Monthly Archives: June 2010

Are TV people stupid?

I’m sorry, let me rephrase that question to be more open-ended:

Why are TV people stupid?

I can’t answer the “why,” so I’ll try to address the “how.” Add your own gripes in the comments.

Exhibit A: Loud Commercials are Bad for Everybody

I get why commercials are so much louder than the show I’m watching. Advertisers think a loud commercial will grab my attention–but they’re idiots. For the past six years, if I watched a TV commercial it was because I WASN’T paying enough attention to remember to hit Fast Forward. And maybe some of the messaging in the commercials actually sank in, who knows? DVRs may not have been common six years ago, but they are now. Every viewer in my demographic is equipped with Fast Forward. If a commercial’s best hook for attention-getting is to blare, it’ll not only get skipped, it’ll get skipped by an annoyed viewer. That’s not good for the advertiser or the network (or the viewer). Continue reading →

I should say up front that I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell. I usually can’t make it all the way through his books (they get kind of repetitive after the first 150 pages or so), but his New Yorker articles are great, and I’m currently reading (and enjoying) What the Dog Saw, a collection of his best essays.

Two of the smartest people I know can’t stand him, and hate how popular he is among advertising-type people. Ad people are always trying to have a finger on the pulse of culture and new ideas, and to my friends’ chagrin, when Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point he became a marketer’s darling.

Gladwell’s weaknesses are that his writing tends to be formulaic, he’ll stretch to make facts fit hypotheses, and he puts too much emphasis on creating new buzzwords from old ideas. (All of those things are what endear him to hack marketing strategists–he’s just like them!). John Graham-Cumming posted a funny takedown of Gladwell’s quirks earlier today (“How to Write Like Malcolm Gladwell“).

Continue reading →

Can I just quickly make a sweeping statement about the history of human communication?

Talking sucks.

Seriously, I hate it. You’ve read those futurists’ visions of a dystopian world in which humans are all shut in their basements, connected to other humans only by email? Sounds great to me!

Seriously, lets look at the cons of verbal interaction:

1. No random access recall and no reliable record (what memories you do have of conversations are probably VERY unreliable and one-sided)

2. The timing is all wrong; you’re expected to reply immediately after being spoken to. After which you expect an immediate reply. Terrible way to arrive at thought-out conclusions

Continue reading →

Watch this news report…simply amazing. Even if you’re not a Rachel Maddow fan (I’m not either), this is a very good piece of commentary.

So there’s good news and bad news in the video clip:

Good News: The oil spill is probably not The End of the World as We Know It…the Gulf will recover eventually. Not a lot of comfort for those whose livelihoods have been lost, but it’s something.

Bad News: In a few years, we’ll have forgotten all about it (judging from the fact that I had never heard of the 1979 spill–which was reportedly the biggest environmental catastrophe of its time). And it’ll eventually happen again and there still won’t be an effective rapid response method.

“The only technological advances have been in drilling deeper…they haven’t gotten any more advanced at dealing with the risks attached to that.”