Media Curmudgeon

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January 25, 2007

Don't Do Business With Merrill Lynch

In a week in which the NFL is celebrating the first time two African-American head coaches will meet in the upcoming Super Bowl, Merrill Lynch announced that its African-American CEO, Stanley O'Neal, earned a whopping $48 million last year.

I'm delighted that Tony Dungee and his good pal Lovie Smith will meet in the Super Bowl and that the New York Giants picked an African-American as its General Manager--high time that blacks got their place in the firmament of the NFL. But it’s also high time that consumers begin to revolt against the outrageously high pay packages of CEOs and other corporate executives.

Merrill Lynch’s O’Neal was only the second-highest paid Wall Street executive. Goldman-Sachs Group’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, took home $54 million last year. However, there is little the average consumer can do to revolt against obscene investment banking pay packages because we are not involved in advising corporate mergers and buyouts or in bond trading. But we can throw our weight around if we do business with a company that has a consumer component, such as Merrill-Lynch’s stockbrokerage unit.

Therefore, if you do business with Merrill-Lynch, protest by cancelling your account and let them know that you’re doing so because of the unconscionable high pay of its top executives. Stanley O’Neal made $48 million, EVP Dow Kim (ironic name) made $37 million, EVP Greg Fleming made $34 million, EVP Ahmass Fakahany made $30 million, and EVP Robert McCann made $23 million, according to the Thursday, January 25, Wall Street Journal. That’s $172 million to five men. I don’t care if it is a diverse group racially and ethnically, it’s too much money.

In the same issue of the Wall Street Journal there was an article that Home Depot’s new CEO, Frank Blake, “rejected the big retailer’s first offer as too rich” and took a compensation package that was about one-third as rich as that of his predecessor, Robert Nardelli. In a statement, Blake said that he “wanted to be totally aligned with shareholders” and took a pay package that was directly related to performance. What a switch.

So, do business with Home Depot to reward Frank Blake for his realism and don’t do business with Merrill Lynch to punish it for giving Stanley O’Neal and his top lieutenants an obscene amount of money.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:45 AM | Comments (1) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at January 26, 2007 05:18 PM writes:

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January 15, 2007

Google Yes, Media Companies No

FORTUNE magazine's January 22 issue had its annual survey of the 100 best companies in America to work for. It was no surprise that Google was the new #1 and, as usual, there were no media companies in the top 100. No large media companies have appeared in 100-best- companies-to-work-for survey since the original Levering and Moskowitz one ten years ago. Why?

Of course I have an opinion, which I've expressed previously in blogs, but before I rant, here are some interesting (to me anyway) stats from the latest survey: Thirteen percent of the best companies to work for are in California and 11 percent are in Texas (mostly Austin and Houston). In third place is New York state, with six in New York city and three in Rochester, for a total of nine percent. Of the six companies in New York city, only one, Goldman Sachs, is a Wall Street firm, one is American Express, and four are financial services/accounting firms (Ernst & Young at #25, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche, and KPMG). So, what's going on? Why no media companies in the media center of the world? No Time Warner, no Disney, no News Corp, no Viacom, no CBS, no GE (owner of NBC Uiversal), or no IAC (Diller's interactive company).

I believe no media companies made the list because large media companies treat their people like shit. Communication, journalism, and film schools graduate tens of thousands hopefuls every year and there are, perhaps, hundreds of jobs open. It's simple supply and demand. Glamor, power, fame, and money motivate people to get into the media business, so college graduates compete viciously for unpaid or minmum-wage internships. Media companies, especially in so-called production jobs and "film," pay entry-level people nothing or next-to-nothing and people will kill to get in the door. So why should media companies pay decent wages or treat people well?

If you need highly skilled people to do boring jobs, like accounting, or live in awful places, like Rochester, you have to treat people well, pay them well, and give them great perks and benefits. Or if you're in a business in which people are passionate about their field and care about quality (quality food, quality software, quality health care, e.g.) and not about fleeting fame or power or celebrity, then management needs to treat people well and give them a satisfying workplace and an inspiring vision.

Media companies and Wall Street firms are motivated by greed (greed for money, power, and, in the media, fame) and are generally among the poorest managed industries in the world--they don't have to manage well, just make more money. Most big media companies and Wall Street firms suffer from Enronitis.

Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp, etc. fret about their stock price. Their CEOs and chairmen think their stock is undervalued, so they try tricks and PR in order to get their stock price up. Did it ever occur to them to them to try to manage their businesses well and treat their people decently?

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:38 PM | Comments (0) | Print |

January 13, 2007

Don't Do Business With Five Across

When I funded and was CEO of DailyComedy.com, I made a lot of mistakes--worthy of a book on how not to run an Internet business. One of the worst mistakes I made was doing business with a Silicon Valley company named FiveAcross that wrote the software for the architectural platform for the website. It was a disaster from the beginning. Don't do business with FiveAcross, the platform doesn't work.

At the first demonstration, their sleazy salesman answered every question I had about the software with the same desperate answer, "we can do that." At subsequent meetings and when I was finalizing the contract, I got the same desperate-to-close-the-deal answer: "we can do that."

DailyComedy.com went live August 1, 2006, and we had nothing but trouble with the overpromised, underdelivered platform product. It seemed to me the site was down more than it was up. I receved frustrated emails from people who heard our ads on XM and Sirrius Satellite Radio and couldn't use the site, log in, or create a comedy stage. The software was highly unstable, so unstable, in fact, that FiveAcross had to constanly try to tweak it and kept it on their own servers rather than move it to the servers I had leased. It was a mess. FiveAcross was horribly understaffed and underfunded and was therefore awful to deal with when we could get them on the phone--all except their overworked tech guy, Jer Grannuici, who was a good guy and who left out of frustration. As a result of the software mess and due to the fact that DailyComedy.com had such tiny traffic that it could never be profitable, I closed the site on Novermber, 30, 2006.

I was promised that we could drag and drop pictures from one page to another. We couldn't. I was promised we could serve ads using the FiveAcross platform. We couldn't. I was promised FiveAcross had a mass email program that worked. It didn't. I was promised that FiveAcross would delver a usuable Help section. They delivered a totally inadequate section for an old product and I had to write a new help section from scratch.

The chaos continued. Five Across fired the genius programmer who wrote the initial architecture, but fired him too soon (I think he could have fixed it). That was a mistake. It wasn't a mistake when they fired the sleazy salesman, but it was a mistake when they let their head tech guy walk out--only smart guy in the company. FiveAcross's COO said to the DailyComedy.com COO in November that we would get a $10,000 rebate (at least that is what I was told). That never happened. Someone was lying.

Some advice: Never do business with FiveAcross, they are not to be trusted and their product stinks. It's better to go with open-source software. It might take more time, but open-source software is more flexible than a closed proprietary system and easier to update.

Posted by Charles Warner at 12:48 AM | Comments (2) | Print |

Media Curmudgeon at January 17, 2007 11:07 AM writes:

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Ivan Pope at January 17, 2007 06:54 AM writes:

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January 10, 2007

My Mistake

I made a mistake. Karen Roy Crockett pointed it out in a comment:

"Charlie... big oops on this one. The RKO station you are remembering is KFRC. That's where I worked after leaving y'all in New York... Sebastian Stone was the PD when I arrived, Paul Drew was PD after Sebastian. They had a crew of legendary DJ's... Les Turpin, KO Bailey, Frank Terry, Jim Carson, Don Rose. KSFO was more conservative. But they were classy and conservative, not trashy and hate-filled."

Karen refers to "y'all," which refers to CBS. Thanks, Karen, for helping my fading memory.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:48 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

January 09, 2007

Don't Mess With Disney

My pals Bruce Braun and Paul Talbot sent me links to a Media Post article by Tom Siebert headlined "Disney Threatens Media Critic, Advertisers Exit Hate-Filled Talk Radio Show."

It seems a blogger and media critic called "Spocko" on a blog named Spocko's Brain "instigated a letter-writing campaign that caused national advertisers including Visa and Master Card to flee the Bay Area ABC-affiliate radio station KSFO."

"KSFO features hard right-wing talk show hosts who endorse torture and mock the tortured, called for public hangings of New York Times editor Bill Keller and other journalists, and demand callers mock Islam. They also mock their own advertisers, calling Chevrolet "shitty" and recommending that Sears' Diehard battery be attached to an African-American's testicles," Sibert writes.

Spocko posted audio files on his site to call attention to the hate rants and sent letters to KSFO's advertisers, which included AT&T and Bank of America. As a result, advertisers started cancelling their schedules on KSFO, which they certainly should have.

But Disney, which owns ABC Radio, began to fight back. Disney lawyers sent cease-and-desist orders to Spocko and to his Internet service provider, "claiming unauthorized use of copyrighted material." So, the gutless Internet provider, 1&1, took down Spocko's blog.

I wrote back my pals that the lesson from this incident is "don't pick a fight with someone who buys lawyers by the ton."

But I want to know is, what is Robert Iger, Disney, and ABC Radio doing allowing this garbage on the air? KSFO used to be a great Rock 'N Roll station back in the late 60s and early 70s--one of the RKO stations consulted by Paul Drew and, originally, by the lengendary Paul Drake back when AM ardio stations such as WABC and WLS dominated the radio dial and the ROck 'N Roll scene--and sold records. AM radio was supplanted by FM radio and now by the Internet and iPods, and AM stations rarely play music; they are filled with talk--bloviators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Big, public companies such as Disney must try to make money on their assets, even AM radio stations, so they'll stoop to put on hate talk in desperation, I guess. I think this Spocko incident of Disney lawyers defending hate-talk radio and shutting down dissent is a good argument for rooting for people with gobs or money buying media companies, keeping them private, and concentrating on good, honest content rather than hate talk, or anything that will make a buck.

I'm rooting for David Geffen to buy the LA Times and Jack Welsh and his group to buy the Boston Globe and for their newspapers to push Bob Iger of Disney to get rid of hate talk and hate crime encouragement.

Posted by Charles Warner at 01:37 PM | Comments (1) | Print |

Karen at January 9, 2007 08:42 PM writes:

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