Tag: Advertising

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.
  • camping utensils.jpg
  • 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”
  • 344289163_971fdc78ed_o.jpg
  • 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 [↩]

Tappening Campaign of Wry Lies Against Bottled Water

Seth Anderson9 Comments

I’m amused by, and sympathetic to the Tappening campaign.

Fiji Over Lake Michigan

Can an ad campaign turn bottled water into the new tobacco?

To encourage the public to drink tap water rather than bottled, an environmental group’s ads feature implausible “facts.” The bottled water industry started it, the group says.
Taking a cue from antitobacco campaigns, Tappening, a group opposed to bottled water on environmental grounds, has introduced a campaign called “Lying in Advertising,” that positions bottled water companies as spreading corporate untruths.

One poster claims “Bottled Water Causes Blindness in Puppies,” while another reads “Bottled Water: 98% Melted Ice Caps. 2% Polar Bear Tears.”

“If bottled water companies can lie, we can too,” the posters read.

The “lies” in question here are about the source of bottled water. Eric Yaverbaum, a co-founder of Tappening, charged that some beverage companies did not list the source of their water — and were using only municipal water.

[Click to continue reading Advertising – Tappening Starts a Campaign of Wry Lies Against Bottled Water – NYTimes.com]

Bottled water is multi-billion dollar business, but then so is tobacco. We would all benefit if bottled water became less of a staple of consumer culture: less environmental devastation, less plastic waste, yadda yadda.

I am So Clean

In this campaign, Tappening plans to spend $535,000 on outdoor posters in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago and Miami, along with an online component. The ads suggest viewers go to Tappening.com to find out “the truth” about bottled water, or to StartALie.com to spread an untruth.

Is Customer Service a Media Channel? Ask Zappos

Seth Anderson0 comment

Amazon has said it is purchasing Zappos for over $800,000,000. Why so high?

Bob's Repair Shine

Pete Blackshaw of AdAge speculates:

Zappos is a game changer, and it found value — and ferocious word-of-mouth and brand advocacy — in a place most of us leave for dead and certainly don’t consider even close to being a media channel: customer service. They took this “cost center” input and turned it into an unassailable asset, fortified by the founder-CEO’s sometimes “cult-like” (arguably irrational, by the typical marketing book) obsession with serving the consumer at all costs. It wasn’t flaky. He approached this with focus, discipline, real incentives and an obsession over a “different” set of numbers.

Zappos did this at a critical juncture for all of us. We know word-of-mouth matters. We suspect “advocacy” might be the metric that truly moves the needle. Even separate from the Amazon deal, Zappos probably did more to shape our collective mind-set around the importance of “paid” vs. “earned” media, and it titled us much toward the later.

[Click to continue reading Is Customer Service a Media Channel? Ask Zappos – Advertising Age – CMO Strategy]

At least for now, Zappos will still be an autonomous subsidiary, remain headquartered in Las Vegas, and maintain its same executive leadership.

I’ve been a long-time customer of both corporations for a long time, and if any of Zappos culture rubs off on Amazon, Amazon will be well served. Amazon is a fine company, but they are a faceless corporate behemoth, a Wal-Mart of the internet, selling a little bit of everything. Zappos on the other hand still feels like it is run by somebody who personally cares for its customers, a sort of mom-and-pop corner store that knows everybody on a first name basis. The kind of place that gives little Johnny candy when he goes by. Poor metaphor, bottom line, Zappos customer service is just spectacularly friendly in all interactions we have had with them.

Amazon, on the other hand, occasionally is bit Orwellian. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who upon hearing the news of the acquisition immediately twittered:so will Amazon steal into my house at night and reclaim shoes I’ve bought from Zappos.

I do hope Zappos maintains what it is that makes it Zappos.

A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web

Seth Anderson0 comment

Will be curious as to how this shakes out.

Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.

[Click to continue reading A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web – NYTimes.com]

Alternative Google

Websites like Google are going to be in for a bit of a dustup

Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use. Executives at some news organizations have said they are reluctant to test the Internet boundaries of fair use, for fear that the courts would rule against them.

…

News organizations already have the ability to prevent their work from turning up in search engines — but doing so would shrink their Web audience, and with it, their advertising revenues. What The A.P. seeks is not that articles should appear less often in search results, but that such use would become a new source of revenue.

Right, there is a simple addition that webmasters can add to their site that tells Google’s automated indexing software to “go away”:

The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard is unrelated to, but can be used in conjunction with, sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

[Click to continue reading Robots exclusion standard – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Not a Good Sign

If A.P. did that, they would lose search engine generated traffic, but that isn’t really what A.P. wants. A.P. wants traffic, and to be paid for the traffic. I doubt it will happen as seamlessly they want, but we’ll soon see. Newspaper executives also don’t like blogs much:

Executives at newspapers and other traditional news organizations have long complained about how some sites make money from their work, putting ads on pages with excerpts from articles and links to the sources of the articles.

but I don’t know if that particular genie could ever be crammed back into its bottle; the bottom of the bottle is missing, and digital content flows wherever it can, instantly.

and this is puzzling:

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

If someone cuts and pastes an A.P. article from some other site, how is this magic technological bullet going to still be attached? Either there is more to the process than the A.P. admits, or else they are really deluded1.2

Footnotes:
  1. not that it matters, but John Gruber, always an astute observer of these sorts of matters, agrees with me [↩]
  2. corrected the URL, oopsie [↩]

Reading Around on July 7th through July 8th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 7th through July 8th:

  • Fox report suggests Pentagon policy nixing religious flyover is a sign Obama is anti-Christian | Crooks and Liars – The military was regularly providing flyovers at countless evangelical Christian events all over the country, not only violating the regulations prohibiting military participation in religious events, but spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the process.

    MRFF began exposing these events, which included flyovers on the five holidays when flyovers at civilian events are permitted, and even a few at National Day of Prayer events, and began to see some decline in their frequency, but we weren’t sure if the number of flyovers at these events was really decreasing, or if the military and organizers of these events were just being more careful not to make the nature of the events so obvious.

    Well, needless to say, the following letter denying, for the first time in 42 years, the request for a flyover at one Christian rally…was the best 4th of July present MRFF could have asked for.

  • Branding blunder gives Russia-Nigeria energy linkup a bad name – Russia’s attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time ‑ after the new company was named Nigaz.

    …the name has “rather different connotations” for English-speakers.

    It recalled other international branding mishaps including the Ford Pinto ‑ which in Brazil means small penis ‑ and the Pepsi slogan “come alive with the Pepsi generation”. In Taiwan this rousing motto translated as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”.

  • Living the “art” Life – … there is more, so much more to art…

Reading Around on July 6th through July 7th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 6th through July 7th:

  • Sarah Palin Speaks to ABC News – ABC News – Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the “department of law” would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

    “I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said.

    There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.

  • Where in the World Are the Federal Trade Commissioners? | Mother Jones – Since President George W. Bush appointed Kovacic to a Republican slot in 2006, he has averaged nearly 100 days of foreign travel a year. So far in 2009, he has been abroad for more than 60 days. (He spent the end of June in Taiwan, Rome, and London, and celebrated July 4th in China at a conference on competition law.)

    All this jetting about appears somewhat out of sync with the commission’s largely domestic role. The FTC’s wide-ranging mandate includes everything from enforcing used car sales regulations to ensuring that clothing manufacturers properly instruct consumers whether or not to put their shirts in the dryer. It runs the “do not call” registry to keep telemarketers at bay and cracks down on bogus weight loss cures. The agency also shares responsibility with the Justice Department for overseeing mergers and acquisitions of big companies and enforcing antitrust laws.

  • Retro Comedy: The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time – “What do murder, pedophilia, suicide and a baby tiger have in common? They have all been used to sell stuff in these amazingly disturbing vintage ads!

    These are real, untouched advertisements from the good old days. It doesn’t matter if it’s lovely ladies or adorable clowns, somehow these old-time ad wizards found ways to traumatize us while pedaling everyday products.”

    Some of these I’ve seen before, but some were new-to-me

Is Free the Future?

Seth Anderson5 Comments

The New York Times allowing one of its staff to advocate stealing images from Flickr is one thing, but Chris Anderson wants to expand upon that equation.


“Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Chris Anderson)

Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker reviews Chris Anderson’s new tome to the mantra, information is going to be free, bitches, so relax and enjoy it.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”

Had James Moroney read Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99), Amazon’s offer might not have seemed quite so surprising. Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts, and he goes on:

There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.

[Click to continue reading Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker]

After the Revolution is Over
[After the Revolution is Over]

So is it true? Are paid content creators going to be the 21st century version of hansom cab drivers? I’m still not convinced. If I have the choice, I’d rather pay The New Yorker for a subscription to their magazine1 so they can pay writers like Malcolm Gladwell instead of paying nothing and reading hacks like the writers of B12 Partners Solipsism on my kindle-like device. I would not assert there are zero non-hack writers who write for free, but if one made a list of all the blog writers who do their own original reporting without relying on the resources of paid journalists and journalistic institutions, the list would be surprisingly short. Especially since billmon retired.

Ballad of the West Loop - Kodachrome version
[Ballad of the West Loop – Kodachrome version]

Malcolm Gladwell is skeptical as well:

Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Keep reading

Footnotes:
  1. as I have done for nearly 2 decades [↩]

Reading Around on June 10th through June 13th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected June 10th through June 13th:

  • ESPN – OTL: Phil At Work – Jackson is not thinking about 10 rings. – He puts the players on alert with it. Trap now. Watch the double. Jump out on that screen-roll. See what the opponent is doing — read the floor. Its meaning shifts. It’s a text to be read, interpreted and acted upon.…His brother taught him the whistle when they were kids. Jackson used it to call his dog …when they were walking through the streets of his hometown of Williston, N.D. When he got to the NBA, and shouting stripped his voice, he turned to the whistle.”Now it’s the source of his power, in a way,” assistant coach Brian Shaw says. “If it were words he was shouting, you could hear them or not hear them, but with the whistle, he’s asking you to think, he’s putting it on you.”

    It’s equal parts advance and retreat, right? He commands attention, then backs off, maybe leans back in his courtside chair, even puts his hands in his lap. The whistle says he’s here and he has expectations, and at the same time it says he trusts you, believes you can do what needs doing.

  • Valassis Uses News America’s Own Clients Against in Trial; Feel the Wrath of Sara Lee! | BNET Advertising Blog | BNET – “Account reps for News America Marketing could face some uncomfortable meetings and phone calls with their clients over the next few weeks, because dozens of their clients’ names have been dragged into the ongoing Michigan state court trial in which the agency is accused of forcing its customers to take anti-competitive bundled deals on in-store promos and newspaper coupons.The News America clients named on just the first day of the trial were:

    Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Dial, S.C. Johnson, Georgia-Pacific, Campbells, Sara Lee, Pepsi, Church & Dwight, Johnson Family Co., Kraft, Coca-Cola, Conagra, Cadbury, Ocean Spray, Clorox, Novartis, Pfizer, Tropicana and Reckitt-Benckiser.”

  • Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk – Number 7 sounds like Apple’s iPhone 3GS and 3G pricing model:
    “A more expensive product makes the old version look like a value buy. An example here is a Williams-Sonoma bread maker. After an introduction of a newer, better, and pricier version, the sales of the old unit actually increased, as couples viewed the new item as “top of the line”, but old product was all of a sudden reasonably-priced, even though a bunch of features were missing”

Belching Out the Devil

Seth Anderson1 Comment


Belching Out the Devil

New exposé of Coca-Cola that you probably won’t hear much about. Coca-Cola spent approximately $450,708,000 on advertising in the U.S. last year, that buys a lot of silence in the struggling corporate media

The company, Thomas contends, looked the other way as some bottlers in Colombia and elsewhere intimidated and attacked union organizers, who “walk with a gravestone” on their backs. Pressured to audit Colombian plants in 2005, Coke helpfully noted a substandard number of fire extinguishers at one, but didn’t address the charges.

Coke often doesn’t make its own Coke. It relies on a vast web of subcontractors, bottlers and distributors. Most have loose or no ties to the company, and are in countries where workplace laws are underdeveloped at best.

In India, Coke drained water from local villages but gave them fertilizer in return—which contained lead and toxins, according to a BBC investigation. A leading British poisons expert warned of “devastating consequences” for the local population, but Coke called the fertilizer “absolutely safe.”

The concentrate for 70 percent of Coca-Cola’s 1.5 billion drinks served each day originates in the tax haven of Ireland, where enough concentrate for 50,000 Cokes costs $2.60—including labor. The concentrate’s main ingredient? Caramel.

[From We Read It: Mark Thomas’s ‘Belching Out the Devil’ | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com]

Coke Truck

The Amazon review:

Coca-Cola and its logo are everywhere. In our homes, our workplaces, and even our schools. It is a company that sponsors the Olympics, backs US presidents and even re-brands Santa Claus. A truly universal product, it has even been served in space. From Istanbul to Mexico City, Mark travels the globe investigating the stories and people Coca-Cola’s iconic advertising campaigns don’t mention such as: child labourers in the sugar cane fields of El Salvador; Indian workers exposed to toxic chemicals; Colombian union leaders falsely accused of terrorism and jailed alongside the paramilitaries who want to kill them; and, many more. Provocative, funny and stirring, “Belching Out the Devil” investigates the truth behind one of the planet’s biggest brand

I haven’t had a coke in many, many years: no need to consumer high-fructose corn syrup unless absolutely necessary.