Well, Walmart for one, along with newspapers, magazines, real estate agents, book publishers and in general anybody who feels Google’s inscrutable gaze on their market. The New York Times is running an article that talks about this subject at some length. Now I don’t feel so bad about having so much Google content on the blog, if WalMart is taking notice, something is going on…
Who’s afraid of the big bad Google?
IM is all grown up
IDC is reporting that Instant messaging has achieved critical mass to be considered a mainstream tool. With 12 billion messages being transmitted each day the statistics support it. Personally I feel that IM is important less as a means of communications, after all, who doesn’t have their e-mail client open all the time, but more as an instrument of presence in an increasingly distributed environment.
You can read a teaser of the article here, of course, you will have to pay much bucks to get the full study.
Tivo and Yahoo team up
Struggling Tivo has signed a deal with Yahoo that allows, as of today, Yahoo portal users to schedule Tivo recordings straight from Yahoo TV listings. Yahoo content would also be integrated into Tivos in an automagical way yet to be detailed. The only reason this is important is that it throws into sharp relief the failure of the Netflix/Tivo deal to allow users to have their Netflix movies delivered over broadband to their Tivos. One can only surmise that the pressure brough on by the MPAA was just too much. (more…)
Hard liquor ads coming to Sirius radio
Tanqueray has announced that they will be running new 150 second radio ads on Sirius radio which seems to have been transformed by their Howard Stern deal. This would not be that noteworthy except for how it shows that the long standing self restraint of the media when it comes to advertising for hooch which has been slowly cracking since 1996, is about to splinter to bits. The core issue is that we are no longer dealing with broadcast as traditionally understod, the national hearth of the big three at which we all sat and consumed pablum, but the edgy world of subscription entertainment where anything goes, including the right to stuff the pipe with more crap than you can measure, as long as we can find a splinter audience for it. So, the word of the day is opportunity. In the soon to be wild west of new media advertising, we can bring back the Marlboro Man and cigarrette advertising, for that matter, we can start advertising the local gun show, come on down!
Civilization though has a way of righting itself and surviving. On the positive side, there are new opportunities for brands such as Trojans that have been relegated to nether media buys in the high digital ghetto. There are saner comments on this matter at Mediapost
