Bad news: newspaper circulation is down 9% for the 1st Quarter of 2008. Good news: the papers report online readership is up. Problem: online readers don’t have to pay for their online editions. Where will the money come from?

I should be sympathetic to the plight of the newspapers. I grew up reading The Washington Post every morning and The Washington Star most afternoons. As a little girl, my favorite part of Sunday mornings was curling up on my Dad’s lap with the “funnies.” Just writing this makes me feel very secure and loved.

Mine is a wonderful memory; but this is 2008. The hand writing has been on the wall for hard copy newspapers since 2002 and it’s inconceivable that intelligent people couldn’t read it. They have instead spent years clinging to beliefs in the power of newsprint and that the search for column C12 is easier than scrolling through an article or clicking on a small arrow.

That is the point. The online reading experience is much simpler and convenient than the hard copy. Moreover online news is completely up to the minute, not 24 hours old. The newspapers created these experiences and continue to perfect them.

What barrier did they imagine would stop people from using them? Why didn’t they come up with a monetization model for online a little earlier? Play with “the Long tail?” Explore localization technologies? Invite readers in?

Newspaper publishers want to blame independent bloggers and the like for the demise of their hard copy editions. That’s simply not fair. The newspapers themselves played a much bigger role than Adrianna Huffington. They blindly created their own replacements, but didn’t plan for the ultimate success of that creation. The strange assumption seems to have been that consumers had the time and inclination to support both sources of content.. They don’t- and video content producers should take note now.

I treasure my memories, but can’t mourn the loss of newsprint when something much better has replaced it. I just “pity the fool” who does.

Throughout my youth, I distinctively remember Wendy ads. They stood out from all the many fast food commercials I saw. I always had faith that Dave Thomas was going to edify me with his good burger making know-how, as dependable as a sunrise. But when he died, a black-hole began to appear around Wendy’s advertising. A black-hole that evolved from conformity to just plain mediocrity.

Now Crispin, Porter, Bogusky has set a new style for fast food commercials with their work for Burger King. The Burger King work is odd ball, but more unique from the King through the recent “Whopper Discontinued” Ads. Wendy’s has been required to answer, but instead of something new and fresh was just a bad knockoff. They took Burger King’s style, replaced the BK King with an average Joe wearing a Red pig-tailed wig, who with this wig was supposed to proclaim individuality in the burger making world. This be-wigged but average Joe came to the realization that only a Wendy’s burger could lead him to true salvation. This came off as blatant mimicking of BK’s style. The Red Wig was lost in the shadow of the BK King.

Red wigs are absent from the new Wendy work. Instead there are just normal people enjoying Wendy’s burgers. Whether Crispin’s style of advertising is wearing thin or the consumer saw through Wendys façade, it is safe to assume Wendy’s misses Dave as much as I do.

Wendy’s Tactic

BK’s Tactic

Everyone has a theory. Here is mine.

The events of the last several weeks are symptomatic of something fundamentally problematic at Facebook.

Mr. Zuckerberg just isn’t that smart. He didn’t come up with the idea of Facebook and writing this code wasn’t that hard. He did see a market for it. But that puts him in the company of many, many brand managers and advertising executives not Brin and Page.

It’s pretty clear he doesn’t know what to do. Nor does he know how to hire people that do.

It is very possible he has learned his lesson and will seek appropriate help. It is also equally possible that blinded by all those dollars and too many yes-men, he won’t.

I’m putting the odds at even. The money will buy him the time to make lots of mistakes and learn from them. It will not make him an inventor, a visionary or a real leader – he’s going to have to hire those. Sure to be tougher on the ego than on the bank account; and we all know which of those is more vulnerable.

The Screen Writers Guild is one of the most venerable unions in Hollywood. Its history storied and its list of members legendary. More than a few of them, like Billy Wilder, were gifted ironists. So here’s to them:

Today the Screen Writers Guild is striking so they will get paid more when their work is distributed across the Internet. Not something considered in the previous contract, but certainly a justifiable request.

Today the Screen Writers Guild has told their membership it is ok for them to accept paying gigs from web sites that are not signatories to their long standing agreement, in other words not any major media corporation.

I may be alone in thinking this is more than just provocative, it is extremely unwise. Would they work for shows or theater offline that weren’t signatories to the agreement? Maybe - but they aren’t so they get paid for that very gig.

By working for the web sites they are saying, these guys are different and our terms with them are different. All at the same time when they are arguing with the Major Media companies that indeed anything on the Internet is THE SAME as offline.

This is less logical than the plotlines of both National Treasure 1 & 2.

On any given Sunday I could happily watch two or three NFL games in their entirely – if I didn’t have a few other things to do. So like many fans I sample- a quarter here, a quarter there, maybe a whole half; only the Steelers get my attention, devotion, prayers and passion for an entire game.

I have to believe that this is not an abnormal NFL fan viewing pattern (Steelers obsession aside), perhaps even lighter than the average.

So how is it that on most given Sundays I am exposed to the same exact ads 4-5 times? What happened to the old reach and frequency rules? Wasn’t it 5 times frequency OVER A BUY, not 5 times over an afternoon?

Under these conditions even the most effective creative (FedEx and Staples) runs the risk of wear-out by the third game of the season or mid-way through the second game of any given Sunday. Less effective creative; the Coors Coaches and Chevy “Our Country” campaigns, just becomes incredibly annoying really, really fast.

No way to sell a product, build a Brand or invest an advertising budget.

So what’s the problem? Simple – who can afford to produce enough creative to feed an NFL buy? With the average cost of a spot topping $1million and most buys requiring 8 spots a Sunday, almost no one. So production costs undermine a very, very expensive media buy and everyone pretends they don’t notice.

Too bad, just when traditional agencies should be upping their game, they’re falling back on to the same old, same old. Not the way to win a game that is in the late 4th quarter.

Sports Brands such as Nike and Reebok have seldom dropped one of their spokespeople when they were accused of a crime such as: hanging out with prostitutes, doing drugs, raping women, inciting murder, carrying a concealed weapon, or spousal abuse. Similarly the NFL has always been almost delicate in handing out suspensions for a range of abuses and outright crimes.

I’ve always assumed this was the result of two biases: 1) the NFL never wants to offend their players; 2) the NFL believes their predominately male fan base doesn’t want to acknowledge these guys might be truly bad; rather they “made a mistake,” “committed errors of judgment,” “fell in with a bad group” – all thing that, at a less extreme level, fans can relate to.

Then along comes Michael Vick with 60+ dead and tortured dogs poisoning everything about Pro Football in less than thirty seconds.

Nike and Reebok, and the trading card companies Upper Deck and Dorrmuss cut Vick from their rosters within 2 weeks of the first press. So fast they got heat from women’s groups screaming double standard as they’d never reacted so quickly when a player was accused of beating a woman.

The NFL took their usual “presumption of innocence stance.”

Vick made his plea agreement with the Feds. But NFL and Commissioner Brian Goodell continues their own investigation, with most writers assuming he will give Vick a one year suspension to follow his jail time. Tikki Barber proclaimed on NBC’s Sunday Night Football that Vick will be back in the NFL in 3 years.

I doubt Reebok and Nike will be quite so forgiving.

Why is NFL commissioner Brian Goodell blind to the danger his Brand is in? Maybe he thinks fans won’t care. He is wrong. Today’s ESPN poll shows that 83% of respondents don’t want Vick on their home team if he ever plays again.

They know Vick’s crimes are different:
First, this was a felonious enterprise systematically conducted for three years to make money; cold blooded, not a crime of passion.
Second, real men don’t hurt dogs. You may not love them, but torture them as a business? This isn’t something most guys think is a good time. Read the boards; there is very little of “the %$#@ deserved it” going on.

Vick’s crimes make him different and they are already tainting the brand.

The NFL needs to walk away from Micheal Vick.

He is in a different league and it is not the NFL; Commissioner Goodell should make that very clear.

I’m fairly immune to the every day miscues of the mainstream press regarding anything to do with the Internet. But when a story that runs on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, attributes a slowing in ecommerce “to consumers experiencing Internet fatigue,” I had to take notice.

It is true ecommerce is not running at its historic annual 25% growth rate. In fact, in certain categories such as music and computer peripherals its annual growth has slowed to the single digits. But has it occurred to anyone that this may have less to do with the Internet, or consumer’s weariness with clicking on SUBMIT, and more to do with economic trends in the real world?

Let’s just put it this way: if Wal-Mart is posting 1.1% sales growth (reported in New York Times “Retailers, Consumer Companies Search For Growth” June 16, 2007) in stores open for a year, then 9% percent looks pretty sweet.

So, do these ecommerce gurus have any statistical support for their profile of the web weary consumer? After all what ecommerce interface couldn’t benefit from a little improvement, or a complete do-over? No, these guys just go for purely anecdotal comments from academics and friends. My goodness, what it takes to get on the cover The New York Times. The press must be getting research weary.

It is a noble goal that brings these great American corporate giants (News. Corp., NBC, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!) together: “for the first time, consumers will get what they want – professional produced video delivered on the sites where they live.”

Deconstructing the hyperbole and lack of consumer insight displayed here could take pages. The real question is, can they make it happen? Five corporations that have been rivals for years, fighting hand to hand for the same ad dollars, the same consumer eyeballs are now working together. None have shown the slightest aptitude for partnership in the past (they are all legendary for their internal in-fighting); nor is there any good reason to believe they will be successful now.

Not even for their real, whispered mission: Google must die.

Not exactly a mission to build a business case on is it?

Nor can it sustain them through the negotiation-filled months ahead. The fear of Google can’t keep the various corporate self-interests at bay as they struggle to turn these press releases into real online consumer experiences and ad dollars.

A question as seemingly simple as “who gets what video first?” will determine which partner is most or least successful. Nor is the answer “everyone gets everything at once” satisfactory. In that route lies a complete dilution of value of these assets for every partner and a valueless partnership.

Then there is the advertising model with all that money to muddle through. It comes down to who sells what, how and what happens when the inventory runs out or goes soft.

It looks like some pretty tough talk ahead. All the time drawing high priced resources away from each partner’s more singular concerns: falling stock prices, re-building brand image, and other competitors.

Critically, there is no Lincoln in this story. No individual with the vision and determination to use each partner’s talents and toss the rest away. Here we see hyperbole and a great deal of misplaced energy; a true team of rivals. The folks at Google couldn’t be happier.