Handbill Handout

Fascinating. In one respect, I am completely typical of my generation. Yay me (?) From mediapost.com: Cause & Effect: How MediaVest's New Research Is Affecting Media by Joe Mandese , 33 minutes ago To help clients better understand the role social causes have on how consumers perceive their products and brands, or on the campaigns and media strategies they use to influence them, Publicis' MediaVest unit has developed a new research tool to understand, well, its cause and effect. The tool, dubbed the Cause-Related Index, is based on primary research conducted by MediaVest's research team that shows the degree to which social cause influences how marketers and brands are perceived by specific types of consumers, and how those perceptions can be used to fine-tune advertising and media plans. The CRI is an index based on three key components of consumer perceptions of social causes: 1) The personal importance a particular cause has for specific consumers; 2) How personally ...

“We need to do more than go after the low-hanging fruit and if we go hunting for bear and come home with rabbits we’re going to starve.” I really wish the previous sentence was a figment of my imagination. Unfortunately, it was not. Words like these, my friends, are the kinds of things one hears at media sales conferences. You know why Dilbert is such a money making machine? Because for many of us, Dilbert is a documentary, not a work of fiction. However one doesn’t have to attend a business function to hear silliness. I was on the airplane coming home and seated on an aisle with an Asian woman in her late 20s or 30s occupying the window seat with (thankfully) nobody in the middle. Without any prompting from me she said “Something isn’t right. You know that feeling when something isn’t right? You get an itch in your third eye and you know something isn’t right.” Now I only had time for one beer before boarding the plane so I was relatively certain I didn’t hallucinate that sentence. I ...

Make chili, remember, and try to laugh a little. Where are you PK? Wherever it is, throw a pot on the stove and crack a beer. We'll be there sooner or later. Hopefully.

They say that every time you go to the ballpark you have a chance to see something you never saw before. Whoever they are, years of experience and hundreds of ballgames have taught me that this is one of those rare instances where “they” are right. A few weeks ago on a bright, sunny late summer Sunday the Mrs. and I strolled into my favorite ballpark, Centennial Field in Burlington, Vermont. Centennial Field is, as you would imagine from the name over 100 years old though the current grandstand is a bit newer than that having been built in 1922. It’s a nice, well worn old park that really feels like the minors unlike the newer, big-market venues which, while nice feel more like mini-stadia instead of simple ball fields. At Centennial Field there are no video boards, no radar gun scoreboards, and no constantly blaring music that removes any chance of conversation while the game is going on. What is there is baseball, tiny dugouts, a visitor’s bullpen that sits back to back with the frye...

There is a tradition in rock radio circles of doing long, best-song-of-all-time countdowns on holiday weekends. As sure as the sun rises you could rest assured of spending your Memorial Day or July 4 or Labor Day weekend with the "Firecracker 500" or the "Top (insert frequency number) or whatever culminating in the ritual playing of "Stairway to Heaven" sometime Sunday or Monday night. Who the hell picked that? Now I know all these countdowns are is the usual database of format-friendly songs rearranged in some fairly arbitrary order keeping in mind the top song had to be "Stairway" and having "Layla" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" somewhere in the top five and oh yeah, just because you had to have a Beatles song throw "A Day in the Life" at number three or so. Well, the classic rock station in NY doesn't seem to be doing a countdown this weekend but the, I don't know quite what to call it, "variety rock...

So they switched my coffee cart guy again. One morning he was there, the next it was a completely different guy of indeterminate Arab-Eastern European-Hispanic origin (I’m really bad at pegging people’s ethnicity unless its really obvious, for example I initially thought Andrew “Dice” (don’t forget the quotes) Clay was Italian until I found out he was Jewish, though I suppose he could be Italian and Jewish because he’s from New York and growing up I thought everyone who wasn’t me was Italian or Jewish but that’s just the top of the South Shore of Staten Island in the 1970’s after all close parenthesis or this won’t work in Excel). So it’s a different coffee guy for the last few days, one who doesn’t know large milk two sugars and a lightly buttered everything bagel before the words come out of my mouth. For some reason the cart itself still has above average coffee for a cart so I will continue to patronize the same location if not the same man. However Friday is a two cup day as yo...