Message From Michael -- May 14, 2007

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SWEEPS

THE PRESIDENT AND LOCAL TV

THE TWO SIDES OF THE TECHNOLOGY COIN

DROWNING IN DIGITAL VIDEO

DELIVER ON YOUR PROMISES

COCKTAIL CHATTER


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SWEEPS: The countdown begins. Coming into the final week of sweeps. For those of you in diary markets, a reminder that your friends at Nielsen often over-sample the last two weeks to compensate for low returns in the first two weeks. And be prepared for the American Idol steamroller in the last two days of the book. Tuesday, May 22nd, will be the last performance show and Wednesday, May 23rd, will be the last results show. The other networks have pretty well given up trying to run anything against Fox those nights. That doesn’t mean you should, but you have to give those viewers a strong reason to come back to your late news.

THE PRESIDENT AND LOCAL TV: So, did you or your local television carry President Bush’s announcement that he was vetoing the Iraq War funding bill. I was curious after three out of the four news stations here in Atlanta carried the announcement. (Meredith-owned CBS affiliate WGCL-TV, did not.) You may recall the President took to the airwaves at the odd time of about 6:10 p.m. EST/ 5:10 p.m. CST—during local news time. So, I did a random check of more than two dozen stations around the country – different size markets, different groups and different time zones. Only a quarter (6) of the stations carried the announcement live. Three stations had stories about the impending announcement in their early newscast but not the actual live announcement. Another three stations had nothing, period, about the announcement in either their early evening or late newscasts. One station had a background package in its early evening newscast but nothing about the actual announcement in their late newscast. Only two stations led with the veto announcement in the late newscast. Six stations carried the story in their first block of news, but most carried it in the second block. Three stations carried the story in the second quarter hour. And most stations did it as a voice over-soundbite.

A couple of interesting side notes. The average length of the first block of all the newscasts was 10 minutes, with a low of 6 minutes and a high of 15 minutes. The median time was also about 10 minutes. About a quarter of the stations had image spots in their newscasts and a little more than a quarter had topicals for their special reports in their own newscasts.

THE TWO SIDES OF THE TECHNOLOGY COIN: A study by the Pew Internet and the American Life project shows (at least in my view) that there are more people who don’t care that much about information and communication technology (ICT) than there are people deeply involved in the technology. The research group identified ten groups of people based on a survey of 4,000 people and their technological attitudes, actions and assets. The ‘elite tech users’ consisted of four groups and accounted for nearly a third (31%) of the population. But there were four groups who fell into the ‘few tech assets’ category and they comprised nearly half (49%) of the population. The ‘middle of the road’ tech users accounted for 20%. On the high end were the so-called ‘omnivores’ who have lots of information gadgets and services which they use “voraciously” to take part in the Web 2.0 world. These are the you-tubing, myspacing, blogging, user-generating group, I guess. That’s only 8% of the population. On the low end are the ones ‘off the network’ who don’t have cell phones or Internet. These are mostly older people who are “content” with old media. That was double though the high end group, accounting for 15% of the population.

The next-to-the-top group are the ‘connectors’ who have feature-packed cell phones, go online frequently and have a high level of satisfaction with all the technology. That was only 7% though. On the flip side of that, just one up from the bottom of the scale, was the ‘indifferents’ group who had cell phones and online access, but used them only intermittently and with some annoyance. This group accounted for 11%. The other high end users were the ‘lackluster veterans’ (8%) and the ‘productivity enhancers’ (also 8%). The other low end users were the ‘light but satisfied’ (15%) and the ‘inexperienced experimenters” (8%). In the middle were the ‘mobile centrics’ and the ‘connected but hassled’, both at 10%.

Wondering which group you fall in? The good folks at Pew have provided the questionnaire online so you can test yourself and find out. Go to http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/ and discover your ‘typology.’ I was a ‘connector’ – no surprise, no surprise.

DROWNING IN DIGITAL VIDEO: More than 60% of Internet traffic comes in the form of digital video, according to Cambridge, England, firm CacheLogic which sells Internet services. And a Carnegie Melon University computer scientist says he thinks that figure will reach 98% in a few short years. You think your downloading is slow now? Wait till then. However, scientist Hui Zhang says the solution may be peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. Most P2P technology is associated with places like Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent known for pirating copyrighted material. But Zhang says he is close to figuring out a way to legitimize the P2P approach, which shares data by breaking up big blocks into little blocks that are stored on multiple computers so no one computer or broadband pipe becomes clogged. He calls his system “chunkyspread.”

Zhang’s proposal is one of ten emerging technologies cited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review publication. Others include a ‘mobile augmented reality application’ being developed by the Finnish based Nokia Research Center. It basically puts a GPS sensor, a compass and what is called ‘accelerometers’ into cell phones so that you can point your cell phone camera at a building, for example, and it will tell you not only where you are but what businesses, restaurants and other attractions are nearby. Or, how about having that already small digital camera of yours become even smaller and faster. Two electrical and computer professors at Rice University have developed a camera that ‘reimagines’ digital imaging. Instead of, for example, a four megapixel digital camera using four million image sensors to catch a picture, their camera uses a single image sensor that reconstructs the image using a novel algorithm. Researchers at Harvard University have created light focusing antennas that could lead to DVD’s that hold hundreds of movies. They have figured out a way around what’s called the ‘diffraction limit’ in the law of physics which, as its name implies, limits the light beams used to record DVD images. So, it seems that while Zhang is figuring out how to cope with the growing digital video flood, these other scientists are figuring out how to add to the flood waters.

DELIVER ON YOUR PROMISES: A study by a professor at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business appears to prove a marketing maxim, but with a twist. The maxim ‘promise what you can deliver and deliver what you promise’ is a warning against over-hyping. In a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, assistant professor Vanessa Patrick found that people notice it when they feel worse than they expected, but they don’t notice it when they feel better than they expected. She and her team have even coined a term for it – affective misforecasting. In brief, the team showed different sets of volunteers a film clip and a music clip. Some were told the clips got a five star rating and some were told the clips got a one star rating, although the clips were actually somewhere in the middle. The people told that the clips had a five-star rating noted that they were not as good as expected, but the people told the clips had only a one-star rating did not note that the clips were better than expected. Aside from warning about the dangers of over-selling, the study authors say business can help themselves by helping consumers take notice of when they feel better than expected. For example, grocery stores printing messages on their receipts telling consumers how much they saved.

COCKTAIL CHATTER: Even though it was created by Americans, nearly two-thirds (61%) of the people who are ‘active residents’ of virtual world Second Life are European. (A personal anecdote – when I explored the Second Life world on a recent visit, I was the only American. Everybody I ran into was from Europe or Asia.) There are now more cell phones than people in the 142 million population Russia, according to research firm eMarketer. Nearly a quarter (23%) of the American public believe “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior,” according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. That is actually down from when the question was first asked in 1987 when just under half (43%) agreed with that statement. The Miami Herald reports that Floridians can now be buried with their pets, thanks to a law sponsored by a state representative who wanted to be buried with the ashes of his Labrador retriever who died ten years ago. The total cost of all civil lawsuits (torts) in the U.S. in 2005 was $261 Billion, which averages out to $880 per person, according to a study by management consulting firm Towers-Perrin Tillinghast.

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