• by John Gaffney , October 27, 2002

Accentuate The Positive: Media consolidation is an issue made for cranking out copy. I read about it everywhere over the past few days as a new flame hits the ABC/CNN news merger. It is arguably the most important topic of the past ten years and will be for the next ten years. I would read just about anybody’s take on what an ABC/CNN news merger will do for each company. I’ll also argue with anybody that media differentiation and individuation is more difficult to achieve than media consolidation. The reason we can even conceive of a merger between ABC News and CNN is that there is very little difference between the two products, in my opinion. The marketing of each, is different. What needs to happen here is that the big media conglomerates need to scrap the Excel sheets for a while, and get on the street. The American consumer is numb with information. Does anybody really know what a 24 year old working male wants from a news product? What about a 24 year old, single working female? What about a non-white male or female? If I’m CNN or ABC, I’d answer these questions to my satisfaction. Maybe I’d find I need more pieces, so I merge them with others. Maybe I have some dead wood. But content needs to live as a message and a medium, not as a set of numbers.

Butterflies: We’re all acting like the MSN butterfly campaign, which got a lot of attention last week with the launch of the new MSN browser, is a new thing. Microsoft did something very similar with street teams three years ago. Bottom line, they should have checked with NYC government before they got in trouble pasting butterflies everywhere. Having said that, it’s also interesting that I didn’t see anything in the news about AOL 8.0 recently.

Strike One: The World Series did not win its time slot last Wednesday. Think about that.