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Bloomberg’s TV Blitz on Guns Puts Swing State Senators on the Spot

March 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The man behind the advertisement is not known for his kinship with the gun crowd: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the nation’s fiercest advocate of restrictions on firearms since the December rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Determined to persuade Congress to act in response to that shooting, Mr. Bloomberg on Monday will begin bankrolling a $12 million national advertising campaign that focuses on senators who he believes might be persuaded to support a pending package of federal regulations to curb gun violence. The ads, in 13 states, will blanket those senators’ districts during an Easter Congressional recess that is to be followed by debate over the legislation.

In a telling sign of how much the white-hot demands for gun control have been tempered by political reality, Mr. Bloomberg’s commercials make no mention of an assault weapons ban once sought by the White House and its allies, instead focusing on the more achievable goal of universal background checks.

“You don’t want to lose everything in the interest of getting the perfect,” Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview, acknowledging his disappointment over the apparent unlikelihood of an assault weapons ban, but insisting he is resolved to push the legislation through at a time when its prospects are uncertain.

The mayor’s advertising blitz, which will saturate television screens in states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona, represents by far the biggest escalation of Mr. Bloomberg’s attempts to become a one-man counterweight to the National Rifle Association in the political clash over guns.

“The N.R.A. has just had this field to itself,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It’s the only one that’s been speaking out. It’s time for another voice.”

After months of wrangling, the current package of Senate legislation would expand background checks for gun buyers, increase penalties for people who buy firearms for those barred from owning them and would give law enforcement new tools to combat illegal gun trafficking, a longtime goal of Mr. Bloomberg’s.

Given the mayor’s role in contributing to the ouster of an N.R.A.-backed candidate in an Illinois Congressional race a few weeks ago, his push carries an unmistakable threat to those who vote against the bills.

The ads are directed at Democratic and Republican senators in both swing states and partisan precincts. Among Mr. Bloomberg’s targets are some of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats, including Kay R. Hagan of North Carolina, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark L. Pryor of Arkansas, for whom the gun issue is particularly problematic because they will need Republican votes to win re-election.

Some of the senators, such as Dean Heller of Nevada, Rob Portman of Ohio and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, all Republicans, represent swing states where voters are divided over guns. Other Republicans would seem to be out of reach for Mr. Bloomberg: Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Daniel Coats of Indiana and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

In each case, the commercials urge support for the measure requiring background checks for nearly all firearms purchases, not just those in gun stores, the most debated element of the legislation and a coveted goal of gun control advocates.

Mr. Bloomberg has singled out Mr. Flake, who already voted against the expansion of background checks in the Senate Judiciary Committee, by producing a special, scolding commercial aimed at Arizona. “Flake’s vote,” the ad declares, equals “no background checks for dangerous criminals.”

The mayor, who has spent tens of millions of dollars to support his favored candidates, intends to wield his “super PAC” to influence the midterm Congressional elections next year and beyond. He said he would prefer “candidates who will stop people from getting killed.”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/nyregion/bloombergs-tv-blitz-on-guns-puts-swing-state-senators-on-the-spot.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Future of TV to Be Displayed at Electronics Show

January 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Almost every major electronic device you own is a black rectangle that is brought to life by software and content. So how can hardware companies make their products stand out in a sea of black rectangles?

That challenge will be on display at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Tuesday through Friday at the 46th annual Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest technology conventions based on attendance, which is expected to exceed 150,000 this year. And one that is particularly acute for television makers. “The hardware is no longer what’s driving the future,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst for Forrester Research. “The hardware is kind of boring.”

More exciting things are happening in software, Mr. McQuivey said. For example, dozens of tablets are on the market, but Apple and Amazon lead the pack because of the impressive apps and digital content available for their devices, he said.

This year, television makers like Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic are trying to grab attention by supersizing their television screens and quadrupling the level of detail in their images. And manufacturers continue to push the idea of “smart” sets by adding apps and other interactive elements.

For the electronics industry, the television is an important but increasingly difficult product to sell. Just seven years ago, big-screen sets that cost thousands of dollars were major profit generators. But more recently, even as televisions have gotten bigger and better looking, they have dropped significantly in price amid heated competition.

To make matters worse, consumers are buying new televisions as often as they buy a new car, not as often as a new computer or phone. And people can now watch video on smartphones, tablets and computers, reducing the need to buy a television at all.

Sales of televisions over the holiday season were down 2 percent from the previous year, according to Stephen Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group. Mr. Baker said one problem for television makers was that bigger screens, ranging from 50 inches to 55 inches were taking sales from televisions in the 40- to 49-inch range, once an especially popular category.

The average selling price of a 45- or 49-inch set was $615, but sets in the range of 50 to 54 inches actually had a lower average price, $520, Mr. Baker said. This is because people who bought the smaller televisions opted for features like LED screen technology and Internet capability, but more budget-conscious consumers chose size over other features.

As they try to prop up profits, electronics makers are trying hard to establish a new high-end category of televisions. They are promoting what they call Ultra High-Definition televisions, which have four times as many pixels as their high-definition predecessors. Some of these new televisions can cost as much as a car, like Sony’s 84-inch Ultra HDTV, which is priced at $25,000. But Sony says it will unveil Ultra HDTVs at the show that are smaller and less expensive.

Mike Lucas, a senior vice president at Sony, called its 84-inch set the Ferrari of televisions. But he said that with the new versions, “we’re moving out from the Ferrari world and more into the Audi, Lexus and Mercedes side of the world.” He declined to say how much the smaller Ultra HD sets would cost, but said they would be more expensive than the older HDTVs.

Samsung will also introduce new televisions this week, including an Ultra HDTV that emphasizes software. Joe Stinziano, senior vice president for home entertainment at Samsung Electronics America, said a majority of the new Samsung sets this year would be smart televisions — Internet-enabled televisions that run apps for things like Netflix and Facebook.

“The television has always been the center of the entertainment of the home,” Mr. Stinziano said. “Now it will be the center of a connected home.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/technology/07iht-ces07.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Essay: Bowl Games Display Explosion of Brands and Erosion of Soul

December 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Let’s start by considering the dozens of brand names being spray-painted onto fields and beamed onto television screens, including BBVA Compass, GoDaddy.com, Gildan, AdvoCare V100, R+L Carriers, TaxSlayer.com, Vizio and Belk. I have no idea what any of those things are, or what they do, or why I should want to pay money for them. I’m at least slightly familiar with a few of this year’s bowl sponsors, including Allstate, Tostitos, ATT, Little Caesars, AutoZone, Bell Helicopter, Kraft, Sheraton and Chick-fil-A. I’m making an undereducated guess that Beef ‘O’ Brady’s and Buffalo Wild Wings have something to do with pub grub, and I’m fairly sure that Capital One and Discover provide the kind of cutting-edge financial services guaranteed to make my wallet thinner. The only sponsors that spell it out in plain English are the San Diego County Credit Union, Meineke Car Care and Franklin American Mortgage.

Many fans of college football, those quaint dinosaurs known as purists, bemoan this tsunami of commercialism. They pine for the good old days when there were only a handful of bowl games, and they fed off long-standing rivalries between powerhouse teams, and they were named for actual physical things that had some regional association, things like roses, cotton, sugar, oranges and the bluebonnet — Texas’ state flower, not the margarine. Nowadays, these dinosaurs complain, the selling of sponsorship rights to corporations for obscene sums has turned the bowl season into a tossed salad of generic, mysterious and ever-changing ingredients. To top it off, universities that send their teams to the less prestigious bowls frequently lose money or barely break even.

This branding binge is telling us a couple of things. On a metaphorical level, it’s telling us we’re no longer a nation that grows tangible things like cotton and sugar; we’ve instead become a nation of marketers seeking to grow vaporous things known as brands. And on a linguistic level, it’s telling us that people in the world of branding have a funny way of talking.

As I’d suspected, this year’s Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl, pitting Texas Christian (7-5) against Michigan State (6-6) — yawn — is being sponsored by a Minnesota-based chain of sports-themed restaurants. The company, which has nearly 900 locations in 49 states and Canada, has an employee called the executive vice president for global marketing and brand development. Her name is Kathy Benning. As she told The Phoenix Business Journal when the company announced the sponsorship deal last summer: “We look forward to entering the college bowl arena as the title sponsor of this progressive property. It aligns our growing brands and provides tremendous opportunity to interact with our guests, who we know are passionate about football.”

And here’s Frank Muir, chief executive of the Idaho Potato Commission, explaining his group’s decision to take over sponsorship of the game in Boise now known as the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl: “We’ve got a national campaign pounding the fact that potatoes are good for you.”

“People have forgotten this,” he added. “Just because they taste good doesn’t mean they’re bad.”

Well, at least the people in Idaho are growing something besides brands.

How did this come to pass? Many agree that it began with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the first time corporations were allowed to pay big bucks to sponsor sites and events. Those Games were a huge financial success, but critics derided them as the Hamburger Olympics because McDonald’s paid for the swimming pool.

Bruce Skinner was then the executive director of the Fiesta Bowl. In 1985, based on what he had witnessed in Los Angeles, he persuaded Sunkist to pony up $2 million to sponsor his game. The horse was officially out of the barn. “If anybody is guilty of spurring corporate sponsorships,” Skinner said years ago, “it was the L.A. Olympics.”

Every once in a long while, a corporate sponsor takes a humdrum bowl game’s name and makes it sublime — as when the Independence Bowl became the Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl, lovingly known as the Weed Whacker Bowl. Was the sponsorship deal, which ran from 1990 to 1996, worth the money? “Over all, it was a net benefit,” Evin Ellis, the company’s marketing communications manager, told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2010. “We consider Weed Eater the Kleenex of weed whacking.”

There you have it: the art of brand management distilled to its essence. Corporations are now willing to shell out up to $5 million a year to have their name attached to a college football bowl game because they want the brand to become so common and recognizable that it enters the language as the thing itself. The dream is to become … generic.

The Kleenex of weed whacking. The Velcro of pub grub. The Tupperware of telecommunications. The AstroTurf of auto parts. The Muzak of the mortgage racket.

A noble dream, indeed, but there’s one hitch. As I survey the names of this year’s bowl games, I don’t see any poetry. Notre Dame and Alabama will square off Jan. 7 in the Discover Bowl Championship Series National Championship. That’s not generic. It’s just plain bland.

It’s enough to make a football fan nostalgic for the good old days. I’m not talking about the days of the Bluebonnet Bowl. I’m talking about the days of the Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl. Or the Diamond Walnut San Francisco Bowl. Or my personal favorite, the Roady’s Truck Stops Humanitarian Bowl. Now that, good buddy, is poetry.

Bill Morris is the author of the novels “Motor City” and “All Souls’ Day” and has just completed “Vic #43,” set during the 1967 Detroit riot and the Tigers’ 1968 championship season.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/ncaafootball/putting-the-brand-before-the-football-game.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Black-and-White Struggle With a Rosy Glow

August 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Inside the museum footprints of many of the marchers are captured in concrete, Mann’s Chinese Theater-style, along with garments from that day’s fateful confrontation. There’s a model of a Selma jail cell around the early ’60s, where scores of arrested protesters were crammed together, and black-and-white photographs that document the day’s odd mix of hope and brutality.

Holding the many exhibits together, providing context and testimony, are television screens playing the “Bridge to Freedom” episode of the documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” a monumental 14-hour television series that wove news and documentary footage, photographs and first-person interviews into the most ambitious cinematic narrative of the movement to date. Created by Henry Hampton for PBS, it was shown in two parts in 1987 and 1990, but, unfortunately, because of issues with copyright holders the film only became more widely available beginning in 2006.

In this breach all manner of documentary and feature films, from earnest biographies to goofy musicals, have tried to illuminate, not just this period of American history, but also the myriad ways in which humans react when faced with profound moral choices. The latest cinematic endeavor is a feature adaptation of “The Help,” a 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett that has been on the best-seller list pretty much since its release and has been published in 35 countries.

Crucial to the novel’s success, just as it was in “Eyes,” was the narrative point of view. Hampton’s documentary slides powerfully from one witness to another, giving little-known organizers equal weight with the Dr. Kings and Rosa Parkses of the movement. Ms. Stockett, a white woman who toiled for five years on “The Help,” uses the voices of three women (Skeeter, an emerging white liberal writer, and Minny and Aibileen, two black maids she persuades to tell their stories) to telescope a wide range of emotions and experiences in the Jim Crow Mississippi of 1962. If Skeeter is Ms. Stockett’s stand-in, then she makes a bold stretch by using local dialect to voice the experiences of the black women, creating a false sense of authenticity that’s vital to the novel.

In the film adaptation the director-writer Tate Taylor, a childhood friend of Ms. Stockett’s, adopts a clever strategy. The film opens and closes with voice-over narration by Viola Davis’s Aibileen, and her voice is interspersed throughout the film. But the narrative is driven by Skeeter’s journey from oddball college graduate to rebellious neo-liberal muckraker, action that happens in the book but is given more prominence in the stripped-down screenplay structure. Minny, played with great wit by Octavia Spencer, is still a huge part of the film, but her narrative voice is sublimated to Aibileen’s and Skeeter’s, which may simply be the difference between a sprawling novel and a Hollywood feature.

A larger problem for anyone interested in the true social drama of the era is that the film’s candy-coated cinematography and anachronistic super-skinny Southern belles are part of a strategy that buffers viewers from the era’s violence. The maids who tell Skeeter their stories speak of the risks they are taking, but the sense of physical danger that hovered over the civil rights movement is mostly absent.

Medgar Evers is murdered in Jackson during the course of the story, but it is more a TV event, very much like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, than a felt tragedy. The only physical violence inflicted on any of the central characters is a beating Minny endures at the hands of a heard, but unseen, husband. At its core the film is a small domestic drama that sketches in the society surrounding its characters but avoids looking into the shadows just outside the frame.

Nelson George is a filmmaker and author. His novel, “The Plot Against Hip Hop,” and documentary, “Brooklyn Boheme,” will both be released this fall.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f4131a67c55dbd11d499db3c26df8c2b

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