“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 March 20, 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.
“Let the buyer beware”.
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.
The Company You Keep
Sometimes all this new fangled technology creates problems that didn’t exist before. Take advertising as an example. In the old school media, you had a lot of control over where and when your ads showed up. You chose the medium; radio, TV or print; and you could even control when and where within that medium it appeared. The ad could appear only during morning drive time, or only on the sports page. The end result was your ad showed up pretty much where you wanted it.
Advertising on digital media doesn’t offer that same simple formula. Because there is such an enormous universe of opportunities, the various media have resorted to algorithms to try and place the advertising content in places where it will be seen by the audiences with an interest. The problem is that just like the Facebook algorithms that put stuff I’m not really interested in on my page, these algorithms are putting advertising in places that the advertiser finds objectionable.
This story first popped up about a month ago, when The Times of London ran an article showing that a variety of major brands had ads showing up on the pages of groups that supported ISIS and jihadist organizations. Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, the Sandals Resorts, and even the Albert and Victoria Museum discovered that their commercials were showing up in places they did not want. All of them suspended their online advertising campaigns while they tried to sort the whole thing out. Since then, more companies have followed suit.
The latest organization to join the exodus is the government of the United Kingdom. The office of Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the government was suspending its campaign on YouTube because the spots were showing up with hate speech and extremist content. A meeting with YouTube parent Google was scheduled for late last week.
No one is sure why this is happening. The programming parameters should be able to make sure that the advertising shows up in front of the viewers desired. There has been some concern that the agencies who handle the campaigns may have pushed commercial placement too hard in order to justify their billing. The other concern is that one the buy is placed, the actual decision on placement is done almost entirely by machines. Those machines are provided with vast amounts of information about viewers, but the database on websites is astoundingly small.
The old saying about computers is “garbage in, garbage out”. You could make the same argument for “insufficient data in, unsatisfactory answers out”.
For the time being online advertisers may want to keep an even older old saying in mind.
“Let the buyer beware”.
RIP Chuck Berry
The roll call of people who have truly changed their world in a profound manner has always been very short. It also amazes me how often they end up as the forgotten people of history. Far too often we will remember those who built upon the innovations of genius rather than remember the original genius.
Some folks will say that I’m underselling the place in music history of rock and roll legend Chuck Berry. My response is that for those of us of a certain age, and those who are students of rock, Berry is as familiar as a number one hit. As the years have passed however, there have come several generations for whom, I believe, he is little more than a vaguely familiar name. They probably recognize his biggest hits, but they may identify “Johnny B. Goode” more with Marty McFly from the “Back to the Future” movies than with man who made the song famous.
Chuck Berry deserves to be remembered for two contributions to rock and roll. The first is the sound. The guitar driven mixture of rhythm and blues with country and western that was to be his signature. And it would become the signature for all of rock and roll. From the very beginning that sound stood out. Berry’s very first record was “Maybelline” for Chess Records in 1955. It sold a million copies. In the next three years he would add “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Rock and Roll Music” and “Johnny B. Goode”.
But for all the great music that he made, his other contribution is at the center of what is “rock and roll”. Berry brought the swagger, the attitude, the slightly dangerous glint in the eye that remains a central part of the character of rock and roll. It wasn’t going to come from the white bread Bill Haley, and even Elvis was a model of southern choir boy from the hips up. Berry was the real deal. He would go to prison three times in his life. But the belligerence of Mick Jagger or the Ramones begins with Chuck Berry. He set the standard for rock and roll.
By the end of the ‘50s he was touring nationally and a big star. His second trip to prison, on a morals charge, brought him back into the world in 1963. Surf music dominated the airwaves and the Beatles were about to change everything. Berry’s career was never the same.
When we sent music up with the Voyager satellite in 1977, only one rock song was included. It was Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”. He was a member of the first group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Every modern music fan should know Chuck Berry.
Charles Edward Anderson Berry passed away this past weekend. He was 90 years old.
She Cried Wolf
In Aesop’s Fables, you find the story of the boy who cried wolf. Too many false alarms meant no one listened to him when the wolf showed up. In the media world, that kind of over-hyping is usually associated with the 1986 Geraldo Rivera special called “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults”. Rivera, once the golden haired boy for a new generation of media star journalists had just been fired the year before by ABC. He was looking for a high-profile event to get his career restarted. The vault under the Lexington Hotel was hyped as a potential burial site for some of the 1930’s gangster’s enemies or possibly even a cache of hidden money. When they finally opened it what they found was tons of dirt. Just dirt. The show became a catchword for anything that is all hype with no payoff.
There’s been a new entrant into this category. MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow announced just ninety minutes before last week’s show that she had “…Trump’s tax returns…”. The revelation was hyped as big, breaking news. Because President Trump has chosen not to release his tax returns, there is a news element to the story. So many audience members believed that there was a major news story coming.
What they got was the Rachel Maddow show pretty much as it is on any other night. It began with about twenty minutes of the anchor doing commentary. Then a commercial break. Finally, we all discover that it’s not really that big a deal. Part of one year’s return from twelve years ago. And nothing terribly unusual there either. The audience came expecting big news. What they got was a shallow attempt at stringing a small story out to garner the best ratings possible. They came away very disappointed and clearly disillusioned at least a little in their host.
The good news is that the MSNBC show is setting ratings records. This wasn’t a make or break kind of show for the liberal media star. It should serve as a caution to her, and media types everywhere, about making sure the hype is at least close to the payoff. While not “fake news”, this whole thing clearly wasn’t heavyweight journalism either. The proof is in the fact that a week later no one is talking about the taxes, only the program.
A long time ago, I was taught that you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. Rachel Maddow offered a four course serving of sizzle, then delivered a fast food hamburger. That’s not the media meal that creates return customers.
I don’t think she’ll suffer the career damage Geraldo did, but she needs to be careful how often she cries wolf.
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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