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.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Message From Michael -- October 1, 2007
DON’T COUNT OUT DEAD TREE TECHNOLOGY
ONLINE VIDEO IS LIKE HAVING YOUR OWN DVR
ADVERTISING AND RODNEY DANGERFIELD
MONEY MAKING MEDIA MILLIONAIRES
COCKTAIL CHATTER
DON’T COUNT OUT DEAD TREE TECHNOLOGY: That wasn’t exactly the point of a MediaWeek Special Report looking at the 2008 media outlook, but when you crunch the numbers, like I did, you are reminded just how much of the advertising dollars they account for. Newspapers and magazines together account for nearly as much advertising spending ($73.41 Billion projected for 2007) as all of television (network, cable, spot) and radio combined ($76.77 Billion). Of course, they’re growing at a much slower rate than broadcasting. I am not going to try and summarize the report here, but instead offer a brief overview and a different way of looking at the numbers. The report offers three projections for growth from Price Waterhouse Cooper, Veronis Suhler Stevenson and ZenithOptimedia. I averaged the three to come up with a projected growth and then projected what 2008 means in actual numbers. (Yes, I know, I don’t have a life.) And I apologize, but there’s lots of numbers coming up.
Low man on the growth totem pole of course are newspapers which actually showed a decline from 2006 to 2007 in circulation and revenue, and are only expected to grow an average 2/3rds of one percent in 2008. But at around $49 Billion, it is still #1 and the 600-pound gorilla of the advertising picture. I have to confess that I didn’t realize that magazines (which comes in #2) accounted for such a huge part of the advertising dollar ($24.85 Billion projected for 2007). But, again, growth is pretty low, with an average of 4% projected for 2008. By comparison, TV in all its forms (network, cable and spot) is expected to average between 6.5% to 7%. Cable TV leads the pack at $20.2 Billion projected in 2007 and an average growth rate that will put it at roughly $21.63 Billion in 2008. Network TV comes in next with $18.45 Billion projected in 2007 and a projected growth rate that will put it at $19.68 Billion in 2008. And finally, Spot TV with a projected $18.3 Billion in 2007 growing to $19.5 Billion in 2008. Another thing I didn’t know (there’s so much I don’t know) is that radio advertising is actually larger than any of the individual TV segments, at least in 2007 with $19.82 Billion. But with a meager 2.2% average growth rate, radio will fall behind cable TV in 2008 and just barely ahead of the other two, reaching $20.26 Billion.
The wild card in all this, of course, is digital advertising. It is the third largest category of advertising, but of course that covers everything from MySpace and Yahoo to television video online and newspaper websites. Still, with an average growth rate of 19.8%, digital is on advertising steroids compared to the others. Digital in its myriad forms has projected revenues of $21.1 Billion in 2007, just barely ahead of Cable, but then leaping to a projected $25.28 Billion in 2008, just barely behind magazines. The report notes that broadcast networks are doing everything they can to leverage their brands, content and distribution system into new media; and that newspapers are leveraging their news brand online and garnering a greater growth (24%) than anybody else in their digital efforts.
ONLINE VIDEO IS LIKE HAVING YOUR OWN DVR: New research by NBC-Universal indicates that people are using online video like they use their DVR. They miss an episode. They just go online to watch it. And, says NBC’s Chief Digital Officer, George Kliavkoff, the research shows that online video viewing is not just for people wanting to watch snippets. More than four out of five (83%) who start watching an hour-long program online finish watching it online. Kliavkoff admitted he was worried that online video would “cannibalize” the on-air product. Even better, the research indicates the online viewing, like the DVR viewing actually adds to the viewing ‘incrementally.’ And, as a personal footnote, I missed the comedy Back To You that I mentioned in last week’s MfM, and it was nice to be able to go online to watch it.
As a footnote to this, DVD penetration has almost reached the level of VCR penetration, according to data from Nielsen Media. The difference is that VCR usage has been slowing declining from a high of 91.4% in May of 2002 to 86.4% in May of last year, while DVD usage has been steadily increasing from 42.6% in May of 2003 to 82.4% in May of last year.
ADVERTISING AND RODNEY DANGERFIELD: What do they have in common? They get no respect. At least, according to a survey by advertising giant J. Walter Thompson which found that only one in seven (14%) of Americans respect ad people. But, a consolation prize to my advertising friends, nearly a third (31%) saw ad people as a “necessary good” and that was better than politicians and car salesmen. Even more interesting to me was the finding that four out of five (84%) think too many things are over-hyped and three-quarters (72%) say they are tired of people trying to grab their attention “and sell me stuff.”
Okay, I have to at least acknowledge the more famous study released by the folks at J. Walter Thompson, even though it has made all the media rounds. That is people’s addiction to the Internet. The ‘snicker fact’ is that one in five actually admitted to having less sex because of the Internet. The less humorous but probably more telling factoid is that almost the same number (one in five) said they could go a whole week without the Internet but most said they couldn’t stand being without the Internet for a day (15%), or a couple of days (21%) or a few days (19%).
MONEY MAKING MEDIA MILLIONAIRES: Okay, say that five times real fast. Actually, don’t bother. Just say Oprah. Forbes magazine unofficially announced her queen of media, naming her as the top money-maker in the media world, earning $260 Million from June of 2006 to June of 2007. You’re probably saying ‘no surprise there.’ True. But how about the #2 spot – Jerry Seinfeld. Thanks to re-runs, he gets $60 Million a year. The one I wouldn’t have guessed, at #3, is Simon Cowell, who gets $45 Million a year, followed by David Letterman at $40 Million, Donald Trump (no, I don’t understand why he’s on the list either) at $32 Million, Jay Leno also at $32 Million, Phil McGraw at $30 Million, Judy Sheindlin (aka Judge Judy) at $30 Million, George Lopez at $26 Million, Keifer Sutherland at $22 Million, Regis Philbin at $21 Million, Tyra Banks at $18 Million, Rachel Ray at $16 Million, Katie Couric at $15 Million, Ellen deGeneres at $15 Million, Ryan Seacrest at $14 Million, Matt Lauer at $13 Million, Barbara Walters at $12 Million, Diane Sawyer at $12 Million and finally Meredith Viera at $10 Million. Just for the record, that’s 11 men and 9 women.
And as a footnote – Oprah also made Forbes 400 list of the world’s richest people. Even more fascinating – for the first time, everyone on that list is a Billionaire. Yes, including Oprah.
WORTH NOTING: This is somewhere between Cocktail Chatter and Factoid, but Nielsen Media has taken some of its own research advice and launched a social networking site, heynielsen.com. It is, according to the site description, “a place where you can make a name for yourself while trading opinions on TV, movies, music, personalities, web sites and more.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: According to linguist K. David Harrison, author of When Languages Die, every two weeks one of the world’s 7,000 languages falls out of use. Some 2.5 Million U.S. adults took part in online dating in the last 30 days, according to research firm Mediamark Research Inc., with men accounting for 52% and women 48% of the users. Researchers at the University of Campinas in Brazil (where sugarcane-based ethanol accounts for a third of its fuel), say they boosted ethanol yield by 17% and shaved two hours off the fermentation process by circulating the fermentation brew past six magnets. Nicholas Negraponte and the folks at the One Laptop Per Child effort have announced a buy one get one program, starting in November, in which you can buy a computer for your child and one for a child in a developing nation.
ONLINE VIDEO IS LIKE HAVING YOUR OWN DVR
ADVERTISING AND RODNEY DANGERFIELD
MONEY MAKING MEDIA MILLIONAIRES
COCKTAIL CHATTER
DON’T COUNT OUT DEAD TREE TECHNOLOGY: That wasn’t exactly the point of a MediaWeek Special Report looking at the 2008 media outlook, but when you crunch the numbers, like I did, you are reminded just how much of the advertising dollars they account for. Newspapers and magazines together account for nearly as much advertising spending ($73.41 Billion projected for 2007) as all of television (network, cable, spot) and radio combined ($76.77 Billion). Of course, they’re growing at a much slower rate than broadcasting. I am not going to try and summarize the report here, but instead offer a brief overview and a different way of looking at the numbers. The report offers three projections for growth from Price Waterhouse Cooper, Veronis Suhler Stevenson and ZenithOptimedia. I averaged the three to come up with a projected growth and then projected what 2008 means in actual numbers. (Yes, I know, I don’t have a life.) And I apologize, but there’s lots of numbers coming up.
Low man on the growth totem pole of course are newspapers which actually showed a decline from 2006 to 2007 in circulation and revenue, and are only expected to grow an average 2/3rds of one percent in 2008. But at around $49 Billion, it is still #1 and the 600-pound gorilla of the advertising picture. I have to confess that I didn’t realize that magazines (which comes in #2) accounted for such a huge part of the advertising dollar ($24.85 Billion projected for 2007). But, again, growth is pretty low, with an average of 4% projected for 2008. By comparison, TV in all its forms (network, cable and spot) is expected to average between 6.5% to 7%. Cable TV leads the pack at $20.2 Billion projected in 2007 and an average growth rate that will put it at roughly $21.63 Billion in 2008. Network TV comes in next with $18.45 Billion projected in 2007 and a projected growth rate that will put it at $19.68 Billion in 2008. And finally, Spot TV with a projected $18.3 Billion in 2007 growing to $19.5 Billion in 2008. Another thing I didn’t know (there’s so much I don’t know) is that radio advertising is actually larger than any of the individual TV segments, at least in 2007 with $19.82 Billion. But with a meager 2.2% average growth rate, radio will fall behind cable TV in 2008 and just barely ahead of the other two, reaching $20.26 Billion.
The wild card in all this, of course, is digital advertising. It is the third largest category of advertising, but of course that covers everything from MySpace and Yahoo to television video online and newspaper websites. Still, with an average growth rate of 19.8%, digital is on advertising steroids compared to the others. Digital in its myriad forms has projected revenues of $21.1 Billion in 2007, just barely ahead of Cable, but then leaping to a projected $25.28 Billion in 2008, just barely behind magazines. The report notes that broadcast networks are doing everything they can to leverage their brands, content and distribution system into new media; and that newspapers are leveraging their news brand online and garnering a greater growth (24%) than anybody else in their digital efforts.
ONLINE VIDEO IS LIKE HAVING YOUR OWN DVR: New research by NBC-Universal indicates that people are using online video like they use their DVR. They miss an episode. They just go online to watch it. And, says NBC’s Chief Digital Officer, George Kliavkoff, the research shows that online video viewing is not just for people wanting to watch snippets. More than four out of five (83%) who start watching an hour-long program online finish watching it online. Kliavkoff admitted he was worried that online video would “cannibalize” the on-air product. Even better, the research indicates the online viewing, like the DVR viewing actually adds to the viewing ‘incrementally.’ And, as a personal footnote, I missed the comedy Back To You that I mentioned in last week’s MfM, and it was nice to be able to go online to watch it.
As a footnote to this, DVD penetration has almost reached the level of VCR penetration, according to data from Nielsen Media. The difference is that VCR usage has been slowing declining from a high of 91.4% in May of 2002 to 86.4% in May of last year, while DVD usage has been steadily increasing from 42.6% in May of 2003 to 82.4% in May of last year.
ADVERTISING AND RODNEY DANGERFIELD: What do they have in common? They get no respect. At least, according to a survey by advertising giant J. Walter Thompson which found that only one in seven (14%) of Americans respect ad people. But, a consolation prize to my advertising friends, nearly a third (31%) saw ad people as a “necessary good” and that was better than politicians and car salesmen. Even more interesting to me was the finding that four out of five (84%) think too many things are over-hyped and three-quarters (72%) say they are tired of people trying to grab their attention “and sell me stuff.”
Okay, I have to at least acknowledge the more famous study released by the folks at J. Walter Thompson, even though it has made all the media rounds. That is people’s addiction to the Internet. The ‘snicker fact’ is that one in five actually admitted to having less sex because of the Internet. The less humorous but probably more telling factoid is that almost the same number (one in five) said they could go a whole week without the Internet but most said they couldn’t stand being without the Internet for a day (15%), or a couple of days (21%) or a few days (19%).
MONEY MAKING MEDIA MILLIONAIRES: Okay, say that five times real fast. Actually, don’t bother. Just say Oprah. Forbes magazine unofficially announced her queen of media, naming her as the top money-maker in the media world, earning $260 Million from June of 2006 to June of 2007. You’re probably saying ‘no surprise there.’ True. But how about the #2 spot – Jerry Seinfeld. Thanks to re-runs, he gets $60 Million a year. The one I wouldn’t have guessed, at #3, is Simon Cowell, who gets $45 Million a year, followed by David Letterman at $40 Million, Donald Trump (no, I don’t understand why he’s on the list either) at $32 Million, Jay Leno also at $32 Million, Phil McGraw at $30 Million, Judy Sheindlin (aka Judge Judy) at $30 Million, George Lopez at $26 Million, Keifer Sutherland at $22 Million, Regis Philbin at $21 Million, Tyra Banks at $18 Million, Rachel Ray at $16 Million, Katie Couric at $15 Million, Ellen deGeneres at $15 Million, Ryan Seacrest at $14 Million, Matt Lauer at $13 Million, Barbara Walters at $12 Million, Diane Sawyer at $12 Million and finally Meredith Viera at $10 Million. Just for the record, that’s 11 men and 9 women.
And as a footnote – Oprah also made Forbes 400 list of the world’s richest people. Even more fascinating – for the first time, everyone on that list is a Billionaire. Yes, including Oprah.
WORTH NOTING: This is somewhere between Cocktail Chatter and Factoid, but Nielsen Media has taken some of its own research advice and launched a social networking site, heynielsen.com. It is, according to the site description, “a place where you can make a name for yourself while trading opinions on TV, movies, music, personalities, web sites and more.”
COCKTAIL CHATTER: According to linguist K. David Harrison, author of When Languages Die, every two weeks one of the world’s 7,000 languages falls out of use. Some 2.5 Million U.S. adults took part in online dating in the last 30 days, according to research firm Mediamark Research Inc., with men accounting for 52% and women 48% of the users. Researchers at the University of Campinas in Brazil (where sugarcane-based ethanol accounts for a third of its fuel), say they boosted ethanol yield by 17% and shaved two hours off the fermentation process by circulating the fermentation brew past six magnets. Nicholas Negraponte and the folks at the One Laptop Per Child effort have announced a buy one get one program, starting in November, in which you can buy a computer for your child and one for a child in a developing nation.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Message From Michael -- September 24, 2007
WHO’S ON FIRST
AMERICANS’ NEWS IQ
NEWS IS FOR THE ADULT DIAPER CROWD
THE INTERNET INNOVATORS
A COMMUNICATIONS MILESTONE
COCKTAIL CHATTER
WHO’S ON FIRST: The answer, when it comes to network programming, is EVERYBODY. ABC programming is on iTunes and AOL. NBC isn’t on iTunes, but it is on Amazon’s answer to iTunes, unBox, and NBC is creating its own video delivery system called NBC Direct. Fox programming is on iTunes and Unbox. And CBS is on all of the above including its own streaming video site Innertube because, says CBS Interactive chief Quincy Smith, the network is “all about open, nonexclusive, multiple partnerships.” In fact, iTunes carries ABC, CBS, MTV, ESPN, the Sci Fi Channel, Comedy Central, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Showtime and the list goes on and on. The same goes for AOL which also has A&E, The Biography Channel, CMT, Comedy Central, and again the list goes on and on. And as for Unbox, add in Adult Swim, Animal Planet, the BBC, Biography Channel, Bravo, Fuel TV, MTV, and again the list goes on and on. Then add Yahoo, Google, and of course YouTube to the plethora of online video outlets. And, of course, the networks all provide their own streaming versions of their programs. The point is that the networks are trying to get their shows in front of viewers any way they can, even if they are on sites that don’t add to the ratings. As reporter Dawn Chmielewski notes in the Los Angeles Times, network websites like CBS.com get 6 Million visitors while sites like Yahoo get 135 Million visitors.
Sidenote: I became fascinated with the number of TV shows being streamed at various sites after I looked up the newest Fox TV show, Back To You, which stars Kelsey Grammer, Fred Willard and Patricia Heaton and revolves around life in a television newsroom. No, it’s not realistic; after all, it’s a comedy, but it is funny and there are some zingers that other news people will recognize. My favorite is the 26 ½ year old News Director.
Footnote: A very good overview of the Fall 2007 Primetime TV programs can be found through MediaWeek. Marc Berman who produces the daily Programming Insider is featured on a webcast outlining ‘what’s hot and what’s not’ this season. Just to make life easier for you, I will even provide the link: http://www.nielsencast.com/ws/content_display/event/e3i700d8a6e85cce5080bf54fd95cd91fe5. And, as a side note to the footnote, you can actually try your hand at network programming on a website, tvbigshot.com, which is running a contest to test people’s programming skills.
AMERICAN NEWS IQ: A quiz created by the folks at the Pew Research Center showed that most Americans are familiar with key facts in the news about politics and Iraq. Only 6% of those surveyed could answer all 12 of the questions, but a quarter (26%) could answer 10 out of the 12 questions. Men (7.6 correct answers) scored better than women (6.3). College grads (8.2) not surprisingly scored better than high school grads (5.5). Interestingly there was a clear ascending scale in news knowledge that correlated with age with 18-29 year olds scoring the lowest (5.5 correct answers); followed by 30-49 (7.1); 50-64 (7.4) and 65+ (7.6). Now, in case you’re wondering why I’m not telling you some of the details, it’s because you can take the quiz yourself. You can check your own news IQ and then compare yourself to others by going to http://pewresearch.org/pubs/601/political-knowledge-update. (PS: I scored 12 out of 12.)
NEWS IS FOR THE ADULT DIAPER CROWD: That’s the lament of Newser.com’s Michael Wolff writing in Vanity Fair magazine. He makes the point that all those pushing news ventures online are ‘old’ – Barry Diller (65); Rupert Murdoch (76); Ariana Huffington (57); Jeff Jarvis (53); and the list goes on. Where are the 20-somethings like Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, he asks. He argues that some how, some way, some one will find the “Holy Grail” of news in this new media world using some kind of algorithm that defines the news process because “every advance in technology has seen the invention of a new form of news.” One of the problems is how do you do that in this multi-multi world when, for example, The New York Times makes $2 Billion a year with its paper version that reaches 1.1 Million daily readers, but only makes $250 Million on its online version that reaches 40 Million readers a month; AND while its newsgathering process costs $300 Million; AND then turns around and charges $600 a year for a subscription for material that is provided free online. In the end, he says, “news is, for better or worse, a card trick… (and) holding people’s attention is the trick.” Yet he still believes that news is meaningful and has a public purpose; that’s why he’s doing newser.com.
THE INTERNET INNOVATORS: It probably says something, although I’m not sure what, that half of the M-I-T Technology Review’s list of leading young innovators deal with computers and the Internet. The TR35 lists the 35 leading innovators under the age of 35. On the list are Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, (no explanation needed); Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon (which is a toolbar which will link you to odd websites that you have a special interest in, based on recommendations from other people who have ‘stumbled upon’ the sites), and Kevin Rose of Digg (which mixes blogging, social networking and crowdsourcing to create an online newspaper of ‘stories selected by the masses’). By the way, their respective ages are 23, 28 and 30. But even more interesting are people like the University of Washington’s Tapan Parikh, named TR35’s humanitarian of the year, for helping fishermen in Indian improve their profits by using cell phones; and TR35’s innovator of the year David Berry who, at the age of 29, is a Venture Capitalist helping to develop renewable petroleum from microbes. My favorite though may be Ivan Krstic, and not just because he is developing a system to make antivirus software unnecessary, but because, apparently, at the age of 21, it seems he has yet to finish his degree at Harvard because he keeps taking leaves to… write software interpreting data for a neuroscientist, build a patient management computer system for a hospital, scale up Facebook’s software architecture and develop security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child program, building inexpensive laptops for Third World children.
A COMMUNICATIONS MILESTONE: According to MediaMark Research, the United States has passed a telecommunications milestone with cell-phone only households for the first time out-numbering landline-only households. The landline-only population has been larger than the cell-phone only population ever year since 2000 when the company first began measuring this. But in the latest survey, the cell-only population reached 14% compared to the 12.3% for the landline-only population. The researchers say the percentage of the population with at least one cell phone (86.2%) also passes the percentage of people who have a landline in their home (84.5%).
COCKTAIL CHATTER: A survey by the Pew Research Center found Americans evenly split on the belief that the country is divided along economic lines. Nearly half (48%) say we’re a country of “have’s and have not’s” while the same number (48%) say we are not. This is a dramatic increase from nine years ago when only a quarter of the American public (26%) believed we are a country of have’s and have not’s. Even more interesting, the number of Americans who see themselves as ‘have not’s’ has doubled in that time from 17% to 34%. Another survey by the folks at Pew, this one by Pew Global Research, finds that nearly as many countries (17) consider the United States to be an enemy as consider the country to be an ally (19). Internet giant Google has put up a prize of $30 Million to the first private enterprise that that can land a rover on the moon and beam back a gig of high definition images. A father-son research team has released a report that shows studying improves grades. I know this sounds like a Homer Simpson “doh” but apparently no-one has quantified the issue before. In an article published in the National Journal of Economic Research, they found that studying an hour a day increases student GPA’s by an average 0.36 points while playing video games for an hour each day led to a 0.24 drop in GPA for males and a 0.13 drop for females.
CONGRATULATIONS: To MfM friend and CBS Anchor Russ Mitchell, being named one of the ten outstanding leaders in the field of journalism and being award the University of Missouri’s Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.
AMERICANS’ NEWS IQ
NEWS IS FOR THE ADULT DIAPER CROWD
THE INTERNET INNOVATORS
A COMMUNICATIONS MILESTONE
COCKTAIL CHATTER
WHO’S ON FIRST: The answer, when it comes to network programming, is EVERYBODY. ABC programming is on iTunes and AOL. NBC isn’t on iTunes, but it is on Amazon’s answer to iTunes, unBox, and NBC is creating its own video delivery system called NBC Direct. Fox programming is on iTunes and Unbox. And CBS is on all of the above including its own streaming video site Innertube because, says CBS Interactive chief Quincy Smith, the network is “all about open, nonexclusive, multiple partnerships.” In fact, iTunes carries ABC, CBS, MTV, ESPN, the Sci Fi Channel, Comedy Central, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Showtime and the list goes on and on. The same goes for AOL which also has A&E, The Biography Channel, CMT, Comedy Central, and again the list goes on and on. And as for Unbox, add in Adult Swim, Animal Planet, the BBC, Biography Channel, Bravo, Fuel TV, MTV, and again the list goes on and on. Then add Yahoo, Google, and of course YouTube to the plethora of online video outlets. And, of course, the networks all provide their own streaming versions of their programs. The point is that the networks are trying to get their shows in front of viewers any way they can, even if they are on sites that don’t add to the ratings. As reporter Dawn Chmielewski notes in the Los Angeles Times, network websites like CBS.com get 6 Million visitors while sites like Yahoo get 135 Million visitors.
Sidenote: I became fascinated with the number of TV shows being streamed at various sites after I looked up the newest Fox TV show, Back To You, which stars Kelsey Grammer, Fred Willard and Patricia Heaton and revolves around life in a television newsroom. No, it’s not realistic; after all, it’s a comedy, but it is funny and there are some zingers that other news people will recognize. My favorite is the 26 ½ year old News Director.
Footnote: A very good overview of the Fall 2007 Primetime TV programs can be found through MediaWeek. Marc Berman who produces the daily Programming Insider is featured on a webcast outlining ‘what’s hot and what’s not’ this season. Just to make life easier for you, I will even provide the link: http://www.nielsencast.com/ws/content_display/event/e3i700d8a6e85cce5080bf54fd95cd91fe5. And, as a side note to the footnote, you can actually try your hand at network programming on a website, tvbigshot.com, which is running a contest to test people’s programming skills.
AMERICAN NEWS IQ: A quiz created by the folks at the Pew Research Center showed that most Americans are familiar with key facts in the news about politics and Iraq. Only 6% of those surveyed could answer all 12 of the questions, but a quarter (26%) could answer 10 out of the 12 questions. Men (7.6 correct answers) scored better than women (6.3). College grads (8.2) not surprisingly scored better than high school grads (5.5). Interestingly there was a clear ascending scale in news knowledge that correlated with age with 18-29 year olds scoring the lowest (5.5 correct answers); followed by 30-49 (7.1); 50-64 (7.4) and 65+ (7.6). Now, in case you’re wondering why I’m not telling you some of the details, it’s because you can take the quiz yourself. You can check your own news IQ and then compare yourself to others by going to http://pewresearch.org/pubs/601/political-knowledge-update. (PS: I scored 12 out of 12.)
NEWS IS FOR THE ADULT DIAPER CROWD: That’s the lament of Newser.com’s Michael Wolff writing in Vanity Fair magazine. He makes the point that all those pushing news ventures online are ‘old’ – Barry Diller (65); Rupert Murdoch (76); Ariana Huffington (57); Jeff Jarvis (53); and the list goes on. Where are the 20-somethings like Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, he asks. He argues that some how, some way, some one will find the “Holy Grail” of news in this new media world using some kind of algorithm that defines the news process because “every advance in technology has seen the invention of a new form of news.” One of the problems is how do you do that in this multi-multi world when, for example, The New York Times makes $2 Billion a year with its paper version that reaches 1.1 Million daily readers, but only makes $250 Million on its online version that reaches 40 Million readers a month; AND while its newsgathering process costs $300 Million; AND then turns around and charges $600 a year for a subscription for material that is provided free online. In the end, he says, “news is, for better or worse, a card trick… (and) holding people’s attention is the trick.” Yet he still believes that news is meaningful and has a public purpose; that’s why he’s doing newser.com.
THE INTERNET INNOVATORS: It probably says something, although I’m not sure what, that half of the M-I-T Technology Review’s list of leading young innovators deal with computers and the Internet. The TR35 lists the 35 leading innovators under the age of 35. On the list are Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, (no explanation needed); Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon (which is a toolbar which will link you to odd websites that you have a special interest in, based on recommendations from other people who have ‘stumbled upon’ the sites), and Kevin Rose of Digg (which mixes blogging, social networking and crowdsourcing to create an online newspaper of ‘stories selected by the masses’). By the way, their respective ages are 23, 28 and 30. But even more interesting are people like the University of Washington’s Tapan Parikh, named TR35’s humanitarian of the year, for helping fishermen in Indian improve their profits by using cell phones; and TR35’s innovator of the year David Berry who, at the age of 29, is a Venture Capitalist helping to develop renewable petroleum from microbes. My favorite though may be Ivan Krstic, and not just because he is developing a system to make antivirus software unnecessary, but because, apparently, at the age of 21, it seems he has yet to finish his degree at Harvard because he keeps taking leaves to… write software interpreting data for a neuroscientist, build a patient management computer system for a hospital, scale up Facebook’s software architecture and develop security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child program, building inexpensive laptops for Third World children.
A COMMUNICATIONS MILESTONE: According to MediaMark Research, the United States has passed a telecommunications milestone with cell-phone only households for the first time out-numbering landline-only households. The landline-only population has been larger than the cell-phone only population ever year since 2000 when the company first began measuring this. But in the latest survey, the cell-only population reached 14% compared to the 12.3% for the landline-only population. The researchers say the percentage of the population with at least one cell phone (86.2%) also passes the percentage of people who have a landline in their home (84.5%).
COCKTAIL CHATTER: A survey by the Pew Research Center found Americans evenly split on the belief that the country is divided along economic lines. Nearly half (48%) say we’re a country of “have’s and have not’s” while the same number (48%) say we are not. This is a dramatic increase from nine years ago when only a quarter of the American public (26%) believed we are a country of have’s and have not’s. Even more interesting, the number of Americans who see themselves as ‘have not’s’ has doubled in that time from 17% to 34%. Another survey by the folks at Pew, this one by Pew Global Research, finds that nearly as many countries (17) consider the United States to be an enemy as consider the country to be an ally (19). Internet giant Google has put up a prize of $30 Million to the first private enterprise that that can land a rover on the moon and beam back a gig of high definition images. A father-son research team has released a report that shows studying improves grades. I know this sounds like a Homer Simpson “doh” but apparently no-one has quantified the issue before. In an article published in the National Journal of Economic Research, they found that studying an hour a day increases student GPA’s by an average 0.36 points while playing video games for an hour each day led to a 0.24 drop in GPA for males and a 0.13 drop for females.
CONGRATULATIONS: To MfM friend and CBS Anchor Russ Mitchell, being named one of the ten outstanding leaders in the field of journalism and being award the University of Missouri’s Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Message From Michael -- September 17, 2007
NEWS IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
BLOG ME THIS, NEWSMAN
ARM WRESTLING ADVERTISERS
COCKTAIL CHATTER – GOD’S GOLF BALL
NEWS IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has found major differences between the news presented on mainstream media news sites versus user generated sites. For example, taking one week in June, the study authors found that 10% of all the news on the mainstream media sites dealt with the war in Iraq. In the user generated sites, the war accounted for only one percent of the news. The project authors used three sites as examples of user generated sites – Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us. They also did a comparison with the news.yahoo.com website. (There is no explanation why they didn’t use news.google.com.) Need another example? The immigration debate dominated the mainstream media news sites. On the three user generated sites, it came up only once as a top ten story. Instead, the user generated sites ‘news’ were more “lifestyle” focused stories.
Okay, now, you may have heard or read some of this, but dig a little deeper in the report (as your friendly neighborhood consultant did) and you find some more interesting data. For example, in the mainstream media, ten stories account for more than half (51%) of all the stories carried on the mainstream media websites. This is a fact noted in previous Project reports, that mainstream media tell you a lot about a little. In comparison, no single story dominated the user generated sites to the same extent. Okay, the iPhone controversy came close, but even it did not reach the same level of dominance. Instead, the user generated sites news agenda was “more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory” than that of their mainstream cousins. The other major point the authors make is that four out of ten (40%) of the stories on the user generated sites came from blogs with three out of ten (31%) coming from non-news, information sites such as YouTube, Technorati, or WebMD and only a quarter (25%) coming from more traditional news sites such as the BBC or Slate.
Some of the findings in the report may fall in the Homer Simpson “doh” category. For example, the user generated sites are all very U.S.-centric in their focus with nine out of ten stories being domestic. Yahoo which has a broader, global base had more foreign news coverage than the mainstream media. (Sunday, when I looked at news.yahoo.com, the ‘most popular’ story was about a gas-guzzling tax proposal in the U.K. In stark contrast, when I looked at news.google.com, the ‘most popular’ story was that there were nude pictures of the female star of the Disney television hit High School Musical.)
The report says the key area of interest was technology and science reports. Well, doh, these sites are dominated by tech-savvy individuals. That said, what was particularly interesting was the difference on news.yahoo.com, in particular, between what the editors picked versus the most recommended, the most e-mail and the most viewed. User-ranked stories tended to be more about health and medicine, lifestyle and crime. Its ‘most recommended’ page was more likely to be ‘news you can use’ articles; its most e-mailed page had those kinds of stories, butthis section was more diverse with big stories but also “oddball” stories; the ‘most viewed’ page was the “most sensational,” according to the report, with stories about celebrities and crime.
Footnote: The study authors make the point that the percentage of Americans who rely on user generated sites for news is only a fraction of the number who use mainstream news sites. But the big question, they say, is whether there will be further divergence over the coming years between user-driven sites and mainstream media sites. (I should note that the website MySpace has started a news website, and it says something that when you go to it, the so-called news stories only get one or two votes, despite the enormous size of the MySpace audience.)
Lessons to be Learned: Let me offer a thought about the findings. I would never recommend setting a news agenda based on such user generated preferences. But I would raise the question about defining your marketing agenda using the topics highlighted on the user generated sites.
BLOG ME THIS, NEWSMAN: So, you’ve now read that blogs accounted for more stories than traditional media on the user-generated sites. Here’s the other shoe dropping. According to a survey by market research firm BIGResearch, bloggers are considered more trustworthy by the American public than the media. Admittedly the numbers are small, but still significant with people 18-34 more likely to pick bloggers (8.5%) than the media (5%) and people 35-54 also picking bloggers (6.1%) over the media (3.8%). Only people over the age of 55 picked the media. If it’s any consolation, bloggers also scored higher in ‘trustworthiness’ than the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate. Only the President scored higher with one in seven (14.2%) of those over the age of 18 rating him “more trustworthy.” Possibly more disturbing is that roughly seven out of ten (69% to 72%) of those surveyed, regardless of age or gender, said, “I don’t trust any of the above.”
The Wall Street Journal in its Act One column talks about the growth of bloggers and a ‘blogging elite’ even though “the blog business model hasn’t been proven by a tough economy.” The article focuses on Washington, D.C., which is the fourth ‘bloggiest’ city in America, according to blog research site Outside In. The ‘bloggiest’ city – Boston, with 89 blog posts per 100,000 residents, closely followed by Philadelphia at 88, Pittsburgh at 53, Washington, D.C., at 51 and Portland at 49. The study authors, semi-tongue-in-cheek, say ‘blogginess’ is a reflection of “growth, civic activism and writerly population.”
ARM WRESTLING ADVERTISERS: Two separate reports, with two different sets of numbers, but the same basic conclusion. The Internet has officially beaten Radio in two out of three falls for advertising dollars. Market research firm eMarketer says the Internet will nudge out Radio by about a Billion dollars this year. But more critically, the Internet is growing while Radio is, in the words of the report, “anemic.” The same message from market research and consulting firm TNS Media Intelligence which says that in the first half of 2006, Radio led the Internet in a tight race in terms of advertising dollars, but now a year later, in the first half of 2007, the Internet took the lead, nudging past radio. But more importantly, while Radio is showing a slight decline, the Internet continues to show double-digit growth. Both reports are careful to note that the Internet advertising growth isn’t entirely at the expense of radio. The eMarketer report even goes further, urging advertisers to “combine the two to take advantage of the unique attributes of each.”
Okay, it’s trite, but I’ll use it anyway. I have some good news and some bad news for local TV Internet advertising. First, the bad news. Local online advertising, in the words of the eMarketer people, is a situation where the promise is greater than the reality. In other words, it’s not living up to expectations, and partly because of the intrusion of operations like Google and Yahoo. The good news is that local online advertising should “accelerate” as small and mid-size companies see its potential, and local Internet sites and services grow as well. Even better news, at least if you’re in television, is that local TV websites are finally beginning to pay off with one in four adults saying they’ve visited a local TV website in the past 30 days, according to a study from The Media Audit.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: One in three Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks, according to a recent CBS/ New York Times poll, even though this myth was debunked by official sources, including the White House. On April 13, 1945, General Patton forced the residents of the German village Ohrdruf to view a nearby concentration camp that they claimed to know nothing about. The next day the mayor and his wife committed suicide. (From Polaris, the magazine of WWII subvets.) A Civil War buff has determined that, based on the actual battles cited, the pregnancy of the character Melanie in the classic novel Gone With The Wind, lasted 21 months. And this is not a factoid of any sort, but I found it so amusing that I had to include it. The editor of the Star and Beacon newspaper in 96, South Carolina, in an editorial urging people to walk with Christ, ends by saying, “it’s the least we can do with our lives here on ‘God’s golf ball’ before the Almighty putts us back into a black hole on the cosmic back nine.”
BLOG ME THIS, NEWSMAN
ARM WRESTLING ADVERTISERS
COCKTAIL CHATTER – GOD’S GOLF BALL
NEWS IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has found major differences between the news presented on mainstream media news sites versus user generated sites. For example, taking one week in June, the study authors found that 10% of all the news on the mainstream media sites dealt with the war in Iraq. In the user generated sites, the war accounted for only one percent of the news. The project authors used three sites as examples of user generated sites – Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us. They also did a comparison with the news.yahoo.com website. (There is no explanation why they didn’t use news.google.com.) Need another example? The immigration debate dominated the mainstream media news sites. On the three user generated sites, it came up only once as a top ten story. Instead, the user generated sites ‘news’ were more “lifestyle” focused stories.
Okay, now, you may have heard or read some of this, but dig a little deeper in the report (as your friendly neighborhood consultant did) and you find some more interesting data. For example, in the mainstream media, ten stories account for more than half (51%) of all the stories carried on the mainstream media websites. This is a fact noted in previous Project reports, that mainstream media tell you a lot about a little. In comparison, no single story dominated the user generated sites to the same extent. Okay, the iPhone controversy came close, but even it did not reach the same level of dominance. Instead, the user generated sites news agenda was “more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory” than that of their mainstream cousins. The other major point the authors make is that four out of ten (40%) of the stories on the user generated sites came from blogs with three out of ten (31%) coming from non-news, information sites such as YouTube, Technorati, or WebMD and only a quarter (25%) coming from more traditional news sites such as the BBC or Slate.
Some of the findings in the report may fall in the Homer Simpson “doh” category. For example, the user generated sites are all very U.S.-centric in their focus with nine out of ten stories being domestic. Yahoo which has a broader, global base had more foreign news coverage than the mainstream media. (Sunday, when I looked at news.yahoo.com, the ‘most popular’ story was about a gas-guzzling tax proposal in the U.K. In stark contrast, when I looked at news.google.com, the ‘most popular’ story was that there were nude pictures of the female star of the Disney television hit High School Musical.)
The report says the key area of interest was technology and science reports. Well, doh, these sites are dominated by tech-savvy individuals. That said, what was particularly interesting was the difference on news.yahoo.com, in particular, between what the editors picked versus the most recommended, the most e-mail and the most viewed. User-ranked stories tended to be more about health and medicine, lifestyle and crime. Its ‘most recommended’ page was more likely to be ‘news you can use’ articles; its most e-mailed page had those kinds of stories, butthis section was more diverse with big stories but also “oddball” stories; the ‘most viewed’ page was the “most sensational,” according to the report, with stories about celebrities and crime.
Footnote: The study authors make the point that the percentage of Americans who rely on user generated sites for news is only a fraction of the number who use mainstream news sites. But the big question, they say, is whether there will be further divergence over the coming years between user-driven sites and mainstream media sites. (I should note that the website MySpace has started a news website, and it says something that when you go to it, the so-called news stories only get one or two votes, despite the enormous size of the MySpace audience.)
Lessons to be Learned: Let me offer a thought about the findings. I would never recommend setting a news agenda based on such user generated preferences. But I would raise the question about defining your marketing agenda using the topics highlighted on the user generated sites.
BLOG ME THIS, NEWSMAN: So, you’ve now read that blogs accounted for more stories than traditional media on the user-generated sites. Here’s the other shoe dropping. According to a survey by market research firm BIGResearch, bloggers are considered more trustworthy by the American public than the media. Admittedly the numbers are small, but still significant with people 18-34 more likely to pick bloggers (8.5%) than the media (5%) and people 35-54 also picking bloggers (6.1%) over the media (3.8%). Only people over the age of 55 picked the media. If it’s any consolation, bloggers also scored higher in ‘trustworthiness’ than the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate. Only the President scored higher with one in seven (14.2%) of those over the age of 18 rating him “more trustworthy.” Possibly more disturbing is that roughly seven out of ten (69% to 72%) of those surveyed, regardless of age or gender, said, “I don’t trust any of the above.”
The Wall Street Journal in its Act One column talks about the growth of bloggers and a ‘blogging elite’ even though “the blog business model hasn’t been proven by a tough economy.” The article focuses on Washington, D.C., which is the fourth ‘bloggiest’ city in America, according to blog research site Outside In. The ‘bloggiest’ city – Boston, with 89 blog posts per 100,000 residents, closely followed by Philadelphia at 88, Pittsburgh at 53, Washington, D.C., at 51 and Portland at 49. The study authors, semi-tongue-in-cheek, say ‘blogginess’ is a reflection of “growth, civic activism and writerly population.”
ARM WRESTLING ADVERTISERS: Two separate reports, with two different sets of numbers, but the same basic conclusion. The Internet has officially beaten Radio in two out of three falls for advertising dollars. Market research firm eMarketer says the Internet will nudge out Radio by about a Billion dollars this year. But more critically, the Internet is growing while Radio is, in the words of the report, “anemic.” The same message from market research and consulting firm TNS Media Intelligence which says that in the first half of 2006, Radio led the Internet in a tight race in terms of advertising dollars, but now a year later, in the first half of 2007, the Internet took the lead, nudging past radio. But more importantly, while Radio is showing a slight decline, the Internet continues to show double-digit growth. Both reports are careful to note that the Internet advertising growth isn’t entirely at the expense of radio. The eMarketer report even goes further, urging advertisers to “combine the two to take advantage of the unique attributes of each.”
Okay, it’s trite, but I’ll use it anyway. I have some good news and some bad news for local TV Internet advertising. First, the bad news. Local online advertising, in the words of the eMarketer people, is a situation where the promise is greater than the reality. In other words, it’s not living up to expectations, and partly because of the intrusion of operations like Google and Yahoo. The good news is that local online advertising should “accelerate” as small and mid-size companies see its potential, and local Internet sites and services grow as well. Even better news, at least if you’re in television, is that local TV websites are finally beginning to pay off with one in four adults saying they’ve visited a local TV website in the past 30 days, according to a study from The Media Audit.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: One in three Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks, according to a recent CBS/ New York Times poll, even though this myth was debunked by official sources, including the White House. On April 13, 1945, General Patton forced the residents of the German village Ohrdruf to view a nearby concentration camp that they claimed to know nothing about. The next day the mayor and his wife committed suicide. (From Polaris, the magazine of WWII subvets.) A Civil War buff has determined that, based on the actual battles cited, the pregnancy of the character Melanie in the classic novel Gone With The Wind, lasted 21 months. And this is not a factoid of any sort, but I found it so amusing that I had to include it. The editor of the Star and Beacon newspaper in 96, South Carolina, in an editorial urging people to walk with Christ, ends by saying, “it’s the least we can do with our lives here on ‘God’s golf ball’ before the Almighty putts us back into a black hole on the cosmic back nine.”
Monday, September 10, 2007
Message From Michael -- September 10,2007
9/11
THE SILVER BULLET
BROADCAST JOURNALISM IN A MULTIMEDIA WORLD
WORD OF MOUTH FOLLOW-UP
WEBLISH VS. LEETSPEAK
9/11: Two numbers that speak volumes. Mark the day. Recognize it. Yes, I know it’s ‘only’ the 6th anniversary. But the fact is that the growing controversy over the Iraq war, the fact that General Petraeus is supposed to release his report on Iraq, the fact that Osama bin Laden has released another tape only adds to the occasion. Even so, that’s not the point. The point is that it is a defining moment in America. Marketers – produce :04 second ID’s, :10 and :15 second spots memorializing the day, saluting the military men and women. Newsies – there should be stories in every newscast (local and national) and your anchor team should acknowledge the event. Let your audience know that you remember… and you care. That’s a powerful message to send viewers.
PS: For those General Managers who do editorials, this is a perfect topic. Hint. Hint.
THE SILVER BULLET: Increase efficiency. Improve morale. Reduce turnover. Raise the ratings. How, you ask? One word – communication. Yes, I know that sounds like a trite answer, but a professor at the University of Miami has done a survey that ‘proves’ just that. Terry Adams at the University’s School of Communication surveyed producers and directors in various markets around the country. Part of what he found out, anybody who has been in a television newsroom knows. Most directors are older males who have been at the same station for a long time while most producers are young females who have only been at the station for a couple of years. Interestingly, although not surprisingly, the producers had a generally positive view of the directors with nearly all of the producers (97%) saying the director helped the process and nearly as many (88%) saying the director provided the information necessary and four-fifths (80%) rating the director as “competent.” It wasn’t quite the opposite with directors, but it was substantially different, with less than half (48%) of the directors agreeing that the producer helped in the process, and only slightly more (54%) saying the producer provided all the information necessary and nearly half (46%) of the directors rating the producer as “incompetent.”
Even more interesting and the key take-away from the survey (at least, to me) was Adams’ finding that there was a “significant relationship” between whether producers and directors held a show meeting and how they assessed each other’s competence. Those who held show meetings were more likely to consider their counterpart either the best they had worked with or at least competent. And it gets even more interesting. Adams found that the “quality of information” the producers and/or directors received from their counterpart was “significantly correlated” to their overall job satisfaction. That, in turn, also showed a relationship to job turnover which Adams rightly noted is a major problem with producers. And both defined the “perfect” producer or director in terms of communication. Finally, the piece de resistance, the stations with the highest reported levels of communication also had the highest ratings. In Academic speak, Adams says, “correlation analysis shows ratings to be significantly related to the amount of information relayed.” To his credit, he also put in plain English: “simply put, companies can make money out of good communication.”
YET… yet… (do you detect a note of frustration?), three quarters of the producers (75.9%) and directors (73%) did not have regular daily show meetings. And most (68%) work in different parts of the building so any ad hoc communication is impossible. Directors are less likely to take part in meetings in the news department than the other way around. Adams says the key finding is that not only do producers and directors not communicate well, they don’t even communicate minimally although, as he rightfully notes, “one cannot succeed without the other’s participation and involvement.”
And that note of frustration? That’s the consultant in me. I have recommended at EVERY station I have either worked at or consulted that the director be part of the editorial meeting. And there’s always excuses why the director can’t do it. As a final footnote, I contacted Adams who turns out to be a former director with ten years in the business.
BROADCAST JOURNALISM IN A MULTIMEDIA WORLD: That’s the title of a new book which argues that “multiplatform journalism is simply a fact of life for any up-and-coming journalist.” The book, designed as a text, looks at the specific strengths and advantages of the different platforms and how students can go beyond re-purposing to actually advancing their stories to the next level for any medium, according to the blurb on publisher CQPress’s website. It was written by MfM friend Deborah Potter, former CBS and CNN correspondent and now NewsLab executive director, and Deborah Wenger, former executive producer and now associate professor media convergence and new media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Okay, I admit this is plugola, and candidly I can’t endorse the book because I have only read the summary, but the fact is that it addresses an issue that seasoned and student journalists have to wrestle with now.
WORD OF MOUTH FOLLOW-UP: My previous MfM talked about the power of Word of Mouth in marketing, advertising and news. Further confirmation of the power of WOM comes from a New York Times article about music producer Rick Rubin and Columbia Records. As part of their marketing effort, they surveyed the 20 college student interns they had brought in who told them that: “a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; that Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That’s how they hear about music, bands, everything.” (Thanks to Tim Livingston of WNWO/ Toledo and David Toma of WECT/ Wilmington for pointing this article out to me.)
Another study, this one by MTV and Nickelodeon found that four out of five (83%) of ‘tech-savvy’ teenagers visited a website based on the recommendation of a friend and half of all teenagers (55%) found out about a viral video through word of mouth. The study also found that 14 to 24 year olds have an average of 53 friends, both online and ‘off-line.’
WIDGETS FOLLOW-UP: I’ll keep this brief. USA Today has become the first major newspapers to develop widgets that can be used on people’s personal websites and that use Flash technology. (Readers will remember me talking about widgets several editions back.)
LEETSPEAK VS WEBLISH: Have you heard of either? Well, “weblish” is, as the name implies, a combination of English and Web-centric words. The latest addition to the so-called “weblish” dictionary – Bacn, which is a variation on spam and spim, and is defined as email consumers may want (such as my newsletter, niche product announcements, social network updates) but which still clog up your e-mail box. Now, there is a version, tentatively nicknamed “leetspeak” in which the shorthand vocabulary is used in regular communication including a spoken version. For example, LOL (Laugh Out Loud) is pronounced ‘lawl’ and PWN (which is gamer talk for annihilating an opponent) is pronounced ‘pone.’ An article in The Wall Street Journal says the changes are already underway and if you don’t believe it, the harbinger of bad taste, South Park, had a recent episode in which one of the characters shouted out, “looks like you’re about to get poned.”
THE SILVER BULLET
BROADCAST JOURNALISM IN A MULTIMEDIA WORLD
WORD OF MOUTH FOLLOW-UP
WEBLISH VS. LEETSPEAK
9/11: Two numbers that speak volumes. Mark the day. Recognize it. Yes, I know it’s ‘only’ the 6th anniversary. But the fact is that the growing controversy over the Iraq war, the fact that General Petraeus is supposed to release his report on Iraq, the fact that Osama bin Laden has released another tape only adds to the occasion. Even so, that’s not the point. The point is that it is a defining moment in America. Marketers – produce :04 second ID’s, :10 and :15 second spots memorializing the day, saluting the military men and women. Newsies – there should be stories in every newscast (local and national) and your anchor team should acknowledge the event. Let your audience know that you remember… and you care. That’s a powerful message to send viewers.
PS: For those General Managers who do editorials, this is a perfect topic. Hint. Hint.
THE SILVER BULLET: Increase efficiency. Improve morale. Reduce turnover. Raise the ratings. How, you ask? One word – communication. Yes, I know that sounds like a trite answer, but a professor at the University of Miami has done a survey that ‘proves’ just that. Terry Adams at the University’s School of Communication surveyed producers and directors in various markets around the country. Part of what he found out, anybody who has been in a television newsroom knows. Most directors are older males who have been at the same station for a long time while most producers are young females who have only been at the station for a couple of years. Interestingly, although not surprisingly, the producers had a generally positive view of the directors with nearly all of the producers (97%) saying the director helped the process and nearly as many (88%) saying the director provided the information necessary and four-fifths (80%) rating the director as “competent.” It wasn’t quite the opposite with directors, but it was substantially different, with less than half (48%) of the directors agreeing that the producer helped in the process, and only slightly more (54%) saying the producer provided all the information necessary and nearly half (46%) of the directors rating the producer as “incompetent.”
Even more interesting and the key take-away from the survey (at least, to me) was Adams’ finding that there was a “significant relationship” between whether producers and directors held a show meeting and how they assessed each other’s competence. Those who held show meetings were more likely to consider their counterpart either the best they had worked with or at least competent. And it gets even more interesting. Adams found that the “quality of information” the producers and/or directors received from their counterpart was “significantly correlated” to their overall job satisfaction. That, in turn, also showed a relationship to job turnover which Adams rightly noted is a major problem with producers. And both defined the “perfect” producer or director in terms of communication. Finally, the piece de resistance, the stations with the highest reported levels of communication also had the highest ratings. In Academic speak, Adams says, “correlation analysis shows ratings to be significantly related to the amount of information relayed.” To his credit, he also put in plain English: “simply put, companies can make money out of good communication.”
YET… yet… (do you detect a note of frustration?), three quarters of the producers (75.9%) and directors (73%) did not have regular daily show meetings. And most (68%) work in different parts of the building so any ad hoc communication is impossible. Directors are less likely to take part in meetings in the news department than the other way around. Adams says the key finding is that not only do producers and directors not communicate well, they don’t even communicate minimally although, as he rightfully notes, “one cannot succeed without the other’s participation and involvement.”
And that note of frustration? That’s the consultant in me. I have recommended at EVERY station I have either worked at or consulted that the director be part of the editorial meeting. And there’s always excuses why the director can’t do it. As a final footnote, I contacted Adams who turns out to be a former director with ten years in the business.
BROADCAST JOURNALISM IN A MULTIMEDIA WORLD: That’s the title of a new book which argues that “multiplatform journalism is simply a fact of life for any up-and-coming journalist.” The book, designed as a text, looks at the specific strengths and advantages of the different platforms and how students can go beyond re-purposing to actually advancing their stories to the next level for any medium, according to the blurb on publisher CQPress’s website. It was written by MfM friend Deborah Potter, former CBS and CNN correspondent and now NewsLab executive director, and Deborah Wenger, former executive producer and now associate professor media convergence and new media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Okay, I admit this is plugola, and candidly I can’t endorse the book because I have only read the summary, but the fact is that it addresses an issue that seasoned and student journalists have to wrestle with now.
WORD OF MOUTH FOLLOW-UP: My previous MfM talked about the power of Word of Mouth in marketing, advertising and news. Further confirmation of the power of WOM comes from a New York Times article about music producer Rick Rubin and Columbia Records. As part of their marketing effort, they surveyed the 20 college student interns they had brought in who told them that: “a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it’s just not cool anymore; that Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That’s how they hear about music, bands, everything.” (Thanks to Tim Livingston of WNWO/ Toledo and David Toma of WECT/ Wilmington for pointing this article out to me.)
Another study, this one by MTV and Nickelodeon found that four out of five (83%) of ‘tech-savvy’ teenagers visited a website based on the recommendation of a friend and half of all teenagers (55%) found out about a viral video through word of mouth. The study also found that 14 to 24 year olds have an average of 53 friends, both online and ‘off-line.’
WIDGETS FOLLOW-UP: I’ll keep this brief. USA Today has become the first major newspapers to develop widgets that can be used on people’s personal websites and that use Flash technology. (Readers will remember me talking about widgets several editions back.)
LEETSPEAK VS WEBLISH: Have you heard of either? Well, “weblish” is, as the name implies, a combination of English and Web-centric words. The latest addition to the so-called “weblish” dictionary – Bacn, which is a variation on spam and spim, and is defined as email consumers may want (such as my newsletter, niche product announcements, social network updates) but which still clog up your e-mail box. Now, there is a version, tentatively nicknamed “leetspeak” in which the shorthand vocabulary is used in regular communication including a spoken version. For example, LOL (Laugh Out Loud) is pronounced ‘lawl’ and PWN (which is gamer talk for annihilating an opponent) is pronounced ‘pone.’ An article in The Wall Street Journal says the changes are already underway and if you don’t believe it, the harbinger of bad taste, South Park, had a recent episode in which one of the characters shouted out, “looks like you’re about to get poned.”
Message From Michael -- August 27, 2007
THE VICE VERSA ISSUE
IBM VS DELOITTE ON TV
CELEBRITY BLAMES VS. CELEBRITY WATCH
WORD OF MOUTH VS OTHER ADVERTISING
THE POWER OF CONSUMER GENERATED CONTENT
TRENDS TO WATCH
COCKTAIL CHATTER - WORLDWIDE
THE VICE VERSA ISSUE: I labeled this week’s MfM that because of the number of what sometimes appears to be conflicting and sometimes contradictory reports, studies and analyses that so often come out in the weekly media reports that I get.
IBM VS DELOITTE ON TV: The Internet rivals TV as a primary media source. Television still remains a core media activity. The first statement comes from the IBM Institute for Business Values. The second statement comes from Deloitte and Touche’s State of the Media Democracy report. The IBM report which covers the U.S., U.K., Japan, Germany and Australia, says two thirds of those surveyed (66%) reported viewing one to four hours of TV per day. That was only slightly more than the 60% who reported the same levels of personal Internet usage. The report says TV is “taking a back seat” to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34, and just as land line phones have replaced mobile phones in that group, cable and satellite TV risk a similar fate at the hands of the Internet. The Deloitte survey which focused on the U.S. says that even though consumers are doing more things from online searching and game playing to cell phone use, they are still watching television. In simple terms, they say, ‘it is always on.’ And even when they do go online, Deloitte says nearly half (46%) go to a TV website. The folks at Deloitte predict an increase in ‘participatory television.’
DVR’S: Both reports found some interesting anomalies in the use of DVR’s (Digital Video Recorders). The IBM report found that out of the quarter (24%) of U.S. respondents with a DVR, a third (33%) actually reported watching more television with a DVR. In the U.K., consumers used Video On Demand twice as much as they used their DVR’s. The Deloitte report found that it was the Generation X’ers and Baby Boomers using the DVR’s, rather than the Millenials. And the prime use was not so much commercial skipping (that came in third) but “season ticket” functions – being able to record an entire season of a show.
Footnote: A study by media investment company GroupM which is the parent company to many leading media agencies seems to take a middle road. It says in the short run, the Internet is expected to play a bigger role in driving advertising growth, especially from a global perspective, but also in the U.S. However, TV still remains the biggest influence in the advertising marketplace. TV is expected to account for nearly half (47%) of the GROWTH (key word) in advertising spending worldwide and more than a third (36%) of the U.S. ad spending growth. The Internet is expected to account for less than a third (30%) of the growth in worldwide ad spending and half (50%) of the U.S. growth.
CELEBRITY BLAME VS CELEBRITY WATCH: Okay, I love this one. An overwhelming majority of the American public (87%) told the researchers at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press say there is too much celebrity scandal coverage. Not only that, more than half (54%) say news organizations are the most to blame while only a third (32%) say the public is to blame. Anyway, that announcement came out just after the celebrity watch website TMZ.com announced its TV site is gaining in popularity after the “meteoric rise” of its website. Plus video-based celebrity interview site, appropriately named No Good TV, announced it is making the leap to television “in a big way” with a possible late night franchise.
Footnote: And in the middle of all this, Maybe – and it’s a big Maybe – there is a message about the American public’s taste in the fact that trash (sorry, that is commentary) news/ reality program Anchorwoman made its debut and its finale show all in one night on Fox. Yes, the ratings put it in last place, but one has to wonder about the huge amount of negative publicity surrounding the program.
WORD OF MOUTH VS OTHER ADVERTISING: This could be part of the vice versa debate, but from everything I’ve been reading in the last month, there is no debate. Word of Mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. Along with its second cousin – peer reviews, followed by its third cousin – user generated content (which website Marketingprofs.com calls ‘word of mouth on steroids’) and its fourth cousin – Interactive Television. A report released this month by Bridge Ratings and the University of Massachusetts says consumers give family and friends a rating of 8.6 on a scale of trust from 1 to 10 while advertising rates on a 2.2. And as reported earlier, researcher firm eMarketer found that 80% of consumers trust word of mouth more than any other resource. Another study by Ketchum and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center says more than half (55.6%) of what it calls ‘adult influencers’ turn to family and friends for information while a third (34.6%) get advice from co-workers and one in five turn to either blogs (20.7%) or social networking sites (18.6%) for information. A survey by word of mouth marketer Bazaarvoice and market researcher Vizu found that three quarters (75%) of shoppers say it is ‘extremely’ or ‘very important’ to see customer reviews before making a purchase decision. The Deloitte report, cited above, also said that word of mouth drove visits to the Internet with 82% saying they visited a site based on a personal recommendation – only slightly behind the 84% who visited a website through search engines.
And you will recall previous MfM reports that Word of Mouth is also the first source of information for many people when it comes to news as well. Last week’s MfM cited a study by Frank N. Magid and Associates that word of mouth was the #1 way people outside the home found out about the Virginia Tech story. That just confirms earlier studies cited by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. A study released by Technorati showed that, based on the number of links to them, 22 blogs (which are a form of word of mouth) ranked in the top 100 news and information sites, which is nearly double the number from the previous year.
Footnote: In television we consultants talk about marketing that focuses on testimonials as one of the most effective forms of promotion, and when you consider it, such testimonials are a form of word of mouth or peer review.
Consumer Generated Media: Going back to the IBM vs. Deloitte article above, one particular point stands out. Despite some different interpretations about TV and the Internet, the two reports agree emphatically that user generated content has become a powerful force in media. The Deloitte report says that more than half (51%) of all Internet uses consume UGC and that goes for all generations. The head of the firm’s product innovation office says he was impressed by the “real popularity” and “widespread demand” of such content. The IBM report which included the U.K., Germany, Japan and Australia as well as the U.S. found consumers are increasingly contributing content. The percentages are small for people contributing to user-generated content sites (7% to 9%) but they more than double (20% to 36%) when consumers are asked about contributing to social networking sites. I should also remind readers of a previous MfM which cited a Pew Internet and American Life Project study that found three out of five (62%) of online video viewers prefer professional content while (one out of five) 19% prefer consumer-generated content.
Two Examples: User involvement in the process is best illustrated by two start-ups in the Music industry. Sellaband celebrated its first anniversary with a SellaBration in Amsterdam, after raising more than $1 Million by inviting fans of bands to invest in their favorite group. Now, another group SlicethePie has started the same concept in the U.S., turning music fans into music investors.
TRENDS: A study by Parks Associates found that a third (34%) of adult web users played online games at least once a week, compared to less than a third (29%) who watched short video clips and only one in five (19%) who hung out at social networks once a week. But, the group says video watching is growing at a rate of 123% compared to online gaming’s 79%. A third (34%) of consumers say they are much more concerned about environmental issues today than a year ago, but only a fifth (22%) believe they can make a difference. And in keeping with the vice versa theme, while concerned about the environment, research firm Yankelovich says ‘going green’ in their everyday life is not a ‘high priority.’
COCKTAIL CHATTER: The world’s #1 cell phone maker, Nokia, reports that India has become its 2nd largest market, jumping ahead of the U.S. but behind China -- something the company had predicted but which happened three years ahead of the predicted time. One country, Afghanistan, supplies 92% of the entire world’s opium, according to an article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. The Japanese government has cancelled a grant that funded a sign language news program after it found out that the newscasters did a striptease while reading news items, the news agency Reuters reports. And a final note, lonelygirl15, the Internet phenomenon that turned out to be a hoax but a hoax that ended up garnering all the publicity it wanted, has died.
IBM VS DELOITTE ON TV
CELEBRITY BLAMES VS. CELEBRITY WATCH
WORD OF MOUTH VS OTHER ADVERTISING
THE POWER OF CONSUMER GENERATED CONTENT
TRENDS TO WATCH
COCKTAIL CHATTER - WORLDWIDE
THE VICE VERSA ISSUE: I labeled this week’s MfM that because of the number of what sometimes appears to be conflicting and sometimes contradictory reports, studies and analyses that so often come out in the weekly media reports that I get.
IBM VS DELOITTE ON TV: The Internet rivals TV as a primary media source. Television still remains a core media activity. The first statement comes from the IBM Institute for Business Values. The second statement comes from Deloitte and Touche’s State of the Media Democracy report. The IBM report which covers the U.S., U.K., Japan, Germany and Australia, says two thirds of those surveyed (66%) reported viewing one to four hours of TV per day. That was only slightly more than the 60% who reported the same levels of personal Internet usage. The report says TV is “taking a back seat” to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34, and just as land line phones have replaced mobile phones in that group, cable and satellite TV risk a similar fate at the hands of the Internet. The Deloitte survey which focused on the U.S. says that even though consumers are doing more things from online searching and game playing to cell phone use, they are still watching television. In simple terms, they say, ‘it is always on.’ And even when they do go online, Deloitte says nearly half (46%) go to a TV website. The folks at Deloitte predict an increase in ‘participatory television.’
DVR’S: Both reports found some interesting anomalies in the use of DVR’s (Digital Video Recorders). The IBM report found that out of the quarter (24%) of U.S. respondents with a DVR, a third (33%) actually reported watching more television with a DVR. In the U.K., consumers used Video On Demand twice as much as they used their DVR’s. The Deloitte report found that it was the Generation X’ers and Baby Boomers using the DVR’s, rather than the Millenials. And the prime use was not so much commercial skipping (that came in third) but “season ticket” functions – being able to record an entire season of a show.
Footnote: A study by media investment company GroupM which is the parent company to many leading media agencies seems to take a middle road. It says in the short run, the Internet is expected to play a bigger role in driving advertising growth, especially from a global perspective, but also in the U.S. However, TV still remains the biggest influence in the advertising marketplace. TV is expected to account for nearly half (47%) of the GROWTH (key word) in advertising spending worldwide and more than a third (36%) of the U.S. ad spending growth. The Internet is expected to account for less than a third (30%) of the growth in worldwide ad spending and half (50%) of the U.S. growth.
CELEBRITY BLAME VS CELEBRITY WATCH: Okay, I love this one. An overwhelming majority of the American public (87%) told the researchers at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press say there is too much celebrity scandal coverage. Not only that, more than half (54%) say news organizations are the most to blame while only a third (32%) say the public is to blame. Anyway, that announcement came out just after the celebrity watch website TMZ.com announced its TV site is gaining in popularity after the “meteoric rise” of its website. Plus video-based celebrity interview site, appropriately named No Good TV, announced it is making the leap to television “in a big way” with a possible late night franchise.
Footnote: And in the middle of all this, Maybe – and it’s a big Maybe – there is a message about the American public’s taste in the fact that trash (sorry, that is commentary) news/ reality program Anchorwoman made its debut and its finale show all in one night on Fox. Yes, the ratings put it in last place, but one has to wonder about the huge amount of negative publicity surrounding the program.
WORD OF MOUTH VS OTHER ADVERTISING: This could be part of the vice versa debate, but from everything I’ve been reading in the last month, there is no debate. Word of Mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. Along with its second cousin – peer reviews, followed by its third cousin – user generated content (which website Marketingprofs.com calls ‘word of mouth on steroids’) and its fourth cousin – Interactive Television. A report released this month by Bridge Ratings and the University of Massachusetts says consumers give family and friends a rating of 8.6 on a scale of trust from 1 to 10 while advertising rates on a 2.2. And as reported earlier, researcher firm eMarketer found that 80% of consumers trust word of mouth more than any other resource. Another study by Ketchum and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center says more than half (55.6%) of what it calls ‘adult influencers’ turn to family and friends for information while a third (34.6%) get advice from co-workers and one in five turn to either blogs (20.7%) or social networking sites (18.6%) for information. A survey by word of mouth marketer Bazaarvoice and market researcher Vizu found that three quarters (75%) of shoppers say it is ‘extremely’ or ‘very important’ to see customer reviews before making a purchase decision. The Deloitte report, cited above, also said that word of mouth drove visits to the Internet with 82% saying they visited a site based on a personal recommendation – only slightly behind the 84% who visited a website through search engines.
And you will recall previous MfM reports that Word of Mouth is also the first source of information for many people when it comes to news as well. Last week’s MfM cited a study by Frank N. Magid and Associates that word of mouth was the #1 way people outside the home found out about the Virginia Tech story. That just confirms earlier studies cited by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. A study released by Technorati showed that, based on the number of links to them, 22 blogs (which are a form of word of mouth) ranked in the top 100 news and information sites, which is nearly double the number from the previous year.
Footnote: In television we consultants talk about marketing that focuses on testimonials as one of the most effective forms of promotion, and when you consider it, such testimonials are a form of word of mouth or peer review.
Consumer Generated Media: Going back to the IBM vs. Deloitte article above, one particular point stands out. Despite some different interpretations about TV and the Internet, the two reports agree emphatically that user generated content has become a powerful force in media. The Deloitte report says that more than half (51%) of all Internet uses consume UGC and that goes for all generations. The head of the firm’s product innovation office says he was impressed by the “real popularity” and “widespread demand” of such content. The IBM report which included the U.K., Germany, Japan and Australia as well as the U.S. found consumers are increasingly contributing content. The percentages are small for people contributing to user-generated content sites (7% to 9%) but they more than double (20% to 36%) when consumers are asked about contributing to social networking sites. I should also remind readers of a previous MfM which cited a Pew Internet and American Life Project study that found three out of five (62%) of online video viewers prefer professional content while (one out of five) 19% prefer consumer-generated content.
Two Examples: User involvement in the process is best illustrated by two start-ups in the Music industry. Sellaband celebrated its first anniversary with a SellaBration in Amsterdam, after raising more than $1 Million by inviting fans of bands to invest in their favorite group. Now, another group SlicethePie has started the same concept in the U.S., turning music fans into music investors.
TRENDS: A study by Parks Associates found that a third (34%) of adult web users played online games at least once a week, compared to less than a third (29%) who watched short video clips and only one in five (19%) who hung out at social networks once a week. But, the group says video watching is growing at a rate of 123% compared to online gaming’s 79%. A third (34%) of consumers say they are much more concerned about environmental issues today than a year ago, but only a fifth (22%) believe they can make a difference. And in keeping with the vice versa theme, while concerned about the environment, research firm Yankelovich says ‘going green’ in their everyday life is not a ‘high priority.’
COCKTAIL CHATTER: The world’s #1 cell phone maker, Nokia, reports that India has become its 2nd largest market, jumping ahead of the U.S. but behind China -- something the company had predicted but which happened three years ahead of the predicted time. One country, Afghanistan, supplies 92% of the entire world’s opium, according to an article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. The Japanese government has cancelled a grant that funded a sign language news program after it found out that the newscasters did a striptease while reading news items, the news agency Reuters reports. And a final note, lonelygirl15, the Internet phenomenon that turned out to be a hoax but a hoax that ended up garnering all the publicity it wanted, has died.
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