Pi-Consulting

The Product Placement (PP) industry, as it relates to movies and television, was an American invention, and largely remains an American preserve. This is for the overriding reason that Hollywood, the filmed entertainment world’s HQ and epicenter, is located on American soil. Its executives, financiers and writers dance to the tune of American message-mongers, sliding everything from branded beer to iconic cars into the movie fare we watch. The PP industry bankrolls Hollywood to a significant degree, and helps to ensure that $100 million movie productions don’t cost $150 million or more. Even the Pentagon – and its army, navy, marines and air force divisions – have their own anonymous-looking but luxurious offices on Hollywood’s outskirts. They run these “entertainment liaison offices” to ensure that Uncle Sam’s latest combat hardware gets a favorable showing, and that the US military continues to occupy a big and favorable corner of America’s – and by extension the world’s –subconscious. Did anyone think that “The Hunt for Red October”, “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Air Force One” got made without a generous slab of cash from the Pentagon? Welcome to America’s world of product placement, where all-conquering technology, prominently featured in the movies and on TV, makes sure that America’s military continues to get – and the profitable armaments industry to produce – well… all-conquering technology! Source: London Sunday Telegraph, Pi

As this site reported on March 17th, “America’s consumer electronics (CE) industry is grappling with stringent new federal and state legislation to ensure that manufacturers ‘take out the garbage’ as they sell-in new gizmos like HDTV. The issue is a serious one, with the impending switch-off of analogue TV services likely to mean huge numbers of old TV sets getting left on the sidewalk”. We spoke too soon. A new CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) study posits an “afterlife” for many superannuated TV sets. “While some have speculated that millions of TVs would enter the waste stream, …results of the (CEA) study …show that households …expect to remove fewer than 15 million televisions from their homes through 2010. Ninety-five percent will be sold, donated or re-cycled”. Nearly half of OTA-only (i.e. traditional “over-the-air”) TV households “expect to buy a digital converter box, …and to continue using the same TV”. When the old set has to go, re-cycling is increasingly the disposal method of choice, with consumers reporting 30% more TV’s recycled in 2007 than two years earlier. Pi salutes this impressively green and responsible consumer trend! Sources: CEA, Pi.

If you go to Las Vegas for a blackjack’n’craps weekend, watch out for whales. Whales, in gambling parlance, are players who can afford to lose (or, presumably, win) $3 million dollars during a single stay at a casino. They number only a few thousand worldwide, though a growing number of them are swimming in from the People’s Republic of China. You know how it is: $3 million here, $3 million there, pretty soon you’re into big money, as the people behind Las Vegas’ Venetian casino and resort empire have found. Their new Venetian casino resort in Macao is three times the size of its namesake in Nevada, and opens its doors to 60,000 gamblers a day. 40% of the casino’s revenues come from 59,700 of them. The remaining 60% of the money is laid on the green baize tables by just 300 people. The rest of us punters just shrug our shoulders, and reflect that getting skimmed a few hundred bucks seems insignificant beside what the whales must be losing. Sources: Washington Post, Pi.

A TripAdvisor survey has revealed that most travelers think hotel mini-bars are a swindle. 86% of the worldwide sample of over 1,600 travelers said that prices for beers, sodas and little bottles of Johnnie Walker were just too expensive. 45% claimed to have been charged two to three times the amount they would normally pay for the goods offered. 94% said they would probably use the mini-bar more often if the prices were more reasonable. But the problem goes beyond a perception of predatory pricing. Mini-bar bills seem to be a major source of indignation for guests, with a quarter reporting disputes with hotels over mini-bar charges when they check out. The introduction of weight and motion sensors, which “ring up the till” at reception when you move a bottle or can, seems to have made a bad thing worse. 16% of respondents complained they had been charged for simply putting their own items in the mini-bar to keep them cold, or for moving things around without consuming them. But hotel chains seem committed. Some hotels are even diversifying their mini-bar offerings to include items like bottled oxygen, sex kits, condoms, caviar and branded fragrances. That should turn around all those negative attitudes, surely. Sources: TripAdvisor, Pi.

Jet-setters in Europe seem to be giving way to train-setters. Air travel is losing its glamour as crowded airports, flight delays, security lines and baggage snarl-ups take their toll. In Western Europe, an invitation to “come fly with me” is these days just as likely to be met with a dismissive “No thanks, I’ll take the train”. The difference is high-speed rail technology, with new lines already installed across France, Germany and Italy, and now snaking their way through Spain and the UK too. Speeds of up to 200 miles-per-hour mean short, comfortable journeys between over a dozen key European destinations. A new rail link just inaugurated in London and South-East England, joining up with the Channel Tunnel, has brought high-speed travel to the British leg of the Paris-to-London route, with the two city centers now only 140 minutes apart. Could this be the beginning of a “Spring Break Party Train–Gone Wild?” And no faffing around in airports! Jet-setting is, like, so last year. Source, The Economist, Pi.