Photo: Ron Fell
Great shot, thanks Ron

My friend Ron Fell has set off from San Francisco on the Queen Mary 2. His 15 day cruise will take him west to Honolulu, Pago Pago, and Auckland. Read all about his voyage via his KGO blog. His first post, the scene setting entry, is here and his first day on board post is here.

Enjoy the cruise Ron and thanks for sharing.

Photo: The UW Arb, Madison
by mjlmadison
Cool pic, thanks

via The Isthmus Pool


"Advertising is the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost." Rosser Reeves

The Super Bowl numbers are out. CBS posted a 42 rating, 63 share, about 93 million viewers. In Chicago WBBM-TV put up a 50 rating, 77 share (lagging the '86 season record 63 rating, 87 share). In Indy WISH-TV had a 55 rating, 79 share. At $2.6mil that's national delivery of a little under 3 cents a head. A cpm of $27.95 is remarkable. The key is the right message. It's a shame most national ads were so very poor this year. CBS posted some killer 18-49 numbers, a 57 share 7-10p. FYI - second-best total bowl numbers of all time and the third highest rated program of any kind in TV history.

Congrats & Cheers: Bant Breen named prexy of Interpublic Group's Futures Marketing Group. Smart guy, smart move.

Some of the news, most of the time: 23/6 is the working title of the original video program slated to debut next month on Barry Diller's CollegeHumor.com, IAC's Michael Jackson at the helm, editing by Daley Haggar. Well-written story by Jessica E. Vascellaro in today's WSJ here.

Reading: Citizen Marketers by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. Interesting take on what's happening in CGM. Visit their blog, Church of the Customer, here, their main site here, Amazon info here.

Photo: Rose by
Fred Winston
Beautiful image,
thanks Fred!

"Baby boomers and members of Generation X were like dogs - treat them right and they will be loyal. But members of this latest generation, Generation Y, are more like cats. They just go where the money is." Linsey Perry

Congrats & Cheers: Jeff Zucker to be named chief executive of NBC Universal. The boy wonder deserves the promotion. LA Times story by Meg James here. Yahoo takes the lid off of Panama this week. Randy Thomas was the voice actor heard during last night's halftime show - she goes into the record books as the first woman to vo the half (she has also been the voice of six Academy Awards shows).

CBS SportsLine has put all the Super Bowl ads in one location here. Congrats to Phil Duncan his great voice gave him away in his one line on-camera role as the boss (Pierce come in here) in the Salesgenie.com spot. Lewis Lazare reviews the bidding and declares Bud & Coke the ad bowl winners. Could not agree more Lew, bravo! Read his take here. The Letterman with Oprah bumper was brilliant!

Fred Winston is blogging here. Kudos Fred!

Wise words of the week: Tom Peters...

"You are in a losing battle unless you are totally, perpetually, viciously and vigorously at war with the tendencies toward control, stifling, bureaucracy, over planning, over systems, too many metrics, etc."

Tony Perkins writes Part II of his "confession", Avoiding the Bubble Blues...

1. Keep your eye on the money because cash is king.
2. Focus your venture money on overcoming risks.
3. Stay away from snappy people and Web 2.0 frat rats.
4. Customers (and prospects) are everything.
5. Bring in the design experts.
6. Base your PR strategy on the principle of attraction rather than promotion.
7. Do it for the passion. Not the money.

Tony's counsel comes from his diary about running two startups in the newly fashionable dotcom times. More here.

"ABC put up what we call a 'lower third' with my name and identity. It has been a longstanding newsroom joke of mine that you are defined by whatever you were doing at the time of a news story. Hence, if you are hit by a car, you are a 'pedestrian'...Well, sure enough, I was listed as 'Steve Safran: Blogger.' There it is. The summary of my life in one word. 'Blogger.' I want to stress that, as a former TV news producer, I had this coming." Steve Safran

Congrats to Steve for being the first to crack the code, break and (with Cory) own the story on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim-Mooninites stunt. Read Steve's 15 hours of fame: my day as a media whore here. Steve's LR colleague Cory Bergman asks the right "after-action" question Any publicity is good publicity, right? Cory's post with comments here. Congrats & Bravo to Steve and Cory! Outstanding coverage. Related: Jaffe tags the "Boston mass-a-scare" as "ugly stuff" and invites your comments here. My sense is Boston, unlike the other DMAs involved, failed to put this stunt into proper perspective, crisis management thin on good judgment calls. Further, the tone of Boston's "response" leads this former reporter to question...did 819, or others involved, "spike" the stunt, after days without notice? A "concerned citizen" call to the police or some other "look at me" stuff, the kind of thing that would demand police attention? A coup de theatre gone wrong? btw, Boston Mooninites is #1 on Technorati as I post this. CNN's Boston storyline here. Boston Globe's Michael Levenson, Maria Cramer and staff write Marketing gambit exposes a wide generation gap here. UPDATE: Turner accepts blame, agrees to pay $1 million via Boston Globe's Michael Levenson, Raja Mishra and staff here

Seth Godin writes on Creativity...

"99% of the time, in my experience, the hard part about creativity isn't coming up with something no one has ever thought of before. The hard part is actually executing the thing you've thought of. The devil doesn't need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics."

Agree with Seth, however, getting "the thing" green lighted is increasingly difficult. While Virgil and Seth are correct - fortune favors the daring ("audentes fortuna iuvat") - the mediocre, the safe, not the daring, gets the majority of green lighting. It was ever thus. The dirty little secret is we are too often working harder to get better at executing ideas of lesser consequence. The "big idea" as defined by the legendary George Lois might be a scary, dangerous experiment. Years ago I engaged George to create a campaign for one of our New York city properties. His "big idea" was brilliant (it reached that certain threshold the great Scot Ogilvy once established: "it takes your breath away"). Knowing George had created the perfect creative solution we set the pitch meeting. As I watched George pitch his amazing idea it became evident, the suits were scared. We later went with another idea. Our boring, safe, researched creative, the one everyone agreed was "fine" and "on message" was executed perfectly...without any meaningful result. My suggestion is we added to the clutter on that one, we helped to raise the noise floor. We have all walked out of a movie theater, seen a billboard, a TV commercial, a POP and said "what were they thinking?" The average executed to perfection is, well, average. Wasn't it also Ogilvy that said you can't bore the customer into buying?

Execution is certainly critical and Seth might well be right that it's the last 99% of the job (Edison arrived at a similar finding "success being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"). However, leadership with the courage to green light the big idea, that 1%, is priceless. The right 1% remains elusive because it has risk and a measure of fight baked into it. The big ideas are out there and they win big. Perhaps the greatest recent success in wealth creation, YouTube, happened only when two young dudes all but said "copyright badges, we don't need no stinking copyright badges"...their execution was daring, messy, users posting copyrighted material created extreme exposure. Lawyers, and other grown ups would have killed their idea at any company of size on the ip issues alone. More than one critic said, before the sale, "these guys are not making money, their gonna get sued, when the copyrighted material comes down their traffic will vanish, their platform is shaky, two kids with a case of red bull could create what they have created over a weekend but it's still not a business." They were right. Nobody liked it but the users. The big idea will out!

LATER: Breaking...Viacom demands that Google pull more than 100K clips from YouTube. Staci is on the story via paidContent here

Photo: dawn perry
Avenue of Trees in Snow
Thank you, fine shot. Winter has arrived in Madison. Snow and single digit temps.


"We are all suffering from a major disability, none of us are twelve years old." Peter Hirshberg

"You can reach the right people but if you don't say the right thing to create the connection to that person there's nothing there." Steven Yee

Today's quotations from my notes on the AlwaysOn Media session Surviving the media disruption. More from Peter Hirshberg: "People trusts people like them...What can a brand do to stimulate people to want to believe and to share and talk about it...this is more like a political campaign...we've gone from creating awareness to building relationships and meaning...If Web 1.0 was about pages, Web 2.0 is about people...we need to go back to school." Excellent points Peter. Bravo! Peter also announced the cool new feature @ Technorati, Where's the Fire? What's Hot and Why. Check it out here.

Congrats & Cheers: Michael Yavonditte and his team on Quigo being named company of the show at AO Media. Accepting the award Michael said his New York based firm was just "blocking and tackling" and his pov is "opportunities seem boundless." How totally refreshing to hear a CEO excited about the future of marketing and advertising, focused on the fundamentals. Quigo is a company to watch. Reed Bunzel has joined Ed Seeger's American Media Services, Reed will serve as prexy of Ed's new interactive venture. Ed and Reed are in the right place at the right time. Brent Alberts named Director of Operations and Programming for Citadel's midwest region.

Charming & Delightful: Our beloved Uncle Lar, the one, the only Superjock, has started blogging...

"Nothing new with me...just hangin' out...golfin' a few balls...awaiting my next ill-fated comeback. The last two haven't gone well. Who knew that "Jammin" Oldies format on WUBT would have such a short shelf life? And that R-R-R-Real Oldies 1690 thing! What the hell was that?"

"If you don't get Animal Stories CDs as a gift, it means you're not really loved...you're just being used!"

Bravo Uncle Lar, welcome to the conversation. Check out the Larry Lujack site here, where you may also affirm the veracity of your love with the purchase and repeated gifting of Animal Stories CDs. Thanks to Robert Feder for the tip.

Bonus: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Read post, print post, burn printed post. Bravo! Well done. Check it out while it lasts here.

Bonus 2: Two more Blogs of Note via Blogger: ts0 (a Liverpool gent launching his own shop) and Varieties of Unreligious Experience (Conrad H. Roth blogging on, uh, language).