• by John Gaffney , August 19, 2002

Power To The People: Consumers will always give you the straight deal in the ad business. You just need to find a reliable way to hear from them. Case in point: the recent numbers from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index. The index is unique. It is run by the University of Michigan. It has no axe to grind. No stock to sell. No reports to sell either. Their data is all online at http://www.theacsi.org/overview.htm . What the ACSI data said on Monday was that despite everything that the news media says consumers think about corporate America and its summer of great discontent, those consumers haven’t much changed their opinion overall of their day-in-day-out brands. In fact, they haven’t changed their opinion much all year about key brands. However, if I’m a media buyer this is no time for complacency. No time to figure that if you can keep a brand squeaky clean during this period of time, you must be doing something right. The consumer is holding the status quo. People who take a daily shot at the status quo, like me, aren’t holding anything but a keyboard. This data shows the American consumer is a stable, reliable entity. No time like the present to shake ‘em up a little bit.

Make Mine Custard Pudding: I don’t doubt the sincerity of Gerber Foods new ad campaign, which is trying to educate parents to the dangers of poor nutrition even at a young age. In fact, I think this is the tact brands need to take in today’s climate. Brands can’t lose by communicating quality in their message and in their relationships to consumers. But Gerber better make sure that the follow up to the current print effort has some solid grassroots efforts behind it. Everybody at Gerber better be wearing their CRM t-shirts.

YapYap: Hey, I’m no programming genius. I think reality TV sucks and I long for an updated version of Ed Sullivan. But even I can see that there’s too much talk TV on cable news channels. Have you surfed the FoxMSNBCCNBCCNN neighborhood lately? It’s a joke. The MSNBC executives that are wondering why their ratings are failing should grab the clicker some night, and pretend to be a detached observer.