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These Early ’70s Ads Tried to Convince Kids the US Army Wasn’t Totally Uptight

by LupeGovanvcuuf Posted on May 27, 2017

Mother Jones

In the early 1970s, the US Army had a serious problem with its brand. It was stuck in an unpopular and bloody war. Morale stank; even President Richard Nixon conceded to West Point cadets that “It is no secret that the discipline, integrity, patriotism, self-sacrifice, which are the very lifeblood of an effective armed force…can no longer be taken for granted in the Army.” Plus, Nixon had promised to stop the draft and the Pentagon had agreed to reintroduce an all-volunteer force in 1973. That meant military brass could no longer rely on a steady stream of warm bodies to fill the ranks—they would have go out and convince new recruits that Army life wasn’t a drag.

Iconic and unseen war photos from Vietnam and Iraq AP Photo

So in 1971, the Army enlisted Madison Avenue to help. Not literally Madison Avenue, but N.W. Ayer, a venerable Philadelphia advertising firm that held the Army recruitment account and had coined copyrwriting gems such as “A diamond is forever.” Armed with a $18.5 million budget—a sixfold increase from 1970—would-be Don Drapers and Peggy Olsons started brainstorming ways to sell the Army to a target demographic that had come of age amid peace protests and love beads.

This wasn’t the first time Ayer had tried to convince young Americans that the military got them. In 1969, it created an ad targeting young women titled “The Army needs girls as well as generals.” Beneath a photo of an aging staff officer and his fresh-faced assistant—his hand creepily touching hers beneath a manila folder—the ad gushed about the need for “girls who can keep things moving in the office.” And if the chance to wage bureaucratic warfare in a potentially hostile work environment wasn’t enticing enough, the copy promised the chance to meet “young people who want to go places and do things.”

N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The generals who oversaw the 1971 Army rebranding project were unimpressed by Ayer’s initial pitches. One rejected concept, described by historian Beth Bailey, featured an image of a chicken wearing dog tags with the tag line “Bye Bye Birdie.” (Sorry, Sal Romano.)

Eventually, the firm sold a reluctant Army Chief of Staff General William C. Westmoreland on the slogan “Today’s Army Wants to Join You”—a twist on the old “I Want You for U.S. Army” posters that one ad exec said was meant to evoke “individual expression and changing lifestyles.” (The other branches of the armed services also deployed new slogans to woo the Me Generation: The Navy: “If you’re going to be something, why not be something special?” The Air Force: “Find yourself in the United States Air Force.”)

N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The resulting youth-friendly campaign featured a variety of print ads published in mainstream magazines such as Popular Science and Field and Stream. Ads aimed at African-Americans ran in Ebony, Jet, and other black magazines. “When was the last time you got promoted?” asked an ad depicting a young African-American woman in an office. There was no mention of doing a general’s paperwork; instead, the ad talked up interesting work—”at the same starting salary our men get.”

N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The campaign also included TV and radio ads as well as records like the one below. Inconveniently, Bailey notes, the TV spots rolled out just as Lt. William Calley was being tried for his role in the 1968 My Lai massacre. A survey found that the ads didn’t shift young men’s interest in enlisting; some unswayed viewers called them “slick garbage.” The TV campaign ended after three months and its funding was not renewed. But Westmoreland later reported that the short-lived campaign was “eminently successful.”

The external rebranding effort was matched by an internal one. In preparation for the end of the draft, the Army rolled out reforms at a few bases as part of Project VOLAR (Volunteer Army). Changes included an end to reveille and bed checks, fewer inspections and more privacy, and other moves toward easing discipline and breaking down military hierarchy. Commanders could even allow the sale of low-alcohol beer in mess halls and barracks.

Operation Dessert Storm: The military loves giant cakes National Archives

In 1971, a couple of recent enlistees hit the road on their motorcycles on a new kind of recruiting mission. “Rapping with kids on street corners, at dances, at bowling alleys and high schools from New York to Baton Rouge,” according to the Soliders magazine, the duo talked up the perks of the new, laid-back Army. At one high school, Specialist Mike Speegle boasted about his two-person room: “I had black light posters, peace signs, a little styrofoam beer cooler in the corner.”

The changes went all the way to the top. Following “an extensive study of Army policy on haircuts,” restrictions on longer hairstyles, sideburns, and mustaches were eased. A LIFE magazine article on “liberated” Fort Carson, Colorado, reported that the new three-inch haircut rule allowed “enough for a spectacular Afro.” One recruitment ad focused on the new hair policies. “You’ll find that today’s Army is pretty relaxed about how you cut and style your hair,” it read. “You’ll discover that we care more about your head than we do about your hair.”

In 1971 LIFE asked cartoonist Bill Mauldin to view “the new Army” through the eyes of his grizzled World War II dogfaces. Life/Google Books

Soliders

The closest the “Today’s Army” campaign came to acknowledging the Sexual Revolution was an ad that suggested a tour of duty in Germany was a chance to see some action. In it, a GI in civvies and almost-civilian-length sideburns fraternizes with an attentive blonde at what looks like a Parisian café.

N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

A photographer follows soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan—and back. Peter van Agtmael

By the mid-1970s, many of the VOLAR reforms were scrapped. Officers and lawmakers alike worried that the changes, exemplified by the “Today’s Army…” slogan, were indicators of deteriorating post-Vietnam morale and readiness. “Because of slogans like that, and because of the felling that they have beer in the barracks, no reveilles, and things like that, it was perceived by a great many Americans that the Army would be an undisciplined Army,” Secretary of the Army Bo Callaway told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1974.

In 1973, “Today’s Army wants to join you” was replaced with a new slogan, “Join the people who’ve joined the Army.” (N.W. Ayer would later lose the Army account after a kickback scandal.) But the campaign’s basic message—that a stint in uniform was a chance for self-realization rather than mindless submission to conformity—would remain a fixture of future recruitment campaigns, from “Be all you can be” to “An Army of one.”

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These Early ’70s Ads Tried to Convince Kids the US Army Wasn’t Totally Uptight

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The Fear-Hate-Anger Click Machine

by KYZJeffere Posted on September 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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We’re at that point in the election cycle where everyone is in full-on hate-the-media mode—and not without reason. From Matt Lauer’s bizarrely imbalanced questioning of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, to Trump consultant Corey Lewandowski’s access to endless free airtime as a paid CNN analyst, to the false equivalency debate over the Clinton and Trump foundations, there’s plenty to get mad about.

So far, so familiar. People get mad about the media during every presidential campaign (and most of the time in between, too). But this year, there’s something more deeply problematic going on, and it’s rooted in the economics of online media. That’s something journalists—and people who read journalism—need to grapple with, because we’re all participants in the toxic feedback mechanism involved.

A good way to understand this mechanism is via the three words most often used to characterize what Donald Trump expresses, and feeds: Fear, hate, and anger.

Fear. Hate. Anger. Most pols appeal to these emotions in some way, but Trump doesn’t just appeal. He embodies, draws out, expertly modulates. Like a three-chord song, his campaign is an endless rearrangement of this basic vocabulary. Fear plus hate. Hate plus anger. Anger squared. Fear with an undertone of hate.

Why does this work so well? Part of the answer has become painfully obvious: It resonates with cultural bass notes that are stronger than many people believed. Racial resentment, economic anxiety, social dislocation. You can argue which one plays the biggest role, or whether all three reinforce and build on each other.

But there’s a fourth factor, and this is where journalists need to look in the mirror: A growing part of this profession, our profession, is also coming to depend on fear, anger, and hate.

Here’s why. There are, give or take, 40 percent fewer journalists employed in America than there were 15 years ago. And those journalists are working to fill not just a finite number of pages or hours of airtime. They are feeding the boundless appetite of the internet, cranking out post after post in search of advertising revenue. As advertising is becoming cheaper, and Google and Facebook are sucking up those dollars instead of publishers, a diminishing number of journalists have to push ever harder, against ever tougher competition, to draw eyeballs.

What do you do in that situation? You reach for what works—and fear, hate, and anger work incredibly well. Publish something that appeals to any of the three and it’s instant gratification: People will click on that headline, share that post. So you do it again, and you try to learn how to do it more effectively. It’s a pretty straight-up Pavlovian mechanism, and there’s no one seeking an audience on the internet—ourselves included—who has not felt its pull.

And the wheel keeps spinning faster. The more something pushes the fear-hate-anger buttons, the more likely it will turn out to be false or oversimplified. But the pressure is on to publish first and fact-check later, and the fact-check never gets as much attention (or as many shares) as the original outrageous bit. Plus outrage-stoking works best among people who already agree with each other, and thanks to the social-media algorithms, we don’t often see the people who disagree with us, so we close ourselves ever more tightly within our own bubbles. It’s the reign of the rage-share.

Trump, in a way, is the most powerful expression of this feedback loop. He understands it in the fine-grained, intimate way of someone who’s been tweeting a dozen times a day for seven years. He recognizes that fear, anger, and hate work whether you express them, elicit them in response, or both. He knows a lie gets around the world in the time a fact-checker is getting her boots on. He is, as some people have said, a comments section become flesh.

This is terrible for journalism, and for democracy. We need alternatives—and here at MoJo, that’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot.

As you know, we’re lucky enough not to have to grab traffic at any cost because advertising isn’t our primary source of revenue (though the 15 percent it contributes to our budget helps a lot). Instead, as you also know, what keeps us going is support from our readers, who provide 70 percent of our revenue in the form of subscriptions and donations.

But here we run into another way that the fear-hate-anger machine exerts its maleficent pull: Like other nonprofits, we have to make the case for support to our audience, and right now we’re in the closing days of a big fundraising campaign. Conventional wisdom holds that to get to our goal, we should push exactly those buttons. Fear :bad things will happen if we don’t meet our budget! (This of course is true—but panic mode doesn’t exactly appeal to your intelligence.) Hate: Look at the bad guy du jour (or even the evil mainstream media!). Anger: People are so misinformed, can you believe what fill-in-the-blank said?! (Also true—but the real point is, how do we fix that?)

We’re betting there’s a better way. We believe that conventional wisdom is wrong, that journalism doesn’t have to depend on the fear-hate-anger machine. And over the last few months at MoJo, we’ve launched an experiment to prove it. We’ve staked our future on gaining your support with transparent, reality-based arguments: diving into the challenges that investigative reporting faces, and the threat to democracy when billionaires try to silence journalists. We want to appeal to your frontal cortex, not your brain stem. And while it’s still early days, we’ve been inspired by the results.

A couple of months ago, when we published Shane Bauer’s investigation about working as a guard in a private prison, nearly 1.5 million people read it. And then they put the information to use. Some told us they were contacting their elected representatives and government officials. Some were government officials: We heard from the Department of Justice, which a few weeks after our investigation announced it was no longer going to do business with private prisons.

And perhaps most amazingly, these readers thought about their part in making journalism like this happen. Even though we didn’t plaster the story with fundraising appeals, a record number of people chose to donate to MoJo or subscribe to our magazine after reading it.

The support has kept coming. About a month ago, we launched our first-ever push to sign up monthly donors here on the site. Our goal is to raise $30,000 in new monthly donations from sustainers by September 30. That would give us more stability to focus on truly revelatory reporting, and to create a model for quality journalism that is supported by the users—voluntarily, without a paywall or even a tote bag.

So far, it’s working. We’re right around $22,000 raised in monthly gifts from nearly 1,900 readers, and we’ve gotten there without the sensationalism or panic that fuel so many fundraising drives. We’ve learned there is a big, powerful audience that wants to buck conventional wisdom.

That audience—you!—can build the alternative to the click machine. You can invest in facts and transparency. You can expose that which hides in the shadows (like the Trump campaign’s refusal to disavow endorsements from every far-right, Nazi, and militia group out there.) And you can ensure that when politicians try to push voters’ buttons, journalists don’t just give them a platform, but challenge them with the truth.

So join us. Help us show that it’s possible to make in-depth reporting sustainable, especially with ongoing, sustaining support. We want to build a model that others in the media can follow. Let’s all get off the fear-hate-anger treadmill.

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The Fear-Hate-Anger Click Machine

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There’s One Piece of Democracy That Fat Cats Can’t Buy

by DanLoftin065 Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago, we told you about how Mother Jones was sued by a billionaire political donor, and how we won a major First Amendment victory. You can read about that case here, but there was one thing we didn’t really go into at the time, and it’s kind of important: Going after media is not just a random thing for a billionaire determined to influence our political debate. It’s the next logical step.

Over the past six years, America has seen a dramatic expansion of the power of the 0.01 percent. First it was economic power: Because of everything from tax policy to the financialization of the economy, wealth has become radically concentrated. That wealth bought political power: Citizens United, the explosion of dark money, the billionaire primary. Now the same concentration of power and wealth is playing out in another arena that is critical to democracy: media.

Our industry is in the middle of an epochal shift in how content is produced, distributed, and, most importantly, paid for. And that matters, because as we learned when the Bush administration was marching America to war, without a critical mass of journalists who can challenge spin and deception, the political process fails.

So that’s what this story is about: How can we make independent, investigative journalism happen at a time of increasingly concentrated power and wealth?

Spoiler: Part of this involves a pitch. December is a really critical fundraising month for nonprofits like us. But, like you, we are kind of tired of the usual gimmicks that get trotted out around this time—HELP! We’ll go dark if you don’t pitch in! It’s actually true (more on that later), but it doesn’t really appeal to your intelligence.

So we had this idea: What if we tried something different? What if we actually showed you how the sausage is made: transparently explaining the challenges of paying for journalism in the digital age and going into detail about how reader support makes Mother Jones possible?

Maybe you already know—in which case, here’s your button:

But Maybe you’re the kind of person who wants the bigger picture. so here goes. You probably know that “legacy media” has taken a hit, but here is a number that brings it into stark relief: In 2007, there were 55,000 journalists working in America’s daily newsrooms. In 2014, it was down to just under 33,000—and all the hot digital shops you hear about employed maybe an extra 4,000.

This is not about paper versus pixels, broadcast versus streaming, or whatever other analog-versus-digital metaphor you prefer. It’s simply that the very structures that used to ensure a robust Fourth Estate have pretty much fallen apart. There are two models we’ve historically used to finance journalism in America, and neither of them is built to ensure a critical mass of watchdog journalism going forward.

The first model is what you might call eyeball bundling: When you give a media company a few seconds or minutes of your attention, the company can sell a portion of that attention to advertisers. Some of the money is spent to create content, which draws more eyeballs, and so on. It’s an imperfect system, but along a road potholed with kitten slideshows and holiday listicles, some amount of journalism gets made.

The problem is that when advertising is a volume game and the volume of content is infinite, the incentive is to produce cheaper and cheaper content, and to assault users with more and more intrusive ads. So naturally people ignore the ads or install ad blockers, and publishers move on to letting advertisers pay directly for articles—that’s the “native content” you see on sites from Buzzfeed to the New York Times.

Basically, what you get is an arms race of ever more annoyed users versus ever more desperate publishers—and eventually, the whole foundation of the model starts falling apart. Because increasingly, the people who own the eyeballs are not the publishers, but the companies—Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Verizon—on whose apps and devices you access media content. (For more on how “tech is eating media,” see this smart essay by John Herman.) If those companies want to sell those eyeballs and keep the money for themselves, they can do that.

And, of course, they do.

The other model for financing journalism is, basically, sugar daddies. Just as superwealthy individuals can now single-handedly underwrite political campaigns, so too can they create news organizations from whole cloth. Sometimes they do it for thoughtful civic reasons, as when eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched First Look Media. Other times they are hoping for a payoff down the road, like the venture capital investors who are pouring millions into Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Vox. Occasionally it’s not quite clear—why, really, did Amazon’s Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? Whatever the motive, the dangers are obvious: What happens when the wealthy funder demands editorial control, or loses interest upon realizing that the new venture doesn’t produce the magical 10x returns?

Just to be really clear about this last part: News doesn’t make money. It never has. Actual, original reporting has always been a de facto nonprofit endeavor, paid for with the revenue from other things (say, sitcoms in a broadcast network, or custom printing in a newspaper company). The only way to end up with a small fortune in journalism is to start with a large one.

There is a third way, though, and this is where MoJo has staked its claim. From our beginning almost 40 years ago, we have made a bet that you would support a newsroom that tells the stories no one else will. And you did. Today, two-thirds of our annual budget comes from readers; some 40,000 of you contribute, more than at any other nonprofit news organization outside public radio and TV.

Here’s how that breaks down: It takes about $13 million to run Mother Jones at our current size. About 15 percent of that comes from advertising, while 15 percent comes from foundations (a few big ones like the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, and a number of smaller family-based ones). Nearly 70 percent is from readers like you.

Some of you—about 175,000, to be exact—subscribe to our magazine. Another 12,000 folks buy individual issues on the newsstand. About 10 percent of our subscribers also become donors—they tack on an extra $20, $50, or even (hooray!) a five- or six-figure gift. Then there are donations in response to specific appeals: For example, about 6,000 people have pitched in online to help us fight the billionaire who sued us for covering his political giving and anti-gay activism. What’s critical for the long haul is that our base is broad and deep enough to ensure that we’re not dependent on any single check or revenue stream.

This model of reader-supported journalism means everything for Mother Jones. It means we can send our reporters after difficult, sometimes dangerous stories without fear that a powerful advertiser or funder will yank us back. It means that in the recession, when the bottom fell out of the advertising market and newsrooms imploded, we were able to open and expand our Washington bureau—because you wanted us to put reporters in the nation’s capital. And it means that today, we reach 9 million people a month, and we’re just getting started.

We believe that when all the craziness in the media landscape has played out, this is how public-interest journalism in America will survive and thrive: by you, the audience, directly supporting it. But here’s the problem we have to solve to get there: Historically, audience support has worked at scale only in the analog world. Your local public radio station gets about 10 percent of its listeners to become supporters. Mother Jones gets about the same rate of support from our print readers—even though we don’t hold your content hostage during pledge drives.

But we all live on the internet now, and while the digital revolution has taken MoJo from an audience of about 200,000 to one of 9 million and growing, reader support hasn’t kept up. Not even close. If the 10 percent ratio held, some 900,000 of our digital readers would donate every month, not a few thousand.

There are some obvious ways to increase that percentage—say, by hiding the stories behind a paywall. But that doesn’t make much sense, since those of you who support us want our journalism to have the biggest possible audience and impact. As do we.

So we need to find another way—for MoJo, and maybe for journalism as a whole.

Starting today, that’s the journey we want to take you on. We want you to understand what reader support is—donations of all sizes, subscriptions, even telling your friends about us—and how it fits into our budget. We think being transparent about the challenges publishers face will make it more compelling for you to support Mother Jones. The first step is this December fundraising campaign.

Most of the time, we’re pretty low-key about our online donor appeals, relying mostly on the “donate” link at the top of every page. But three times a year, we do big campaigns to meet our budget. (And by “meet our budget,” we mean “pay journalists.” Unlike some sites, we believe in paying for the work we publish, and that’s what the lion’s share of our budget goes to.)

Our target for December is $200,000. If everyone who visits the site this month gives 2.5 cents, we’re done. If everyone who visits today gives 40 cents, we’re done. If 40,000 people—fewer than 2 percent of our monthly visitors—each give the price of a latte, we’re done. Are you one of them?

No matter what happens, we’ll be transparent about that, too. So check back here as the month passes, and we’ll update you as we go. We’ll be testing a bunch of different appeals, and when we can, we’ll ask you to weigh in on which might work best.

We don’t know if this transparency thing will work, and that’s kind of terrifying. But it feels right. After all, that’s what we do with our reporting: lay out the facts and let you take it from there. And the facts are that democracy needs a critical press, and the era of that being financed by the magical elves of advertising is coming to a close. Will you be part of the next era?

Illustration by Dale Stephanos.

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There’s One Piece of Democracy That Fat Cats Can’t Buy

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

by IsabellASV Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Roberts has a long post at Vox about tech nerds and their disdain for politics. He highlights one particular tech nerd who describes both major parties as “a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things,” and jumps off from there:

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

The first, which is extremely common in the nerd community, is a distaste for government and politics….a sense that government is big, bloated, slow-moving, and inefficient, that politicians are dimwits and panderers, and that real progress comes from private innovation, not government mandates. None of which is facially unreasonable.

The second is the conception of politics as a contest of two mirror-image political philosophies, with mirror-image extremes and a common center, which is where sensible, independent-minded people congregate.

There’s about 4,400 more words than this, so click the link if you want to immerse yourself.

But I have a little different take on all this. The truth is that politics and tech are the same thing: inventing a product that appeals to people and then marketing the hell out of it. Back in the dark ages, this was a little more obvious. Steve Wozniak invented, Steve Jobs sold. It was so common for tech companies to be started by two people, one engineer and one salesman, that it was practically a cliche.

The modern tech community has lost a bit of that. Oh, they all chatter about social media and going viral and so forth. As long as the marketing is actually just some excuse for talking about cool new tech, they’re happy to immerse themselves in it. But actually selling their product? Meh. The truly great ideas rise to the top without any of that Mad Men crap. Anyway, the marketing department will handle the dull routine of advertising and….well, whatever it is they do.

Politics, by contrast, leans the other way. Inventing new stuff helps, but the real art is in selling your ideas to the public and convincing your fellow politicians to back you. It’s all messy and annoying, especially if you’re not very socially adept, but it’s the way human beings get things done.

Well, it’s one of the ways. Because Roberts only tells half the story. As much as most tech nerds disdain the messy humanness of politics, it’s equally true that most politicians disdain the eye-rolling naivete of tech nerds. You wanna get something done, kid? Watch the master at work.

In politics, you have the wonks and the hacks—and it’s the hacks who rule. In tech, you have the nerds and the salesmen—and it’s the nerds who rule. There are always exceptions, but that’s the general shape of the river.

But guess what? The most successful nerds have always been the ones who are also willing to figure out what makes people tick. And the most successful politicians have been the ones who are willing to marry themselves to policy solutions that fit their time and place. That doesn’t mean that nerds have to slap backs (Bill Gates never did) or that successful politicians have to immerse themselves in white papers (Ronald Reagan never did), but wonks and hacks and nerds and salesmen all need each other. The political hacks and the tech nerds need to get together and get messy. And more important: they have to genuinely respect each other. When that happens, you have a very, very powerful combination. So get to work.

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

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Guess Who’s Getting Rich(er) off the College Football Playoff? (Hint: It’s Not the Players)

by RowenaBaader Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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The first-ever College Football Playoff, culminating in tonight’s national championship game between Oregon and Ohio State, has been years in the making: Fans, coaches, and players had long complained about the lack of a tournament, à la college basketball’s March Madness, to determine a national champ. The four-team tourney has proved a smashing success: The semifinal games on New Year’s Day each brought ESPN more than 28 million viewers, breaking the cable TV ratings record set in 2011 by the title game between Oregon and Auburn. Thanks to NCAA rules, though, the players will make bupkis. So who is cashing in, then? Here’s a partial breakdown.

ESPN: In 2012, the sports network inked a 12-year, $7.3 billion deal for the rights to air seven postseason college games—the four big bowl games plus two national semifinals and the championship game. That’s a ton of money, even when you consider that media buyers told Advertising Age that 30-second spots during this year’s title game are selling for $1 million a pop. But even if ESPN barely covers its expenses, securing the long-term rights to the playoffs has further cemented its dominance as the go-to channel for sports fans. And that, in the end, should prove immensely profitable.

The NCAA: College sports’ governing body loves to prattle on about amateurism while pulling in nearly $1.4 billion annually in TV royalties for the football playoffs ($608 million) and March Madness ($771 million). Still, Mark Emmert, the NCAA’s embattled president, made $1.7 million in total compensation in 2012, 46 percent more than his predecessor, Myles Brand, earned in his last full year as prez.

Nike: There have been plenty of swooshes on your screen this playoff season: All four playoff semifinalists—Alabama, Florida State, Ohio State, and Oregon—wear Nike gear due to $15 million in contracts for the 2014-15 academic year. (Nike founder Phil Knight is a well-known Oregon alumnus and superbooster.) Related: Have you picked up your special-edition Oregon title game jersey yet? How about your custom CFP Zoom Hypercross TRs?

The Big 5 Conferences: The biggest recipients of the TV largesse will be the so-called Big 5 conferences—the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12, and the Southeastern—which will each receive $50 million a year, according to the CFP’s revenue distribution plan. The ACC, Big 10, Pac-12, and SEC also all got a $6 million bonus because their teams made the semifinals, plus millions more for travel expenses. (As you might imagine, these conferences already have hefty TV deals that are distributed among the schools.)

Coaches Mark Helfrich and Urban Meyer: Meyer—who won national titles at Florida in 2006 and 2008 and is earning nearly $4.5 million in base compensation this season at Ohio State—will take home $250,000 just for making it to the championship game. OSU athletic director Gene Smith told USA Today in December that those numbers are right on the mark: “He’s the CEO of a large corporation. We’re fortunate we have him at Ohio State.” Helfrich, the second-year Oregon coach, will pocket $2 million in salary this year (the lowest among semifinalist head coaches), plus $250,000 more should the Ducks win Monday night. (His assistant coaches already have snatched an additional six months’ worth of base salary this postseason, and could earn even more.)

Gene Smith: The Ohio State athletic director came under fire last year when it was reported that he earned a bonus of more than $18,000 after a wrestler won an individual national title in March. He’s on track to make another two weeks’ worth of base pay, roughly $36,000, if the Buckeyes bring home the trophy Monday night.

On Tuesday, the CFP announced that the NCAA would let it help cover the expenses of parents who wanted to come watch their kids play in the title game, allotting up to $1,250 per parent/guardian (maximum: two) for travel, meals, and accommodations. So that’s nice. But what of the kids whose hard work makes this all possible? Don’t they deserve something?

As it turns out, the NCAA allows players up to $550 each in goods from gift suites set up by individual bowl games. According to SportsBusiness Daily, the Rose Bowl (the Florida State-Oregon semifinal) handed out Fossil watches, Oakley Works backpacks, and New Era 59Fifty caps, while the Sugar Bowl (the Alabama-Ohio State semifinal) also gave away Fossil watches and New Era hats. It’s not the custom-made Fathead wall decals handed out by the Quick Lane Bowl, but hey, these kids are amateurs.

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Guess Who’s Getting Rich(er) off the College Football Playoff? (Hint: It’s Not the Players)

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Artificial ESP Comes to Twitter

by JulianaPizzey Posted on November 15, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Robert Waldmann is feeling creeped out:

An obvious twitter ‘bot followed me with tweets consisting only of advertising for, among other things, wasabi flavored ice cream. Now, I think you will agree that wasabi flavored ice cream is rather a niche product. You may not know that it exists (in Rome to which all roads lead). I hope with some (but rapidly declining) confidence that you don’t know that I really like wasabi flavored ice cream. HOW does a twitter ‘bot know I like wasabi flavored ice cream ??? I feel we have skipped artificial intelligence and gotten straight to artificial ESP.

How indeed? I’ll bet the answer is pretty interesting. I’m assuming, of course, that Waldmann hasn’t simply blanked out and forgotten that he wrote a tweet a couple of weeks ago about wasabi ice cream.

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Artificial ESP Comes to Twitter

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Advertising: FEMA Promotes Its Wireless Emergency Alert System

by Myrna Posted on May 28, 2013

The agency is releasing radio, television and digital ads to educate the public about the system, which began two years ago. Source:  Advertising: FEMA Promotes Its Wireless Emergency Alert System ; ;Related ArticlesWal-Mart Is Fined $82 Million Over Mishandling of Hazardous WastesIsraeli Electric Car Company Files for LiquidationBooks: ‘Storm Kings’ Review – Where Tornadoes Dug In, So Did They ;

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Advertising: FEMA Promotes Its Wireless Emergency Alert System

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