State Of The Cuisinart Marketing: BuzzFeed Hits Purée

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Big takeout in New York mag this week on BuzzFeed and its forays into the frontiers of native advertising/sponsored content/commerce journalism.

buzzfeed130422_1_560-1Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret?

Jonah Peretti’s viral-content machine purports to have solved the problems of both journalism and advertising at once, all with the help of a simple algorithm.

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the website BuzzFeed—though this is increasingly unlikely, as it’s currently enjoying a viral moment. The site is a hyper active amalgam: simultaneously a journalism website, a purveyor of funny lists, and a perpetual pop-culture plebiscite where you can vote on articles with bright-yellow buttons reading lol, wtf, and omg. You can find news there, really serious news by first-rate journalists, about subjects like lobbying scandals and killer drones. You can also find an enormous amount of stuff like “The 40 Greatest Dog GIFs of All Time.” If you’re into that, in fact, there’s an entire section devoted to animals.

Not to mention big chunks devoted to native advertising, which is sponsored content (read: marketing material) that’s virtually indistinguishable from editorial content . . .

Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.

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Boston Is A Burger Burg

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Red meat lovers, rejoice. Both local dailies feature burger samplers in today’s editions. Must be some alignment of the stars. Or napkins. Or something.

Regardless, here’s the front page of the Boston Globe’s G section:

Picture 1

And here’s the story, by Michael Andor Brodeur . . .

Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.

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Whitey Wars In Local Dailies

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

From our Dueling Excerpts desk

For the past three days, the Boston Herald has been excerpting columnist Howie Carr’s new book Rifleman: The Untold Story of Stevie Flemmi, Whitey Bulger’s Partner.

(The hardreading staff suspects that lots of the book is Carr’s Already Told Story of Stevie Flemmi, but we can’t say for sure since we have no intention of actually reading the book or the excerpts.)

Regardless, today’s Herald features the final excerpt in the three-part series:

010504rico‘Rifleman’: Agent Rico and Stevie like blood brothers

FBI always had a place for the thug

Gangster Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi is due in Boston in June to testify in his longtime underworld partner Whitey Bulger’s federal murder trial. In today’s excerpt from my new book, “Rifleman,” based on Flemmi’s 2003 confession, he details some of his dealings with corrupt FBI agent H. Paul Rico:

When they first met in 1958, Rico was a young FBI agent and Flemmi was an up-and-coming hoodlum. Pretty soon they were, you might say, thick as thieves.

And etc.

Previous excerpts include this . . .

Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.

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Not-So-Grand Openings On The Boston/Brookline Border

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Beacon Street between St. Mary’s and Carlton is a beehive (not to be confused with the Busy Bee) of foodie action right now. Tomorrow Whole Foods opens its 22nd Massachusetts store in the space formerly occupied by the late, lamented Johnny’s Fresh Market.

From the Boston Herald:

040813wholefoodsmh01Whole new market set to debut in Brookline

Grocer will skew to ready-to-eat items

A new Whole Foods will open in Brookline on Thursday with the distinction of being the smallest in the country for the natural and organic food grocer.

But even with just 8,000 square feet of retail space, managers of the Beacon Street store say no product category is being left out, despite stocking 4,000 distinct products compared to the 10,000 to 15,000 found at the largest Whole Foods.

“We didn’t eliminate any entire department,” associate team leader David Lomonaco said. “We squeezed them in.”

And squeezed Johnny’s out.

Yeahyeah – Johnnies Foodmaster chose to sell six of its Boston-area locations to the Texas-based supermarket chain, but local residents still need to adjust to the change from a reasonably priced grocery store with real workers serving them to a fancy-schmancy “community grocer, offering the finest and largest selection of natural and organic foods” (including “a produce section, charcuterie/deli, bulk foods such as grains and granola, and a juice/smoothie/coffee bar,” according to the Herald) staffed by people wearing Whole Foods sweatshirts and baseball caps (at least that’s what the hardwalking staff saw yesterday on our way to work).

Meanwhile, at the corner of Beacon and St. Mary’s, work proceeds apace on The Strangest Restaurant Ever, Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ.

From what the hardwalking staff can gather, Gyu-Kaku’s dinner for two costs $55, which doesn’t strike us as a price point that will be popular with either the locals or the BU students likely to patronize the place.

Then again, the hardworking staff has long been a reverse barometer of what the American public wants, so we’re likely 100% wrong about that.

Details at 11.

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Hark! The Herald! (U.S. Senate Debate-o-Rama)

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

The Boston Herald has officially become a perpetual self-promotion machine. Case in point: The feisty local tabloid 1) co-sponsored a UMass-Lowell debate last night between Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Ed Markey and Stephen Lynch (that’s good); 2) streamed it live on the Web (okay); and 3) devoted six full pages to it in today’s paper (huh???).

Start with the front page:

Picture 1

Then on page 2 Hillary Chabot provides the basic play-by-play, and a plug for the debate replay . . .

Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.

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New York Times Catches Up (Sort Of) To Sneak Adtack

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

For months now the hardtracking staff at Sneak Adtack has been on sponsored content like Brown on Williamson.

Now the New York Times has jumped on the brandwagon.

hubble-395Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads

Articles in a series on Mashable.com called “What’s Inside” looked for all the world like the hundreds of other articles on the digital media site. But journalistically, they were something very different.

The articles, about technology topics in a wide variety of products, including modems and the Hubble Space Telescope, were paid for by Snapdragon, a brand of processor chip made by Qualcomm, and the sponsor of the series. Most were even written by Mashable editorial employees . . .

Advertisers and publishers have many names for this new form of marketing — including branded content, sponsored content and native advertising. Regardless of the name, the strategy of having advertisers sponsor or create content that looks like traditional editorial content has become increasingly common as publishers try to create more sources of revenue.

The Times piece over all is so relentlessly sunny-side-up, it reads like sponsored content for sponsored content.

Unfortunately, this is getting to be a habit with the Times. Last month the paper ran a similarly judgment-free piece by Stockholm-syndrome ad columnist Stuart Elliott about sponsored content on television.

Hey, Timesniks: Keep this up and you’ll need to change your slogan to “All the steno that’s fit to print.

Originally posted at Sneak Adtack.

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Hark! The Herald . . . Ignores Itself! (Wingo Square Edition)

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Some of the Boston Herald staffers got together yesterday at the feisty local tabloid’s former South End headquarters to kiss the old dump goodbye. It’s slated for the wrecking ball this week, so about 30 current and former staffers gathered and reminisced at what was once known asWingo Square, named after the incessant numbers games the Herald ran back in the ’80s to goose circulation.

Surprisingly, today’s Herald has no story about the reunion. But crosstown rival Boston Globe does.

07heraldphotos03Boston Herald veterans salute building’s passing

The old Boston Herald headquarters in the South End will stand for just a few more days, but memories of the colorful characters and feisty spirit that filled the squat brick building on Harrison Avenue for five decades will have a much longer shelf life.

That was the message from about 30 former Herald staffers who met across the street from the building on Sunday afternoon to reminisce before demolition begins on Friday to make way for an apartment and retail development called the Ink Block .

“The esprit de corps here was extraordinary,” said David Weber, a Herald reporter for 17 years who left in 2005. “We were a powerful underdog. That’s the way we felt.”

That seems to be the way Heraldniks still feel, except in a nicer building.

Regardless, the Globe reports that “[a] formal farewell is planned for Thursday, when speakers, including Herald columnist Joe Fitzgerald, will pay tribute to the site.” Hard to believe the Herald won’t cover that one.

Tip o’ the pixel to Dan Kennedy’s Facebook post.

Originally posted at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.

 

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For All You Know, Facebook Owns Your First-Born Child

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

The New York Times reports that “despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently,” which is the Times-nice way of saying stupidly. To half-wit:

PRIVACY-articleLargeLetting Down Our Guard With Web Privacy

SAY you’ve come across a discount online retailer promising a steal on hand-stitched espadrilles for spring. You start setting up an account by offering your e-mail address — but before you can finish, there’s a ping on your phone. A text message. You read it and respond, then return to the Web site, enter your birth date, click “F” for female, agree to the company’s terms of service and carry on browsing.

But wait: What did you just agree to? Did you mean to reveal information as vital as your date of birth and e-mail address?

Most of us face such decisions daily. We are hurried and distracted and don’t pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse.

Helpful graphic of an experiment by Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University . . .

Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.

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Gronkocalypse 3!! (Globe Rips Off Herald Division)

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

From our Gronkmageddon desk

Sunday’s Boston Herald played its New England Patriots scoop Gronk-and-center in the Sports section:

Picture 1

 

The Ron Borges/Karen Guregian report . . .

Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.

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Dead Blogging Joseph Wheelwright At The Boston Sculptors Gallery

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus and I trundled down to the South End yesterday to see Joseph Wheelwright: Roots at the Boston Sculptors Gallery and it was swell.

Wheelwright “carves stones into monumental heads and turns trees upside-down to make walking giants. He is also currently carving figures from roots, some cast into bronze.”

Representative sample:

BalleticRootssml

You really need to see them up close. And you have until, well, today.

Sorry for the late notice.

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