Banditry

Rupert Murdoch to the FTC:

Technology makes it cheap and easy to distribute news for anyone with Internet access, but producing journalism is expensive.

True. Phones don’t just illegally tap themselves, and making police investigations magically disappear is also an expensive business…

However, his implied public service argument falls down on an obvious point: none of the expensive reporting the soon-to-be-paywalled News of the World does is of any benefit whatsoever to anyone. So a footballer’s dad is willing to buy some Bolivian marching powder, or a vicar shagged a tart; see my rock of indifference the size of the Ritz.

On the other hand, the reporting that the non-paywalled New York Times did into the NotW’s crooked ways, and super-dodgy relationship with the Metropolitan Police, is well worth anyone’s money. Funny the way that tends to work…

There are, obviously, strong historical connections between Australia and the UK. These have created cultural similarities – probably more and closer than most Australians would be willing to admit. The two countries are diverging as time passes, but Australia’s still culturally closer to the UK than anywhere else I’ve visited outside of the British Isles.

However, it still strikes me as very strange, bordering on lunacy, for a US reviewer to take an Australian book by an Australian writer set in Australia about Australian suburban life, and use it to hang the conclusion:

The Slap’s the work of the moment for a nation that I met more at the pubs and picnic tables of England than in any other book I’ve read. It’s the book of the great muttering resistance of England, a dark-witted, vote-nay group who could rival the American Tea Party for influence if they could only agree on a bar at which to meet.

Read the whole thing, if you’re also in the market for bemused American reflections on how Cheryl Cole sounds like Dick Van Dyke (this may explain his difficulty in telling Brits and Aussies apart), and how Londoners are violent, Friends-obsessed drunks who sound like Liam Gallagher making a cameo in Trainspotting. Alternatively, don’t.

Yes, I know MGM (or, more accurately, the latest in a long bunch of shysters to own the rights to the MGM name and to make James Bond movies) are in serious financial trouble.

But if I was in serious financial trouble, and I owned a money tree, but I couldn’t afford to harvest the money tree due to my serious financial trouble, then I’d sell someone the rights to the next harvest of my money tree. Then, I might be able to do the following money tree harvest myself. At a worst case, the money tree’s money crop hasn’t just rotted on the branches.

So I’m genuinely perplexed about the weird machinations that mean we’re not going to get another Bond movie until forever. What incentive have MGM’s management got to not sell the rights to make a new Bond (which will make copious quantities of money, unequivocally) to someone with dollars, rather than sitting around making nothing until they go painfully bust?

I suspect it’s an accounting / US law / principal-agent problem, but would appreciate guidance from anyone who either knows, or can come up with a vaguely sensible reason for MGM’s management to do what they’re currently doing…

There seems to be a meme floating around the social marketing world at the moment that the super-notorious Old Spice mass media and viral ad campaign has failed to drive sales, despite grabbing mindshare and winning awards. This seems to be based on a Brandweek article that isn’t available on their website (w00t new media marketing excellence, not), but that has been excerpted here. It says:

[S]ales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.

SymphonyIRI get their sales data direct from the tills in all major US supermarkets except Walmart (who figure they’re big enough that they’ve got more to lose than to gain from sharing their data with competitors), so it’s pretty reliable. I wish I had access myself – I have done for projects in the past, and damn it’s good, but a subscription costs millions of dollars…

However, even without access to the data, we can easily show that the Brandweek piece is absolutely irrelevant. First, a quote from Forbes last Thursday:

Total sales for Old Spice body wash at supermarkets, drugstores and mass market retailers excluding Wal-Mart were up 16.7% in the 52-week period ending June 13, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market research firm.

In other words, assuming both articles are accurate, a specific sub-brand of Old Spice has fallen in sales, but the overall brand has risen in sales. Since the campaign primarily promotes Old Spice as a master brand (I didn’t even know it was plugging Red Zone After Hours Body Wash, and nor did you), the Brandweek article is somewhere between misled and misleading in its selective data usage.

Even if Forbes has somehow got its numbers wrong, and the Brandweek data is representative of the brand’s overall performance, this still wouldn’t show the campaign had failed. The IRI data covers a 52 week period – it’s comparing Jul 2009-Jun 2010 to Jul 2008-Jun 2009. The interesting comparisons for a breaking campaign (the ads started in February, and the social campaign’s been building since) are week-on-week (wk20 2010 vs wk20 2009) and month-on-month (Jun 2010 vs Jun 2009), not averages for the whole year. If sales fell in the second half of 2009 and were gradually revived this year by the campaign, the 52 week data wouldn’t show this at all.

The most awesome thing about IRI data if you’re a marketing-stats-data-geek (guilty) is that it’s updated daily. So Procter & Gamble and its agency, Wieden & Kennedy, will know exactly, day on day how sales have reacted. They (well, they plus SymphonyIRI, Unilever, Colgate, and their respective marketing agencies) are the only ones currently in a position to say whether the campaign has worked. Until and unless they, or SymphonyIRI, or a naughty leaker working for a company with access to IRI’s database, tell us what the week-on-week comparisons are, we’ve got little idea whether or not the campaign has succeeded.

Well, except that Old Spice had been in decline as a brand for a very long time – so if there has been a 17% rise in 52-week sales as the Forbes piece suggests, then that’s a good indication that the rise in sales since the campaign launched in February is larger still.

Lesson: while everyone wants smug marketers to fail (yes, of course you do), a campaign that captures the public imagination to the degree that Old Spice has is bloody unlikely to fail to drive sales, at the very least in the short term. Relatedly, most people don’t understand data.

1) which country’s national anthem contains the line “I’ve always been a loyal subject of the King of Spain”?

2) which famous 20th Century American science fiction writer wrote Blade Runner: a movie?

So, I come up with a contrarian view on the BP issue that I don’t 100% hold, but which is a genuine aspect of the story and which has been completely neglected in any of the coverage I’ve seen. I mention it on Twitter, I spend a couple of days thinking about it, and then I write it up for a blog post.

…and then, the same bloody day, the sillier ends of the UK press have the same idea, although with far less research and more pointless nationalistic ranting. Had I known they were going to do that, I wouldn’t have bothered – there’s a difference between contrarianism where you float a viewpoint that nobody’s promoting, and Clarksonism where you float a viewpoint that lots of people are promoting and pretend that you’re being oh so brave and daring for doing so. The latter is no fun at all, and even the perception of the latter is a bit embarrassing.

Anyway.

There are elements of Obama’s public references to BP that can only be explained by Brit-bashing. The underlying problem in the US oil industry is regulatory failure, and if the US oil industry were to operate under the same regulatory framework that the UK oil industry adopted after Piper Alpha, then the disaster wouldn’t have happened. And the best way to deal with safety in general is the aviation industry’s one of heavy, preemptive regulation, with accident inquiries that avoid blame and stick to making recommendations that are enforced, rather than doing nothing until there’s a disaster and then throwing around massive amounts of blame and infinite lawsuits [*].

I’m in two minds about the US administration’s behaviour at the moment, though.

As I mentioned in comments to the other post, I don’t understand their strategy here: the incident is fundamentally George Bush’s fault, in that his government deliberately cut regulation from its already poor start and also granted permits for unprecedentedly deep-sea drilling, which the current government has had no time to fix. Any UK or Australian PM worth their salt would be milking this fact for all it was worth, and saying “unlike our inept, industry-beholden, corrupt predecessor, we’re going to create a proper regulator to ensure this doesn’t happen again”.

But assuming that slating former presidents is off the menu in US political debate, and given that the public are baying for blood, I can see what they’re doing on self-preservation grounds. And if it ends up with BP paying the expected actual cost of $20-30bn for the cleanup, compensation, and fines for any specific violations that led up to the disaster, and not being charged crazy punitive damages, expropriated, kicked out of the country, or similar, then that’s a reasonable outcome.

Whether the fact that the markets seem to think a worse outcome is likely is because there’s a genuine political risk that Obama is going to go Putin-y on foreign investors, or whether it’s because markets are paranoid beasts at the best of times, remains to be seen. I’m not sure it’s a good thing that the US president is using the kind of rhetoric that makes markets believe he might – but I’m not sure he has much of a choice.

In short, let’s see what happens. If the end outcome is a reasonable settlement, coupled with massive increases in regulatory requirements, enforcement and spending in the US oil industry, then bring it on and three cheers for Mr Obama.

[*] relatedly, my attitude towards dead oil rig workers is very similar to my attitude toward dead volunteer soldiers: “that’s sad for you and your loved ones, but it’s also why you were paid so much more than someone with your skill-base could have earned in a job that didn’t have a substantially elevated risk of death”.

Rory Cellan-Jones has a good article on the BBC site about Murdoch’s paywall. Well, I say “good”; being on the BBC site and hence subject to Strict Impartiality Etc, it’s far too neutral about the paywall’s prospects of success (which are zero). But it’s informative.

Most informative of all is the final proof that Times associate editor Danny Finkelstein is not, in any meaningful sense, a journalist:

I asked Danny Finkelstein whether it bothered him that from now on none of his journalism would “go viral”, with the risk that he’d be left invisible on the sidelines as the online debate raged through news sites without paywalls. “No,” he insisted,”I want my employer to be paid for my intellectual property.”

In my current role as a freelance market analyst, I want my client to be paid for my intellectual property, because I write reports that are only of interest to the people who pay for them. Those reports can fairly be categorised as intellectual property, and my relationship with my client can fairly be categorised as one of mutual commercial advantage.

As a result, I tailor the reports I write to meet the client’s brief as closely as possible (having used my experience in the relevant sector to ensure that we can agree a brief that helps their commercial objectives). When I find information that doesn’t help achieve this, I don’t try to include it in the output I pass onto my client, even if it’s interesting – why would I? It doesn’t help the main goal, of ensuring my employer is paid for my intellectual property.

This, pretty obviously, is not journalism. It’s the opposite – I’m finding things out selectively, based on a commercial brief, and the things that I do find out will be kept secret and used by people who’re willing to pay for them.

My blogging (at least, the data/analytical stuff I do on LC, and the transport stuff that goes up here) is journalism – I find out new things, whether previously unknown or hidden in plain sight, and then try and disseminate them as widely as possible.

If, when faced with the choice of “shout as loudly as possible so that as many people as possible can hear what you’ve found or what you have to say” or “back the boss in his plans to make more cash by stopping people from hearing what you have to say”, you pick the latter, then whatever you may be, you’re certainly not a journalist.