One of the things I actually like about Mondays is the NY Times Business section. The paper makes up for the lack of hard business news from the weekend by running features, with a heavy emphasis on tech and media. Today's paper has a couple of stories on the front page of the Business section that remind me of the funny Too Light / Too Heavy commercials from Bud Light.
On the "Too Light" side of the balance sheet is an article about Apple's soon-to-be formally announced tablet (see David Carr's Media Equation story: Conjuring Up the Latest Buzz, Without a Word.) It is hard to say that Apple's marketing campaigns are too anything, except successful. They are "light" because they get all this buzz with nary a traditional PR peep. As Carr reports:
This Wednesday, Steven P. Jobs will step to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and unveil a shiny new machine that may or may not change the world.
In the magician’s world, that’s called “the reveal.”
And the most magical part? Even as the media and technology worlds have anticipated this announcement for months, Apple has said not word one about The Device. Reporting on the announcement has become crowdsourced, with thousands of tech and media journalists scrambling for the latest wisp and building on the reporting of others.
On the Too Heavy side of the balance sheet is the growing trend for big companies, brands and celebrities to take their fights public, even if it involves applying some tough love to their own customers and corporate sponsors. In Corporate Antagonism Goes Public, Stephanie Clifford cites examples of cable companies and the Conan/Leno/NBC dispute. She writes:
What’s happening, according to some observers, is a shift in how business negotiations are conducted — from closed and discreet to open and political.
“There’s a code of the past that we keep things in the boardroom and don’t go public,” said Bobby Calder, chairman of the marketing department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “What you’re seeing is, I think, a realization that you can go outside and gain some negotiating power.”
The campaigns play to populist sentiment, asking the public to do the right thing, an approach that also draws from politics. They create a public spectacle, a narrative that distills dull subjects like contract negotiations into a good-guy, bad-guy conflict — a Harvard Business School case study turns into a shootout with Liberty Valance.
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