Message From Michael
January 10, 2007

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS
HIGHLIGHTS AND LOW LIGHTS
FACTS AND FACTOIDS

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THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: How will history record the year 2006? Will it be the year of YOU, as TIME magazine says, with YouTube and consumer generated content. Or will it be recorded as the year computer based social networks such as MySpace replaced neighborhood based social gatherings. Or even more dramatic when Second Life avatars replaced real life people. Interactivity. Connectivity. Wireless mobility. Broadband breakthrough. I feel a sudden urge to break into a rendition of We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel. Instead I thought I would review the reviews of 2006 by various publications. What follows are some facts and factoids, highlights and low lights. See what you think.

The most watched single telecast of the year, according to Nielsen, was – as always – the SuperBowl with a 41.6 rating. But the top rated program of the year was Fox’s American Idol which averaged a 17.2 rating. In fact, it took the top two slots with ABC’s Dancing With The Stars coming in third with a 12.7. And the top ‘time shifted’ primetime TV program was NBC’s Studio 60 with a 10.9 rating.Not too surprisingly, none of those TV shows made the American Film Institute’s list of TV programs of the year, although NBC’s Heroes which was the second most watched ‘time shifted’ program, according to Nielsen, did make the list along with Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, Elizabeth I, Friday Night Lights, The Office, South Park, 24, The West Wing and The Wire.

The most watched news story of the year, according to the Pew Research Center, was rising gasoline prices with 69% of the public telling the researchers in May, just before the summer driving season, that they were following this story “very closely.” In its list of the top news interest stories of the year, the British officials stopping a terrorist plot to blow up planes coming to the U.S. was second, with 54% saying they were watching this ‘very closely’ when it broke in August. The 12 miners trapped in a West Virginia coal mine was the third most closely watched story (47%), followed by the mid-term elections (46% in November), the school shootings in Pennsylvania (46% in October). North Korea’s announcement that it had tested a nuclear bomb (45% in October) actually beat out the situation in Iraq (44% in November).For writer Alexandra Berzon writing in Red Herring, which covers technology, 2006 was “the year of spamming dangerously and zombies in your home.” Spam increased 30% in 2006, according to her report, accounting for 90% of all e-mails. The even bigger development was the zombies taking over and remotely controlling computers and networks – a development that accounted for 85% of ALL spam on the Internet. Anti-spam company Commtouch says on one given day, zombies took over 8 million hosts and sent out a Billion spam messages in a few hours.

The top Box office movie of the year, according to Nielsen, was Pirates of the Caribbean which took in $423 Million. Far behind in the number two spot was the animated movie Cars which took in $244 Million. For comparison purposes, the top box office documentary movie was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth which took in just under $24 Million. Consolation for the former vice president though is the fact that the American Film Institute cited the movie as one of the eight most significant moments in film and television this year, arguing that the movie raised the level of debate around the world over global warming.

The hottest DVD of 2006 was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.Dirty Harry, a/k/a Clint Eastwood, was called a “national treasure” by the American Film Institute in its list of most significant moments. The institute calls his two movies, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, “one of the great motion picture experiences of the new century… an epic reminder that the American viewpoint is not the only human perspective.” The Institute, along with just about everybody else, cited the emergence of YouTube as a significant development “when the audience is both producer and distributor.” On the television site, the AFI declared that TV actually does have some sense of shame and provided as proof, the decision not to air the O.J. Simpson interview on how he would have killed his wife. The institute called the ‘migration’ of TV news to the Internet and the migration from “fact to fiction,” as significant moments for 2006, citing The Colbert Report as an example of the “fusion of journalism and comedy.”

The producers of The Colbert Report can also claim “credit” for producing most of 2006’s most popular words, according to website Dictionary.com. According to a survey of its users, the word “truthiness” was voted ‘word of the year.’ Other top voter getters, also from the show, were Lincolnish, Wikiality, it-getter, grinchitude, factinista, and superstantial. The words love and sex were also voted in as top words along with the word defenestrate, which is defined as a transitive verb meaning ‘to throw out a window.’ The word ‘love’ was the most searched for word on the website, followed by Affect, Effect, good, beautiful, metaphor, integrity, experience, irony and happy.

Media Web named New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristoff the print journalist of the year and NBC’s Brian Williams the broadcast journalist of the year. But the big announcement was the Online Journalist of the year – Brian Stelter, the 21-year-old Towson (Maryland) University student who founded the blogsite TVNewser.com – arguably the most influential TV blogsite in the country. Stelter is credited with breaking several major stories, including CBS’s publicity department sending out a touched up publicity photo showing a slimmed down Katie Couric. Aside from the fact the site gets 250,000 unique visitors and 900,000 page views a month is the fact that Brian Williams, CNN chief Jonathon Klein and other ‘movers and shakers’ read him and call him.

Back to Nielsen, the top selling album is Walt Disney’s High School Musical Soundtrack with sales of nearly 3.5 Million, beating out Rascall Flatts’ Me and My Gang (3 Million) and Carrie Underwood’s Some Hearts (2.5 Million). The top song played on radio stations in 2006 was Mary J. Bilge’s Be Without You (395 Thousand), followed by Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten (336 Thousand) and Sean Paul’s Temperature (324 Thousand). The top ringtone sold for mobile phones was Eminem’s Akon Shake That (1.2 Million) followed by Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back (1.1 Million). And, no, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t know them all either.

The New York Times’ technology writer Stuart Elliott says one of the high points of the advertising year in 2006 was Phillips Electronics sole sponsorship in magazines Gourmet and The Week, as well as the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams which resulted in an 8% higher rating and 4,000 “praise filled e-mails.” Others taking part in the single sponsorship concept were Ford Motor Company, Match.com, and Nike. One of the low points was a spot showing a Blinged-out Cadillac Escalade as the main attraction at a ritzy fashion show. The problem? It was placed in the SuperBowl which, as Elliott put it, made about as much sense as arranging a product place in The Devil Wears Prada for Hungry-Man Dinners. The ad agency was fired.

Of course, one of the big movements in advertising in 2006 was the growth in viral videos, not just the home-grown version, but the million-dollar ad agency versions. All designed to get attention. One of the best versions I have seen is the Smirnoff “Tea Partay” viral video ad which shows a bunch of rich white boys and girls in boat shoes and clothes doing a gangsta rap style video.On the P.R. side of the fence, in 2006, Businessweek’s Phil Mintz points to Hewlett Packard’s in-house investigation into leaks to the media which brought out the practice of “pretexting” in which people impersonate others on the phone or on-line in order to obtain personal records. Of course, the O.J. Simpson situation made the list. But as an example of doing something wrong and something right, Mintz cites Wal-Mart. Its PR firm, Edelman, created a fake blog about Jim and Laura taking a cross country trip visiting Wal Mart stores. On the flip side, its generic drugs program generated a lot of positive pub.

Back to the news side, the Pew Research Center said there were several news stories in 2006 in which public opinion had an impact, including the Democrats regaining control of Congress in large part because of the “deepening gloom” about the situation in Iraq as well as what the authors of the report call the “stockpiling scandal” of Congressmen being investigated. Other examples of where public opinion had an impact were the decision to stop a Dubai firm from taking over control of some U.S. ports, Vice President Dick Cheney’s quail hunting incident, and the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, with the public still supporting Israel.Under a heading which the Pew folks called, “Dogs That Didn’t Bark in 2006,” the authors cite the bi-partisan panel report on Iraq which just didn’t register with Americans; indifference to the immigration issue; the deaths in Darfur which only 13% of Americans said they followed closely; gay marriage, where although 54% say they favor legal arrangements for gay and lesbian couples, it just was not an overriding concern for voters; the Abramoff bribery case which the researchers say failed to ignite public outrage; and lastly, Katie Couric’s move to CBS which… “despite an unprecedented buildup… public interest remained restrained.”

Lastly, in an article in USA Today, reporter Kevin Maney argues that 2006 may be the year of “you” but 2007 may be the year to get over it. The techie buzz phrase of the year was ‘user generated’ content created by ‘users’ who, in a less politically correct age, would have been called ‘amateurs,’ says Maney. Even some major companies are ‘hyper-ventilating’ over user-generated advertising. And there are some good examples of user-generated content, he says, such as Curriki which is sort of a Wikipedia version of online textbooks for grades K through 12, and Wize.com which is a user-generated version of Consumer Reports. But he argues, “somewhere along the line, after the publicity surge, we realize that what came to pass was actually more evolutionary.” Garage bands, personal journals, community theaters and county fairs are all precursors. He says there is no doubt this is impacting media, entertainment and society, but in the end, reporters and editors will still have jobs to go to and roles to play, and we will all move “on to the next big thing.” I should say this is not meant as commentary, but just as a final thought. Something for you to think about. And, if you want, comment on. Contact me. In the next edition of MfM, I am going to review some of the trends and forecasts making the rounds for 2007.

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