Bloggasm

A PR person just emailed me this new anti-Obama ad that’s supposedly going to start running in swing states from a group that calls itself Our Country Deserves Better PAC. It looks like the Republicans have decided that Clinton voters are a key weakness for the candidate and they’re going to try to twist the knife as much as possible.

The dumbest quote from the ad: “He says he’ll play nicey nice with Islamic militants who want to kill Americans at home and abroad.” Much of what the woman in the ad says are recycled Republican talking points that wore thin 6 months ago (Rezco, Obama is an Islamoterrorist, flip flopper), but the Clinton footage certainly packs a punch.

Of course there is no shortage of prominent Republicans that have said bad things about McCain; Will Democrats start running audio footage of James Dobson bashing McCain in order to chip away at his Christian base?

Steve Outing asserts that Craigslist is not the enemy. He says this despite the fact that his new site, Reinventing Classifieds, is focused on reversing trends that Craigslist and its ilk have caused.

“Enemy? No, I wouldn’t use that word,” Outing said in a phone interview today. “If Craig [Newmark] wouldn’t have come along with this idea then someone else would have. The nature of what the internet makes possible meant that all this was going to happen no matter what. Newspapers just need to adapt to a new reality and it’s as simple as that.”

Regardless of how you frame the free classifieds site’s relationship to newspapers, its effects on revenue cannot be ignored. According to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper classified buys declined by 16.5% between 2006 and 2007 — a drop of nearly $3 billion. Scarcely a publisher exists who can say the word “Craigslist” without the underlying tone of doom and contempt.

Outing, for his part, is not sitting idly by to watch. The web guru wrote for a number of newspapers until the early ’90s and later left to cover new media and consult with various companies about the intersection of the internet and journalism. He’s been writing a column on the subject for Editor and Publisher for years.

A web startup Outing had been working on hadn’t quite panned out, and as it was closing shop last year he began doing consulting work with Christopher Ryan, the creator of Future of News, a site that allows advertisers to place ads in newspapers without human interaction. “[Chris] has this idea that he’s working on…The product is going to be called Ad Everywhere,” Outing said. “It’s going to be a distributed web strategy for getting back classified revenues…We came up with this idea to do a separate site that was not part of that effort that would be a venue or a clearing house to help folks think through this issue. Both of us feel strongly that the traditional model doesn’t work and we really need to come up with something totally different and nobody seems to have done it. Newspapers continue to bleed staff. Things are not pretty right now. Both of us came out of the newspaper industry and we feel strongly that there’s still a lot of value in saving that kind of journalism.”

Reinventing Classifieds, the result of these discussions, will combine case studies, solicited media columns, and the mining of crowd wisdom to live up to its name. Outing has already released an online survey that tries to pinpoint innovative methods that individual publishers are using to reverse the dire trends. “We’ll probably devote a lot of the site to highlighting success stories that various businesses have had,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll certainly come out with some kind of written documented solution that publishers can adopt on their own.”

Behind the scenes of all this is Christopher Ryan’s new advertising platform he’ll be working on in the coming months. Outing explained that Reinventing Classifieds wasn’t necessarily created as a marketing tool for the new platform, but rather the site is more of a separate semi-altruistic endeavor to save a threatened form of media. “I think [Chris] has a pretty clear vision of what he wants and I’m kind of adding my two cents as an outside consultant,” he said. “Regardless of the information that comes through the site he has an idea of what he wants. But I think what happens on the site will influence him as he develops it. It’s a great way to come up with a solution or platform that meets a lot of the needs for potential customers.”

But does Outing really believe that he can not only stop the bleeding advertising dollars but also reverse the trend?

“Yeah I do because I think newspapers still have huge brand recognition within local communities,” he said. “And I definitely do not feel like it’s lost yet. But without doing something radical sometime soon, the industry doesn’t have much hope.”

And proving that it’s not only politics that makes strange bedfellows, Outing has lined up a rather interesting guest writer who will pen a post for the site within the next few weeks: Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist.

So remember Donutgate? Possibly the dumbest “scandal” manufactured by the right-wing blogosphere (and that’s saying a lot)? Well before it gets swept into the dustbin of stupidity forever, make sure you watch this clip from a Fox News show. It turns out that nobody informed this guy that Dunkin Donuts was one of Fox News’ sponsors. Hilarity ensues.

This is utterly bizarre. A car dealership in Mojave, California called Kieffe & Sons Ford has been running this advertisement on local radio stations:

["Did you know that there are people in this country who want prayer out of schools, "Under God" out of the Pledge, and "In God We Trust" to be taken off our money?"]

“But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Kieffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don’t tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that’s tough, this is America folks, it’s called free speech. None of us at Kieffe & Sons Ford is afraid to speak out. Kieffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.”

First off, they don’t even have the statistics correct. As The Underground Believer notes, only 73% of the U.S. identifies as Christian. Secondly, what the hell does this have to do with cars? The dealership is voluntarily going out of its way to offend a sizable portion of its potential customer base with an advertisement that has nothing to do with its business.

Not only are you directly attacking 27% of the population, you’re also likely offending a good number of left-of-center Christians who would cringe at such unsubtle bigotry.

Here’s one way to strike back: Gather around five atheists in that area. Over the course of the week have each of them go in and show interest in buying some of the most expensive cars in the lot. Then, after they’ve wasted a good 30 minutes to an hour talking to you, bargaining with you, and getting ready for you to sign the contract and give them those great commissions, have sudden epiphanies that this was the dealership that had those offensive ads. Then have them walk out without buying the cars.

This way, not only does this get them thinking they’ve lost out on thousands of dollars in sales, but it also wastes their valuable time they’ve spent tending to you.

So who’s up for it?

It happens all the time. A company spends millions of dollars advertising a product — creating slogans, musical jingles, product designs– only for it to be bought up by a larger company. That larger company wipes out the name of the original and incorporates it into its own products. All that money spent branding that original product is now useless because it no longer carries the same name.

Or is it wasted? It turns out it may be worth something. How many of you out there can still hum the advertising jingle of a product that’s no longer on the shelf? This is evidence that the brand lives on, and some companies are taking advantage of this.

The NY Times Magazine has a great feature article about how one such company is buying up the intellectual property rights of no-longer-existing products and using their still-remembered brands to kick-off sales.

Many analysts agree that once social networking sites get their shit together that they’ll be prime real-estate for advertisers, primarily because they have so much personal info on their users, which in turn means highly-personalized ads. But other than the controversial Beacon program I haven’t seen much evidence for this until today.

When I logged into my account today I saw this ad in my news feed:

As most of you know, I’m a journalist. It wouldn’t be too hard to ascertain this from my Facebook profile — given that I’m listed as an English major grad and my place of employment is in my workplace info.

Is this just a coincidence or was Facebook able to scan my profile and deliver a targeted ad?

Either way, I did something I rarely do to advertisements on the internet: I clicked on it.

Though there have been countless news stories on the decline of newspaper advertising revenues and the impending doom of the industry, magazine ad sales have remained mostly steady. It seemed for awhile that they would be able to ward off any major competition from the web. Also, magazines often focus on niche topics — and therefore, niche advertising markets — making it much harder to track general trends in the industry.

But now we have word that the decreases in offline record sales are reverberating to music magazine revenues. “Ad pages for the three biggest music magazines slid 26% in the first quarter,” says Crain’s New York. “Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, the category’s iconic publication, saw a 33% drop, according to just-released numbers from Publishers Information Bureau.”

Because music listeners are now purchasing songs online, advertisers are migrating to the web. This makes sense for them, really, because online music offers an advantage over print magazines — impulse buys. If I see an album advertisement in a magazine, I have to have the impetus to leave my house or go to my computer to purchase the song. If I see an advertisement online, in a few click-throughs I can not only sample a song but then quickly follow up with a purchase.