Chautauqua Day 5: David Marash

David Marash is one of those Emmy-winning journalists who trucks in a different kind of celebrity than the name-trotting sort headlining newscasts today. He’s a genuine article, deep in voice and language, the rare breed of television media personality who believes in the strength of long-format journalism, reporting stories to conclusion, rather than fatigue, and he’s got the resume to back it up.

He’s most known for his 16-year stint with Ted Koppel on Nightline, winning awards for his coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and TWA Flight 800. But, when that show was cancelled, he made an interesting move: Al Jazeera English.

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Chautauqua Photos

For those interested, I’ve started a flickr set of pictures from around the institution, including some larger pictures of the guest lecturers so far. Yes, most are family pics, OPC (other people’s children), but they’re cute children — what can I say.

Click here to head to flickr!

Chautauqua, Day 4: Juan Williams

National Public Radio’s Juan Williams is funny.

No, you can’t tell from the picture. Here he looks angry. Brooding. Somber. Morose. He came out on stage and sat in the chair awaiting his introduction for nearly a full minute looking just… like… this.

Scarey.

But then, the humor came, delivered secretly in that NPR monotone taking us all by sweet surprise. Jokes about drugs and penises. Jokes about Chautauquans and good manners. But mostly, he joked at the expense of the media.

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Chautauqua, Day 3: Arianna Huffington

In an IM earlier this morning, I told my friend Curt that I would be heading into the Chautauqua lecture by Arianna Huffington. He said, “Heh… make sure you slap her for me.”

I admit. I had the same thought. I’ve always sort of ascribed Huffington with the Ivanna Trump vibe — funky accent, firey speech, not a lot there. Now that I’ve seen her up close, I know that two out of those three are correct. I’m just not sure which two.

Obviously, she was here to contribute to the discussion on media, new media, ethics in media, and media bashing. To be sure, there’s been a boatload of each. But while the other folks in the discussion were from inside the fold, working in traditional media newsrooms and desperately trying to wrap their arms around this non-traditional whatnot, Huffington is coming at it from a different angle. She founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 and while she contends hers is one of the highest trafficked sites on the net, she doens’t hold much of a candle to the other representatives who’ve shared the stage with her so far this week. Click on the graph below to see Alexa.com’s rankings comparing her site to ABCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and nytimes.com (she’s at the bottom).

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Chautauqua, Day 3: Arianna Huffington Lecture Today

More on this lecture after I actually see it. But there was a Huffington editorial in the local paper today and she had this comparison regarding traditional media converging with new media:

The shifting dynamic between those two forces is exactly like the relationship between Sarah Conner and the T101 in the “Terminator” movies. At first, the visitor from the future(digital) seemed intent on killing Sarah (print). But as the relationship progressed and the sequels unspooled, the Terminator became Sarah and her son’s one hope for salvation. Today, you can almost hear digital media (which for some reason has a thick Austrian accent) saying to print: “Come with me if you want to live!”

Am I the only one who finds that … funny?

Chautauqua, Day 2: David Westin

Let me start by saying that, as far as executives inside major corporations go, my experience heretofor has been that company lawyers are about the last folks you want to invite to the big chair, to Presidencies and Chief-Executiveships. That’s not to say that savvy business people can’t be lawyers too, but those folks who specifically exist to protect the organization by managing relationships vis the law have a strange and wonderful perspective on growth and development of initiatives. They say “no” a lot.
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FM, Valleywag, Arrington, and Microsoft: A rose by any other name…

About two years ago, before I joined the communications department, we were approached by an agency pushing us to have their bloggers for hire go out and start blogging positive mojo about our then-new educational asset, Axia College. The original pitch was just that: bloggers, who aren’t our students, telling the blogosphere, MySpace-dom, Facebook-hood, and the rest of the world just how great it is to go to school with us.

I joined and was handed the contract. We’d spend a boatload with this agency specing out this contract that no one in the department really knew what to do with, so they passed it off to the only guy who had any skin in the game.

I had a huge problem with the arrangement, and I have the same problem now that it’s evolved and reared it’s head from Microsoft and Cisco. Valleywag has a good summary. Here’s a snitch:

Break

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.

The evolution is fairly obvious — in this case, these lassoed bloggers are shilling, and making it clear that they’re shilling, for an advertiser. On the surface, that should be the end of the discussion if you hang your hat on the “Truth in Advertising” mantra. Nick Chase tries to paint this issue with spit and polish in the Valleywag comment thread.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM’s authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

Duh.

Then why do I still have such a problem with this mess? In my own situation, I tried to make this work. The first proposed change was to use our own stable of bloggers — current students of Axia college who might happen to have had blogs at the time. We couldn’t find enough of them, and the ones we did find couldn’t blog for beans.

Then we thought about having the agency stable of bloggers go back to school with Axia to legitimize their shill. Of course, they wanted to be paid hourly for their time in school, their time studying, their time writing papers, their time thinking about school, and so on.

As you can imagine, the whole pitch was suddenly loosing its luster. I cancelled the program.

I cancelled it because the methods did not meet the objectives of the program. The pitch was all about creating a discussion with our prospective students. But no matter how you spin it, there’s no way to create a legitimate, authentic discussion when that discussion starts from the voices of those who are not students, are not experienced, are not authentic.

Commenter Filament nails it far more eloquently than I ever did:

This is only “conversational” in the sense that a chat with Tony Snow about Bush’s record is a conversation: only technically. What you’re doing is creating the false appearance of conversation to make money.

This whole mess smacks of a key learning that so many companies are failing to learn. Companies formerly accustomed to building relationships through the brute force of advertising dollars don’t know how to translate their wares into anything more transparent than tin foil. You can’t blame Microsoft for giving it a shot. They’re not architected to know any better.

It’s harder, as with all things, to do it right. It’s harder to actually build an army of flag-waving maniacs sreaming from the rooftops about your organization. Leaders have to shake the trees, clear out old-media thinking and build the army the right way, from the beginning. Otherwise, you’re building a Potemkin Village, and your conversation is nothing more than vapor.

Why Apple’s iPhone Advertising Campaign is Mad Brilliant

On June 29th, Apple will launch their next great evolution. The iPhone will hit Apple and AT&T Wireless stores with great hoopla at 6:00 p.m. and the world market for handheld devices will change again. This is what Apple does — change market dynamics.

But there’s raw beauty in the iPhone campaign that comes from lessons learned over the last decade of Apple advertising. This is as unadulterated a product marketing mix as I’ve seen in the market in very long time, and the point it serves to prove is thus: EB White had it right — “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

The “Switch” campaign was considered (mostly by me) to be a critical success and a business non-starter. But it was the first time that Apple attempted to tell their story transparently, and that was an important move. It taught them the power of the unadulterated user’s voice, the untarnished message. They were already making powerful, beautiful products. The “Switch” campaign sold the experience, sort of.

The iPod “Sillouhette” campaign drove the message further, selling the outcomes of the experience, linking the product to the feeling you get when you use it. It was beautiful and compelling and engaging, and sold the experience, sort of.

The iPhone capitalizes on everything the first two campaigns delivered so well, and drives the messaging completely naked. The broadcast advertising is nothing more than a screencast on using features of the product. Their print and outdoor focus on dates. Their 25 minute introduction to iPhone uses Young Steve Jobs to deliver transparent, real world use cases to demonstrate the device.

All this is to say one thing: tell your story. Rely less on agency steerage and paranoia and more on your own instinct. You’re the only one that knows your customer the way you know your customer. The closer you get to mirroring their experience in your messaging, the closer you’ll get to communicating your product or service to the unititiated.

Stick to the simple truth.

Chautauqua, Day 1: John Harwood

John Harwood was an interesting choice to have kick off the Chautauqua season, and the week one series of discussions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that political party polarization both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for viewership of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to parties as “brands”, and says that in the political sphere, these brands have done nothing but solidify, cementing public participation in a binary system. This simplification is driven by the notion that people, by-in-large, want to know what they’re getting in a particular candidate or party.Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat. [Read more]

Two Weeks in Chautauqua, NY

If you’ve never heard of Chautauqua, join the club. It’s one of the best kept intellectual destinations out there. Nestled against Lake Chautauqua in western NY, the annual Chautauqua instituation ranks as my A#1 spot for resting the spirit and engaging the mind.

The Institution is broken into a nine week series, each week focusing on a differnt subject area for exploration. I’ll be here for the first two weeks of the series. The first entitled “The Media & News: Applied Ethics; the second, “The Family: All of a Kind? All Different?” You can read more about the program for 2007 here.

I’ve been doing my usual searches through the blogosphere looking for others who might be blogging Chautauqua, and I’m surprised at the lack of traffic this place generates. I’ll try and pull some of the load here myself.

It’s 4:30 here now, however. There’s a light breeze gusting across our Victorian porch, and that screams “Wine:O’Clock”. Check back later for more!

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