Posted 4:21 PM by Gene

If it's Sunday it must be Big-Double-A-Scribble Time:

1. No no no no no no no no NO! Four of the biggest members of the American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers have cut their JUNK TV spending for the latest quarter -- by up to DOUBLE DIGITS? NO NO NO NO NO!!!!! We'd guess it's either STRATEGY (a word CEOs love to use when justifying why they're worth nine digits), or the economy -- or maybe, just MAYBE, financing JUNK TELEVISION earns them more ENEMIES than FRIENDS.

We see too that Moon 'n' Stars has boosted its Web spending -- and while that may mean financing JUNK TV in a DIFFERENT VENUE, it may also mean a slight boost in sense at the Puzzle Palace on the Ohio.

2. Whoops: I'd say the Big Double-A-Scribble pulled a FAST ONE on us -- three other members of the American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers upped their spending! HOWEVER, if we read between the lines this MAY be concentrated in the "channel", and in the stores, which seems to us the best place to get a customer, rather than by reminding him for the millionth instance that CEOs who spend half their time schmoozing with stars in the name of advertising are among the most despicable.

3. Elsewhere the Big-Double-A insists companies go bankrupt because they STOP FINANCING JUNK TELEVISION. We can SEE why companies MUST put their faces before the public, but aren't there ways of doing it without this hip notion with the middle finger? And how much could outfits like Mervyns or Bennigan's showcase themselves in such intensely cookie-cutter businesses with problems of their own? And wasn't one of Sharper Image's conundrums the very effective marketing of Consumer Reports?

4. Big Double-A is also aghast because Moon 'n' Stars and its twin in Europe might change CEOs, which, whatever their current placeholders think, suggests such jobs are interchangeable, though their enormous perks and opportunities for malevolence are not.

5. Just So You Know, No One Paid for This Article

Sometimes, to paraphrase the late, great Hoagland Howard Carmichael, we wonder.