media commentary

When I was still doing stand-up, one of my compadres had a regular bit where her punchline was “women: we make milk. We make eggs. We’re a dairy!”

I’m a big fan of the dairy. No, not the human variety, the kind you find in grocery & gourmet stores. So imagine my surprise when I saw the latest ad campaign from the US Milk Board. The Milk Peeps have been riding on “got milk?” for almost 20 years.

It seems that they saw a niche messaging opportunity, and ran with it. Did they run over a cliff? You be the judge.

I’m a big fan of the funny, as you know. However, when you deploy the funny in service of a brand message, you’ve got to make sure that everyone in your intended audience is on board. Women howled in protest from sea to shining sea when the campaign was launched about 4 weeks ago.

As someone who knows PMS only too well – totally an insider, trust me – I would have advised the Milk Peeps to make a woman the face of the campaign. She could warn her boyfriend/husband/boss/random strangers that their lives might be at stake unless dairy products were brought forth right-damn-now.

And it wouldn’t hurt to add some commentary on the potential risks of drinking milk that has rBGH (a/k/a bovine somatotropin, or bovine growth hormone) in it: like the pus from mastitis – udder infection – that cows who get pumped full of the stuff wind up suffering from. Who needs that, right?

The campaign has certainly kicked off some buzz. I don’t think it’s exactly the buzz that the Milk Peeps were looking for, but buzz is, after all, buzz. Just ask Rupert “help-I’m-strapped-to-a-buzz-saw” Murdoch.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it …

Netflix jumps the gun

When you announce a price increase, timing is everything. Netflix learned that the hard way when they broadcast a 62% price hike – from $9.99 to $15.98 – on their basic discs-and-streaming subscription package. The screaming was heard everywhere from backyard barbeques to CNN.

Netflix’s earning call was today – Monday, July 25, 2011 – and was almost entirely taken up by discussions about their price hike, not about their great share price increase. If they’d waited until today, or tomorrow, to announce their subscription rate hike, they would have looked like really smart business folks. Instead, they wound up being tagged greed-heads.

Over on Mediapost, David Goetzl shares a pretty good breakdown of the why and how of their communication #fail.

Old Spice jumps the shark

I’m a huge fan of the brilliant “your man could smell like … me!” campaign Old Spice launched in February 2010. Talk about giving an old-school brand a 21^st century makeover – it’s a case study in how to create a viral juggernaut.

So now, they announce they’re replacing the new Old Spice Guy, Isaiah Mustafa, with … FABIO? Seriously?

I don’t know what their intended purpose is there. If they’re trying to build a rivalry to juice up the campaign, they could have picked a waaaay better foil for Mustafa than a faded Italian pinup dude whose voice sounds like he’s been inhaling helium. And whose biggest headline was generated by his getting beaned in the beezer by a goose while riding Apollo’s Chariot at Busch Gardens back in … 1999. So now Old Spice is partying like it’s 1999? What fun.

When it comes to successful business storytelling, your message is very important. The timing of that message is critical. Both Old Spice and Netflix offer cautionary tales on how not to jump the gun, or the shark.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it …

I started my career in network news around the same time the space shuttle Columbia made its first trip into low-earth orbit.

Also around that same time, CNN (acronym for Cable News Network, was referred to as Chicken Noodle News by those of us in “establishment” TV news at the time) brought the 24-hour TV news cycle to life. That was, I think, one of the first strikes on the first nail in the coffin where the body of real news ultimately got buried.

As my grandmother used to exclaim, “saints preserve us!”

That 24-hour spin cycle has now delivered the most meta of screaming headlines. A media shark frenzy is now chowing down on media itself: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and its burgeoning phone hacking scandal has, so far, brought us the heads of Rebekah Brooks, chief of News International and the last editor of The News of the World (I so will not miss that rag) and Sir Paul Stephenson, who was the chief of Scotland Yard until his career got hacked by hiring former NotW editors as Scotland Yard PR flacks.

The wind sown on the day that 24-hour spin cycle started – April 1, 1980 – is now reaping the whirlwind, and taking down an entire profession. Both Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner have a lot to answer for – I’m wondering how wide a net might ultimately be cast as the feeding frenzy keeps bloodying the news-business water.

I’m no longer working directly for any news organization, haven’t been for five years. Part of that decision was driven by the writing I saw on the interwebs wall. The web was eating the lunch of mainstream media, and combined with “the internet wants content to be free!”-ocracy that developed in the first decade of the 21st century, it all meant that making any kind of a living in media was going to be problematic at best, impossible at worst.

But what really drove my decision was my utter disgust at what had happened to a profession in the 20+ years I had been in it. I was passionate about news, about that first draft of history that is the news business, about the feel of newspapers in my hands, about covering stories that I thought were important, exciting, and informative.

Democracy only fully works when an educated citizenry has access to unbiased information about what their overall society is up to, going through, exploring, learning, or pissed off about. By “unbiased” I mean that the reporter isn’t inserting his/her own opinions into their reportage.

Calls ’em like they sees ’em – those should be the rules of the game.

Unfortunately, the advent of a 24/7/365 “feed me!” mindset, along with the rise of info-tainment – which dictates that everything from how Tiger Wood’s wife deploys his 3-wood, to whether or not some celebutante is or is not wearing underpants, to which loser gets a rose from some other loser on some “reality” show that’s about as real as Pam Anderson’s rack – as “news” has brought us here.

At first blush, the crew who was phone-hacking might seem to be just the lower-than-pond-scum Brit tabloid jerks. However, the investigation has crossed the pond, and the FBI is now looking into allegations that Murdoch’s minions were hacking the families of 9/11 victims, seeking headline-worthy dirt.

So, the next time you pick up a People magazine or a supermarket tabloid, watch Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood, read TMZ or Perez Hilton, you must understand that you’re supporting the lack of real information available to move our society, our culture, and our world in a positive direction.

Yep, I’m talkin’ to you.

Stop the insanity.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

I have been a Google brand advocate for over a decade. Fell on their search engine like a starving dog when it launched in beta in ’98 (even then, they really were better than everybody else), and have enthusiastically jumped in on all their web-based tools as they’ve rolled out.

Since I switched to an Android-powered phone recently, and am trying to find the right tools to sync my Outlook contacts (almost 2K) with both my Droid and Google Contacts – backups to the backups, always available – I decided to investigate Google Apps.

Their Premier (paid) Edition looked like it was worth a try. And they offer a 30-day free trial. Or at least they say they do.

I signed up for the free trial. They asked for my credit card number, and I gave it – I’ve taken advantage of many free trial offers the same way. I use it, if I like it, I stay and pay. If I don’t like it, I cancel during the trial period.

Has always been easy…until Google Apps.

I was concerned when I saw a charge appear on my credit card account online almost instantaneously after I signed up for the “free” trial. How is it free if you’re charging me for it?

I followed the “Support” thread in an attempt to find why they’d charged me. This is all I got:

In case you can’t make out the text at the bottom, it says that even though it looks like I was charged, I wasn’t.

I beg to differ. $50 that has been taken out of my account is $50 I don’t have access to – which sounds like “charging” to me.

I canceled the trial immediately.

The charge IS STILL ON MY ACCOUNT ALMOST 36 HOURS LATER. Trying to engage with Google as a customer gets you lots of bot-generated “do not reply to this” email, but no actual customer service.

I’m very much not the only person to have been bait-and-switched by Google Apps. BTW, Google Apps Power Poster LMckin51 is answering lots of questions (badly) on this topic, but doesn’t seem to understand the concept of listening. Since s/he is a volunteer, I’ll observe that Google seems to like getting stuff for free themselves. To be fair, they do offer lots of free tools – but bait-and-switch makes me madder than Dick Cheney at a PETA meeting.

Sorry, Google – you have officially become the giant soulless representation of crappy customer service. I realize that, to you, I don’t even qualify as a gnat to your elephant. However, there are more of me (small business owners) than there are of you (giant soulless global corporations).

And I call bait-and-switch – saying something is one thing (in this case, free) when it’s really something else (in this case, $50 plus possible overdraft fees) – the essence of evil in business.

Don’t be evil? Don’t make me laugh.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.