Wal-Mart Culture/Marketing Clash

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Two interesting articles on the identity conflict underway (perhaps being resolved?) at Wal-Mart:

  • Michael Barbaro & Stuart Elliott:

    Yesterday, in a surprising rebuke, Wal-Mart overturned Ms. Roehm’s choice to replace the company’s longtime advertising agencies — a decision that puts $580 million worth of marketing up for grabs again, two months after the original search process ended.

    Her departure has roiled Madison Avenue and sent several major agencies scrambling to dust off their marketing plans for the nation’s largest retailer.

    At the heart of the controversy, everyone agreed, is a culture clash. Ms. Roehm, a 35-year-old rising star who won acclaim in advertising circles for her work in the automobile industry, was never at home within the painstakingly modest by-the-books culture of Wal-Mart.

  • Michael Barbaro & Stuart Elliott:

    t was the kind of bold advertising campaign that Wal-Mart executives agreed was needed to attract style-hungry consumers: a series of commercials featuring two sisters — one a regular Wal-Mart shopper, the other not — trying to redecorate their homes.

    In commercials set to run throughout this holiday season, the sisters were to discover that Wal-Mart offers a lot more than low prices.

    But in July, as gasoline prices spiked, senior executives abruptly scrapped plans for the so-called sisters campaign, sending a marketing team led by Julie Roehm scrambling to create a replacement, according to people involved in the process. The reason was that the ads did not focus enough on low prices.

Web Investment Bubble: 61 Video Hosting Companies

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Phil Harvey:

I’m pleased to offer this latest revision of the Web Video Cheat Sheet, a quick and dirty guide to sharing videos online. I’m in the process of compiling another report that examines a specific facet of the video sharing experience (more on that later). Meanwhile, I couldn’t wait to get this 61-site overview out there so folks can figure out the best place to host their most memorable (drunken) holiday moments.

AT&T: No Fiber to the Home

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Well, we Wisconsinites subject to AT&T’s new monopoly can pound sand. No fiber for us…. Reuters:

“Our view at this point is that we’re not going to have go ‘fiber to the home.’ We’re pleased with the bandwidth that we’re seeing over copper,” Chief Financial Officer Richard Lindner told a Credit Suisse conference.

“On average, at this point, we’re producing about 25 megabits (per second). But in many many locations, we’re producing substantially more than that.”

Nice to see the status quo – standing still while the rest of the world moves on.

A New Goofy Short: “How to Install Your Home Theater”

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Charles Solomon:

It is not surprising that Mr. Lasseter is using short films to train and test the artists: he and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made “Toy Story” and the string of hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and has won Oscars for the shorts “Tin Toy,” “Geri’s Game” and “For the Birds.”

Four new shorts are in development at Disney: “The Ballad of Nessie,” a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; “Golgo’s Guest,” about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; “Prep and Landing,” in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit; and “How to Install Your Home Theater,” the return of Goofy’s popular “How to” shorts of the ’40s and ’50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate — with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year.

I’ve long enjoyed short films. Clusty has more.

Books and the Future of Publishing

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Michael Maiello and Michael Noer:

Are books in danger?


The conventional wisdom would say yes. After all, more and more media–the Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames–compete for our time. And the Web in particular, with its emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.


But surprise–the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression–wikis, networked books–are blossoming in a digital hothouse.

Revenge of the Garlic Farmers, or More Feeding at the Public Till

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Alexei Barrionuevo:

For decades, the fiercely independent fruit and vegetable growers of California, Florida and other states have been the only farmers in America who shunned federal subsidies, delivering produce to the tables of millions of Americans on their own.

But now, in the face of tough new competition primarily from China, even these proud groups are buckling. Produce farmers, their hands newly outstretched, have joined forces for the first time, forming a lobby group intended to pressure politicians over the farm bill to be debated in Congress in January.

Nobody disputes that competitive pressures from abroad are squeezing fruit and vegetable growers, whose garlic, broccoli, lettuce, strawberries and other products are a mainstay of world kitchens. But the issue of whether the United States ought to broaden farm subsidies beyond the commodity crops like corn and cotton, which have historically been protected, is a big flashpoint.