“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 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of June 10, 2018
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.
The Burger Flap
There are times in advertising when you are trying to break out of a well worn groove. You want to show that you are more than what everyone knows you for, and so you take the chance on something big. The upside is that by going way over the top, you are virtually guaranteed to get lots of attention. The bad news is that if you have misjudged what you are trying to do, all that attention may come with a price tag higher than you expected.
So everyone was very interested in what was going to happen when the iconic breakfast food restaurant IHOP announced that they were changing their name to IHOB. On Monday of this week the announcement was made, International House of …Burgers? That was a solution to the puzzle that no one was expecting.
International House of Pancakes has been serving up the flapjacks and associated foods since it was founded in Burbank, California in 1958. You can find IHOP restaurants all around the world, and is renowned for the fact that many (but not all) restaurants are open 24/7. They also have the dubious distinction of serving me the single most expensive meal I had on my last trip to Las Vegas. What may have eluded most of us is that they have served a standard lunch and dinner menu since at least the 1980s.
But they are trying to raise the visibility of their burgers, so they made the big deal out of changing the name. In all likelihood, the name change is temporary as part of the media stunt. But that hasn’t stopped folks having lots of fun with it, especially on Twitter. Burger King changed their name to Pancake King, Netflix said they would change their name to Netflib (one of many folks playing that card) and Wendy’s noted that they weren’t much concerned with competition from a pancake house.
But here’s the real danger. Just as you don’t mess with Star Wars canon without suffering the angry pushback of fanboys, IHOP also has a very dedicated following. And they are not much amused. While the company may want to stress that they are not primarily focused on breakfast, the reality is that for many of its followers, it’s all about the pancakes. That other stuff is so your less cool friends (the ones who aren’t into pancakes) have something to eat when they join you for a meal. Like or not, it’s about the pancakes.
You have to be careful that when you go over the top, you don’t jump the shark.
Big Time Sports
Every year March rolls around and I just want to find a hole, crawl into it and pull the hole in after me. It is time for the yearly ordeal called “March Madness”. I am not a basketball fan. My hometown of Pittsburgh is not and has never been a hotbed for that particular sport, so I come by my lack of interest honestly.
All of which allows me to say, for those of you who are dreading the arrival of the biggest sports event in the world, allow me to repeat that phrase, the biggest sports event in the world, the World Cup, suck it up buttercup. It takes about the same amount of time to go from the beginning of the NCAA men’s basketball championship to the other as it does from 32 national teams to the final champion. And whether you like it or not, a lot more people in the world care.
OK, that last bit was a cheap shot.
It will be interesting to see how ratings in the United States do this year. Because the games are all in Russia, most of them will air in the later morning hours, say ten or eleven AM. Not prime viewing time. Plus, much to the anger of American soccer fans, the U.S. team failed to qualify. I expect to see lots of social media posts demanding that people not spoil the results till the fans can get home and watch the game on a time shift basis.
I have no illusions about soccer in the pantheon of American sports. Doesn’t make the top four certainly. It would finish behind college football and probably behind college basketball. Maybe top ten? Maybe?
But here’s the reality. Soccer is growing in the U.S. Major League Soccer is growing, the USL, the next tier down is growing as well. And Americans are watching more international soccer too. The English Premier League is the leader easily here, but the French, German, Italian and Spanish leagues all get coverage by sports networks here too.
The really interesting note is that Amazon just signed a deal to exclusively stream 20 Premier league games. So there is money to be made.
So all of this will give us a pretty good idea of just how far soccer has grown. With the absence of the our national team, I expect the numbers to be on the low side. But there’s still plenty to enjoy over the next month. I will be rooting for my two ancestral nation teams, France and England. Between those scores, I’ll also be keeping my eyes on the ratings as well.
The End of Miss America?
Sometimes doing the right thing inevitably results in an outcome that you just don’t want. I was raised that you do the right thing anyway, even if it doesn’t play to your advantage.
So I applaud the folks at the Miss America Pageant for making the decision to pull the beauty pageant portions of the competition. In simplest terms, that means the swimsuit competition is out. It is absolutely the right decision. There is no justification for this kind of pulchritude parade in the 21st Century, no matter how much some troglodyte talking heads want to pretend.
But here’s the reality, from a media point of view, pulling the swimsuit portion of the competition means the end of the Miss America competition as we have known it. It’s the right decision, but I believe it is the death knell for the iconic program.
I simply don’t believe that folks will tune in to watch the talent competition and the interview segment where they talk about how they will change the world. Those are the two elements that have been perpetual targets of satire (sometimes for a very good reason). Pardon the sweeping generalization but the average American male tunes in for the swimsuit show.
This whole thing is a lingering artifact from a different America. Most folks know that the competition was a promotional stunt for the businesses in Atlantic City. And the center of the idea was pretty girls in swimsuits. It attracted eyeballs and sold newspapers. They didn’t pull any punches either. The contest was a “bathing beauty review”, and built on the big trend in the newspaper business of using beauty contests to drum up business.
Business has been slow of late. 1954 was the first year it was on television, 27 million people tuned in to watch Lee Meriwether get the crown. Last year it drew just 5.6 million viewers, down over thirteen percent from the year before.
The Miss America Competition, as it will now be called, is 96 years old. It is based on a value system for women that no longer has any place in our society. It’s time has passed. Be honest, do you have any idea who the current Miss America even is? I didn’t. Her name is Cara Mund, who was Miss North Dakota last year. She won’t be the last Miss America, but there can be no doubt that she will not have many successors.
And that’s the right decision too.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
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
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