Magnosticism

Some consider “broadcast journalism” an oxymoron, but Tim Russert defied that derisive view. He was the ultimate newsman. In these days of stream-of-conscsiousness blogging masquerading as news, Russert stood out as a relentlessly prepared and fearless journalist, an objective reporter who had no other agenda than to get the truth out of politicians and other Washington power brokers. But as colleagues and friends noted in the many tributes pouring in since his sudden and unexpected death yesterday at age 58, he didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

As someone who always believed in the ideals of journalism, the art of interviewing, and the thrill of pursuing a hot story, I loved watching Russert perform his craft. He was a true master, and both journalism and politics will be much worse off without him.

A new study from a research firm called Grunwald Associates indicates a significant shift in the media habits of children:

Sixty-four percent of kids go online while watching television, and nearly half of U.S. teens (49 percent) report that they do so frequently — anywhere from three times a week to several times a day. … The study reveals that 73 percent of TV-online multitasking kids are engaged in “active multitasking,” defined by Grunwald Associates as content in one medium influencing concurrent behavior in another. This trend represents a 33 percent increase in active multitasking since 2002. While kids are using more media, their attention primarily and overwhelmingly is focused on their online activities.

I don’t need stats to tell me about the decline of traditional TV among tomorrow’s generation; I see it daily in my own house, as my 17-year-old watches downloaded episodes of Degrassi on her iPod, as my 12-year-old focuses far more time IM’ing or fast-forwarding through DVR’d Celtic games than watching live TV, and as my 9-year-old runs around the house making videos and begging me to let him post something on YouTube, or as he surfs for PS2 cheats online, half-listening as Jimmy Neutron drones in the background.   

Sure, there are a few seminal TV events that the family feels obligated to watch live, like the Super Bowl or, to a lesser extent, American Idol. But today’s kids are edging - no, rushing - away from the passive TV experience. I do not envy network execs.
 

At client meetings today in Milwaukee, where - surprise! - it’s snowing. For such a supposedly hardy area of the country, the local news sure makes the populace seem weather-wimpy. The ABC affiliate extended their morning news by a half-hour to cover what amounted to a traffic jam on I-94 and generally slippery roads. Among the list of safe-driving tips they offered:

• Clear snow from vehicle before you drive
• Drive slowly
• Avoid skids

And the anchor added, with the tone and furrowed brow of someone who’s acutely aware of the seriousness of the situation: “Drive slowly out there.”

This probably speaks more to the state of local media than the fine state of Wisconsin.

Still recovering from the shock and awe of Super Bowl XLII. Shock, as in I can’t believe the Patriots lost, and awe, as in the Giants - my boyhood team of choice in the ’70s before I transitioned/bandwagoned to the Pats in the ’80s and ’90s - not just beating New England, but beating them up in the process. I’ve been out of sorts all day, still trying to make sense of it.

So I’m way behind (as usual) on the usual post-Super Bowl blather over the ads that ran during the game. Far better pundits have already weighed in. You have USA Today’s Ad Meter results [puking e-trade baby only ranks 15th - are you kidding me?], and BusinessWeek’s picks and pans (nice graphic treatment with the embedded ads), and the curious critiques of AdAge Ad Critic Bob Garfield (Bridgestone homophobia? screams that frighten children?), and countless other post-mortems that show just how focused we all are on unimportant things.

Spare me the debate over whether these ads actually provide any return on investment. Buzz trackers are off the charts for this event, and the YouTube effect no doubt makes these spots justifiable. The only one I’m truly perplexed by is salesgenie.com - a completely inane three-pack (3 spots!!!) from a dot-com that sells call and mailing lists. Double ick. Adweek provides an important piece of insight on these spots:  

Vin Gupta, chairman of Salesgenie … said that, like the previous spot, he conceptualized and wrote copy for the new ads himself.

So there you have it. Gupta claims that last year’s spot sent 25,000 folks scurrying to the website. He doesn’t say if they bought any sales leads once they got there. But why sweat the details? This is the Super Bowl, baby.  

Update: Churbuck concurs.

Whew! I nestled in for a long winter’s nap and the next thing I know it’s Jan. 2.

Why do some advertisers - particularly sponsors of sporting events - put their TV ads in such heavy rotation? I’m talking about the six-times-per-broadcast spots, the ones from which my kids are now reciting complete lines of dialog. And no, brand owners, that’s not really a good thing. Oversaturation is BAD, even for clever ads.  After seeing the same spot a half-dozen times during a single football game, amusement leads to fatigue, followed by annoyance. What started as a positive consumer experience (Hey, funny ad) turns painfully negative (Not this again!).  

 Here are the worst offenders:

• Chevrolet. ”This Is Our Truck - This Is Our Country.” This tired John Mellencamp campaign is our Grand Prize Winner for a jingle that has jumped the shark.
• Cialis. An uncomfortable subject made worse by endless overexposure during “family viewing” time. Really now, my 9-year-old son has enough phobias without having to fret about a future of erectile dysfunction. And this from my 16-year-old daughter: “ED is gross.”
• Nissan. First with the Rogue, now with the Altima, these ads are creatively cool yet annoying in their omnipresence. Worst sin: They made me sick of The Clash!
• AT&T Wireless. The wireless carrier gets some credit for at least offering a series of different spots in its “Seamless World” campaign, which features mash-ups of city names like Philawarepragicago to demonstrate, I dunno, how mobile we are. But the punch lines wear off quickly. And for this they’re anointed Marketer of the Year?

I’m sure there are others, but I’ve purged the evil brands from my consciousness (and use my DVR whenever possible to avoid them). Take that!

If it’s December, that can mean only one thing: an endless stream of Top 10 lists. Some interesting tidbits from Nielsen’s look at what it considers the year’s top media, consumer and advertising trends:

• Top TV Program “Buzzed” About Online: My Name Is Earl (No. 10 on the list: Battlestar Gallactica. Battlestar Gallactica???)
• Top US Market for Adults Who Have Read/Contributed to a Blog within the Past Month: Austin
• Top 3 Consumer Packaged Good Sold in US Retail Stores: Carbonated soft drinks ($17.6 billion), Milk ($12.8 billion), Cigarettes ($7.8 billion)
• Top US Advertiser (by US Spending on Traditional Media): Procter & Gamble ($2.6 billion). Question: Why measure just traditional media?

The full list is downloadable here.

Honestly, I don’t understand the ongoing existence of the annual mating dance between the TV networks and advertisers known as the upfront. As far as I can figure, the upfront is a great excuse for TV execs and media buyers to throw lavish parties as they broker advertising to fund their upcoming fall TV lineups. There’s big money involved - around $9 billion was spent during last year’s upfront - but the process is anachronistic on so many levels.

In the old days, the ritual probably made sense: TV was the dominant advertising medium, the big three networks controlled the airwaves, and prime time shows followed an orderly schedule: premieres in the fall, reruns in the summer. Advertisers locked up the prime spots on the best shows in advance, paying premiums for the most-watched shows. It wasn’t ideal, but everyone grudgingly accepted the process. And the networks raked in big bucks.

Then cable came along, and the Internet, and TiVo, forever altering the universe around broadcast TV. Broadcast viewership continues to shrink. New shows debut on cable channels throughout the year, not just in the fall. DVRs have thrown ratings systems designed for live viewership for a loop. Internet video - and the ad model around it - is catching fire.

The changes have led to much discussion about the composition and even the relevance of the upfront. Why pay in May for shows that may last for a month in September? How does time-shifting and delayed viewing figure into the ratings (and the cost of the advertising spots)? What role does online play in the upfront? I’ve never bought or sold a TV spot, so I surely don’t have the answers to any of these questions. But as an outside observer, the upfront certainly strikes me as a concept that has outlived its usefulness. There has to be a better way.

Stupid media tricks: MediaPost reports that ABC and ESPN have struck a deal with Cox in which the cable provider will disable the fast-forward feature for some of the on-demand content it offers from the two Disney properties.  That means Cox cable subscribers won’t be able to skip commercials and zoom through the programs they watch via Cox’s VOD (video on demand) service. (The agreement does not apply to programs that subscribers record on their own using Cox’s DVR box.)

This a classic horse-has-left-the-barn overreaction to the media companies’ ad-skipping angst. There are two main benefits of VOD: convenience (you can watch anytime you want) and control (you can pause, skip and rewind). Removing one of those elements will absolutely kill VOD. Disabling features that customers have already embraced is a surefire way to make them hate you.

Has anyone captured the essence of integrated marketing as well as the producers and sponsors of “American Idol”? I highly doubt it.

[Full disclosure: I, like bazillions of others, watch Idol every week. It's the rarest of contemporary TV viewing: a show that my wife and I can watch with our 16-, 11- and 9-year-olds without cringing over inappropriate content (with the exception of the occasional poorly placed ad that grosses out my oldest daughter and makes my son cover his face).]

The show was one of the first to integrate new media into its broadcast with the text-message and online voting system viewers use each week to decide the fate of the contestants. Talk about engagement - last week’s show garnered more than 80 70 million votes. Idol’s producers have perfected product integration as well, with Coke cups prominently placed on the judges’ table each week, the Cingular/AT&T texting sponsorship, and contestants appearing in Ford commercials shot as music videos and shown during the broadcast. The viral component of Idol is off the charts. It’s the ultimate water cooler event. A Google blog search on “American Idol” returned 569,124 results.

Last week’s “Idol Gives Back” charity event raised more than $60 million through phone and online donations. Viewers could purchase and download videos from the show via iTunes, with proceeds going to the Charity Projects Entertainment Fund. They have even perfected the art (science?) of bringing dead celebs back to life, as evidenced by the Celine Dion-Elvis duet that left me wondering if The King was, in fact, still roaming the streets of Vegas.

The success of the show and all of its extensions will be a case study one day of how to blend mass-market and one-to-one media and marketing to provide an all-encompassing experience for consumers.

The broadcast networks and production studios get beat up a lot over their sluggish reaction to the Internet video phenomenon, but occasionally they hit on a bright idea. The New York Times reports today about Sony’s plans to launch the Minisode Network, comprising a selection of TV classics such as Charlie’s Angels and T.J. Hooker edited down into digestible, YouTube-worthy Web chunks. From the Times article:

The network will consist of a lineup of tightly edited versions of shows lifted off the shelves of Sony’s television library. These are not clips of the shows, but actual episodes with beginnings, middles and ends, all told in under six minutes.

As Steve Mosko, the president of Sony Television, described it, “So in ‘Charlie Angels,’ they have a meeting, Charlie’s on the intercom telling them what the assignment is, there’s a couple of fights, and then a chase, and they catch the bad guy. Then they’re back home wrapping it up.”

These minisodes will be a runaway hit. I hope Sony owns the rights to The Fall Guy and The A-Team.