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…

Magic, Disney’s way, just got a little more expensive, as it does every year around this time when Walt Disney World raises its admissions prices.

WIth its prices generally tracking the national economic exuberance or lack thereof, the fact that Disney raised prices this week for, among other things, its “Magic Your Way” multi-day tickets, appears to reflect expectations for some recovery at least in consumer spending somewhere on the horizon.

With the recession still weighing on family vacations, Disney hiked the resort’s most popular multi-day passes by a relatively gentle 2.5 percent to 5.3 percent this week, compared with a rise of more than 16 percent in the boom year of 2006, according to data compiled by Pali Capital analyst Rich Greenfield.

This price hike, whatever its size, may simply be aimed at mitigating a 7 percent lag in hotel bookings at its domestic parks in the current quarter, as well as margin-gouging discounts at its Walt Disney World hotels, which boosted attendance but saw revenue drop by 9 percent last quarter.

Disney CEO Bob Iger himself expressed a glimmer of optimism on a conference call to analysts  last week, saying he say signs of ”economic stabilization”, but would not commit to ending the hotel discounts that have been propping up park attendance since last year’s market crash.

A spokesman for Disney Parks and Resorts said the price increases resulted from the company’s “continuous monitoring” of park prices relative to other forms of entertainment like football games, skiiing or concerts – and by that calculus, a park visit, at $79 for a one-day, one-park adult ticket was still “great value for the money.”

So if having fun is getting pricier again, that’s a good thing. Right?

Gannett Co Inc has not been too generous lately with making its executives available to media reporters. And why would it? Few newspaper publishers have because there’s little good to say about the business.

Ad sales are tanking, as usual. Debt is looming (what else does it ever do?). Lots of self-styled media experts can’t let a day go by without writing a few blog posts telling publishers that they brought it on themselves and they deserve to die.

With that merry backdrop, I was surprised to get invited to a press conference and an interview with Gannett’s latest picks for editor (John Hillkirk) and publisher (Former Detroit Free Press Publisher David Hunke) of USA Today. Gannett brought them to New York to meet the insular Manhattan media world, which is responsible for writing all those obituaries that you’ve been reading about newspapers lately.

Here are some excerpts (paraphrased as well as verbatim) from our conversation on Wednesday afternoon at Gannett’s New York bureau at Madison Avenue and 54th Street:

Advertising revenue is down by some 30 percent versus last year. Publishers say much of this is because of the recession. How far down would ad revenue be without the financial crisis?

About 10 percent, Hunke guessed.

Nobody we talk to in the newspapers around the United States is very happy. At Gannett, they’re dealing with layoffs, furloughs, you name it. What can management do?

“There is a problem… These are crushing times for people in this country… People are getting nervous and afraid… Management has to shoulder the duty to do more to communicate,” Hunke said. That means keeping the door open and talking to employees at USA Today, he added.

When will the bad times end?

“I don’t know,” Hunke said. “We’re not going to get better [in advertising declines] in the third or fourth quarter, but I don’t think it is getting worse… That’s a far cry from me delivering good and warm news.”

On plans, announced Wednesday, to charge for an electronic edition of USA Today:

• It will cost $120 a year, or $10 a month.
• USAToday.com stays free.
• Hunke would not say how much money he expects it to make. This is an important question because there already is a very free way to get the paper’s contents. And while Hunke said it’s not an interim step toward making the paper available on an electronic reader, this still could be the ultimate goal.

This may not be groundbreaking news, but it is a sign that at least some top officials in the U.S. newspaper business are trying to inspire some confidence by offering up plain talk about the state of the journalism industry instead of saying as little as possible and hoping that everyone is satisfied with that.

(Photo: Reuters)

The recession is bringing back the strangest characters.  Rising from their graves like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead are people we thought had been buried decades ago.

The Milky Bar Kid is one, Persil mum is another and, inevitably, the Hovis bread delivery boy struggling up his cobbled hill while the brass band plays on.

What next? Bing Crosby singing about Shell perhaps or the famous Smash-peddling Martians who thought it was so funny that Earthlings bothered to peel potatoes?

Advertising experts believe nostalgia works because it takes adult consumers back to a time when they were young and without any worries. Never mind recession, the old ads say, these are value brands that have stood the test of time.

Marks and Spencer has been trying a similar tack with the launch of its 75p plain jam sandwiches. "For those who haven't eaten one for years, one bite takes you straight back to your childhood," runs the blurb.

The old ads are peculiarly effective transports to the past. Some of us go so far back we can still hear the jingle from Esso Blue adverts and remember those gobsmacked housewives comparing the whiteness of their newly washed sheets with Daz man. Ah, takes you back ...

Are there any old adverts that you would like to see come back?

(Hamlet cigars - Ed)

Pity Major League Baseball.

The U.S. sports league will be the first to face the recession from the beginning of its season, and team officials are bracing for a decline in attendance of as much as 10 percent.

Two-thirds of the 30 MLB teams have frozen or cut their ticket prices and many have made similar moves on their concessions and souvenirs, team officials said. Combine that with the cutbacks in spending on suites and blocks of tickets by companies and the sport's revenue also could slip.

Baseball officials are especially worried about teams in California and the Midwest.

The league already has frozen its budget and hiring, echoing moves made by most sports. The NFL, NBA and several NASCAR race teams have cut jobs, Arena Football canceled its season and a couple of teams in smaller sports have folded.

Far from striking out, however, baseball is in good shape. It saw record revenue last year, just launched a new TV network and has long-term broadcast agreements in place to weather the economic storm.

If the recession does not land beyond this season, baseball and other sports should recover nicely as consumers still love distractions in tough times, analysts and sports industry executives have said.

(Photo: Reuters)

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)

Neiman Marcus chief Burt Tansky had some choice words for retail reporters last night, saying they had unfairly influenced the outcome of the 2008 holiday shopping season well before it even started. He was referring to stories that came out as early as September, like this one, predicting that holiday sales could be the worst in up to two decades because of the bad economy.

"I think the media have done us a terrible disservice," Tansky said at an evening event sponsored by Financo Inc during the annual National Retail Federation conference in New York, attended by our own Karen Jacobs. "The media, I think, should start thinking about the impact they are having on retail."
    
Many of these media stories were based on predictions from leading research groups, such as Deloitte, who gave gloomy forecasts due to the global financial crisis, the U.S. housing slump and credit crunch. 
    
And when retail chains finally began to take down the tinsel after the holidays, their performance proved even worse than that, with sales dropping for the first time in the nearly 40 years they have been tracked.
    
We didn't know it last night, but Tansky may have had other reasons to be piqued than our role in bringing the bad news. Neiman today said it would start making interest payments on some of its senior notes by issuing more debt, rather than using cash, and planned to fire 3 percent of its workforce.
    
The news comes barely a week after Neiman posted a 31.2 percent drop in same-store sales at its unit that is home to the Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman stores.

(Photo of a Neiman Marcus gift book from a Christmas past: Reuters)

Give the “Glass is Half Full” award to Stan Glasgow, Sony’s top U.S. electronics executive, ahead of what could be the most crucial (and potential painful) “Black Friday” shopping weekend in many years. It’s normally a happy time of year, filled with family gathering, gifts, etc.

This year its different. Read the papers, or a blog. Things look pretty gloomy.

Perhaps, just perhaps, things aren’t as bad as they seem, Glasgow told a gathering of journalists on Thursday, suggesting that there are great bargains to be had on cool gadgets and big TVs, if consumers can overcome their apprehension.

Glasgow, a passionate engineer-by-trade, whose casual briefings with the tech press are usually chock full of geek-y chatter about flat screen TVs, Digital SLR Cameras and OLED displays, took on the economy, such as it is.

His message in short: Yes We Can shop our way out of this mess:

All of us get shell-shocked a little, that we have been disappointed by the events that have happened in the economy. We’d like to think that it’s an opportunity. I’ve asked our employees to get out there and get aggressive, to come up with new ideas how to do things better for Sony, but also to begin to talk to their friends and family about ‘its a good time to buy products — the values are good right now.’

Prices have gone down on every product. It’s almost a deflationary time period in terms of good and services in this country. What that means is that everything is going down in price, including oil and gold and stocks and bonds and everything. It is not a bad time to buy products, it is not a bad time to make investments. So I’m encouraging our people — and I’m encouraging all of you around the table — that we can play a part in helping restore consumer confidence.

(Reuters photo of Stan Glasgow)

That’s obviously what Woody Guthrie would have written had he been a more contemporary singer (Speaking of which, where’s our 2008 Woody Guthrie? Isn’t it depression time again?)

We thought of that headline after receiving this press release from comScore:

While 43 percent of iPhone owners earn in excess of $100,000 annually, the strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income, particularly since the launch of the iPhone 3G. According to a new comScore report, “All about iPhone,” iPhone adoption since June 2008 rose 48 percent among those earning between $25,000 and $50,000 per year and by 46 percent among those earning between $25,000 and $75,000. These growth rates are three times that of those earning more than $100,000 per year. Overall, iPhone penetration grew 21 percent.

“As an additional household budget item, a $200 device plus at least $70 per month for phone service seems a bit extravagant for those with lower disposable income,” said Jen Wu, senior analyst, comScore, the report’s author. “However, one actually realizes cost savings when the device is used in lieu of multiple digital devices and services, transforming the iPhone from a luxury item to a practical communication and entertainment tool.”

Extravagant? What could be less extravagant when you’ve just lost your house to foreclosure than a TOUCHSCREEN IPHONE?