On-Demand Fiasco

The Sopranos ended its run this past weekend.

I still have yet to see it.

Sunday night I was exiled to my basement by a hen party held by Mrs. Agricola. I'm not sure why it happened when it happened but there was some complex algorithm of other Sunday night, all-female get togethers at which neighbor-ladies gather to watch the execrable Desperate Housewives over the past two years which we have never hosted . . . I can't pretend to understand.

I didn't mind too much however because I knew that I'd catch the finale On-Demand, Monday night. Except that I didn't. RCN -- stellar cable provider that it is -- was unable to deliver HD HBO and On-Demand on Monday night. After several abortive attempts to get On-Demand to work I spent 30 minutes on hold before connecting with a service rep.

The guy was very nice but he, and, so he said, the entire organization didn't know why the outage was happening. Ninety percent of his calls dealt with the same issue last night. It appears everybody was trying to catch the Sopranos finale On-Demand and the RCN system couldn't handle the load. He also posited that a Saturday night firmware update may have been responsible, but no one knew for sure. RCN seems to have a tremendous IT department -- a system wide firmware update and/or high traffic basically crippled their system on a pair of nights that they should have known would have been very high traffic nights.

Last night's call was our third in two weeks for poor On-Demand performance, and our patience is wearing thin with RCN. That they are IT-incompetent should not surprise me because RCN sends monthly bills every other month, and they never once reached me when I'd established email billing. For this service I pay $137 each month.

Hilllary, Barack & 1984

This morning's Wonder Land column by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal turned us onto this video. After reading his typically, on-target observations we wandered over to YouTube to check things out for ourselves.

A very well executed play on Mac's seminal "1984" commercial we think that it nicely captures what Hillary is all about -- actually, what the Democrat Party is all about as they seek to take care of us, the naked savages in the wilderness. That it's produced by someone connected to the Obama campaign -- Phil de Vellis -- makes us laugh. We are still 10 months from the primaries and 18 from the general election and the aspirants on the Democrat side are already bloodying themselves.

Previously, we posted some comments on how organizations are losing control of their brands -- a talk we heard at an advertising symposium -- and they need to let it happen, there is no fighting it. This latest dust-up strikes us as the ultimate inside-outside-job of late. A "political pro" (Henninger's description) uses a grass-roots tool (YouTube)to lambaste a major brand (Hillary), all the while being an operative for another major brand (Obama) and, at least for a bit, making it appear as if it was the work of some Obama supporters.

The next ten months should be fascinating to watch. Republicans, and conservatives, should just sit back and watch the Democrats shred each other in their effort to achieve their ultimate goal -- power.

Convergence Culture Talk

Yesterday morning (3/14), for work, we attended the morning session of an advertising symposium in Boston. We heard a few speakers the most interesting of whom was Henry Jenkins -- co-director of the center for comparative media studies at MIT.

His area of focus is fans, and fan culture, particularly how fans influence, and alter a brand. He had a great series of dichotomies in a string of his slides that highlighted the change in the media-scape and that create challenges for the marketer and the brand manager.

Interactive
Participation

Individual Consumers
Collective Intelligence

Mass Markets
Brand Tribes

One Size
All Size

Attraction
Activation

Sticky
Spreadable

The most interesting insight that he provided, however, was that "we [marketers/brand managers]don't control the whole brand and that we've already lost control." Rather than try to control it we need to find ways to embrace this fan participation and use it to our advantage to improve both the brand and the brand's communications.

This loss of brand control was also echoed by Jim McDowell, VP of Mini Cooper USA. There is opportunity in the ambiguity -- always.

Dark Lights

With the Christmas Season in full swing, and houses bedecked in their holiday finest, we've noticed many shrubs lit by super-bright LEDs. The intensity of these lights is startling. They burn like little suns but cast off little ambient light and accentuate the darkness rather than alleviate it.

This seems to miss the point of the Christmas light. Traditional Christmas lights cast a warm glow and brighten dark winter nights. They serve as beacons in the gloom to guide visitors to welcoming homes -- a fitting symbol of the season's true meaning.

Next Blog & Portuguese Blogs

One of our new favorite web pastimes is to come onto Blogger and keep hitting the "Next Blog" button. It's fascinating what you bump into. One thing that amazes on a daily basis is the number of Portuguese-language blogs that we encounter. We're unsure how the randomizer works on this button and what the criteria are, but we've never blogged about Portugal, or Brazil, though we have visited the former and loved every moment of the trip. Perhaps the next blog button has some sort of psychic powers, and can read our mind and thus connect us with people who also have a connection to Portugal. It would not surprise if Google had this in Beta . . .