Ward on Words

DDB London created a spot for Budweiser to air on Irish TV. (An interesting enough proposition, if you think about it!) Pix showcase the vibrant American city of Chicago as seen from the El train. Music is a very fun remake of a Beatles classic done by The Hours. Add it all together and what do we have? A British ad agency selling an American brew to an Irish audience using images of Chicago.... Check it out ... The Guardian story details the complexity of the shoot (50 hours of production during a freezing November week in Chicago! Coordinating the speed of the El train with the lyrics of the tune and the movements of multiple actors! And provides you a link to the spot.) What I love most - the glimpse it gives of a city I love....

I absolutely love Maira Kalman's work, the latest of which you can find here . A rich stew bubbles in the American melting pot, even today.

We open today by paraphrasing The Terminator's Sarah Connor: "Come on. Do I look like the mother governor of the future? I mean, am I tough, organized? I can't even balance my checkbook! " Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of the beleaguered state of California, is tough, no question about that - he's the Terminator, for Christ's sake - but he is certainly having enormous and well-publicized problems balancing the checkbook of the state he runs. What's a governor like Arnold going to do? Apparently he's borrowing an innovative financial tactic from another Sarah in his life - Sarah Palin - he's selling things on eBay. (Of course there was no end of controversy about Palin's claims to have sold the state's plane on eBay, but that's another story for another time...) According to Money Central on msn.com , the Governor is autographing automobiles to sell on eBay, in an attempt to close the deficit gap. Used cars. (Maybe he ...

But the liberal lion died, proving once again that Ted Kennedy was mortal like the rest of us. He lived an eventful life, full of grief and error and tragedy and love. He was the youngest of nine in a large, wealthy family, a pampered baby who grew up to be a very spoiled, undisciplined young man who achieved the near impossible task of getting kicked out of Harvard for cheating. He was blessed with a father who worked tirelessly to acquire power for his sons. As a young man, Ted Kennedy did his best to destroy his career, but he was lucky enough to be able to eventually get his career on track, becoming one of the most influential senators in America. His life was full of cancer as well. Cancer struck down the lion, but not after he worked tirelessly to help two of his children overcome cancer as well. My most enduring memory of Ted Kennedy is from ten years ago. The body of his nephew, John Kennedy, Jr., had been found and a boat was waiting to take the Senator out to s...

Some interesting links on a widely discussed topic... Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's controversial WSJ Op-ed piece (Confess that I started laughing when I read the Maggie Thatcher quote he opens with... "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Same could be said of bankers and their utilization of OPM.) BusinessWeek story on the uproar caused by Mackey's op-ed (Story ends by noting that shares of Whole Foods had risen 27 cents.) A primary care physician talks about the pressures he faces on the job , which include a diminishing salary and the ongoing need to educate patients about why an expensive test is not immediately needed.... Story in the LA Times on how the insurance companies have gained the upper hand in the reform. "'It's a bonanza,'" said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Polic...

So this was how it was supposed to happen - my father would not feel pain; he would not feel agony; the end would come swiftly and relatively easily, probably around Thanksgiving. That's what we were told by the doctors the summer after I graduated from college. My father had kidney cancer - and had been born with just one kidney, which had complicated the treatment. When remission ended and the cancer returned, my father made the decision not to pursue aggressive treatment to prolong his life. He'd watched his beloved wife die of cancer ten years earlier and saw no point in extending the agony that comes with dying of such a disease. I was the oldest of three girls. My father was a widower. My two younger sisters went off to college a week after that initial "end of life discussion" and my father and I were left alone to contemplate the end of his life. For some months, it was as the doctors had told us. Not too much pain or discomfort. A growing wea...

According to the WSJ , BoA attorneys today filed statements in court that made clear their perspective on the $3.6 billion in Merrill Lynch bonuses that were paid out just one day before it was absorbed by BoA: "Bank of America Corp. said Monday it did not mislead shareholders about its approval of billions in Merrill Lynch & Co. bonuses before a merger of the two firms, noting that it was "widely understood" that Merrill would award year-end compensation and the bank never told investors it had prohibited such payments. Bank of America said Merrill disclosed its intention to pay bonuses in separate federal filings throughout 2008. The new statements were made in a filing to federal Judge Jed Rakoff, who has refused to sign off on a $33 million settlement of a Securities and Exchange Commission civil lawsuit targeting the bank for what it disclosed about the bonuses before a December shareholder vote. The SEC said proxy documents sent to investors in November 2...

You'll be humming a little Eric Clapton after watching this Daily Show clip... The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Good News/Bad News - America's Recession www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests As Clapton says... "If you got bad news and you want to kick the blues Cocaine..." The answer to kicking the recession blues is right there in your pocket, apparently!

Death panels. Rationing. Morality . This is what we talk about when we talk about health care reform. The conversation seems to have veered in a direction that takes us further away from reform and closer to chaos. The simple truth is that the health care system we have today is unsustainable. We cannot continue to afford steep increases in the cost of health care. If we focus our efforts on adding more people to a broken system, health care will bring us all to bankruptcy sooner, rather than later. As one who is self-insured, I've got a huge stake in the health care debate surging across the country right now. To me, the issue is not really an issue of morality, nor should it be reduced to a conversation about providing health care to the uninsured. It's about fixing a broken system that touches each and everyone of us at different points in our lives. Birth requires health care. For most of us, dying takes us into the health care system as well. And at nu...

This story about the hurdles catching the heels of anyone interested in reining in Wall Street pay had me thinking about compensation. According to that story in yesterday's NY Times, Wall Street has not long endured life without the reward of the "guaranteed bonus." (In fact, I doubt it's endured even a second without such a perk.) Though unemployment has grown exponentially in the last year, though the recovery is looking to be a "jobless" one for those outside of Wall Street, the investment bankers who've been propped up and well-fed at the trough of TARP are planning a lot of "ironclad, multimillion-dollar payouts – guaranteed no matter how an employee performs." Guaranteed no matter how the economy performs. And, as we saw last winter, guaranteed by the feds no matter how the company performs. And when I was thinking about compensation, I starting thinking about something a very wise man said not too long ago about Wall Stree...

When the homeless become the subject of an article in the WSJ, poverty is an issue that is getting greater attention these days. "Cities tolerate homeless camps," is the headline of the WSJ story , and it offers a glimpse into life at tent cities in Nashville, Tampa, Sacramento and other urban areas: "Last summer, police [in Nashville] responding to complaints about campfires under a highway overpass found dozens of homeless people living on public land along the Cumberland River. Eviction notices went up -- and then were suspended by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, a Democrat, who said housing for the homeless should be found first. A year later, little has been found -- and Nashville, with help from local nonprofits, is now servicing a tent city, arranging for portable toilets, trash pickup, a mobile medical van and visits from social workers. Volunteers bring in firewood for the camp's 60 or so dwellers." According to the story, vagrancy is developing an ...

People appear giddy with joy that July saw the loss of only 250,000 jobs. Here's how the US News & World Report characterized the news : "Finally, some good news for the nation's long-suffering job seekers: Employers cut just 247,000 jobs last month, the smallest payroll slice since last August, the Labor Department reported today." (Not sure myself why finding out that nearly 250,000 people are also now looking for jobs would make the "long-suffering job seekers" so happy...) Econbrowser's take on the report is not quite as happy, pointing to a key issue with the loss of so many jobs: "But the problem is, if a traditional economic recovery had actually begun in June (8 weeks after the April peak in claims), the number of people with jobs should have increased in July rather than fallen by another quarter million." Yes. To Econbrowser, the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs is a concern, not a celebration. And here's more...

I know the people who work at Optimus, a commercial editing house in Chicago. They're hard working people, good people. They've worked very hard to build and maintain a successful business in a tough market during a difficult economic time. But they have horrible party planners, choosing as they did, to bring in disgraced governor Rod Blagojevich to entertain the revelers. I liked it better back in the day when disgraced politicians slunk off to the Siberia of self-imposed isolation. Richard Nixon comes to mind... Maybe - just maybe - this is Blago giving us a rehearsal of his next act - Jailhouse Rock? Here's a REAL entertainer giving us some Jailhouse Rock of his own... (FULL DISCLOSURE - I'm an Elvis fan, so comparing Blago to Elvis gets me riled up good.) Here's the story in full... "Blagojevich shakes, rattles, rolls as party pro Two men known in part for their hair stepped out from the back of a white Hummer limousine Friday evening ...

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20 - but who today can say they KNEW last fall that Goldman Sachs would rake in tons of money since becoming a bank holding company? Certainly not me. I absolutely cannot brag about my prescient vision in this matter. I totally believed that when they transformed from high rolling investment bank to boring but regulated bank they'd be scaling down the risk, and thus, the scale of their profits. Here's how Goldman characterized the shift in a press release: “'While accelerated by market sentiment, our decision to be regulated by the Federal Reserve is based on the recognition that such regulation provides its members with full prudential supervision and access to permanent liquidity and funding,' said Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs." I bought the story that regulation would provide "prudential supervision." So did the Wall Street Journal : "With the move, Wall Street as it has long been kn...

Front page of the Wall Street Journal today had two stories that offer a vivid picture of where we are today as a nation. The first story , above the fold, tells the story of the fee bonanza Wall Street firms are experiencing, thanks to the work involved on the AIG breakup. The lawyers and bankers on the job "could collect nearly $1 billion for IPOs and advice..." The second story , below the fold, talks about how the "tide" has turned for Proctor & Gamble, with the company reporting an 18 percent loss in 4th quarter profits. The loss is attributed to the fact that "sales of their premium-priced brands shrank amid tightened consumer budgets." So in some stores, P&G has launched "Tide Basic" - a cheaper version of their popular laundry detergent "that the company freely admits isn't 'new and improved'" and lacks some of the capabilities of the full-strength product. According to the WSJ: "It's ver...

Harry Patch died last week in England. It was the expected outcome for a man of 111. But it is a notable death because with Harry Patch goes the last living memory of trench warfare experienced nearly a century ago during The Great War - known now as World War 1. This story on CNN.com is a wonderful summary of Patch's life. He was a plumber before and after his stint in the trenches. He saw some of the worst warfare man has ever experienced: "He fought and was seriously wounded in Ypres, Belgium, in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his fellow soldiers died -- including three of his close friends." That's a placid little sentence to describe the slaughter of 70,000 men. A horror Patch refused to talk about until he turned 100 years old. Here's a YouTube video that shows some photos and film footage from the Battle of Passchendaele: You can hear the survivor's voice in this video shot at Passchendaele about two years ag...

"Tarnished Citigroup looks like it could shine again!" That's the bold claim made by the headline writer over at the WSJ today. And why not? Cit's a group that's been pounded over the last few years. Stock prices down 50 percent this year (and compare that to the rise in Goldman and JP Morgan Chase stocks this year!) Apparently, the folks in the know are now thrilled about Citi because "it has put concerns to rest about its viability and capital adequacy." But there's just one catch... and it's not Catch-22. It's a lack of profit. The article offers this bit of info, for purposes of clarity: "A caveat: unlike most of its key rivals, Citigroup isn't profitable now and may not operate in the black next year either." And that's what I find so funny about this story. Who cares about profit when the stock price is a good deal and the feds have signaled their desire to prop up the bank at all costs? The tarni...

Todd Mintz has a great story in Focus, a trade publication for business execs on the business lessons we can learn today from taking a look back at Monty Python . The men of Monty Python were brilliant satirists, but who knew their business acumen could be applied today when developing branding, marketing, sales and corporate strategies? Some lessons include: On branding: "Well, before he went he left a note with the company, the effect of which was how disappointed he was with your work and, in particular, why you had changed the name from Conquistador Instant Coffee to Conquistador Instant Leprosy. Why, Frog?" In the quest to be new and innovative, brand managers sometimes feel the need to tinker with success (think “New Coke”). Their ego gets the better of their judgment and they push forth ideas they think are creative but are unsuccessful in the marketplace. The end result is that revenue tanks. If brand is strong, don’t mess with it; just adjust the peripheral...