LOTD: 2/5/07

I’m completely in denial over the fact that Rex Grossman appeared to have suffered a sharp blow to the head right before yesterday’s game. Did his teammates wear Colts jerseys during practice?

• I more or less agree that the editing of Wikipedia entries to correct factual errors should be OK, but I understand Jimmy Wales’ reluctance to allow PR people editing access.
• Wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki.
• Josh kind of has a point. Bloggers spend so much time railing against big media and then we fall all over ourselves to cover the biggest media event of all, the Super Bowl.
• Seems that while ads might be a source of concern for parents worried about the messages their kids see, the shows those ads are embedded in also have parents furrowing their brows.
• Federated Media and comScore are partnering for blog metrics reporting.
• eBay will no longer allow you to sell virtual items, such as gear and such for World of Warcraft, through their auction service.
• The corporate minds behind MySpace don’t like it when you try to link to a competing media site like YouTube or Revver. Lets see how this affects the Google/Fox advertising negotiations that are happening now.
• Todd has added a number of nifty feed options to his Power 150 list of marcom blogs.

Quick Takes: 2/5/07

Getting these stories out of the system.

• What happens when two guys go on a promotional roadtrip but the company sponsoring it forgets to tell anyone? That’s what Mike Lesker is wondering about a Peerflix promotion.
• Steve Hall is talking about a movie that blames environmentalists for poor job growth in third-world countries that just happens to have been funded by a Canadian mining company.
• You can now download some fan-created posters for Disney theme park attractions.
• Disney has sold 1.3 million movies via iTunes in the three months since they went up for sale.
• The feds, in an attempt to find ways to make themselves look even dumber, are now considering suing the marketing team behind the Aqua Teen Hunger Force deal in Boston.
• Geeks get horror and chicks get romantic comedy this weekend at the theaters as studios think these two groups aren’t going to be interested in wall-to-wall Super Bowl coverage.
• SuperHeroHype has the linkage to both the cover art and a trade ad for the new DVD edition of Spider-Man 2 that’s about to hit shelves.
• James has not one but two online ads for Shooter.
• Some AMC Theater locations are offering a marathon of this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees.
• Bill Green thinks Ghost Rider is going to tank, based largely on the fact that the cross-promotions started way early. Can’t say as I disagree completely.
• Steven Spielberg is mouthing off over his problems with Paramount one year after Dreamworks, the studio he co-founded, was absorbed.
• The trailer for Dead Mary is dead awful.
• Jeff Wells says that Reign Over Me is just the latest in a series of Mike Bender-directed flicks to get under-marketed.
• 300 and Spider-Man 3 are the movies we’re likely going to see two new trailers for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer in front of.

Behind the scenes of AdJab’s demise

I wanted to share the story of AdJab’s end with you all since I’m no longer associated with AOL or any of their blogs and, quite frankly, I’m honked off over the whole thing. Below is the text of an email I sent to a colleague about how things went down.

I was called about three weeks ago by one of the Weblogs, Inc. higher-ups telling me that AdJab would be shutting down at the end of January. This was not a point of discussion but something that had been, apparently, “agonized” over for quite a while. Adding to my disappointment over the shut down the site was my frustration that, despite my status as lead editor on AJ, I was not included in any of those “agonizing” discussions. They were all apparently made at the AOL corporate level. The reason for the shut-down was that the ad revenue was just not great enough to support the running of the site and that the traffic, while building, wasn’t doing so fast enough. Especially maddening was the fact that, in the last month or so I had been working with the WIN team to develop new features and even were discussing bringing on new people. All of those discussion occurred without a hint that our future was in doubt.

I was asked to not make a big deal out of the site going away and get that one last (and toothless) post up. I couldn’t just let AdJab disappear, though.

The decision to shut it down made – and makes – no sense to me. We’re always in the top 10 ad-related blogs out there and I thought we were putting up better content then ever before. Plus, we were going out of business just days before the Super Bowl, an event that AdJab is kind of known for. I couldn’t figure it out.

It basically came down, in my mind, to AOL not knowing what to do with it. It doesn’t fit into any of AOL’s existing verticals and wasn’t big enough to manage in its own right so it got ditched. The changes that are happening on TV Squad and Cinematical are pretty much what we all feared when WIN was sold to AOL. Those two sites are becoming more editorially driven by AOL dictates. If you look at TVS you’ll see it’s slowly being re-branded as “AOL Television” and they’ve brought in new writers specifically devoted to mass-appeal shows like American Idol and 24, in some cases taking away those shows from the regular folks who had been reviewing them and assigning them to new writers brought in just for that purpose. Cinematical, too, is being taken over by MovieFone. AOL sends out these twice-daily emails about what they consider “top news”, some of which has already been covered by the CINE team. It’s kind of ridiculous.

In short AdJab went away far too quickly and in a manner I wasn’t at all happy with. In my opinion the end was completely out of whack with the way we at AdJab had conducted ourselves. It was disappointing on so many levels I felt sick to my stomach at the end. It was so infuriating that I didn’t believe it was happening, and especially not like this.

That’s all I have to say on the subject. I’m sure some might disagree with some of my points but this is my perspective on matters.