MSN has announced it will partner with Control Room, the company that produced the Live8 charity concert. Together they will stream concerts to your computer. First up, James Legend.
Here’s the thing about a concert. There is an immediacy to them. The idea that you can shout loud enough to influence the artist, the way you’re [...]

Box Office Weekly #034 (MP3 - 14.4 MB - 21min)
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In todays show: The director of Bloodrayne boxes with film critics – who do you root for? … Girls Gone Wild Mastermind admits he’s using real girls… and in my commentary, I pay more attention to commercials themselves than the programs they’re on or the [...]

* What Would Larry Tate Do?
This year Volkswagen introduced a campaign emphasizing their safety record. In the spots, people are having a casual conversation while driving a Volkswagen, only to be suddenly shocked by a surprise collision with another vehicle. The ads are shocking and scary.
In the latest ad, two woman are talking about how [...]

Bob Wright, the man who has boldly escorted NBC to a solid last place among the four networks, is worried about the plan to measure viewer ratings for commercials. Not for the reasons you’re thinking!
Wright, in an interview with TelevisionWeek, says that it puts network executives(Wright, for one example) in the awkward position of having [...]

Apple has sent a nastygram to the company PodCast Ready, informing them that the terms “mypodder” and “podcast ready” infringe Apple’s trademark and confuse consumers. According to Wired News, Apple has been making noise about people using the word “pod” in their products, even though the trademark they own is for “iPod.”
The letter arrived a [...]

A most entertaining executive is Sumner Redstone. First he publicly fires the talent (Tom Cruise - remember him?) and now he has announced he is restructuring his salary to (per the New York Times) “more clearly align it with shareholder interest.” The twist here is, for a change, this language actually signifies a cut in [...]

Patrick Crowe, the man behind http://www.oprah08.net, should not have received a nastrygram from Oprah Winfrey’s lawyers, Oprah said today. The site is the web headquarters for an Oprah for President campaign. Quoted in Associated Press, the queen of the day said “My lawyers overreacted, I think, by sending him a cease-and-desist order because it really [...]

In a move that is surely more metaphor than strategy, the MPAA this week presented Lucky and Flo, a pair of Labrador Retrievers trained to sniff out DVDs. Their job will be to find blanks in your luggage or other containers and prevent you from taking them to an illegal duplication plant. Link to Reuters is [...]

Sir Paul McCartney’s newest classical piece, Ecce Cor Meum (Behold My Heart), will premiere November 3 at the Royal Albert Hall. I just read it in the news today. Oh boy!

…or car or cleaning product or skin cream - you buy advertising. And depending on where you put that commercial, it could cost you a whole hell of a lot of money.
A survey conducted by Advertising Age says that the asking price for 30 seconds on the coming season of AMERICAN IDOL will run you [...]