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This is a time of uprecedented activity in the national security space.  The country is in the midst of two wars and in a global pursuit of terrorists.  At the same time, President Obama and Secretary Gates are increasing emphasis on hybrid military options and softer power national security options.  And, the Quadrennial Defense Review, a top-down review of military strategy, is underway. 

This coming Tuesday, June 30, Ogilvy PR will hold its second lecture in the National Security Lecture series.  We’ll post some of the hightlights on this blog following the event so stay tuned. 

I’ll have more to say later, but the overnight ratings for last night’s ABC “Primetime” town hall meeting on health care featuring President Barack Obama were not good lousy.  According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show finished at the bottom of the ratings last night (at the very bottom according to Variety).

I cannot judge how effective the special was, in that, like apparently the vast majority of Americans, I found something better to watch last night during the time slot.  I also chose sleep over the follow-up on “Nightline.” 

But, I do know that the program didn’t get low ratings because ABC slipped it on with little warning.  The network promoted the special heavily — including an interview with the President on “Good Morning America.”  It was helped in the promotion by the Republican National Committee, who after being rebuffed in buying ads on the show (ABC as a network does not accept advocacy ads so they were not treating the RNC any different than other political group) charged that the program would be an infomerical for the administration’s health care plan.  The RNC also went after a member of the Obama administration — Linda Douglass — who used to work at ABC and the participation of ABC’s Dr. Timothy Johnson, who they tried to portray as a longtime advocate of universal, government run health care.  Those charges were picked up in the political media and the media about the media and the complaints were echoed regularly on Fox News.

So was the Republican campaign successful in deterring Americans from watching or was there something else involved?  My guess is the latter. 

The timing certainly didn’t help.  But, there is one other factor there that I think needs to be taken into account.  If you look at the ratings for presidential news conferences and appearance of the president and the vice president on various news shows, you will see they have been on a downward path since the inauguration. 

Could it simply be that America’s fascination with politics (as seen by the higher ratings during the presidential campaign through the inauguration) has ended and we are back the same level of blah that we were in as recently as two years ago?

Interesting article on the problems at My Space and at Fox Interactive Media.

As a companion to today’s earlier post on Lou Dobbs (see previous post), I wanted to call attention to a piece that Stuart Rothenberg had yesterday in Roll Call and on Real Clear Politics.  In it, he announces that he will no longer do MSNBC’s “Hardball” since it no longer has a civil approach to political discussion.

I’ve been cynical that the civil discussion can lead to ratings success, but Rothenberg makes a number of important points and a rather impassioned case that is worth reading.

The New York Observer had an interesting story tonight on an oft overlooked part of the overall decline of CNN in prime time — Lou Dobbs.  Similar to others on CNN, Dobbs’ ratings rose during the campaign, but have subsequently fallen back to earth.

What makes Dobbs’ fall most interesting, at least to me, is that his show is the one on CNN that is closest to the programs on Fox and MSNBC that CNN (Jon Fine, Howard Kurtz, etc.) so likes to criticize.  In fact, Dobbs has long been doing some things — a penchant for only interviewing guests who agree with him, self-important commentaries, stacked polls — that later became (in)famous with critics who don’t like the more partisan tone on the network’s competitors.

Can Dobbs recover?  Perhaps.  Remember, this is the second version of Dobbs we’ve seen on CNN — this one very different that the one that hosted “Moneyline” before leaving the network to try his hand in the Internet age with Space.com.  When he came back to CNN, he was more opinionated and with a harder, populist edge that attracted both the left and the right of the political spectrum.  Dobbs adopted both immigration and globalization as his bogeymen and rode both issues to ratings success last fall. He even started a nationally syndicated radio talk show that airs daily before his CNN show.

But, as the article points out, immigration is no longer as much an issue as it was a year or more ago, in part because illegal immigration has declined with the economic recession.  Therefore, Dobbs’ efforts to keep it front of mind have not been successful.  I even agree with his critics that he has sometimes crossed the line with his opinions on the evils of illegal immigration and the Bush and now Obama administrations’ response to it.

The big question, I guess, is will Dobbs have an Act III?  CNN’s public relations department had a big hand in branding him as “Mr. Independent” and stoking rumors that Dobbs might run for president.  Therefore, creating a “new Lou” is possible.  That said, only time will tell…

Yesterday, the New York Times‘ Doug Quenqua had an interesting piece on dead blogs.  Included in the piece was a statistic from Technorati:

[O]nly 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Now admittedly, many of these blogs are personal blogs, not corporate ones, but I am sure that there a fair number of those too.  This leads to an interesting question about how does a company handle a dead corporate blog?  It could be that the blogger was promoted, transfered to a new job inside or outside the company, retired or terminated.  Or it could just be that the blogger ran out of things to say.  But in any case, what does a company do?  For example, what will General Motors do when Bob Lutz retires?

Have an opinion?  Let us know.

For most PR professionals, there is nothing earth shattering in this piece from McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required).  However, it is refreshing to see other business professionals reiterate many of the same things that companies such as Ogilvy PR attempt to sell into the c-suite.

I know, I thought it was called SPEED Channel…

Sports Business Journal has an interesting article regarding the potential of NASCAR creating its own cable network after its television contracts end with FOX, TNT and ESPN/ABC in 2014.  It is an interesting concept since there is an existing cable network (News Corporation-owned SPEED) that largely does the same thing. 

Lots can change in the next few years, but given NASCAR’s faltering attendance and ratings in the past two years (FOX’s NASCAR ratings are down at least 10% year-over-year so far with two races left in its package), one wonders if NASCAR’s decline in popularity is a temporary hiccup or a sign of a larger problem.  The downturn in the economy can explain away many of the empty seats at various tracks as fans, who often drive many miles to see their favorite racer, choose to stay at home to save money.  However, as Michael Hiestand, the TV critic for USA Today, has said, and I am paraphrasing here, staying away from the race track is one thing, but it doesn’t cost someone to sit on the couch at watch the race. 

Another concern is the lack of sponsors this year.  Again, some of this is understandable given the economic environment, but there have been signs that some long time sponsors, such as Kodak, think that big ticket sponsorships of racing teams, which cost somewhere between $15-25 million, are no longer worth it.  This has led to lay-offs and mergers among the race teams and cars (some in the Sprint Cup Series, and many more in the Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series) running without sponsors on the hoods and back panels.  The lack of sponsorships has also affected the TV networks who have been challenged in selling ads and have been cutting production costs (notice a lack of blimp shots recently?).  Finally, consider the future of General Motors and Chrysler.  In short, the “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” strategy of Detroit is under serious challenge.

In short, NASCAR has some problems it needs to solve in the near term.  How it solves those problems will help determine whether the channel becomes a reality.

After several years of public relations campaigns and battles at the Federal Communications Commission, the league and the cable provider finally reached a truce today that will see the NFL Network show up on the cable company’s basic digital package later this year.  In the end, the compromise meant that the league agreed to a reduced fee in order to gain additional carriage in Comcast homes.  Next up for the league is to try to gain carriage on other cable systems — Time Warner Cable and Cablevision among the largest.

Having followed this for years (yes, years), it’s not hard to say who won and lost in this battle of the titans.  In the end, I give the nod to Comcast in this one.  They were able to use their market size and the threat of ever decreasing carriage to get the league to lower its proposed fee.  The NFL, which had a much weaker hand, saw that its efforts to put pressure on the NFL via the fans (its “I want my NFL Network” campaign), Congress (Arlen Specter et. al.) and the Federal Communications Commission (Kevin Martin) fail, forcing it to cut its fee.  As I’ve written before, the League’s hand was weak because its product — the NFL Network — was weak, primarily because of its lack of live games.

This, however, is not the end of the game for the NFL.  It still has to deal with other cable providers who currently do not carry the channel.  That will not be easy — one only needs to look at Time Warner Cable’s ongoing fight to keep MASN, the regional sports network that carries the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Nationals, off its cable systems in North Carolina, as an example.

Nor is it the end of the game for consumers worried about higher cable bills.  Even though the NFL dropped its demand of Comcast from 70 cents to somewhere between 40 and 50 cents, look for Comcast to pass along this cost to consumers (previously Comcast made the channel available to those — like me — who were willing to pay an additional $5 or so a month for it and a variety of other sports channels such as NHL Network and NBA TV).  It may only be a buck or two a month, but I have no doubt my bill will be going up as will the bills of those who did not pay for the package .  Moreover, given way the leagues control television rights, I can’t get around this by watching on the Internet like I can with say “Family Guy” or “Bones.”  But that’s a story for another post.  Back to work….

In The Hill today, Democratic pollster Mark Mellman makes the case that there is no need to reframe the climate debate.  It is an interesting counterpoint to the arguments made by EcoAmerica and expressed in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times articles cited earlier.