• by John Gaffney , June 5, 2002

Airline Riffs: I think the airline business needs to forget about Wall Street and move uptown to Madison Ave. You will read a lot in the coming weeks about the sector's "elusive" economic recovery. Yesterday, Continental Airlines, which I think is an excellent brand marketer, announced that its estimated May system unit revenue fell six to eight percent. That’s better than April, but worse than the Street thought it would be. The airline industry needs a wake up call and that call has absolutely nothing to with security. It has everything to do with advertising and emotion. Committing to an airline has become an emotional choice. I don’t think you need to conduct a focus group to figure out that getting on a plane takes a bit more consideration and even fear than it used to. Airline advertising needs to address that. They need to change. Right now their media choices seem to focus on outdoor and business publications. That can be an excellent venue for advertising, but not to pitch a catchy slogan. Seems to me that the best advertising in any field will resonate emotionally with consumers. Offering frequent flyer miles when most travelers are just happy to get from runway to runway in one piece doesn’t get it. I don’t know exactly what the right message is, but it needs to touch the concerns of today’s airline passenger. Maybe if the airlines and their agencies can figure out how to do that, they can turn this ship around........

PwC Riffs: The latest global media and entertainment report from PricewaterhouseCoopers seemed to be the very definition of "damn with faint praise." It said the domestic media business would grow in single digits over the next five years, but hardly gave a compelling case as to why. I don’t think there’s any hard and fast research method that will prove an ad recovery is sustainable. I keep coming back to the word "dynamic." Does the industry have positive motion? Does it have energy? And above all, are brands in competitive mode? Hell yes, to all three questions. Sometimes this business has a lot to do with rough magic and instinct. Hard to put those qualities on a spreadsheet........

Religious Riffs: You can have your own fun around the coffeepot with this one. According to the Associated Press, Cardinal Roger Mahony has written an open letter that will appear Thursday in editions of the Los Angeles Times, the Daily News of Los Angeles and La Opinion. It will appear as a full-page ad. Haven’t seen the headline/tagline yet. Sympathy for the Devil? Dear Parishioners?