Blog Guy, my favorite actress is Marcia Gay Harden. Why isn't she in more stuff?

Because Marcia divides her time between acting and her real love, working as the captain of a luxury cruise ship.

WHAT?

We caught up with her this week in New York City, aboard the Carnival Dream, tooting the horn, dropping the anchor and stuff, charting a course for Louisville or someplace like that.

Blog Guy, are you out of  your fricking mind? She's just there to promote a new cruise ship. That's it.

You know, that's what I thought at first, too. But look at the caption. It has one of those NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS warnings on it.

So, why would they bring in a famous actress and then not be able to use the pictures for anything? No, I'm sticking with my original guess, that she's the captain.

Blog Guy, do you always just "guess" at the so-called news you print here?

No, not always. Sometimes I just make it up completely.

Join the Oddly Enough blog network

Follow this blog on Twitter at rbasler

Actress Marcia Gay Harden dons Carnival Dream Captain Carlo Queirolo's hat while touring the ship's bridge in New York City, November 12, 2009. Harden presided over ship's naming ceremonies for the new ship. REUTERS/Ray Stubblebine/ Carnival Cruise Lines/HO) FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS

More stuff from Oddly Enough

ROGERS, Arkansas – At a time when most of America is wondering whether the economy is recovering, Rockfish Interactive’s business is growing by leaps and bounds.

Founder and CEO Kenny Tomlin said the company – recently named Small Ad Agency of the Year by specialist publication Advertising Age – has grown 900 percent over the past three years and should grow 100 percent this year.

“If this is a recession, then we’re really excited to see what our growth is like once there’s a recovery,” Tomlin said at his office in Rogers, just a few miles from the headquarters of retail giant Walmart, one of Interactive’s customers.

Although about 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from digital media advertising, Tomlin said much of its future growth will be driven by creating innovative products to sell to its customers. He started the company four years ago using his laptop in a coffee shop. Rockfish now has around 70 employees and aims to expand to 100 by the end of the year.

The inventions Rockfish has come up with include a secure web-based coupon service, a web-based video chat service and a customized corporate blogging package.

Tidy Tweet is another Rockfish invention, designed to remove unwelcome language from infiltrating a corporation’s public Twitter feed – the program simply weeds out profanity from Tweets.

“We found that we encountered a problem with this (Tweets of the uncouth kind) and developed an app to deal with it,” Tomlin said. “We were then able to sign customers up to the service.”

Some 700 corporate customers have already signed up for Tidy Tweet, which carries a monthly fee.

Rockfish tends to leave employees to their own devices to come up with new products that the company can then sell to customers.

“Unless we have a really good reason to believe that someone is not doing what they should, we let them get on with their work,” Tomlin said. “A lot of our staff have come from large corporations. Corporations tend to move slowly, so they appreciate the freedom they have here to work on their own.”

Tomlin and his staff – many of whom are software engineers – say that the advertising world is heading toward tremendous change.

“Under the old model, companies traditionally bought a tremendous amount of media to reach a large number of customers,” said Chief Operating Office Jeremy Wilson. “But advertisers are learning to engage more directly with customers without having to spend so much money.”

According to Tomlin, Rockfish’s strategy is to find ways to help its clients engage with consumers where they are rather than make them visit specific sites, through, for instance, starting out by them a free application for their cell phones that they can share with family and friends.

“As long as advertising is defined as interruption then it’s going to continue to decline,” he said. “It’s rare to talk to people today who don’t digitally record their TV shows so they can cut out the commercials when they watch them.”

“The way forward is to engage with customers where they’re at,” he added.

Okay gang, you all know the deal. We've actually persuaded Prince Charles to endorse our brand of coffee for a TV commercial!

Yeah, he said it's only Canada so nobody will see it anywhere important, and he can use a few extra bucks.

It's a real advertising coup, but we only get one take, so it has to be perfect the first time.

Now, the prince is going to just be walking along doing prince stuff, and ask for a cup of our coffee. He'll try it, and then give us a big smile of delight.

Oh my God! This is our one take? This is supposed to make people buy this crap?

Well, we've paid for it so we have to use it, but at least edit out that last few seconds where he drops to his knees and spews his lunch on the crowd.

Get a grip! Join the Oddly Enough blog network

Follow this blog on Twitter at rbasler

Britain's Prince Charles samples naturally grown coffee in traditional farmer's market, at the Evergreen Brick Works Restoration site, in Toronto November 6, 2009. REUTERS/Fred Thornhill

More stuff from Oddly Enough

A string of Yahoo sales, engineering and product executives took the stage on Wednesday in the company's first full-day briefing with analysts since May 2006, all with a mantra that came down from on high: "Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect," said CEO Carol Bartz.

With page views increasing, Carl Icahn having drawn in his horns, and the company extending a deadline for finalizing a search agreement with Microsoft, the time was right for a love-in.

Finance Chief Tim Morse said Yahoo expects to achieve operating margins between 15 percent and 20 percent by 2012. After the third quarter's "pathetic" 6 percent, shareholders would certainly consider that a more respectful performance.

Another way to show their respect would have been to give specific details on the engineering involved in the promised prestige. Executives said Yahoo would achieve the new margin targets by accelerating its revenue in the next few years, but demurred from providing a specific revenue growth target.

The company said it would invest in editorial staff to produce more original features, and tweak its online products to keep users on the site longer and boost advertising revenue.

Hiring more staff and investing in ad search wizardry will certainly add to costs, so the need for a little more Internet alchemy could require a leap of faith to engineer the recovery in esteem Yahoo hopes to achieve.

We had a hard time finding the good news in Monday's report that U.S. newspaper circulation has fallen more than 10 percent, based on an analysis of 379 daily papers. Thank goodness for the newspapers whose publishers helped them understand why losing hundreds or thousands of paying readers is good.

Most papers acknowledged deep declines in circulation, but explained it in one of the following ways:

• We had to clear out all the bulk copies sold at discount. (I'm still not sure how this one works because I recall publishers saying this a couple of years ago. How many deadwood readers are there?)
• We shrank our coverage area so of course we lost some circulation. It tells advertisers that they're getting a BETTER quality of reader.
• We're charging more for the paper so circulation revenue has risen, and anyway, who wants to rely on a business as fickle as advertising (the one that lined our owners' pockets for the past 150 years.)?
• Readership is rising on the Internet.
• At least we didn't get whacked as bad as the next guy.

All these statements are true, and they all are good business moves. What I can't find among the numbers is what percent of print decline at many of these papers is because of the other reasons that you hear from people. Some are legitimate, some aren't and some are just silly. All say one thing: Many people don't pay for the paper anymore, which means there's less money to keep them in business. (Don't believe us? Ask the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

• I hate my newspaper
• My newspaper doesn't have anything interesting in it
• News is boring
• News is free on the Internet
• My newspaper is biased to the right/left/middle/other Little League team than the one my kid is on
• My paper stopped running Garfield in the funnies. It doesn't run Hints From Heloise anymore.
• You can't get good TV listings anymore
• I don't care about anything that happens in the rest of the world or outside my front door.
• There's not enough local/regional/national/world news here.
• The sports section sucks.
• It always arrives too early/late for me to read it.

Here are samples of how some papers handled Monday's news:

San Francisco Chronicle headline: Chronicle's strategy shift starts to pay off

The Chronicle said Monday that reshaping the newspaper's business model is paying off financially even though, as anticipated, it has resulted in a sharp decline in circulation. For the six months that ended in September, The Chronicle's daily circulation dropped 25.8 percent to 251,782, compared with the same period in 2008, the steepest decline among major U.S. metropolitan papers. ...

Frank Vega, publisher of The Chronicle, said the newspaper's loss in circulation was an expected result of moving away from a business model that depends mainly on advertising and instead relies on readers for a greater share of revenue.

The Chron also adds that subscription price increases and other changes have given it some profitable weeks after losing $50 million last year.

The Detroit News: Detroit newspapers lose less circulation than other big dailies

The steeper losses at other newspapers boosted the Detroit publications' rankings among the largest in the country. The News pulled ahead from 50th place to 46th; the Free Press jumped from 20th to 17th.

"We radically changed our delivery model and throughout the industry we have seen greater losses," Janet Hasson, senior vice president of audience development for the Detroit Media Partnership, said in a statement.
The Des Moines Register: Newspaper circulation falls, including at Register

Register Publisher Laura Hollingsworth said much of the decline is due to strategic changes, such as eliminating discounts, reducing unprofitable delivery in far corners of the state and increasing home delivery and single copy prices.

"Our unduplicated audience reach in central Iowa is higher today than it was a decade ago," Hollingsworth said.

As you can see, things are doing well, so please stop telling everyone that they're not.

(Photo: Reuters)

Just about everyone who covers media is talking about whether a potential Comcast-GE deal for NBC Universal will kick off a round of consolidation in media.

One executive -- one very smart executive -- who doesn't think we're in for a tidal wave of mergers is Viacom's Philippe Dauman. (Word is Dauman earned a perfect score on the SAT -- at the age of 13). After a speech at Executives' Club of Chicago on Tuesday, we asked Dauman about consolidation.

"As far as we're concerned, we 're focused on growing our brands, growing our business. We have tremendous brands with a lot of room for growth both in the U.S. and internationally. It's a big opportunity for us.

"We've been involved involved in a lot of consolidation in our corporate history. The record of success in media consolidation has not been all that great for the most part so for ourselves we think the better strategy is to grow organically."

But what does Dauman think about about the rest of the industry? To that question, he noted that "all of us in the traditional media business have seen the pitfalls" of big mergers, but Comcast may decide to chase a deal because of its unique circumstances. He didn't elaborate, but we all know that Comcast has longed for more content for quite some time. The structure of the deal reportedly under consideration may work in Comcast's favor since it doesn't have to issue any equity.

Dauman isn't the only smart guy in the media industry of course. Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes made similar though slightly more cutting comments about the prospect of the Comcast-NBC deal last week and about what it said about success of previous big media mergers.

Dauman was more diplomatic.

"There's a unique set of circumstances here that won't necessarily in and of itself trigger a wave of other activity," Dauman said.

A big battle is brewing over the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Chinese Muslim inmates held there.

The Supreme Court announced Tuesday it would decide whether federal judges have the power to order the release of the ethnic Uighur prisoners into the United States.

The White House and Congress argue the inmates have never been admitted into the United States under U.S. immigration laws, and judges should not be making those sorts of decisions.

To underscore the point, the U.S. Congress Tuesday approved a spending bill that includes a measure effectively prohibiting Guantanamo prisoners from being released into the United States. The measure would admit them only to face trial.

President Barack Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo by Jan. 22, 2010, but meeting that goal has become increasingly difficult.

Few countries are willing to accept any of the approximately 220 inmates, and the United States continues to debate what to do with them.

The 13 Uighurs -- a Turkic Muslim ethnic group from Xinjiang in western China -- have been cleared of being suspected terrorists by U.S. authorities.

Many of them had traveled to Afghanistan for weapons training in order to fight the Chinese government before Sept. 11, 2001, and fled to Pakistan after the outbreak of hostilities.

They were captured and handed over to U.S. custody and have been held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly eight years.

Five of the original group of 22 Uighurs were transferred to Albania two years ago. Four more were sent to Bermuda in June.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan told the Supreme Court in a letter Sept. 23 that the south Pacific island of Palau had agreed to accept 12 of the remaining 13 Uighurs.

But only six of the 12 have agreed to resettle there.

Meanwhile, pressure is increasing on the White House to close Guantanamo.

Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressman from Maine, announced the launch Tuesday of the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo.

He was joined by retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard and retired Brigadier General John Johns.

Attacks on closing the prison are "pure politics at its worst," Andrews said.

The campaign unveiled a new advertisement to air on cable television and the Internet.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Deborah Gembara (View inside common area of medium security prison at Guantanamo; guard tower at Camp X-Ray detention facility)

Thanksgiving thank-you lists can get pretty lengthy. This year, add a newspaper to the things you're thankful for. That, more or less, is the message that the Newspaper Association of America is delivering in an advertisement that it hopes daily papers will run this coming Monday. The ad will appear a week before the Audit Bureau of Circulations publishes its latest circulation statistics for North American newspapers.

As USA Today has already said, and other insiders have told us, circulation is going to fall compared with last year -- and those declines at many papers likely will be worse than usual. That's the kind of thing that advertisers don't like to hear, and one of the reasons that they are devoting their dollars in increasing amounts to other media. But as the NAA will remind people, some of that sentiment might be misplaced. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the ad.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt declared "the worst of the recession is over" while unveiling third quarter results. Certainly Google's recession doesn't look like anyone else's.

Revenues of $5.945 billion were up 7 percent from a year ago  and up 8 percent over the previous quarter, after  two flat quarters. Earnings of $5.89 per share were comfortably ahead of the consensus estimate of $5.32. Cost per click, the average amount advertisers pay, was up 5 percent from the second quarter, although still down on the previous year. And Google gushes money -- the third quarter had $2.5 billion in free cash flow.

There are, however, factors that give pause. Part of Google's strong recovery came from discipline. Capital expenditure was way down ($186 million compared with $452 million year on year), contractors in the workforce were largely eliminated, staff numbers were cut, and even the famed free food at the Googleplex was trimmed. Schmidt suggested that some of those constraints will be loosened. Capital expenditure will rise -- the third quarter was already ahead of the second -- and Google is hiring again.

Schmidt also talked about making strategic acquisitions, although these are likely to be small. When Google was growing by double figures each quarter, discipline was an afterthought. The company has shown it can clamp down, but there is some risk that it will return to previous profligacy.

Given the global downturn in advertising, which still accounts for the vast bulk of Google's revenues, the results count as stunning. They were only 10 percent ahead of estimates, but estimates had been boosted in recent weeks by a stream of bullish comments from Google executives. During the darkest days of the recession, Schmidt insisted that search advertising would prove more robust than other forms, and he has been proven right.

There are also signs that Google may be finding ways to make money on drains like YouTube. On the earnings call, CFO Patrick Pichette said that Google is monetizing more than 1 billion videos views each week (YouTube streams more than 1 billion videos each day).

Ideas continue to stream out of the Googleplex, from clever phone service Google Voice to the over-hyped Google Wave. There's also Android, Google's mobile phone operating system. Schmidt said that "Android adoption is about to explode." We'll see. Most, however, don't move the needle in Google's multibillion revenues.

There are certainly challenges, notably the migration to mobile search (up 30 percent on the quarter) and the lure of real-time search. But the main show provides plenty of room for experiment and evolution.

Search advertising may be a one-trick pony for Google, but what a trick.

Blog Guy, I represent the creative team of a big advertising agency, and we want to buy a photo for an ad campaign.

We need a poor-quality black-and-white photo of a guy standing in front of some pegboard. Preferably, he should be a suspected war criminal.

Money is no object if the photo is bad enough. We noticed you have a headshot of one of the four most wanted suspects from Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

Sorry Ad Man, but read the fine print in the caption below: "NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS!" You think that doesn't apply to you?

I'm sorry to hear that. What about shots of balding older guys pointing at each other and sharing a laugh? I know you've got some of those.

Boy, you just don't learn, do you? No means no!

I GOTCHA! We don't really want ANY of those, I just wanted to see what you'd say, since it's beyond human comprehension what kind of ad campaign you think would want them.

Well, somebody must want them real bad, or else we wouldn't use that dire warning.

Join the Oddly Enough blog network

Follow this blog on Twitter at rbasler

Undated U.S. State Department photo of Idelphonse Nizeyimana, one of the four most wanted suspects from Rwanda's 1994 genocide, who was arrested October 5, 2009... REUTERS/ U.S. State Department/ Handout  FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS