Them the media

Rich Skrenta bursts Dan Gill­mor’s We The Media bal­loon:

There is still a power law to suc­cess, and the few con­tinue to reap dis­pro­por­tion­ate rewards, as they always have. Pub media turns out to be a farm league for big media. The blog­gers who “make it” look more and more like reg­u­lar media than “us”. They gradu­ate to the A-list, and start to get lumped in and cri­ti­cised along with the estab­lish­ment. Suc­cess looks like a sel­lout to a big media com­pany, or a good busi­ness doing job boards and con­fer­ences on the side to pay the bills.

Hav­ing once been in the main­stream media, I don’t mind say­ing it was full of people — like us! Get over it.

The future of advertising…

I have seen the future of advert­ising. It sucks. Per­haps it slurps and burps too. Anheuser-Busch has cre­ated a ded­ic­ated TV chan­nel for Bud­weiser. It’s bet­ting that lov­ers of the gassy brew will not want to watch TV sports, inter­net por­no­graphy and Jon Stew­art. Instead they’ll watch three attract­ive young women per­form makeovers on the kind of fat losers who would get dates if they didn’t spend so much time imbib­ing gassy alco­holic bever­ages (What Girls Want), and a fake “fake news” quiz called Hardly News. Hard news, Hardly News? Get it?

The Anheuser-Busch people have spent a lot of money on bud.tv. It looks almost con­vin­cing, and yet…it’s charm­less cor­por­ate crap. Shame. The idea sounds so smart. But it’s all about the execution.

If the Bud­weiser people wanted to know how to make a cor­por­ate chan­nel work they should have talked to the AJE folks…