There was a brief flurry—it may well now have subsided a bit—where every Internet company, no matter what its actual business, wanted to become a portal—that place from where (they hoped) your web browser would start on its exploration of the great .com unknown. It would, they hoped, be a friendly place, customized with the news, stocks, weather, sports scores and other junk that you wanted to see—and of course serve as the search engine—even if what it was doing was linking to another portal’s search engine, so as you typed "golf clubs" in, a piece of software somewhere would make a note the person sitting at your machine, someone who lived at zip code 30324 (you told them this to get the weather) liked golf, so maybe we should be showing him or her golf ads.
It’s always fairly creepy when a banner ad pops up on my web browser showing clear evidence of an attempt to target me based on where I’m surfing—and yet that’s the Holy Grail of advertising. Message reaches audience. The folks who sponsor NASCAR know that if you’re a Dale Earnhardt fan, chances are you want to shop at a certain kind of place, and they can conclude you’d be in the market for, say, Texaco gas and motor oil.
It’d be creepier if "hyper-appropriate" ads showed up on the television show I’m watching, since there’s absolutely no feedback mechanism about what channel we’re tuned to (another reason I like over-the-air broadcast television) —although of course media buyers, the people who buy commercial time on behalf of advertisers—are trying to make similar guesses. If you’re watching "Felicity," you may want to look at this spring’s fashions from Old Navy, for example. Watching Dan Rather? You may have bladder control problems. A recent issue of Electronic Media dove a little more deeply into that paranoid place—where the execs at the older, stodgier TV networks were complaining that since media buyers were, for the most part, folks in their mid-twenties, their personal favorites are the only shows that get advertising money. An endless parade of "Dawson’s Creek"-clones, they say, will be the result. (Not likely. Scary, but not likely.)
This ability to effectively target advertising is one of the reasons big corporations are investing heavily into these all-in-one news/portal/city guide things on the web, and why we’ll be seeing more and more "local" sites that purport to give us the "ultimate" guide to Atlanta. Cox Interactive (yes, more or less the same folks who bring us the AJC and WSB) have quite a head start in this and a handful of other markets, and I give them credit—their Access Atlanta site has a healthy dose of "here" on its zillions of pages. Contrast that with atlanta.sidewalk.com, Microsoft’s extension of a service that’s seen some success in Seattle and San Francisco and some other places out west. I don’t recognize our town in its pages. It feels like a soulless, generic template generated by a server in Redmond, Washington, operating on instructions like "insert the words ‘kudzu’ and ‘grits’ every 18.5 words."
For better and worse, Atlanta’s way more subtle, complex, and inconsistent than that.
AUTHOR: jcburns
TITLE: Italic Anxiety
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 0
PRIMARY CATEGORY: MediaRare
DATE: 3/29/99 12:00:00 AM
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BODY:
When the lotto jackpot creeps up above $70 million the concept that people are buying lottery tickets suddenly drops into the brains of assignment editors and out of their mouths as if it were actual news, deserving of Dedicated Determined Team Coverage You Can Count On. Get those crews out there! Bring us those familiar pictures of hands, cash registers, money and tickets. Unleash those anchors, enabling happy talk on the order of "gee, I guess I should get my tickets. Time for sports. Bill, d’jou get your tickets yet?"
When Bill Gates cranks out another book of public relations tripe about e-mail, the Internet, and how corporations can be rejuvenated by installing Windows-based machines by the hundreds, who at Time magazine stands up and says "we should put this brilliant man on the cover"…? Did we hang onto every word of Henry Ford decades ago when his basic message was "the world will become a utopia if you buy enough of these basic black cars?" Well, hmm, maybe so.
And just when exactly did Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw discover that they were more than pretty-boy anchors—why, they’re authors, qualified to pontificate in print on the meaning of the century, or of the generation past? If they had so much extra time for authoring, why didn’t they instead snag a camera crew and go out and find some actual news?
Yes, these are just rhetorical questions. And no, don’t get me started. Uh-oh. Too late for that.
Did they hire Tom Skerritt to shill for Aleve because the guy looks like he’s in perpetual headache agony? I’m standing in front of the mirror, scrunching up like crazy, and no, I can’t make my face do that.
Is there some sort of gender thing going on when they counterprogram Ice Dancing Championships with Die Hard 2, or the Final Four with Something to Talk About?
Is Craig Kilborn going to tank as the new host of the Late Late Show because he refers to himself as "frat-guy fun" and "charming" in interviews?
If they pick Joel Siegel of Good Morning America to replace the late Gene Siskel, will we tune in one day to find Ebert’s hands around Siegel’s throat?
If the Supreme Court outlaws camera crews riding along with cops (as they kick the doors in of America’s shirtless and blurry-faced), will the Langley-Barbour series Cops be able to survive with only eleven years worth of reruns to syndicate? (or gee, will the Supremes require them to erase those tapes?) Maybe they’ll just require the producers to blur out the entire program.
When a station tells you that something is "New at 11," what exactly do they mean? Are they operating from the NBC Zen Theory of Reruns that says (and I quote), "If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you?"
Do the producers of Jeopardy! wail on Alex Trebek during commercial breaks when he’s spent too much time doing funny voices, helping out Canadian contestants, or pointing out the failings of hapless guests? (Seems to me as if right after he does that, we come back from break, and he’s much more subduded.)
And will I get my runaway italics corraled before next week?
