Some say the Frankfurt Motor Show, which started on Sept. 15, has lost a bit of its lustre amid the crisis that has hit the global car industry with an economic baseball bat. But there are still people out there who are willing to shell out the big bucks to go see the new car launches. One lucky bidder, identified only as i***l on www.ebay.de paid 158 euros ($232) for two tickets to get into the car show today, days before other mortals are allowed to pass through the big white doors leading into the halls of the show. There are 150 separate auctions for tickets to the car show, with sale prices starting at 7 euros for tickets valid on the days that are open to the public, which start on Sept. 19. So it looks like there are still plenty of people out there who are just wild about cars even though the government has to pay tightfisted consumers to buy a new one with their cash for clunkers programme. Would you pay that much to get a glimpse of  what the automotive industry has in store before others can?

Photo by Edward Taylor

The Frankfurt Motor Show is bustling with scantily clad models in high, high heels who present carmakers new models. Volkswagen’s Skoda decided against the models and opted for a more furry mascot. To present its new 4×4 crossover Yeti model, it hired the abominable snowman! Mom is never going to believe this…

U.S. Securities regulators on Thursday sued a well-connected Kuwaiti financier, saying he reaped millions in suspicious profits after false takeover reports briefly sent shares of Harman International Industries soaring this week.

Reuters reporter Ransdell Pierson was in the office working the Sunday shift when he received a fax with the purported takeover offer.  Unable to verify the authenticity of the fax, Reuters did not publish the story.  Here is Ransdell's first person account of what happened, and a copy of the fax. Would you have questioned its veracity?

Ransdell Pierson:

I was scouring newspapers on a Sunday shift in the Reuters New York bureau and waiting for news about distressed lender CIT Group, when the phone finally rang and broke my reverie. "Newsroom," I said, and the caller replied, "Your Jeddah bureau is closed today. Can I send you a fax?" The male caller, who I imagined to be a middle-aged office aide frustrated by the thankless chore of delivering his fax, said it was a press release about a deal. Something about one company buying another for about $3 billion.
"If it's such a big transaction, shouldn't this news be coming over the PRNewswire or BusinessWire?" I asked him. He explained that it was the weekend, so faxing a press release was the best route.
I gave him a fax number and he called back, irritated the document hadn't gone through. I gave him another fax number and he soon called back again, more irritated than before. So I gave him the number of a third Reuters fax machine, but told him that it needed to include contact information for all the parties. "Otherwise, we can't authenticate it." "OK, you'll have it," he replied.

But when the single-sheet document arrived seconds later, it was bereft of any contact info.
Topped by a legitimate-looking APG logo [standing for Arabian Peninsula Group] , it described an offer by the group to buy U.S. stereo equipment maker Harman International Industries. It was plausibly well written, so I did not dismiss it out of hand. But I was skeptical.

Finding no references to the Arabian group in the Reuters databases or Google, and unable to reach any Harman officials for verification, I was glad I hadn't sent any headlines out about the "deal" on the Reuters wire.

I followed up by calling my editor at home and telling him about the calls, and the fax. He said the 100 percent premium for Harman, in this economy, seemed outlandish. "I'm sure it's a hoax."
Even so, the last thing I did that night, after going home, was to do one last Google search -- to see if any other news organizations had carried the "news." The headline from the press release did appear on one or two websites, but not on any major news organizations. I slept well.

It’s the question of the moment in the technology world: have we hit bottom?

Tech execs appeared at a bunch of investor events this week and gave their best guess on what’s going on in this murky economy of ours. Some said things seemed a bit better, while others said visibility is as bad as ever. Here’s a collection of their comments:

Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, who is leaving the company, said advertisers are “in shock” at the moment because of the economy, but cited the superior return on investments that they get online compared with traditional marketing mediums.

Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers said most people seem to expect the economic downturn to last “well into 2010″ but he is more optimistic and sees business conditions beginning to recover around the end of 2009.

Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said, “You’re starting to see a pattern of purchases emerge again that’s more predictable. I’m not saying we know where the bottom is or that we’ve hit the bottom (but) the predictability is starting to come back into the system.” He added, “I think you have seen the global shock and now people are starting to figure out how to work out of it.”

Applied Materials CFO George Miller Davis was asked whether things might be stabilizing at a low level in the chip equipment side of the business. “It’s hard to make that call yet because the falloff that everybody was reacting to happened so quickly and not only did it roll through the broader customer base far more quickly than we’d ever seen … I think everybody had to completely redo their sense of what their near-term forecast was. I think it’s premature to try and call a bottom.”

On a more positive note, Miller Davis was hopeful about the solar business and the new stimulus package, which provides a 30 percent investment tax credit for renewable energy and conservation. “I think the stimulus package and the investment tax credit actions are very important… for the U.S. to be relevant you’ve got to get the utilities bringing scale to investment in this area,” he said. “I think with the Obama administration coming in you have a real change and a real shift in the tone … we at least now have the investment tax setup … I think things are going to really shake loose over the next 2 to 3 years. You’re going to see some very big things happen. “

How would you widen your appeal beyond an audience of  14-24 year-olds to say the 18-35 year-old demographic? Some companies might give their advertising a gentler or more grown up tone. Others might throw in a service credit or some airmiles. 
Boost Mobile has decided the right theme is “wrong”
Investors already thought its recently-launched $50 unlimited mobile service plan was so competitive their first reaction was to sell shares in rival companies. The plan’s arrival in a terrible economy plagued with job cuts is also expected to draw crowds. 
But to make sure Boost, a unit of Sprint Nextel, launched an ad campaign designed by Santa Monica-based ad agency 180 LA, to stand out from the clutter. 
One has a coroner eating lunch over a dead body and at one point holding an internal organ in one hand and sandwich in the other. Is this wrong? he asks. Not as wrong like high prices. 
Then there’s a girl on a bike questioning if there’s something wrong about her flowing long arm pit hair.  The answer is of course that its not as wrong as sneaky charges in phone bill.
And what about the cute pig who’s tucking into a plate of ham at the dinner table. 
“Is this so wrong? Its delicious.” says the pig. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, a cellphone company that advertises one price and charges you hidden fees well north of that.”
Sprint said yesterday that Boost has been taking in 6 times more customers than it is losing since the new plan was launched Jan. 22. Now that  the campaign launched this week on national TV it will be interesting to see the effect on sales.
(Photos: Boost)

It takes a delicate touch to make job cuts sound more palatable. As U.S. companies reduce payrolls by the thousands, the press releases seem to be getting more and more creative.

Check out today's announcement from The Reader's Digest Association, which is eliminating 8 percent of its global workforce and suspending matching contributions to employees' 401(k) retirement accounts. Somehow it stings a bit less when you tell employees that it's all part of a "Recession Plan" right?

"We have announced a comprehensive 'Recession Plan', which is our internal roadmap for dealing with the extraordinary effects of this recession on consumer spending," Mary Berner, president and CEO, said in a statement.

Then there was Caterpillar, which said earlier this week that it would "remove" 20,000 workers as it executes "strategic 'trough' plans".

Reader's Digest spokesman William Adler said the language wasn't intended to try to soften the blow of something as traumatic as losing a job.

"We're calling it the recession plan internally to encourage not only understanding of it by the employees, but for their interactive participation," he said, adding that the company was encouraging employees to think of ways to cut costs and save money, which was all part of the "recession plan."

"It's not like 'rightsizing,'" Adler said, referring to an infamous U.S. euphemism that many companies in recent years have adopted to describe firing and laying off their employees.

Have we missed any gems? Share your best examples/worst and maybe we'll gather enough for a special 50 Ways to Leave Your (Loving) Employer blog!

(Additional reporting by Robert MacMillan)

Employees of embattled wireless service Sprint had yet another reason to complain on Monday after the company, which has been losing customers for years, announced 8,000 job cuts.

However, even after they’ve been booted out in the cold, these workers will likely still be reminded of their previous job by the sight of their old boss Dan Hesse, when he moonlights as lead actor in Sprint’s sepia-toned TV commercials on top of his day job as CEO of a struggling wireless company. 
    While Hesse’s dual lead man/CEO role may be saving the company some money, a few experts have wondered whether the commercials are doing more harm than good to Sprint, which has been roundly criticized for its marketing message. 
    Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the company has continued to report steep customer losses since the ads started to run soon after Hesse took on the job just over a year ago.

(Photo: Still shot of Dan Hesse in Sprint ad)

Strauss Zelnick, chairman of Take Two Interactive, has a bone to pick with the media: He doesn't like the two words "Financial" and "Crisis." At least not when they are used to describe the current state of economic affairs.

"I don't think we're in a financial crisis," Zelnick said at the Reuters Media Summit. "The use of the word crisis -- I'm loathe to be critical of the media since I'm every bit a part of the media -- but I don't think the word has been especially helpful. We're obviously in a recession and these are very very trying times."

If not a financial crisis, then what? Well, Zelnick offers up a hospital metaphor. 

"We're still seeing the car crash, and the ambulences are still showing up at the scene. Maybe we're in the emergency room, but we're not even in the intensive care unit yet for a lot of these companies. But they will get there."

Call it what you like. Either way, It's not pretty.

(Photo: Reuters)

Media coverage of economic troubles in the past 18 months has shifted repeatedly in the last year from a narrative about mortgages to one about recession, a banking crisis and now largely gas prices, according to a new report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, D.C.

All this is good to know, but the bigger question is why it has progressed the way it has. Fortunately for us, PEJ digs right into it.(And before the meat, here’s the methodology: The PEJ study is based on an analysis of more than 5,000 economic stories from January 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008, drawn from 1,950 hours of programming on the three major cable news cable channels, 390 on network morning and evening TV, 910 on radio, and 468 days’ editions of 21 different newspapers, and the five leading news websites, some 48 different news outlets in all.)Here’s an excerpt:

[The] connection between media coverage and economic events has often been uneven. Sometimes, coverage has lagged months behind economic activity, when the storyline was dependent on government data. Other times, coverage has tracked events erratically, as with housing and inflation. … But when the story is easier to tell, as in the case of gas prices, coverage has been closely tied to what is actually occurring in the marketplace.

The economy has been the No. 2 story so far in 2008 in the U.S. media, moving ahead of the Iraq war but behind the presidential campaign. (Economy takes 8 percent of the space available for news; Iraq takes 3 percent; The campaign takes 37 percent) Often the press coverage has lagged behind economic events, sometimes by months. … The only change in the economy that reliably predicts more press coverage in the last year has been rising gas prices.While public attention to economic news does not always translate into more coverage, more coverage of the economy can be correlated to deepening public worries.

We’re not only looking for the easy stories, we’re also constantly behind, the study finds:

One gets a sense of a news industry curious about what is occurring in the economy but with limited handles to grab on to the story. The government data are one handle, though often months behind. Congressional testimony and statements by government officials in press conferences are another. The reaction of the private sector, through the stock market, quarterly earnings reports and the financial health of companies is a third. Yet all of these may tend to leave the media narrative lagging months behind what is going on in people’s lives.

When it comes to gasoline, however, we are there with bells on:

Not only are gas prices an easy story to spot, they also represent an easy story for the media to tell and perhaps also for the public to understand. There are no confusing sets of conflicting data or complex economic jargon to parse, no indices made up of multiple elements to explain.

One last intriguing question: do our nervous-Nelly natterings make people feel worse about the economy? The study concludes:

It is neither a clear case of media reflecting nor manufacturing public worry, but there are evident correlations between increased coverage and growing public anxiety. … even if the media did not manufacture that public concern, more coverage may have reinforced those worries and confirmed for people that their fears are justified.

Conclusion: It’s OK; blame the media.

(Photo: Reuters)