{"id":4394,"date":"2016-10-21T08:47:46","date_gmt":"2016-10-21T15:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/?p=4394"},"modified":"2016-10-22T08:01:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-22T15:01:28","slug":"aaugh-the-blockheadedness-it-hurts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/2016\/10\/aaugh-the-blockheadedness-it-hurts\/","title":{"rendered":"AAUGH! The blockheadedness! It hurts!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The dropping of the MetLife Peanuts licenses has produced some rather ignorant coverage, like:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>MetLife has dropped the 1950s cartoon character, a mascot that likely doesn&#8217;t resonate with the youngest generations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: The Christian Science Monitor article\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/Business\/2016\/1020\/See-you-Snoopy-why-insurance-co.-is-saying-goodbye-to-cartoons\">See you, Snoopy: why insurance co. is saying goodbye to cartoons<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>To make that point, the Monitor:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Buried well into the article the point that MetLife was spinning off its consumer life insurance business, which is a big portion of what the Peanuts characters were used to promote, onto a separate brand. Serving a smaller business naturally makes it harder to justify the huge bucks MetLife was putting out for the license.<\/li>\n<li>Leads with an expert supporting their claims, buries the expert saying\u00a0\u201cPeople think Snoopy is totally cool, and it\u2019s a pretty broad range of people.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Tied the supposed lack of interest in Peanuts among younger folks to the death of Saturday morning TV, as though that was even a significant portion of what has driven the popularity of Peanuts. (Yes, there was a Peanuts Saturday AM show&#8230; for all of 18 episodes in the 1980s.)<\/li>\n<li>Failed to mention that Peanuts does, right now, have a new TV series, which appears successful (if in the relative terms of success in the 500 channel world.)<\/li>\n<li>Never mentions that there was a Peanuts movie just last year&#8230; which did more domestic box office than the overlapping release of a Pixar movie (<em>The Good Dinosaur<\/em>), the latest installment of\u00a0<em>Ice Age<\/em>, or\u00a0<em>The Angry Birds Movie<\/em>, to point to some more modern things that kids would be familiar with.<\/li>\n<li>Talks about how the characters used to be visible appearing in ads&#8230; as though they&#8217;ve not appeared in ads besides MetLife recently.<\/li>\n<li>Uses as its proof that one 10 year old as asked if they understood a\u00a0laundry soap commercial that references Peanuts. (Doesn&#8217;t even give her answer!) And then the expert uses that to simply make uninformed musings about &#8220;millenials&#8221;, which would not include that 10 year old (who would be post-millenial.)<\/li>\n<li>Ends with a claim that &#8220;the Charlie Brown cartoons are available on Netflix&#8221;. Netflix is not streaming any Peanuts product in the US at this point.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>MetLife is shrinking their business. It makes sense they would want to shed an expensive license that was used to support that larger business. Assumptions beyond that are just blather.<\/p>\n<p><em>Note added Oct 22: Upon my contacting the\u00a0<\/em>Monitor<em> with my concerns, they have <a href=\"http:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/2016\/10\/squeaky-wheel-meet-grease\/\">updated the story with some adjustments<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The dropping of the MetLife Peanuts licenses has produced some rather ignorant coverage, like: MetLife has dropped the 1950s cartoon character, a mascot that likely doesn&#8217;t resonate with the youngest generations. Source: The Christian Science Monitor article\u00a0See you, Snoopy: why insurance co. is saying goodbye to cartoons To make that &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","filesize_raw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-schulzpeanuts-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}