Some of us still remember ten years ago, when then-Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes (aka “the cereal killer” ) had the Staples Center pay for the paper’s reporting about said center’s launch. Happily, Willes is no longer at the newspaper, and this time, the L.A. Times’ special section advertising writers penned articles about Staples’ 10 year anniversary. The L.A. Times is still suffering financially, but it’s no longer sacrificing journalistic ethics to survive.

Posted under Michael's Blog

I read just now that liberal agitator MoveOn.org has attracted 3 million people to vote online for its "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest to pick which Obama advertisement gets picked for national TV.

And I suddenly realized that the long-predicted democratization of content distribution may finally be underway. As I see online contest after contest (See my posts this week on Filmaka.com and Massify.com and others to come on songwriting and comic book contests) bring in hundreds, thousands, millions of ordinary folks to vote on their favorite content,  submit themselves to the will of the masses and create hits, I’m thinking perhaps we have reached the cross-over point, where we’re finally at the cross-over point — where  advertising executives, record executives, studio chiefs, publishers are only one piece of the content food chain, not the sole arbiter of what content the public sees and hears.

The extraordinary success of American Idol — with its millions of fans who create a built-in audience for home-grown stars like Kelly Clarkson –is clearly the original source for this contest craze. But it’s now clear that the model can translate into virtually any medium some segment of the population cares passionately about.

We already know user-generated content on sites like YouTube can attract millions of viewers. Now we know users can also determine what Hollywood or Madison Avenue create.

This doesn’t mean the suits go out of business. It actually means they may have a much less expensive way of figuring out who’s a star, what content sells and creating an audience. And, in true Hollywood fashion, you can bet the studio suits will take credit for the idea once they’ve watched the smaller guys flounder their way to success.

See Also

• Horrors! Online Auditions!
• Filmaka: Vetting Filmmakers on the Web

Posted under Uncategorized

When I was a TV reporter seven years ago, us journalists used to pose hard-ball questions to broadcasters about how they were going to deal with their plummeting audience share.

Lower CPMs presumably meant lower ad dollars.

These days, I’m surprisingly beginning to hear  TV executives talk about tailoring their message to each customer.

One of these is Deanna Brown, President of Scripps Interactive Networks, overseeing the interactive components of the Food Network, the Fine Living Network and Home and Garden Television, among others.

For Brown, the message gets as granular as helping Mom make chicken soup.

 "Ultimately, people are looking for things that are important to them, the individual user," says Brown, who spoke at IPTV World earlier this week. "Our job is to aggregate those individuals."

Here’s how it works:

1) One of Mom’s friends tells her about Recipezaar, a Scripps property that creates a web space where she can choose between 1,006 chicken soup recipes, rate them and share her own.

2) Mom becomes a regular user and one day happens to bump into 12 cocktail recipes from the Food Network, the better to ply hard-drinking Dad.

3) Mom gets hooked on Rachael Ray videos.

4) Mom starts watching the Food Network.

What’s interesting is the way this model turns the networks’ current strategies on its head. Your favorite shows are all on TV, but you know you can watch them stream on the Internet. Here, you’re starting on the Web, and gradually pulling people into the TV experience.

And, your Web experience is built around helping them get what they want making, rather than enticing them to do what you want (i.e., click the banner ad).

Food for thought.

See Also

• IPTV World

Posted under Uncategorized

With carriers inundated with proposals and big media options, direct-to-consumer mobile video may come on strong

With the success of MyWaves.com (1 million subscribers and counting) and CBS’s recent announcement that it was contracting with four mobile ad firms for its on and off-deck mobile media initiatives, the momentum for direct-to-consumer mobile video seems to be building. Getting content onto the mobile deck has become a long and tortuous process, especially for newcomers who don’t bring to Verizon VCast or Sprint TV the marquee value carriers crave. I have tracked companies over the past year that were promised deck placement month after month and ended up launching up to a year after originally scheduled. As well, the carriers still haven’t made up their minds about what video streams from which supplier gets to carry what form of advertising. For major media like the networks, who live and breath ad dollars, the lack of media savvy at the operator level has got to be frustrating. As John Gauntt, analyst for eMarketer told me recently, content merchandising by carriers has been a “disaster.” No wonder we are starting to see companies like MyWaves, MyCorner, 3Guppies, and CellFish emerge as serious players and the likes of CBS start erecting more of an off-portal strategy.

Versaly Entertainment, makers of the free and ad supported Fast Lane channel on Sprint is about to make its small network of mobile video for young men accessible to the wider audience off-deck allows. Versaly is an interesting company, in that it has evolved through all of the available models on decks. It ran for Sprint a fee-based entertainment news channel, but found the pay model limiting. It came back earlier this year with one of the first fully ad-supported and free mobile video products from a major carrier. Its Fast Lane was free to anyone with the Sprint PCS plan and a video-enabled phone. The company says that in about six months of operation it has served over 2 million video streams. What works for them? “Girls, girls, girls,” a company spokesperson tells me. Their channel of bikini-clad women has proven to be the killer content. Also interesting has been the ad model so far. Instead of pre-rolls (which the company will roll out at some point), Fast Lane created branded channels for BMW Mini and others to contain their video mini-series and branded entertainment. Within the context of a Fast Lane service for young men, the “ads” felt and looked more like more interesting content.

By going off-portal Fast Lane and Versaly have the opportunity to reach a cross-carrier audience and market the service more freely through search engines and mobile video portals. This can be as much a challenge as an opportunity, of course, but with some mobile brands like Crush or Flush, MobileSideWalk and MyWaves creating audiences without much help from the carriers one has to wonder if the mobile content economy may pass the Tier-1s by?

Posted under Michael's Blog

As agencies conglomerate and content providers focus on the value of their data, Washington will take notice

The Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday that it will host a two-day Town Hall on issues of privacy with a specific focus on behavioral tracking and targeting. Coming on the heels of the AOL purchase of behavioral ad network Tacoda, Google’s intentions to buy DoubleClick, and Microsoft’s purchase of aQuantive, this is a fair warning to the content and ad industries. Details of the FTC Town Meeting and its agenda are here.

Ironically, this new and more focused attention on BT (behavioral targeting) by agencies of the government is a good sign of just how mature and evolved the interactive marketing economy has become.

A number of people in the interactive marketing and publishing industries have told me recently that the wave of buyouts demonstrates how the online-ad game is all about technology now. The years of talking about better targeting finally are coming to a head as search engines, ad networks, and content providers begin to collect the necessary toys for putting the full potential of interactive targeting into practice. Yahoo already uses search-keyword data to better track and target its users. Microsoft’s AdCenter has folded behavioral segments into the targeting mix. And Google had to retract a public slip by one of its executives last week when she mentioned that the engine was going to move into the behavioral realm. Make no mistake, BT is the next big thing in online advertising and it is bound to attract the attention of legislators.

The FTC called this Town Meeting, in part, as a result of hearings it held late last year on the topic of online privacy and advertising and, in part, because of petitions from advocates. But don’t be surprised to see publishers trying to use privacy as a differentiator and helping to fuel the controversy. Marketers and publishers have never before had such tools for tracking and targeting users. Frankly, the industry has done a poor job of preparing for this day when the government and advocates ask who is guarding our data and how will it be used? Individual publishers and networks have many good and bad answers to these questions, and that is the problem. If this industry is advanced enough now to network our profiles across thousands of sites and target our recent activities – even our search histories – it is mature enough to agree to some common standards all consumers can count on.

Posted under Michael's Blog

In acquiring behavioral targeting newtork and technology Tacoda, AOL is vying to become a major player in ad sales across the Web

In purchasing one of the two biggest and oldest behavioral targeting providers online, Tacoda, AOL is increasing its reach into the general Web advertising world and rebuilding its crumbling fee-based empire on the ad model. Broken yesterday by The New York Post, whixh pegged the deal at between $200 and $300 million, the acquisition adds to AOL’s previous purchase of Advertising.com, another large ad network that serves behavioral ads. The blogs were abuzz with valuation speculation, but Reuters reports $275 million, accoridng to an insider. Tacoda’s network touches about 120 million users, and so AOL is demonstrating that it plans to re-build its lost empire of subscriber revenue on an ad model that reaches across the entire Web. Kate Kaye’s excellent analysis at ClickZ outlines how this follows AOL’s purchase of mobile ad network Third Screen Media and video ad technology Lightningcast.

AOL is positioning itself not only as a a big ad player but also one that like Yahoo could cater to the entertainment industry. Behavioral targeting currently occupies a small slice of the overall digital ad spend, but interest in it is growing and its use among entertainment marketers is strong. Behavioral targeting can tag visitors to a portal’s TV or film section as interested media consumers and then serve them relevant ads as they move “out of context” into other content areas. The Tacoda deal gives AOL even more reach out into the Web at large, so it can target ads at people even when they move off of the AOL.com property. For entertainment marketers, behavioral targeting could prove critical in finding enough ad inventory. As it is most TV and film areas at the major portals sell out far in advance and at high CPMs. At yesterday’s Behavioral Marketing Forum in New York, which I programmed (and blogged here), several ad executives mentioned the important of this platform for finding users when they are off the pricier entertainment portals. AOL is among the most important distribution hubs for movie trailers and TV clips and schedules. By tagging and following entertainment consumers here, AOL could be building a very Hollywood-friendly ad product.

See Also

• AOL
• Tacoda

Posted under Michael's Blog

Marc Esper is NBC Universal’s Vice President of Search.

Five years ago, such a title at a major broadcast network would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s indispensable.

Esper, recruited a year and a half ago from AOL’s brand marketing team, is charged with making sure that NBC Universal’s 40 websites – including properties like Sci Fi Channel, NBC and Universal Pictures  — show up properly in Google and Yahoo!, blogs, YouTube, discussion boards and the myriad other ways users discover content online.

“My view of search is that of a programmer looking at a sea of content,” said Dmitri Ponomarev, Vice President of On Demand, TV Guide Television Group.

 About 60 percent of TV Guide Broadband’s customers come from search engines, including channels on AOL Video, Google Video and YouTube.

Then there’s the brouhaha around a mysterious trailer inserted before a recent Transformers screening in Los Angeles. Surprised audience members saw the handycam-captured destruction of New York, with no title or distinguishing element other than the name of its producer J.J. Abrams. Type JJ Abrams  and Transformers and you get….well, see for yourself.

Posted under Uncategorized

Let’s see.  It’s been a hard day at work and I head home for dinner, a Bud and Bud.TV.

I don’t think so.  And apparently neither do the 100,000 other people who bailed out of Bud.TV’s struggling online network, one month after it launched with an underwhelming 253,000 visitors in February. Anheuser-Busch is said to have spent between $20 million and $30 million to launch the site, and hopes to have 2 to 3 million visitors a month by early next year.

AdAge.com opines that the 40% drop in traffic at Anheuser-Busch’s site is due to the online form on the launch page, which verifies your name, age, zip code and gives you a user name and a password.  That’s silly.  People fill out oodles more to sign up for free MySpace or Amazon accounts.  It took me five minutes to fill out Ad Age’s own online reg form — and they made me fill in my address, company, job title and check a box not to receive the magazine’s email propaganda.

There are two reasons why people aren’t going to Bud.TV.  One is tepid content.  A hackneyed show about fake celebrities, interviews with Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and a "Bud Light daredevil" who orders pizzas using only the words "large" and "yes," is not exactly compelling content.

But the more important reason why the site is bombing is that people just don’t want to watch a TV channel run by a beer company.  Especially when it features the same kind of beery spots you see in Bud Light commercials.

Imagine if NBC started selling beer in grocery stores.  You think that would sell?

Advertisers are advertisers for a reason.  It’s because they need to bounce off content consumers really want to see to get their attention.

Now, you could argue that a few advertisers really are in the content business, say BMW Films.  But they’re really not.  BMW’s critically acclaimed Internet short film series featured the work of famous directors like John Woo, Ridley Scott and John Frankenheimer.  BMW wrapped itself in their notoriety, the way any good advertiser does.  But it didn’t produce the films.

Had Bud done its site that way, leaving the programming to programmers, Bud.TV might have had a chance.  As it is, I predict it will end its life as a mere belch in the history of Internet programming.

See Also

• Traffic Plummets at Struggling Bud.TV
• Beer Site Hobbled by Barriers to Easy Access and Shareable Content

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Most of you are probably too young to remember when Terry Semel and Robert Daly were co-presidents of Warner Bros., running the studio through perhaps the longest winning streak in Hollywood history.

Yes, running Yahoo! is a second vocation for Daly.  Unlike Google chiefs Sergei Brin and Lawrence Page, who cut their business teeth on search engine technology at Stanford.

Daly’s Hollywood contacts and savvy undoubtedly played a big role in Yahoo and Viacom’s joint announcement today that Yahoo would be the exclusive provider of search ads at MTV.com, Nickelodeon.com and other Viacom sites.

If you wonder how Yahoo! will survive Google’s onslaught, that’s it in a nutshell.  Yahoo is a media company.  Google is a fancy search engine.

The famously incestuous world of Hollywood doesn’t do well with outsiders — whether they’re named Google or Microsoft.  Look for a lot more Hollywood deals in Yahoo’s future.

See Also

• Yahoo Provides Search Ads for Viacom web sites
• Terry Semel Bio

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I doubt Google is going to become a huge force in conventional TV advertising anytime soon. Consider that the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, which represents most major cable companies, just pulled out of eBay’s own online brokering system.

But if you focus on just this Old Media aspect of Google’s entry into TV advertising, you’re missing the point.

The key in Google’s deal with Dish Network is (shudder) convergence. You know, that TV-turning-into-a-PC thing that’s gotten a bad rap lately because, hey, who wants to watch TV on their computer?

In an IPTV world, interactivity becomes standard and a growing number of features — GUIs, video-on-demand and, yes, search — begin to look an awful lot like PCs. At some point, they just become different iterations of the same device for office and home.

That’s what Google is preparing for. When the old passive advertising model dies its well-deserved death, Google wants AdSense (or its TV equivalent) to be plastered on every television cum PC. Just as Google wants to have Google Mobile plastered on every cellphone.

And the sum is greater than the parts. An advertiser who finds their message on computer, mobile and TV really gets consumers where they live.

The idea of Google brokering impersonal advertising transactions for people like GM and Absolut is ludicrous. Those multi-million-dollar deals are cut on boardroom tables, not websites.

But if you’re talking about TV watchers clicking on little bail bond ads in the corner of "Prison Break” episodes, you’re (sadly) a lot closer to the truth.

See Also

• Cable-TV Group Bails Out of EBay Ad Sales Trial
• Google’s Revolution May Not Be Televised

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