Consumer Group Can’t Be This Naive

It’s kind of cute. Apparently, the consumer group Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood really thought the people who make Dove soap came up with their much-praised “Campaign for Real Beauty” for some reason other than to sell bars of soap. But the scales have dropped from their eyes all right! According to the LA Times:

A consumer group accused Unilever of hypocrisy Tuesday for running conflicting advertising campaigns — one for Dove that praises women and their natural beauty and one for Axe that the group said “blatantly objectifies and degrades” them.

The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood launched a letter-writing effort on its website and demanded the company pull ads for the Axe line of grooming products for men, which one online pitch says makes “nice girls turn naughty.”

Unilever shouldn’t be commended for Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” while promoting products with a starkly different message, said Susan Linn, the consumer group’s director and an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

“The campaign says they’re going to help girls to resist a toxic marketing environment but they’re creating that environment as well,” Linn said.

Both campaigns are clever attempts to push the right buttons to stimulate their respective target audiences. In this case, there is probably zero overlap between the horny teenage boys who are supposed to buy Axe and the skin-texture-obsessed women who buy Dove beauty soap.

The consumer groups surely understand this. They’ve just found a good PR angle to draw attention to themselves, albeit by insulting the intelligence of the rabble they seek to rouse.

Nevertheless, a flack tries to keep Santa alive for another season:

The Pride of Torrance

Who says the South Bay isn’t a leader in defense technology any more?  What about this?

It looks like a big flashlight — but it’s really a nonlethal weapon designed to make you sick.Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., of Torrance, Calif., has been granted a contract by the Department of Homeland Security to develop what it calls the “LED Incapacitator,” according to a DHS online newsletter.

The handheld device using light-emitting diodes to emit super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths, causing disorientation, nausea and even vomiting in whomever it’s pointed at.

“There’s one wavelength that gets everybody,” says IOS President Bob Lieberman. “Vlad [IOS top scientist Vladimir Rubtsov] calls it ‘the evil color.’”

(h/t Opinion Journal)

“If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

No, that quote isn’t from President Bush’s press statement today.  And it’s certainly not from Harry Reid.

It’s Digg.com’s founder Kevin Rose, forecasting possible doom for his high-profile Web 2.0 site over its decision to rescind an earlier decision to pull all posts that featured an HD-DVD hack:

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The “bigger company” to which he refers is a video licensing authority that enforces copyrights on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs — the Advanced Access Content System consortium, which was working with the Motion Picture Association of America.  They sent cease and desist notes to other websites where the code was posted, including Google.  For a time yesterday, some of the sites complied.

Imagine a flood.  Imagine you want to stop the flood.  Imagine throwing seven pebbles into the flood and waiting for it to stop.

This from TG Daily:

Copies of the cease and desist letters started appearing on the web yesterday and as we’ve seen in so many previous cases it was “Game On!” for the hackers.  The processing key in its full hexadecimal glory  sprouted like a weed all over the Internet.  Users of popular websites like Digg and Slashdot thumbed their virtual noses at the MPAA by posting the key into the comments sections, often using decimal, binary and other permutations.  Some users have also been creative enough to make up a shopping list using the numbers, 9 oranges, 9 fruits, etc.

The leaking of the HD DVD processing key isn’t a complete doomsday for the high-definition movie industry because the key only affects some players and presumably the movie companies could push updates that would prevent copied movies from playing.

This might sound very familiar.  Some years back, when I was in PR, MPAA was a client, and our assignment was to support its litigation to stop spread of a DVD copy-protection code hack — the famous DeCSS.  Only a three or four sites existed then that would post the hack, but I was told there were kids walking around New York City with the hack code printed on their t-shirts.  Now…fuhgeddaboutit.

Imagine if you really wanted to stop this flood.  What would you use?  That’s what should  really worry us.  What kind of bill are the copyright owners’ lobbyists writing now to reflect this new world?

Old Media Gets the Vapors (CORRECTED)*

(via howardowens.com)

In addition to the LA Observed suite, another great Web 2.0-from-the-ground-up site is Pegasus News, which delivers content mostly of interest to Dallas-Ft. Worth area users. On Monday, Pegasus’ Mike Owens Orren posted a story on his ill-fated partnership with the local Fox 4 News outlet — a relationship that started very promisingly, but was killed by someone he doesn’t name in Fox’s corporate headquarters for what can only be described as whimsical reasons.  

At first, Owens Orren writes, it seemed like a great match:

They had the reach; we had the depth. We had the search engine rankings; they had video people wanted to find. We had the indie cred; they had the network cred. They could promote us to a million people at a pop; we could promote them a million times a month in little increments.

The downfall began when Pegasus got Fox to agree the partnership was newsworthy and should be announced in a press release.   At first, an enthusiastic “yes.” But then, “no,” with a request for what seemed to be a slight change in the copy that would introduce the Fox 4 content. (The copy was boilerplate stuff; Fox’s requested edit was the kind of thing only PR people would notice.)  

Pegasus’ web developers needed a few days to make the change (not an unusual frustration in this world), which Owens Orren hadn’t understood to be an urgent matter anyway. However, two days after the request, in a scene that reads like a bad break-up:

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney (from Fox 4) on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn’t be working together on hyperlocal news.

The best that could be offered was “maybe give it a time interval and try again.” How long? “I have no idea … a long time.”

Given the amount of precious time Pegasus invested in the tech side of this marriage, Owens Orren is understandably a little bitter.  His meta-conclusion rings true, however:

You can wait for corporate media to “get it.” You can think they have. But, in the end, corporations aren’t inherently smart, even if people inside of them are. And corporations aren’t inherently honorable, even if people inside them are. And those who can’t see past their nose and who don’t have regard for their partners will pull stunts like we just saw from Fox.

(snip)

This Little Company is at its best when it is flying the jolly roger. We work and play well with others, but apparently mainly those others that, like us, are on the outside. This episode thoroughly re-taught me that lesson, one that I won’t soon forget. That’s not to say that we can’t work with big corporations — we just can’t until we look the people who pull the pursestrings in the eye and they tell us that they, too, believe. And probably even then, we wouldn’t be safe unless they had a financial stake in our success.

One other thing is clear to me: We will, sooner rather than later, eat these larger media corporations for lunch, unless they learn how to behave in a world of distributed media. Granted, that’s the larger “we.” I can’t guarantee that Pegasus News will be The One, or one of the ones to pull it off. We’ve grown more quickly than you could have ever imagined with fewer resources than you waste in an afternoon. The “people formerly known as the audience” are mobile and transient and will abandon their old media habits without prejudice — perhaps worse, without even realizing they have done so. Blogs, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, RSS, Flickr: how many had you heard of a few years ago? These and others have disrupted the hell out of media in general, but have had less of an impact on local media. That’s changing, and fast.

The unnamed Fox executive who got the vapors about protecting the corporate image, brand, name or whatever from contamination by upstarts will probably have some explaining to do down the road.   

*(Note: In an earlier version of this post, I misidentified Mike Orren as Mike Owens, leaving the impression that I was quoting Howard Owens.  My apologies to both Owens and Orren)

The LA Times Goes Tut-Tut-Tut*

Oh, give me a break, Christopher Hawthorne!

What would a wireless Los Angeles look like?

In the sunniest scenario, the one sketched out rather persuasively by the mayor and his speechwriters, the plan would not only help make online access more affordable and available but expand the public sphere, turning every corner park and sidewalk bench into a possible home for the kind of coffeehouse culture that has always been a defining feature of urban life. It would send a message that the digital realm is a kind of public utility, as accessible as water and electricity.

A more likely effect, frankly, is a noticeable increase in the odd sort of public, shared alienation already on display in cafes everywhere, with people packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens. And given the sort of Angelenos who are most obsessed with being always connected, wireless access might fall far short of creating a new kind of social interaction or a revamped notion of communal space in the city. Ultimately, it might do little more than let a thousand PowerPoint presentations bloom in the open air.

The only thing worse than a religious scold is a secular one.

I happen to be writing this in a coffee shop right now, a Starbucks in Rolling Hills Estates.  I’ve visited every Starbucks in the South Bay and San Pedro, and quite a few in LA, including one in Little Tokyo where I waited for the jury, but this one is the most convenient, the biggest and equipped with the most electrical outlets.   Lately I’ve been working at home more, but this environment is almost as cozy.  I talk to people all the time  — brief conversations to be sure, but occasionally more.  I also run into people here, including friends and relatives of my wife and son.  I’ve arranged to meet people — “I’ll be working, you’ll see me, come whenever” — including my mother.

At any given point in the day, I might be the only wi-fi guy, or one of a dozen.  When I used to park here for entire days, I’d note cycles of activity:  Young Moms with their pramfuls of baby in the mornings, ladies taking a break from shopping at mid-day, realtors searching the listings, salespeople doing deals, day-traders, high school kids after 2 (they seem to prefer the noisy frozen blended drinks — so no phone calls then) madly flirting and flopping their skinny bodies on the cushiony seats six to a chair, and the friendly baristas taking their cigarette breaks at the outdoor tables.  I’ve overheard conversations in Spanish, Mandarin, various Arabic dialects, Japanese, Farsi and our native tongue down here, surfer-ese, which of late has taken on some hip-hop overtones. 

I love the idea that I could go almost anywhere in LA, open my laptop and rejoin the blogosphere, and/or do my work.  It completely opens up the day.  How many social and cultural engagements do we avoid because we think we’ll be on the road for too much of the day, out of touch from work?  In wi-fi LA, your life becomes more flexible.  If you know you could, say go to LACMA for an hour at lunch, then stop off somewhere nearby to see if you’ve missed any e-mails from your clients rather than waiting an additional hour to get through the traffic, you’re more likely to go to LACMA, no?  So what if we are “packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens….”  At least we’re out and about. The possibility of connection is immeasurably increased.

I don’t get what Mr. Hawthorne thinks we did before wi-fi.  Certainly, the length of the average stay at wi-fi enabled cafes was a lot shorter; and we probably did a lot more drive-through.  Very few of us have the social skills required to have a personal adventure in a coffee shop every day, or the time, unless we have another reason for being there — our work.   You will see much more use of public spaces — isn’t that a good thing? 

No, nothing’s good enough for the reflexive “if they’re enjoying it, there must be something wrong with it” mindset.  To ensure we all feel good and chastened, Hawthorne throws Mayor Villaraigosa’s ”digital divide” rhetoric in his face.

But free wireless service doesn’t mean a whole lot if you can’t afford a laptop. And the structure of the plans that have been taking shape in other cities suggests that ours may not match the populism of the press-conference talking points. The service in Houston may cost as much as $21.95 per month (with possible discounts for low-income residents). San Francisco may offer parallel services, a subscription plan from EarthLink and a slower, free alternative from Google loaded with targeted advertising.

That sounds quite a bit like the digital equivalent of a highway system split between private toll roads and sluggish public freeways. And it raises the question of how precisely to measure civic progress as nearly every corner of city life undergoes commercialization. If you put a drinking fountain on every corner but allow a private company to charge for each sip, even if it’s only a few pennies, can you really make a case that you’re improving access to clean water?

Actually, I think you can easily make that case.

In that sense, what rings most hollow is the claim from the mayor and his allies that universal wireless is designed primarily to help the city’s electronic have-nots. If that’s the goal, why not take full advantage of the fact that L.A. owns its utility poles, turn this into a wholly public project and make access universal and free? The answer, of course, is that cities feel they can’t manage even a moderately ambitious initiative these days without the capital and marketing muscle the private sector can provide.

Strike the words “these days” from his last sentence, and take away the negative connotation from what is, in fact, a rational awareness of government’s limits.  Even the most liberal mayors and governors realized about 20 years ago that the public sector is unable to compete with the private sector, especially when the private market for a good or service is already well-established.  Where does Hawthorne think the cliche “reinventing the wheel” came from? If the point of Villaraigosa’s wi-fi plan is to deliver wi-fi to as many people as inexpensively as possible, of course the city should tap the wi-fi industry!  It shows great common sense! Does that mean the contractor gets to make some money?  Yes!  Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

What moral nannies like Hawthorne should focus on is the city’s procurement process. Who is going to get these contracts and by what process?  How can we avoid the “two shades of blue lights on the Vincent Thomas Bridge” effect?  (The result of a lobbyist-brokered compromise to allow two firms to get the lighting business, resulting in the lights on the span being a slightly different shade of blue than the lights on the towers.)  Granted, Hawthorne might not have the opportunity to opine on the Decline of the West, but it’s the details of this project – the marriage of the public and private sector — where you need to be focused.  

*Edited slightly, 3/12/07

Suicide Virus Attacks Music Industry!

Again.

Why oh why, music plutocrats from Pluto, does it make sense to choke off a source that lets your consumers find out about new music? 

The practical result of this ruling…

In a decision that could drive the nail in the coffin to Internet radio providers, the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has endorsed a proposal by SoundExchange to enact royalty rates for webcasts and streaming music sites that will stay in effect from 2006 until 2010.

SoundExchange, the royalty collecting division of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), will seek to retroactively charge webcasters for streaming content delivered throughout 2006 to users, a decision that could send the sites packing for good.

The new rates will require webcasters to pay for each song streamed to each user, and will increase yearly…

will be to transform Internet streaming radio sites into one of two things:  A former Internet streaming radio site; or a site that plays sure-fire hits with a predetermined, guaranteed audience.  Kind of like the crappy radio music you can dial into today.

Does the music industry have the slightest clue about how listeners use their product?  Have they ever surveyed listeners who bought a CD or a download from a new performer, or from a non-mainstream genre, to find out how the listener became aware of the existence of this music they’ve now added to their life?   It’s not radio, because radio pretty much plays the music people already know.  And, sorry all you marketing geniuses, but it isn’t the advertising, the PR, the promotions, the commercial tie-ins. Or at least not those things alone; and they don’t apply to the fringe styles of music that many Internet streaming sites specialize in.

Mike at Techdirt channels how the recording industry thinks:

They still view the world (especially the internet) as a broadcast medium. Therefore, they want at small number of “professional” content producers who create the content for everyone else. Then they can just sign a few ridiculously large licenses with those large players, and “the people” get to consume it. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet as a communications medium — a medium where people express themselves back and forth to each other, rather than a place we go sit back and “consume.”  

Bad for the culture, bad business choice by the music industry.

(via LA Observed and Instapundit.)

Spontaneous Admission

Just noticed this embarassing blurt in a NY Times story this week about the reissue of a 10-year-old Anna Nicole Smith biography, “Great Big Beautiful Doll.”   You think maybe the publisher feels a little bit guilty making money off a corpse? 

The book, which is priced at $16.95, was originally published in hardcover in 1996, but Barricade, almost eerily prescient, had completed an updated version weeks ago that was scheduled to be issued in trade paperback this spring.

Last fall, Carole Stuart, the publisher of Barricade Books, had observed Ms. Smith’s recent troubles, notably, the death of her 20-year-old son and the paternity dispute over her newborn daughter. (Ms. Stuart’s late husband, the publisher Lyle Stuart, was famous for courting controversy with books like “The Anarchist Cookbook,” “The Turner Diaries” and the literary hoax “Naked Came the Stranger.”)

“I just thought, so much has happened in the 10 years since the first book came out that it would make a good trade paperback,” Ms. Stuart said. “Then of course last week she dies. And so we suddenly got really, really attractive to the distributors and to the book buyers.”

She added hastily: “We didn’t kill her or anything.”

But she admitted that Barricade Books is relishing its apparent monopoly on books about Ms. Smith.

Yeah, I’ll bet.  The detectives on Law and Order might even call that a motive.

Sweet DRMs, Baby

It sure looks as if digital-rights management (DRM) coding will die without a friend in the music business.   First Steve Jobs blames the music industry for the restrictions iTunes places on purchased music, and calls for a DRM-free marketplace.  Now this: 

Almost two-thirds of music industry executives think removing digital locks from downloadable music would make more people buy the tracks, finds a survey.

The Jupiter Research study looked at attitudes to Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems in Europe music firms.

Many of those responding said current DRM systems were “not fit for purpose” and got in the way of what consumers wanted to do.

And yet, the article goes on to say:  

Despite this few respondents said DRM would disappear in the near future.

What are they saying? Is DRM a kind of vampire?   The biggest retailer doesn’t want it.  The producers don’t want it.  Obviously the consumers don’t want it.  So let’s round up the villagers and storm the castle.  

Among all those questioned, 70% believed that the future of downloadable music lay in making tracks play on as many different players as possible. But 40% believed it would take concerted government or consumer action to bring this about.

Despite these feelings, said (report co-author Mark) Mulligan, record labels are committed to using DRM because their digital music strategies revolve around these technologies.

“Despite everything that has been happening the record labels are not about to drop DRM,” said Mr Mulligan. “Even though all they are doing is making themselves look even less compelling by using it.”

“Concerted government or consumer action,” eh?   Well consumer action is already happening in the form of music piracy, which is still going strong among younger music fans.  What more do you want them to do?  As for government action, which government? Music is borderless.  These music execs have far more power to enforce some kind of anti-DRM, interoperability mandate than a national government.  They just need to get their act together.

Irony, Defined: PepsiCo in India

Indra Nooyi is an inspirational figure in India, having risen to the position of PepsiCo CEO, and becoming (according to Fortune) the most powerful woman CEO in the world. She is a fascinating person in her own right, and a great symbol of globalism.  

So you would think a visit to Dehli for Nooyi would be a tour of triumph.  Not according to the International Herald Tribune:

Unfortunately, the timing of her return could not have been worse. She walked straight into a dispute about the evils of junk food, arriving just as India’s health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, announced that he planned to ban colas and greasy snacks in schools because they were ruining the health of the nation’s children.

In a powerful speech days before Nooyi’s arrival, Ramadoss warned that the wealthy middle classes were facing a “galloping” rise in obesity, heart disease and diabetes. He promised to introduce compulsory yoga in schools along with classes on healthy eating.

Moving beyond the allegations of insecticide contamination, which have shaken sales of both Coke and Pepsi in India for the past five months, he added firmly that “with or without pesticides” colas were “harmful for health and should not be consumed.”

It was a rude welcome for the visiting celebrity. Nooyi fought back bravely, stressing that PepsiCo wanted to work with the Indian government to combat “the prevailing sedentary lifestyle,” which she identified as the root cause of obesity-related illnesses. She announced that her company’s “Fun for You” products (colas and snacks) would be balanced by its “Good for You” line (waters and energy drinks). But the expected exuberance of this trip was dampened by the controversy.

The deeper and more tragic irony is that just as India faces an obesity crisis, it continues to struggle to feed its children. According to Ramadoss, 50-60 percent of Indian children are malnourished. 

Certainly, the American stereotype of India has shifted quickly from that of desperate poverty to one of outsourced efficiency and business success.  But with success comes the cycle of workaholism, two-income families, the increased reliance on food you can grab off a convenience store shelf or get through a drive-thru window, and all the health problems that come with living that way.  

Ramadoss made it clear that his strategy for tackling India’s new weight problem would be to target precisely the products Nooyi was in Delhi to sell. He conceded that there might be “legal hindrances” with introducing a blanket ban on colas and chips in schools, and he proposed introducing a system of fines and penalties instead.

Health experts welcomed Ramadoss’s decision to highlight the growing problem of obesity in India.

Ambrish Mithal, senior doctor at an obesity center run by Apollo, a private hospital in Delhi, said that by conservative estimates at least 30 percent of women and 20 percent of men in urban areas were already clinically obese, although some experts put the real figure at closer to two-thirds of women.

“Malnutrition continues to be the bane of India, but the people who matter in this country are affected by the opposite problem,” he said. “The worst sufferers are the people working in the multinationals in urban India; they make up the new work force driving the nation’s economy, working to put India on the world map. A vital component of our manpower will become sick if steps are not taken to address this.”

A world of meaning in the doctor’s use of the phrase “the people who matter in this country.”  Certainly, Nooyi’s company has picked up his not-subtle message about whose problems count the most.  PepsiCo will be investing $500 million in India over the next five years, “part of which will go to building a new research center outside Delhi, where scientists will work on concocting low- calorie and low-caffeine drinks,” according to the IHT.

“Supreme Adequacy”

“BE ADEQUATE,” all in capital letters, were the words with which Lindsay Lohan ended her meandering tribute to director Robert Altman after his recent death. 

The e-mail, and indeed Ms. Lohan’s entire existence, gets attention because she is part of a celebrity cohort that would make a nun pine for the comforting rectitude of the Rat Pack — booze, broads, battered paparazzi and all. But I always feel a little sad for Lohan. Unlike Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Nicole Richie and their interchangeable sleazy parasite boyfriends, she had talent.  Because I was raising children during the 90s, I saw Lohan’s version of “The Parent Trap” a time or two.  She was 11 when she made it and did a fine job.  But nowadays, when Lindsay Lohan contemplates adequacy, she is looking up at an ideal that is fading away.

Jon Weisman found an interesting way to talk about “adequacy” the other day, in this post on his great blog, Dodger Thoughts.  About the Dodgers signing Luis Gonzalez to play left field next season, Jon said he is “not excited.” Gonzalez was once an excellent player, but his skills are in decline.  But then Jon added:

At the same time, I am very open to the idea that with superstar talent at a clear premium, there may be something to the idea of trying to dominate with depth, with supreme adequacy.

I like that idea.  Sometimes, “supreme adequacy” is a high enough goal for an organization — a baseball team, or anything else.   Things like genius or ”superstar talent” can’t be planned for; they are four-leaf clovers.  Truly great ideas — they’re rare. But you can assemble a team where everyone is adequate.  Not mediocre: Adequate.  Everyone knows their roles and performs their roles.  The roles are clearly delineated.  To be adequate is not easy, but it’s achievable. It’s not a mystery. 

Greatness is a mystery. There is nothing more awesome to me than observing a person who is extraordinary at … really just about anything.  But sometimes, people who think they’re special, aren’t.  And their striving to be seen as great becomes an obnoxious drama of self-delusion. 

Even the great have to master “supreme adequacy” first.  I think people used to know that, before celebrity became a goal in itself.  Maybe Altman’s death disclosed this truth to the befogged Ms. Lohan, and her subconscious is trying to point her back in the right direction. 

Have you heard the call to be supremely adequate?

Let Me Tell You a Story About A Little Town Called Los Angeles…*

Harold Meyerson’s Los Angeles magazine column is not on its website yet, so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s pathetic.   Called “Topsy Turvy,” it is the kickoff to a series of features under the umbrella “The Power Issue.”  I’d call Meyerson’s piece propaganda — and Meyerson more pamphleteer than journalist — except I think he believes every word of it himself.  

In the spirit of Christmas I suppose, the story Meyerson wants to tell is like the Gospel verses that purport to show the birth of Christ and his divinity were foreshadowed by the Old Testament prophets.  In Meyerson’s cathechism, the whole history of Los Angeles has been leading up to this magical moment — the ascension of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor.  The story’s John the Baptist is the late Miguel Contreras, the man who had the vision of a “labor-Latino-liberal alliance,” and then brought it into the world — dressed I suppose in swaddling clothes.

Do I dispute the fact that Latinos, labor and liberals today dominate City Hall?  Of course not.  But how new is it?  Not very.  The trend lines bringing each of these factions into power weren’t the vision of anyone in particular, and they were clearly visible long before Contreras became head of the LA County Labor Federation in 1996.  And for all the benefits empowerment accrues to these groups, it has not shown itself to be a coalition that’s strong enough to overcome Los Angeles’ profound problems.

Meyerson has to tweak history to make it fit his mythology.  His tale includes, but minimizes and misinterprets the 20-year mayoralty of Tom Bradley, attributing his rise solely to a coalition of Jews, African-Americans and liberals.  As I understand the history, those factions got Bradley into a runoff in 1969, where he was defeated by a racist reactionary assault by incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty.  It took additional help from labor and some of the business community to get Bradley elected in 1973. 

Labor played an enormous role throughout Bradley’s reign — as strong or stronger than it does today.  Bradley’s mightiest achievement, the rebuilding of downtown, came about because of labor leaders like Bill Robertson and Jim Wood, who saw the potential for thousands of good jobs in the construction of office towers and, later, the Metro Rail.

In comparison with Los Angeles’ reputation before World War II as an anti-labor city, Meyerson makes it seem like a phenomenon of the Villaraigosa era that unions play a dominant role in choosing who sits on “more than half the seats” on the City Council.  In fact, that level of influence took hold in the 1970s.  Bill Robertson was about as big a power broker as this city has seen in the past 50 years.  The carpenters, machinists, transportation workers and several others were serious power players that at least half the council and all other elected officials had to take seriously.  The players today are different and the agendas are different, but the labor movement’s decisive strength goes back decades.

It goes almost without saying that liberals have dominated Los Angeles politics at least since Bradley’s emergence in the late 60s — back when liberals didn’t hide their philosophy behind anodyne words like “progressive,” back when liberals were much more left-wing than today’s breed.  Three of the four mayors who have served since 1973 were liberal Democrats, and the fourth, Republican Richard Riordan, was only electable in 1993 because Los Angeles was in both a deep recession and a social malaise in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. 

Riordan, however, was the embodiment of the RINO, the Republican In Name Only — a liberal in GOP drag, who only adopts a handful of conservative ideas to maintain his party identity.  A former Bradley appointee himself, Riordan’s staff was populated by Democrats. In fact Riordan and Villaraigosa had the same chief of staff.  Riordan posed no threat to the liberal achievements of Bradley’s era.  His conservatism on law enforcement and the economy mirrored the shift in many liberals’ thinking on those subjects at the time of his election.

True, Riordan took on the unions sometimes — but so did Bradley, and so has Villaraigosa.  If you want to see a mayor who was truly obedient to labor, the only example in my lifetime was Villaraigosa’s predecessor, Jim Hahn, whose defeat was celebrated by Meyerson.

Latinos are also not new to political power in Los Angeles.  Meyerson neglects a significant success of the Latino-labor coalition:  The uphill fight to elect Edward Roybal to the City Council in 1949, a seat he held until 1962.  True, after Roybal left City Hall, Latinos couldn’t win another seat on the council until Richard Alatorre in 1985, but that was more due to the devious political genius of a Spanish-speaking Irishman, Art Snyder, whose pork-barrel politics kept him popular in East LA for two decades.  But Latinos were a part of Bradley’s grand coalition. Throughout his tenure, Bradley never had more than two deputy mayors at a time.  One of the two was always a Latino.  

What really boosted Latino political fortunes in LA was the U.S. Justice Department. In the early 90s, the department sued to force the city to redraw its council district boundaries to maximize the potential for Latinos to win two more seats, for a total of three.  There are still three Latino council members today.  There probably should be four, but for the consensus desire to avoid conflict between the fast-growing Latino population and the shrinking black population.  The 2010 census will likely cost one African-American seat, and perhaps bring about two more Latino seats.  But this is demographic destiny combined with federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — not anyone’s grand strategy. 

In Meyerson’s mythology, Los Angeles was dominated by business leaders for most of its history until very recently.  In fact, at least since I was old enough to vote, business has had to form or join coalitions in order to have much political influence at all.   Even developers have to adopt the protective coloration of others’ agendas to win votes for their projects.  During Bradley’s era, business joined with labor and with the African-American and Latino communities on pro-growth policies that eventually led to a backlash among affluent suburbanites pining for preservation of Brady Bunch-style neighborhoods.  The homeowner groups — who Meyerson pretty much ignores in his fable — continue to exert strong influence on councilmembers representing parts of the San Fernando Valley and the Westside.

Meyerson is correct in observing that, beginning in the 1980s, “slowly but inexorably, all of the city’s signature big businesses–its banks, oil companies, aerospace conglomerates and department stores…were sold to or enveloped by new owners who moved their headquarters out of town.”  But why did things move in that direction — out of town?  Why weren’t LA-based corporations strong enough to be the nucleus of many corporate mergers?  

That saga is where the real story is, but it’s not one Meyerson wants to tell.  The fact is, Los Angeles has an extremely hostile business climate.  It’s heavily regulated, it’s expensive, and its public services are in tatters.  The young, eager and talented coming out of the nation’s colleges don’t think of LA as a cool place to start their careers.  Married employees with kids don’t want to deal with the bad schools, the traffic or the smog. Los Angeles is also afflicted with California’s poor business climate — a double whammy. 

I was just talking to someone in Phoenix today — the growth there is phenomenal.  Las Vegas, Reno, Portland, and other cities from Boise to Dallas are growing at LA’s expense, because they offer business lower costs, lower taxes, better services and a better lifestyle for the workforce.  Businesses want to ship their good through LAX and the Ports of LA and Long Beach.  They want to sell to the region’s huge population.  But they don’t want to have their headquarters here, and they want as little of their operations here as they can get away with. It’s just too costly and too much of a hassle.

Much of the blame for LA’s anti-business image, and California’s, falls at the feet of the portion of organized labor representing public employees.  To whatever extent labor’s political clout grew in the 90s and 00s, it was due to public sector workers taking over the labor movement.  The labor leaders in Bradley’s time, like Bill Robertson, were pro-business, because business meant jobs.  The labor leaders of the Contreras era are pro-high taxes, because high taxes pay for public sector jobs and perks.

Far from being the fulfillment of an historic evolution, the current political dynamic is in fact quite volatile and unsustainable.  Eventually, high taxes depress business activity so much that raising them brings in little additional funds.  Public services suffer as more and more of the public revenues go toward salaries and extremely generous pensions — and eventually, even the most liberal voters who give government the most benefit of the doubt will notice that despite massive resources going into the government, services aren’t improving.  Those who can afford to leave, leave.  Those who can’t leave are also those who don’t have much to give the taxman — or who can hire accountants to keep the taxman at bay. 

If there is any manifest destiny in Villaraigosa’s emergence, I think it comes from qualities unique to the man himself — his energy and enthusiasm, his charisma.  He obviously makes some people feel hopeful about Los Angeles.  He also has a great network; and better relationships with the state government, the governor and the legislature, than Bradley, Riordan or Hahn had.  That helps.

But the diminishing presence of business in Los Angeles is not a good sign, and it is not good news for liberals, labor leaders or Latinos.  In the first half of the 20th century, as Meyerson points out, business had too much power, and they abused that power to suppress organized labor and minorities.  After Bradley was elected, there was a balancing of influence between business and labor, leading to a period of growth from which all communities and factions saw benefit through working together.  The equilibrium was lost in the early 1990s, and since then, Los Angeles has been in decline.  Meyerson’s pseudo-socialist ideology blinds him to the fact that his beloved labor-liberal-Latino coalition is primarily in charge of handing out ever-smaller pieces of a shrinking pie.  It’s not clear if they know how to grow it. It’s not clear whether anyone does.

*Edited 12/2/06

On Fox, O.J. Simpson, and Mike Piazza

I gather that if you spend enough time in the highly rarified strata where the biggest media executives dwell, you just lose all your wits. 

It’s a voluntary form of sensory deprivation; to have enough money and enough people demanding your time that you decide you must completely detach yourself from ordinary people.  A form of character mutation must take place, per the theories of Charles Darwin. Certain powers of intuition grow weaker, starved for energy by the parts of your brain that must expand to encompass the business dealings of a global media empire entrusted with billions of investor dollars. 

To be an “A-list” publisher, editor, literary agent or broadcasting executive today bears no resemblance to how such people lived their lives in the past; when they drove their own cars, took taxis, rode subways, frequented local pubs and sat with everybody else at pro football games.  The income and experience gap between the executive and the audience was much narrower decades ago than it is now.  

All of this must explain the O.J. Simpson debacle.  Judith Regan and Rupert Murdoch, and the anonymous but nearly as powerful suits who directly report to them, must just be unable to look normal people in the eye and understand what they are seeing there.  I can’t think of anyone I know who wouldn’t have immediately recognized the stupidity of giving Simpson a massive public platform, and paying him a fortune to spin gruesome fantasies, masked confessions and bullshit rationalizations about the crimed he committed but absurdly denies:  Decapitating his ex-wife and an acquaintance.  How could they not have expected the victims’ survivors to object publically?  How could they have convinced themselves that this mercenary exercise would provide the victims with “closure?”

In this morning’s New York Times coverage of Murdoch’s decision to drop the show and the book, a familiar name popped up, one I hadn’t heard in awhile:  Peter A. Chernin, president and COO of the Fox Entertainment Group, which was responsible for the now-scuttled TV broadcast. 

Los Angeles Dodger fans recall Chernin all too well — for an almost equally clueless move.  From the archives of DodgerBlues:

May 15, 1998… a day that will live in infamy. After rejecting the Dodgers’ $84 million contract offer, (Mike) Piazza was traded to the Marlins along with Todd Zeile for Gary Sheffield, Charles Johnson, Bobby Bonilla, and Tourettes-inflicted Jim Eisenreich. While Sheffield has certainly paid dividends for the Dodgers, putting up solid numbers for three straight years, the Piazza trade marked the beginning of the end of Dodger tradition. It was Fox’s first major move, and it showed how much they knew about baseball: nothing. The move was engineered by two TV guys, Peter Chernin and Chase Carey. Fred Claire, as lousy as he was, would never have made such a move–trading a certain Hall of Famer in his prime, the cornerstone of the organization, a guy loved by fans. It still makes us sick to think about it.

Well, I guess Chernin’s not that great of a “TV guy,” either.

By the way, in case you were wondering what happens when a big TV spectacular is cancelled, and a mega-big book is withdrawn, here’s a primer from the same NY Times’ article:

In an interview last week, Judith Regan, the publisher, said ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, had signed a contract with “a manager who represents a third party” who owned the rights to Mr. Simpson’s account.

Because the News Corporation and ReganBooks decided on their own to cancel the book and the television special, that money is likely to still have to be paid.

A spokesman said Ms. Regan declined to comment yesterday on the book’s withdrawal.

Erin Crum, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said some books had already been shipped to stores. Those books will be recalled and destroyed, Ms. Crum said.

Last Friday, Borders announced that it would donate the net proceeds from sales of Mr. Simpson’s book to a nonprofit organization for victims of domestic violence.

Ann Binkley, a spokeswoman for Borders, said she received a call from HarperCollins yesterday afternoon notifying her that the book would be recalled. No explanation was offered for the decision.

“I think everybody knows why,” Ms. Binkley said.

The rights to the book could still be sold to another publisher, said the News Corporation executive involved in the negotiations.

There is precedent for a recalled book to be sold to another publisher and then to the public. In 1990, Vintage Books, a division of Random House, bought the rights to “American Psycho,” a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after the original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew from publishing it because of the novel’s graphically violent content.

As for the television interview, it could also be offered to other outlets, although at least two other networks, ABC and NBC, have reported that they turned it down before it was accepted by Fox. Ms. Regan, who conducted the on-camera interview with Mr. Simpson and is presumed to own the rights to it, could still seek a sale to either a cable channel or even a pay-per-view company.

The fact that the interview already exists on tape, executives at Fox and News Corporation said, means it is likely to turn up somewhere, perhaps on the Internet.

See, nobody ever pays for blunders like this.  By the time you’ve reached the level where you have the power to f— up to this degree, it’s too late — you can’t go back to where the normal people live.   You’d die, and your colleagues know it.  In the real world, the Piazza error would have cost Chernin his job.   But at his level, you’re kept around — and history can repeat. 

If you’re looking for a Christmas present for anyone at Fox involved with this fiasco, well, I don’t think they could ever have enough of these:

Punching Picasso

Robin Williams once said that cocaine was God’s way of saying you were making too much money. That was during the 80s. Now, 20 years later, God is finding more dramatic ways of making this point:

A US casino mogul has pulled out of a deal to sell his Picasso painting for a record $139m (£74m) after accidentally elbowing a hole in the middle.

Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn was showing Le Reve (The Dream) to guests at his office in Las Vegas last month.

Mr Wynn, who has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease affecting peripheral vision, tore a coin-sized hole.

He will now keep the painting, which he bought in 1997 for $48.4m, and repair it, his spokeswoman said.

Mr Wynn had finalised the sale of the 1932 painting to art collector Steven Cohen.

The $139m price tag would have been $4m higher than the previous private-sale record – for Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, in July this year.

Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe, which fetched $104.1m in 2004, holds the record for art sold at auction.

Mr Wynn, known for gesturing with hands while speaking, was showing the painting at his office at Wynn Las Vegas when he struck it with his right elbow, spokeswoman Denise Randazzo said.

Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron was at the incident and wrote about it on a blog site.

She said Mr Wynn raised his hand then “at that moment, his elbow crashed backward right through the canvas. There was a terrible noise”.

“Smack in the middle… was a black hole the size of a silver dollar. ‘Look what I’ve done’ he said. ‘Thank goodness it was me.’”

Mr Wynn, a high-profile art collector, developed The Mirage and Bellagio resorts in Las Vegas in the 1990s.

My Last Yellow Bag

“We had better sales before we were going out of business,” says a soon-to-be-unemployed Tower Records clerk about the big Going Out of Business sale the terminally liquidated music and video chain launched on Saturday. (Link from the Velvet Rope via LA Observed.)

It’s no wonder. The chain is knocking a measly 10 percent off its overpriced stock. You can do better at Best Buy, and they aren’t going anywhere. I went inside the Torrance store anyway and picked up a few classical disks (Beethoven’s triple concerto featuring David Oistrakh, Debussy’s most famous orchestral works, a two-disk Leonard Bernstein survey) that looked like good deals, plus a live Irene Kral — that jazzy lady is almost forgotten and her recordings hard to find. I didn’t want to wait until all their best inventory was gone and the racks half-empty; that would be too depressing.

I asked the sweet Goth girl behind the counter how long this sale would go on. “About a week,” she said. I told her I thought at this rate it would be more like a month. But now, thinking about it, maybe not. These items were not priced to move. At best, they were trying to get rid of the most recent stuff that the store overstocked. Could be, in a week they will close the doors and ship the remaining inventory to an online reseller. Maybe it will all be sucked into the maw of Amazon, or Ebay.

This story, by longtime music industry journalist Chris Morris, suggests the liquidation will unsettle a number of businesses:

The sell-off of Tower’s inventory, valuations of which run as high as $200 million, could have a wide-ranging impact on the music business at large. The company’s West Sacramento, Calif., warehouse is filled with product from the vendors of its independent distribution company, Bayside Distribution, and its accessories suppliers. Companies with a high degree of exposure could be dealt a serious blow when their product is returned for full wholesale cost.

According to Morris, Tower’s demise leaves Virgin Megastores as the largest remaining terrestrial “deep catalogue” music seller. The firm’s founder took note of the occasion.

The family of Russ Solomon, who founded Tower in 1960 as a music department in his father’s Sacramento pharmacy, remained a 15% shareholder. Solomon did not enter a bid for the company.

In an e-mail circulated Friday to Tower’s staff, Solomon said, “The fat lady has sung … she was way off key. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.”

Update on Swag Bags and the IRS

Randi Schmelzer’s piece in PR Week (link for subscribers) on the IRS’ position that “swag bags” are taxable straightens out some of my own confusion in the previous post on this topic. The IRS has determined that the swag baskets are not gifts, and that is why they will be taxed from now on. From Schmelzer’s story:

If any organization is truly benefiting from this news, however, it’s the IRS. Focusing on both recipient reporting and the filing of Form 1099 by merchandise providers, the IRS’ outreach program includes letters to entertainment industry groups and tax professionals, an online FAQ, and plenty of media relations, according to Nancy Mathis, a DC-based public affairs specialist at the IRS.

“Any individual’s requirement is to pay tax on income,” she said. “You are not required to pay taxes on gifts, [but] our position is that these… are items given with the expectation of something in return, that use by a celebrity will enhance sales, and the products themselves serve as compensation.”

Okay, I’m a celebrity, and I get a gift basket that has some items in it I wouldn’t be caught dead using. Can I return them so I won’t have to pay taxes on them? And, if am given an item I don’t want, can I avoid taxes by declaring that I un-endorse it? “Hi, I’m a celebrity, and for the record, I never wear Axe body spray. The gallon of Axe body spray I was given in a swag bag went straight down the kitchen sink.”

Schmelzer’s piece includes quotes from PR firms whose business is focused heavily on filling these bags with swag:

Everyone is talking about it,” said Kari Feinstein, whose eponymous PR firm organizes brand, charity, and Young Hollywood-melding “style lounges.” “Even the guy at the car wash asked me about it.”

General consensus among celebrity gift-oriented firms is that while there is reason to proceed with caution, the demise of swag may be greatly exaggerated.

Feinstein said brands want to be in touch with stars, and vice versa. “That [won't] stop,” she added. “It’s too beneficial.”

“The whole intersection between Hollywood Boulevard and Madison Avenue isn’t going away,” added Lash Fary, founder of LA-based entertainment marketing firm Distinctive Assets. “It’s too important to the brands I work with.”

It might be important to the brands, but the key question is: Is it important enough to the celebrities to go through the hassle and expense of taking these products home? Celebrities are smart enough to understand that they help sell the products, but if you make it hard for them, why would they bother?

The art of real-life product placement is that you slip these products into celebrity hands stealthily, and then make sure someone else sees it, hears about it and photographs it. The celeb is working for you, and it’s only costing you the wholesale price of the item you gave them. If it’s costing the celebrity? Seems like that changes the dynamic, and puts us back in the world of paid endorsement contracts. But maybe the PR pros who specialize in this business are more creative than me.

Tower Falls

How should I, a lifelong music fan and major customer of Tower Records over most of the past 35 years, feel about the company filing for bankruptcy?

Nostalgic? Definitely. I’ll never forget the sweet redhead clerk at the Berkeley store who leaped over the counter to kiss me when she saw from my ID that I was buying myself an album on my 18th birthday.

A visit to Tower Records on the way home from work was a sure-fire way to beat the blues–especially if I walked out with a trademark yellow plastic bag with a new platter inside. The classical Tower that used to be a stand-alone on Sunset Strip expanded my musical horizons. (Yes, you read that right. Just down the road from the Whiskey A Go Go and Gazzari’s was a store devoted to classical music.)

Guilty? Probably. Like most of their former customers, I buy most of my CDs from Amazon nowadays; and increasingly listen to music I’ve downloaded from Rhapsody via my subscription.

I’ve never bought a CD at Wal-Mart, the rival cited in most stories, but to me a Wal-Mart would never be competition for Tower, because Tower’s music offerings were vastly deeper than Wal-Mart (or Target or K-Mart). I have only been to Wal-Mart twice, and my purchases were mostly T-shirts (although I did get an external hard drive for $14!).

I still like to stop and browse the Torrance Tower sometimes, however. And I visit their Santa Monica Promenade location every time I go there.

Will I patronize “the brand” after it is taken by its new owners into cyberspace only? Who knows, but it doesn’t sound promising. Virtual shopping I already know how to do. It was the browsing through Tower’s aisles, flipping through the stacks and finding things I didn’t know existed that made Tower special. And it’s probably not a good business model to keep all that inventory around in the world of 2006:

“The brick-and-mortar specialty music retail industry has suffered substantial deterioration recently,” Tower said in court papers.

So that’s what Tower’s bankruptcy and imminent disappearance from the brick-and-mortar world makes me feel:

Substantially deteriorated.

Old.

Pinkberry vs. the Parking Trolls

Two Los Angeles obsessions — dieting and parking — have collided with the fury of rutting mule deer in West Hollywood, according to Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times.

Netburn’s story describes what happens when Hyekyung Hwang, a USC business school grad, bought a little storefront on Huntley Drive. She wanted it to be an English tea room with outdoor seating, and ran up against the local property owners’ group. Of course, under the City of West Hollywood’s rules (which are typical for Southern California cities), the neighbors had the right to tell her she couldn’t offer outdoor seating. Then she thought, what about serving something elegant like sherry? Using the liquor license laws, again the neighbors slapped her down.

This was, by the way, a store that previously had been a tattoo parlor and then a medical marijuana outlet. So it’s worth pondering what these homeowners thought would be so destructive of neighborhood values if instead of pot Hwang sold sherry. What’s probably the case is that the medical marijuana dealership and tattoo parlor operated under the regulatory radar, but Hwang needed a permit. In local politics, the need for a permit brings out the trolls under the bridge who demand payment to let you cross.

So what other kind of business could an entreprenuer slide into this slot without incurring the trolls’ wrath? Hwang settled on selling frozen yogurt made with her own recipe. Low-fat, but without artificial flavorings, served with fresh fruit on top. She called it Pinkberry.

By February 2005, one month after it opened, Pinkberry was already turning a profit. The lines started that summer. By that August, it was discovered by Daily Candy. By spring, Los Angeles had fallen hopelessly in love. The little store on Huntley where the tattoo parlor used to be now serves about 1,300 to 1,600 customers a day.

This, of course, was not exactly what the neighbors thought would happen. Hwang said when she first opened the store the neighbors were friendly and welcoming. “They were like, ‘Good luck, Asian lady’ and buy a yogurt,” she said. Now they are plagued with increasing traffic on their once sleepy street of million-dollar bungalows and people double parking “just for a minute” to run in for a quick Pinkberry (though with the long lines, there is no such thing as a quick Pinkberry any more).

For neighbors, there is Pinkberry trash on their lawns, and sometimes Pinkberry customers too. The angriest of the neighbors stand outside at night to remind yogurt lovers that the street is all permit parking, and they will be ticketed if they park illegally. But even that doesn’t always work.

“The bottom line is the customers that go to Pinkberry don’t mind paying $68 for a tub of yogurt,” said Huntley Avenue resident Oliver Wilson, handily adding the price of a parking ticket to the $7.45 cost of a large yogurt. “It’s all Escalades and Mercedes and BMWs. You tell them, ‘Don’t park here,’ and they do. They can afford it.”

I love it!

“Permit parking.” If you’re not a well-off homeowner in certain parts of Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Santa Monica and other desireable locales near attractive commercial neighborhoods, this concept might be alien to you. Beginning about 20 years ago, such homeowners decided it wasn’t enough that they had a house with a driveway and a garage, and they could walk to stores, parks, pubs and other urban play areas. They wanted to own their street, or at least all its parking spaces. However, they didn’t want to have to pay for this additional valuable property. So someone came up with the brilliant idea of getting the city to give it to them, like a present.

So, if you own a house on Huntley Drive, or on one of the hundreds of streets like it, you get to park in front of your house, but no one else can, even though we’re all taxpayers, and we all paid for the street, the curb, the park strip and so on.

Huntley Drive runs right into busy Santa Monica Boulevard, which was a commercial street long ago. The little bit of Huntley that abuts the boulevard was also zoned for commercial. The homeowners weren’t blindfolded when they purchased their homes. In fact, proximity to Santa Monica Boulevard is, for some, an added attraction. Nonetheless, they feel they are entitled — entitled! — to enjoy the amenities of a suburban neighborhood ambience in which outsiders are unwelcome.

I worked in LA City Hall when the permit parking trend first took hold. I couldn’t believe such a thing was legal. I found it even harder to believe that a city political culture supposedly dedicated to equality thought the better-off residents who could afford to buy homes in pricey neighborhoods were deserving of a gift of public property that all taxpayers had paid to build and continue to pay to maintain.

But these homeowner groups were unbelievable. They depicted daily life in their cozy little neighborhoods as if everyone who parked there threw a week’s worth of garbage on their front lawn and then urinated on it. Every time a new permit parking zone was approved, the debate would be the same. The local councilmember would agree with these organized homeowners that it was a “crisis,” an “emergency,” from which only permit parking would save them.

I figured, if these people want to buy the parking rights in front of their home, fine. The city could use the revenue. Charge them market rates — in fact, have an auction, with the proceeds to fund additional police, more teachers, health clinics, the kinds of things government is supposed to do. But — it wasn’t my department. And I’m sure if I’d pushed this idea in City Hall, I would have been instructed, not so patiently, on who really runs the city. The 10-20 percent of those who vote in municipal elections are disproportionately property owners. So you do what they want, or you find yourself unelected.

All bad policies have a way of blowing up in someone’s face eventually. Well, the brilliant Hyekyung Hwang and her “frozen heroin juice” (as one fan calls it) did the deed. She created a yummy, low-fat product that wealthy people from another part of the Los Angeles area were willing to pay the price of a parking ticket to buy. Why can they afford to pay $68 for a yogurt, night after night? Oh, lots of reasons I suppose, but one of them must be that their homes have also risen in value and low-interest home equity loans can help pay their bills–including their parking tickets. Their homes probably are really nice, lots of amenities, big shady trees — and permit parking to keep the riff-raff away.

Meanwhile, Ms. Hwang, on behalf of the South Bay, I want to welcome you here with open arms whenever you’re ready to franchise your concoction. Permit parking is relatively rare, and there are lots of storefronts on PCH with ample parking out front. And we are just as obsessed about our waistlines down here as anyone in West LA.

Saul Levine and the Long Tail

If you haven’t lived in LA for decades, the name Saul Levine might not mean anything to you, but if someone was going to compile a list of “100 People Who Make LA Great,” Saul Levine would be near the top.

For years, anyone who has owned a “stick” (e.g. a license to operate a radio station) in a major market like Southern California sold it to the highest bidder, who would program it for the biggest audience, to reap the most profits. That’s why Los Angeles radio is so alienating; why most of the AM dial is dominated by redundant right-wing talk, goofy sports or Spanish-speaking programming, and why most of the FM dial plays hip-hop, classic rock or Spanish-speaking programming. Even public radio has succumbed to compulsion to maximize dollar value per program. It’s why KPCC’s once-great music programming was replaced by way too many NPR chat shows, and why KUSC’s daytime classical programming has become so dumbed-down, playing only the movements of symphonies and concertos that are easy to work, eat or drive by.

Except Saul Levine, owner of K-Mozart, a commercial FM classical station, and KKGO-AM, which plays pop standards. According to a lovely profile in today’s LA Times Business section, Levine could sell the FM station alone to a conglomerate for $100 million, which is about $99,999,975 more than he paid for it. He’s grandfathered into having an 18,000-watt signal, when the current FCC standard is just 680 watts. But Levine just won’t sell. He wants to keep his stations independent — and playing the music he wants to play.

Brahms symphonies…Nat King Cole singing “Sweet Lorraine”…that’s what Levine provides Southern Californians, really, out of his pocket. He undoubtedly makes money doing it, but nowhere near as much as he could serving a bigger audience. Levine is a throwback to a time when people chose a vocation out of love, not necessarily to maximize profit. But he also might be a man ahead of his time:

(He) does not want his children, both of whom are involved in the operation of the family company, Mt. Wilson Broadcasting Inc., to sell when he is gone and live off the proceeds.

“You are supposed to work,” Levine said. “I would not want them to sit around on an island in the Mediterranean.”

Levine’s son, who is KMZT’s marketing director, declined to comment on the station’s future.

“He is still the owner,” Michael Levine said quietly.

In the meantime, Saul Levine forges ahead. He loves to talk about podcasting — the station offers listeners downloadable interviews and lectures about music on its website.

“Otherwise, you are in the horse-and-buggy era,” Levine said.

Now, I haven’t yet read The Long Tail, but I wonder if Saul Levine has. Chris Anderson’s book, which evolved from this 2004 article in Wired (which he edits) believes that the “hit” mentality that has driven the media for a century is giving way to those media providers who will cater to non-mainstream tastes — a process enabled by the zillion-channel universe of the Internet. From the Wired piece:

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody’s monthly statistics and you get a “power law” demand curve that looks much like any record store’s, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero – either they don’t carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There’s the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to ’80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don’t have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

(skip)

What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail“). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity.

Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.”

Radio is a classic “scarcity” medium of the 20th century. Only so much spectrum in any given geographic area. Except now, the spectrum isn’t as much of a limiting factor. Each satellite radio service offers more than 100 channels. Internet audio, including podcasts, grabs more and more ears. And services like Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music allow you to program your own audio streams, either on your computer or in your mp3 device, without having to buy the tracks (unlike the somewhat overpraised iTunes, which demands that you buy a track before you can listen to it.)

Now, Saul Levine is a radio programmer from the get-go. His first act after hoisting his antenna atop a flagpole in 1958 was to spin Franz Lehar’s operetta “The Land of Smiles.” And this is what he and his staff still do. They decide what plays, and you can listen. The element of choice that Rhapsody or Amazon give us, Levine’s stations don’t give you — although his interest in creating podcasts is a big clue that he gets it, that choice is the future.

I guess what you could say about Levine and the Long Tail is that he kept the flames burning until the media could catch up with his craving to serve minority tastes. The kinds of music he programs have been in danger of disappearing from the culture, but in LA, classical music rides one of the region’s strongest signals. Some kid might stumble on K-Mozart tonight and hear Beethoven for the first time. And tomorrow morning, try to find more Beethoven in his computer.

AOL’s “Customer Service John” Only Following Orders

The Consumerist was sent anonymously a copy of the AOL Member Connection Retention Manual, which proves that the annoying “Customer Service John” at AOL — who is “no longer works at AOL” according to PR Week — was treating “Vinny” precisely the way he was trained to do. His only mistake was flashing anger when Vinny wouldn’t let him follow the AOL script — a script designed to frustrate callers who want to cancel.

But “Customer Service John’s” anger is not what makes the recording of his call from Vinny so compelling. It’s the oddly disconnected way the rep tried to turn everything Vinny said back onto itself as a sales hook. The manual is evidence that this is what Vinny would have run into no matter who answered the phone at AOL. It was “Customer Service John’s” unlucky day.

Remember, AOL’s VP of corporate communications Nicholas Graham told PR Week that a company study showed one out of two people who called to cancel an account “ended up staying with the service (because they only needed troubleshooting help.)” That’s a dubious assertion if I ever heard one. But what Consumerist describes is worse than I imagined. Consumerist calls it “creepy,” and that’s hard to argue with.

The manual says:

If you stop and think about it, every Member that calls in to cancel their account is a hot lead. Most other sales jobs require you to create your own leads, but in the Retention Queue the leads come to you! Be eager to take more calls, get more leads and close more sales. More leads means more selling opportunities for you and cost savings for AOL.

This thinking is so bizarre: It takes work to even find the number you’re supposed to call if you want to drop your AOL service. My experience included a lot of trial and error clicking to find the right jargon that equated to “cancel my account.” So, already the caller has walked across a bed of coals to get someone on the phone who can remove this useless monthly charge from their credit card bill. This is a “hot lead?”

Read the whole thing. Thanks to New York University PR Forum for pointing to it. In their item, they ask readers to “predict what AOL will say next.” Not good.

Mice on a Plane

On a day in late April, an American Airlines jet flew from JFK to LAX — infested with mice, according to an investigative report on KSDK St. Louis, which featured footage from a whistleblower’s hidden camera. The airline personnel at JFK knew about the mice, but let the jet fly — not just that day, but for weeks thereafter.  (Click here to watch the report, click here to read the station website’s text version.)

From the station’s website:

The video was shot by a long-time employee at the overhaul base at Kansas City International Airport. The whistleblower did not want to be identified but did want to expose a hidden secret onboard a Boeing 767 passenger plane.

The whistle blower said, “We had to take the chairs off and that’s when everybody saw mice running around on the floor and one ran down one of the mechanic’s arm.”

The plane arrived in Missouri April 30.

The whistleblower explained, “There’s feces all along this edge right here. It’s throughout the whole aircraft.”

The whistle blower said workers found nests in air vents and dead mice in emergency oxygen masks. When mice would get hungry, they ate insulation and chewed through wires.

“If they shorted themselves and caused a fire, it would go through that cabin so fast, we could have lost some lives,” said the whistleblower.

By May, the whistleblower estimated there was “900 to 1000″ mice on the plane. A subsequent investigation only found 17 live mice, however, according to American Airlines. Nevertheless, the station interviews a retired pilot and crash scene investigator who says the plane should have been grounded.

“The potential for the catastrophic mishap is there and if you have one mouse, you have two. (If) you have two, you have a family,” he said.

The KSDK report cites the FAA as saying American Airlines “did nothing wrong because airlines do not have to report rodent infestations unless the rodents affect the mechanics.” But, naturally, that assumes you know at any given moment how many mice are on the plane, where they are, and what they’re chewing on.

The airline’s spokespeople say it’s rare, that “infestations simply don’t happen.”

Obviously, in an period when capturing images on video and uploading them onto the Internet can be done in seconds, American Airlines is taking a pretty bold stance with that comment. It won’t be pretty if their confident declarations come back to haunt them.

(Thanks to one of the travelin’ Stodder brothers for showing me this link.)

Nissan: Shift…location

Thanks to the excellent South Bay blog, The Aesthetic, I have been pointed to Curbed LA's photos of the moving vans pulling up to Nissan North America's Torrance headquarters to take their stuff to Tennessee.  Click here to see them. 

In the beautiful South Bay, most of the landmarks are natural features, but the distinctive Nissan headquarters building, with its beveled glass feature, was a gateway of sorts to this part of LA County. When Nissan became a client of the PR agency I worked for in 1995 or so, I'll admit to a little thrill that I actually got to go inside this iconic (to me) structure. 

I assume, but don't know for sure, that the building stays up after its occupants leave.  Several other Japanese automakers companies still maintain big offices in the Torrance/Gardena/Carson area, which might account for the fact that so many Nissan employees declined to move with the company.  

I wonder if the greater LA area will ever add a major corporate headquarters again.  We've certainly lost quite a few, and our local and state governments seem powerless to stop the flow.   

No More Goose, No More Golden Eggs

Advertising Age's Gavin O'Malley is disturbed that marketing managers are putting money in the pockets of supposedly independent editorial outlets:

Something's rotten with the state of media. Nearly half — 48.9% — of senior marketing executives admit to paying for editorial or broadcast brand placement, according to an industrywide survey just released by PRWeek and PR agency Manning Selvage & Lee.

What's more, the survey of 266 chief marketing officers, marketing VPs and directors found that half of those who haven't paid for placement said they would if the opportunity arose.

"This type of behavior is as harmful to PR professionals as it is to consumers and the media," said Mark Hass, CEO of the Publicis Groupe-owned public-relations agency.

While the publishers mixing editorial and advertising most likely are consumer-product glossies, Mr. Hass said he strongly believes their lax standards harm the image of media in general. "When people see the erosion of concepts like objectivity, they start to lose faith in any organization claiming to be objective."

Interestingly, when PR Week released the survey last month, this particular finding was buried at the end of its story (subscription required). But once they got to it, PR Week raised the same concerns:

But the rise of ad-driven editorial content in both broadcast and print media has led, some say, to a fuzziness of the line separating advertising and editorial. There is a difference between inserting a product into an entertainment property and paying to secure a mention of a product in a more sterile editorial environment – such as a newspaper – says Hass. He notes a survey by sister media firm Starcom MediaVest which found that 65% of consumers thought editorial mentions of a product had been paid for.

News executives might want to keep this consumer perception in mind when contemplating why newspaper circulation is dropping, and why so many ex-readers find the highly subjective blogosphere more reliable. PR and marketing executives might start wondering what kind of strategies they're going be able to sell clients when the "third party credibility" of editorial placements is no longer seen as credible.

It's akin to the issue of broadcasters' use of PR-generated VNRs. Editors have the First Amendment right to publish or broadcast content that someone has paid for. But you can't have it both ways. Either you're independent, or you're not. If you're not, don't pretend you are. Because you'll be found out.

Playwright Jean Giraudoux was the first (of many) to say "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." But that applied to an era when phony sincerity was difficult to uncover. Maybe history will show that paid-for editorial content was the rule, not the exception in decades past. The future will be different. In our time, transparency isn't just a lifestyle choice. It's a law of nature.

Mush From the Wimps*

"Mush from the Wimp" refers to a famous journalistic gaffe — a headline placed atop a Boston Globe editorial about President Jimmy Carter's 1980 economic plan, which was supposed to be replaced with "All Must Share the Burden."

What made this episode funny and memorable was that the editorial was supposed to be an endorsement of Carter's plan. The accidental headline gave up the game. The Globe's editorial board didn't think the Carter plan was any good, but they felt compelled to instruct their poor readers to support it.

The public intuitively recognizes there is a gap today between what supporters of a politician or political party really think and the elaborate bows of fealty to political correctness that they make in public. In my opinion, it's the key reason why both Republican and Democratic approval ratings are so low right now. People don't sense that the parties and their standard-bearers are committed to the things they claim to stand for.

In this morning's New York Times, columnist David Brooks gives a clue as to why this gap has grown so large. (You'll have to either buy the paper, pay the Times for its TimesSelect service, or trust me, because I can't link to it.) Brooks suggests that if the legacy parties didn't exist, our politics would be divided between a party of "populist nationalism," (PN) and a party of "progressive globalism" (PG)

Per Brooks, the PNs stand for: America and Americans first; conservative social values; generous social welfare; universal health care; and closed borders. They are against the war in Iraq, for the wall to keep illegal aliens out, against outsourcing, and against gay marriage.

The PGs stand for: Free markets and free trade; liberal social values; an aggressive but multilateral interventionist policy in foreign affairs; reform of entitlements. They are for the war in Iraq, against continued oil dependence, for strong international institutions, against restrictive immigration policies, and for a woman's right to choose.

The PNs are suspicious of all elites: Government, corporate and cultural. The PGs are suspicious of populists who think they can create an America that is militarily, economically and culturally a fortress.

Brooks' realignment isn't so neat and tidy in the real world, but it has a ring of truth. If nothing else, it explains why all our politicians, from George W. Bush, to Hillary Clinton, to John Kerry, to John McCain, all sound like mushy wimps nowadays, as they try to straddle both the PG and PN camps.

I saw Al Gore on Larry King the other night. He was there to discuss his global warming documentary, but then Larry reminded him of the famous debate on his program, in which Gore defended NAFTA against Ross Perot — and did it so effectively that Perot was discredited and NAFTA was passed.

This trip down memory lane made Gore palpably nervous. Free trade, a PG issue, is highly controversial among Democrats now. Gore might want Democratic votes again someday, and the pro-free-trade contingent is a distinct minority. (Global warming is also a PG issue, but that's partly because no one's seen a price tag yet.)

But this kind of thing happens all the time. A couple of weeks ago, the Bush Administration was supposedly pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a classic PN issue–and an issue PGs tend to dismiss. The vote was timed to coincide with several primary elections, including California's. Everyone knew it was going to lose. Bush spoke up for it on his Saturday radio speech, which no one listens to.

And, according to Newsweek, Bush wasn't entirely sincere:

Though Bush himself has publicly embraced the amendment, he never seemed to care enough to press the matter. One of his old friends told NEWSWEEK that same-sex marriage barely registers on the president's moral radar. "I think it was purely political. I don't think he gives a s–t about it. He never talks about this stuff," said the friend, who requested anonymity to discuss his private conversations with Bush.

(snip)

Whatever Bush's motivation, his actions aren't likely to quiet his critics. (Southern Baptist leader Richard) Land says he's happy Bush is speaking out, but he'd like to see signs of real commitment to the issue. "We know what a full-court press looks like when we see one," Land says.

Bush needed anti-gay marriage voters to get elected in 2000 and 2004, and he'll need them again to maintain Republican congressional majorities in 2006. But, for Bush, the significance of a GOP majority is to maintain support for the war in Iraq.  This unpopular war draws most of its remaining support from PG's, who are acutely sensitive to the global consequences of failure in Iraq, not PN's, who believe secure borders are the key to winning the war on terror, not  planting democracy in faraway countries. It's an arbitrary–and perhaps temporary–thing that the pro-war and anti-gay-marriage constituencies are in the same political party.

Bush is a little more open about his PG position on illegal immigration. The press has identified a split in Bush's party between the globalists and the nationalists on that issue. The Democrats, however, are also split on illegal immigration. Democratic PGs recoil at the idea of a wall between America and Mexico, and the cultural intolerance that such a wall implies. But many key Democratic voters are PNs, especially labor union members and African Americans, who tend to be less tolerant of this flood of workers willing to work for low wages.

On the war, on immigration, on social issues like gay marriage and abortion, both parties oversee constituencies that are divided on the hottest issues. As the parties zig and zag to please these different interest groups, more and more Americans are just letting go of politics altogether, and pressing for their goals in places where they don't hear mush: Churches, union halls, the streets, talk radio–and the Internet.

Joe Trippi and others have pointed out that, because of the Internet, the barriers to creating new political organizations to replace the existing parties are falling. Trippi sees the evolution of a "unity" party that transcends partisanship. But that idea–a third party "above politics"–might even be too traditional (see Perot, and in 1980, John Anderson). The coming realignment might happen more quickly and dramatically than anyone predicts, and it might divide us even more.

*Revised, 6/15/06, 3:30 p.m., 10:30 p.m.

This Property is Condemned

Jeff Jarvis today tells the story of Mattel shutting down its online American Girl club, and the grief this corporate decision has caused:

Companies don’t realize that starting a community is a commitment. You can’t get people to move in and hand over their time and attention and then just one day decide to close.

Mattel is shutting down its American Girl Club and our daughter is rightfully upset. She joined the community and made friends there and now Mattel is pulling up and leaving town. Because of the anonymity features of the community, this means that thousands of friendships are suddenly cut off; they communicate only through the club.

It's an interesting comment on our times. Marriages and contracts are made to be broken, but one dare not scuttle an online community.

A Jarvis commenter throws his support behind Mattel:

Perhaps third grade is a good time for a girl to start learning that there are friends, and there is business. Mattel is a business, and makes business decisions. It’s not nice, but it is reality. Networks of friends… will someone find the business model to make that good business? Mattel pulled the plug. It’s not a bad idea to know what the motivations are for our associations…networts, and friendships. It’s a lesson worth learning or beginning to learn anyway in third grade.

Icy!

When PR people tell their clients they "need to understand how to communicate and connect in a new environment in which you have little or no control," it's not just an airy concept. Once you've ceded control to your consumers, you can't just decide one day to — poof – take it back, without suffering damage to your reputation.

Scoble Ankles

Robert Scoble's decision to leave Microsoft for a podcasting start-up generates a lot of comment today in the blogosphere. Scoble, an intelligent guy and a fine writer who conveys a winning personality in his blog Scobleizer, was characterized as the guy who "put a human face" on Microsoft. His departure from Microsoft was amicable, but from the media reaction, one would think this is a grievous loss for the software behemoth. From FT.com:

The internet was buzzing on Monday as bloggers digested news that Robert Scoble, the technical evangelist” whose Scobleizer weblog made him one of the foremost ambassadors for the world’s biggest software group, is to leave the company to join a Silicon Valley start-up.

The move, reported at the weekend, raises fresh questions about the importance of high-profile bloggers to companies that encourage employees to talk about work in their online journals.

(snip)

The move illustrates the challenge facing companies as they try to get to grips with a world in which the reputation of individual bloggers can come to be closely associated with – or have a big impact on – the reputation of a company’s own brand.

This is pretty silly. Scoble was an alternative source of information about Microsoft, and it spoke well of the company that it didn't fire him for filing posts that had a candid tone to them. But he was not Microsoft's "human" face. That honor still belongs to founder Bill Gates, one of the most recognized humans on the planet, and Steve Ballmer, the current CEO whose utterings are carefully parsed in the business and technology press.

Robert Scoble's left pinky was warmer, fuzzier and more "human" than Gates and Ballmer combined, but that doesn't change their relative impact on Microsoft. If Scoble's job was to take the focus off these two gentlemen, he failed. But I don't think that was the idea.

I think Scoble was driven to blog because he genuinely loved Microsoft and the people who worked there, and had a knack for articulating his passion about his company–and about his life. When I think about Scobleizer, I think about his incredibly honest posts about his mother, who died recently, and how the experience affected his view of his family and his life. I enjoyed his dispatches from the tech-conference circuit. They were human and humorous.

Frankly, I tended to discount whatever Scoble said about Microsoft, for two reasons. He was a marketing guy. You can't sell a product you don't believe in, and part of the psychology of salespersons is the ability to auto-generate the kind of belief needed to sell. Secondly, I'm not obsessed with Microsoft. I know Vista's coming, for example. But I won't be the first to try it. I realize I live in Microsoft's world, but I don't think about it much.

I want to see more businesses–big, small, and not-for-profit–hosting blogs. But over-reliance on one individual — and a lower-level employee at that — doesn't make much sense as a strategy.

To me, one point of a company blog is to dramatize the firm's expertise; to take its potential customers on an intellectual journey that parallels the company's growth, evolution, and new offerings. Another point is to demonstrate the commitment to transparent decision-making that companies' stakeholders increasingly demand — as Elizabeth Albrycht discussed in this required-reading post, and this follow-up. (I wrote about her ideas here.)

Scoble did some of the first, although it was mostly his intellectual journey. He wasn't in a position to do the second, because he wasn't a decision-maker.

The kind of blog I would envision as helpful to a company would be highly customized. There is no off-the-shelf strategy, and never will be, for this kind of communication. It must be flexible — a place where conversation about a new product could comfortably share space with responses to a crisis, or outlines of a decision-making process underway in real time.

I would look at a company blog as a cyberspace auditorium — a place targeted readers will want to go to hear from, and interact with, interesting people with relevant information to offer, whether they were executives, academics, customers or employees. Sometimes it might be an arena, where adversaries debate. The blog would become an essential experience for anyone who envisioned themselves as a potential customer, or who had any significant relationship with the company in question.

Above all, a company blog has to give its audience a reason to come back frequently — a hook. Robert Scoble's hook was: "How honest is he really going to be?" After awhile, the hook became Scoble himself — a guy we liked and rooted for. But as he said himself many times, he was just one person at Microsoft. For businesses, non-profits, public-sector agencies and others, the trick will be to create your own blog format, one that allows us to read and hear the many voices that make up your universe — and help us figure out how you fit into our lives.

The Secret to Making Money from Blogs

You can't make money blogging, or at least you can't make much. At least not now. Well, actually nobody knows. I don't have any ads on this site, the main reason being nobody has ever asked me to put their ad on this site. Maybe advertisers are missing a huge opportunity!

But I think I've figured out the secret to making money from blogs. Get someone to pay you to monitor them.

That's the conclusion I draw from Deborah Brown's op-ed (subscription required) in the current PR Week. Deborah Brown is senior director at Peppercom, a much-awarded small firm with offices in New York, San Francisco and London. She's got a common-sense approach to what she calls "digital media" that reminded me of the John Prine lyric, "It don't make much sense, this common sense don't make no sense no more."

For example, she says:

It’s also critical to understand that your company cannot state the same key messages via digital media that are allowed in other marketing initiatives such as advertising. With digital, the customer is in complete control. You need to understand how to communicate and connect in a new environment in which you have little or no control.

This is true, but it is fast becoming a cliche. Realizing you have little or no control is good Zen discipline, but pretty soon the clients are going to start asking their PR people for something more than a list of "what-not-to-do's." From my perch, I think we're at the point where an old economic idea, "Creative Destruction," needs to be applied to these new realities. From Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, written in 1942:

(T)he contents of the laborer's budget, say from 1760 to 1940, did not simply grow on unchanging lines but they underwent a process of qualitative change. Similarly, the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today–linking up with elevators and railroads–is a history of revolutions. So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mailcoach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

"Industrial mutation" — there's a term I'd like to see the PR blogs use more often! The fact is, in a breathtakingly short period of time, mass communications has undergone a profound mutation, to which the PR industry and current practices might not successfully adapt.

In PR Week, Brown quotes Christopher Barger, "Blogger-in-Chief" at IBM, saying the customers "want relationship building" and not "traditional messages." From this article and dozens more like it all over the PR blogosphere and trade media, you get the idea that some PR industry leaders see "relationship building" as just another tactic in the PR professional's arsenal.

I don't think so. Training in the PR industry is notoriously poor, but from what I remember, it's mostly about dealing with the news media, elements of good writing, client relations and "managing for profitability." There aren't many PR agency GMs who could instruct staff to go forth and help clients "build relationships" via "digital media" and have any confidence in how their employees would translate those words into action. Chaos would ensue. It might be funny like "The Office" is funny. But a client shouldn't pay for people to do something they aren't qualified to do.

I don't mean to knock Deborah Brown. Her article is good as far as it goes. She has a clear view of the mutation process, and how control is slipping away. The rather tentative tone of her article is probably appropriate. Nobody really knows what to do, and she doesn't pretend to either.

However, she did make one suggestion that made me laugh.

Monitor…monitor….monitor…know what’s being said about your company, but know when it makes sense to react.

Digital monitoring: It's a tactic PR people can certainly do. It's just like media monitoring, except more billable hours, since, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report,

As of last December, 35 percent of Americans had posted to a blog, created a Web page, shared online photos, or otherwise generated content. That proportion is more than double the 16 percent that had posted any content to the Web in January 2002, when Pew first researched the topic.

Can you imagine how many of those posts mention a brand-name company, one that might have PR people in-house or under contract? Monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor… monitor…

Blogging as Lobbying*

Remember how you'd cringe when Greg on The Brady Bunch would talk about a "groovy chick?" I have a feeling a lot of people will have flashbacks like that if they delve into the "Net Neutrality" debate. Because both sides are supplementing the usual battery of PR and lobbying tactics with blogging! Cool, daddio!

First, and most painfully, we get this soporific blog entry attributed to former Clinton spokesman and now Washington communications consultant Mike McCurry and attorney Chris Wolf, who run the telecommunication industry-backed "Hands off the Internet":

We need the freedom to figure out the answers to numerous questions: Who will pay for the pipes that will deliver the next generation Internet? What is the best way to ensure packets of information get across the Internet in the most efficient manner possible? How will traffic be managed when 100 million movies are being downloaded at any given moment?

These are complex questions, and over the coming months, we will do our level best to explain not just why the Save The Internet crowd is wrong, but where their online supporters have their wires (or these days, their wireless) crossed. And that’s why we’ve set up shop here in the blogosphere.

We’ll drop in from time to time, but for now we’ll turn this over to the Hands Off the Internet team, who will keep this blog updated and alive, hopefully even lively.

I'm not holding my breath. In "About Us," they describe those krazy "Hands off the Internet" kids as "a nationwide coalition of Internet users united together in the belief that the Net's phenomenal growth over the past decade stems from the ability of entrepreneurs to expand consumer choices and opportunities without worrying about government regulation."

In other words, this is a coalition of executives at ISPs who need to maintain high shareholder value, and are bored with the money they're already making from all of us who pay them for high-speed access.

Corporations are about growth. Shareholders don't want to be told, "The cable modem/DSL market is nearly saturated and we're going to be fighting an expensive fight simply to retain the customers we've got." For the stock price to rise, the ISPs need to charge more, and apparently figure they should have the unfettered ability to offer new services to justify premium prices. Content providers are free to create content that opens up new streams of advertiser or subscriber revenue — why not the ISPs?

This ISP hunger makes the content providers — big players like Google and Microsoft, but also entrepreneurial netizens who have faith that the next killer app is a gleam in their eye — nervous.

The ISPs control the pipes. What if they decide they want to make money off of searches, or user-generated wacky videos? Couldn't an ISP somehow disfavor Google or YouTube in favor of similar providers they control? What if you had a great new idea? Doesn't this give ISPs leverage to extract payment or even co-ownership in return for access to their customers?

Hence, "Save the Internet." Actually the net neutrality advocates are somewhat less centrally-directed, I think because a constituency exists that is motivated by actual beliefs, not just corporate prompting. Some have started their own activist sites, but "Save the Internet" seems to be where the big money is being directed. But, unlike "Hands…", "Save the Internet's" blogroll includes lots and lots of real bloggers, from bigfeet like Instapundit and Atrios, to dozens of obscure local bloggers, to "Charmed" star Alyssa Milano.

Of course, they've got a blog, too — one that basically repurposes the press releases posted in the press section. Blog entries announce Moby's support, the Christian Coalition's support, an endorsement from the San Jose Mercury News, and lots of long statements by someone called "tkarr" who does not otherwise identify himself. (Presumably, it's Timothy Karr, a Net activist who runs Free Press, but his name never appears anywhere on the "Save…" site.)

Here's how a recent "tkarr" post begins:

The telco cartel wants to gut the Internet and portion it off to the companies that pay their broadband tolls. Companies like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth seek to get rid of Net Neutrality so they can muscle aside the real online revolutionaries — the small-guy innovators who historically have made the Internet a beacon for democracy, economic growth and new ideas.

In the words of Internet architect Vint Cerf, the Internet is “innovation without permission.” That is the genius of the network that has proven to be a wonderland for new entrepreneurs and ideas, with all the intelligence residing with the end users and not those who control the pipes.

Now, large phone companies like AT&T have unleashed a million-dollar-a-week spending spree to influence Washington decision-makers, pass telco-friendly regulations and change the Internet forever. They want to control online content by placing gateways on the on-ramps and exits to the information superhighway. This is why people on the right and left have joined with every major consumer group, Internet rights advocacy and public interest organization to fight AT&T and their lobbyists.

I mean…it's mostly not a blog. A good blog for "Save the Internet" might be something actually written by a lobbyist. A diary that documents the political warfare as it happens, rather than a compendium of talking points and press releases. Their frontline PR person could contribute to it, too, with accounts (even transcripts) of their discussions with the press.

Don't just lecture us, engage us. The net community is more than just a constituency that will write e-mails and sign petitions. They want a conversation.

I'd give the same advice to the "Hands off the Internet" folks. Right now, they look like a classic AstroTurf campaign, dressed in netizen drag. They are campaigning in exactly the manner you'd expect from a "telco cartel." But lots of people would enjoy reading a blog written by a personable guy like Mike McCurry. He shouldn't hand it off to the "team" (i.e. the underpaid, anonymous flacks responsible for regurgitating the talking points). Write the darn thing yourself!

For a reasonably balanced and comprehensive summary of this issue, I can recommend this piece on Wikipedia. I'm pondering where I stand. I know which side I'm leaning toward, but I want to read more.

My one request to both sides: No blogs from Harry and Louise. Please?

*(Post edited and expanded 5/24, 8 a.m.)

(UPDATE:  The Wall Street Journal posts a debate between McCurry and Craig Newmark that is well worth reading.  What's interesting is both sides claim they are only working to preserve the status quo.  They can't both be right.)    

Googling the Hill

Older readers who grew up like me on the east coast might remember a New York sports columnist named Jimmy Cannon. Before offering pithy opinions about boxers and ballplayers, he'd warn you he was about to say something out of turn. He'd write, "Nobody asked me, but…"

Well, nobody asked me, and nobody will ask me, but… hasn't this story been written before?

Of the billions of searches conducted by Google Inc., potentially its most important is playing out in offices above an Asian fusion restaurant here: the quest for influence in the nation's capital.

The Silicon Valley company's dominance of Internet search is built on its mastery of advanced mathematical algorithms. But like other fast-growing tech titans before it, Google is finding Washington's political calculus harder to solve.

Since opening its Washington office last summer, Google's attempts to establish its presence has moved at dial-up speed — resulting in a slow and sometimes balky connection with lawmakers that has irritated both Democrats and Republicans.

"I think they've been a little bit too innocent in how the game is played," said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-focused Washington think tank.

Google's efforts to rally support for rules guaranteeing open Internet access — an abstract issue known as Net neutrality — has been called largely ineffective by key Democratic supporters. Heavily lopsided political contributions to Democrats from Google employees have annoyed the GOP majority. And in what veteran lobbyists called a high-profile tactical mistake, a Google executive called before a House panel this year tried to engage subcommittee members critical of the firm in a debate.

I remember stories just like it about Microsoft, Intel, America Online, and every other high-tech supernova — admonitions to start spending more on high-powered lobbyists. It's the only time the press portrays lobbyists as anything but enemies of the people, and campaign contributions as anything but barely-legal bribery.

And what's this? "(K)ey Democratic supporters" objecting to "heavily lopside political contributions to Democrats?"

Two possible explanations.

1. The news media, or at least this reporter (Jim Puzzanghera of the LA Times), wants Google's position on "net neutrality" to prevail, and worries that Google is about to lose the arms race. The net neutrality campaign is all about making sure content providers like Google and Yahoo! don't have to pay a toll to the high-speed carriers like AT&T or Comcast to reach customers.
2. Like a good boxing reporter who wants a story he can hype, this reporter wants to build Google up so he can knock them down later.

I don't pretend to have any pertinent advice for Google, except for this: Don't expect praise if you follow the Times' advice. Expect the opposite. Lobbyists and reporters are natural enemies, because they compete to be the gatekeepers of public policy. 

Hey, Google: Maybe, in the long run, the times are right for a quirky, not-business-as-usual approach to our esteemed representatives. It seems oddly off-key at this moment when outrage at K Street has reached a climax that a major company would be criticized for not buying into the lobbying game.

Just guessing here: When a high-tech winner starts hiring packs of DC lobbyists, the rise in their stock price begins to level off, or go down. If that's true, of course, I can't prove cause-and-effect. These might be two distinct symptoms of a company like Google reaching a sadder but wiser stage of maturity.

iDon’t Get It

The digital smackdown between France and Apple over a pending French law that would require the iTunes Music store to allow music downloads onto devices other than iPods is another reminder of a digital-age phenemenon that I don’t get.

What is the value proposition that causes iPod and iTunes to be the dominant portable music format?

If you buy an iPod, you can only get music from one place: iTunes. On iTunes, you can only listen to fragments of songs. If you want to hear the whole thing, you have to buy it, for 99 cents. At that point you own the song, just as if you’d bought a CD of one song for 99 cents. Which is great, if you’re sure you want to keep playing that song the rest of your life. You can burn it onto a CD. But you can’t put the song onto any other portable device–only an iPod.

There’s another alternative. You can become a subscriber to another online music store, such as Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music or Napster. You pay them a monthy fee. There are usually two pricing tiers — neither of them more than the price of a typical CD. The lower price allows you to stream almost anything they have, i.e. listen to the whole song as often as you want on your computer, or to burn it and keep it like iMusic does, for an additional fee of about 79-89 cents.

For the slightly higher price, you can also “subscribe” to tracks, which means you can store them on your computer to play even when you’re offline, and you can download them onto your portable device. Eventually, your “rights” to that song will expire if you don’t reconnect your device with the subscription service. And you can’t burn it onto a CD, unless you pay that extra fee.

Myriad portable devices can take downloads off these competing music services, from dozens of manufacturers. Microsoft has finagled its way into this picture with the “Plays for Sure” logo, which is actually helpful. When I got a Creative Zen for my birthday, I was able to give my Rio to my son, knowing that I could put subscription music onto his and mine from the same service.

That’s a very different world from the restrictive one that Apple has built.

Go back to the lower-tier price. If you have a laptop and can pick up wi-fi, the ability to stream music means you can set up a playlist of, say, 200 songs (any number really), plug the earphones into your computer and just listen while you work. I’ve done this many times. Sometimes I’m in the mood for Handel. Sometimes I’m in the mood for the Rolling Stones. Rhapsody lets its listeners create playlists, and sometimes I listen to one of those. One weird day, I even created a Bee Gees playlist. Not too bad, actually!

You can’t do that on iTunes, unless you’re happy with 200 30-second fragments.

I am not endorsing weird French laws. Mon Dieu, non. If Apple wants iTunes to only play on iPods, that’s their right.

But thanks to subscriptions and streaming, I’ve been able to discover, or re-discover, vast libraries of music I would’ve never paid to try. Not just the Bee Gees, but a long list of current rock bands, old jazz masters, and favorites who just had more music out there than I could have kept up with before.

Take Johnny Cash. Most everyone knows the great version of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” that Cash recorded with producer Rick Rubin a few years before he died. But Cash completed four CDs with Rubin, and more songs that didn’t fit into those CDs were released later. A great version of the Beatles’ “In My Life,” the country chestnut “Streets of Laredo,” and literally dozens of others. Who has the money to buy all of that? But now I’ve heard a lot of it. Recent box set surveys of Duke Ellington and the Band are now, almost in their entireties, on my MP3 player.

Another example: I bypassed CDs by the New Pornographers many times, just because I didn’t like their name (still don’t.) But checking them out on Rhapsody has turned me into a huge fan of their expertly crafted pop-rock (imagine the Mamas and the Papas, backed by Led Zeppelin, singing songs by Brian Wilson). Listening to the New Pornographers turned me on to one of the band’s singers, Neko Case, who has grown from a Patsy Cline-like alt-country cowgirl into a brilliant, uncategorizable singer-songwriter. If you want to listen to her new album, “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” you could test-drive it on Rhapsody before deciding if you want to buy it. Or, if you’re a subscriber, you could put it on your MP3 player — as long as it’s not an iPod.

That’s what confuses me. iPod gives you fewer choices, but it’s far and away the standard, outselling everything else. When Donald Fagen released his new single “H Gang,” the press release said it was available for purchase on iTunes. And it was. But it was also available for streaming, downloading or purchase on Rhapsody and presumably other services, but that fact was not mentioned in the news releases. Is it supposed to be a secret?

This might be a PR problem. The benefits of subscription services have not been reduced to a soundbite. Napster, Yahoo! and Rhapsody are all competitors against each other as well as Apple. Apple is selling hardware as well as its online service, so its incentive to market heavily is greater.

To me, it’s a hiccup in the market, one I hope is corrected, because the subscription model opens doors for people to get exposed to new music in ways iTunes’ does not. And with the demise of commercial radio as a proselytizer of music, I would hate to see the subscription alternative fail.

Mighty, Mighty Stress

I wonder if talk-radio fans get embarassed when they hear who sponsors their favorite programs: Peddlers of marginal cures for obesity, baldness and tax problems. I assume there is some basis for their claims, however slight, but it is delightfully surreal to listen to hard-heads like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt tout herbal cures that promise to build your brain or restore your eyesight without glasses. The most disquieting ad I’ve heard is for a product that will make your children taller. Please, parents are competitive enough already!

This digression leads into a startling fact I learned this morning via Boing-Boing: Severe stress can cause children to stop growing. The most famous case of psychogenic dwarfism is JM Barrie, author of “Peter Pan.” The site’s Cory Doctorow wants to draw your attention to a couple of “mind-opening” lectures by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford researcher and expert on the physiology of stress, now available via podcast. The links are here on Boing-Boing and on BrainConnection.com, which includes a short summary of Sapolsky’s lectures:

Sapolsky related a story about a boy from a very psychologically-abusive setting who was hospitalized in a New York hospital with zero growth hormone in his bloodstream. Over the next two months he developed a close relationship with the nurse at the hospital–undoubtedly the first normal relationship he had ever had–and soon, amazingly enough, the growth hormone levels zoomed back to normal. The nurse then went on vacation and the levels dropped again, rising once more immediately after her return.

“Think about it,” Sapolsky said, commenting upon the story. “The rate at which this child was depositing calcium in his bones could be explained entirely by how safe and loved he was feeling in the world.” He added that while this standard textbook version of stressed dwarfism is rare, there is nevertheless “major league psychopathology” throughout society, retarding human growth.

“Major stress is the police and social workers breaking down the door of the apartment, finding the kids who have been locked in the closet for two months, the food slipped under the door. Total nightmare situations that turn out often in history. . . kids in war zones, kids in areas of civil strife.”

The problem with human beings, Saplosky says, is that unlike animals, we expose ourselves to sustained periods of stress — sometimes through undergoing a prolonged, horrific experience like war or abuse, sometimes because we anticipate, or remember stressful experiences…and sometimes because we choose stress as a lifestyle.

Stress is fundamental to our economy. We make heroes out of people whose work habits are unhealthy, and tell young employees to model themselves after stress addicts. Without asking the question directly, employers try to assess potential employees’ ability to handle stress. Job applicants understand this game, too. They know it won’t be helpful to their employment prospects if show too much curiosity about the company’s “work-life balance policies.” Better to say, “I’m used to working long hours,” or even “I don’t have a life.”

The only job interviews where prospects raise “work-life balance” occur when the prospect knows they have many competitors for their services. But even in cases where bidding is heavy, the potential employee’s perceived market value is usually associated more with their ability to carry a huge workload than their talents. “He’s a horse,” a boss will say admiringly. “She’s got such energy.”

The glorification of stress may never change, but the employer eventually pays a price, Sapolsky research suggests. Stressed-out workers slowly become stupider.

Until recently…it was commonly believed that if you lost brain cells they were lost forever. “You can make new neurons in your brain after all,” Sapolsky said, “and especially in the Hippocampus in response to things like learning and environmental stimulation. But stress will block the formation of new neurons.”

While the hippocampus does have the capacity to regenerate, it’s far from certain that this will occur, Sapolsky asserted. People who have endured horrible stress, such as Vietnam combat veterans and victims of prolonged childhood sexual abuse, are often fated to suffer permanent damage to the hippocampus, resulting in memory loss.

Depression, “what Sapolsky termed the common cold of psychopathology,” also attacked the hippocampus with stress hormones. Massive long-term depression, he said, was almost certain to cause permanent damage in the form of memory loss.

Companies that want to “invest in their employees” need to keep this in mind. Your best employees’ long hours might make them more profitable, but the brainpower-per-square-inch will decline unless you take some of the pressure off.