SOCIAL MEDIA SEND-OFF
WIDGETS GONE WILD
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BLOGGERS
NOT SO HAPPY BLOGGERS
BEST VIRAL VIDEO
COCKTAIL CHATTER – GRANDPARENTS AND W00T
AWARD CONGRATULATIONS
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SOCIAL MEDIA SEND-OFF: Next year may be the year of social media (that’s if 2007 wasn’t already), according to several recently released studies. The most prominent was by eMarketer which says spending on social networks will soar in 2008 from a ‘mere’ $920 Million this year to $1.6 Billion next – an increase of 74%. And in five years half (49%) of all Internet users in the U.S. will visit a social network site and four out of five (80%) of all teenagers will visit such a site. The American Marketing Association says that “social networking shopping” is one of the leading trends this holiday season (along with cause-related marketing) as consumers seek out recommendations about holiday gifts. Another report, this one by the Pew Internet Project found nearly two-thirds of online teenagers, aged 12 to 17, have engaged in some form of content creation, mainly through social network domains. A report by the Society for New Communications Research found that more than half (57%) of public relations and marketing professionals believe ‘social media tools’ are becoming more critical to their work and that more than a quarter (27%) say social media is a core part of their communications strategy. A slightly contrary point of view is offered by the Gartner group which warns that the “hype” around social network does not necessarily translate into good business strategy. It should also be noted that the survey by the Society for New Communications Research says more than half (51%) of those surveyed say it’s important to measure the impact of social networking by determining how it enhances their company’s reputation and their relationship with their audience.
And an article by Brian Morrissey writing for Mediaweek’s Digital Download argues that search, which initially drove the Internet, is falling behind social networking and he quotes Carat CEO Sara Fay as saying, “the way search has infiltrated our lives, social networking becomes the fabric of our lives.” Even further proof that social media has arrived is an article in The Washington Post that “now come the academics” to the field with several universities, including the Rochester Institute of Technology, Cornell University and the University of Michigan scoring grants and starting programs to study social networking. The report says the “high priestess of social networking” is what it calls “celebrademic” Dana Boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley. There is even a “bookazine” now being published by Dennis Publishing that is titled “Facebook.” In actuality, the real indicator may come from moves by two of the leading social networking sites. Google is letting users tap into their social networks by integrating its Gmail address books into the social aspects of its other applications. Facebook is letting other social networking sites run applications developed for its sites. This is similar to Google’s OpenSocial initiative to create standard API’s (application programming interfaces.) I should also note a particularly interesting side development is Google’s creation of KNOL, which is being billed as a competitor to Wikipedia.
Finally, let me just put some numbers next to all this. The top social networking sites, according to Nielsen Online, in November were: MySpace (57 Million unique visitors), Facebook (22 Million), Classmates Online (11.5 Million), Windows Live Spaces (9.5 Million), AOL Hometown (7.6 Million), LinkedIn (5.4 Million from 1.6 Million a year ago), Club Penguin (4.4 Million), Reunion.com (4 Million), AOL Community (3.5 Million) and Flixster which has grown from less than a million users a year ago to 3.4 Million this November.
WIDGETS GONE WILD: That was the headline on an AdWeek article which reported on the other big development to watch next year. We reported on this phenomenon in an earlier MfM, but several recent reports only further reinforce the development. The article notes that the concept has arrived when there is a conference, WidgetCon 2007, about the applications which more marketers are using. Company Clearspring is creating a Widget Ad Network so media companies can create ad-embedded widgets on social networking sites.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BLOGGERS: According to an article on the BBC News website, this week is the 10th anniversary of the term “weblog” being coined. On December 17th, 1997, John Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, made a note that he was “logging” interesting “web” sites in his daily online journal. The term was shortened to “blog” two years later. The website article notes that numbers are hard to come by, but as much as anyone can figure, there were 23 “weblogs” in 1998. Now blog monitoring site Technorati keeps tabs on more than 70 Million blogs.
NOT SO HAPPY BLOGGERS: On a somewhat personal aside, colleague David Hazinski has learned that hell hath no fury like a blogger shorn. He wrote a commentary in the Atlanta Journal Constitution saying there should be standards for so-called ‘citizen journalists’ just as mainstream media adhere to certain ethical standards. Bloggers and talk radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh, called him every name in the book and some even sent death threats. All of which probably own proves his point. (Disclaimer: IN MY OPINION)
BEST VIRAL VIDEO: Two different reports with two different sets of the top viral video’s of 2007. Video website Truveo.com list of the top ten viral video searches starts with Miss Teen South Carolina Answering Questions, followed by Leave Britney Alone and then Prison Inmates Performing “Thriller.” After that it’s Paris in Jail: The Music Video, The Landlord, Featuring Will Ferrell, Safari Animals Battle at Kruger, Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday, I Got a Crush on Obama by Obama Girl, Karl Rove’s Rap Debut as MC Rove and the College Student Tazered at the Kerry Forum. Online marketing agency GoViral reports that the top five viral video advertisements are the Cadbury Gorilla Drummer, Smirnoff Green Tea Partay, Ray Ban Catch Sunglasses, Blendtec Will It Blend and Lynx/Axe Born chicka wah wah. You have to see these to believe them and you can at the Financial Times link: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1560d954-a81c-11dc-9485-0000779fd2ac.html. Maybe it’s me, but the Cadbury Gorilla is funnier than heck.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Website grandparents.com reports that grandparents spend an average of $1,700 per grandchild, that the 70 Million grandparents in the U.S. represent one of the largest and most powerful consumer segments in the country, and that by 2025 one in four Americans will be a grandparent. Merriam Webster has picked w00t, typically spelled with two zeros and defined as “an expression of joy coined by online gamers,” as its word of the year. The latest craze in Japan is keitai shousetus, mobile phone novels, written on a cell phone and distributed to other cell phones. A story about high school romance written by a nursery school teacher from Kokura in Japan’s south has written several, one of which has since sold 420,000 copies in hardcopy format. Japan also held what may be the first film festival featuring works shot on camera-equipped cell phones. OfficeMax has brought back its elfyourself.com website where you can add a face to a dancing elf.
AWARD CONGRATULATIONS: To my friends at my former station KMOV-TV in St. Louis for winning a DuPont Columbia silver baton for excellence in broadcast journalism. The station was one of three Belo stations (others were KHOU-TV and WFAA-TV) to win one of the 13 awards given. Even more impressive was the win by little KNOE-TV in Monroe, Louisiana, for its examination of the National Guard and the Katrina disaster. As a slight brag (okay, a big brag), we won a silver baton at KMOV when I was there as well.
FOOTNOTE: This is the last MfM for this year. As noted in last week’s newsletter, we will be going on a short hiatus over the holidays, unless of course something huge develops that I just have to report on. Happy Holidays!
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail 0 with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Monday, December 17, 2007
Message From Michael -- December 10, 2007
FACTOIDS FORETELLING THE FUTURE
COMPUTERS DISAPPEARING INTO THE CLOUDS
HE KNOWS WHEN YOU’VE BEEN GOOD OR BEEN BAD
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
THE COUNTERINTUITIVE CHINESE STUDY
STEPPING INTO THE POLITICAL WAYBACK MACHINE
ANOTHER MARKETING CONUNDRUM
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
FACTOIDS FORETELLING THE FUTURE: Two of them, actually. The number of multimedia mobile phones being shipped worldwide will pass the number of television sets being sold, with more than 300 Million units being shipped next year, according to the firm MultiMedia Intelligence which specializes in ‘delivering IP-based video to the nth screen.’ And buried in an Associated Press article about the UBS Media Conference was a statement by the head of Gannett’s newspaper division, Sue Clark-Johnson, that they had trained 600 print journalists how to make video for their websites. The second factoid is a message to my TV brethren and speaks to the growing battle over the Internet; and is also why I take a holistic approach to reporting on media in all its facets in MfM. The first factoid also speaks to that holistic approach and is indicative of the battle between new media and traditional media.
MultiMedia Intelligence defines a multimedia handset as one with an image sensor, MP3 audio support and video playback. Based on that definition, three out of five handsets today have multimedia functionality. However, in three years time, by 2011, the report says almost 9 out of 10 handsets would qualify. The report says the number of handsets with touch screens will reach 200 million by 2011.
COMPUTERS DISAPPEARING INTO THE CLOUDS: Several of the world’s largest Internet and computer companies are trying to get rid of the computer as we know it. It’s a system called “cloud computing” in which not only are the data and content (documents, spreadsheets, presentations and emails) stored online but so are the applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). Microsoft has Office Live; Google Calendar stores events; Google Docs stores spreadsheets and documents; Picasa stores pictures; and, of course, companies like Yahoo, Amazon and eBay have search, email, and e-commerce applications online. Google and I.B.M. are funding a major cloud computing research initiative to build large data centers that research universities can tap into in order to perform a kind of ‘supercomputing’ function – what they call ‘Internet-scale computing.’ The big concern, of course, is security. InformationWeek reports that the Sans Institute latest @Risk bulletin found 60 vulnerabilities in the online Web applications, compared to two for Windows, Internet Explorer and Mac OS, three for Linux, nine for third party Windows applications and 16 for cross-platform applications. However, the article points out the new Web applications are just that – new, while the other systems have been around for a long time and so they’ve been tried and tested more.
HE KNOWS WHEN YOU’VE BEEN GOOD OR BEEN BAD: And, no, I’m not talking about Santa Claus sitting around at the North Pole. Instead I’m talking about the CEO of a phone company in Monroe, Louisiana. The company, CenturyTel Inc., is using software called ‘deep packet inspection boxes’ that can track EVERY – repeat, EVERY – website you visit. Up to now, such tracking has been limited to cookies that are stored on your hard drive after you visit a website. Now, with the deep packet system, the tracking is done at the Internet Service Provider site so that your online travels are noted at the start. An article in the Wall Street Journal notes that the software developed by several companies including NebuAd, FrontPorch and Phorm is raising all kinds of privacy concerns. A lengthy article carried by the Associated Press raises similar concerns about what is called “behavioral targeting.” The AP report cites as an example how, based on weather reports and restaurant listings you check out online, Yahoo, for example, has a good idea where you live; then based on searches you have made online, the web portal also knows where you want to go. The result – next time you go online there’s an advertisement from United Airlines for flights between these two places.
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT: Readers who are old enough will remember seeing a sign saying that behind the counter at the Country Store or Five and Ten store. Well, apparently it’s coming back, except that now it’s called “consumer generated reviews.” Two separate studies tout the importance and advantages of such reviews. Nielsen-owned comScore and ‘research and strategic analysis’ firm The Kelsey Group found that one in four Internet users rely on consumer generated reviews to make a decision; and of that group; three quarters said the review had a major impact on their decision to buy and nearly ALL of them say they found the reviews to be accurate. Not only that but the consumers surveyed said they were willing to pay more for products or services that got good ratings. In a similar vein, a study by social commerce site BazaarVoice and word of mouth research and consulting firm Keller Fay Group found that, despite the belief that the Internet caters to people with a gripe, more than half of such reviews are positive. Nine out of ten such reviewers said they were only trying to help other consumers make better decisions. The Internet Retailers Association says nearly a quarter of the Internet businesses have started customer reviews for this holiday buying season.
THE COUNTERINTUITIVE CHINESE STUDY: A study by interactive conglomerate IAC and advertising agency JWT finds that five times as many Chinese as American respondents (61% vs. 13%) say they have a parallel life online; Chinese youth are twice as likely as young Americans (25% vs. 12%) to say they would NOT feel okay going without Internet access for more than a day; More than twice as many Chinese youth admitted they sometimes feel ‘addicted’ to living online (42% vs. 18%); Chinese respondents were four times as likely as Americans to agree that things ONLINE feel more intense than things OFFLINE (48% vs. 12%); More than three quarters (77%) of the Chinese sample agreed that computer/console games are more fun when played online compared with a third of the Americans. And lastly, the folks at the two companies say the Chinese Internet is buzzing with “virtual pheromones – cybermones, if you will” with three times as many Chinese as Americans (32% vs. 11%) willing to admit that the Internet has broadened their sex life. As a side note to this, one of the hottest blogging sensations in China was a sex blog by a young woman who goes by the name Mu Zimei.
FOOTNOTE: Security software vendor MacAfee says that China accounts for four out of five major cyber attacks on governments. In a report carried by the Associated Press, the company says there were more attacks on ‘critical’ governmental infrastructures in 2007 than ever before. The company says 120 countries are developing “cyber attack strategies”, that there is a brewing “cyber cold war” and that the attacks could erupt into a worldwide conflict. China, almost needless to say, denies such involvement.
ADVERTISING REPORT FOLLOW-UP: In an earlier MfM, we reported on ZenithOptimedia’s worldwide projections for advertising in 2008. Another interesting factoid I found in the report: Between now and 2010, the ten fastest growing advertising markets will be Kazakhstan in first place, followed by Belarus, Serbia, Egypt, Russia, Moldova, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, and what the agency refers to as “Pan Arab.”
STEPPING INTO THE POLITICAL WAYBACK MACHINE: The ‘most memorable’ political moment in American radio/television history, according to a survey of scholars, politicians and analysts by the Museum of Broadcast Communications, was the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent funeral coverage. The attack on the World Trade Center was second in the list of 125 moments, followed by the first Kennedy-Nixon Debate in 1960, Franklin Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor speech in 1941, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Franklin Roosevelt, again, for his first inaugural address in 1933, Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech, Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech in 1963 and Richard Nixon, again, for his farewell speech in 1974. Ronald Reagan leads in terms of mentions with 14 moments listed, followed by Richard Nixon with 12, John F. Kennedy with 10 and Franklin Roosevelt with 9. President George W. Bush gets five mentions, the same as his father and Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson, but one more than Jimmy Carter. The assassination of Robert Kennedy came in at 46 and the assassination of Martin Luther King came in at 50. You can view the full list at the museum’s website http://www.museum.tv.
ANOTHER MARKETING CONUNDRUM: Following a previous week’s MC (marketing conundrum) in MfM, I have another. Explain to me why the liquor store next to the Publix supermarket across the street from me carries $40 to $80 bottles of wine when they have surly 20-something clerks whose knowledge of wine is limited to ‘reds’ and ‘whites.’
FOOTNOTE/ DISCLAIMER: The weekly Message From Michael will be sent out on an intermittent basis over the holidays. As we find new research or studies that we find interesting and that haven’t been beaten to death in other media, we’ll bring them to you.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
COMPUTERS DISAPPEARING INTO THE CLOUDS
HE KNOWS WHEN YOU’VE BEEN GOOD OR BEEN BAD
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
THE COUNTERINTUITIVE CHINESE STUDY
STEPPING INTO THE POLITICAL WAYBACK MACHINE
ANOTHER MARKETING CONUNDRUM
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
FACTOIDS FORETELLING THE FUTURE: Two of them, actually. The number of multimedia mobile phones being shipped worldwide will pass the number of television sets being sold, with more than 300 Million units being shipped next year, according to the firm MultiMedia Intelligence which specializes in ‘delivering IP-based video to the nth screen.’ And buried in an Associated Press article about the UBS Media Conference was a statement by the head of Gannett’s newspaper division, Sue Clark-Johnson, that they had trained 600 print journalists how to make video for their websites. The second factoid is a message to my TV brethren and speaks to the growing battle over the Internet; and is also why I take a holistic approach to reporting on media in all its facets in MfM. The first factoid also speaks to that holistic approach and is indicative of the battle between new media and traditional media.
MultiMedia Intelligence defines a multimedia handset as one with an image sensor, MP3 audio support and video playback. Based on that definition, three out of five handsets today have multimedia functionality. However, in three years time, by 2011, the report says almost 9 out of 10 handsets would qualify. The report says the number of handsets with touch screens will reach 200 million by 2011.
COMPUTERS DISAPPEARING INTO THE CLOUDS: Several of the world’s largest Internet and computer companies are trying to get rid of the computer as we know it. It’s a system called “cloud computing” in which not only are the data and content (documents, spreadsheets, presentations and emails) stored online but so are the applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). Microsoft has Office Live; Google Calendar stores events; Google Docs stores spreadsheets and documents; Picasa stores pictures; and, of course, companies like Yahoo, Amazon and eBay have search, email, and e-commerce applications online. Google and I.B.M. are funding a major cloud computing research initiative to build large data centers that research universities can tap into in order to perform a kind of ‘supercomputing’ function – what they call ‘Internet-scale computing.’ The big concern, of course, is security. InformationWeek reports that the Sans Institute latest @Risk bulletin found 60 vulnerabilities in the online Web applications, compared to two for Windows, Internet Explorer and Mac OS, three for Linux, nine for third party Windows applications and 16 for cross-platform applications. However, the article points out the new Web applications are just that – new, while the other systems have been around for a long time and so they’ve been tried and tested more.
HE KNOWS WHEN YOU’VE BEEN GOOD OR BEEN BAD: And, no, I’m not talking about Santa Claus sitting around at the North Pole. Instead I’m talking about the CEO of a phone company in Monroe, Louisiana. The company, CenturyTel Inc., is using software called ‘deep packet inspection boxes’ that can track EVERY – repeat, EVERY – website you visit. Up to now, such tracking has been limited to cookies that are stored on your hard drive after you visit a website. Now, with the deep packet system, the tracking is done at the Internet Service Provider site so that your online travels are noted at the start. An article in the Wall Street Journal notes that the software developed by several companies including NebuAd, FrontPorch and Phorm is raising all kinds of privacy concerns. A lengthy article carried by the Associated Press raises similar concerns about what is called “behavioral targeting.” The AP report cites as an example how, based on weather reports and restaurant listings you check out online, Yahoo, for example, has a good idea where you live; then based on searches you have made online, the web portal also knows where you want to go. The result – next time you go online there’s an advertisement from United Airlines for flights between these two places.
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT: Readers who are old enough will remember seeing a sign saying that behind the counter at the Country Store or Five and Ten store. Well, apparently it’s coming back, except that now it’s called “consumer generated reviews.” Two separate studies tout the importance and advantages of such reviews. Nielsen-owned comScore and ‘research and strategic analysis’ firm The Kelsey Group found that one in four Internet users rely on consumer generated reviews to make a decision; and of that group; three quarters said the review had a major impact on their decision to buy and nearly ALL of them say they found the reviews to be accurate. Not only that but the consumers surveyed said they were willing to pay more for products or services that got good ratings. In a similar vein, a study by social commerce site BazaarVoice and word of mouth research and consulting firm Keller Fay Group found that, despite the belief that the Internet caters to people with a gripe, more than half of such reviews are positive. Nine out of ten such reviewers said they were only trying to help other consumers make better decisions. The Internet Retailers Association says nearly a quarter of the Internet businesses have started customer reviews for this holiday buying season.
THE COUNTERINTUITIVE CHINESE STUDY: A study by interactive conglomerate IAC and advertising agency JWT finds that five times as many Chinese as American respondents (61% vs. 13%) say they have a parallel life online; Chinese youth are twice as likely as young Americans (25% vs. 12%) to say they would NOT feel okay going without Internet access for more than a day; More than twice as many Chinese youth admitted they sometimes feel ‘addicted’ to living online (42% vs. 18%); Chinese respondents were four times as likely as Americans to agree that things ONLINE feel more intense than things OFFLINE (48% vs. 12%); More than three quarters (77%) of the Chinese sample agreed that computer/console games are more fun when played online compared with a third of the Americans. And lastly, the folks at the two companies say the Chinese Internet is buzzing with “virtual pheromones – cybermones, if you will” with three times as many Chinese as Americans (32% vs. 11%) willing to admit that the Internet has broadened their sex life. As a side note to this, one of the hottest blogging sensations in China was a sex blog by a young woman who goes by the name Mu Zimei.
FOOTNOTE: Security software vendor MacAfee says that China accounts for four out of five major cyber attacks on governments. In a report carried by the Associated Press, the company says there were more attacks on ‘critical’ governmental infrastructures in 2007 than ever before. The company says 120 countries are developing “cyber attack strategies”, that there is a brewing “cyber cold war” and that the attacks could erupt into a worldwide conflict. China, almost needless to say, denies such involvement.
ADVERTISING REPORT FOLLOW-UP: In an earlier MfM, we reported on ZenithOptimedia’s worldwide projections for advertising in 2008. Another interesting factoid I found in the report: Between now and 2010, the ten fastest growing advertising markets will be Kazakhstan in first place, followed by Belarus, Serbia, Egypt, Russia, Moldova, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, and what the agency refers to as “Pan Arab.”
STEPPING INTO THE POLITICAL WAYBACK MACHINE: The ‘most memorable’ political moment in American radio/television history, according to a survey of scholars, politicians and analysts by the Museum of Broadcast Communications, was the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent funeral coverage. The attack on the World Trade Center was second in the list of 125 moments, followed by the first Kennedy-Nixon Debate in 1960, Franklin Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor speech in 1941, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Franklin Roosevelt, again, for his first inaugural address in 1933, Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech, Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech in 1963 and Richard Nixon, again, for his farewell speech in 1974. Ronald Reagan leads in terms of mentions with 14 moments listed, followed by Richard Nixon with 12, John F. Kennedy with 10 and Franklin Roosevelt with 9. President George W. Bush gets five mentions, the same as his father and Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson, but one more than Jimmy Carter. The assassination of Robert Kennedy came in at 46 and the assassination of Martin Luther King came in at 50. You can view the full list at the museum’s website http://www.museum.tv.
ANOTHER MARKETING CONUNDRUM: Following a previous week’s MC (marketing conundrum) in MfM, I have another. Explain to me why the liquor store next to the Publix supermarket across the street from me carries $40 to $80 bottles of wine when they have surly 20-something clerks whose knowledge of wine is limited to ‘reds’ and ‘whites.’
FOOTNOTE/ DISCLAIMER: The weekly Message From Michael will be sent out on an intermittent basis over the holidays. As we find new research or studies that we find interesting and that haven’t been beaten to death in other media, we’ll bring them to you.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Message From Michael -- December 3, 2007
SWEEPS AFTERMATH
SWEEPS BY THE NUMBERS
REPORTS OF TV’S DEATH ARE
READING REPORT FOLO
HEY, BIG SPENDER, SPEND A LITTLE
COCKTAIL CHATTER – CHINA AND RUSSIA
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS AFTERMATH: Only one of the five networks, Fox, showed any improvement year-to-year in the November ratings. Or, put another way, every network but Fox dropped year to year, according to Nielsen and reported by The Programming Insider. Fox claimed the #1 spot in the Adults 18-34 demo, but more importantly, as I say, it was the only network that was up year to year. CBS won the race for households and for total viewers, and tied in the Adult 25-54 demographic, although it was down 7% year to year. ABC claimed the title in the key Adults 18-49 demographic, although it, too, was down 7% year to year. NBC… well, the Peacock Network really didn’t have anything to crow about, dropping anywhere from 10% to 20% in the various categories. Its only consolation was that the CW was worse, dropping a staggering 21% to 25% year to year.
SWEEPS BY THE NUMBERS: A “record.” A “new zenith.” These are two references, also from The Programming Insider, about cable programming ratings in November. The ‘record’ was a reference to the male-driven G4 program which had 96,000 viewers. The ‘new zenith’ was a reference to Style which had 101,000 viewers. Just to put that in perspective, the number one station, WABC-TV, this November in the number one market, New York, had 281,000 viewers. And just to provide perspective on the perspective, the number one station, Belo8, in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, which is #5 in the country, had 248,431 viewers for its 10pm newscast. Okay, some more perspective (and, yes, that means more numbers). New York has 7,391,940 TV households. Dallas-Fort Worth has 2,435,600 TV households. The difference in the TV stations is that while a rating point is worth 73,920 households in New York City, WABC won with a 3.8 rating; while in Dallas-Fort Worth, even though a rating point is ‘only’ worth 24,350 households, Belo8 had a 10.2 rating.
Okay, one last set of numbers and then I promise I’ll quit. Nielsen Media puts the total number of TV homes in 2008 at 112,798,170. The Census Bureau puts the total U.S. population as of today (December 2nd) at 303,505,856. Lastly, total viewers for the network evening news put NBC on top with 9.91 Million viewers for the week of November 19th, followed by ABC with 9.03 Million and CBS with 6.94 Million. I should also note that there are cable channels pulling substantial numbers – like ABC Family (1.1 Million), SciFi (1.14 Million), and USA (1.98 Million). Also, many of you will note that NBC’s Brian Williams took back the number one spot from ABC’s Charlie Gibson after Williams appeared on Saturday Night Live.
REPORTS OF TV’S DEATH ARE: You know, the rest of the quote – Greatly Exaggerated. Two recent reports confirm that TV is here for some time. The first, a survey by researcher Jack Myers and commissioned by ‘global intelligence service’ Teletrax found that nearly half of media industry executives believe that Television will account for the majority (60%) of the video being delivered with the Internet accounting for the rest by the year 2012. Another fifth believe that Television will account for 80% of the video delivery. Of course, on the flip side of that, one in ten executives believe that the Internet will account for 80% of the video delivery system and two in ten believe the Internet will account for 60% of the video by 2012. Not surprisingly, the younger the age group the higher the usage of video on the Internet or other mobile sources. There is much less equivocation in a report released by consultancy firm Bain and Co. which says it will be five years or more before Internet video becomes a viable alternative to broadcast, cable or satellite. Even more telling, the Bain report says that by 2012, U.S. viewers will spend on average two hours MORE per week watching television but that Internet use ‘outside of the office’ will only rise by half an hour per week. The head of Bain’s ‘global media practice’, David Sanderson, is quoted in a Reuters’ report as saying the technology isn’t quite there and neither is the business model for Internet video.
Disclaimer: The Teletrax/ Myers report is focused on ‘selling’ the concept of video watermarking, which is one of Teletrax’s services. Video watermarking is a system of embedding a mark into video and/or audio so that it can’t be picked up by the ear or eye but can be tracked by downstream recognition devices. The other form of tracking content use is video fingerprinting which ‘recognizes’ the different sound, motion and patterns of the video.
Footnotes: Regular readers of MfM will recall previous studies reported here that despite the proliferation of user-generated content, most video users still gravitate to professionally produced content. And add to the long list of things I didn’t know: Former Massachusetts governor and Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was once CEO of the Bain and Co. management consulting firm.
READING REPORT FOLO: There was so much info in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Reading Report, profiled in last week’s MfM, that I had to do a brief follow-up. One of the other fascinating facts in the report confirms previous studies about media multi-tasking. More than a quarter of 7th to 12th graders (28%) say they are using other media ‘most of the time’ while reading while nearly another third (30%) say they are using other media ‘some of the time’ while reading. And the two top ‘other’ activities are watching television (11%) and listening to music (10%). The report cites U.S. Department of Labor statistics that indicate 15 to 24 year olds spend an average of 7 minutes each day ‘reading for pleasure’ (remember, that’s the key). The same age group spends two to 2 ½ hours a day watching television. And before any of you ‘oldies’ start tsk-tsking, the report says the 45-54 age group spends 17 minutes a day reading something other than what’s required for work, while the 55-64 group spends 30 minutes and the over 65 group spends 50 minutes a day ‘reading for pleasure.’
HEY, BIG SPENDER, SPEND A LITTLE: Or, if you’re Proctor and Gamble, spend a lot. The consumer products and advertising behemoth retains the title of the world’s largest advertiser, spending a whopping, unbelievable, incredible, amazing $8.52 Billion worldwide in the last year surveyed. In its annual Global Marketers report, Advertising Age says the top 100 marketers spend $97.8 Billion in the 90 countries surveyed, with nearly half (47.1% or $46.02 Billion) being spent in the U.S. alone. In part, of course, that’s because 46 of the top 100 marketers are U.S. based. Europe accounted for the next largest amount (31.8%) followed by the Asia/ Pacific region (15.3%). The London/Rotterdam based Unilever came in second worldwide at $4.54 Billion, beating out General Motors which actually lowered its advertising by 17.4% to $3.35 Billion, followed by Clichy, France, based L’Oreal at $3.12 Billion, and Toyota at $3.1 Billion.
Media companies making the list include Time Warner at #7 with $2.14 Billion worldwide spending; Walt Disney Co at #13 spending $1.75 Billion; General Electric which sort of qualifies as a media company at #23 with $1.25 Billion; News Corp at #25 with $1.1 Billion; and Viacom at #41 with $735 Million. The report available at http://adage.com/images/random/datacenter/2007/globalmarketing2007.pdf gives you country by country breakouts from Australia to Azerbaijan and from Italy to India.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: As a side note of sorts to the P&G spending, the company has launched a website, along with NBC Universal Digital Media, aimed at pet owners, called petside.com. Another website, midomi.com, allows you to search for songs or artists by singing or humming a few bars of the song you are looking for. And just in time for the holiday season the Mall of America joined with Phillips Electronics to implement a cell phone text parking system in which you can put in your car location and a text message will be sent back to remind you where you parked. Trendwatching website Springwise.com says the latest PC video game to make the rounds is Arabian Lords which is a bilingual strategy game inspired by the rise of Islam between the 7th and 13th centuries and targeted specifically at Middle Eastern players. According to Blognation Russia (which, BTW, is a great site for reading about the former Soviet Union), Russia has its first Billion dollar Internet company – Mail.ru, a free web mail service which South African media and Internet group Naspers paid $26 Million to get a 2.6% stake. China-based (and Yahoo invested) search engine Alibaba is launching an online ad service to compete with the other Chinese ad service Baidu, named – no, joke – Alimama.
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST: Social networking giant Facebook has had to roll back its controversial advertising program Beacon (featured or ‘warned about’ in an MfM last month) which sent alerts about what people were buying to their friends, after a rebellion by members and privacy groups. However, it still retains the extremely targeted behavioral/contextual advertising program. And 60 Minutes did a profile piece last night on the One Laptop Per Child program featured in MfM several times over the last year.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
SWEEPS BY THE NUMBERS
REPORTS OF TV’S DEATH ARE
READING REPORT FOLO
HEY, BIG SPENDER, SPEND A LITTLE
COCKTAIL CHATTER – CHINA AND RUSSIA
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS AFTERMATH: Only one of the five networks, Fox, showed any improvement year-to-year in the November ratings. Or, put another way, every network but Fox dropped year to year, according to Nielsen and reported by The Programming Insider. Fox claimed the #1 spot in the Adults 18-34 demo, but more importantly, as I say, it was the only network that was up year to year. CBS won the race for households and for total viewers, and tied in the Adult 25-54 demographic, although it was down 7% year to year. ABC claimed the title in the key Adults 18-49 demographic, although it, too, was down 7% year to year. NBC… well, the Peacock Network really didn’t have anything to crow about, dropping anywhere from 10% to 20% in the various categories. Its only consolation was that the CW was worse, dropping a staggering 21% to 25% year to year.
SWEEPS BY THE NUMBERS: A “record.” A “new zenith.” These are two references, also from The Programming Insider, about cable programming ratings in November. The ‘record’ was a reference to the male-driven G4 program which had 96,000 viewers. The ‘new zenith’ was a reference to Style which had 101,000 viewers. Just to put that in perspective, the number one station, WABC-TV, this November in the number one market, New York, had 281,000 viewers. And just to provide perspective on the perspective, the number one station, Belo8, in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, which is #5 in the country, had 248,431 viewers for its 10pm newscast. Okay, some more perspective (and, yes, that means more numbers). New York has 7,391,940 TV households. Dallas-Fort Worth has 2,435,600 TV households. The difference in the TV stations is that while a rating point is worth 73,920 households in New York City, WABC won with a 3.8 rating; while in Dallas-Fort Worth, even though a rating point is ‘only’ worth 24,350 households, Belo8 had a 10.2 rating.
Okay, one last set of numbers and then I promise I’ll quit. Nielsen Media puts the total number of TV homes in 2008 at 112,798,170. The Census Bureau puts the total U.S. population as of today (December 2nd) at 303,505,856. Lastly, total viewers for the network evening news put NBC on top with 9.91 Million viewers for the week of November 19th, followed by ABC with 9.03 Million and CBS with 6.94 Million. I should also note that there are cable channels pulling substantial numbers – like ABC Family (1.1 Million), SciFi (1.14 Million), and USA (1.98 Million). Also, many of you will note that NBC’s Brian Williams took back the number one spot from ABC’s Charlie Gibson after Williams appeared on Saturday Night Live.
REPORTS OF TV’S DEATH ARE: You know, the rest of the quote – Greatly Exaggerated. Two recent reports confirm that TV is here for some time. The first, a survey by researcher Jack Myers and commissioned by ‘global intelligence service’ Teletrax found that nearly half of media industry executives believe that Television will account for the majority (60%) of the video being delivered with the Internet accounting for the rest by the year 2012. Another fifth believe that Television will account for 80% of the video delivery. Of course, on the flip side of that, one in ten executives believe that the Internet will account for 80% of the video delivery system and two in ten believe the Internet will account for 60% of the video by 2012. Not surprisingly, the younger the age group the higher the usage of video on the Internet or other mobile sources. There is much less equivocation in a report released by consultancy firm Bain and Co. which says it will be five years or more before Internet video becomes a viable alternative to broadcast, cable or satellite. Even more telling, the Bain report says that by 2012, U.S. viewers will spend on average two hours MORE per week watching television but that Internet use ‘outside of the office’ will only rise by half an hour per week. The head of Bain’s ‘global media practice’, David Sanderson, is quoted in a Reuters’ report as saying the technology isn’t quite there and neither is the business model for Internet video.
Disclaimer: The Teletrax/ Myers report is focused on ‘selling’ the concept of video watermarking, which is one of Teletrax’s services. Video watermarking is a system of embedding a mark into video and/or audio so that it can’t be picked up by the ear or eye but can be tracked by downstream recognition devices. The other form of tracking content use is video fingerprinting which ‘recognizes’ the different sound, motion and patterns of the video.
Footnotes: Regular readers of MfM will recall previous studies reported here that despite the proliferation of user-generated content, most video users still gravitate to professionally produced content. And add to the long list of things I didn’t know: Former Massachusetts governor and Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was once CEO of the Bain and Co. management consulting firm.
READING REPORT FOLO: There was so much info in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Reading Report, profiled in last week’s MfM, that I had to do a brief follow-up. One of the other fascinating facts in the report confirms previous studies about media multi-tasking. More than a quarter of 7th to 12th graders (28%) say they are using other media ‘most of the time’ while reading while nearly another third (30%) say they are using other media ‘some of the time’ while reading. And the two top ‘other’ activities are watching television (11%) and listening to music (10%). The report cites U.S. Department of Labor statistics that indicate 15 to 24 year olds spend an average of 7 minutes each day ‘reading for pleasure’ (remember, that’s the key). The same age group spends two to 2 ½ hours a day watching television. And before any of you ‘oldies’ start tsk-tsking, the report says the 45-54 age group spends 17 minutes a day reading something other than what’s required for work, while the 55-64 group spends 30 minutes and the over 65 group spends 50 minutes a day ‘reading for pleasure.’
HEY, BIG SPENDER, SPEND A LITTLE: Or, if you’re Proctor and Gamble, spend a lot. The consumer products and advertising behemoth retains the title of the world’s largest advertiser, spending a whopping, unbelievable, incredible, amazing $8.52 Billion worldwide in the last year surveyed. In its annual Global Marketers report, Advertising Age says the top 100 marketers spend $97.8 Billion in the 90 countries surveyed, with nearly half (47.1% or $46.02 Billion) being spent in the U.S. alone. In part, of course, that’s because 46 of the top 100 marketers are U.S. based. Europe accounted for the next largest amount (31.8%) followed by the Asia/ Pacific region (15.3%). The London/Rotterdam based Unilever came in second worldwide at $4.54 Billion, beating out General Motors which actually lowered its advertising by 17.4% to $3.35 Billion, followed by Clichy, France, based L’Oreal at $3.12 Billion, and Toyota at $3.1 Billion.
Media companies making the list include Time Warner at #7 with $2.14 Billion worldwide spending; Walt Disney Co at #13 spending $1.75 Billion; General Electric which sort of qualifies as a media company at #23 with $1.25 Billion; News Corp at #25 with $1.1 Billion; and Viacom at #41 with $735 Million. The report available at http://adage.com/images/random/datacenter/2007/globalmarketing2007.pdf gives you country by country breakouts from Australia to Azerbaijan and from Italy to India.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: As a side note of sorts to the P&G spending, the company has launched a website, along with NBC Universal Digital Media, aimed at pet owners, called petside.com. Another website, midomi.com, allows you to search for songs or artists by singing or humming a few bars of the song you are looking for. And just in time for the holiday season the Mall of America joined with Phillips Electronics to implement a cell phone text parking system in which you can put in your car location and a text message will be sent back to remind you where you parked. Trendwatching website Springwise.com says the latest PC video game to make the rounds is Arabian Lords which is a bilingual strategy game inspired by the rise of Islam between the 7th and 13th centuries and targeted specifically at Middle Eastern players. According to Blognation Russia (which, BTW, is a great site for reading about the former Soviet Union), Russia has its first Billion dollar Internet company – Mail.ru, a free web mail service which South African media and Internet group Naspers paid $26 Million to get a 2.6% stake. China-based (and Yahoo invested) search engine Alibaba is launching an online ad service to compete with the other Chinese ad service Baidu, named – no, joke – Alimama.
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST: Social networking giant Facebook has had to roll back its controversial advertising program Beacon (featured or ‘warned about’ in an MfM last month) which sent alerts about what people were buying to their friends, after a rebellion by members and privacy groups. However, it still retains the extremely targeted behavioral/contextual advertising program. And 60 Minutes did a profile piece last night on the One Laptop Per Child program featured in MfM several times over the last year.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Message From Michael -- November 26, 2007
SWEEPS
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN
TO READ OR NOT TO READ
LOCAL TV NEWS VIEWING
RADIO LISTENING
NEWSPAPER READING
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS: Three days left. Okay, now, who knows what’s wrong with that statement? All of my diary clients do, of course. That’s because we always preach that you have to maintain a marketing and news push AFTER the official end of sweeps because nobody fills out their diary the day of. It’s always a day or two later, and that’s why it’s important to remind them who they were watching.
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN: Based on a survey by Harris Interactive, you might find the picture of the ‘average’ American to be a little different than you would expect. Americans spend much more time reading (29%) than watching television (18%) and almost as much time going to the movies (7%) AND even fishing (7%) as they do on the computer (9%). Family is still important to them, but they don’t spend nearly as much time with family and kids (14%) as they do reading or watching TV. And they’re more likely to garden (6%), go walking (6%), or playing team sports (6%) as going to church (5%), although they’re equally likely to exercise (5%) or golf (5%) as go to church. That’s how we split the 20 median hours of leisure time we have each week. The Harris Poll of 1,052 Americans shows we’re also spending less time working (with a median of 45 hours a week) than we did three years ago (when it was 50 hours).
The poll makes a point of showing the differences between now (2007) and then (2004) or even way back then (1995). For example, not surprisingly, the amount of time spent on computer activities has risen steadily from 2% in 1995 to the present 9% and watching sporting events has risen four points since 2004 along with exercise (up three points) and crafts (up three points). But when you average out the time spent (as OCD me did) on various activities since 1995, you find that while there has been a great deal of fluctuation year to year, the average time is pretty consistent. For example, reading averaged 28.6% while TV watching averaged 20.1% and family time averaged 13.7%; and that’s true for most of the activities (except fishing which at 7% this year is down from the average of 9.9%).
TO READ OR NOT TO READ: The Harris Interactive survey runs contrary, to a degree, to a report issued this month by the National Endowment for the Arts which found that Americans are spending less time reading, that reading comprehension skills are eroding and that “those declines have serious civic, social, cultural and economic implications.” The report particularly decries the drop in reading (for pleasure, that’s the key) by young people, noting that nearly half of all Americans aged 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure. Or put another way, the percentage of young Americans who read a book “not required for work or school” has declined significantly in the last ten years, although I should note the percentage is still over half for all age groups. The report makes the point that employers now rank reading and writing as the top deficiencies in new hires. It cites a report by The Conference Board which found that employers ranked four out of five (81%) job applicants with a high school degree deficient in written communication skills and more than one out of four (28%) college graduate deficient in such skills.
LOCAL TV NEWS VIEWING: According to a survey by The Media Audit, viewers in the South and Midwest are heavier local TV news viewers than those in the West and Northeast. In a survey of 11 news time periods in 88 markets, the research firm found that adults in the Midwest (defined as the West Coast through Colorado and New Mexico) are most likely to view a late evening LOCAL news program on NBC (36% more likely than the average U.S. adult) followed by prime time LOCAL news on Fox (25% more likely) and early morning LOCAL news on Fox (25%). Adults in the South (defined as Texas and Oklahoma across to West Virginia and Virginia) indexed above the national average in all 11 measured local news programs with the most popular being CBS early morning LOCAL news (32% more likely than the average U.S. adult to watch), followed by CBS late evening LOCAL news (28%) and early morning LOCAL news on Fox (24%).
RADIO LISTENING: The same group, The Media Audit, says the radio format with the greatest overall reach in adults 25-54 is Country with 13.3% of those listeners, followed by Contemporary Hit Radio AND News Talk (both with 12.2%) followed by Classic Rock (11%) and Public Radio (10.3%). If you’re looking to reach households with children living at home, Contemporary Christian formatted radio ranks number one (70.1%) even though it only ranked #16 out of 30 in Adults 25-54. The second most popular format in those households is Contemporary Hit Radio (66.4%) followed by Dance CHR (64.5%), Hot Adult Contemporary (64.4%) and Country (64.4%).
As a side note to this, MfM reader and radio consultant Jimmy Risk argues in a recent article that radio has always been a social network “of sorts” to generations of listeners and he says radio could build a digital ‘community’ using its dial position and website address and “reclaim the hipness factor.” It’s an argument I have made for local television. As he puts it, “local ratings and revenue are there for the taking by leveraging a parallel universe of digital bodies under an umbrella known as a social network.”
NEWSPAPER READING AND REVENUES: They’re both up… sort of. Actually it’s the Online versions that are up. According to The Media Audit (Again), the top 25 newspaper websites increased 15.4% in terms of average unique monthly visitors while the combined print and online audience increased 5.9% (indicating, therefore, a drop in the print version). Meanwhile, trade industry publication Editor and Publisher cites a study commissioned by the World Association of Newspapers which says 2006 was “a turning point” in the newspaper Web business model for many of the world’s newspapers. The study reports that “mature online operations” are generating 40% and higher profits for newspapers whose print operating profits have fallen to 23%. Of course, at this point, Internet operations make up less than 10% of a newspaper company’s revenues in the U.S. and only about 5% outside the U.S. The study says it is unlikely Online income will make up for the lost print income any time soon. The report also warns that ‘Internet pure play” businesses such as Google and Yahoo “now threaten local newspaper online advertising to an alarming degree.” That may explain why so many newspaper groups have partnered with Yahoo and other such players. The Associated Press reports that the Columbus Dispatch and 16 regional newspapers owned by The New York Times Company have joined the Yahoo consortium, bringing its total number to about 415 dailies and 140 weeklies. Interestingly, neither the New York Times nor the co-owned Boston Globe has joined the consortium. Nor have Gannett or Tribune, the #1 and #2 newspaper publishers by circulation.
As a side note to all this, I found it interesting when an executive with Morris Publishing visiting the Grady College made the point that one of the drawbacks of partnering with groups like Yahoo is that the pure play businesses do not require registration for people to view the various ads and articles. That means the local newspaper does not have a way of measuring this part of its Online viewing so that it can put together a total picture of audience reach. This brings me back to that Media Audit report. The analysis lists out the Top 10 Daily Newspaper Websites, starting with The New York Times which averages 3,146,900 monthly unique visitors, giving it a combined total (Print & Web) of 4,972,600. It’s followed by Newsday.com (1,798,400 and 3,017,000), ChicagoTribune.com, WashingtonPost.com, NYdailynews.com, LATimes.com, NYpost.com, SFGate.com and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution’s AJC.com. BUT of those sites, only two make it to the Top 10 Newspaper Websites based on percent of market reached: The Washington Post website which reaches 44.9% of the local market and the AJC website which reaches 35% of the local market. The top newspaper website in terms of local market penetration is the Times-Picayune out of New Orleans which reaches 47.4% of the local market. Even more interesting is that when the Print and Web versions are combined, the New Orleans newspaper has an unduplicated 18+ reach of 86%. The Buffalo News comes in second with 84.6% reach of the market, followed by the Omaha World Herald (83.7%) and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (81.8%)
As a side note to the side note, and to partially explain why I spent so much time on the LOCAL reach of the combined Print and Web products, Harry A. Jessell writes on the TVNewsday.com website, “with the possible exception of the daily newspaper, TV stations dominate local media today. To continue to do so, they must operate and promote the best local Web sites and mobile services. If they don’t, others will.” The article (brought to my attention by Peabody director Horace Newcomb) notes two companies have changed their names: Morgan Murphy Stations became Morgan Murphy Media and NBC Universal Television Stations has become NBC Local Media Division. He notes the analogy with passenger railroads failing in the 50’s and 60’s because, say analysts, they saw themselves as being in the railroad business when they were actually in the transportation business.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN
TO READ OR NOT TO READ
LOCAL TV NEWS VIEWING
RADIO LISTENING
NEWSPAPER READING
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS: Three days left. Okay, now, who knows what’s wrong with that statement? All of my diary clients do, of course. That’s because we always preach that you have to maintain a marketing and news push AFTER the official end of sweeps because nobody fills out their diary the day of. It’s always a day or two later, and that’s why it’s important to remind them who they were watching.
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN: Based on a survey by Harris Interactive, you might find the picture of the ‘average’ American to be a little different than you would expect. Americans spend much more time reading (29%) than watching television (18%) and almost as much time going to the movies (7%) AND even fishing (7%) as they do on the computer (9%). Family is still important to them, but they don’t spend nearly as much time with family and kids (14%) as they do reading or watching TV. And they’re more likely to garden (6%), go walking (6%), or playing team sports (6%) as going to church (5%), although they’re equally likely to exercise (5%) or golf (5%) as go to church. That’s how we split the 20 median hours of leisure time we have each week. The Harris Poll of 1,052 Americans shows we’re also spending less time working (with a median of 45 hours a week) than we did three years ago (when it was 50 hours).
The poll makes a point of showing the differences between now (2007) and then (2004) or even way back then (1995). For example, not surprisingly, the amount of time spent on computer activities has risen steadily from 2% in 1995 to the present 9% and watching sporting events has risen four points since 2004 along with exercise (up three points) and crafts (up three points). But when you average out the time spent (as OCD me did) on various activities since 1995, you find that while there has been a great deal of fluctuation year to year, the average time is pretty consistent. For example, reading averaged 28.6% while TV watching averaged 20.1% and family time averaged 13.7%; and that’s true for most of the activities (except fishing which at 7% this year is down from the average of 9.9%).
TO READ OR NOT TO READ: The Harris Interactive survey runs contrary, to a degree, to a report issued this month by the National Endowment for the Arts which found that Americans are spending less time reading, that reading comprehension skills are eroding and that “those declines have serious civic, social, cultural and economic implications.” The report particularly decries the drop in reading (for pleasure, that’s the key) by young people, noting that nearly half of all Americans aged 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure. Or put another way, the percentage of young Americans who read a book “not required for work or school” has declined significantly in the last ten years, although I should note the percentage is still over half for all age groups. The report makes the point that employers now rank reading and writing as the top deficiencies in new hires. It cites a report by The Conference Board which found that employers ranked four out of five (81%) job applicants with a high school degree deficient in written communication skills and more than one out of four (28%) college graduate deficient in such skills.
LOCAL TV NEWS VIEWING: According to a survey by The Media Audit, viewers in the South and Midwest are heavier local TV news viewers than those in the West and Northeast. In a survey of 11 news time periods in 88 markets, the research firm found that adults in the Midwest (defined as the West Coast through Colorado and New Mexico) are most likely to view a late evening LOCAL news program on NBC (36% more likely than the average U.S. adult) followed by prime time LOCAL news on Fox (25% more likely) and early morning LOCAL news on Fox (25%). Adults in the South (defined as Texas and Oklahoma across to West Virginia and Virginia) indexed above the national average in all 11 measured local news programs with the most popular being CBS early morning LOCAL news (32% more likely than the average U.S. adult to watch), followed by CBS late evening LOCAL news (28%) and early morning LOCAL news on Fox (24%).
RADIO LISTENING: The same group, The Media Audit, says the radio format with the greatest overall reach in adults 25-54 is Country with 13.3% of those listeners, followed by Contemporary Hit Radio AND News Talk (both with 12.2%) followed by Classic Rock (11%) and Public Radio (10.3%). If you’re looking to reach households with children living at home, Contemporary Christian formatted radio ranks number one (70.1%) even though it only ranked #16 out of 30 in Adults 25-54. The second most popular format in those households is Contemporary Hit Radio (66.4%) followed by Dance CHR (64.5%), Hot Adult Contemporary (64.4%) and Country (64.4%).
As a side note to this, MfM reader and radio consultant Jimmy Risk argues in a recent article that radio has always been a social network “of sorts” to generations of listeners and he says radio could build a digital ‘community’ using its dial position and website address and “reclaim the hipness factor.” It’s an argument I have made for local television. As he puts it, “local ratings and revenue are there for the taking by leveraging a parallel universe of digital bodies under an umbrella known as a social network.”
NEWSPAPER READING AND REVENUES: They’re both up… sort of. Actually it’s the Online versions that are up. According to The Media Audit (Again), the top 25 newspaper websites increased 15.4% in terms of average unique monthly visitors while the combined print and online audience increased 5.9% (indicating, therefore, a drop in the print version). Meanwhile, trade industry publication Editor and Publisher cites a study commissioned by the World Association of Newspapers which says 2006 was “a turning point” in the newspaper Web business model for many of the world’s newspapers. The study reports that “mature online operations” are generating 40% and higher profits for newspapers whose print operating profits have fallen to 23%. Of course, at this point, Internet operations make up less than 10% of a newspaper company’s revenues in the U.S. and only about 5% outside the U.S. The study says it is unlikely Online income will make up for the lost print income any time soon. The report also warns that ‘Internet pure play” businesses such as Google and Yahoo “now threaten local newspaper online advertising to an alarming degree.” That may explain why so many newspaper groups have partnered with Yahoo and other such players. The Associated Press reports that the Columbus Dispatch and 16 regional newspapers owned by The New York Times Company have joined the Yahoo consortium, bringing its total number to about 415 dailies and 140 weeklies. Interestingly, neither the New York Times nor the co-owned Boston Globe has joined the consortium. Nor have Gannett or Tribune, the #1 and #2 newspaper publishers by circulation.
As a side note to all this, I found it interesting when an executive with Morris Publishing visiting the Grady College made the point that one of the drawbacks of partnering with groups like Yahoo is that the pure play businesses do not require registration for people to view the various ads and articles. That means the local newspaper does not have a way of measuring this part of its Online viewing so that it can put together a total picture of audience reach. This brings me back to that Media Audit report. The analysis lists out the Top 10 Daily Newspaper Websites, starting with The New York Times which averages 3,146,900 monthly unique visitors, giving it a combined total (Print & Web) of 4,972,600. It’s followed by Newsday.com (1,798,400 and 3,017,000), ChicagoTribune.com, WashingtonPost.com, NYdailynews.com, LATimes.com, NYpost.com, SFGate.com and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution’s AJC.com. BUT of those sites, only two make it to the Top 10 Newspaper Websites based on percent of market reached: The Washington Post website which reaches 44.9% of the local market and the AJC website which reaches 35% of the local market. The top newspaper website in terms of local market penetration is the Times-Picayune out of New Orleans which reaches 47.4% of the local market. Even more interesting is that when the Print and Web versions are combined, the New Orleans newspaper has an unduplicated 18+ reach of 86%. The Buffalo News comes in second with 84.6% reach of the market, followed by the Omaha World Herald (83.7%) and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (81.8%)
As a side note to the side note, and to partially explain why I spent so much time on the LOCAL reach of the combined Print and Web products, Harry A. Jessell writes on the TVNewsday.com website, “with the possible exception of the daily newspaper, TV stations dominate local media today. To continue to do so, they must operate and promote the best local Web sites and mobile services. If they don’t, others will.” The article (brought to my attention by Peabody director Horace Newcomb) notes two companies have changed their names: Morgan Murphy Stations became Morgan Murphy Media and NBC Universal Television Stations has become NBC Local Media Division. He notes the analogy with passenger railroads failing in the 50’s and 60’s because, say analysts, they saw themselves as being in the railroad business when they were actually in the transportation business.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Message From Michael -- November 19, 2007
SWEEPS – IN OR OUT
THE 51ST STATE
SHORT ATTENTION SPAN THEATER
BILLIONS AND BILLIONS
COCKTAIL CHATTER – VIRTUAL BEAUTY AND FAST COMPUTERS
A MARKETING CONUNDRUM
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS – IN OR OUT: The Thanksgiving holiday (and Black Friday) falls in the sweeps period this year. So, do you keep it in or take it out? Most stations re-title the newscasts and take them out of the sweeps because viewership is so erratic and low. Just a heads up – something you should think about.
THE 51ST STATE: And no, I’m not talking about Puerto Rico. That’s what SEARCHER, the magazine for database professionals, calls the Internet in this upcoming election and says the Internet is ‘breathing down the neck of mainstream media’ when it comes to the elections and that 2008 will be the first true “Internet election.” Citing another study by iCrossing, the report says the Internet is the number two source for election information, after television, and tied with newspapers. However, before my mainstream media friends commit hara-kiri, the study notes that voters are not going to the candidates websites or to the candidates MySpace pages for information, but rather are turning to Web search engines and the online versions of the traditional media. However, political blogs like the dailykos.com, huffingtonpost.com and talkingpointsmemo.com are becoming increasingly influential. The report also notes that all of the candidates (except, for some reason, Rudolph Giuliani) have adopted social networking tools on their websites. By the 2012 election, the report says, the Internet will be so essential and mainstream to presidential politics that “it probably won’t even warrant an article like this.”
As a side note, the Democrats have two thirds of the Online Internet traffic. And of them, Barack Obama has the most Facebook contacts – 122,00 which is more than twice the combined total of all the Republican candidates combined. And John Edwards has the most social networking links – 23. And if you want to keep up with the presidential race online, the report recommends three sites: http://www.memeorandum.com, http://www.politicalwire.com, http://www.realclearpolitics.com.
And as a foot note, you may have heard or seen the study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania which shows that the number of poltical “adwatch” stories run by the media has more than tripled from the 2000 election cycle to the 2006 election cycle. The head of the center, which by the way sends out a weekly newsletter (mentioned in previous MfM’s) examining political claims, says it is now a matter of “Caveat mendax – let the liar beware.”
SHORT ATTENTION SPAN THEATER: Half of those between the ages of 18 and 34 are watching less TV than they did a year ago, according to a survey by advertising rep agency Burst Media. And a ‘plurality’ of all respondents (42.4%) say they are watching less. The decline is even more noticeable among women, with nearly half (48.3%) of those 25-34 and almost the same number (46.7%) of those in the age group 35-44 saying they are watching less. Those figures are part of a survey released by the company showing that four out of five (82.4%) Internet users are doing something else – multitasking – while they’re online. The most common activity – watch television. Three-fourths (75.6%) of those watching television while online say they go to websites related to the programming. Jarvis Coffin, the CEO of Burst Media, says the “short attention span of consumers poses a challenge to marketers,” but he says the solution is to deliver ‘coordinated messages’ across different platforms to get the consumer’s attention.
On the flip side of that, a survey by The Conference Board and TNS Media Intelligence finds that even though three-quarters of ONLINE households report watching entertainment on the Internet every day, four-fifths of them say web viewing has NOT cut into their traditional TV viewing. As noted before, TV shows have replaced news as the most widely viewed content online. And as a further side note, a study by the Wharton School of Business found that YouTube use may actually increase TV viewing because the clips act as a tease to get the viewers to watch more. And as a side note to the side note, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen says the service may start providing higher quality videos, using a system that detects the speed capability of the user’s net connection.
And as a footnote, New York Times tech guru Stuart Elliott says fewer viewers are watching the new fall television series and raises the question that it may be because of online video opportunities. Most of the online videos are much shorter than TV programming and, curiously, he quotes the head of one advertising agency who also talks about “short attention span” of online viewers. Elliott also raises the question whether the writers strike will fuel the growth of online video.
BILLIONS AND BILLIONS: If you’re old enough, you probably re-played those words in your mind with a heavy accent reminiscent of Carl Sagan. The United Nations annual Internet Governance Forum says it’s official – there are 1 Billion Internet users worldwide. One Billion out of a total world population of 6 Billion. The question is how does the next Billion get online. The head of the U.N. forum says that the next Billion users will be decidedly poorer than the first Billion. Internet use is growing in what the forum organizers call the “less well off” nations that comprise three quarters of the world’s population. The forum debate focused on whether the Internet access should be government mandated, as a public service, or left to private enterprise. In areas like Africa where fewer than 4% have Internet access and basic electricity is an issue, the organizers say mobile phones may be the answer. This is also where the One Laptop Per Child program comes in to play.
As a side note, I should remind readers that a Harris Interactive poll found that four out of five people now access the Internet in the U.S. That’s up dramatically since 2000 when three out of five (57%) went online and even more dramatic is when you consider that eleven years ago in 1995 only 9% of the population went online. Equally interesting is the fact that the survey says the Online population now reflects more of the general population demographics.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: MTV has announced a super model contest with a difference. The network, along with Ford Models and Elizabeth Arden, is looking for the best looking avatar, a virtual world supermodel. The fastest computer in the world is IBM’s Blue Gene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, with the ability to perform 478 Trillion calculations per second – what computer geeks would call 487 teraflops. The second fastest computer is IBM’s Blue Gene/P sister computer in Germany. The winner of the most awards for creative director in the Gunn Report which ranks advertising around the world was somebody you probably never heard of -- Thanonchai Sornsrivichai, based in Thailand. A survey by Clarity and The EAR Foundation found that senior citizens fear loss of independence (26%) and moving into a nursing home (13%) more than they fear death (3%). For those of you who rent cars all the time, a little item in FreePint which deals with research matters great and small says you can tell which side the gas cap is on by looking at which side the filler hose is on the icon on your dashboard. (Although for some reason, this applies to all cars but Japanese cars.)
A MARKETING CONUNDRUM: So, explain to me, dear readers, how four auto parts stores within 500 yards of each other can survive. Driving through Abbeville, South Carolina, there were two local auto parts stores, Logans and Sonny’s, almost side by side and less than a hundred yards further down was an Advanced Auto Parts store and across from it was an O’Reilly’s auto part store. And just to prove that it isn’t a South Carolina thing only (although it may be a southern thing), there were three auto parts stores within four blocks of each other in Elberton, Georgia. (I know, you’re jealous of all the cool places I travel to.)
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
THE 51ST STATE
SHORT ATTENTION SPAN THEATER
BILLIONS AND BILLIONS
COCKTAIL CHATTER – VIRTUAL BEAUTY AND FAST COMPUTERS
A MARKETING CONUNDRUM
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS – IN OR OUT: The Thanksgiving holiday (and Black Friday) falls in the sweeps period this year. So, do you keep it in or take it out? Most stations re-title the newscasts and take them out of the sweeps because viewership is so erratic and low. Just a heads up – something you should think about.
THE 51ST STATE: And no, I’m not talking about Puerto Rico. That’s what SEARCHER, the magazine for database professionals, calls the Internet in this upcoming election and says the Internet is ‘breathing down the neck of mainstream media’ when it comes to the elections and that 2008 will be the first true “Internet election.” Citing another study by iCrossing, the report says the Internet is the number two source for election information, after television, and tied with newspapers. However, before my mainstream media friends commit hara-kiri, the study notes that voters are not going to the candidates websites or to the candidates MySpace pages for information, but rather are turning to Web search engines and the online versions of the traditional media. However, political blogs like the dailykos.com, huffingtonpost.com and talkingpointsmemo.com are becoming increasingly influential. The report also notes that all of the candidates (except, for some reason, Rudolph Giuliani) have adopted social networking tools on their websites. By the 2012 election, the report says, the Internet will be so essential and mainstream to presidential politics that “it probably won’t even warrant an article like this.”
As a side note, the Democrats have two thirds of the Online Internet traffic. And of them, Barack Obama has the most Facebook contacts – 122,00 which is more than twice the combined total of all the Republican candidates combined. And John Edwards has the most social networking links – 23. And if you want to keep up with the presidential race online, the report recommends three sites: http://www.memeorandum.com, http://www.politicalwire.com, http://www.realclearpolitics.com.
And as a foot note, you may have heard or seen the study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania which shows that the number of poltical “adwatch” stories run by the media has more than tripled from the 2000 election cycle to the 2006 election cycle. The head of the center, which by the way sends out a weekly newsletter (mentioned in previous MfM’s) examining political claims, says it is now a matter of “Caveat mendax – let the liar beware.”
SHORT ATTENTION SPAN THEATER: Half of those between the ages of 18 and 34 are watching less TV than they did a year ago, according to a survey by advertising rep agency Burst Media. And a ‘plurality’ of all respondents (42.4%) say they are watching less. The decline is even more noticeable among women, with nearly half (48.3%) of those 25-34 and almost the same number (46.7%) of those in the age group 35-44 saying they are watching less. Those figures are part of a survey released by the company showing that four out of five (82.4%) Internet users are doing something else – multitasking – while they’re online. The most common activity – watch television. Three-fourths (75.6%) of those watching television while online say they go to websites related to the programming. Jarvis Coffin, the CEO of Burst Media, says the “short attention span of consumers poses a challenge to marketers,” but he says the solution is to deliver ‘coordinated messages’ across different platforms to get the consumer’s attention.
On the flip side of that, a survey by The Conference Board and TNS Media Intelligence finds that even though three-quarters of ONLINE households report watching entertainment on the Internet every day, four-fifths of them say web viewing has NOT cut into their traditional TV viewing. As noted before, TV shows have replaced news as the most widely viewed content online. And as a further side note, a study by the Wharton School of Business found that YouTube use may actually increase TV viewing because the clips act as a tease to get the viewers to watch more. And as a side note to the side note, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen says the service may start providing higher quality videos, using a system that detects the speed capability of the user’s net connection.
And as a footnote, New York Times tech guru Stuart Elliott says fewer viewers are watching the new fall television series and raises the question that it may be because of online video opportunities. Most of the online videos are much shorter than TV programming and, curiously, he quotes the head of one advertising agency who also talks about “short attention span” of online viewers. Elliott also raises the question whether the writers strike will fuel the growth of online video.
BILLIONS AND BILLIONS: If you’re old enough, you probably re-played those words in your mind with a heavy accent reminiscent of Carl Sagan. The United Nations annual Internet Governance Forum says it’s official – there are 1 Billion Internet users worldwide. One Billion out of a total world population of 6 Billion. The question is how does the next Billion get online. The head of the U.N. forum says that the next Billion users will be decidedly poorer than the first Billion. Internet use is growing in what the forum organizers call the “less well off” nations that comprise three quarters of the world’s population. The forum debate focused on whether the Internet access should be government mandated, as a public service, or left to private enterprise. In areas like Africa where fewer than 4% have Internet access and basic electricity is an issue, the organizers say mobile phones may be the answer. This is also where the One Laptop Per Child program comes in to play.
As a side note, I should remind readers that a Harris Interactive poll found that four out of five people now access the Internet in the U.S. That’s up dramatically since 2000 when three out of five (57%) went online and even more dramatic is when you consider that eleven years ago in 1995 only 9% of the population went online. Equally interesting is the fact that the survey says the Online population now reflects more of the general population demographics.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: MTV has announced a super model contest with a difference. The network, along with Ford Models and Elizabeth Arden, is looking for the best looking avatar, a virtual world supermodel. The fastest computer in the world is IBM’s Blue Gene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, with the ability to perform 478 Trillion calculations per second – what computer geeks would call 487 teraflops. The second fastest computer is IBM’s Blue Gene/P sister computer in Germany. The winner of the most awards for creative director in the Gunn Report which ranks advertising around the world was somebody you probably never heard of -- Thanonchai Sornsrivichai, based in Thailand. A survey by Clarity and The EAR Foundation found that senior citizens fear loss of independence (26%) and moving into a nursing home (13%) more than they fear death (3%). For those of you who rent cars all the time, a little item in FreePint which deals with research matters great and small says you can tell which side the gas cap is on by looking at which side the filler hose is on the icon on your dashboard. (Although for some reason, this applies to all cars but Japanese cars.)
A MARKETING CONUNDRUM: So, explain to me, dear readers, how four auto parts stores within 500 yards of each other can survive. Driving through Abbeville, South Carolina, there were two local auto parts stores, Logans and Sonny’s, almost side by side and less than a hundred yards further down was an Advanced Auto Parts store and across from it was an O’Reilly’s auto part store. And just to prove that it isn’t a South Carolina thing only (although it may be a southern thing), there were three auto parts stores within four blocks of each other in Elberton, Georgia. (I know, you’re jealous of all the cool places I travel to.)
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Message From Michael -- November 12, 2007
THE FACEBOOK RIFLE SHOT
IT’S NOT YOUR COLLEGE STUDENTS’ FACEBOOK ANY MORE
THE BLOGGING JOURNALISTS
STRANDED ON A BLOG DESERT ISLAND
THE BEAUTY OF AN INDEPENDENT PRESS
COCKTAIL CHATTER -- PERFECT PITCH
TRAVEL WEBSITES WEIRD AND WONDERFUL
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES – WINE AND CRIME
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE FACEBOOK RIFLE SHOT: Depending on how you look at it, the new Facebook advertising strategy dubbed “social ads” is a rifle shot approach that targets consumers to a degree not seen before as opposed to the scattered shotgun approach of most advertisers, but it may backfire on them. The former Harvard college student who founded Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, describes the ad approach as “revolutionary targeting” in part because Facebook users supply so much real information about themselves in their profiles. Add to that the ability to track and filter their on-line movements and purchases, it makes the Amazon process of recommending books based on past purchases seem like child’s play. Facebook is able to whittle down the target audience for a specific brand from millions to thousands, even down to hundreds. You can almost hear the tone of incredulity in the overview Microsoft, which recently bought a stake in Facebook, gives in its sales pitch: Facebook users communicate details about their demographics, interests, photos and even their contact information.” The head of Fox Interactive Media is quoted in AdWeek as saying, “it changes everything.” It’s behavioral and contextual advertising on steroids, but it is also, as one article put it, “creepy.” The Facebook and MySpace ad programs have already drawn complaints from the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups. Yes, indeed, it will change everything.
IT’S NOT YOUR COLLEGE STUDENTS’ FACEBOOK ANY MORE: Since Facebook opened its doors to people outside education, the growth has been amazing. That part you know, but do you know where it’s grown the most? How about Turkey, where the growth rate is 280%, followed by Israel with 87%; and then Malaysia, Singapore, France and China all hovering around 50% while the U.S. has grown a mere 7.4%. Of course, the U.S. still makes up the mass of subscribers with 21.4 Million subscribers as of November 11th, compared to Turkey’s mere 1.24 Million and Israel’s even merer (yes, I know that’s not a word) 175 Thousand. According to figures from Facebook guru and blogger Jeff Pulver, the total Facebook subscription outside the U.S. is about 25 Million, and it includes places you might not expect such as Pakistan, India, Lebanon and Columbia. (Yes, I know, you didn’t expect Turkey either.)
THE BLOGGING JOURNALISTS: Four out of five business journalists (84%) use blogs as either primary or secondary sources of information while more than half (54%) say blogs help spark ideas for news stories and a quarter (25%) say blogs make their jobs easier. The survey by marketing and public relations consultancy Arketi Group out of Atlanta also shows that the majority of these journalists say that their online publication is allowed to “scoop” their print publication in what the group says is “a trend that continues to blur the line between print and online media.” Nine out of ten of these journalists turn to industry sources for story ideas, but the same number relies on news releases or public relations contacts. Not surprisingly the business journalists are heavy Internet users with all of them saying they use the Internet to do their work. The news release from the company quotes Professor Kaye Sweetser from our own Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication who says business journalists are embracing user-generated content like blogs, webinars and podcasts in their day-to-day reporting and that, “savvy companies know this and are looking for ways to legitimately increase their participation in creating and growing online content using Web 2.0 methods.”
STRANDED ON A BLOG DESERT ISLAND: You’re stranded on a desert island and you can have only one book, what would it be? Remember that old challenge? The modern day version is that you’re stranded on a digital desert island and you have only limited Internet access, what would that be? Five grad students at Carnegie Mellon University have answered that question using what else – an algorithm. They have developed a list, out of the 10-Million-plus blogs available, of the top 100 blogs which are the most up to date and which catch most of the stories that propagate over the blogosphere. And they found some “counterintuitive results” showing that the popular blogs might not be the most effective way to “catch information.” The sites range from well known ones like Instapundit to lesser known ones like BasicThinkingBlog – which, by the way, is in German and which, interestingly, to me at least, had only two English words that I could detect – Videos and YouTube. Many moons ago, I remember a report that said the three most popular blog topics are politics, technology and ‘mom’ issues. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the blogs on this list are disappointingly (my opinion) about politics. Still there are some interesting ones, including Pajamas Media and TheNoseOnYOurFace which bills itself as “news so fake you’ll swear it came from the mainstream media.”
Everything on the Internet is an algorithm, it seems. The algorithm used by the students for detecting the ‘best’ blogs is the same used to determine where to put sensors in a water distribution system to most quickly detect the spread of contaminants. The underlying concept is that the spread of information between blogs is an “information cascade” where the information pours over the blogosphere. They then examined a number of differing factors so that it wasn’t just PA (people affected) which would favor the bigger blogs or NP (number of posts) which would favor the summarizer blogs, but in-links, out-links, scalability and so-on to develop a “cost unit” model. By the way, the report did win “best student paper” award in the computer sciences. However, it may say something about the list that when I checked all 100, the links were broken on four of them. Also, it might raise questions about the validity of the system when the Austinist, Phillyist, DCist, Bostonist, Londonist, Shanghaiist, SFist and Seattlest all make the list. LINK: http://www.bloggersblog.com/cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=1024072
COCKTAIL CHATTER: People who speak Mandarin are more likely than the speakers of any other language to have the rare gift of perfect pitch, according to Oliver Sacks, author of the book Musicophilia. One of the stars of the NBC hit series Heroes has been named ‘global ambassador’ for the One Laptop Per Child program we’ve mentioned before in MfM. But this isn’t one of those celebrity spokesperson things. Masi Oka is a Brown University Math/Computer Science grad who is also an SFX guru with George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic company. A third of the American public (33%) believe that electing a woman President would be a good thing while only one in ten (9%) believe it would be a bad thing, but more than half (55%) say gender doesn’t matter, according to the Pew Research Center.
WEBSITES WEIRD AND WONDERFUL: There are numerous websites around the world which provide an actual real life look at the world today. Want to watch for the Loch Ness monster? Go to camvista.com. It will provide a link to a live camera focused on the lake, or you can pick out various sites around the British Isles and elsewhere. Want to see what Tutankhamen saw when he grew up? Visit pyramidcam.com and watch the sun set over the pyramids of Egypt. Planning a trip to Brisbane with a stopover in London? Visit trafficland.com and see what the traffic and weather is like. Or maybe you want to check on your cousin Minerva in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Visit http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/index.html and see what the weather is like.
CONTRIBUTOR NOTES: Crime and wine. I’m proud of the fact that MfM runs the gamut of interests and the readers reflect that variety of interests. From Nick Simonette, GM/ WAFB/ Baton Rouge, comes a conversation about “two buck chuck.” For those who haven’t heard of this, it is a California wine that originally cost $2, but has risen as the popularity has risen, but which can match wines ten times the price. Ask your local sommelier or liquor store. From Lee Brantley, GM/ WTVM/ Columbus, comes a link to a website that shows a world map of all the crime or disaster related incidents going on in the world. Visit globalincident.com for a fascinating snapshot look at your world.
CONGRATULATIONS: To Scott Libin. Scott takes over the reins of news director at CBS O-and-O WCCO, leaving his position of Managing Editor at the Poynter Institute but returning to adopted hometown Minneapolis where he was previously ND at WTSP.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
IT’S NOT YOUR COLLEGE STUDENTS’ FACEBOOK ANY MORE
THE BLOGGING JOURNALISTS
STRANDED ON A BLOG DESERT ISLAND
THE BEAUTY OF AN INDEPENDENT PRESS
COCKTAIL CHATTER -- PERFECT PITCH
TRAVEL WEBSITES WEIRD AND WONDERFUL
CONTRIBUTORS NOTES – WINE AND CRIME
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE FACEBOOK RIFLE SHOT: Depending on how you look at it, the new Facebook advertising strategy dubbed “social ads” is a rifle shot approach that targets consumers to a degree not seen before as opposed to the scattered shotgun approach of most advertisers, but it may backfire on them. The former Harvard college student who founded Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, describes the ad approach as “revolutionary targeting” in part because Facebook users supply so much real information about themselves in their profiles. Add to that the ability to track and filter their on-line movements and purchases, it makes the Amazon process of recommending books based on past purchases seem like child’s play. Facebook is able to whittle down the target audience for a specific brand from millions to thousands, even down to hundreds. You can almost hear the tone of incredulity in the overview Microsoft, which recently bought a stake in Facebook, gives in its sales pitch: Facebook users communicate details about their demographics, interests, photos and even their contact information.” The head of Fox Interactive Media is quoted in AdWeek as saying, “it changes everything.” It’s behavioral and contextual advertising on steroids, but it is also, as one article put it, “creepy.” The Facebook and MySpace ad programs have already drawn complaints from the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups. Yes, indeed, it will change everything.
IT’S NOT YOUR COLLEGE STUDENTS’ FACEBOOK ANY MORE: Since Facebook opened its doors to people outside education, the growth has been amazing. That part you know, but do you know where it’s grown the most? How about Turkey, where the growth rate is 280%, followed by Israel with 87%; and then Malaysia, Singapore, France and China all hovering around 50% while the U.S. has grown a mere 7.4%. Of course, the U.S. still makes up the mass of subscribers with 21.4 Million subscribers as of November 11th, compared to Turkey’s mere 1.24 Million and Israel’s even merer (yes, I know that’s not a word) 175 Thousand. According to figures from Facebook guru and blogger Jeff Pulver, the total Facebook subscription outside the U.S. is about 25 Million, and it includes places you might not expect such as Pakistan, India, Lebanon and Columbia. (Yes, I know, you didn’t expect Turkey either.)
THE BLOGGING JOURNALISTS: Four out of five business journalists (84%) use blogs as either primary or secondary sources of information while more than half (54%) say blogs help spark ideas for news stories and a quarter (25%) say blogs make their jobs easier. The survey by marketing and public relations consultancy Arketi Group out of Atlanta also shows that the majority of these journalists say that their online publication is allowed to “scoop” their print publication in what the group says is “a trend that continues to blur the line between print and online media.” Nine out of ten of these journalists turn to industry sources for story ideas, but the same number relies on news releases or public relations contacts. Not surprisingly the business journalists are heavy Internet users with all of them saying they use the Internet to do their work. The news release from the company quotes Professor Kaye Sweetser from our own Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication who says business journalists are embracing user-generated content like blogs, webinars and podcasts in their day-to-day reporting and that, “savvy companies know this and are looking for ways to legitimately increase their participation in creating and growing online content using Web 2.0 methods.”
STRANDED ON A BLOG DESERT ISLAND: You’re stranded on a desert island and you can have only one book, what would it be? Remember that old challenge? The modern day version is that you’re stranded on a digital desert island and you have only limited Internet access, what would that be? Five grad students at Carnegie Mellon University have answered that question using what else – an algorithm. They have developed a list, out of the 10-Million-plus blogs available, of the top 100 blogs which are the most up to date and which catch most of the stories that propagate over the blogosphere. And they found some “counterintuitive results” showing that the popular blogs might not be the most effective way to “catch information.” The sites range from well known ones like Instapundit to lesser known ones like BasicThinkingBlog – which, by the way, is in German and which, interestingly, to me at least, had only two English words that I could detect – Videos and YouTube. Many moons ago, I remember a report that said the three most popular blog topics are politics, technology and ‘mom’ issues. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the blogs on this list are disappointingly (my opinion) about politics. Still there are some interesting ones, including Pajamas Media and TheNoseOnYOurFace which bills itself as “news so fake you’ll swear it came from the mainstream media.”
Everything on the Internet is an algorithm, it seems. The algorithm used by the students for detecting the ‘best’ blogs is the same used to determine where to put sensors in a water distribution system to most quickly detect the spread of contaminants. The underlying concept is that the spread of information between blogs is an “information cascade” where the information pours over the blogosphere. They then examined a number of differing factors so that it wasn’t just PA (people affected) which would favor the bigger blogs or NP (number of posts) which would favor the summarizer blogs, but in-links, out-links, scalability and so-on to develop a “cost unit” model. By the way, the report did win “best student paper” award in the computer sciences. However, it may say something about the list that when I checked all 100, the links were broken on four of them. Also, it might raise questions about the validity of the system when the Austinist, Phillyist, DCist, Bostonist, Londonist, Shanghaiist, SFist and Seattlest all make the list. LINK: http://www.bloggersblog.com/cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=1024072
COCKTAIL CHATTER: People who speak Mandarin are more likely than the speakers of any other language to have the rare gift of perfect pitch, according to Oliver Sacks, author of the book Musicophilia. One of the stars of the NBC hit series Heroes has been named ‘global ambassador’ for the One Laptop Per Child program we’ve mentioned before in MfM. But this isn’t one of those celebrity spokesperson things. Masi Oka is a Brown University Math/Computer Science grad who is also an SFX guru with George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic company. A third of the American public (33%) believe that electing a woman President would be a good thing while only one in ten (9%) believe it would be a bad thing, but more than half (55%) say gender doesn’t matter, according to the Pew Research Center.
WEBSITES WEIRD AND WONDERFUL: There are numerous websites around the world which provide an actual real life look at the world today. Want to watch for the Loch Ness monster? Go to camvista.com. It will provide a link to a live camera focused on the lake, or you can pick out various sites around the British Isles and elsewhere. Want to see what Tutankhamen saw when he grew up? Visit pyramidcam.com and watch the sun set over the pyramids of Egypt. Planning a trip to Brisbane with a stopover in London? Visit trafficland.com and see what the traffic and weather is like. Or maybe you want to check on your cousin Minerva in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Visit http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/index.html and see what the weather is like.
CONTRIBUTOR NOTES: Crime and wine. I’m proud of the fact that MfM runs the gamut of interests and the readers reflect that variety of interests. From Nick Simonette, GM/ WAFB/ Baton Rouge, comes a conversation about “two buck chuck.” For those who haven’t heard of this, it is a California wine that originally cost $2, but has risen as the popularity has risen, but which can match wines ten times the price. Ask your local sommelier or liquor store. From Lee Brantley, GM/ WTVM/ Columbus, comes a link to a website that shows a world map of all the crime or disaster related incidents going on in the world. Visit globalincident.com for a fascinating snapshot look at your world.
CONGRATULATIONS: To Scott Libin. Scott takes over the reins of news director at CBS O-and-O WCCO, leaving his position of Managing Editor at the Poynter Institute but returning to adopted hometown Minneapolis where he was previously ND at WTSP.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Message From Michael -- November 5, 2007
WORLDWIDE PRESS FREEDOM REPORT
HUMONGOUS AMOUNTS OF MONEY
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG
HEY NIELSEN
MORE ONLINE PROGRAMMING COMPETITION
COCKTAIL CHATTER – COLLEGE MINDSET
NEWSPAPER ERRORS
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
WORLDWIDE PRESS FREEDOM REPORT: The French-based but international organization Reporters Without Borders puts The United States at 48th in a list of 169 countries when it comes to press freedom. That actually is an improvement from last year when the U.S. ranked 53rd. The countries of Iceland and Norway tied for first place in the 2007 list just released. In fact, the top 14 countries listed were all European. Eritrea replaced North Korea as the worst country in the world when it comes to press freedom. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, came in 18th while Britain came in 24th and France was 31st. India came in 120th while Pakistan came in 152nd. Iraq was 157th and Iran was 166th. Russia was 144th while China was 163rd.
Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the index, seven are Asian (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam, China, Burma, and North Korea), five are African (Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Somalia and Eritrea), four are in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Palestinian Territories and Iran), three are former Soviet republics (Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) and one is in the Americas (Cuba).
The report authors say the Internet is “occupying more and more space in the breakdown of press freedom violations” with an increase in the number of cases of online censorship. The group says more and more governments have realized that the Internet can play “a key role in the fight for democracy” and have developed new ways to censor people online. It notes that “the governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.”
HUMONGOUS AMOUNTS OF MONEY: That’s what the “information industry” will generate in less than three years, according to Outsell – the ‘only’ worldwide market research and consulting company. Let me define ‘humongous.’ That’s $448 Billion worldwide. The company says the ‘information industry’ – isn’t that a weird term? – will have sustained but moderate ‘combined annual growth rate’ (CAGR) of 5.5% over the next three years. Not surprisingly the Search, Aggregation and Syndication segment of the industry (aka Google, Yahoo, etc.,) will leave the other segments “in the dust” with a CAGR of 22.7%. What the group calls the “news providers and publishers” segment will actually have a 2.5% decline in revenue in that time. Of course, the ‘information industry’ is broadly defined to include everything from credit and financial information to B2B trade publishing, education and training, IT & Telecom Research, etc…etc..etc…
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG: That’s what Google is saying as it develops an open social networking platform so you can “take your friends with you.” The Internet behemoth already has its own social network – Orkut… no, I never heard of it either. And for good reason, more than half of its user are Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. Why? I don’t know. Google has been working with several other social networking sites to develop an open platform, transportable kind of social networking which experts say could have a dramatic impact. Called OpenSocial, the concept is to let software developers and websites develop a single set of software standards for the little software widgets that can add a social networking layer to all Web sites. The other ones include Bebo (the #1 site in the U.K.), SixApart, HI5, Friendster, LinkedIn and Ning. Now, social network giant MySpace has joined as well, adding much more weight to the concept. The two other giants in the social network arena – Facebook and Craigslist – have not joined… yet. Tech writer and San Jose State University business professor Randall Stross writes in The New York Times that “Google’s self interest is plain enough.” It doesn’t want to lose web users to the social networking sites, but it hasn’t added OpenSocial to its own Websites because, quoting a Google type, “trust builds up over a very long time… and can be lost very quickly.”
Footnotes: The same New York Times edition profiled Andy Rubin, who is “Google’s resident gadget guru” and in charge of developing the ‘Google phone” due out next year. Social networking site Twitter which specializes in very brief IM’s, called ‘tweets’, was the source of recent controversy when one user sent a ‘tweet’ that he was going to commit suicide. He didn’t in the end, but it pointed out the growing public display of everybody’s desire to be Warholian. And research firm Ipsos Insight reports that social networkers are three times more likely to download music or video to their phones, twice as likely to send a text message or pay a bill through their mobile devices.
HEY NIELSEN: Continuing the social networking theme, the folks have created a website heynielsen.com which we’ve mentioned before in MfM. But I recently decided to re-visit the site, and it’s interesting to me just how little traffic it generates. Many of the highlighted TV shows, movies and music get one or two “votes” but little else. The most popular TV shows highlighted (The Dresden Files and Stargate Atlantis) did get anywhere from 500 to 600 votes, but most everything else got zippo. Now the website has named the top TV blog sites. First place went to jerichomonster.blogspot.com; second to cultural leanings, whose website is memles.wordpress.com. Honorable mentions went to televisionary.blogspot.com, tvsquad.com and tvovereasy.com.
MORE SOCIAL NETWORKING NEWS: A social networking site aimed at the disabled has been launched – Disaboom.com. Another social networking site you probably haven’t heard of is Belgian website Netlog, even though it has 28 Million members and is in 13 languages and does it all with a staff of only 35 people. A survey of advertising executives by digital marketing firm CoreMetrics finds that three-quarters (78%) believe social networking offers a marketing advantage; yet the average percentage of online marketing dollars allocated to social media is only 7.8%.
MORE ONLINE PROGRAMMING COMPETITION. The newest competitor to Joost which we beta-tested and mentioned in previous MfM’s, is Hulu, an online video service put together by NBC-Universal and News Corp. The site is in the beta testing phase right now, but it promises to offer programs from NBC, Fox as well as Sony and MGM. Under the Hulu model, advertisers – which include Cisco, Intel, General Motors, Nissan and Toyota – get to embed their ads in a form of product placement.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Every year Beloit College in Wisconsin puts out a Mindset List which lists what the students entering college would be familiar with and NOT familiar with. For example, students entering this fall, who will – maybe, hopefully – graduate in 2011 have never “rolled down” a car window but have always had bottled water. The phrase “off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone and music has always been “unplugged.” MTV has never featured music videos; and stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names. High definition television has always been ubiquitous. Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil. Burma has always been Myanmar. The Berlin Wall never existed for them but Humvees, minus the artillery, have. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities. Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN and Katie Couric has always – as list compilers Tom McBride and Ron Nief put it – “had screen cred.” And the World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
A study by the Pew Global Research Project finds a high level of distrust between Muslims and non-Muslims, but with Muslims having more negative views of Westerners. The e-Voter Institute says a survey of political consultants find nearly half (46%) will allocate between 6% and 20% of their communications budget to the Internet – an increase from the 38% in 2006. For those old enough to remember, former Gulf War “scud stud” Arthur Kent is running for office on the Tory party ticket in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
NEWSPAPER ERRORS: This didn’t fit anywhere else, but I found it too interesting not to include. The Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel newspaper (which I used to work for) has admitted that it has had an increasing number of errors in the newspaper since it went through a financial belt-tightening. The paper’s public editor Manning Pynn wrote that the reason was fairly simple. The paper lost a number of seasoned veterans, mainly editors, “and the result is more published errors.” He writes, ““Every business’ success depends on the reliability of its products or services. If their reliability declines, people are less likely to buy them. Newspapers are particularly susceptible to that phenomenon.”
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com as well as on my Website. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
HUMONGOUS AMOUNTS OF MONEY
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG
HEY NIELSEN
MORE ONLINE PROGRAMMING COMPETITION
COCKTAIL CHATTER – COLLEGE MINDSET
NEWSPAPER ERRORS
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
WORLDWIDE PRESS FREEDOM REPORT: The French-based but international organization Reporters Without Borders puts The United States at 48th in a list of 169 countries when it comes to press freedom. That actually is an improvement from last year when the U.S. ranked 53rd. The countries of Iceland and Norway tied for first place in the 2007 list just released. In fact, the top 14 countries listed were all European. Eritrea replaced North Korea as the worst country in the world when it comes to press freedom. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, came in 18th while Britain came in 24th and France was 31st. India came in 120th while Pakistan came in 152nd. Iraq was 157th and Iran was 166th. Russia was 144th while China was 163rd.
Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the index, seven are Asian (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam, China, Burma, and North Korea), five are African (Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Somalia and Eritrea), four are in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Palestinian Territories and Iran), three are former Soviet republics (Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) and one is in the Americas (Cuba).
The report authors say the Internet is “occupying more and more space in the breakdown of press freedom violations” with an increase in the number of cases of online censorship. The group says more and more governments have realized that the Internet can play “a key role in the fight for democracy” and have developed new ways to censor people online. It notes that “the governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.”
HUMONGOUS AMOUNTS OF MONEY: That’s what the “information industry” will generate in less than three years, according to Outsell – the ‘only’ worldwide market research and consulting company. Let me define ‘humongous.’ That’s $448 Billion worldwide. The company says the ‘information industry’ – isn’t that a weird term? – will have sustained but moderate ‘combined annual growth rate’ (CAGR) of 5.5% over the next three years. Not surprisingly the Search, Aggregation and Syndication segment of the industry (aka Google, Yahoo, etc.,) will leave the other segments “in the dust” with a CAGR of 22.7%. What the group calls the “news providers and publishers” segment will actually have a 2.5% decline in revenue in that time. Of course, the ‘information industry’ is broadly defined to include everything from credit and financial information to B2B trade publishing, education and training, IT & Telecom Research, etc…etc..etc…
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG: That’s what Google is saying as it develops an open social networking platform so you can “take your friends with you.” The Internet behemoth already has its own social network – Orkut… no, I never heard of it either. And for good reason, more than half of its user are Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. Why? I don’t know. Google has been working with several other social networking sites to develop an open platform, transportable kind of social networking which experts say could have a dramatic impact. Called OpenSocial, the concept is to let software developers and websites develop a single set of software standards for the little software widgets that can add a social networking layer to all Web sites. The other ones include Bebo (the #1 site in the U.K.), SixApart, HI5, Friendster, LinkedIn and Ning. Now, social network giant MySpace has joined as well, adding much more weight to the concept. The two other giants in the social network arena – Facebook and Craigslist – have not joined… yet. Tech writer and San Jose State University business professor Randall Stross writes in The New York Times that “Google’s self interest is plain enough.” It doesn’t want to lose web users to the social networking sites, but it hasn’t added OpenSocial to its own Websites because, quoting a Google type, “trust builds up over a very long time… and can be lost very quickly.”
Footnotes: The same New York Times edition profiled Andy Rubin, who is “Google’s resident gadget guru” and in charge of developing the ‘Google phone” due out next year. Social networking site Twitter which specializes in very brief IM’s, called ‘tweets’, was the source of recent controversy when one user sent a ‘tweet’ that he was going to commit suicide. He didn’t in the end, but it pointed out the growing public display of everybody’s desire to be Warholian. And research firm Ipsos Insight reports that social networkers are three times more likely to download music or video to their phones, twice as likely to send a text message or pay a bill through their mobile devices.
HEY NIELSEN: Continuing the social networking theme, the folks have created a website heynielsen.com which we’ve mentioned before in MfM. But I recently decided to re-visit the site, and it’s interesting to me just how little traffic it generates. Many of the highlighted TV shows, movies and music get one or two “votes” but little else. The most popular TV shows highlighted (The Dresden Files and Stargate Atlantis) did get anywhere from 500 to 600 votes, but most everything else got zippo. Now the website has named the top TV blog sites. First place went to jerichomonster.blogspot.com; second to cultural leanings, whose website is memles.wordpress.com. Honorable mentions went to televisionary.blogspot.com, tvsquad.com and tvovereasy.com.
MORE SOCIAL NETWORKING NEWS: A social networking site aimed at the disabled has been launched – Disaboom.com. Another social networking site you probably haven’t heard of is Belgian website Netlog, even though it has 28 Million members and is in 13 languages and does it all with a staff of only 35 people. A survey of advertising executives by digital marketing firm CoreMetrics finds that three-quarters (78%) believe social networking offers a marketing advantage; yet the average percentage of online marketing dollars allocated to social media is only 7.8%.
MORE ONLINE PROGRAMMING COMPETITION. The newest competitor to Joost which we beta-tested and mentioned in previous MfM’s, is Hulu, an online video service put together by NBC-Universal and News Corp. The site is in the beta testing phase right now, but it promises to offer programs from NBC, Fox as well as Sony and MGM. Under the Hulu model, advertisers – which include Cisco, Intel, General Motors, Nissan and Toyota – get to embed their ads in a form of product placement.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Every year Beloit College in Wisconsin puts out a Mindset List which lists what the students entering college would be familiar with and NOT familiar with. For example, students entering this fall, who will – maybe, hopefully – graduate in 2011 have never “rolled down” a car window but have always had bottled water. The phrase “off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone and music has always been “unplugged.” MTV has never featured music videos; and stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names. High definition television has always been ubiquitous. Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil. Burma has always been Myanmar. The Berlin Wall never existed for them but Humvees, minus the artillery, have. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities. Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN and Katie Couric has always – as list compilers Tom McBride and Ron Nief put it – “had screen cred.” And the World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
A study by the Pew Global Research Project finds a high level of distrust between Muslims and non-Muslims, but with Muslims having more negative views of Westerners. The e-Voter Institute says a survey of political consultants find nearly half (46%) will allocate between 6% and 20% of their communications budget to the Internet – an increase from the 38% in 2006. For those old enough to remember, former Gulf War “scud stud” Arthur Kent is running for office on the Tory party ticket in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
NEWSPAPER ERRORS: This didn’t fit anywhere else, but I found it too interesting not to include. The Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel newspaper (which I used to work for) has admitted that it has had an increasing number of errors in the newspaper since it went through a financial belt-tightening. The paper’s public editor Manning Pynn wrote that the reason was fairly simple. The paper lost a number of seasoned veterans, mainly editors, “and the result is more published errors.” He writes, ““Every business’ success depends on the reliability of its products or services. If their reliability declines, people are less likely to buy them. Newspapers are particularly susceptible to that phenomenon.”
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com as well as on my Website. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Message From Michael -- October 29, 2007
THE EVENING NEWS RACE
THE OLD MEDIA’S NEW MEDIA TARGET
YOUR NEW MEDIA TARGET
THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON YOU DON’T KNOW
STEP INTO THE WAYBACK MACHINE -- WASTELAND
COCKTAIL CHATTER – NOVELS, THE LAST SUPPER AND CURRENT TV
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE EVENING NEWS RACE: You all know of course about the race between ABC with Charles Gibson and NBC with Brian Williams for first place. According to Nielsen, on average only 34,000 viewers separate the two in the ratings season to date. With Sweeps coming up, I thought it would be interesting to take a historical look. For example, as tight as the present ratings battle seems, in the 1998-99 season, NBC took first place for the season with an average edge of only a thousand viewers, a look back through Nielsen’s records shows. The last time CBS held the #1 spot was in 1988-89, although only by the skin of its teeth, after dominating the ratings for nearly two decades starting in 1970. And in case, you’re wondering, because I know you are, Dan Rather took over the anchor chair from Walter Cronkite in March of 1981. So he was able to hold on to it for seven years. CBS lost the #1 spot to ABC which held on to that position for seven years from 1989-90 to 1995-96. Peter Jennings became sole anchor in 1983, after sharing the anchor duties for five years in the unusual three-anchor format with Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson and after an early disastrous stint as ABC’s evening news anchor in 1965 at the age of 26. NBC took over the #1 ranking in the 1996-97 season. Tom Brokaw had taken over the solo anchor duties 16 years earlier in 1983 after co-anchoring with Roger Mudd for two years. And, continuing to prove I am anal retentive, some last facts from the historic trends. The Networks combined had a 30-plus rating through the 70’s and halfway through the 80’s. In 1988-89, the ratings dropped for the first time below 30. The ratings declined steadily until 2002-03 when it dipped for the first time below 20. So far this season, the average is a 15.2 for the three networks combined.
THE OLD MEDIA’S NEW MEDIA TARGET: The folks at Standard & Poor’s predict that traditional media companies are going to go on a buying splurge for Blogs. As they say in their investing newsletter The Outlook – “they reach large, loyal audiences, they’re fairly cheap to run, and they can be lucrative.” What’s not to like? In classic understatement they say it’s “an attractive business model.” To put it in context, the S&P newsletter points out that the number one blog on the Internet is technology blog Boing Boing which attracts 7.5 Million page views a month. By way of comparison, technology magazine Wired has 1.9 Million print readers. As of September, 2007, blog monitor Technorati says it is indexing 106 Million blogs – 12 Million more than the month before. Newspapers in particular are predicted to turn to bloggers to augment their own strong Web presence. The Outlook report says the move is a recognition by ‘old media companies’ that “Internet users would rather participate in the news than simply consume it.”
A similar but slightly different view comes from former entertainment executive and IAC/ InterActive Corp CEO Barry Diller who says traditional media companies still ‘don’t get it’ when it comes to the ‘disruptive power’ of the Internet. He says they should invest more in research and development and build new things online from scratch.
To provide a little further perspective, the Television Bureau of Advertising projects spot television revenue to ‘surge’ 9% to 10% in 2008, because of the political races and Olympics. BUT it predicts that station web-site advertising will grow 40% to 50% and station wireless 50% to 70%.
YOUR NEW MEDIA TARGET: Looking for your own ‘attractive business model’ for investing? Research firm Hitwise picks five potential Internet Superstars that are getting the attention of the hip, techno savvy younger generation. KeepVid lets users capture and replay streaming video from various sites such as YouTube, Metacafe and iFilm. And there is an online talent show Bix where you can upload comedy videos and karaoke performances. WikiMedia Commons is a central repository for freely licensed photos, music and video. Stickam is a community-based Webcam which allows live video streaming and video conferencing. And, finally, Hitwise picks out Veoh, an online video destination that we’ve mentioned in previous MfM’s.
THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON YOU DON’T KNOW: Or maybe you do. After all she has 1,791,920 MySpace friends. Her name -- Tila Tequila. I’ve mentioned her before in MfM, but now she has her own MTV show which reportedly is #1 in its time period for the 18-34 demographic. Ms. Tequila (real name Nguyen) emigrated to MySpace from a Houston public housing project after her family emigrated from Vietnam. The only reason I mention her is that a) it is part of my never-ending quest to make sure the readers of MfM are ‘in the know’ even if, sometimes, it may be question whether it’s worth knowing and b) because of a great line in Sunday’s New York Times by writer Guy Trebay trying to explain the phenomenon: “When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?” Plus, even more interesting and worth knowing is a series of studies cited by write Jake Halpern in his book Fame Junkies that a third of American teenagers (31%) have the honest expectation that they will one day be famous and four out of five of them (80%) think of themselves as truly important.
STEP INTO THE WAYBACK MACHINE: On May 9, 1961, then Federal Communications Chairman Newton Minnow referred to television as a “vast wasteland.” Years afterward, he said he wished the two words that people remembered from his speech were “public interest.” Proving yet again that I need a life, I recently listened to the 40-minute speech. A couple of notes. He was only interrupted four times and then only with very light applause when he said the free enterprise system must be allowed to work and that he would fight any kind of censorship. Also, interestingly for the time, he urged stations to do editorials. And his quote about television being a vast wasteland was one of only several great quotes in his speech:
To networks – “tell your sponsors to be less concerned with costs per thousands and more concerned with understanding per millions… remind your stockholders than an investment in broadcasting is buying a share in public responsibility.” Public interest isn’t just what interests the public. Talking about his role as FCC chairman, “either one takes this job seriously – or one can be seriously taken.”
About ratings – He said the three great influences on a child were home, school and church, and that television was becoming the fourth. But that if the first three followed ratings, like television did, children would eat a steady diet of ice cream, there would be school holidays all the time and there would be no Sunday school. “If some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience.”
And as an interesting footnote to all this, Minnow noted in his speech that broadcasters were in good financial health, noting that the gross broadcast revenues for all television in 1960 was roughly $1.2 Billion with a before taxes profit of $243 Million, yielding an average return on revenue of 19.2%. Just for perspective, BIA Financial Network reported television revenues in 2006 of $22.5 Billion.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Besides the countdown to sweeps, there is another countdown – to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The idea is simple – write a 175-page, 50,000 word novel in a month. You can register at NaNoWriMo.org. You start writing November 1st and you have to have it finished by November 30th. A high resolution rendering (16-17 giga pixels) of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has been posted on the Internet at the site www.haltadefinizione.com by digital imaging company Hal9000 for – as Reuters put it – art lovers and conspiracy theorists alike to study. More than half of the U.S. public (58%) believe that “as Americans we can always solve our problems and get what we want,” according to a survey by the folks at the Pew Research Center. Sounds pretty good until you read further on that the number is a 16 point drop from the three-quarters (74%) who believed that way five years ago. And I know you already have heard this, but it’s so amazing that it’s worth repeating: Microsoft has bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 Million which, when projected, values the company headed by a 23-year-old at $15 Billion. One you may not have heard comes from that same Forbes conference mentioned earlier – investment company Yucaipa founder Ron Burkle says one of his investments, Current TV, is worth up to $2 Billion after just a few years in existence.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
THE OLD MEDIA’S NEW MEDIA TARGET
YOUR NEW MEDIA TARGET
THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON YOU DON’T KNOW
STEP INTO THE WAYBACK MACHINE -- WASTELAND
COCKTAIL CHATTER – NOVELS, THE LAST SUPPER AND CURRENT TV
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE EVENING NEWS RACE: You all know of course about the race between ABC with Charles Gibson and NBC with Brian Williams for first place. According to Nielsen, on average only 34,000 viewers separate the two in the ratings season to date. With Sweeps coming up, I thought it would be interesting to take a historical look. For example, as tight as the present ratings battle seems, in the 1998-99 season, NBC took first place for the season with an average edge of only a thousand viewers, a look back through Nielsen’s records shows. The last time CBS held the #1 spot was in 1988-89, although only by the skin of its teeth, after dominating the ratings for nearly two decades starting in 1970. And in case, you’re wondering, because I know you are, Dan Rather took over the anchor chair from Walter Cronkite in March of 1981. So he was able to hold on to it for seven years. CBS lost the #1 spot to ABC which held on to that position for seven years from 1989-90 to 1995-96. Peter Jennings became sole anchor in 1983, after sharing the anchor duties for five years in the unusual three-anchor format with Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson and after an early disastrous stint as ABC’s evening news anchor in 1965 at the age of 26. NBC took over the #1 ranking in the 1996-97 season. Tom Brokaw had taken over the solo anchor duties 16 years earlier in 1983 after co-anchoring with Roger Mudd for two years. And, continuing to prove I am anal retentive, some last facts from the historic trends. The Networks combined had a 30-plus rating through the 70’s and halfway through the 80’s. In 1988-89, the ratings dropped for the first time below 30. The ratings declined steadily until 2002-03 when it dipped for the first time below 20. So far this season, the average is a 15.2 for the three networks combined.
THE OLD MEDIA’S NEW MEDIA TARGET: The folks at Standard & Poor’s predict that traditional media companies are going to go on a buying splurge for Blogs. As they say in their investing newsletter The Outlook – “they reach large, loyal audiences, they’re fairly cheap to run, and they can be lucrative.” What’s not to like? In classic understatement they say it’s “an attractive business model.” To put it in context, the S&P newsletter points out that the number one blog on the Internet is technology blog Boing Boing which attracts 7.5 Million page views a month. By way of comparison, technology magazine Wired has 1.9 Million print readers. As of September, 2007, blog monitor Technorati says it is indexing 106 Million blogs – 12 Million more than the month before. Newspapers in particular are predicted to turn to bloggers to augment their own strong Web presence. The Outlook report says the move is a recognition by ‘old media companies’ that “Internet users would rather participate in the news than simply consume it.”
A similar but slightly different view comes from former entertainment executive and IAC/ InterActive Corp CEO Barry Diller who says traditional media companies still ‘don’t get it’ when it comes to the ‘disruptive power’ of the Internet. He says they should invest more in research and development and build new things online from scratch.
To provide a little further perspective, the Television Bureau of Advertising projects spot television revenue to ‘surge’ 9% to 10% in 2008, because of the political races and Olympics. BUT it predicts that station web-site advertising will grow 40% to 50% and station wireless 50% to 70%.
YOUR NEW MEDIA TARGET: Looking for your own ‘attractive business model’ for investing? Research firm Hitwise picks five potential Internet Superstars that are getting the attention of the hip, techno savvy younger generation. KeepVid lets users capture and replay streaming video from various sites such as YouTube, Metacafe and iFilm. And there is an online talent show Bix where you can upload comedy videos and karaoke performances. WikiMedia Commons is a central repository for freely licensed photos, music and video. Stickam is a community-based Webcam which allows live video streaming and video conferencing. And, finally, Hitwise picks out Veoh, an online video destination that we’ve mentioned in previous MfM’s.
THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON YOU DON’T KNOW: Or maybe you do. After all she has 1,791,920 MySpace friends. Her name -- Tila Tequila. I’ve mentioned her before in MfM, but now she has her own MTV show which reportedly is #1 in its time period for the 18-34 demographic. Ms. Tequila (real name Nguyen) emigrated to MySpace from a Houston public housing project after her family emigrated from Vietnam. The only reason I mention her is that a) it is part of my never-ending quest to make sure the readers of MfM are ‘in the know’ even if, sometimes, it may be question whether it’s worth knowing and b) because of a great line in Sunday’s New York Times by writer Guy Trebay trying to explain the phenomenon: “When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?” Plus, even more interesting and worth knowing is a series of studies cited by write Jake Halpern in his book Fame Junkies that a third of American teenagers (31%) have the honest expectation that they will one day be famous and four out of five of them (80%) think of themselves as truly important.
STEP INTO THE WAYBACK MACHINE: On May 9, 1961, then Federal Communications Chairman Newton Minnow referred to television as a “vast wasteland.” Years afterward, he said he wished the two words that people remembered from his speech were “public interest.” Proving yet again that I need a life, I recently listened to the 40-minute speech. A couple of notes. He was only interrupted four times and then only with very light applause when he said the free enterprise system must be allowed to work and that he would fight any kind of censorship. Also, interestingly for the time, he urged stations to do editorials. And his quote about television being a vast wasteland was one of only several great quotes in his speech:
To networks – “tell your sponsors to be less concerned with costs per thousands and more concerned with understanding per millions… remind your stockholders than an investment in broadcasting is buying a share in public responsibility.” Public interest isn’t just what interests the public. Talking about his role as FCC chairman, “either one takes this job seriously – or one can be seriously taken.”
About ratings – He said the three great influences on a child were home, school and church, and that television was becoming the fourth. But that if the first three followed ratings, like television did, children would eat a steady diet of ice cream, there would be school holidays all the time and there would be no Sunday school. “If some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience.”
And as an interesting footnote to all this, Minnow noted in his speech that broadcasters were in good financial health, noting that the gross broadcast revenues for all television in 1960 was roughly $1.2 Billion with a before taxes profit of $243 Million, yielding an average return on revenue of 19.2%. Just for perspective, BIA Financial Network reported television revenues in 2006 of $22.5 Billion.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Besides the countdown to sweeps, there is another countdown – to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The idea is simple – write a 175-page, 50,000 word novel in a month. You can register at NaNoWriMo.org. You start writing November 1st and you have to have it finished by November 30th. A high resolution rendering (16-17 giga pixels) of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has been posted on the Internet at the site www.haltadefinizione.com by digital imaging company Hal9000 for – as Reuters put it – art lovers and conspiracy theorists alike to study. More than half of the U.S. public (58%) believe that “as Americans we can always solve our problems and get what we want,” according to a survey by the folks at the Pew Research Center. Sounds pretty good until you read further on that the number is a 16 point drop from the three-quarters (74%) who believed that way five years ago. And I know you already have heard this, but it’s so amazing that it’s worth repeating: Microsoft has bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 Million which, when projected, values the company headed by a 23-year-old at $15 Billion. One you may not have heard comes from that same Forbes conference mentioned earlier – investment company Yucaipa founder Ron Burkle says one of his investments, Current TV, is worth up to $2 Billion after just a few years in existence.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Message From Michael -- October 24, 2007
SWEEPS
THE REPLACEMENT FOR NEWS
THE SHIFTING SANDS OF TV
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
CONSULTANTS ARE YOUR FRIENDS
COCKTAIL CHATTER
HARRY POTTER’S CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS: Hear that tick, tick, tick sound? It’s not the clock in the stomach of the alligator in Peter Pan. It’s the countdown to sweeps. Eight days to go. Here are some things for you to mull over as we go into sweeps.
The REPLACEMENT FOR NEWS: According to The Conference Board, television broadcasts have replaced news as the most widely viewed content online. That fact was buried in the board’s Consumer Internet Barometer which found that one out of six (16%) of American households use the Internet to view TV broadcasts. That number was double that of a year ago. The other online preferences from the survey are entertainment (three quarters of online households use the Internet for entertainment purposes on a daily basis), sports, previews and “additional content.” Three out of five online TV viewers say the main reason for watching TV broadcasts online was “convenience.” More than a third choose online viewing in order to avoid commercials. The executive vice president of study co-author TNS says that even though only a small percentage of people say online viewing has reduced their traditional TV viewing, watching TV shows online “is going to have a huge impact on the way brands and advertisers communicate with viewers.”
THE SHIFTING SANDS OF TV: Here’s another one of those ‘buried’ statements in a press release. Digital video recording service TiVo reports that nearly two-thirds of ALL viewing during PREMIERE week was done on a time-shifted basis. What is equally interesting was that sports programming was NOT time shifted as much as other programs. For example, according to the company’s news release, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy in the number one spot had a LIVE rating of 7.399% but an additional RECORDED rating of a whopping 19.865%. NFL Football in that same week had a LIVE rating of 8.378% but its RECORDED rating was only 0.668%. That almost seems counter-intuitive. In the same vein, you would think that a contest program like ABC’s Dancing With the Stars would score high, but nope. It was the #4 program in premiere week in LIVE rating, but it was much lower (7.551%) when it came to RECORDED rating.
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: That all points out that there is no longer just one way to rank a television program. There is of course “Live” – Nielsen’s measure of who watched the program while it actually aired. Live-plus-SD (same day), which is the semi-official standard and Live-plus seven – all indicating recorded programming viewed after the actual live airing. Then there is the new measurement -- C3, which is who watched commercials either live or in a recorded form. But there is also the most Tivo’d shows, Video On Demand shows, and television show websites. And, from looking at a number of these over the past two weeks, they don’t always match up. Now, forgive me if I don’t get this 100% right; it obviously changes week to week; but there is some message in all this that smarter people than me could probably figure out.
For example, the top rated program, using Live&SD, for the week just ended (10/21) was CBS’s CSI, with 14.5 Million homes, followed by ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, with 14.4 Million homes, and then ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy with 13.5 Million homes. But then, as noted above, the most Tivo’d program by a wide margin in premiere week was Grey’s Anatomy. But it drops to number five when it comes to popular TV websites (at least for the week of October 6th) with only 3.26% of the Internet market share. The most popular website, by a wide margin, was NBC’s Deal or No Deal which didn’t even make the top 10 in ratings (it was #21) but which had a whopping 13.6% of the Internet market share, followed by Dancing With the Stars in the #2 position with 10.63% of the market share.
Consultants are your friends: Oh, well, maybe not all of them, but at least my clients would say that… I think. Actually, a study by a professor at Arizona State University says that despite all the stories about how news directors hated consultants, in actual fact most of them endorsed consulting as “one of the (field’s) greatest tools.” Critics charged that consultants represented “a rape of journalistic responsibility by upper management” because they urge stations to provide news that is “not what the public needs but what it wants.” But writing in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, professor Craig Allen quotes early reports from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association that “consultancy is the best thing that ever happened to talented newscasters.” And news directors who recognized that it is a business. Or, as Craig put it, “television news was a business-journalism dialectic long before this concept (consulting) was popularized in empirical studies.”
In the same journal publication, Indiana University professor Mike Conway reviews the beginnings of television from 1941 to 1948 when the focus was on “content and visualization” and argues that “news would be best served if today’s news executives take a page from television’s news pioneers and put the emphasis on the stories and remember the newscaster is best utilized as a guest in our living room.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: George Harrison became the final Beatle to make his solo albums available digitally on iTunes, Amazon.com, and the Zune Marketplace. The world is still waiting for the Beatles catalog to become available after Paul McCartney was quoted saying a deal was imminent in May. According to Ars Technica, the starting salary for a computer sciences graduate is $53,051. Frito-Lay which scored lots of publicity for its consumer generated television spot in last year’s Super Bowl is doing it again, calling for the best consumer-written song to be played in the game in February. At Tokyo’s Ceatec 2007 exhibition, Mitsubishi which is better known for its cars and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo mobile service provider unveiled a cell phone which has a built-in bad-breath monitor, along with a pulse meter, body-fat analyzer and pedometer. Senior executives prefer getting their news and information by print rather than by electronic means, according to a survey by Marketing firm Doremus along with the Financial Times. Pharmaceutical giant Merck reports that the number of people with Alzheimer’s is expected to soar over the next 40 years from 5.5 Million to 14 Million as baby boomers reach retirement.
HARRY POTTER’S CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY: I admit it. This is way over my head, but it’s so interesting, I thought it worth sharing. There is a substance called “metamaterial” which is used to make distortion free lenses, powerful microscopes AND “cloaking devices that make objects invisible.” Normally, light bends slightly when it hits material. “Metamaterials” bend light the OTHER way – what scientists call a “negative index of refraction.” Metamaterials kind of route the light around the object, making it invisible. Now, researchers at Princeton University have demonstrated “metamaterials” that are both higher performing and easier to make, which metamaterials and invisibility applicable and more of a reality.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
THE REPLACEMENT FOR NEWS
THE SHIFTING SANDS OF TV
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
CONSULTANTS ARE YOUR FRIENDS
COCKTAIL CHATTER
HARRY POTTER’S CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
SWEEPS: Hear that tick, tick, tick sound? It’s not the clock in the stomach of the alligator in Peter Pan. It’s the countdown to sweeps. Eight days to go. Here are some things for you to mull over as we go into sweeps.
The REPLACEMENT FOR NEWS: According to The Conference Board, television broadcasts have replaced news as the most widely viewed content online. That fact was buried in the board’s Consumer Internet Barometer which found that one out of six (16%) of American households use the Internet to view TV broadcasts. That number was double that of a year ago. The other online preferences from the survey are entertainment (three quarters of online households use the Internet for entertainment purposes on a daily basis), sports, previews and “additional content.” Three out of five online TV viewers say the main reason for watching TV broadcasts online was “convenience.” More than a third choose online viewing in order to avoid commercials. The executive vice president of study co-author TNS says that even though only a small percentage of people say online viewing has reduced their traditional TV viewing, watching TV shows online “is going to have a huge impact on the way brands and advertisers communicate with viewers.”
THE SHIFTING SANDS OF TV: Here’s another one of those ‘buried’ statements in a press release. Digital video recording service TiVo reports that nearly two-thirds of ALL viewing during PREMIERE week was done on a time-shifted basis. What is equally interesting was that sports programming was NOT time shifted as much as other programs. For example, according to the company’s news release, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy in the number one spot had a LIVE rating of 7.399% but an additional RECORDED rating of a whopping 19.865%. NFL Football in that same week had a LIVE rating of 8.378% but its RECORDED rating was only 0.668%. That almost seems counter-intuitive. In the same vein, you would think that a contest program like ABC’s Dancing With the Stars would score high, but nope. It was the #4 program in premiere week in LIVE rating, but it was much lower (7.551%) when it came to RECORDED rating.
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: That all points out that there is no longer just one way to rank a television program. There is of course “Live” – Nielsen’s measure of who watched the program while it actually aired. Live-plus-SD (same day), which is the semi-official standard and Live-plus seven – all indicating recorded programming viewed after the actual live airing. Then there is the new measurement -- C3, which is who watched commercials either live or in a recorded form. But there is also the most Tivo’d shows, Video On Demand shows, and television show websites. And, from looking at a number of these over the past two weeks, they don’t always match up. Now, forgive me if I don’t get this 100% right; it obviously changes week to week; but there is some message in all this that smarter people than me could probably figure out.
For example, the top rated program, using Live&SD, for the week just ended (10/21) was CBS’s CSI, with 14.5 Million homes, followed by ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, with 14.4 Million homes, and then ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy with 13.5 Million homes. But then, as noted above, the most Tivo’d program by a wide margin in premiere week was Grey’s Anatomy. But it drops to number five when it comes to popular TV websites (at least for the week of October 6th) with only 3.26% of the Internet market share. The most popular website, by a wide margin, was NBC’s Deal or No Deal which didn’t even make the top 10 in ratings (it was #21) but which had a whopping 13.6% of the Internet market share, followed by Dancing With the Stars in the #2 position with 10.63% of the market share.
Consultants are your friends: Oh, well, maybe not all of them, but at least my clients would say that… I think. Actually, a study by a professor at Arizona State University says that despite all the stories about how news directors hated consultants, in actual fact most of them endorsed consulting as “one of the (field’s) greatest tools.” Critics charged that consultants represented “a rape of journalistic responsibility by upper management” because they urge stations to provide news that is “not what the public needs but what it wants.” But writing in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, professor Craig Allen quotes early reports from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association that “consultancy is the best thing that ever happened to talented newscasters.” And news directors who recognized that it is a business. Or, as Craig put it, “television news was a business-journalism dialectic long before this concept (consulting) was popularized in empirical studies.”
In the same journal publication, Indiana University professor Mike Conway reviews the beginnings of television from 1941 to 1948 when the focus was on “content and visualization” and argues that “news would be best served if today’s news executives take a page from television’s news pioneers and put the emphasis on the stories and remember the newscaster is best utilized as a guest in our living room.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: George Harrison became the final Beatle to make his solo albums available digitally on iTunes, Amazon.com, and the Zune Marketplace. The world is still waiting for the Beatles catalog to become available after Paul McCartney was quoted saying a deal was imminent in May. According to Ars Technica, the starting salary for a computer sciences graduate is $53,051. Frito-Lay which scored lots of publicity for its consumer generated television spot in last year’s Super Bowl is doing it again, calling for the best consumer-written song to be played in the game in February. At Tokyo’s Ceatec 2007 exhibition, Mitsubishi which is better known for its cars and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo mobile service provider unveiled a cell phone which has a built-in bad-breath monitor, along with a pulse meter, body-fat analyzer and pedometer. Senior executives prefer getting their news and information by print rather than by electronic means, according to a survey by Marketing firm Doremus along with the Financial Times. Pharmaceutical giant Merck reports that the number of people with Alzheimer’s is expected to soar over the next 40 years from 5.5 Million to 14 Million as baby boomers reach retirement.
HARRY POTTER’S CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY: I admit it. This is way over my head, but it’s so interesting, I thought it worth sharing. There is a substance called “metamaterial” which is used to make distortion free lenses, powerful microscopes AND “cloaking devices that make objects invisible.” Normally, light bends slightly when it hits material. “Metamaterials” bend light the OTHER way – what scientists call a “negative index of refraction.” Metamaterials kind of route the light around the object, making it invisible. Now, researchers at Princeton University have demonstrated “metamaterials” that are both higher performing and easier to make, which metamaterials and invisibility applicable and more of a reality.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Message From Michael -- October 15, 2007
THE INTERNET AND TV
OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE SPECTRUM
COCKTAIL CHATTER – PUZZLES AND BEAUTY AND GAMING
THE AWARD WINNERS DINNER
NOTEWORTHY EVENTS TODAY
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE INTERNET AND TV: A study by networking giant Cisco Systems (the company that makes the routers used to connect computers) predicts that monthly Internet traffic in North America will increase 264% by 2011 to more than 7.8 Million Terabytes – again, MONTHLY. Just to remind you, a terabyte is a Million Megabytes or a Thousand Gigabytes. Much of that, of course, is coming in the form of video. Okay, I’m still wrestling with the fact that YouTube alone accounts for as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet did in 2000, according to Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell. That was from a Wall Street Journal commentary. Now, another article from WSJ quotes Larry Roberts, the original creator of ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet, as saying the Internet is ‘last-generation technology.’ In what may be one of the great quotes of the day, he says, “the Internet wasn’t designed for television… I know because I designed it.” He and former Cisco chief technology officer Len Bosack are trying to re-design the infrastructure of the Internet to cope with that 264% increase. One-time pirating website BitTorrent is doing the same thing, designing what it calls DNA (Delivery Network Accelerator) for your PC.
And they better work, because several recent studies indicate that, as one study put it, online video has gone mainstream. Microsoft’s digital agency Avenue A/ Razorfish reports that two-thirds of what it calls ‘connected customers’ (meaning people with broadband access) say they regularly watch video on YouTube and that nearly all of them (95%) report that they have watched an online video in the past three months. Further indication of the growing interest in online video comes from a study by Frank N. Magid and Associates which found that only a quarter (23%) of Millennial would rather watch video on TV instead of the Internet. More than a third (36%) of the 18-24 crowd say that the PC is “competing” for their entertainment time. Meanwhile Wayne Karrfalt reports on TVNewsday.com that most of the major TV groups now have a C-level executive dedicated to developing and monetizing online activities even though online activities only represent about 5% of the revenue pie for them.
And they’re not alone; BrightCove announced that it has launched a new service providing what it calls “broadcast quality online TV shows” using the BitTorrent technology mentioned above. Joost, as you will recall from last week’s MfM, has moved out of the beta stage and gone public. Vuze ‘Open Entertainment Platform’ which also promises high resolution video has opened up its platform to independent producers. Add to the expanding list Comcast’s Ziddio.com which focuses on consumer generated content. And, reportedly, today newly minted Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore is supposed to announce a major development to the CurrentTV site. Read Cynopsis and you will seek a weekly, but often daily, listing of new television series being released on either iTunes or UnBox.
And for good reason. The Interactive Advertising Bureau reports that Internet advertising in the second quarter of this year passed the $5 Billion mark for the first time. That’s the highest quarterly revenue reporting since 1996 and a 26% increase over the previous year. The first half of 2007 is more than $10 Billion with the yearly revenue expected to hit $21 Billion. The report tracks Internet advertising revenue starting in 1999 when the total for the year was $4.6 Billion. It nearly doubled the next year, 2000, but then declined for several years before starting its phenomenal growth in 2004. On the flip side (there’s always a flip side), a survey by Nielsen of 26,000 consumers in 47 markets worldwide found that advertising in old media scored much higher than advertising in new media. Nearly two thirds (63%) say they trust newspapers ads and more than half (56%) say they trust TV spots and magazine placements. But only a quarter (26%) trust banner ads and only a third (34%) trust search ads.
Indicative of the power of peer recommendations, the same study found the most trusted form of ‘advertising’ came from other consumer recommendations with more than three-quarters (78%) expressing confidence. And a warning to marketers everywhere, the Nielsen survey noted that some word-of-mouth experts report that bad experiences outnumber good ones by as many as five to one.
Just as an only semi-related side note, Raymond Kurzwell, the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, estimates that a human being’s functional memory is about 1.25 Terabytes.
OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE SPECTRUM: Two recent reports contain some interesting observations about Millennials and Baby Boomers. News Director Stacy Woefel of the University of Missouri’s KOMU-TV station writes about Millennials in the recent Radio Television News Directors’ Association magazine, The Communicator. In part, the story says Millennials want financial security, strong mentors and a feeling of being someone special. There is also a sense of entitlement along with unrealistic expectations. On the other end, a report by Mediamark Research Inc., found Baby Boomers are optimistic with four in ten (39%) saying they think their ‘households” will be better off financially a year from now and 90% of them saying they ‘themselves’ will be better off a year from now. More than half of Baby Boomers (55%) reported vote in an election, with a third (31%) undertaking a home remodeling project and less than half (41%) playing the lottery.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: U.S. consumers have lost more than $7 Billion to viruses, spyware and phishing, according to a survey by Consumer Reports. A group of M-I-T grads have designed a folding-wing plane, the Terrafugia, that they say will eventually be the prototype of a hybrid car-plane that would make George Jetson jealous. Makers of a puzzle called Eternity II, being sold at Toys R Us for $49.95, are offering $2 Million to someone who solves the puzzle which has 256 geometric shapes (sort of a successor to Rubic’s Cube) by December 31, 2007. And a study by researchers at the University of Toronto found that the “spatial gap” (the ability to process visual information from a wide variety of sources) between men and women can be closed if women spent time playing video games. According to Virtual Worlds Management (Yes, strange as it may seem, there is an organization aimed at managing virtual worlds), venture capital, technology and media firms have invested more than $1 Billion in 35 virtual worlds.
Okay, this one isn’t cocktail chatter, although it is, but it isn’t. Anyway, MfM readers who remember the Dove “Evolution” spot will want to see the newest one – Onslaught, which is a one-minute visual warning to mothers to “talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.” You can find it on YouTube or the official website, campaignforrealbeauty.com.
THE AWARD WINNERS DINNER: It’s tonight in New York, when the national Edward R. Murrow award winners will be honored. I just wanted to add my own Mazel Tov to the friends and winners at WKYT/ Lexington (Continuing Coverage); KEYE/ Austin (News Series); WSLS/ Roanoke (Newscast); WTVQ/ Lexington (Spot News); WAFF/ Huntsville (Website); and news director Frank Volpicella at KVUE/ Austin which won for Overall Excellence.
ALSO OF NOTE TODAY: Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch launches the company’s new business channel today. And today is blog action day when bloggers around the world are supposed to join in solidarity for the environment. You can visit the website blogactionday.com.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE SPECTRUM
COCKTAIL CHATTER – PUZZLES AND BEAUTY AND GAMING
THE AWARD WINNERS DINNER
NOTEWORTHY EVENTS TODAY
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
THE INTERNET AND TV: A study by networking giant Cisco Systems (the company that makes the routers used to connect computers) predicts that monthly Internet traffic in North America will increase 264% by 2011 to more than 7.8 Million Terabytes – again, MONTHLY. Just to remind you, a terabyte is a Million Megabytes or a Thousand Gigabytes. Much of that, of course, is coming in the form of video. Okay, I’m still wrestling with the fact that YouTube alone accounts for as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet did in 2000, according to Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell. That was from a Wall Street Journal commentary. Now, another article from WSJ quotes Larry Roberts, the original creator of ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet, as saying the Internet is ‘last-generation technology.’ In what may be one of the great quotes of the day, he says, “the Internet wasn’t designed for television… I know because I designed it.” He and former Cisco chief technology officer Len Bosack are trying to re-design the infrastructure of the Internet to cope with that 264% increase. One-time pirating website BitTorrent is doing the same thing, designing what it calls DNA (Delivery Network Accelerator) for your PC.
And they better work, because several recent studies indicate that, as one study put it, online video has gone mainstream. Microsoft’s digital agency Avenue A/ Razorfish reports that two-thirds of what it calls ‘connected customers’ (meaning people with broadband access) say they regularly watch video on YouTube and that nearly all of them (95%) report that they have watched an online video in the past three months. Further indication of the growing interest in online video comes from a study by Frank N. Magid and Associates which found that only a quarter (23%) of Millennial would rather watch video on TV instead of the Internet. More than a third (36%) of the 18-24 crowd say that the PC is “competing” for their entertainment time. Meanwhile Wayne Karrfalt reports on TVNewsday.com that most of the major TV groups now have a C-level executive dedicated to developing and monetizing online activities even though online activities only represent about 5% of the revenue pie for them.
And they’re not alone; BrightCove announced that it has launched a new service providing what it calls “broadcast quality online TV shows” using the BitTorrent technology mentioned above. Joost, as you will recall from last week’s MfM, has moved out of the beta stage and gone public. Vuze ‘Open Entertainment Platform’ which also promises high resolution video has opened up its platform to independent producers. Add to the expanding list Comcast’s Ziddio.com which focuses on consumer generated content. And, reportedly, today newly minted Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore is supposed to announce a major development to the CurrentTV site. Read Cynopsis and you will seek a weekly, but often daily, listing of new television series being released on either iTunes or UnBox.
And for good reason. The Interactive Advertising Bureau reports that Internet advertising in the second quarter of this year passed the $5 Billion mark for the first time. That’s the highest quarterly revenue reporting since 1996 and a 26% increase over the previous year. The first half of 2007 is more than $10 Billion with the yearly revenue expected to hit $21 Billion. The report tracks Internet advertising revenue starting in 1999 when the total for the year was $4.6 Billion. It nearly doubled the next year, 2000, but then declined for several years before starting its phenomenal growth in 2004. On the flip side (there’s always a flip side), a survey by Nielsen of 26,000 consumers in 47 markets worldwide found that advertising in old media scored much higher than advertising in new media. Nearly two thirds (63%) say they trust newspapers ads and more than half (56%) say they trust TV spots and magazine placements. But only a quarter (26%) trust banner ads and only a third (34%) trust search ads.
Indicative of the power of peer recommendations, the same study found the most trusted form of ‘advertising’ came from other consumer recommendations with more than three-quarters (78%) expressing confidence. And a warning to marketers everywhere, the Nielsen survey noted that some word-of-mouth experts report that bad experiences outnumber good ones by as many as five to one.
Just as an only semi-related side note, Raymond Kurzwell, the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, estimates that a human being’s functional memory is about 1.25 Terabytes.
OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE SPECTRUM: Two recent reports contain some interesting observations about Millennials and Baby Boomers. News Director Stacy Woefel of the University of Missouri’s KOMU-TV station writes about Millennials in the recent Radio Television News Directors’ Association magazine, The Communicator. In part, the story says Millennials want financial security, strong mentors and a feeling of being someone special. There is also a sense of entitlement along with unrealistic expectations. On the other end, a report by Mediamark Research Inc., found Baby Boomers are optimistic with four in ten (39%) saying they think their ‘households” will be better off financially a year from now and 90% of them saying they ‘themselves’ will be better off a year from now. More than half of Baby Boomers (55%) reported vote in an election, with a third (31%) undertaking a home remodeling project and less than half (41%) playing the lottery.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: U.S. consumers have lost more than $7 Billion to viruses, spyware and phishing, according to a survey by Consumer Reports. A group of M-I-T grads have designed a folding-wing plane, the Terrafugia, that they say will eventually be the prototype of a hybrid car-plane that would make George Jetson jealous. Makers of a puzzle called Eternity II, being sold at Toys R Us for $49.95, are offering $2 Million to someone who solves the puzzle which has 256 geometric shapes (sort of a successor to Rubic’s Cube) by December 31, 2007. And a study by researchers at the University of Toronto found that the “spatial gap” (the ability to process visual information from a wide variety of sources) between men and women can be closed if women spent time playing video games. According to Virtual Worlds Management (Yes, strange as it may seem, there is an organization aimed at managing virtual worlds), venture capital, technology and media firms have invested more than $1 Billion in 35 virtual worlds.
Okay, this one isn’t cocktail chatter, although it is, but it isn’t. Anyway, MfM readers who remember the Dove “Evolution” spot will want to see the newest one – Onslaught, which is a one-minute visual warning to mothers to “talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.” You can find it on YouTube or the official website, campaignforrealbeauty.com.
THE AWARD WINNERS DINNER: It’s tonight in New York, when the national Edward R. Murrow award winners will be honored. I just wanted to add my own Mazel Tov to the friends and winners at WKYT/ Lexington (Continuing Coverage); KEYE/ Austin (News Series); WSLS/ Roanoke (Newscast); WTVQ/ Lexington (Spot News); WAFF/ Huntsville (Website); and news director Frank Volpicella at KVUE/ Austin which won for Overall Excellence.
ALSO OF NOTE TODAY: Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch launches the company’s new business channel today. And today is blog action day when bloggers around the world are supposed to join in solidarity for the environment. You can visit the website blogactionday.com.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Message From Michael -- October 8, 2007
TRUST IS TO BE EARNED
THE SWEET SPOT
MOST EXPENSIVE ADS ON TV
MOST EXPENSIVE TV ON ADS
GOOD NEWS FOR NEWS
FOLLOW-UPS – JOOST AND LINKEDIN
COCKTAIL CHATTER – MALLS AND CUBA
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
TRUST IS TO BE EARNED: And apparently the media hasn’t earned it, at least in developed countries. The Edelman public relations firm did a worldwide survey – what it called a Trust Barometer -- to find out what people thought of business, media, religion, government, and non-governmental organizations. The question was “how much do you trust each institution to do what’s right.” Interestingly, the media scored lower (37%) than any other institution in developed countries (defined as Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States). Yet the media scored the second highest level of trust (56%), just behind business (60%) in the developing countries (defined as Brazil, China, India, Poland, Mexico and Russia).
Just for the record, in developed countries the scores go like this: Non-governmental organizations, NGO’s, scored the highest (53%), followed by business (47%), government and religion (both at 38%) and media (37%). In developing countries, it goes like this: Business (60%), media (56%), NGO’s (53%), government and religion (both at 46%).
THE SWEET SPOT: The language is a little convoluted, but one of the many messages that I found particularly interesting from the report is this one: “the vertical axis – the top-down, one-way dissemination by an authoritative voice of precise, controlled messages – has been firmly intersected by a horizontal axis of a continuous, messy, powerful, peer-to-peer conversation.” Notice – not replaced, but augmented. According to company President and CEO Richard Edelman, it’s at the nexus of these “vertical and horizontal axes” that companies will find the ‘sweet spot’ of communications and trust.
The report also indicates, yet again, the power of Word of Mouth, which we have talked about before in MfM. In the European Union, North America and Latin America, “a person like me” is the most credible deliverer of information about a company. In Asia, “a person like me” is second only to physicians. And in many countries, a conversation with a friend or peer is as trusted a source of information about a company as an article in a newspaper or TV news coverage. However, newspapers, TV and radio remain more credible than new media sources like blogs or a company website. The report notes that it used to be that ‘a person like me’ was one of our neighbors or people in our social circle, but now the commonality is that they share our interests, regardless of geographic location.
Finally, and I shouldn’t say finally because there is so much in the report, the survey says the “new green” – that is, the new hot button issue – is how companies treat their employees. “Fair treatment of employees” is the most or second most important activity (behind the environment) for a socially responsible company to engage in.
MOST EXPENSIVE ADS ON TV: Last year, it was ABC’s Desperate Housewives that took the top spot. This year, according to Advertising Age, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy at $419,000 per 30-second spot is the most expensive show on network TV. Followed by: NBC’s Sunday Night Football ($358K), Fox’s The Simpson’s ($315K), NBC’s Heroes ($296K), ABC’s Desperate Housewives ($270K), CBS’s CSI ($248K), CBS’s Two and Half Men ($231K), and tied for 9th place at $208,000 per spot was CBS’s Survivor: China and ABC’s Private Practice. Of course, reporter Brian Steinberg notes that all of them will be toppled by American Idol in the spring.
MOST EXPENSIVE TV ON ADS: I’ll admit it. Sometimes my headlines are a stretch. In this case, we’re talking about the top media companies. Two lists came out. Both reporting that Time Warner is the biggest media company in the world. The oddity is the ‘slight’ difference in numbers. Advertising Age puts TW’s gross revenues at just under $34 Billion. Fortune magazine puts it at just under $45 Billion. Both lists also put the Walt Disney Company at the top of their lists, but again there is a wide disparity in numbers, with Advertising Age putting Disney’s revenues in 2006 at $16.8 Billion while Fortune magazine puts Disney’s revenues at $34.2 Billion. The disparity (I think) is that Advertising Age lists only the net U.S. media revenues while Fortune is listing worldwide revenues. That doesn’t quite explain why Advertising Age puts Comcast in the number two spot with revenues of about $27.4 Billion, but Comcast doesn’t even make Fortune magazine’s list of top entertainment companies.
In any case, the lists do provide some interesting fodder. For example, Time Warner as the top media company in the world ‘only’ has one-tenth the revenues of the world’s largest company – Wal-Mart which had more than $351 Billion in revenue in 2006. Staggering, isn’t it? In fact, even based on the larger revenue figures, Time Warner only makes it to the 48th spot on the Fortune 500 list. However, even so, the revenue of Time Warner at the top spot in the Advertising Age list is 100 times the revenue of the media company occupying the final 100th spot on the media company list – Schurz Communications at $300 Million. The editors at Advertising Age also note that the cost of entry to the top 100 media list has grown significantly over the last two decades. In 1986, a ‘mere’ $100 Million would have gained a company entry into the top 100 list; in 1999, that figure rose to $200 Million; and now in this latest report, it’s $300 Million.
GOOD NEWS FOR NEWS: It was only one line in the Associated Press report, and it was buried at the end, but it’s too interesting not to report. According to a poll by the AP and survey research firm Ipsos (which has the somewhat insulting slogan – Nobody’s Unpredictable), more than a quarter (28%) of the American public would like to see more news on television. This is up significantly from two years ago when it was 17%. This is the same poll that found nearly two-thirds of the American public (62%) believe television is getting worse and that nearly three-quarters (71%) believe there are too many reality shows on TV.
FOLLOW-UPS: TV-on-computer/ video-streaming site Joost has gone public. Regular readers of MfM will remember that we were part of the Beta testing of the site which up to now had been by invite only. But now it’s all aboard. Al-Jazeera says it is close to inking a deal with a major distributor in America. The British Broadcasting Company has launched the Americanized version of its World Now television newscast at 7:00 p.m. EST. After a week of watching, what I noticed most was not just that the report had a much broader worldwide perspective, but the commercials which included a spot about Qatar as the financial center of the world, Turkish Airways as connecting the world, and tourist attractions in India. As long as I am making some personal observations, LinkedIn, a social networking site for the business community, which we’ve mentioned in previous MfM’s appears to be taking off. In the last month, I have had more requests to link up from former students, and others, than I can remember receiving in the last year.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: In what must signal the end of an era, the International Council of Shopping Centers reports that only one enclosed shopping mall (the one-time haven of teenagers everywhere) was built in 2006 and none are planned for this year. According to an article in The New York Times by Stanford journalism professor and technology writer G. Paschal Zachary, Internet behemoth Google uses at least 450,000 computers in its search operations.
There is a website, cubaheadlines.com, which, as you would expect, has news and editorials about Cuba. All fine and dandy. But the part I love is that the banner at the top of the page is a map of Cuba (to be expected) a picture of Havana harbor (to be expected) and emblazoned across all this, the true symbol of Cuba – what looks to me like a 1953 Packard, in mint condition of course.
And finally, website Entrepreneur.com named ten businesses facing possible (and that’s the debatable word) extinction in the next ten years: Record stores (no explanation needed), camera film manufacturing (again, no explanation needed), crop dusters (commercial airlines are taking over); gay bars (because of greater acceptance in society); newspapers (at least the printing press plant part, but not the Internet part); pay phones whose numbers have dropped by half over the last decade (not just because of cell phones, but because cities are eliminating them because they’re gathering points for drug dealers); used bookstores (you can find what you want on the Internet); piggy banks (as we go to a paperless society); coin operated arcades which have dropped from 10,000 to 3,000 in the last decade because of video games at home and online; and -- wishful thinking -- telemarketers whose sales have been stagnant because of the national Do Not Call list, but who still managed to bring in $393 Billion last year.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
THE SWEET SPOT
MOST EXPENSIVE ADS ON TV
MOST EXPENSIVE TV ON ADS
GOOD NEWS FOR NEWS
FOLLOW-UPS – JOOST AND LINKEDIN
COCKTAIL CHATTER – MALLS AND CUBA
We encourage people to pass on copies of Message from Michael. But if you would like to get your own copy, you can subscribe by sending an e-mail to Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “subscribe-MM” in the subject line.
TRUST IS TO BE EARNED: And apparently the media hasn’t earned it, at least in developed countries. The Edelman public relations firm did a worldwide survey – what it called a Trust Barometer -- to find out what people thought of business, media, religion, government, and non-governmental organizations. The question was “how much do you trust each institution to do what’s right.” Interestingly, the media scored lower (37%) than any other institution in developed countries (defined as Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States). Yet the media scored the second highest level of trust (56%), just behind business (60%) in the developing countries (defined as Brazil, China, India, Poland, Mexico and Russia).
Just for the record, in developed countries the scores go like this: Non-governmental organizations, NGO’s, scored the highest (53%), followed by business (47%), government and religion (both at 38%) and media (37%). In developing countries, it goes like this: Business (60%), media (56%), NGO’s (53%), government and religion (both at 46%).
THE SWEET SPOT: The language is a little convoluted, but one of the many messages that I found particularly interesting from the report is this one: “the vertical axis – the top-down, one-way dissemination by an authoritative voice of precise, controlled messages – has been firmly intersected by a horizontal axis of a continuous, messy, powerful, peer-to-peer conversation.” Notice – not replaced, but augmented. According to company President and CEO Richard Edelman, it’s at the nexus of these “vertical and horizontal axes” that companies will find the ‘sweet spot’ of communications and trust.
The report also indicates, yet again, the power of Word of Mouth, which we have talked about before in MfM. In the European Union, North America and Latin America, “a person like me” is the most credible deliverer of information about a company. In Asia, “a person like me” is second only to physicians. And in many countries, a conversation with a friend or peer is as trusted a source of information about a company as an article in a newspaper or TV news coverage. However, newspapers, TV and radio remain more credible than new media sources like blogs or a company website. The report notes that it used to be that ‘a person like me’ was one of our neighbors or people in our social circle, but now the commonality is that they share our interests, regardless of geographic location.
Finally, and I shouldn’t say finally because there is so much in the report, the survey says the “new green” – that is, the new hot button issue – is how companies treat their employees. “Fair treatment of employees” is the most or second most important activity (behind the environment) for a socially responsible company to engage in.
MOST EXPENSIVE ADS ON TV: Last year, it was ABC’s Desperate Housewives that took the top spot. This year, according to Advertising Age, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy at $419,000 per 30-second spot is the most expensive show on network TV. Followed by: NBC’s Sunday Night Football ($358K), Fox’s The Simpson’s ($315K), NBC’s Heroes ($296K), ABC’s Desperate Housewives ($270K), CBS’s CSI ($248K), CBS’s Two and Half Men ($231K), and tied for 9th place at $208,000 per spot was CBS’s Survivor: China and ABC’s Private Practice. Of course, reporter Brian Steinberg notes that all of them will be toppled by American Idol in the spring.
MOST EXPENSIVE TV ON ADS: I’ll admit it. Sometimes my headlines are a stretch. In this case, we’re talking about the top media companies. Two lists came out. Both reporting that Time Warner is the biggest media company in the world. The oddity is the ‘slight’ difference in numbers. Advertising Age puts TW’s gross revenues at just under $34 Billion. Fortune magazine puts it at just under $45 Billion. Both lists also put the Walt Disney Company at the top of their lists, but again there is a wide disparity in numbers, with Advertising Age putting Disney’s revenues in 2006 at $16.8 Billion while Fortune magazine puts Disney’s revenues at $34.2 Billion. The disparity (I think) is that Advertising Age lists only the net U.S. media revenues while Fortune is listing worldwide revenues. That doesn’t quite explain why Advertising Age puts Comcast in the number two spot with revenues of about $27.4 Billion, but Comcast doesn’t even make Fortune magazine’s list of top entertainment companies.
In any case, the lists do provide some interesting fodder. For example, Time Warner as the top media company in the world ‘only’ has one-tenth the revenues of the world’s largest company – Wal-Mart which had more than $351 Billion in revenue in 2006. Staggering, isn’t it? In fact, even based on the larger revenue figures, Time Warner only makes it to the 48th spot on the Fortune 500 list. However, even so, the revenue of Time Warner at the top spot in the Advertising Age list is 100 times the revenue of the media company occupying the final 100th spot on the media company list – Schurz Communications at $300 Million. The editors at Advertising Age also note that the cost of entry to the top 100 media list has grown significantly over the last two decades. In 1986, a ‘mere’ $100 Million would have gained a company entry into the top 100 list; in 1999, that figure rose to $200 Million; and now in this latest report, it’s $300 Million.
GOOD NEWS FOR NEWS: It was only one line in the Associated Press report, and it was buried at the end, but it’s too interesting not to report. According to a poll by the AP and survey research firm Ipsos (which has the somewhat insulting slogan – Nobody’s Unpredictable), more than a quarter (28%) of the American public would like to see more news on television. This is up significantly from two years ago when it was 17%. This is the same poll that found nearly two-thirds of the American public (62%) believe television is getting worse and that nearly three-quarters (71%) believe there are too many reality shows on TV.
FOLLOW-UPS: TV-on-computer/ video-streaming site Joost has gone public. Regular readers of MfM will remember that we were part of the Beta testing of the site which up to now had been by invite only. But now it’s all aboard. Al-Jazeera says it is close to inking a deal with a major distributor in America. The British Broadcasting Company has launched the Americanized version of its World Now television newscast at 7:00 p.m. EST. After a week of watching, what I noticed most was not just that the report had a much broader worldwide perspective, but the commercials which included a spot about Qatar as the financial center of the world, Turkish Airways as connecting the world, and tourist attractions in India. As long as I am making some personal observations, LinkedIn, a social networking site for the business community, which we’ve mentioned in previous MfM’s appears to be taking off. In the last month, I have had more requests to link up from former students, and others, than I can remember receiving in the last year.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: In what must signal the end of an era, the International Council of Shopping Centers reports that only one enclosed shopping mall (the one-time haven of teenagers everywhere) was built in 2006 and none are planned for this year. According to an article in The New York Times by Stanford journalism professor and technology writer G. Paschal Zachary, Internet behemoth Google uses at least 450,000 computers in its search operations.
There is a website, cubaheadlines.com, which, as you would expect, has news and editorials about Cuba. All fine and dandy. But the part I love is that the banner at the top of the page is a map of Cuba (to be expected) a picture of Havana harbor (to be expected) and emblazoned across all this, the true symbol of Cuba – what looks to me like a 1953 Packard, in mint condition of course.
And finally, website Entrepreneur.com named ten businesses facing possible (and that’s the debatable word) extinction in the next ten years: Record stores (no explanation needed), camera film manufacturing (again, no explanation needed), crop dusters (commercial airlines are taking over); gay bars (because of greater acceptance in society); newspapers (at least the printing press plant part, but not the Internet part); pay phones whose numbers have dropped by half over the last decade (not just because of cell phones, but because cities are eliminating them because they’re gathering points for drug dealers); used bookstores (you can find what you want on the Internet); piggy banks (as we go to a paperless society); coin operated arcades which have dropped from 10,000 to 3,000 in the last decade because of video games at home and online; and -- wishful thinking -- telemarketers whose sales have been stagnant because of the national Do Not Call list, but who still managed to bring in $393 Billion last year.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, e-mail Michael@MediaConsultant.tv with the word “unsubscribe-MM” in the subject line. Also, back issues of MfM are available at the website, media-consultant.blogspot.com. You can reach me directly at my website MediaConsultant.tv.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
