CORRECTING and REPLACING 19% of Senior Marketers - or One in Five - Say Their Organizations Have Bought Advertising in Return for a News Story, According to MS&L/PRWeek Survey

NEW YORK, Jul 30, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE)

A rather sizable number of senior American marketers - 19 percent - say their organizations have bought advertising in return for a news story, despite growing criticism of these "pay-for-play" practices, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of PRWeek and Manning Selvage & Lee (MS&L) by Millward Brown. The sixth annual Marketing Management Survey polled 252 U.S. chief marketing officers, VPs of marketing and marketing directors and managers about digital media and marketing ethics.

The survey also found that 10 percent of senior marketers said their organizations have had an implicit/non-verbal agreement with a reporter or editor that anticipated favorable coverage of their company or products in exchange for advertising. And 8 percent, or about one in 12, said their organizations paid or provided a gift of value to an editor/producer to place a news story about their company or one of its products.

Questionable marketing practices such as those explored in this survey have generated controversy in recent months, raising questions about the deterioration of news coverage, as well as broader questions about industry ethics.

"Any kind of undisclosed paid placement spells trouble for consumers, the media and the marketing industry," said Mark Hass, worldwide chief executive officer of MS&L. "Without full disclosure and transparency, media lose credibility and their value as an unbiased source of information for consumers. That a substantial number of marketers - about one in every five - engage in 'pay-for-play' year after year is even more troubling, and that much more damaging to the credibility of news media."
The results from this year's survey are consistent with results from previous years: Last year, for example, 17 percent of senior marketers said their organizations bought advertising in return for a news story, 7 percent said their organizations have had an implicit/non-verbal agreement with a reporter or editor that they expected to see favorable coverage of their company or products in exchange for advertising, and 5 percent of marketers said their companies had paid or provided a gift of value to an editor or producer in exchange for a news story about their company or its products.

The issue of paid placements in news media raises serious implications for the marketing industry. Marketers and advertisers often say they view this type of activity as an extension of product placement in entertainment, no different than featuring a car in an action movie or a movie star drinking from a particular brand of soda. But with those programs, the stories are fictional, and their purpose is to entertain. The news media, on the other hand, need to operate by a different set of editorial guidelines, to ensure that trust is at the core of their message delivery.
Marketing efforts in the online world are subject to the same rules of disclosure and transparency that consumers expect with traditional news media. But despite widespread criticism of online ethical breaches such as creating fake blogs and cloaking bloggers' identities, there is little indication that marketers plan to stop trying to engage with consumers in these ways. When asked whether the marketing industry as a whole is following ethical guidelines in new media more than they did a year ago, 53 percent of the survey respondents said no.

"The online world creates a whole new unsettling platform for marketers who are willing to engage unethically," said Hass.

The 2008 PRWeek/MS&L Marketing Management survey was conducted in partnership with PRWeek by Millward Brown. Survey results were collected between May 1 and May 19, 2008. Results are not weighted. Based on the sample size, the results are statistically tested at a confidence level of 90%.

Labels: advertisement, marketing, Society

By Thomas Frank
USA TODAY

BALTIMORE — Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation's busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York's Kennedy airport.

Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport in Washington starts using a body scanner today. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks.

"It's the wave of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.

Schear said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation's 2,000 airport checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who need extra screening. "We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with whole-body imaging," Schear said.

The TSA effort could encourage scanners' use in rail stations, arenas and office buildings, the American Civil Liberties Union said. "This may well set a precedent that others will follow," said Barry Steinhardt, head of the ACLU technology project.

Scanners are used in a few courthouses, jails and U.S. embassies, as well as overseas border crossings, military checkpoints and some foreign airports such as Amsterdam's Schiphol.

The scanners bounce harmless "millimeter waves" off passengers who are selected to stand inside a portal with arms raised after clearing the metal detector. A TSA screener in a nearby room views the black-and-white image and looks for objects on a screen that are shaded differently from the body. Finding a suspicious object, a screener radios a colleague at the checkpoint to search the passenger.

The TSA says it protects privacy by blurring passengers' faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person's gender. "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back," Schear said.

The scanners aim to strengthen airport security by spotting plastic and ceramic weapons and explosives that evade metal detectors and are the biggest threat to aviation. Government audits have found that screeners miss a large number of weapons, bombs and bomb parts such as wires and timers that agents sneak through checkpoints.

"I'm delighted by this development," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former Homeland Security inspector general whose reports urged the use of body scanners. "This really is the ultimate answer to increasing screeners' ability to spot concealed weapons."

The scanners do a good job seeing under clothing but cannot see through plastic or rubber materials that resemble skin, said Peter Siegel, a senior scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

"You probably could find very common materials that you could wrap around you that would effectively obscure things," Siegel said.

Passengers who went through a scanner at the Baltimore airport last week were intrigued, reassured and occasionally wary. The process took about 30 seconds on average.

Stepping into the 9-foot-tall glass booth, Eileen Reardon of Baltimore looked startled when an electronic glass door slid around the outside of the machine to create the image of her body. "Some of this stuff seems a little crazy," Reardon said, "but in this day and age, you have to go along with it."

Scott Shafer of Phoenix didn't mind a screener looking at him underneath his shorts and polo shirt from a nearby room. The door is kept shut and blocked with floor screens. "I don't know that person back there. I'll never seem them," Shafer said. "Everything personal is taken out of the equation."

Steinhardt of the ACLU said passengers would be alarmed if they saw the image of their body. "It all seems very clinical and non-threatening — you go through this portal and don't have any idea what's at the other end," he said.

Passengers scanned in Baltimore said they did not know what the scanner did and were not told why they were directed into the booth.

Magazine-size signs are posted around the checkpoint explaining the scanners, but passengers said they did not notice them.

Darin Scott of Miami was annoyed by the process.

"If you don't ask questions, they don't tell you anything," Scott said. When he asked a screener technical questions about the scanner, "he could not answer," Scott said.

TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said the agency is studying passenger reaction and could "get more creative" about informing passengers. "If passengers have questions," she said, "they need to ask the questions."

Passengers can decline to go through a scanner, but they will face a pat-down.

Schear, the Baltimore security director, said only 4% of passengers decline.

In Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where scanners have been tested since last year as an alternative to pat-downs, 90% of passengers choose to be scanned, the TSA says.

"Most passengers don't think it's any big deal," Schear said. "They think it's a piece of security they're willing to do."

Labels: politics, Society, Stuff

By Ellen McGirt

Win or lose, Barack Obama's rise changes business as usual for everyone. Here's why.

"Whatever you do, don't hurt Barack!" It was the afternoon of Super Tuesday, and the Chicago sky threatened snow. Senator Barack Obama had just returned to his hometown as voters in 22 states were making history by choosing between a black man and a white woman to be the Democratic nominee for president. The road-weary candidate put off calling fund-raisers or leading one last rally. Instead, he headed over to a downtown gym to play basketball with his nephew, his brother-in-law, and a few buddies. He needed to take a few minutes to chill out, and hoops was his therapy.

Among those on the court would be his old friend -- and major contributor -- John W. Rogers Jr. Rogers is the founder and chairman of Ariel Capital, an investment firm with some $13 billion in assets under management. He is a neighbor of Obama's in Hyde Park and has traded elbows with him on the hardwood dozens of times. But as Rogers left for the gym, he was accosted at the door by his colleague, Ariel president Mellody Hobson. A friend of Obama and his wife, Michelle, Hobson knew that Rogers, usually a shy sort, could be aggressive on the court. So she implored him to go easy on the senator: "He can't look all beat up!" It wouldn't be good if the candidate showed up on TV later that evening with a black eye.

Hobson had no need to worry, and not because Rogers held back. As Obama has been known to joke before he hits the boards -- or the podium -- "Relax, I've got game. I've got plenty of game." Super Tuesday proved him right: On the court, his team won two of three contests, and he walked off without a scratch. At the polls, he took 13 states to Hillary Clinton's 9, generating momentum that would build from the Potomac to the Pacific and, in some eyes, make him the Democratic front-runner.

The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news. What has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well. Politics, after all, is about marketing -- about projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume. The promotion of the brand called Obama is a case study of where the American marketplace -- and, potentially, the global one -- is moving. His openness to the way consumers today communicate with one another, his recognition of their desire for authentic "products," and his understanding of the need for a new global image -- all are valuable signals for marketers everywhere.

"Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand," says Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide. "New, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets." Obama has his greatest strength among the young, roughly 18 to 29 years old, that advertisers covet, the cohort known as millennials -- who will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010. They are black, white, yellow, and various shades of brown, but what they share -- new media, online social networks, a distaste for top-down sales pitches -- connects them more than traditional barriers, such as ethnicity, divide them.

"Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand: New, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets."
-- Keith Reinhard, DDB Worldwide
Obama has risen above what he calls a "funny" name, an unusual life story, and -- contrary to the now popular (and mistaken) notion that nobody sees race anymore -- a persistent racial divide to become a reflection of what America will be: a postboomer society. He has moved beyond traditional identity politics. And whether it's now or a decade from now, the new reality he reflects will eventually win out. Any forward-thinking business would be wise to examine the implications of his ascent, from marketing strategies and leadership styles to the future of the American workplace.

COMMAND AND CONTROL

When People Magazine asked a slew of presidential hopefuls late last year what they never leave home without, the answers were revealing. Mitt Romney's choice, homemade granola in his Dora the Explorer bowl, left the blogosphere snickering. Clinton cited her BlackBerry -- efficient, businesslike, and an homage to the Web 1.0 world. Obama's response, via his wife, Michelle, was a half-step ahead: a Webcam. "We talk at the end of the day when the girls and I are in Chicago and Barack is out on the road."

Obama has deftly embraced -- and been embraced by -- the Internet. His campaign has deputized soccer grandmoms and hipsters alike to generate new heights of viral support. And he has been exceptionally successful at converting online clicks into real-world currency: rallies in the heartland, videos on YouTube, and most important, donations and votes.

The question is how. Social networking poses challenges for marketers, no matter what -- or whom -- they're selling. Traditional top-down messages don't often work in an ecosystem where the masses are in charge. Marketers must cede a certain degree of control over their brands. And that can be terrifying. (Remember that "I got a crush on ... Obama" lip-synched YouTube tribute?)

Yet giving up control online, in the right way, unleashes its own power. And more than any other "national product" to date -- and far more than any other presidential candidate -- Obama has tapped into that power. The campaign's secret weapon: a fresh-faced 24-year-old named Chris Hughes. Four years ago, he was at Harvard, helping launch Facebook with his roommates, kids named Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. Just over a year ago, Hughes took a leave from Facebook to do online organizing for Obama. A history and literature major who did no coding at Facebook, he brought with him a mastery of the human side of social networking that has translated into real results for the campaign. Early on, when resources and credibility were in shorter supply, one insider told me, "We were completely focused on making sure that people knew on a very basic level how, where, and why to caucus in Iowa. And a local network, like Facebook, was ideal for that." It was a cheap and effective way to leverage supporters' personal connections.

The campaign's Web site is "far more dynamic than any of the others," says Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who has been studying Web sites and social media in campaigns with her colleague Jeff Gulati. BarackObama.com features constant updates, videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events to give supporters a reason to come back to the site. On mybarackobama.com, the campaign's quasi-social network, Obamaniacs can create their own blogs around platform issues, send policy recommendations directly to the campaign, set up their own mini fund-raising site, organize an event, even use a phone-bank widget to get call lists and scripts to tele-canvass from home.

The Obama crew has also tapped into other online communities. "One of our members had excerpted a portion of a Vibe profile of Obama," recalls Kay Madati, vice president of Community Connect, a suite of niche demographic Web sites including blackplanet.com, asianave.com, migente.com, GLEE.com, and faithbase.com. A flurry of discussion drove traffic to BarackObama.com, drawing the attention of Scott Goodstein, who runs the campaign's external Web strategy. He called Madati, who invited all the candidates to create profiles for each of his company's targeted communities. Only the Obama people, Madati says, have created credible presences: "They sometimes update daily; they even update more than Oprah." It has worked. The Obama profile on BlackPlanet has more than 450,000 "friends."

"This is where the Obama campaign has been strategic and smart," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a Web site that explores how technology is changing politics. "They've made sure the message machine was providing the message where people were already assembled. They've turned themselves into a media organization."

They've also taken advantage of messages created by others. The "Yes We Can" mashup by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, starring a handful of his famous friends, cost the campaign nothing and became a viral hit. By comparison, a Clinton mockumentary called "Hillary's Leaving the Band" -- young rockers, clearly actors, lament the loss of their favorite guitar player -- fell flat. It seemed ad-agency slick and forced. "It's even easier to reveal inauthenticity in the online world," Bentley's Gulati says. "If it doesn't resonate in the offline world, it won't resonate in the online world."

What's true in politics is no less true in business. "There is a new, authoritative consumer empowered by the Web," says Karen Scholl, a creative director at the digital-advertising agency Resource Interactive. "And they can smell a fake." The agency has coined the term "OPEN brand," an acronym for on-demand, personal, engaging, and networks; it is a framework for companies to think about distributing brand messages in new ways. With Obama, "not only do people feel they know who he is, they feel trusted to share their views," Scholl says. "And they get constant feedback from the campaign and from each other."

"There is a new, authoritative consumer empowered by the Web. And they can smell a fake."
-- Karen Scholl, Resource Interactive, a digital ad agency
Being an OPEN brand can be daunting when something as simple as starting a company blog can entail interdepartmental reviews and legal vetting. But, Scholl points out, "you don't have to cede all control, just some." A case in point: the do-it-yourself ads for Doritos during the 2007 Super Bowl. More than 1,000 snack-food fans submitted their entries -- but it was Frito-Lay that decided which ones would run.

The Obama campaign plays its own version of this game. The candidate himself has been made available to the press in strictly controlled doses. (The campaign declined requests for a sit-down interview with Fast Company.) And while the Web site may have set the bar high in terms of openness, the campaign still keeps an eye on the imagery and messaging associated with the movement. When supporter Joe Anthony's "BarackObama" fan page on MySpace attracted 160,000 friends, the campaign found itself in a tug-of-war over ownership. Ultimately, MySpace brokered a peace treaty; Anthony gave up the domain name but kept his friends. Obama's emails urging supporters to take action -- "Tell the superdelegates what's on your mind," a recent blast implored -- are often signed simply "Barack," implying intimacy without risking exposure.

LEADING BY LISTENING

Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, has long considered himself a political independent. An Obama encounter at a campaign event inspired him to take up arms for the Democratic candidate. But he can't quite explain why. "I'm still struggling to articulate what it is about him beyond the issues that I care about," he says. Newmark then fumbles his way to this realization: "I see him as a leader rather than a boss." A leader, he notes, gets people to do things on their own, through inspiration, respect, and trust. "A boss can order you to do things, sure, but you do them because it's part of the contract."

What Newmark is describing is more complicated -- and more modern -- than it might appear. There have long been leaders who are bosses, and bosses who are leaders. Having a vision and inspiring or instructing others to follow that vision have long been hallmarks of business and politics. But Obama epitomizes a new way of thinking called "adaptive leadership," which is now being taught at Harvard's Kennedy School, among other places. This approach, as Stephen Bouwhuis recently wrote in The Australian Journal of Public Administration, is effective in handling problems that necessitate "a shift ... in ways of thinking across a community." While a visionary puts forth a specific plan to be implemented, an adaptive leader works with constituents to devise one together.

Obama has tapped into this adaptive-leadership vein by inviting voters in with his "Yes we can" slogan, then reinforcing it with attacks on the complacency and withdrawal from politics of many Americans, particularly the young. "Change will not come if we wait for some other person," he said on Super Tuesday, "or if we wait for some other time... We are the hope of the future." Marty Linsky, professor at the Kennedy School and cofounder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, is among those who've taken note of Obama's adaptive style. "Obama often proposes process plans that involve a trust in the community at large," Linsky says. The potential ramifications for business leadership are enormous. The cult of the imperial chief executive officer still reigns in most C-suites and boardrooms. But winning tomorrow's talent -- and tomorrow's consumer -- may require a dramatically different approach.

And not only to reach the young: Dennis Edwards, a white 50-year-old small-businessman from South Carolina, told me that his main issue in the presidential campaign is health care. "I know that no candidate can push their plan completely through," he says. "That's not cynicism, that's reality. But I believe Obama can get people to the table to talk. I think he'll listen to other points of view. I also believe he can move it further in the right direction than anyone else."

"Obama and Clinton make an interesting contrast in brands," says Professor John Quelch, senior associate dean at Harvard Business School and coauthor of Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy. "Obama communicates that he loves people, and Clinton communicates that she loves policy." Consider Starbucks, Quelch says. "People love it for the experience, not for the specifications of the coffee." Obama, through his inclusive Web site and, yes, his lofty rhetoric, reinforces the notion that everyone is included and that this movement is actually a conversation to which everyone is invited.

RACE STILL MATTERS

"The coloration of society is changing." Harriet Michel is president of the National Minority Supplier Council, which helps corporations find qualified Asian, African American, Hispanic, and Native American vendors. When the organization started 35 years ago, Michel continues, "people felt forced to check boxes instead of thinking about how new suppliers might help their businesses." Today, census data make clear that a changing population means new markets and new opportunities. "The 'right thing to do' is tired, quite frankly. It's business," she says. "This is economics. Now when you're talking about imperatives, they accrue to the bottom line of the company."

Michel is an Obama supporter. "The success of his candidacy indicates that we have moved a bit beyond our tortured past as it relates to race," she says. "If he's credentialed enough and experienced enough to be elected by all the people, it will make a difference to how everyone views America and Americans."

The fact that a black man may soon be a major-party nominee, or even sit in the Oval Office, has far-reaching implications for a business community that's still overwhelmingly white at the top. As of 2005, one third of the Fortune 500 had no African-American directors; of 5,572 available seats, 449 were held by 245 black board members. Of course, executive ranks are also overwhelmingly male -- 85% of Fortune 500 boards -- making Clinton's rise, too, a challenge to the business status quo.

Ariel's Mellody Hobson personifies both of those constituencies. At 38, she is the president of the firm and one of the few women of color in a C-suite. She sits on the board of public companies including Starbucks, Estée Lauder, and DreamWorks Animation, as well as private organizations such as the Sundance Institute, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Public Education Fund. She is a trustee of Princeton University. She is self-made, smart, and outspoken. It's hard not to be impressed, and a little intimidated, by all she has achieved. And yet, she says, "I still feel the bias." Biases are baked into the human condition -- "we all have them," she says -- but they don't have to be baked into the structure of American business. "We haven't come nearly far enough." Would a black president make a difference? "Yes," she replies without hesitation. "It would send a message. But there is so much more work to do."

Her boss, John Rogers -- who played hoops with Obama on Super Tuesday -- has been leading some of that work. Rogers cofounded an informal group of black directors of major publicly traded companies in 2002. At that first meeting, about 30 people showed up. "My concern was that African Americans on corporate boards were uncomfortable addressing civil rights issues, and worried about being typecast as a minority member and wouldn't speak up," says Rogers, who sits on the boards of McDonald's and Aon Corp. "If not us, then who will?"

The meeting, which has become the annual Black Corporate Directors Conference, now attracts more than 100 business bigwigs and last year featured Time Warner's Dick Parsons and Wal-Mart's Lee Scott, along with CNN's Soledad O'Brien as moderator. The group spends a good deal of time talking about the distinction between being a black board member and a board member who happens to be black. Rogers explains: When you are in the room, do you shortchange your fiduciary duties by advocating for diversity? "Diversity benefits the bottom line substantially, for all sorts of reasons," he says. "But it also takes years to establish a culture, with all the benefits that come with that. If there is only an immediate business imperative, then you might end up creating expectations that might not be met."

Tory Clarke, who is British, and Larry Griffin, an African American, have heard these debates for years. As the founders of Bridge Partners, a boutique executive-search firm that specializes in placing minority candidates at senior levels, "we've seen the shift from a quota mind-set to a business case mind-set," says Clarke. "Now we hear very specific requests -- we want a Latino male or an African-American female -- specifically so our clients can better approach a particular market, or solve a problem with a particular community." They cite the recent election of Avon CEO Andrea Jung to the Apple board -- its sole Asian and only its second woman. Business acumen aside, Jung offers a direct conduit to millions of female customers, a segment that Apple would dearly love to exploit. She also speaks fluent Mandarin, a plus for a company that has just invested $40 million in its first store in Beijing.

Both Griffin and Clarke acknowledge that minority representation at the upper echelons of business remains "abysmal." As a result, Griffin explains, the closer minority hires get to the corner office or the boardroom, the more they become symbols. Even people recruited for their legal or financial expertise may be pressed to become what Griffin calls "internal brands." "They may be asked to show up at campus recruiting events, or take a more public-facing role than they are prepared for," he says.

While some observers hoped the Sarbanes-Oxley provision calling on companies to seek out new independent board members would bring about more change, progress has been slow. But with census data projecting that 40% of Americans will be nonwhite by 2010, business leaders who are charged with inspiring and attracting the best talent and satisfying an increasingly diverse pool of shareholders may soon find that diversity is a business imperative.

BRAND AMERICA

Should Obama become president, his leadership style -- not to mention his brown skin and African name -- could give a new face to the image America telegraphs to the rest of the world. "It's already made a difference that a minority could rise this far through the democratic process," asserts Harvard's Quelch.

"It's already made a difference that a minority could rise this far through the democratic process."
-- John Quelch,Harvard Business School
That brand U.S.A. has suffered in recent years is indisputable. According to the Pew Charitable Trust Global Attitudes Survey, updated in the spring of 2007, the country's favorable ratings have declined over the past five years in 26 of 33 countries -- including most of our European allies -- and are particularly negative in the Middle East. A BBC International poll from 2007 is even more dismaying: A survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries shows that three out of four disapprove of how the United States is dealing with Iraq, Guantanamo, global warming, Iran, and North Korea.

"It's a constant discussion point in international business," says Keith Reinhard, whose DDB Worldwide has offices in 99 countries and has been the steward of such premier global brands as Hasbro and Anheuser-Busch. "We're seen as culturally insensitive on a personal level, and on a corporate brand level," he says. Determined to do something about it, Reinhard dipped into his own pocket in 2002 and started Business for Diplomatic Action, a coalition of marketing, political science, and media professionals aimed at improving the standing of America in the world through business outreach. (He has scaled back his work at DDB to work for the coalition full time.) After commissioning research and testifying before Congress, Reinhard can distill his advice to brands to one word: Listen. "Everywhere I go, from CEOs to people on the street, I hear the same thing," Reinhard told me as he rushed between conferences in Frankfurt, Germany, and Doha, Qatar. "The U.S. needs to listen to the world."

This is precisely the strategy that Obama professes in international relations: to engage, even with countries that have been viewed as America's enemies -- in much the same way that businesses from McDonald's to ExxonMobil often find themselves engaging in places where regimes are not necessarily to their liking. Obama's strategy is not one that all geopolitical experts agree with, but it is consistent with how American business has conducted itself. It is also consistent with his criticism at home of what he terms "a politics that says it's okay to demonize your political opponents when we should be coming together to solve problems."

Obama's candidacy and its call for change may already be resonating in countries that have lamented U.S. policy but still want to believe in the promise of American leadership. "That Obama exists has already begun to recalibrate the way the world sees us," Reinhard contends. "This is a good thing."

"LOOKING FOR A CHANGE"

Sitting at the bar in the Chicago Hyatt on Super Tuesday, I scarfed a burger before rejoining the Obama press circus. My 24-year-old waiter seemed bored by the chaos, but took some time to admire my iPhone and chat. He'd known only a Clinton or Bush in the White House, he said. "I'm sort of looking for a change." Then he caught sight of Obama on CNN over my shoulder, tossed his dreadlocks, and smiled. "But that guy," he patted his chest, "he makes me believe."

Barack Obama may not win his party's nomination. And even if he is nominated, he may lose at the polls. If that happens, pundits will be quick to point out strategic or tactical missteps, and some will say America just isn't ready to elect a black man as president. Such a pat analysis is to be expected. But there is no question that the brand of Obama -- what he represents to the next generation of Americans -- is important. A business that ignores this message does so at its own peril.

Labels: advertisement, Society, Stuff

-By Gregory Solman

LOS ANGELES "Stop working for the ni**er."

The year was 1975. In the client's mind, George Lois had crossed a line: On his own time and dime, he'd mounted a controversial newspaper ad campaign and solicited celebrity endorsements to free boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter from jail.

Lois hadn't consulted with his partners, James Callaway and J. Ronald Holland, before undertaking Carter's cause. When you lose the big accounts, he said recently, "you gulp. But [my partners] more than understood."

The self-described "left-wing Democrat," who has worked officially for politicians ranging from Robert F. Kennedy to Dennis Kucinich, added, "I've almost always had trouble with clients."

More than 30 years later, creative directors enjoy unprecedented access to free media channels -- and they're using them to support candidates and causes.

Ben Relles, at the time digital strategist at Agency.com in New York, made an unofficial contribution to Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign with his "I've Got a Crush on Obama" video starring the "Obama Girl." The Omnicom shop's clients include Chevron, a favorite Obama target along with other big oil companies. Chevron declined to comment on Relles' video or its relationship with Omnicom. Relles said he left the agency to start a political satire site, barelypolitical.com, and that the video played no role in his exit.

Mike Jurkovac, CEO of New York production company Cyclops, produced the pro-Obama music video "Yes You Can" (directed by Jesse Dylan), which has gotten a whopping 5 million hits on YouTube. In the video, for which Jurkovac has received praise, not flak, musicians and actors speak and sing the words Obama is saying on the split-screen.

Donny Deutsch, chairman of Deutsch, New York and Roy Spence, principal of GSD&M Idea City in Austin, Texas, worked outside their agencies on both of Bill Clinton's presidential campaigns. Spence is working on Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign -- despite military critic Clinton having made a point of questioning the contracts of one of GSD&M's clients: the U.S. Air Force.

Spence declined to comment, but a GSD&M rep said the Air Force -- which did not respond to an inquiry from Adweek -- is well aware of Spence's outside work.

Deutsch/LA president and CCO Eric Hirshberg sells GM's Saturns on the clock and Obama, who contends he'll take on the auto industry, when he's off it. Hirshberg produced and directed the unofficial Obama video "Hope Changes Everything" with Deutsch cohort Tom Dunlap, director of integrated video.

The black-and-white campaign ad, which imbues the presidential candidate with a cool, rock star glamour, was professionally seeded on sites by like-minded business ally Josh Warner, president of The Feed Company in Los Angeles. Released Feb. 11, the video has already garnered more than 80,000 views.

Hirshberg doesn't just oversee the Saturn campaign, he does its voiceovers. Yet GM remains nonchalant about his political work, despite Obama telling the United Auto Workers that he personally called Mike Sheridan of Local 95 to support a strike against GM. "I know someone once said what's good for GM is good for America," Obama said in a November speech. "But it's time we also recognized that what's good for the UAW is good for America."

"I'm proud of our partnership with Eric Hirshberg and the Deutsch team," said Jill Lajdziak, general manager of the Saturn division, Detroit. "His personal choices are certainly his own. We respect anyone who wants to get involved in a cause or volunteerism or whatever their personal mission is."

Publicly held Interpublic Group, which owns Deutsch, said it has no beef with his Obama work, either -- as long as Hirshberg does it on his own time.

"I'm 100 percent committed to my clients' success," Hirshberg said. "I don't talk to GM about politics any more than I talk to them about my synagogue. Telling me I can't make commercials for Obama is like telling a carpenter he can't work for Habitat for Humanity in his spare time."

Candidates aren't the only controversial causes. While his agency represented energy company BP, Josh Tavlin, group cd and senior partner at Ogilvy & Mather in New York, spearheaded pro bono spots warning against global warming for the Ad Council. And IPG's McCann Erickson works for Nestl? on the one hand and creates anti-obesity ads on the other.

"These lines are blurred more and more," said Howard Benenson, co-founder of cause advertising specialty firm Benenson Janson in Los Angeles, which handles the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. "Corporations are embracing causes, so agencies are, too."

Labels: advertisement, Society

Rules for Radicals


In 1971, Saul Alinsky wrote an entertaining classic on grassroots organizing titled Rules for Radicals. Those who prefer cooperative tactics describe the book as out-of-date. Nevertheless, it provides some of the best advice on confrontational tactics. Alinsky begins this way:
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
His “rules” derive from many successful campaigns where he helped poor people fighting power and privilege

For Alinsky, organizing is the process of highlighting what is wrong and convincing people they can actually do something about it. The two are linked. If people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, they stop thinking about it.

According to Alinsky, the organizer — especially a paid organizer from outside — must first overcome suspicion and establish credibility. Next the organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy. This is necessary to get people to participate. An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of complacent community life where people have simply come to accept a bad situation. Alinsky would say, “The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”

Through a process combining hope and resentment, the organizer tries to create a “mass army” that brings in as many recruits as possible from local organizations, churches, services groups, labor unions, corner gangs, and individuals.

Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process. But he emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.
The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

Labels: Radicals, Society, Stuff

Thomas Frank


The workings of Wall Street can be understood in terms of industry-building, speculation, manipulation, corporate governance, or simple human greed. But they are perhaps best thought of as a long-running dialogue on the wisdom of the common people and the meaning of democracy itself. As with any Capra movie, the literature of Wall Street alternates between hope and profound pessimism; one year it scoffs at us as a "mob," a clueless mass of dopes to be manipulated and fleeced; a few years later it bows to us as "the people," a collectivity so infinitely wise that it is us who is fleecing them.

This dialectic of public wisdom is best observed by examining the various bull markets of recent years. During the boom years of the 1960s, a period of soaring idealism about "the people" generally, an almost Hamiltonian contempt for the public held sway on Wall Street. The financial journalist "Adam Smith," whose 1967 book The Money Game remains an amusing account of those frenetic years, uses the notion of psychological combat between genius financiers and a herd-like public to give his book whatever narrative continuity it has. The simplest "indicator" used by Wall Street honchos, he wrote, is to

find out what the average investor, or the little investor, is doing. Then you do just the opposite. The sophisticates never feel comfortable unless they can be reassured that relatively uninformed investors are going the other way with some conviction.

The "little people," the "public," in other words, "are always wrong." For the assorted brokers, fund managers, and traders that "Smith" followed, small investors were blundering chumps whose enthusiasm for any particular issue was a clear augury to those in the know that it was time to get out. He even describes fund managers paying regular visits to Merrill Lynch, then the agora of Wall Street democracy, in order to use its clients' moves as a contra-indicator. Such "sophisticates" were said to be avid readers of the deeply antidemocratic turn-of-the-century social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, whose contribution to Western letters was the notion that, given the proper techniques, the public mind could be easily manipulated. They were even more partial to a curious book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by one Charles Mackay in the 1840s but which only began to find a mass audience during the conformophobic years of the 1960s and 1970s. With its tales of Dutch tulip mania and other memorable financial bubbles, the book served to provide the sanction of the ages for Wall Street's disdainful take on the public mind. The introduction to the 1980 edition, for example, comments with Tory scorn on the absurdity of various fads and popular dances of the Seventies and even blames a "panicked" public for the banking collapse of the 1930s.

This attitude ensured that 1930s style public outrage would continue to erupt periodically. Even in the Eighties popular anger at Wall Street could be summoned forth by movies like Oliver Stone's Wall Street and by journalistic coverage of the era's various financial scandals: leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, insider trading, the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the savings and loan industry. One particularly close call provided a bridge between the casual Nietzscheanism of that era and the Wall Street egalitarianism of our own time: The Salomon Brothers treasury bond scandal of the late '80s actually got as far as Congressional hearings before being defused by the timely appearance of populist investor Warren Buffett, who showed up at the last minute to buy the troubled brokerage. Financial journalist Roger Lowenstein attributes the anger that arose on that occasion to Salomon's acting "the picture of Wall Street arrogance--and arrogance, more than any specific crime, is what turned the public's stomach." This is precisely true. Whatever the specific issues at hand, American criticism of the financial industry has always focused itself on this particular venal quality: Vanderbilt's disdain for the People; the banquets and effete sports enjoyed by the Astors, the Belmonts, the DuPonts; J. P. Morgan's yacht. This "arrogance," Americans believe, is the sin of Wall Street; give them a saintly commoner like Warren Buffett, assuring everyone that it wouldn't happen again, and all is quickly forgiven.

The melodrama of Salomon "arrogance" and Buffett "humility" might well have marked the beginning of the People's Market. If the prosperity of the Eighties was one of malevolent, contemptuous insiderdom, that of the Nineties would be exactly the opposite: A bull market that admitted to all the worst suspicions of the Thirties but which presented itself as the solution to upper-class arrogance; a frank acknowledgement of the malice of official Wall Street combined with a soaringly idealistic view of financial markets themselves. What emerged, by the middle of the 1990s, was a historically weird but ideologically potent cultural hybrid bringing together the anti-authoritarian strains of traditional populism with the most orthodox faiths of classical economics. Wall Street would accommodate itself to the language (if not the ideas) of its historical enemies, invent a vision of the nation's banks, stock exchanges, and mutual funds as instruments of the common weal more representative and less corrupt than any government could ever be. This was to be the bull market of the People, their long alienation from Wall Street over at last, voting with their dollars and deliberating with all the majesty attributed to them in TV commercials for Chrysler cars.

Among the founding faiths of the People's Market was the notion that mutual funds were somehow rearranging the landscape of social class. Formally, I suppose, there was a certain logic to this. If the NYSE as a whole allowed everyone to "own their share of America," the mutual fund made the "genius" of the insider available to just about anyone. But before the 1990s market, observers rarely considered mutual funds to be implements of democracy. Financial writer John Brooks had maintained that "the high-performance funds of the 1960s were obviously unfair if not illegal," simply because the reputations of their closely followed "gunslinger" managers made any pick an automatic winner as the millions rushed to follow their lead. Writing of the same period, "Adam Smith" describes Edward Johnson, the owner of the Fidelity company and the colossus of the mutual fund world, not only as a fan of the noxious Gustave Le Bon but as a social conservative of the most stalwart sort, a Harvard-educated Brahmin who we see visiting the Union League Club, discussing Marcus Aurelius, and quoting bits of ancient Greek. And in aftermath of the 1929 crash, of course, the masterminds of the big mutual funds (at the time called "investment trusts") like Alleghany and Shenandoah were regarded as the greatest public thieves of all.

Much of the change in the image of the mutual fund--and, by extension, in the image of the stock market generally--can be attributed to Peter Lynch of Fidelity's "Magellan" fund, the man who still holds the title of all-time greatest fund manager some ten years after his retirement. His unbroken string of successful annual returns made him a public figure in the late 1980s and early 90s, as much a celebrity "gunslinger" as his predecessors had been in the 1960s. And his celebrity in turn made Magellan the largest mutual fund of them all, the vehicle of choice for average Americans interested in dabbling in the market. Lynch's celebrity was of a different moral kind than his predecessors, however: One admirer describes him as "relentlessly normal," a man of "deeply middle-class instincts and tastes--which is perhaps why the middle class felt so comfortable with him as its designated stock picker." Lynch is said to be humble, not arrogant. Although he worked for Edward Johnson, Lynch was no Brahmin. He graduated from Boston College rather than Harvard, appears publicly in crooked glasses and poorly chosen clothes, and recounts in his books the many hours he spends not in the stuffy confines of the Union League Club but amidst the crowds at various shopping malls and fast food restaurants.

Lynch's stock-picking strategy, as he outlined it in his books One Up on Wall Street (1989) and Beating the Street (1993), reflects his everyman public persona and inverts the public-as-dope theorizing of his predecessors. He begins One Up on Wall Street with this blast against expertise: "Stop listening to professionals! . . . Any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert." Instead of a complex system he proposes the "power of common knowledge," according to which it is one's averageness that determines one's success in the market. Readers hear of people who discovered stock market "ten-baggers" (Lynch's folksy term for a stock that has appreciated to ten times the purchase price) by contemplating products or brands in the grocery store, at the shopping center, in the food court, at work, and literally in the back yard. He tells of all manner of average people who "beat the street," regaling readers with tales of stock-picking firemen, small-town North Carolinians, seventh-graders, and again and again returning to the often-overlooked wisdom of housewives. And even though the Lynch name is indelibly associated with mutual funds, the greatest financial institution in his telling seems to be the local investment club, where a group of friends and neighbors do their own research and invest faithfully on a regular schedule, regardless of the financial weather.

"Buy what you know," the Lynchian stock-picking adage, often seems simply to mean "buy shares in brand names." And the key to identifying the brands in which to invest is being an alert consumer. Many of the stock-stories that make up his books arise from everyday encounters with products, chain stores, or middlebrow restaurants, where a good consuming experience convinces Lynch to take the relationship one step further. So thoroughly intermingled are everyday consuming and stock-picking that Lynch even describes a trip to the local mall not as browsing but as "fundamental analysis on the intriguing lineup of potential investments, arranged side by side for the convenience of stock shoppers." It is no coincidence that Lynch's investing heroes, the housewives and the seventh-graders, are among the demographics most heavily targeted by national marketers. By the middle of the 1990s this would be a stock-picking strategy in such widespread use that it couldn't help but succeed, at least for a time, as millions of Lynchites across the land snapped up shares in the same familiar consumer brands and retail chains.

There is also a distinct anti-intellectualism to Lynch's thinking. Channelling averageness is the essence of his strategy, and the best stock-pickers, in his accounting, always turn out to be those with the least affected, most "normal" tastes of all. The deluded "experts" of Wall Street, meanwhile, are captives to all manner of empty financial scholasticism. "There seems to be an unwritten rule on Wall Street," Lynch sighs: "If you don't understand it, then put your life savings into it. Shun the enterprise around the corner, which can at least be observed, and seek out the one that manufactures an incomprehensible product." The sin of Wall Street turns out to be exactly what the populist always charged: intellectual arrogance in its most highfalutin form. Financial analysts will actually "sit around and debate whether a stock is going up," Lynch writes increduously, "as if the financial muse will give them the answer, instead of checking the company." For us, though, it's levelheaded empiricism, and an almost infantile simplicity: "Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon."

It is Wall Street that is in the grip of extraordinary delusions. The Capraesque "normal" person stands pat with his neighborhood investment club while the financiers of Manhattan, driven by imaginary fears and wild superstitions, panic and flee. "It's the amateurs who are prudent and the professionals who are flighty," Lynch insists, inverting the ancient financial mantra. "The public is the comforting and stabilizing factor." Such a formulation leads Lynch inevitably to a curious sort of populist jingoism melding the egghead-baiting of the 1950s with the anti-capitalist broadsides of the 1930s--and all in the service of better stock market returns. Lynch describes, for example, an annual Barron's round-table discussion, where, year after year and regardless of what's actually going on outside, leading brokers and fund managers wax "negative" about market, nation, and world. Average folk, meanwhile, are said to succeed because they "keep the faith" in the people and their corporations, making those monthly contributions to the investment club kitty and continuing to believe "that America is a nation of hardworking and inventive people," that "people will continue to get up in the morning and put their pants on one leg at a time, and that the corporations that make the pants will turn a profit for the shareholders." Looking for a metaphor for Wall Street error, Lynch quite naturally settles on . . . the French, those notorious welfare-staters, consumers of luxury foods, and snubbers of American culture.

Lynch may not consider himself a political figure, but there is nonetheless a politics to his financial populism, a politics that would become quite unavoidable as the decade advanced. When Lynch hails us as a canny and a virtuous people, he is also suggesting that we have little need for government economic intervention and the welfare state generally. After all, who needs Glass-Steagall or AFDC or social security when you've got a few well-managed mutual funds?

Labels: advertisement, Media, Society, Sociology

Thomas Frank


Markets may have made their peace with activism, rebellion, radicalism, revolution, change-agenting, hierarchy-questioning, sacred-cow-killing, power-seizing, apple-cart-overturning and everything else on the exciting menu of New Economy upheaval, but markets still have trouble reconciling themselves to democracy proper. Markets romp joyfully when word arrives that the vote-counting has been halted. Markets punish the bond prices of countries where left parties still attract a substantial vote. Markets reward countries where left parties have been induced to wind up their operations. To you Bill Clinton's rightward triangulations may have seemed like rank hypocrisy or worse, since they deprived Americans of meaningful political choice, but in the view of markets the man who managed to kill off the New Deal is a statesman for the ages.

Above all markets love the country of Singapore. There was a time a few years ago when one heard this repeated so frequently that it became one of the great media clichés of the age. Singapore was an economic miracle, a land arisen from Third World to First in a handful of decades. Singapore was showing the world the way forward. Singapore had resolved it all: ethnic hatred, crime, social decay, good government. Singapore was the country with the most economic freedom in the world. Singapore was the best place to do business in all the earth. Singapore was more comprehensively wired than anywhere else. "Asian values," as described by Lee Kuan Yew, the man who has effectively ruled Singapore ever since 1959, would inevitably prevail. And as proof you needed look no farther than a postcard of Singapore's glittering downtown, at all the spanking new skyscrapers erupting from the earth in stern testimony to the market's approval.

And what the market loved best about Singapore was what was absent: Politics. The country has quite literally traded politics for wealth, with its most prominent political thinkers endlessly reminding the world that "Asian values" prioritize economic achievement over civil liberties. But the trade-off between a lively political life and the blessings of the market is hardly a uniquely Asian phenomenon. Americans know the logic quite well. For ten years now we have labored mightily to convince ourselves that once we had hobbled unions and rolled back regulation and dropped antitrust enforcement and "reformed" welfare and stopped worrying generally, we would break free into a world beyond ideology and dread partisanship, a place of civility and simple pleasures, a utopia where watching the NASDAQ shower us with its blessings far outranked electioneering as an expression of our democratic ways. So acute was the desire in some circles to nail a final lid on politics that Thomas Friedman, the highly respected New York Times foreign affairs columnist, actually came up with a term for the glorious trade-off in his ecstatic 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: "the golden straitjacket." Since all alternatives to laissez-faire are now historically discredited, Friedman maintained, all countries must now adopt the same rigidly pro-business stance. When they do, "your economy grows and your politics shrinks." The pseudo-democracy of markets replaces the real democracy of democracy, the great multinational corporations nod their approval, and (some) people get fantastically rich.

I have no idea whether Friedman had Singapore specifically in mind when he came up with this formulation, but there can be little doubt that Singapore has come close indeed to realizing the "post-partisan" dream of New Economy ideologues everywhere. Many facts can be cited to illustrate Singapore's exchange of democracy for wealth, but few are more poignant than the bankruptcy into which the country's opposition MPs (at present there are three in a parliament of 84), are perennially thrown by ruling party lawsuits. Dissenting publicly can quite literally mean losing it all. As a result opposition politicians have learned, as X'ho, the ultra-arch Singapore punk rocker puts it, "Speak not, bankrupt not."

Unfortunately, aggressive "depoliticization," as Singaporean journalists refer to it, has pitfalls of its own. As the allure of public life recedes, the country may get rich, but who is to manage the public sector? So effectively has the ruling party punished the opposition and discredited politics generally that it now faces, ironically, a crisis unique among advanced nations: It has trouble recruiting gung ho young candidates to stand for parliament.

Nor do countries simply evolve into "golden straitjacket" postpartisanship by some natural process of popular enlightenment. Depoliticization is an achievement that requires effort. And building a depoliticized state in Southeast Asia was an accomplishment that took decades. The arduous story is told in precise, clinical detail by Francis Seow, one of the country's best known dissidents, in his 1998 book The Media Enthralled. Running down the long, long list of Lee Kuan Yew's battles with a once-feisty press, Seow tells us exactly what arguments and legal strategems Lee used from the 60s to the 90s to get his way in every single case, to force the more tractable publications to see things as he did and the recalcitrant sheets simply to disappear. Only rarely did the country have to resort to outright censorship. Warring with the Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, and the Asian Wall Street Journal, Lee used a combination of lawsuits, anti-Western bluster, intimidation, and circulation restriction to ensure that these publications would practice "self-censorship" when describing events in his country. Turning to the local media, Lee came up with a plan whereby market forces did the work for him. Using the language of marketplace democracy that we all know so well from brokerage commercials and "New Democrat" reform efforts, Lee's government simply required that all newspaper publishing operations be publicly traded rather than owned by families or private investors--and that crucial voting shares be held by politically reliable individuals. "Lee Kuan Yew has understood perfectly that the media business is, first and foremost, a business," the canny Singaporean journalist Cherian George has written: "that a press allowed to make money out of a system will support that system; and that publishers value their bottom-line more highly than they do their editorial freedom."

Described that way Lee Kuan Yew sounds like the kind of guy a traditional American press lord, thundering on behalf of the interests of the owning class, could do business with. But Lee tolerates very little thunder. He and his successors seem to regard the press as fundamentally illegitimate, an unelected interloper in the nation's politics. In 1994 a writer named Catherine Lim made the mistake of violating an unwritten prohibition against criticism of government officials; in the official declaration that slapped her down it was announced that neither journalists nor anyone else could be allowed "to set the political agenda from outside the political arena. . . . People who seek to change the nature of Singapore politics and society cannot be allowed to do so from political sanctuaries." No one could be permitted to comment on political issues except duly declared politicians--and everyone knows how the government deals with them. The results may be draconian, but the terms of the debate must seem very familiar to American readers, living as they have through thirty years of assaults on the "elite" media, always said to be foisting their "arrogant" concerns and their big city ways on the rest of us. And Lee Kuan Yew has achieved in Singapore what the American Right can only dream about: Freedom from the press--and along with it freedom from criticism and freedom from critical thought generally.

* * *

So what replaces politics? What fills the blank space left when a country has sacrificed criticism and intellectual life on the altar of the market? I went to Singapore to find out. Since the Asian economic collapse in 1998 we've heard very little about Singapore or the wonders of "Asian values" or the necessity of following Singapore down the paths of inevitability. No longer do intrepid New Economy ideologues bring us back bold stories from this land of the future. But there is still much to be learned from the land of Lee Kuan Yew.

I have before me a copy of the Straits Times, the country's official newspaper, dated December 10, 2000. I have kept the paper in my files because it was my first clue that there was something amiss about this country. I remember reading it for the first time on a sunny equatorial morning in a twelfth story hotel room overlooking the city's marina, a blimp advertising a local Internet service provider orbiting annoyingly outside my window. From its front page the Straits Times looked like a standard state-of-the-industry product, remininding one of USA Today maybe a little more than the New York Times. There were colorful photos and human interest stories, serious journalism about important topics like water reservoirs, all of it written in familiar newspaper English. It certainly looked inoffensive. Where things started to go wrong was in an account of protests at a college commencement in Hong Kong in which Lee Kuan Yew had been awarded an honorary degree. Although it was a news story, I had trouble discerning exactly why the students were protesting (this would have to wait until I was in Hong Kong a week later and came across the South China Morning Post's coverage of the incident); the point of the piece seemed rather to be the foolishness and feebleness of protesters, and the contrasting nobility of Lee. Lee is said to speak in a "business-like" tone; to stand stoically while great waves of official flattery wash over him, "perhaps because he has received so many [accolades] over the years that they roll off him." Of the protesters, it is noted that they are few in number, that there are many "outsiders" among their ranks; that they are "led by a man dubbed 'Long Hair' Leung Kwok Hung"; and that, given the opportunity, they will complain about nearly anything: "Another day, another protest."

Protest may not earn a Straits Times journalist's respect, but turning to the paper's "Review" section, I discovered what did. There, in the place most American newspapers reserve for book reviews and think-pieces, I found a profile of the management guru who co-wrote the One to One series of marketing books; a column about the urgent need to adapt to waves of workplace "change" (you know, like "outsourcing"); an enthusiastic story about the new president of PepsiCo, a native of India who likes rock 'n roll and reportedly studies videotapes of Michael Jordan's greatest basketball moments in order to "catch insights about the value of teamwork"; a profile of the management guru who co-wrote The Individualized Corporation ("Power to the people is [his] motto"); a discussion of one of the paper's more popular feature writers in which the concept of "the journalist as a brand" is used as a point of departure; and a review of one of those sweeping, pseudo-historical books so beloved of business readers that start out with the Neanderthals and end up affirming various contemporary management homilies about creativity and entrepreneurship. In the entire section, only a brief editorial and a lone column (deploring the persecution of the Chinese minority in Indonesia) addresses matters other than management theory.

Venturing out from my hotel I found that nearly wherever I went management talk--even the liberationist variety we hear so much of these days from the evangelists of the everyone-will-be-free Internet economy--blended easily with the depoliticized, prosperity-centric culture of Singapore. In the bookstores I could find no copies of the Baffler but collections of management theory so vast that they dwarf any I have ever seen in America. In the upscale Ngee Ann City mall I bought a copy of George Gilder's long-anticipated Telecosm and thumbed through the alarming new installment in the Fifth Discipline series, Schools That Learn. From the windows of the offices of the Informatics Group bold advertisements instructed me to "Increase Your Market Value," advised me to "Surf Ahead in Your Career," and exhorted me to "Make it to the Top." I was passed on the street by a rebellious youth whose sassy T-shirt derided those "at the bottom of the ladder." In Suntec City, a combination mall and office complex that is billed as "Asia's vertical Silicon Valley," I walked through a corridor in which the spaces that are usually taken up by ads for commercial products were instead given over to testimonials from various jargon-spouting CIOs and SVPs from Oracle, Xerox, and Union Bank of Switzerland: "Networking for Success at Suntec City"; "Suntec City is positively future-proof"; "You've got to get connected." Venturing further into the crowded complex I discovered that it was Microsoft Day at the "Fountain of Wealth," the gigantic bronze ring around which the mall is arranged. I watched as fathers and sons, under the benevolent gaze of Bill Gates's emissaries to Southeast Asia, slowly circumnavigated the fountain in the direction believed to maximize the acquisition of luck. For many, the presence of corporate PR officials and the banalities of American management rhetoric clearly made for a pleasant shopping experience. In fact, the line outside Suntec City's Kenny Rogers restaurant was so long that I had to get my ribs from Tony Roma's instead. (I could also have chosen a rib place called "Fat Daddy.")

I do not mean to mock Singapore, like so many writers do, as some weird and brutal Asian regime. In fact, proceeding from these two crucial starting points--Singapore is very rich; Singapore tolerates no political criticism--it has become a country whose culture, superficially at least, looks a lot like our own. I did not find Singapore strange; I found it familiar. My objections to what I saw there almost all arose from the official media's energetic recapitulation of bland American originals: management theory, fast food, pop music, Hollywood movies. Depoliticized but intensely successorized, Singapore is what America will be like if the "New Economy" crowd get their way for much longer. Christmas, for example, is celebrated with far more enthusiasm than it is at home--and entirely as a secular holiday. The displays of lights and dioramas on Orchard Road--including a two-story outdoor tableau of skiers complete with gusts of fake snow--are so elaborate they put one more in mind of downtown Vegas than Marshall Field's windows. Their celebration of the holiday puts our own in the shade. Ads for the Takashimaya department store promised "A Christmas in Gold." Those for another whispered unsarcastically of "The Glitz and the Glamour." And the reach of the holiday cheer is astoundingly comprehensive: I heard the same soundtrack of maudlin Christmas favorites (including "The Little Drummer Boy" in a tearful minor key) in a supermarket, a gym, and in the underground bunker where British generals planned their ineffectual defense of the island in 1942.

I will admit that I found the music irritating. In my hotel dining room a top-of-the-line grand piano was used to produce unctuous renditions of "Yesterday," Broadway favorites, songs by the Carpenters. Later I observed the same set-up and the same repertoire in effect in the famous Raffles hotel. And a third time in a mall whose name I have now forgotten. On the radio I heard an excited announcer hail the unbearably awful boy-band Westlife as "kick-ass." At Changi airport I saw the private jet of the Backstreet Boys waiting to ferry its toxic cargo off to some other unfortunate burg.

But the weakness of public intellectual life was what struck one most sharply. History museums that deal in transparent party-line propaganda. TV dramas that interrupted themselves so the characters could advise viewers didactically on personal safety or civic responsibilities. And positive reviews as far as the eye could see. I understand how Lee Kuan Yew's "hypersensitivity to criticism" (to use Seow's phrase) has had a chilling effect on the country's political discourse. What is less clear is the process by which this suspicion of criticism has been extended into the cultural realm. But this it has undeniably done. X'ho, the acidic Singaporean cultural observer, declares sarcastically that "unlike other countries, we are 100% good, and though we dare not outrightly say we are perfect, the non-existence of put-downs in public media and the constant self praising we do imply that, yes, we are absolutely fair and perfect." From every magazine, newspaper, alternative weekly, or slick lifestyle supplement I came across arose a suffocating fog of affirmation. Helpful appreciations of that great new movie, Charlie's Angels. Some fun facts about the career of that enchanting singer, Christina Aguilera. A great expensive new restaurant to consider for your Christmas feast. Where was that legendary Singaporean rudeness in the world of ideas? Could anyone here muster a simple, honest "no"?

I am pleased to report that at least one person can. Before leaving the country I managed to procure both a book and a spoken-word CD by the above-mentioned X'Ho, a former punk rocker who has of late moved into the broader field of cultural criticism. What first drew me to his book, Skew Me, You Rebel, Meh?, I admit, was its cover: The dayglo pink and orange background with ransom-note lettering that we all remember so fondly from the Sex Pistols days. Making it more attractive still was the plastic wrapper in which it had been germlessly encased, ensuring that casual shoppers wouldn't be bothered by its contents. And for good reason. X'Ho turns out to be a scathing critic of the money culture of his native land. In "Singapore You're Not My Country," a poem by Alfian Sa'at that X'ho reads on his CD, we hear

Singapore why do you wail that way, demanding my IC?
Singapore stop yelling and calling me names.
How dare you call me a chauvinist, an opposition party, a liar
a traitor, a mendicant professor, a Marxist homosexual communist
pornography banned literature chewing gum liberty smuggler?
How can you say I do not believe in
The Free Press autopsies flogging mudslinging bankruptcy
which are the five pillars of Justice?
And how can you call yourself a country, you terrible hallucination
of highways and cranes and condominiums ten minutes' drive from the MRT

In his own work X'ho seems to prefer, for reasons that should be very clear by now, to work through sarcasm, ridicule, irony, and double-speak (and also mainly through small rock magazines like Big O). The collection of poems and essays that he reads on his CD, Me All Good No Bad, are advertised as "Pro-Singaporean content." He mocks such characteristically Singaporean initiatives as an ill-begotten drive to ban smoking simply by repeating them verbatim in his almost aristocratically correct English. He proposes as a national motto, "Say 'Yes.' It's the Way to the Top. . . . Heaven is just a compliance away." (On the other hand, there's his exceedingly direct and irony-free chant, "Asian values suck.") In America we are quite familiar by now with irony as an expression of privilege, with irony as salesmanship, with irony as Tory scorn. I had to go all the way to Singapore to have my faith in the arch restored.

Labels: advertisement, Media, Society

PHILADELPHIA - Sony Corp. scouted out an unusual place to advertise its PlayStation Portable before the holidays: the side of an abandoned building in a gritty North Philadelphia neighborhood.

The black-on-white graffiti shows wide-eyed cartoon characters riding the PlayStation like a skateboard, licking it like a lollipop or cranking it like a Jack-in-the-Box.

But there's no mention of the Sony or PlayStation brands — nor any hint the wordless display is an ad.

The stealth marketing campaign has popped up in San Francisco, New York and other large U.S. cities.

"It's all about hip-hop, urban and all that. They're just trying to get into the teenagers' minds," said Eddie Torres, 29, who works at a nearby furniture shop. "I think it's sharp."

Anti-blight advocates think otherwise.

"They're breaking the law," said Mary Tracy, who runs the Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight, a watchdog group that fights illegal or ill-advised billboards in Philadelphia.

Tracy said Sony ignored the zoning process that regulates outdoor commercial advertising in the city.

Philadelphia Managing Director Pedro Ramos on Wednesday faxed a cease-and-desist letter to Sony Computer Entertainment's U.S. division in San Mateo, Calif. He could seek modest fines allowed by city code or sue to recover any profit the ads produced.

"My fines aren't going to scare Sony," Ramos said. "What will worry them is what the parents and their users will think. This really flies in the face of everything we've been trying to do with our anti-blight initiative."

The Sony division did not immediately respond to the letter or to a telephone message left by The Associated Press. However, Sony spokeswoman Molly Smith told an Internet news site earlier this month that Sony was hiring artists in seven cities — Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago were the others — to spray paint the pre-drawn designs.

"With PSP being a portable product, our target is what we consider to be urban nomads," Smith told Wired News.

In San Francisco, the ads were defaced soon after they appeared as word spread that Sony was behind them. "Get out of my city!!!" and "Fony" were written on one.

"I thought it was sneaky. Not cool," said Zan Sterling, who works at a bar near one of the ads, which has since been painted over. "I hope that they paid for the cleanup and removal."

Critics and supporters agree the campaign is designed to crack through the clutter of marketing that pervades daily life. Others have criticized its visual appeal.

"They hired artists to just copy this same figure over and over, which isn't too creative," said 29-year-old Jake Dobkin, a New Yorker who writes for the blog Gothamist.com.

That matters little to North Philadelphia resident Leslie Griggs, 39, who said the Sony ad is an improvement over the handbills and scrawls it replaced.

"I don't think that's graffiti," Griggs said as she paused beside the PlayStation ad. "That's art."

Labels: advertisement, Society

malcolm Gladwell

What does 'Saturday Night Live'
have in common with German philosophy?



Lorne Michaels, the creator of "Saturday Night Live," was married to one of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster. One day when the show was still young, an assistant named Paula Davis went to Shuster's apartment in New York and found Dan Aykroyd getting out of her bed--which was puzzling, not just because Shuster was married to Michaels but because Aykroyd was supposedly seeing another member of the original "S.N.L." cast, Laraine Newman. Aykroyd and Gilda Radner had also been an item, back when the two of them worked for the Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, although by the time they got to New York they were just friends, in the way that everyone was friends with Radner. Second City was also where Aykroyd met John Belushi, because Belushi, who was a product of the Second City troupe in Chicago, came to Toronto to recruit for the "National Lampoon Radio Hour," which he starred in along with Radner and Bill Murray (who were also an item for a while). The writer Michael O'Donoghue (who famously voiced his aversion to the appearance of the Muppets on "S.N.L." by saying, "I don't write for felt") also came from The National Lampoon, as did another of the original writers, Anne Beatts (who was, in the impeccably ingrown logic of "S.N.L.," living with O'Donoghue). Chevy Chase came from a National Lampoon spinoff called "Lemmings," which also starred Belushi, doing his legendary Joe Cocker impersonation. Lorne Michaels hired Belushi after Radner, among others, insisted on it, and he hired Newman because he had worked with her on a Lily Tomlin special, and he hired Aykroyd because Michaels was also from Canada and knew him from the comedy scene there. When Aykroyd got the word, he came down from Toronto on his Harley.

In the early days of "S.N.L.," as Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller tell us in "Live from New York" (Little, Brown; $25.95), everyone knew everyone and everyone was always in everyone else's business, and that fact goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary chemistry among the show's cast. Belushi would stay overnight at people's apartments, and he was notorious for getting hungry in the middle of the night and leaving spaghetti-sauce imprints all over the kitchen, or setting fires by falling asleep with a lit joint. Radner would go to Jane Curtin's house and sit and watch Curtin and her husband, as if they were some strange species of mammal, and say things like "Oh, now you are going to turn the TV on together. How will you decide what to watch?" Newman would hang out at Radner's house, and Radner would be eating a gallon of ice cream and Newman would be snorting heroin. Then Radner would go to the bathroom to make herself vomit, and say, "I'm so full, I can't hear." And they would laugh. "There we were," Newman recalls, "practicing our illnesses together."

The place where they all really lived, though, was the "S.N.L." office, on the seventeenth floor of NBC headquarters, at Rockefeller Center. The staff turned it into a giant dormitory, installing bunk beds and fooling around in the dressing rooms and staying up all night. Monday night was the first meeting, where ideas were pitched. On Tuesday, the writing started after dinner and continued straight through the night. The first read-through took place on Wednesday at three in the afternoon. And then came blocking and rehearsals and revisions. "It was emotional," the writer Alan Zweibel tells Shales and Miller. "We were a colony. I don't mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor. We didn't go out. We stayed there. It was a stalag of some sort." Rosie Shuster remembers waking up at the office and then going outside with Aykroyd, to "walk each other like dogs around 30 Rock just to get a little fresh air." On Saturdays, after the taping was finished, the cast would head downtown to a storefront that Belushi and Aykroyd had rented and dubbed the Blues Bar. It was a cheerless dive, with rats and crumbling walls and peeling paint and the filthiest toilets in all of New York. But did anyone care? "It was the end of the week and, well, you were psyched," Shuster recalls. "It was like you were buzzing, you'd get turbocharged from the intense effort of it, and then there's like adrenal burnout later. I remember sleeping at the Blues Bar, you know, as the light broke." Sometimes it went even later. "I remember rolling down the armor at the Blues Bar and closing the building at eleven o'clock Sunday morning--you know, when it was at its height--and saying good morning to the cops and firemen,"Aykroyd said. "S.N.L." was a television show, but it was also an adult fraternity house, united by bonds of drugs and sex and long hours and emotion and affection that went back years. "The only entrée to that boys club was basically by fucking somebody in the club," Anne Beatts tells Shales and Miller. "Which wasn't the reason you were fucking them necessarily. I mean, you didn't go "Oh, I want to get into this, I think I'll have to have sex with this person.' It was just that if you were drawn to funny people who were doing interesting things, then the only real way to get to do those things yourself was to make that connection."

2.

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that's not how it works, whether it's television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book "The Sociology of Philosophies," Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves:the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses. Freud may have been the founder of psychoanalysis, but it really began to take shape in 1902, when Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler would gather in Freud's waiting room on Wednesdays, to eat strudel and talk about the unconscious. The neo-Confucian movement of the Sung dynasty in China revolved around the brothers Ch'eng Hao and Ch'eng I, their teacher Chou Tun-i, their father's cousin Chang Tsai, and, of course, their neighbor Shao Yung. Pissarro and Degas enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts at the same time, then Pissarro met Monet and, later, Cézanne at the Académie Suisse, Manet met Degas at the Louvre, Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre's studio, and Renoir, in turn, met Pissarro and Cézanne and soon enough everyone was hanging out at the Café Guerbois on the Rue des Batignolles. Collins's point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction--conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener's eye that tells you you're onto something. German Idealism, he notes, centered on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Why? Because they all lived together in the same house. "Fichte takes the early lead," Collins writes,

inspiring the others on a visit while they are young students at Tübingen in the 1790s, then turning Jena into a center for the philosophical movement to which a stream of the soon-to-be-eminent congregate; then on to Dresden in the heady years 1799-1800 to live with the Romantic circle of the Schlegel brothers (where August Schlegel's wife, Caroline, has an affair with Schelling, followed later by a scandalous divorce and remarriage). Fichte moves on to Berlin, allying with Schleiermacher (also of the Romantic circle) and with Humboldt to establish the new-style university; here Hegel eventually comes and founds his school, and Schopenhauer lectures fruitlessly in competition.

There is a wonderful illustration of this social dimension of innovation in Jenny Uglow's new book, "The Lunar Men" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), which is the story of a remarkable group of friends in Birmingham in the mid-eighteenth century. Their leader was Erasmus Darwin, a physician, inventor, and scientist, who began thinking about evolution a full fifty years before his grandson Charles. Darwin met, through his medical practice, an industrialist named Mathew Boulton and, later, his partner James Watt, the steam-engine pioneer. They, in turn, got to know Josiah Wedgwood, he of the famous pottery, and Joseph Priestley, the preacher who isolated oxygen and became known as one of history's great chemists, and the industrialist Samuel Galton (whose son married Darwin's daughter and produced the legendary nineteenth-century polymath Francis Galton), and the innovative glass-and-chemicals entrepreneur James Keir, and on and on. They called themselves the Lunar Society because they arranged to meet at each full moon, when they would get together in the early afternoon to eat, piling the table high, Uglow tells us, with wine and "fish and capons, Cheddar and Stilton, pies and syllabubs." Their children played underfoot. Their wives chatted in the other room, and the Lunar men talked well into the night, clearing the table to make room for their models and plans and instruments. "They developed their own cryptic, playful language and Darwin, in particular, liked to phrase things as puzzles--like the charades and poetic word games people used to play," Uglow writes. "Even though they were down-to-earth champions of reason, a part of the delight was to feel they were unlocking esoteric secrets, exploring transmutations like alchemists of old."

When they were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly--in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative--a mutual-admiration society. "Their inquiries ranged over the whole spectrum, from astronomy and optics to fossils and ferns," Uglow tells us, and she goes on:

One person's passion--be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks--fired all the others. There was no neat separation of subjects. Letters between [William] Small and Watt were a kaleidoscope of invention and ideas, touching on steam-engines and cylinders; cobalt as a semi-metal; how to boil down copal, the resin of tropical trees, for varnish; lenses and clocks and colours for enamels; alkali and canals; acids and vapours--as well as the boil on Watt's nose.

What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it "philosophical laughing," which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there's more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.

Uglow tells us, for instance, that the Lunar men were active in the campaign against slavery. Wedgwood, Watt, and Darwin pushed for the building of canals, to improve transportation. Priestley came up with soda water and the rubber eraser, and James Keir was the man who figured out how to mass-produce soap, eventually building a twenty-acre soapworks in Tipton that produced a million pounds of soap a year. Here, surely, are all the hallmarks of group distortion. Somebody comes up with an ambitious plan for canals, and someone else tries to top that by building a really big soap factory, and in that feverish atmosphere someone else decides to top them all with the idea that what they should really be doing is fighting slavery.

Uglow's book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two --the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity--you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. You get Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and a revolution in Western philosophy. You get Darwin, Watt, Wedgwood, and Priestley, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And sometimes, on a more modest level, you get a bunch of people goofing around and bringing a new kind of comedy to network television.

3.

One of "S.N.L."'s forerunners was a comedy troupe based in San Francisco called the Committee. The Committee's heyday was in the nineteen-sixties, and its humor had the distinctive political bite of that period. In one of the group's memorable sketches, the actor Larry Hankin played a condemned prisoner being led to the electric chair by a warden, a priest, and a prison guard. Hankin was strapped in and the switch was thrown--and nothing happened. Hankin started to become abusive, and the three men huddled briefly together. Then, as Tony Hendra recounts, in "Going Too Far," his history of "boomer humor":

They confer and throw the switch again. Still nothing. Hankin starts cackling with glee, doubly abusive. They throw it yet again. Nothing yet again. Hankin then demands to be set free--he can't be executed more than once, they're a bunch of assholes, double jeopardy, nyah-nyah, etc., etc. Totally desperate, the three confer once more, check that they're alone in the cell, and kick Hankin to death.

Is that sketch funny? Some people thought so. When the Committee performed it at a benefit at the Vacaville prison, in California, the inmates laughed so hard they rioted. But others didn't, and even today it's clear that this humor is funny only to those who can appreciate the particular social and political sensibility of the Committee. We call new cultural or intellectual movements "circles" for a reason: the circle is a closed loop. You are either inside or outside. In "Live from New York," Lorne Michaels describes going to the White House to tape President Ford saying, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night," the "S.N.L." intro: "We'd done two or three takes, and to relax him, I said to him--my sense of humor at the time--"Mr. President, if this works out, who knows where it will lead?' Which was completely lost on him." In another comic era, the fact that Ford did not laugh would be evidence of the joke's failure. But when Michaels says the joke "was completely lost on him" it isn't a disclaimer--it's the punch line. He said what he said because he knew Ford would not get it. As the writers of "Saturday Night Live" worked on sketches deep into the night, they were sustained by something like what sustained the Lunar men and the idealists in Tübingen--the feeling that they all spoke a private language.

To those on the inside, of course, nothing is funnier than an inside joke. But the real significance of inside jokes is what they mean for those who aren't on the inside. Laughing at a joke creates an incentive to join the joke-teller. But not laughing--not getting the joke--creates an even greater incentive. We all want to know what we're missing, and this is one of the ways that revolutions spread from the small groups that spawn them.

"One of Michaels's rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home," Shales and Miller write. "The collective approach of the show's creators could be seen as a kind of arrogance, a stance of defiance that said in effect, "We think this is funny, and if you don't, you're wrong.' . . . To viewers raised on TV that was forever cajoling, importuning, and talking down to them, the blunt and gutsy approach was refreshing, a virtual reinvention of the medium."

The successful inside joke, however, can never last. In "A Great Silly Grin" (Public Affairs; $27.50), a history of nineteen-sixties British satire, Humphrey Carpenter relates a routine done at the comedy club the Establishment early in the decade. The sketch was about the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed in the war, and the speaker was supposed to be the Cathedral's architect, Sir Basil Spence:

First of all, of course, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the German people for making this whole project possible in the first place. Second, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people of Coventry itself, who when asked to choose between having a cathedral and having hospitals, schools and houses, plumped immediately (I'm glad to say) for the cathedral, recognizing, I think, the need of any community to have a place where the whole community can gather together and pray for such things as hospitals, schools and houses.

When that bit was first performed, many Englishmen would have found it offensive. Now, of course, hardly anyone would. Mocking British establishment pieties is no longer an act of rebellion. It is the norm. Successful revolutions contain the seeds of their demise: they attract so many followers, eager to be in on the joke as well, that the circle breaks down. The inside becomes indistinguishable from the outside. The allure of exclusivity is gone.

At the same time, the special bonds that created the circle cannot last forever. Sooner or later, the people who slept together in every combination start to pair off. Those doing drugs together sober up (or die). Everyone starts going to bed at eleven o'clock, and bit by bit the intimacy that fuels innovation slips away. "I was involved with Gilda, yeah. I was in love with her," Aykroyd tells Shales and Miller."We were friends, lovers, then friends again," and in a way that's the simplest and best explanation for the genius of the original "S.N.L." Today's cast is not less talented. It is simply more professional. "I think some people in the cast have fun crushes on other people, but nothing serious," Cheri Oteri, a cast member from the late nineteen-nineties, tells Shales and Miller, in what might well serve as the show's creative epitaph. "I guess we're kind of boring--no romances, no drugs. I had an audition once with somebody who used to work here. He's very, very big in the business now. And as soon as I went in for the audition, he went, "Hey, you guys still doing coke over at SNL?' Because back when he was here, they were doing it. What are we doing, for crying out loud? Oh yeah. Thinking up characters."

Labels: Philosophy, Society, Sociology