TV Commercial Measurement vs Web Ad Reports

Get ready for a bit more give and take when it comes to your commercial consumption. You digest sales and advertisement all the time on billboards and signs on your way to work, in the magazines and newspapers you read and in the radio you listen to. Still, according to Todd Chanko, an analyst with market research firm Jupiter Research, "Even today, the easiest way for an advertiser to reach a broad number of potential customers is through network television".

But the game is getting a bit trickier and adjustments are taking place. Starting this week, Nielson Media Research begins offering ratings for commercial breaks, instead of just the shows themselves. Soon advertisers will know who decided to stick around for their product pitch.

This has become necessary for a few reasons, two of the most compelling being the widespread adoption of DVRs into an estimated 17% of households (growing quickly) and the accelerating spending on web advertising. CNN has an interesting article on how TV networks are getting sneakier about commercials. In that piece they also provide that nearly half of viewers 18 to 49 years old are watching recorded programs instead of live ones.

With web advertising you can get a far more complete picture. You can get total number of views, you can adjust the message based on profiles of the viewer, you can recognize any action they take on the message and you can even, in some cases track them all the way from exposure to purchase.

That is a pretty hard solution to compete with when you are primarily a passive entertainment venue like television. In the short term, network television has a few ideas. Product placement is one. Interactive programs and exclusive offers within the commercials is another.

In the long run, television will have to increasingly become more like the web, as the web has created entertainment offerings the compete in the same programming space. With Google and Microsoft providing ad engines and video readily available online it will be interesting to see where they converge.

Friends, Family and Digital Recording

It is a long weekend and I hope you get plenty of outdoor activity. I would also like to recommend three books for you to read if you are interested in the darker or more critical view of the escalating data store being kept on all of us.

First, "A World Without Secrets" by Richard Hunter. A short snippet from Publishers Weekly describes the book as "The warning bell about our rapidly disappearing privacy is sounded again albeit none too stridently in this study of new technologies and their impact. Hunter... wants to sketch out how the omnipresence of computers affects every last centimeter of modern human existence. His first chapter, "Why Won't They Leave Me Alone?" is most to the point, asking, on the subject of Internet commerce, "Is the convenience of being known everywhere worth the risk of being known everywhere?"

Second, "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?" by David Brin. This was highly recommended to me by a professor at the Institute of Technology, UWT. The following is lifted from Amazon.com's Editorial Review. I didn't take the Publishers weekly snippet because (full disclosure) it was not complementary.

"David Brin takes some of our worst notions about threats to privacy and sets them on their ears. According to Brin, there is no turning back the growth of public observation and inevitable loss of privacy--at least outside of our own homes. ...Brin asserts that cameras used to observe and reduce crime in public areas have been successful and are on the rise. There's even talk of bringing in microphones to augment the cameras. Brin has no doubt that it's only a matter of time before they're installed in numbers to cover every urban area in every developed nation.

While this has the makings for an Orwellian nightmare, Brin argues that we can choose to make the same scenario a setting for even greater freedom."

I left in the extra sentence as he mentions the Orwellian nightmare. This is my awkward segue to the third recommendation. Take out, check out or buy, then (re)read the George Orwell classic "Nineteen Eighty-Four".

Because Big Brother is watching you, and we are Big Brother.

Here are three current celebrity examples. (Thank you for pointing out the first on your blog Lynneta and thank you Adrian for the Romanian example in class).

David Hasselhoff is drunk to a complete lack of coherence. He struggles, shirtless and slurring, to eat a hamburger and talk at the same time. It is posted for the entire world to see on YouTube and elsewhere.....by his own fourteen year old daughter.

Alec Baldwin is heard berating his daughter and calling her a selfish pig on a recording he left on her phone answering system. Kim his ex-wife denies she or her lawyers in their custody case leaked it to the press.

Romanian President Traian Basescu was approached by the journalist, Andreea Pana, in a Bucharest supermarket. At this time, Romanians were voting on whether to impeach him for alleged constitutional abuses. While the reporter was asking him about the ballot and trying to film him with her cell phone, Basescu angrily snatched the phone from her. He kept it with him and when alone in a car with his wife he called Pana a "stinky Gypsy." What he didn't know was that the phone continued to record his conversations. When the phone was returned, the conversation was released. The President has apologized.

There is a maxim about the web. Don't party with friends who have digital cameras.

Have a good read this weekend and ponder that.

Completely Non Virtual

For all the time I spend thinking, talking and writing about technology and the virtual world, you might wonder where a tangible world balance comes in.

Balance is about work/life, yin/yang, give/take.

For me, the quest for something tangential comes through live theater and musical theater in particular. When doing theater you are at a heightened state of the senses for a predetermined period of time.

You are hyper aware of everything around you because you are being counted on to hear the cue, sing the song, grab the prop, move the scene around and quite often (gasp) dance. Picking up the pace or the dropped line requires you think on your feet and that you can understand visual cues from the other actors. I would mention the taste and smell aspects of it, but if anyone has been backstage in a crowded dressing room you know I don't need to go there.

Most of my experiences come from shows at the Tacoma Musical Playhouse. Though I have been in other shows in different venues, I consider that stage my home base. I hope that my good fortune in being cast in shows there continues.

Currently, and for one more weekend, I am in the Tacoma Children's Musical Theater production of The Fabulous Fable Factory as Wadsworth, the Word Worker (and Lion, and Ant and Mouse). A bonus goes to the fact that Cassie, the Character Conceiver (my wife) is in the show with me. Not to mention the cast and director are great to work with.

If you're in the South Sound and have small children, bring them on by for one of the two remaining matinees. If you are interested in knowing more. The Volcano and the Tacoma Weekly both have reviews posted.

That is not to say that technology and the web haven't changed how theater is sold, supported, managed and produced. But that's for another time.

A Visit from Kevin Freitas

The Living and Working class had the honor of another guest lecturer yesterday. Kevin Freitas, of www.kevinfreitas.com and www.feedtacoma.com, got to share his experiences starting, running and aggregating blogs in and about the South Sound and Tacoma. Kevin works as a developer at SiteCrafting and has hand built the blogs that he writes and manages.

Most recent of the projects and one with great momentum and potential is FeedTacoma. A marriage of RSS feeds, South Sound blogs, a plethora of photos and photo adventures, discussion groups and an event calendar, it also boasts one of the few political and subversive cartoons in the Tacomic.

The general nature of the aggregation of the blog postings from several divergent sources (with common themes and differing perspectives) strikes me as being similar to an Associated Press or United Press International offering. It is the new South Puget Sound news feed, with the news being highly localized, personal and frequently unabashedly biased. Nothing wrong with that.

"Hey, what's going on in Tacoma?"

"I don't know, let's see what's come across the Blog wire."

Kevin has an open source sensibility and allows for postings to come from a multitude of sources. With 21 one current contributors, including this blog, that allows for many postings per day. But unlike traditional blog postings, this are titles with first paragraphs of the noted post acting as the synopsis.

As it grows and as more blogs contribute, it will be interesting to see how it can maintain its focus, or whether it will have to further break down and categorize the copy as it rolls in.

6% Budget for Web at Voice of America

I will have to go back through my notes to remember who gave this bit of information out. I'm just back from Washington, DC where I attended among other events Congressman Adam Smith's 9th district day. It was an engaging array of speakers and excellent information. I also got to walk the whole of Washington Mall from the Capital Building to the Lincoln Memorial.

But the information that was given was that the Voice of America has 6% of their budget assigned to online and internet communication. If true, then I think that is too low. The Voice of America (VOA), is the official external radio and television broadcasting service of the United States federal government.

As they describe themselves...
"The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 115 million people."

I'm not making a content judgment. It could even be argued that their charter is for radio and television communications, and therefore budget considerations for the web are secondary. It might also be pointed out that they do allow for some podcasts and internet streaming.

But is that enough? The web has emerged as its own media source, outside the repurposing of traditional media programming. Much of what we see is consumer generated, organizationally provisioned messaging as well as programming specifically created for the web.

It just strikes me that if your mission is to provide information that is effective to a global audience, the piece of the budget pie for web based communications needs to be greater than a percentage in the single digits.

Virtual World Travel Agencies

Looking for a very different Summer job? Are you an avatar with great communications skills?

When the web matured into more than a marketing and communications network, and started to introduce applications based on expert systems, enterprise level software and personalization, many support level occupations went on a steep decline. Travel agencies in particular took a hit from the likes of Expedia, Vacation Planning Segments of Airline web sites and even Disney's very complete tickets and reservations programming.

Translation services, financial planning and personal shoppers are now more likely digital than corporeal.

But you never know what opportunities will spring up from this new environment. Travel agencies have surfaced in an unexpected place, the complex and expanding online universe.

Synthravels calls itself the fist online virtual travel agency. It is "the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds."

These virtual worlds include Second Life, Worlds of Warcraft, Horizons, the SIMS online and many others. It is the product of two forward thinking savvy Italian entrepreneurs who developed their idea with expertise in travel planning.

I just visited Leavenworth and loved it. I am heading to DC tomorrow and Chicago later this year. But these guys promise "you will see exotic landscapes where among prehistoric trees break out bizarre surrealistic architectures, strange fantasy regions where the elves built astonishing temples, synthetic deserts covered with post-atomic ruins, seas of pixels where float ghostly vessels, organic architectures that conceal undercover avatars."

Sweet.

I understand that they are even hiring skilled avatars as guides.

“We’re flying…., we’re flying….., we’re flying….. Now we’re stoping. To your right is the palace of Zandar the Eater of Worlds, to the immediate left is the Lollipop Forest where we will be stopping for lunch.”

Catching a Domain Name

Back in the early 90's there was a bit of a gold rush mentality when it came to domain names. I knew folks who made a business out of registering as many domains as they could and then turning around and selling them, sometimes for huge profits. Often times this is known as "Cybersquatting". It refers to the purchase of a domain name in bad faith. Usually this is done with the intention of reselling that domain name back to the legal copyright holder. This is now legally recognized as a violation of the trademark of the holding company. Of course there are legitimate disputes both online and in the real world. The World Wrestling Federation (WWF) had to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment after a dispute with the World Wildlife Fund. McDonalds settled with a high school student early on over mcdonalds.com.

Here is an item of interest on the local front. Where would you go to find the Humane Society? Also consider that the Humane Society is an international organization.

If you were to use the .org extension, www.humanesociety.org resolves itself to The Humane Society of the United States. If you were to use the .com or commercial extension to go to www.humanesociety.com it would take you to The Humane Society of Canada. If you tried www.thehumanesociety.com using the .COM or commercial extension it would take you to the web site of Pet Ark. I would have to consider that a bit confusing.

However, of all the locales possible, Tacoma/Pierce County is the home page owner of www.thehumanesociety.org which has the correctly used .ORG or organization extension for a non-profit. I guess that makes The Humane Society of Tacoma and Pierce County "THE" Humane Society.

For those interesting in adopting or volunteering, their real world address is ..

2608 Center Street
Tacoma, WA 98409
Phone: (253) 383-2733

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I once considered buying the old domain of Free Range Media back (www.freerange.com), three years after Luminant Worldwide bought the company and subsequently closed its doors. Someone had snapped it up and wanted 12,000 dollars for it.

Any good domains out there that are still available?