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Cell phone jamming

Next time some loudmouth on the bus starts yapping on his cell phone, it's nice to know you have a few options, aside from joining the conversation or resorting to violence. Commercial cell phone jammers -- which range in price from $250 to $2,000 -- temporarily disable nearby cell phones .  Neat, huh? Reminds me of the brilliant TV B-Gone device, which is designed to turn off televisions in airports and other public places. Now if only someone could create a push-button device to get rid of gigantic billboards.

Keep TV Free?

Gee, who would have thought that some of the same suits who are now trying to dictate what you can watch and record on television once urged Americans to "Keep TV Free"? Well, here's a PSA from the late 1960s Hollywood that does just that.

In 1967, when one of the first pay TV services was preparing to launch in California, Hollywood and the networks helped defeat the service because they didn't want the competition. Theater owners organized a KEEP TV FREE campaign, with PSAs like this one running in movie houses before feature films.

Though this particular campaign was limited to California, the advertising industry and television networks have long argued a similar case. When Vance Packard, Ralph Nader, Peggy Charren, and other critics attacked advertising in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s (respectively), defenders of industry often cited a common refrain: "advertising provides free news and entertainment."

In other words, the major networks (in conjunction with the ad industry) have promoted the idea that television is free for decades. Now that viewers have taken their word for it by recording and sharing TV shows freely, the industry has only itself to blame.

DOWNLOAD VIDEO

• BitTorrent version* - right-click and save the torrent to your hard drive, then open it. You can download BitTorrent software here.
  
• Quicktime version - please use BitTorrent if possible to save bandwidth

Thanks to Russell Scholl for the video, which he  screened at one of his excellent Barbes shows.

* Courtesy of Downhill Battle's BlogTorrent software.

Great Moments In Journalism History, Vol. 1

Last Sunday's NYT Business section, featured a 3,000 word story about how McDonald's move towards healthier fare has suddenly made them the largest purchaser of apples in the country. McDonald's Apple Dippers are going to "take the place of French Fries in some child's Happy Meal" and "answer many of its critics who contend that most of its menu is of poor nutritional quality."

Apple Dippers? They are dipped in yogurt, right? Twenty-four paragraphs (and eight pages) later, on the heels of a McDonald's lackey bragging about how salads have improved McDonald's image, we are finally told:

Apple Dippers, which come with a caramel dipping sauce and are offered either as a part of a Happy Meal or sold separately for $1 ... have also given McDonald's customers some alternatives to burgers, chicken nuggets and fried potatoes.

The alternative is caramel??? But don't blame McDonald's. They wanted to do the right thing, but it is the evil, evil customer that forced them to include caramel:

[Lackey 2] was among those who wanted to sell apple slices without the sugary dipping sauce. But because McDonald's insists that all new products get a clear thumbs-up from more than 70% of its test customers, dipless apples did not make the cut.

In paragraph 47, after a nine-paragraph tongue bath in which McDonald's is praised for using expensive vegetables (only for appearance), preservative-free salad dressing (to leverage the Newman's Own brand credibility) and ceding authority to a supplier (same), does the author quote a nutritionist:

... the Apple Dipper caramel sauce, which is packaged separately, has nine grams of sugar, one-quarter of the total recommended daily limit under new guidelines of Department of Agriculture.

Lackey 2 also suggested that McDonald's may introduce bags of baby carrots. I'll bet they taste great with nacho cheese.

You Want Any Fruit With That Big Mac?
by Melanie Warner
New York Times, 2/20/2005, sec. 3, p.1

Each day, 50,000 shiny, fire-engine-red Gala apples work their way through a sprawling factory in Swedesboro, N.J. Inside, 26 machines wash them, core them, peel them, seed them, slice them and chill them. At the end of the line, they are dunked in a solution of calcium ascorbate and then deposited into little green bags featuring a jogging Ronald McDonald.

From there, the bags make their way in refrigerated trucks to refrigerated containers in cavernous distribution centers, and then to thousands of McDonald's restaurants up and down the Eastern Seaboard. No more than 14 days after leaving the plant, the fruit will take the place of French fries in some child's Happy Meal.

The apple slices, called Apple Dippers, are a symbol of how McDonald's is trying to offer healthier food to its customers - and to answer the many critics who contend that most of its menu is of poor nutritional quality. McDonald's has also introduced "premium" salads, in Caesar, California Cobb and Bacon Ranch varieties, a lineup that will soon be joined by a salad of grapes, walnuts - and, of course, apples.

It remains to be seen whether these new offerings will assuage the concerns of public health officials and other critics of McDonald's highly processed fat- and calorie-laden sandwiches, drinks and fries. So far, they have not - at least not entirely. But this much is already clear: Just as its staple burger-and-fries meals have made McDonald's the largest single buyer of beef and potatoes in the country, its new focus on fresh fruits and vegetables is making the company a major player in the $80 billion American produce industry.

The potential impact goes beyond dollars and cents. Some people believe that McDonald's could influence not only the volume, variety and prices of fruit and produce in the nation but also how they are grown.

The company now buys more fresh apples than any other restaurant or food service operation, by far. This year, it expects to buy 54 million pounds of fresh apples - about 135 million individual pieces of fruit. That is up from zero apples just two years ago. (This does not include fruit used to make juice and pies, which use a different quality of apple.)

And it is not just apples: McDonald's is also among the top five food-service buyers of grape tomatoes and spring mix lettuce - a combination of greens like arugula, radicchio and frisée. The boom has been so big and so fast that growers of other produce, like carrots and oranges, are scrambling for a piece of the action.

OF course, other fast-food chains have similar salads and fruit choices on their menus, but they have not had a comparable influence on the market because of their smaller size. Burger King, for example, has 7,600 restaurants in the United States, while Wendy's has 5,900 and Arby's has 3,300. McDonald's has 13,700.

While salads have been offered at McDonald's in some form or another since the late 1980's, this is the first time they have been big sellers. And Apple Dippers are the first fruit the chain has sold that did not reside between two layers of pie crust.

Missa Bay, the company that runs the Swedesboro plant - one of six McDonald's apple slicing facilities around the country - could not be happier about that.

"McDonald's is really pioneering the concept of ready-to-eat sliced apples," said Sal Tedesco, the chief operating officer of Missa Bay, which built the new production line specifically to process apple slices for McDonald's.

In a few months, Missa Bay, owned by Ready Pac Produce of Irwindale, Calif., will also be supplying roughly one-quarter of the 13,700 restaurants with sliced green apples for the new fruit salad, which is scheduled to be introduced in May. Mr. Tedesco said that these two items would increase Missa Bay's revenue by at least 10 percent this year.

With those kinds of numbers comes power. Just as the enormous size of McDonald's once helped the company turn the nation's beef, chicken and potato industries into highly mechanized, consistent, efficient and low-cost businesses, McDonald's is using its purchasing decisions to build a reliable supply of fresh fruits and vegetables that meet its exacting specifications.

At the U.S. Apple Association's annual marketing conference in Chicago last summer, Mitch Smith, the McDonald's director of quality systems in the United States, told a crowd of growers, many from the big apple-producing states of Washington and New York, that if they wanted to work with McDonald's, they should grow more Cameo and Pink Lady apples. Historically, growers have produced relatively few apples of these varieties, but McDonald's likes them for their crispness and flavor.

Already, Cameo production in Washington State is up 58 percent in the current crop year from a year earlier, according to the Yakima Valley Growers-Shippers Association.

Eventually, a bigger supply of certain varieties will drive prices down, which will be good for McDonald's. But right now, the company's huge presence in the market is keeping prices high. James R. Cranney Jr., vice president of the apple association, said that McDonald's was one of the reasons that apple prices had not declined this year, despite favorable growing conditions that produced an abundant crop. "When you've got such a big buyer like that it's going to keep the prices from falling," Mr. Cranney said.

If the new power that McDonald's exerts over the produce industry ends up reducing prices and squeezing margins, he said, it would be a trade-off that many growers and processors seem willing to accept. "Apple consumption has been flat over the past 10 to 15 years," he said. "This is exactly what the apple industry needs because we think it's going to increase consumption."

J. M. Procacci, chief operating officer of the Procacci Brothers Sales Corporation in Cedarville, N.J., said sales of grape tomatoes, climbing for the past five years, had received a particular boost from their inclusion in the McDonald's premium salads. Since early 2003, grape tomato sales in the United States have risen 25 percent; he attributes a significant part of the gain to McDonald's.

For decades, of course, McDonald's has been buying produce like iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and onions for its hamburgers and other sandwiches. But the premium salads - unlike their poor-selling predecessors, the Shaker salads that came in plastic cups - are an entree and have found a considerable following.

Michael Donahue, the McDonald's vice president for communication and customer satisfaction, said the salads now on the company's menu were among the most successful introductions in the last 10 years. While the double cheeseburger is still the most beloved single item - 1.5 billion of them are ordered every year in the United States - Mr. Donahue said the company has sold more than 300 million of the premium salads since their introduction in March 2003.

At $4 a salad, that translates to roughly $600 million a year, or 10 percent of domestic revenue for McDonald's last year. "The salads have definitely been a driver for McDonald's sales in the U.S.," said John Glass, an analyst at CIBC.

Mr. Donahue conceded that the Shaker salads "did not resonate with customers" in part because customers did not like the idea of eating salad from a plastic cup. The company sold about 170 million of them in the 18 months they were on sale.

At the McDonald's corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., the excitement over the new salads has as much to do with public opinion as rising sales. Five months before the salads were introduced, the company had to contend with a debate over what role it has played in the nation's expanding waistlines after two overweight, burger-loving New York teenagers filed a lawsuit accusing McDonald's of making them fat. A judge dismissed the case, but a federal appeals court last month overruled that decision, allowing the suit to proceed. Many had already come to see McDonald's as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the American food supply.

"Salads have changed the way people think of our brand," said Wade Thoma, vice president for menu management in the United States. "It tells people that we are very serious about offering things people feel comfortable eating."

Apple Dippers, which come with caramel dipping sauce and are offered either as part of a Happy Meal or sold separately for $1, do not have the same blockbuster status as the salads. But they have also given McDonald's customers some alternatives to burgers, chicken nuggets and fried potatoes. Mr. Thoma said the salads help explain why the company is serving one million more Americans now than it was a year ago. Many of these customers, he said, are mothers who feel better about giving their children Happy Meals if they come with fruit rather than fries.

McDonald's executives say they hope to put even more fresh fruits and vegetables on the menu. "We're always thinking about this," said Mark Lepine, the director of food innovation and development. "We're looking at whether we can leverage the Apple Dipper concept for carrots."

That is music to the ears of Grimmway Farms, the country's largest producer of carrots. "We think snack packs of baby carrots really make sense for the fast-food environment," said Lisa McNeese, vice president for food service sales. "Today we're growing sweeter varieties and improving flavor."

The potential payoff from suddenly moving a product into 13,700 restaurants is so big that the orange industry is kicking itself for not being better positioned for the fast-food market. Oranges are not sold at McDonald's or the other big chains, with the exception of canned mandarin oranges at Wendy's. "We've got to pool our resources and do a better job of processing oranges in an economical fashion," said Joel Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual, a trade association of citrus growers.

Mr. Lepine says he gets frequent calls from fruit and vegetable growers, industry associations and processors wanting to enlighten him on the attributes of their products and to offer him taste tests. At times, he says, his desk is stacked with bags of lettuce and stalks of broccoli.

BUT there are limits to what Mr. Lepine and his team can do. "There has to be a willingness on the part of the customer to buy these products," said Mr. Lepine, who has been working on menus at McDonald's for seven years. "We only sell things that people want to buy."

For instance, McDonald's does not want to sell something that people may have readily available at home. It learned that lesson from the disappointment of Go-Gurt, a squeezable tube of fruit yogurt that McDonald's sold in a deal with Go-Gurt's manufacturer, General Mills. Despite Go-Gurt's popularity in supermarkets, it didn't sell well at McDonald's and was pulled within a year. "Kids think of McDonald's as a treat, and it's not a treat if you have it at home," said Vicki Spiller, the director of new product purchasing.

McDonald's also faces the problem of trying to satisfy contradictory consumer demands. Maura Havenga, senior vice president for supply chain management in the United States, said that a lot of McDonald's customers say in focus groups that they want healthy food, but less than 10 percent actually buy the salads. "Everyone says they want a veggie burger, but we sell about two or three a day in stores that sell still them," she said.

For that reason, McDonald's is cautious in introducing products, especially nontraditional ones like sliced apples. Mr. Lepine's team took three years just to get the internal approval to move ahead with consumer testing on the Apple Dippers. It took an additional year to complete the required four stages of focus group research.

Mr. Lepine was among those who wanted to sell apple slices without the sugary dipping sauce. But because McDonald's insists that all new products get a clear thumbs-up from more than 70 percent of its test customers, dipless apples did not make the cut.

"The cost of failure is extreme," Ms. Spiller explained. "We have 26 million customers we serve every day in the U.S., and we've got to make sure we get it right."

It helps if healthy food looks nice, too. The premium salads were designed, in part, for aesthetic appeal. Cheap and reliable iceberg and romaine account for 90 percent of the lettuce in the salad; the 10 percent smattering of spring mix is intended to make the salads more attractive to the eye as well as the palate.

The carrots in the salads, for example, are sliced so thin that customers are lucky if they end up eating one-quarter of a small carrot, but the delicate slices don't fall to a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. "Women look at the salads and say, 'It's beautiful,' " said Ms. Spiller, proudly. About 80 percent of salad buyers at McDonald's are women, she added.

Healthier fare does not come cheap, for McDonald's or its customers. Fruits and vegetables are much more expensive and complicated to ship and store than meat and potatoes. Unlike meat patties, chicken breasts, French fries and other items on the McDonald's menu, salads and fruit cannot be frozen and stored for a month in distribution centers. Shipments of Apple Dippers and salad components leave McDonald's warehouses several times a week, which is part of the reason salads cost $4 and everything else can be had for less than $3.

The care required for perishable food also raises the costs. Spring mix is much more delicate than iceberg and romaine lettuce and is twice as expensive, said Bill Zinke, vice president for marketing at Ready Pac, which supplies McDonald's with all three kinds. "It's almost like you have to protect every leaf," he said.

Similarly, grape tomatoes, which dot the lettuce on McDonald's salads, are more than double the price of plum or standard tomatoes.

Despite the fragility of the salads and fruit, McDonald's says it does not use any artificial preservatives or additives to keep them fresh longer. The calcium ascorbate in the Apple Dippers is not much different from the orange or lemon juice that many people pour on their homemade fruit salad to keep it from browning.

At Ready Pac's plant in Irwindale, Calif., oxygen is sucked out of the large lettuce packing bags and replaced with nitrogen, an inert gas. This is the same process used on bags of lettuce sold in supermarkets, and, as a result, the McDonald's supply of spring mix lasts about the same as they do: 14 days. Because of that, said Mr. Smith, the McDonald's executive, "we have to have a very tight-knit distribution network."

PRESERVATIVES were a big issue for Newman's Own, which is responsible for supplying dressing for the salads. When McDonald's first approached the company in early 2002, Paul Newman, the actor who is its chief executive, made it clear that the arrangement would have to be on his terms. One condition was that the company would not use artificial preservatives.

"When we told them we wouldn't do salad dressings with preservatives, they were a little scared," recalled Tom Indoe, the chief operating officer at Newman's Own. "We taught them they really didn't need them." He added that McDonald's was eager to work with Newman's because of the company's all-natural products and reputation for corporate responsibility.

Despite his initial reservations about working with McDonald's, Mr. Newman went ahead because sales to a customer of McDonald's size could improve his company's bottom line - and therefore increase the amount it gives to charity. Newman's Own contributes all its profits to charity; working with McDonald's has increased that amount by more than $3 million a year.

As part of the three-year deal, though, Mr. Newman has approval over all advertisements and promotions that feature the premium salads. That represents an unusual concession for a company like McDonald's, which is accustomed to calling the shots. So far, nothing has been rejected, Mr. Indoe said.

Some critics bristle at the notion that McDonald's has somehow become healthier simply because it uses natural dressings and sells salads and some fruit. "Nearly all the entree choices at McDonald's - as well as Burger King and Wendy's - are still all of poor nutritional value," said Margo Wootan, director of nutritional policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food activist group. "I applaud them for making those changes, but there's still a lot more that needs to be done."

Ms. Wootan also points out that the Apple Dipper caramel sauce, which is packaged separately, has nine grams of sugar, one-quarter of the total recommended daily limit under new guidelines of the Department of Agriculture.

Other advocacy groups said that they were hopeful that McDonald's would one day use its power not only to get better prices and greater supply, but also to change the way the produce industry operates - for the better. Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, an advocacy group based in Little Marais, Minn., said he would like to see McDonald's buy some organic products, which he believes are more healthful for consumers.

In a 2003 report on pesticides in produce, the Environmental Working Group, a public-policy outfit based in Washington, ranked apples as the third-most-contaminated produce group, after peaches and strawberries, in terms of pesticide residue. The findings were based on tests done by the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration from 1992 to 2001.

"McDonald's could have a huge impact," Mr. Cummins said. "They could be the company that changes agriculture toward a more organic and sustainable model." It may sound far-fetched, but from a company that's come a long way from the days of selling mainly hamburgers and fries, anything is possible.

Billboards Are For Underwear Models and Vincent Gallo

Though that airplane hauling around the ABC advertisement was plenty aggravating, at least we know someone paid dearly for it. This little piece of iconography, spotted at Myrtle and Washington in Clinton Hill, probably cost about $35. We've got no problem when cash-strapped local businesses use public property to hawk their wares, but why is a mammoth soda czar making like the holder of a garage sale? We've heard rumblings about the Bloomberg administration pimping out city infrastructure to various magnates; could this humble Brooklyn light pole be the start of the franchising bonanza?

Still no class

The Republicans in Congress, continuing their crusade to protect the little man by the self-evidently more expedient measure of protecting large corporations, have passed a bill removing jurisdiction over class action suits from state courts. President Bush eagerly  signed it into law last Friday. In the Orwellian bill-naming tradition that brought us the civil-rights infringing "Patriot Act" and the standards-loosening "Clean Water Act" comes the proposed "Class Action Fairness Act of 2005."

CAFA is yet another shiv in the public ribs under the heading "tort reform." The motivation behind tort reform is so anti-democratic, so designed to permit the worst business excesses, that any minor improvements are overwhelmed by the underlying corporate welfare.

To give credit where it is due, CAFA goes a long way to eliminate "coupon settlements." Under the old regime, class plaintiffs in a coupon settlement would receive nothing but a coupon to buy more goods from the company that screwed them the first time around. Coupon settlements are more like promotions for the settling defendants than actual settlements. In one notorious case against a number of cruise lines, the lawyers proposed a settlement that would give each class member a $50 coupon toward a cruise; however, the lawyers calculated their fees as a percentage of the award as if the coupons were cash. The judge was so incensed at the attorneys for selling out the class in such a way that he converted most of the attorneys' fees into similar coupons. So good for CAFA for getting rid of this nonsense.

The second feature (not a bug!) of CAFA makes it virtually impossible to bring a class action in state court. Corporations hate the pre-CAFA system because they say greedy plaintiffs' lawyers bring suits in "jackpot justice" counties with dimwitted judges and benefit far more than the class members do from the settlements. It isn't that the well-known plaintiff's havens like Madison County, Illinois or Jefferson County, Texas are representative of the country; they are not. It isn't that federal judges aren't typically more talented jurists than their state-court counterparts; they are. It isn't that trial lawyers don't benefit more from the suits than the plaintiff's; they do. It is that all of these things make class actions useful.

Even when a class action results in $20 million for the lawyers and five cents for each of 100,000 plaintiffs, the defendant has to pay twenty million bucks. It is easy for companies to steal five cents at a time from a lot of people if there is no reason for anyone to try and stop them. ("How do we make money? Volume.") Large counsel fees are part of the solution, not part of the problem. (And they typically aren't out of line anyway.) "Plaintiff's counties" make this benefit even more real by forcing would-be corporate thieves to watch their backs. Taking them out of the class action system is a thumb in the eye of juries, plaintiffs' rights and federalism. (Who is surprised that federalism takes a back seat when the oxen of the rich are being gored?)

Maybe federalizing class actions won't hurt this system, but a lot of people who want to swipe a nickel from you when you aren't looking sure think it will.

Proposed law on movie theater ads

Fire up for New York City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who has introduced legislation that would require movie theaters to specify when movies actually start, not when the ads start. If passed, theaters that don't provide actual start times could face fines of $500 to $1,000 for each infraction.

(Via Commercial Alert)

Coming distractions
By David Saltonstall
From New York Daily News

It's the latest horror at the movies: endless ads for everything from ladies' underwear to perfume to soda.

But a new City Council bill aims to set moviegoers free with a different kind of advertising - movie listings that reflect when movies actually begin, not the ads and previews before.

"We can't outlaw advertising," said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), author of the bill. "But at least we can tell the industry that they have to be honest about when their movies start, not their ads."

She shouldn't have much trouble finding support among the city's film buffs, many of whom say they feel entrapped not by previews - which many like - but by the growing number of TV-like commercials that now precede most flicks.

"I didn't pay to see the ads," said Lorraine Lew, 33, a dietician from Queens, as she headed to the movies yesterday. "I paid to see the movies and the previews."

At one recent showing of the sleeper hit "Sideways" at the Loews 34th St. in Manhattan, for instance, seven ads - for everything from Coke to the Jamaica Tourist Board - competed with five previews. The result? The movie started 16 minutes after its advertised time.

If passed, Brewer's bill would require theaters to advertise the "actual start time" of any movie, not when ads and previews begin. Any theater that doesn't comply could face fines of $500 to $1,000 for each infraction.

Not surprisingly, the city's larger theater chains are giving two thumbs down to the idea, saying moviegoers know to expect "pre-feature content" at any movie.

"We believe that the public understands that the feature film starts sometime after the published showtime," said a statement from Loews Cineplex, which has 15 theaters in the five boroughs.

Some of the city's smaller, independent theaters don't have to be forced into providing truth in advertising. At the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn, for instance, movies start when advertised, and there are never any ads mixed among the previews. "We have to respect people's time," said theater manager Efi Shahar.

If passed, Brewer's bill would be a first in the nation.

"In the scheme of things, it isn't life or death," said Brewer. "But people shouldn't feel used after going to the movies."

Queens developer drops plan for NYC Wal-Mart

From The New York Tiimes: Facing intense opposition, a large real estate developer has dropped its plans to include a Wal-Mart store in a Queens shopping complex, thwarting Wal-Mart's plan to open its first store in New York City, city officials and real estate executives said yesterday.

(Via  WalMartFreeNYC; see also The Box Tank)

ABC-TV ad covers the Gowanus sky

Reader Ted Houghton writes: I was just looking out the window, holding my newborn and enjoying one of baby's first sunsets over the Gowanus expressway, when I noticed a dark blotch in the sky. On closer inspection, it was a giant floating billboard being towed by a helicopter advertising an ABC-TV program.  It was gigantic -- you had to wonder how the helicopter got it off the ground.
 
The size of the thing slowed the helicopter to a crawl, better to catch the eye of the tens of thousands of commuters parked on the Gowanus during rush hour.  Being so stationary, it was as if a 40-story billboard had been hoisted smack dab in the middle of my golden hour.
 
Though it is desperately post-industrial, the landscape that complements our Brooklyn sunsets is decidedly beautiful.  I even like the way the red sun shines through the latticwork of the old Kentile K sign. But this was just a blotch. Four of them together would block out a big portion of evening sky.

In conservative methodology, they would constitute a "taking" of my sunset (ah, but, sir, you do not own the sunset, so there is no loss to you, I can hear the lawyers now...).

Maybe this was the one-time only brainchild of some 23 year-old in ABC's marketing department or maybe it's the beginning of the end of western civilization (again). I don't know.  It was just kind of surprisingly depressing, so I thought I'd let you know.

Like TiVo, But More Prurient

Did you ever want to watch TV but didn't want to get bogged down in plot or dialogue? Did you ever think "Why can't I just skip to the necrophilia and avoid all the tedious character development?" Well, now you can! The Parents Television Council website features the Worst of the Week in network television, giving their membership access to all of the things that they really, really hate so they can watch them over and over again. Probably with their pants off. Their prudery is your ticket to pleasure.

Click and enjoy our debased culture.

(Via Waxy)

Five Ring Circus

As noted in a previous post, New York's attempt to snag the 2012 Summer Olympics has engendered a marketing campaign of rare, insidious vintage. The mayor announced last year that 95% of all physical advertising space in the city, this includes subways, billboards, buses, phone booths, benches and lots of other things, would be reserved exclusively for official Olympic sponsors. This not only ensures an inescapable ubiquity, it also, in the trenchant words of the press release, protects the "Olympic brand from ambush marketing." By "ambush marketing", the bigwigs mean companies that didn't shell out millions of dollars to the International Olympic Committee making a billboard that says something like "We support our Olympic athletes." Emotional support just isn't going to cut it anymore.

Ambush marketing, however, came in a more unstoppable form here: 2012landgrabs.net/spoofs
We'd tell you the rascals behind this bit of genius, but then Deputy Mayor Dan "Spin" Doctoroff would banish us to Yonkers for ten years.

Wal-Mart TV

The New York Times on Wal-Mart's TV Network, which airs "a constant stream of consumer product ads" in the store:

According to Wal-Mart and to an agency that handles its ad sales, [Wal-Mart TV] captures some 130 million viewers every four weeks, making it the fifth-largest television network in the United States after NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox.

In the produce aisle, the TV screen gets shoppers' attention, thanks to its big size and lighted face, and from speakers installed on the ceiling, which create a kind of pathway of sound that can make even focused buyers turn toward its source... "A lot of them are picking up bananas and not even looking at them," said Dale Koehler, the store manager, referring to his customers. "They're looking at the TV."

I don't necessarily buy the numbers of the Wal-Mart TV audience; then again, the major networks inflate their numbers too -- and they can't force people to wait in line in front of TV screens.

(Via the boxtank, an excellent NYC blog focused on Wal-Mart and big-box retail)

Don't Call Him Wesley

I admit that I am addicted to poker. I programmed my TiVo to tape any poker related show. The upside is a lot of professional poker. The downside is the execrable Hollywood Home Game, a World Poker Tour spinoff featuring "celebrities" playing abysmal poker. Ordinarily, I just delete the celebrity episodes but I noticed that Wil Wheaton was playing. Wil is a poker afficionado himself, so I decided to watch him for a bit.

But forget about the game. Wil's chosen charity was the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defender of Illegal Art, file-sharing networks and other important free speech issues in cyberspace. He is truly a man after our heart.

I haven't built up the stomach to watch the whole episode to see if Wil won, but I will eventually summon the strength to cheer him on.

A stats log is worth 1,000 words

Recent searches that have led to this blog:

Google:
stay free magazine
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stay free daily

MSN Search:
free daily porn
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where to get a free drug test in san francisco

Here's an idea: "New York City"

Because I like reading without the burden of "thinking," I occassionally pick up am New York. It is a good thing I did. Otherwise I might never have known that New York is in the process of renaming The Big Apple. New York City has filed a trademark application for the phrase "The World's Second Home" (a phrase already in use by the City's 2012 Olympic committee) to use on T-shirts and other promotional geegaws.

This would be unremarkable (after all, the Olympics are 20% sport, 30% pathos and 50% selling stuff) but for a not-so-coincidental coincidence: "The Big Apple" is in the public domain. In other words, it isn't enough for the City to sell t-shirts and temporary tattoos and keychains for the Olympics: it has to have a proprietary mark. Of course it does. New York may be the world's second home, but remember: you are just renting.

That said, I don't think that the City's "Second Home" merch will move nearly as well as "Big Apple" stuff. Does anyone have any ideas for a new trademark? Here are mine:

• Just Like Home: A Tragic Past and an Emotionally Distant Present
• The Home of Starbucks' Pricing Strategy
• Come Now, Before It Is Just Like Your Hometown

Wizard People screening in NYC

UPDATE: Wizard People is once again downloadable. See the Illegal Art Exhibit for the bittorrent files. (Thanks to Downhill Battle for their handy Blog Torrent software.)

Those of you in NYC will have a rare chance to see Wizard People, Dear Reader performed LIVE next week at Anthology Film Archives. (If you're not familiar with the movie, see Daniel Radosh's article on Salon.com.) Brad Neely will be here in-person, narrating the story, which is based on the first Harry Potter movie.

For those of you not in NYC, I'm hoping to get a BitTorrent of the audio files working again soon on the Illegal Art Exhibit site so you can download and watch it in the comfort of your own home. For those who want to give us money, you can buy our Wizard People CD package instead.

Screening info:
Anthology Film Archives
Friday, March 4, 8 pm

Silent Disobedience

With the 'AA's and major rightsholders going after everyone from BitTorrent tracker sites to Beatallica, most copyright violaters are keeping their heads down. But not  Scott Moschella, who's documented how he stripped Apple's Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology from an iTunes track and posted the de-DRM-ed song online for others to download. Moschella used a promotional Pepsi iTunes code to purchase "Silence," by the Ciccone Youth, from the iTunes Music Store. He's now more or less daring the RIAA, Apple, or anyone else, to come after him.

But it's not like Moschella's pirating the new Kelly Clarkson single. Ciccone Youth was a side project of Mike Watt, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Greg Ginn (of the minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Black Flag). Named after Madonna, the band's first single was a track called "Into the Groove(y),"  which featured the band playing over Madonna samples. Reportedly, it was only the benevolence of The Material Girl herself that prevented Warner Brothers from enforcing its copyrights and silencing the unauthorized samples. "Silence," the track in question, was released on Ciccone Youth's first, and only, full length album, Whitey. It's one-minute and three-seconds of complete silence. Sweet, blissful, copyrighted silence. Get it while you can.

More on Christo's policy of photographing The Gates

As a followup to my previous post, here's an article from Newsday about Christo's policy of preventing photographers from using images of The Gates commercially.

Jeanne-Claude, whose saffron hair has evoked comparisons to the billowing bright sheets in Central Park, seemed to see red yesterday when a Newsday photographer tried to take the couple's picture in the park's northwest corner..... Jeanne-Claude sternly warned [the photographer] that pictures of the artwork are trademarked and can't be sold.

See our earlier discussion for commentary.

(Via Gothamist)

FCC Fallout

We all know how the FCC upped fines to have more teeth going up against such big-money, (arguably) "indecent" programs such as the Howard Stern Show or a particularly racy Super Bowl Half-Time show.  However, upping the fines has already brought about some unintended consequences (or intended, depending on how cynical you are).

For example, PBS, college, and community stations can collectively tremble in fear of the raised maximum fine of $500,000.  Most would be happy to collect 1/10th of that figure in a pledge drive.  Even the old maximum of $32,500 could have permanently crumbled such a station. 

Under the new threats, PBS has forced Frontline to broadcast a clean version of it's upcoming documentary on soldiers in Iraq as its primary feed.  The original version (that includes profanity from soldier interviews) will be broadcast later and be more inconvenient for stations to air.  Any station agreeing to broadcast the original version must "sign a legal waiver indemnifying PBS and the producers in the event of any fines or legal actions."

Capitalizing on the manufactured controversy "Education Secretary Margaret Spellings also sent PBS a letter questioning whether federal funds should be used to support such programming." Not sure if the problem with the programming is just the curse words, or being so bold as to show America's young men and women serving in the Armed Forces using "potty-mouth".

Eyesore Revisited

In issue #23 (American Gentrifier), I wrote about the profusion of U'SAgain's fake-charity clothing collection boxes in Brooklyn. (For those unfamiliar, the article is now online.) 

The intervening months since I originally wrote the piece have not been kind to those boxes. Would-be donors have dumped piles of clothes around all around them; the boxes end up shucked like oysters, the undesirable contents strewn about the street. As if this crime-magnet isn't bad enough, the homeless have repurposed the collection boxes for their own uses -- as dumpsters and semi-private urinals. The owner of the bodega at St. John's and Underhill asked the company to remove the box in front of his store after someone started a fire inside it. Meanwhile, the box at the corner of Washington and Lincoln now bears the graffito, "For-profit corporation. Donate to charity instead."

An example of the type of treatment the boxes receive (and deserve) was this box, knocked over and dragged into the street near the corner of Prospect and Underhill:

Top Of The Pops 2004

You've heard of the Billboard Chart, but what about American Brandstand?  Agenda Inc., a San Francisco based "brand management" consulting company, tracks mentions of brands in lyrics on the Billboard Top 20 Singles chart.  So when Missy Elliot says "I shake it like JELLO" score one point for Jello on the American Brandstand chart.  And 50 Cent's "You mix a little COKE with a little DOM PERIGNON / And a little HENNESSY / You know we fine to carry on" means a notch for Coke, Dom Perignon, and Hennessy (by the way, what kind of nasty drink is that?).  The totals are tallied up and published on their site.
 
Yes, people are actually keeping track of this.

So how often does Toby Kieth, Norah Jones, and Avril Lavigne mention a brand?  Not that often.  The chart is dominated by popular hip-hop.  Kanye West, Lil' Jon, Chingy, and Ludacris are ranked among the top 5 "Brand-Dropping Artists of 2004" because of their lyrics about fine cars (Cadillac, Mercedes, Rolls Royce), gear (Gucci, Nike), and gettin' crunk (Hennessy, Cristal).  In turn, the top three categories on the Brandstand chart are cars, fashion, and beverages.

All this brings up some disturbing questions.  The first being, are the companies paying for mentions?  It's hard to know. Regardless of whether a company is paying to have it's brand incorporated into rap lyrics, or artists simply volunteer to mention products, either way it's pathetic. 

Another issue is that these artists are becoming brands themselves.  Many rappers, (50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Sean Combs, etc.) own clothing and shoe lines.  Jay-Z even has his own brand of Vodka.  Not to mention the potential "synergy" between record companies, parent companies, and affiliated brands.  It all slips fairly quickly into an ethical grey area that the Brandstand chart only helps to point out.

There's little things too.  What should one think about brands like "MTV" and "Bank Of America" going from zero mentions in 2003 to significant positions on the chart in 2004?  With large corporations like Bank of America suddenly mentioned in rap songs, does it not start to smell fishy?  Or the brand "AK-47" jumping from 54th to 14th on the chart this year?  What is that a sign of?  And how exactly will the Holiday Inn capitalize on their newfound cred in the world of hip-hop?  We can only imagine.

And then there's the obvious further co-option of hip-hop culture by advertising.  Which is it's own very long and very sad tale.  But luckily, a battle still being fought.

ABC News vs. Reason

It's not just political agendas that are making American network news unbearable. ABC's "Primetime Live" recently devoted an hour to a Brazilian "faith healer," and consulted James Randi, the living patron saint of skepticism, to provide a responsible scientific viewpoint on the alleged miracles. Randi's extensive and expert deconstruction of classic faith-healer scamming was reduced to a rather ineffectual nineteen-second clip on the hour program.

Randi has devoted his entire weekly online column to telling the true story of how this "news" broadcast sacrificed any objectivity to produce a tantalizing, "could-it-be-true" commercial for a huckster, which they believe people would rather watch.

I dread the notion that they're right.

Bill Gates Drops Some Mad 5x1llz

Need to know what your kidz are saying to each other online? Microsoft's primer to computer slang has the answers.

"It's important to remember that the leetspeek community encourages new forms and awards individual creativity, resulting in a dynamic written language that eludes conformity or consistency."

We must destroy them.

(Via Paul DeGeorges)

Bloglines not updating this blog

UPDATE: Bloglines is now working. Nevermind.

For some reason Bloglines isn't showing when this site has been updated. I have no clue why... I do know that the RSS feed is working via LiveJournal. If you're a LiveJournal user, here's the feed:
http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=stay_free_blog (Thanks to Justin and to the person who said it up, whose name I forget... sorry!)

Christo says: don't photograph The Gates!

From an email by NYC activist Robert Lederman:
UPDATE: Corrected Chicago URL

Christo's publisher claims a vast new degree of copyright and trademark protection. They claim they will prosecute anyone who sells their own original photos of The Gates; who makes and sells a drawing of The Gates or who even uses the words, The Gates, without their permission....They also claim to have an agreement with the media that media sources may only use news photos of the gates for the period the installation is up. That after that the media will only be allowed to use "official" photos of The Gates.

This sounds exactly like what's happening in Chicago with the public art at Millennium Park.  Makes me want to get some photographers together to go to Central Park and start shooting! Any takers? [ email: carrie (at) stayfreemagazine.org ]

(Thanks to Andrea Hull for the tip)

Sony is at it again

Sony/ATV has sent a cease and desist notice to Beatallica for using Beatles songs without permission. Instead of going after the band and its label, Sony sent the notice to its internet service provider and demanded that the ISP (theplanet.com) remove all Beatallica music, news, and merchandise.

This, incidentally, is the same tactic Sony used to try to get the Illegal Art Exhibit to remove DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album. (In fact, we only heard about the cease-and-desist through our ISP.) We were fortunate enough to have the EFF in our corner and so after switching to a free-speech ISP and writing a response, Sony backed down. But these guys have a tougher case.

As of now, the music clips remain online. I haven't heard them yet but the Bittorent files are moving at a brisk pace; if we get approval, perhaps I'll add them to the Illegal Art Exhibit.

Kembrew McLeod on copyright criminals

My buddy Kembrew McLeod has just published his book Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. (You may remember Kembrew for his brilliant part in the Illegal Art Exhibit; he trademarked the phrase "freedom of expression" and then threatened to sue AT&T for using it in an ad campaign.

The book is filled with all kinds of curious stories about the copyright cartel; we'll be reprinting a short excerpt in the upcoming issue of Stay Free! magazine. But you don't have to wait for that; you can download the ENTIRE BOOK FREE (courtesy of a Creative Commons license) at Kembrew's website.

Kembrew has also just finished a trailer for his documentary Copyright Criminals. The movie won't be out for a while, but check out the trailer for a surreal lineup of players: from Pete Rock to Matmos to Cibo Mato to Lawrence Lessig. (Yours truly also makes an appearance.)

Like Stephen Colbert, but Without the Jokes

Somehwere, Edward Bernays is smiling.

Through the magic of early Web posting, you can read Frank Rich's Sunday column today on the increasingly disturbing Jeff Gannon scandal. Rich quotes sources claiming that the White House would have to have been complicit in allowing a fake reporter for a fake Republican news outlet into official press briefings where he could ask fake questions. Gannon-gate comes after the Government Accountability Office declared that a series of fake news reports on Medicare produced last year crossed the line into illegal propaganda.

Looks like Karl Rove has caught on to the DIY "make your own media" revolution!

Wal-Mart: Always Lowering Standards. Always.

Wal-Mart remains evil. The latest in their bag of tricks is a penchant for child labor violations.

I'm disappointed in - if not surprised by - Wal-Mart's child labor practices. How did I manage to be surprised by the limp-dick enforcement by the Department of Labor? A $135,540 fine?! Way to make them dig deep, DOL. It is the corporate equivalent of a Montana speeding ticket. 15 days' notice before the Labor Department investigates any other "wage and hour" accusations?! When did the cops start asking criminals for the right to investigate? I assume this will become standard in all criminal investigations:

A search warrant will be executed in two weeks if we don't get a note from you assuring us that you currently have no crystal methamphetamine or crystal methamphetamine production facilities. If you are making crystal methamphetamine, please correct this violation and send us a report of your plan to avoid such mishaps in the future.

Wal-Mart is the example that the rest of the country follows, after all.

McLibel at 20

Yesterday, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the 1994-97 trial of Dave Morris and Helen Steel in the British courts was "unfair." Better known as the McLibel 2, Morris and Steel were sued for libel for handing out leaflets in front of McDonald's restaurants detailing the company's various ugly practices. Very, very long story short, the two defended themselves, made McDonald's look like an incomparable bully, won a measure of success in the court's ruling that many of the leaflet's statements were true, but ultimately lost the libel suit itself.

I don't have much legal background in the US and even less in the UK (read: none and none) but I do know that the UK libel laws are maybe the most draconian around, not the least of the reasons being because the burden of proof in a UK libel trial is shifted to the defendant. So Morris and Steel took their case against British law to the ECHR and the court came back with an "unfair" verdict against the government. Let's hope this means the beginnings of reform, as the suit was a huge embarassment for everybody but Morris and Steel.

The trial garnered an enormous amount of press coverage in the UK, but I remember being at a loss to find a word about it in the US while it was in session. I'm assuming this decision will also be less than a blip on our screens, especially considering the administration's want of late to reduce the class action lawsuit to the level of a parking violation. Still, I can't help but be monumentally impressed with what Morris and Steel have done almost completely on their own. If you're not familiar with the whole story, it's a fascinating read.

Copyright and documentary films

Here are two important links for fans of documentary films (and "illegal art"):

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has selected eight short films as finalists in its Moving Image Contest and posted them online. The films aim to show "some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law," focusing either on music or documentary film.

My vote goes to Christopher Sims' "An Army, One by One" for its simplicity and clarity of message. In fact, this short makes the perfect lead-in for Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers, a report from the Center for Social Media on how our ever-expanding "culture of ownership" is handicapping documentary filmmakers.

Authors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi interviewed 45 filmmakers about the problems they've encountered in securing rights to music, historical footage, and other so-called intellectual property. The discussion includes some revealing anecdotes:

    * Any time people featured in a film start singing a song, documentarians should open their wallets. The makers of THE PERFECT CANDIDATE (a documentary about Oliver North's run for Senate) had to pay $3,000 to include a scene where a woman sang "God Bless America" at a campaign rally. And that's nothing. AOL Time Warner, which owns the rights to "Happy Birthday," charges $15,000-$20,000 for one verse of the song. Filmmakers who can't afford to pay or risk legal conflicts end up cutting out scenes altogether, as Linda Goode Bryant did when the principal subject in FLAG WARS (a documentary about the clash in a gentrifying area between African Americans and newly arrived gays and lesbians) starting singing along with the radio.
    * Sometimes rights owners require a "most favored nation clause" in the licensing agreements, which guarantees the rights owner the highest price the filmmaker can pay. In other words, if Capitol quotes the filmmaker $3,000 to use an old Johnny Mercer song, and the filmmaker also licenses a Looney Tunes clip from Warner Brothers for $5,000, then the filmmaker will automatically have to pay Capitol $5,000, too. As Jeff Tuchman describes it, "It's like going to go the grocery store and pinching your pennies and using your coupons, and then the last thing you buy is a steak for $20, and then every soda and bag of M&Ms you bought suddenly costs $20."
    * Directors often avoid shooting in places where background music is playing so that they don't have to worry about clearing the rights. For example: when making her film LITTLE PEOPLE, Jan Krawitz stopped shooting dwarf children exercising in gym class when the instructor played "YMCA."

Reading this stuff, you get the idea that producer Katy Chevigny is right when she tells aspiring filmmakers that "the only film you can make for cheap and not have to worry about rights clearance is about your grandma, yourself, or your dog."

But then there are people like Jeff Krulik (Heavy Metal Parking Lot series) who aggressively exercise "fair use" and use many short clips in their films without licensing. On the downside, they can't get distribution. Krulik, for example, is limited to posting his film HITLER'S HAT online and screening it at festivals and independent venues. But I can't help rooting for this route, for a number of reasons: it strengthens fair use, results in much better films, and ultimately encourages people to find new ways to get their films out (Keep in mind that there's no law saying it's wrong.)...which reminds me:

Though the report includes many fine recommendations for solving some of the documentarians' problems, it could use a positive word about alternative distribution methods. MoveOn's success in distributing Robert Greenwald's UNCOVERED and OUTFOXED through house parties is one example of films finding an audience with the mass media machine. And, of course, there's always the internet. So on that note: planetkrulik.com.

(Thanks to David Glenn.)

Advertise on my colon!

Update: The Guardian ran a brief story about the auction (scroll down). Thanks to Mark Blacklock.

Maybe you've heard the recent story about the guy selling ad space on his forehead on eBay. Or the one the woman who auctioned off space on her pregnant belly.

Since these stories became media sensations, eBay has been flooded with copycats -- people trying to sell space on their faces, bald heads, backs, etc. I guess it's a small consolation that most of these morons haven't found their auctions to be nearly as lucrative as their predecessors, with bidding hovering around a dollar or two, at most... but the fact remains that they remain undeterred.  Therefore, at the risk of my dignity, I've decided to step into the fray and auction off ad space on my colon.  Perhaps this way we'll at least get to see an ad in a space where it belongs.

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A fellow Brooklynite has come up with what is arguably a more innovative solution to the "forehead advertising" problem: special eyeglasses designed to block the ads (though, as a commentator on one blog suggested, a lead pipe to the head would be more effective).

Jesus was a kike

Teenage Millionaire, a company that sells t-shirts with the slogan "Jesus Is My Homeboy," has been using its legal muscle to stop people from parodying its product. The company sent cease-and-desist letters to Dan Sieradski, for instance, who was selling shirts bearing the phrase, "Jesus was a kike." The back-and-forth between the Teenage Millionaire lawyer and Sieradski is certainly worth your while (Sieradski is a bright bulb).

That said, Sieradski is in a poor position to win a legal battle since he used Teenage Millionaire's Jesus pretty much as-is.

Aaron Watson probably has a better case. Like Sieradski, Watson was threated by Teenage Millionaire for selling a parody t-shirt of "Homeboy" via CafePress, one that read, "Arnold is my Homeboy."

But unlike Sieradski, Watson didn't appropriate Teenage Millionaire's imagery; he used a likeness of Mr. Schwarzenegger. Also unlike Sieradski, Watson appears to have the means to fight.

After Teenage Millionaire threatened legal action, CafePress removed both sellers' shirts in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But Watson told me he has secured a lawyer and plans to have an official response soon. When that happens, there's a decent chance CafePress could reconsider its decision and allow him to keep selling his shirts. I talked to Candice Carr in the CafePress legal department and, though she couldn't comment on the case, she said the company is open to working with sellers who have substantial fair use claims. The company did, after all, back the creators of Jib Jab after they were sent a cease-and-desist from Woody Guthrie's estate for using "This Land Is Your Land."

We'll let you know what happens. In the mean time, it's not too late to pick up Buddha is my homeboy or -- my fave -- Darwin is my homeboy t-shirts (Apparently, Teenage Millionaire hasn't found these guys yet).

Volkswagen car bomb hoax

I generally avoid mentioning advertising efforts that are clearly designed for shock value, but Volkswagen's new viral campaign really gets my goat.

The blogosphere is afire with word of a commercial for Volkswagen that features a man getting inside his VW, driving to a cafe, and setting off a car bomb; the driver's plans go awry, however, because the bomb doesn't explode the car, which remains intact.

In posts about the spot, several bloggers have simply mouthed Volkswagen's claims that it has nothing to do with it; the company originally said it was filing criminal charges against the creators but quickly settled for a public apology.

The whole brouhaha strikes me as a transparent (albeit clever) effort by Volkswagen to engage in the guerilla-style viral marketing that's all the rage in corporate boardrooms now. The ad team that created the spot -- Lee Ford and Dan Brooks -- have claimed they have no idea how the commercial got on the internet. But Adland found a dead link named "Volkswagen" on the Ford and Brook's website (the site has since been changed and the link is no longer there).

Ford and Brooks told the Guardian that the spot cost 40,000 pounds but wouldn't say who footed the bill; the spot's director, however, disputed that claim and said it only cost 400 pounds (extremely unlikely given the high production values).

Keep in mind that Ford Motors did a similar campaign last year for its SportKa. One viral spot showed the car squashing a small bird; another had the car's sunroof decapitating a cat. Ford tried to distance itself from the spots but, according to the Guardian, they were made by Ford's advertising agency.

So if Volkswagen did indeed sanction the commercial, it is far from the first megacorp to bank on plausible deniability. And since the internet is increasingly the media of choice for reaching coveted young adult males, you can bet it won't be the last.

Malcolm Gladwell

I hope you'll pardon me while I rant for a minute. New Yorker writer  Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out, BLINK, that has become the talk of the town, even prompting one reviewer -- Farhad Manjoo of Salon -- to state that, "You won't find a reader who doesn't at least like Gladwell" and "There's just no arguing with Gladwell."

I'd like to know what planet Mr. Manjoo is living on; Gladwell's work ALWAYS makes people want to argue. As I've written here before, his writing follows a simple formula: put forth a counterintuitive argument, then cleverly select points that advance this claim while ignoring and obscuring those that don't.

I haven't read the book in question, so you can take this all with a grain of salt, but the premise alone is preposterous: Gladwell claims that "rapid cognition"--"the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye"--is underappreciated. As Gladwell writes, "I think the Rapid Cognition Model needs to be taken far more seriously--that it's smarter and more sophisticated and certainly more influential than we generally give it credit for."

Oh, really? What about the advertising industry, which does nothing if not appreciate humanity's ability to make unconscious, split-second decisions (and profit from them). Every year, marketers pour billions of dollars into researching and exploiting "blink."

What about the recent election of a president who acted on "gut instinct" over a man noted for careful deliberation? What about the widespread assumption that it's important to make a good first impression... or, for that matter, the belief in love at first sight?

Gladwell devotes a chunk of his book to the work of the John Gottman, who videotapes couples and says that within 15 minutes he can tell with 90 percent accuracy whether the couple will be married 15 years later. According to Gladwell, Gottman's abilities illustrate the power of blink. But Gottman's work could just as well illustrate the power of careful, deliberative analysis. I first heard about the Gottman Institute on NPR's This American Life; in that story, Gottman discussed how he acquired his ability to read couples through extensive trial and error. It took him over a decade of watching and analyzing to get to a point where he figured things out quickly. It seems to me that this gets to the heart of the problem with touting blink: at least a solid part of its strength is dependent on the kind of analysis that Gladwell suggests is overrated.

The very reason that Gottman's work interests us in the first place is because it's so unusual, the exception to the rule. The truth is that most of us aren't very good at knowing whether our own relationships will last, let alone those of our peers. Yet Gladwell maintains that the power of blink is democratic, as useful for lay persons as experts. If that's the case, why is the divorce rate for people who fall in love at first sight no better than those who trod a slow-moving path?

It's also really hard to swallow Gladwell's love of blink in light of its role in the social stereotypes that play against the female, dark-skinned, disabled, or physically unattractive among us. Gladwell and his New Yorker colleague James Surowiecki debate this point in an enlightening Slate article. )

To make his case, Gladwell discusses the hiring practices of top orchestras. For years, such orchestras, which conducted open auditions, overwhelmingly selected male performers. But in the 1980s, as Gladwell writes, orchestras "started putting up screens in audition rooms, so that the committee could no longer see the person auditioning. And immediately -- immediately! -- orchestras started hiring women."

Might this indicate that relying on quick impressions isn't such a good thing? After all, it suggests that committee members who had relied on first impressions were likely to assume a female player wasn't very good. Gladwell's retort: people rely on their biases regardless of how quickly they make a decision. The problem, he suggests, is bias, not the style (or speed) of decision-making. To bolster his point, he sites the overwhelming presence of tall men heading up corporations. Even very deliberate decisions, he points out, reflect bias.

But this reasoning is ridiculous. The fact that reasoned decisions often reflect bias doesn't mean that reasoning can't help minimize it. When you eliminate reasoning and deliberation, you eliminate even the chance of countering biased first impressions.

Gladwell's solution is no solution at all: "We can put up the equivalent of screens. We can find ways of editing out nonessential information." When you consider that we form prejudices based on a person's name, skin color, voice, height, gender, medical history, and appearance, the equivalent of screens would be a soundproof, windowless blackbox.

I'm not saying Gladwell is a bad writer, or that none of his points have merit. I think his skills lie precisely where Farhad Manjoo denies them: in getting readers to argue and discuss. He's also good at weaving engaging narratives. But, for me, his penchant for overselling arguments--and for concealing significant counterpoints--overshadows his obvious talents.

Gladwell's thesis would be more accurate in stating that split-second decision-making isn't worthless -- that it can at times be channeled effectively, and that knowing when to do so is key. But that argument sounds a lot less sexy. At any rate, it wouldn't make for a Malcolm Gladwell book.

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The first article of Gladwell's that I remember was his profile of Paco Underhill, which you can read on his website: The Science of Shopping

This article pissed me off so much that I did my own interview with Underhill for the Village Voice (later reprinted in Stay Free!): Shopping Spies: Why is that man staring at me?

NYT: The Hidden Persuaders

The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders
From the New York Times Magazine, 12/5/04

Excellent cover story by Rob Walker about agencies that enlist everyday joes to buzz products. By now most Stay Free! readers know about viral marketing, but what makes this piece so good is Walker's attention to the social relationships involved. The agencies Walker profiles have been able to get people to work essentially for free, with only product samples and the promise of bolstered egos as payment.

The one thing missing from this piece is an acknowledgment that the companies' claims are no doubt exaggerated. Marketers routinely inflate their numbers, and these guys are already on record as encouraging their charges to lie (asking agents to call book stores pretending to be customers searching for a desired book, etc.). Besides, anyone who has worked with volunteers before (especially volunteers operating independently from a distance) knows that 95 percent of them aren't doing much of anything; thus, you can forget BzzAgent's claims of 60,000 and Tremor's 240,000 -- my guess is that they each have a few hundred active agents. Still, the success of their business model is no less terrifying; and this quibble shouldn't detract from an otherwise solid article. (Thanks to Salim Virji)

The NYT on vaginal "rejuvenation"

If you read the New York Times religiously, you know about the next big thing in cosmetic surgery: vaginal "rejuvenation." That is, excising fleshy labia and tightening vaginal muscles to make one's genitals more "youthful" and "normal-looking." The Times doesn't give much space to examining *why* vaginal surgery is taking off, but the increasing reach of pornography--facilitated by the internet--is no doubt a big part of it. When women with asymmetrical labia say they want to look "normal," what they're really talking about is looking more porn models. Women's eNews is much less shy about pinpointing a cause, quoting one gynecologist who says, "I can't tell you how many pages and pages of pornographic material woman have brought in to me saying 'I want to look like this.'"

This reminds me of a documentary that Chyng Sun, a friend of mine who teaches at New York University, is working on. Chyng has been interviewing consumers of pornography and told me at lunch a couple of weeks ago that many of the women she has talked to report that their partners are always asking them to imitate sex acts that they've seen in porn.

Hmmm. Maybe we should add this phenomenon to our stories of people imitating things they see in the media.

Since I have no clue what constitutes a fabulous vagina (it's been years since I've seen my own), I turned to the web and found these photos...and now I can report that the ideal vagina is--surprise, surprise--tall and skinny.

Malcolm Gladwell on drugs

How to Think about Prescription Drugs
By Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker

Let me preface this by saying that I think Malcolm Gladwell is a bit of a charlatan. His modus operandi is to put forth a counterintuitive argument, then cleverly select points that advance his thesis while ignoring and obscuring those that don't. Still, he raises a good point here: one reason prescription drugs costs are skyrocketing in America is because Americans are taking a lot more drugs. The rest of his argument is, however, pure hokum.

"The emphasis of the prescription-drug debate is all wrong," Gladwell writes. "We've been focused on the drug manufacturers. But decisions about prevalence, therapeutic mix, and intensity aren't made by the producers of drugs. They're made by the consumers of drugs."

See, friends, it's not the drug company's fault that your colitis medication is almost $600, it's YOURS. What's especially weird is that Gladwell himself acknowledges the power of deceptive marketing and patent-law abuses--practices that the average consumer has no real control over. But in Gladwell's fantasy world, doctors, health insurers, and consumers should take responsibility for drug company shenanigans. In making his case, Gladwell conveniently ignores the fact that drug companies have done everything they can to prevent studies comparing competing drugs to one another, and to prevent the reporting of negative data from clinical trials.

How come, when I'm prescribed a drug, there is no way for me to report the drug's effectiveness: did it help? did it hurt? If there were some reliable, independent resource that collected this data--a sort of Consumer Reports for pharmaceuticals--then maybe patients would have a tool to balance corporations' marketing muscle. (Such a resource would also help in filling out the shortcomings of clinical trials.) But with nothing of a kind, and with only flashy--and often misleading--advertisements to fill the gap, neither the little old lady in Omaha nor the hyperinformed New York journalist has much to go on.

UPDATE:

Turns out that the Consumers Union (which publishes Consumer Reports) has launched a website, Best Buy Drugs. At the moment, it only has reports on three categories of drugs--cholesterol/statins, arthritus & pain/NSAIDs, and heartburn/PPIs--but a new report will be appearing every month.

Also: Help the Consumers Union make drug trial info public.

More bullshit from the Ad Council

Anyone remember how, after September 11, everyone in the news media seemed to be touting the line that irony is dead?

Ok, well, maybe you don't, and maybe you also don't remember the series of Advertising Council public service announcements (PSAs) that launched just before Independence Day, in July 2002. So I'll refresh your memory.

The PSAs portrayed short vignettes all geared to inspire pride in America, with the theme: "Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it." One spot, called "Library," (RealMedia video) featured a young man who goes up to a library info desk and inquires about books that appear to be missing. "Those are no longer available," the librarian replies, then plies him for his name. When he declines to give it and turns to leave, scary secret-service types mysteriously appear, and we fade in to the 1984-ish clincher: "What if America Wasn't America?"

I was reminded of the America That Wasn't when I came across a press release by the American Library Association last week, via BoingBoing.net:

Ashcroft orders public libraries to destroy law books

The Justice Department is ordering public libraries to destroy certain books it has deemed not "appropriate for external use."

The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.

The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).

This is just more evidence that Ad Council's embarrassing attempt to promote patriotism praised the government for NOT doing exactly what it WAS and still is doing -- restricting citizens' basic civil rights. In fact, looking back at the other spots in the "Freedom" campaign, it is all but impossible to deny that the fictional "Big Brother" portrayed there is precisely the America we've inherited under Bush.

Ad Council spot: "Library" (RealMedia video)
The key fiction: The American government doesn't monitor libraries and arrest people based on what they read.
The reality:
San Francisco Chronicle: Santa Cruz libraries warn patrons that the government may monitor borrowing practices.  (read story)
CBS News: Statistics on how many libraries the FBI has contacted since the Patriot Act went into effect. (read story)

Ad Council spot: "Church" (RealMedia video)
The key fiction: America isn't a place where people have to hold their religious services in secret.
The reality:
Working for Change: After a Saudi man creates a website for the Islamic Assembly of North America and links to other Muslim sites, he is arrested by the FBI and charged with "three counts of terrorism, four counts of making false statements, and seven counts of visa fraud." (read story)
Associated Press: Americans attack Muslims, post-9/11. (read story)

Ad Council spot: "Diner" (RealMedia video)
The key fiction: In America, people don't have to worry about criticizing the government
The reality:
San Francisco Chronicle: The FBI investigates a man after fellow gym members report him for critizing Bush and the U.S. government (read story)
Popular Mechanics: The U.S. Government is developing new technolgies to spy on its citizens (read story)

Ad Council spot: "Arrest" (RealMedia video)
The key fiction: American are free to read whatever they like, without government interference
The reality:
Peaceredding.org: Army officials question the mother of a peace activist, who was seen wearing a t-shirt that read: 'Unfuck the world' on the front, and 'Dethrone the Bushes' on the back.  (read story)

City Paper: Security at Philadelphia International Airport refuse to let a man fly after he is spotted carrying the book Hayduke Lives! by the radical environmental activist Edward Abbey. (read story)

The irony here is so sharp, it's painful. You can almost imagine the ACLU producing the very same spots to CRITICIZE our government... so it's no wonder that this first round of "Freedom" PSAs wasn't around for long. The Ad Council continues to promote its Campaign for Freedom, to be sure, but these days the PSAs have take a decidedly different approach. Gone are the scary portraits of an over-reaching government, which must have too closely resembled the real-life scenarios made possible by the PATRIOT ACT. Now, instead of portraying the threat of a sinister government, the Ad Council characterizes the threat as one of clueless, couch-potato Americans.

"Youth," "Ummmm," and "Deaf Ears" are all pretty much the same: faux-documentary-style clips of Americans naming issues they care about -- segregation, racism, homelessness -- while saying they are "not really doing anything." Or "I get angry about it, but in my own apartment."

The one actor who does hint at a real social critique -- a woman who says, "I don't vote. I refuse to vote..." -- is cut off before she finishes the sentence.

The spots, one could argue, contain more than a germ of truth. (I'm often frustrated by the political apathies of friends or family.) But it is difficult to take homiles like "The first step toward making a difference is believing that we can," from the Advertising Council, which is essentially a front group for the mutual interests of multinational advertising agencies and the US government. The glossing-over of the public's legitimate grievances with our government makes me want to punch someone. Hard.

It gets worse. A radio ad, "The Biggest Threat," features an African-American man informing us that:

The biggest threat to freedom isn't the next corporation involved in a scandal. It's not covert government operations, or even politicians. The most immediate, persistent, avoidable threat to your freedom is you.

The only good thing about these PSAs is that they're so badly executed, it's hard to imagine them having much of an impact. While they may inspire some of us to swear and throw things, many people will simply find them pointless.

If you are politically active at all, you know what happens when real, everyday, concerned people try to do good in America: they are silenced, harrassed, spied on, and portrayed by the media as window-breaking, SUV-exploding lunatics. Michael Moore did a fine job portraying what happens when an honest, anti-war group tries to organize in Farenheit 9/11, but I've seen this happen to people I know personally.

After September 11, the FBI listed Reclaim the Streets (RTS), an activist group here in New York, on its website as an example of a "left-wing terrorist" organization--a ludicrous claim.

That the Advertising Council and its in-house Bushies dare to point the finger at us -- us! -- is but another sign of the unbearable, reality-defying hypocrisy that makes citizens feel defeated and powerless in the first place. With it's grossly misleading rhetoric, the Ad Council is itself the Big Brother it portrayed two years ago.

And to think that September 11 was once thought to be the death of irony -- now THAT's ironic!

EPA public disservice announcements

EPA Energy-Saving Spots Give Cars Short Shrift (from The New York Times)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- the agency responsible for increasing the fuel efficiency of cars -- has produced a series of commercials that MOCKS attempts to increase the fuel efficiency of cars. Apparently, spots feature an overweight, nerdy man devising silly, quixotic schemes (think: sails and a helium tank) to save gas with his vehicle. His wife, by contrast, is the voice of reason: "The E.P.A. says the energy we use in our home can cause twice the greenhouse gases of a car," she says. The responsible consumer, she suggests, needn't worry about cars; she simply needs to buy energy-saving household products!

Nevermind that the commercials suggest that the solution to earth's energy crisis is for people to buy more new stuff -- that the onus rests on the consumer rather than government agencies or auto manufacturers. In the tradition of public service announcements, that's a given. What really gets my goat is the portrayal of plans to cut fuel use as ludicrous when they are, in fact, quite mundane. By carpooling, using public transportation, or walking to the store instead of getting in the damn car to go a few blocks people could cut their fuel usage by half. As an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists points out in the NYT article, "You're not likely to cut your electricity use in half by using more efficient appliances." People who really want to buy something could buy a hybrid car -- that'll also cut fuel use in half.

That said, it wouldn't be all that difficult to convert the spots into something that seriously promotes energy conservation -- if only they'd show people driving their cars off cliffs... or perhaps throwing them in the ocean (after all, they do it with subway trains)...or just blowing them up. Sure, there'd probably be some environmental damage but certainly no worse than daily car use...and at least they'd save fuel!

Jackass-inizing of education

Pressed to Raise Test Scores, Principals are Resorting to New Gross-Out Stunts (from the WALL STREET JOURNAL)

After reading this, I'm not sure who we should be more worried about: the kids who get ideas from watching reality TV or their teachers.

According to the WSJ, public school educators across the country -- terrified of losing funding -- are offering to humiliate themselves in front of their schools if enough students raise test scores. School officials are eating worms, kissing pigs, even letting children shave them with dog shears. Maybe the Bush administration should change the name of its high-stakes testing plan from "No Child Left Behind" to "Fear Factor" - ?