The Most 2008 Movie of 2009, or, Economic Uncertainty and Ennui Explained through Prostitution!

February 2, 2010 smithkoveconomics, financial crisis, movies, soderbergh, The Girlfriend ExperienceLeave a comment

It might be a consequence of living in New York (where it takes place, albeit in a very different New York than mine), but Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience unsettled me as much as any movie I saw last year.

Not bad for a barely plotted, mostly improvised, movie about a high-priced escort.

It’s no secret that most movies about prostitution aren’t really about sex, but it is interesting to come across one that isn’t really about intimacy, or even relationships. Instead, it’s about economics. And what’s scarier right now than economics?

Filmed and set during a few days in late October of 2008, The Girlfriend Experience captures the feeling settled over the city in the time just after the financial crisis well and truly blossomed, when we all realized, regardless of our professional proximity to Wall Street, that we were in long-term trouble. More than that, it nails the way in which New York (or most cities, I’d imagine) runs on a combination of money and dreams, and how a disruption in the former messes with the latter.

In The Girlfriend Experience, every character who isn’t rich is chasing self-sufficiency, and are circling those who have the money to make that happen. The characters with money, meanwhile, seem willfully ignorant of the effect they have on the people around them. They’re focused on their own emotional needs.

When the financial crisis starts mucking up the equilibrium of this system, people’s dreams are even more effected than their lives. What’s chilling is the sense that, in the absence of the hope for either upward mobility or “having it all,” there’s very little left except the sense that at some point most of us got sold a bill of goods about what it means to be successful or to be happy. Once those possibilities start disappearing from the table, the question “What now?” seems to echo through the movie.

And “What now?” was a scary question in 2008 that’s only gotten scarier.

How Jay Leno Might Cause your local Weatherman to Stop Taking his Medication

January 15, 2010January 15, 2010 smithkovconan o'brien, jay leno, jimmy kimmel, Media, team coco, television, tonight show1 Comment

The lesson we learn from the Conan/Leno late night imbroglio might have more to do with the power of mainstreaming conflict than anything involving NBC, late night television, or comedy.

It’s harder than ever to get people to care about entertainment institutions, and if the current late night late conflict has shown us anything, it’s that conflict sells. (Well, it’s also taught us that NBC seems to have standards for executive performance that would make them right at home on Wall Street, but that’s a story for a different day.)

One of the key moments in the ratings battle between the Conan’s nascent Tonight Show and David Letterman’s Late Show was Letterman’s involvement an extra-martial affair related extortion plot. With real life drama supplementing Stupid Pet Tricks, what active late night viewer wasn’t going to watch?

Naturally, since NBC’s stupid human trick put Conan on the spot, his ratings have been rising every night. Hell, the conflict even got me to watch Leno once. (On the wrong night, unfortunately, as I missed Jimmy Kimmel’s unreal appearance last night.)

So, while NBC’s brand is taking a hilarious beating, when it comes to the numbers that they really care about, ratings that will later be used to determine advertising rates, their ham-fisted handling of the Tonight Show has solved the very problem they were trying to address.

I’m wondering, why stop there? If real world conflict translates to advertising dollars, why shouldn’t a local newscaster, say, announce that they were going off their meds and didn’t know for sure what might happen? (Come to think of it, I just described Glenn Beck’s show…)

We’re living in a society that’s just about post-dignity and post-seriousness. Success, even in something as ultimately meaningless as television ratings, provides a patina of respect. It took American Idol, after its premiere, about two months to turn from a carnival sideshow exploiting damaged youth by exploiting their hopes for fame into a chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit. And Mr. Beck’s nuttiness has certainly worked out well for him.

So, I wonder if the lasting legacy of this very public conflict between millionaire comedians won’t be a sizable increase in the use of real world conflict to generate interest in cultural properties.

Sarah Palin is being Exploited [media]

November 20, 2009 smithkovMedia, oprah, palin, publishing, sarah palin, television5 Comments

Oprah exploited Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin knew this, of course. She signed up for it. It’s all part of the deal that people opt in to when they’ve when got a platform that’s larger than their employment prospects.

It’s a bad deal, though. And one that tells us some things about our deeply flawed media.

The deal is supposed to work like this: A notable figure writes a book. They spend the better part of a month giving interviews to as many venues as they can in hopes that the attention will get people to purchase the book. Then they take the money earned by the book out of the bank in singles, cover their bed it in, and roll around happily.

This quid pro quo is a much better deal for broadcasters than it is for authors (as loosely defined as the term may be in this case), and it diminishes both mediums. It turns book publishing into a de facto money laundering operation. Is there any doubt that everything Sarah Palin wished to express and accomplish with “Going Rogue” could have been done just as well with a series of interviews? Or 20 pages of bullet-points?

Worse, the arrangement gives an enormous free pass to a “news” culture that’s become to celebrity newsmakers what the NCAA is to athletes. In a time when the book business is ever more troubled, and the ability to draw an audience together for anything longer than a youtube clip is ever more valuable, how does it make sense for books to serve as the near exclusive means of monetizing interest, while television newscasters get paid millions upon millions for asking softball questions in service of news broadcasts that serve as profit centers for multinational corporations?

Orpah and other broadcasters get a definable benefit, in ratings and advertising dollars, from having someone on who brings extra eye to the screen. If Sarah Palin brought one extra viewer to Oprah’s show, or to any of the other venues she’s been on in the last couple of weeks, why shouldn’t she be entitled to payment for the value she added?

Taking the idea a step further, imagine a broadcast where the journalists and their interview subjects shared the profits, in an above-board way.

Perhaps a profit motive might lead to someone like Palin answering questions that journalists typically don’t ask, like about Trig’s birth, or how she really feels about her political future. After all, nothing sells like conflict and revelations.

Most celebrity “news” interviews these days are non-confrontational to the point of propaganda. The news could cease showing their desperation for the ratings that come with a good “get,” and fearing that showing a semblance of spine would torpedo their chances. Instead, the could focus on offering the best financial deal, and preparing a show that would create the most possible interest.

We might even get more truth out of the deal.

(I, for one, would pony up $24.99 to watch Sarah Palin interviewed by Michael Moore on Pay-Per-View. Would the integrity of the news business really suffer in that kind of deal?)

It’s time for a new method of monetizing interest. (And if it only served to save us from all of those dubious books, that would be success enough.)

Bill Simmons represents ESPN’s Biggest Failure [sports media]

November 18, 2009November 17, 2009 smithkovbill simmons, Media, sports, sports mediaLeave a comment

ESPN’s Bill Simmons is the most popular sportswriter in America. He’s arguably the only one that really matters anymore. He’s enough of a common denominator that if you end up in a semi-decent conversation about sports with a stranger under 45, that both of you read his column is a very safe assumption.

His popularity is such that his 700 page book about basketball went to number 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List in its first week. His book signings have attracted fans in the high hundreds. His columns’ page views are measured in millions. He’s unquestionably a star.

And his ascension represents ESPN’s biggest new media failure.

Simmons was something of a phenomenon. Hired by ESPN in 2001 to write for their web site, first as the “Boston Sports Guy” and soon as just the “Sports Guy,” his was the first voice on a major sports site to write from a fan’s point of view. And a funny fan, at that. Simmons wrote about sports the way fans actually talk about sports and he did so with a looseness of style, not to mention column length, that was unique among big-platform sports writers.

It didn’t take long before word about him spread. I know I was a early evangelist, sending some of his earlier columns to more a few friends under subject headings like, “You’ve got to check this guy out!”

Upon seeing the success that came from have a columnist torpedo the idea that sports media was about “insiders” writing for “outsiders,” ESPN decided that there was no lesson to be learned there, and gingerly stepped away from that door. Instead of introducing a “New York Sports Guy” or “LA Sports Gal” or others, and seeing if they connected with readers like Simmons had, ESPN decided that, while Simmons would continue to do his thing, his situation would be unique.

With that decision, ESPN hasted the rise of the alternative sports blog scene, one that would bedevil them, by years; put itself in a more difficult situation in terms of talent negotiation; and made harder their current effort to generate revenue through locally-oriented content.

Make no mistake, Simmons is a talented writer and it’s admirable that, in an era when most sportswriters seems to view actually “writing” as a means to a radio show or regular television appearances, he takes it quite seriously. Simmons’ success, though, was also the result of his being the right kind of voice, at the right time, on the biggest platform imaginable.

A large part of the sports blog scene rose up in opposition to the relative stranglehold on sports media that ESPN had. Since the early 1990’s, The World Wide Leader (as it calls itself) decided what was newsworthy, what was interesting, and what was funny. And it presented a world where athletes didn’t swear; managers and coaches had to do something supremely dumb to be called mildly mistaken; and, for years, the only sports with steroid problems involved either the former Eastern Bloc or bike racing.

A roster of “outsider” writers, dealing with sports culture closer to the way normal humans do (though still without swears), would have seriously lessened the market’s hunger for sites in the vein of Deadspin, The Big Lead, and With Leather.

As it happens, one of that sports blog community’s favorite pastimes is reading the tea leaves about what Bill Simmons will do when his current contract with ESPN expires in 2010. He’s already, by my reckoning, more effectively monetized being a writer on the web than anyone else. There will be competition for his talents and who ever gets him will have to open up the piggy-bank. Meanwhile, ESPN hasn’t developed any voices that might be credibly able to take his place.

Another possibility, one that Simmons himself mentioned in an interview, is that he might start his own sports web site. The readership that he could take with him to such an enterprise would be significant, and with the low overhead of web journalism, I wouldn’t bet against him.

Finally, over the last year ESPN has launched several locally branded pages, such as ESPNBoston, to compete with local sports pages for readers and advertisers. If they’d used their experience Simmons as an example of how a local focus can be used as an incubator for talent, ESPN would already have writers with the experience and platform to bolster their local efforts. Instead, ESPN has to poach talent from the newspapers they’re competing with.

ESPN dealt with the success of Bill Simmons like an old media company.

When Bill Simmons succeeded, ESPN had discovered a new paradigm for sports media on the web, but was far more comfortable just deciding that they’d found a new star.

They’ll be paying for that mistake for quite some time.

Why NBA Teams Should Think of Bloggers like they Think of Players

October 29, 2009 smithkovbasketball, blogging, gilbert arenas, nba, Social Media, sportsLeave a comment

Can something as ephemeral as cultural footprint make something as concrete as a sports franchise more valuable?

The NBA season just started with the majority of its franchises struggling in this economic climate. Television ad revenue is down, season ticket sales have cratered, and the number of marquee teams that can reliably sell out arenas has gotten smaller. So how should NBA teams maximize their dwindling revenue sources?

They should start treating bloggers like they treat players.

By which I mean, when a team identifies a player that they think will help them win, they try to acquire that player. In the same way that all players aren’t created equal, bloggers aren’t either.

Let’s go to a case study.

In the 2004-2005 NBA season Washington Wizards point guard Gilbert Arenas had a great season. He was among the league scoring leaders and the leader of an up-and-coming team. His jersey, however, was not among the league’s top 25 sellers. He was a good player, but not quite a star.

In the 2005-2006 season, however, his jersey did make the top 25. And the year after, it was in the top 10. Not only that, but Arenas had become the kind of player who put butts in seats and brought viewers to the television. One who increased a team’s connection to its surrounding community. His game hadn’t changed, so what had?

He got a nickname. More than that, he became a character. “Agent Zero.” (After his jersey number.) And that happened thanks to a very popular, Wizards-centric, blogger. Besides just coming up with the “Agent Zero” name, the blog The Wizznutzz, unaffiliated with the team, also popularized the fact that Arenas had started to shout “hibachi!” each time he made a shot, and that he’d set up a giant tent inside his house to simulate high-altitude conditions. Their coverage of him went a long way from turning him from a player into a happening.

Even with his entertaining idiosyncrasies, Arenas was a high scoring guard who’d never won anything on a team that had more or less been moribund for years. His becoming one of the most popular players in a league with quite a few compelling characters was no sure thing and, without the blog’s help, may not have happened.

Think about what that means. NBA teams make money from every ticket and jersey sold, of course, but their value is also tied to the community they create. When the owners of the team think about selling, how much is having a player who’s become a local hero worth?

If the cultural capital generated by a great blogger moves the needle even 1%, the team will have realized millions of dollars in new value.

And what about when it’s time for a referendum on a new arena? What would a 2% swing in the vote because residents feel a real and deep connection to the team be worth? (Putting aside the issue of public money going for sports-related projects.)

If teams are trying to create value wherever they can, hiring a great blogger is a whole lot easier than putting together a winning team.

Are Personal Brands Compatible with Corporate Ones?

August 5, 2009 smithkovLeave a comment

In order to get a job in the public relation or marketing spaces, I’m told I need to have a strong “personal brand.” I don’t disagree, but I do wonder about the intersection of “personal” and “corporate” brands.

Where people in the communications business were once conduits for the authority that their company provided, now it seems that companies are hoping to be conduits for the authority that their communication hires can provide. (Or in the case of Best Buy, the number of twitter followers.)

In a corporate communications situation, the personal brand of the professional doing the communicating might dovetail with the needs of the corporation’s brand but if there ends up being tension between the two, it won’t really be a contest. An ever decreasing number employees identify with their employer or expect to be with them for the long haul, so while serving a corporate brand is at best a temporary assignment fostering their personal brand is a never ending job.

How does a company combat that? Perhaps through a strong company culture that nurtures and encourages employees, creating the kind of internal loyalty that’s hard to quantify. (Though I’m sure some economist has.)

What Zombies Can Tell Us about the Aughts

July 8, 2009 smithkovLeave a comment

You can a lot about a culture from the monsters it embraces. Sometimes even things it might not know about itself. (And we’re talking literal monsters, like werewolves and such. While Bernie Madoff certainly counts as a monster under most definitions, say, no child outside of Palm Beach leaves their closet light on just in case he’s in there.)

In the boom times, earlier this decade, the our monster of choice was the zombie. Starting with the film 28 Days Later and continuing with Dawn of the Dead, the reverent spoof Shaun of the Dead, the excellent black and white comic The Walking Dead, and even the Resident Evil franchise of video games and movies, zombies were everywhere.

What we didn’t know at the time was that zombies really were everywhere.

In everyday life we were surrounded by zombie institutions. Banks and brokerages leveraged past the point of viability, and with portfolios of worthless assets, shuffling about their business until being told that they’d actually been dead for years.

A news media that let a war get sold to the public on provably false pretenses while producing the same millions of column inches and hours of talking heads it always had. Reading or watching it, you’d hardly know they missed anything.

A political system that turned against itself. A justice department actively trying to influence elections. A disaster agency designed to prove, at high human cost, its own inadequacy. A Congress content to argue on the margins with constitutional principles at stake. It seemed like it was still mostly doing what it always did while inside it was rotting.

Maybe the zeitgeist was trying to warn us.

If the early and mid- part of this decade belonged to the zombie, what does it mean that now the monster of the moment is the vampire? (Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries…) I’m not sure, but I suspect things are about to get mean.

(And I’d keep a close eye on one’s precious bodily fluids, just in case.)

Saving the Poor by Dodging Bullets: When “Conventional” no longer equals “Safe”

June 25, 2009June 30, 2009 smithkovMedia, philanthropist, television1 Comment

In an extremely competitive marketplace, why be expensively mediocre?

I’m fascinated by the promos for NBC’s new summer series and they way they seem to embody a whole Big Media mindset.

Despite being a multitasking, distracted, TV watcher, I’ve seen enough promos for NBC’s new show “The Philanthropist” to tell you the plot (a billionaire saves a poor African boy and realizes that he should use his wealth to help people while getting shot at a lot), the actors (Neve Campbell, finally out of “Scream” residuals; the big guy from “Rent”; the fellow who quit “V for Vendetta”; Omar), and the big action beats (a helicopter is involved). What I can’t tell you is why anyone would watch the show. The previews seem determined to exactly mimic the promotional material of every show, failed and not, that’s come before.

A successful television series is a franchise that can produce huge revenues for years and years, but the failure rate for new shows is French Revolution conviction rate high. Why, then, would a network aim to create a promotional campaign that’s, but for the particulars, completely generic?

My guess would be fear.

For someone to be unconventional in their promotion of a show is to fully own its failure if it, like nearly all new show, fails to catch on. Being conventional is, on an employee to employee level, safe. Hey, you’re just doing what everyone else does.

Being conventional also makes it far less likely that a passionate audience will develop around a property.

It seems to me that media companies can no longer afford to operate from a default position of fear. If they want to stop doing so, however, they need to change their culture and how success and failure are interpreted. When the odds are already stacked against you, “conventional” is no longer synonymous with “safe.”

With Marketing more Important than Ever, Can Companies Afford Marketing?

April 23, 2009 smithkovLeave a comment

A Slate article about Microsoft’s new ad campaign linked back to a longer piece about that campaign’s creator, the ad world giant Crispin Porter & Bogusky. That article, from April 2007, mentions that Crispin demands nearly total message control over it’s clients (companies such as Burger King, Miller Brewing, and Volkswagen) and was increasingly taking an ownership stake in the companies with which it worked.

That last piece, the ownership stake, is a fascinating comment on the state of marketing and authenticity in the marketplace today, and portends trouble that may be ahead for companies like Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

First off, having an advertising/marketing company literally buy into a corporate enterprise seems to me pretty close to an admission that isn’t much inherent value to the products the company sells. If your company communications have to be so pitch perfect and well coordinated that you’re willing to cede huge swaths of authority over to a previously outside group then perhaps what you’re making simply isn’t that good.

Second, while it’s long been known that a positive recommendation from a trusted word of mouth source is far more powerful than any media buy can ever be, the ability of people to check in with their sources about products or services is getting easier and easier. In response, marketing companies like Crispin have tried to co-opt trusted sources through campaigns designed expressly to generate social network traffic (like the “Subservient Chicken” website they created for Burger King) or through rigging the game a bit by paying directly for positive word of mouth on twitter, blogs, yelp, and others. While these strategies might currently work, I suspect they’ll have the eventual effect of causing a person’s network of trusted sources to get more exclusive, leaving people even less susceptible to conventional image branding and skeptical of enthusiasm from sources they don’t have a track record with.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the future for communicating with customers will be based on excellent products/services and authenticity. (Cue, “if you can fake authenticity…” joke.) And authenticity may not always be compatible with companies that take selling themselves as a goal that’s on par with making things people can get excited about.

And by “authenticity” I don’t mean the canned, “we know you’re being marketed to all the time and are way too smart for our ruse, so we won’t even try to be slick with our pitch” anti-advertising aesthetic that’s been used by every company up to and including Nike, which hasn’t done a non-slick thing (excepting that sweatshop business) since the inventing of the waffle sole.

While branding that creates positive connection between a brand and its market will never go out of style, I wonder if the larger mission for smart marketing companies will be to teach their accounts how to intelligently speak for themselves, from their place of expertise, and to provide them with the metrics needed prove the positive effects of doing just that.

Who’s Your Fullback?

April 13, 2009 smithkovbusiness, fullbacks, Neal, NFL, sportLeave a comment

One of my favorite football players is a guy who’s scored exactly 6 touchdowns in his career. He’s never rushed for more than 175 yards in a season, nor caught more than 31 passes. By every conventional statistic measuring offensive players, he’s a non-factor. And he’s been told by 6 different teams that his services are no longer required.

And yet, for nearly his entire career (and in a league where the average player lasts less than 4 years he’s lasted 16), an interesting thing happens to every team to joins. They start to win more.

The player is Lorenzo Neal, and he’s a fullback.

A fullback basically serves as the bodyguard for a more highly paid, more famous, running back. The fullback is allowed to carry the ball, but very few do. Most often, when a play calls for the running back to run through a certain gap between linemen, the fullback’s job is to get there first and knock the stuffing out of the defender in the best position to make a tackle.

When a fullback does his job correctly, the viewer at home will be treated to endless replays of the highly paid running back prancing untouched down the field while the announcers talk about his “breakaway speed.” In success a fullback is invisible.

In the case of Lorenzo Neal, for most of his career, each time he’d arrive to a new team, that team’s running back would suddenly get much better. The running back would, running untouched through the holes opened up by Mr. Neal, start appearing in Nike commercials, get a big new contract, appear on the cover of Madden. Then Mr. Neal would be released or traded and the running back would suddenly be normal again.

This all occurs to me because, having spent the last number of years as an book editor, for many of us in the background of the culture business, we are fullbacks.

If I did my job well on a given product, the end result would have my fingerprints on it, but not my name.

Each project was an opportunity for me to block for an author, and that could mean fighting to get the right kind of marketing support, convincing them that a particular change to the book’s structure might more effectively tell their story, or keeping them on track when it felt like forces were aligning against them.

If I block well and a project is a touchdown, the satisfaction in watching the author get to do a touchdown dance is immense. If the result is a first down, I’m excited to take another shot. And if it’s a tackle for a loss, I know I’ve overextended a metaphor.

Do you have a fullback? Are you one?