The Moon Blog

As a member of what Thomas Friedman likes to call the “radical center”, I feel particular incensed at the medias’ slathering over the Republican Presidential Campaign with the same egregious overwrought tones as ESPN considers NFL Draft Day or as the rest of America relentlessly twitter-chats over who should be the next to get booted …

Couldn’t help but share this great commentary on the March 7 edition of KCRW’s witty and incisive show Martini Shot With Rob Long.  It’s what I have been saying all along that in order to have a truly effective advertising message you must seek to embed it into the content of the programming.   http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/ma/ma120307my_sponsors …

I was looking through this past years’ obituaries on Wikipedia yesterday (as only the mordantly dark do) and discovered a rather odd and disturbing recounting of the October 2 death of “King of Infomercials” Don Lapre at age 47. After years of fervently hawking 900 Lines, Business Opportunities, Supplements and anything else shady and not …

I meant to post this awhile back when a client asked me why I did not attend the Direct Response TV Electronic Retailers Schmooze-Fest in San Diego back in May.  Well, the truth of the matter is nothing gives me a bigger headache than the sound of DRTV marketers tooting their own horns about the …

Opening Up Pandora’s Box: The End of Radio As We Know It For some reason I am obsessed with the unraveling of the iconic media I grew up with. Though there is little love lost over that stupid spindle you put on your record player so that it could drop one 45 rpm record after …

I was recently watching one of my favorite TV reality shows, NBC’s The Biggest Loser (c’mon admit there is some voyeuristic curiosity to watching a dude lose 200 pounds in a month!). Bob, the trainer was having a conversation with one of the contestants/exercise bulimics when the concept of intelligence came up. “You know what’s …

If you are a natural products manufacturer or have a product or service that targets adults over 50, here are fifteen reasons why you should be running advertorials in newspaper: 1) Same Target Audience. The median age of a newspaper reader is currently 51. In newspapers, there are verified circulation numbers and these figures do …

I have been in the direct response media buying industry for thirty years, and I have always been mystified by the entire concept of per-inquiry advertising or “PI”. Even the term “PI” is a bit misleading because many clients don’t pay for the “inquiry” but for the “sale” or per order “PO”. However, the PI …

Welcome to my first blog entry on the Moon Blog. As a media buyer for the last thirty years, I have never seen such a level of transformation in the sacred cows of traditional media as I have seen in the last several years and I am compelled to write about it, as chronicler or …