Media

“In what respect, Charlie?” reveals poor grasp of media

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Hard not to feel bad for Sarah Palin.

She’s completely rattled by the media, and does not have the instincts or training to push back.

Her response to Charlie Gibson on his question about whether she understands the Bush Doctrine, with the question, “in what respect, Charlie?” revealed two things:

  1. She was clueless and probably had never heard the term before.
  2. She was dumb enough to take the bait and succumb to the question whose sub-text was “prove to me you’ve done your homework.”

With Katie Couric she appeared to simply be following instructions & talking points by repeating her answer when unable to clarify a follow-up question. That was before she swung into operation-Putin, about him flying into U.S. airspace. She was also not ready with specific examples. “I will try to find you some…” is NOT an answer!

It’s easy to see the urgent need for media training. But more than that, she need media understanding. Anticipating what the interview might be looking for and coming prepared with it.

Let’s hope that in the next few days someone will give her some proper media training. Memo to governor Palin: There’s plenty of free advice out there, if the McCain campaign has no time for this. Here are just two.

Poorly timed ad for Merrill Lynch

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No amount of advertising can repair the damage for some financial institutions.

In this week’s The Economist magazine, the powerful cover image (left) shows the cyclone sucking up brand names like Fannie Mae, AIG, Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers and … Merill Lynch.

But the bull got sucked into the swirl by another means. Its full page ad inside (probably scheduled and printed before the news stories were laid out) ran with this copy:

“Merrill Lynch connects capital to opportunity…”Our 94-year history of leadership in the financial industry has been a source of confidence for our clients in both good and challenging markets.”

Dell’s green road trip bristling with social media

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Dell is no newbie to new media. I have been tracking them for more than two years, especially Lionel Menchaca’s parlay into social media with the hugely popular DirectToDell, its attention to the blogosphere, its presence in Second Life, the new Digital Nomads effort, and even the use of Twitter for marketing Dell Outlet,

So when I heard Dell’s latest social media effort, a 15-day, 15-city sustainability road trip with non-profit group Grist was headed to ASU and stopping right here at the Decision Theater, it sounded like a program worth writing about myself. On Friday, Todd Dwyer, Dell’s Environmental blogger, came by with Sarah van Schagen, an editor for Grist.

The reason for the visit was to look at ASU’s role in sustainability, with the School of Sustainability, and our work with the Global Institute of Sustainability.

The ReGeneration blog has some interesting features, steeped in social media. There is the grafitti wall, exploiting web 2.0 to get visitors to contribute to contribute ideas to the site. Videos are posted to Quik, and there’s a graffiti art contest with entries like the one on the left.

They have two posts, and two videos worth checking out.

The rest of the road trip is worth following, too!

“Gather Conservatives, lend me a hand..”

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JibJab has come out with another classic ‘toon to relieve the dark mood about the economy and the sniping that passes for campaignin’.

What’s more interesting than the entertaining usual suspects, is that this time around, being a social media election and all that, you can insert yourself into the video! Then post it to your social networking site, or grab the link.

Watch this.

Op-ed video proves Sarah Palin a wild card

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Stanford aw professor, Lawrence Lessig, has a great analysis of why Sarah Palin doesn’t stack up against other VPs in history (a claim she made to ABC’s Charlie Gibson recently).

He compares the experience factor to a long line of vice presidents, and concludes that yes she may be courageous and smart, but not enough to meet the challenges today.

Why is this interesting? Not just because this is an erudite response to a prepared (read: spun) answer for the media. But because this is a YouTube response that moves the news story (linked to and viewed more than 235,000 times on YouTube) forward.

Much of the media coverage of the candidates doesn’t get to this kind of detail. It’s amazing what those outside the realm of journalism can do with a story. Sure Lessig weighs in at the end, making it an Op-ed video. But it’s a lot more valid (and dare I say entertaining) than seeing governor Palin completely blanking out over the question about the “Bush doctrine.”

Negative ads taint McCain’s character

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He shouldn’t have gone there, but he did. John McCain stood out as a different breed among the presidential hopefuls on the Republican side, watching as contenders like Rudi Giuliani and Mike Huckabee imploded. He displayed an unusual trait in politics: Presidential.

But the Karl Rovian attack ads unleashed by the McCain campaign are showing a new trait in McCain. Desperate. Heck, you don’t have to believe me. Even Karl Rove thinks they are going too far.

“I regret, and am sometimes offended by some of the negative aspects of this campaign,” he recently remarked in an ad released on YouTube. It’s as if he’s saying “I’m John McCain; I’m not sure what I was thinking when I approved this message.”

I guess being found out (even as far back as January this year) is also regrettable.

McCain’s campaign, seduced by the capacity to launch inexpensive ads via YouTube, will soon find it is backfiring. There’s too little thought put into these pictures + sound bites + title card videos that are caricatures of ads. They taint his political stance by naively allowing the “..and I approve this message” sound clip to be added to the video.

Will negative ads backfire for Obama? Absolutely! But McCain ought to know better, having being the target of such tactics in the previous election.

OverlayTV: television you can mashup

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I find the whole concept of OverlayTV game-changing, not just for the television industry that packages and pipes content, but to anyone looking far out enough to see where interactive media is headed.

What’s OverlayTV? It’s basically a media player that embeds video, on top of which you can add layers of product, text, a URL, coupon or graphics. Even another piece of video that works like picture-in-picture.

Sure OverlayTV is a tool, but in a malleable way that allows the end user to think of it, as the name suggests, as a layer not a piece of technology. Though initially intended for ecommerce folks, musicians, agencies and publishers, people could use it to create interesting interactive spaces.

Check this out.

Quotes for the week ending 13 Sept, 2008

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“Google is the oxygen in this ecosystem”

John Battelle, journalist and author, commenting on the company called Google that started out in this garage on 7 September, 2008.

“I had thought 51 years of rough-and-tumble journalism in Washington made me more enemies than friends, but my recent experience suggests the opposite may be the case.”

Robert Novak, longtime journalist, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times who was disgnosed with brain cancer.

“In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours through the cracks.”

Nick Cohen, The observer, UK

“Colgate University Has an Official Twitterer. World Yawns.”

Headline for article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, about how the university is using micro-blogging.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Steve Jobs, using the Mark Twain line to open his address at a Mac event.

“It works like predictive texting. You start to type in a word…it suggests what you might mean to say. Like….you start to type in “stre”, and it might suggest “street view” or “utter lack of privacy” or “you only need to sign off 3,793 papers to get your face off our program”

Jodie Andrefsky, with a cynical take on Google’s claim to ‘anonymize’ people’s searches on the new web browser, Chrome.

“Houston, we have a PR problem! I’d offer the McCain campaign some PR advice, but I can’t seem to stop laughing…”

Len Gutman, at ValleyPRBlog, a on Saragh Palin’s PR nightmares.

“Good journalism is essential to democracy. With good journalism, you have good government.”

Calvin Trillin, hournalist, poet and author (A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme), who will speak at ASU on 30 September, 2008

“We become the proverbial, ‘just stopping in for a cup of coffee don’t have time to chat social network user’.”

Mark Meyer, Director of e-commerce and interactive marketing for Emerson Direct, a fellow blogger at SocialMediaToday.com“

Live streaming on BitGravity

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I am watching a live feed of a lecture we are streaming via a provider called BitGravity. It’s an amazing, out-of-the box feature.

The video is very stable, and there’s no lag time on audio.

The speaker is Jay Hakes, Dir. of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and former head of the Energy Information Administration at the U.S. Department of Energy. His book, on the same subject

The topic is fascinating: “A Declaration of Energy Independence.”

This is the link for anyone interested.