If size really does matter, everyone at Ziff-Davis Inc. must be feeling a little more well endowed after Wednesday's US$399.9 million IPO, the second largest of the year.
The latest Goliath of Wall Street, however, has been pricked by one of the Net's scrappiest Davids: ApolloMedia's annoy.com, which ran a parody of CNET's ZD-bashing "Bigger" ad on 21 April, substituting tumescent turpitude for wink-wink innuendo.
CNET's original ad, which had run the day before, played into the ongoing blitz of phallically obsessed campaigns and media properties (Godzilla, Boogie Nights, The Full Monty). Aimed at advertisers, the ad portrayed Ziff-Davis' online presence as small potatoes compared to the size of its audience for print publications such as PC Magazine and PC Week.
ApolloMedia's brazen parody, however, stripped the ad's subtext to the bone, asking that readers consider whether or not they "really want [their] online experience shaped by size queens."
CNET staffers took the parody in good humor, circulating the URL on internal mailing lists and using annoy.com's anonymous electronic postcard service to forward copies of the satire to their friends. The ad itself, created by Saatchi and Saatchi, had already been the subject of ribbing within the company, an unidentified source reports.
"They gave out T-shirts with the ad on them. We like free T-shirts," the source says, "but I've only seen one person wear one -- and he didn't have any clean clothes left."
Ziff-Davis, however, got a bee in its bonnet when several copies of the parody image were emailed out signed with the name of Dan Rosensweig, president of the company's online arm, ZD Internet Productions.
ApolloMedia founder Clinton Fein took the image down after receiving a complaint that Rosensweig's name had been forged, but changed his tune after getting a letter from ZD's general counsel. The letter demanded that the "pornographic ApolloMedia postcard" be "removed from the Internet to ensure that it can no longer be accessed by anyone."
"In addition," the letter continued, "you are now on notice that no future orders for postcards using the name Dan Rosensweig (or any variation of that name) should be accepted by your company."
The tone of the letter struck the wrong note with Fein, still smarting from a ZDNet headline that dismissed annoy.com's response to the Timothy McVeigh/America Online anonymity fracas as a "porno spam scam."
"In the interests of my own commitment to free speech online, the last thing anyone needs is Ziff-Davis attempting to control the medium or the message," Fein says.
Fein also slammed CNET for the spin of the original ad, pointing out that a company that has advocated the adoption of the Internet Content Coalition's ratings system for "bona fide news sites" is now pitching itself on the basis of raw eyeball count, rather than editorial merit.
"If you're going to claim the privilege of being a real news organization, then the size of your readership is irrelevant compared to the quality of your coverage," Fein observes. "The Net is an equalizing medium. We don't need big self-proclaimed news organizations bullying littler men or women."
Rosensweig also used the affair to critique the original ad, rather than focusing on the annoy.com parody, calling the forging of his name "disappointing. We had nothing to do with the sending of those cards, obviously. These things are an unfortunate consequence of negative advertising. If we were to run advertising, we would focus on the benefits of our products."
Fein has not only put the parody back up, he has added an even more anatomically spectacular version, called "How Big is Big?," as part of his defiant response to the ZD letter.
Fein vows that annoy.com will go forward with its mission of defending stigmatized speech on the Net. This Friday, annoy.com will launch a satire of the Drudge Report, to be called the "Patti Libel Fudge Report." The site will test the limits of protected speech, Fein says, by running mockeries of Drudge news flashes along the lines of, "An uncorroborated, second-hand, known-to-be-a liar source has told us that Babe Buchanan is a lesbian."
In an era when spin takes the upper hand, Fein is an unusually candid content provider, acknowledging that the site generates a lot of hostile email.
"Annoy.com is the most unpopular thing we've ever done," he says proudly. "Free speech shouldn't be reserved for those who have good legal counsel."
