• by September 17, 2003

We found that an interesting choice of metaphor used by incoming J. Walter Thompson chief Bob Jeffrey to describe the current and future state of the ad business in today's New York Times. "If you watch the movie 'Catch Me if You Can,' you see the prominent brands are Pan Am and T.W.A.. Forty years later, look at the airline industry. If you look at the ad industry, you could prognosticate something similar," Jeffrey suggested to Times ad columnist Stuart Elliott, adding, "If we don't get our acts together, that could be us." The problem with that example, isn't so much that Jeffrey made an analogy to the airline industry, but that he used "Catch Me if You Can," a movie about a con artist to do it. Madison Avenue still hasn't gotten over an association with such works as "The Hucksters," not to mention a number of other literary and cinematic allusions to it being a charlatan like practice. So why is it that the new chief of one of the industry's most preeminent brands is building an association with that film. Could it be because the 50- year-old agency chief still has enough boyish good looks to be mistaken for Leonardo DiCaprio?

Breaking Some Rules: The Riff agrees with Madison Avenue's outrage over ABC's plans to keep "8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter" alive following the death of its star John Ritter. And it's not because we don't think it's a good idea to keep the series going. In fact, we think sustaining the series would serve as a great homage to Ritter's TV legacy. We just think ABC missed some other creative solutions to the problem. In an era when actors such as Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart and Marylyn Monroe can be digitally resurrected for TV commercials, we wonder why the industrial lighters and magicians in ABC parent Walt Disney Co.'s Imagineering department couldn't come up with a high tech solution. Okay, that's a creepy idea. Just like all those TV commercial resurrections. But it's not as bad as the suggestion one top agency exec whispered to the Riff: Why don't they just get "Dragnet" star Ed O'Neil to fill in for [Ritter]." The reference, for course, was to the fact that O'Neil's former "Married With Children" spouse plays the wife of John Ritter's character on "8 Simple Rules."

This just in: The Washington Post has reported - yet again - that AOL Time Warner is poised to drop AOL from its corporate name. In fact, the paper says the company's board is scheduled to vote on the name change as soon as tomorrow and that most members are leaning toward the leaner, cleaner version. As far as the Riff is concerned, this news comes none too soon. It's not just that carpal tunnel syndrome-plagued media trade headline writers have been struggling to work with the longer moniker, it's just that we need some relief before we start dealing with the possibility of yet another verbose media conglomerate name: NBC Vivendi Universal Entertainment.

A lot of people thought the combination of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment would suck and now it appears their next project actually will. Even before the ink has dried on their merger deal, the peacock net and Vivendi's Universal Network Television unit have announced plans to develop "Transylvania," a dramatic fantasy TV series based on Stephen Sommers upcoming feature film "Van Helsing." The series, which is slated for a fall 2004 debut, and the movie were inspired by Universal's classic monster films of the 1930s and 1940s. And we're not just talking bloodsuckers here, but a veritable monster mash, including Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man.

It's probably just as well that California has recalled its recall, at least as far as truth in political media spending is concerned. The state apparently needs to do some more homework on its campaign finance reform, according to a just released report from the Campaign Disclosure Project, a collaboration of the California Voter Foundation, the Center for Governmental Studies and the UCLA School of Law. The report Grading State Disclosure (www.campaigndisclosure.org/gradingstate), gives California a C grade, just enough to make it one of 38 states to qualify for a passing grade.