Let's Get a Leash on those Legal Beagles

As is commonplace these days, almost everybody responding to Jimmy's column this week missed the point of his weekly Spin. Jim asked a smart question when he inquired about the point of having T&C standards if nobody adheres to them. What he's too nice to point out, however, is that corporate counsel seems to rule over the process of signing insertion orders these days. There are a bunch of lawyers working for publishers that seem to need to prove their value to their own organizations by attempting to reserve rights for themselves that are either redundant under the IAB's V.20 T&Cs, or they're just plain silly.

Case in point, Jimmy was working on one contract this week that made absolutely no sense. The publisher's legal team was trying to reserve the right to cancel the campaign at any time for any reason. Wisely, Jim asked, "Why?"

The ad sales rep responded that the publisher needed to reserve this right in case one of our ads was deemed inappropriate, offensive or indecent. But that can't be the reason why. The IAB T&Cs state: Media Company reserves the right within its discretion to reject or remove from its Site any Ads where the Advertising Materials or the site to which the Ad is linked do not comply with its Policies, or that in Media Company’s sole reasonable judgment, do not comply with any applicable law, regulation or other judicial or administrative order.

So the publisher already has this right and we find ourselves dealing with a lawyer who wants to inject all sorts of redundant crapola into the already-time-consuming process of approving insertion orders. What's driving this? An overzealous lawyer eager to prove his value to his company.

I want to point out that there's at least one smart company out there that realizes these legal snafus are a detriment to its business and has done away with it. That company is AOL.

A while back, I interviewed Michael Barrett as a follow-up to a Spin column about the elimination of their director of agency relations position. Michael promised easier T&Cs negotiation and delivered on that promise. Whereas doing business with AOL used to be a legal nightmare, these days it's as easy as submitting the IAB T&Cs and putting your John Hancock on the bottom line.

Publishers should take a look at the effect of protracted legal discussions on their bottom line business and make a decision as to whether all the extraneous BS is worth it.

The Disneyfication of America

"Won't somebody think of the children?" has become such a cliche. People constantly use this line to mock overprotective conservatives who think kids need to be protected from every little danger the world presents. While the idea of children being harmed in any way is distressing to just about everybody, the solution to the problem is not to coat every surface with six inches of foam padding, dammit. There are things in this world that are inherently dangerous, and some of us like it that way.

Think back to when you were a kid. There always seemed to be that kid who got hurt (or worse) and jump-started some sort of revolution among parents in the community. Some kid would get hurt riding a dirt bike, or a toddler would wander somewhere and have a serious accident. When these things happen, usually entire communities rally around the notion of banning whatever it was that hurt the kid, appealing solely to the emotions we all feel when there is a tragic accident involving a child. Instead, these folks should look to the parents of the child and closely examine just what the heck kind of supervision the kid was under when the accident happened. That's usually where a deficiency is found. Instead, motivated solely by emotion and very little rational thought, parents crusade against things in our society that are potentially dangerous for children.

Take swimming pools, for instance. In New York State, all swimming pools have to be surrounded by an enclosure at least four feet high, with self-latching gates, no openings bigger than 4 inches, able to withstand minimum pressures, etc. Why? Because someone's toddler might wander into a yard with a pool and drown. Does this seem a little silly to you? Instead of blaming someone for failing to keep an eye on their child, we blame "unsafe" conditions on someone else's private property. As if there's some reasonable expectation that the world needs to be safe for other people's children...

Here's another example: Adult images on the web. Once again, conservative legislators are crusading against Internet porn, on the grounds that it's too easily accessible by children.

Once again, we're placating the parents who are too lazy to supervise their children's computer usage or set parental controls with their ISPs. Instead of addressing poor parental supervision, we focus instead on kiddie-proofing our entire environment.

Now, I'm not saying it's okay to, say, go to the park and sprinkle carpet tacks all over the ground. We don't need people unnecessarily making the world a more dangerous place. But the solution to lazy parenting is not placing unwarranted restrictions on the rights of adults to make the world safe for kids.

We're always hearing crusading parents using lines like "We just never want to see another parent experience the pain we've experienced" in justifying their kiddie-proofing crusades. Many times we cave in to this display of emotion because it resonates with us. After all, who wants to see a child get hurt? But there's a danger in letting unbridled emotion rule our legislative process.

How would you like to live in a world in which you're not confronted by anything remotely threatening because certain parents are too lazy to supervise their children? Sounds silly to me. But if we don't start telling the lazy parents to clean up their act, this is the direction in which we'll continue to go.

My Kingdom for a Cellular Provider that WORKS

With the exception of Cingular, I've had wireless accounts with almost every cellular provider that services the New York Metro Area. Why? Because I can't find one that provides services that actually work as advertised.

My partners know that poor cellular service makes me go positively bonkers. I've been known to throw phones out windows when they don't work. (I once through my Motorola i1000+ out the window of a moving cab on the FDR Drive when Nextel dropped an important client call.)

Anyway, I thought I had found a reliable partner in Verizon Wireless, until recently. They seem to have great coverage everywhere I travel (within the U.S.) and reasonable rates. But I'm running into all sorts of problems with voice mail.

Apparently, Verizon Wireless' concept of voice mail service involves not notifying users when they have important voice mail waiting. When I hear the chime on my phone that notifies me I have voice mail, I never know what's going to confront me when I log in. Could be a message from five minutes ago, could be something from a week ago.

Based on recent experience, a message can sit in Verizon's system for up to five days without my phone being aware of it. It happened again today. I got up this morning, took a shower and heard the voice mail chime while I was getting dressed. I dialed *86 just like I'm supposed to, put in my voice mail password and was greeted by a voice mail left for me by fellow blogger Rick Bruner. Problem was, the voice mail was a day late. If it had been something terribly urgent, like a relative calling me about something family-related, I would have thrown a fit.

It seems like the only way to combat this half-ass service is through class action lawsuits and the like. A subscriber will notice how crappy voice mail service is through Verizon Wireless, mention it to some opportunistic lawyer type and then there will be some sort of settlement of $0.86 per user (if you remembered to respond to an e-mail, piece of junk mail or some other such notification to join in the class action.)

Isn't there another way? Maybe that 142-page contract I signed when I opened up my account with Verizon Wireless says otherwise, but I think I should be able to exit my contract pronto if services don't work as advertised. Or maybe I should bite the bullet, throw my phone out the window again and see if I can try Cingular out. I wonder if they support the Handspring Treo 600? Hmmm...

Clear Channel Yanks Stern

As if Bubba the Love Sponge wasn't enough...

Looks like Clear Channel is on a crusade to clean up its act, responding to fines and pressure from the FCC. Now Howard Stern has been yanked from six Clear Channel stations simultaneously. Gee, it's really easy for the federal government to force its will on the country's radio stations, considering they're all owned by, what, four companies?

And thank you, Chairman Powell, for interpreting "community standards" to mean that the entire country constitutes one homogeneous community.