Overflight Oversight?

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Full disclosure: The hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider avoids air travel like chocolate chip bagels (see baggage theft story here) – unless, of course, the flight deposits the hardworking staff at CDG.

Regardless, the Honey, I Overshot Minneapolis saga’s latest development cries out for comment.

First, the New York Times report, headlined “Details Are Added On Pilots in Overflight:”

The captain of the Northwest Airlines plane that overshot its destination by 150 miles in October told investigators four days later that he was “blown away” by how long he and his first officer had been distracted from their duties, according to documentsreleased Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Also:

The crew was out of radio contact with air traffic controllers for 77 minutes.

Cut to the Wall Street Journal, which reported this, under the headline “Errant Pilot ‘Blown Away’ by Incident:”

Summaries of interviews with the pilots, air-traffic controllers, company officials and other documents related to the investigation are consistent with preliminary conclusions that the pilots were perusing their personal laptops and discussing new company pilot-scheduling practices.

The captain, who estimated the discussion about schedules may have lasted 20 minutes, told investigators: “You don’t know how sorry I am.”

So, is it just me, or do we have a 57-minute gap to fill?

Your answer goes here.

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Radio [Ratings] Waves

Posted on December 17, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Two years ago, Arbitron – the bull-goose radio ratings service – started replacing its paper diaries to track radio listening with Portable People Meters, a pagerlike device carried around all day by roughly 57,000 Arbitron-niks.

Yesterday, the People Meter story hit the front page of the New York Times.

The bottom line:

“[C]lassical radio’s market share fell 10.7 percent . . . talk radio’s market share declined 2.6 percent . . . at Univision’s KLVE in Los Angeles, ratings fell 54 percent in the first quarter of 2009.”

(Your discrimination lawsuit goes here.)

Meanwhile . . .

Question #1: Is there a shift in ratings because the people who are willing to fill out diaries are not the same as the people willing to wear a People Meter gizmo all day long?

Question #2: See Question #1.

As the Times piece noted about the Arbitron paper diaries:

“People tended to look at it almost like an election — they would vote for the things they liked,” said Jaye Albright, an industry consultant with Albright & O’Malley, a radio consultancy.

So is the “discriminatory” new Arbitron technology actually indiscriminating (as in, lacking in discrimination)?

Your conclusion goes here.

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Jiltin’ Joe

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-I Control You) is currently off the reservation on the Obamacare front.

Headline from Tuesday New York Times piece:  “Lieberman Rules Out Voting for Health Bill.”

Lede:

In a surprise setback for Democratic leaders, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said on Sunday that he would vote against the health care legislation in its current form.

A surprise, because Jiltin’ Joe junked his previous support for expanding Medicare coverage to “let uninsured people 55 to 64 years old purchase coverage under Medicare.”

From MSNBC’s First Read:

*** Principle or Politics? There’s now growing evidence that Lieberman’s objection to the Medicare “buy-in” compromise isn’t necessarily based on principle. Yesterday, a video from this past September made the rounds that showed Lieberman clearly stating he supports expanding Medicare to those in their 50s. In addition, while Lieberman has been a hawk on national security issues, he’s been a consistent liberal on economic ones. According to National Journal’s vote ratings for 2008, he was MORE LIBERAL than 68% of the Senate on economic issues, putting him squarely in the Democratic mainstream. (By comparison, he was more liberal than just 38% of the chamber on foreign affairs, placing him to the right of the Dem caucus.) In 2007, he was more liberal than 72% of the Senate on the economy, and his ratings for 2005 and 2006 were similar. Bottom line: It appears Lieberman is acting a bit out of character on this issue, given his history of being a rank-and-file Democrat (leaning liberal/progressive) on domestic issues. This is why the charge of playing politics with the left is looking so believable to some.

Somebody, please, give Joe Lieberman a dope slap.

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Smart smartphone marketing

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Let the wild smartphone rumpus begin.

Google has just jumped into the pool, launching its own branded cellphone, Nexus One, after leasing its Android smartphone technology to no less than 32 wireless carriers – Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile among them.

Regardless of those partnerships, Google is going the Nexus One route wireless-less, as the Wall Street Journal notes (subscription required).

Google is also going up against a tough smartphone marketplace: According to the WSJ, BlackBerry (aka CrackBerry) currently occupies roughly half of the smartphone category; iPhone has roughly a quarter.

(Close captioned for the math-impaired: BlackBerry has twice the market share of iPhone.)

But iPhone has twice the share of mind..

True, BlackBerry has a very expensive – and, I suspect, ineffective since it doesn’t show the device itself – “All You Need Is Love” ad campaign running right now (examples here).

But these days, all you need is buzz. And iPhone’s got it.

Google needs to get it if the search giant wants to  be a smartphone player.

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The New Totalitarianism

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Meet the new boss. Same as the underlings of the old boss.

So it seems that French politics is tangled up in the Web. Via the New York Times:

[T]he Internet has proved to be an exasperating source of embarrassment for this country’s ruling class. In particular, a stream of widely popular online videos has repeatedly exposed French politicians at their least stately

According to one French media observer, the Internet is “changing the relationship between the politician and his fellow citizen . . . ‘desanctifying’ a once untouchable political class.”

The response of the once untouchable political class?

Touchy.

French government official:

We can no longer say anything, we can no longer do anything. It’s absolute transparency — it’s the beginnings of totalitarianism!

Okay, so government transparency equals totalitarianism (defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as “imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life”)?

So the people are now the problem?

Paging Alice. Paging Alice in Wonderland.

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Recording the Act of De-record-ing

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Don’t miss Jeremy Eichler’s excellent piece in the Sunday Boston Globe about digitizing his music collection.

The premise:

I’ve been thinking not only about the virtues of high-tech listening but also about what’s been lost in our headlong sprint into the digital future . . .

To begin with, there is nothing left to hold in our hands.

That’s the equivalent of “losing music’s corporeality, its thing-ness,” Eichler writes.

There’s also the loss of the hunt, that “working hard to track down a particular recording, thumbing through the bins, or scouring the holdings of used-music stores.”

And don’t forget the autobiographical nature of acquiring music recordings. Eichler: “They help us hold together the fugitive pieces of both a historical and a personal past.”

That’s why digitizing your music collection produces such a soulless result – or, as Eichler says, “why, exactly, collecting music now means so much less.”

Your book quest story goes here.

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Format o’ the Day™

Posted on December 13, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

New look.

Questions? Comments? Bitter recriminations?

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Steve Payliuca

Posted on December 13, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

On Saturday – three full days after the special-election primary to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant U.S. Senate seat – the Missus received a mailer from former Senate hopeful and current merely Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca.

The headline on the front of the mailer:

“Where I stand.”

Steve Pagliuca

Candidate for U.S. Senate

On the back:

Here is one more thing:

How do you know that when I go to the Senate I won’t be bought or bullied by the same special interests that are blocking our path to a better future? Here’s how you know: I won’t take a penny of their money. Ever.

Hey, Steve – you don’t have to take a penny of your own money, either. You lost. You can stop spending now.

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Pixellure

Posted on December 13, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

Even I – a certified pulp guy in a pixel world – find the new Sports Illustrated tablet-friendly digital magazine wicked pissah. From Marketing Vox:

The Sports Illustrated tablet offering will feature the magazine’s content, other selected material from its website, and ads enhanced with video, store finders, and other functionalities, AdAge reports. Users will be able to flip through the pages as if they were reading the print version, but will also have the ability to rearrange sections or specific articles as they choose.

In other words, a total-immersion machine.

SI’s video tour (via the New York Times Media Decoder blog) features a weird-but-ear-catching narration that starts out this way: “Hello, I’m Terry McDonell. I’m the editor of Sports Illustrated, and here’s your new issue.”

What follows is a mix of video, still photography, print pieces, and endless choices. Back to McDonell’s voiceover:

“You can read SI any way you want. Go with the editors’ version . . . then move on to what we’re calling the ‘flip view’ of the entire magazine . . . then maybe stop and take a closer look at the cover story . . . ”

All the while, the video features an anonymous finger scrolling through the magazine on an e-reader. Every time a new screen appears – Dead Tree Alert! – you hear the sound of a page turning.

Nice!

Back to McDonell: “And here’s something else we’re working on: If you like the SI swimsuit issue, ask yourself – what if it came to life?”

(Insert swimsuit video here. Subscribe. Repeat.)

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Crazy Like Fox

Posted on December 12, 2009 by Campaign Outsider

So there’s this big dustup between Time Warner Cable (a.k.a. the pipeline) and Fox Broadcasting (a.k.a. the content) about renegotiating their cablecast contract. Seems that Fox wants a big bump to allow Time Warner to cable the network into untold households.

Of course, whenever faced with a business/PR kerfuffle, right-thinking corporations turn to marketing.

Thus, RollOverOrGetTough.com – Time Warner’s weapon of mass distraction.  The website features a full-page ad Time Warner ran in Friday’s New York Times essentially accusing Fox of price-gouging.

Then again, Time Warner might be playing hardball because no Fox means more (Time Warner-owned) CNN.

A similar situation might soon play out in Boston, where Comcast is the major cable provider. Comcast is in the process of acquiring NBC Universal, which could raise conflicts of its own.

The Friday edition of the Times also featured a Comcast ad about the NBC merger headlined “Infinite Possibilities.”

For NBC’s competitors, finite possibilities is more like it.

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