• by John Gaffney , February 10, 2003

Dial F For Frustration: As I said in one of last week’s riffs, I moved to a town farther up the Connecticut coast last week. Nice place. Went running on the beach road Sunday, unpacked a few more boxes, turned down Michael Jackson for a sleepover with the kids (I knew he’d find us again) and oh yeah, the new little town has no cable modem service or DSL yet. So I figure I’d tighten us up with a nice little dial-up service to hold us over until DSL shows up later in the month. Lemme tell you something, the disc packages for dial-up service should have a valium packed inside. This was the most frustrating experience I’ve had outside of an airport. “Modem not recognized.” “Modem recognized, number not responding.” To say nothing of pages that take minutes to load or never load completely. I know this is nothing new, but it must be fixed for rich media and other ad formats to truly have max effect. The cable and DSL companies (call it broadband if you want) should be ashamed that any customer is still using dial up. It’s like black and white TV on an 18-inch screen. This ad and Internet industry needs to make dial-up hard to get, number one, instead of making it available through a disc at every supermarket in the country. And it needs to work with a good agency to come up with a campaign that can show the differences. The ad business made sneakers into a cash crop. It made vodka elegant. Don’t tell me it can’t convince the American consumer that broadband is necessary.

Martha ’03: Did catch up on some reading this week, including Jeff Toobin’s piece in the New Yorker about Martha Stewart’s case. Whether or not she committed anything illegal, we are talking about a case that is about $225,000 in trades and it has hamstrung a company that employs people, pays taxes and adds to the media economy. For this case to take almost a year and a half is rude.

Parting Shot: I miss football. I even miss the ads.