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February 25, 2004

The death of broadcast
: Clear Channel has cut off Howard Stern. When Janet Jackson's outfit opened, it opened a door not on her breast but on censorship. Clear Channel even sent out a press release bragging about cutting off Stern. MarksFriggin, the unofficial Stern site, says those stations are in Pittsburgh, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Rochester, Louisville and San Diego. Clear Channel also fired Bubba the Love Sponge. lyrics hunterxhunter

: Here's how I predict this will play out:
- Stern will engineer his firing from Viacom.
- Stern will sign with satellite, giving satellite the boost it needs to become a viable business.
- Buy satellite stock now. Sell radio stock now.
- Broadcast radio will quickly falter, losing attention to MP3s, satellite, and cellular broadcast. Broadcast radio will die. Consolidation won't kill it. Censorship will.
- Satellite will grow rapidly, getting more consumer revenue and ad revenue.
- Broadcast TV will suffer similar blows.
- Cable and satellite TV will grow.
- The bottom line: Any medium that can be government-regulated will shrink; any medium free of government regulation will grow.
- Government censorship will grow until, at long last, libertarians and Republicans and Democrats wake up and realize that this is not the role they want for government, this is not the America they envision. But in the meantime, they will have destroyed a medium or two.lyrics hunterxhunter

: And why don't you tell the FCC what you think. Here's how.
I don't need a government nanny, do you? I didn't think so. lyrics hunterxhunter

: The more I think about this, the more enraged I get. One tit flopped out and the government -- the Bush administration -- can't wait to play to its far-right fringe and censor speech and intimidate speech and chill speech. How dare they? This is not the role we expect of our government. We don't need a nanny.
Let's hear a little liberartarian outrage at government meddling in our lives and our speech.
Let's hear a little conservative outrage at government growing beyond its bounds.
Let's hear a little liberal outrage at goverment stiffling free spech.
I don't give a damn whether you like or despise Howard Stern; that's beside the point. If you're American, you cherish free speech and you should be appalled at what is happening to it. This is not coming from media consolidation. This is coming from government intimidation.
F Michael Powell. F the FCC. F Clear Channel.
Defend Howard Stern. Or lose your own rights to say what you want where and when you want to say it. lyrics hunterxhunter

: I know that many constituencies want to tell Clear Channel to f off. Here's where and how. lyrics hunterxhunter

: UPDATES... There are calls for me to answer the many comments on this post. I'm traveling today and so I don't have time to say much until later. But a few basic observations:lyrics hunterxhunter

- Yes, Clear Channel is a company with the full right and responsibility to decide what to put on its air. But that's not what's happening here. The government is behind this. The government called broadcast chieftens to the woodshed and they came back vowing to avoid further government censure. Mel Karmazin of Viacom, owner of Stern's station, held a conference call threatening to fire DJs, program directors, and general managers who are even the subject of complaint.
The government tried to put a chill on speech. And it worked.
And that should chill you.lyrics hunterxhunter

- Don't like Stern? Fine. I understand. Don't want to defend Stern? Ok, but what happens when they come after somebody you do like. What happens when Bill O'Reilly slips one day and says something that offends someone in a gotcha way and that's just the excuse somebody needed to demand that he go off the air. Or Andy Rooney. Or Dan Rather. Or Al Franken, once he's on radio. Doesn't matter what your political stripe is; it's all speech and once it can be shut off for one guy it can be shut off for the next.
Defending free speech almost always starts with defending those whose speech you don't like -- but if you don't defend that speech, then you defend no one's speech.
When I grew up, the ACLU defended the noxious speech of the KKK to march in the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie. It was necessary to defend the principle even with them so as to defend the rights of antiwar protestors or civil rights protesters or, in latter days, abortion protestors to protest.
If you don't defend Stern agains the government chill, then you open the door for someone you like to be taken off the air.lyrics hunterxhunter

- Yes, they are public airwaves. That means they belong to me, too. I want to listen to Stern. You don't. Fine. Change the channel. We have lots of them. lyrics hunterxhunter

- I abhor this culture of offense. We are becoming ruled by what offends a few of us. If it's offends somebody, then it must be wrong and it must be shut up.
Well, I don't need anyone -- government or corporate nanny -- to protect me from that which might offend me. I can take care of myself and respond myself. lyrics hunterxhunter

- I have been far, far more offended by things I have heard Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson say on our public airwaves but I have not called for them to be banned, even though they are more disgusting and hateful than Stern has ever been.lyrics hunterxhunter

- Hiawatha Bray, a good technology reporter for the Boston Globe (his blog here) leaves a comment saying good riddance to Stern. Fine if you feel that way. But what happens when people get offended by something you say, Hiawatha? There's something bigger happening here and it has an impact on our business, on media, on journalism, on the press. Danger lurks here, colleague.lyrics hunterxhunter

- See Micah Sifry on Clear Channel. See Adam Curry. See Tony Pierce. lyrics hunterxhunter

- Have to go. More later....lyrics hunterxhunter

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'All marketing should be permission marketing'
: Ten years ago, Procter & Gamble CEO Ed Artzt gave a now-legendary speech shaming the ad industry into innovating and embracing new media. I was starting online then and it made waves.
Now, 10 years later, another P&G exec, Jim Stengel, gives a followup speech to the industry and gives them a bad grade, a C-, for their efforts so far.
A few good lines:

In 1994, we anticipated an explosion in TV channels, resulting in significant fragmentation in viewers. Today, the average U.S. household has more than 90 TV channels—this is up from an average of 27 channels in 1994. Share for the big four networks during primetime has dropped from 52.4 percent to 30.6 percent.
Specialized networks offer advertisers access to more segmented audiences, but in much smaller volume. And we’ve lost whole segments of consumers whose needs aren’t being met by today’s programming. We must accept the fact that there is no “mass” in “mass media” anymore, and leverage more targeted approaches.

And I especially like this:

All marketing should be permission marketing. All marketing should be so appealing that consumers want us in their lives. We should strive to be invited into consumers’ lives and homes.
When we think of permission-based marketing, most of us think about opt-in online newsletters. We really need to expand this mentality to all aspects of marketing. We must develop creative that both maximizes the channel and appeals to the consumer. For each element of the marketing mix, we should ask ourselves “would consumers choose to look at or listen to this,” and let that be the benchmark.

I like that: All marketing should be permission marketing. Right.
Yet I think he's still not looking at that from quite the right perspective. Almost, but not quite. He's still thinking about all this in terms of old-time creative and old-time media: Is our commercial good enough to show you?
Instead, they should be thinking: Is our information good enough to serve you? And he can even start to think about having mutual friends (see Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing on the idea of underwriting citizens' media).
For this new medium offers more than eyeballs. It offers relationships. And, more important, it offers the consumer control.
So rather than trying to create a commercial you force upon a consumer that so darned good he might tolerate if given a choice, realize instead that consumers do now go to advertising when it's useful: I go to Handspring's site to learn about and buy their phone.
More important, I go to fellow consumers -- with whom I have a relatsionship of trust -- to learn about products. I went to the TreoCentral forums to learn more about Handspring's phone before and after I bought it.
That's a helluva different from happening to see a good commercial about the phone.
That's the future of marketing.
As Fred Wilson said one morning, "The push model of advertising is over. It's over. It's just a matter of time before people realize it. It's toast."lyrics hunterxhunter

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Government in exile but online
: Yesterday's Times noted ousted Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori's use of the Internet to try to rebuild his political base from exile:

His energy is focused, though, on a thin laptop computer, with a freestanding microphone and a Web camera perched like a Cyclops eye. A blue data cable serves as a high-speed umbilical cord to Peru, 9,000 miles away.
Alberto Fujimori is a political exile in the age of the Internet.
Wielding what he calls this "powerful instrument" over the last year, Mr. Fujimori, former president of Peru, has parried an Interpol arrest request, started a political movement in Peru, maintained his "From Tokyo" Web site, and transmitted programs for his new hourlong weekly radio show, which is broadcast on 60 stations in Peru.
"I live as if I were in Peru, but without the physical contact with the people," said Mr. Fujimori, who took up residence in Japan, the land of his ancestors, in November 2000 as his administration fell apart during a corruption scandal. "Five years ago, this would have been unthinkable."

In the case of Fujimori, the technology is being used by a disgraced loser. But the same technology can be used by most any outsiders to get inside. The Iranian bloggers are, of course, using this to build the political future of their country (and they have something wonderful underway you'll hear about soon). The irony, of course, is that Ayatolla Khomeini had to build his base and power from exile and would have found all these tools quite powerful; now they will be used by the citizens he exiled to change the regime he created. lyrics hunterxhunter

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