Tiger - the Update - Short

Ok so this is getting either really weird or really, really funny.

Today many news outlets reported that Tiger's response to his multi-year, multi-women affair is to...

Change his prenuptial contract to make it incredibly expensive for him to cheat again on his wife.

Apparently his wife gets $5m now (kind of a downpayment on past indiscretions) and a further $80m if the marriage lasts until 2016....I wonder how they define "marriage lasts"...Does that mean he doesn't stray until 2016 or that he can stray but she can't chase him around the house with a golf club....until 2016....

No..stop laughing I did not make this up.....

So after cheating on his wife for 3 years and coming out to say that he is going to work on his behaviour etc etc his answer is to increase the financial penalties for him if he strays again...That's it...So the only thing that will keep him from taking on another mistress is to have more money at stake.

I can see it now...his new prenup fixed at $80m...His deep (newly found) morals kicking in....I told you darling that I would be faithful and those last 137 women only rated somehwere between $15m and $63m..but Svetlana...Come on....She is at least a $88m prize..Sorry but there is just so much a man can bear....


The we hear today that a 6th mistress has come out with (apparently 3 more in the wings!)...Exactly how does someone have 3 or 4 affairs going on while married???Also how come he is so shocked that this has all come out....He really thinks that he can have affairs with 6 women and for it not to come out. No wonder his golf has not been that great this pastr couple of years...Tiger has been a busy little boy running between home and his vast array of mistresses...Such a chore for the poor golfing great...


So what happens next. We find out that Tiger has had sex with every woman spectator at the recent US Open while at the same time conducting a year long affair with the all of the cheerleaders of his favourite football team???

I just can't wait to hear how our intrepid Today show gurus (Karl and Deborah whatisher name) respond to this latest news.....I can hear them already warming up...Karl you go first.

Well Tiger suffers from a rare and sadly incurable mental illness called fuckwhoeveruwantitis..Sadly many rich an famours people fall prey to this insidious disease and my professional opinion is that we should all turn a blind eye to this poor man's struggle with this disease, slip him the name of a few brothels and go back to idolising his golf swing.........

What do you think Debo.

Well we have already organise a cover shoot for next week's AWW. Tiger and his wife look so happy in the photos - which shows that clearly nothing untoward has gone on...I mean look at their nice clothes, the beautiful setting at their home, his big broad smile and the little children in perfectly co-ordinated outfits...Call me old fashion but when I see happy family snaps like these I knwo what the truth is....All this mistress stuff is a hoax perpetrated by jealous golfers who want Tiger off the PGA Tour.....It's just like that fake moon landing in 69.....

Tiger, Tiger, Tiger and the Today Show

So the facts seem to be (at this point) that;
1) Tiger Woods has had an affair for at least 3 years with one woman
2) Tiger was so worried his wife would find out that he asked one woman to change her voicemail (quick interlude here.....Tiger's wife was checking his mobile phone...Is this normal behaviour in a secure marriage or rather the actions of a wife that knows her husband is cheating on her?..anyway)
3)2 other women have come out claiming affairs...That is 3 women in 2 days....hmmmm me thinks there are more to come out
4)Tiger crashed his car at 2:25am..Was he a) deserate for a magnum icecream, b) he wanted to get an early start at the golf course or c)his wife had found out about one or more of his affairs and she wanted to smack him with a 5 iron.

Fast forward to the Today Show on Ch9 this morning. Karl and Deborah whatishername from the Woman's Weekly were chatting about the "Tiger incident"..Ok family loving Karl and defender of women's rights Deborah...let fly.

Deborah said (words to this effect) " Tiger has lots of groupies throwing themselves at him every where he goes so perhaps he just gave in to temptation". ie those bad, nasty girls tempting Tiger...And to tempt him so forcefully for him to have a 3 year affair...that is some tempting. You horrible women!

Come on now Karl...Come through for family values..

Karl (words to this effect).."Tiger has had a very controlled upbringing since his early childhood and maybe this is part of him breaking out of the control".. What the %#$^...So Tiger's therapist sat him down and said "listen son I know you have had a controlled life and sure this life has delivered you world wide acclaim and about $1b but to deal with this horrid past you need to go out and sleep with a bunch of women..I know this is against your family values but Tiger I must insist...this will help you get better".

Also did I miss something...when did Karl get a Phd in Psychology??

Both fully paid up members of the "Tiger can do what ever he wants" club, Karl and Deborah then chatted about how it was kind of normal for famous people to sleep around. Karl even made a comparison of Tiger to Shane Warne...Now that is a low blow....except Karl was trying to be complementary!.

In summary these esteemed media commentators believe that Tiger had such an appallingly controlled childhood such that when he was confronted with those temptresses he had no option but to screw their brains out...Poor, poor Tiger.

How about this version.

Tiger (like many famous people before him) maybe used his power and influence to chase down any woman he desired.....often I have found that fidelity and respect for wives and children do not matter to famous people...Reminds me of a conversation I once had with a married man who is now head of one of our top professional services firms...He slept around also...in his mind..I kid you not...hand on heart...he felt it was his duty to, as he put it ,share his love around...He had so much love to share and he felt it his responsibility to share the love...Hmmmmmm how about sharing love in the true sense but keeping your dick in your pants....

Anyway the last word has to go to Tiger...he (on his website) apologises for his "transgressions" and feels it is not fair for the media to scutinise him at this time....

Firstly a transgression is something like a drunken one night stand...It is not a 3 year affair with one woman and affairs with at least 2 others....Affairs that required day to day deceit and day to day planning and organisation...listen to the voicemail he left one woman if you want to fully understand intricate planning of deceitful actions...Tiger's minders surely had to know what was going on as well..This was not a transgression but a pattern of deceit going on for years.

As for the demand for privacy...Sorry that ship sailed whentakes the hundreds of $M in sponsorhsip money..they have decided to live a public life for money so they can't cry now that they have been found out.

As to Tiger's statement about working on his behaviour....Funny how we is only doing this now that the affairs are public.

As for Karl and Deborah you should both be ashamed for the positions you took..Tiger Woods actions are nothing less that deceitful and poor form. There is no excuse for what he has done and he should accept whatever punishment awaits..To try and provide excuses for this appalling behaviour says alot about your morals and ethics.....and I had thought you were a decent guy Karl....

Public Schools vs Private Schools

So private schools are full of super rich, arrogant families with a born to rule attititude and a lust for ripping cash from the public purse. Public schools are overrun by the stalinist Teacher's Federation and lawlessness rules the school grounds...If only life were that simple.


Sadly the debate about education has been captured by groups that have an axe to grind and would rather not deal in the facts and try to develop a better education system for all..On both sides there are simple minded and selfish ideologues who perhaps were beaten puppies in a former life, such is their need to drum up anger and bitterness.

So let's first deal with some facts...


IF you take all the money provided by governments for education in Australia and compare the the OECD you find that in fact Australia overall spends LESS on education than do many other countries...



This is the major issue and one that gets lost as successive governments have preferred the fight to be public vs private rather than everyone against the government.


Secondly if you look at total government funding for education (Federal and State) then you find that each public school student's education is funded to the tune of around $10,715 per student (numbers from 2007) and each private school student is funded to the tune of $6,054 by public funds....So to be clear public school students get government funding that is 60% HIGHER than government funding for private school students.



Now there is a skew between the feds and the states. Under Howard the feds did increase spending on private school education but to be fair you have to look at TOTAL public funding when making comparisons of how all levels of government fund education.


Moving on.


The current funding mechanism for private schools is a joke. This is NOT to say that private schools deserve more or less but rather the allocation is wrong..On the north shore of Sydney you have 2 schools that are less than 4 km apart. One school gets DOUBLE the per student subsidy from the government?? Why???




The premise behind the new private school funding system sought to fund schools on the basis of their parent population's' economic status (SES)...If you have poorer parents you got more...if you had richer parents you got less..Seems fair....Except there was also a little clause that said that a school would not be disadvantaged..So unless I am mistraken....adn I am happy to be told I am wrong..... if the new system suggested you should get $2000 per student and you were currently getting $4,000 per student then you were allocated the $4,000 per student...no time line to recalibrate to the right level just more money than you should get forever....Ridiculous! and grossly unfair....


Then you have the situation of really well off schools (large grounds, large endowments) that happen to be located in less wealthy suburbs...They too get a disproportionate allocation because of their geographical situation and historic subsidies...even if their parent population has changed!!..



Further you have really, really well off schools that can spend enormous amounts of money (e.g. a Sydney school that was able to buy a historic building that they can't redevelop for $35m...these guys do not need help from anyone)......

Therefore you have a reasonable premise for funding bastardised by self-interest and poor execution. We do need a new system that provides the same or similar funding per student with any deviation from the average determine by the financial resources of the school (which would include fee structures, endowments, net assets etc).


As to what the average should be...it should be closer to the lower end of the current subsidy range as opposed to the higher end with any excess funds seperately allocated on a case by case basis to truly needy schools.


Now some believe that private schools should not get any government funding. This is a stupid and ill informed position to take for many reasons..To just take one point.. Parents of private school children pay tax and some of their taxes fund education therefore they have a RIGHT to some of their education taxes coming back to them in the form of education funding. It is nonsensical and unfair to say that just because you made a financial sacrifice to put your child in a private school that you are now not allowed to get any education funding...

Also as I have noted above if anything the private school student's family SUBSIDISES the public school students (...because the government allocation is biased towards public students and because on average private school families pay more tax than on average the public school families...combination is a healthy subsidry going on for public schools).



I actually think this subsidy model is a good one...The better off in society should help out those less well off. It is the way a good society works..However this does not mean that private schools should therefore get no funding..If funding to private schools was stopped a lot of private schools would close and then what.....


What would happen if tomorrow the approximately 30%- 40% of all students that attend a private school suddenly left and went to the local public school?? What would happen is that the education system would collapse because suddenly the government would have to inject hundreds of millions of dollars in capital works to build more public schools AND they would have to increase the annual operating expenses for public education...by how much....well at least by 60% if you just look at the operating expenses as discussed above BUT in reality alot more if you include massive capital works....Education in this country would go back 50 years...



So to those small minded fools that hate private school and wish they would close...be careful what you wish for.....Also do not assume all private schools are flush with money (like that school in northern sydney that I mentioned above). Most are not flush with $m in loose change and most are populated by normal, hard working families that have made a choice to sacrifice something to allow their kids to go to a private school..It is not just not fair to assume these families are all made up of snooty, snob investment bankers....Ok some schools have disportionate representation by these oxygen thiefs but not all nor most.. And yes there are some private schools that are an embarassment to the majoity of private school families, due to their excess, values and ethos.

However picking out the few schools that are elitist, abuse the use of govt funding and produce nauseating, up themselves young men and women is like picking on the couple of public high schools that have far too regular occurences of violence (to students and teachers) and assume all the public system is modelled on these unfortunate schools...


Are private schools necessarily insitutions of great virtue and morality..Sadly not...Some private schools, as I mentioned above, do engender a culture of exclusion and privilege. They serve their students poorly by pandering to the insecurity of the parents and creating this environment that suggests the students are above those in normal society. These schools do nobody a favour. They breed young men and women that wander around with a sense of entitlement...young people with no sense of the broader society and their responsibilities to help build a better world....



By the way sadly the problem in these schools is often the influence of the "old boy's"...Often a bunch of stufy throwbacks to victorian england...racsist, elitist, intolerant and downright insular...A group that likes the idea of a tiered society, people with entitlement and close groups and clubs......However the great majority of families that attend private schools do not accept these dinosaurs as role models..All they want is what every family wants...the best possible education for their child...Whether their particular prviate school will deliver this is not the point. the point is their motives are no different to any family.



What should happen....All parents and families, public and private, should stop attacking each other but rather turn on our governments and demand more to be spent on education (of all forms)...where will this money come from.....hmmmm how about spending less on sport (Uh Oh I can hear the stampede of the nutty olympics people thundering towards me)....Maybe even tax us more to put more into education...I will bet that if we knew that an extra 5% of tax was going directly to education (or even in the form of a tax credit each family could use towards education) the majority of Australians would agree with a tax increase....




Also for the good of the education system the private school funding model needs to be changed to ensure private schools that have significant stores of cash have their govt subsidies cut back to the lowest level available...This would only be fair and just.....

Gifted.....

On meeting a new parent (i.e. a parent whose child attends school with yours but who you have not yet, until now, met) the median time until they tell you that their child is "gifted" is usually 12 minutes in Australia (slightly longer in the UK and slightly less in the US).. I am really perplexed by this incredibly common phenomenon...Given the frequency by which I come across parents of "gifted" kids either every child I have ever met is gifted (not likely given some of them have ended up doing completely zip with their lives and others have yet to master how to buy a train ticket let alone cure testicular cancer) or b) the bar by which a child is termed" gifted" has been lowered just a tad..I am thinking it is more likely to be b..So lock in b please Eddie.

Gifted is meant to imply an intellectual ability ahead of the average at any particular age and yet intellectual ability can take many forms, many of which are not truly explored in a school environment... Further "gifted" does not mean successful nor does it mean happy nor content nor fulfilled. It just means the kid "may be" smarter than the average...


At this point let me share with you a secret..Generally speaking most of us hope that everyone else's child has a happy, fulfilling and long life. This does NOT translate in any way into any of us caring about what the other person's child is up to and why is it that you obsessive pyscho parents have to try and manufacture some model that promotes your little shit as "gifted".


Often Jonny, who shows an unbelievable skill at reading 4 books at once (literally..one word from each book at a time...very cool party trick), also happens to bite the other kids at pre-school and has an unnatural fascination with creating models of the opera house out of his own poo and yet all we hear of Jonny is that he is "gifted". Why don't the parents also mention these quirky attributes when regaling us all about their gifted child?



Further given my proposition above that most of us do not have a deep desire to understand, in detail, the lives of other people's children either just shut up or give me a more complete picture - taking into account the child's level of happiness, self-esteem, whether they are kind, caring and loving as well as whether they are smart or good at sport.

At this point it is also worth wondering why it is that some parents have to believe that their child is "above average". Why is it an insult to suggest your child might be average? Isn't the true measure of a life not whether you are above average, below average or average but rather are you living a happy, fulfilled life and are you adding true value to the society in which you live?


Is there something inherently wrong with a child being of average skill, intelligence etc? Does a high UAI or ability at sport translate into a successful life....NOOOOOO it doesn't.

Often I have heard parents lament that they "gave" the school a gifted child only to see in the Yr7 report that the child is (shock, horror)...average...Rather than assuming that a) your child being able to finger paint in 3 colours in Kindy does not in and of itself mean that the child was gifted to begin with or b) that other kids have caught up or finally c) the child has a lot to offer the world but is not particularly academic and so the parents have to find someone to blame for no long having a "gifted" child.


Some schools do not help in trying to keep all of this G&T stuff in context..Often you drive by both public and private schools and banners/noticeboards promote their "Gifted and Talented Programme". No mention on their public noticeboards of a programme for struggling students...funny about that.

There are of course some children that are gifted and schools (all) tend to do a good job of ensuring these kids continue to find school interesting and fun. Some (rare) even see how important it is to NOT just focus on the academic performance of the child but rather help the child develop as a complete person....


Yet the parents of the smart kids seem to herald their child's performance as something that somehow implies they (the parents) are better people than parents of not so bright kids...WTF..


Further the parents seem to not understand the role that genes play in all of this. Two parents I know posses very high intellect (we can leave to the side that they are arrogant, uncaring, selfish bores for the moment and just focus on their intellect). Both achieved very high levels in post graduate degrees. They have 2 daughters and one son.....Guess what the kids are good at school...Now you might think that this is kind of what you would expect..If these parents had produced a child of limited academic ability that would have been a surprise..It is not a surprise that the kids do well...And yet at the end of every school year when their child gets an academic award the parents trumpet the awards as both a complete surprise and secondly akin to winning the Nobel Peace prize for physics...Same goes with particularly athletically capable parents who drill their poor kids in a particular sport from the womb...Surprise, surprise, surprise the child ends up being good at sport....

One mother (both parents are good at most sports) told me how her 5 yr old daughter was so good at all sports that it was a complex and stressful decision as to which sport they should channel her into...given she will reach Olympic Gold level in any she chooses......

If you and your partner are smarter than average or better at sport than average then chances are your children will follow this line (through both the beauty of genes and behavioural conditioning)..So it is NOT a surprise...What is a surprise is a kid who does not have the gene pool or environment to draw on, who by sheer effort and application does well..

And yet I return to the central theme of this rant. Having a gifted child is not something that needs to be promoted by the parents nor necessarily desired by parents. If your child is gifted then congrats as your child will (in academic terms alone) have a slightly easier schooling life... and maybe you should move on to focus on helping them understand what it takes to have a successful life and what it takes to become good people as. Ohh and why not show a little humility amongst those with kids who may not be gifted...




If your child is not gifted then do not despair and think your child is any less a person than the genius playing with poo in the playground. Do not also try to create some weird new sport where the child can prove themselves to be gifted. Celebrate your child, help them find self-esteem in who they are and how they can add value to the world around them. Help them become a good person and focus on how lucky you are to have kids in the first place.


More than anything else we need to accept the deep truth - a happy and fulfilled life is not a function of intellect, sporting achievement or significant financial reward. It comes from a complex combination of undertaking a career that you are good at and which adds value to other people, developing relationships where you are truly loved and you love unconditionally, looking out for those in our world who are less fortunate and finally being more focused on enjoying life and all it has to offer and less about trying to be seen to be better than the next person.

Considered article...short blog post...twitter...???

When it was difficult to create and distribute news stories (i.e. before the advent of the PC and the internet) generally speaking a lot of thought went into the creation of an article that appeared in the major newspapers (OK I know there are glaring examples that debunk this statement but notwithstanding some journalistic crap there was a time when people spent a lot of time considering a story).....

Fast forward to the last 5 years (last 2 or 3 actually) when we had the creation of the blog post. Most often short (400 - 600 word) posts which did not always result from a lot of time spent considering what was being written..It was like a stream of consciousness (much like my blog!) that provided the writer with an ability to create and distribute something as if they were a global media empire (even if nobody actually read the post)..Still the blog post does provide interesting insights into products, people, industries and companies...They do serve a purpose that seems useful...albeit not in the ilk of the major newspaper story but value nonetheless.

Then over the last year we have been introduced to the 140 character (not word!) twitter post. Kind of like a group SMS but to VERY long (in the cash of Ashton Kutcher - 1m followers) list. I have been really interested in what wisdom people provide in 140 characters...The answer is not much..Things like....

"L.A. really hot today"

"Trying to get a cab downtown but none around"

"Check out the new photo of XXX"

"Stop press. Britney Spears got her period and used....a tampon. First woman to do so, obviously" - this is another real one...I am not making this stuff up.

"6 year old Xbox console blew up in a cloud of smoke. MSFT are sending me a brand new 360 pro for only $160 (RRP $300). Good outcome."

While I think this is all pretty BORING lots of people are both twittering (not surprising as everyone likes to pretend to be important and broadcast their thoughts--like I am doing in this blog! and I twit as well.) more amazing is that people are signing up in droves to follow people issuing 140 character pearls of wisdom like the ones above....The following of mindless banter bit I don't get....Ok if it was something like....

"cured cancer this morning. cure is at http://www.curedcanceryippee.com/"
then I can see why someone would follow this guy...or perhaps

"Guarantee that the ASX will go up 100 points tomorrow" and they were accurate day after day then again I get it but things like Ashton's latest posts today......

"If you could pick one body part to have a spare of what would it be? check this out .." Or

"it's sad that ppl don't C pirating movies off the net as stealing. its eventually going 2 reduce the quality of films"..Do these really add anything to anyone??

More importantly where next...I suspect we follow the existing trend and the next big thing will offer media savy people the ultimate short hit of cool and incisive content...Here comes the 8 character post...insightful things like

"Work?"
"Think!"

slowly giving way to

"Poo"
"Fart" etc.

So you heard it here first....

"bugger"

Buying books online and more......

Years ago business travellers would return from the U.S. with all sorts of new gifts/toys and clothes that were not available in Australia. You were an instant hero with your wife/daughter/son (assuming your taste is not in your bum) with purchases of items that were the latest cool thing to have.... Yet as the net started to encroach on the cosy world of monopolies and "protected" markets things started to change..

For instance there used to be a huge delay between when a movie was released to video/dvd for puchase in the US and then in Australia...Due to this delay people would happily go to any of a large number of US video and DVD online stores and buy the movies well before they were released in Australia....Over time I suspect the collective brains trust of movie distributors locally worked out that the delay (which was the product of lazy scheduling and not much else) was costing them alot of lost revenue and (drum roll please) suddenly the timing of release between US and Australia is generally short...

In other ways it seems as though some businesses don't seem to know that the internet actually works outside Austalia...Books are a case in point...For many years (like just around the time everyone was aughing at the prospect of John Howard becoming Prime Minister - come on...that boring man stuck in the 1950's...don't be ridiculous) Amazon has been selling books and CDs/Videos/DVDs online. Their service has been mature (ie well developed on the basis of user feedback etc etc) for more than 10 years and they dominate the US (and global) retail book selling world. To get an insight into what their service is like you do not have to take a flight to Seattle via LA and sneak into a store carefully disguising yourself. All you have to do is turn on your PC, open up your internet browser of choice and type in www.amazon.com. That's it. So while sitting in your pjs in your study/family room you can avail yourself of the complete service offering of Amazon...

So why, why, why is the online offering from local resellers (you know the big ones) so poor...It is not as if it is hard for these guys to see what the best in the world has to offer..I mean 1hr of viewing the amazon sight will give you a pretty decent view on how the best in the world present book selling online...Any yet the local offerings are so bad it is nearly funny.

Assuming the people at our large local book retailers understand that the internet is global (side point to these guys - you do know that there are these massive cables from Australia to the rest of the world that takes and receives internet and other data traffic?? Just want to be clear on this) then there has to be a good reason to offer such an appalling service online.

It could be that they think Australians will not like annoying features like user reviews, recommendations, inside look, lists of bestsellers from the NYT etc. Or it could be that they are following the creed of anything good in life must take effort..Therefore given buying a book online is a joy then they need to make it hard so that we appreciate the experience all the more..

Perhaps they are hoping that we find the online buying experience so bad that we are forced to get in our cars and go to the shop to buy the book (sneaky and perhaps relevant if you are a franchise network). Or it could just be that our local businesses have fallen into the same trap as many Australian businesses...Which is to compare your service offering to that offered by other domestic competitors and not compare your self to the best in the world...Consumers deserve the best offering in the world and until the internet arrived it was hard to even know what the "best in the world" looked like...Now we know and a message to the local guys goes something like this (cue Peter Finch from the movie Network with slight edits from me)...."I'm as mad as hell with your crappy local offerings and I am not going to take it anymore so I am buying from world best suppliers wherever they are!".

Hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same. Amazon ships an incredible number of books and DVDs into Australia. It's not that the Aussie consumers are not patriotic. It is just that they want to use an online store that is well designed, has compelling features and is easy to use.

Ohh...and by the way...(please no comments on my reading material)...Why is it that (insert local book retailer name whose site I just went to) offers The History of God by Karen Armstrong for $A34.95 (plus shipping) and Amazon offers it for $A15.64 (plus shipping)? Pricing disparity is something I'll come back to on another post...

The great marketing ripoff...

Recent data from Nielsen shows that increasingly people are spending less time reading newspapers and watching television and more time on the net..In fact the younger generations (ie < 40) are spending significant less time watching TV and this been going on for years.....Go into any household in Australia and ask them if they are watching more or less TV than they were 5 years ago..The answer will be less and where has the time gone...on to the internet.

In the normal world advertising dollars follower consumers...I mean what idiot would pay for a bill board in a park where no one came or what genius would increase their TV advertising spend over the past 5-10 years when their audience has been moving to the net?

Interestingly total $ allocated to digital advertising is around $1.3b and to television around $3.5b. Strange given the behaviour of consumers does not map to this allocation. So why is there this enormous discrepancy between where people spend their time and where ad dollars are spent.

The simple answer is that for a large number of people it is not helpful to have money shift from television to the net. This group includes (obviously) the TV networks, the ad agencies (who would much prefer creating a big budget TV commercial filmed off the coast of Cuba with Russian dancing bears) then having to create something on a lower budget that actually drives people to act, Media planners (who have a much easier and less complex life allocating money between a few TV networks with limited and laughable measurement metrics as opposed to the more complex and intellectually challenging process of finding out where on the web people are and how to engage them) and finally (and sadly) the marketing directors.

It is understandable that the TV networks, ad agencies and media planners hate the idea of less money being spent on TV but why are the marketing directors in on this game....Firstly it is because it just feels nice and comfortable (kind of like going back to gran's house when you are an adult and sitting in the chair you did when you were smaller eating a piece of her special cake)relaxing back in an ad agency board room with a bunch of black skivvy creatives going through their show reel while the TV ad exec spins stories of engaging audiences etc etc..This is so nice and easy just as long as no one mentions the cost per actual viewer or (heaven forbid) the cost of acquisition of someone who will actually buy the advertisers product compared to the web then all is OK.

The second issue is a darker one...The currency of the marketing director is the size of their advertising budget. This is the cache of their world...Unfortunately what the web shows us is that we can spend less money to achieve better outcomes...In simple terms this means that to achieve the SAME advertising outcomes (reach, brand recognition, sales) we can spend LESS money than in the past..In real terms this means that you can take a bank/auto/FMCG ad budget of $30m reduce it by 40% (with most of the cut coming out of TV and display newspapers) and allocate half of this to the web and put the other half to the bottom line (that would be the profit line for people who have spent too much time in the marketing department).

This is what is happening in the US...why?? Becuase marketing directors that want to be employed in 5 years time can see the writing on the wall and CEOs are taking a more active interest in the efficiency of the marketing spend...In Australia we are seeing a few examples of this breakout but in most cases the marketing director stays coddled in the loving arms of the TV/Ad agency/media planner family while hoping that the CEO doesn't start asking some hard questions any day soon...

Is such a strategy sustainable??? No. It is a strategy that will result in the marketing director being out of a job. If you as a marketing director and you are not on the front foot cutting wasteful media spend, really understanding the power and efficiency of the web and providing your CEO with more margin points then your goose is surely cooked.....

CEO salaries - This is such a joke...well not really a joke...

So it seems the criteria to pay Joe 15 gzillion dollars to take on a CEO role is because some other company paid their Joe 13 gzillion dollars for a similar role. Often the comparisons that Australian firms are eroneous comparing firms operating in larger, more competitive markets to those operating in a smaller and often less competitive market in Australia.

Many of our top banks and companies are paying their CEOS north of $5m (or $10m including share options) a year...Does anyone seriously think we would get a much less capable person if we paid them maybe $3m instead of $10m??Seriously this is such a case of kids in the lolly shop with no adult supervision....However expecting our boards to start to behave appropriately and cull back these ridiculous packages is a waste of time...Often they are too busy developing the justfication to increase their board fees to waste time on a munane matter like exhorbitant CEO salaries...