Kindles burn at temperatures much greater than Fahrenheit 451.  Should be Centigrade.  The debate over eBooks gets even hotter. 

 Throughout history, old media never disappeared when new media appeared.  They changed.  Newsreels didn’t kill newspapers anymore than TV didn’t kill radio.  The Internet won’t kill newspapers, either.  Even illuminated manuscripts changed . . . into valuable artwork.  Like the evening news, at the end of the day it’s the content, not the medium.

 Personally, I like Barnes & Noble’s new Nook, or at least the name.  It’s up there with other silly branding mistakes like Apple, Google and Twitter.  Whatever happened to good old products like Pan Am, Ipana and Oldsmobile?   Obviously, names have some value.  At $259, the wireless Nook is hot and sales are unexpectedly back ordered, probably until Nook 2.  Clearly, consumers love eBooks, particularly passionate book buyers.  Symbolically, so do publishers like Random House with Kindle igniting sales of Dan Brown.

 Crazy industry, though, book publishing.  Gives big advances to writers.  Sells new books at a loss.  Takes back unsold books.  Publishes hundreds for one or two successes.  Never spends a penny on marketing till one is successful, then spends a penny.  Why are so many successful foreign authors “over there” so widely unesteemed and unsold here?  Apparently, books don’t travel well.  Tough business.  Tough to read.

 Most books are still printed the way Gutenberg did it in 1439.  Pagination finally showed up 100 years later.  Most improvements have been for productivity to deliver millions of Harry Potters, like magic, to the computer generation (unbelievable).  Believe me, the monks who wrote manuscripts back then were nun-too-happy with new technology.  Neither are today’s union printers.

 Someone, not sure who, claimed if the Internet came first, we’d all say, “Hey, look.  We can print out this stuff.”  Yup.

 Everybody wants to be an author, though.  Certainly, less risky than launching a digital device or operating a book store.  Plus, you get immediate cache at cocktail parties and future cash from a movie deal or licensing.  Almost forever.  Your grandchildren never have to work.  Your birthplace and country home become museums with tours on podcasts.  Your autographed first editions get collected.  All this without getting dressed in the morning.

 The book business will survive as will the newspaper business.  They’ll change with The Times and the times.  These industries need to harness technology beyond the speed of printing pages.  Trucking one copy to East Flatbush finally will make no sense because it makes no cents.  Long entrenched institutions, like lunches at Michael’s and parties in Tribeca, will somehow change, too.  Breakfasts are briefer and cheaper, anyway.

 Will eBooks cannibalize sales of printed books?  Amazon says eBook owners buy many more books than before, up to three times more.  Sales also increase with iPhone apps that enable in-store user reviews.  The spread of digital TV recorders has shown people actually watch more TV and – unexpectedly and incredibly – more commercials.  Network ratings are up.  The Boston Globe, a very old and highly regarded newspaper, has seen its circulation drop in half to about 260,000, yet its web site gets an extraordinary five million unique visitors a month.

 In addition to smartphone apps, all digital books – mobile or desktop -– offer exciting new possibilities.  Some call this “augmented reality.”  A click will take you from pages of Petrarch to pictorials of Pompeii.  Or a video of Mario Batali cooking.  Maybe pop-up coupons for pasta makers at Williams-Sonoma.  The magazine industry is aggressively experimenting with it.  McGraw Hill is actively marketing it with a college product called Connect.  Digital fiction is next, with an optional movie on your Kindle.  Nice touch.

 Book jacket art may end up the biggest beneficiary, despite its predictable death by digital.   An old client was a leading printer of music album covers when “vinyl” provided a 12-inch canvas.  He collected them.  Brookstone sold pre-fabricated frames for hanging them.  Eight-track cassettes, tape and CDs really hurt them.  Downloads finally killed them.  But, of course, paid downloads are up in the face of declining disc sales.  So are prices for original album art.  Norman Rockwell illustrated magazines.  Quick, name one or two book jacket designers.

 Grandma, mom’s mom from Russia, never learned to read, after 70 years in this country.  Never became a citizen.  Love knows no boundaries.  She was a great story-teller, almost better than TV’s Mr. Rogers.

 McLuhan was sort of right — the TV replaced story telling.  As children, as we gathered in front of the old DuMont (with Kindle-sized screens) the way village natives gathered around a bonfire to hear vanities of the tribal chieftain.  People don’t view computers quite that way.  Nobody gathers around the monitor.  In fact, there’s rarely a Dell in the living room, but this is changing with WebTV.

 Like the music, TV and motion picture industries before it, the book industry will finally embrace digitization.  Digital is not another version of print, it’s more.  Whether smartphones or dedicated devices, it’s all about how readers interact with a book.  Digital also provides authors with new visibility on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other wildly popular social media.  Bibliographies provide links to other sites, no longer pedestrian footnotes.  Reading is richer.  Publishers, too.

 Google’s internationally unpopular goal will be realized – all books online.  A global electronic bookstore with full texts, not snippets.  A prominent prep school outside Boston now has a fully digital library.  Other schools have all but eliminated printed reference material.  Annotation is dying ! 

 As you’re reading this, a price war for top books among the industry’s online giants is generating big sales.  At prices often lower than wholesale.  Maybe some of this technology thing is nothing more than a marketing issue – poor point-of-purchase, lousy packaging, minimal promotion, high cost.  Is $25 for hardcovers too high?  In Europe, bookstores and online sellers peddle books at prices fixed by the publishers.  In Germany, where Gutenberg lived, discounting is outlawed to protect small merchants and publishers.

 Pricing drives technology.  My clunky 1980s Bowmar calculator at $350 is now the size of a credit card and free with magazine subscriptions.  Smartphones and flat screen TVs have seen sales rise as prices drop.  Same with eBooks.  What’s needed are new business models with a choice of purchase, rental and subscription plans.  The biggest beneficiaries are consumers.  They love the big selection and low price.  Also, the interactivity, accessibility, portability and customization.  What type size do you prefer?

 The industry’s biggest fear is that lower prices will erode the inherent value of books.  Maybe, maybe not.  A 1776 printing of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” recently sold for $62,000.  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” sold for $168,000.  But a perfect print of a great French impressionist is barely worth the cost of its paper.  Owners of prints are paupers.  Owners of rights are not.  Old book plates are valuable, calendar pictures are not. 

 Digital is not paper in the same way that Starbuck’s Instant isn’t coffee.  Then, again, reading SparksNotes for your book club isn’t reading, either. 

 Click, click.

 # # #

Last summer was the summer of Woodstock, actually the 40th anniversary of the original, seminal event on Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. The occasion of this long-expected, anti-climatic reunion has been used as an explanation for the “new” popularity of all things retro from the 1960’s. (Hippie costumes seemed everywhere on Halloween.)

See, I’ve barely analyzed this topic and already the above first paragraph shows the power and influence of public relations, the flaws of memory after four decades and the widespread use of generalizations by civilians.

First, the retro thing is not new and has been going on for some 30 years or more. Second, Woodstock didn’t take place in Woodstock, New York, but in the nearby town of Bethel. Third, what most people remember as the 60’s, really was mostly in the early 70’s. I still remember crewneck Shetland sweaters, Bass Weejun penny loafers and buzz cut crewcuts in no less a power center of the coming flower generation than Boston in 1968. Hash was still corned beef.

We went home in the Spring of ’68 only to return in the fall to the first sprouts of facial hair, the flair of bell bottoms and the sniff of Mary Jane. The eternal peace symbol was created long before, in 1958, by a graphic designer for the British nuclear disarmament movement. Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, not long after playing – sans ‘fro – in Little Richard’s band in 1965. Kent State was 1970.

The retro thing probably began first in the 80’s when, 10 years out of college and a few paychecks later, people longed for the cars they drove in the mid 60’s, the Mustangs, Cameros and Firebirds, that were killed off by the 1970s oil embargoes and VW bugs painted psychedelic orange and green.

Also, along about that time, Ralph Lipshutz saw gold threads in the old waspy tweeds of Yankee New England after years of non-conformist polka-dots, beads and rose-colored glasses. “You can look like old money, too!” shouted the young Bronx-born designer and he defiantly changed his name to Lauren.

All those classic horn-rims and herringbones simply looked better in Austin-Healeys and MGs than behind the wheel of a Chevy Super Sport with four-on-the-floor and dual exhausts. The beginning of the American automobile industry’s destruction probably started then when carriage trade meant more than horsepower.

Prior to all this, nobody wanted retro anything. Why aspire to the chrome and Formica look of the fifties, the olive drab of the forties or the thread-bare look of the thirties? We wanted a new look, not a hand-me-down lifestyle. So, Army-Navy stores started selling turtlenecks. Werner Erhard started selling new age philosophy. And Bob Dylan started outselling Bobby Rydell. Somewhere along Route 66, salsa out sold catsup and pizza was American pie. So much for nostalgia.

New technology helped spread new thinking. Color television was widely available and at lower prices by late 1960s. Stereo had fully replaced high fidelity. Movies were changing, too, and all these media were changing us. No more Dirk Bogarde in wet trenches or Humphrey Bogart in wet trench coats. Gone from the theater were the likes of “Gone with the Wind.” Fellini, Bergmann and Kurosawa replaced Houston, Ford and DeMille. The classic western was replaced by the art film and with it a cultural lifestyle based on history was replaced by anything avant-garde.

Arguably, really arguably, two things at this point other than Ralph Lauren contributed to the popularity of the retro look — cheap travel to Europe and the movie “Bonnie & Clyde.” Huh?

As now-defunct airlines, such as Pan Am and TWA, fought for market share in 1970, fares to Europe dropped to a not-believable $199 roundtrip and, with Frommer’s $5-dollar-a-day guide, there was every reason to explore the stuff of history books. Retro was reality. French vineyards, Tuscan hills, British Cotswolds. So quaint, so charming. We saw Europe’s battlefields a mere 20 years after World War II – a refreshing change from Vietnam’s mind fields at Columbia, Harvard and Berkley. It was a chance to see Grandpa’s homeland and live the French you learned at school or Italian you heard at home. Capishe?

Whether it was James in an Aston or Marcello in an Alfa, we were evolving from “Easy Rider” to riding an easy lifestyle that would force us one day to look back. We quickly went from a patina to a shine, from charming to old fashioned in a blink, and never trusted anyone over 30. Maybe too quickly we rejected black and white TVs, Hush Puppies, Ramblers, Wiffle Balls and spaldeens, but also quickly missed them. After a mere decade, we made the “Official Preppy Handbook” a bestseller in 1980 – 30 years ago !

Oddly, Japan in that decade exploded on the economic scene and not only acquired our buildings but acquired our taste in foods, art and apparel. As things were made less and less in America, Japan was buying more and more J. Press. They liked the look so much, they bought the venerable New Haven-based haberdashery (now, there’s an old-fashioned, if not archaic, word). Even Brooks Brothers sells more there than here.

Then came the movies reinforcing retro’s renaissance. The preppy look, that died with JFK, was resuscitated in 1970 with Erick Segal’s “Love Story.” We applauded those wonderful stripped suits and fedoras in Bonnie & Clyde as much as the script. Stars like Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal and a young graduate named Dustin Hoffman made us long for a simpler time and place when a pack of cigarettes, a gallon of gas and a slice of pizza all cost 25 cents each. Candy apple red was dead.

Suddenly, retro is metro and we lost nothing in the process. In fact, we gained a lot. Brick and mortar instead of glass and steel. Cashmere instead of polyester. Granite instead of Formica. Leather instead of real Naugahyde. Books instead of CliffsNotes. Real, instead of . . . almost real. What were we thinking? It wasn’t disposable, it was despicable.

Slowly, nostalgic became analgesic. Certainly, not anti-septic. Definitely not anti-establishment. Clearly, established. Antique goods and modern prices boomed. Art Nouveau was, well, nouvelle, and restoration outdid renovation. Grand Central Station was saved.

Prell, Doan’s, Gold Bond, Old Spice, Animal Crackers, Peeps, Good Humor, Oreos, Ivy League, muscle cars, comic characters, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, three-piece suits, horn-rimmed glasses, classic, traditional, remakes, revivals, reprises, retreads – R E A L I T Y.

Perceived and Posted By Jerry Schwartz

Amazingly, people still wonder why the stock market moves up and down. It’s really nothing new—more buyers than sellers…or vice versa. Usually, the movements are in anticipation of future news and events, often looking out six months, more or less, often not fighting the Fed, commonly after insiders make their move, sometimes when short sellers cover positions, regularly too late when too many stories have already appeared in the press, always when P/E get too high or too low. Rarely surprises.
There are bulls and bears debating over the market’s direction just as there are Republicans and Democrats debating healthcare reform. In the same publication, one columnist says the rally’s over while another writes about hidden values. One day the market is running out of steam and three up days later, it’s headed into new territory. Everyone is always prognosticating because everyone wants to call the market and be right. Fortune tellers attract curiosity, while forecasters attract subscribers and advertising, or deals and investors.

But, what really moves the market and individual stock is consensus—most people believing Apple is overvalued, Microsoft is overlooked, Home Depot is under-appreciated and Amazon is just appreciated too much. Not everyone appreciates this.
The latest game is forecasting revenues, not predicting profits. Companies cut costs like red herrings over the last eighteen months. Naturally, earnings went up. Cutting costs is easy, as stronger than expected earnings this spring and summer showed and fueled the market. Richard and Mimi Farina sang a song some 40 years ago about being down so long, can’t tell when it’s up. Or, up too much. Or, down too much. Does anyone really know?

Increasing revenues is another matter. Ask any venture capitalist, LBO king or takeover specialist trying to pay for an acquisition by slashing expenses. Only so much can be gained from inventory restocking before driving sales organically becomes vital. That’s not the same as growing top line by acquisitions. The musical chairs of stripping and bailing is a common strategy. Banks’ willingness to lend only prolongs the dance until the party’s over and the deal goes bad.

“Rev Revenues” is my new buzz word for the economy, the 2010 version of 1978′s “Whip Inflation Now,” a stupid lapel button promoted by an old Republican administration.
If the fancy financial guys were the drunken sailors of the recent decade’s losses, marketing executives are true captains of industry, the wind in sales, who were regularly thrown overboard. Yes, that includes public relations, advertising, sales promotion and others who don’t understand flash trading, derivatives and currency swaps, but know how to catch fish. Typically, they’re the first ones to go in a recession, because they are the spenders and, besides, old habits die hard.
Not only does marketing generate revenue—in good times and bad—but it is leading the movement to social media, a true global change, exciting consumers and investors to search out new sources and reasons to buy goods and services…and stock like never before. The appeal is clear: all that stuff at their fingertips, a click away, including healthcare policies and proposals.

Yes, those people in the offices between the corners are mobilizing public opinion. They are using their creative juices to build loyalty and connect with consumers, investors and voters. Today, power and influence belong to those who have mastered the art of engagement, not the science of finance.

Yale economist, Robert Shiller, recently wrote about the phenomenon of publicity, referring to it as a huge feedback loop of stories and news. He said the market is unpredictable because stories change and the process is complex. More simply, he said, when stocks headed down last winter, there was a proliferation of negative stories. Duh! In his defense, he’s only an economist, not a publicist.

Part of the problem is too much information, more than ever before from more sources than even before. Schiller was right when he called it “noise” and referred to the “modern mathematics of chaos theory.” But he failed to blame the sheer volume of stories hitting consumers and investors from so many traditional and, now, new media. Whom do you believe? What are the filters? Where is the truth? How else can you explain the market’s decline when productivity is reported at its highest level in six years? Or, its rise when unemployment hits a 26-year high?

Never before have IR and PR been so important, if only to control and harness the flow of ideas and information. It’s really not that different from needing lawyers to unscramble and interpret laws created, in the first place, by lawyers. Sometimes, this leads to new revenue and profit sources.

Investor relations is not widely loved. Uncertain times like these make it understandably hard to value. When the market is bad, management says nothing we do will help. Conversely, when times are good, why do they need IR? Sounds like a reasonable bet to me—spend a couple hundred thousand dollars to potentially impact hundreds of millions in market cap. Plus, management gets a hardworking, moderately compensated executive to deal with shareholders, the SEC and pesky reporters.
The problem is probably mostly our own fault. At the exact moment IR was distancing itself professionally from PR, publicity was having a greater impact on stock prices. At the exact moment, good shareholder communications was the goal, flash trading took over. At the exact moment we were mourning the death of fancy printed annual reports, social media bursts on the scene changing the entire definition of timely disclosure. Dow Jones and Reuters are slower than a Tweet. Annual reports are history books in a world of future shock.

Really bright economists and analysts join really bright editors and reporters to simultaneously say the market’s going up, going down or, worse, going sideways. Every era has its business trends. In the 1950s, it was the entrepreneur who built whole industries on the backs of two wars. The 1960s saw the rise of the MBA. The 1970s created conglomerateurs like Royal Little and Harold Geneen. The 1980s enjoyed a number of star CFOs such as Jerry York of IBM and Chrysler. And if the 1990s was a time for CIOs, why not CMOs and other marketing pros in the 2000s? See, sweet?
Without marketing, there would be no revenues to finance big factories that employ workforces that require HR departments that all contribute to incomes that enable style purchases that rev revenues and finally move stock prices. We earn our keep.

# #

Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz

Is the sign on the road that says “Deer Crossing” for us or the deer? Obviously, deer can’t read. Perhaps, they can laugh.

Is the sign on the building that says “Seeing Eye Dogs Allowed” for us or the dogs? Dogs can’t read, unless they went to the same school as the deer, so logically the sign is for us. But why would we care unless we were blind, but then we couldn’t read it.

Walking quickly through Grand Central Terminal, a sign on the way up to a restaurant warns “Don’t Sit on the Steps.” Most people regardlessly sitting on the steps are Asian tourists. Probably, they don’t understand English.

Signs are our guideposts. Guideposts are our signs. They are verbal and non-verbal emblematic indicators that signal news, events, places, purposes and activities. They signify the significant or they would be irrelevant. As I’ve grown up, I’ve grown impatient with signs of irrelevance, meaningless signs. My theory is that sign-making is a job somebody gets stuck doing, not something you sign on to do. Calligraphers don’t seek careers with the highway department, do they? But often they become graphic designers, some even become web designers. The 1960s peace sign was created for a 1950s nuclear disarmament movement by a professional designer. It can be generated in HTML by typing &#x262E.

Perhaps it’s human nature not to read or believe the content on signs. We often drive through them, the way we ignore tags and labels. Many consumers never remove the white cloth tags on the bottoms of chairs and mattresses for fear of going to federal prison. Why do we always push when a door says pull or vice-versa? One spray in each nostril, open other end, don’t open til Tuesday, open ’til midnight. We’re closed . . .yes, sometimes we are.

Jay Leno built a regular Monday night feature on his show, known as “Headlines,” which covers more than headlines, to include one-liners and many signs. Favorites have included signs that are oxymorons, such as “Mandatory Volunteerism” and “Elevated Subway.” Fun ones are “Drive-Thru Colo-rectal Exams” and “No Peddlers,” a sign misinterpreted as no biking allowed. Most likely, the latter was written by the sign-maker who thought “D.C.” stood for “Duh Capital.”

Can there be invisible signs? Is that like being blind-sided? It’s not blind-sighted. Besides, ASL sign language is for the deaf.

No entrance, line forms here, single file. Paper here, cans and bottles there. Call, don’t call. Walk, don’t run. Quiet zone, 50 MPH zone. Oh, the many signs we ignore, intentionally or not, or mis-read. Is it rebellion, stupidity or information overload. Maybe there are too many, even one word long. Regardless, they’re a sign of something, not nothing. Synz. Cynes. Pseynes, Tsi-nz.

One Hispanic woman saw the wristlets on her newborn twins and thought the doctors had thoughtfully named the boy and girl, Molly (male) and Femolly (female). Imagine the awkward moments when they grow up, when their names are called out in school, when they marry, when they sign important documents.

Words have never been worth more money. The price per word has skyrocketed in recent years as compensation for movie, TV, book and software deals have reached new heights. Michael Eisner was right, content reigns. And when it reigns, it pours. Except for sign-makers, they don’t make much. They’re just plain poor. Hand-lettering when English is a second language produces “stopp.” There are few proofreaders and no spell checkers on the road to success. It’s not journalism or even symbolism, though it may be heresy.

Last month, I saw the much-publicized movie “Angels & Demons,” a film that absolutely underscores the skyrocketing price per word. It’s one of those films that a publicist can appreciate if only for it’s extreme promotion, right down to stimulating stories on travel to Italy and launching investigations on the History Channel. It’s also a story about the power of signs (segni in Italian) and symbols. The story ends with the Vatican manipulating all the news about a series of murders… a sign of being cross? The signs were real, their interpretation cinematic and the story was Dan Brown’s fiction. Tom Hanks plays a symbologist, a sign studier not a maker.

Previous movies and books see signs as important keys to the past or future, abbreviated communications tools like so many computer emoticons. The sign of the anti-Christ in the form of three sixes in “The Omen.” M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, “Signs,” “The Seventh Sign” with Demi Moore, and others. In Yasmina Reza’s award-winning play, “Art,” which became a movie, three characters sit on a sofa and debate the meaning of a blank white canvas as a sign of what?

I saw Reza’s new play, God of Carnage, recently, which was great, which was at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, which was the former Royale Theater in New York. Lotta sign changing and, more than hand-lettering, there are the lights. Broadway lights. Different than street lights. Different than lights on New York’s Jackie Robinson Parkway and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Ya think the Royale family was upset over the name change? What about the Triboro and Interboro families? Who decides these things? Who changes Shea Stadium to Citifield? Who changes Idelwild Airport to Kennedy? Who changes the history books? Why change all those signs (and who pays for the changes), anyway? All different signs, not necessarily brighter.

I love you but….. he’s very business-like… she has a great personality… convenient lower floor apartment… intensely flavored…. openly direct… sprightly… calculating… attractive… full-figured… ambitious… learning disabled… height challenged. Sign-onyms

But still, signs, words or labels – oh, please.

A couple of years ago, a company specializing solely in computer emoticons – one of many businesses like this – wanted to hire us to promote their online signs. Their offer of stock instead of cash was a real sign, a sign of the times. We said no. They said it was a sign of our insincerity. We said, no, again. We have checks to sign. We had to resign.

Signs of economic recovery. Little, green shoots sprouting through the market’s floor. A dependable sign is the significant drop in initial unemployment insurance claims. Housing’s decline is stabilizing a little here and there, as is consumer spending. Companies are lean and that signals stronger profits. More signals still needed. We have all signed on.

I need to sign off.

#

Selling residential roofing and siding door to door was one of my first paying summer jobs while in college. The work was hard, clearly frustrating and demoralizing but paid well. . . if I made a sale. It was career and character-building, too.

I truly believe that much of my success today is due to skills honed and pain endured trying to persuade housewives to redo their homes in hopes that they would convince their husbands when they came home in the evening for dinner.

An incident one hot afternoon stood out so much, of many incidents, that I have laughingly retold the story many times over the years. It was part of my “schtick.”

Recently, I stopped laughing and began to see another side to the story.

I remember knocking on the door of a neat little house in a classic 1960s suburban working class neighborhood. You’ve seen it in a thousand movies and TV shows.

A little boy, not older than eight and not taller than four feet, answered the doorbell. “Hi, is your mom home?” I asked. It was the 60s and people were less fearful and cynical back then.

The kid then turned and yelled, “Hey, ma, there’s a man at the door.”

A man at the door? I immediately turned around to see if someone was behind me. There wasn’t. He was referring to me. I was about 18 at that point and hadn’t started to view myself as a man regardless of what the rabbi said five years before at my Bar Mitzvah.

Fast forward to the present.

After 28 years of running my own PR agency, promoting goods and services, ideas and ideals, and selling new business with the ardor of an 18-year-old signing an order for aluminum siding, that man reappeared at the door. And he was much older. Suddenly, I was no longer the youngest kid in my classroom, the last of my friends to get his driver’s license, and the first in the front row of every photograph. Now, I am the oldest. Everyone working for me is younger. I am the gray hair everyone said you had to have in the room. There is less hair, too, from years of pulling it out. I am the “gray beard,” though clean shaven.

Are there advantages to being the wise old sage, permanently black-and-blue from years of kicking myself for doing dumb things? Yes, I also burned my fingers two or three times before learning that the flame was hot, but I am a better person for it, tempered by pain and experience. It’s no accident that Star Wars’ Yoda looks the way he does, from centuries of pontificating. Besides, a wise young sage sounds like an oxymoron.

A study I read, too long ago to remember by whom, reported that entrepreneurs are less likely to dye their gray hair. Is this because entrepreneurs:

1. Are more self-confident, with strong sense of being?
2. Don’t worry about losing promotions to younger executives?
3. Desire the solicitous courting that comes with grey hair?
4. Like the contrast with navy blue suits

Probably, it is a bit of all four reasons. Then, again, grey is the new blond and the person I see in the mirror each morning is different. . . in a good vain way. Certainly, my 5 o’clock shadow now comes out at 6 o’clock. Occasionally, someone offers me a seat on the subway, or I get senior admission to movies without asking. But the greatest change was the biggest surprise because it was unexpected, unexpected so soon, anyway, and unexpected because I found myself graciously accepting.

A new business prospect actually said, “Tell Jerry to speak less.” It’s not that I was talking too much; it was because they knew well that I wasn’t going to work on their business. They truly wanted to hear from those on the next rung down.

“We like Jerry and he sets an image and a pace we want,” they explained. “He clearly has the experience and we value his opinions and creativity.” They were right. Next time we met, I did defer to the others. We got the business. We beat out the competition, serious competition, and I was content to stay in the background. I shook my head a lot, fidgeted with my pen and smiled knowingly.

Since then, since that seminal event, I’ve worked hard to restrain myself in presentations. Harder still is convincing my wonderful younger partners that it’s okay for them to take charge and run a new business meeting, even if the lead came from one of my relationships. Not unexpected, I found that if you give somebody the opportunity, they will rise to the occasion. In fact, fears of succession have rapidly faded away, along with my tap dancing skills. They have been replaced by pride.

Grief therapists will talk about a delusion called the “concept of the self” as a reason why some people fear death. They are referring to an inability to accept that the people around you, your loved ones, will be able to get along without you. I love the people at G.S. Schwartz & Co. They are great. I am learning rapidly that the business will continue to grow long after I retire to the golf course (I honestly don’t play, but I could learn) or some mountain top (I do ski).

That said, I am not retiring that fast. After 30 years of selling and servicing, I still have a lot to contribute. Besides, what else would I do? Where would I go every day? I guess I could always sell roofing and siding. I’m pretty good at it. I’m not a bad publicist, either. I like what I do.

Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz

Last month was an incredibly busy month of no news.

You always can tell it’s a dull day in the world when an article on the front page of The New York Times is a stylish profile about a local merchant, or a TV newscaster turns an evening talk show guest into a lead story.

Whatever the news, I have learned not to automatically believe everything I see, hear or read.  Maybe I’ve been in this business too long.  Too many docudramas, historical novels, scientific fiction and even advertorials have blurred the line for good.  Orson Welles sort of started it with his infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938, turning avid listeners of radio into terrified captives of Martian invaders.  The Chicago Tribune was clearly wrong in 1948 when it printed “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  And my Captain Midnight secret decoder ring never quite worked the way the cereal box said it would.

Sorry for the paranoia, but what if there was no pandemic last month?

Sure, there was a swine flu outbreak.  In fact, the pandemic of 1918, that killed 50 million people worldwide and 500,000 in the U.S., was a swine flu.  “Flu” is short for influenza and humans picked up this one from living in close proximity to farm animals.  The word swine was dropped by some media in favor of H1N1 influenza A because pork sales had dropped.  Now, that was public relations!

But what if this whole media frenzy, that spread faster than the disease, was made up?  The SARS virus was the training ground.  In the 1990s, we saw the power of the Internet to virally spread news globally at the click on the mouse.  More recently, Twitter tweeters reported in a near-instantaneous 140 characters about a terrorist attack at hotels in India and plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River.  H  E  L  P  is only four characters.

Certainly, there was a swine flu outbreak.  Tragically, people did die and, yes, the threat of spreading was real….  but the fervor of the fever coincidently subsided after one week.  Many more people die every year from old-fashioned regular flu.

Then, what was going on?

The 24/7 media coverage for that week was way out of proportion to the problem, and, in some cases, bordered on outright fear-mongering in the face of higher ratings.  In fact, one network news doctor literally stood there, live on screen, saying that he didn’t want to over-hype the story and scare people.  .  . but that is exactly what he was doing.

I’m not wagging any dogs, errrrr, swine, here, but you have to ask the question.

What if the whole pandemic was contrived for another purpose — to deflect the world’s attention from the auto industry’s troubles and Obama’s first 100 days?  In fact, Chrysler’s bankruptcy was announced in the middle of the flu crisis and on Obama’s 101st day.  Could have been on the 99th day.  Timing is everything.  It was a good trial run for General Motors.

It was only the week before (unfortunately) that the head of Bank America claimed he was forced to do the Merrill Lynch deal, despite Merrill’s bad numbers.  Truly, wow!

And just in case a case of virus wasn’t virally spreading fast and far enough, somebody said, “Hey, let’s send some low-flying planes over the tip of Manhattan.”  Honestly, nobody would do such a stupid and obvious thing.  But it happened.  Two planes flew over Ground Zero right before the Chrysler announcement.  Somebody got fired.

Now, despite my 1960s northeast liberal upbringing, as a public relations executive, I still believe in, ahem, a controlled flow of information.  Ideals aside, sometimes a greater good is more important than total transparency.  We saw the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, but found it comforting to hear that brains, hearts and courage are the stuff of heroes and scholars, not magic tricks.

Who would have benefited from knowing that Bank of America was pushed hard to acquire Merrill Lynch?  Who would have benefited if the deal died?  Did Paulson and Bernanke pull off the shot gun marriage of the financial world or should they have thrown that baby out with the bad water?  On the heels of the Bear Stearns and Lehman collapses, we did not need to chance a third failure.  Are we better off now that we know?  Would we have been better off not knowing?

Dunno.  But to some extent, what you don’t know, you don’t know.   Remember that old line, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it make a sound?  Same with news.  The New York Times decided that if they publish something then it is news fit to print, making the Times the newspaper of record.  A prior administration refused public pictures of solders’ coffins, hoping if you did not see it, maybe it did not happen.

Long ago, I learned that news is what the media decide to publish.  Every day, dumb public relations events get pre-empted by important breaking news.  You can feel the power of the press when you see stories about crises on the front page and your story gets postponed or pushed to page 43.  Maybe a major objection to the Internet and bloggers is that there are no gatekeepers in cyberspace deciding what’s hot and what’s not.  There is great truth in what they say about democracy — I’d rather be here than somewhere else.  It’s a great country.

The 1978 movie Capricorn One, which echoed a favorite Twilight Zone episode, told the story of a group of astronauts whose mission to Mars was faked to save the space program.  That was fiction.

It’s tough being an “insider,” which, in this business, means you see the publicity stunt or press agentry.  It’s the waiter who sees what the chef really does to the food, the contractor who finds the electrician short-cutting on materials, the travel agent who knows  the lower price you could have paid.  So, too, it’s the publicist who knows the restaurant or book or actor isn’t as good as the reviews.  Worse is the person who believes their reviews and let’s them go to their head.  Often, when I see a tough but successful placement I say to myself, “Good job,” because when you are in this business long enough you really can see another agency’s work and you know how hard it is. 

On the other hand, the Internet creates a consumer-driven and transparent marketplace that is a valuable mediator between buyers and sellers.  Like any competition, quality and value improve when the playing field is level.  Like Wikipedia, an accurate definition eventually surfaces.

Matthew 7:6

Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz

Secretaries, stewardesses, janitors and press agents have all joined with the guy who used to clean our typewriters – IBM Selectrics – once a month.

For 10 years, from the mid 1980’s to the mid 1990s, the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school was a client of my public relations agency.  Our mission was to attract women into secretarial jobs as a stepping stone to executive positions and create an image of quality that pushed salaries to a premium for Gibbs grads.

At that point, the world was changing rapidly, thankfully, and in less than one generation my secretary disappeared.  Where once there was one secretary per executive, there was one for two executives, then one per group, then one per floor.  Now, whole businesses have a handful of “admins” and executive assistants.  Of course, the trade-off was that executives, at their higher salaries, were doing clerical work, doing their own electronic typing, filing, mailing and recordkeeping.  But it was too late, the engines of change were grinding ahead.  No longer would they “dial” a phone number; just push “address book.”

Necessity being the mother of invention (success has a lot of fathers), in that period from roughly the mid-1980’s to the mid-1990’s, computers exploded on the business scene, increasing penetration at the same time they declined correspondingly in price.  Logically, software applications followed and suddenly we went from two fax machines running full time to two addresses for emails.  “Delete” replaced “White Out.”  “Cut and Paste” replaced “Cutting and Pasting.”  Voice mail replaced the receptionist and females started replacing males in key executive positions and often they were better because they brought new thinking to the boardroom.  Guys weren’t the ones demanding better childcare, for example, and arguably their children provoked casual Fridays, free snacks and two presidential birthdays celebrated on one Monday.

How quickly we forget.  Up to this seminal crossover, the U.S. had been falling behind some other countries, most notably Japan, in innovation.  Magically, during this period, the shifting balance in the American workplace generated the spark that drove the new technological revolution that produced the Internet and put the U.S.back on top, again.  Incredibly, there was a time when French was a contender for the language of business (huh?), then it was Japanese, then the Internet spread English so widely that its early teaching in India helped drive that country’s economy as the leading global destination for outsourcing everything from call centers to market research to law.  No one realistically envisions Spanish as the global language of business despite the massive numbers of native speakers.  Nor Mandarin, though elitist parents may push their children to study it in private schools to give them cocktail party conversation on weekends.

The loss of jobs to low cost producer countries has been bemoaned for 50 years since Kodak lost sales of Brownies to Nikons after World War II, and Nash Rambler sales declined as Volkswagen Beetle sales boomed during the same period.  Made in America did not mean assembled in America.

But for all the industries that evaporated with a corresponding loss of jobs to overseas manufacturers, our national unemployment rate has not increased.  Innovative businesses, different skills and new jobs popped up.  In merely a decade, brand names like eBay and Google became as well known as Coca Cola and Nabisco, though the latter took a hundred years to reach their present presence.  Now, it’s the auto industry at risk.  Before, the apparel, toy and appliance industries, among many others, rose and fell.  Factory graveyards in the Northeast and Midwest have been resurrected as condos, restaurants and boutiques. 

Once we were an agrarian society with most jobs tied to the land, then we became manufacturers after Eli Whitney invented the concept of interchangeable parts.  For the last 25 years, we’ve been moving to a capitalist society based on intellectual capital.In the midst of the current economy, probably it’s hard to see that America’s finest hour may be dawning.  It took us 200 years to realize – but not yet appreciate — a new age, finally free from high cost, manual labor intensive growth that’s better suited to more developing countries, where their psycho-social-educational point on the time line is now where ours was 50 to 100 years ago in the decades starting with the Industrial Revolution.  Japan was a low cost provider in the 1950’s and 1960’s and then they, like us, moved manufacturing to places like Taiwan, Korea and Singapore.  Now, Chinese manufacturing is starting to get expensive.  Who will benefit next, South America, Africa, Antarctica?

Imagine a place, a country where the power of thought is the economic vehicle driving growth.  Imagine a civilization so advanced that creativity and innovation are the only currencies by which GNP is measured.  Maybe that’s where we are going and the current economic downturn is not so much a case of over leverage as it is a very difficult transition from one economic order to the other, as we move from a manufacturing base to an intellectual base.  Perhaps the Great Depression was caused by the transition from an agricultural-based economy.  More important, what happens when we run out of low cost providers?  Do we seek other planets?

So many science fiction books and movies portrayed the aliens as super-intelligent beings with big heads and frail little bodies.  Most likely they were once muscle bound machinists eons before Ray Bradbury’s imagination.  They sought to conquer new worlds where cheap labor could build new civilizations, the way the garment industry was built on poor immigrants in the early 1900s. 

The intellectual capital has always been there, a Darwinian survival by many cultures, ethnicities and nationalities seeking central heating and running water.  That creativity and innovation shows in the sons and daughters of drill press operators who sought jobs where they could shower before instead of after work.  I’m reminded of a story about a young trader, who indignantly quit his $3 million Wall Street job when his employer paid him only $2.5 million because the markets declined.  This was the son of a dishwasher in east L.A. Sure, the parents had the ambition and intellectual capacity but they often lacked the language skills and education.  So, dad built the largest mechanical contracting business in New Jersey or struck it rich as a wildcatter in Texas.  Mom became the high school guidance counselor or the hottest real estate broker in town.

Yes, we did earn more than our parents, but it wasn’t hard.  Should our children expect the same?  Inventors and other entrepreneurs should make as much as possible.  Should hired guns running publicly funded organizations?  Maybe not.  They have a financial and fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and lenders.  “Retention Awards” in a shrinking industry make no sense, yet the compensation numbers are staggering.  Is half of $5-million annually acceptable pay?  Is a $35,000 office redecoration more reasonable because it creates a better work environment?  Are private jets worth their cost in executive time saved at airports?  Is $500,000 not enough to live on in New York because Hampton’s summer homes cost a lot? 

I remember when, in the 1970s, the baby boom generation rejected materialism.  Times change.

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Perceived and Posted By

Jerry Schwartz

Music. Records to some, jingles to others, a theme, a tune, a few bars or a beat — it’s music, yes, but it’s more: It’s branding, music branding, and the sound is music to corporate ears.

What is new for companies is technology, which allows marketers to target consumers aurally on a variety of platforms.  More than radios, tape recorders and record players, suddenly computers, iPods, birthday cards and toys sing and play instruments — and ever more cheaply. The size of reproduction has shrunk from a big wood-and-metal box to a thin plastic case, and the quality has only improved.

Imagine the theme of Sesame Street playing on your cellphone via Bluetooth technology while you’re passing a toy store in a mall, or Jiffy Lube’s theme on your car’s GPS system while driving to work, triggered by an electronic roadside billboard. Music enables a marketer to fine-tune an audience by demographics and geography based on genre – hip-hop, rock, blues, country, oldies — in a way sports or cultural events can’t.

Please read the full article as it appeared on AdAge.com on February 18, 2009, click on the link or copy and paste it into your browser:  http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=134684

Adapted from “IRupdate” – a publication from the National Investor Relations Institute

Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz

The rise of digital communications as the predominant method of shareholder communications was outlined at a presentation before NIRI’s New York Chapter three years ago. Everyone applauded…politely, though skeptically.

Since then, two major global events took place that were key to this seminal transition from old media to new. One was the explosion of social networks and the second was the acceptance by the SEC of the digital distribution of annual reports without a backup hard copy. Nearly 80 years have passed since the SEC Acts were first passed, and it is remarkable that this latter change has gone mostly unnoticed — and certainly unsung.

There is a third digital trend occurring that will have a massive impact on shareholder communications because it builds on the first two and that is the explosive growth of mobile communications, adding yet another new media platform to the pallet of tactics available to investor relations professionals. Technology is our friend and Wall Street embraced it a long time ago. It has made a lot of people who build firms around electronic trading very wealthy.

Welcome Technologies to the Party

Now, technology-based media are elbowing their way into the party and we need to welcome the unique advantages and opportunities they provide. Investor relations professionals’ reluctant acceptance of these new media is evident in a general resistance to anything more than streaming or downloading of management presentations.

The business of shareholder communications and analyst relations was profoundly changing prior to the last bubble, when the dot.coms cratered. Governmental, economic, marketing and social forces were well underway 20 years ago that would shift the influences on stock price and corporate reputation. It was an evolution of the relationship between corporations and investors, a changing balance, as well as the explosion of forces much more powerful than meeting with a room full of investors.

Let’s not waste time arguing about the impact of publicity on stock price and corporate reputation (it’s undeniably huge and growing). Further, let’s not waste time on a definition of publicity and instead let’s call it multi-platform communications to refer to the wider selection of methods for reaching various target audiences and now their new-found ability to respond, called interactivity.

Once upon a time, publicity meant third-party endorsements — commentary by reporters, editors, and broadcasters in traditional print and broadcast media. Then, the Internet changed the rules and suddenly that third party became less important. The dot.com era created an atmosphere where just posting information on a Web site was as important — if not more important -— than a reporter’s story. Companies and investors would call a simple press release, reproduced verbatim on a company’s own web site, “publicity.” Quantity became more important than quality. The more press releases the better. Any news was more information and press releases evolved into news releases. In fact, “news” was defined by the volume of information and, so, daily press releases became the rule, if not the practice, and stock prices rose (or fell) accordingly. Some even viewed a lack of press releases as an indication that something was wrong. There were no blogs and bloggers at that point (in the late 1990s), only “whisper numbers,” spread in hallways after the investor meetings.

Today, we have bloggers and much more. No longer are there merely magazines, newspapers, radio and television. Today, publicity — or whatever you want to call it — thrives across a wide range of media with broader power to affect business and how we all make a living. The growth and success of these dynamic new technology-based news platforms, occurring in such a short period of time, cannot be underestimated nor relegated to the doings of teenagers buzzing about their social lives.

Social Media, Blogs, Twitter, YouTube…

Where once eighteen-year-olds played with MySpace, today both young and old hear, see and learn from Twitter, YouTube, SecondLife and millions of blogs of varying importance, ranging from extreme to meaningless. Some seventy-year-olds get all their financial information online, along with healthcare, travel and other information. Moreover, all this information is not from company web sites or online sites of traditional media. Bloggers, chatrooms, message boards and other alternative sources are big digital destinations for financial facts and figures (and, yes, fiction).

The extraordinary contrast between investor relations now and then is summed up by Magellan Fund’s legendary manager Peter Lynch, who said “…invest in things you know….” Well, one big way we know about companies we invest in is through publicity, especially for B2B companies, products and services.

How do you think millions of small investors learned about ITT telecommunications equipment, Schlumberger drilling equipment and Genzyme’s bio products? They read about them somewhere, and not on cereal boxes in supermarkets. McDonald’s and Wal-Mart are easily familiar, each with thousands of brick and mortar billboards across the country. Face it, you can’t love a ceramic capacitor like you love Rice Crispies®.

Some IR professionals may still feel that the broker buzz or analyst trickle down is more important, but maybe it’s their reluctance to accept the billion-dollar impact of a story planted somewhere by a 30-year-old kid making $75,000 a year, who barely knows a put from a call. Maybe it’s a territorial thing.

That same deprecation shows in the reluctant acceptance of bloggers by credentialed journalists. But, chiropractic isn’t medicine to some people, either, and its professional practitioners aren’t as widely accepted as doctors, either.

Should We “Ask Uncle Bill?”

Okay, so we don’t want to deal with or admit to the enormous power of a mere comment in an article on the price of a stock, let alone a feature story in a major national business publication reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of investors. Worse is accepting the sheer psychological impact of a vastly read and quoted blog with a name like “Ask Uncle Bill.”. We’re talking about millions of impressions at the touch of a key — locally, regionally, nationally, internationally — versus a well-crafted CEO’s annual speech in front of a smallish room of mostly directors, officers and a few shareholders.

In a global investing climate, in a horrific international market meltdown, at a time when the huge Baby Boom generation is retiring and also inheriting the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth ever — why  believe in one-to-one marketing — when we can reach a billion people all at the same time? The reason stocks move is that there are more buyers than sellers, not fewer. Tell people to buy your stock. Tell everyone you can. Tell them now.

It is the truly reclusive and potentially self-destructive IR professional who refuses to embrace and use these increasingly influential technologies or platforms or channels — or even worse, who dismisses them altogether as the domain of PR executives.

Change is good.

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Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz

Even Ghengis Khan had a mother who loved him.

Yes, recessions are not loveable and, in fact, are downright painful experiences for owners, managers and staff alike.  The instability and insecurity, however and by whomever defined, sucks.  It’s hard to plan, rough to motivate and impossible to grow in the midst of an economic breakdown.  This one is wide and deep and is not ending so quickly.

For me, having gone through six or eight of them in my career, the best I can say, and somewhat proudly, is that recessions make me a better manager.  They test my skills, talents and adaptability, and teach me the virtues of humility along with advantages of living modestly.  No million dollar office renovations for me, Mr. Thain.

As the saying goes, when someone else loses their job it’s a recession, and when you lose your job it’s a depression.  Certainly, we all know people who have lost their jobs.  Our houses don’t sell.  Our portfolios are down.  Our 40l(k)’s are now 201(k)’s.  We postpone purchases and seek out sales and specials.  Restaurant Week now lasts a month and everyone is aging rapidly to get senior admission to movies.  The problem is so pervasive, so complex that even the inauguration of a popular president has not yet lifted hopes.  The mood is particularly unsettling for those under 30, who are probably experiencing their first big bust.  Words like “depression,” or phrases like “this time it’s different” are scary.

In the face of such angst and pain, here are some random thoughts on why you could love a recession:

•         Irrational exuberance (horrible thing that it is) is finally over

•         Arrogant people are humbled and easier to be around

•         People who are really dumb stop making millions of dollars

•         Obnoxious people in the next office disappear…finally

•         You can always get a reservation at a “hot” restaurant, if it’s still in business

•         You can sit down even if your entire party isn’t present

•         Good wines are frequently 25 to 50 percent off

•         Not buying dessert saves you real money and calories

•         You have time for breakfast (dinner is too expensive!) with your friends

•         You can get in really good shape since you finally have time to go to the gym

•         You don’t have to be at the office at 7:30 pm because there isn’t that much to do

•         You can always get a cab — even in the rain and even at 5 pm

•         Everything in the stores is on sale, all the time

•         You are less self-conscious about bargaining

•         Clothing colors, shapes and styles seem to last a bit longer

•         Your cooking, sewing and hair-fixing skills sharpen

•         Ad-bare magazines and newspapers are lighter and easier to carry

•         The rotten stock market gives us something to discuss at parties

•         Bernie Madoff and Marc Drier give us more to discuss at parties

•         You finally feel like you’re not the only one

But the best thing about recessions is that they end, eventually.  They always do and it makes us value the good times that much more.  One day not soon enough, cash will flow, again, businesses will rehire and everyday life will return to something called normal.  Restaurants will say they only have openings at 5:00 pm and at 10:00 pm.  The Hampton Jitney will be filled.  Two-fers will be one-fers, again.  And investment bankers will get big bonuses so they can live the lifestyle they had once grown accustomed to.

Like 7-year cicadas, James Bond movies, the four seasons, the number 6 subway and certain prolific authors, the cycles of boom and bust are inevitable.  Nothing goes up or down forever.  As they say on Wall Street, “Even a dead cat will bounce if it’s dropped from high enough.”  Boing.

This recession should end on June 21 at 4:32 pm EDT – Father’s Day and the first day of summer.  It’s a good time to hug your kids, kiss your spouse and spend a little money to help stimulate the economy.

Out with the bad air, in with the good.

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