce.
  • Mad Men Confronts Heaven and Hull: The Season 3 Finale: James Wolcott | Vanity Fair – Although this episode began with ominous echoes of The Godfather…it pedaled into an inspirational tale–an entrepreneurial vision of A Christmas Carol, where everyone comes together under one roof not out of love or family ties or sentimental obligation but out of mutual economic self-interest and buccaneer solidarity, sink or swim, eat or be eaten. “Well, it’s official,” toasts Roger after he, Don, Bert, and Pryce form their rebel alliance. “Friday, December 13, 1963: Four guys shot their own legs off.” The shark cunning entailed in starting up this new agency may seem cold, bloodless, and mercenary—an Ayn Rand mission minus the rhetorical bombast–but the collaborative enthusiasm of this breakout operation was brisk, invigorating: it gave you a lift being in an adult universe where talent and initiative were on the move and mediocrity left behind to fend for itself.

  • The Watcher: Sterling Coup: A terrific ending to ‘Mad Men’s’ season – ” I was just transfixed by Sally’s watchful brown eyes. She just kept looking from parent to parent, waiting for someone to tell her the truth. More effectively than anyone else has ever done, she called Don on his b.s. “You say things and you don’t mean them! You can’t just do that!”

    Later, we see Sally once again in front of the TV, her comforter, her friend. Carla and the TV are the most stable forces in Sally’s life. Truth be told, Carla being the biggest influence on Sally’s life would not be a bad thing at all.

    Later when Bobby was clinging to Don’s body like a little monkey, unwilling to let go, holding on tight with every limb — that was heartbreaking.”

  • Footnotes of Mad Men: Goodbye, All Our Pretty Horses | The Awl – Don’s revulsion at being sold off has to do both with his free-pony-roaming the-silvery-plains sense of individualism (DREAMY) and also McCann Erickson’s noxious reputation in the 1960s. ‘Giantism’ was their business ethos. Beginning in the early 1960s, McCann-Erickson, then known as Intergroup McCann-Erickson, gobbled up a mid-sized shops and retained them under one umbrella, but still forced them the compete for clients. This had an upside: two agencies could be under the McCann Erickson parent with one shop servicing American Airlines and the other shop servicing TWA. And a downside: the fear, at the time, was there would be leaks and betrayals between agencies. In 1964, Nestle left McCann-Erickson because they also serviced Carnation. Continental also withdrew their business because McCann was in bed with other airlines. “Bigness is an evil,” a Nestle executive explained, “that strains relationships that ten years ago were very warm and close.”
  • Eschaton – Evil Google – “As is occasionally pointed out when journalists and news business people complain that Google is stealing their content, if they don’t want Google to index their pages they can simply… tell Google not to index their pages by inserting a bit of code into them. What they really want Google to do is pay them for the privilege of making money from a derivative of their product, the way book reviewers always pay novelists, for example.”

View my photos at bighugelabs.com

Faux Ad Agency Execs

Seth Anderson0 comment

Almost amusingly brazen scheme: scammers pose as advertising account executives, and convince publishers to host fake advertisements for legitimate sounding corporations. The advertisements are embedded with malicious code and/or lead to fake websites, the goal is to collect names and addresses that can be resold, or worse. Dozens of high profile ad agencies have been targeted, as well as high profile websites like The New York Times, the Gawker Media group, and others who don’t want to publicly admit they’ve been duped.

crime plus 8 mailbox

The scam goes something like this: Someone posing as an agency executive or marketer approaches a publisher with a credible e-mail domain like vonage-inc.com or hyundai-inc.com and asks for a quick turnaround campaign, often over a weekend. The ads then install malware or harvest user identities and continue to do so until the publisher figures it out. Often they don’t and the “advertiser” — sometimes part of a European organized-crime syndicate — will even pay for the campaign and run another.

…

What do the scammers want? Eyeballs, and installs, for the most part. Some are paid by the number of malware installs they can get; others by the number of identities harvested or number of computers than can be used remotely as part of a bot network. In all cases, the bigger and more trusted the site, the easier to make money. “It’s purely financially motivated,” said John Harrison, manger at security firm Symantec.

Gawker Media was one of the latest to fall victim, and ran a campaign last week that installed malware on visitors to Gawker sites for several days until the ads were discovered. The scammers were clever enough to credibly pose as employees of Spark SMG, a unit of Publicis Groupe, and had a detailed knowledge of Spark clients and repertoire of industry lingo convincing enough industry insiders to create a fake campaign for Suzuki across Gawker sites.

As is typical, they created a legitimate-looking e-mail address, @spark-SMG.com (real Spark employees are @sparksmg.com), and called from a Chicago area code. Their ads only infected computers in intervals, so routine tests on the ads wouldn’t discover the malicious code.

…

Mr. Caruso said the scammers would have very likely paid for the campaign. Depending on the goal of the scam, it can be a very good business. Identities can be resold to organized crime; scare ads can harvest sales of phony anti-virus software. In the end, the goal is not to get caught, because when they do, Mr. Caruso said, “they have to change their name, change their LLC and come up with a new scam.”

[Click to continue reading Advertising: Latest Ad Scammers: Faux Ad Agency Execs – Advertising Age – Digital]

Crime Scene

Sterling Cooper never had to deal with this aspect of the modern world…

Marketers Still Prefer a Garbage Trail

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Despite opting out of nearly every catalog I could think of1, we still receive mounds and mounds of paper trash from various retailers. Garbage cans full every week, most of which gets2 recycled, at least in our household. A shame, because so much energy is wasted attempting to stimulate sales of crap we don’t even need or want.

Rings of fire

Jeffrey Ball writes:

[The paper and catalog industry] is the third-largest energy user within the U.S. manufacturing sector, trailing the energy and chemicals industries, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. Making paper accounted for 2.4% of U.S. energy use in 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Little data exist on how much energy is used specifically to make catalogs. A 1999 report by the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group that sought to highlight catalogs’ impact, said they consumed more energy in one year than one million homes.

[Click to continue reading Marketers Still Prefer a Paper Trail – WSJ.com]

The damn things are not even very effective at stimulating sales:

only 1.3% of those catalogs generated a sale, the survey found. The average U.S. catalog retailer reported mailing about 21 million catalogs in 2007, sending out a new edition every 26 days

and for no good reason, the catalog paper is not even recycled paper, by and large, meaning virgin lumber is sacrificed for 98.7% of the virgin lumber to end up in a trash can, unopened, unread, unwanted.

The paper typically used in catalogs contains about 10% recycled content, according to industry consultant RISI. That is far less than paper in general, which typically contains about 30% recycled content. For newspapers, a bigger paper user than catalogs, the amount of recycled content is roughly 40%.

Bent Towards Golden Shade Light

Pretty sad statistics.

Catalog Choice wants to update the mindset of catalog retailers, but the industry is reluctant to change long-established practices:

Chuck Teller, executive director of Catalog Choice, is working on an idea that could wean catalog retailers away from paper-based marketing without hurting their businesses. His “iCatalog” aims to adapt the accessibility of a paper catalog to the digital realm. Using an online widget that consumers can install on a personal Web page or social-networking site, Catalog Choice continually updates and customizes retailers’ product selections.

Still, so far there are widgets available for only a few dozen titles. The National Directory of Catalogs, meanwhile, lists 12,524 catalogs, the vast majority of which include a paper version. That directory runs to 1,266 pages.

Occasion All Our Own

Footnotes:
  1. using Catalog Choice, as blogged about here [↩]
  2. allegedly [↩]

Reading Around on October 14th through October 15th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected October 14th through October 15th:

  • Today’s Weather: Dreary – Chicagoist – Another dark, damp, dank, dreary day for Chicago. Off and on rain showers coupled with highs in the mid 40s will give us an unseasonable chill for mid-October. If there’s any glimmer of hope, it’s that by Monday we could crack 70 degrees once more. Still, those warmer summer days are a distant memory far too soon. We dig the autumn, but were hoping for a gentler transition

  • Slightly Beyond the Shore

  • My First Look At Radio Free Albemuth – The Movie –

    About a month ago I had the opportunity to drive down to LA to see a screening of Radio Free Albemuth with director John Alan Simon. Pretty cool, I know. John wanted me to take a look at the current cut of the film before any further changes are ‘locked out’ and they begin the painstaking work of mixing and cleaning up the sound, correcting the color-timing, tweaking the special effects, and putting on the final polish.

    I really enjoyed the movie and think most Dick-heads are also going to like this film 1) it’s an independent release, so it’s free of dodgy chairs, high-speed chases, fight scenes, gun battles or Keanu, Tom, Nick, Arnold, or any other Scientologist; 2) and best of all, it’s very true to the book. While writer/director John Alan Simon was forced to cut some of the material from the novel, I think he did so in a very effective and sensitive way.

  • Mad About Mad Men – The Atlantic(November 2009) – The cognoscenti, though, have largely ignored this quiet virtue while extolling what are really the show’s considerable flaws. Ah, the media juggernaut. If Mad Men were half as good as the hype would have it, the show would be one of the best ever produced for American television. It’s both.

The FTC and the Unreasonable Case of Disclosure

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The blogosphere is starting to think about the new FTC regulations we mentioned yesterday. Case in point, Nine reasons why the rules will solve no problem, and just cause headaches:

I'm With Stupid

However, I don’t believe that the new FTC guidelines actually help to further the goals of transparency but rather, instead, the new rules will be rife with abuse and misuse and uneven application. Here’s why:

1. Adversely affects smaller blogs. Small blogs like ours do not have editors. We don’t get paid to review and what we do is truly a labor of love. Yes, we are starting to host ads but we cannot afford a full time editor for our reviews. Blogs without editorial staffs will be subject to the new rules while blogs and mainstream publications, regardless of other issues and relationships, will not. Let me state it this way: the blogs with the highest earning capacity will likely be exempt while the blogs with the lowest earning capacity will not. I found it fascinating that Richard Cleland of the Bureau of Consumer Protection said this:

Cleland said that a disclosure was necessary when it came to an individual blogger, particularly one who is laboring for free. A paid reviewer was in the clear because money was transferred from an institution to the reviewer, and the reviewer was obligated to dispense with the product. I wondered if Cleland was aware of how many paid reviewers held onto their swag.

“I expect that when I read my local newspaper, I may expect that the reviewer got paid,” said Cleland. “His job is to be paid to do reviews. Your economic model is the advertising on the side.”

From Cleland’s standpoint, because the reviewer is an individual, the product becomes “compensation.”

[Click to continue reading The FTC and the Unreasonable Case of Disclosure | Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary]

and Number 7, especially as it pertains to Twitter is a bit of a joke:

Eliminating any relationships. § 255.5 requires disclosure of “material connections”.

When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience), such connection must be fully disclosed.

I’m not sure what this pertains to. I have attended luncheons, parties with publishers. Do I need to explain each and every piece of swag I am ever given? Could I even possibly remember every pen and mint tin I picked up? I doubt it.

It’s important to note that in various interviews around the web and in the Guide itself, the FTC contemplates that any comment, tweet, post on a facebook page, participation on a message board, must be accompanied by the relevant disclosure.

As for Twitter, the FTC isn’t letting you get a pass with the excuse that 140 characters–Twitter’s famous text limit–is simply too short. “There are ways to abbreviate a disclosure that fit within 140 characters,” Cleland said. “You may have to say a little bit of something else, but if you can’t make the disclosure, you can’t make the ad.”

I do wonder how long it will take before this policy is attempted to be enforced, and how long before a high-profile case goes before the courts. Do I have to hire an editor now? An advertising manager so there is a wall between “content” and “advertising”? How come celebrity magazines1 are seemingly exempt from the FTC? If I read another positive review about a Michael Bay film, I may ask the FTC to investigate.

Footnotes:
  1. print and television [↩]

FTC Says Bloggers Must Disclose Payments

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Blog rules have, apparently, changed.

Mictorate Surrogate

– Blogger or flogger? The Federal Trade Commission is taking a tougher line on bloggers who accept cash or gifts to tout a company’s products or services.

Under revised rules announced Monday, the FTC will require bloggers and celebrities to clearly state when they receive cash or “payment in kind” for endorsing a company’s products or services.

The changes, adopted on a 4-0 vote, are the first revisions to federal guidelines on endorsements and testimonial advertising since 1980.

Connections between advertisers and endorsers must be disclosed under the revised guidelines. The FTC said the stricter disclosure will apply to comments on talk shows, blog posts and on social media as well as in traditional advertisements.

[Click to continue reading FTC Says Bloggers Must Disclose Payments – WSJ.com]

But this policy, as reported here and in a similar NYT article, is pretty vague as to terms and definitions. How will it be enforced? Who qualifies as a blogger? Does this policy include Yelp and their pay-to-play model?

Or does the policy include low trafficked sites like your humble host? Does Amazon.com’s mildly dirty lucre qualify as “receiving cash”? Amazon pays me approximately 3% of the pre-tax price of any product that you purchase through a B12 Partners affiliate link1, which reaches peaks of nearly $30 some months, but more frequently is in the single digits. Google ads, over on the sidebar, or possibly inserted into your RSS feed or daily email, pay me a few cents for every click-through, which also adds a few dollars to my bank account every month. I pay more for my website than I make, but I’m not doing it for money, I’m doing it for other2 reasons.

Other than that, B12 Solipsism has not received squat from any product I’ve mentioned, any person I’ve praised or ridiculed, or any event I’ve mentioned. Now and again, someone will suggest a topic to me, but most of the time, I just ignore the PR pitch. Perhaps if there was financial compensation attached to the pitch, or even free tickets, I might pay attention.

Or Else

Besides B12, is the new ruling akin to what television product placement law is? Which is what again? Seem to see a lot of product placement in traditional media, how is a consumer to know which news magazines are running paid-for content, and which are not? How about Congressional leaders? Can the FTC or comparable governmental agency place disclaimers, perhaps in a forehead tattoo form, on health industry shills like Max Baucus for instance?

The FTC Guide, as currently written, seems woefully unenforced. Nearly all of the Sunday Talking Head shows seem to skirt the endorsement guidelines. Will that change too?

For purposes of this part, an endorsement means any advertising message (including verbal statements, demonstrations, or depictions of the name, signature, likeness or other identifying personal characteristics of an individual or the name or seal of an organization) which message consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser. The party whose opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience the message appears to reflect will be called the endorser and may be an individual, group or institution.

(c) For purposes of this part, the term product includes any product, service, company or industry.

(d) For purposes of this part, an expert is an individual, group or institution possessing, as a result of experience, study or training, knowledge of a particular subject, which knowledge is superior to that generally acquired by ordinary individuals.

[Click to continue reading FTC GUIDES CONCERNING USE OF ENDORSEMENTS AND TESTIMONIALS IN ADVERTISING ]

Live High aka High Life

Anyway, we’ll probably read more about this in the future, but B12 Solipsism readers can sleep easy tonight knowing that we are not paid blogger shills3 ,4 ,5

Footnotes:
  1. such as the images of books-recently-purchased residing on the blog sidebar [↩]
  2. heretofore unknown [↩]
  3. though, Corporate America, our lines of communication are open, hint, hint [↩]
  4. no, not really, we’ll probably just make fun of you. [↩]
  5. but maybe not, if the price is right! [↩]

Corporate Interests vs Public Interests

Seth Anderson0 comment

Very rarely does corporate interest and public interst intersect, and as we mentioned previously, especially not in the laughably anti-consumer food industry initiative called Smart Choices. The backlash has been strong enough that the American Diabetes Association has requested their name be removed from the Smart Choices website, and so has Tufts University, home of the corrupt Dean, Eileen Kennedy.

Watermelon Break

A new program headed by the dean of Tufts’ nutrition school that grades the health value of food products has drawn severe criticism for its ties to members of the food industry and for endorsing what many experts call unhealthy eating choices. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy Dean Eileen Kennedy leads the Smart Choices program, which denotes approved foods with a green checkmark which appears on the foods’ packages.

Criticism of the program has focused on its inclusion of a number of popular, sugary cereals, like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops.

…

Mike Adams, editor of the online Natural News Network, has called the Smart Choices program a “marketing fraud.”

“You’d have to be deeply misinformed about nutritional basics to think that a processed breakfast cereal made of 41% sugar, partially-hydrogenated oils and artificial coloring chemicals is a ‘smart choice’ for any child,” Adams wrote in a Sept. 22 article for the Natural News Network, a non-profit information source that draws on Web sites covering health and environmental issues.
“A more appropriate label might be ‘Diabetes Choices’ or ‘Obesity Choices,’ but certainly not ‘Smart Choices,’” Adams wrote. His office declined to comment for this article.

Tufts has requested that Smart Choices not list Kennedy’s academic title as dean of the Friedman School on the program’s Web site, Christine Fennelly, Tufts’ director of public relations for the health sciences campuses, said in an e-mail to the Daily.

[Click to continue reading Tufts Daily – Dean criticized for program’s ties to interest groups]

Reading Around on September 29th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading September 29th from 11:32 to 20:54:

Speaking of Capitalism

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Romeo Bleeding: Live from Austin” (Romeo Bleeding)

In 2006, Ben Sisario interviewed Tom Waits about his frequent, necessary lawsuits against corporations that use a Tom Waits android to sell products, after these same corporations approach the real Tom Waits and are turned down.

Here’s the brief New York Times article that ran

Tom Waits (right), who has successfully sued in the past over the use of impersonations of his voice and musical style, is now taking on Opel, a European subsidiary of General Motors, in response to a new ad. ”I have a longstanding policy against my voice or music being used in commercials,” Mr. Waits said in a statement this week, ”and I have lawyers over there investigating my options.” Mr. Waits has sued Audi over imitations of his voice in commercials, and in 1993 he won a $2.5-million suit against Frito-Lay for a Doritos ad. In a statement, Opel responded, ”We actually are surprised about the fact that Tom Waits considers the music that goes with the current TV commercial ‘Lullaby’ for a range of Opel cars as a potential misuse of his voice and style of singing.” Opel said that the underlying music was by Brahms, that it had not approached Mr. Waits and that the only celebrity singer it had considered was Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. ”But before even starting any negotiations, a Frankfurt-based singer was found who delivered an excellent rough voice interpretation for the ‘Wiegenlied’ theme in English,” the company added, referring to the Brahms ”Lullaby.” Mr. Waits said: ”If I stole an Opel, Lancia or Audi, put my name on it and resold it, I’d go to jail. But over there they ask, you say no, and they hire impersonators.’

[Click to continue reading Arts, Briefly; Tom Waits Objects to Another TV Ad – New York Times]

Today, Ben Sisario posted a transcript of the entire interview, including a topical bit about the power of corporations.

Ben S:It must be extremely time-consuming and expensive to pursue these cases. Why is it so important to you to do this?

I ask myself that sometimes. Because there are things I would rather be doing. It does take a tremendous amount of time, energy and money. But in a way you’re building a road that other people will drive on. I have a moral right to my voice now. It’s like property. There’s a fence around it, in a way. In Spain now there’s such a thing as moral rights. So that’s a good thing.

In both these cases — the Scandinavian/German Opel thing and the Spain Audi deal — they called me first to ask me if I would do the commercial. Then, when I politely declined, they turned around and hired an impersonator. So they’re really left hanging out there in the wind legally, since I had documentation that they asked me; it only strengthened my case. But there’s plenty of other situations where they just out-and-out do it. There’s a whole sound-alike industry, and it has to eat too. Like flies at a picnic, you know. “Enjoy your lunch, but we live here too.”

and corporations are used to getting their own way too often:

Ben S: Does it offend you more that somebody is copying you, or that they’re doing it to sell a product?

I don’t mind if someone wants to try to sound like me to do a show. I get a kick out that. They got these bands over there in Europe that do my songs, have a singer with a really deep voice. It’s my own little raggedy version of Beatlemania. [Laughs.] These little bar bands that try to sound like me.

But the product stuff, it bugs the hell out of me. The idea is to make it so commonplace that you barely notice that the whole world is being dominated and controlled by big business. I didn’t get into this to write jingles. I’m trying to have some effect on the culture, and my own growth and development.

I make a distinction between people who are using voice as a creative item and people who are selling cigarettes and underwear. It’s a big difference. We all know the difference, and it’s stealing. They get a lot of out standing next to me and I just get big legal bills. It’s like someone coming into your house and stealing something. It slowly erodes my own credibility. So that’s a pain.

Most of these companies operate more like countries than companies. They’re so large. And the way they behave is kind of like the might and the right of a country, the way they roll over you. They don’t think anything of taking something that they want, because they’re going to get a parking ticket. And it doesn’t even ever reach the brain of the company. The news of this is just like gum on the bottom of their shoe.

When it comes to the face that most of them want to put on for the public, they don’t want to wear corporate feathers. They masquerade more like one of us. So that’s why want to wear your music. It’s the first thing that gets your attention: “Hey, I know that song.” Now they’ve got ya — that’s the foot in the door.

[Click to continue reading Ben Sisario – Conversation with Tom Waits]

Tom Waits should be appointed the Czar of Culture…

Oh, here’s the Opel ad referred to, with the faux Tom Waits soundtrack

The case ended with Opel/GM/McCann Erickson settling for an undisclosed sum.

Continue reading “Speaking of Capitalism”

Sugary Cereal is Not Smart

Seth Anderson1 Comment

There’s a new nutritional label starting to appear called Smart Choice, and it seems to be just a marketing gimmick, not anything that’s actually good for your health or your families health. I assume Michael Pollan is rolling his eyes right now.

Dance of the Devil Corn

A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, is “designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices.”

The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including — to the surprise of many nutritionists — sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops.

[Click to continue reading Industry-Backed Label Calls Sugary Cereal a ‘Smart Choice’ – NYTimes.com]

The Smart Choices people have a ridiculous example as to why eating Froot Loops is good for you:

Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices board and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said the program’s criteria were based on government dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards.

…

Dr. Kennedy…defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

Yeah, think about that for a second. Why are a donut and a bowl of sugar sprayed with nutrients your only choices as a parent? Where’s the protein for your child’s brain? Where is the fresh fruit? I was lucky enough as a child that my mom made me a breakfast every day: oatmeal, eggs, whatever. Is it really that hard to spend an extra 20 minutes in the morning to feed your child?

Wonder Bread Factory

I wonder how these corporations underwriting the Smart Choices program will spin this damning article?

Ten companies have signed up for the Smart Choices program so far, including Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. Companies that participate pay up to $100,000 a year to the program, with the fee based on total sales of its products that bear the seal.

The Smart Choices organization fired one nutritionist who wanted the program to stand for something other than marketing:

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, was part of a panel that helped devise the Smart Choices nutritional criteria, until he quit last September. He said the panel was dominated by members of the food industry, which skewed its decisions. “It was paid for by industry and when industry put down its foot and said this is what we’re doing, that was it, end of story,” he said

…

Mr. Jacobson objected to some of the panel’s nutritional decisions. The criteria allow foods to carry the Smart Choices seal if they contain added nutrients, which he said could mask shortcomings in the food.

Despite federal guidelines favoring whole grains, the criteria allow breads made with no whole grains to get the seal if they have added nutrients.

“You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria,” Mr. Jacobson said.

Yummy, sawdust, it’s better than a donut!

Glenn Beck advertisers

swanksalot0 comment

Brief follow up to an earlier post, these are the advertisers who used to advertise on Glenn Beck’s hateful show, but have since gotten cold feet.

Mathematical Calmness

Last week, ColorOfChange.org began emailing the 150,000+ people who signed their initial petition, asking them to call five major advertisers who continued to refuse to pull their ads: Clorox, Experian (creator of FreeCreditReport.com), Lowe’s, Red Lobster and Vonage. Hours after members began making calls, Lowe’s contacted ColorOfChange.org, pledging not to run additional ads on Beck’s programs. Clorox followed suit Thursday, and Experian did the same on Friday. Vonage’s recent defection leaves Red Lobster as the only company in the group that has not yet responded.

Previous companies who have corrected advertising errors and/or pulled their ads entirely include Airware Inc. (makers of Brez anti-snoring aids), Allergan (maker of Restasis), Ally Bank (a unit of GMAC Financial Services), Ancestry.com, AT&T, Best Buy, Blaine Labs Inc., Broadview Security, Campbell Soup Company, ConAgra, Clorox, CVS, Ditech, The Elations Company, Experian (creator of FreeCreditReport.com), Farmers Insurance Group, GEICO, Johnson & Johnson (makers of Tylenol), Lawyers.com, Lowe’s, Men’s Wearhouse, NutriSystem, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, RadioShack, Re-Bath, Roche, SC Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis, Sargento, Sprint, State Farm Insurance, Travelocity, The UPS Store, Verizon Wireless and Wal-Mart.

[From ColorOfChange.org]

Why these corporations advertised in the first place baffles me, Fox News is not their friend, nor is Glenn Beck a friend of their customers. At least they have come to their senses, momentarily at least.

Glenn Beck and His Friends at Fox

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Couldn’t happen to more despicable folks

Why Im Glad We Moved Away from East Texas

Despite media reports to the contrary, Fox News executives explicitly refused to distance themselves from Beck’s claim that President Obama is a “racist,” let alone reprimand the host for the shockingly hateful comments. Fox News’ initial knee-jerk response of failing to question any of the gutter rhetoric Beck dishes out, and the cable news giant’s decision to treat the transgression as a nonstory unworthy of a serious response, of course, is what led to the boycott drive.

The fact that nobody anywhere inside Fox News had enough sense to hold Beck accountable or to even suggest that calling the president of the United States (aka “this guy”) a “racist” on national television was well outside the bounds of professional broadcasting — the fact that Fox News could not even for a moment publicly contemplate that Beck had stepped over a glaringly obvious line of common decency — is why those same executives have been forced to watch as an avalanche of A-list advertisers go public with their plans to make sure they are no longer associated with Beck.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how executives at Fox News could have handled Beck’s “racist” smear any worse. And it’s hard to imagine how Fox News could have inadvertently cultivated the ground any better for a sweepingly successful advertising boycott than the cavalier way they dealt with Beck’s presidential race-baiting.

And if you don’t think the snowballing ad boycott has left Fox News suits stunned and knocked back on their heels, then I don’t think you understand the kind of arrogance that runs through the water supply over at its Manhattan headquarters on Sixth Avenue. Execs there this year no doubt have been congratulating themselves on their ratings success and patting each other on the back for having the brilliant insight to unleash a hatemonger like Glenn Beck on the airwaves.

But suddenly, uh-oh, there’s a price to be paid for peddling hate? And worse, it’s a free-market penalty where blue-chip advertisers — those bastions of corporate America that Fox News idolizes — are deciding for themselves that they cannot afford to be associated with Fox News’ wonder boy? Corporate America is turning its back on the new face of Fox News?

[Click to continue reading Why Glenn Beck, and Fox News, can’t escape the “racist” trap | Media Matters for America]

Glenn Beck’s vile show may get good ratings, but if blue chip advertisers stay away from sponsoring it, what good does the high ratings do for the network? Money is king, after all. Can the Fox News division survive on a diet of penis enhancement pills and other bottom of the proverbial barrel fare? I doubt it, there are summer homes in Aspen to pay for, and times are tough for corporate executives all over.

Looking for a complete list of advertisers who’ve bailed, here’s a partial list:

The A-list collection of disgruntled Beck advertisers is staggering: Applebee’s, AT&T, Bank of America, Best Buy, Campbell Soup, Clorox, ConAgra, CVS, Ditech, Farmers Insurance Group, GEICO, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe’s, Nutrisystem, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, RadioShack, Sprint, State Farm Insurance, The UPS Store, Travelers Insurance, Verizon Wireless, Vonage, and Wal-Mart, among others.

Reading Around on August 17th through August 18th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected August 17th through August 18th:

  • Poaching Suspects Charged – Yosemiter – Criminal complaints against Kyle Narasky and brothers Chad and Chris Gierlich were signed on Wednesday, August 5th, charging them with multiple counts of poaching, violations of the Lacey Act, aiding and abetting the commission of a crime, and many Title 36 CFR violations. The signing of these complaints marked the culmination of a year-long investigation which entailed the issuance of multiple search warrants and close cooperation between wardens from the California Department of Fish and Game, rangers from the Tuolumne Meadows Subdistrict and special agents from across the Pacific West Region. Over the past four years, the Gierlichs and Narasky have poached multiple trophy-sized deer from inside Yosemite National Park. State charges are also pending.
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  • When Airplane Stewardesses Were All Glamour and Sex Appeal – Gizmodo 79 – Gizmodo – “1979 I flew to Sweden in SAS, and I still can remember the blondes in the pretty uniforms, their eyes, and their smiles. Which means I noticed (maybe too much, given my passion for the Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—although I blame Lego for that one). Those affable, efficient women hosted the Golden Age of aeronautics, being professional, attentive, sympathetic, and yes, absolutely sexy”
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  • Adobe – Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter : For Macintosh : Camera Raw 5.2 update – *With the release of Camera Raw 5.2 (and upcoming release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® 2.2), there is an important exception in DNG file handling for the Panasonic DMC-LX3, Panasonic DMC-FX150, Panasonic DMC-FZ28, Panasonic DMC-G1, and Leica D-LUX 4. For those who choose to convert these native, proprietary files to the DNG file format, a linear DNG format is the only conversion option available at this time. A linear DNG file has gone through a demosaic process that converts a single mosaic layer of red, green, and blue channel information into three distinct layers, one for each channel. The resulting linear DNG file is approximately three times the size of a mosaic DNG file or the original proprietary file format.

    This exception is a temporary solution to help ensure that Panasonic’s and Leica’s intended image rendering from their proprietary raw file format is applied to an image when converted DNG files are viewed in third-party software titles.

Mad Men Returns Soon

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Mad Men – Season One” (Lionsgate)


“Mad Men: Season 2” (Matthew Weiner)

I recently watched both Season 1 and Season 2 of Mad Men on DVD [you should rent Netflix Season 1 and Season 2 ] in a marathon session. Am very happy that Season 3 is about to air.1

But, ah, television. Its great accomplishment over the past decade has been to give us the best of all movie worlds, to meld personal filmmaking, or series-making, with something like the craft and discipline, the crank-’em-out urgency, of the old studio system. I’m thinking first and foremost of The Sopranos, which debuted in 1999 and sadly departed in 2007. This strange and entertaining series, as individual a work as anything by Hitchcock or Scorsese, was the creation of David Chase, and it paved the way for The Wire, Deadwood, Rescue Me, Damages, and its successor as the best drama on television, the equally strange and entertaining Mad Men, which will launch its third season on AMC August 16.

Set in an advertising agency in the early 1960s, Mad Men debuted two summers ago and right off the bat earned itself two Golden Globes and a Peabody Award, and was nominated for 16 Emmys, becoming the first basic-cable series to win for outstanding drama. Its second season, no sophomore slump, has been nominated for another 16 Emmys, including best drama and four out of five possible writing nominations. A more interesting measure of the show’s impact is the fact that its title has become a kind of shorthand: you can now talk about a Mad Men skirt or lampshade or pickup line where once you might have used “space age” or “Kennedy era” or “Neanderthal.” But while the show, like its subject, has many surface pleasures—period design, period bad behavior (if you like high modernism, narrow lapels, bullet bras, smoking, heavy drinking at lunch, good hotel sex, and bad office sex, this is the series for you)—at its core Mad Men is a moving and sometimes profound meditation on the deceptive allure of surface, and on the deeper mysteries of identity. The dialogue is almost invariably witty, but the silences, of which there are many, speak loudest: Mad Men is a series in which an episode’s most memorable scene can be a single shot of a woman at the end of her day, rubbing the sore shoulder where a bra strap has been digging in. There’s really nothing else like it on television.

The central character is Don Draper, the cool and commanding creative director of the fictional Sterling Cooper agency. He’s a man in flight from his own past, a Gatsby-esque figure without the romance of a Daisy; or rather, he seems to be looking for a Daisy everywhere but his home in the suburbs, where his beautiful, bored, emotionally stunted wife, Betty, is stranded in what feels at times like an improbably compelling adaptation of The Feminine Mystique. Played in an instantly iconic performance by Jon Hamm, Don is a man whose emotions are in lockdown—a man as sleek and handsome and seemingly invulnerable as a hood ornament. But in the show’s central irony he is able to plumb human needs and desires with an artist’s intuition: if Mad Men ever approaches shtick, it’s when Don gets a faraway look in his eyes and somehow pulls a psychologically barbed selling point out of his own inner ether (a trope wonderfully parodied on Saturday Night Live last fall, when Hamm was hosting). In short, Don Draper is an advertising Mozart, or at least he’s the best Sterling Cooper has to offer, for another of the show’s ironies is that Don and his colleagues are dinosaurs not just in terms of the impending social revolutions of the 1960s but also in terms of the creative revolution that would roil advertising that decade. As in Hitchcock, the characters are unaware of shocks that the audience knows all too well lie ahead, whether they be the Kennedy assassination and women’s lib or long sideburns and the lasting influence of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s witty, self-deprecating “Lemon” ad for Volkswagen, which Don dismisses with the words “I don’t know what I hate about it the most.”

[Click to continue reading Bruce Handy on Mad Men | vanityfair.com]

Of course, it helps that the actors playing the Dan and Betty Draper2 are so damn good looking.

This is another:

One thing [Matt Weiner] quite consciously set out to do with Mad Men was to reclaim the 1950s and early 1960s from the condescension of “baby-boomer propaganda,” as he put it, the easy ironies with which the era has been caricatured in popular culture. “You know,” he continued, rattling off some cultural clichés, “Fun with Dick and Jane, the dad with the pipe, Ozzie & Harriet“—goofy and square and uptight and supposedly innocent, no one having sex, or good sex anyway, except for maybe Frank Sinatra. “We think everybody was walking around in corsets, but people are people,” Weiner said, and cited a 1968 episode of Firing Line he once saw in which a drunken Jack Kerouac was interviewed by William F. Buckley Jr. on the subject of “the hippie movement” and said to the younger generation, in essence, “You think you invented fucking?” Don Draper and his colleagues at Sterling Cooper, the women as well as the men, would seem to be asserting the same point.

Footnotes:
  1. I had seen a few of early season’s shows on television, but it was much more satisfying to take them in as a whole entity, without having to skip commercials [↩]
  2. Jon Hamm and January Jones [↩]