Could 2008 be the year that Hollywood has waited for so long, when that "indestructible cockroach" of independent movies-New York's Harvey Weinstein-finally runs out of luck? Forget about disappointing revenues from movies such as Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse; one should be looking at the plight of a boring home video distributor which was supposed to be the Weinsteins' salvation.
Oil was $140 a barrel on Monday, now it's below $133 a barrel either because Vladimir Putin farted or the U.S. released its fuel stock figures — we're not sure. Is Peak Oil real, or is the myth driving investors to get nutty with an otherwise healthy market? A decade ago, when oil was cheap, it was a "controversial theory," reported in the San Francisco Examiner, that predicted the party wouldn't last very much longer. So why was the conventional wisdom of OPEC fantasists, who warned of "$5 oil," so laughably bogus? (The Economist devoted a cover story to it; see left.) Who made false predictions then, and who's really talking sense about the state of the industry now?
The Perez Hilton brand is becoming an empire! Well, sort of. The off-putting celebrity blogger has been stamping his name on shitty clothing, he might be getting his own record label, and now he's had a damn musical written about him. Is he really becoming an unstoppable juggernaut corporation, or is it just hooey? We'll take a closer look at the corpulent stain-artist's side projects after the jump.
Starbucks just unveiled a special rewards program, offering free refills and wireless internet for its most loyal addicts. But this isn't enough for Times columnist Ron Lieber, who considers himself a very special, lucrative customer and who has a list of demands. He would like his own special, shorter lines and a special VIP seating section with Aeron chairs and reserved electrical outlets. He would like to be invited to exclusive parties. And everyone else would like his head on a platter. Again.
Howard Schultz, the founder of Death Star coffee chain and religious icon Starbucks, built the company up from nothing with pure grit, energy, and a visionary outlook. Then he went too far, aiming to open 40-freaking-thousand stores (more than McDonald's), and the company's stock price cratered over the past year. Schultz brought himself back as CEO earlier this year, and the dynamic caffeine pusher has now revealed how he plans to revive his floundering company: by micromanaging the shit out of every god damn thing:
BrandTags.net is a website with a deceptively simple idea: it shows you a brand's logo, and you enter the first word that comes to mind. Then it combines all the thousands of responses into a tag cloud, showing the overall consumer perception of each brand. Smart! So what great truths do these responses show, besides the fact that many people associate Adidas with "shoes?" They show that your brand is crap, stupid, and sucks! Corporate image gurus, take note:
"Jack Flack" at Portfolio.com is one of a small handful of bloggers who writes things that are interesting and intelligent about corporate PR. One of his trademark constructions is "Parsing XYZ," where he takes some statement or speech or press release full of corporate doublespeak and decodes it. I identify him so closely with that stuff that I even gave him credit the last time I used the word "Parsing!" But not so for the Wall Street Journal, which ran a column last weekend with a premise virtually identical [see update also, below] to an earlier Jack Flack column:
Actor-turned-entrepreneur Robert "I call him Bobby" Deniro is planning to open a "Nobu Hotel" in the Financial District. It will be the second one—he already has a Nobu Hotel in Israel (who knew?). The plan is to, you know, make it a nice hotel, and also have a Nobu restaurant in it. Branding a hotel with a restaurant's name, and not vice versa, is an interesting concept. If it becomes popular and widespread, it could help prominent chefs and restaurateurs to have greater leverage in their partnership deals, rather than being treated as ornaments for the hotel centerpiece. The brand drives the business, so it's a bit of a gamble on Nobu's international appeal. One partner says of the hotel, "Instead of a mint on the pillow, you could find a sushi roll." Well, that actually sounds disgusting. [NYP/ pic via Curbed]
Earlier this month, American Lawyer Media laid off 42 staffers across the board. The company is also "scaling back" plans to expand the scope of one magazine, and moving another to an all-digital format, according to an internal memo. One insider says all of the laid off people are gone, but a sense of nervousness still pervades the office. What, lawyers can't afford to buy magazines any more? Cheap bastards. The full memo from ALM CEO Bill Pollak is below.
The new "BrandZ" ranking of the world's most powerful brands is out, and it just helps to confirm that it's only a matter of time before China is running everything. China Mobile is the fifth most powerful brand in the world, ahead of names like IBM, Apple, and McDonald's. China's most powerful brands collectively gained more than 50% in value over the past year. And China and other emerging economies are the most powerful drivers of growth for all brands. Russia is also a fast riser. The takeaway: at least we are still killing all these foreigners through our strong American Marlboro brand (#10). Below, the top 25 brands in the world, and their added value to the company, so you can sound smart at your next branding party. Yes, Google is #1:
So, Natalie Portman has signed on to play Cathy in a new Wuthering Heights film. Whether or not you think the casting really works (I'm not sure I do, but I hate that book so don't really care), you've got to credit Natalie and her agents for her consistently smart choices. She's bounced between prestige and popcorn, period and modern, crafting a resume with depth and diversity that should be (if it's not already) the envy of her peers. Her direct competition (and S&M friend) Scarlett Johansson is still a bit unproven in the whole "talent" department, so Natalie needn't worry there. And sure Reese Witherspoon (maybe in a slightly older age group) has that Oscar, but her glossy period effort Vanity Fair totally bombed. Gwyneth Paltrow (again, a bit older) went too period and too British (moving to London and whatnot) and is now stuck playing the girl secretary role in Ironman.
PlanetOut Inc. used to have a monopoly on Serious Gay Media—they published Out and The Advocate. But they went into tremendous debt and sold their entire magazine and book publishing business to Regent Releasing (owner of Here!) for $6 million. Our favorite theory (because we know nothing of the workings of the gay media): "PlanetOut's financial problem are due to its expansion into the gay cruise business - where it has lost millions." Why on Earth can't that happen to The National Review? [Towleroad]
"Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) continue to play the cat-and-mouse game out in the open, even on the weekend: MSFT has send a letter to Yahoo board, and has set a three-week deadline for Yahoo to accept its current $31 a share offer or Microsoft will take its case to Yahoo shareholders. This could also mean a lower offer from Microsoft in case of a proxy war."
Word on "The Street" is that CNBC Reporter Michelle Caruso-Cabrera may be dating Gary Parr, deputy chairman of Lazard and a guy who is involved in finance stories Caruso-Cabrera could be covering [Radar]. It's reminiscent of CNBC Money Honey Maria Bartiromo's purported canoodling with Citigroup exec Todd Thompson. This raises an important issue: why do all the rich business guys go for the CNBC women? Haven't they heard of a little place called FOX BUSINESS NETWORK, which put in a lot of effort to hire its own stable of attractive female on-air personalities to lure male viewers? Can they get some love over there? We've decided to help them out; after the jump, five of Fox's foxy professional women, and a real item of interest about each one. Act now, Wall Street jerks!
XM and Sirius radio are merging! The Justice Department said it was ok and it totally won't hurt competition to have all the satellite radio provided by one company, because they actually compete with land-based radio, or something. In honor of the deal, Sirius is starting ten thousand more stations devoted to shitty 90s rock and Howard Stern saying naughty words. [AP]
Since when is Newsday so hot? The paper consistently publishes the most boring front page of any of the Gotham tabloids, but the publication is clearly stirring the passions of corporate tycoons. Rupert Murdoch's interest emerged yesterday; now it's clear that the News Corp. CEO and Post owner must queue with other suitors interested in winning Newsday from money-hemorrhaging Tribune Company. Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman wants the paper for largely the same reason as Murdoch, which is to merge business-side offices and cut costs enough to drive the remaining, unaffiliated tabloid out of business. Long Island cable operator Cablevision Systems Corp. is bidding, perhaps so it can cross-sell ads from its cable system and local news channel into Newsday. It's not clear that the other two bidders are as serious as Murdoch, or can afford to be, but broker Citigroup is apparently planning a "soft auction." Newspaper analyst John Morton estimates Newsday could fetch $350 million to $400 million, down about half from its value five years ago. Kind of sad for what Morton described, in the Times' retelling, as "probably one of Tribune's more lucrative papers." [Times, WSJ]
New York has long been an anomaly among American cities: the metropolitan area supports four competing daily newspapers, the New York Times, the Post, Daily News and, in Long Island, Newsday. Maybe not for much longer. Crains, the business newspaper, claims Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation may have approached the owners of Newsday, Sam Zell's Tribune Company, with a bid. That the Australian media mogul would make such a bid is less a sign of confidence in the newspaper industry, and more an indication of the decline in print advertising, which has put pressure on all newspaper groups. It's only since the latest horrific numbers came out that Newsday's erratic owner, Sam Zell, has indicated Tribune may be willing to sell. (The conglomerate lost $78m in the fourth quarter.)
Deadpan actor and much-derided financial commentator Ben Stein has a long article in Best Life Magazine this week in which he speculates about why there are so many attractive women on TV business news channels these days. You can practically see Stein's drool spattered about the pages of the article, and he's drawn some (justified) mockery for the leering tone of the story. But he does raise an interesting question about the profusion of "Money Honeys" on TV. Compare that to the situation in sports broadcasting; it's full of ex-jocks and men's men, not Fox-branded eye candy. Why the discrepancy between the two traditionally male provinces of business and sports TV? You have come to the correct place to hear a theory.
Producing The Office is just not as profitable as building engine rings for billion-dollar bombers or constructing vast Superfund sites—that's the sad fact of being a huge corporate conglomerate. So it's been rumored that General Electric will sell NBC, possibly after the Olympics. But GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt, liberally employing exclamation points, told shareholders that he is planning no such thing: "Should we sell NBCU? The answer is no!" They're the only multinational defense contractor with an in-house propaganda wing and they're gonna keep it, dammit. [NYT]
Newspaper people are impressed (and terrified) by the size of the stake that a pack of hedge funds has built up in the New York Times. The 19% stake now controlled by Harbinger Capital and scary-sounding Firebrand Partners is now roughly equivalent to the ownership of the Sulzberger family. Here's what's amazing: not that another great American media institution is (snore) at the mercy of ravening capitalists; but that the newspaper is so frakking cheap.
