October 2012

Chairman Leibowitz says FTC open to settling Google case

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz said he is open to settling with Google to address concerns that the company is engaging in anti-competitive conduct.

Chairman Leibowitz emphasized that the FTC has not made any decisions yet in its yearlong antitrust investigation into Google, but he hinted that the agency's small size means a drawn-out legal battle with Google could be difficult. "I would say the FTC's door is always open, and look, we're a very small agency by Washington standards. We do consumer protection, we do antitrust, we only have 1,100 employees. So we would always prefer resolution to litigation," Chairman Leibowitz said. "But again, we haven't decided what we are going to do." He reiterated that he expects to conclude the investigation by the end of the year.

Lance Armstrong shows why the disruption in journalism matters

Even if you don’t follow professional cycling, you’ve probably heard about the almost epic fall-from-grace experienced by former Tour de France superstar Lance Armstrong, who was shown to have boosted his performance with illicit drugs and has since had all of his previous awards removed. Was it an investigative report from a sports magazine or a high-profile mainstream journalistic outlet that finally brought this sports super-hero down? No.

As New York Times media writer David Carr points out in a perceptive post, amateur or “citizen” journalists using Twitter and little-known cycling blogs as their platform were the ones who were the most responsible for bringing the story to light. In the wake of the decision by cycle-racing authorities to strip Armstrong of his awards and ban him from the sport, a number of outlets that were devoted to covering the cyclist admitted that they had been suspicious of Armstrong and his performance for years, but weren’t able to prove that he had been “doping” and therefore weren’t able to write about it. As Carr notes in his post, apart from a few standouts who questioned Armstrong’s performance publicly, “for the most part, the journalists who seemed to know the most about professional cycling told us the least.” Why did this continue for so long? One likely reason was that the Armstrong story was so incredibly inspirational — an athlete who fights back after cancer and not only becomes healthy again but becomes a world champion. But there were other reasons as well, including the fact that media outlets focusing on the sport were reluctant to poison the well, since Armstrong was such an amazing story.

Do book publishers deserve special treatment? Antitrust experts say no

The publishing industry, roiled by e-books and Amazon’s behemoth behavior, has been the target of government price-fixing charges. The situation raises the question of whether books are a special cultural product that the law should treat differently than buttons or rubber boots. According to antitrust experts speaking at a New York book event this week, books should be treated like any other good in the market.

“There’s never been a defendant sued for antitrust who didn’t think their market was special,” said Chris Sagers of Cleveland State University, adding that “agency pricing” (a commission-style pricing system used by the publishers to check Amazon) is just another word for price-fixing. And according to Ariel Katz, a law professor at the University of Toronto, publishers have been engaging in cartel-like behavior for more than a century. In 1908, for instance, a publisher sued the department store Macy’s for disobeying notices that required books to be sold for at least $1 (the publisher lost and the Supreme Court established copyright’s first sale doctrine). The recent price-fixing charges, in which publishers allegedly ganged up with Apple in order to stop Amazon, also appear to be classic cartel behavior — meaning the government was justified to sue them to protect the free market. Yet, it also feels intuitively wrong to equate book publishers with oil barrons, AT&T or other antitrust villains.

Presidential Election: From Net Neutrality to Piracy, The Issues Keeping Hollywood Up at Night

From the economic recovery to the war in Iraq, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have espoused starkly different world views during their battle for the presidency, but what's keeping Hollywood up at night are a series of legislative and legal battles that could determine the future of the entertainment business.

Less often articulated than their policy differences on geo-politics have been the candidates' views on network neutrality, media ownership rules and piracy. But these issues are enormously important to studios and broadcasters. Lobbyists and analysts say the difference between a Romney and Obama administration could be the deciding factor on whether or not Tinseltown gets its way over the next four years.

TheWrap breaks down the issues for you:

  • Arts and Public Broadcasting funding
  • Network Neutrality
  • Media Ownership
  • Retransmission consent fees/Cable blackouts
  • Piracy
  • Spectrum for Broadband
  • Indecency rules for broadcasters

Political Affiliation Becomes Ad Targeting Data Point

Democrat and Republican character traits and preferences can provide brands with attributes to build audience segments.

Research from Tribal Fusion, a digital advertising agency, demonstrates how data assists brands to better understand customers through their political affiliations. Now, with the right data, political affiliations are more easily matched to other attributes. Bryan Melmed, director of insights strategy at digital ad company Tribal Fusion, doesn't recommend advertisers directly target ads to one particular party over another, but attributes connected to political affiliations have become useful shortcuts to other characteristics that suggest receptiveness to specific products or categories.

You Don’t Need Wealthy Donors to Run a Campaign: How NationBuilder is Making Sure Every Vote Counts

There are 500,000 elected officials in the U.S. according to research from the University of Chicago law school. It’s a staggering number that includes a plethora of local positions like school board or sheriff. And in those offices candidates without the benefit of wealthy donors and big advertising budgets often win by just a handful of votes according to Joe Green, cofounder and president of NationBuilder, who also developed Facebook Causes.

But how often can the average person identify their Congressperson, much less the woman across town running for the Water board? “A lot of people never hear from their campaign,” Green asserts. That’s where NationBuilder comes in. Its enterprise software aims to turn the challenge of running as an unknown into an opportunity to galvanize a community. And it doesn’t cost much. For about $20 a month, Green says the software effectively replaces developing and using an ad hoc set of tools that could cost candidates a small fortune. NationBuilder folds a custom website, news feeds, blog, and donation tools along with social media analytics into a dashboard that shows a stream of activity from supporters. But it also helps with to turn voters’ tweets and Facebook likes into part of a targeted effort to drum up support.

Political Ads: Do Minority Media Outlets Benefit?

[Commentary] With less than two weeks remaining before Election Day, the presidential candidates and Super PACs have spent nearly $1 billion on advertising, enriching broadcast station owners. But without unraveling confusing datasets from at least two separate federal agencies, it is almost impossible for the average person to determine how much of that money is being spent on broadcast stations owned by minorities. While the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) requires anyone buying broadcast advertising time in excess of $10,000 on behalf of a political candidate to report, within 24 hours, the “amount of each disbursement of more than $200 … and the identification of the person to whom the disbursement was made,” it is almost impossible to cross-reference this data with data the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) collects on minority station ownership.

[Miller is Deputy Director and Senior Policy Counsel of the Media and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies]

Hollywood Votes With Its Wallet: Obama Holds 16-1 Advantage in Fund-Raising

With all indications that the presidential election on Nov. 6 will be extremely close, one factor in the race clearly isn't: the money Hollywood is giving to the two presidential candidates. Through Oct. 21, 198 "celebrity" donors have given $684,006 to the Barack Obama campaign compared with 14 donors who have given $43,250 to Mitt Romney's camp, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the leading organization that tracks donations.

For those keeping score, that’s a 16-to-1 advantage for the incumbent over the Massachusetts governor. Among the actors, producers and directors who have given the Obama campaign at least $5,000 are Cameron Crowe, Will Ferrell, Ron Howard, Scarlett Johansson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Eddie Murphy, George Clooney, J.J. Abrams, Ellen DeGeneres, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., Jamie Foxx, Brian Grazer, Adrian Grenier, Tom Hanks, Mariska Hargitay, Will Smith, Aaron Sorkin, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Quentin Tarantino, Marlo Thomas, Sam Waterston and Rita Wilson. Among singers and songwriters, Don Henley and Randy Newman have given Obama $5,000 each. Dozens more from the industry have given lesser amounts. The list of Hollywood campaign contributors has grown so long that, for the first time, The Center for Responsive Politics has established “celebrity” lists with the names of well-known people giving to each campaign. The list, which is based on filings with the Federal Election Commission, includes entertainers but also professional athletes, authors and fashion designers.

Apple: 'From a tech titan into a dinosaur' -- but not for a year

"As we have stated before on many occasions, Apple's time to turn from a tech titan into a dinosaur will come, but we still think that we are at least a year away..." -- Berenberg Bank's Adnaan Ahmad.

The occasion for his note -- issued the day after Apple's Q4 2012 report -- was the company's gross margin guidance for Q1 2013: A surprisingly low 36%. Like most analysts, Ahmad is pretty sure that number will trend up over the next 12 months as the company's production "learning curve" improves. A bigger issue, he writes, are the margins on the iPad mini, which Apple has priced lower than it might otherwise if it weren't trying to squeeze competitors like Amazon and Google who can't seem to sell their 7-inch tablets for less than $199 without losing money on each sale. But he believes the biggest worry for Apple -- and the one that led to that remark about dinosaurs -- is that day in the future when the company's iPhone business begins to slow down

Fake Social Profile Info Impedes Ad Targeting

Aside from the idea of giving fake information in profiles to foster a safe haven from predators, one concern advertisers have remains the accuracy of information relied on to target ads.

Search engines and some retargeting display ad strategies rely on intent data from clicks and searches, but social media ad targeting starts by tapping information in profiles. Depending on the widespread use of fake information in profiles, it should make marketers rethink ways to determine whether all impressions are valid. Fake information in social profiles means that ads will serve up to Facebook users based on their falsified profile data, as ad targeting parameters, like gender and age, come straight from the user profile data, said Larry Kim, Wordstream founder.