When I was a kid, I lost count of the times my father (mother, teacher, adult, grandparent, etc.) said “Pay Attention!” to me. Not that it mattered. I’ve always been something of a dreamer. It’s where I get my best ideas. Anyway, it seems that they were onto something. Attention, I mean.
It goes something like this…no matter how rich or how poor, how powerful or how weak, how young or how old, there is one common denominator in all our lives. Time. Each of us has the same 24 hours per day – no more, no less. How we spend this time is what occupies our waking hours. When I was a kid, time was a pretty simple thing to manage – get up, eat breakfast, go to school, come home, do homework, eat dinner, go to bed. What free time I had, I could choose to read (my personal favorite) or watch one of three TV channels, or listen to a handful of radio stations. Occasionally, I could go to see a movie or a play. That was about it. Now consider my daughter. This seven-year-old is growing up in a world with hundreds of satelite TV channels, ditto for satelite radio. Add to that dozens of magazines, CDs, DVDs, podcasts, MP3s and a host of other stiumuli. She has literally hundreds more choices in entertainment than I had at her age.
Pause with me for a nanosecond. [Read more…] about Pay Attention.
Okay. Stay with me on this one. In America, we tax everything. There’s income tax, sales tax, inheritance tax, and on and on and on. That doesn’t even begin to cover all the hidden taxes – user fees, surcharges, and the like. I, for one, would dearly love to see the entire U.S. tax code scrapped, and either a flat tax (X% of income) or a VAT (value-added tax) to replace all of it. Since I don’t think I’ll see that in my lifetime, I have a modest proposal for an alternative that would generate all the income the government needs, and then some. It’s simple, effective, and likely to be welcomed with open arms by a vast majority of the public.
I don’t want to get off on a rant here (with apologies to Dennis Miller), but I feel compelled to say a few words about SPAM. I’m not talking about the all-purpose food from the fine folks at Hormel, nor am I making a Monty Python reference. No, gentle reader, I’m talking about unsolicited email, and nefarious bastards that are behind the practice. Unlike the Feds “we don’t know how to define spam, but we’ll know it when we see it,” I can define it. It is the moral equivalent of 4th class advertising. Unsolicited, unwanted, and unnecessary. Ever wonder why you get so many unsolicited ads in your (snail) mail box? Because they are A) cheap to send, and B) work.
In January 2006, The “King of All Media” (a.k.a. Howard Stern) moves his blue humor act from terrestrial radio to Sirius satellite radio.
For a media guy, I don’t really watch a lot of TV. When I was a kid, I did. LOTS of TV. In fact, my folks told me that my first word wasn’t “Mama” or “Dada,” but “Popeye.” They also told me that I used to run out of the room when the programs were on, and run back in to watch the commercials. Frankly, they thought I was nuts. As an adult, I’ve learned that the average network 30 second spot has the same budget as a 30 MINUTE television sit-com. Think about that. second for second, the commercial has better acting, much better special effects, better writing, frequently better story lines, and better directing. I’m afraid, though, that television is changing, and the way advertising works (or doesn’t work) is changing, too. Let me explain… 
Most things work in cycles, like the swinging of a pendulm. Hemlines go up and hemlines go down. Pants legs go from flares to straight and back again. The country swings towards liberalism and back to conservative values. Some cycles take longer than many people observe in their lifetimes. To understand those cycles, we must study history. For instance, did you know that there have been several periods in American history where the two sides were as polarized (if not MORE polarized) as they are today? There are periods in our past where politics were even more nasty than what we see today – with more dirty tricks than Watergate, with more scandals than the Clinton era, and with more bile than a Howard Dean speech. 
