There’s one problem though: no one can understand the ads.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal this week, an increase in competition has led like Northrop Grumman and Quinetic North America to expand their marketing efforts in a way that has touched the broader public.

The “wooing” of government procurement officers used to be “conducted mainly in private.” But as the advertising has become more widespread, many Washington-area residents are utterly confused by cryptic ads plastered across metro cars and local buses.

The ads talk in governmentese, using “mysterious acronyms” the WSJ says gives “the ads the flavor of coded Cold War era shortwave radio broadcasts: ISR, F136, IPV6 and ICD-10.” And it seems the more obscure the ad the better. Take one for instance, that simply reads: “THOSE WITH A NEED TO KNOW, KNOW.”

But it may be that these enigmatic ads are a bit too unintelligible: even procurement officers claim they often can’t understand them.

According to the article, Northrop Grumman ran an ad in a metro stop picturing a “bombed-out city neighborhood,” followed with the text, ‘By the time you’ve identified the threat, we’ve already taken it out of the picture.’ In the lower, right-hand corner, a single clue: ISR.”

A lengthy online conversation ensued in which viewers revealed they “still don’t even get what they mean.”

Read the full article here.

Bartlett Cleland, Director of the Texas-based Institute for Policy Innovation wrote this week about how countries like Venezuela are reassured by the FCC’s recent regulations, which they can now use to justify greater controls over their own communications systems.

Just days before the FCC made its ruling, the Venezuelan Parliament changed its laws in order to give President Hugo Chavez the power to regulate Internet content by implementing heavy regulations on Venezuelan-based service providers.  Specifically the country’s ISPs are now required to block broad categories of material that, for instance, “fosters unrest among the citizenship or disturb[s] public order,” and “refuses to recognize the government’s authority.”

In other words, the Venezuelan government has found a way of regulating all content. As Cleland concludes, “Venezuela needed little provocation for its continued oppression, especially from the U.S.” Nevertheless, Chavez can relax “knowing that the U.S. has joined Venezuela in the company of governments who regulate the Internet.”

That’s the adage that always comes to mind when I pass the syrup impersonators at the grocery store. I suppose it’s because when I first got married, I made the mistake of bringing home Aunt Jemima syrup from the grocery store instead of real maple syrup. My husband was aghast – in part, because I had spent four years at a college in Vermont.

In seven years of marriage, I haven’t repeated that mistake, and I’ve become a bit of Vermont maple syrup snob.  That’s why I can sympathize with regulators at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, whose job it is to protect the “maple” brand.

Fast food giant McDonald’s recently released a new breakfast option – fruit and maple oatmeal – and as a result have found themselves in a bit of a sticky situation. While they describe the oatmeal as “sweet harmony,” the new product hasn’t gone over so well with Henry Marckres, consumer protection section chief of the VAA.

According to Marckres, “We have a set of laws and regulations, and in maple law, it has to come from the sap of the maple tree or syrup.” The problem? McDonald’s advertises its new food as containing “natural maple flavor;” yet, there is nothing truly maple in the oatmeal, making it illegal to use the phrase in Vermont.

Kelly Loftus, the public information officer at the Vermont agriculture agency is concerned with making it clear to the public that McDonald’s is not using Vermont maple syrup in its oatmeal, and the state claims it’s their goal to work with McDonalds to meet all regulations.

Anyone who has worked on a branding campaign before can tell you, a single word can forever define a product: Xerox, Kleenex, Coke.  So it’s hard to know if this is a struggle to protect the purity of maple or the next step in the war against fast food.

While Kahn spent more than 60 years teaching economics at Cornell University, he will probably be best remembered for his years during President Carter’s administration, when he served as chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board and presided over the deregulation of the airline industry. His work was monumental, setting the stage for the era of deregulation during the Reagan years. In one fell swoop, Kahn helped dismantle a heavily regulated industry, allowing airlines to determine both where they could fly and how much they could charge.

Kahn told NPR in 1986, competition’s biggest effect was “empowering the consumer,” a sentiment that fueled his long crusade against comprehensive regulation. He ultimately expanded beyond the airline industry to public utilities, and in the past decade, he was deeply involved with the deregulation of the telecommunications industry, which he viewed as a nearly parallel situation to the airline industry in the 1970s.

It was in this capacity that many of us at the White House Writers Group had an opportunity to work with Kahn. The WHWG, which has consulted to the Washington and General Counsel’s offices at Verizon since 2001, relied on Kahn’s expertise on several occasions for conferences and congressional testimony regarding telecommunications deregulation.

In his 2003 work, Lessons from Deregulation: Telecommunications and Airlines after the Crunch, Kahn defends deregulation of the telecommunications industry, in part, by showing how the airlines have benefited in the years since deregulation. While he believed unburdening the telecommunications industry would be more complex and take more time than with the airlines, he never doubted that open competition rather than comprehensive regulation would yield positive results for both industries.

Apart from his tremendous contribution to economics policy, Kahn’s commitment to the English language made him singular among Washington administrators.  As the New York Times describes it, Kahn maintained a “longstanding revulsion to bureaucratic language.” In fact, he told staffers, try to write “in a straight-forward quasi-conversational, humane prose – as though you were talking to or communicating with real people.”

That’s something all of us at the WHWG will remember.

Apparently, in addition to the nation’s near-10 percent unemployment, Americans are really angry about loud TV commercials. To be fair, many of those annoying ads do transmit at much higher volumes than the shows they interrupt – in some cases as much as twice the volume.

It’s been well known for years that TV advertisers compete for viewers’ attention by pumping up the volume.  (A strategy that’s been less effective in the age of mute buttons and DVR technology.) That’s why it’s not surprising that the television industry has been largely supportive of the new regulations. More and more they realize they will have to communicate their message in more creative ways.

The FCC will be given a year to determine their operations and the television providers will have another year to comply with the law.