What If Obama Was A Telco?
Nothing stupider than a telco. The secret handshake of the nascent phreaker/hacker movement in the San Francisco area and peninsula in the early 1970s. Captain Crunch using a cereal whistle to get free calls from Ma Bell. Jobs and Wozniak were making and selling phreaking equipment before they glommed onto the whole personal computer thing. But everyone agreed, ‘Nothing stupider than a telco’.
Remarkably it’s one of those truisms that remains valid 35 years later. (Disclosure – we’ve represented and worked closely with RBOCs and IXCs (long distance carriers) at the VP and in one case CEO level. So we can tell you it ain’t no lie). We must add, of course, cable companies. Now, it’s true that when Wired magazine was WiReD and truly hip say circa 1994/95, they did put John Malone of the cover as a Mad Max Road Warrior digital hero. They also sucked up to Ray Smith of Bell Atlantic at the time. Stupidity is contagious.
Consider Black Water. Murder? Fraud? Corruption? Indictments? Well, become Xe. There ya go, a new logo. Fresh start, right? Comcast is doing the same thing. Buy a failing network. Why get a new name and logo. Xfinity! Same cable service! Same cable culture! Now with an oddly pharmaceutical sounding name. (Warning, Xfinity may cause vomiting, nausea, kidney failure, dizziness and nose, throat and ear bleeding).
AT&T (the re-assembling of several regional bell operating companies in the theory that clueless + clueless + dullard = super genius) quite rightly is being hammered for an inferior wireless network among other things. In many cases, AT&T’s woes aren’t just low cell tower population for scant coverage area. That’s commodity technology. More like CAPEX lacking. Worse, the ‘back haul’ connection to the network backbone from a cell tower is often miniscule: a piece of yarn, silly string or in better situations, a straw. So all that 3G speed when you get it? Pushed along from the cells like an old 300 baud Hayes modem. To the end user it doesn’t matter. Calls are dropped, mobile Internet a joke, and sexting problematic.
How embarrassing to sext someone on AT&T in say San Francisco or New York. An intrepid customer unleashes their glorious image into the ether and . . . it actually arrives 10 years later. A once svelte, good looking person’s picture matched up with the now aged sender sporting that unmistakable botox rictus grin. Cruel, cruel telco.
So what does AT&T do? They take a page from Comcast. Just create a new marketing campaign. Same weak network. But with new commercials and jingles.
Obama could learn something. Comcast and AT&T likely will do OK. Sheople today are enthusiastic about being fodder for someone else’s business model. They boast of their allegiance by clicking on ‘like’ and ‘fan’ on various lowest common denominator social websites thronging with ephemeral chit chat. Or if they are hard core, line up for hours to buy a gizmo of dubious distinction wearing their Uggs and faux Lance Armstrong ‘cycling’ outfits with stretch spandex.
As a total non-sequitor, the Stiftung merely goes bike riding. Not the rest of D.C. They ‘cycle,’ dropping $1,000 on custom wind-friendly ‘cycling outfits’ and another $1,000 on a *bike* merely to strike a pose for 2 miles along the flat pedestrian Crescent trail here in D.C. Ending the farce by hurrying back to the sofa for a Big Mac and ‘Hardball’.
But we digress. What are Obama’s branding problems? What can he learn from Xfinity and AT&T? He’d probably like to address the ‘oh God, another rhetoric filled speech followed by Bush-lite action’ problem. Going to Wall Street? Posing at its shallowest. Everyone there knows the legislation is weak beyond the telling of it. Yet isn’t that what he did on health care? And Iraq? And Afghanistan? And torture investigations? And surveillance? [Fill in the rest, here].
Advertising and branding campaigns want to turn a weakness into a strength. Or deflect attention. Xfinity — for all its if it lasts longer than four hours call your doctor vibe — is a far cry from a company selling pipes to the home. So what can Obama do to be like Nixon in ’68, calling himself the ‘New Obama’. Any ideas? Names? Slogans? Logos? What are your ideas for an Obama makeover?
SEC Scrambles For Relevance Via Goldman
Henry Blodget (yes, that Henry of the you’re-so-fired-for-a-tech-bubble-scam) is now a cited blogger on business matters. He speculates that the SEC surprise, unannounced suit against Goldman was timed and framed to obscure a scathing internal SEC review of its failure to act or investigate documented ponzi schemes going back to 1997. Speculative. But such craven, self-serving actions are a commonplace in D.C.
Reuters doesn’t go that far but also declares the SEC is using Goldman. They note clumsy efforts to scramble after the meltdown and pursue firms have been swatted down by courts and judges. Some judicial dismissals of SEC’s after-the-act ham fisted enforcement are scathing.
Pundits intone that SEC’s Goldman suit will bolster significantly Dodd’s the toothless and greatly watered down ‘financial reform’ bill. Republicans didn’t get the memo and have better focus group research. There’s always a tension in cynical D.C. between doing something or doing just enough to keep an issue alive for the next campaign. In our current meme environment, it’s even more stark. Actual achievement in any legislation is irrelevant to the perception in hyper-real twit-like consumptions. Thus, the astoundingly weak Dodd bill is already being amped up like a HiWatt stack as radical, massive ‘reform.’
Of all the people forced to chow down on that thin gruel, how bitter it must taste to the Left [sic], Progressives and Others Who Know Better. Again.
The Human Element Appears To Have Failed Here, But We’d Hate To Condemn An Entire Program Based On A Single Slip Up
Such a cornucopia of riches this week. Liz Cheney’s low budget web ad? When we saw our old friends David Rivkin and Lee Casey (they used to write everything as a threesome) organize conservative lawyers in opposition, we knew ‘it’s so on.’ Adding Starr was a nice touch.
Ex-Congressman Massa’s extemporaneous absurdities probably speak more truthfully about the disintegrating American political class. His informationally bulimic style was too much even for the double X chromosome chattering industry. And how often is it we get treated to their slack jawed silence?
Absent a truly galvanic development in the health care debate [sic], doubt we will write about it much more. It became a USA Network (Characters Matter!) remake of a Peruvian satire of a Fellini movie. Sure, we get juggling midgets and sobbing clowns mumbling about. Then the screaming between takes ‘What’s my motivation?’ To watch one more Administrative stooge blankly recite ‘The President’s Plan’ [sic] will reduce health insurance premiums for the majority of Americans’ is simply to watch the mirror image of Fox News’s pro-wrestling contrived narratives.
The whole world sees it. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Israelis, before slipping the shiv into Biden’s back, didn’t mutter ‘We got your reconciliation right here.’