Milk is white
Doug Arellanes (who led the Czech team that programmed my first newspaper portal site) has a bunch of links to old TV ads from communist Czechoslovakia. As Doug paraphrases Vaclav Havel in another post : you can learn a lot about a person from his aesthetics. And you can learn a lot about a culture from its ads.

Rock... paper... SCISSORS!!!
Some magazines are getting shredded in newstand sales, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Did the pixel buzzsaw finally pulverize paper?

Sales up or down for the first six months of the year versus same period in 2002:
Better Homes and Gardens -15.5%
Cosmopolitan -9.0%
Entertainment Weekly -5.5%
Fast Company -55%
Fortune -12.5%
Martha Stewart Living -18.1%
Money -28.9%
O, The Oprah Magazine 37.5%
Reader's Digest -19.7%
Real Simple 10.1%
Rolling Stone 4%
Sports Illustrated 3.5%
Weight Watchers 11.1%

Ben Franklin on offensive ads
Lee Barstow pointed me to Ben Franklin's Apology for Printers, something Franklin wrote in 1731 after an advertisement he'd taken in his Pennsylvania Gazette offended some churchgoers. He wrote: "Being frequently censur'd and condemn'd by different Persons for printing Things which they say ought not to be printed, I have sometimes thought it might be necessary to make a standing Apology for my self...."

Franklin continues, "I request for all who are angry with me on the Account of printing things they don't like, calmly to consider these following particulars: 1) That the opinions of men are almost as various as their faces... 5) ... that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former almost always is an overmatch for the lattter: Hence [printers] chearfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute."

Finally, my favorite part: "That I got Five Shillings by [the ad]. That none who are angry with me would have given me so much to let it alone. That if all the People of different Opinions would engage to give me as much for not printing things they don't like, as I can get by printing them, I should probably live a very easy Life; and if all Printers were every where so dealt by, there would be very little printed." (Franklin's essay linked from this page.)

Trade magazines and the Internet
"The internet stops nothing short of threatening the very existence of trades [magazines], in its timeliness making obsolete much of the editorial of traditional weeklies and monthlies. Many advertisers have already pulled out of their trade publications, and they will be followed by many more. Far fewer will ever return. Ad pages for b2b publications fell 30 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the Business Information Network. In comparison, consumer magazine pages were down 21 percent over the same period, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. So far this year, consumer magazines are up 3 percent in pages, while trade titles are down another 5 percent." (Media Life.)

Kicking DoubleClick
Over at MarketingFix., I had some fun debating the merits of the old-school online ad network DoubleClick.

Stoop to graze... or die
From this month's National Geographic: "Bulk benefited Indricotherium, the largest land mammal ever (weighing the equivalent of several modern elephants.) Its size let it browse tall trees and discouraged enemies. But size also brought its demise: When climate change turned this giant's forest environment grassy, it couldn't stoop to graze and became extinct."

Salon slamming
I enjoyed trading views about Salon with Robert Loch after this Marketing Fix post. My favorite riposte: "Give me profitability over premium-priced CPMs any day." (What fun is writing if you can't giggle at your own stuff?)