AR&D Reinventing Local Media

An article in Advertising Age sheds new light on the revenue problems of media companies and portends continued difficulty for all media, especially print. Two big advertisers, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, have both announced deep cuts in ad spending, and this will have a domino effect on the media companies who’ve been counting on that revenue to keep sinking ships afloat.

The magazine reports that P&G cut spending last quarter by 19.6%.

Not only that, but many of P&G’s biggest global rivals — including Unilever, L’Oréal and Johnson & Johnson — also cut U.S. spending last quarter, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence, though not nearly as sharply or broadly.

The pullbacks come as the marketers grapple with rising commodity costs, big price increases, rising private label sales and consumers who’ve been spending less. Unilever executives last week described the U.S. market as essentially flat.

A newspaper publisher told me a few months back that he was summoned to the office of the largest retailer in his market to be told that they were cutting back on advertising, and I continue to believe that for all the disruptions facing local media, the bigger problem is the economy. Observers continue to hammer at all that’s wrong with media — as well they should — but media’s biggest enemy today is an economy in recession, although nobody in any position of authority has the balls to call it that.

UPDATE: Hearts-Argyle CEO David Barrett told investors that the climate is “recessionary-like” for the ad business, adding that it “feels as bad as it’s been in my business experience.”

This is interesting. The networks all went after the FCC before the Supreme Court yesterday over the commission’s ridiculous fines for language and nudity. Broadcasting & Cable reports that both in person and (ED. NOTE: There was no hearing. Thanks to Steve in the comments.) in briefs, the networks were unified in their belief that it’s time for the court to reconsider earlier rulings in this regard, because the communications world has changed so much. It’s brilliant, and I hope the court comes down on their side. How can they not?

Fox is the network “on trial.” The hearing was filings were over a brief filed by the FCC after a lower court ruled with Fox that the FCC’s crackdown on cussing during the Billboard Music Awards was “an arbitrary and capricious change in policy that broadcasters were not sufficiently warned about.” The Supreme Court agreed in March to hear the case. Meanwhile, in a brief with the court, NBC, CBS and ABC called the FCC’s indecency-enforcement regime “unfathomable and indefensible.” Good for them.

While the FCC wants the court to rule narrowly on this one instance of fleeting profanity, the networks in their filing said it is time for the court to rethink the indecency-enforcement regime altogether.

They argued that broadcasting is neither uniquely pervasive nor uniquely accessible to children — concepts they said have been “eviscerated” in the 30 years since the Supreme Court used them to uphold the FCC’s indecency enforcement authority in the Pacifica decision.

The networks went even further, taking aim at the Red Lion decision, in which the High Court upheld content regulations — in this case the jettisoned “Fairness Doctrine” — using the spectrum-scarcity rationale.

“Whatever its validity when Red Lion affirmed it in 1969 or in 1987 when the commission rejected it without reservation, today the scarcity rationale is totally, surely and finally defunct,” the networks said.

“The antiquated notion of spectrum scarcity can no longer serve as a basis for according only ‘relaxed scrutiny’ to content restrictions in the broadcast media,” they argued. “Nor can the outmoded premises of Pacifica — that over-the-air broadcasting is ‘uniquely pervasive’ or ‘uniquely accessible to children.’ As with any other content-based restriction of speech, the government should be made to demonstrate that the remand order serves a compelling state interest and is the least restrictive means available to achieve that interest. It cannot do either.”

I think the FCC has outlived its usefulness and needs to go. In recent (conservative) years, the appointed body has been used by faux-concerns of the extreme right, such as the Parent’s Television Council, for political leverage. The networks are right. Times have changed, and it’s unfairly punitive for broadcasters to pay the price for the political gain of somebody else.

We don’t need an appointed group of bureaucrats to function as our nanny.

Chez Pazienza has posted a CNN email providing guidelines for employees on how they may behave in the public space known as the Web. Chez, of course, was fired for violating this policy, even though it wasn’t in place at the time. I think this document is ridiculous, because transparency — not a muzzle — is the new ethical standard for a reinvented journalism, and frankly, any journalist who can live with this ought to examine his or her own calling. Free speech is not a right to be given up in the name of some hodgepodge nonsense called “objectivity.” How noble, or not.

The whole memo is fascinating, but this is the heart of it:

WHY SHOULDN’T I COMMENT ON NEWS OR CURRENT AFFAIRS?

Unless given permission to comment publicly on the issues or people we report on as a CNN analyst or commentator, it is important that you and all other CNN employees be independent and objective regarding the news and people that we cover.

If you publicly declare your preference for issues or candidates or one side or the other of the public policy issues CNN reports on, then your ability to be viewed as objective is compromised.

We appreciate that everyone has a life outside work and we encourage all of our employees to get involved with the issues that are important within their communities. That said, you need to avoid any appearance of bias or partiality. It’s just one of the responsibilities associated with working for a news organization.

WHAT IF I DON’T WORK DIRECTLY WITH NEWS GATHERING OR NEWS REPORTING BUT ELSEWHERE WITHIN THE SUPPORTING DEPARTMENTS OF CNN?

In discussions about this issue with your colleagues across CNN, it was felt by them that it was important to have this policy apply across the board. If you don’t follow this policy, and you are officially a CNN employee, the loss of objectivity won’t just apply to you, but could be associated with CNN. Therefore this policy applies to all CNN employees in all departments worldwide.

My position on all of this is well-known, but the narrow purity of this particular explanation of objectivity gives me a chance to expand. Let me be very clear: the artificial nature of objectivity is one of the key things that is killing the contemporary press. It is unnatural. It is self-serving. And worst of all, it has created a science in how it can be used by special interests to manipulate culture. The press has no balls, and this “responsibility associated with working for a news organization” is good for the organization’s ability to make money but damned hurtful for our culture.

To fulfill the role of the press sought by Walter Lippmann (the dean of professional journalism) and his cronies, the press must see itself as separate from (and above) the culture — a detached elite that helps guide the masses through the intricacies of the issues of life, issues that are far too complex for the uneducated masses to understand on their own. This is modernist colonialism to the nth degree.

If you ask people, they will say that the press “should” be objective and not express a point-of-view, but where do they get that notion? They’ve gotten it from us. Consequently, people point out our humanness with an appropriate “tsk-tsk,” and trust in the press is at an all-time low. Why? Because we’re offering up an artificial standard that has no place in our world. The same First Amendment that gives the press freedom also gives our citizenry the freedom to speak their minds. The whole thing was written to protect just that, not the gathering of impartial facts or the bogus need to “balance.” That’s all poppycock, and it’s about time the press stopped digging the hole that will serve as its own grave. To deny the First Amendment to its employees in the name of protecting press freedom is insane. It’s oxygen-deprivation atop the pedestal the press has created for itself.

And while we’ve been practicing “objectivity,” special interests have been perfecting the game of how to use that standard to get what they want. “Balance” has given the minority voice such a place in our culture that there is no majority voice anymore. The melting pot is long gone, because the melting pot might offend somebody who can give their view equal footing in the name of an objective press.

I did a research project a few years back in which we asked people if they would mind reporters’ bias as long as they were up front about it. Overwhelmingly, the people in the study said it would be no problem. So what are we waiting for? I’m all for honesty, accuracy and fairness, but I think transparency is the new objectivity and that we all would be better served for it.

I feel so passionately about this, because I honestly believe that professional journalism is self-destructing. I agree with my friend Howard Owens that it’s high time we looked at the journalism itself as the problem, because if we don’t, a whole new “press” is going to take our place. Hell, it’s already happening.

And it’s happening in the place that CNN wants its journalists to avoid. Good luck with that.

I noted with interest last night that the True North nut company has altered the audio on its now infamous “nut sack” commercials.

The new ad now just says “an extraordinary snack.” One has to wonder, of course, if the whole “nut sack” thing wasn’t deliberate. It’s a fairly popular video on YouTube, and if it was deliberate to call it a “nut sack,” I’d give it a mixed review. Hell yes, it got my attention, but I was so shocked by the thing that I never could remember the name of the company. True North. Oh yeah.