Russia and Korea are both mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore. They also said if we didn’t start letting them win once in a while, they were going to get their big brother to come over and beat us up. Gee, on all the TV commercials, the athletes seem to be having great fun hanging out together at the McDonalds where they smile and sip Coca-Cola. Really, with those 12,000 free condoms floating around, can’t we all just along?

Finished reading Caroline Alexander’s The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Amazing story. Enjoyed it enough to write a short review for Amazon.com:

After his team’s victory in Super Bowl XXXV earlier this month, New England Patriots Coach Bill Bilichick told reporters that one of the keys to his team’s successful season was viewing a movie about Sir Ernest Shackleton’s fateful adventure in Antarctica aboard The Endurance. That was all I needed to finally pick up and read this book I received as a gift a couple years ago. Frankly, I’d presumed it was merely an attempt by some publisher to coat-tail the success of the adventure-gone-awry phenomenon then in vogue, i.e., Into Thin Air, Perfect Storm, etc.

I’ll now admit to living under a rock for not being familiar with the Shackleton story. After reading this book and viewing its incredible photography, I am now in complete understanding of Bilichick’s declaration of the Endurance as the definitive metaphor for boldly facing overwhelming adversity and unbeatable odds; and surviving.

This book is rather unique, in that the quality and abundance of work done by photographer John Hurley during the trip enable the editor to place the photography within the context of the narrative, rather than the usual grouping of photos within a defined section of a book. This apparently required the book to be published on a finer grade of coated paper than usual, which, along with its square shape, gives the book a near “coffee-table” feel without being oversized. Another design device adding a subtle statement that this is an “art” book is the designer’s use of a rather severe ragged-right justification of type.

While it is a book to behold, this is also a book to be read closely. Its use of source diaries and journals gives the story a sense of intimacy. I did not know how the story turns out (but assumed that at least some made it back to civilization with the diaries and photos) so I was lucky to be treated to a page-turner as well.

By sheer coincidence, I read The Endurance immediately after reading the book Down the Great Unknown, a re-telling of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 harrowing survey of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Both are amazing books of challenge, privation, tragedy and perseverance.

Next time you have a team you want to inspire into the Super Bowl, I suggest either of these books.

According to Advertising Age, a study to analyze “the combined effects of online, print and TV advertising in a single product campaign found the online component significantly increased the campaign’s measurable brand awareness impact.” A six-week analysis of a Unilever mixed-media campaign for Dove Nutrium bar soap concluded that spending 15% of the campaign’s TV/print/online budget on the Web resulted in a 24% lift in branding impact.

Jim Nail, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, wrote a briefing for the survey, in which he noted, “in the past, much of what has been presented as online advertising ’studies’ has been little more than propaganda. This one is important because it is the first time this kind of study has been done in a disciplined, credible manner.”

The advertising study (not to be confused with just any old advertising “study”) was conducted by Marketing Evolution in conjunction with the discipline, credible folks at Microsoft’s MSN, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Advertising Research Foundation, Dynamic Logic, New York, and WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, New York.

I looked at the report and was suprised to see that Forrester did not further extrapolate from the findings that by spending 30% of their budget on the Web, Unilever would have lifted the Dove branding impact 48%. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Forrester is not using this research to predict that by 2004, 100% of all soap advertising will be spent on the Web, with the results being a 500% increase in cleanliness.

That media investment-banker made-in-heaven story got denied by Goldman Sachs, sort of.

Quote:

Another banker picked up the theme, saying his firm had tallied nearly $20 billion in private-equity funds targeted at magazines. “I know the $1 billion Goldman’s supposedly putting up seems like a lot,” he said, “but in this context it’s not.”

Addendum (1:56 PM): Forbes.com weighs in with some heavy-duty analysis of Goldman’s rumored, but denied, magazine strategy.

Quote:

“Goldman would be doing to the market exactly what [Time Inc. title] Real Simple has done to the market,” says Husni. “They’re doing antithesis of what is considered the market’s conventional wisdom. It’s always been assumed that to make a successful woman’s magazine you need to either have sex, chocolate or a celebrity on the cover. But Real Simple reached 1 million in circulation in just two years by putting things on the cover like an umbrella, a cat or a bowl of cereal. Goldman may be betting on magazines when everyone else thinks they’re dead.”

As the magazine world turns at Time Inc., as reported by the New York Times.

Quote:

Time Inc. on Thursday named Martha
Nelson as managing editor of its People magazine,
succeeding Carol Wallace.

Addendum (1:45 PM): The Times runs a long feature story about John Huey’s role in the new look of Time Inc.

Quote:

John Huey’s central role in appointing new editors at People
and In Style confirms his intention to roam freely across
all the properties in the world’s largest magazine company.