Tina Brown Returns to the Web: Train Wreck Ahead!

Tina Brown knows absolutely nothing about running Web sites, and her disastrous record with Talk.com should have resulted in her being banned from the Web forever. Unfortunately, it's impossible to do this, and so Brown is reaping tons of press with her plans to launch a new site that's going to blah blah blah. Big deal - she hired away the creative director from nymag.com - if this guy's such a hotshot, why can't Nymag.com beat Gawker.com in the traffic wars? The whole thing is a joke and I'm sure that whatever Brown comes up will be a ghost site within 18 months of its launch.

How to Read an Advertising Agency Blog

AdFreak (a really good Blog on advertising) has a funny post noting how badly ad agencies handle their Blogs. Only a few actually blog at all and even the ones who do put up content which is only updated once a month or so and is entirely vacuous. In the spirit of AdFreak's cynical take on advertising, here's a quick translation of the mild rantings of Bob Scarpelli, Chairman & Chief Creative Officer of DDB (formerly Doyle Dayne Bernbach, now part of a giant, soulless ad agency holding company):

BLOG ENTRY FOR OCTOBER 9, 2007 (Gee, that was weeks ago)

ENTRY: Great to see the activity and people's different perspectives.

TRANSLATION: Thank God there's more than one comment on this stupid thing. They were really starting to laugh downstairs.

ENTRY: I agree that part of our job is to tell interesting stories that are inspiring, moving and uplifting.

TRANSLATION: 99 percent of our job is to move product. The remaining 1 percent is devoted to making extremely drunk people laugh at our stupid spots.

ENTRY: At the same time, we are in the business of educating and convincing, so it is true we are problem-solvers.

TRANSLATION: We use fear and sex to move truckloads of toothpaste into your mouths. The only problem we really solve is justifying our fat salaries to clients who would have moved more toothpaste if it wasn't so expensive because of our fat salaries.

ENTRY: Objective, identifiable results in our business and craft are undeniably important with process and measurement being a big part of the debate these days.

TRANSLATION: We have no idea whether our ads are effective or not, and it really bothers us that people are bothering us about this.

ENTRY: I wanted to turn our discussion to the thorny topic of measurement.

TRANSLATION: I want to distract you from seeing how bad this experiment is turning out.

ENTRY: In a business sense, how can we measure creativity?

TRANSLATION: The only way to measure creativity is by how much we pay our creative director.

ENTRY: What are some of the metrics and measures you think are fair to use in the assessment of creative product?

TRANSLATION: Which fuzzy numbers are most likely to protect us from angry clients?

Should The HuffingtonPost.com Pay Its Bloggers? Not on Your Life!

As reported in ValleyWag.com, the AP's Simon Dumenco has been on the warpath for the past several weeks against The HuffingtonPost.com for not paying the Bloggers who contribute to the popular liberal site. Dumenco seems particularly miffed by Huffington co-founder Ken Lerer's remark that paying its contributors is "inconsistent with HuffPo's business model."

Frankly, I think this is all a tempest in a teapot. Using volunteers to build a brand by offering them a few crumbs of recognition in exchange for monetizable text IS the business model of the Web. The multi-billion dollar AOL brand could not have been built without the cooperation of legions of unpaid volunteers. Geocities would never have made its founders rich without the cooperation of unpaid, attention-seeking home page authors. One can argue that Google is nothing more than a huge content aggregator that uses the same time-proven model of exchanging visibility for intellectual property.

Nobody holds a gun to the heads of HuffPo's writers forcing them to write for the site. They willingly contribute and reap the benefits downstream on their own sites or elsewhere in their off-line careers. Call this new content exchange model a way-new form of capitalism, or a sinister species of socialism, but it's the way the idea marketplace works and it's not going away.

New York Times Comes to Its Senses, Abandons "Walled Garden" Content Plan

Back in 2005, I wrote an article for Ghost Sites excoriating the New York Times for putting much of its best content (including columnists Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, Judith Warner, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and others) behind a subscription wall.

The Times was making $10 million a year on its subscription scheme, but its management clearly recognized that it could be making much more by opening up its content and making it ad-supported. Abandoning the "walled garden" approach is great news both for the Times and for those who continue to regard this institution as an indispensable resource. Bravo!