David Kline finds the ideal Christmas present for the age: The Playmobil airport security toy. Surely, I thought, this must be a joke. But, no, it’s really on the Playmobil site. Coming soon: subway bag checkers… Guantanamo interrogators… FEMA ice trucks…
My son is mad and has a right to be. If he and other Apple fans knew the video iPod was coming in only a few weeks, they might have bought it instead. They should have had a choice. Jobs is gaming his community for no good reason.
Don’t know whether this is a new survey but Carnegie says the average age of a newspaper reader is 55 and one cable news channels average age just plummeted to 59. It used too be, it was just the trees that died.
Well, if anyone wanted the alleged housing bubble to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, they just found the guys with the pin: The President’s tax-advisory council is set to recommend limiting the tax deduction on mortgages — just as increased prices forced huge increases in the mortgages people have to pay to afford a home. Just as numbnutty, they are proposed to tax employer-paid health-insurance benefits — just as the cost of those benefits is skyrocketing. The commission was supposed to find a way to replace the revenue from the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax, which is screwing more and more Americans every year. They didn’t stop screwing up. They just found another orifice.
Once again, this shows the utter lack of strategic vision from Bush. If he had balls and had any political capital left, he would have found a new tax strategy: flat-tax, value-added tax, simplified tax, something. Instead, he just found another way to piss off people.
Speaking of Garfield, he speaks on On The Media with overly quoted newspaper industry analyst John Morton, who acts as if there’s nothing strategically broken with the business he covers… because, one presumes, he still wants a business to cover.
BOB GARFIELD: I want to ask you about the Internet. Newspapers are losing readers to online sources. They’re also losing classified advertising, the most profitable part of their business, to online outfits like Craigslist and so forth. Is there anyone who’s getting that figured out and do you have any idea how that’s going to play out?
JOHN MORTON: Well, let me make a couple of observations. One is that the newspapers’ problems with circulation began long before there was an Internet. It’s been exacerbated by the Internet. It’s retail, it’s gone south. But, so far, the Internet has not become such a powerful force that you can attribute any decline in the newspaper business to it. But clearly, you know, the Internet is only going to get to be a bigger and bigger factor, and newspapers probably made a big mistake in the beginning when they adopted the assumption that everybody expects everything on the Internet to be free.
Oh, that fairy tale again.
Next time you see John Morton quoted — and you will — take him not just with a grain but with a whole box of Morton’s Salt.
Bob Garfield writes another magnum opus for Ad Age. The last was on his chaos scenario for advertising. This is on the open-source revolution. Great lead:
Hear that?
In the distance? It’s a crowd forming — a crowd of what you used to call your “audience.†They’re still an audience, but they aren’t necessarily listening to you. They’re listening to each other talk about you. And they’re using your products, your brand names, your iconography, your slogans, your trademarks, your designs, your goodwill, all of it as if it belonged to them — which, in a way, it all does, because, after all, haven’t you spent decades, and trillions, to convince them of just that?
Congratulations. It worked. The Great Consumer Society believes deeply that it has a proprietary stake in you. And like stakeholders everywhere, they are letting their voices be heard.
Why? Because the information society is reversing flow. What began as an experiment among a few software nerds has, thanks to the Internet, expanded into other disciplines, notably media and law. But it won’t stop there. Advertising. Branding. Distribution. Consumer research. Product development. Manufacturing. They will all be turned upside down as the despotism of the executive suite gives way to the will, and wisdom, of the masses in a new commercial and cultural epoch, namely: The Open Source Revolution.
Here’s the Ad Age link, though that won’t work without blood tests and security clearances. Don’t tell anybody, but a blogger put the piece up here. Open-source revolution, indeed.
