the elevator pitch

In an interesting article published by the New York Times, it seems as though Apple has finally decided to do something about the adult content floating around in their App Store. Although the App Store was created for the public to create and share their own personal applications, some individuals have taken advantage of the freedom. The iPhone, iPod and all hand held devices that use iTunes as a store for applications is and always will be marketed to all ages, but with the considerable amount of SPAM and promotional applications, Apple has decided to filter out all of the adult oriented content.

The story became extremely hot when Sports Illustrated released an app of their own to accompany their annual swimsuit issue. Parents started to voice their concerns and Apple’s head of worldwide marketing Phillip Schiller responded with,

It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.

In the wake of Schiller’s response, Apple began removing all adult content from their app store. But the question remains, was this the right move for a company that pushes creativity, the sharing of ideas and online developmental freedom? We’ll have to wait and see.

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While scouring the Interwebs the other day I stumbled upon something rather disturbing. Now, I’m usually all for campaigns and interactive concepts that really push the bar in terms of content and issues, but a recent interactive campaign titled “Hit The Bitch,” takes things way too far. From the perspective of the ad company that put this together, I can understand why they would try. I mean “Hit the Bitch,” has been generating a lot of interest lately. But this ties back to the argument of whether or not any press is in fact good press.

In any case, I find this extremely offensive and downright distasteful. Here’s a link to the flash component, but I encourage people to use the web for more productive things other than practicing domestic violence.

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The final week of off-season mainstream television is fast approaching, so with it, networks are doing everything in their power to generate new audiences and re-inspire returning fans of their shows. Specifically I’m talking about Fox’s experiment with Twitter last week. If you were lucky enough to miss the experiment then you can sleep easily knowing that Fox and Twitter both failed miserably. In an effort to regain some of the fans of shows like Fringe and the upcoming Glee, Fox announced that stars of the show and people behind the productions would be Tweeting live during the airing of the final rerun episodes of the season. But the Tweeting wasn’t the terrible part, what created a ridiculous dichotomy of visuals and information overload was the fact that Fox decided to air the shows with the live Tweets running on the screen.

As a Twitter user and a fan of both shows I was interested in how this would all play out, but wow, I didn’t expect anything to be this bad. The Twitter feed took up way to much real estate on screen. It took the focus away from the actual show and placed it on the messages below. The shows became less about the storylines and visuals and became nothing more than a bad DVD extra nobody would watch anyways.

And I’m not the only person who feels this way as the backlash for all of this live Tweeting nonsense is reaching astronomical levels. Here’s some advice to Fox – don’t ever do that again… Please.

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Sacsha Baron Cohen is probably one of the world’s most popular comedians/entertainers/international stars with his over-the-top characters like ALi G, Borat and Bruno. His film Borat from a few years ago brought shock and awe to movie goers in North America as he paraded around the states as his Borat character exposing issues like how the outside world views the US and vice versa. Well, lets just say Bruno will take viewers to levels of uncomfortable they aren’t used to.

PR for Bruno began long before this week (Bruno opens in North America this weekend), and one of the biggest stunts of the year was probably during the MTV Movie Awards. Cohen (dressed as Bruno… dressed as an angel…) dropped in from the ceiling and landed crotch first on the face of rap star Eminem. Although it was later revealed that the entire stunt had been planned as a promotion for the movie, it still made blogs, news shows and headlines around the world.

So judging from the reaction people get from stunts like this, can we expect more of the same with the movie? I suspect so.

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We all knew it was just bound to happen right? Well, the moment has finally arrived and a big-name producer / writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing and A Few Good Men) is currently writing a script that will center around the creation of Facebook. For those of you (probably only 1 person left in this world) who don’t know what Facebook is, it is the online network phenomenon that has swept across the globe attracting billions of users. The application is essentially the end-all for online communication where users can interact on many different levels in order to stay in touch with each other.

I won’t go into detail about Facebook because as I’m sure many of you are already aware of the power this application garners. Sorkin is now tasked to tell the story of how such an application came to be. I’ve done some research on the subject and found out that Facebook was actually initially created to help college students stay in touch. I’m assuming the script will focus around the creators and their troubles in starting such a huge business.

This is an amazing PR move for Facebook as they burst onto the scene a few years ago and their prowess in pop-culture is very slowly starting to slip away. The addition of networks like Twitter are slowly gaining prowess so I’m assuming the people behind Facebook see this as a way to stay in the limelight for a while. Sorkin on the other hand is an interesting choice to have pen the script. The West Wing was an amazingly successful television show, but it was a television show. He had multiple seasons to create drama and tell his story. Writing a feature film script restricts a lot of the story because of the time factor. It can be done well, as evidenced by some great films, but more often then not people walk away from the theater wondering if there was more to the story. Unlesss Sorkin can pull off an amazing script, I have a feeling people will walk away from a Facebook movie thinking there’s got to be more to it.

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