Search Results for: Businessweek

What it’s like for an actor to become a TV commercial megastar—forever associated with a brand, for better and worse:

On the day of the audition, roughly 30 actors showed up. When it was Olcott’s turn, he flashed his big, ecstatic smile. The director loved it, and Olcott got the job. In February, on a bare-bones budget of roughly $100,000, a first commercial was shot touting the herbal product Enzyte. It boiled down to 30 seconds of campy innuendo. Olcott was shown breezing through life flashing his blissed-out smile at breakfast, at work, and while waving happily to his neighbor, a guy holding a sagging hose. ‘This is Bob,’ went the voice-over. ‘Bob is doing well. Very well indeed. That’s because not long ago, with just a quick phone call, Bob realized that he could have something better in his life. And what did he get? Why, a big boost of confidence, a little more self-esteem, and a very happy Mrs. at home.’ Toward the end of the commercial, viewers were given a telephone number for Enzyte.

A couple months later, Olcott got a phone call from the advertising team in Los Angeles. The commercial was a huge hit in the U.S. The phones at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, the Cincinnati-based maker of Enzyte, were ringing like crazy. They wanted more ads, more Bob, more smiles. Spear rushed back to Vancouver. By the time they stopped shooting in 2005, Olcott had starred as Smiling Bob in 18 different Enzyte commercials. Ultimately, Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals spent more than $125 million on airtime, the company’s founder would later tell GQ. Smiling Bob was famous.

“Branded for Life.” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek

More by Gillette

How much blame for the financial crisis should be placed on people like Robert Rubin, former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Citigroup chairman? A fresh look at the decisions he made:

Like many Rubin defenders, Sheryl Sandberg suspects that her mentor has become a scapegoat for events beyond comprehension.’My own view is that, look, these have been hard times, and people need people to blame,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t mean they blame the right people.’

Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn’t know Rubin personally. He admits that his antipathy, like that of so many Rubin critics, is fueled by symbolism. ‘He represents everything that’s bad in America,’ he says. ‘The evil in one person represented. When we write the history, he will be seen as the John Gotti of our era. He’s the Teflon Don of Wall Street.’ Taleb wants systemic change to prevent what he terms the ‘Bob Rubin Problem”—the commingling of Wall Street interests and the public trust—“so people like him don’t exist.’

“Rethinking Robert Rubin.” — William D. Cohan, Bloomberg Businessweek

A look at the illegal tunnels that have been dug under the Arizona-Mexico border by Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs, and how U.S. law enforcement teams are dealing with them:

Crime has been coming up out of the ground in Nogales for a while now. Since 1995 more than 90 illicit underground passageways have been discovered in various states of completion in the two-mile stretch of urban frontier that separates Arizona’s Nogales from its far larger twin in Sonora. Twenty-two complete tunnels have been found in the past three years alone. Streets have opened up beneath unwary pedestrians and subsided under heavy vehicles; the city has become infamous as the Tunnel Capital of the Southwest.

Although quantification is impossible, the underground shipment routes represent a significant economic investment, one that far exceeds the time and money spent on the homemade submarines, ultralight aircraft, and catapults used to move narcotics elsewhere. Some tunnels cost at least a million dollars to build and require architects, engineers, and teams of miners to work for months at a stretch. A few include spectacular feats of engineering, running as much as 100 feet deep, with electric rail systems, elevators, and hydraulic doors. But the economies of scale are extraordinary. Tunnels like these can be used to move several tons of narcotics in a single night.

“The Narco Tunnels of Nogales.” — Adam Higginbotham, Bloomberg Businessweek

See more from Bloomberg Businessweek

What Estonia can teach us about economic recovery—and how The country’s leaders got into a fight with New York Times columnist Paul Krugnan:

On June 6, in a blog post titled ‘Estonian Rhapsody,’ Krugman took on what he called ‘the poster child for austerity defenders.’ In his post, he graphed real GDP from the height of the boom to the first quarter of this year to show that, even after a recovery, Estonia’s economy is still almost 10 percent below its peak in 2007. ‘This,’ he wrote, ‘is what passes for economic triumph?’

‘It was like an attack on Estonian people,’ says Palmik, in an office above his plant, surrounded by blueprints for his new production line. ‘These times have been very difficult. People have kept together. And this Krugman took all these facts that he wanted.’

“Krugmenistan vs. Estonia.” — Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek

More Greeley

One man’s quest to reshape the online porn industry through the “.xxx” top-level domain:

The resistance to Lawley, whatever its merits, has the ring of desperation. ICM arrived at a moment of crisis for commercial porn. After enabling several boom years, the Internet has brought many smut marketers to their knees. Rampant freebies on “tube” sites have reduced global porn revenue by 50 percent since 2007, to less than $10 billion, including about $5 billion generated in the U.S. Those are rough guesses by Diane Duke, executive director of the industry’s trade group, the coyly named Free Speech Coalition. Speaking privately, some porn executives say the coalition’s revenue estimates are optimistic. In a field dominated by privately held companies, no provable statistics exist.

Setting aside moral judgments and potential social harms—we’ll get to those—it’s remarkable that Lawley is making any money at all. Especially since he had to fight for seven years, spending millions of his own dollars, to get permission for .xxx from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit regulatory body. His persistence in the face of hostile lobbying by competitors, religious conservatives, and the U.S. government suggests that if the stubborn British entrepreneur claims to have a money-spinning solution for the Great Porn Depression, he should not be underestimated.

“The New Republic of Porn.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek

More from Barrett

How Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina is using technology and advice from high-profile mentors to prepare for November:

The day after Jim Messina quit his job as White House deputy chief of staff last January, he caught a plane to Los Angeles, paid a brief visit to his girlfriend, and then commenced what may be the highest-wattage crash course in executive management ever undertaken. He was about to begin a new job as Barack Obama’s campaign manager, and being a diligent student with access to some very smart people, he arranged a rolling series of personal seminars with the CEOs and senior executives of companies that included Apple, Facebook, Zynga, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and DreamWorks. ‘I went around the country for literally a month of my life interviewing these companies and just talking about organizational growth, emerging technologies, marketing,’ he says at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago.

“Obama’s CEO: Jim Messina Has a President to Sell.” — Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek

More Bloomberg Businessweek

What the Facebook founder did to outmaneuver his competitors, and the challenges he faces to keep employees motivated and investors happy after the IPO:

One area Facebook will have to prove itself in is mobile. Earlier this month, it amended its public filings with the SEC to disclose that it doesn’t collect any meaningful revenue from smartphones and tablets, and its failure to do so is dampening per-user revenue. Mobile has flummoxed the company for years. In 2008, Jobs asked Facebook to present its iPhone app at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity himself, Zuckerberg sent a Facebook engineer and a marketing manager to handle it. They did such a poor job in auditions attended by Jobs and other Apple executives that Apple pulled them from the presentation, according to the person, who declined to be named for fear of alienating both companies.

“How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley.” — Brad Stone, Douglas MacMillan, Businessweek

More #longreads from Stone

Coming Monday, May 14th:

Bloomberg Businessweek and Longreads present “Behind the Tech Longreads”: A night of storytelling featuring Felix Gillette, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Brad Stone, Ashlee Vance and editor Josh Tyrangiel.

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Manhattan, 7 p.m., Free admission

RSVP on our Facebook Page

Steve Jobs pledged to go “thermonuclear” in Apple’s battle against Google’s Android and device manufacturers like Samsung who he claimed ripped off the iPhone and iPad designs. But bringing a patent fight to court comes with significant risks:

Several Asian manufacturers were noodling around with similar-looking rectangular smartphones before the iPhone came to market. Tipping its hat to a fellow Korean manufacturer, Samsung notes that in 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone appeared, LG Electronics (066570) announced the round-cornered LG Chocolate, with ‘virtually all of the [design] features Apple claims’ to have patented. In December 2006, before Apple released images of the iPhone, Samsung itself filed a design patent in Korea for a similar rectangular phone called the F700. Smartphone and tablet-computer design was ‘naturally evolving’ in the direction Apple claims it has exclusive rights to use, according to Samsung. If true, that matters because basic patent law states that if an idea is ‘obvious’ to an ‘ordinary observer’ at the time of its invention, it doesn’t deserve patent protection. By attacking Samsung, Apple has inadvertently put its own patents into play.

“Apple’s War on Android.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Google Android: on Inevitability, the Dawn of Mobile, and the Missing Leg.” — Mark Sigal, O’Reilly Radar, Dec. 3, 2009

Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money: 

At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.

“BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Can CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV?” — Adam Sternbergh, New York magazine, Dec. 13, 2010