Who Murdered This Movie’s Marketing?

Atop a gas tank at a 7-Eleven. What happened, good people? Did marketing experts create this? Or a high school lit class? This promotion does not increase my desire for 7-Eleven junk food or tickets to the Sherlock Holmes motion picture.

News, Advertising, What’s the Dif? Part Deux

Aw, now The Dallas Morning News is being an AOL copycat. Anyone’s who’s ever scribbled quotes on a steno pad is very, very upset that DMN is now making editors answer to sales managers. DMN editor Bob Mong calls it “integration,” and we all know how uncomfortable that process can be, and how ignorant people who protested it appear, in retrospect.
I’ve lived in Dallas only a few months, and am still acclimating myself to how hated this newspaper is.  How, disappointed people are in the DMN. I don’t know if this management announcement will help, although most loyal readers, the 25 or so remaining, according to my estimates, probably are outside of the media buzz, and will continue to at least glance at the headlines.
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Rick Edmonds from the Poynter Institute weighed in on whether AOL’s advertising-driven content is journalism. And I think his words ring true when considering the changes at the Dallas Morning News: “Independence is a critical element of serious journalism by definition. This isn’t.”

News, Advertising, What’s the Dif?

AOL announced that it will become a content producer. Content meaning news. Or advertising. Or something. Exactly what constitutes ”news” has long been a battle between those who deliver the news and those who pay for the delivery. Advertisers want control; journalists and publishers want freedom to tell the truth. AOL says it will use algorithms to “predict the types of stories, videos and photos that will be most popular with consumers and marketers,” says the Wall Street Journal. I appreciate that the WSJ asked a Poynter Institute thinker whether this content could be actually journalism. He said nope. I have worked on both sides, as an investigative journalist for a newspaper and as a writer of content paid for by advertisers. Why do advertisers want their ads surrounded by news content that they control? Why don’t advertisers stay inside their 3-column by 6-inch boundaries? I think it’s because advertisers know that readers subscribe to newspapers and magazines for the content, not for the ads. A passing (but positive) mention in a news story creates more interest than an ad. But not all news outlets have the same clout. As a columnist, I was inundated by people asking me to mention a worthy cause in my column. “Why don’t you just submit a press release for the calendar listing?” I would ask them. “It’s free.” They would always reply “But nobody reads that. Everybody reads your column.” And YES, I enjoyed that ego boost a lot.

How Does Fort Worth Look in the News Today? Sort of Crazy

Not that there’s anything wrong with shopping for guns … with a grocery cart, or putting purple dye in a river because of a … non-championship college football game. It’s what passes for normal Thanksgiving weekend behavior in Fort Worth, Texas. The gun-mania pic was a section front photo of the Wall Street Journal print edition delivered in Dallas. It’s Slide #4 in the online version.

7 Ways to Pretend Twitter Succeeds as a New-Business Tool

1. Pretend that 500 followers is superior to 10,000 readers, viewers or other captive audience.
2. Pretend that tweets have lasting impact.
3. Pretend that customers who have never heard of Twitter, or don’t find it vital to their existence, are not important.
4. Pretend that telling your customers how much they will like Twitter beats trying to reach them in a place they feel comfortable.
4. Pretend that Twitter will bring you new customers, just like that.
5. Pretend that your 1000 followers is a measure of your future success.
6. Pretend that half your followers aren’t employees and family.
7. Pretend that Twitter’s zero growth in the past four months is a measuring error.

Soft Eloquence Vs. Fierce Persuasiveness

A friend shared this poem by Robert Frost as I was launching my public relations business. I’ve memorized it, because I think it’s important to store beautiful words in my brain for nourishment. These days, I memorize passwords or directions, and very few words for the simple pleasure of recall. I hope to commit more verses to memory.

Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds’ song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

I loved Frost’s depiction of the influence of Eve, the biblical first woman, and her influence. That’s what drives me, makes me passionate, the quest to have an influence on others. Eve wasn’t just softly eloquent, as she is portrayed in this poem. She persuaded Adam to try a new product, the fruit from a tree. She was the first advertising genius, using the power of her gender to sell. Or at least, that was his excuse for trying the apple. “She told me to do it.” Caveat emptor, Adam.

Master of Panic

On TV at the gym today, a pro basketball player, doesn’t matter who, called another player a “master of panic.”  I’m not exactly sure of the phrase, because it was closed caption, and later the phrase was repeated as “master Hispanic.” But I’ll go with the first one — master of panic.
An image-obsessed business knows how to tame panic like a pro. Managing a company crisis is as important as managing day-to-day customer relations. Public relations revolves around thriving in times of calm and times of chaos. A master of panic may feel fear, but he uses his own panic, and the panic of others, as rocket fuel. Control freak = adrenaline junkie = master of panic.

Today’s economic news: economic analysts can’t predict diddlysquat

iIt’s bad news, folks: depressing statistics reported today about Americans who can’t find a job and can’t survive without leaning on other Americans. Last week, there were more than a half million people out of work for the first time AND who applied for unemployment benefits. The “AND” is important because not all jobless people are eligible for benefits and not all jobless people file for benefits right away. The desperate optimist may believe a new job/some job/any job/please-God-I-have-children-to-feed is just around the corner. For some first-time filers, the unemployment claim is a public admission that they were laid off and were powerless to stop it, and have lost hope they will ever find a job. So those half-million deserve sympathy, and the thoughtful news coverage of the Associated Press.
“New claims for unemployment insurance plummeted by 52,000 to 565,000,” according to the AP story. The story cites the Labor Department. Not sure if AP or the Labor Department is the originator of the word “plummeted.” Makes me think about people jumping off tall buildings. Not pleasant when considering jobless people at their wit’s end.
But, wait, this is GOOD news. Why, you ask, as you post your resume on yet another job-hunting Web site used for exploitation by spammers and scammers? Because analysts had predicted a higher number of first-time unemployment claims, not the piddly 565,000. So the fact that analysts were wrong is … good news?!?!
“That’s significantly below analysts’ expectations of 605,000, according to Thomson Reuters.”
Keep reading, and you’ll find that unemployment is the highest it’s been in 25 years. And the number of people still on unemployment last week is 6.88 million, the highest since the Labor Dept. started keeping records, which was, uh, 1967.
So the big news is, the news wasn’t as bad as analysts predicted. And we all know that predicting the news takes precedence over, well, the news.
Here’s another crystal-ball revelation from the story. Wouldn’t bet or hold your breath on this one, either:
“Economists are closely watching the level of first-time claims for signs the economy will recover in the second half of this year, as many predict.”

Public speaking = public relations

Yesterday I heard a live audio stream of a presentation by Google developer Anil Sabharwal, which made me think about how all of us are giving presentations whenever we communicate with someone else. Anil’s topic was Web innovation, and he did a super job of promoting Google and its new application, Google Wave.
The brilliance was in his subtle reminders of Google superiority.
For instance, Anil referred to Microsoft’s release of software named by years — “Office 2003″ and “Office 2007″ and contrasted Google as being very, very different. Which means not poky, and very, very much on the ball.
“We constantly innovate,” Anil noted. “We release things every week or two weeks. … The idea is, it’s all about quick releases. “
Speed is necessary to test innovative ideas, and the lessons are learned along the way. And not every quick release is going to be a smashing success, he said.
That’s OK.
“Try lots of different things. And be willing to fail at 80 to 90 percent of them so you can come up with the one brilliant idea,” he said.
Which echoes the creed of Lush, the cosmetics company I wrote about recently. Part of the company’s belief system, which is printed on its shopping bag, is “the right to make mistakes, lose everything and start again.”
(Fear of failure = fear of success.)
Dominant companies not only move fast, they are willing to make mistakes, and keep moving.
Anil was one of several brilliant thinkers and doers speaking at AMPlify, an Innovation & Thought Leadership Festival held by AMP, a wealth management company in Australia, for its employees.

My gut hurts, or, let’s sell some books

Sympathy for the young miss who diagnosed her own Crohn’s disease by looking at slides of her intestines in high-school science class. Wow!
Turns out, her doctors had been misdiagnosing her for years. And she figured it all out.
“It’s weird I had to solve my own medical problem,” Jessica Terry told Washington state TV station KOMO.
What had the doctors been doing wrong? Telling her she had irritable bowel syndrome.
The fact is, Crohn’s disease is a type of irritable bowel syndrome (the serious type). Symptoms of Crohn’s disease can appear and disappear for years. Doctors weren’t misdiagnosing her, according to the facts in the story. The doctors had looked at pictures of her gut before, and didn’t see the granulomas that Terry found. That’s not unusual.
I have a family member with Crohn’s disease, and have seen her endure surgeries and colonoscopies and other suffering. And I come from a family afflicted across the board with irritable bowel syndrome. So I have all the sympathy in the world for those who suffer from gut problems, pass the Pepcid, where’s the restroom? Amen.
Except … except … what’s that in the last paragraph of the story?
The student “hopes to have a kid’s book on Crohn’s disease published.”
Oh …. right. Sorry, I was reading a press release. I thought it was a news story.