Tag: advertising

Categories
News The Fly-By

Cab Ad

With the recent dip in the economy, several Beale Street businesses hope to drive more customers into the area with local taxicabs. Figuratively speaking, that is.

Taking a cue from NASCAR, Blues City Café, Club 152, and Blues City General Store are the first merchants to try the “AutoGlove,” a fabric cover that stretches to fit the hood of any car.

Unlike other vehicle wraps, it is not permanent and it does not damage the car’s paint job. In a partnership with Nashville-based AutoHood Media and local taxi company Kumar Transportation, the AutoGlove will be placed on 30 to 50 taxis.

Jeff Goss, director of operations for Blues City Café, Club 152, and Blues City General Store, says that most of their previous advertising was in print products. With the taxi ads, they hope to reach people who may not pick up a local paper.

“We’re targeting airport and hotel clientele,” Goss says. “If those people who are in town for one or two nights get picked up in a Blues City Café cab, chances are, we may get them.”

Prior to last week’s launch of the new advertising campaign, one Blues City Café cab already was roaming the streets.

“Within three days, I had people coming in saying they’ve seen us on a cab, and that was with one cab, so we’ll see how it goes,” Goss says.

Co-owner and marketing officer for AutoHood Media, Devin James, says the AutoGlove is a perfect outdoor advertisement medium. The ads, which run $300 per taxi per month, are interchangeable, low-maintenance, and highly visible.

“[The ad] goes on in five minutes and comes off in 30 seconds. It’s water repellant and heat resistant, and it won’t damage the paint on your car,” James says.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Bad News

This month, the Newspaper Guild of Memphis will celebrate a rather unhappy anniversary. It’s been four years since the union’s contract expired, starting a painfully slow collective bargaining process with The Commercial Appeal management, which has repeatedly shown its intent to fight a battle of endurance and attrition in order to starve out the union. As if on cue, the CA‘s management has now decided to outsource a significant portion of its advertising layout department to India.

In 2005, Mark Watson, past-president of the Memphis Newspaper Guild, predicted that the CA would begin to outsource jobs sometime in the near future. He was a little premature, but he was correct to insist that the guild’s collective bargaining agreement was the only thing protecting guild members from losing their jobs to outsourcing.

“The paper could outsource every position but one in every department,” Watson told the Flyer. “I’m not saying that they have proposed this, but they could do it. You might have one person here in Memphis compiling data for classified advertising, and the rest would be in India or Estonia or Arlington, Texas.”

Earlier this year, the CA laid off 15 truck drivers and outsourced the work to an Indiana-based delivery firm. Because of a side-letter agreement existing between management and the drivers and dating from the early 1970s, those workers weren’t protected by the guild’s contract.

“Of course, [the new company] hired back all the truckers but without benefits,” says Linda Moore, the current guild president.

Last week, the CA’s management kicked things up a notch when news leaked that the advertising layout department was bound for a slightly more exotic destination: India.

Outsourcing newspaper work isn’t a new idea, though the notion remains controversial. Reuters, a multimedia news agency, has moved its photo desks in Canada and Washington, D.C., to Singapore. Several papers across the country have outsourced their printing, human resources, circulation, customer service, and advertising layout departments.

News of the CA’s decision to outsource work to India comes at a time when the newspaper is reeling from a number of blows to both its credibility and its bottom line, including fallout from the company’s recent decision to seek paid sponsors for editorial content.

The CA, which has undergone numerous content changes to cut costs and appeal to readers who haven’t traditionally read the paper, is also bleeding circulation. In May, the Flyer reported a recent publisher’s statement, obtained from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which contained some very bad news.

According to the statement, average weekday circulation for the six-month period ending in March 2007 was 146,000 copies, down almost 10 percent from the year before. The Sunday edition had seen almost a 15 percent drop.

“Morale is nonexistent on a number of levels,” Moore says. “I don’t feel as though we’re any closer to getting a new contract. In fact, I feel very frustrated.”

Moore’s frustration is tempered by the fact that none of the roughly 20 people affected by the outsourcing will lose their jobs. The last contract, the terms of which are held in place by an “evergreen clause” that the CA management has repeatedly tried to eliminate or circumvent, prevents firing or laying off workers as the result of outsourcing.

“All of the work isn’t being sent to India, and some of the workers will be moved to other projects,” Moore explains. “But as all these workers eventually leave the company, they won’t be replaced. … Right now, [management] is testing the waters to see just how much they can get away with.

“[Outsourcing] will be a rallying cry,” Moore says, expressing her hope that it will help to grow guild membership and fire up the existing members. “It will show members the value of our contract as the only thing standing between their jobs and the door.”

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

I want my f*&king money back. I keep seeing a paid advertisement on television that deeply offends me and probably millions of other red-blooded Americans. It’s the commercial for Positive Changes, the company that swears it can help you lose weight through hypnosis. You may have seen it. It’s the one in which the still-overweight woman is talking about how great the program is and how it gives her so much more energy and, just when she says that, her eyes close and she appears to doze off. It’s pretty spectacular in its badness and to think that they actually paid an advertising agency to create the spot is hilarious. But what offends me about the commercial is that right after she seemingly falls asleep on camera while talking about how much more energy she has, a very loud man appears and makes the statement: “Diets just don’t work. Positive Changes does.” Well, as a person who has been on a diet since the age of 11 and who has had success in some instances (though not lately, as gravity and old age continue to ravage my once sleek physique), I am offended and I am sure millions of other Americans who diet are too. Here we are trying to look better to make the United States of America a more pleasant country and cut down on healthcare costs associated with being overweight, and this man has the audacity to question us. I think the FCC should look into this and I want a portion of my Direct TV bill taken off. No, wait, I have a better idea. Let’s have the U.S. Senate spend a great deal of time debating this paid ad and then spend more time voting for a nonbinding resolution to condemn it, like they did with the controversial MoveOn.org “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad that the group ran in The New York Times. And politicians wonder why we don’t trust them. Sure, the ad backfired on them and gave those who live in constant fear of the terrorist bogeymen something to come together about, especially the Republican senators who aren’t so happy with Bush and his war but don’t have the ‘nads to speak up about it because they might lose some of their conservative base. Now they have one extremely important vote under their belts to realign themselves with Bush in some way. Yes, they took the brave step of voting to condemn an ad in a newspaper. And even 22 senators from the Democratic side thought long and hard about this and cast their vote in favor of condemning the ad. What they should be condemning is the fact that The New York Times charges $142,083 for one page of advertising, even though Moveon.org somehow got the brother-in-law discount and paid only $65,575. Chicken feed. And pretty stupid of MoveOn.org to shell out that much money on one ad when they could be using that money on a campaign to get Bush impeached. But they have since said they will step up and pay the difference and the whiny Times issued a letter of apology for giving them the rate, in response to complaints by FreedomsWatch.org, the organization that pushes the war in Iraq and pays to run those horrible commercials about not “surrendering” featuring maimed, legless soldiers from the war talking about how they would like to go back. I went through every link on their Web site the other day, just for fun. Although they claim to be nonprofit, their site informs visitors that donations to the organization are not tax-deductible. Sounds pretty fishy to me. I also registered to become a member and sent them some questions, like: Do you pay these soldiers and their families to drone on and on about how great the war is and how much “progress” we are making? Of course, I haven’t heard back from them, but that might be because I registered under the name Phil McCrackin. But back to the Senate vote — the brainchild of Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from, naturally, Texas. I guess he was bored with all the hard work he’s been doing as the vice president of the Congressional Sportmen’s Caucus, which is dedicated to making sure Americans have the right to hunt, fish, and trap animals. I guess it also gives him the right to trap senators in a room and have them waste their time admonishing a newspaper ad rather than trying to figure out a way to keep more soldiers from having their legs blown off. So, as I mentioned above, I want my f*&king money back. If one red cent of my taxes was used to pay for those senators’ salaries and the time they spent, I want it redistributed to something worthwhile. And while they’re at it, telling me that it is treasonous and unpatriotic and disgusting to ever, ever question or say anything bad about members of the U.S. military under any circumstances? Please. Watch a tape of the Abu Ghraib hearings. Trying to force us to be noncritical about the military is completely and utterly against what the military is laying their lives on the line for in Iraq, even if they are in the wrong country.