Saturday, May 22

Google TV

Companies are now racing to build marketplaces for TV programs that act much like iPhone apps, able to interact with social-networking services, play games, call up movies and other Web content—all using a remote control. What is missing is the equivalent of a Windows system for the living room, a widely accepted way to write programs that appear and act the same on most TVs. But many companies are trying.

Google hopes to provide this missing piece. Using the search engine’s Android platform and the Google Chrome Web browser, Google TV aims to seamlessly integrate traditional TV with DVR and the Web. Viewers will be able to watch shows from TV providers, the Web and personal collections or use video chat with smart phones controlling the equipment.

Read more here.

Friday, May 21

Magazine Audience Numbers Stabilize

The total audience for consumer magazines remained more or less stable from spring 2009 to spring 2010, according to the latest figures from GfK MRI.

Comparing 2009 to 2010, total magazine readership for 215 consumer magazines tracked by MRI increased 1% from about 1.819 billion in spring 2009 to 1.838 billion in spring 2010 (both figures obviously included a great deal of audience duplication between magazines).

Big gains were seen at some women's fashion and beauty titles. A number of celebrity mags also enjoyed audience growth and health and fitness titles. These gains were partially offset by double-digit percentage drops at titles including Newsweek, down 13.8% to 15.2 million, Parenting, down 15.7% to 8.6 million, and TV Guide, down 12.6% to 14.8 million.

Read more at Media Post.

E-Books Rewrite Bookselling

The digital revolution sweeping the media world is rewriting the rules of the book industry, upending the established players which have dominated for decades. Electronic books are still in their infancy, comprising an estimated 3% to 5% of the market today. But they are fast accelerating the decline of physical books, forcing retailers, publishers, authors and agents to reinvent their business models or be painfully crippled.

"By the end of 2012, digital books will be 20% to 25% of unit sales, and that's on the conservative side," predicts Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Co., publishing consultants. "Add in another 25% of units sold online, and roughly half of all unit sales will be on the Internet."

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Highest First-Quarter Revenue for Internet Ads

Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. hit $5.9 billion for the first quarter of 2010, representing a 7.5 percent increase over the same period in 2009, according to the numbers released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). This marks the highest first-quarter revenue level ever for the industry.

Read more here.

Thursday, May 20

Google App Store

Google plans to create a store for applications for its Chrome Web browser and operating system, the Internet giant's latest attempt to lure developers away from software platforms controlled by Apple Inc. and others. There are more than 70 million active users of the Chrome browser, up from 30 million in June 2009.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Wednesday, May 19

Using Online Games to Get Movie Audiences Involved

Sony is offering a series of Web episodes and companion challenges that reveal an important plot line in an upcoming movie. Sony hopes to mimic the viral success of Facebook games like Mafia Wars, which is played by tens of millions of people.
Ambitious Web games that interlock with social networking sites are an increasing focus. The goal is to reverse the consumer-advertiser relationship. Traditional marketing pushes a message over and over. If people instead pull bits of information into their lives through a game, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership.
Successful movie games get over a million plays, with some soaring to 10 million and movie-related iPhone apps can be downloaded in “the high hundreds of thousands of times. The challenge is to make these kinds of efforts feel organic. It has to be an experience in and of itself that is powerful enough that people will forget that they are being marketed to.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Tuesday, May 18

Google to offer internet on your TV

Google is set to move into the living room with a computer operating system that will bring the internet to home televisions. The company is working with the chipmaker Intel and Sony, the electronics giant, to introduce Google TV this week at a conference for 3,000 Google software developers in San Francisco. The aim is to get them to create new and innovative applications in the same way that outside developers have created new software programs for smartphones. The aim now is to put the web on to televisions via a new generation of television sets and set-top boxes, further blurring the line between home entertainment and computing.

Many TV set-makers already offer the internet in some form on integrated systems or through set-top boxes via cable or satellite. Yahoo! has been pushing its Connected TV widgets platform, which gives users access to certain websites such as eBay and Facebook and provides movies and TV shows streamed over the internet. But the market has yet to take off.

Read more at the London Times.

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears


New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears

Newspaper Industry in Germany

While daily newspaper circulation in the US fell 27 percent from 1998 through 2008, it slipped 19 percent in Germany, according to a report this month from the German Newspaper Publishers’ Association. While fewer than half of Americans read newspapers, more than 70 percent of Germans do. While newspapers’ revenues have plunged in the United States, they have held steady in Germany since 2004. “Germany is and will remain a print nation,” said Andreas Wiele, a board member of Axel Springer, publisher of the biggest newspaper in Germany, Bild, in a speech last autumn. Instead of focusing on journalism, the report says, U.S. newspapers also made unwise investments in new media, and compounded the damage by giving away their contents free on the Internet.

Read more at the New York Times.

Writing Online Headlines

Headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative. Now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. In that context, “Jon Stewart Slams Glenn Beck” is the beau ideal of great headline writing. And both Twitter and Facebook have become republishers, with readers on the hunt for links with nice, tidy headlines crammed full of hot names to share with their respective audiences.

Keep in mind that all of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, said, “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.”

The Huffington Post knows its way around search engine optimization, or S.E.O. as it’s known. A story about whether the president would play golf with Rush Limbaugh was headlined: “Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match: Rush ‘Can Play With Himself.’ ” It’s digital nirvana: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the Web.

The Huffington Post sometimes tests two different headlines in real time to see which the audience is responding to. (“How to Reduce Your Oil Footprint” did better than “How to Say No to Big Oil and Reduce Your Oil Footprint.” Go figure.) The site also uses its Twitter account to solicit reader suggestions on headlines.

There’s no room for that kind of discursive, descriptive run-on on the Web. Google’s crawlers and aggregators like Digg quit paying attention after 60 characters or so, long before readers might. The need to attract attention from computer-generated algorithms sometimes makes the headlines seem like a machine thought them up as well.

‘Ivana Be Left Alone’ is a great headline, but it wouldn’t work on the Web because there’s no Trump in there and anybody looking for that information would be looking for Trump.

Read more at the New York Times.

Monday, May 17

The Pocket Guide to Defensive Branding

The era of friction-free feedback is turning Twitter into a 24/7 anywhere and anyplace complaint desk. Media reporters, now fortified by social-media tools themselves, regularly source scoop from a cheat sheet of tweeters, bloggers and article commentators. Often, they know things about our brands before we do. And let's not forget the already-toxic and wickedly effective activist groups that -- now on social-media steroids -- have dramatically upped the ante for brand pain. Reflect hard on the "Six Drivers of Brand Credibility" -- trust, transparency, authenticity, listening, responsiveness and affirmation. Don't get high and mighty about "cause marketing" if there's a cause group that has a bone to pick with you. Remember, a "Don't talk to me" sign can quickly prompt a video nasty-gram on YouTube, a petition drive on Facebook or a tweetstorm in your honor.

Read more at Advertising Age.