US TV networks return cash to advertisers

The future of advertising is starting to arrive in the US this week and it could be here soon as well. TV networks there are returning cash to advertisers as the impact of digital video recorders start to bite.
US TV networks are facing a ratings decline and the three major networks -- ABC, NBC and CBS -- are compensating advertisers mostly with extra commercial time, while NBC is actually giving cash back. It seems like an anathema and is all down to the growing use of digital video recorders like TiVo.

NBC is reported to have begun reimbursing advertisers for fourth-quarter prime-time ratings shortfalls, averaging about $500,000 per advertiser, marking the first time in years a network has taken such a step because it had already sold much of its available commercial inventory.

It could happen here next, just take a look at the numbers. Last month BSkyB hit a record 14% quarterly growth in subscribers to Sky+, up 323,000 on the previous quarter to 2.7m, and the service is now in almost a third of Sky homes.

That figure will grow again next year as Virgin Media starts pushing its own DVR service although its marketing to customers is generally so poor that most probably don't even know that the service is available (plus it has an onerous installation cost, double that of Sky+).

I'm a big fan of Sky+. It is Television how it was mean to be. And when I say I don't just mean television without the advertising (although it’s a major bonus), but also TV when you want it.

Video on demand is alright and Virgin Media's catalogue of programmes and films is extensive, but it is not necessarily want you actually want to watch. It's not what I want to watch at least, but then I have already gone through the pain of getting rid of my service if not the box (I can not for some reason get Virgin Media to take it away for love nor money; nor indifference and loathing for that matter either).

If you happen to be in and there is something you want to watch it's much more pleasant to go off and do something more useful for ten minutes and then return to the programme and skip through the ads.

Of course, even fast forwarding at x30 you don't miss the messages. You see the logos, recognise the brand trimmings and have taken on a message all the same. Just not all of them and just not in the same way as before.

Everyone knew that the 30 and 60 second broadcast ad spot would have to change and this is only more confirmation of that.

For US networks this problem will be exacerbated next year for other reasons as the writers' strike continues to run and schedules are loaded up with reruns and reality shows. That will have an impact as well on British schedules and some channels will be harder hit than others.

National tell the truth day?

If you are working in marketing you can sell just about anything, right? How about the truth? I only ask as 'National Tell the Truth Day' is rolling around and the pressure is on.

What - you haven't heard of TTTD? No me neither, but Tamara Gillan of SF15 is trying to establish it (possibly as a penance, I'm not entirely sure) and (among other things) has written to our great nation's MPs. Not one or two, but all 646 of them.

Any idea what happened next? That’s right: most didn't reply, and some said 'no', including the likes of Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman and Peter Hain.

Harriet Harman? You'd want to put her on stage on TTTD. No, not to throw stuff at, but because it would be hilarious, while Gordon Brown would be no better and would waste away in minutes sweat pouring like a river down his deeply furrowed brow.

Surprisingly, some MPs have signed up. They are the ones you would expect to sign up and leading them is Ann Widdecombe. I think she's usually described as a national treasure, but on TTTD the answer might be a little different.

"I can imagine some very awkward questions being posed that day, such as 'Did you like the dress I was wearing?' or 'Don't you think my cat is beautiful?' However, I am pleased to enter into the spirit of the campaign," Widdie said.

Same for professional Labour rebel Kate Hoey, who often appears to be against everything that her party is for. She is the chairman of the Countryside Alliance (and they couldn't find a Tory? Oh right, that was the point).

Then we get to advertising and  the old joke about the "truth in advertising". I don't know what it is, but as I understand it you can't tell it...because there isn't any. Tah dah!

I digress, back to the question can you tell sell the truth (generally and not specifically) and here I'm thinking of Dr McCoy - "it's worse than that he's dead Jim" or Jack Nicholson who knows we can't handle it? Well, can you? I'm not sure you can, but I like the idea as a focus for public debate in this age of institutional lying (sorry news management) and crazy canoeists fresh from Panama.

Gawker gets it

It's a New York thing. Never has so much been written about one blog, as yet another long analysis appeared of media/celebrity slash slash whatever blog Gawker started by the former FT journalist Nick Denton a few years back and since spawned a blogging empire.

Gawker is the blog that started back in 2002 by the former Financial Times journalist, Nick Denton. It started out as a blog about New York, then became a sort of media land blog/Conde Nast insider blog where you could read things like what Anna Wintour was wearing/eating/firing, before morphing more into a celebrity gossip column that would at times rival the New York Post's Page Six.

This week a little US literary magazine n+1 spent thousands of words dissecting Gawker and possibly sparking the departure of the blog's managing editor Choire Sicha and editor Emily Gould.

The thesis of the piece in n+1 magazine is that Gawker was too often beyond the pale and it "had always sold itself as mean but it now became, actually, very mean". It was "taking the form but lacking the content of tabloid magazines and websites… co-editors besieged essentially private people".

It cites a number of lows including one where it exposed a writer at the once great Village Voice for fabricating parts of a cover article and for weeks ran stories on the guy with headlines like 'Putting Nick Sylvester on Suicide Watch' and 'Sylvester Continues Picking Up the Pieces'.

n+1 went on to make the point, as illustrated, that the status of Gawker rose as the overall status of its subjects declined, and it was this that made Gawker appear at times a reprehensible bully.

Anyway, the editors left (a story covered by the New York Times as well), but denied it was because of the magazine articles that say you are mean (but smart) when this is what you have made your name so far doing, but more because, well, blogging, is low paid and Gawker is about poking fun at people (among other things) who work at Conde Nast, which is where all the Gawkerettes really want to work anyway so that they too can see up close and personal what it is that Anna Wintour is wearing.

Gould told WWD: "Whatever Gawker originally set out to do, it kind of did, and now it just feels over," she said. "I would love it if it just fell off the face of the earth....I don't want to say the meanest thing or the most shocking thing possible anymore, because it gets so old and so soul-killing. There is stuff I really care about. I'm not interested in tearing it down as much as describing it."

To illustrate the low paid thing, Nick Denton had another brilliant idea this week. Most Gawker bloggers were paid a flat rate of $12 per post for 12 posts a day (with bonuses), but now he is looking at a pay-for-performance system. Ouch. I know online can be viewed as a sweat shop, but still. The piece says Denton has always tracked the page views of each individual Gawker Media writer, whoever generates the most page views becomes his favourite. If each writer was only as valuable as the page views he drew, then why shouldn’t Denton pay him accordingly?

Balk, the site's primary troublemaker, quickly posted an item on Gawker about this change with the slug “Like Rain on Your Wedding Day, Except for Instead of Rain It’s Knives.” Denton wasn't amused. "Your item makes the argument for performance pay even stronger,” he responded in the post’s comments. “This awesomely self-indulgent post -- of interest to you, me, and you, and me -- will struggle to get 1,000 views. Which, under the new and improved pay system, Balk, will not even buy you a minute on your bourbon drip.” (Balk gave notice two weeks later.)"

It's been an interesting ride for Denton who having helped build dotcom networking event First Tuesday has gone on to build a bonafide new media publishing firm, racking up serious amounts of page impressions.

It isn't just Gawker now, he has a number of sites: Fleshbot (porn); Jalopnik (cars); Gizmodo (gadgets); and Kotaku (games).

Gawker has always traded on sarcasm and being New York bitchy:

"we hear that Spitzer's press minder who was handling the reporters is kind of an idiot!. After Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker profile was already in edits, Spitzer's guy was asking him, "What's going to be in the piece?" That's just sad. Real political operations -- see Team Clinton -- don't have to ask, because they already know".

I'm not entirely sure if Gawker is written by people who really know (my italics) either (they say things like this, "I don’t even really want to be a writer, but I feel like I don’t have a choice. It's all I’ve ever known how to do", which you have to be well under 30 to get away with, but its mostly fun if you like your blogs served that way, and a lot of people do) and really it is easy to appear as you know on blogs, which don't generally require any critical restraint.

This is what the exhaustive n+1 piece is about, which itself followed a 6,000 word (count 'em) piece on Gawker back in October in New York Magazine (Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the Age of Insolence), which mostly wrote it off as a place of sarcastic cheap shots and gleefully predicted its demise chiefly on the basis that Gawker is nowhere near as successful as some of Denton's other blogs (Gizmodo and Kotaku).

"The past couple of years, Gawker has expanded its mission to include celebrity gossip, sacrificing some of its insider voice in the process, but on a most basic level, it remains a blog about being a writer in New York, with all the competition, envy, and self-hate that goes along with the insecurity of that position."

It wasn't exactly a watertight analysis considering that the rest of the article was spent talking about how depressed print journalists were becoming with their disappearing pages and pointing out that Gawker was racking up 10m page impressions a month, which are nice numbers and in this moment of social media frenzy don't suggest a decline anytime soon.

Morrissey takes a swing

I'm not even slightly a fan of Morrissey. I have some on my iPod, but he was never my thing, but all credit to the miserablist in chief as he fires back at the NME in his open letter published today.

He really takes no prisoners and takes the NME and its editor, Conor McNicholas, to task.

It does appear that the magazine has sensationalised the material it had. Otherwise, you would not have the writer removing his name from the story and ending up with the bizarre by-line as we reported last week ("interview Tim Jonze", "words NME").

Morrissey sets out his views quite clearly in the letter saying quite clearly that he abhors racism (well he would, but I'm sure he does).

The letter seems honest and heartfelt in parts before he really starts to take the NME (a magazine with no insides) and its writers apart. It isn't a secret that as the brand has grown the magazine has continued to diminish, which is a shame, but it’s a radio show to be, website and series of sponsored gigs (Shockwave – hey everyone needs hair gel).

I'm not entirely sure it’s one of these "things are not as good as they used to be" rants because some of it is true, but working out exactly why it is true is much harder to tell.

That or maybe it is just too soon to say that the next generation of Paul Morleys and Julie Burchills are not being nurtured at IPC towers.

But a clue is that the NME sent its "best writer" along (apparently) and he seemed to know not a lot about music (OK, David Bowie, is that the same thing)?

The letter: Morrissey condemns racism

On Friday of last week I issued writs against the NME (New Musical Express) and its editor Conor McNicholas as I believe they have deliberately tried to characterise me as a racist in a recent interview I gave them in order to boost their dwindling circulation.

I abhor racism and oppression or cruelty of any kind and will not let this pass without being absolutely clear and emphatic with regard to what my position is.

Racism is beyond common sense and I believe it has no place in our society.

To anyone who has shown or felt any interest in my music in recent times, you know my feelings on the subject and I am writing this to apologize unreservedly for granting an interview to the NME. I had no reason whatsoever to assume that they could be anything other than devious, truculent and unreliable. In the event, they have proven to be all three.

The NME have, in the past, offered me their "Godlike Genius Award" and I had politely refused. With the Tim Jonze interview, the Award was offered once again, this time with the added request that I headline their forthcoming awards concert at the O2 Arena, and once again I declined it. This is nothing personal against the NME, although the distressing article would suggest the editor took it as such. My own view is that award ceremonies in pop music are dreadful to witness and are simply a way of the industry warning the artist "see how much you need us" - and, yes, the "new" NME is very much integrated into the industry, whereas, deep in the magazine's empirical history, the New Musical Express was a propelling force that answered to no one. It led the way by the quality of its writers - Paul Morley, Julie Burchill, Paul du Noyer, Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Ian Penman, Miles - who would write more words than the articles demanded, and whose views saved some of us, and who pulled us all away from the electrifying boredom of everything and anything that represented the industry. As a consequence the chanting believers of the NME could not bear to miss a single issue; the torrential fluency of its writers left almost no space between words, and the NME became a culture in itself, whereas Melody Maker or Sounds just didn't. Into the 90s, the NME's discernment and polish became faded nobility, and there it died - but better dead than worn away. The wit imitated by the 90s understudies of Morley and Burchill assumed nastiness to be greatness, and were thus rewarded. But nastiness isn't wit and no writers from the 90s NME survive. Even with sarcasm, irony and innuendo there is an art, of sorts. Now deep in the bosom of time, it is the greatness of the NME's history on which the "new" NME assumes its relevance.

It is on the backs of writers such as Morley, Burchill, Kent and Shaar Murray that the "new" NME hitches its mule-cart, assuming equal relevance. But the stalled views of the "new" NME sag, and readers have been driven away by a magazine with no insides. The narrow cast of repeated subjects sets off the agony, a mesmerizing mess of very brief and dispassionate articles unable to make thought evolve; a marooned editor who holds the divine right to censor any views that clash with his own.

The editorial treatment given to my present interview with the "new" NME is the latest variation on an old theme, but like a pre-dawn rampage, the effects of the interview have been meticulously considered with obvious intentions. It is true that the magazine is ailing badly in the market place, but Conor doesn't understand how the relentless stream of "cheers mate, got pissed last night, ha ha" interviews that clutter every single issue of the "new" NME are simply not interesting to those of us who have no trouble standing upright. Strangely enough, my own name is the only one featured in the "new" NME that links their present with the NME's distant past, therefore a Morrissey interview is an ideal opportunity with which to play the editorial naughtiness game.

This, regrettably, is what has taken place with this most recent interview, which, it need hardly be said, bears no relation in print to the fleshly conversation that took place.

I do not mean to be rude to Tim Jonze, but when I first caught sight of him I assumed that someone had brought their child along to the interview. The runny nose told the whole story. Conor had assured that Tim was their best writer. Talking behind his hands in an endless fidget, Tim accepted every answer I gave him with a schoolgirl giggle, and repeatedly asked me if I was shocked at how little he actually knew about music. I told him that, yes, I was shocked. It was difficult for me to believe that the best writer from the "new" NME had never heard of the song 'Drive-in Saturday'; I explained that it was by David Bowie, and Tim replied "Oh, I don't know anything about David Bowie." I wondered how it could be so - how the quality of music journalism in England could have fallen so low that the prime "new" NME writer knew nothing of David Bowie, an artist to whom most relevant British artists are indebted, and one who single-handedly changed British culture - musically and otherwise.

Tim's line of questioning advanced with: "What about politics, then ... the state of the world?" - which, I was forced to assume, was a well-thought-out question. It was from here that the issue of immigration - but not racism - arose.

Me: If you walk down Knightsbridge you'll be hard-pressed to hear anyone speaking English.

Tim: I don't think that's true. You're beginning to sound like my parents.

Me: Well, when did you last walk down Knightsbridge?

Tim: Ummm....?Knightsbridge ....is that where Harrods is?

So, Tim was prepared to attack and argue the point without even being clear about where Knightsbridge actually is! The "new" NME strikes again. Oh dear, I thought, not again.

I chose to mention Knightsbridge because it had always struck me as one of the most stiffly British spots in London. I am sorry Tim, but you are not yet ready to interview anyone responsibly.

When my comments are printed in the "new" NME they are butchered, re-designed, re-ordered, chopped, snipped and split in order to make me seem racist and unreasonable. Tim had told me about his friend who did not like the 1988 song Bengali In Platforms because the friend had thought the song attacked him on a personal level. I explained to Tim that the song was not about his friend. In print, the "new" NME do not explain this, but attempt to multiply the horror of Tim's friend by attributing "these people" and "those people" quotes to me - terms I would never use, but are useful to the "new" NME in their Morrissey-is-racist campaign because these terms are only used by people who are cold and indifferent and Thatcherite. ??All of the people I spoke to Tim about in the interview who are heroes to me and who are Middle-Eastern or of other ethnic backgrounds were of no interest to either Tim or Conor. Clearly, Tim had been briefed and his agenda was to cook up a sensational story that would give life to the "new" NME as a must-read national if not global shock-horror story. Recalling how Tim asked me to sign some CD covers, I do not blame him entirely. If Conor can provoke bureaucratic outrage with this Morrissey interview, then he can whip up support for his righteous position as the morally-bound and armoured editor of his protected readership - even though, by re-modelling my interview into a multiple horror, Conor has accidentally exposed himself as deceitful, malicious, intolerant and Morrissey-ist - all the ist's and ism's that he claims to oppose. Uniquely deprived of wisdom, Conor would be repulsed by my vast collection of World Cinema films, by my adoration of James Baldwin, my love of Middle-Eastern tunings, Kazem al-Saher, Lior Ashkenazi, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and he would be repulsed to recall a quote as printed in his magazine in or around August of this year wherein I said that my ambition was to play concerts in Iran.

My heart sank as Tim Jonze let slip the tell-all editorial directive behind this interview: "It's Conor's view that Morrissey thinks black people are OK ...but he wouldn't want one living next door to him." It was then that I realized the full extent of the setup, and I felt like Bob Hoskins in the final frame of The Long Good Friday as he sits in the back of the wrong getaway car realizing the extent of the conspiratorial slime that now trapped him.

During the interview Tim asked if I would support the "Love Music Hate Racism" campaign that the NME had just written about and my immediate response was a yes as I had shown my support previously by going to one of their first benefit gigs a few years ago and had met some of their organizers as well as having signed their statement. Following the interview I asked my manager to get in touch with the NME and to pledge my further support to the campaign as I wanted there to be no ambiguity on where I stood on the subject. This was done in a clear and direct email to Conor McNicholas on the 5th of November, which went ignored and last week we found out that it had never even been presented to anyone at the campaign as that would obviously not have suited what we now know to be the NME's agenda. I am pleased to say that we have now had direct dialogue with "Love Music Hate Racism" and all of our UK tour advertising in 2008 will carry their logo and we will also be providing space in the venues for them to voice and spread their important message, which I endorse.

Who's to say what you should or shouldn't do? The IPC have appointed Conor as the editor of the "new" NME, and there he remains, ready to drag the IPC into expensive legal battles such as the one they now face with me due to Conor's personal need to misstate, misreport, misquote, misinterpret, falsify, and incite the bloodthirsty. Here is proof that the "new" NME will twist and pervert the views of any singer or musician who'd dare step into the interview ring. To such artists, I wish them well, but I would advise you to bring your lawyer along to the interview.

My own place, now and forevermore, shall not be with the "new" NME - and how wrong my face even looks on its? cover. Of this, I am eternally grateful.

MORRISSEY.

3 December 2007.
 

Naked guy from 180 runs through Amsterdam

I'm not sure why anyone would want to read this, but there is a picture…

Oh come on, it's for charity. Mark Schermers, account director on 180 Amsterdam's Adidas account did a naked run through the city on Friday. It is crazy stuff. I would give you money for charity, but run naked, at the end of November? You're in sane.

He did it in a bid to raise awareness and money for testicular cancer, sponsored by colleagues and clients. Unbeknownst to the agency (it gets worse, for Schermers at least) the event was filmed by a Dutch TV station (what is it with those crazy Dutch and their naked thing?) and was on the news last night.

The whole thing took place in full view of the mayor of Amsterdam. Lucky guy.