The play is being positioned as a way to help the hearing impaired enjoy YouTube, but there’s another huge upside to this: it will dramatically enhance search capabilities on the video giant. Already the world’s second-largest search engine, this move will only strengthen that position for YouTube. Text associated with videos on YouTube will also have the secondary benefit of boosting search engine optimization with Google (or Bing, or whatever), so it’s incumbent on those who are smart enough to already be using YouTube to start uploading text files as well.

We know from all the data that local is where its at in terms of advertising growth over the next five years. This is why Google, Yahoo and a host of other pureplay Internet companies are creating applications that enable commerce at the local level. They want a (big) piece of that pie, if not all of it. What these people understand – perhaps even more than we do – is that they lack an existing relationship with local advertisers, and so there’s an all-out war underway to find and exploit non-advertiser-originated relationships in the name of helping small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) part with their advertising money.

Who has such a relationship? Well, we know about the Yellow Pages people, but how about companies like American Express? That’s right, American Express is leveraging its existing relationships with SMBs to introduce people to companies that are eager to teach businesses how to use the Web to conduct commerce (and take a cut of money spent, of course). This is a booming growth business, and we need to be paying attention, ‘lest some outsider come in and hijack our relationships with clients.

We keep this from happening by doing a better job than they do of offering a host of a la carte services that help SMBs do business via the Web. We become consultants, if you will, teaching everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to how to use Google Analytics to how to use YouTube to help their business. We don’t do this for free, of course; we upsell them these services as a part of our portfolio, because we’re no longer just media companies selling advertising; we’re multimedia companies that enable commerce, and if that means helping clients use tools that don’t belong to us, then so be it. Better for us to be mining that relationship than for outside pureplays to come in a steal it.

“But this isn’t my job description,” I can hear throughout the land. Perhaps it isn’t, but it should be, and it behooves you to study, study, study, until you know as much as the next guy about how everything works online. Or hire us, and we’ll come in and teach you everything you’ll need to know.

The almost complete lack of understanding about all of this by local merchants is stunning, but it represents perhaps the greatest opportunity for generating serious online revenue at the local level. Somebody needs to teach the community how all this works, and we’d much rather that be a smart local media company than Google.

(Originally published in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel Newsletter)

What is news is how Nielsen is trying to “adjust” to aid local broadcasters in this scenario, announcing recently that, beginning January 1st, they will no longer provide “live only” ratings for TV viewing. “Live” is being replaced with “live plus same day,” to accommodate for the use of DVRs. This has made the TV people very happy, but the advertisers, not so much.

GroupM, which controls a great deal of TV advertising, has sent a harshly worded letter to Nielsen.

Media buyers are upset, because the move will boost ratings by as much as 13%, and that will cost advertisers more money for what they view as bogus numbers.

This is a pretty big deal for broadcasters, who’ve seen revenues slide recently as much as 30-40%. It’s going to get ugly, however, because there’s ample evidence that the people who delay watching live TV skip the ads when playing shows back on their DVRs. Advertisers won’t want to pay for that, and Nielsen has a real conundrum on its hands.

As the press tries to figure this out, many stories are surfacing. Dobbs is running for the U.S. Senate. He wants to be President. Dobbs is joining Fox News, where his point-of-view would be welcomed.

Also interesting are the reports about how the forced move by CNN is a part of its effort to secure the “high ground” niche in the news game, with MSNBC owning the left and Fox News owning the right. CNN figures it can be the unbiased bunch. Good luck with that.

Viewers want their newscasters and organizations to be unbiased, but they don’t believe they are, and this poses a very problematic situation for the marketers of those programs. The best anybody can do is try to be fair and accurate, but playing around with any sort of “high ground” is a very dangerous proposition. Those who favor Fox, for example, will view any attempts by CNN to “balance” a story as evidence of liberal bias. Contrariwise, those who favor MSNBC will view opposite attempts by CNN as evidence of conservative bias. The problem with attempts to fence sit, is that there is no fence in the minds of people, no identifiable middle ground that people accept as the place where varying opinions reside. As Jay Rosen has brilliantly concluded, the idea that truth lies between two points-of-view is the great illusion of the professional press, and the people formerly known as the audience intuitively know this.

The origins of objectivity in the professional press are so tied to advertising that it’s impossible to disconnect the two. As Christopher Lasch wrote in his seminal essay “The Lost Art of Political Argument,” the need to create a sterile environment in which to sell advertising fit beautifully with Walter Lippmann’s social engineering views of an elite press, and so was born the professional journalist with his or her “objective” reporting.

This has produced a considerable backlash, and now we have an unmistakable drift to point-of-view journalism that is just beginning. At the grassroots level – and at the pinnacle of big media – we’re seeing more and more argument entering into reporting, and this is a welcome change from the dishonest drumbeat of “we’re objective.”

So what will happen with CNN? Even if it enjoys a reputation among observers as being “independent,” I’m not sure that will resonate with a public that is jaded by the media’s lust for celebrity, gotcha, and bandwagon journalism.

With regards to Mr. Dobbs, there is also the very real trend of personal branding that cannot be denied. People – especially young people – don’t watch networks; they follow people, and one could easily make the case that the brand of Lou Dobbs is, at least in some ways, more valuable than the brand of CNN.

We shall see.

Walking the day after my hip replacement

Greetings one and all. It has been a long time since I’ve ventured here. The reasons have been many: I got hacked and it took a long time to get back. I’ve been busy as hell writing stuff for which I actually get paid. And then there’s the latest, the total replacement of my right hip.

I’m now 2 1/2 weeks out from the surgery, and I’m on target for total recovery in 4-6 weeks. I’ve just moved from the walker to the cane for getting around the house, although I still use the walker for jaunts around the neighborhood. I’m in physical therapy, but there’s no exercise better for this than just plain old walking.

Pain management is an issue, for the tissue around the titanium implant is swollen and sore. That will just take time. I know well the dangers of narcotics, and I’m being very careful to stay with what my doctors recommend. I hope to be back on the road consulting in December.

I’ve lost 25 pounds, mostly because I have no appetite. I’m also drinking water like crazy, which helps flush the system. I’m a mere shadow of my former overweight self, which is, I suppose, a good thing. I can’t say that it’s been “fun,” but the pain that originally drove me to the surgery is gone, and I am very grateful for that.

Over the next few days, I’m going to go back into files of our newsletter since the hack occurred in early June and post some of the best items. I want them here for posterity’s sake, and I think you’ll enjoy reading them, especially if you aren’t subscribed to our newsletter.

Now back to rest.

…the President of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of this country have the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a Presidential address, without having the President’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudice of hostile critics before they can even be digested.

Agnew charged that such power in the hands of just a few “men” was not good for democracy, for even these men acknowledged their biases. In looking back at this with an open mind, one cannot escape the reality of what’s happened with regards to trust of the press in the U.S. since Agnew made the speech. I can’t prove it, but the evidence suggests that the people agree with Agnew, and not the press. Agnew’s speech was in 1969. Here’s Gallup data going back to 1973.

For the first time, more people in the U.S. distrust the press to be fair and accurate than trust us, and this must be a central theme as we try an reinvent ourselves for future relevancy.

Shakira's new album

Now comes word of a further development in this that bears note today. The pop star Shakira is introducing her new music video Give It Up To Me tomorrow via her Facebook account. She’s using a technology called Ustream to “broadcast” the debut at noon Pacific Time. She’s not the first, but she’s probably the biggest. Chamillionaire debuted his new single Good Morning last Tuesday.

Why is this significant? Because it undercuts and weakens the role that big media companies like MTV have played in the past in the introduction of music to the masses and puts the control directly in the hands of the artist and his or her record company. The loss of media’s role as filter to the masses is the biggest threat to a business model that’s based on such clout, and this is all something completely new.

This kind of thing is happening all over the place in various forms, and J.D.’s “revolution” is in full bloom. I think it has profound consequences for our culture, because it’s the institutions of power that are being ravaged by technology. I’m very excited by what the future holds in this light, but I doubt the status quo is too happy.

If we can just keep the lawyers at bay a little while longer…

Just recently, the blogosphere has been filled with stories of this hack. TechCrunch has an excellent post. And Lorelle on Wordpress.com has some excellent suggestions for cleaning up a blog like this one.

The sad thing is this. While I’m back publishing — and was able to keep all my posts intact — I’m afraid I may have lost all comments, and when you go back seven years, that’s a lot of content. Included in the loss is the outpouring of love expressed to me by you when Alicia passed away in 2006. Fortunately, I have a printed copy, but I’m sad that the online record may not contain the comments.

Much has happened over the past few months, and I’ve wanted so badly to comment. Twitter, for all its wonder, is a weak substitute for blogging, IMO. Blogging is for writers; twitter is for reporters. I agree with Dave Winer, who calls Twitter “a publishing environment, a place to push links, a notification system.”

Over the next few days, I hope to be posting items from our newsletter that I’ve written over the summer. For now, let me just say that I’m happy to be back in business (the business of writers is to write) and happy that I can share my work with you.

To all the people who wrote to ask where I was, I wish to say thanks. To the hackers, I’ll only say this: may Karma’s wheel visit you with the curse that you have visited upon me.

Of course, any advertiser involvement in a news operation is a tricky affair. Keeping the lines clear between church and state — editorial and business — has always been an uneasy balancing act between editors and business executives. Local TV news reporters have done in-depth pieces about a less-than-scrupulous’ local automotive dealerships, and newscasts have paid the price with lost local automotive advertising business.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and my view has changed considerably. It’s a conflict of interest, because we say it is. We’ve supposed that the “wall” to which Wayne refers is necessary for us to remain “objective” in covering the news. There’s an honor, of sorts, in not breaching that wall, and so we never consider that the wall itself might be the problem in a news-as-a-profit-center paradigm. Moreover, we think that the (stupid) audience needs us to be pure, because we could easily pull the wool over their eyes.

You all know how I feel about objectivity, but here’s the thing: I don’t believe the audience of “Morning Joe” would sense or suspect a conflict of interest if a negative story about coffee did come up. But let’s take it even further. Let’s assume that the producers of the show felt an affinity to the people paying them, so they stayed away from the negative story about coffee. Think about this before you react, but in today’s world of thousands of news sources, what is really wrong with that? And wouldn’t people feel that the one place they could get the Starbucks’ “side” of the story would be “Morning Joe?”

If you assume that you are the ONLY source for news and that you have to market yourself as such, then the need for such purity is pretty obvious. But if you can bring yourself to accept that you don’t need to be the ONLY source for news, then the fundamentals of purity don’t matter as much. News is ubiquitous today, and that’s different than it was in the past, when the newspaper in the community was truly the only source of news and information for the people.

I fully realize this is heresy, but we need the courage to challenge the basic assumptions of journalism, ‘lest we find ourselves unable to support the practice any longer. Besides, I keep coming back to the reality that the audience just isn’t as stupid as we think they are and that transparency beats artificial objectivity any day of the week.

There is considerable debate about all of this, and of course, agencies aren’t giving up without a fight. At the very core of that fight is the world of data, the Holy Grail of the Web, and whoever or whatever is able to manage data for the benefit of clients in a cost-effective way will likely have a seat at tomorrow’s media table. Even this, however, is uncertain, for one of the big unanswered questions of the day is who owns the data about visitors to a website, the publisher or the advertiser who’s running ads on that site? This is one of the issues in the publisher revolt started last year by ESPN in announcing they would no longer accept ads from 3rd-party ad networks. The networks think the data belongs to them. Publishers think otherwise.

A recent New York Times article (Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.) featured the work of an ad agency built on the use of online data.

From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tagline, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman (Darren Herman, president of Varick Media Management) and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.

If your site is part of an “ad exchange,” your remnant ad spaces will be grouped together with others of similar demographic and psychographic nature and sold through one of these data-centric agencies. The idea is that the eyeballs that visit your site are more valuable when grouped with other similar eyeballs, and the exchange allows publishers to earn more per ad impression than they would otherwise.

Jarvis Coffin of Burst Media wrote in response to the Times article that this data-centric approach should eventually lead to offline as well. He took the Times to task for missing the real story, which is the use of data in behavioral ad networks.

Indeed, searching for the new heart of Madison Avenue has been the past-time of many people inside and out of the industry for years. Maybe love has finally found a way. Once again, information is power and much of it derives from the sort of relationships that ad agencies have continued to enjoy — albeit in serf fashion — with their clients. Sitting atop copious amounts of campaign data, which they have watched get turned into fortunes by vendors with shifting attachments to the strategic welfare of a client, ad agencies have decided they are – and ought to remain – media planning and buying vendors of first and last resort.

Good for them. Now they just have to figure out how to get paid for it, but the excitement and opportunities increase when they consider how data can begin to play a livelier role given the expansion of digital media technology to all places offline, especially TV.

One of the cornerstones of Media 2.0 is data, and local media companies are facing the dawn of the database age with no idea of its requirements, scope or the tools necessary to compete. This needs to change and change quickly, ‘lest all local media companies find themselves at the wrong end of the online value chain. The making of expensive content is not the best revenue position for tomorrow. That seat belongs to those who manage the data of the local market.

Gordon Borrell has seen this evolve in his own work. One of the characteristics of what he calls “Green Zone” performers — those media properties that do above average online revenue market share — is an incredible thirst for data. He told me in an email that most media companies are still stuck in the past.

I think analog media reached the zenith of their youthful beauty a few decades ago, and what we’ve seen since the mid-1980s is an obscene amount of cosmetic surgery and make-up. Newspapers moved from talking about “subscribers” to a much bigger metric called “readers,” figuring that if a newspaper hit the doorstep of a household had 2.5 adults in it, there must be 2.5 readers in it. TV started talking about TV households, figuring that if a household had a TV in it, people must be watching it. And radio invented cume — which is a fancy way of saying that if the radio is left on long enough, a lot of people might actually listen at some point.

The Internet isn’t as lucky. It has things like pageviews, clickthroughs, unique visitors, time spent online, “bounce” rates, and connection speeds. While some of those statistics can be misread or manipulated, there’s a helluva lot more to go on than a mere telephone survey or diary sent to less than one percent of the population.

Borrell added that data has become incredibly important and that he’s witnessing “a great divide” between those who know how to collect and read that data and those who don’t.

Helping advertisers understand just how many people saw their message, how many clicked on it, what times of days produced better responses, and what people did after they clicked — are all wildly powerful pieces of information. The collection, analysis and manipulation of data will continue to be more important in the media landscape, thanks to the application of computing power to advertising. I think information is still power, but the collection of vast amounts of data magnifies the potential.

Add to the equation the reality that some well-informed local advertisers are themselves becoming extremely well versed in data, and you can see the problem for media companies who just sit on their hands in the Media 2.0 world.

We feel strongly that the window is open for smart media companies to move in and seize this space at the local level, becoming, if you will, ad agencies themselves. That window won’t stay open forever, and the sooner we adapt to a data-driven marketplace, the sooner we’ll be able to grow significant revenues online.