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Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), a long-time defender of public broadcasting and Big Bird, followed up on his live tweeting of the first presidential debate with a statement that Mitt Romney was "robbing Big Bird to pay Big Oil."
Rep Markey almost immediately tweeted the following: .@MittRomney loves #BigBird but its #BigOil that gets his affection. $40b in tax breaks 4 oil co's but cut @PBS. Later, Markey's office issued a statement. "Mitt Romney says he loves Big Bird but its Big Oil that gets his affection. In a budgetary blow to children and parents everywhere, Mitt Romney would take an axe to PBS while shielding billions in taxpayer subsidies to big oil companies. Mitt Romney's budget priority is to protect $40 billion in subsidies for the most profitable oil companies on the planet but put an end to Elmo's World."
Rep Markey Comes to Defense of Big Bird
[Commentary] The following 2012 election spend analysis shows the campaigns are sticking with what has worked in the past -- even as consumer habits evolve and they spend more time online at the expense of some of the more traditional channels. According to Borrell Associates, “TV is getting 57 cents of every $1 spent on election ads. Online, meanwhile, gets just 1.6 cents -- which tallies to $160 million nationwide.”
[Watson is director, broadcast at Empower MediaMarketing]
Political Ad Tracker: Campaigns Spending More On the Ground Than Online
Big data analytics has and continues to transform the race to the White House.
Strategists for both presidential candidates are increasingly relying on digital technology and analytics to find, engage and, most importantly, activate voters and donors. These strategies offer some valuable lessons--and caveats--for chief marketing officers and sales leaders. Like campaign strategists, CMOs need to find, engage, and activate customers in a data-rich landscape. A proliferation of social platforms coupled with an emerging culture of sharing has generated not only massive amounts of user data but also a wide array of opportunities to make connections with customers.
Among the many digital strategy and data analytics lessons from the current US presidential campaign, five stand out:
- Go micro.
- Go mobile.
- Get relevant.
- Empower your base.
- Get your money’s worth.
Steal That Idea: 5 Smart Ways Presidential Candidates Mine Big Data
Tracking campaign ads in the 2012 elections is no easy feat. Between the flurry of spots from the Obama and Romney campaigns as the presidential race enters its home stretch, and the massive expenditures by outside groups such as super PACs, it is hard to get a handle on who is spending what to influence the nation’s biggest political decision. The confusion is being aggravated by another basic obstacle: that each major source of data on campaign ad spending provides widely different figures.
The Ad Wars: From every source, a different number
Mitt Romney's Big Bird shout-out, about halfway through the first presidential debate, was one of the debate's most popular moments so far, according to viewers on Twitter.
"Big Bird" and "PBS" each earned 17,000 tweets per minute, Twitter reports. The debate was driving the majority of Twitter traffic. Romney's campaign owns the top trending topic on the microblogging service, but half of the other top ten topics on Twitter were also about the debate. One popular hashtag in heavy rotation during the debate is #zinger, referring to a report in The New York Times last week that Romney's team "has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August." Many Twitter users were looking to identify which parts of Romney's debate response were the "zingers" he had pre-planned.
Twitter: Romney's 'Big Bird' reference explodes online
A million users isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion users. Facebook announced that it had topped one billion active users, meaning users who visited the site within a month.
Although a few companies can claim to have had more than a billion customers, Facebook is the first social network to hit that number. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and founder, made the announcement in a blog post on the company’s Web site. “If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.”
People have used the “Like” button more than 1.1 trillion times since it was added in February 2009. There have been more than 140 billion friend connections. And since the fall of 2005, nearly 220 billion photos have been uploaded to the site. Facebook also said it has 600 million mobile users.
Facebook Tops 1 Billion Active Users One Billion People on Facebook (Facebook) Facebook's 'Next Billion': A Q&A With Mark Zuckerberg (Bloomberg) Facebook Hits The One Billion Users Mark (Fast Company) Facebook hits milestone of 1 billion users (Washington Post) Facebook hits 1 billion users, reaching historic milestone (LATimes) After 1 billion users, what’s next for Facebook? (GigaOm)
The Association of American Publishers has settled a long-running copyright infringement case with Google though the issue of whether Google had the right to digitally reproduce books in copyright is still being hashed out in court. The settlement allows U.S. publishers to remove digitized titles from the Google Library Project if they want. The settlement also "acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders." Court approval isn't necessary. The Authors Guild is still pursuing the legal case.
Google Settles Copyright Case With Publishers Google settles with publishers (Washington Post) Publishers abandon fight against Google book scanning (ars technica) Google and publishers settle book scanning lawsuit (paidContent)
With the new announced merger with MetroPCS, analysts say that Deutsche Telekom has given itself a much better path to higher profits in the United States one way or the other.
The specifics of the deal are that MetroPCS will declare a 1-for-2 reverse split, thereby cutting the existing level of stock in half. MetroPCS—the first company in America to launch LTE—will also pay $1.5 billion to its shareholders and acquire all of T-Mobile’s stock. However, Deutsche Telekom will still retain 74 percent ownership in the new company. In other words, the deal has injected the new company (which will still be called T-Mobile) with viability, but provides Telekom with a chance to make a nice profit should the company want to sell its large stake. "A complete exit is probably an overstatement, but this gives [Deutsche Telekom] a relatively simple mechanism for dialing back their exposure in the US market," said Craig Moffett, an analyst with Bernstein Research. "They’ve made no secret of the fact that they’ve been willing to sell it, they’ve talked about IPOing it. You have to take this at face value that this is not an exit from the US market. It is an incremental investment in a stronger US asset, albeit one that has a built-in exit door."
With merger, Deutsche Telekom finally has viable plan for US market
Spectrum and coverage maps show us exactly where the new ‘T-Metro’ will deliver on the promised 4G capacity. The gains in many key markets are impressive, but adding Metro’s assets won’t be a spectrum panacea for T-Mobile.
In some regions (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta and Miami), the new company will have more than 70 MHz of overall capacity, which frankly is going to make T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray do backflips. With that much capacity there’s frankly no network AT&T or Verizon can build that T-Mobile can’t match. Depending on how quickly the new ‘T-Metro’ moves, it could beat its larger competitors to those cities with a big honking 40 MHz network that puts any 4G network so far deployed to shame. But even in cities where T-Mo stands to gain substantial frequencies like New York City and Philadelphia, the new merged carrier won’t cross that 70 MHz threshold.
A Bird’s Eye View of a Combined T-Mobile/MetroPCS
Many e-book buying consumers in 49 states will soon receive payments as a result of the states’ settlement with publishers HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster. The states have provided a few more details about how those payments will work and have changed some things slightly.
In a document filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the states’ attorneys lay out two modifications to their original settlement:
- Payouts: The settlement had originally said that consumers who bought agency-priced e-books between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 would receive $1.32 per book for purchase of New York Times bestsellers, $0.36 per book for frontlist titles [in their first year of publication], and $0.25 for backlist [older] titles.” But retailers have said they “will be unable to provide the degree of precision needed to accurately separate and identify frontlist and backlist purchases,” so instead there will now be just two payout categories: $1.32 for New York Times bestsellers and $0.3o for all other titles.
- Credits: The way that customers receive credits is also changing. The settlement had originally said that retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble would automatically deposit the calculated credit amount in eligible customers’ accounts and would send a notice to consumers telling them that the credit is available for use. As credits are used, the retailer would bill the settlement escrow account for reimbursement. At the end of one year, unused credits would expire.
States Modify Payouts and Credits in E-Book Pricing Settlement