AR&D Reinventing Local Media

According to a new Pew report, 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. This in no way resembles a bulletin, but there is one hugely important piece of information contained in this report: two-thirds of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. In other words, you have to be invited into their network in order to view their profile, something that drives some parents and the Media 1.0 types absolutely bonkers.

It’s information like this, however, that puts the whole social networking phenomenon in perspective. One, it shows that teens are a lot smarter than we give them credit for being. Two, it punches a sizeable hole in the worrywarts’ self-serving (can you say NBC Dateline?) rants that these places are seething hives of treachery and evil. Three, this statistic — more than anything else — screams that teens want and respect privacy, and for that, we should all be grateful.

Steve Rubel gets it wrong when he suggests that this statistic shows teens aren’t “being social.” They’re being very social; they just don’t want outsiders shoving messages — or worse — in their faces (there’s a name for that, and it’s called e-mail). Parents may lament this, but if parents aren’t allowed in, it says volumes more about the parents than it does the teens.

Those of us who work in media must burn into our minds the message from the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, “The Web is more a social creation than a technical one.” I’ve learned this not only by paying attention but also by experience, and instead of looking for the bogeyman all the time, we’d do well to study what’s really taking place behind the walls of the millions of these closed networks of teens. Far from the evil we suspect, life is the thing about social networks — young people supporting each other, sharing their lives with each other, and growing together.

This is textbook postmodernism: people crafting their own “tribes” and turning to each other instead of trusting institutions. And if they do this as teens and young adults, those habits will become lifetime habits, and what does that say about our culture?

Volumes, methinks.

Is there a better illustration of what’s happening to traditional media than this photo? The Wall St. Journal (I’m a subscriber) began selling the smaller version of its paper last week, and while I like it, the image of the “new” Journal is telling. I don’t wish to beat up the newspaper industry, but here’s an interesting comparison.

Screen resolution of home computer monitors has been changing since the early days, that is to say the screen size has been getting bigger. According to Browser News, the default screen resolution is now 1024×768 pixels. Over 80 percent of computers report this resolution (or higher) now. Only 15 percent use the “old” 800×600 resolution.

Since browsers are adjustable, nobody really knows the default browser window size now, but most sites are currently designed to be 980 pixels wide, up from the popular 800 pixel width just a few years ago. Sites that continue with 800 pixel width will sooner or later get wider.

Contrast this with the Journal getting narrower, and the picture of a changing media world is complete.

This is one of the funniest things I have seen in ages, and my hat’s off to whoever produced it. It is of such quality that it may indeed be a Kodak viral spot. Regardless, it tells the story of the beleaguered company so well, that I’m probably going to use it in my presentations from now on. Get ready to laugh out loud.

UPDATE: This was indeed produced by Kodak, according to AdAge.

“You’d never expect it from Kodak,” said Betty Noonan, Kodak director and VP-brand management, talking about the video’s appeal and popularity. “Kodak has been very narrowly defined — broadly represented as a brand, but narrowly defined.”

“Kodak has been puppies and balloons and families and birthday parties and God bless us all. It’s defined the brand for 100 years and done a wonderful job. But we have to look at puppies and balloons and those visual cues a bit differently,” she said. “We want to keep what defined the brand, but we need to make it relevant to what’s happening out there today.”

Smart. Very, very smart.

In September of 2004, Doc Searls noted 526 “finds” in a Google search for the word “podcasting.” The creation of Dave Winer’s was just beginning to find traction with geeks back then, but, oh my, how times have changed.

A current search of the word on Google reveals 38 million finds. Not bad for just a couple of years.

But here’s something that really made me sit up and take notice. Friday night’s episode of the CBS drama NUMB3RS contained an important reference to podcasting. The bad guy was one of those religious survivalists who was on the run and communicated with his flock by, you guessed it, podcasting. I was just amazed, and I imagined people in living rooms around the country shaking their heads and saying, “Martha, what did he say? What the hell is ‘podcasting?’”

Good news, right? Well…

I spent some time in a web demonstration last week with the good folks at Ingeniux looking at their new podcast management tool. It’s pretty nice and should be in the CMS of any station serious about podcasting. Their business development guy, David Hillis, told me that only about 20% of podcasts are actually downloaded for use in a player. That means the term is basically interchangeable with on-demand streaming, and that’s not what it was originally intended to be.

And so it goes…

Well, it was a weekend of NFL playoffs and relentless commercial breaks, so here are a few observations.

The broadcast version of targeted advertising means every pod in an NFL broadcast contains at least one truck commercial. Men buy trucks. Men watch football. Presto, whammo, bring on the truck ads.

I got so sick of Chevy’s “This is our country” song that the mute button became a dear friend. And, of course, living in Texas means the super manly “Texas version” of all these ads during local and cable breaks. The screen virtually drips with testosterone during the truck ads, and the manipulation is so obvious. And if I see the Loch Ness monster spit that Toyota truck one more time, I’m going to hurl. It was great the first 100 times, but c’mon.

Truck ads in NFL games are a caricature of themselves, a parody in sincere clothing, and they’re so 20th Century.

This is why God made TiVo.

After a score, there’s a commercial break, followed by the kick-off and another commercial break. AUGH! Sonic needs a new ad agency. McDonald’s needs a new ad agency. The rubber floor is fun, but who needs the silly Bud logo ads? A little Viagra goes a long way. And then there’s those damned truck commercials!

Give me more of the Geico cavemen.

I watched nearly the entire two-hour pre-show on ESPN yesterday. I think that Boomer, the coach, the pimp, the player and the mouth make the best NFL analyst team on the air (wait a minute, ESPN isn’t on the “air”). The show, however, splits its time with commercials and pre-produced (with a deep-voiced, macho announcer, of course) teases. I swear the show has more marketing than content, but what do I expect?

This is the sad reality of the end of the blockbuster advertising economy, for there are few blockbusters these days. The NFL playoffs still qualify, I guess, and that’s why traditional advertisers still want to spend their money here. But hold on, fellas! Jamming nine pounds in an eight pound bag is a sure sign that the end is near, a hatchet aimed at the neck of the goose that laid the golden eggs.

All of my teams lost, BTW.

I am very, very pleased to announce that my buddy, Steve Safran, is joining me here in the Media 2.0 unit of AR&D. The announcement will be made on Monday. Steve is one-of-a-kind and a real sharp fellow when it comes to new media things, and I’m delighted we’ll be working together.

Here’s the pertinent part of the press release:

Dallas, TX, January 8, 2007: Audience Research & Development (AR&D), an international media research and consulting firm, announced today it has acquired Boston-based Safran Media Group. The company’s top executive, Steve Safran, will become AR&D’s Senior Vice President of Media 2.0. Safran is a convergence media visionary and innovator, and is best known from his writings at Lost Remote, the “granddaddy of convergence media websites.” His expertise and insight about the rapidly changing landscape of local media have been “required reading” for news and information executives since 2000. Jerry Gumbert, President and CEO of Audience Research & Development made the announcement today in Dallas, Texas.

”Steve is one of only a handful of young local media Internet executives who not only see the future, but have spent the past three years building it,” said Gumbert. “He is a proven player in the Media 2.0 space and is both a leader and trusted advisor to the online journalism community. To AR&D, Safran brings a strong vision and practical revenue-generating experience from his 15 years in TV and web news. Clearly, Steve Safran has written some of the definitive articles and new thinking about digital media in the past two years,” said Gumbert in announcing the deal.

“The traditional media is begging for a lifeline right now as its long-held beliefs are going under,” said Safran. “I’ve been writing for years about the urgency of convergent media, and AR&D is clearly at the forefront of leading media companies into a new era with new business initiatives to capture new audiences. The bottom line: Local stations aren’t just in the TV news business anymore – they’re in the local information business.”

Steve will continue to write for Lost Remote, and we’ll be traveling the countryside planting the seeds of Media 2.0. In the years to come, it’ll be fun to look back at this date and see how much has changed. I should add, also, that this is only the beginning for AR&D. Jerry Gumbert is positioning the company for the future, and I think that’s terribly smart.

Welcome aboard, partner.

Since my return from Amman and my immersion into the Arab culture, I’m extremely sensitive to crap like what happened to an Arab traveler at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas last week. This is a horrible story that suggests we are no better than the terrorists we’re trying to exterminate from the world. The consequences of our behavior may be unintended, but behavior is what others observe. And you can’t talk your way out of something you’ve behaved your way into.

Here’s the story, as reported Wednesday in The Las Vegas Sun.

German national Majed Shehadeh and his wife, Joanne Mulligan, had scheduled a surprise holiday visit with their daughter in California. Wanting to avoid LAX (because they’d been detained there 2 1/2 years ago), they went through Las Vegas. Mulligan traveled several days ahead of her husband, and when she went to the airport to get him last Thursday, she found he had been detained.

The 62-year old Shehadeh, a Syrian native, has a heart condition and was denied his own prescription medicine. He was held incommunicado, taken to a detention center, where his wife was refused access to him, went without medication for 36 hours, had nose bleeds and heart palpitations, and was eventually put on a plane back to Germany four days later.

Mulligan tried everything but was treated rudely and the holiday weekend worked against her.

Shehadeh told AP in a phone interview from his home in Alzenau, a small Bavarian village, that he had given an official at McCarran his German passport “and he looked to see which countries I visited. He found I had stamps that looked like Arabic and asked if they were fake.”

“Nobody ever informed me why I was being questioned,” he said. “All that was ever told to me was this had to do with Washington.”

An aide to (Rep. Diane) Feinstein later told the family that Shehadeh was on a “look-out list,” Mulligan told AP.

Mulligan, born in Massachusetts, retired as a math teacher for the U.S. military. She has lived in Germany since marrying, and the couple has visited the United States many times over the years. In 1996 she founded a nonprofit organization called People in Motion to help people in need, including children in Afghanistan and women in Bosnia.

Her husband’s detention “has to do with that we’re Muslim, that’s all,” she said.

Daughter Majida Shehadeh said, “When you’re a Muslim, you expect you’re going to get this in airports - a little more runaround. But being detained like this - it’s unbelievable. It’s unacceptable.”

The family is demanding to know why Shehadeh was detained and asks a curious question. “If he was a bad guy, why did they let him go? And if he was a good guy, why didn’t they let him join his family?” And according to the International Herald Tribune of Europe, the German government also wants an explanation.

Officials from the Germany’s Consulate General in Los Angeles will write shortly to U.S. immigration authorities in Las Vegas to ask why Shehadeh was detained, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin said Thursday.

The consulate also will ask why U.S. officials allegedly relieved Shehadeh of his prescribed heart medicine, and why the immigration authorities did not inform the consulate about the case.

The spokesman said the consulate was following up a complaint from the man’s relatives that officials had taken away his medicine. Shehadeh has filed no formal complaint, he said.

A representative of the land of the free and the home of the brave (Oh, that’s us!) would only say that Shehadeh was detained, something we already knew.

I shudder at this kind of stuff, because I picture it happening to my family. I just cannot imagine what my daughter and her children would suffer, if this kind of thing happened to Waseem. I mean, it’s one thing to exercise security measures, but it’s quite another to dehumanize people in the process. Even if this man was some sort of threat, which I doubt, there is no justification for separating him so completely from his frightened and concerned family.

Way to go, Homeland Security. You’ve just lowered us, once again, in the eyes of a watching world.

Given the dearth of recent postings here, I think it’s fair for you to surmise that I’ve been pretty busy. Things are really starting to move in the Media 2.0 world, and I find myself pulled in many directions all of the sudden. My mind is here, but my body and my senses are often elsewhere.

It’s one thing to write about this stuff, but it’s entirely another to actually implement the ideas and theories espoused here. I’m finding many more willing ears these days, however, and that’s actually the first step in recovery from a business model that is entirely driven by mass media principles. So with respect to the authors of the original Twelve Steps, here are mine for a complete recovery from old media addiction.

1. We admitted we were powerless over our profitability and that our businesses had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that the power of the disruption could restore us to profitability.
3. Made a decision to turn our thinking and our resources over to Media 2.0, as we understood it.
4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of resources and our business model.
5. Admitted to ourselves, each other and to investors the exact nature of why Media 1.0 wasn’t working anymore.
6. Were entirely ready to give up our dependence on mass media.
7. Humbly asked the disruption to remove our dependence.
8. Made a list of all the things we were doing wrong, and became willing to let each of them go.
9. Let them go, wherever possible, except when to do so would foolishly give away revenue.
10. Continued to take resource inventory and when we made mistakes, promptly turned the other way.
11. Sought through open-minded study to improve our understanding of the disruption, hoping only for the knowledge of profit possibilities and the power to explore them.
12. Having had a media awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry the Media 2.0 message to others, and to practice these principles in all our business affairs.

Max Kalehoff writes a beautiful summary (Page Views Weaken As Metric–But Won’t Die In 2007) of the page views debate in today’s Online Spin. For the unaware, there’s considerable weight out there behind the notion that counting page views is dead or dying as a metric for measuring internet effectiveness, especially in terms of advertising.

This is pretty huge, and Kalehoff offers some real wisdom for web publishers (I hate that term — we don’t “publish”):

Even if the page view doesn’t disappear today or tomorrow, its eventual demise is a signal for publishers to start thinking harder–right now–about their most important stakeholder: their audiences. If your audiences are boss, and you’re nothing to advertisers without them, then you must think seriously about shifting your emphasis from page views to the value and usability of your product. Page-view dependence is competitive vulnerability, because it compromises your audience experience.

What do I mean? Aforementioned Web technologies enable far more compelling user experiences, but page-view addiction often stints publisher innovation by rewarding clunky designs which increase page reloads and result in more interruptive experiences. Most major publishers today are guilty of this to some degree, and some far more than others. Sites specifically rigged to deliver high page views often are as disruptive to flow as a television show crammed with too many intrusive commercials. For example, how annoyed do you get when news sites force you to click through multiple pages, all for one story? And worse, when you’re forced to click through multiple pages simply to review readers’ comments to a story? It’s as if we need a TiVo-like device to skip excessive page views! This is but one trivial example of compromised experience, but hopefully you get my point.

I will continue to argue that the money in Media 2.0 is in direct marketing, not mass marketing, and that we need to be developing strategies that make this a viable alternative to the broadcast/page views model. And I agree with Kalehoff that even if the page view isn’t dead as a metric, we need to be operating as if it is.