Pothole pizzagate

$5,000 is going fix, like, what? Three potholes?  

Last week, the New Orleans City Council agreed to accept a "Paving for Pizza" grant from Domino's, according to WDSU-TV. The City Council is expected to vote on the $5,000 grant on Thursday (Aug. 9). If approved, the money will go to the city's Department of Public Works. 

Turns the streets into little Domino's billboards, though.  Gets the truck on the news, too.  All in all it's a pretty good ad buy for them.  The last time a corporation tried to spray graffiti ads all over New Orleans, people didn't take too well to that.  Seems like $5,000 is a pretty low price to sell out at now.

Why is the news fake?

Yeah yeah, the President is a totalitarian ogre who thrives on de-legitimatizing the authority of the press and the very possibility of objective facts.  And, yeah yeah, that's not exactly a new part of the right wing playbook with copious examples accumulated over the course of the past century.    Yeah yeah, David Brock created a bunch of Upworthy style propaganda websites that took advantage of Facebook algorithms in order to promote the Clinton campaign. There's a lot of bad political info out there.

But if you really want to know why "fake news" has traction as an epithet, it's because a lot of the news is, in fact, fake.

Interviews with more than two dozen marketers, journalists, and others familiar with similar pay-for-play offers revealed a dubious corner of online publishing in which publicists, ranging from individuals like Satyam to medium-sized “digital marketing firms” that blur traditional lines between advertising and public relations, quietly pay off journalists to promote their clients in articles that make no mention of the financial arrangement.People involved with the payoffs are extremely reluctant to discuss them, but four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Inc, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites. Two of the writers acknowledged they have taken part in the scheme for years, on behalf of many brands

Maybe the "traditional lines between advertising and PR" would be less blurry if media companies were invested in keeping them un-blurred.  One good way to do that would be to pay writers. Instead, they offer "opportunities" to freelancers looking to build a "personal brand."  

The Fast Company writer also defended the practice by arguing that it’s enabled by editors who are hungry for cheap or unpaid blog content. Many high-volume sites, including the Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and Forbes, maintain networks of unpaid contributors who publish large amounts of material. Forbes, for instance, marks articles by contributors with a small disclaimer, but the Columbia Journalism Review has pointed out that those dubiously sourced articles are often cited as though they were normal stories written by Forbes staff. In reality, the editorial process that leads to those articles being published is opaque — a Forbes spokesperson declined to answer questions about how many contributors the site has, whether they’re ever paid, or whether an editor reviews their work before publication. One former Forbes contributor, Josh Steimle, has even offered a “masterclass” on how to get published on the site, an accomplishment he described as “rewarding for both my personal brand and my digital marketing agency.”

For writers willing to accept payments in exchange for coverage, that’s an opportunity.

So everybody climbs all over each other in a competition for piecework or even unpaid piecework in the hope that can be monetized somehow. And it turns out the way to monetize a "personal brand" is to sell out one's.. person..  to advertisers. It's a practice that debases not only the exploited labor but also the "brands" of the capitalist media companies who enable and profit by it.  Eventually nobody believes the news is real anymore. Why would they?

But that's the gig economy.  Our hyper-individualized society forces us to "brand" our private selves, our hobbies, our free time, and, yes, homes, into saleable (the euphemism is shareable) products. Sometimes these opportunities converge. Such as when an STR marketer sends an automated pitch to your blog based on keywords.

Hi Jeffrey,

I hope this message finds you well.

While researching about travel, my team noticed the Airbnb mention you have on Library Chronicles. My name is Andrea and I’m part of the Creative Team at AllTheRooms, a vacation rental search engine. Our aim is to make travelers’ lives easier.

You are welcome to link www.alltherooms.com to your page as well. AllTheRooms shows results from every major booking site on the Internet, including Airbnb, Couchsurfing, Hostelworld, Expedia, Booking.com, and any other major booking site on the Internet. We believe it would be a great addition to your article.

If you have any questions about AllTheRooms, we would be happy to answer them.

Thank you,

Andrea & the Creative Team

They didn't offer one million dollars so I never got back to them.

Funny bounce

Spotted this Nike ad on the Le Meridien hotel as we were on our way to Krewe Du Vieux Saturday.  You may have noticed, as the city gets ready to host the NBA All Star Game, that brands are taking over all of the available scenery.

If you need a reminder that the NBA All-Star Game is coming to New Orleans this weekend, look skyward.

Adorning Benson Tower on Poydras Street is a 250-foot image of New Orleans Pelicans forward Anthony Davis. Farther down the street is an enormous visage of Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant, plastered on Le Meridien's wall.

And then there is a Nike campaign, also splashed across the sides of downtown buildings, with the message, "The Ball Should Bounce the Same for Everyone."

As we know, the reason NBA is here making a mess out of the first weekend of parade season in the first place is because North Carolina's hateful bathroom law shamed them out of Charlotte. Nike's PR is happy to capitalize on that. The ads it's plastering onto Benson Tower and some of our high end hotels convey a feel good smarmy message about "Equality"  in order to drive the point home to anyone who asks that their brand is one of the good guys.

Company officials said in a statement that the campaign evolved out of conversations that have been ongoing within the company for more than a year.

“We believe it’s important to speak up on issues that are important to our athletes, consumers, employees and communities,” the statement said. It said the “Equality" campaign "raises Nike’s voice and uses the power of sport to stand up for the value of equality. We have a long history of promoting equality on issues of race, gender and sexual orientation.”

Of course that is less than exactly true of this particular company.  They do have a long history of cynically claiming to care about these issues.  But that isn't the same thing.

Although they may be unfamiliar with Nike’s global campaign, the goal of the women I spoke with sounds a lot like the Girl Effect—to raise themselves and their families out of poverty. Each of the 18 women, however, reported pay so low they could not even meet the basic needs of their families, let alone save money or contribute to their communities. (Four had been laid off less than three months before we met, after their factory building burnt down; they spoke only about their wages and child care, cautious of giving critiques that might jeopardize their chances of getting hired back.) They told me that they would need to earn between three to four times their current salaries to offer their families a basic level of economic security. The average monthly wage for manufacturing in Vietnam was $200 in 2015. Their stories highlighted something the Girl Effect campaign is silent about: the importance of a living wage.

I also found evidence that Nike’s contract factories breach basic Girl Effect tenets of freedom from exploitation and harassment, security, safety, and Nike’s own Code of Conduct, put in place to prohibit, among other things, harassment, abuse, and nonconsensual overtime. Women who worked in different factories told remarkably similar stories of being subjected to arbitrary punishments—such as financial penalties and threats of dismissal for making manufacturing mistakes, not working quickly enough, or coming in late, along with intimidation and ongoing humiliation by managers.

Finally, although the Girl Effect champions the importance of women protecting and empowering their own children, the women in Vietnam explained to me why their low wages make it impossible for them to ensure their children’s safety. The 10 mothers with young children whom I spoke with either send their children to unlicensed child care services they consider underqualified or dangerous or they leave them with family in home villages they are able to visit only once or twice a year.

Unsurprisingly, the Advocate's glowing feature on the wraparound ads doesn't ask questions about this. Less surprisingly, even, people all over New Orleans are sharing these corporate slogans on social media and gloating about how proud they are that our "blue" city is #woke enough to have been blessed with them.  

Thus propaganda and fake news feed off one another to further benefit the oligarchs. Same story every day.

Mischief managed

Zatarain's is picking up their litter.

The Zatarain's Crab Boil ads that were affixed to the curb cuts on N. Carrollton Avenue in Mid-City may be gone now, but they left a bad taste in the mouth of some New Orleanians — as well as City Hall, which says they were illegal. Though residents had been removing the stickers themselves, the remainder were taken up last night, according to Michael Morse, general manager of Zatarain's.

Morse said he wasn't aware that sidewalk advertising was illegal in New Orleans, and had not heard of other high-profile cases of companies doing so. Last week, a New Orleans-based software company called Meusu upset French Quarter merchants and residents with a sidewalk stenciling ad campaign, and in 2012, Coca-Cola ended up paying the city $10,000 after stenciling sidewalk ads downtown during the Final Four basketball tournament.

The whole point was to have some ads up during as much of Jazzfest as they could maintain them for. They made it through a full weekend, it looks like. So it served its purpose. Also.. this whole two-day news episode brought to you by Zatarain's.  Zatarain's: There's a boil around every corner.  Available at a grocery near you.

Brought to you by...

Zatarain's

If you're waiting for the streetcar at Bienville Street and N. Carrollton Avenue in Mid-City, you've got some reading material. Advertisements for Zatarain's Crab Boil are painted in the curb cuts in what seems to be semi-permanent paint — right across the street from a City Park streetcar stop that takes people to Jazz Fest.

We've been here before, and recently. Last week, chalk ads for a software company were stenciled on sidewalks in the French Quarter, upsetting residents and merchants. In 2012, Coca-Cola paid local graffiti artists to lay down Coke logos on French Quarter sidewalks during the Final Four tournament.

Really interested in how this one ends.  As the rest of that Gambit post points out, "bandit sign" advertising on the city sidewalks and public right of ways is prohibited. The Coca-Cola guerrilla marketing violation in 2012 bubbled up into a fairly significant controversy causing the city to take action....  even if that action was merely collecting a fee from Coca-Cola after the fact. 

My gut feeling here is that, just three years later, the mood is more apathetic toward these matters and that the city is actually in on the deal.  Maybe I'm wrong about that but I expect the Mayor's response will be something about how sidewalk ads are really about "resilience and innovation" or something.

Coca-Cola proves the real money really is in PR

Here's a Pew report from last year about the tilt in the media business away from journalism and toward PR.

The salary gap between public relations specialists and news reporters has widened over the past decade – to almost $20,000 a year, according to 2013 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the public relations field has expanded to a degree that these specialists now outnumber reporters by nearly 5 to 1 (BLS data include part-time and full-time employees, but not self-employed.)

In 2013, according to BLS data, public relations specialists earned a median annual income of $54,940 compared with $35,600 for reporters. In other words, journalists on average earn just 65% of what those in public relations earn. That is a greater income gap than in 2004 when journalists were paid 71 cents of every dollar earned by those in public relations ($43,830 versus $31,320).

Most of that widening has come from salary growth in the public relations industry during a time when salary increases in the journalism field did not even keep up with inflation.

Only chumps go into news.  The real money is in telling pretty lies.  Of course some of these numbers may be a statistical anomaly.  For example, the low-wage writers who produce NOLA.com content still aren't technically counted as PR professionals for some reason. 

It doesn't help, also, that more and more journalism jobs are going to robots who work for free.

You wouldn't necessarily know it at first blush. Sure, maybe reading it in the context of this story it's apparent, but otherwise it feels like a pretty standard, if a tad dry, AP news item. The obvious tell doesn't come until the end of an article: "This story was generated by Automated Insights." According to AI's public relations manager James Kotecki, the Wordsmith platform generates millions of articles per week; other partners include Allstate, Comcast, and Yahoo, whose fantasy football reports are automated. Kotecki estimates the company's system can produce 2,000 articles per second if need be.

But there are some things even those robots can't do.  For instance, they still can't quite replicate the phony smarm necessary to run a corporate social media ad campaign. 

For the campaign, which was called “Make it Happy” and introduced in an ad spot during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an adorable mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

But Gawker, noticing that one response had the “14 words” white nationalist slogan re-published in the shape of a dog, had other ideas.

The media company’s editorial labs director, Adam Pash, created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, and set it up to tweet lines from Mein Kampf and then link to them with the #MakeItHappy tag – triggering Coca-Cola’s own Twitter bot to turn them into cutesy pictures.

Whoops! Don't you just hate when your smarmbot accidentally goes #MakeitHitler all over your shitty commercial. But then if you're gonna "tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media"  maybe a cynical, disingenuous ad campaign set up to run on autopilot isn't the best way to go about that. 

For that kind of work you still need to shell out the big bucks. Which is why the real money for humans is in PR.... although probably not ideal for the humans with souls or consciences or whatever. They're less good at saying this with a straight face. 

By Wednesday, the campaign had been suspended entirely. In a statement to AdWeek, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola said: “The #MakeItHappy message is simple: the internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It’s unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn’t.”

The statement concluded: “Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign.”

All they wanted to do was teach the world to sing... or something like that.  When will you humans learn it's not polite to point out that phony smarmbots are, in fact, phony smarmbots? How "negative!"

Mike Nichols' beer commercials

Varg went and found all the youtubes.

Grass roots

Seems legit

The campaign’s origin and purpose were unveiled about a month later in a Twitter post that read: “#NEWORLEANSWILL is a tourism industry initiative led by the NOCVB aimed at smart, sustainable growth for our city.”

Although it was corporately created, the visitors bureau said it hopes the campaign will turn into a “powerful grass-roots movement.”

And they're off

Qualifying ended just this past Friday. Candidates in municipal elections sure haven't wasted any time getting their signs up in time for your morning commute. These were all up along Broad St and St. Bernard Avenue Monday morning.







Not to be outdone by any of these people, Mitch Landrieu launched his first TV ad Sunday afternoon at the end of the first quarter of Saints-Rams game. The Saints at that point were trailing 0-14 thanks to two Drew Brees interceptions and some exceptionally poor tackling on defense.  Things would only go downhill from there. Not exactly the opportune moment to pop in with a, "This Quarter Of Saints Football Sponsored By Mitch Landrieu For Mayor" but it's a risk you run when you buy that slot. Well, that and the risk that voters will think you are running against Ronnie Lamarque.

It didn't help matters that Mitch's ad did something Saints fans have been screaming for the networks who carry Saints games to stop doing since before Landrieu even took office. It leaned heavily on imagery from the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans.

Set to a gospel version of the last stanza of Bob Dylan's "Pressing On," the one-minute ad juxtaposes photos of inundated landmarks and neighborhoods, shortly after Hurricane Katrina, with their stages of recovery today. There are no spoken words, but it ends with the words "Let's Keep It Going" and Landrieu's mantra of "One Team" flashing on the screen.

The good news about this spot is that it is ripe for parody. 

One can imagine an ad set to "Ain't Dere No More" where people hold up photos of what used to be wherever all the new Walgreens and Dollar Stores are. 

Or we could hold up a photo of some musicians on a corner in front of that same corner where a code enforcement officer waives a decibel meter at us.

Or we could stand on Jackson Avenue and hold up the asking price of the Da Fresh Seafood Market.

But late last week, The Lens found the store shuttered and posted with “for sale” signs. The 1,000 square-foot building is on the market for $339,000.

In August 2012, the Fresh Food Retail Initiative loaned Kariker $117,000 — $17,550 of which was forgivable, according to the mortgage — to open DaFresh Seafood.

The store was the first beneficiary of the program, which has since loaned more than $2 million for projects including a Whole Foods in Mid-City and the reopening of the Circle Food Store in the Seventh Ward.

FFRI is a grant program designed to bring grocers into so-called "food deserts"; poorer neighborhoods without ready access to fresh healthy groceries. In practice, it's turning out to be just seed money for real estate flipping.

Or maybe we could shoot one in the Quarter where we hold a photo of Brennan's in front of a photo of a shuttered Brennan's in front of another photo of Brennan's while unpaid Brennan's employees wait patiently in the background.

That one is my favorite. More than any of these other images, in illustrates the static economic, social and political hierarchy of the city despite its many celebrated but superficial "signs of progress."

No #spon Zone

If  Drew Brees's face can sell us Jimmy Johns and NyQuil and boy bands and such, I don't see how this is really any worse.

From WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge:

A Louisiana mother has a warning for other parents after her teenage son had a bad reaction from smoking what she's calling a new synthetic drug.

Mary Hughes is on a mission to protect other kids.

It all started this past weekend with a little plastic bag of a product called "Blue Brees." The Denham Springs mom said her 16-year-old son got it as a present and smoked it, which led to a scary night.

"His eyes were basically real droopy," Hughes said. "His speech was very slurred. He had no emotion. He barely could stand and absolutely no emotion, so 'Zombieland' was really correct. He was a zombie."

Hughes admits her daughter, who is of age, bought the product at a store called Zombieland.

Assuming Brees has no contract to receive payment for his.. um.. endorsement here, this might actually be an improvement. On the other hand, the symptoms exhibited by the young man in this story scan awfully close to Brees's performance at Atlanta this year so maybe there is a connection after all.

Still, it's probably not an official NFL licensed product which means 1) It's probably not an approved supplement and so could violate the league's drug policy and get somebody in trouble. ... sort of like Adderall used to do.  And 2) you absolutely cannot sell it within the confines of the "Clean Zone"

NEW ORLEANS -- As New Orleans prepares to host the Super Bowl, the city is also preparing to enforce temporary rules inside a so-called "clean zone" surrounding events leading up to the big game.

Host cities agree to adopt "clean zone" ordinances to help control activities that conflict with NFL sponsorships and the integrity of the game.

City approval for things such as temporary structures, signage and advertising are tightly regulated in the zone.

The zone boundaries include much of downtown, the French Quarter and the CBD.

"These clean zones are areas that are free of temporary ambush marketing, signage and events and other recognition of conflicting sponsors of the NFL," said New Orleans Sports Foundation President and CEO Jay Cicero.

In other words, NFL marketing agreements will dictate the kind of signage you can display at your home or business, as well as what sorts of products you can distribute,  if it is located within the "clean zone" I guess because the NFL marketing agreements take precedence over constitutional niceties during Superbowl week.

This doesn't mean we can't figure a way to test the limits if we're creative.  According to the city's information packet about the "Clean Zone"

Any temporary signage approved by the City shall be required to consist of at least 60% Super Bowl/NFL branding, look and feel, and no more than 40% third party commercial identification.

So if any downtown business wants to display a banner that reads "Mitch Landrieu is Roger Goodell's bitch" it's probably okay to do that so long as 60% of the background consists of NFL logos.  The downside is if the city happens to cite you anyway I'm pretty sure your only recourse is to appeal to Paul Tagliabue because, again, NFL is the ultimate civil authority during Super Bowl week.

Also one footnote to this article worth highlighting is this.

"These clean zones are areas that are free of temporary ambush marketing, signage and events and other recognition of conflicting sponsors of the NFL," said New Orleans Sports Foundation President and CEO Jay Cicero.

The city forced ambush marketers to remove Coke and Power Aid advertisements from sidewalks in a similar clean zone during the NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament earlier this year.

That's interesting because, at the time, we were under the impression that the city's move against the Coke ads was based on citizen outrage at having the public sidewalks used as an advertising vector.  But, according to the WWL report, they were actually just enforcing their corporate agreement with the NCAA.  Guess we should have known. 

Now they tell us

Company promises to pay your mortgage for turning your house into a billboard but is several months too late to save the one house in America most suited for such a purpose.

Kickback, donation...

Whatever you want to call it

Coca-Cola plans to donate $10,000 to the Mayor's Office of Cultural Economy, says Kel Villarrubia, senior public affairs director for Coca-Cola Refreshments New Orleans. The donation comes as a result of last month's illegal sidewalk advertising campaign in and around the French Quarter, which drew scorn from neighborhood residents.

The Office of Cultural Economy will use the money to help promote the next "cultural" event or film project which might occasion the next guerrilla marketing activity and then, if we're lucky, the next "donation." And on and on and such and so forth.

Fake news you can use

Throughout the recent City Council At-Large campaign, the Uptown Messenger has run a series of paid advertisements for candidate Stacy Head. The ads appear with such persistence that we've come to think of the publication, which specializes in covering "Faubourg Stacy" anyway, as the Stacy Daily.

There's nothing especially wrong with this, of course. Political candidates pay for advertising space in newspapers, on television and radio, and on websites all the time. But the Messenger has developed a peculiar ad delivery mechanism where the paid spots are published as posts the same way their actual news content is.

The ads are clearly labeled, of course, so they aren't quite as underhanded as the TV news practice of passing off sponsor-produced "video news releases" as actual news content. But bleeding them into the regular feed like this is clearly inspired by the "advertorials" and other forms of slightly deceptive advertising that appear frequently in all sorts of print and online publications. The Messenger is at least telling us what they're doing. But that doesn't mean what they're doing is completely honest. On some level, by blurring the lines like this, they're trying to fool us.

And yet today's entry does this so well that it actually crosses back over into the realm of useful informative content. It does this in two ways. First, the advertorial reminds us that early voting for the At-Large runoff is currently underway. Election Day itself is set for April 21.

Secondly, because the advertorial is dressed up as a "recommended French Quarter Fest schedule" provided by the Head campaign, it provides a handy guide for deciding where not to be if you wish to avoid encountering Ms. Head or her minions during the festival. And so we all are better informed both as voters and as individuals looking to enjoy the weekend. And we have this fake news item to thank for it.

Coke sprays bandit signs all over the Hospitality Zone

New Orleans has been virally marketed upon and is reacting... um... virulently.

Lunanola writes:

The following is a letter I sent this evening to elected officials and law enforcement; I’m tired, so it was brief and to the point.

Honorable Mayor Landrieu, Councilmembers Palmer and Clarkson, and NOPD 8th District Commander Walls:

The attached photos depict advertising associated with the NCAA Men’s Final Four event for Coca-Cola products — spray-painted on sidewalks and pavement (including flagstones) in the French Quarter and Faubourg Tremé (and perhaps other) neighborhoods in our city. I ask, is this really how we want companies to behave when our city hosts national events?

This advertising is also prohibited by a recently adopted New Orleans ordinance

I've borrowed one of her photos here. I hope that's okay.



The ordinance she cites was passed last year by city council as part of their then very heated crusade against "bandit signs"

Tighter enforcement of laws barring illegal dumping and "bandit signs" will begin in earnest in mid-September, after an amnesty period designed to get violators to tidy up. Bandit signs include placards, posters and other advertisements affixed to trees, utility poles, light fixtures, street signs and parking meters. It also includes signs displayed in parks and playgrounds or along neutral grounds.

Starting Sept. 12, the city plans to dispatch employees to "photograph, count, log, remove and dispose of bandit signs and litter," according to a news release. "Owners" of most signs will be fined $25, with signs affixed to trees garnering a $50 penalty.

It wasn't immediately clear how officials will determine culpability if a sign's origin is unclear or disputed. A law authored by City Councilwoman Stacy Head and authorized by the City Council in June states that a sign itself serves as evidence that people or entities identified on it authorized its placement and can be billed for the cost of removing it.

Exceptions to the prohibition include newspaper display boxes, signs on public property leased to private businesses, and campaign signs, which may be posted 48 hours prior to and following an election. Realtors also may post signs 24 hours before and after an open house.

Here are some examples of the sort of signage the council members may have meant to shut down with this ordinance.















Meanwhile the giant Mercedes-Benz logo installed atop the Superdome this week doesn't appear to be much of a problem. But, of course, the Benz bandit sign is an example of the "public property leased to private businesses" clause in this ordinance and thus an exception. Probably we can say the same for the Mr. Peanut bandit sign park on Simon Bolivar Avenue. But these coke ads appear to have slipped through the cracks somehow.

Probably this is by design. Coke's official response today is that they have "misinterpreted their permits" but actually guerrilla marketing campaigns like this thrive because of the controversy they generate. In this case, the ginormous Coca-Cola beverage corporation wants to be seen as a roguish outlaw much like the kids in this TV advertisement they've created here.



You see The Man doesn't want you to be creative and express your subversive enthusiasm for a global consumer product. But Coke knows you better than that and they're going to express that enthusiasm for you, Stacy Head's stodgy ordinances be damned! All they're asking is that you "open your mind" as the tagline to this ad reads... presumably by imbibing the neurotoxic artificial sweeteners in Coke Zero.

Apparently the people at NOLA.com (itself pretty much a glorified ad company) were impressed. The headline above Michelle Krupa's report on this episode currently reads "Coca-Cola sidewalk ads spark fury among French Quarter residents, New Orleans officials" but that's only after it was changed from this more congratulatory statement which I screen-captured because.. well I had a feeling there would be some editing to come.



See the ads caused a "sensation" on the popular viral mediums. In other words, mission accomplished, Coke!

All we've really learned here is that when high-profile events come to town, our city is pretty much going to get painted like a whore by advertisers whether we agree to it or not. The city leaders have already demonstrated a clear understanding of this phenomenon and are currently taking steps to ensure they aren't left out of the action next time. Once the Mayor gets his "Hospitality Zone" board up and running, this sort of thing won't be a problem since there will then be an appropriate channel through which the bribes permit fees can be distributed.

And then it's the residents who will have to go vigilante. Anybody know where to buy a bucket of gray chalk?

Fantasy Creeps

BP Ad Campaign Following Gulf Oil Spill Deemed 'Propaganda' By Some

NEW ORLEANS -- Nearly 20 months after its massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill – and just as the nation focuses on New Orleans, host of the BCS title game – BP is pushing a slick nationwide public relations campaign to persuade Americans that the Gulf region has recovered.

BP PLC's rosy picture of the Gulf, complete with sparkling beaches, booming businesses, smiling fishermen and waters bursting with seafood, seems a bit too rosy to many people who live there. Even if the British oil giant's campaign helps promote the Gulf as a place where Americans should have no fear to visit and spend their money, some dismiss it as "BP propaganda."

It is crucial to keep in mind just how strongly Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the plutocrats who run the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau have encouraged BP to engage in this deceitful propaganda campaign solely for the short sighted short term benefit of their tourism-dependent business interests.

But the ad campaign rings hollow to many folks here.

"They talk about areas being all open. There are areas that are still closed," said A.C. Cooper, a shrimp fisherman in Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. He listed some bays and fishing spots that he says the state still has closed due to oil contamination. "It's bogus, it's not the truth."

He added that last fall's shrimp harvest was dismal. "The numbers on our shrimp are way down," he said. "They (BP) make it sound like they're doing a lot, but they're not doing much to help the fishermen out ... I got good fishermen struggling to pay their bills right now."

The head of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, a commercial shrimpers group, called it "BP propaganda."

"When you have a lot of money, you can pretty much get any point across," Clint Guidry complained. "It's kind of like indoctrination."

Instead of demanding that BP be held accountable for and made to pay for what will be decades of mitigation of the full extent of the damage it has done, our elected representatives and unelected business leaders have settled for this series of bribes and lies in order that they may reap the short term benefit of a phony recovery.

But then, as Ray Nagin once told us, even during phony recoveries, there is money to be made so long as you know who to ask.

The company is paying chefs Emeril Lagasse and John Besh to promote Gulf seafood.

It's what we call bucking the trend.

Life in the Truman Show

I can name more than a few Facebook and Twitter folk who just naturally spend all day plugging products for no obvious reason already. The funniest example of this in my mind is one particular friend who has a habit of tweeting out some love for the NBA or NFL while watching games. As in, literally, "Ready for tonight's game! Let's go NBA!" Seriously, who roots for the league? I mean, I enjoy electricity but you don't see me walking around in an Entergy jersey.

Anyway the fact that we're all being turned into virtual billboards and that most of us are happy to go along with it shouldn't surprise anyone by now.

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Thought from a cranky old man

I realize we're long past the point where every aspect of our formerly private lives becomes mere fodder for use in selling crap to us... but sometimes I'm still astonished at the speed with which it all happened. Not too very long ago, something like this would have been seen as obviously evil on multiple levels; an invasion of private space, an abomination against the concept of human individuality, a corruption of the sport of basketball. Now, it's just the hip thing everyone wants to be a part of.

But I am a cranky old man, I guess.