Comcast announced in late June that they will launch a version of their VOD channel, Fearnet, as a linear, ad-supported cable network. Fearnet’s VOD service is available in 28 million homes, and the linear, ad supported channel will expand its reach. Presumably, the ads and license fees will bring in more money, since the VOD service is available free to digital subscribers. This is a significant development. When Comcast launched Fearnet on Halloween 2006 they hailed the VOD-only channel as a new paradigm in cable service. The days of the linear network were numbered, since consumers wanted to consume their video on demand. Fearnet would be the first in a series of new VOD networks.

A funny thing happened on the way to this future. Linear cable networks continued to launch — news channels, local sports channels, foreign language channels, HD versions of current channels. There are groups looking for funding for several more. Instead of fading away, networks with limited distribution continued to expand. Satellite services like Direct TV and DISH made more networks available to homes and cable systems competed by adding more channels and creating their own proprietary channels. The VOD interfaces that cable networks put in homes turned out to require several clicks to find specific shows. Most consumers didn’t want to work that hard. It was so much easier just to see what was currently on your favorite channels than hunt for specific VOD programs.

Comcast further demonstrated the importance of networks and content last year when they bought NBC for its popular cable channels like USA, and the most old-fashioned dinosaur of them all– a broadcast network. Although an increasing number of people time shift their viewing of shows, they still rely upon networks to schedule programs at specific times so they can record them.

What does this mean for your program idea? It means that cable networks in the U.S. and around the world will be a viable market for the foreseeable future. Selling a program to a cable channel remains a good way to make money and increase your program’s visibility. That doesn’t mean you have to wait for a network to buy your show before you create some video for your web site. It does mean that you should consider a network sale as a viable part of your business plan. And if you’re dreaming of creating a new linear network don’t give up hope. It looks like they will be around for awhile.

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant in Orlando, FL.

As the Tour de France prepares to climb the Pyrenees, ratings are up while 2010 TDF numbers are down.

Crashes and injuries have forced 20 cyclists to drop out leaving only 178 riders in the race.  But riders’ pain seems to be Versus’ gain. Live morning race coverage on the channel has averaged 501,000 viewers and a .5 household rating through Stage 9 on July 13 — the best start for race coverage in the network’s 10-year history with the Tour.

The cable network also says unique users on its Tour de France Web site in the U.S. have increased 15% overall, while pages per user are up 22%. Unique users’ average time on the site is currently running 13% higher than a year ago.

Versus, like all media companies in big events, is touting its three-screen approach to this competition. In addition to cable and internet coverage, Versus is offering an iPhone app for its mobile component. The Tour app will offer video highlights, standings and route maps.

The three-screen approach just reached a new goal for media conglomerates to strive for with ESPN’s coverage of soccer’s World Cup. ESPN estimated that 132 million persons aged 2+ had consumed World Cup content in the U.S. across all of ESPN’s platforms. ESPN is promoting the notion of 3 with the new website, ESPN3.com. This website is all about watching live streaming sports online.

Sources: Versus, TV By The Numbers 7/7/2010
See also:

• re:Cycling TV 7/12/2010
• MediaPost 7/12/2010
• Rating The Race & The Riders 7/2/2010

Photo: Quickstep’s Sylvain CHAVANEL, Stage 7 on 7/10/2010. Credit:  ©PresseSports/B.Papon

Justin Halpern, whose twitter feed, “S*** my Dad Says”, will become a sitcom on CBS’ fall schedule. There’s a lot we can learn from Justin’s story.

Justin was an aspiring screenwriter who moved back home to San Diego in his late twenties after his screenplay did not become a movie. Although he had a job writing for maxim.com, his dream of making it in Hollywood was dead. While living at home he started writing down his father’s words of wisdom and posting them on Twitter (119 posts so far). His dad’s witty and sometimes profane thoughts became very popular, and eventually a production company came calling.

Justin’s story shows the extraordinary opportunity you have to get your idea directly to the audience. Twitter, Facebook, you tube, and other web outlets give you the chance to tell your story. If your work strikes a chord out there, you may be able to move it to the more traditional media that can pay you significant money for it.

Here are two lessons from Justin’s story that are particularly important for you. First, create something. If Justin hadn’t written down his father’s words in the first place, nothing would have happened. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect: just get going.

Second, create for multiple platforms. S*** my Dad Says” is a twitter idea that became a tv sitcom. Do you have a movie idea that can also be a novel? Try writing the novel first. Perhaps you’ll find a publisher, but you can also self-publish. If you have a popular novel, the film and television rights will pay you more.

Whatever you’re creating, get started today. Moving from conception to creation to publication can take months or years. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get done.

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant in Orlando, FL.

How long does it take for a format or technology to migrate from one medium to another?  Take wide-screen pictures for instance.  In the early 1950s they were in your neighborhood movie house.  Only a half-century later, wide-screen TVs were on display at your local electronics emporium.  I have a feeling 3D is going to move a lot faster than that.

3D was around in the early 1950s too, but not seriously.  Used mostly in low-budget novelty films, audiences considered it a joke and it soon vanished.  One of the first was Bwana Devil, a jungle epic with spears thrown directly at the audience for shock value.  It was perhaps best known for its ad slogan “A lion in your lap.”

This time the studios are very serious about 3D.  They’ve discovered a gold mine.  Witness Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.  And the TV set makers aren’t sleeping through it.  They’re pushing their own 3D systems.

The cinema 3D technology is essentially an improved version of the 1950s spear-tossing films in that the glasses worn by the audience are “passive.” They contain a lens material that filters out the portion if the picture each eye is not supposed to see.  The new TV systems tend to use “active” glasses, mechanical devices that open and close shutters rapidly to admit the proper images for each eye.

How long before 3D is an everyday item for the home?  I’m guessing less than 10 years.  Expect the consumer electronics marketers to position it as necessary for “true HDTV.”  That lion is coming to your living room.  Don’t let it scratch-up your furniture.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

The upcoming Academy Awards broadcast on ABC is poised to do well in the ratings. The controversial decision to expand the Best Picture category from 5 to 10 films might frustrate purists, but it should also draw additional viewers.

Oscar ratings tend to fluctuate a bit from year to year, often based on whether higher- or lower-profile films receive the most attention. It’s no coincidence that the lowest rated broadcasts tend to be in years when less popular movies dominate the Best Picture nominees.

Over the past 10 years, two of the lowest rated broadcasts were the last two. Last year’s winner, Slumdog Millionaire, was up against Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and The Reader – all quality movies, but not exactly major box office hits. Likewise, the previous year had No Country for Old Men facing off against Juno, Atonement, Michael Clayton, and There Will Be Blood.

Had last year’s nominees also included Dark Night, ratings undoubtedly would have been higher. If there were five nominees this year, they might have been The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, and An Education. How many would have tuned in? Making room for crowd pleasers like Avatar, District 9, Up, The Blind Side, and Up in the Air will defintitely draw in more viewers. Probably most people that are fairly regular moviegoers have seen at least one or two of these. Now some might say Avatar would have made it anyway. But given that the critical and moviegoer blockbuster, Dark Night didn’t make the cut last year, I’m not sure Avatar would have this year.

Another factor that may contribute to high ratings is that there seems to be a renewed national appetite for big event programming. Recent strong ratings for the Super Bowl, some high-profile award shows, and the Winter Olympics seem to indicate a trend. Perhaps in this economy, more people are staying home and watching television. Maybe families are searching for primetime shows they can watch together (roughly 80% of homes only have one TV turned on during primetime). Or maybe social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are enabling more real-time shared viewing experiences, which the fragmentation of TV viewing in a 200+ channel environment has made all too rare.

As usual, the Academy Awards will continue to be an excellent platform for advertisers. It has significantly less commercial clutter than the typical primetime series. Last year, only 18% of the broadcast contained commercials (national, local, promos, and billboards). The average regularly scheduled primetime series, by comparison, has roughly 28% devoted to commercials/promos.

As I mentioned in my Winter Olympics analysis, Nielsen has a little known rule that it only measures national audiences up to the final national commercial. Last year, the final half hour of the Academy Awards, when three of the four major awards – Best Actress, Actor, and Picture – were handed out, was not rated by Nielsen.

The last national commercial was at 11:25pm. Any subsequent programming was not included in the program’s average ratings. ABC tries to keep viewers tuned in for a three and a half hour broadcast by holding back the biggest awards until the end, and then Nielsen doesn’t report most of it. If they moved these three awards to 10:30pm instead of 11:30pm, national ratings would undoubtedly improve.

A 1996 and 2007 recipient of Ad Age’s Media Maven award, Steve Sternberg has more than 20 years of experience analyzing and reporting on television and programming and video viewing trends for major advertising/media agencies. Read more from Steve at The Sternberg Report.

As many observers and bloggers have noted, this year’s Super Bowl commercials featured an unusual number of henpecked men.

In an ad for Chrysler’s Dodge Charger, a male voiceover recites a long list of husbandly duties, including putting down the toilet seat and carrying his wife’s lip balm, while blank-faced men stare mutely at the camera. At the end, the speaker concludes that, after doing so many good deeds, he deserves to get the car he wants.

If the commercials revealed that guys are feeling a bit uneasy about their gender’s position, new studies show that they have good reason to think they are living in a woman’s world.

The Pew Research Center recently reported that more women now have higher incomes than their husbands than in 1970. In 2007, 22 percent of women out-earned their husbands, compared to just 4 percent in 1970. Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center said, “Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women.”

Thanks to the recent recession, which put more men than women out of work, the number of female breadwinners has probably increased even further. Construction and manufacturing, both of which are still predominately male industries, were both hit hard by the downturn. In December, 11 percent of men were unemployed, compared to just 8.8 percent of women.

The growth of female economic power is likely to continue, as more women than men pursue higher education. According to a recent report by the American Council on Education, for nearly the past decade women have consistently represented about 57 percent of undergraduate enrollments at American colleges. Women earn more master’s degrees than men and earn just as many professional and doctoral degrees.

Fortunately, if the Super Bowl ads are any indicator, men at least have a sense of humor about their changing situation. Advertising agencies were betting that guys whose wives hold the purse strings would be willing to laugh about it.

One spot, however, did strike me as having a nasty undertone. In the FloTV ad a man accompanies a woman on a shopping trip. He stands with a bra draped over his shoulder at the lingerie store and reluctantly sniffs candles in the housewares department. At the end of the commercial, a narrator tells him to “change out of that skirt.”

Rather than inviting us to laugh along with the hapless man, FloTV portrays his position as womanly and, by the commercial’s logic, therefore degrading. The commercial suggested that, while it would be fitting for a skirt-wearing woman to cater to her mate’s whims, a man should not let himself be put in that position.

But most of the ads took a good-natured approach to the bad times that have been particularly bad for men. Underneath the ribbing, it seems, most of today’s men appreciate how much worse off they would be without the accomplished women in their lives. And if they have any complaints, they usually keep them private.

My wife sometimes tells me to “just smile and nod” when voicing my opinion is going to get me into trouble. On my better days, I have enough sense to take her advice. It looks like I have a lot of company.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

The 2010 Super Bowl set a ratings record with 106.5 million people tuned into the Big Game. About 7 in 10 U.S. households watching TV on Super Sunday watched the Bowl averaging a 68 percent share of viewing.

Which is huge, but it isn’t everyone. What were the other 32 percent of football-agnostic people watching? How does the rest of broadcast and cable compete with most the watched telecast of all time?

For the most part, competitors treat the Super Bowl like most of us handle the recession. You muddle along as best as you can and hope it’s over quickly.

“You’re fighting for a much smaller piece of the pie. It’s not worth trying to counter program,” says Peter Gordon, former head of programming for The Golf Channel. “It’s not worth putting out your killer key lime pie when you’ll get the same viewers for apple pie.”

More than 30 percent of all TV viewing is too big an audience for some competitors to dismiss. There have been big successes during the Super Bowl halftime – but none recently. In 1993, In Fox’s Living Color lured 20 million viewers away from the Super Bowl with a special football-themed parody.

Media consultant and former head of Fox cable research Steve Leblang says successful counter programming needs to reach a broad audience. “General entertainment networks such as TNT and USA will run older skewing drama marathons because there is a larger percent of viewers that tend to be less interested in the Super Bowl and sports in general,” he says.

One tried and true strategy is to rerun tried and true TV classics. This year, ABC Family ran The Sound of Music opposite the Super Bowl with modest results – about what was expected when you go up against the Big Game. The hills may still have been alive – but they delivered about 25 percent less than its usual audience.

“It’s not that programmers lay down,” says Gordon. “It’s more like recognizing reality.” However, some channels literally lay down. Or encourage their “talent” to do so.

Animal Planet aired the 6^th Annual Puppy Bowl on Super Bowl Sunday, an event filled with “dogged defense, puppy penalties and Fido first downs,” starring pups from animal shelters. Announcers provided the football-like play-by-play for the on the field animal play.

“We were very pleased with the performance – it did extremely well both on TV and online,” says Lauren Goodson Machen, senior research director at Discovery’s Animal Planet. She says Animalplanet.com broke its previous record for unique visitors on Super Sunday, counting 56 percent higher traffic than last year’s Puppy Bowl.

Machen says despite the CBS’ record-breaking Super Bowl delivery, this year’s TV household Puppy Bowl rating was on par with last year. Which doesn’t surprise media consultant Leblang. “Networks that are the most successful are reaching an underserviced demo niche.”

Even on Super Bowl Sunday there’s something on the tube for everyone. Where some viewers go gaga over Drew Brees, others go “aaahhh” over bunny rabbit cheerleaders and a blimp piloted by hamsters.

Sources: blog.nielsen.com, Animal Planet, Wikipedia

This article was originally published on Associated Content.

I told my twenty-three year old son the other day about something I posted on my Facebook page. He said, “If five years ago someone told me my dad and his friends would be spending more time on Facebook than I was, I would have thought he was crazy.”

A short five years ago Facebook was a college phenomenon. Now it’s spread to all levels of society – major companies, non-profit institutions, and even products have Facebook pages. What does this have to do with NBC’s late night television controversy? Just this: Both of them demonstrate the impossibility of predicting consumer taste five years down the road.

Five years ago NBC had a problem – their competition was courting Conan O’Brien, their money-making ‘Late Night’ host, to leave at the end of his contract. In order to prevent that NBC paid him a boatload of money and promised he could host ‘The Tonight Show’ in 2009. That only makes sense if NBC executives believed Conan would be more popular than Jay Leno five years later.

Even if they weren’t sure, that agreement had an immediate benefit. It solved the immediate late night problem and pushed the controversy five years in the future. Since the glory days of Brandon Tartikoff and Warren Littlefield in the 80s and 90s, the tenure for heads of programming at NBC has been short. It made sense to solve the short term problem at the possible expense of the long term.

Fast forward five years – NBC’s prime time schedule is mired in fourth place, and the time for Conan to take over The Tonight Show approached. Leno was still popular and coming to the end of his contract. NBC proclaimed the bold, innovative, and fiscally responsible move of Leno to prime and Conan to the Tonight Show. If Leno’s show in prime time only performed as well as it did in late night, NBC would make more money than they would with more expensive scripted programming.

As you know if you followed the media news, delaying the Day of Reckoning did not turn out well for NBC.  They plan to return Leno to the Tonight Show. In the meantime, David Letterman of CBS is now the King of Late Night Television, and NBC’s programming problems are jokes in every comedy monologue and stand-up routine in the country.

Therefore, the lesson to learn from Facebook, Leno and Conan is the futility of predicting the public taste five years down the road. Ironically, that’s exactly what television networks and movie studios do. It takes time to write screenplays and teleplays, put them into production, and release them. There’s an inevitable time lag between conception, creation and finished product. Tastes change, or in the case of Leno and the Tonight Show, they don’t. Either way, no one can be sure what will work.

So what’s a Head of Programming or studio Production Chief to do? First, understand the limits of what’s possible. Since we can’t know for sure what will work, networks and movie studios need a wide and deep development slate to maximize opportunities for hits. Some shows and films should be in the current mainstream, but always make sure to develop some things that aren’t. I recommend looking for genres that once were popular but have fallen out of fashion. For example, there hadn’t been a regular talent or variety show in prime time for years until American Idol hit big.

Second, understand that entertaining the public has been a hit-driven business since Florenz Ziegfeld brought Anna Held to New York to star in the Follies. Stars command high salaries because of their proven ability to entertain. That doesn’t mean everything they do is a hit (even Steven Spielberg directed 1941), but over time they’ll have more hits than misses. After all, no one ever paid to watch the accounting department.

And finally, since they’ll blame you when things go wrong, make sure to take the credit when things go well.

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant in Orlando, FL.

There were only a few channels on TV when I was a kid. Everyone watched them, and we watched the commercials that came with them, too.

Now the business model of advertising-supported broadcast television is breaking down. Customers with cable or satellite service pick from a huge number of channels, drastically reducing the audience that any single cable or broadcast station can hope to deliver to advertisers. And, with customers increasingly able to bypass advertisements using services like TiVo, the payoff for TV spots is dwindling. At the same time, the recession has tightened companies’ advertising budgets.

“Good programming is expensive,” Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the Fox television network, told shareholders this fall. “It can no longer be supported solely by advertising revenues.”

While traditional broadcast networks are struggling, cable channels are doing fairly well. These channels have two revenue streams. Cable companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp. charge consumers monthly subscription fees. These fees are then used to purchase the right to carry cable channels, providing the channels with an important source of funding in addition to advertising.

Broadcasters may be forced to follow the dictate, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Fox has already started going after fees from cable providers. With its contract with Time Warner Cable expiring at the end of 2009, Fox threatened to pull its programs if Time Warner did not offer the network more money.

The two companies managed to reach an agreement before screens went dark. Though the terms were not disclosed, they most likely compromised somewhere between the 30 cents per subscriber Time Warner offered to pay and the $1 per subscriber that Fox originally demanded.

Of course, cable companies do not always see eye-to-eye with cable programmers, either. After talks between Cablevision and non-broadcast Scripps Network broke down, The Food Network and HGTV disappeared on New Year’s Day from Cablevision’s lineup in metropolitan New York. Cablevision told customers that it had “no expectation” of carrying the network’s programming again “given the dramatic changes in their approach to working with distributors to reach television viewers.”

Nonetheless, some now-free networks may switch over completely to the cable model. Jeff Zucker, who runs NBC and its sister cable channels such as CNBC and Bravo, told investors this month “the cable model is just superior to the broadcast model.”

This switch would not necessarily be a bad thing. As technology makes it easier to avoid advertising, consumers will have to get used to paying for their information and entertainment. Those who enjoy quality programming ought to help shoulder its costs (as public television and radio broadcasters have reminded us for years).

In the old advertising-supported model, you “paid” for programming by lending your ears during commercial breaks. Only the channels that aired shows you wanted to watch could count you as part of the audience they delivered to advertisers.

With cable, however, consumers generally have to pay for many channels they do not care about. Rather than allowing consumers to select the specific channels they want to buy, cable companies usually offer different service tiers, meaning that, if you absolutely have to have one of the channels in the top service tier, then you have to pay for all of the other channels that also come in that tier.

This practice is known as bundling. In some cases, bundling can be illegal. When films with sound were still new, Hollywood studios relied on a form of bundling known as block booking. In order to show popular films, movie theaters had to agree to also screen a studio’s other, lesser-quality films, often without even seeing them in advance.

The theaters, stuck with the duds, grouped high quality and low quality films together into double features, ensuring that they would be able to get moviegoers to munch popcorn and other profitable concessions through the bad flicks.

In the 1948 case of United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice of block booking violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, since it prevented studios that were not able to produce A-list movies from competing in the low-budget market.

Bundling is not always illegal, but, even when it is legal, it is often bad business. Time Inc., which publishes a variety of magazine titles, including Time, Fortune, People, Entertainment Weekly and GOLF Magazine, does not require Fortune subscribers to also purchase People and Entertainment Weekly, because those customers would probably forego the package altogether instead of paying for glossies they don’t plan to read.

The same thing may happen with television programming. If cable companies continue to force customers to pay for programming they don’t want, viewers may turn off their television sets for good, finding other ways to see what they want to see. Those who want to stick with a more old-fashioned method can buy shows when they come out on DVD. Others will make their purchases from iTunes and the like. Still others will watch shows online, either on network sites or on third-party sites like Hulu.

That is, of course, assuming that cable companies that offer both television and Internet service don’t slow down online video sites in order to draw customers back onto the sofa. In order for the net to provide a true alternative to television, we need strong net neutrality rules to prevent cable companies from using their control over customers’ Internet service to squash those who dare to threaten their hold on TV viewers.

As we transition away from a system in which advertising supports most of our programming, consumers will have to start paying for what they watch. But they should not have to pay for everything that a cable company decides to throw into the package.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

My little brother started kindergarten in the fall of 1965, which allowed my mother to go back to work full-time. Our family needed the money. I was 8 years old and in third grade, and it was my job after school to walk my brother back to our Bronx apartment and look after him until our parents got home.

I had plenty of help. My mother’s friends in neighboring apartments would look in on us. I could reach both of my parents by telephone if I needed them. And there was Soupy Sales and his cast of zany characters on Channel 5, WNEW-TV in New York, every afternoon, to entertain us.

Soupy had a personal relationship with his young audience. His shows were done live. He played most of the live-action characters (like his girlfriend, Peaches) himself, while puppets made up the rest of the cast. He would speak directly to his viewers. Sometimes this got Soupy into trouble, like the time he told us kids to go through our parents’ wallets and mail him those funny green pieces of paper that had pictures of dead presidents.

One day I decided I wanted talk to Soupy. I got the number for WNEW from directory assistance (yes, we had 411 back then) and called the switchboard. A kind woman’s voice told me I was too late; Soupy left the studio by 4:30 each afternoon. The next afternoon I called back just after the show ended. A few minutes later Soupy picked up the phone.

I have no idea what I said to him, or what he said to me. But I remember being excited and proud that I had reached my friend Soupy. A few days later, an autographed picture arrived in the mail. It showed Soupy getting hit in the face with a pie, which was his trademark. Soupy later estimated that he took 25,000 pies to the face in the course of his career. I wish I could say I still have the picture, but it got lost with the other debris of my childhood.

Soupy Sales, whose legal name was Milton Supman, died last week at a hospital in The Bronx. Hearing of his death was a bit like learning that a long-lost friend had passed away. It also made me appreciate the way the world, with all its risks and opportunities, was so accessible in that long-ago time.

Soupy Sales had been a local TV personality in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles and finally New York by the time I called him. For several years his show was carried nationally on ABC. The season I called him was the apogee of his career, a year in which Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. would appear on his show and take the requisite pies to the face.

Yet Soupy Sales, at the end of his work day, found time to talk to an 8-year-old latchkey kid, jot down his address and send a picture. On one level this was a small gesture, a personal touch in a more-personal era than today’s. But on a different level Soupy Sales was teaching me to go after things that might seem out of reach. It was a valuable lesson.

A couple of years later I did a school project about India. Most kids would have gone to the library, but I looked up the Indian consulate in Manhattan and persuaded my mother to let me make my first unaccompanied trip on the subway downtown. I was 10 or 11 at the time. It helped that I had memorized the New York City subway map.

At the consulate I was greeted politely and ushered into a meeting room. A turbaned man entered, sat down and gravely spoke with me for a few minutes. I did not get the impression that I was being humored or patronized. About a week later, an amazingly thick envelope arrived, jammed with booklets and brochures about every part of India. I was delighted, and as I recall, so was my teacher.

An 8-year-old home alone with a kindergartner. A fifth- or sixth-grader alone on the subways and streets of New York. Parents who permit these things today might find themselves facing child endangerment charges, especially if anything bad happens. But my parents were not negligent or uncaring, or even unworried. Nor was my childhood unusual for that place and time. We rode bikes without helmets. We played ball in the streets. We got on the subways or buses when we needed to go somewhere, and we looked after younger kids when there was nobody else to do it.

Looking back, it was risky, even if it was necessary. A lot of things could go wrong. Occasionally they did. But most of the time, when we reached out to the grown-up world, it reached back, gently.

Photo Credit: LeftInAboite.blogspot.com

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.