How Agencies Are Remaking the Retail Media Market

"As agencies have moved more aggressively into the domain of commerce media, one has to wonder about the role of Amazon — specifically, how the holding companies and independent agencies setting up retail units impacted their all-important relationship with the 800-lb. gorilla of the space." (from Digiday's editorial series on the state of retail media)

Twitter Taunts NPR as State-Run Media But Won't Permit These Two Clowns to Be Tagged in Posts

NPR finally said enough is enough and did what we all want but don't have the balls to: quit Twitter. As Poynter reports, NPR, which had about 8.8 million followers on the social network, said in a statement: “We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence. We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities.” Preach. 

The World's On Fire, and It's All Trump Trump Trump

"The Arabs have decided to jack up the price of oil another 20 percent. The C.I.A. has been caught opening Sen. Humphrey's mail. There's a civil war in Angola, another one in Beirut. New York City's facing default, they've finally caught up with Patricia Hearst ... and the whole front page of the Daily News is Howard Beale." -Diana Christensen, Network

I can't help feel this way as I look at the homepages of all the news sites this morning. The Times, CNN, the Posts (Washington and New York), BBC: It's all Trump, all the time (again). And isn't that a depressing reality. The Times couldn't have put it any better when it commented "Biden has the Oval Office, but Trump has center stage." One could be forgiven for not noticing the fact that in the past day there were not one but two important elections, in Wisconsin and Chicago; Israeli police raided a mosque in Jerusalem; a tornado in Missouri caused multiple deaths and injuries; a study was released suggesting that, despite years of reports to the contrary, there are absolutely zero health benefits to the moderate consumption of alcohol; and in South Africa, a plane had to make an emergency landing because of a cobra in the cockpit. (Some headlines write themselves.) 

Does the latest Trump news warrant wall-to-wall coverage? In fact it does, considering the historical merit. Does it call for the resurrection of the Trump circus? Obviously not. But here we are, déjà vu all over again. And it's just the beginning. Which calls to mind a line from another classic movie about journalists and journalism, Broadcast News, where character Aaron Altman, watching a particularly sordid and sensationalized piece on the evening news being reported by his rival Tom Grunick, remarks to his colleagues in the newsroom, rapt by the spectacle: "Can somebody put on the news for a minute?" (Which is also how I happened to feel when I came across this Jacob Bernstein piece in the Times, on the ex-fiance of two weeks of Rupert Murdoch, which has all the news value of what I had for breakfast — which, as I'm on a diet, wasn't nearly enough. Isn't it comforting to know what an influence the National Enquirer and Inside Edition continue to have on our establishment media?

Attention Brands: If You're Not Adidas, PEZ or IKEA, Kindly Stop Unnecessarily Abbreviating Things

Some of the world's most loved brands — Adidas, IKEA, PEZ, Arby's — happen to be abbreviations. And certain companies are so iconic that they've embraced going by their initials — KFC being a famous example. It's when people unnecessarily complicate things with "abreeves" (only you fans of the dearly departed TV series "Happy Endings" will get that reference) that it gets ridiculous. I recently tuned into a webinar put together by a well-known ad agency in which the host repeatedly referred to the place by its initials. Not only had I never, in all my years covering this stuff, heard the agency referred to that way before, but as one of the letters was a "W," it actually took the presenter longer to say the abbreviation than it would have to say the actual name of the company. Generally, having "W" in a brand's identity is a horrible idea (unless you happen to be George W. Bush, aka "Dubya," which, love him or hate him, has to be one of the greatest abreeves ever). The most egregious example of such a brand fail is Weight Watchers, which changed its name a few years back to the perplexing WW. I'm still not quite getting Weight Watchers' reasoning for shortening a perfectly descriptive brand name brimming with consumer goodwill and recognizability. Of course, some acronyms are worse. Much worse. Just consider the one below. (Though having been to Sarasota myself, I'm thinking maybe it was done on purpose.)

The Only Good Thing to Come Out of This Pandemic: The Befitting Failure of New York City's Hudson Yards

It's official: that gleaming monument to hubris known as Hudson Yards—the mega-development on the West Side that made Tenth Avenue unnavigable for years and ruined the Manhattan skyline with a bunch of ugly, dystopian towers, not to mention that rusting atrocity The Vessel—is a big fat $25 billion flop, as the Times reports. I'm sure similar, schadenfreude-stoked stories were written in the 1930s when the Empire State Building opened just in time for the Great Depression and sat half empty for years, but Hudson Yards is uniquely ill-timed, maybe even irredeemably cursed, as the pandemic has shuttered its marquee tenants (most notably Dallas import Neiman Marcus—as if the city didn't already have a surplus of homegrown retailers selling a bunch of overpriced stuff nobody can afford), while even that suicide-inviting, stairway-to-nowhere monstrosity that is its centerpiece has been mothballed. And the residents of the city are stuck with a hideous heap of hulking, deserted junk whose main purpose seems to be blocking the afternoon sun along the Hudson. Just think of what that $25 billion (and the many millions more in tax breaks and infrastructure projects devoted to the debacle) might've done to revamp New York's neighborhoods that are actually in need, or to help fight the virus that has devastated the city, or to provide affordable housing for working and middle class people who've been priced out of the borough. Meanwhile, don't worry about the developer, Steve Ross, and his merry band of capitalist thieves—they can always dry their tears with $100 bills and the eviction orders of all those widows and orphans.

Would Walter Cronkite Have an Instagram Account?

If you are a working journalist, as I am, you could be forgiven for wanting to off yourself daily for being reminded by other reporters of what a complete failure you are.

Let me say upfront that I have enjoyed the spoils of my career, of which there have been many. I've been honored to rub elbows with famous journalists and other bold-faced names. I've attended the Oscars, talked at the Cannes ad festival, and partied at the Tribeca Film Festival. I've gone on TV to talk about this or that on occasion. I've had celebrity writers pick fights with me, some of them public — among them Salman Rushdie and the late Jimmy Breslin. Those were a lot of fun.

But I never saw myself as the story. How naive of me.

Professors, albeit brilliant ones, who like to write about current events are now being classified not just as journalists but as superstar journalists. Consider Ben Smith's puff piece on Heather Cox Richardson in the Times this week. Richardson teaches American history at Boston College and has built an impressive following on Facebook and the newsletter platform Substack. She is a wonderful writer and teacher. What she does not do is journalism, which she is the first to admit. 

That doesn't stop Smith from hyperventilating that she's the future of our trade. He writes:

Dr. Richardson's focus on straightforward explanations to a mass audience comes as much of the American media is going in the opposite direction, driven by the incentives of subscription economics that push newspapers, magazines, and cable channels alike toward super-serving subscribers, making you feel as if you're on the right team, part of the right faction, at least a member of the right community. She's not the only one to have realized that a lot of people feel left out of the media conversation.

Richardson herself figures she has drawn so much attention (and so much success; her Substack account pulls down $1 million a year, Smith estimates) because she makes readers come away feeling "smarter, not dumber." Not only is that an incredibly arrogant thing to admit, but it's an insult to every committed journalist out there fighting to reveal some truth on this bleak mortal coil. (I do not include the bottom feeders among them. See: the New York Post.) If the public is too bored by what most of us toil to report, if they feel "dumber" after consuming our stuff, then may I suggest that the fault lies with the easily distracted, garbage-clogged lizard brain and its need (nay, craving) for quick and easy explanations. It requires some focus, after all, to absorb that characterized by even a suggestion of complexity. Or at least they have to assume some of the blame, as I see it.

The medium may make us "stars." That's not a new phenomenon. Consider H.L. Mencken, Nellie Bly, Martha Gellhorn, Hunter S. Thompson, Walter Winchell, Walter Cronkite, Walter Lippman, and other people who may or may not be named Walter. But doesn't it strike you as somewhat ludicrous that any of these people would have had newsletters on Substack or Medium? Or, Twitter accounts? If they'd been around in his time, no doubt Suetonius would've been active on Instagram and have had a personal stylist and book agent.

Let us consider this piece by McKay Coppins in the current issue of The Atlantic. Ask yourself: who is the subject of this story? 

Tragedy and disaster have always been the stuff that journalism careers are made of. But the Trump era has been especially rewarding to a certain class of Washington reporter. As the White House beat became the biggest story in the world, once-obscure correspondents were recast in the popular imagination as resistance heroes fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. They were showered with book deals, speaking gigs, and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. They got glow-ups to accompany their new cable-news contracts, and those glow-ups were covered in glossy magazines. Along the way, many of them adapted their journalism to cover an unusually mendacious and corrupt president (much to the delight of their new fan bases). As the story draws to an end, the reporters who got famous fighting with Trump are facing a question: What do we do now?

That's right: the subject is the journalist, naturally — not the POTUS, not the executive residence, not the republic, but the exalted reporter. As Albert Brooks's correspondent in the still-holds-up 80s film "Broadcast News" put it: "Yes, let's not forget, we are the real story here."

I wrote in this forum awhile back on how annoying these reporters are who lament not having Trump to cover anymore because they'll be "bored." To them I say, get a new job. I hear Substack is looking for fresh, new voices. Maybe they'll even pay for your stylist?

I'm Still Grieving Simple, Elegant Grey, Hating on AKQA

Ad agencies are in the business of selling stuff with simple brand names and easy to understand messages — just not when it comes to themselves. As Ad Age reports, agency names have become seriously whack. I swear I think they used alphabet soup to come up with some of these: dentsumcgarrybowen, Muh-tay-zik / Hof-fer (which used to be the somehow even worse M/H VCCP), and what used to be good old reliable Grey getting swallowed up into something called AKQA Group. (If you ask me, AKQA kinda sucked as a name even before the merger. Who in the business of brand marketing would ever decide that AKQA is a better name than simple, elegant and storied Grey?) Remember when the idea was to make things simpler, not as impossible to make sense of as the Zodiac killer's cipher?