It’s rare to see a good idea, failed parody, and knee-jerk reaction all collide in one horrible mess, but Sprint managed to pull that off this week.

The phone giant launched a series of ads attacking the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. They spoofed — very effectively — T-Mobile’s girl in pink campaign by dressing up a crusty, corpulent, cigar-chomping fat-cat in a similar outfit.

The message is simple: you can dress up this merger in a cute pink dress, but it’s still ugly. Smart idea — but as for parody, I’m not convinced that enough people recognize the T-Mobile spokesmodel to make it effective. Don’t overestimate the awareness of the general public. They don’t pay as much attention as you think.

But that’s not all, for this story has an insane twist that you won’t believe. Sprint yanked the ads — which were all over newspapers and the internet — because the transgender community found them offensive. Of particular concern was the tagline “It makes sense if you don’t think about it,” which some suggested constituted transphobia.

Behold the death of humor in America. You can’t even put a guy in a dress anymore.

The best thing to ever happen to local TV is newspapers breaking stories on their websites.

In the old days, your local TV news crew would have to wait until morning to read what’s going on in town. Now they have it fed to them all day long.

TV stations have never had the resources of newspapers and always relied on them as the agenda setters for the day’s coverage. Whenever someone pointed this out, they’d say, “Maybe so — but our service is intended to offer up a condensed version of a story to suit our audience’s needs. Plus we make it our own by adding unique elements.”

And then there was this: “Besides, we have something the newspaper can never match: immediacy.”

They were right. The paper was locked into a rigid production schedule that could not accommodate breaking news.

Attention local TV: Just in case you missed the paper that morning, Erastus Corning is dead.

Then along came the internet. Newspapers gained the ability to report news immediately — and TV had a new way to get stories on the same day — even beating the print edition of the paper.

But in the long run, the newspaper will win. They will always have more people and it will remain easier to produce a print story than a video piece. And newspapers will get good at doing video long before TV station learn how to be newspapers.

I went to a class this week called social media marketing. Though it was geared to newbies, I’d say I learned a thing or two I didn’t know — and it reinforced some ideas I already understood.

But what I really got out of it was this: you cannot learn about something like social media by listening to someone talk about it. No, you have to use it.

Could you learn how to drive a car by sitting in a classroom? Sure, you’d learn about driving, but you wouldn’t be ready to get your license.

It seemed that many people in the room did not use the tools we were talking about, simple things like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Facebook. So here’s my advice to people who want to learn about social media: sign up and start participating.

Learning by doing is powerful — and when it comes to social media, the skills you acquire with a personal Twitter account or blog can help you at work.  

You can’t become a carpenter by watching YouTube videos or reading a book. It will give you some ideas, maybe inspire you, perhaps help you make a plan, but if you want to learn something real, pick up a hammer and start hitting some nails.

You keep hearing that things are bad for local TV, right? You won’t get any argument from WLNE in Providence. This week, the station pre-empted its 7pm newscast so they could run a half-hour infomercial for the Genie Bra.

News is the ATM of local TV, a machine that cranks out cash as fast as you can stuff it in your wallet — so if a station is nuking the news to run an infomercial, you know things have really gone bust. TV Spy says that the sagging station plans to use its news as a backup for when it can’t place paid programming in the 7-7:30pm time slot.

Meanwhile, WLNE is in receivership and about to go on the auction block — a situation complicated by ABC’s threat to drop the station from its affiliate roster.

Local TV stations were once a guaranteed investment; now some of them are struggling to pay the power bill.

Here in the Albany area this week, there’s been one story: what’s come to be known as the Kegs and Eggs Riot of 2011. To say the media has had a field day would be like saying Japan had an earthquake.

On Saturday March 12, throngs of UAlbany students were doing some early morning pregaming for the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Things got out of hand and ended in an orgy of mad drunken mayhem. Nobody got hurt, five got arrested.

As I wrote elsewhere, it would not have been a huge story if not for all of the pictures and videos that started zipping around the internet. The images turned it into a media sensation.

That’s all well and good, but now it appears that the Times Union newspaper is doing everything it can to see that more of these marauding students get arrested. Just take a look at this graphic from the front page of their website.

Why would they do this? Simple. Arrests mean that they get a few more days out of a story that’s been a huge online sensation. Interestingly, the newspaper is doing more here to help catch the Kegs and Eggs kulprits than they did to help generate leads after the coldblooded murder of a UAlbany student in 2008. That wasn’t on the front page for five days,* nor did it receive such broad online treatment.

I’m sure in 2008 they would have said, “Hey it’s not our job to help the police find his killer.”

Oh, really? But it’s your job to help them arrest some drunken college students?

*Someone counted and told me it was four days, 10/22/08 – 10/25/08

Everything you need to know about local TV news is in this book.

TV news has always been addicted to slogans. I should know, I used to write them.

My magnum opus? Live Local Late Breaking.

My boss used to joke that if we had only copyrighted Live Local Late Breaking, there would have been piles of money made. Not for me, exactly, because they owned my work, but for somebody. A lot of TV stations around the country picked up on the slogan — and nearly twenty years after it was first rolled out, many of them still use it.

So how does something like that spread from one television market to the next? Consultants.

Local TV news is consistent from town to town because of a small circle of consultants. Two companies in particular, AR&D and Magid Associates, have done more to homogenize local TV news in America than any other force. They may think they take different approaches (here’s AR&D sniping at Magid’s love of Live Local Late Breaking) but they don’t.

And woe to those who try to break the mold.

When Chicago’s WBBM tried to do a no-frills newscast in 2000, a show that covered serious stories — and did it without unnecessary sound effects, flashy graphics, and happy talk — they got creamed. Less than a year later, it was back to business as usual.

The station management didn’t give the new approach time to work — and how could they? The audience that had been trained to expect their news to look and sound a certain way was disrupted.

This is what the TV news consultants have wrought: an entire nation where there is no incentive to offer the audience anything new or different, a place where good ideas are shunned, and sameness is a virtue.

A little old fashioned low-tech coupon clipping.

When can a coupon make your customer angry? Let’s ask Groupon.

Hot on the heels of their Super Bowl ad controversy, the online coupon giant made a major flub before Valentine’s Day. An FTD coupon they issued caused some customers to pay more for their flowers, not less. Oh, well. Can you really put a price on love?

Coupons work best if customer feels they’re getting something special, not hosed. If you come off as being cheap or petty, the customer — or potential customer — might think you’re trying to give them a hard time instead of a great value.

For example, take the curious case of Ted’s Fish Fry.

I love anything that’s fried, and when it comes to deep fried fish, Ted’s Fish Fry are the champs. I like saving money too, so this coupon of theirs caught my eye. Ten percent off? Cool! But it’s not so simple:

SUN – THURS ONLY

OK… can’t use it on Friday during Lent. But as if that wasn’t enough, they go on:

Not valid on Ash Wednesday

So what we have is the fish joint telling its Catholic customers, “Don’t expect a special deal on Friday. Or on Ash Wednesday either, you cheap bums.”

I’m sure that’s not what they intended, but maybe it’s time to switch to Bob & Ron’s Fish Fry…

Big media is today’s Tom Sawyer. God help me, I just quoted a Rush song.

For a long time, I’ve compared content providers like newspapers and websites to Tom Sawyer, who made short work of his whitewashing by getting people to work for free.

I’m not the first person to make that comparison, and I won’t be the last. David Carr at the NY Times recently joined the Tom Sawyer club in a story largely about how Huffington Post was built on the back of unpaid help.

Yeah, I‘ve written about this before. More than once.

Maybe your local newspaper uses bloggers from the community who provide free content. They tell these folks that it’s a great platform for getting readers to see their work. They’re right! For a lot of people, it’s an excellent way to get exposure — and I’ll tell you from personal experience, the ego stroke provided by sometimes seeing your post on the front page doesn’t hurt either.

As Carr writes:

Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: “You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.”

Like if you were a plumber. Writing a blog about plumbing for the local paper could improve your reputation and convey your expertise, which in turn may bring more business. Nobody would dream of asking you to do your plumbing for free, but to write about it?

I’m not saying don’t write for free, just be aware that they’re going to make money from your efforts. The only reason your blog is there is to drive up traffic — and that’s how they sell ads. The important thing to remember is that Tom Sawyer didn’t just get other people to do his work, he actually proffited from them doing his work.

But does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?

I got this up morning and there was an iPad sitting on the table. Woo-hoo! An iPad! Rather than the the usual routine of emptying the dishwasher and making sandwiches, I couldn’t keep my hands off the iPad. Oh, gorgeous and sleek iPad I love you…

Ours was to be just a brief encounter; turns out my wife borrowed it from work for a client meeting. But, oh it was so… perfect. And then the stupidity of Motorola’s Super Bowl commercial struck me hard.

Yeah, I’m old enough to remember Apple’s 1984 spot. And I get what Motorola is trying to say, that we are all mindless sheep who bleat “Apple” . But there’s a flaw here: Apple products are genuinely good. I don’t want an iPad because it has an Apple logo, I want it because it’s well made.

Instead of just focusing on what the Xoom does well, Motorola couldn’t resit taking a shot at Apple. Sorry Motorola. I just don’t believe that the iPad sucks — or that everyone has one. Or that the people who use them are lemmings.

Don’t agree with me? Then imagine how absurd it would be if Microsoft made the same commercial, except for their Zune music player. Funny, right? You’ve never used a Zune — or for that matter, you’ve probably never even seen one or known anyone who uses one. But you’d never dream of buying one.

I rest my case.

"K stands for the Kindness we show our customers."

One of the things that makes 30 Rock so good is its NBC parallel universe. In this slightly alternate reality, the network has been acquired by Kabletown, just as in real life Comcast is the new boss at NBCUniversal.

Kabletown is a homey family company that’s the polar opposite of GE. Their founder and CEO, a big bear of a guy played by Ken Howard, greets you with a hug. You’re not an employee, you’re family. He’s a far cry from Jack Donaghy, the Six Sigma Black Belt Ultra (with the groin branding to prove it) who’s equal parts Jack Welch, Roger Ailes, and… well, Alec Baldwin.

But could it be that Comcast is just as clueless as Kabletown?

Last week Comcast banished the peacock from NBCUniversal’s corporate branding. Oh, sure, the peacock will remain on the network and MSNBC — for now — but to send the peacock packing is significant. NBC used to like telling people that the peacock was one of the most recognizable logs on earth. I can’t speak for whether people in Romania would recognize the NBC peacock, but in the United States, everybody knows it.

Nightly news anchor Brian Williams was not impressed. While moderating an event introducing Comcast, he said of the peacock, “It’s our Coca-Cola. It’s our Apple. It’s our Ford Motor Company, that instantly recognizable thing.”

Indeed it is.