Ford’s new money machine

Whilest reading an article in the Journal Gazette about branding (linked to from the caffeinegoddesses blog I cam across an interesting fact:

„Occasionally, a company pulls it off with little notice. Ford Motor Co. now makes more profit financing the sale of cars than it does on the cars themselves, although few outside of Wall Street know it.“

Amazing, but somehow I get the feeling that this kind of phenomenon might actually happen in quite a few large corporations by now. Business models have changed quite a lot in the last decade…

VW Ad – a happy end

Well, it seems that the whole thing is being settled rather fair. I couldn’t really imagine VW suing these guys, that would have damaged their image more than the spot did…
ad-rag also states that the clip was indeed published through Lee and Dans Website. Surprising, isn’t it??

VW Ad

Wizbang has a reference to the brilliant VW ad that has been around the web for the last couple of days.
Even though VW claims it did not produce this ad and is now even considering legal actions against the creator of this ad, one cannot argue, that the clip is funny and surely helping VW to sell this car (all moral thoughts on car-bombings and terrorism left aside).

The Blog-Inflation II

Adding to my comments below, blogs have had their influence on the news in the past. I can recall a recent case in Germany, where one blog started a media run on a company selling mobile-phone ringtones, condemning their practises of business aimed at teenagers. I am sure similar cases can be found in other countries.But I still think that this kind of publicity is not common for blogs and 98% of all blogs will go unnoticed, passing by like a dark ship in the night.

The trouble with Blog-Inflation

I am new to this blogworld, even though I know about this phenomenon for quite some time. But now, that I joined this world, I am truly amazed about the amount of blogs out there. Only when you subscribe to blogger, you can get lists of recently updated blogs. And there are so many out there!
Some are very personal diaries, some try to comment on public or other issues and some are just a random chit-chat on nothingness.
Geez, I wonder if it makes sense to put any effort into this. At some point the noise of all blogs out there will be so loud, that none will get heard (or read for that matter) any longer. And then the blog phenomenon will have entered reality: We will still only read and rely on a very few sources. Only some of which may be blogs.
And the rest of these blogs will fade into the grey cloud of the WWW, into which so many personal homepages disappeared since ’94 (and keep disappearing, as search engines continue to move towards „priority-linking“).
Being slightly dissilusioned, I can’t see how this blog-phenomenon has a great future for „John Smith“ in the landscape of the general public media. Media fragmentation will just get worse because of blogs, and to go back to good old Darwin: only the best fitted will survive (the best being those, that somehow manage to attract a large audience and commentary – I will get back later on this, as I don’t yet know, how blogs get a large audience; and if I don’t get back on this, I probably never found out 🙂 ).