McDonald's has become the poster brand for the credit crunch. But should it be?
Both Presidential candidates have repeatedly used the example of McDonald's franchisees not being able to get loans and lines of credit to, for example, install McCafe coffee making equipment in their stores. TV pundits and legislators have also turned to McD's franchisees as the main vehicle to communicate the dire need to pass the bailout legislation.
I guess there is nothing more "Main Street" than a Mickey D's.
Using The Google, I came up with 3.1 million hits for "McDonald's credit."
But, reports now indicate that Mickey D store owners aren't having quite so many problems getting credit. Bank of America, for example, has said it is not freezing or denying credit to McD's franchisees, though a letter from the fast food giant to its operators had said so. GE Capital has said that it is tightening its credit requirements for restaurant operators. But that would seem to invite more business for B of A, as McD operators are actually considered low risk borrowers.
Maybe all this talk of the poor McD franchisees will draw some sympathy business from Main Street.
It’s hard to believe that advertisers and Sirius XM can’t agree on some sort of audience measurement system for satellite radio subscribers.
Advertisers say that any system thee company pays for itself won’t be accepted. But there is no burning desire for Arbitron to spend the money to do a third party audience measurement for one provider.
It would seem that there is a good incentive for both Sirius XM, advertisers and media agencies to get some kind of rating system. The key would seem to be allowing Sirius XM by way of its own satellites to track what people are tuned to in an aggregate fashion. In other words, the ability to read how many people are listening to CNBC, Fox or (right wing) The Patriot during morning and afternoon drive.
This can be done on a sample basis. But I would think the technology would allow a more quantitative approach that would not violate privacy.
There are some 18.5 million satellite radio subscribers. People willing to pay for monthly radio service has got to be a valuable advertising demographic.
Have a third party entity gather the data at least on a trial basis and let media buyers examine the results.
Now that Sirius and XM radio are combined, one would think that CEO Mel Karmazin will try and rationalize some of the high-priced contracts that were so expensive when XM and Sirius were bidding against one another.
Regardless of Karmazin’s insistence that Howard Stern was worth a $500 million contract, I’d have to argue against that logic. Stern had almost nowhere to go in terrestrial radio. If XM hadn’t been out there as a competitor, Stern would have signed for lots less. The two services had been bidding against one another for Major League Baseball, NBA and NFL games as well. It’s hard to believe those contracts won’t be much cheaper to renew, if they are renewed, when they lapse.
Sirius XM has a long way to go with advertisers before it catches up with its terrestrial competitors, however. According to its second-quarter earnings report, advertising revenue for the company for the first half of the year was $16.7 million, an increase from $15.9 million during the same period in 2007. That's only about 3%-4% of revenues.
As a long-time Sirius subscriber, I will make a few seat-of-the-pants observations about the service.
Most of my in-car listening is CNBC, CNN and Fox TV feeds.
There are waaaaaay too many music offerings. Who wants to listen to someone else’s programming when you can listen to your own ipod?
The Kid’s channels are addictive to small kids. It’s a battle not to put Kidstuff on when I ride with my six-year-old son.
Last December I wrote about Catalog Choice, an environmentalist-backed website that helps people stop receiving unwanted catalogs. The upstart site created an uproar among direct mailers last winter after it sent them requests from 300,000 people in just a couple of months of existence. Many major catalogers refused to remove the names the site submitted. The Direct Marketing Assoc. (DMA) sent an email to its members telling them to “JUST SAY NO,” to Catalog Choice’s requests.
Now Catalog Choice appears to be gaining traction. Williams Sonoma, L.L. Bean, Crate & Barrell, and 207 other companies have agreed to honor the site’s removal requests since December. Catalog Choice now has over 1 million users.
The site just signed up too many people to ignore, says Hamilton Davison, of the American Catalog Mailers Assoc., which voted unanimously to endorse the site last week. “We wanted to be assured that they would respect consumers’ privacy,” says Pat Conolly, Chief Marketing officer of Williams Sonoma, adding that after nine months of evaluation, he's now confident the site will. The DMA, which offers its own suppression service, still won’t endorse Catalog Choice, but now recommends merchants decide on their own whether to participate. Other catalogers, like fruit merchant Harry & David, still won’t say whether or not they honor Catalog Choice’s requests.
Nielsen just released data showing that U.S. wireless subscribers now send and receive more text messages than mobile phone calls.
As of Q2 2008, the typical subscriber sent or received 357 text messages, compared to 204 phone calls. While the average number of calls has remained relatively stable, the average number of text messages sent or received has increased 450% since Q1 2006.
U.S. teens (ages 13 to 17) had the highest levels of text messaging in Q2 2008, sending and receiving an average of 1,742 text messages per month.
For more detail on this analysis, check out Nielsen’s blog:
The word spread late last week while I was away that Microsoft “pulled” TV ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.
Based on talking to Microsoft officials when the campaign broke, though, the transition of the campaign to an ad featuring cool people who are PC users (to try and debunk the depiction of PC-man in Apple ads) was planned from the start.
Lots of the so-called Technorati press, bloggers included, hated the Seinfeld/Gates ads, fueling the presumption that the ads were “pulled.”
Consider this assertion by Ad Age: “After only two weeks, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates' rambling conversations about nothing have been jettisoned for a new campaign in which Microsoft tries to rebuild an image that has long been battered by rival Apple.”
“Jettisoned,”????????
Microsoft spokesman Eric Hollreiser told me more than two weeks ago that the Seinfeld ads were only a first phase of the campaign, and were intended as a “conversation starter.”
I wrote on the campaign previously, and the fact that I thought the Seinfeld/Gates ads were an example of good story-telling and engagement.
Here is an example of the new ads:
Microsoft might have done itself a favor if they had shown all the work to reporters gat the start, instead of being so cryptic about where exactly the campaign was going. But a strategic decision was made to make the reporters and bloggers follow the campaign, rather than having all the info and content upfront. However, bloggers especially don’t like to have to follow a news story with the rest of the world. They like to be ahead.
I chalk the whole thing up to a marketplace bias against Microsoft. People like to hate Microsoft, and they like to like Apple. It’s a difficult fact that confronts anyone at Microsoft with a marketing title. One of the jobs of the Seinfeld/Gates ads was to do the equivalent off off-shore bombardments, softening up consumers for the real product messages that would follow. Clearly, it worked with some, but not others. My guess is that it worked pretty well with people who are mostly indifferent to Microsoft, and did little to move those who are dug in on hating Microsoft.
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News, opinions, inflammatory meanderings and occasional ravings about the world of advertising, marketing and media. By Marketing Editor Burt Helm and Senior Correspondent David Kiley.
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