Message from Michael - November 24, 2008 - Cocktail Chatter

THE COCKTAIL CHATTER EDITION




We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.

THE COCKTAIL CHATTER EDITION: Or, put another way, the catch-up edition. The last two editions of MfM focused on the President-elect and media and technology. That didn’t leave a lot of room for the various facts and factoids, bits and pieces, trivia and not-so-trivia that come across my desk every day. So, here in no particular order, is a plethora of cocktail chatter points for you to use at your next holiday party.

Conservative policy group, the Leadership Institute, based in Arlington, Virginia, is offering courses to teach would-be pundits exactly that – how to be pundits. For anywhere from $75 for a lecture to $1,500 for three-hour one-on-one sessions, the New York Times reports, the young American Idol-esque commentators learn how to give soundbites “you can expect to hear on Hannity later.” Nearly 600 people have signed up so far this year, up from 461 in 2005.

Okay, one last election related note – the two ‘hot’ items online for the Presidential transition sound like a dietary recommendation for the over-80 crowd – prunes and plums. PrunesOnline is described as a “must have” for Presidential appointees. Known as the “prune book,” the listing of presidential appointment positions has been around since 1988. In a very similar vein is “The Plum Book” which also identifies key presidential appointment positions.

You remember in Forrest Gump when Tom Hanks was somehow inserted into an old scene involving L.B.J.; or have you seen those commercials in which a modern day person is inserted into an old movie. Well, a company which creates speaking avatars, Oddcast, has created a site, mymoviemoment.com, where you can do the same thing. It’s a little late for Halloween, but Oddcast has struck a deal with Twentieth Century Fox and MGM to allow you integrate your submitted photos into clips from some old B-grade horror movies. They reportedly have cut a deal to do a similar promotion for a selection of holiday films.

At the end of the other end of the spectrum is something called rotoscoping. This time it’s the reverse, with live video images turned into comic book-like animations. As reported in Advertising Age, the CMO of Charles Schwab says she’s seen nothing like it, when it comes to viewer response. It refers to a technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate, according to Wikipedia, so it may be composited over another background. In case you want to try it, there are a couple of websites providing software, including rotofactory.com and videomaker.com.

Okay, you’ve heard about behavioral targeting and contextual targeting and… maybe.. micro-targeting in which you can narrow the focus of your online ads. But now there’s ‘nano-targeting’ in which you can create a series of ads on Facebook that are targeted at specific individuals. Writer Sam Lessin shows how he did it in an article in Advertising Age. All he had to do was target an ad to “Wall Street Journal reporters who are 25, graduated from Harvard with a history degree and live in San Francisco.” The Facebook told him there were less than 20 people who fit that… and one of those 20 was his girlfriend.

The number one video of all time on YouTube is the Evolution of Dance, according to website ReadWriteWeb.com. Comedian Judson Laipply uploaded the video in April of 2006 and it has garnered 55.8 Million views and it has been ‘favorited’ 252,082 times, making it the most viewed and most favorited video of all time. I think I mentioned the video in a previous MfM but I didn’t know it was the #1 video. This is another of my – do yourself a favor and watch it – recs. As a side note, the website notes that seven of the top ten videos are music based and five of those are professional videos.

The U.S. Military has created its own video sharing site, after blocking YouTube, MySpace and even Twitter, because (and I am not making this up) “terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the U.S. as an operation tool.” The website is called TroopTube and was created by a Seattle-based video services company, Delve Networks. Troops can send videos to families at home and families can do the same. When I checked out the site, the most popular video (and I am not making this up either) was General David Petraeus’ message to the troops.

More than two-thirds (68%) of technology companies were slapped with a lawsuit last year, according to law firm Fulbright & Jaworski which annually surveys U.S. litigation trends. Nearly a third (30%) faced six or more law suits and nearly half (47%) reported spending over $1 Million a year on business disputes.

While nearly half of iPhone owners (43%) earn in excess of $100,000 a year, the fastest growth in iPhone buying is among those earning between $25,000 and $50,000 (48% growth) and $25,000 to $75,000 (46% growth). Senior analyst Jen Wu of comScore says the reason may be that these people are using the iPhone in lieu of multiple digital devices and services, “transforming the iPhone from a luxury item to a practical communication and entertainment tool.”

Silicon Valley company Better Place has announced a plan to develop an electric-car infrastructure for Australia, which will eventually eliminate the need for Australia to import any oil. Before you dismiss this completely, publication Technology Review notes that the company has already developed such an infrastructure for Israel and Denmark. The difference is those countries are small, and Australia is the same size as the U.S. The company says it plans to sell the cars the same way mobile-phone companies sell phones, with a subsidized low cost and a monthly plan.

From the New York Times business section, the world’s largest corporation is Exxon/Mobil, worth $375 Billion – more than General Electric, Bank of America and Google combined. Quoting a Bernstein Research analyst, the report also says Exxon has the highest per barrel profit ($17) of any oil company, including Chevron ($16), Shell ($14) and BP ($12).

The Society for New Communication Research has named Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams their Innovators of the year. The Visionary of the Year award went to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, co-authors of blogging website Groundswell which claims to tell you “how people with social technologies are changing everything.” A side note, they must be changing things awfully slowly – when I visited the site, the latest posting was a week old.

Actor George Clooney has been named “distinguished journalist in residence” at American University’s School of Communication. He is hosting the Reel Journalism series, looking at how journalism is portrayed in the movies.

Quinnipiac University whose polling institute has garnered it national fame has now garnered national notoriety for attempting to curb the activities of student journalists running an independent, online newspaper. First the university imposed a gag order on administrators, coaches and athletes to keep them from talking to the online reporters. Then it threatened to ban the student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The university since backed off after several national groups and national media criticized the school.

Gossip website JuicyCampus.com is also gaining national notoriety, with its publication of detailed rumors about sex, drugs and college life with contributors naming people anonymously. The rapidly growing year-old site has such gossip about 500 campuses nationwide. It also has spawned hate groups on Facebook, is under investigation by two state’s attorney generals and been voted to be banned by several student governments. Founder Matt Ivester told a group of Georgetown University who complained that the site has caused some students to drop out of school and raised fears about their job prospects that “they’re going to have to start developing a sense of humor,” according to a recent article in the Washington Post.

A website claiming to be the blog of a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain has generated lots of juicy gossip about the campaign and politics in general. It turns out though it’s the work of two guys trying to create a buzz for a movie they want, but they managed to fool MSNBC, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and The New Republic. The fake author of the website was supposedly one Martin Eisenstadt, a fellow at the fake Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. The two would-be film-makers say yes they want to make a movie but they also want to make the point that in the 24 hour news cycle there is a lot of shoddiness in the reporting. And although The New York Times and the Associated Press both say the main “victims” (please note, that’s in quotes) were bloggers, it was also a blogger who eventually tracked down the hoax.

China’s leading video site, Youku.com, has obtained licenses from Chinese producers to stream more than 1,000 TV series on its site. That converts to more than 40,000 episodes and 50,000 hours of content. But here’s the part I love, the site is partnering with website Sina.com to produce a Chinese-language version of Sofia’s Diary, a ‘confessional type’ web show that first appeared in Portugal in 2002, well before Lonelygirl15 hit it bit in the U.S. A look at the site, BTW, and you can see it is pretty slickly produced.

From the annual “Oh My Gosh” category of news, a thirty second spot on the SuperBowl has jumped from $2.7 Million for the Fox carried game last year to $3 Million for the NBC carried game this year.

A California-based company is offering single-serve wine called Volute that can be drunk anywhere, including no-glass zones like concerts, camping grounds and beaches. According to trend watching website, Springwise, the aluminum bottle is “eco-friendlier” than traditional glass bottles, according to the makers, because it can be recycled and is actually better than glass because it blocks UV rays.

Students at Rice University in Texas are trying to create a beer with the health advantages of red wine. The six undergrads say they are engineering a yeast that produces the antiaging chemical, resveratrol, found in red wine. The so-called “BioBeer” is an entrant in the International Genetic Engineering Machine competition held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Student Taylor Stevenson says, “it’s not going to prevent you from getting a beer gut from drinking too much beer or from getting cirrhosis of the liver, but people are already drinking beer, so why not make it a little healthier.”

LASTLY: A study reported by website TV by the Numbers says happy people watch less TV—48 minutes a day less, to be exact. That’s the difference between very happy and very unhappy people, according to the study published by Springer Science and Business Media. The study also notes that very happy people had sex ten times more than unhappy people, but I digress. Sociology professor John Robinson at the University of Maryland says his analysis of General Social Survey data shows that, “TV may provide viewers with short-run pleasure, but at the expense of long-term malaise.” The professor adds the ironic note that, “what viewers seem to be saying is that while TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, the shows I saw tonight were pretty good.” I should also footnote this by saying that my hoax antenna went up when I saw the name of the author. Professor John Robinson is also the name of one of the characters in the old TV series, Lost In Space. But I double-checked and yes indeed there is a real version as well.

DISCLAIMER: This is a longer than usual MfM, and I still didn’t get all my CC tidbits in. In any case, have a happy Thanksgiving and may the consulting gods help you cook your Turkey so it’s not too dry.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv.