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I was leaving the office the other day, feeling a bit beaten up from the stress of the business that day. Maybe feeling a bit sorry for myself that I was leaving the office at 9 PM……it was cold, I was tired, I felt like I had no life…..and I saw someone walking a dog….I did a double take. The dog had three legs. It’s right front was completely GONE….but it was wagging it’s tail and seemed so happy and content. It’s owner was at a red light. When the light turned green, the owner walked along and the dog walked briskly right along, wagging his tail and seeming very content with the world…..it made me stop and think. How lucky I am to be working till 9 PM at night. How lucky I am that I was walking with both legs to my car and that I would be warm soon and that I would be driving home to a house where I had food. It’s really tough out there, and this happy little dog made me feel happy too.
So under pressure from my daughter, young interns and the media, I decided to create a facebook page. I fail to understand the significance of it, other than to attract people that I have been trying to hide from for the last 10 years…..so I thought, well, I created the page, even though it is pretty lame, and I would see who else of interest I could “friend”. So I looked up Obama, and there was a page. I thought. Ok. I see the merit here. So I sent him a friend request and……..he never responded. So of course I feel like a real reject now. I mean just because he is the president and most powerful man in the western world, that means he can’t friend me back. Doesn’t he work 24 7 like me? Doesn’t he want people to go to his page and ooh and aah over how many friends he has? In any case, I hope someone can tell me why I should be on Facebook other than to waste endless hours of time that I do not have. I am not looking for a job or for my long lost high school sweetheart or looking to connect with relatives in Russia or Ireland or any of the other countries that my mutt heritage derives from. So, please, someone, give me a reason and I will stay.
Queen Bee
A-List Secrets: Who Gets Paid Most for Commercials?
Leslie Gornstein
Tue Sep 23, 10:18 AM ET
Los Angeles (E! Online) -
What determines what a celebrity will get paid for endorsing a product? Is there like a minimum wage?
—Macaela, New Zealand
Minimum wage. That’s cute. But no. A-listers can choose to shoot a craptastic Michael Bay flick or do a national ad campaign—either way, if the client is a giant brand, their pay can start at $5-$10 million.
Jerry Seinfeld charged $10 million to star in those ill-fated Microsoft commercials, and whatever Tina Fey’s making for those AmEx ads should be 10 times that. Natalie Portman reportedly has turned down campaigns worth tens of millions of dollars.
Those offers depend on a mix of box office, visibility and the Q Score,
a number calculated by Marketing Evaluations Inc. It’s a go-to
reference for advertising companies looking to hire the most desirable
faces.
So who has the highest Q Score? The lowest? The answer will surprise you:
First, here’s how the Q Scores work. The company surveys people, asking them whether they have heard of a certain public figure.
If the person does know of the celebrity, the company then asks whether
the star counts among his or her “favorites.” So if a star is well
loved among half the people surveyed, the Q Score is 50.
The actor with the highest current Q score?
William Petersen. Really. That guy who shows up on CBS to solve crimes and such right after Survivor.
“He’s been the most appealing person for the past five years or so,” the company’s Steve Levitt tells me. After him comes the seemingly unstoppable Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Johnny Depp.
Among women, who generally Q about 10 points lower, Carol Burnett—yes, really—still rates among this country’s most loved, along with Mariska Hargitay, Reba McEntire and, finally, Julia Roberts.
People with a negative Q score, in no particular order, include Don Imus, Paris Hilton, Snoop, Nicole Richie and Howard Stern.
God bless America.
Got a question about Hollywood? ASK IT!
Oh, and be my fan on Facebook, ‘kay?
As I read more and more about this so-called “recession” I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more the so-called experts and pundits talk about downturns, the more apt they are to happen.
I’m convinced that the one thing a recession or depression won’t impact are good ideas. They are always in demand. Especially ideas that will help people avoid recessions in the first place or get out of them.
If you’re in advertising the way to do that is to get consumers to make sure they include in their budget the money needed to buy what you are offering.
If it’s a cigarette product make sure they want it because it’s going to help them quit ONCE AND FOR ALL! That’s what smokers want.
If it’s a memory product be certain that they’ll demand it because it’s going to help them FINALLY HAVE A SHARP MIND AGAIN LIKE WHEN THEY WERE YOUNGER. If the memory product turns back the clock, they’ll want it.
Recessions are easy to beat with good ideas. People don’t want ad agencies or production people or creative geniuses. In recessions, they want killer sales people who can move stuff.
That’s us. Recession be damned. Let’s move stuff.
Gallup now measures U.S. happiness daily
By Frank Greve | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Gallup Organization and a health industry partner now offer a detailed daily measure of U.S. happiness and stress that you can look up on the Internet. They hope that it’ll be as influential an indicator of national progress someday as the gross domestic product.
The index, which is based on 1,000 in-depth interviews nightly, is the first time that happiness and its many components have been measured regularly and precisely in other than dollar terms.
To come up with the daily index, Gallup asks a battery of questions about respondents’ previous days, including state of health, economic comfort, job satisfaction, social life, restedness, optimism, worry and other factors in contentment.
The magic of the effort, which started Jan. 2, isn’t in the simple results: Spring lifts gloom, for example, and manufacturing jobs are stressful. Rather, it’s in teasing out previously unknown links between job stress and health, or depression and success at quitting smoking.
For example, a closer look at one subset puts a new value on health insurance: Among sick people with no health insurance, 56 percent reported a lot of stress in the previous day. Among those with health insurance, only 39 percent reported a lot of stress.
Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, hailed the index and its vast underlying data set as “music to the ears of the profession of public health.”
“We have lots of information about disease, cost and risk,” Gerberding said of the new index and its database, “but we know very little about health and how to measure it.” Her hope is that the index will reveal special traits for healthy people.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a senior scholar at Princeton and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, called the database of 150,000 respondents collected since January “a huge treasure . . . absolutely unique in richness and precision.”
Gallup, which is based in Washington, developed the index with support from Healthways Inc. of Franklin, Tenn., which promotes strategies to improve personal health and reduce health-care
provider costs. So it’s called the Gallup-Healthways Daily Happiness-Stress Index.
Employers who want to cut down on sick days or improve job satisfaction already are studying the data, according to Gallup. So are Wall Street analysts who are looking to measure how optimism and worry distort trading decisions.
The happiness-stress index itself is simply the percentage of the previous day’s respondents who said they’d been happy and relatively stress-free versus the percentage who’d worried a lot without much enjoyment.
On an average American day, the overall ratio is about five to one in favor of happiness, said James Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for well-being.
Lots of factors influence the scores for subsets, however.
Among lonely people, for example, the usual happiness-stress ratio is more like one to one, Harter said. On Tuesdays, the ratio is lower than on
Fridays. In spring, it’s higher than in winter. And women worry more than men.
Weekends are always the best of days, Harter has found, and the very best so far included New Year’s Day, Super Bowl Sunday and Easter.
Jim Clifton, Gallup’s chief executive officer, has big plans for the index. He thinks that lawmakers should be judged, at least in part, by their constituents’ happiness-stress scores. He plans to sort the responses by state and congressional district, using ZIP codes already in hand, and deliver the scores to members of Congress at year’s end.
ON THE WEB
The current happiness-stress index
I’ve been doing 28:30s and :120s for the last 20 some odd years……..so, in this age of speed, internet, You Tube and Tivo, why on earth are marketers relegated to these same media lengths? Maybe there is a reason that You Tube limits their video posts to 10 minutes. Maybe people really don’t watch much longer than that any more.
In the old days, when people watched more television, people might sit down and watch a thirty minute infomercial. When they channel surfed, they might watch 10 or 12 or even 15 minutes of infotainment, especially for a compelling topic that piqued their interest…..
However, marketers (MY CLIENTS!!!) are still paying to do thirty minute shows because there seems to be nothing in between two minutes and thirty minutes. WHY??????
If the average time an infomercial is watched is 8 minutes and shrinking, why can we not get media time that is between, say, 5 minutes and 15 minutes in length???
I admit that I am no media expert, however, there is supply and demand.
If marketers with multiple products could split 28:30s into 2 or 3 shows for different products, would that not be a major value to them, especially as they really don’t need a full half hour to sell a product….We really could do it in 15 minutes or even 9.
It’s a really tough economy. Consumers have a harder time reaching into their pockets for purchases. We are all trying to give consumers a value. Why can’t we give marketers a value and give them choices?
I know. There would need to be many many people who wanted 15 mins, 5 minutes, etc…..So, they only way to start is to gather up marketers who say : I WANT MY NEW LENGTH MEDIA TIME!!!! Hey, it worked for MTV long ago, maybe it will work now. All they can say is no.
I would LOVE to hear your comments and thoughts on this, especially you media folk. Let’s stir the pot and get this party started!!!!
Just in Heath Ledger has been found dead in his NYC apartment. The Maid found him dead! Apparently sleeping pills were found on the ground. That’s all not sure if it was suicide.
I know gossip before it hits Yahoo!
The big E kicked Wisconsin’s butts!!! Kickers are not my favorite people. In fact, it took this guy three times to get it right…if it took me three times to get it right, our clients would fire us and these guys are going to the SUPER BOWL!!!!!
So, what does this tell me? That Avalanche kicks more in than Super Bowl teams do….how’s that for a winning record????
If we only scored once in every 7 years like the Giants, we would be one of those famous infomercial companies that overcharges everyone and gets the same results as the Detroit Lions and Phoenix Cardinals. For you sport challenged people, they’ve NEVER been to a super bowl.
WE KICK BUTT EVERY DAY AT AVALANCHE!!!!!! Now why are we not famous, drinking champagne and freezing our butts off? Because we are too busy making you money!
We fight with clients alot about this topic. When clients tell us to go imitate a commercial or infomercial that did well, do you know what happens? They are no longer our client. Why? Because that is like going to a spa for a facial, massage and manicure and only sticking your toe in the pool and getting no services. Because at Avalanche, we are ruthless about delving into creative territory that our clients have never gone before…..because that is what works….breaking through the clutter. Of course we use sound principals that work in DR, but it might look, sound and act differently. Don’t you think people get tired of seeing the same things over and over. Don’t you? You are human aren’t you, even though you might be in this business? It’s the same with consumers.
Come to Avalanche because you want inspired and fresh IDEAS. Anyone can shoot and edit a commercial, but only Avalanche delivers ideas that pack a mean creative punch. Anyone that has worked with us knows our people are colorful, brilliant, at times even downright cranky in defending a solid creative approach. We don’t just want to take your money and do whatever you tell us. That is not in your best interest.
I hope someone will write a retort to this and get a heated debate going!
Ava