Just saw the Esquire eInk cover. BFD. All it does is bring the blinking banner add to paper. What will they think of next? Radio ads that play when you open The New Yorker?
Month: September 2008
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We hate success
The Justice Department has hired a litigator to look at going after Google and its growing dominance in advertising.
This isn’t surprising, of course. It’s the yin-yang of American business: we love success stories but we hate too much success.
The problem with going after Google is that unlike Microsoft or earlier monopolies, the industries Google affects handed it its dominance on a silver platter. Google didn’t steal it away. Yahoo went to Google to be rescued from erstwhile monopolist Microsoft and to improve its bottom line by hundreds of millions of dollars. Newspapers–non-French-speaking ones at least–hire specialists to make their content more attractive to Google and happily take its ads–including this week’s announcement about Google digitizing and monetizing newspaper archives. See also this week’s announcement by NBC that it is handing over some ad inventory to Google. That’s not just about the money. It’s about bringing in a new population of advertisers that big media couldn’t serve (being too big–irony noted).
The agency side of the business, too, is eager to do business with Google. When I interviewed Rishad Tobaccowalla of Publcis’ Denou for my book, he explained that the giant agency consolidated all its digital divisions so it would have better negotiating leverage with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al — and also so it would gather more data (as Google does) to learn more about users and target ads better.
But Google gobbles up advertising companies, you say. Well, its acquisition of Doubleclick was approved by the government only recently. Has Google gotten too big since then?
I’ve long argued that we do, indeed, need competition in the ad market but it’s not going to come from regulation. It’s going to come from getting off our asses and creating those competitors. I said that we need an open-source ad marketplace. Nobody’s heeded that advice. Meanwhile, Glam has built a non-Google network that has grown to gigantic proportion–CEO Samir Arora told me at a Burda party the other night that it now serves more than 80 million uniques worldwide, more than 40 million in the U.S. with brand advertisers. That is a competitor to Google.
(Full disclosure: I’m writing a book about Google, What Would Google Do? And I own Google stock.)
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I’m baaa-aaack
I just went in the corrected (I hope) manuscript for my book. It has been a real crunch at the end (because the deadline and pub date were moved up) so I declared life bankruptcy. I did nothing but work on the book, teach, and say hello to my family on my way into the office. Nothing.
I’ve missed the blog and feel particularly lax since it — you — were so vital to the process of writing the book. But then again, I heard no protests. I’ll act as if that’s not a message.
I’ll now try to catch up with life and with the blog.
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Who needs a convention?
I’m amused at the vision of 15,000 journalists sitting with their thumbs up their asses in St. Paul yesterday with nothing to type while Gustav filled cable news. Without cable news, of course, there is no need to have a convention. Cable news is their raison d’être. That the Republicans can truncate their convention and the campaign still goes on is the best proof that conventions are meaningless and thus that journalists are wasting their time covering them.
That was the topic of my Guardian column this week, where I took the argument to the next level and said convention coverage is a symptom of another problem in journalism: We cover politics too much. Politics is the opiate of of journalism and it’s time to go to rehab. Snippet:
I’m sad to see that hundreds of bloggers have been co-opted to give more attention to these free adverts for the parties. I wish they found their own way and hadn’t joined the press mob. They, too, want to feel important. Like journalists, they want to be on the inside. But that’s not where either should want to be. I saw a party official crow that bloggers were just another means to get a message out. They’re being used.
The attention given to the conventions and campaigns is symptomatic of a worse journalistic disease: we over-cover politics and under-cover the actions of our governments. We over-cover politicians and under-cover the lives and needs of citizens. . . .
We assume that covering politics is high public service. But too often it amounts to covering celebrity, except that political stars have less talent and worse wardrobes than real stars. There’s little difference between camping out at the end of Joe Biden’s driveway, as the press did, to learn nothing after Barack Obama picked him as his running mate, and staking out Britney Spears when she heads out for burgers. At least she may do something unpredictable.
We don’t need the press to tell us what the politicians say; we can watch it ourselves on the web. We don’t need pundits to tell us what to think; we can blather as they do on our blogs. The rise of mass media – primetime TV – ensured that conventions would never surprise again: they became free commercials. The internet then took away the last reasons to devote journalistic resources to the events – there’s nothing we can’t see and judge on our own.
This is all the worse in the US since our elections never end, and we have a half-dozen networks with hours to fill and hundreds of newspapers that apparently still have a few too many people with not enough to do. But, anywhere, it’s worth asking whether we spend too much covering politics and too little covering the rest of life.
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Remember me?
Sorry, blog friends. I remain in life-bankruptcy, doing nothing but editing. I have a week to go to get all my revisions in on the manuscript and so I’ve been locked in my office feeling as if I’m playing a video game called Kill The Extraneous ‘But’. But I am seeing air so you’ll have me back to kick around soon.