“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of February 13, 2017
This Week’s Podcast:
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Advertising Films
Once upon a time, most broadcast ads came in three sizes, fifteen seconds, thirty seconds and sixty seconds. Sometimes the fifteen was only ten, but that was about all the time options you could hope for. Back in the day when I was writing advertising copy, I became impressed with how “long” those sixty seconds could be. It seemed like it took an awful lot of material to fill a spot that long.
In reality, the most you can hope for is two concepts in a sixty, one in a thirty, and just basic information in the ten or fifteen-second versions. Writing advertising copy in those timeframes teaches you a lot about brevity and clarity.
So I look in awe at a new trend for online advertising. In a day when people want fewer commercials, some companies have decided to say fine. And they are making their commercials LONGER.
There are several companies that have made this move, I expect that we will see more if there is any level of success. Let’s take a look at the classic English fashion house Burberry as an example.
Quick background, Burberry has been around since the 1800’s. You probably know them best by the classic trench coat. Think Humphrey Bogart preparing to walk off into the fog with Claude Rains’ Capt Renault at the end of “Casablanca”. That’s Burberry.
On the advertising front what they moved into late last year were longer form videos with the production values of a major motion picture. Think three to four minutes long, with extended storylines and name actors and directors getting involved. It’s impressive, let me tell you.
The trend is focused on high luxury brands at the moment. Customers, there are buying as much because of the cachet of the brand as they are on its quality. The longer films (and that’s what they are being called) give the brand extended storytelling time to create the emotional connection and prestige of a high-end product.
For all the criticism of shorter attention spans among the denizens of the Internet generation, there is a growing audience for longer form video.
There’s also a simple business equation at work here. While the production costs are much higher than the traditional forms, there are no ongoing airtime costs. The film can be posted and run endlessly for hundreds of thousands of viewers. The films are also being shown with the trailers before movies in theaters.
It’s unlikely that we will see too many companies moving in this direction. The upfront costs are high, and there just isn’t three minutes of story to be told about big box stores or fast food burgers and fries.
But if you look around you may just find an advertising story that is taking its time to sell you on the romance and desirability of some pretty fancy stuff.
Some Happy News?
There are a great many people in the world who feel that the news is nothing but death, doom and gloom. When you begin to wonder not only about “fake news” but whether the world is really in as a bad a shape as it seems to be when you follow the media.
There is an old saying in the news business, “If it bleeds, it leads”. Going back to the days when print was the king of journalism, the conventional wisdom was that people wanted the worst. That’s why in 1928 Tom Howard of the New York Daily News snuck a camera into the execution chamber at Sing Sing to grab a photograph of the death by electrocution of Ruth Brown Snyder. Sadly, there is and has always been, a market for bad news.
That doesn’t mean people don’t try to row against the tide. Just two years ago, a Russian news website called “The City Reporter” based in Rostov-on-Don, spent one full day reporting the news with a positive spin. Not simply reporting good news but finding the positive in all their stories. So a story about a snow storm was headlined “No Disruption on Roads Despite Snow”. Their traffic dropped by two-thirds and they returned to a more traditional style of reporting the following day.
Sadly, that is the history of media trying to find a more positive view of what is going on in the world each day. Which means I give bonus points for courage to the folks at the Christian Science Monitor. They are looking at a new model for themselves that respects their history while trying for something new.
The Christian Science Monitor was founded as a newspaper in 1908 and has won seven Pulitzer Prizes over the years. In 2008 they stopped printing the daily paper and moved to a more digitally based presentation. Now they are preparing for the next step in their evolution. They felt that following the crowd into more click-bait style reporting would betray their heritage. Instead, in the words of their editor, Marshall Ingwerson, “We want to look at the news in a way that has fact-based integrity, but creates a legitimate sense of possibility…”. Following initial positive reaction to tests of the new style in November of last year, the news organization is looking toward creating a new, digital-only, paid service by April of this year.
The challenges facing the Monitor are still enormous. Consistency in finding that tone of possibility is one, getting people to buy into it, and pay for the service are others where the history is against them.
It’s an experiment worthy of praise. Let’s hope that news that delivers the facts in a fashion that gives us hope is a trend that will catch on.
Anonymity
Anonymity has been a something of a foundational piece of Internet culture from the very beginning. There was a freedom that came with being able to be the person you wanted to be, rather than the one that you had to be in real life. Living life with an avatar and scree name would allow people to speak their minds without the fear of retribution. We simply relax and say what we thought.
As with all freedoms, it comes with both a positive and negative aspect. Because, as it turns out, some of what we thought was destructive and hate filled. All these years later (which, parenthetically, is an interesting concept, given that the world wide web as we know it today is less than thirty years old), I am still amazed at the kinds of things that will really set people off. And the kinds of awful things that they will feel perfectly comfortable saying about other people. Things that would virtually never be said if we were all face to face. There have been ongoing conversations about how to keep the free flow of opinion while trying to re-introduce some level of basic civility.
At National Public Radio, they simply chose to shut down comments on their stories. This was not done exclusively to deal with civility issues, most of the conversation on stories had moved to other venues. The folks at Quora are trying something a little more complicated.
If you don’t know Quora, it’s a question and answer website. Or as they put it a place where you can “gain and share knowledge”. Like many places, there has been a disturbing increase in anonymous incivility. So here’s what they’ve decided to do. Anonymous users can still post questions and even share posts. But their ability to comment, upvote, edit answers or make a variety of other changes to topics on the site will be restricted. Anonymous content will also be reviewed before it’s published as well. This allows users to ask sensitive, personal questions without being identified, but will restrict the free for all atmosphere in response. All of this is in response to growing concerns about both abuse and spam on the website. Quora is also making changes to insure that questions posed anonymously can not be tracked back to a specific user. All of this goes into effect towards the end of March.
I don’t know if Quora has hit the perfect solution in dealing with anonymous abuse. I do believe they’ve made a good faith effort to find a reasonable starting point for the discussion. Because I believe that if we don’t find such a solution, the internet will become, to borrow from a favorite movie, a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Stories Are My Life 
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