|
| Wednesday, February 16, 2005 |
 |
Just call him Mister Blogger 
| | Jerry Brown, Mayor of Oakland, former Governor of California, and one of the most interesting pols in the history of 'tics, has a blog. |
Wanted: new wine in new bottles
| | Recognizing the waning clout of television's 30-second commercial spots, Initiative Worldwide, a major Madison Avenue ad-buying firm, has hired a former network marketing chief to pursue new venues for advertising. |
| | The money word is "venues." That says they're putting the same wine in new bottles. And sure enough, |
| | Cohen's mandate will be to develop effective ways to get Initiative clients' messages onto cellphone screens and the Internet and into video games and digital downloads of movies and TV programs. |
| | But what if Initiative's "messages" are sewage rather than wine? Hey, the MUTE and skip-forward buttons on remote controls testify to negative value for most advertising. There's a good reason why 30-second ads have waning clout: people don't want them, and make efforts to avoid them. |
| | On the other hand, there's encouraging stuff in the closing paragraphs: |
| | "Everyone is realizing that the business has changed," Cohen said. |
| | "There's a lot of experimenting going on," he added. "It's very fertile ground." |
| | Initiative's clients include Home Depot Inc., Coors Brewing Co., Bayer Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s America Online. Initiative is part of the global media giant Interpublic Group of Cos. |
| | Think of Home Depot, Coors, Bayer and AOL as participants in conversations about building, drinking and online community. Think of them as partners in relationships with customers. Not as hunters trying to capture or shoot eyeballs that wander from TV to other "venues." Think of the Net (and, for that matter, the real world) as a marketplace where people get together; not just to spend money, but to talk and relate — just as they do in real world markets. Think of business as culture. And think of culture as an economy in which everybody participates. Then think of an economy as a collection of participants that includes a much larger number of smart and influential people than you have in your own company, or your own agency. |
| | Then, with awe and humility about the enomous possibilities, make some good happen. |
Crossing Jordan, cont'd
| | I've stayed clear of the Eason Jordan mess, mostly because everybody else is doing such a fine job with it. But this item by James Robertson showed up in my aggregator this morning, and I like how it ends: |
| | Jordan didn't lose his job because of politics - he lost it because his statements embarrassed his employer, and they decided that they didn't want to take any more PR damage. Sure, the politics of the various people asking questions entered into it, but that's mostly irrelevant. When you have a bad PR problem, what you need is more transparency. In this case, Jordan and CNN opted for less, and they took damage as a result. What CNN needs to do is recognize this mess for what it is - atrociously bad PR. If they continue to view it as nothing but politics, then we'll see the same kind of thing happening there again in the not too distant future. |
Dis(re)membering the First Amendment
| | Caught a bit of Howard Stern in real time this morning. (Out on the West Coast it's delayed three hours — a kind of pass-along podcast for network affiliates out there. Except for Los Angeles, where KLSX airs it live from 3-6am, when the delayed broadcast starts.) The big subject was H.R. 310, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. The bill is on a railroad to passage. (It was fast-tracked by the Energy and Commerce Committee by a vote of 42-2.) One voting against it was Henry Waxman, who represents the heart of the entertainment industry. Jeff Jarvis: |
| | The chickens in Congress -- birds of both parties -- will pass it because they're afraid of voting for smut but not afraid of voting against the Constitution. The chickens in the broadcast industry have done nothing to fight this (if they had any guts, they'd go silent for some period of time in protest, as Howard Stern suggests); the unions are squacking at last. |
| | Meanwhile, the allegedly religious right is pushing for more: They want the Justice Department to go after cable. |
| | Since this bill is a re-launch of the one that got us talking almost a year ago, I'll repeat some of what I said then: |
| | To bring some sense to this whole thing, let's return to the late Communications Decency Act, by which Congress attempted to impose "decency" on the ungovernable chaos of the World Wild Web when it first appeared on the public radar in the mid 90s. The best thing ever written about that act came from the typewriter of Steve Russell, a retired Texas judge. |
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
