Word: sec
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...commercial--call it a blink ad, for obvious reasons--depicts the company's signature image, a bullet shredding but not opening a lock, together with the logo. The ads are part of a campaign that also uses 30-sec. spots for Master Lock padlocks...
...length of the traditional 60-sec. TV ad has been halved a couple of times to keep up with our shortening attention spans. Now 15- and 30-sec. spots dominate, in part because they cost less. One-second ads are even cheaper to buy (Master Lock isn't saying what it paid), and cheaper to make. But can you sell anything in one second? "It's way too early to tell whether--or how--it's going to impact sales," says John Heppner, Master Lock's vice president of marketing...
...have probably never heard of Robert A. Bonifas, but you may be seeing a lot of him in the next few months. Bonifas, the owner of an Aurora, Ill., burglar-alarm company, is the star of a 30-sec. spot that the HMO industry is considering rolling out across the U.S. this summer to keep Congress from imposing new regulations on them in a burst of election-year populism. "We work hard to make people safer, and we work hard to offer our employees health insurance," Bonifas says in rich Middle American earnestness. "Higher health-insurance costs...
...this because he is so good at letting us. He is clutch, not in a pained, John Wayne sense, but joyfully, shrugging and grinning as he backpedals away from each accomplishment. He makes us believe, against our own experience, that hard work can reward--that even 0.8 sec. means there is hope. And in doing so, he has defined masculinity despite publicly admitting that his favorite performers are Toni Braxton and Anita Baker; this guy could say his favorite movie was Beaches, and he'd still be the alpha male. He has unwittingly followed the plot of a hero, suffering...
...flaw in such reports is that they mistake reticence for inaction. Most companies are purposely saying as little as possible about the issue in their public disclosures. Hock concedes that the sec's information request was both voluntary and vague, and that big companies have a natural tendency to clam up about business operations and potential liabilities. The majority of firms, says Hock, do seem to be focusing on their most critical systems--a strategy that should spare us from catastrophic consequences. "There will be some extremely annoying, disruptive failures," says Hock. "But it's not going...