Oh, the feathers have been ruffled in media land today. Last week, ANA President Bob Liodice wrote a post in his blog, ANA Marketing Musings. It was an insightful look at some of the elements hurting the television medium such as ad clutter, high cost and lack of measurement. Reacting to that, MediaPost satirist George Simpson wrote a fake letter to Bob as if written by Meredith Topalanchik, who works for PR firm CooperKatz – the PR firm for the ANA – poking fun at Bob for not running his post by his PR folks before dumping on a medium of which the ANA has many members.
Still with us? We didn’t think so. Anyway, in response to all of that, Steve Rubel, also with CooperKatz, bit back on his weblog Micro Persuasion in defense of his co-worker and in support of the open and free voice central to the characteristics of weblogs.
We don’t know if George was having a bit of fun by lighting a snarky fire under the ANA and the plight of old fashioned public relations in the face of weblog proliferation or whether he truly believes blog posts should be edited by PR folks. We hope it’s the former. We also hope he doesn’t think an association should never say anything bad about itself or its members. We also hope he thinks insightful conversation about the issues facing the advertising industry are also a good thing. In fact, we know he does. George love to stir things up like this.
