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Mis-spent teenage years or missed business opportunity?
0December 5, 2004 by Colin
I don’t know what I find more disturbing: that some teenage students at the IMG Academies in Bradenton, Florida enrol in an on-campus media training and communication program, or that I didn’t think of it first.
IMG Academies specializes in providing intensive sports training to students and young athletes. Nick Bollettieri teaches there. Naturally, moving a kid into this sort of environment prompts a grab-bag of societal issues to be discussed over frappucinos – or around the Saturday soccer pitch, during the exurban 2:15-3:15pm semi-professional under-14 league game.
The NYT magazine ran a story on the facility last week.
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Your mobile and you: PR and chatting outloud
0December 3, 2004 by Colin
You can pretty much identify a person’s PR specialty by their mobile phone habits:
Investor Relations: very short, abrupt conversations, finished off with “I’ll call you on a land line.”
Trade Communications: very long conversations about concrete plant specs and the next client meeting in Waukesha.
Marketing Communications: call starts with a discussion about a new boss (“she’s a witch!”), then moves into discussions about retail campaigns
Media Relations: “did you get my email? No, the other one. The one about the tree planting Sunday morning!”
Corporate Communications: “Hi. Mom? What’s for dinner?”
Publicist: “What time is it? Two? Why don’t you and Lindsay meet me at Megu at eleven.”But all PR folk know to limit their conversations at certain crucial moments. When? As the old saw goes: it’s all about location, location, location!
For instance, you probably shouldn’t spin your new business pitch while on a crowded train:
But last week the Paddington-to-Swansea … train gained notoriety as the blabbermouth express when staffers at one agency decided not only to discuss the pitch they were on their way to – but to prepare for it with a plethora of loud calls to the press, sounding out views on their potential client.
‘It was embarrassing – it was very Ab Fab,’ PRWeek’s spy on the train tells us.
The agency boss … defended her loudmouths … ‘It was nothing confidential, we would never discuss something confidential in public.’ It is not the first time pitches have been overheard on the Paddington train – PROs be warned. (PR Week UK – behind a sub wall)
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Playboy cross promotion?
1December 3, 2004 by Colin
The folks at Playboy are considering hi-tech consumer vehicles for cross-promoting their brand.
My question: What exactly would a Playboy ringtone sound like? This?
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CIBC, scrap metal and funny money
0December 2, 2004 by Colin
Well, it ought to be an interesting quarterly earnings call for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce next Thursday. First, a scrap dealer reveals that CIBC branches across Canada have been faxing reams of sensitive RSP and loan documents to his office in West Virginia, then this happens this past Monday:
A CIBC cash machine started dispensing Canadian Tire money at a mall outside of Moncton, N.B.
This latest slip-up comes as the CIBC reels from the repurcussions of the fax crisis: the bank appears to be assuming a defensive posture as lawsuits have been filed against the West Virginia scrap dealer for violating Canada’s privacy laws – a clear sign that the lawyers are in charge of the company’s strategy.
As I said, that quarterly call ought to be entertaining.
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CMOs and “surrogate metrics”
0December 1, 2004 by Colin
A joint study on the growing role of chief marketing officers, conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Association of National Advertisers, doesn’t exactly break new ground. It is, however, a good summary piece, and has a really catchy title:”Making the Perfect Marketer.”
I was intrigued by their use of the term “surrogate metrics” to examine how marketers (and by extension, communicators) try to wedge their (relatively) thin performance measurements onto shelves full of quant measurements produced by operational divisions.
“Although these forms of measurement may be valid to the tasks at hand, we surmise they have not been adequately explained and “sold in” to other senior executives, who typically come from backgrounds with different rigors. Among marketers themselves, there is a lingering, if fading, fear that too much “science” might dampen the “art” of marketing.
Some marketing chiefs value unbridled creativity and innovation over multivariate regression models that isolate the incremental consumption delivered by a new program or ad execution. Although this communication gap involving metrics is understandable, given the novelty of the CMO position relative to other officer positions, it appears to be contributing to the diminished status of CMOs in many companies.”
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Death of the slide projector
0December 1, 2004 by Colin
Apparently, Kodak has stopped making the Carousel slide projector. (WPost via Alyson Hurt)
Strangely enough, this now lends a certain social cachet to the formerly ostracized members of the high school Audio Visual Club: “Oh yeah, the Kodak Carousel 4200! You may not remember this, but that slide tray had to be positioned JUUUST right, or the whole geography class was screwed for the day!”
Of course, the pseuds have long jumped on your uncle’s old vacation slides as a cultural artifact and Saturday evening amuse-bouche:
“… the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design … presents another annual installment of its immensely popular Anonymous Photography exhibition. Begun in 1999 as a response to the growing interest of the public, art galleries and institutions in vernacular photographic images, the first show was practically an instant sellout, with buyers vying for a favorite snapshot or old news photograph.”
Vernacular photographic images? Sheesh!
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PsyOps, public affairs and war
0December 1, 2004 by Colin
Have you read the LA Times reporting on the coordination between psychological operations and public affairs on the ground in Iraq? You should. It dances around a very important question: at what point should a fighting force stop being transparent and attempt to deceive its enemy through obfuscation, implication or outright fabrication?
I’ll leave the moral handwringing and ethical debate to other fora. Maybe that freshfaced lieutenant shouldn’t have lied right to CNN. But if you remember your military history, armies from many nations and cultures have a long history of deception and disinformation. The difference? The window of gullibility used to be very wide – weeks or even months – before opposing forces, reporters and the public caught on.
Today, it’s minutes.
If you want a bit more information about the implications of information warfare, the CIA’s unclassified journal has a dry, but informative, article.
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Notes for protesters
0November 30, 2004 by Colin
Just had a front row seat for the anti-Bush protesters marching through Ottawa, and thought I’d pass along a few thoughts about the execution of the march:
- The aboriginal drums were a good idea. They really reverberate off the office blocks and draw the attention of the workers inside.
- When it comes to signs, stick to big letters, small words. “Buck Fush” comes across clearly, the longwinded diatribes were illegible.
- If you’re going to throw around totalitarian analogies, try to be original. A swastika over an American flag? Who would find that serious? And what was with the PRC flag?
- The coordinated anarchist cheerleaders were magic!
- If your anarcho-syndicalist group is going to carry a 10 foot by 20 foot anti-war flag at waist level, make sure to swing it in the air so we can actually read it.
- Where were the performance artists? The people on stilts?
- This sign, no matter your politics, was funny: A village in Texas has lost its idiot.
- A rented cube van is only as valuable as the sign it carries. One in the march looked like a lost moving van
You know what was missing? Vendors. Hawkers. How were bystanders supposed to voice their support? Where were the $1 buttons?
Here’s a handy guide on “How To Organize a Protest.” And here’s one from the Rainforest Action Network.
BTW- the Canadian Press headlined a story today “Bush in Canada for first stage of world charm offensive.”
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Declining newspaper readership
1November 30, 2004 by Colin
Old line media (I mean newspapers! Come on, people: stay with me) are facing a real problem: their circulation is declining. Younger readers just aren’t jumping at the chance to cough up $25 a month to have the paper delivered to their doorstep.
I suspect it has something to do with irrelevancy: this demographic doesn’t feel a pressing urge to spend time flipping through 35 pages of flyers, antiseptic comics, city editorials, birding columns or small-minded columnists to find the information they need.
As subscribers of the Sun Times, Newsday and others know, this decline has prompted some publishers to cook the books. Others have commissioned reader surveys to dig deeper into the psyche of the elusive Generations X and Y.
Their findings? As the OJR observed earlier this fall, young adults are picking and choosing their media: radio, alternative weeklies, RSS, Google News, and news service websites. Information doesn’t come a la carte anymore: it’s a multimedia all you can eat breakfast.
Last week, Wired reported on the results of focus groups commissioned by the Washington Post. Their stunning finding? A large number of young adults would not even accept a FREE subscription to the paper. Their principal objection? The clutter of old papers around the apartment.
The WPost ran an article about the circulation troubles today. You’ll have to look down, look wa-a-ay down to find mention of their own troubles.
At The Washington Post, for example, daily circulation has fallen from 779,898 to 717,696 over the past five years … The paper chalks up some of that drop to the increased popularity of its Washingtonpost.com Web site and Express, the free daily it launched in August 2003, which will soon print 175,000 copies each day.
It’s a comprehensive article, covering the fraud, deceit and promotional gimmicks attempted in the quest to grow paper sales.
And that’s the problem. You’re not in the paper business, folks! You’re in the news business! Step out of the 1970s and smell the LCD screen, people! Give me some freakin’ options to consume your news!
Can I pay $2 a month to get movie listings and restaurant reviews for my neighbourhood delivered to my phone? How about a custom search function, a la Google Alerts, that delivers news of interest to me, billed to my credit card?
And not at the ridiculous rates you charge now. $4.95 for an article? That’s a pricing structure left over from when corporate librarians were the only ones with access to Dialog, LexisNexis and Infomart. It doesn’t reflect your costs of production, or your costs to store the information.
Oh, I know what you’re going to say. People like the touch, the feel, the smell of fresh broadsheet in their hands. There’s an existential aspect to old-fashioned newspapering. Sure there is. That’s why I have a printer which, after rebate, cost me $30.
The paper business isn’t going to die quickly. The technology is going to evolve underneath them. For example, the NYT ran an article on podcasting. But why don’t they make their “audio slide shows” accessible in this new format? These are revenue streams they’re not even considering.
Many news organizations will adapt, and many small community papers will continue to thrive thanks to a loyal local base, but they should stop and take their heads out of their paper mill invoices. Their readers will thank them, and the beavers, deer and eagles of British Columbia, Ontario and Norway will thank them.
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Online monitoring of political demonstrations
0November 30, 2004 by Colin
It’s a nice crisp fall day in Ottawa, and President Bush has just landed on his first official visit to Canada’s capital. He’ll be making a brief visit to Parliament Hill, then will travel to view several culturally significant but interminably boring local sights.
Plenty of organizations across the country are exercising their democratic right to protest various issues of personal interest, and you can watch some of them congregate on the Parliament Hill Cam – which is supported by a department of the Government of Canada.
CBC News Online’s Paddy Moore is on the ground filing every few minutes. He reports that some of the protesters on the Hill are playing “Rebel, Rebel” from a loudspeaker.
A webcam and a minute-by-minute blog: shades of the new world of participatory and instantaneous reporting.
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Let’s hear it for the Guardian’s footie coverage
0November 26, 2004 by Colin
Here’s one of the ‘nets hidden treasures: football coverage in the Guardian. You may not follow the sport much, but if you’re a fan of wit, sarcasm and cross-cultural comparisons, it’s the read for you.
Today, the paper began their description of Wayne Rooney’s new house quite caustically:
The thing about being a professional footballer in England is this. Unless you’ve carpet-bombed half of Cheshire to make way for your mansion’s helipad and snooker complex, really, who the hell are you?
If your latest girl never emerges in metallic bikini bottoms from the 18th-century chapel you’ve converted into a state-of-the-art tanning salon … You don’t, after all, want to be a loser, one of those no-marks who doesn’t have a football boot-shaped swimming pool that can be seen from space.
Another drawing card? The work of Barry Glendenning, who provides minute-by-minute live coverage of significant internationals. An example? How about this exchange from Tuesday’s Manchester United/Lyon game:
43 mins: A corner for Manchester United, won by Ruud van Nistelrooy. Ronaldo plays it short to Gary Neville, who sends a low drive screaming across the box. Cris clears. In a perfect world, Cris would have crossed, facilitating no end of lame puns, but then nobody ever said life was fair.
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FAO Schwartz – Phoenix or Fireball?
0November 26, 2004 by Colin
Watching the pretaped Today Show “tour” of the new FAO Schwartz store on Fifth Avenue, I noticed that one segment featured an FAO executive and Katie zooming around on Segways.
FAO’s aiming for the high end of the market with $18,000 antique cast iron locomotives and a $50,000 kid-sized Ferrari. Sure, there are tchotchkes and more reasonably-priced toys – but the expensive toys are leading the media coverage.
The question is: will FAO win market share with their new strategy, or is this unfortunately a PR campaign that will burn bright then fade away, like the Segway?
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Now that’s an office perk!
2November 26, 2004 by Colin
Magma Communications, a successful Ottawa ISP for business and government customers, has provided a perk beyond foosball and cappucino bars for its HQ employees: an outdoor hockey rink, with boards and nighttime lighting.
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Designers: Aesthete or Agent of Neutrality?
0November 24, 2004 by Colin
The new edition of Eye magazine has a number of incisive pieces on branding, as Design Observer points out.
John Waters writes in his introductory editorial:
“Personally I hope never to use the ‘B’ word again. In the course of editing this issue, I have literally typed it out more times than I have had hot dinners – and that can’t be good. But if I have learned one thing from the gurus, it’s that when you write about ‘branding’ it is best to start off with a self-serving personal anecdote, followed swiftly by an dollop of uncritical brand worship – reproducing the logo as big as you can get away with. It’s madness. Brand madness. And that’s what we promise.”
Of particular interest are the two characterizations Nick Bell makes of designers in his piece “The steamroller of branding.”
As Michael Bierut notes, by describing these “agents of neutrality” and “aesthetes of style,” Bell has
“nailed the choice that many designers feel they face. They can choose to become the passive, “objective” voice of their clients, or they can be creative fountainheads, beholden to no one but their own imaginations.”
Some elements of truth in that argument for PR folk as well, eh?
(Eye only has an extract of Bell’s piece, but Bierut has won permission to post the two descriptions on Design Observer)
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All those empty hockey arenas
0November 23, 2004 by Colin
Is the office holiday committee looking for unusual event locations? How about some skating? There are 30 professional hockey rinks across Canada and the United States facing an interminable lockout. And the NHL players who aren’t playing in Europe are kind of at loose ends. The opportunity for PR and marketing folks? Events at marquee facilities with recognized stars.
With sizeable fixed costs, facility managers are looking to fill their arenas, even if they have NBA or AFL franchises to fall back on. I mean, when’s the last time an NHL arena hosted a PUBLIC SKATE in December?
On a local level, second and third line players may be available for regional, local or retail promotions. Or front-line players could headline charity events – like Jeremy Roenick’s “Wicked Weekend” golf and hockey do in Arizona in a few weeks.
Of course, the lockout is hitting luxury box owners hard as well. An Ottawa Hill & Knowlton VP was actually forced to take clients to a Beastie Boys concert last week.
On another note, Molson Canadian’s protesting the lockout with a fan ad spoofing Culture Club’s “Do you really want to hurt me?” Well worth watching.
Canuckflack
… Colin McKay has some thoughts about design, data, management, government and oddities … written in Canada!
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Blood Stains from the slaine Monks of Lindisfarne in the Viking attack of 793AD. Â Folios 191v and 192r of the Lindisfarne Gospels - written and illuminated by the Anglo-Saxon Bishop Eadfrith in 698AD.
Liber generationis Jesu Christi
“Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.â€
Alcuin, Letter to Ethelred, King of Northumbria
Images: British Library
I had a Brooks Brothers 15 1/2 - 35 shirt and we used its front pocket to determine when the Pilot design was “pocket sized” - Joel Jewitt, discussing the invention of the Palm Pilot
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130408043926-7298-early-employees-joel-jewitt-palm
Before I discovered the Internet
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