Blog Archives

Remember a few days ago, when I wrote about AT&T’s “decidely stupid” new advertising campaign, but noted that it probably wouldn’t last long, since they would soon be premiering a series of new ads directed by Wes Anderson? Well, I was sort of wrong. The decidedly stupid ads are the new ones by Wes Anderson. I should have guessed by the Brechtian staging that they were his, but since they’re so decidedly stupid, I guess I never imagined he could suck so much.

You can see all five of them (hopefully that’s all there is at Goldenfiddle.

I’m so disappointed in Anderson. I loved the Amex spot he did. I just hope The Darjeeling Limited is better than this nonsense.

It’s finally happened.

I wrote back in May about the path the “new” AT&T was taking to rebrand itself away from the Cingular name. They’d already gone from “Cingular is now the new AT&T — your world, delivered” to “Cingular’s name is now AT&T.”

With their latest (decidedly stupid) campaign, they’ve switched the tagline to simply “the new AT&T works in more places” — no more mention of Cingular (although the mobile page on their site still tells us that “Cingular is now the new AT&T”).

And it seems this (stupid) campaign is to be fairly short-lived. AT&T has already announced that Wes Anderson is going to be directing some new corporate spots with a new theme: Your Seamless World

AT&T Inc said on Tuesday it was launching a new corporate advertising campaign, with ads designed to convey a younger, edgier style associated with wireless.

The company’s “Your Seamless World” corporate ad campaign features situations that “speak to the on-the-go lifestyle of today’s consumers and businesses.”

The campaign includes six television spots overseen by Wes Anderson, director of films including “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

AT&T also said it will now use orange as its primary corporate color. Ads, company signage and its Web site are undergoing a “color makeover,” the company said.

“The new initiatives are designed to highlight how AT&T helps connect people to their worlds wherever they live and work,” AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said in a statement. “We want to ensure this message is reflected in our brand.”

So we can expect an orange death star in the near future. Joy. Actually, I think we can hope for them to drop that awful Oasis song. Anderson’s known for his use of music, and he has better taste than that.

I suppose the next step is to drop the “new” from “the new AT&T,” but I have a feeling that they’re going to be reminding us that they’re new for quite some time, letting “new” get very old on us, because that’s the youthful and edgy way to do things.

I saw a couple of new adverts for Ask.com on the eye of hell Tuesday night. I’m pretty sure this makes five different campaigns in the past 18 months or so. We had…

• One that took place in a café full of animalistic searchers, and that one Ask user who evolves, plus one with some scientist types being described as “animals in pants” by an ape. These, I’m sure, were massive hits with the intelligent design crowd.
• The series with Apostolos Gerasoulis himself (founder of Teoma) pointing out what a “pimped out” search engine Ask is.
• Two or three spots involving people talking about “the algorithm” and yucking it up over their friends who just didn’t get it.
• Those god-awful singing and dancing “I got what I was looking for” ads, featuring searches for [Kato Kaelin] and [chicks with swords].

And now we get a couple of new ones. In these, the only sounds are a few musical notes at the end and the sound of a user clicking (must be using IE, so how smart a searcher can it be?) as s/he shows us the beauty, the splendor, the majesty, and the usability of Ask’s GUI. One of them shows how a search for San Francisco offers lots of options, such as different media — images, maps, images from news stories, or the Wikipedia entry on the city, direct information — the time and weather in SF, or the opportunity to narrow or expand the search.

In the other, we get to learn about how we can make our searches more pleasant by choosing wallpaper (they refer to it as a “skin”) from a dropdown list:

• AskX – the Web 2.0-ish interface they introduced a few months ago
• Azul – a bench, ostensibly in London in front of a blue backdrop
• Cartas – a mail slot on a red door
• Flower
• Golden – wheat
• Pink stripes
• Polka dots
• Rotunda – Sorry, I don’t know what building’s rotunda it is
• Timber Brume – A forest in a bit of fog, which is apparently what a brume is
• Western Sky – at sunset, of course, and
• Default – that boring interface we all hate so very much.

The thing is, the “skin” only appears to skin ask.com. Run a search, and it’s gone until you go back to the home page. So… big deal.

Are these ads going to help Ask? Maybe the one involving how useful the engine is might bring them up from a distant fourth to a close fourth, but the skin ad really doesn’t strike me as a reason for anyone to switch.

I guess I’d like it if Google had a bit more competition. All three of the other supposedly big four are on the eye of hell, trying to get the public to give them a try. Big old Goggly Gogol has yet to stoop to advertising on the tube, and I’m still waiting for the day when Paris Hilton looks out at me from the dreaded eye and says, “iGoogle. Do you Google? Wanna Google with me?”

I was watching Countdown on Friday night (I usually catch the midnight replay) and of course, it being the night of the official premiere of the Simpsons Movie, they had a story about the global hype surrounding the film. After Monica Novotny was done talking about how the CN Tower “now has a sprinkilicious view,” our boy Keith, hero of lefty bloggers all over the interweb tubies, he who fears no Bushy, came back to say (from the official transcript):

And, of course, Monica meant squishies, not slushies. The woman behind Bart Simpson will be joining us live here on Monday. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, dude, on COUNTDOWN at 8:00 Eastern, 5:00 Pacific. Be there, aloha.

I was so excited! No, not because I was going to learn all kinds of fun stuff about the show or the movie. I was excited because Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, is a Scientologist. We know how Olbermann feels about Scientology. There was no way he was going to interview Nancy Cartwright without one of them bringing up the Church — either he’d bravely take the interview off its planned course of plugging the movie and insist she tell the truth about Prince Xenu, or she’d at the very least demonstrate her disdain for the things he’s had to say about Tom Cruise. In either case, this was going to be good.

So I tuned in tonight at 8:00. I didn’t want to risk something big and ugly going down and having it deleted from the version I would have seen at midnight. No, I didn’t want to miss a thing.

And what did I get? An interview with Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson. What? It was supposed to be Bart, not Lisa. You said so, Keith!

What a disappointment. The interview was fine — perfectly infotaining. But it was not what I’d been waiting all weekend for. No fireworks. No name calling. Poo.

I want to know who blinked, and under what circumstances. Did the brave Sir Keith turn coward on us, afraid of things getting less than fun in his final segment of the night, when he normally gives us his powder-puff soft celebrity news? Did Cartwright refuse to speak with the heretic? Did MSNBC wise up to what was likely to take place and decide to play it safe? Somebody clue me in.

Update: I just noticed, in the repeat broadcast of the interview (hey, there’s nothing else on, ok?) that Keith makes a point early on about how the entire cast seems to enjoy working together, and he reels off a list of names: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Harry Shearer… but not Nancy Cartwright! Freudian slip, or spiteful omission?

I wrote a post last year about the use of the phrase “all new” in advertising, but I assure you, this post is all new.

Remember the Ford Taurus? It was pretty popular back in its time. In fact, I think it beat out the Accord as the most popular car in the US for a year or two. It was discontinued just a year or two back, and replaced with the all new Ford 500. The 500 wasn’t such a big hit, though.

Well, Ford is going to make everyone happy now, as the 500 is to be replaced with the all new 2008 Taurus. That’s a picture of an ’08 Taurus to the right, and the picture above is an ’06 500. Do you see what I see?

I see two almost identical cars. The new model doesn’t have the chrome strip along the side, the taillights are different, and it looks like the front turning signals might be slightly different as well, but that’s about it. So basically, what those deep thinkers at Ford have done is to take a not new model, attach a not new name to it, and come up with what they refer to as an all new product.

While I’m on the subject, the old all new post mentioned the use of the term “hit” being used for any program on the eye of hell, whether it received a large audience or not. Well, I saw a promo for Fox’s new game show, “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” last night. I think the program has aired once or twice at this point. Did they refer to it as a hit? Actually, no, they didn’t. Instead, the promo spoke of the “Don’t Forget the Lyrics phenomenon.” At first, that kind of threw me. Is a phenomenon bigger than a hit? Then I realized they’re probably just using the dictionary definition of the word: an observable fact or event, or an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition. That’s fair. I mean, I haven’t seen the show, but I think it’s safe for me to assume that if I were to tune in, I would experience something through my senses.

I just prefer not to find out exactly what that experience might be.

This time it’s personal.

Michael Moore was on CNN during the 5-6 pm (Eastern) hour today for a live interview conducted by Wolf Blitzer. The interview was preceded by a report by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, which attempted to fact check Moore’s film Sicko. After the report ran, they went live for the interview, and Moore proceeded to slam Blitzer, Gupta, CNN, and the mainstream media. He accused them of being water carriers for their sponsors, including the pharmaceutical and health care industries, of refusing to ask tough questions of the powerful, of cowardice, dishonesty… it was beautiful.

It ran long (Jack Cafferty complained that they’d dug into his time), but Blitzer was barely able to get a word in edgewise. The best he could do was defend Gupta as a doctor and a journalist, and admit that CNN is a business and has to make money.

Blitzer offered to continue the interview on tape, but Moore insisted that he would only do it live because he didn’t want to be edited against his will. Blitzer replied that he’d play the whole thing, uncut. I don’t know if Moore agreed to that or not.

If I can get my hands on a video of the interview, I’ll post it here. Moore says he’s going to answer all of Gupta’s points on his site, so maybe he’ll upload the interview too.

Update: Blitzer just did a tease for the 7:00 hour, and he says he’s going to have the first part of the interview and the second tomorrow, so hopefully that means they’ll show all of the stuff that was live earlier today and more — uncut — tomorrow. I wish I had a DVR.

Update to update: today’s interview is up at YouTube. It’s non-embeddable, so you’ll have to go way over there to see it. Thanks, Mike.

OK, one more update: Moore, as promised, has published a blow by blow response to Gupta’s report on his site, closing with the following:

CNN: “But no matter how much Moore fudged the facts, and he did fudge some facts…”

This is libel. There is not a single fact that is “fudged” in the film. No one has proven a single fact in the film wrong. We expect CNN to correct their mistakes on the air and to apologize to their viewers.

We shall see…

News on the eye of hell used to be pretty straightforward. A guy, sitting at a desk, reading the news. Those days, however, are long gone.

I grew up on Lawn Guyland, from the mid-60s to the early 80s, and I saw a lot of the changes in the news at the flagship stations of the major networks (back when there were only three). Some were fads, but some have stuck around.

Scripted Small Talk

I remember Jim Jensen, who was the quintessential NY anchorman. For some 25 years, he had just a touch of grey on his temples. Jensen used to challenge his reporters: they’d come back from the taped segment of the report and he’d have questions to ask the reporter — real questions. You could tell that they didn’t know in advance what he was going to ask.

I remember seeing them go back to the studio after a report by Meredith Vieira (who was seriously hot back then) about abused children. Meredith was in tears, and Jim did what he could to (ahem) comfort her.

I remember, but didn’t see Tex Antoine’s last night on the air. Tex was a weatherman, and he used a character called “Uncle Wethbee” to show us what the weather would be like: if it was to be sunny, Uncle Wethbee wore sunglasses. Cold weather meant Uncle Wethbee would be wearing a hat and scarf. Tex lost his job when, after a report about a rape, Tex was to make a quick statement before they went to commercial. Rather than something to the effect of “We’ve got some wild weather coming up,” he said something like, “Confucius say if you’re going to be raped, lay back and relax.” No more Tex, no more Uncle Wethbee.

Now, just about everything is scripted. When we come back to the studio after a taped segment, the hard hitting, incisive questions asked of the reporter by the anchor are all being read off the prompter. After all, they don’t want to get stuck with some reporter not knowing the answer. Every now and then, the small talk appears not to be scripted, like when Kira Philips’ mic was left on when she went to the bathroom to kibbitz about her sister-in-law, or when Carol Costello’s needling caused Chad Myers to have a weather tantrum.

Weather Radar

This one seems to be going the way of the dodo, but you can still catch them pulling this crap now and then: Americans are stupid. We know that. When you say the word “radar” to an American, they either think of the little Iowan guy from MASH, or an image from a World War II movie of a monochromatic screen with a line sweeping around it in a circle. Apparently without that line, we don’t know that it’s radar, so when weather reporters show us images from their radar, they’ll add in that rotating scan line. It’s not actually part of the radar image; they just figure we need it to assure us.

Hand-held Camera

This is something they were doing rather a lot of maybe ten years ago: to make the news more exciting and immediate, they’d pretend that they hadn’t had sufficient time to prepare their reports, so the reporter would come bounding down a corridor and into the studio, being covered by a very shaky hand-held camera. Did it work? Of course not. But it’s not that different from…

The Control Room

The standard was always to have the reporters sit in at the big desk, next to the anchor to introduce their stories, but we see a lot of reporters sitting in what’s supposed to look like either an editing room or the control room. It shows their connection to the technical aspects of reportage, even if they have no idea how the machines there work — even if the machines are just mock-ups that don’t do anything.

Big Screens, Fake Screens, Screens Screens Screens

Anyone who’s seen CNN in the past couple of years knows that they just love gigantic video monitors over there — big ones, sometimes arrays of monitors, and sometimes arrays of big monitors. On some broadcasts, the giant video wall is completely fake. It’s just a blue screen, and when the anchor carries on a fake, scripted conversation, s/he has to pretend to look at the image of the reporter while reading the scripted conversation off the monitor, all the while looking as if they’re just talking to another person. This is why they make the big big money.

The monitors our boy Wolfie has in his Situation Room are real, and they can do all sorts of fun things with them: a different picture in each one, a single picture spanning across all of them, or breaking them up into groups. One thing they do that doesn’t make a lot of sense, however, is to point a camera directly at them, so that the array of monitors takes up the whole screen. Why do they do that, when they can just send the array of feeds out as the feed we receive? Pointing a camera at a monitor is so 1950s.

STFD, or the Finger Clasp

I think we can blame Blitzer for this too, although someone else may have done it before him: for many anchors, the anchor desk is no more. Sometimes they’ve got a stool, but often it’s their job to just stand there. I suppose sitting down implies that they’re too lazy for the exciting world of journalism. The problem is that back when they had their desk and chair, they could lay their hands on the desk or hide them under it. What are they to do with their hands now that everything is so out in the open? Some choose to hold a few pieces of paper. They don’t read them, of course — that’s what the prompter is for. But if they don’t hold anything in their hands, it seems that the trend is for them to stop their hands from wildly swinging about in the studio by gently clasping the fingers of one hand in the other. Some of them seem to take this very seriously indeed. If their fingers ever slip out of the proper clasped position, they seem to go into a tiny panic attack until they find their way back. Maybe some guy in the control room is responsible for reminding them about it, shouting “FINGERS! FINGERS!” whenever they slip.

Remember when Paul McCartney sold a piece (or maybe all) of his song catalogue to Michael Jackson and Beatles songs started showing up in commercials on the eye of hell? I’m not a fan, but I thought it was kind of sad. Of course now, you’ve got Dennis Hopper shilling for Ameriprise to the hippy sellouts with their hippy sellout music in the background. This is to be expected from that generation. They were born to sell out.

Apparently, I’m now old enough that the music of my youth is starting to show up in commercials. For example, this spot for the video game Major League Baseball 2K7:

What’s that song playing in the background? Why, it’s “Breed” by Nirvana. Courtney Love has taken on Larry Mestel as a “strategic partner,” which basically means she sold a percentage of the rights to the Nirvana catalogue for about $50 million. As she put it,

We’re going to remain very tasteful, and we’re going to [retain] the spirit of Nirvana and take Nirvana places it’s never been before.

Right, Courtney. Do you really think Kurt had a collection of men scratching themselves and spitting in mind when he wrote

I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
Care if it’s old.
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
Mind. I don’t have a mind.
Get away
Get away
Get away
Get away
Way, way from your home.
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
Afraid, of ghosts!

If you have…
Even if you need…
I don’t mean to stare.
We don’t have to breed.
We can plant a house,
Or We can build a tree
I don’t even care.
“We could have all three,”
She Said…

I don’t pay a lot of attention to baseball, but does it really involve quite that much angst?

Naughty, naughty, Courtney.

Earlier today, I was avoiding work by catching up on my daily dose of a few quadrillion RSS feeds. The eye of hell was on CNN, but I wasn’t paying attention. But then I heard a voice talking about Moses and Joshua, and cheering and applause in the background, and I turned to the screen to see what the hell was going on.

It was Barack Obama speaking in Selma Alabama in memory of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. I have to say, Obama is one hell of a public speaker.

He was connecting all the dots. The ripples sent out by the civil rights movement led to his father coming to America, so he owes his existence to the movement. He’s a product of the generation that began the movement, but his generation (Joshua to their Moses) still has a lot of work to do and can’t rest on what they’ve inherited. He talked about the responsibility of government, of communities, and of individuals, and wrapped the whole thing in hope. And of course, his generation is my generation.

Atheist that I am, I have to admit that this particular style of oratory impresses me. MLK is my hero, and while I’d like to believe that he could have done what he did without bringing religion into it, I know that’s not true. He preached justice, and that’s just what Obama did today.

Shortly after Obama finished, Clinton started her speech at a church down the street. She tried to do what he did, but it just wasn’t happening. She’s simply not an orator. I could hear her shouting while the audience cheered, but I was losing interest like I do whenever the weather report comes on — I lived in Iowa for about 18 months, and I’m simply not a rural person. Half of the local news is dedicated to “drying times” out there, and I learned to just automatically ignore it. Now, 20 years later, I’m incapable of paying attention to a weather report. And I’m afraid that’s how Clinton’s speech felt to me.

It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if today’s speech is remembered for a long time. This “Joshua Generation” speech could be the start of something. If I can find video of the speech, I’ll update this post to include it.

I really wanted Russ Feingold to run for president. I thought he’d be the perfect person to deal with the mess Bush is going to leave us with. But in Feingold’s absence, I’m thinking Obama just might be the one who can get enough people to care that he might actually be able to accomplish something.

You may have heard about some guy called “JP” who was trying to raise money to propose to his girlfriend on the broadcast of the Überbowl last week. I wasn’t really following along with it myself, although I’d seen a few mentions of it in the various search marketing sites I read. JP had a blog called “My Super Proposal” and he was getting some publicity assistance from Joe Morin, a well-known search marketer. JP even got interviewed on Good Morning America.

The plan to get the proposal broadcast during the feetsball game fell through, but JP ended up recording the proposal at a local TV station that broadcast it during last night’s episode of Veronica Mars.

It turns out that JP is none other than Rand Fishkin, aka Randfish, a highly respected (and far more famous than your faithful servant, qwerty) search marketer. The video of his proposal to Geraldine, aka Mystery Guest is here, and here’s her response. That’s them in the picture. The guy on the left is Danny Sullivan, Godfather of Search.

The weird coincidence is that I had emailed Rand yesterday because I’d read a post at Think Progress that indicated that this week’s episode of VM was going to be spreading misinformation about the morning after pill. I figured they’d be watching, since Geraldine had written about how much she likes the show, but I had no idea they had a much bigger reason to watch.

So I’m making a rare exception and writing a post here that’s at least somewhat related to my work, just to say congratulations to Rand and Geraldine. Now the big question is what couple name they’re going to be given, since they’re such a famous pair in our little world of search… let me think…

• Randaldine
• Gerafish
• Mystery Fish
• Gerand