AdWeek : Michael Wolff's Column

The Name Murdoch

Michael Wolff — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:49:26 +0000

It is impossible for the Murdochs to be voted off the board of News Corporation at the company’s annual meeting to be held at the end of the week on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, as several of the most influential shareholder advisor groups have advocated. With their own shares and those shareholders who have committed to voting with them, the Murdochs have the wherewithal to re-elect themselves, and their cronies, to the board.

And yet I don’t know anyone who is closely engaged with the company who believes that this heretofore impregnable voting majority can actually protect the Murdoch family—there is an inexorability to what has engulfed this company.

Chase Carey, the company’s COO, has even taken to using the line, “My name is Carey not Murdoch.”

The end is less in question than the timing of the end and the nature of the end. There is in fact quite a sense of awe about what is happening here.

Certainly, the dynastic inevitability has been dashed. The overwhelming consensus within the company and among News Corp. and Murdoch partisans is that the whole mess is on James Murdoch. It’s his fault, and good riddance. He’s the fall guy. He mishandled the situation. He will not become the CEO of News Corp.—not now, not soon, not ever.

And then there is the foreboding. Of all the people who have been arrested and who face personal ruination—many of them deeply woven into the fabric of the company and the Murdoch family—one of them, if not all of them, will invariably spill. And then the lawsuits. Of the more than 4,000 phones that were hacked, how many $700,000, or $1 million, or $2 or $3 million (that’s what the family of the Milly Dowler, the murdered girl whose phone was hacked, has gotten) settlements can the company shoulder? And prosecutions in the U.S.: One view inside News Corp. is that the only thing that can stave off the Justice Department is a Republican victory in 2012—on the other hand, it is this prospect that is also galvanizing the DOJ’s movement of the case.

A mood of sheepishness, embarrassment, and incredulity permeates News Corp. It is also a mood of they did it, not us. That is, there is the vast company that had no part of the British newspaper tabloid business, and then there is the part that did—the Murdoch part.

And if the blame falls on James, a sense of something like pity has coalesced around Rupert—or, even, a sense of tragedy: All of his accomplishments will be brought down by this.

And now these shareholder advisory groups: Their’s is a simple, powerful, and catchy message—vote the Murdochs down. What is being created is an ecosystem of delegitimization.

It’s all tainted.

News Corp.’s Murdoch-led push into the education business has been largely stopped in its tracks because education businesses need support of local and state politicians—and the Murdoch name makes politicians shiver.

This week a minor circulation deal by The Wall Street Journal’s European edition of the dubious kind made by newspapers everywhere became a headline-grabbing scandal—because its dubiousness, however minor, is attached to the Murdochs.

Friday’s annual shareholders meeting will unfold in a scripted sense—albeit with Rupert looking ever-more pained and uncomfortable. The Murdoch family and its allies will vote their shares and re-elect the Murdochs to the board. It will all go as planned.

But for the last time.

Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The Once and Future Steve Jobs

Michael Wolff — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:25:50 +0000

In 1998, Jay Chiat, whose agency, Chiat/Day, helped invent the Tao of Apple, was trying to convince me of Steve Jobs’ epochal importance. Jay and Steve had become good friends (although Chiat also regarded Jobs as being epochally irritating), and I figured his regard for Jobs was more sentimental than historical. After all, at that point in time, 20 years after Apple had started, almost nobody but the most faithful would have credited Apple with being much more than a specialty enterprise. Apple, however innovative, had overwhelmingly lost to Windows and was not even a contender in the Internet universe.

The legend of Steve Jobs, in other words, is not only based on transformative technology, but on the fact that he achieved one of the great reversals in business history. Everybody else turns out to have been wrong, and he turns out to have been right. In a world and industry that values teamwork and groupthink and wisdom of crowds, Jobs’ contrariness prevailed.

His rules were irascibly—almost autistically—his own.

At the center of his worldview was a retro thesis about machines—that they were cool.

The commonplace modern view, on the other hand, was that machines, i.e., hardware, had been commoditized into identitylessness. And, indeed, Apple, dedicated to the singularity of its own hardware, shrunk to something like irrelevance on the strength of its refusal to license its software to run on other people’s machines. And yet, the resurgence that began when Jobs returned to the company he had 12 years before been kicked out of, was based on nothing so much as his continued insistence on the primacy of his box. He took this fetishistic view even further, turning his machines into accessories, trophies, and talismans—into lifestyle choices. Not for nothing is Jobs often grouped with Ralph Lauren in the marketing pantheon.

Jobs was a brander, a pioneer of the product as experience and identity and personal statement, with all the corporate control and disciplined messaging that requires. The rebel and poet and romantic figure, was, too, an authoritarian and despot. Microsoft, heretofore the gold standard in corporate hegemony, was left looking like a disorganized and mealy mouth liberal regime next to Apple’s ultimate dictatorship.
The irony of Jay Chiat’s 1984 Big Brother Apple ad was most of all that Big Brother turned out to have a great sense of style.

And yet, Jobs was an awfully unlikely corporate autocrat. He was too odd. Too apart. Too messianic. Too too.
He may have been, according to Rupert Murdoch (who, until he needed to do an iPad deal, found Jobs to be a “fruitcake”), one of the best chief executives of the age, but he was, as well, among the most peculiar.
His near other-worldly obsessiveness added a whole new dimension to the business case study.

No doubt, part of his ever-increasing desire for control over the last few years was that he knew, even if his shareholders did not, that he was dying. His circumscribed time line lent new urgency to his thesis—the machine rules, and ubiquity meant that his machines would rule ever more absolutely. Apple was never more successful than in the period when Jobs knew he himself was doomed.

He is now the unequaled model for success in American business life. This is a bit confounding because there is little in American business life that would encourage anybody to be like Jobs—everything augers against not taking the risks he took, or being as difficult as he always was and the kind of micromanager he couldn’t help himself from being. Most of all as Steve did you’re not supposed to make it so much about yourself.

But now, a new generation of messianic technology executives—we know who they are—are on the scene. Everybody of any ambition wants to be Steve-like in his fervor, control, and ultimate influence. This may prove to be a good thing and presage a future of many Apples.

Or, more likely, it will prove that Steve Jobs was a one-off.

Photo Illustration: Alfred Maskeroni
Source(s): Justin Sullivan (Jobs), Catrina Genovese (Chiat) via Getty Images

The Age of Ailes

Michael Wolff — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:39:24 +0000

It is tempting—as well as, in liberal circles, heretical—to try and separate Roger Ailes from his politics.

That’s a fiery (and gassy) debate. Is the 15-year Fox News epoch more about politics or more about television? And is there a difference?

Or, is joining politics and television more a marketing play than a political play? And is that cynical and amoral, or postmodern and brilliant?

I was in a discussion the other day with executives at one of the large Spanish-language networks and the talk was about how to get the English-speaking media to pay attention to Hispanic media, with its vast audience share. The proposition was why not do it the Fox way. Nobody would have paid attention to a network catering to older conservatives if it had not turned that audience into a political threat. Politics branded Fox.

But is Roger Ailes himself a dedicated extreme right winger? Is Roger Ailes (as his boss Rupert Murdoch has suggested) nuts?

Or is Roger Ailes crazy like a fox? Is Roger Ailes just a trouble maker? Is Roger Ailes one of the greatest promoters in the history of news—hell, in the history of promotion?

A corollary to all of the above: Is Roger Ailes having more fun than anybody else in news and television?

The network business, broadcast or cable, is an unhappy one. I don’t know of anyone in the network business (no less the television news business), save for Ailes, who seems full of piss, vinegar, and brio. I can’t say I know anyone who even terribly likes his job.

The liberal retort: If that is what it takes to have fun, then we all ought to be glad to be glum.

But, if the fun principle isn’t about conservatism, per se, but about giving the finger to everybody else, then shouldn’t Ailes be something of a vaunted anti-hero?

Who, with heart and imagination, and a problem with authority, wouldn’t want to do what Ailes has done?

His accomplishment over the course of Fox’s 15 years is to have rolled the stuffed shirts (part of that accomplishment is to have turned the liberals into the stuffed shirts), to have gone, on the strength of the counterintuitive, from mere rump outfit to paradigm shift and category killer. The people who were sitting pretty have been flattened; he’s now on top. And gloating.

This happened wholly on the basis of doing the opposite of what convention proscribed you to do. Of paying for carriage when nobody did that, of catering to an audience that was largely unserved, of shattering the mood and manners of cool and oracular stuffed-shirt news.

Along the way, he gets to have a shocking amount of political clout—a byproduct of his success.

The rules, in liberal parlance, should have protected us from someone like Ailes.

But the rules were weak, and the people upholding the rules were lazy, and Ailes was a clever, trouble-making opportunist with a voice and a point of view.

Roger Ailes is what a media executive ought to be.

Photo: Jeff Malet

Sorrell Takes Out His Guns

Michael Wolff — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:42:31 +0000

Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP and, arguably, the dominant voice in the advertising business, recently gave an interview in which he challenged the basic efficacy of social media as an advertising tool.

Mind you, this is against a backdrop of the entire advertising industry in a manic dither to stress its social media bona fides. What you want to be right now is a social media agency—because every other agency network or holding company has to buy you. Buddy Media, a social media advertising agency slash technology company, even took a round of VC investment. Advertising, heretofore, is not a business the VC community has ever looked at with anything more than contempt.

But Sorrell told the Royal Television Society that he had “some fundamental doubts about the ability to monetize social platforms.”

“We used to write letters to each other,” he continued, “and now we correspond through Facebook and Twitter and other forms of communication. If you interrupt that with a message, you may run into trouble.” Of course, he added with artful humility, he had once said that Facebook was overvalued at $15 billion whereas it is looking at a public offering near $100 billion.

Now, in some sense, Sorrell is merely making a contrarian argument—and hardly a far-fetched one. The Web itself, once expected to be the ne plus ultra of advertising, has returned much more equivocal results. Its cost keeps going down instead of up. And social media is more complex and less linear and more anarchic than the Web. There is no straight path for a message to get through.

But Sorrell is wily and, we can assume, his point was something more than just polemic.

Facebook, like Google before it, is about to usher in another great depression in the value of the ad market. Its billions of user views which it can sell for fractional pennies will create, for Facebook, a cash gusher. But for everyone else, it will cheapen the value of digital media. By once again letting the technology guys control the advertising play, the chance is great that they will take volume instead of spending the time and effort to develop a more particular and exclusive branding play.

Sir Martin, in other words, is trying to put a stake in the ground.

The digital world is surely the future of advertising, but, as surely, the digital guys are fucking it up. Worse, the big digital kahunas have come up with a way to make money for themselves, at the expense of everybody else. Worse yet, the forms of advertising they’ve created don’t even work very well—so the entire craft becomes devalued.

It’s war—of a sort.

Curiously, WPP is Google’s biggest client (and it will, no doubt, if it is not already, become Facebook’s biggest client), but, because of AdSense’s fundamental democratization of the medium, this means that WPP is still a small overall contributor. Large ad agencies hold large sway over television; they don’t over big digital platforms.

Uncle Martin is jawboning.

He is at last trying to take back the discussion. The technology guys, not least of all because they understand technology, have controlled the conversation, even when it’s about advertising, a subject they don’t much understand at all (or particularly care about). The advertising guys, trying to placate cowed clients worried about their uncool digital strategies, and unable to truly talk the technology talk, have gone along.

A business that supports itself with advertising, that, effectively, has only one revenue stream—advertising—is almost entirely run by people who, effectively, want to cut out the advertising pros.

It’s a war whose time has come.

Photo: Jonathan Fickies / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Is Content the Problem or the Solution?

Michael Wolff — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:35:58 +0000

The ever-mounting disarray at Yahoo, along with the not-so-far-behind-it disarray at AOL, is just another part of the long-in-coming conclusion that content doesn’t work as a business online.
      “Content doesn’t work” means, in this context, that other businesses work better. It means you’re a goddamn palooka if you’re actually paying to create content when advertisers are just as happy with businesses fueled by cost-free user interactions. And yet, ultimately, everybody does embrace content.
      Or, that is, mature technology businesses (Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and now Google) almost invariably come to content.
      This is partly because with an installed base it is very hard to offer ever-transformative new technology or to profoundly change your stripes and worldview. Google is not going to be Facebook. Likewise, Microsoft was not going to be Google. And it is partly because, contrary to the shibboleths of user-created blah-blah, people love content—and, mirabile dictu, it increases traffic. The problem is, advertisers don’t love it. Or they don’t love it enough. Or there is so much of it, they can be fickle lovers of it—hence the cost goes down (and down). This math has actually created an entire genre of online businesses that are all about being able to keep lowering the cost of content to keep up with the ever-lower price that can be charged for it.
      And yet, there is content that works—that remains unique and that commands premium pricing. That’s television—or video.
      Put another way, what still works, what advertisers and audiences still seek, is superexpensive content.
      And there is a model in which mature non-content-producing businesses help themselves by becoming sophisticated content producers: the premium channel business, the HBO model. HBO was not a content creator; it was effectively just an aggregator and a redistributor. But faced with higher licensing fees and lower margins, and looking to solidify its own brand, it started to produce its own content.
      That’s essentially the same position that Yahoo long ago found itself in, and that even Google is looking at now.
      Just like HBO, Yahoo, faced with competition from Google, started to deliver its own branded content. Unlike HBO, Yahoo’s content wasn’t very good. Better than nothing, perhaps, but never good enough to redefine itself. This is because the price of good content is a scary mountain and also because nobody at Yahoo has ever been a content person—a showman, as it were. Likewise, Google, with a lot of money to spend, has just bet a piece of it on Zagat—its first foray into name content. I’m not sure that a showman would have made Zagat his first purchase, and I can hardly imagine who at Google is temperamentally ready to build a hit-making business.
      Similarly, at Google’s YouTube, there is the much-discussed HBO-like initiative to invest in unique must-see content. But is there the showmanship and the temperament to go for broke at what is, in essence, a server-farm company?
      The answer sort of seems obvious: Technology people aren’t content people. Never have been. And it’s the Internet’s flaw.
      But then there is Glenn Beck, the ultimate showman—and the looming specter of his new Internet-delivered show.
      Google should have bought him instead of Zagat.
      Or, hell, let him save Yahoo.

The Soul of a Media Company

Michael Wolff — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:34:27 +0000

Recent events have branded—or reverse-branded—News Corporation. Its reputation, according to the company’s just-filed annual report, could be damaged dramatically enough to impair its business.

Curiously, it takes a lot—i.e., a scandal of international proportions—to give an information conglomerate an identity (even a negative one).

All of the great media combines—companies that otherwise are selling point of view, personality, story; companies, the best of them anyway, that began as purposeful and unique voices—assiduously debranded themselves over the last few decades. Time Warner, Viacom, NBCUniversal, even News Corp., came to stand for nothing. (Only Disney, arguably the most successful media company, maintains a distinct identity.)

Ad agencies followed suit. Anodyne holding companies fostered anodyne networks. It was the hundredth anniversary of Bill Bernbach’s birthday earlier this month, but his agency, forsaking one of the most famous names in advertising history, Doyle Dane Bernbach, is now, merely: DDB.

Curiously this has happened against the backdrop of information brands thriving most of all when they demonstrate an explicit identity: Fox News, Huffington Post, The Daily Show, TMZ.

That was part of the debranding theory. Media megacompanies housed so many varied and discordant brands that they needed a neutral umbrella over them—one that said (not least of all to Wall Street), we’re really only about efficient management.

But it may be that this very lack of identity, this effort to hide in plain sight, is what has gotten them into trouble—not just, as in News Corp.’s case, legal trouble, but market trouble too.

That is, standing for nothing means it is easy to be negatively defined.

Time Warner, more than a decade later, still has not quite recovered from its association with AOL.

CNN dies a little more each day in comparison to Fox News’ moxie.

Ad agencies which have turned themselves into characterless superstructures have lost the wherewithal to charge clients premium prices for their special magic and brilliance.

As it happens, most of News Corp.’s value is in businesses that have nothing to do with hacking or even much involvement with people named Murdoch. And yet the company, in the mind of the public, politicians, and many of its employees, is now the embodiment of bad behavior, if not evil. It cannot mount a credible defense that it stands for something else besides hacking when, in fact, it stands for nothing else.

And then there are Google and Facebook and Apple—all of which have become media companies of choice not least of all because they have a coherent story to tell and worldview for users to inhabit that captures the imagination of ever-growing audiences.

But, of course, back to News Corp. It has sometimes felt that Murdoch has maintained a rump organization of blackguards within his empire precisely as a counterpoint to the sanitized company News Corp. has become. Indeed, it likewise has felt that his more modern managers have built a faceless corporate shell precisely to hide the real identity of News Corp. But Rupert, turning from the modern world, or rebelling against it, has found solace (as well as profit) among his tabloid reprobates. (Among the reasons they hacked phones, I believe, was to entertain their boss with the tales they collected.) For Rupert, they made media fun. They gave the place soul and personality.

They are crooks. But, in some sort of defense, they aren’t boring.

Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

The Murdoch Summer

Michael Wolff — Michael Wolff

"At the end of the day not much changes, unless there is a smoking gun in the U.S.," says a banker I know who deals with News Corporation, as well as other media companies. His view reflects, I think, the basic business faith in the power of a controlling position—that is, the Murdochs’ effective lock on the voting shares of the company.

And yet, of course, everything has changed.

The final battle that has begun is between a legalistic defense—trying to create distance between the key executives and criminal acts by placing the responsibility on others—and the existential challenge to elemental aspects of the company’s identity.

For one thing, there is a new Rupert. The old Rupert’s tenure, no matter how wavering he might have seemed to his executives and family, was indefinite. Nobody had been in a position to challenge his control. Now, his age is evident to everyone. Senior managers and board members, who heretofore have chosen to see no issues, must now sheepishly acknowledge what everyone knows. The above banker, applying the most positive analysis possible to the new Rupert, says, “He’s still compos mentis, but his judgment is going.” That faltering judgment may be key both to the crimes themselves and to how the management of the crisis has unfolded. Rupert, the Houdini of so many business escapes, isn’t, obviously, the master of this one.

And there is a new James, far now from heir apparent. In a level world, he would obviously have gone the way of both Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton, executives with whom he has shared myriad and overlapping responsibilities. Instead, because he is named Murdoch and is backed by the ultimate resources of the company—including a legal strategy that delays the reckoning—he still has a job, if not credibility. Indeed, the overwhelming likelihood is that he will be arrested soon. It is, therefore, a company without its main organizing principle: the inevitable ascension of a Murdoch.
And, too, there is a new Britain. That is, at least, a Britain in which the Murdochs have lost their power. The structure of the Murdochs’ influence has all but been dismantled—any connection to them is now toxic. The only way the prime minister can hope to survive his link to the Murdochs is to become a cheerleader for their vilification.

There is, too, a new family dynamic. The company’s most significant shareholders are Rupert’s four adult children, who not only hold enormous influence over him, but who also ultimately vote the controlling shares in a system that depends on their consensus (four votes but no tiebreaking mechanism). But now it has become every man for himself, with each blaming the other. Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband Matthew Freud blame James and their former friend, Brooks. James blames Elisabeth and Matthew for helping to build Brooks’ power in the company and in London. Lachlan, previously deposed as the heir apparent in favor of his brother, is exerting new influence over his father. Even the emergence of Rupert’s wife Wendi as an uplifting part of this tale is a problem: She rankles his children, and, as well, his inner circle (neutralizing Wendi’s influence has always been part of the shared responsibility of Rupert’s children and executives).

And there is, surely, a jaunty new outlook in the White House. What better election cycle gift could there be than for a Democratic president to have the wherewithal to put Fox News on the ropes? The slow moving, and vastly expensive, process of the federal government investigating you is always transformative if not mortal.

The British Parliament is in recess now and that might otherwise provide a summer respite. But the judge at the center of the civil cases that have been filed by hacking victims has now asked News International to supply all discovery evidence, including the vast trove of emails, to plaintiffs by Aug. 8. The leaking will start soon after.

U.S. businessmen, like my friend the cautious banker, tend to prefer a bankruptcy or indictment before they entertain the end of the world. But it has already ended for Rupert Murdoch.

Illustration: Margarida Girão

People Named Murdoch

Michael Wolff — Michael Wolff

The possibility that Rupert Murdoch would choose to close a 168-year-old newspaper, a profitable one at that, is nil. It’s just that the man at the top, who once called all the shots himself, isn’t alone anymore.

   News Corp is a family-run company—and, more and more, a family imbroglio.

   Some of the intrigue:

   Rupert has ceded substantial power to his son James, who made the decision to close the News of the World. While James’ power is part of a calculated succession plan, he also has his own leverage: he’s his father’s closest family ally in accommodating Wendi—the patriarch’s divisive third wife. His father needs his support. James has an often tense relationship with his sister, Elisabeth, who has a tense relationship with Wendi. Elisabeth has built her own media company, which her father bought this year—giving her great say within News Corp. James and Elisabeth’s relationships, indeed many of the family relationships, are facilitated by Elisabeth’s husband Matthew Freud, the most famous, and most famously slippery, PR man in London. One of Freud’s closest friends is Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News International, who almost everybody believes needs to be fired. Rebekah, counseled by Matthew, has become James’ most dedicated lieutenant. James and Matthew are determined not to fire her (indeed, she is an important instrument in Matthew’s business). As it happens, Wendi doesn’t like Rebekah. Rupert, who has described Rebekah as a social climber in his family, can’t press for her ouster for fear of siding with Wendi against his children. Rupert’s oldest son Lachlan, once the presumed heir and now a sullen presence in Australia, fights with his brother and is most closely aligned with his sister Elisabeth. Their older half sister, Prudence, is aligned with James. Ultimately, they will have four votes between them when it comes to running the company—with no tie-breaking mechanism.

   Just as News of the World was a throwback to another time of lawless newsrooms, News Corp. is a throwback to insular and Byzantine family rule—and a them-versus-us relationship to the world.

     We don’t apologize, don’t accommodate, instead we wield our power, is the Murdochian view. In that view, Nixonian in so many ways, the campaign against the News of the World is a campaign by Murdoch enemies.

     The embattled Murdochs—as they see themselves—have denied, stonewalled, stood tough, no matter that virtually every statement they’ve made about the unfolding scandal has been contradicted by events to come.

     If there’s regret on their part, it’s not so much about breaking the law as it is about giving their enemies a weapon. Shutting the paper down is, they hope, a way to take away that weapon.

James seeks to be his father. He’s Rupert without the subtlety—quite something to think about. Even his father was gob smacked when, during the election campaign for prime minister, James charged over to the offices of the editor of the Independent to publicly upbraid him for his paper’s coverage of News Corp.

     Rupert has watched much of the unfolding of this scandal from afar—and he’s been grumpy about it, often complaining to Robert Thomson, the Wall Street Journal editor, about how James has been handling the mess. That’s one reason James doesn’t much like Thomson or his father’s other counselors (he sees himself as his father’s counselor)—their advice often leads to his interference. In this he has the support of his siblings, who don’t like their father’s interference either. (Two of Rupert’s key confidants, his communications chief, Gary Ginsberg, and general counsel, Lon Jacobs, lost their jobs this year in part because they didn’t get along with James.)

     Recently, the Murdochs have started to refer to the hacking scandal as a crisis as serious as News Corp.’s near bankruptcy in the early '90s—in family lore one of Rupert’s finest moments.

     That, however, was a crisis resolved by negotiation, cutting deals, and leveraging strength. Rupert is at his best when talking power to power (one reason why the BSkyB deal seems still viable).

     But this crisis is about public perception and trust—which is not, to say the least, Rupert’s nor his son’s métier. Family insiders say that it was Freud, the PR man in the family, who suggested closing the paper. He is said to have described it to James as a “Wapping” approach—that is, when Rupert in the dead of night moved his British papers to Wapping on the outskirts of London to break the print unions.

     Closing the News of the World may be the first instance of proactive PR strategizing during the entire term of the scandal, but, in the language of scandals, it’s probably too little too late. (News Corp. executives not implicated in the scandal openly talk with gallows humor about all the shoes that have yet to drop.)

     Credibility may be restored, and the public cry for blood sated, only when the company is no longer run by someone named Murdoch.

The Lion King

Michael Wolff — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:43:23 +0000

This has been my first year at the Cannes Lions festival.

Cannes is the premier advertising festival, but, considering that it is preceded by the much more famous Cannes Film Festival, it can’t help but seem a little lame. When, at this time of the year, you say, “I’ll be in Cannes,” almost everyone outside of the advertising business will say brightly, “For the film festival?” And you must say, sheepishly, “No, for the advertising one.”

The first International Advertising Film Festival in 1954, an effort to promote the creative bona fides of TV ads, had 187 entries representing 14 countries; the current one has 24,000 entries representing 90 countries—and 8,000 delegates. And yet, surely, advertising has even less respect and glamour now than it did then. A discordant note here for any outsider is the constant use of the word “creative” in a world where no one else thinks of advertising as a creative act. Movies are creative, advertising…well, hardly.

And yet, movies are a dwindling industry (at the film festival it is much more likely to meet people trying to codger a meal than people trying to buy you one), and its product, dominated by sequels and franchise concepts, is “creative” only by an imaginative leap (movies are surely as committee-driven, manipulative, and formulaic as ads). Say this for advertising, its very form and nature is now so open to debate, reinvention, and unlikely possibilities (the maker of Angry Birds declaring that his game is a much more effective ad medium than television) that this is as much an existential as a commercial event on the beach at Cannes. What once was a boondoggle in a serene climate for copywriters and art directors has turned into a marketplace full of dedicated and aggressive buyers and sellers in search of a product—one without clear form, defined outlet, or certain creator. Ads are not even called advertisements any more; they are called solutions.

Oh, and there is a lot of money here—and, it appears, a desperate desire to spend it on whatever it is that will solve all the problems.

The search for this solution to what remains, at best, a deep conundrum—how to reach an ever-more fractured, jaded, and unmindful audience—makes for an oddly metaphysical marketplace, and elevates the word creativity into even more mystical reaches. You have, in Cannes, advertising agencies saying they are really, truly creative (creativity in this instance being a willingness to adapt to whatever the market says it needs); technology platforms (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft) arguing that they can provide the best environments and functionality for these as yet unimagined creative solutions; brands hungry for a first look at these creative solutions once they do manifest themselves; and laggard, old media companies trying to hold on to the solutions and creativity that once worked, as well as trying to gamely say they will do whatever is necessary to stay in the game, whatever the game turns out to be.

It is easy to feel in Cannes that you’re among a lot of people who don’t know the world has ended. But at other moments, it quite feels that we are all here fortuitously as it is just about to begin—and that we will all be able to tell our grandchildren we were present at an extraordinary moment in the relationship of content and commerce. Which is the relationship that defines our world (and, for so many of us, our ability to make a living in it).

What you have in Cannes, represented more by the ferocious pounding of music from the beach and the tumultuous and not quite human din from the bar under my window at 3 a.m. than by any obvious or standout success model, is a market fearful of and hungry for the shock of the new.

To me the greatest opportunities and the best comedy occur when people have no idea what to do and pretty much no idea what they are talking about, and yet no alternative but to keep showing up in the blind faith that somehow someone will figure it out (and that, meanwhile, people will keep spending money anyhow).

For sure, I am coming back next year.

And I am grateful the center to the world, the nexus of all of our futures, turns out to be in a salubrious climate.

The Devil's Due

Michael Wolff — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:21:28 +0000

Rupert Murdoch was in London last week for his company’s annual summer party, trying, you can bet, to compartmentalize his likely-to-be-successful bid for satellite television company BSkyB—a capstone of a career that has had many capstones—and the ongoing and intensifying investigation in London that could undo his career.

These same two issues will have been on the minds of many of the center and right-of-center members of the British establishment, including most of David Cameron’s cabinet, who attended the News Corp. party in Kensington Gardens: Will Rupert succeed in truly—totally and completely—dominating British media, or will he come tumbling down? The latter is only slightly less likely than the former.

While the phone hacking scandal is omnipresent in the U.K., it is a story that continues to unfold in the U.S. as though by sporadic telegraph, and always seems to require a ritual recap for the implacably unaware American audience. In sum: It is now well-documented that employees of Murdoch’s News of the World British tabloid eavesdropped on the voice mail messages of practically anybody who was anybody in Britain for the better part of the last 10 years—the most recent revelations put Kate Middleton and Tony Blair on this list—including, undoubtedly, some of the people who went to the News Corp. party. Although this might not have seemed like much of a crime while it was being committed by myriad News Corp. reporters, and sanctioned by their bosses—just hacks being hacks—it has since transmuted into a profound breach of the civil trust. And to date, each next domino in the inquest has fallen.

The informed speculation in U.K. media and political circles is about which present and former members of the top circle of News Corp. management in London will next be frog marched in front of a tribunal. In addition to company chief Rebekah Wade Brooks (who herself appears to have been hacked by NoW reporters) and her predecessor Les Hinton, who now runs The Wall Street Journal, this might naturally include Rupert’s son, James, who approved the early settlements in the case—settlements so large they could only reasonably be hush-money payoffs.

And yet the company’s largely American shareholder base remains somehow unaware or in denial about what’s happening. News Corp. faces its greatest peril since it almost went bankrupt in the early ’90s, and yet the share price holds.

This is partly because of the Rupert effect. Shareholders invest in the company as a bet on Murdoch himself. He has been in many a tight squeeze before, and part of his value is that he gets out of them. And it is partly because the U.S. media is disinclined to pursue Murdoch or to spend much time on foreign business news (in the past, The Wall Street Journal was the one paper that might be counted on to cover such stories).

And yet this really appears to be an unstoppable thing.

First, they did it. Boy, did they do it. And then they tried to cover it up. Oh, and it turns out they documented it, too. And then there is the hard-core, bedrock, long-oppressed, anti-Murdoch faction in the U.K., suddenly armed with a mighty weapon: a scandal, into its third year, that drips out week after week. There doesn’t seem like any going back to an invulnerable Rupert.

And there is a newspaper that has committed itself to this dogged and captivating pursuit. The Guardian—also the paper of WikiLeaks—is having what can only be called its Watergate moment, and its editor, the Delphic Alan Rusbridger, his Ben Bradlee moment. The newspaper film of the summer, Page One, should not be about The New York Times puzzling over its own purpose, but about The Guardian, which has no doubt about its mission. Murdoch is its unmistakable Nixon. In that, the hacking scandal is the perfect dénouement of the Murdoch career. Hacking is not at all an aberration, or a what-were-they-thinking error of judgment and strategy, but an expression of the company’s fundamental identity: It’s not just that they did it, but, more importantly, this is what they do.

News Corp., as fierce as almost any company has ever been, has nearly always had greater staying power than any of its many antagonists. And, indeed, at many points in this scandal, it seemed like News Corp. would stonewall through. But the very nature of the story, of its myriad and prominent participants, of a Murdoch backlash long thwarted, and of The Guardian’s near soulful stewardship of the unfolding details, has meant that the scandal comes back each time with greater and greater force.

It is, frankly, an amazing story. The indomitable patriarch who will shortly be forced to plead age and infirmity; his headstrong son whose eagerness to do what his father would have done will shortly doom him; the loyalists who will unquestionably fall on their swords; an upending of the moral landscape in which the miscreants once happily functioned; and the virtuous newspaper, perhaps the last great newspaper, with a last great editor, who, long waiting for and never believing it would get such an opportunity, now has the devil in its sights.

We in America are poorer for missing out on the telling of this tale.