It seems funny to me that after reading how Facebook is rapidly catching up to MySpace in the UK, more than 70% of businesses in Britain are now threatening to sack employees found accessing the site. That's despite a recent survey showing that two thirds of professionals are using these sites for business networking, Apparently, 55% of business users go online to network with others in similar businesses, and 49% do so to seek answers to professional problems.
With the increasing use of Facebook, LinkedIn and others as a place to build business connections, this seems to me like a case of employers burying their head in the sand, or shoving it up their arse! Take your pick.
As for LinkedIn, compared to the superior functionality and interface of Facebook, it's a bit of a joke. More like a MySpace for business losers who merely want to see how many links they can put up. They were probably all "Train Spotters" when they were kids. Whenever I get an email invitation from someone who wants to link to me, I delete it.
no comments
The well publicized saga of the "Wizened of Oz's" pursuit of the Wall Street Journal continues. Members of the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for a century, had a 5 p.m. deadline today to tell the family's lead trustee how they would vote on Murdoch's $5 billion offer to buy the company.
So far (7.00 PM Eastern time, Monday) no word. A News Corp. spokesman said the company was "highly unlikely" to go ahead with the deal if the level of support among the Bancroft's remained at a mere 28 percent of the shareholder vote, which The Wall Street Journal reported was the level of commitment from the family as of Sunday.
I can just imagine "The Wizard" in his Antipodean dugout threatening dire retribution to those members of the family who would dare to consider the maintenance of journalist standards to be more important than dumpster loads of filthy lucre. What the hell is the newspaper industry coming to. Signing off as your News Corporation "Fair and Balanced" reporter... Stay tuned for updates.
3 comment(s)
After the perennial optimists on Wall Street or in the City of London, who never fail to spin gold out of dross with their "minor market corrections' or "buying opportunities," no one talks more shit than Big Dumb Agency management when they're trying to avoid talking about how dismally their agency is performing.
I've written about this on AdScam with particular emphasis of late on Draft/FCB, who continue to put out lame videos and memos reassuring staff that everything is going great, even as they are laying off hundreds of employees. So, no surprise last week to hear Maurice Levy shouting about future "organic growth" for Publicis while playing down numerous account losses (including some non-specified pharmaceutical stuff, which is the current BDA milch cow,) and flat revenues over the last year.
Perhaps he can persuade Kevin Roberts over at Saatchi & Saatchi to do some "Lovemarking" on the struggling flagship. J'taime Maurice!
Seems like Vice President Dick Cheney's brand new iPhone battery has already run out. Unlike the millions of people who have already shelled out $600 dollars for an iPhone chest implant, which when the battery runs out will require them to buy a new iPhone, the VP's model came with a personal guarantee from Steve Jobs that he could have an instant, implant battery replacement.
Cheney, 66, has a history of heart problems. He has had four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, two artery-clearing angioplasties and an operation to implant the defibrillator. In March, doctors discovered that he had a deep venous thrombosis in his left lower leg. After an ultrasound in late April, doctors said the clot was slowly getting smaller. In 2005, Cheney had six hours of surgery on his legs to repair a kind of aneurysm, a ballooning weak spot in an artery that can burst if left untreated.
Apart from these minor irritations, he's in great shape and as surly as ever. When asked to comment on this upcoming procedure, he claimed executive privilege, adding... "F**k you!"
You have to hand it to Apple. On a day when the New York Stock Exchange is doing a "Das Boot, and sinking faster than Bush's approval ratings, and Wall Street analysts are starting to wonder whether buying that Lamborgini for juniors High School graduation was a good idea, Apple is up about eight dollars on the day. Of course, everything I own is screwed.
On Wednesday, Apple posted a 73% increase on earnings. And don't forget, this does not include the iPhone at this early stage of its launch. No, it's thanks to strong sales on iPods... And Macs! Yeah, which means there are more people out there buying them than just Apple crazed art directors and designers.
I've always said, after working on the account for many years... Steve Jobs is a genius... Albeit, a very twisted, very weird, very egomaniacal genius... But, any way you look at it... A genius!
It's official, Second Life is dead as a Dodo. The virtual world which a lot of people hyped as the Holy Grail of online advertising as consumers increasingly adopted massively multiplayer online gaming, is rapidly going down the tubes.
Fascinated by Second Life's commercial potential, marketers, news publishers, even interactive ad shops bought the hype. And, if you wander through Linden Lab's virtual world, you can still see virtual replicas of Pontiac's cars, American Apparel stores, an NBA theme park or a Reuters news bureau. But, as Michael Donnelly, Coca-Cola's worldwide head of interactive marketing says, you can also find yourself feeling totally alone. On a recent trip through Second Life to explore branding opportunities, Donnelly noticed, "There was nobody else around."
But he spent money anyway, creating a "Virtual Thirst Pavilion" for Coke. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those "unique" marketing opportunities presented by Second Life have failed to meet the hype. Marketers moved into Second Life because it created something tangible for them to control, unlike user-generated content sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.
They assumed Second Life would be a world where they could create marketing campaigns similar to those produced offline. Unfortunately, the numbers no longer support their initial enthusiasm: In June, there were 4 million Second Life avatars created. (Mostly with big knockers and huge John Henry's - But not on the same avatars, I hasten to add!) Of those, about 1 million had logged on in the last month. In all, about 100,000 Americans enter Second Life per week. To be honest with you, I always believed it was one of the world's dumbest ideas, and have said so repeatedly on my various blogs. So, perhaps now, marketers will come back to reality and get on with their First Life.
As is usual in US Presidential political races, the contenders always jump on the easy shit which appeals to the vast majority of Americans who refuse to think about anything that goes on in the rest of the world, even if it includes having their next door neighbor blown away in Baghdad because the current office holder is as daft as a brush.
In common with all the other politicos on the election trail, presidential hopeful "Mitt" Romney is going for one of the knee jerk issues by taking aim at video games with the avowed purpose of keeping America's kids safe. Topping the Republican candidate's list of issues to fix when he to takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., (Mmmm, wonder what the current odds are on that?) are, of course, freedom-hating terrorists and online sexual deviants. But right up there alongside these on Romney's to-do list is his desire to "clean up the waters" with respect to violent games.
Speaking last week, Romney pledged to strike at the heart of the problem facing today's youth. "I've proposed that we enforce our obscenity laws again and that we get serious against those retailers that sell adult video games that are filled with violence, that we go after those retailers." According to Romney's official platform, "there must be strong punishments and fines for retailers that sell violent and sexually explicit video games to minors."
I wonder how the "wannabe" president feels about the teenagers currently losing their lives in the real war games of Iraq and Afghanistan right now? Wouldn't his time be better spent putting a stop to this criminal waste of real lives, rather than the fake stuff that happens on a computer screen? Just think, we have another eighteen months of this shit to put up with. Then after the inauguration... I'll start all over again leading up to 2012. It never stops!
When "The Wizened of Oz" (Rupert Murdoch) finally gets his gnarly old hands on the Wall Street Journal... And he will... 'Cos what the Wizard wants, the Wizard gets - Everyone assumes he'll do a Sun and stick naked birds with big knockers on page three, and procede to make the editorial content even more conservative than it is right now. Which is well nigh impossible if you've ever read the close to fascist content of the back of the paper.
Anyway, the one thing he can't look forward to is the continuing dumper loads of ad revenues from IBM. 'Cos whereas when I used to work on it for Ogilvy a few years ago, it was the number one advertiser in the WSJ, it has now, according to AdAge, dropped to number nine. In fact I've noticed a continuing decline in technology advertising in the Journal and just about every other general business publication over the last few years.
The ad biz should thank God for all the consulting, financial services, cars and watch companies that seem happy to run the same ad featuring Tiger Woods in every single issue of every single business publication. I suppose if we didn't have a Tiger Woods, we'd have to invent him!
Remember when you were a kid and you weren't allowed to look at National Geographic 'cos it had pictures of primitive tribes who often had the bloody nerve to encourage their ladies to walk around without whalebone corsets? Well, now it would seem that Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have been using them to explore pornographic Web sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported last week.
NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on many of the children's laptops. "Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone a bit "tits up" as the pupils seem able to freely browse adult sites containing explicit sexual materials, all of which expose lots and lots of naughty bits" NAN said.
A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters. But even so, they will still have to be fitted with an anti-smoking health warning.
As advertising worldwide is becoming ubiquitous, to the point where you just cannot escape it, at the same time its overall effectiveness is going down. News here in the US today that NBC Universal has steadily been expanding into the out-of-home market, partnering with a number of providers to sell ads and/or provide content on various non-traditional networks, makes me wonder just who the hell is going to buy into this?
Most recently, NBC has reached an agreement with an In-Store video operation in which NBC will sell package deals, bundling time on its network with space on Supermarket Checkout TV. All I know is that my local supermarket has these screens all over the the bloody place, plugging everything from dog food to nappies. And in all the years I've been going there, I've never seen anyone in the store take a blind bit of notice. Supermarket Checkout TV has a presence in more than 1,000 stores, including two of the biggest chains in America, Shop Rite and Albertson's, and NBC is saying the deal will yield 45 million impressions a year. Which we all know is a pile of crap. 'Cos impressions mean nothing.
That's just shoppers walking by. What I want to know is how many are actually persuaded to buy something by the cheesy videos they studiously avoid? That, I am guessing would be a very hard number to prove to a prospective media buyer. But what the hell do I know, I'm just a writer... I think!
So, I've been writing this blog now for about six months. But I'm not sure if anyone is reading it. I get virtually no comments. At first I thought, well maybe none of the other BrandRepublic blogs get comments. So I checked, and they get bloody tons. On my main US blog, "AdScam" I get an average of 3,000 hits a day and dozens of comments, sometimes up to 50 a day.
I admit I swear and curse a lot on "AdScam" and take the piss out of a lot of BDA wankers. But that's strictly my own private domain, and I understand Haymarket Press, as a public entity, cannot allow me to do that.
So, what can the reason be... Perhaps, if anyone out there who happens to have stumbled on "MadScam" could offer an explanation, I would be delighted to hear it. That would of course require you to post a comment, which would delight me even more. If you wanted to send me into a paroxysm of ecstasy, you could also buy a copy of "MadScam" over on Amazon. Cheers/George
8 comment(s)
News on the US beverage scene is that the world's biggest brewer of beer, Anheuser-Busch is getting into the bottled water game. Which smacks of redundancy to me, as most of the beer it brews tastes like water anyway. The maker of some of the most pathetic beers on the face of the planet, announced today it would become the master distributor for Icelandic Glacial super-premium natural spring water in the U.S. A-B will take a 20% ownership in Icelandic Glacial, which sources its water from the Olfus Spring in Southwest Iceland.
Which reminds me of a scheme a few years ago, when some idiot came up with the idea of towing icebergs down from the Arctic, then melting and bottling them when they got to California. The whole thing fell through when someone pointed out that by the time they got to LA, you could probably fit what was left in a single bottle.
Anyway, most bottled water is a giant scam, having been filled from sewer pipes in Newark, New Jersey in the US, or the Manchester Ship Canal in the UK. Still, advertising it keeps layabouts like us off the streets!
2 comment(s)
One of the first things you learn when you blog, is that you can't bullshit your readers. They can smell a rat, even when it's disguised as a dead fish... Or something like that!
Which is why I'm not surprised to read that John Mackey, the weirdly eccentric chief executive of the worlds most expensive grocery chain Whole Foods Market, (which has just opened a Millennium Dome sized one in Kensington, selling strawberries at $10 each.) Has been exposed, by the Wall Street Journal for posting comments on Yahoo Finance message boards unashamedly cheerleading himself and his company, not to mention bashing competitor Wild Oats.
And he's been doing this for eight years, which is plenty of time for him to have possibly boosted Whole Foods' stock price and drive down Wild Oats' enough so that his company could take it over, in a deal that's now drawing scrutiny from the government. Illegal? Who knows. Arrogant, narcissistic, foolish, and compulsive? Absolutely! Mackey's cheerleading, under the moniker "Rahodeb," for Whole Foods was unconstrained, guaranteeing amongst other things that the company would soon be an $800 a share sock, when in fact it fell nearly 50%.
He also liked to post about himself with such gems as... "I like Mackey's haircut. I think he looks cute!" And... "While I'm not a 'Mackey groupie, I do admire what the man has accomplished." Wow... Just goes to prove, all those healthy vegs' without sufficient alcohol, can turn you into a weirdo!
I'm a big fan of Internet radio. I listen to it all the time when I'm working, usually with headphones on so I can't hear my wife when she yells at me to take the bins out or something... Shades of Mrs B!
Anyway, the good news at the end of last week was that on the eve of a royalty rate hike for Internet radio firms, the US music industry bowed to political pressure and offered to drop its demand. The move, announced late Thursday, came less than three days before the rate hike was scheduled to go into effect. The hike would have increased some web broadcasters’ royalty payments by as much as 1,200 percent!!!
Which would obviously have put many of the smaller firms out of business, not to mention making fees on some of the paid services go through the roof. Instead these Internet radio firms appealed to US government legislators who in turn asked the music industry to hold off on imposing rate increases. At least the self serving, mealy mouthed scumbags, finally did something right!
I'm sure it's been all over the English tabloids by now, but the continuing attention to the Obama Girl video where a chick with excessively large boobs has an on-screen orgasm while singing the praises of Barrak Obama, is now being followed up with a classy bit of semi-porn entitled Obama Girls vs. Giuliani Girl, soon to be released. In the video, the famed Obama Girl, aka Amber Lee Ettinger, and her posse of bootie shakin' hotties will take on a posse of bootie shakin' hotties known as the Giuliani Girls. So, there will be a huge excess of bootie shaken' going on.
As Steve Hall says on AdRants... This, my friends, is what's become of American politics. Bootylicious asses and big boobs are the new determining factor in the selection of America's next President. Not to forget money... 'Cos at the end of the day, it's all about money. Network TV when reporting on the Presidential campaign... Which still has nearly a year and a half agonizing months to run, virtually never talks about the issues, concentrating instead on how much money the candidates have raised.
John McCain will probably drop out soon as he's only raised $20 million this year. That's right, $20 million doesn't even get you a chance to run for your parties nomination. For the actual Presidential race, you need close to A BILLION!
George Parker
Blogging for:
Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 05 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 829
