Money For Nothing

Money For Nothing
Radio Shack reported this week a 20% drop in 4th quarter sales. It was their 8th consecutive quarter of losing money. They also announced that they would close over a thousand stores. Oh, and they also announced a half-million dollar bonus for their ceo.

Dude shoulda closed 2,000 stores. Then he coulda got a million.

Running My Mouth
Two speaking gigs coming up in the next few weeks.

Next week I'll be at the American Society on Aging conference in San Diego on a panel about marketing to people over 50.

On April 2nd I'll be in London to give a talk at Advertising Week Europe. I expect to see you all there. And, please, no lame excuses about passport difficulties.

And if you're looking for a dynamic and provocative speaker for an event you're having, I can do a pretty good impersonation.

And the Oscar For Technical Difficulties Goes To...
...the Interwebs.

According to an article on Quartz entitled, Internet TV Was The Big Loser On Oscar Night...

One of the biggest nights in American television was essentially unwatchable online, as technical problems marred various live streams of the Oscars and highlighted the huge gap between internet TV’s promise and its glitchy reality. 

Hold on a second. Does Adweek know about this?

Bulletin: Advertising Trade Press Discovers Television

Stop the presses!

The advertising trade press has just awakened after a 10-year nap to discover that television is popular with consumers. Well, f*ck me blind!

That's right after 10 years of bullshit about how TV was dying and the web was taking over the world, Adweek had a piece on Monday called You Won't Believe How Big TV Still Is.

Really? We won't?

Well, guess what, Adweek, not only do we believe it, we've known it all along.

Nothing personal here, Adweek, but while you were busy publishing nonsense about how TV was dead, we were looking at the facts. You remember facts, right? That's the stuff that separates truth from bullshit.

In typical trade press cluelessness, even while they're telling the story in gee-whiz tones, they get it wrong. They published the following chart:

These charts show that television has almost twice as many viewers as online video, and that the industry is about 20 times bigger in terms of ad dollars. These are both interesting statistics, but neither is a proper indication of how much more popular TV viewing is than online video.

The proper way to do this is to compare total viewing hours. Using the numbers Adweek provides, it turns out that TV viewing constitutes about 95.5% of all video viewing, while online and mobile combined constitute about 4.5%.*

So while the death of TV has been an article of faith among the self-absorbed digital maniacs huddled in their Brooklyn walk-ups, in the rest of the world TV is kinda popular.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Adweek in which we learn that Canada is still a country.


* To prove this to yourself, multiply the number of monthly TV viewers (283,000,000) by the average number of hours they watch (146) and compare that to the total number of online and mobile watchers (155,000,000) multiplied by the average number of hours they watch (12.5 combined.) By the way, I'm officially skeptical that the amount of video watched on a mobile device is about equal to that watched on a PC, but we'll leave that for another day.

The Eternal Eye-Roll

There are a substantial number of people in the marketing and advertising industry whose livelihood depends on convincing us that we need them to help us understand and interpret the "unprecedented" changes in our culture and society.

These market researchers and "behavioral anthropologists" are constantly bombarding us with propaganda about how changes in our culture are uniquely different from the past.

These are people who know nothing about history.

They seem to think that the world was at a standstill until the invention of the internet. They have no idea that previous advances were at least as "earth-shaking" to society.

They are clueless about the impact that earlier breakthroughs had on society -- electricity, or the automobile, or radio, or armor, or the telephone, or gunpowder.

They only know what is in front of them. They think what they are experiencing is unique. They think that history didn't begin until they were born. And like every generation before them, they think they have a unique perspective.

After a while it becomes entertaining to watch successive generations of narcissists and clowns assert that they have a ringside seat for the most momentous changes in history.

Every generation believes it, and every generation is wrong.