• by August 21, 2003

It May Be Time For Fox To Pull Its "Power" Plug: For years now, Roger Ailes has been making the largely unsubstantiated claim that Fox is the "most powerful brand in news." Now some ad buyers are pondering just how much of that power is coming from DC. No, not the nation's capital, but from direct current. When much of the Northeast lost its power last week, it seems so did the Fox News Channel. "When the lights went out CNN outdrew Fox. That suggests that the 15% of the country that was blacked out were stronger Fox News markets," speculated a top agency media researcher. "Or it could just be that when real news happens, more people would rather watch CNN." Now if we could only pull the plug on the "O'Reilly Factor".

Is That A New Business Pitch In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Glad To See Me?: At a time when the new business market still seems, well, flaccid, some agency rainmakers are getting a rise out of prospects for a new marketing war. No, it's not the cola guys again. They seem to have fizzled out. Nor the burger folks. They're not exactly sizzling these days either. The next expanding marketing category appears to be EDS. For the uninitiated, that's erectile dysfunction syndrome. You know, what we used to call impotence. That was before pharma giant Pfizer came up with a polite way of describing the mostly male malady it claimed could be fixed with a little blue pill. And for the better part of five years, that little blue pill, Viagra, and its media shop Carat, have had the market all to themselves. But that was before the FDA approved the marketing of GlaxoSmithKline's and Bayer's Levitra, with another approval looming for Eli Lilly's Cialis. These names may not exactly roll of the tongue, just yet, but wait until these pharmas put hundreds of millions behind their launch budgets. That should stimulate the media marketplace. Meanwhile, we at the Riff just can't help considering the endorsement possibilities. Former NFL coach Mike Ditka (we're not going to touch that one) reportedly has already signed up to pitch Levitra. Might we suggest Cialis take a page out of Viagra's play book and sign up a former presidential candidate. No, not Bob Dole again, the one of dangling chad fame. Then again, some people think Al Gore is already a little too wooden.

And Now For Our Favorite News Item Of The Day: The FCC has finally granted AOL Time Warner permission to add video to AOL's wildly popular instant messaging service. While others including Microsoft and Yahoo! are expected to follow suit, we can't help chuckling over this latest development in peer-to-peer communications. AOL Time Warner, you may recall, was one of the big media concerns that fought hard to have such peer-to-peer video file sharing features barred from the next generation of ReplayTV devices. Now that they've won, ReplayTV is essentially out of the video file sharing business. It seems AOL is ready to step up to the plate. Does anyone else find this ironic? Let's hope AOL does a better job of building a video file-sharing community than it has in its attempts to counter audio file-sharing.