Old Media Articles by SEO Speedwagon

March 12, 2008

At the NYT, Suddenly It's All You Can Eat

New York Times CEO Janet Robinson said yesterday that "In this era, no media company can afford to be an island," referencing the NYT's commitment to prioritizing its online growth. Ms. Robinson pointed to the 50 blogs the Times has started this year. To be honest the NYT already offers a treasure trove of information, interactive content and personalization tools. After walling off the good stuff for so long, now they want to give us more...fantastic!

Hey I admit I am a Times junkie, and when the Berlin Wall toppled a while back at the NYT I jumped in with both feet. Check out some of the cool stuff they offer:

1) Times Reader. Times Reader is a Windows XP and Vista compatible software application that provides an intuitive and enjoyable (no scrolling necessary!) reading experience. It automatically adjusts the articles to fit your computer screen. You can change the font size, and save, print, annotate and email articles. It works off-line or you can sync it to get the latest news. It costs $14.95 per month or $169.00 per year, or you can get it free with your NYT newspaper subscription. Which leads me to my next point...

2) NYT Large Print Weekly. I am both near-sighted and short on time, and by subscribing to this great little paper, I got the Times Reader for free. The Large Print Weekly reprints the top news for the week and is a super fast read. Grab this for only $1.65 per week surface mail or $3.30 per week priority mail.

3) NYT Podcasts. The NYT online has a podcast for most any interest. Try their Science podcasts or their OpCast featuring discussions with the Times' Op-Ed contributors.

4) NYT Blogs. News, Sports, Trends, the NYT has it all but if you're into tech, try Pogue's Posts where Dave Pogue can often be found making fun of tech support people.

5) The NYT on your phone. If you think the Times loads fast on your computer, you'll love how quick it loads on your web-enabled phone. With the NCAA tournament coming up and NFL free agency in full swing, the mobile Times is a must-have.

Another NYT tip: Interaction is in. If leaving article comments is old hat for you, try corresponding with the Times' writers about their articles. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how rapidly you'll get a personal response.

At the NYT, Suddenly It's All You Can Eat
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March 04, 2008

NYT Traffic Doubles, Revenue Grows Since Killing Subscriptions

John wrote a few times last fall about the NY Times tearing down its paid subscription wall and allowing spiders in.

Now, in an interview at The Deal, Google's David Eun (on p. 5) confirms that it was a good idea:

We have some partners that have made very bold steps, such as The New York Times, which went from a pay model to a free model. After they went free, the traffic they got from us alone doubled. Their math says they make more money by offering content free to consumers, but stimulating demand and making it work with advertising. The Financial Times did the same thing, and at least early on in the process they experienced at least a 100% growth in traffic.

Don't hold your breath waiting for further breakdown of the math, especially for the NYT example. Note that while Eun says traffic doubled, he was less specific about the money, saying only that "they make more" under the current scenario.

It should be no surprise that it's Google -- not the Times -- telling us the good news about expanded indexation. After all, Google has more to gain from all of us knowing about it, because it now gets a slice of the pie:

Thanks to BeetTV via SearchCap.

NYT Traffic Doubles, Revenue Grows Since Killing Subscriptions
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December 06, 2007

Old Media Quote of the Day

I just love it when Old Media can't adapt to Web 2.0 and tries to pass the buck while hubris prevents them from admitting they are passing the buck:

...the Motion Picture Association of America has asked ISPs to act as monitors of movie piracy. MPAA head Dan Glickman says ISPs need to take on that role if they are hoping for any sort of future support from Hollywood.

Actual buck-passing-disguised-as-responsible-parenting quote from Dan Glickman, head of the MPAA:

The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected.

Old Media Quote of the Day
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November 28, 2007

SEO Speedwagon Killing In Vegas

Who'd have thought a mere 2.5 years from first post we'd be blogging to beat the band?:

Here's the link for proof this isn't a photoshop job, let's just hope the jump in visits doesn't cause them to wonder what is going on.

I for one am having a T-Shirt made of this, anyone else interested?

SEO Speedwagon Killing In Vegas
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November 01, 2007

Search: Too Sexy for Advertising?

Search Quote of the Day from He of the Great Name:

Search is utilitarian. Search is constantly accused of not being sexy. That drives me nuts. The irony is that in pigeonholing search as being boring and utilitarian, all these brilliant advertising minds are missing the biggest idea of all: search works because it’s the customer driving the process, not the advertiser.

I'm with you, Gord. In our industry, conversions are sexy.

Search: Too Sexy for Advertising?
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October 01, 2007

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles

Frank and Maureen and Thomas, oh my!

The chipped cement still has yet to be cleaned up fully from the wall being torn down at that historical error known as TimesSelect, and already we are seeing NY Times columnists able to commune with readers freely at point of search, at least at the Frank and Maureen level:


As internet titan Alan Meckler noted in his posting of the Times e-mail to subscribers, search results like these were the driving force:

Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

Sharing it, linking to it, and commenting on it are the currency of being able to find it in search, and that might be important to a newspaper if, as the latest surveys indicate, 91% of adults use a search engine to find information and 72% get news therefrom.

Ya think?

LATE UPDATE: We just noticed that similar to 1989, another Eastern Block Web Site is about to topple...

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles
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Descriptive Snippets for News Sites

On the heels of Google noting the importance of a strong meta description, I felt compelled to remind you that while I agree with that in theory for most sites, not all Google properties are using it the way publishers would like. Old media is a big enough ship to turn around, and it has finally swung around to see that search is important (see John's post about Times Select), so while they're feeling nimble, I want to offer them some additional advice on click-throughs from news sites such as Google News.

Descriptive snippets on news sites have a tough job. Newspapers need their descriptions to be the "hook" that entices readers like me to click through. They need to be written to fully reside in the confined character quarters that news SERPs allow them. They need to short enough to tease and convince me that I won't get the full story by skimming headlines, but they need to be long enough that I believe THIS SPECIFIC SITE has the full story.

But the problem is that Google News doesn't consistently pull descriptive data from the meta description. Instead, it tends to pull characters from the byline, wire data (if applicable), graphics captions (if applicable), and the first paragraph of the story.

Take the Houston Chronicle as a site that just doesn't get it. In looking through my customized home page of Google News, the algo determined I might be interested in the articles shown here:

The Chronicle messes up because the first text the engine sees after the author's byline is the error text belched out by the Flash sniffer. Not exactly your article's best foot forward.

In a situation like this (an algo-generated list of stories I might like), the Chronicle has the only article about Franchione (the Texas A&M football coach). So the headline itself might be enough to convince me to click through. But if I'd searched Google News for [Franchione], the Chronicle's article would be one of many, and due to the lack of description, my click would almost certainly go elsewhere.

So what's a poor paper to do, beyond making sure its no-Flash error text gets buried out of the way? Is the rest of the article set up to give your description maximum exposure? Take a look at the following headlines and descriptions and see who really gets it:

In the shot above, the green text is descriptive text about the story itself, while the yellow text is author/byline/wire information. The LA Times gets it because they bury the byline AFTER the story's lede, as shown in the shot at the left. Only the Times gets its WHOLE abstract on the SERP. The other papers' abstracts get cut off because they lead with author bylines. On the actual article page (shown at left), notice how the Times' placement of the intro paragraph followed by the byline is mirrored on the actual Google News SERP above.

Unless your story's author IS PART OF the story itself or is part of the brand (think Dowd, Ebert, Buckley, etc.), you'll need to experiment to ensure that your byline doesn't distract readers and keep them from getting the full benefit of the description you've written. Test, test, test, and make sure your readers get the most tempting view of the story you can manage.

Descriptive Snippets for News Sites
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September 18, 2007

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989

We knew it was coming and we tried to bake a cake for Maureen Dowd more than a Month ago, yet we are still surprised at how search-friendly they are being in their explanation today:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

If you have any doubt that this is the SEO equivalent of 1989 scroll a bit further down the page for this money quote:

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.

Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.

Mr. Murdoch, tear down that wall!

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989
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September 17, 2007

PPC vs. Yellow Pages vs. Direct Mail CPA

Via Chris Zaharias via MediaPost via Piper Jaffray, we get this stark contrast:

Search advertising has proven to be fertile ground for customer acquisition. A recent study by Piper Jaffray & Co. entitled, “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting,” indicated that the average CPA for search was $8.50, considerably lower than the CPA for the Yellow Pages ($20), online display ads ($50) and direct mail ($70).

Could you imagine how low the Organic CPA would have been in comparison, had they found a way to incorporate that into the study?

PPC vs. Yellow Pages vs. Direct Mail CPA
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August 21, 2007

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II

Article or Press Release?:

It's always seemed strange to look for information on a brand, and to see it appear both in the organic search results and at or near the top of the paid listings. Why spend money on a brand term that's going to deliver a top five organic result for the same query anyway?

If this sounds eerily similar to what many Wagon Riders thought yesterday was a lede of questionable intelligence, then your parotid attention may have kept you from swallowing full gulp. For those caught in the act of mastication, though, it's good to know that the above meme is being pushed by Atlas, owned by Microsoft, neither of which are owned or own or like Google, beneficiary of the great majority of the branded ad spend currently under PR assault.

Here at The Wagon we get the same strange feeling the Talking Point pushes in the quote above when we fix our eyes on a graph like the below:

With search behavior like that, why in the world would you want your brand to appear more than once, let alone a single time, in the same screen space above the fold? Good advice from the originator of democracy of screen space.

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II
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August 20, 2007

New SEM Industry Term Coined: Disposable Clicks

We sure did have fun with this Quote of the Month while taking The Wagon for a spin this morning. From the magazine that takes itself so seriously it demands all caps, ADWEEK, we are treated to this breathless lede:

New research by Microsoft suggests a big chunk of search ad spending is wasted because advertisers pay top dollar for high ad placements clicked by consumers who are en route to their sites anyway. Listings tied to such "branded" keywords, typically a company's name or products, eat up about half of search budgets, Atlas estimates.

Wasted, indeed. Heard while The Wagon pulled up to fill itself up with coffee:

It's like saying Applebee's doesn't need specific signage or identifiable markings on its building to show out-of-towners where it is, because people are going to go there for dinner anyway. That is exactly how stupid this is.

Isn't this also an argument against any brand advertising of any kind?

New SEM Industry Term Coined: Disposable Clicks
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August 15, 2007

NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade

As you probably know, the NY Times has been the most prominent experiment in the paid content-behind-a-firewall-yet-at-least-partially-indexable model, and they are indeed now, finally, announcing via trial ballooning they are no longer going to put their most popular columnists behind that magic curtain one has to pay to sweep aside. After the magic show ends and the same fingers which initially drew the curtain are finished being pointed this way and that, this failed experiment will have had much to do with the principles of Link Building.

A party-goer cloaks her content as Maureen Dowd. Found on Flickr. Copyright 485i

First a great quote that helps explain the decision's relevance to our industry:

But the truth of the matter is that you get far more eyeballs when you're not locking away your content from the general public. The reality of Web 2.0 news is that people a rising tide raises all the ships. If you've got good content, and the Times does, people will link to it. When people read a technology blog like Engadget or a political blog like Daily Kos and find links to articles at the New York Times, everybody wins. Keeping your archives, op-eds, and other content locked up means that blogs and news sites won't link to you, won't give you credit for finding a story first, and won't drive up your traffic.

This lack of inbound links to the content-behind-the-firewall damaged traffic to the site not only through a paucity of visitors being able to click on these links to the columns themselves...:

...the share of traffic that the NY Times sends to NY Times Select has been decreasing over the past year – down by 16% year-on-year in July. With NY Times Select receiving more than two thirds (67%) of its US traffic from NYTimes.com, the decline had an impact with US visits to NY Select down 22% in the past year.

...in having to rely far too heavily on the parent site rather than third party links for traffic, but also in the residual effect such had in these columns' search engine visibility. With few third party inbound links accumulating with each new column, in fact from a deliberate online community decision not to link to content-behind-a-firewall, it is also very difficult for each new column to be judged more relevant than similarly themed columns emerging on the same topic that immediately acquire inbound links in the form of the same online community recommending them. It's no wonder the Times Select had to rely so heavily on clicks from the parent site for visits, as a great many of those visits were likely already subscribers. In that situation it is difficult to grow at the rate of the internet. Try these two simple searches for Frank and Maureen alone: nary a column to be found. Haven't they written quite a few?

I think everyone likely to read this blog knew this would happen. But to say we knew it would happen ultimately is not to say we are not happy to see even giants felled by an algorthm rejected, not select(ed).

NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade
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April 04, 2007

If I Could Just Insert Something Here...

...certainly you will no longer realize you have just been interrupted. That's the latest note in the bittersweet Old Media symphony of interruption marketing rationalizing away the fact that their advertising vehicles, those dinosaurs eying the glaciers in sight, are -- well -- interruptions:

Fox, in a bid to keep viewers watching during commercial breaks, will begin running short, animated snippets of programming between ads.

The tiny bits of programming will be about a taxi driver called Oleg, who will share words of wisdom and will chat with spoof versions of celebrities like Tom Cruise and Donald Trump, writes The Wall Street Journal. Two eight-second clips will begin airing on Monday.
The other broadcast networks are working on similar initiatives. At its development meetings with advertisers, for example, ABC showed off an idea that it hopes would make the break between programming and commercials seamless. The idea involves having characters watching an ad on TV. The ad would then expand to fill the whole screen.

Good golly if the characters are watching the ad, shouldn't I?

Allow me to insert here my growing belief that a key distinction between Old Media and New -- with each new brand of trick pulled on customers assumed prima facia breathtakingly dumb and devoid of any critical thinking skills whatsoever, collectively -- appears rather unfortunately to be disdain for the customer.

When an audience is telling you they would rather not be interrupted and rather than alter your vehicle you instead devise schemes to either strap them in or trick them out of realizing the route they choose has suddenly changed, what other could that strategy been born of than contempt?

New Media has a word for these tactics: Spam.

If I Could Just Insert Something Here...
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March 12, 2007

Consumer Privacy Can Be SOOOOOO Annoying!

Perhaps it's simply a matter of having worked so long in a marketing niche that outputs only upon user-initiated input -- and questions seeking answers at that -- individuated down even to the syllable level, transmitted from the mind to the fingertips, each single atomic instance of the exchange a mutual handshake, rather than a phone-ringing, paper-flinging, desktop-hijacking raid.

Perhaps not. Perhaps I value privacy at some hermit-level degree and just haven't left my cave enough to yet realize it. But I find some of the assumptions inherent in this whining blurb about the fictional consumer "Katy" from Do-Not-Mail Movement Gains Traction in State Legislatures to be a particularly offensive note in the bittersweet AdAge symphony of interruption marketing rationalization:

Having clearly established her ability to bad-mouth your brand on her blog, TiVo your TV commercials, stop your phone calls and filter out your pop-ups, now-with the help of the government-she's trying to stop you getting access to her mailbox.

Is this blistering self-parody or have they finally jumped the shark into totalitarianism?

Consumer rights? Let them eat cake!

Consumer Privacy Can Be SOOOOOO Annoying!
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March 07, 2007

Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name

Here and there The Wagon has been known to get political in its analysis, often to illustrate pols know not what they do on the internet. Today we have a new honey of a rankings scandal courtesy of techPresident:

In a recent survey, I found that Wikipedia has an expansive influence in organic Google search results for 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, their Wikipedia entry is ranked no lower than 5th place by Google. In addition, the Wikipedia entry ranks higher than the election web presence of that particular candidate for 25% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans.

Now first, lest the uninitiated, casual SEO observer not fully grasp the above search incompetence, it is quite difficult for a major brand not to rank first for its own brand name. You almost have to be doing something wrong at the site level, and most competent SEOs will be able to discover the reason for the glitch and remedy the error fairly quickly. The higher the brand recognition the greater the ease, if for no other reason than Google understands that a pure brand search will almost always signal an intent to find the brand site itself. Google's product is relevancy, as we like to say here.

Is there a more recognized brand on the techPresident list than America's Mayor, [Rudy Giuliani]? Yet at second he languishes, behind the Wikipedia entry replete with detailed analysis of the controversies not broached on the site he would like for you to rather visit instead.

The difference between these first and second positions? We know from the massive AOL search data leak that on that engine, at least, about half of all searchers click on #1 and south of 15% on #2, at least for the 20 million searches performed by 658,000 subscribers in that data sample.

If you are losing half of all searches on your brand that should be visiting your site uncontested, you should try and do something about it. Let's keep an eye on Rudy and see if he does.

Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name
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February 19, 2007

Visitors Lost When It Comes To Searching for ABC Videos

Mark Simon has a great Old Media catch in today's Search Insider:

...Big Media hasn't yet fully grasped search's value. Consider ABC -- which offers full-length downloads of its most popular shows, surely placing it amongst the most Web-forward of the big media giants. When it comes to search, ABC.com is clearly lagging.

For starters, the page on which ABC.com visitors can download full-length ABC programs has minimal HTML text -- even though HTML is the language that search engines read best. Even the names of the shows themselves are absent from the page's HTML. Title tags are also critical for organic rankings, but the page's title tag -- "ABC.com full episode player" -- doesn't mention the word "download." I could go on, but suffice it to say that it's not surprising that on the term "download lost," ABC.com is absent from Google's first organic result page.

Good golly. Begs that Old Media philosophical query: if a video is uploaded to a server yet no one ever plays it, does it exist?

Visitors Lost When It Comes To Searching for ABC Videos
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November 13, 2006

A Digital Maginot Line?

Boy, this is some great idea.

I suppose the Newspapers will repose in the same sort of security as that provided by The Maginot Line circa 1940, as I'm sure what they see as Google and Yahoo invasions will quickly find a very similar walk-around to the Scheer Plan, not to be confused with the Schlieffen Plan, the former recently uncovered by Just an Online Minute:

THE CALIFORNIA FIRST AMENDMENT COALITION has a plan to save newspapers from the perceived threat of Google, Yahoo and other portals. Newspapers should withhold their content from all but paying subscribers for at least 24 hours, proposes Peter Scheer, a lawyer, journalist and executive director of the nonprofit. "A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals--Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN--with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from 'mainstream' media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap," he wrote in a column in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Yikes. With Executive Directors like that, who needs enemies?

A Digital Maginot Line?
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July 31, 2006

Proximity Uber Alles: Relevancy Not Very Relevant

This is a hoot:

The idea is to encourage visitors to start their searches for additional articles on newspapers' own sites, rather than go to Google News or another news aggregator, said Julian Steinberg, Inform's vice president of operations. "If you give your users all the functionality and content that your users want online, then your users will keep coming back day in and day out," he said.

Julian, we hardly knew ye. Yet online history is littered with the tattered pages of business plans stipulating relevance to be less important than proximity, so there is a long line of tradition for you to stand in and, hopefully, some free drinks remain at the bar from the bubble era to tide you over as you await your on-site search revolution.

Relevance? Fie! We'll worry about relevance after users start searching within our site.

Old media can be so quaint it's almost kind of cute...

Proximity Uber Alles: Relevancy Not Very Relevant
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June 14, 2006

Just a Second - Was That an Ad?

Via Threadwatch, I read an interesting bit about Clear Channel considering one-second radio spots for advertisers. One second. Despite the interjectory worst-case scenarios about the character limit in one second of air time ("GoToHooters!"), if well placed, they might just cause the listener enough momentary imbalance to be relatively memorable.

My first thought (alas, my cross to bear) was wondering how such an advertising vehicle would integrate with search. Not too badly, I think. Assuming you approached the campaign correctly (that is, backwards) - finding a unique, memorable, interest-piquing, easy-to-spell phrase, then making sure your organic and PPC positioning was pre-loaded prior to the radio spots, you could probably get a lot page views.

(And maybe even some desired actions, assuming your landing page was tailored to users with one-second attention spans.)

Stepping back, part of the bigger story here is that traditional radio is finding less and less solace in the overstuffed wing chairs at the Old Media Country Club. The terror troika of satellite radio, podcasting, and internet radio are stealing eardrums, and advertisers have a bad habit of noticing things like that.

Still, whether commercials are 30 seconds, or one second, or a photon burst directly into the cerebral cortex isn't really the issue. New media is about pull, and it's going to take more than the audio equivalent of pop-up ads to keep advertisers in FM, where day after day, the morning drive team slings out

Nothin' but blues and Elvis
And somebody else's favorite song

Just a Second - Was That an Ad?
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May 31, 2006

Do We Really Need an Interactive Gross Rating Point (iGRP)?

First a bit about Gross Ratings Points, before we add the ubiquitous i. A Gross Ratings Point (GRP) is an old media relic, a trace of that outmoded practice of extrapolating what the nation's 110 million households are watching based on 5,100 strong. One GRP = 1% of these 110 million TV households based on the sample of 5,100 actual TV households culled from a mere 56 markets across the much-more-than-fifty-six markets of the United States. I'm not kidding.

So this 1% of 5,100 TV households across 56 markets allows for the unit GRP to be expressed as costs per point (CPP) when TV advertising is being purchased. Sounds quite quaint when compared to our own Pay Per Click (PPC) system, where each unit of cost is an actual, live visitor actually engaging with the brand advertised via an actual, live click to the brand site, but it's worked for so long, right?

Cory Treffiletti warms my heart with her objection in her OnlineSPIN article today:

The problem is that Nielsen data is becoming less and less valuable at an alarming speed, as consumers' media consumption behavior changes.

That is indeed the rub, when you're basing pricing on 1% of a 1% that doesn't even sample 30.34% of the nation's TV markets nor account for the fact that sitting down and watching TV programming as it is broadcast is rapidly becoming a quaint relic of the past in and of itself. So Cory is spot on when she asks why we would want to add an i to make our industry Gross when the pricing model itself is becoming too gross to work anymore anyway:

My point with all of this is that a GRP only works if the model for buying is on a cost per point. If we revise the counting and measurement methodologies to reflect actual delivery or actual exposure in the way that we currently buy online, then an estimated share is no longer applicable, and we can revise the model based on impressions or OTS (opportunity to see). A few years ago, I tried to revise the buying model to reflect cost per visitor rather than cost per impression, and for a little while that worked, too, but it became onerous and didn't have the strength to stay in place, nor does the GRP--not until the methodology for measurement from Nielsen includes all opportunities for exposure and actual viewership.

Like her, I'm for a unifying apples-to-apples old-media-to-new unit of advertising cost someday, but why condescend from our accurate current system to their fanciful one? iRegression seems to be a move in the wrong direction.

Do We Really Need an Interactive Gross Rating Point (iGRP)?
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May 08, 2006

On Advertising, Egalitarianism, Totalitarianism, Hegemony, and Adaptation

The internet is an egalitarian system. The distance between the birth of a new idea or thought and the critical mass obtained to make either suddenly part of the global conversation, or even a niche conversation that would have never been possible at any other epoch in human history, can literally be minutes- minutes only because the atomic element in these births is equal across the global nursery.

Were the atom in this case to be judged first and categorized by a hierarchical appraisal of assets, as is the want of the current net neutrality land-grab attempt before congress, we would no longer have an egalitarian system, and the distance to critical mass would either stretch out beyond sight and reach or be barred completely by an electronic ceiling. The heads hitting it would be those attached to the least assets, of course.

It's this same egalitarianism that challenges old media, and as hegemonic systems usually demonstrate when challenged to change, the urge to become totalitarian rather than adapt to the burgeoning egalitarianism they are faced with clouds judgments, and very bad ideas seem very good. The loony Philip's toothpick-in-the-eyes patent is a wonderfully stupid case in point.

All of this as preamble serves as a way to attempt to fully recognize a good old media idea in the face of the egalitarian change they are confronted with- an all-too-rare attempt to adapt rather than change the game such that only they and their buddies can play:

TiVo today launched its new advertising search product, TiVo Product Watch, offering advertisers a new way to reach highly valued in-market consumers - those TiVo subscribers who are actively looking for products - with advertising content and information, MarketingVox reports. Some 70 advertisers and 100 leading brands have signed up at launch. TiVo subscribers will be able to create searches, including their favorite brands, and select advertising content ranging from one minute to 60 minutes.

Mind you, TIVO is no old media company. Yet note in the following advertisers adapting to the challenge of a new media format like TIVO, rather than trying to disable it like the Philip's Clockwork Orange approach:

At launch, General Motors, Sony Pictures, Lending Tree and Kraft Foods will be among the premium advertisers for their respective advertising categories. Examples of content range from cooking demonstrations from Kraft Foods, to understanding the impact of different types of mortgages from Lending Tree, to behind-the-scenes movie trailers from Sony Pictures and new automotive features and aesthetic options from General Motors.

I'm willing to bet viewers just may appreciate this a bit more than having their eyes pried open forcibly.

On Advertising, Egalitarianism, Totalitarianism, Hegemony, and Adaptation
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April 10, 2006

The Latent Value of a Fast-Forwarded Ad

Regular riders on the Wagon will recall my disdain for all things Nielsen. I have to admit, though, that those mendacious media ratings men (and women, to be sure) have taken a giant leap towards truth and accuracy in reporting with their latest extrapolation of what the nation's 110 million households are watching based on 5,100 strong.

In a surprising effort to break out what households are watching from whether they are also watching the ads in between, they have now TIVOized ratings down to television minute molecules:

By overlaying minute-by-minute data and DVR ratings - which provide a "live" category and a "live plus seven day" number - the new data provides the average audience for each minute, including minutes containing ads, and serves as a proxy for commercial ratings.

The surprises stop there; only 1% of DVR users are actually watching the ads in between the programming they are capturing. But the punch line comes in that old media spin, with a fresh twist of incredulity:

Networks argue that ads seen in fast-forward mode still offer value, providing at least some exposure.

If buyers buy this, what of the unclicked click in PPC Advertising?

The Latent Value of a Fast-Forwarded Ad
Posted by john at 08:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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