know | Future

In a game of chicken with media landscape changing implications, advertisers and the networks are double daring each other to flinch as reported by an AdAge report on this year’s network upfront.  The wrangling between the agencies and marketers versus the networks: the former want to use only live viewership as the ratings standard, the latter are holding out for the new Nielsen Live Plus numbers which include PVR viewers as far out as seven days from original airdate.  There is almost universal agreement that the agencies are holding the cards on this one and will ultimately prevail.  The networks are definitely showing the behavior of a sunset industry by attempting to squeeze an ever higher price for an ever decreasing audience.  The differential between live and live plus hardly merit this kind of battle as the numbers are still low, but it proves that even the networks have seen the writing on the wall.

Videoconferencing has never taken off in our industry, mostly because of the quality. A creative only has to see his beautiful roughcut butchered over a stuttering video link to walk away from the technology forever. Yesterday I had the opportunity to finally take a live look at the LifeSize high definition videoconferencing system. In short, the system delivers a 16:9 widescreen 1280×720 pixel image (720p in broadcast parlance) at 30 frames per second with very little artifacts. By comparison, traditional video conferencing uses CIF resolution which is 352×240. Thanks to Videré, a specialist on video conferencing systems based in Quincy, MA, I was able to see it side by side with a traditional videoconferencing rig, and there is no comparison…

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According to a report released yesterday by the Newspaper Association of America and picked up today by the Boston Globe ,newspaper circulation overall is down 2.5% from the same period last year. The two biggest losers on the list were the San Francisco Chronicle with a drop of 15% and the Boston Globe with an 8% drop. My first thought, which is echoed in the article, is that it is not surprising that the two most wired and tech savvy cities in the country should see an exodus away from newspapers and onto the web for news. The problem for newspapers is that those defections are not going to newspaper sites, but rather to Google News and other web only news sites.

MacWorld UK has published the results of a poll where of 776 readers 63% said they would stick with InDesign. My first surprise is that there were so many of the readership, which I assume is mostly UK, that has switched to InDesign, unless that 63% reflects those that are using both as has been my experience here in the US with my clients. The other surprising tidbit is that many users are warming up to Quark as a company and feel that they now provide better support than Adobe. I don’t know about you, but my experiences with Quark as a company have always been rather painful.

I also got a notification today that Quark has released a beta version of a universal binary of Quark 7, so it is obvious that they will ship way before Adobe’s vague “in 2007″ promised ship date for universal binaries of CS3.

For all your Quark vs Indesign news, check out this site, there is a blog for everything.

Props for the image to bronzefinger.com

Tivo today has announced today the release of Product Watch. This new capability will allow users to select favorite categories or brands and TiVo will deliver ads that match the criteria to their main menu. The service has been designed with the participation of many advertising entities including IPG, OMD The Richards Group as well as Comcast Spotlight, the advertising sales division of the cable operator (I guess this means that the partnership between them and Tivo is bearing fruit).

General Motors, Sony Pictures, Lending Tree and Kraft Foods are the premium advertisers for their respective categories and will be producing custom content targeted at the Tivo service, presumably longer format video. Though there is no mention of other capabilities, it is safe to assume that this product will make use of existing Tivo capablilities to allow user interaction such as brochure requests etc.

This is really a testing ground for the viability of advertising on demand, where the consumer opts in to receive targeted ads. (more…)

I often come across people that feel they are not at risk for viruses and malware because they are on a Mac. Many small mac centric firms even run workstations with real Internet IP adresses and no firewall, OUCH! I blame Apple and their marketing for creating this dangerously superior attitude, but things are changing. Over the past couple of months Apple has been quietly patching systems over its automated system update process, twenty different vulnerabilities in March and an additional fifteen recently.

Now adding fuel to the flame, in a not entirely altruistic fashion, virus protection provider McAfee has released a study that points out that over the last two years “the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on Apple’s Mac OS platform has increased by 228 percent” Now, when you start from a base of near zero where nobody is interested in writing a virus to attack you, to now where we are seeing people begin to probe OSX as the platform increases it’s popularity, 228% may be a meaningless statistic.

The bottom line is not to be complacent about security and follow best practices including a firewall, network address translation, patching operating systems consistently, securing wireless access and running virus/spyware/malware detection software.

Xinet sent me word of a report they commissioned about return on investment on digital asset management systems. I am a big fan of Xinet’s product combo Fullpress/Webnative and feel that they have a unique take on the category having grown up in the print/advertising/publishing industry. The system is best for mid size to large agencies because of the cost of the software as well as the hardware required to run it on, typically Sun or SGI servers, and the need for specialized integrators or senior internal technical resources.

The document does a good job of providing a top level introduction to the sorts of things that you should consider when evaluating DAM systems and trying to come up with a financial justification for the expense. As with many ROI papers, this one is long on generalities and short on specifics. ROI usually boils down to soft costs that are difficult to pin down such as time savings or potential increased revenue. Included as apendices are also several case studies that highlight how Xinet clients are using their products, a great source of ideas as to how you can leverage DAM internally in the agency and externally towards your clients.

If you are considering a DAM system, or even if you already have one, you will find this document an interesting read.

In an effort to drive consumers to their pay subscription service as well as opening up an additional stream of advertising revenue, Napster announced yesterday that it is opening up free streaming of its entire 2 million song strong library.  The catch? You can only listen to a track five times before it is locked out.

They also announced Napsterlinks a music linking service so you can send a link to that deep track you found down at the thin end of the tail to a friend  as well as Narchive a social network set up around the Napster library.
I imagine it is only a matter of time before somebody rips the entire Napster library by capturing the audio in real-time and hand cataloging the content.  Though my calculations put the time it would take to play 2,000,000 five minute songs around twenty years…

In the April issue of the Digital Journalist, there is a column by Terry Heaton that proposes an interesting concept for the future of advertising in a consumer centric pull environment. Terry posits that advertisers should be moving away from the traditional role of attracting attention from consumers that are tuning out traditional big splash advertising and instead producing small bits of advertising content to be set free on the Internet to find their way to self-targeted consumers.

Though not revolutionary by any means, Terry’s model with advertisers producing discrete encapsulated content: bits of video, images, specifications, product information, xml data dropped in an rss feed and passed through a three stage sieve of search engines, dumb aggregators (automated blogs) and editorial aggregators (blogs and social networks) on their way to consumers is simple and elegant.

The problem as always, is tracking success so that clients will pay you fairly for the production of that advertising stream.

via the MIT Advertising Lab blog

Two developments late last week have pushed e-readers to the fore:

• The Belgian publisher De Tidj, which is running a test of an electronic handheld newspaper reader device from Phillips, has run the first ad in the e-reader edition for Rabobank. (If you follow cycling Rabobank sponsors an elite pro team)
• Microsoft and the New York Times have announced a new software set to debut with the notorious next gen MS operating system, Vista that promises to provide a natural interface to an online version of the newspaper.

During the presentation at the American Society of Newspaper Editors 2006 Convention in Seattle, Washington. (full transcript available here) one of the tidbits that came up was that advertising size and shape will be automatically reformatted to fit the device which is being used, a radical departure from current web practice. Sadly. no mention was made of any low powered devices such as those using e-ink technology from Phillips or Sony’s Librie. Until MS supports a low power reference platform like that, I am afraid this will be just an evolutionary step, tablet pc’s or even the new handheld UMPC platform just consume too much power with their active screens.