“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 and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of April 3, 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.
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.
April Fools Fake
We are far enough past April first that I feel safe bringing up this topic. It’s going to sound like an April Fool’s prank but it’s really not. A curious thing began to happen this year on the silliest of all holidays. Some folks have decided to back away. It seems that April Fool’s may become a victim, strangely enough, of fake news.
A whole bunch of newspapers in Norway announced that this year they would not be publishing their traditional April Fool’s prank stories. They were joined by several broadcast outlets, including the Norwegian national network. The reason was very simple. In an age of “fake news”, when the most ridiculous things are being taken seriously by large numbers of people, they didn’t want to add to the chaos and confusion.
It’s a decision I find both sad, and very reasonable. Sad because the day ought to be about simple fun. Reasonable because the current media environment doesn’t really allow for this kind of simple fun. Too many people are simply too willing to believe what they read, without any critical thinking at all.
Here’s an example. A small Utah-based video company issued a press release that said they were buying Disney. The price given in the release? $100. Yet despite the obvious silliness, and the date of release (April 1st), a handful of reporters believed the story.
April Fool’s Day is one of the more dreaded holidays for some folks. A day to be endured. It’s interesting to note that we don’t seem to know when all this tomfoolery got started. It might have been based on a Roman holiday called, I kid you not, Hilaria. Or maybe it’s from a Scottish tradition called the April Gowk, “gowk” apparently means cuckoo.
When a prank is well done it becomes legendary. Sports Illustrated magazine had the legendary baseball phenom Sidd Finch. George Plimpton created the NY Mets prospect who could throw a fastball 168 miles an hour for the April 1, 1985, issue of the magazine. It is still spoken of in hushed tones. On the other side of the coin are some folks working for the London, Ontario city government. They pranked a co-worker telling him that his big project’s due date had been moved up to the middle of his vacation. He rushed home, completed the work, was overcome with heart palpitations, sued the city and was granted early retirement.
There’s certainly a time and place for an April Fool’s prank. Given the loss of trust that so much of the media has endured recently, giving April Fool’s up for Lent might be a very good idea.
The Return of Vinyl
They told us it was dead. An outdated technology whose time had come and gone. We had to convert to the new technology, and the vast majority of us did just that. We even tried to convince ourselves that we like the new stuff better.
And now this. For the seventh straight year that old technology has shown double-digit growth. Everyone from Boomers to Millenials are getting into it. So tell me – do you still have your album collection?
That’s right, one of the surprising bright spots for the music industry has been vinyl. This year the experts say that a billion dollars worth of vinyl records, turntables and accessories will be sold worldwide. The vinyl discs themselves will make nine out of every ten dollars in sales.
Once upon a time vinyl was king. Before that, vinyl was the hot new technology, becoming the recording material of choice in the late 1930’s. Vinyl had a variety of advantages. First and foremost was durability. Many of it predecessors, using shellac or wax, were easily damaged. Vinyl also could create high-quality recordings as well with very limited surface noise. The final winning attribute was that vinyl could be “micro-grooved” meaning the long playing records (that’s why they’re called ‘LPs”) were possible.
Vinyl ruled till the mid- 1980s when digital recording in the form of Compact Discs took over. The quality of the audio was a virtually perfect reproduction, even is some folks felt that it was a cold, almost mechanical perfection. A certain nostalgia for the scratchy sounds of a well-worn record even developed.
Today vinyl is coming back. It will never be the big audio kahuna again. In 1977, 534 million units were sold in the U.S., accounting for ninety percent of the total music sales that year. The estimate for this year is around forty million records sold worldwide. Average price will be around twenty dollars, so the music industry is fairly content with the return on investment. Vinyl sales will account for around six percent of worldwide music sales this year.
I am a member of the last generation of radio DJs who had to learn how to slip cue a vinyl record. I will admit to missing the peculiar joy of flipping through a shelf or bin of vinyl albums. Certainly, the glories of album art have suffered by being reduced to CD size or as a small graphic for a digital file. There is also something about the sound of vinyl recording that the digital just seems to miss.
But most modern buyers don’t buy the vinyl to play. They’re collectibles in this day and age, a 21st Century audio Beanie Baby.
The king is dead, long live the king.
Sex Sells!
If there is one advertising adage that has survived down through the decades it’s “Sex Sells”. It may be implied or overt but the concept has been used over and over for as long as there has been commercial advertising.
In the last decade or so, there is one company that has really hung its hat on selling with sex. It’s not beauty products, or men’s magazines either. It’s a hamburger chain. The Carl’s and Hardee’s chains are both owned by CKE Restaurant Holdings have run a wide range of suggestive ad campaigns, ranging from the catch line “More Than A Piece of Meat”, which featured multiple bikini-clad models, to the Super Bowl ad in 2015 that featured an apparently nude Charlotte McKinney (she was also in a bikini it turned out) wandering through an open air market in support of the “all natural” tagline.
Apparently, it has just dawned on the folks at the management company that this means that people think about something other than the food when they think about Carl’s or Hardee’s. So the chain has decided to dump the sexy commercials for ones that remind everyone that they sell burgers. When you’re a combined fifteenth place among fast food restaurant’s, even with the sex, it’s probably time to consider a new approach.
And selling with sex is a very old approach. The dawn of what we would recognize as “modern” advertising is back in the late 1800’s. Some of the very first print advertisements featured scantily clad young women. At the time the fashion was to mimic the styles of classical Greece, so the human form, barely draped was considered high brow. That’s a pretty cool excuse, but the reality is that the customer base was entirely male, and the figures were all barely covered young women. The math isn’t hard to do.
Through the years, the sex sell has gotten a tiny bit more subtle. It’s amazing the products that will make you more attractive to potential partners. Sparkling teeth from the right toothpaste and the potentials come flocking. Heck, the current Mr. Clean ad campaign claims that women find men who clean up the house sexy.
In the end, it’s a fairly juvenile approach that doesn’t show our culture at its most thoughtful. On the other hand, it seems to work. You can draw your own conclusions.
There was an ad campaign years ago that told us that when you’re #2 you have to try harder. Just imagine the challenge for number fifteen, when even sex doesn’t help.
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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