Last week I analyzed the solipsistic qualities of a billboard ad for eating peanuts by the National Peanut Board in which the protagonist (main character in a fiction) prefers speaking to his dog. As usual, when a company creates a character through an offbeat or weird trait, it is talking to a large, if sometimes […]
Yesterday, National Public Radio ran a fairly longlong feature on country-and-western performer Merle Haggard, who has recovered from lung cancer and recently released a new set of recorded material. The story took the standard format of cutting back and forth between a conversation with Haggard and samples of the new material. Here are the topics […]
The headline in today’s article on the first page of the business section of The New York Times says it all, “On 40th Anniversary, Earth Day Is Big Business.” The article, by Leslie Kaufman, does a good job of showing how Earth Day has become a platform for businesses to sell “a variety of goods […]
Even since I became a marketing communications professional about 25 years ago, one of my pet peeves is the accepted view that the history of public relations begins with the late 19th century impresario P. T. Barnum (you know the one who said that there’s a sucker born every minute) and Edward Bernays, owner of […]
While in Manhattan for two weeks on a working vacation, I’ve been taking advantage of the greatest mass transit system in the United States, the New York City subway—dingy with age, but clean, inexpensive, extremely safe and it gets you where you want to go faster than any alternative transportation option in the city. This […]
In the current New York Review of Books, dated April 29, 2010, Eyal Press analyzes three books and one study about the growing religiosity of Israeli soldiers and the growing militarization of Israeli society. I recommend the article highly, and in fact, recommend that all my readers check out The New York Review of Books. […]
I love to read the annual survey in Parade Magazine of what people earn in their jobs. I always do an informal count of the various salary levels to illustrate what I know from demographic studies to be true: that over the past 30 years, the middle class has shrunk and we’ve seen a much […]
A few weeks back, I wrote about a Louis Harris Interactive survey that was introduced to the world in a Daily Beast column in which the author essentially used the announcement of the survey results as a platform for explicitly shilling one of his books. At the time, I thought to myself, “Reporters for online […]
My entry into frozen food giant Stouffer’s “Let’s Fix Dinner” marketing campaign came via a two-page, full-color ad in AARP Magazine, the bimonthly slick lifestyle magazine of the American Association of Retired People, which claims to have the largest circulation of any magazine in the entire world. So before taking a look at why “Let’s […]
Do you ever get the idea that Internet news media are more trivial than the traditional newspaper, more given to stories that are not hard news, but instead focused on selling products, titillating sensibilities or gossiping? In fact, it’s not true. As frivolous as much in the news section of Yahoo! or Google can be, […]