Not for Love and Money

Earlier this week, I shared a link on my facebook page: “A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted” after reading a ridiculous article in TIME Magazine about high-rollers stumping up $50,000-$100,000 to find a mate. Can money buy love? Ask any celebrity.


The service's pitch claims that the matchmaking “investment” could prevent them from a costly divorce, and that today people are just too busy to look for a mate. Personally, I find these arguments inherently flawed, for two reasons;

1. Anyone who lists income as a criteria for being matched (or not), is paving the path for a gold-digger. Show me a wealthy man who has found a match with a woman NOT looking for a wealthy mate. True love? Show me the pre-nup, I say!

2. Furthermore, if you are too busy to find a mate yourself, you are probably too busy to have a healthy, fulfilling relationship – mentally, spiritually and physically.


Finding a life companion isn't about matching multiple choice questions and answers, or colour by numbers. Paying someone to take away the responsibility (and in many cases, heartache) of finding the right partner is a guaranteed way – in my mind at least – of NOT finding the right person.


Of course, this is just my opinion. I have not polled any high-rollers or couples who have met through elite matchmakers. But still.


And for the rest of you without a spare $100,000 to spend on lurve, there is MeetMoi, http://www.meetmoi.com/welcome - a new “proximity based dating application.” Proximity may be a criteria to interact, but it really doesn't sound very sexy, does it?


Okay. I am off to contact the MeetMoi founders about helping with their messaging (read the press release they issued yesterday and you'll see what I mean). Then I’m going to test out this concept on my phone - for research purposes only as I’m married.

On 'The View,' Obama courts approval in an uncommon setting

Communicator-in-chief puts forth key goals and successes to an essential demographic

President Obama sat down with the ladies of "The View" yesterday in what has been reported as the first appearance by a sitting U.S. president on a daytime talk show. We are not talking about a “ladies who lunch” session or something as base as a Jerry Springer production, so why the big deal?

There is, of course, some hairsplitting in that reportage: President Bush actually claims first digs at this title, as he taped a segment at the Crawford ranch with Dr. Phil back in 2004. But there is a distinction between a president who allows an interviewer to bring the production to him, and one who physically goes into a studio and engages in lively dialogue with five TV personalities.

Why that distinction is gaining so much traction in the media is a function of some familiar factors.

The left/right ping-pong match

Conservative media outlets have seized upon Obama’s appearance as a denigration of the presidency, contending that an interview on a show that might next week host a teenager starring in a movie about vampires is somehow beneath the commander-in-chief. This sells short "The View"; the recently returned Barbara Walters conducted the bulk of the questioning, and she was as incisive and insightful as she has been with just about every other head of state over the past 30 years. The rest of the cast were as engaging, and the studio audience utterly respectful. So it’s hard to see any harm done to the office simply by virtue of the platform. Had the segment been hosted on Fox News Network, what would the argument have been? And tell me how this appearance differs from one on Dr. Phil?

"The View's" format provided Obama the opportunity to present his policy goals and administration’s achievements in a plainspoken and tangible way. As the world witnessed during 2008, Obama thrives in this environment, distilling complex questions and ideas without oversimplifying them and without bewildering average citizens with his Ivy League intellect. Delivering his message in this way on "The View" struck a decidedly populist note, which I am sure contributed to both conservative media’s outrage and to the mainstream’s fascination with this appearance.

‘Getting’ media

Obama and his administration’s approach to media have exhibited plenty of populist moves, including making the first appearance by a sitting president on a late-night talk show (actually, President Dwight Eisenhower taped a segment for Ed Sullivan, but let’s just go with it) and executing the most wide-ranging social media and grass-roots online outreach campaigns of any administration.

One could argue, therefore, that Obama’s appearance on a daytime chat show is simply an extension of his administration’s media and outreach strategy—and very illustrative of its media savvy. As White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs put it, “People have busy lives, and it’s best to go where they are.”

Is it a populist tactic? Sure it is. Is it realistic and reflective of our times and the role in which media plays? Absolutely.

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When a Few Thousand Pounds Isn't Enough (to buy you a laptop connection on British Airways)...

Here I am, sitting on a British Airways flight about to leave LHR and I can't
use my laptop in the "World Traveller" class. I had planned to use the next 5
hours or so to catch up on work. So much for global connectivity...

But alas, my ticket was only $2521. It turns out that World Traveller is just a
posh name for ECONOMY, so no perks with British Airways today. Amazing how
little the dollar buys you these days.

Adding insult to injury, after spending more than $100 to buy an "inverter" to
enable my laptop to connect onboard (plus the myriad phone calls to the airline
to find out which craft I was flying -767- and tail number to find out if the
plane was wifi enabled, as well as a 25 minute head scratching session with a BA
Customer Service Agent at T5 - he graciously thanked me for teaching him
something today), it turns out that my new purchase is completely useless on
board... I'm not sitting in the right cabin.

Ah....

Worse still, the cabin crew were not "allowed" to sell me an upgrade onboard and
I was not permitted to power my laptop in any of the dozen or so empty seats in
front of me.

I'm not in the "right" cabin.

Now for the irony.... I just spent the week in London attending the Farnborough
Air Show, watching airlines place big orders for new craft and then at the
Airline Retail Conference to hear Ryanair's Micheal Cawley tell the airline
industry to "grow up and act like a business," while others talked about the
urgent need for airlines to develop sustainable revenue models that would endear
loyalty. In other words, thinking beyond the baggage fees.

So here's a start.. When a customer is willing to pay more than $100 simply to
plug their laptop into your plane, take their money.. And when a customer is
willing to pay for an upgrade on the plane, take their money too.

You could actually make some money. How novel.

NB - I sat down with the Purser to discuss what happened. The sad reality, she
told me, is that she has less power to satisfy customers than ever before. She
said because of fraud and the airline's inability to implement consistent
policies, she had no idea what the future would hold for her after a 22 year
career with BA, or her fellow flight crew.

Long Live Reading, Digitally and In Print

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that for the first time, electronic books for the Amazon Kindle have outsold hardcover books. The online bookseller averaged 143 Kindle book sales for every 100 hardcover copy sales over the last three months. WOW.

Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the impending death of print. And with it some other things, you know, like cultural literacy, Western civilization, and all knowledge.

Although I own a Kindle (and most recently an iPad), I have hung onto the (obviously) antiquated notion that the tactile sensation of a book in your hands (or, for that matter, of a newspaper spread between them) contributes to the experience of reading. So I am sympathetic to the fear that books will become obsolete; should that happen, a sizable chunk of me will become obsolete right along with them.

But I don’t see that happening.

I was watching Ghostbusters not longer ago, and in a great scene Harold Ramis’s character announces to Annie Potts’s harried secretary that “print is dead.” (This, for fans, is just before Spengler tells her that he collects “molds, spores and fungus” as a hobby. Classic.) The point is, Ghostbusters came out in 1984- more than 25 years ago. Not to make Ramis and Dan Aykroyd (the writers) out to be bad prophets, but print still isn’t dead, despite the tremendous advances in technology that might have rendered it such. I’d bet it continues to survive at least for another generation. Or three.

The Amazon announcement doesn’t refute this belief, either. Look closer at the figures, and you realize that they don’t account for paperback sales, which make up the bulk of Amazon’s total book shipments. They also don’t mention the fact that Amazon is aggressively promoting e-books, to facilitate sales of its Kindle, offering electronic titles for as little as $0.99, versus the $9.99 price of a hardcover new release. And let’s not forget that Amazon is only one retailer. They make a good barometer, to be sure, but as the dominant online bookseller, Amazon is in a better position to facilitate the sale of e-books than a brick-and-mortar bookstore with an ancillary website. All of this indicates that the popularity of e-books is indeed growing, but not necessarily that print is doomed.

If print was doomed, if this did mark the first death throe of the beloved book, would that really spell the end of life as we know it? I’m not so sure. E-books facilitate reading, and in certain circumstances can enhance it. They aren’t printed on bundles of dead trees. They are easier to obtain, particularly through Amazon.

Regardless of the ratio of e-books to hardcover to paperback, the figure that’s forgotten is that Amazon sold more written material this quarter than last. More people are reading. More people are buying authors’ work. More people are interested in divining the wisdom deep within a book.

These are positive developments, and we should recognize them as such.

So let’s not sound the death knell for books quite yet, and let’s not fret quite so much about what happens when we must.

In the meantime, I’m going down to the local Waterstone's bookstore (in Richmond, London) to grab the Stieg Larsson trilogy for both of my kids.

The PR Industry: An Economic Bellwether? / from MediaPost

Happy days are here again. Or are they?

On June 29, WPP, the global behemoth marketing and communications firm reported a significant uptick in earnings and growth. WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell reported that "in the first quarter, branding and identity, healthcare and specialist communications (including direct, digital and interactive) continues to show relatively stronger growth at over 2.0%, followed by consumer insight at slightly over 2.0% and public relations and public affairs at 2.0%." Congrats, WPP -- that is great news for stakeholders, but what about the rest of the agency world?

Roughly six months ago, as the new decade broke, agencies started the year in a cautiously optimistic mindset. And they had reason to; the recession was over (almost), consumers were shaking out the cobwebs from their wallets, the White House promised to put some sort of chokehold on Wall Street, and firms were hiring again. We saw green shoots.

Today, however, that somewhat rosy picture has failed to materialize for a lot of the PR industry and its clients. It was like a mirage in the Gobi Desert. An illusion.

As PR agencies find themselves at the crossroads of sticking to old-school tactics versus the social-media-as-an-everything Goliath, reinventing their model -- and really, trying to stay relevant to their clients, another major hurdle is facing them -- companies say can no longer afford PR. Seriously.

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Mobile's Coming Of Age? For The Hundredth Time, Yes

A recent article on the WashPost website does a great job describing the proliferation of mobile coupons, along with their benefits to consumer and retailers.

Mobile coupons, as our mobile clients have been touting for years, have a threefold advantage over their paper forebears:

1. They provide convenience and ease of use to consumers,
2. Allow consumers and retailers to engage in a dialogue with one another, and
3. Let retailers collect valuable tracking data about their loyal customers and their spending habits.

All of these are highlighted in Ariana Eunjung Cha’s piece "Mobile coupons help retailers track customers," though of course no article of this kind would be complete without a veiled hint of menace (“the convenience…comes at a price: your privacy”).

But it’s the cautionary aspects of this column that are a little bit misplaced.

Now, we’re not complete pollyannas about the mobile marketing movement, nor are we deaf to the intimations of big brotherhood that inevitably accompany the accumulation of vast amounts of tailored, individualized data by large corporations.

But in terms of mobile couponing, there seems to be a very clear-cut trade off that consumers are willingly engaging in. This is NOT an invasion of privacy, but rather accepting an invitation to trade personal privacy for preferential treatment, and even that in a very circumscribed manner. Now Facebook, that is a whole nother story...

What is important to remember here is that the current generation has been willingly ceding aspects of their (our) privacy for more than a decade. When every travail is documented on Facebook, why balk at allowing purchasing behavior to steer discounts your way?

The truth is, very few balk at this. This is the choice generation, we (and they) want our offers to be relevant, tailored just to us, and we want the ability to seize them or let the pass as we see fit.

And this is the beauty of the mobile coupon, an aspect only briefly mentioned in the Washington Post article: the mobile coupon is an ‘opt-in’ offer. There must be an affirmative decision made on the part of the recipient to receive one. This means that if you don’t sign up for a mobile coupon, it’s just like the other coupons in the Sunday paper you never bought; they exist, but they don’t affect you.

Many would rather have access to the discounts mobile coupons provide. And so mobile coupons have persisted, and will continue to grow in popularity.

But of course, if you read this blog, you knew that already.

All Work And No Play....

Makes us very dull people. This is a fact.

I read a great post last week about vacation time on Firm Voice, a PR blog, and the fact that Americans need a holiday.

A recent national survey commissioned by Mondial Assistance, revealed that;

four in ten (39 percent) Americans haven't had a vacation - defined as leisure travel of a least a week to a destination at least 100 miles from home - in the last two years, up from 33 percent who said the same last year. An additional 17 percent of Americans haven't taken a vacation in over a year, meaning 56 percent of Americans haven't taken a vacation recently (39 percent more than two years and 17 percent more than a year).

Tragic, huh?

While I do agree that sneaking off for a "breather" in times of crisis a la Tony Hayward is a really bad move (then again, show me any good Hayward move), I think the guilt factor and perpetual having to be "on" is working against the American workforce.

Personally, I work anywhere from 50 to 80 hrs a week.. It's not ideal, but as a PR agency owner, I have to do what I have to do. When it comes to down time, however, I feel no guilt. Of course, the blackberry and laptop are my travel buddies, yet sometimes I won't respond to emails until a few days later - shock, horror, gasp!!! But these mobility tools allow me the luxury of time away, without worrying about not being connected to the office, or I need to deal with an urgent client matter.

I (try) to take 2-3 one week breaks throughout the year as this length is managable, pre, during and post holiday.

And you know what?

I come back recharged, reinvigorated and creatively pumped to keep going until the next break. And usually a good 15 lbs heavier, but I digress....

No person should feel obligated to spend every breathing moment in the office for fear of not putting in enough face time or losing their job.

That type of workforce is a thing of the past; the one that confuses activity with acheivement. An inefficient worker is an inefficient worker no matter how much face time they put in.

We have been empoeered with tools that allow us to work anywhere and everywhere.

For the sake of innovation, creativity and a healthier, more sane workforce...

TAKE A BREAK!