Lone Gunman

In my opin­ion there are two great War­ren Buf­fett inter­views; both by CNBC:

• The Bil­lion­aire Next Door, where Buf­fett dis­cusses a cou­ple of his invest­ments and addresses his per­sonal invest­ment his­tory and phi­los­o­phy.
  J.D. at Get Rich Slowly gives a good overview of the inter­view.
• His epic three-hour inter­view with Becky Quick (tran­script only).

Fol­low­ing on from the (not so) shock­ing news that stars from Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ were paid a small for­tune to smoke on screen, I came across the slightly more shock­ing news that musi­cians are get­ting paid sim­i­lar amounts for prod­uct place­ment in their lyrics.

The prac­tice itself doesn’t sur­prise me as prod­uct place­ment in music videos has been going on for as long as music videos have existed – this is just an evo­lu­tion of that prac­tice. What sur­prises me is that the lyrics for these songs are obvi­ously writ­ten after an adver­tis­ing agree­ment has been made. Disappointing.

For the amus­ing back-story to this, head to Wired’s Lis­ten­ing Post and read about how com­pa­nies pay artists to include brands in lyrics.

In the e-mail, Kluger (who has rep­re­sented Mariah Carey, New Kids on the Blog, Ne-Yo, Fall Out Boy, Method Man, Lady GaGa and Ludacris) explained via e-mail that for the right price, Dou­ble Hap­pi­ness Jeans could find its way into the lyrics in an upcom­ing Pussy­cat Dolls song. Crouse posted the e-mail on his blog at the Anti-Advertising Agency, an art project of sorts that’s basi­cally the philo­soph­i­cal mir­ror image of a tra­di­tional ad agency.

In Home Equity Frenzy Was a Bank Ad Come True, The New York Times’ Louise Story digs up the his­tory on finan­cial adver­tis­ing encour­ag­ing con­sumers to take on debt – specif­i­cally, home equity loans.

Adver­tis­ing his­to­ri­ans look back at the ‘80s as the time when bank mar­ket­ing came into its own. Cit­i­group led the way by hir­ing away adver­tis­ing staff from pack­aged goods com­pa­nies like Gen­eral Mills and Gen­eral Foods, where catchy ads were more common.

“Bank­ing started using con­sumer adver­tis­ing tech­niques more like a depart­ment store than like a bank,” said Bar­bara Lip­pert, an adver­tis­ing critic for the mag­a­zine Adweek. “It was a real change in direction.”

Banks thought they were in safe ter­ri­tory. A Mer­rill Lynch exec­u­tive, Thomas E. Capasse, told The New York Times in 1988 that home equity loans were safe because bankers believed that con­sumers would spend the money on wise invest­ments and not “pledge the house to buy a blouse.”

As part of Google’s tenth birth­day cel­e­bra­tions, Project 10¹⁰⁰ has been announced as Google’s most recent phil­an­thropic ges­ture – it’s “a call for ideas to change the world”.

Ask­ing for sub­mis­sions in eight cat­e­gories (com­mu­nity, oppor­tu­nity, energy, envi­ron­ment, health, edu­ca­tion, shel­ter and ‘every­thing else’), Google is pledg­ing $10 mil­lion to bring to life five of the very best ideas.

And how does a sub­mis­sion ‘win’? By help­ing the most peo­ple in the world pos­si­ble. Sim­ple, really. (It’s a bit more com­pli­cated than that, naturally!)

Ear­lier this month Seed Media, the organ­i­sa­tion behind the excel­lent Seed Mag­a­zine, launched Research Blog­ging — a great new website/hub for dis­sem­i­nat­ing peer-reviewed research. In light of this, The Econ­o­mist dis­cusses the future of sci­en­tific debate on the Inter­net.

Although Web 2.0, with its empha­sis on user-generated con­tent, has been derided as a com­mer­cial cul-de-sac, it may prove to be a path to speed­ier sci­en­tific advance­ment. Accord­ing to Adam Bly, Seed’s founder, internet-aided inter­dis­ci­pli­nar­ity and glob­al­i­sa­tion, cou­pled with a gen­er­a­tional shift, por­tend a great rev­o­lu­tion. His opti­mism stems in large part from the fact that the new tech­nolo­gies are no mere new­fan­gled gim­micks, but spring from a desire for timely peer review.