Viacom's movie studio Paramount needs a new way to make money since DVD sales are declining. They are now launching an online video clip service that makes favorite segments from its movie collection available for purchase. 

The price depends on your licensing agreement with them, and how you plan to use the clips. Heres' a link to their demo, which is only open to "friends" right now (if you have access, please let me know).

Techies call these clips "short-form video assets." I think they are the future of online video. We're working in this space too - more to follow!

The Senate is considering tossing the public option in favor of an experiment: See if private insurance companies play fair for a couple years, and if not, then include a public option. In a very clever reframing, cartoonist Andy Lubershane paints a picture (draws an animated cartoon actually) of what would happen if we treated firefighting services like we do health insurance - complicated contracts, pre-existing conditions, etc. Check it out.

Whatever your opinion, now's the time to express it.

What a marketer LuAnne is - making money from her blog! She recognized how to apply the law of supply and demand to transform her little brother's need for computer time into a revenue stream. Now kids all over the world can learn the economics of blogging from the Sunday comics... see, entertainment can educate!

I was recently at an event honoring Norman Lear, the great TV and film producer, and political and social activist who brought us All in the Family,  Maude, The Jeffersons and many other culture changing shows.

He said two things in his acceptance speech that really struck me: 1) I believe waking up every morning to be a production. We have a day to produce. 2) Success is how much joy we get out of the moments of our lives as we live them.

Much meaning -- not just for marketing, but for living.

The FTC is mad at the credit reporting company Experian for misleading consumers and luring them away from the government's free annual credit reports in order to get them to subscribe to a $14.95 monthly credit monitoring service. Experian is using classic marketing tactics. The government provides free credit reports at annualcreditreport.com (why not .gov?).  Experian, smelling money, bought a better-named site called freecreditreport.com, and they have been saturating the airwaves with their very popular trio of slackers singing about how they could have avoided ruining their credit if they had only tracked their status on Experian's website.

Now the government is fighting fire with fire. Their video spoofs show a remarkably similar band warning people, as the NY Times story quotes, that: Other sites may turn your head; they say they’re free, don’t be misled. Once you’re in their tangled web, they’ll sell you something else instead. 

Experian knows what they're doing, and refuses to give the FTC their freecreditreport.com domain or to cease and desist. Though they did pay a $1.25 million fine for misleading consumers; small change compared to the money they're making. The other marketing tactic is playing on people's fears. Most of us just don't need regular updates on our credit reports. But messages about identity theft, losing everything we have, etc, trigger us to buy these credit monitoring services.

Lots of people go to Experian's site for free credit reports when they mean to go to the government site, Bottom line is that Experian's marketing is effective and I believe intentionally misleading. But is it right?

After 72 Years on the Air, 'Guiding Light' Fades to Black.

This was a recent Washington Post headline announcing the demise of the longest running soap opera in history.

We worked with the soap opera community several years ago, as part of the multifacted Soap Summits to encourage better portrayals of safe-sex, drug problems, and violence prevention in soaps, which at that time reached over 30 million very loyal viewers a day.

I learned five key lessons:

1. My initial and rather smug dismissal of soaps as a waste of time was deeply misguided, as I quickly realized that for many viewers watching their soap was a valued ritual that they called "my time." It was an effective and reliable escape from the hardships of everyday life.
2. The currency for entertainment on television is ratings, which translates into profit, which is their bottom line. Incorporating positive health portrayals is only relevant to the soap opera community when it helps ratings. The job of the health community is to package their issues in ways that improve soap opera stories. It's their turf.
3. Health and social issues can be highly engaging and poignant, and add to to a storyline,without turning into a dull or preachy lecture. I remember one conversation among All My Children writers deciding, as a result of the Soap Summit, to have a new young female character always carry condoms in her purse as part of her persona.
4. Women and men want different endings. Women want stories to show the resolute woman taming the wild man or bad boy so he becomes good. Everybody wins. Men want the bad guy to lose and be beaten by a better man. Winner and loser.
5. Lastly, I learned that soap operas were invented by Procter & Gamble to sell soap, hence the name. The "opera" was simply an addictive container for P&G ads that sold their products to homemakers. Pretty clever.

May we all shine our guiding lights.