The AP has the story now; Tinotopia had it almost two years ago.

Do you see a way to get rid of this ad that popped into view? I don’t:

Unless I’m really, really interested in the article, I’m just going to leave when something like this happens, rather than puzzle out how to dismiss the ad. And if it happens often enough, I’m going to avoid the site in the first place — or beef up my ad filters. Attempting to show me ads that are too intrusive and rude will result in me attempting to block all your ads.

Incidentally, if I click on ‘Click Here’, nothing happens, probably because the developers of the ad only thought about Internet Explorer.

Are there some businesses that only work as monopolies? A lot of people would say that utilities and railroads and such fall into this category, but those just depend on critical masses of customers. There are plenty of places that are served by two railroads, each in its own right-of-way; and if you could get the permits to install the pipes, you could easily run two water systems in most cities. It might be most efficient to operate a single series of (water) tubes, but there’s no particular reason why there has to be only one.

A short story recently in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has me thinking, though.

Verizon will sell ads for its first St. Louis directory

Verizon joins more than a half-dozen competitors selling Yellow Pages ads in St. Louis this week.

[...]

AT&T Directory Operations, based in downtown St. Louis, distributes more than 1 million copies of its Greater St. Louis directory, as well as smaller numbers of neighborhood directories. Other local competitors include Yellow Book, Megabook, Impact Directories, the St. Louis Black Pages, Women’s Yellow Pages of St. Louis and Chinese Yellow Pages.

Jeff Oberschelp, a Verizon regional vice president, said the company decided to enter the St. Louis market because it believes it can offer a competitive value to advertisers here. [...]

Competitive? Is this actually a good thing for the consumer (and thus the advertiser) in the phone-directory business?

At Tino Manor in Front Royal, VA, we get at least four phone books.

This is the official phone book; it was issued in March 2006 by Sprint (now ‘Embarq’), who also send the phone bills and drive around in trucks maintaining wires. It’s actually published by Donnelley, but for Sprint. That’s not important, though. What’s important about this directory is that it is almost entirely useless.

It’s useless because it’s full of errors, in both the white pages and the yellow pages parts. Call a number listed in this book, and there’s a better than even chance that you’re going to get a wrong number or an out-of-service recording. I am in there twice, despite having only one phone line: and neither entry lists my actual phone number. The phone book has been like this for as long as we’ve lived here. Every year they print up and deliver another edition with a fresh set of errors.

It’s also useless because it covers a totally arbitrary area: it has complete listings for Front Royal and Washington (VA); white pages only listings for Culpeper and Sperryville; and business listings for Winchester.

Then there’s the Yellow Book.

This covers a much wider area, but of course it only covers those people who choose to advertise in it.

There’s also the EZ To Use Big Book:

Or, as we call it, PLUMBER, as PLUMBER is the biggest text on the cover. This one has offered up for sale its very identity.

And, finally, the Shentel Pages:

Shentel used to be the local phone company in the northern Shenandoah Valley; now they’re just an ISP and a brand name for an off-brand yellow pages.

In the end, we’ve stopped bothering with any of these books, even though at least one of them probably contains the information we’re likely to look for, because the time and consternation involved in hunting through all of them just isn’t worth the trouble.

This suggests an interesting hypothesis:

Consumers and businesses both are best served, in advertising, by monopolies or oligopolies.

And this goes double for classified advertising: every additional place that an advertiser has to buy space, and every additional place a consumer has to look for an ad imposes large costs on both the advertiser and the would-be consumer.

Classified advertising is absurdly easy to do online, but it was only when Craigslist came along and established a monopoly that it became very useful. Newspapers had been reluctant to put their classifieds online, because the classified ads drove the sale of a lot of newspapers. And all the non-Craigslist, non-newspaper classified advertising sites — of which there were thousands — didn’t achieve the critical mass that’s necessary to make them useful resources for consumers.

Every city or any size has at least one company like Frederic Roofing. I don’t mean that in the sense that every city has an outfit that will put a roof on your house or your place of business, though that’s certainly true, too.

I mean every city has at least one company with a horrible jingle that everyone in town knows. If you know anyone from St. Louis, you might sing to them: “For a hole in your roof, or a whole new roof” and they’ll respond “Frederic Roofing!”

Either that or they’ll look at you like you’re insane. If they do that, though, you’ll at least have gained the knowledge that your friend either:

A. grew up without a television or radio, and was forbidden to ever watch anyone else’s TV or listen to anyone else’s radio, or
B. is not from St. Louis at all. Check to see whether your friend speaks Russian, or is from Remulac (a small town in France).

This one is pretty typical of the Frederic Roofing TV oeuvre, misaligned and badly-lit card and all. They are still using the same jingle — the same recording of the same jingle — in their current ads, and I don’t even think they’ve added the area code to the phone number.

Frederic Roofing, :30, 1.1mb Quicktime.

Mike Shannon played right field and third base for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1962 to 1970, when he retired from baseball after being diagnosed with nephritis. From 1972 to the present, he has provided the color commentary for Cardinals games on the radio.

As a baseball player, he was good but not great. He only had a lifetime batting average of .255 in 2,780 at-bats, but he was born in St. Louis, never played for any team other than the Cardinals, and has never lived anywhere else. In St. Louis, this makes him something of a god: I do not think that this guy could manage to pay for his own drinks anywhere in town. Not that he should be drinking at all, what with his kidneys.

Anyway, his position makes him a natural pitchman in St. Louis for just about anything. In the 1980s, for some reason, this meant woodenly pitching residental HVAC equipment. You can tell he’s a radio guy in this spot; his delivery is great, but he looks like he’s been propped up with a 2×4. In my memory, at least, he’s always that squinty.

Comfortmaker, :30, 1.1mb Quicktime.

“This isn’t awesome” — but the commercial sure is. I wonder whether Geico has two different ad agencies? Most of their ads are horrible, but this is pretty clever.

Tiny House, :30, 2mb Quicktime.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today, particularly apropos of yesterday’s thing about the MTA’s proposal to rename subway stations for corporate sponsors. (Journal subscribers can read the article here; if you’re not a subscriber, why not? You can download a 155K PDF of it here.)

The article in question is about product placement in video games, and how the advertising industry is all agog about it.

That in itself is somewhat interesting. It’s hard to sort out cause and effect here, but the advertising industry always seems to be agog about something, but for all the ad industry’s focus on novelty, very few of its innovations actually work, at all.

This is true behind the scenes as well as in its product: In the mid-1990s, Chiat/Day was famously agog about ‘hoteling‘, the idea that worker-bees should not be assigned permanent work spaces, but that they should just come in in the morning and sit down at whatever desk was free. Computer networking and modern phone systems make this possible, if not practicable: hoteling was a disaster. Chiat/Day — an organization that’s supposed to have its finger on the pulse of how to motivate people — completely ignored the fact that people don’t like this. The program had some good results — like introducing cordless phones so that people are reachable even when they’re not sitting at their desks — but overall the somewhat predictable effect was to make people feel uncomfortable and disconnected.

Nevertheless, because Chiat/Day knows nothing like it knows how to promote things, and so a lot of other companies attempted to duplicate this harebrained scheme, and they continue to attempt to duplicate it, even long after Chiat/Day themselves concluded that it wasn’t cost-effective and went back to a more traditional approach.

Anyway, the current idea in advertising seems to be that, since people aren’t watching TV ads, maybe they’ll notice our products if we stick ‘em into video games somehow.

For years, videogames have been stealing away consumers who might otherwise have been watching television or reading a magazine. Now they’re beginning to attract business from some of the U.S.’s most coveted advertisers, part of a broader assault by new media and technology on the traditional ad industry.

It’s not a ‘broader assault’ by anything but the advertisers themselves, though. Consider an average TV show: you watch it because you find it entertaining or informative. Several times an hour, the stuff you find entertaining or informative stops, and the ads come on.

These ads, any advertising 101 textbook will tell you, need to grab your attention somehow and hold it, and then present you with whatever specific message the advertiser wants to get across. Ads for a few products — diet soda, chewing gum, and beer most prominently — do this by putting good-looking women on the screen. In ads for some other things, you can generally count on seeing a baby. These are some very basic attention-getters for certain demographics, and they’re based in biology.

Beyond those few things, though, advertisers seem to be entirely out of ideas. One of the few new ones I’ve read about lately is to somehow rig the software in TiVos and similar devices so that you cannot skip the ads. If they don’t want to see the ads, we’ll force ‘em to see the ads! That’s certainly a way to build audiences and goodwill.

Anyway, maybe someone put down the crack pipe long enough to realize that. Unfortunately, the video game he played while sobering up gave him an idea.

There are two different approaches to product-placement in video games, I gather: the first involves sticking your product or logo into a commercial video game, and the second involves making your own video game that’s centered, somehow, around your product.

The main problem with the second approach is that there are not that many products to which it’s even applicable. It works for cars — and according to the Journal article, Jeep has had some success with it — but what other products can be so easily turned into a game? ‘Dish Washer 3: Plates of Rage’ might be useful for Dawn product-placement, but it would suck as a game. Most of the things advertised on TV these days seem to be medications of one sort or another, but somehow I don’t think that ‘Flonase Floyd In The Land Of Pollen’ — the gameplay would involve wandering around and breathing — would find too many willing players.

This leaves the first approach, the idea of sticking your logo or product into a video game that people actually buy. While this might work for any product, it doesn’t work for all games: you can easily have a billboard for Snuggle high above Vice City, but that doesn’t make sense in a lot of other games. If video-game producers follow the path of the TV companies, they’ll start tailoring the games to the advertisers’ needs, by ranking ‘advertisibility’ near the top of the list of design considerations. We’ll wind up with games like “Drive Down Billboard Alley ‘08″, which no one in their right mind will pay for, and the advertisers will again speak of an ‘assault’ and will come up with another cockamamie scheme, possibly involving naming rights again. Viagra Presents Staten Island. The Great Ohio Experience, Brought To You By Depends. The USS Cialis, CVN-65: 280,000 shaft horsepower: for the whole weekend! Warning: those with high blood pressure should not use nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

I’ve written before (warning: embedded Quicktime) about the hazards of product placement, as well as about its potential. The problem with most product placement is the same as the product with most advertising in general these days: the advertisers feel that the audience owes their attention to the advertisements for supporting whatever main content is being supported by the advertising. Unsurprisingly, the audience sees it differently, and the eagerness of the advertising industry to find alternative methods of getting their messages in front of the public suggests that they don’t have any real idea why their TV ads are not working. As long as they don’t know that, they’re not likely to be able to come up with product-placement strategies — whether for video games or anything else — that achieve their goals, either.

There is apparently a plan under discussion in New York over whether the MTA should sell naming rights to subway stations and the like. I wrote about a similar situation a couple of years ago when Bloomberg was publicly suggesting that the city should sell naming rights to things like Central Park.

The article in the New York Times says:

Indeed, the authority’s officials said they could easily imagine the Delta Times Square Shuttle or, say, I.B.M.’s adopting the Tarrytown station on Metro-North’s Hudson rail line.

It is not until the last paragraph of the article that the Times points out that Times Square itself, as well as its subway station, is already named for a corporate entity: The New York Times.

And they don’t mention at all that Grand Central Terminal — apparently one of the things under consideration for a new corporate name — is already named for the New York Central Railroad.

A lot of things are named after corporate entities without anyone minding, or even thinking much about it: Wrigley Field in Chicago is named for the chewing-gum company. The Sears Tower is named for a certain mail-order and department-store company. Ditto the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and Busch Stadium: they all carry corporate names that are ‘organic’ in that they were named by (and for) the companies that built them.

These companies were also fairly well-respected — they built these buildings and stadiums, after all — and all these names are names rather than brands. Even among today’s sponsored-name stadiums, a few stand out as not setting one’s teeth on edge: Ford Field, Miller Park, Coors Field, and Heinz Field. All are so-named because big companies wrote checks, of course, but they’re also in a way named for the car, beer, and ketchup magnates who helped build their cities into what they are today.

You can even make a guess as to where these things are, so strongly-associated with particular cities are Ford, Miller, Coors, and Heinz. On the other hand, things like ‘U.S. Cellular Field’, ‘Ameriquest Field’, ‘Minute Maid Park’, ‘Citizens Bank Park’ and ‘Petco Park’ could be anywhere, and they just sound idiotic. ‘Citizens Park’ in particular would sound just fine; but then the bank wants to make sure that the people of the city (who of course paid for the stadium) are not under the mistaken impression that the place is named for, you know, them.

What’s the difference, really, between a corporation writing a check to a city (these things are almost always municipal operations now) to name a stadium, and a tycoon personally running the operation and then naming the thing after himself? One of the big ones is that when the tycoon names the stadium after himself, he’s patting himself on the back, recognizing himself for improving the city this way. When a company buys the naming rights so that it can add a giant sign reading ‘Zovuvazz Meat Byproducts Inc. Coliseum’ to the skyline, it’s naked advertising and something of an insult to the taxpayers who build these things.

So back to the MTA. They appear to be making the mistake — pretty common now — of thinking that any kind of advertising is desirable and in demand. To begin with, there’d be a certain reputational cost to anyone who bought the naming rights to something like Grand Central Station. If it was suddenly known as Famous Original Ray’s Station, a lot of people would be so disgusted that they’d start getting their pizza from Original Famous Ray’s instead.

Second, companies buy naming rights for stadiums because nearly everything that happens in a stadium happens on TV. For a few million dollars, you get your corporate name repeated over and over on TV every time there’s a game. Very few subway stations are televised. Aside from a very few things — every one of which would present the backlash problem I mentioned above — most of this stuff is fairly anonymous. Nobody in their right mind would pay money for the name.

Here’s an idea, though. If the MTA really needs the money, they should sell off some of these anonymous stations. The sale would have a few conditions, like that you couldn’t close the station without the consent of the MTA, and, obviously, you had to allow people to use the station to get on the trains. The MTA would maintain the tracks, and you would be in charge of everything else. The MTA would take most of the fares that you collected (what percentage of the fare accounts for running the stations? 10%? Then give that to the station operator, assuming that about as many people leave the system at a given station as board), and you’d keep the rest. You’d have an incentive, as a subway station owner, to attract as many people as possible to your station, and with so many people a day passing through your premises, you could potentially clean up by renting out little shops in the warren of offices, passages, and storage rooms that NYC subway stations seem to be full of.

If you bought an under-used station, you’d have an incentive to get more people to use it, perhaps by financing attractions on the surface. You might refund part of passengers’ fares, cutting into your margin in order to increase volume.

None of this makes the slightest bit of sense, though, not least because the MTA is in a strange position. The MTA wants as many people as possible to use their services, because that is, after all, why the MTA exists. But because the MTA — like all transit systems — does not make a profit (or even attempt to), they’re not really in a position of wanting to do anything that encourages too much use. More use, above a certain level, means less money, not more, because the MTA can’t pay its costs out of the fare money. The only real solution is to sell off the entire system, and thus require it to operate at a profit (or at least to break even) or not operate at all.

But this won’t work! everyone says. The BMT and IRT went bankrupt and were taken over by the city! The subway needs to be subsidized!

Well, it’s true that the BMT and IRT went out of business, but then they charged the same fare — five cents — from 1904 until the city bought them out in 1940. The subway fare — fixed by the city — was an issue in mayoral campaigns and, as railroads don’t vote, successful candidates supported the nickel fare, saying that it was essential to the operation of the city. Unfortunately, enough money to actually pay the bills turned out to be essential to the operation of the subway, and eight years after taking over the system, the city doubled the fare that had remained fixed at five cents for the previous forty-four years. The fare has been increased fourteen more times since then.

The New York subway system would be a good one to privatize because it was originally built with the intention of turning a profit. Publicly-built transit systems were never intended to make money, and so they probably can’t.

It’s not going to happen, but it would be nice if it did, at least as an experiment. In the United States, most things are done by the private sector, and most things here are at least the equal of their counterparts everywhere in the world. Most things get cheaper (in real terms) with time, too.

But mass transit we leave almost entirely to the public sector to run, and then when there’s an enormous cock-up we do nothing but examine how the public sector might get more money to do the same things.