Thomas Peterffy, 68, of Greenwhich, CT is the epitome of self-made man, a first generation American and one of the richest men in the world. He’s also a political advertiser.
According to Forbes, Peterffy was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 during a Russian bombing raid. He immigrated to the United States in 1965, and by 1977 purchased his own seat on the American Stock Exchange where he began trading options. In 1993 he launched the electronic brokerage firm, Interactive Brokers. The firm paid its first dividend to investors in December 2010, dolling out a whopping $1 billion.
Peterffy’s own wealth is reported to be $5.4 billion, making him the 189th wealthiest billionaire in the world. In other words, this is a man with little to be worried about. Yet he is worried. He’s worried that the Hungary of his youth and the America of our present are too similar — that we are a nation sliding into socialism.
Gyro/SF creative director, Steffan Postaer, thinks Peterffy’s ad is well done.
Yes, the music and imagery are pedantic. And yes, it’s pure propaganda. But the fact isn’t the facts: It’s the story. And the story is riveting. Whether Mr. Peterffy is right or wrong doesn’t matter. He believes he is right. And his argument is unwavering as it is stoic. When he infers that under President Obama “The rich will be poorer, but the poor will also be poorer” we are thunderstruck. I was anyway.
Personally, the only parallel I see between post-war Hungary and modern day America is the widespread use of propaganda. The desire for a prosperous America is pretty much universal, even radical independents like myself are for it. It’s how we achieve that prosperity and how we reinvest it, that calls for debate and more delicate solutions.
The fear of a Socialist America is an impure fabrication. To what end, I can’t quite conceive. Also, I question the idea that socialism is bad, or that it robs people of ingenuity or an incentive to achieve great things. Modern socialism — the kind found have in Sweden, for instance — means we’re all in this together, and we’re going to provide for one another. That isn’t wrong, it’s right.
It’s also right to point out that Mitt Romney has a great safety net firmly in place. It’s called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Peterffy wants to see Romney in the White House because it quells his childhood fears of a socialist state. To each his. Oh but that’s not what Romney, the good Mormon, believes. No, he wants to impose his will, like the Bishop/CEO/Governor that he is.
Help me out here…the insanely rich guy from Hungary wants the super rich guy from Michigan for President, in order to promote capitalism and it virtues, but the super rich guy for President is really a bit of a totalitarian jerk?
In Spring of 1977, The Paris Review, published an interview with Kurt Vonnegut.
The interview is a composite of four question and answer sessions with the writer, and edited by Vonnegut himself. Therefore, what he has to say in this “interview” is not as off-the-cuff as it might seem. Rather, it’s intentional, as most text-based exercises are.
INTERVIEWER
You have been a public relations man and an advertising man—
VONNEGUT
Oh, I imagine.
INTERVIEWER
Was this painful? I mean—did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
VONNEGUT
No. That’s romance—that work of that sort damages a writer’s soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren’t putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn’t buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
After studying anthropology at University of Chicago, Vonnegut took a job working in PR for General Electric. His choice to earn is only one reason why I love him, but it is an important one. “It was dishonorable enough that I perverted art for money. I then topped that felony by becoming, as I say, fabulously well-to-do,” Vonnegut reflects.
It’s wonderful to know that Vonnegut thinks having a hack job doesn’t hurt your writing, it just sucks up your time. One might argue then, that a writer with a hack job merely needs to make time for their real work, while simultaneously performing the tasks that pay. I might add here that a writer can also work to transcend the hackery. Sure, it can become a head-banger of a challenge to write ad copy, or news copy, that does its job and delivers on craft and artfulness. But it’s a pursuit that strengthens the writer, in my opinion.
I can see where Vonnegut, or another writer, might claim that transcending the hackery isn’t the point, the point is simply to make money and return home to your family and the book that’s growing there, trying desperately to be born. My counterpoint is why make such harsh lines between real writing and writing merely to earn? Why not write it all with great care?
Warren Buffett, the greatest investor the modern world has ever known, just ponied up $142 million to add Richmond, Virgina-based Media General to his list of prized companies.
Media General operates 18 network-affiliated television stations and their associated websites, plus several dozen community newspapers across the Southeastern part of the U.S. Titles like Richmond Times-Dispatch and Winston-Salem Journal are well known, but most of the others like The Goochland Gazette and The Bland County Messenger have small circulations in the range of 5,000 – 25,000, according to paidContent.
Is the old man getting sentimental, or is this truly a wise investment? Both, I reckon.
“I’ve loved newspapers all of my life — and always will,” Buffett, who delivered newspapers as a boy, wrote in a letter introducing himself and his newly formed BH Media Group to the Media General team.
Berkshire Hathaway purchased The Omaha World Herald, its hometown newspaper last year, and has owned the Buffalo News since 1977. Buffett has also been on the board of The Washington Post and owned a large share of that national paper for years. One might say he’s making Omaha something of a genuine media town now. As a native of the hilly river city, I’m happy about that.
Of course, there are others with other more important media matters on their minds. Professor, consultant and writer Clay Shirky, for one. He argues that “ordinary citizens don’t pay for news. What we paid for, when we used to buy the paper, was a bundle of news and sports and coupons and job listings, printed together and delivered to our doorstep.” Shirky believes that news has always been a loss leader subsidized by advertisers. And now those advertisers are off to greener pastures. “Ad dollars lost to competing content creators can be fought for; ad dollars that no longer subsidize content at all are never coming back,” he contends.
GigaOm writer, Mathew Ingram, adds that “the subscription price of a newspaper and circulation revenues in general have historically only accounted for a small proportion of a media company’s overall revenue. In most cases, the bulk of that revenue comes from advertising.”
I’m a fan of both Shirky and Ingram, but I don’t agree that all the value is in the platform. The Oracle of Omaha believes there’s value in content and he wants his new newspaper managers to find ways to maximize that value for readers (who will be asked to pay for the content, regardless of the platform). “It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town,” Buffett outlines. (more…)
Carlos Santana is one of my musical heros. He’s also a board member and part owner of premium spirits brand, Tequila Casa Noble.
I don’t drink a lot of tequila, and I can’t say that I have ever tried Casa Noble, but now that I know Carlos’ role in the company, I will give the product a sip or two. Yes, it’s that easy to get me to sample the product. We’ll see about cost, taste, availability and all the rest.
I have to say, I love that Carlos reveals himself in the video, but the construction of the piece isn’t beautifully rendered, as it needs to be. Premium brands need to go all out on their production values, or doubt creeps in.
Speaking of Carlos and doubt creeping in, did you hear he’s doing a two-year “residency” at House of Blues in Las Vegas? I may find myself attending some of these shows, but I can’t help reflecting on how this is an unfamiliar time in rock and roll. For one, ticket prices to live shows are freaking outrageous.
Grateful Dead’s bass player, Phil Lesh, is also about to embark on a residency program at his own venue, Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, Calif. His opening ten-night run is just about sold out, although it looks like there are a couple $300 VIP tickets and $150 general admission tickets remaining. It’s enough to lead a psychedelic rock fan to drink.
I sometimes stumble when meeting new people. At a conference, for instance, a well meaning person will eye my badge and ask, “What’s AdPulp?”
There’s no succinct way to say AdPulp is an industry website that reaches thousands of people around the world every day…but it’s not my main deal, I also run a marketing services company that specializes in brand identity, social media activation and content development.
Sadly, a variety of gibberish falls from my mouth at these crucial first-impression occasions. I won’t try to repeat my awkwardness in writing, you have to see it to believe it.
When you have a job, of course, the awkwardness isn’t there. You say, “I’m a mechanic, or I’m a copywriter” and you’re done with it. Why is it so different when you are self-employed? And why is that difference magnified when you’re a writer?
The answer is not pleasing to me. It’s tougher to deal with because words like “writer,” “freelance” and to a lesser degree “entrepreneur” may leave the listener with a negative impression.
The reality is I ought to be happy and proud to say, “I’m the principal of a brand identity concern and editor of a widely read industry pub.”
When I was in college, I had the same issue. I would meet someone and say, “I go to F&M.” Blank stare.
All those years ago I would want to explain what F&M is to people who’d never heard of it and didn’t particularly care. Now I meet a stranger and walk away feeling like an ass if I oversell AdPulp, just like I did 25 years ago when overselling my college.
Why do I let my insecurities get the best of me? I don’t know, but I do know that sharing this truth about myself is one step out of the shadows that ego casts.
On Sunday night, I launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo, a site that provides a platform for small business owners, filmmakers, writers and others looking to launch and manage on online fundraising effort for their project.
It’s been a humbling 48 hours. As you can see from the following screen grab, we have plenty of “crowd,” but no “funding” yet. It stings a bit, but I want to share this stuff because there’s some good learning here that others looking for this kind of funding might benefit from.
This traffic report from IndieGoGo doesn’t indicate where the visitors are coming from, but I assume most of the views are the result of my promoting the “AdPulp Journalism Fund” on Twitter, Facebook and AdPulp.com. So, I have enough influence to drive people to click and consider, but I’m weak when it comes to motivating conversion.
Weak though I may be, I hope to improve and find new ways to go about raising money for AdPulp. One thing that occurs to me at this early stage is the need to go one-to-one with this ask. That means email, letter writing and in-person appeals. Somehow I need to establish a personal connection to the site for our most ardent supporters.
I want the campaign to work, and I want to learn what works and what does not. I also would love to see my paid email newsletter, “Hungry for Gumbo” take off. Right now, I have nine paid subscribers to the email. As you can see, it’s tough going, this path to the paid content mountaintop.
I’ve been invited to speak on the topic at GeekEnd in Boston in October. The title of my talk is “The Honeymoon Is Over And The Bill Is Due: Paid Content in 2012 And Beyond.” I’d like to be able to share a few personal success stories at that time, but I’m going to need to roll out some innovative new approaches in order to do that.
I’ve tried to explain “the other side of Oregon” to friends from outside the state who don’t know about the economic hardships many Oregonians endure. The Beaver State’s high unemployment rate, coupled with inflation, is a misery inducer for those caught in its jaws–one in four Oregonians is under-employed and one in five is on food stamps.
When we consider these problems it’s easy to think only about the loss of low-to-middle income jobs, but it’s not just factory jobs and agricultural jobs that are missing from the local economy. Many of the region’s high paying jobs are going to outside talent because Oregon isn’t producing enough qualified workers. That was the message delivered by Intel software chief Renee James at Portland Business Alliance’s (PBA) annual meeting this morning.
According to The Oregonian, James said that the state’s education system isn’t generating enough skilled workers and that Oregon isn’t doing enough to support entrepreneurship. “Innovation leaves Portland,†James lamented in her keynote address at the Oregon Convention Center. “Instead of being a lifestyle city, we should endeavor to become an innovation city that has a great lifestyle.â€
It’s important to note that James, one of the top execs at Intel (which is Oregon’s largest employer), received her Bachelors and Masters from University of Oregon. So she’s clearly pulling for the home team. But sometimes the home team needs a new pitcher. And a new first baseman, center fielder, shortstop and so on.
Here’s a new commercial from PBA that makes the case for job creation:
When you click over to PBA’s microsite, ValueofJobs.com (as the video requests), there’s this additional information to consider:
Oregon is an income-tax-dependent state. The state’s schools, community colleges, universities, social and human services and corrections services all depend largely on revenue derived from taxes on personal income. The region’s low wages and declining per capita income translate into anemic state income tax revenues, which directly impacts the state’s ability to deliver social services. Economists have predicted that Oregon faces a decade of state budget deficits and is likely to fall about $3 billion short of the funds needed to maintain current services in every two-year budget cycle.
Bottom line, Oregonians need high paying jobs to reverse the tide. But is it wrong to think we might also benefit from a sales tax? To ensure essential services, the income has to come from somewhere. Certainly we’re all for a focus on jobs creation, but where do these jobs come from when the economy is ailing? Incentives for small business owners is a great start, but the state can only do so much, especially when it’s hamstrung by a budget shortfall. Businesses need to create jobs on their own, but many businesses are too busy hanging on to add another person to the payroll.
Sadly, the cycle keeps repeating and the momentum we need keeps slipping away. It is time to take common sense steps to walk our way out of this. Growing industrial hemp for food, fiber and fuel is a common sense step and an American industry waiting to happen. Oregon could encourage farmers to grow hemp despite the federal law prohibiting the production of the crop. Many states would follow our lead on this and we could help right a serious wrong, but what’s important is increased farm incomes and the number of new businesses that would “crop up” to make things from hemp.
Perhaps you have a better idea? I’d love to hear it.
Nobody expects the President or Ben Bernanke to speak honestly, as the truth would shatter an increasingly fragile status quo. But this reliance on artifice, half-truths and propaganda has a cost; people are losing faith in government, in all levels of authority, and in the Mainstream Media—and for good reason.
The marketing obsession with instant gratification and self-glorification has led to a culture of what I call permanent adolescence. Politicians who promise a pain-free continuation of the status quo are rewarded by re-election, and those who speak of sacrifice are punished. An unhealthy dependence on the State to organize and fund everything manifests in a peculiar split-personality disorder: people want their entitlement check and their corporate welfare, yet they rail against the State’s increasing power. You can’t have it both ways, but the adolescent response is to whine and cajole Mom and Dad (or the State) for more allowance and more “freedom.†But freedom without responsibility and accountability is not really freedom; it’s simply an extended childhood.
President Obama must be seeking re-election because here he is earlier today advocating for the continuation of the status quo:
I wish Obama wouldn’t concern himself with re-election and instead do the right thing for the country every day for two more years. But he won’t, because he’s stuck inside the two-party system, which is a prison of our own making. I’d like to think that one day we might break free of this prison, but to do so we will have to stop feeding the guards.
MGM, led by Republican activist and movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, produced three fake newsreels to attack Sinclair before election day, using shots from old movies and Hollywood actors. The newsreels sparked riots in theaters. Irving Thalberg later admitted producing the newsreels. “Nothing is unfair in politics,” he explained.
Just yesterday on Twitter I said, “politics is war,” which led to an interesting exchange with Chris O’Rourke.
As we know, there are all sorts of wars today. Culture wars, drug wars and very real and bloody wars. In all of them lives are at stake. That’s certainly true when we look at the war on poverty, which has been ongoing in America for generations.
Let’s hear from Upton Sinclair about the lives at stake during the Great Depression.
The “EPIC†(End Poverty in California) movement proposes that our unemployed shall be put at productive labor, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labor certificates or whatever name you may choose to give to the paper employed. It asserts that the State must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves and thus take themselves off the backs of the taxpayers. The “EPIC†movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry, because the unemployed are no longer of any use to industry.
Ultimately, Sinclair lost the race to Frank F. Merriam. It’s now 76 years later and we’re still burdened by an inordinate number of people on the sidelines in America, and that’s no way to manage a city, state or nation. But who among us has the faintest clue about how to fix the mess that is the American economy? Sure entrepreneurs can and do create businesses and new jobs, but as Sinclair argues above, the unemployed are not aided by this.
At any rate, we’re 48 hours from another mid-term election and polls indicate that the Republicans will do well on Tuesday. Why will they do well? There are many reasons, one of which is the skilled use of advertising and the media by the Grand Old Party.
In the end, we can call today’s attack ads propaganda, but identifying them as such and rendering them meaningless and ineffective are not the same thing. As long as political propaganda works to get people elected, there will always be people of all political persuasions willing to employ it. Sure, it’s a sad commentary on our values as a nation, and all the lying and manipulation that goes on erodes the fabric of what’s good in our society. But the problem with lies is they’re not seen as lies by the people who retell them. For Loius B. Mayer and Karl Rove and the like, sure, they know the lies they tell, but the audience, sadly, isn’t that discerning.
Men’s Health named Portland, Oregon “America’s Most Patriotic City.”
The magazine came to its conclusion after factoring the number of registered voters who turned out for state and federal elections in 2004 and 2008, money spent on military veterans, percentage of residents who volunteer, and finally, sales of fireworks and U.S. flags.
Portland wins lots of media contests and has long been the darling of The New York Times, but this new designation from Men’s Health Magazine is surprising to me, for Portland is home to lots of free thinkers. Of course, free thinkers are the people who make America great, but they’re often marginalized in favor of another, simpler view of patriotic Americans.
Speaking of Portland’s free thinkers, I met Jeffrey Thomas at Meatapalooza on Wednesday and just days later a huge, flattering feature by D.K. Row appears in The Oregonian on Thomas.
Row is the paper’s art critic and he asks Thomas, a former art dealer, some great questions about the art of selling art.
Q: Can you remind us how tough it was to sell art back in the ’80s here in Portland?
A: Remember, this was a timber economy and in the 1980s, Oregon went through its first of many recessions. We went through three years of lapsed timber sales; this little business called Intel was just starting up, so we really had no tech industry. Interest rates for houses were 12.5%.
So it was a tough time to get interest in cultural activity. There was a lot of money in town but you did not show it. It was very old school WASP. Nobody showed their wealth; no one supported anything. There was this anti-philanthropic thing going on. You just didn’t show that you had money. That made for a tough environment to create cultural activity and awareness that would draw people here.
Q: And people think it’s tough now.
A: It was nothing like it was then. There was just no cultural awareness. It was a country club for a few families and everyone else was part of the working class. There were few galleries, and only a handful of people interested in them.
Today, Thomas is a producer and photographer’s rep for Polara Studio. His Polara bio says, “…in his mind every day is a birthday party, which sort of explains the applause and flowers that he constantly showers upon everyone around him.”
