Amazing how abuzz the mainstream media is today with the WestJet apology story. There's lots, lots more out there if you care to look. All the usual suspects are in with their $0.02. Heck, I don't know if I should feel badly or happy for poor Jacques Kavafian. He just can't seem to shake being the go-to Quote Boy for all things aviation, no matter where he goes. Which means, his services are less in demand of late, so this flurry must feel like old times. And that leads to the key message for me in all this coverage:

The business media really, really misses the  bad-old-days of Canadian aviation.

I mean, there was so much material! First there was AC privatization, then there were the years of AC/CP dogfights, charter airline collapses, the CP acquisition - with it's headline-friendly Quebec-vs.-The West overtones - then more charter airline collapses, some start-ups, some shut-downs, the odd bankruptcy, more start-ups, a little spying, more collapses, a few labour crises...

Phew! What a journalistic buffet! Pages and pages of copy, jillions and jillions of pixels. High fives all round the newsroom, the industry is a complete mess. Yippee!

Not to mention all of the personality stuff. Beddoes vs. Milton to be sure, but there have been plenty of other odd ducks along the way. Anyone remember LeBlanc at Intair and Royal? Obadia at Nationair? Deluce at Air Ontario and Canada 3000 (still in the picture with *yet another* start-up to-be. Sigh)? Kinnear at Canada 3000? What is it about aviation that attracts these folks? And of course there's the general sexiness of the business and the romance of travel that adds an allure. Let's face it: for years, the airline biz was the news story gift that kept on giving.

But now? How sad. Biz is relatively stable. AC is stronger than they have been in a long while, Uncle Miltie is about to ride off into the sunset (complete with Reguly's "gosh, I'm sorry I called you a knob all those years, I really think you're a great guy, now you take care" story ($) a while back), WS continues to do it's golly-we're-nice thing, and we haven't had a major failure in, well, months. In fact, there hasn't been much until this little redux of the already-told spying story fell from the sky to fill a whack of column inches. Call it a quick reminder of remember-when. Fuel prices are a pain of course and AC is still doing stuff to tick people off, but broadly things are pretty good.

Man, those reporters must be pissed.

Update: Further evidence of this in today's Globe and Mail, where reporter Brent Jang has a front page non-story about Clive Beddoes. Why non-story? Well, the premise is to discuss Beddoes' future plans, but given that he tried to exit his role as President in 1999 with the disastrous hiring of multi-former-AC-role-boy Steve Smith, the idea that Clive wants to move on is not exactly news. But hey, he was in town and it fills a nice news hole, so my call is that this week's spying-redux flurry has reminded them of that. Maybe airline news is going to be the New Black. Again.

Tags: aircanada, westjet, spying

For the past 50 or more years, advertising has been based on one basic concept: yelling at people via the television, works. You could get enough of them in one place, nice and passive, and if you delivered the right message enough times you could create awareness. From that (and I simplify) awareness led to trial, trial led to preference, preference led to loyalty. At the heart of this process were the assumptions that (a) you could get enough people in one place to allow for scale and (b) the message was for the marketer to control.

Fast forward to 2006, and that past starts to feel like a trip to Never-never Land. Companies are spending 50% or more of their ad dollars on things like paid search, the money that's left is being cast across extremely fragmented markets, PVRs and Tivo are at long last making commercial-skipping "Me TV" a reality in a way that VCRs never really did.

Clearly, for marketers with a job to do and agencies and networks who would like to keep their jobs, this is a challenge of the first order. So what is the answer?

As we sit here today, I don't think anybody knows. People talk about micro-tactics and multiple small efforts, but how does that work when you need to reach tens-of-millions of people? This is not clear. You hear about "conversations" being important, but how do you control your message in that environment? Feels to me that you just don't. And on top of that, you have an agency and broadcast community that seems to want to wish these changes away and keep doing what they have always done. I've seen *that* movie: travel industry in around 1998, anyone?

At mesh we are tackling these topics with some of the smartest people in the field, and today Mathew, Rob, Mark are joining the discussion, too. I have a bit of a different take on the mesh blog, and Mike has a good post about how we are putting these principles to work promoting the conference.

If you care about this topic, you can't afford not to be at mesh. Register today.

Tags: marketing, media, mesh06tags, web2.0