What do you get when you combine a sportswriter awaiting his buyout, baseball’s winter meetings, two big-budget teams and Las Vegas?
This epic post from Dan Graziano, soon to be formerly with the Newark Star-Ledger.
My biggest fault? Well, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. . .
Merck gave a “state of the biz-nass” presentation today. Here’s their statement about it. As with every other major pharma company, they plan to
- develop more vaccines and biologic drugs
- sell more in emerging markets like India and China
- use “diversity” when they mean “diversification”
My favorite statement was this sentence on the company’s “focus”:
The Company is focused on developing novel, best-in-class or follow-on treatments for patients in primary care, specialty care, and hospital settings.
That is, they’re “focused” on making all types of drugs for all settings.
Lost in the Supermarket: The Flavor of Night
This series of posts about adventures in my local supermarkets began with a single product. This is that product:
I suppose the indigo packaging, set off against the sky blue of the other toothpastes, was enough to catch my eye. Who puts toothpaste in a dark box? Wouldn’t that be tantamount selling it in a dingy yellow carton?
Not if your toothpaste possesses . . . the flavor of night!
Yes, this brand of Crest is somehow imbued with “clean night mint,” as opposed to the dirtyDIRTY day mint of other toothpastes. Studying the box, I was struck by two thoughts:
- It’s pretty ballsy for a company to try to convince consumers that they need to use two different toothpastes, depending on time of day. Maybe they can come up with a mid-day toothpaste to mask the odor of a lunchtime martini.
- The Color of Night was such a bad movie that the New Yorker decided to review it as a comedy, instead of a thriller.
See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series
Monday Morning Montaigne: Of brain-cloud
I know the news will break your heart, but there’s no Montaigne post this week. My headcold rendered me even less comprehensible this weekend. I’ll try to write about the first few essays of Book Three next week.
The Orient Express
About four years ago, our company hired an internet marketing guru who was supposed to “bring us into the 21st century” or something. I nicknamed her “The Orient Express.” This wasn’t because she was Asian — she wasn’t — but because she’d managed, within a single week, to alienate every single branch of our 50-person company: editorial, sales, circulation, production, and accounting. Even the office manager hated her. In fact, the only thing that prevented me from throwing a stapler at her head was the fact that my computer monitor was blocking my path.
I started to get called into strategy meetings around this time, because I seemed to know something about the internet and some of my marketing suggestions were bearing fruit, despite the fact that I occasionally walked around the office dressed as if I’d just broken out of prison.
During one of the Orient Express’ presentations on how she was going to reshape our company, she busted out a breakdown of the money were spending on web-hosting, e-mail management, and other online services. She repeatedly hammered the point of how much money we were spending this way, when we could cut those costs by moving things in house (and maybe hiring people she knew, including her son, to handle things). I kept waiting for her to say what we would do after making these changes, but this appeared to be the extent of her “online strategy.”
After her umpteenth explanation of how much money we were wasting by using outside providers, I spoke up. I said to the group (including the owner of the company), “Y’know, the premise of my magazine is that, if you don’t do something really well, then you’re probably better off paying someone else to do it. Especially if you’re a small company. As far as I know,” looking over at the owner, “we’re not exactly hemorrhaging cash, so I’m not sure we need to make a priority of cost-cutting. I mean, it’s cool to want to save us money, but it seems to me that it’s one thing to shrink costs, and another to build new sources of sales.”
She announced that if we just listened to her, we would become a cutting-edge online content provider! I realized then that I should’ve brought a Bullshit Bingo card into the meeting. She had no plans for creating new online products for us to sell. All she saw was our online expense and how it could be smaller.
I was reminded of the Orient Express and her fixation on cost-cutting for its own sake when I read this BusinessWeek article on Edgar Bronfman’s Warner Music Group last week. Warner’s album sales have grown under Mr. Bronfman’s tenure. The numbers are pretty anemic, but they’re positive when the competition is in decline.
The point the article makes is that Mr. Bronfman did cut costs at the company, but savings weren’t treated as their own goal:
How did Bronfman do it? He cut Warner’s artist roster nearly 30%, ditching more than 50 acts that were no longer selling well. He refused to pay big bucks to keep the likes of Madonna and Nickelback out of rivals’ hands. And he found some $300 million in annual cost savings. Result: Warner had more time and money to focus on new potential hitmakers.
Other music companies have slashed budgets for artists and repertory (A&R), the department that finds and nurtures talent. Not Bronfman, whose hundreds of scouts spend their nights in clubs, from Manchester to Seoul, and their days on MySpace, finding new chart toppers such as James Blunt, Gnarls Barkley, and Panic At The Disco. The strategy is paying off: Warner’s share of U.S. sales of new releases is up 7% since 2004, vs. a decline of 2% for the rest of the industry, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales
It’s one thing to say, “There’s no way Madonna can earn back the advances on her albums; we can save $100 million by letting her walk,” but it’s another to actually put some of that money into developing new acts.
What happened to the Orient Express? At our Christmas party that year, I warned her explicitly about alienating the company that was handling our web-hosting and site updates. That company was also an ad agency that had long relationships with several of our magazines. Maybe I was too friendly in my warning. Days later, she sent the company a fax stating that we no longer needed their services. Two days after that, she was shitcanned. She hadn’t lasted 100 days.
Unrequired Reading: Dec. 5, 2008
Everybody’s working for the weekend! Now make with some links! Just click “more”!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 5, 2008”
Publishing: Still Doomed
I’m still a bit under the weather, so I won’t offer much commentary on these posts about book publishing. There was a big shakeout yesterday at Random House and layoffs at Simon & Schuster. Along with last month’s announcement that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was “freezing” acqusitions — leading to the resignation of its publisher — the industry looks like it’s reeling.
Kassia Kroszer thinks that imprints don’t mean much and that independent publishers have a great opportunity ahead, since they don’t need to worry about generating profits that would satisfy a multinational corporation.
Eric Wolff thinks that publishing needs to return to its roots as a hobby for literary rich folk.
Oh, and here’s a link I’ve been sitting on for a little while: Theodore Dalrymple on used bookshops and inscriptions.
Talk amongst y’selves . . .
Lost in the Supermarket: The Imitations of Crab
For this week’s installment of Lost in the Supermarket, I thought I’d hearken back to my doubleplusunkosher post by offering up . . . imitation crabmeat!
Of course, it begs the question as to whether something this artificial is actually traife. As opposed to just a Bad Idea.
This week, you get a bonus pic! It doesn’t come from a supermarket, so it doesn’t warrant its own post. However, I couldn’t resist snapping a pic of . . . a kosher hot sandwich vending machine?
I found this one up at an outlet mall in New York state. My wife & I will only go there on a Saturday morning, before the busloads of New Yorkers arrive and when the hasidic contingent has to stay home for shabbat. Otherwise, it’s like a cross of Spanish Harlem, the Axis powers, and Samaria up there.
See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series
Monday Morning Montaigne: Of the resemblance of children to fathers
With Of the resemblance of children to fathers (pp. 696-725), Montaigne closes out Book Two of the essays by ranting against medicine and the doctors who practice it. M. uses his standard practice of springboarding from his own experience into the wisdom and anecdotes of the ages. That portion of the essay takes up a full 20 pages, which I found way too long. I mean, as a man in my mid-to-late-30s, I can understand reticence about going to a doctor, but I don’t ramble on about the topic.
If the body of the essay was a bit tiresome, its introduction managed to catch my attention. M. starts out the piece by discussing his process of writing his essays. I quoted one bit a few weeks ago:
This bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed in this manner: I set my hand to it only when pressed by too unnerving an idleness, and nowhere but at home. Thus it has built itself up with diverse interruptions and intervals, as occasions sometimes detain me elsewhere for several months.
In the seven or eight years since beginning the project, he tells us, he has made a “new acquisition”:
I have in that time become acquainted with the kidney stone through the liberality of the years. Familiarity and long acquaintance with them do not readily pass without some such fruit. I could wish that, out of many other presents that they reserve for those who frequent them long, they had chosen one that would have been more acceptable to me. For they could not have given me one that I had had in greater horror since my childhood.
M. tries to find an upside to his experience with the stone:
I have at least this profit from the stone, that it will complete what I have still not been able to accomplish in myself and reconcile and familiarize me completely with death: for the more my illness oppresses and bothers me, the less will death be something for me to fear.
That is, it’s not that he craves death to escape the pain; rather, the pain helps him lessen his fear of the end. He writes about other sufferers through history and their willingness to cling to life no matter how horrible their afflictions. It’s as if the immediacy of the body solves the questions of philosophy. Or, as Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
This “news” of M.’s kidney stone put me in mind of the close of Quicksilver
M. contends that the pain doesn’t exactly unman him, that his years of studying and thinking have left his mind “in a considerably better condition of life than a thousand others, who have no fever or illness but what they give themselves by the fault of their reasoning.”
This brings M. to the ostensible topic of his essay. See, M.’s dad also suffered from the stone, although he didn’t develop it until he was 67, more than 25 years after M.’s birth. And so, M. asks:
Where was the propensity to this infirmity hatching all this time? And when he was so far from the ailment, how did this slight bit of his substance, with which he made me, bear so great an impression of it for its share? . . . [H]ow did it remain so concealed that I began to feel it forty-five years later, the only one to this hour out of so many brothers and sisters, and all of the same mother?
His father’s legacies play out in other essays — in fact, it was at his father’s behest that he translated Raymond Sebond’s work, which led to my least favorite portion of the Essays — but this is the first time that he explores this aspect of parents and children. Sadly, he doesn’t stick with the subject, soon launching into his 20-page diatribe against medicine.
On to Book Three! Let’s hope he doesn’t end it with Of airplane food.
Your tax dollars at work
Public-private construction deals: bringing out the best in venality and pettiness:
The Bloomberg administration was so intent on obtaining a free luxury suite for its own use at the new Yankee Stadium, newly released e-mail messages show, that the mayor’s aides pushed for a larger suite and free food, and eventually gave the Yankees 250 additional parking spaces in exchange. . .