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All iPhone Sales Suspended At Apple Stores in China

Apple said in a statement that it had temporarily suspended sales of all iPhones at its five mainland China stores out of concern for the safety of customers and employees. The phones will still be offered online, through Apple’s official partner, Unicom, and at authorized resellers. The statement did not say when Apple stores would resume selling the iPhone 4S.

Demand for iPhones in China far exceeds supply, which has spawned an army of scalpers who hire migrant workers to snap up products that the scalpers then resell at much higher prices.

The horde of more than 1,000 people who gathered outside the store Friday in the Sanlitun district of Beijing included organized teams of migrant workers, identifiable by matching armbands or hats. Some of the migrant workers said they were bused in and promised payment of 100 renminbi, or about $16, for purchasing a phone.

Wary of unrest, police ordered the store not to open, according to one source familiar with the situation. Furious, some would-be customers threw eggs. Police dispersed the crowd and temporarily cordoned off the store.

Those recruited by scalpers were particularly angry. Some said the store’s closing meant that they would get only 10 renminbi, meant as a food allowance, after standing in line all night in freezing temperatures.

It was the second time in less than a year that the Sanlitun store had been forced to temporarily close while trying to offer a new product. In May, four people were injured and a glass door was smashed when a crowd waiting to buy the iPad 2 turned disorderly, according to China Daily.

At Apple’s other Beijing store and three stores in Shanghai, the iPhone 4S sold out quickly, leaving some disappointed, but with no reports of incidents.

China is Apple’s fastest-growing market: with just five of the company’s stores, it accounts for one-sixth of its global sales. Timothy D. Cook, chief executive of Apple, said last week that “customer response to our products in China has been off the charts.”

Tags: Apple, China, iPhone, Sales, Stores, Suspended

Media Decoder Blog: Fighting Antipiracy Measure, Activist Group Posts Personal Information of Media Executives

Mike Segar/ReutersThe hacking group Anonymous posted online the personal details of Jeffrey L. Bewkes, left, the chairman of Time Warner, and also leaked information about the family of Sumner M. Redstone, right, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation.

The online activist group known as Anonymous, which has targeted opponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and businesses that stopped providing services to WikiLeaks, has set its sights on a new adversary: media executives.

In protest of antipiracy legislation currently being considered by Congress, the group has posted online documents that reveal personal information about Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sumner M. Redstone, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation. Those companies, like almost every major company in the media and entertainment industry, have championed the Stop Online Piracy Act, the House of Representatives bill, known as SOPA, and its related Senate bill, called Protect I.P.

The documents, culled from various databases, included Mr. Bewkes’s home addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged users to bombard the company and its executives with e-mails, faxes and phone calls. Mr. Bewkes has received intimidating phone calls and a barrage of e-mails, according to supporters of the legislation who have knowledge about the matter but are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The documents also included the corporate contact information for a range of companies including NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company.

A Disney spokeswoman said neither the company nor its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, had received threats. Time Warner declined to comment. The file that was posted regarding Mr. Redstone has details about his family, home and career but does not include private contact information. A Viacom spokeswoman declined to comment.

Anonymous, a loosely organized collective of so-called hacktivists, has called its effort “Operation Hiroshima.” It began on Jan. 1, when the group dropped a trove of documents on Web sites that facilitate anonymous publishing, like Pastebin.com and Scribd.com. The documents included information about media executives and government figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and data on corporations and government entities that the group opposes.

“They should feel threatened,” said Barrett Brown, a Dallas-based online activist who has worked with Anonymous, referring to backers of the antipiracy legislation. “The idea is to put pressure on the politicians and companies supporting it.”

The online effort underscores how heated the arguments have become over legislation that may seem like arcane government regulation. Media companies say the legislation, which has bipartisan support, will crack down on illicit downloads of movies, music and television, especially from overseas Web sites. SOPA would expand the ability of the government and private companies to hold Web sites responsible for content the companies believe infringes on their copyrights, allowing greater use of court orders and lawsuits that could ultimately shut down the sites.

The technology industry, including giants like Google and Yahoo, and advocates for Internet freedom say the bills would censor the Internet, stifle free speech and give the government too much power to regulate and shut down Web sites in the United States. Both sides have spent millions on lobbying in Washington. But at the grass-roots level, the issue has galvanized Internet activists, who lack lobbying power but have promoted the cause among the online community.

“You take our speech, you take our Internet, you take our Bill of Rights, you take our Constitution, we fight back,” said a monotone voice on a YouTube video posted by Anonymous before the Operation Hiroshima document drop.

Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?” this aide said.

The vast majority of SOPA opponents convey their views through legitimate means. Hundreds of Web sites have encouraged blackouts and boycotts to protest the legislation. According to BlackoutSOPA.org, nearly 12,000 users have changed their Twitter profile pictures to a “Stop SOPA” badge.

“The more outrage expressed on the Internet in the coming days, the better,” said Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm and an early investor in Twitter. He said he did not condone threats or “any kind of intimidation” by hackers.

Last month Scribd.com introduced a function that made the words on documents gradually fade away. As they did, a pop-up prompted users to contact their representatives. “Don’t let the Internet vanish before your eyes,” it read.

The tactics have succeeded in some cases. Initially a supporter, the Web hosting company Go Daddy reversed its position on SOPA after Wikipedia and thousands of other Web sites said they would withdraw their domains from the service. “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Companies like Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Brothers studio, and Viacom, which owns MTV and the Paramount studio, have experienced security teams, but they are not necessarily trained to handle anonymous online threats, said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer at Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software.

“It’s easy to get something taken off a Web site, but it’s impossible to erase things off the Internet,” he said.

Less than a week after the Operation Hiroshima documents were posted, a Twitter message linking to Mr. Bewkes’s home phone numbers and addresses, his annual income and his wife’s name and age had spread across the Internet. The message included #OpHiroshima, the shortened Twitter code for the effort.

The global activists in the nebulous collection known as Anonymous often use computer skills to support political causes. For example, Anonymous demanded a full Christmas dinner for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is in prison facing charges of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Last month, hackers associated with Anonymous published a trove of e-mail addresses and the personal information of subscribers of Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex. Last year, a splinter group affiliated with Anonymous attacked the Sony Corporation, shutting down its PlayStation online network. The attack cost the company around $171 million, according to industry estimates. Movements like Anonymous often squabble among themselves, but SOPA is a uniquely unifying cause, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and an expert on hacking. To these activists, she said, “Internet freedom is not controversial.”

Tags: Activist, Antipiracy, Decoder, Executives, Fighting, Group, Information, Measure, Media, Personal, Posts

Advertising: Stirring Memories of Commercials Past

A campaign for StarKist tuna reworks the brand’s longtime “Sorry Charlie” theme — which StarKist began using to sell canned tuna in 1961 — to depict people saying, “Thanks Charlie” for newer products like tuna in pouches.

The StarKist campaign is part of a trend on Madison Avenue that might be called comfort marketing, which is becoming more popular as the economy sputters. Advertisers are bringing back vintage characters, themes and jingles in hopes that evoking fond memories of the past may help shoppers feel better about buying products now.

Comfort marketing is part of efforts to reassure consumers who demand value for money that they are buying products that have stood the test of time. But to counter perceptions that brands trading in nostalgia are too old-fashioned for contemporary needs, many of the revivals, like StarKist’s, also involve updating and refreshing the mascots, songs, slogans and other venerable ad elements.

Other examples of brands trying to balance yesterday, today and tomorrow include Alka-Seltzer, Bacardi, Doritos, Dr Pepper, Fiat, Pepsi-Cola, Planters and Uncle Ben’s.

“People, particularly in this environment, are looking for substance and authenticity,” said Robert Furniss-Roe, regional president for the Bacardi North America unit of Bacardi, “and at the same time, they’re looking for novelty.”

A $10 million campaign coming this month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Bacardi brand and company mixes modern and traditional takes on that heritage. For instance, Bacardi will give away T-shirts bearing ads from bygone eras through its Facebook fan page.

And a Bacardi print ad, carrying the headline “History’s Supposed to Be Boring. Nobody Told Us,” recreates a party circa 1957 in a way that evokes contemporary TV shows about the past, like “Mad Men” and “Pan Am.”

The goal is “to depict a moment in time that lives in history” and offers “an eye to what’s next, an exciting future,” said Leo Premutico, a co-founder of Johannes Leonardo, the WPP agency that created the Bacardi campaign.

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After Charlie’s 50th anniversary last year, executives at StarKist and its agency, MMB, decided to make the character a central figure as he was in the days of “Sorry Charlie,” a campaign created by Leo Burnett for a previous StarKist owner, H. J. Heinz.

The premise of the animated “Sorry Charlie” commercials was that Charlie — voiced by the actor Herschel Bernardi — kept trying to cultivate “good taste” so he could become a StarKist tuna. But StarKist kept rejecting him because, as another fish would declare, “StarKist don’t want tunas with good taste. StarKist wants tunas that taste good.”

An announcer then intoned, “Sorry Charlie, only good-tasting tuna get to be StarKist,” and in many of the spots, a fish hook appeared, to which was attached a note reading, “Sorry Charlie.”

“There is no particular negative about the ‘Sorry Charlie’ campaign, but 50 years has passed,” said In-Soo Cho, president and chief executive at the StarKist Company, part of Dongwon Industries of South Korea. “We thought giving new life to Charlie would be good.”

The new “Thanks Charlie” campaign, with a budget estimated at $18 million, is “not us talking about Charlie,” Mr. Cho said. “Now, it’s consumers talking about Charlie, and that interaction made more sense.”

In tests consumers said they liked the new approach, but Mr. Cho said he was nervous about the change. “You should always be careful,” he added, “but if you don’t push the envelope, you never evolve.”

Fred Bertino, president and creative director at MMB, called the campaign “a platform for the future, because we could start thanking Charlie for all the new products the brand would be delivering.”

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“You want to keep your icon, but a lot of people make the mistake of using it in the same old way,” Mr. Bertino said. “This is still Charlie, but a fresh take on Charlie, giving him more dimension.”

That impulse also seems to be motivating Dr Pepper, which introduced a campaign this week that carries the theme “Always one of a kind.” The campaign includes a commercial featuring a young man in a Pied Piper role, a premise reminiscent of the upbeat “Be a Pepper” campaign for Dr Pepper in the 1970s.

The young man seems to be part of a crowd, but as soon as he drinks a can of Dr Pepper, he removes his suit to reveal a T-shirt that asserts, “I’m One of a Kind.” His disrobing inspires other people to shuck their outer garments, revealing T-shirts that express thoughts like “I’m a Dreamer,” “I’m a Fighter” and even “I’m a Pepper,” echoing the jingle from the “Be a Pepper” campaign.

The idea of “standing out within the crowd” is meant to symbolize how the taste of Dr Pepper is “unique within the soft drink industry,” said Dave Fleming, marketing director for Dr Pepper at the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

The concept of the main character as a “catalyst” to spur people into “declaring they are unique” is intended as “a nice nod” to the “Be a Pepper” campaign, Mr. Fleming said.

But the “Always one of a kind” ads are part of “a new campaign that stands on its own,” he added. “It’s not a remake.”

The Dr Pepper campaign, which also includes Twitter and the Dr Pepper Web site, at drpepper.com, is being created by Deutsch L.A., which is the Marina del Rey, Calif., office of Deutsch, part of the Lowe & Partners Worldwide division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group spends about $40 million a year on ads for Dr Pepper.

Tags: Advertising, Commercials, Memories, Stirring

Mutual Funds Report: Second Quarter

The stock market went on a roller-coaster ride in 2011, plunging in the third quarter and surging in the fourth, to end about where it started. For mutual fund investors, the volatility may not end.

Tags: Funds, Mutual, Quarter, Report, Second