Hard News, Inc.

TV as We Know It is Dead: Shift to Web-based Video Costs Producers 88% of Ad Revenues

Can you say "Doomed"?

Apparently, a report called "And Now for the News," written by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, came out this week, and it's got both Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and, not coincidentally, HDNet, and the pundits at Digital Media Wire all atwitter over the stark economic realities.

Cuban made billions of dollars in the internet video game, and, while he's acted the fool at various Maverick games over the years, nobody has ever accused him of either being stupid or lacking passion. So when he starts winding up the air-raid siren, it gets my attention.

From Cuban's blog:

Starting with the disappointing but expected news that journalism is no
longer a service consumers desire to pay for, he moves on to the
problems facing Internet video.

(snip)

Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have learned
two things. First; consumers won't pay for content on the web, so it
will have to be ad supported. And second; it won't be ad supported.

Oh, shit. (*stomach lurches*)

On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out –
click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of
advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over
the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been
lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising
for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a
typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for
web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30
minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields
approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.

Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs...by 88%?

In fact, the actual economics of web-based video are far, far worse than this.

Sweetie, can you get me a hemlock cocktail, please? Easy on the ice. And see if there are any razor blades in the junk drawer?

88%? Are you freakin' kidding me? That kind of revenue restructuring would be in line with what newspapers have experienced since classified ads migrated to the web (i.e. the "Craigslist effect"). And yeah, I know, there are some shellshocked newspaper reporters/editors who will nod wearily, taking schadenfreude satisfaction that the arrogant pacotillos in local TV are about to take the bollocking that print has taken these last 10 years.


Over at Digital Media Wire, Paul Sweeting explains the problem that video producers here in Hollywood face, seeing as how they're making the same goddam mistakes that music labels made when the internet came calling:

There's no reason to believe that video producers' experience will be
any different. Like it or not, the web simply isn't very kind to
publishers, packagers and distributors. It rewards enablers. Search is
an enabling technology--perhaps the ultimate enabling technology. And
as Google shareholders can tell you, it's been rewarded. The challenge
for publishers is not to figure out how to force the web to reward
them. It's to figure out how to capture the value created by enabling
technology.



In that sense, Cuban is right. It may not make sense for the networks
simply to make their schedules available for free on the Internet. That
doesn't really create any new value; it mostly just drains value from
linear platforms.



What the networks need is to figure out how to capture the value
created by enabling consumers to access, select, aggregate, transform,
embed and share content--in a word, to use it. Anything else is just TV with buffering.

For scripted TV entertainment, well, I'm not sure what the survival strategy is yet. I do know that there is not much love in the ad world for a CPM rate hike for online video that would bridge that 88% gap. There's just too much other product out there screaming for attention ... not to mention the fact that the scripted TV content (and movie content, for that matter) is a melting sandcastle to the surging broadband tide. Trying to make back a $160 million budget from some exotic cocktail of online subscription, advertising and branded sponsorship ... well, let's just say that I'm glad I'm not writing the checks on that one. I don't know how you can possibly monetize the budgets that Hollywood is used to.

And folks, we know - dammit, we know all too well - how the media megalopalies react to revenue reductions. For a time, they throw money at the problem. And then come the cutbacks. "We have to do more with less."


It comes down to our old friends, supply and demand. If there is
demand for the kind of spectacle that you get in Iron Man or Raiders 4,
or whatever, there will be someone out there that will supply it ...
but at the price point that the people on the demand side set.

Kiss those expense-account lunches at The Ivy goodbye. All the little perks that pampered writers, directors, producers and stars have gotten used to over the years. There is going to be a lot of screaming and whining hereabouts in the next decade or so.

I think that my clients over in newspapers have actually got a significant advantage in this arena. The future of video is going to be like the future of news: disaggregated and hyperlocal. Papers can do this. Papers ARE doing this.

I can't figure out how to take a 2 1/2 hour piece of video - hell, video of any length, from a blipvert to the entire back catalog of the Museum of Radio and TV - and make it pay off a $320 million opening weekend return.

But I can teach you how to monetize short clips shot by reporters that go along with local news stories. That's do-able.
One last thing: in the comments was this gem, sure to be included in my next series of trainings for newspapers migrating to video on the web:

I've never seen ABC.com and the rest put an RSS, Email, or text message subscribe/alert button on their video pages. Instead they want us all to *remember* show schedules, come back, and sit through ads. They're blowing a huge chance to have a relationship with the audience. The sad truth is that TV networks don't want a relationship. They want us all to sit around the glowing box together on *their* schedule as if it were 1966.

June 1 Protest for Photographer's Rights

As someone who has spent much, much more than my share of time being hassled by cops for doing my job, face jammed onto the hot, stinking hood of a patrol car, I felt it necessary just to acknowledge this protest event being held at Hollywood & Highland on June 1.

More and more, I find that the police have been infected by the "well, we're just trying to be cautious" bug, spread by the geeks at Homeland Security that show up every six months with their PowerPoints demonstrating how the eeee-vil Mooslim terr'rists are going to set of a nuke right here in River City if the beat cops slack up even for a second. Sheesh. Mostly, the induced paranoia is nothing more than a fig leaf for some overzealous freaks to throw their weight around.

So yeah, join the group, send some supportive e-mails, whatever it takes. Taking a picture in a public place is not a crime. Should not be a crime. Idiots that want to clamp down on people obeying the law because they feel justified ... that is the bigger danger to our republic.

I particularly liked this question from the comments on the blog: "what if a bunch of art students sat down and sketched a public place? would that be a crime?"





This image of a shirt was posted on Flickr - go there and join the group, even if you don't plan to show up

Crashed the Mac

OK, someone up in Computer Heaven HATES me.

I managed to completely crash the Mac. as in, "The little pinwheel just spins on the screen, and none of the buttons, clicks to key-combos does the least little thing."

Happened when I tried to close out of Firefox. The whole system just hung.  Had to do a "Hard Quit" of holding down the power button until the machine went dead.  And now that I've been trying to work with Premiere Pro to import footage from the NAS, the Mac has gotten downright cranky.

I did, however, manage to install 4 extra Gigs of RAM from Crucial - for those of you shambling around wearing Apple t-shirts and mumbling "braiiiinnnssss .... brrrraaaaiiinnnssss " - a much better option than buying memory from the gottverdammt total rip-off Apple stores. 

Not that all that extra mem seems to have pepped the system up much.  (sigh)

I guess this is a case of the "grass = greener over in the Mac pasture."  FAIL.

All Hail the New Mac

I have bowed to the inevitable, and bought a Great Big Expensive Mac Pro.  This is a dual quad-core machine, and I just got an extra 4 gigs of RAM from Crucial (NOT the Mac store - their prices are nothing short of absurd) so that I can really work on post-production on my short film.

It struck me that every computer I've bought has been about 10x as fast as the previous machine.  My first computer was the old TRS-80, with 4K (later 16k) of RAM.  Programs were loaded in via a cassette tape drive, and later we all freaked out when there were actual floppy disks.  Which, back then, were really floppy - the 5 1/4 size, and the big TRS disks were about 8 inches across. 

Yes, children, you're reading that right. Shut up and go play with your terabyte iTouches.

Next, was a PC-AT that sped along at 4.77 mHz. This had dual disk drives, and a sickly green monochrome display.  My sister Sara and I played some kind of lame "Adventure" game on it for hours and hours, wandering around in a lame dungeon and shooting arrows into green slimy blobs.

In the early 90s, I made the decision to go whole hog to the PC platform - at the time, a Mac SE30 was about the size of a boom box, a monochrome screen the size of my hand, and a tiny 30 meg hard disk.  By comparison, my old Zeos desktop had 4 megs of RAM, a 120 meg hard drive and a 14" color display.  Whee!

I still remember the cover of the old PC Magazine, back when the mag was fat as a phone book with all the clone makers who had been unleashed on the landscape, packing the mag with ads ... the big splash headline said: "25 Megahertz Screamers Unleashed."

Yeah, a lot of things are quaint in retrospect.

Next, in '98, I got a Dell laptop that ran at 233 mHz.  This had a 3 gig hard drive and could actually connect to the internet. 

In '02, I got the Fry's Electronics desktop - 2.53 gHz, 120 gig hard drive, dual DVD drives.

This Octocore has 8 cores, all running at 3 gHz, which specs out to 32 gHz.  The hard drive is a puny 250 gigs, but I have a gigabit connection to my NAS (which has decided this week to play nice with the rest of the network), and a Superdrive.  I'm still trying to reconcile myself to the change in the way that I navigate around from program to program, and I am really hating not being able to use my keyboard (typing on a regular keyboard hurts like a bitch after about 5 minutes - I need the split keyboard because of my 2XL hand size). 

Still, Vista had made my life into such a living hell for the last year that I could not in good conscience keep banging my head against the wall. The crashes, the constant updates, the security holes, the unexplained way that multimedia content JUST WOULDN'T WORK no matter what I did ...

If I am going to actually produce video content for the web, I need something that actually works.  Vista did not.  It just didn't.  I spent hours and hours on the phone with customer service reps who painfully tried to walk me through all the steps to troubleshoot Vista, and on more than one occasion, they just threw up their hands and said, "Well, we don't know."

That can't happen.

Or, when I was doing a presentation in Cucuta, I arrived in front of a room full of expectant journalists, tried to fire up my machine ... only to stand there, sweating, in dismay, as the computer took more than 25 minutes to install what Microsoft called "Critical updates."  For 25 minutes, the screen was blank as the disk light just lit up and kept on, and I head the clicking and grinding from inside the Vaio (and don't get me started about the for-shit quality of the hard disks in the Vaio). 

You try standing in front of a room that's expecting to see demonstrations of how multimedia can change their lives when your computer won't even wake up and there is no way to make it work. 

So I have embarked on this adventure with the Mac. It is my hope that I can learn how to deal with all the quirks and differences with the Mac fast enough so that my productivity doesn't take a massive hit.  So far, I am not encouraged.  Despite the promises of how the Mac makes things so easy, it is impossible to add a printer in any way that makes the slightest bit of sense to me.

The WiMax Dog is Covered in Fleas

Google "snookered" on $3.2 Billion Deal

At the Digital Hollywood Conference this week, speaker after speaker waxed poetic about the boundless future offered by the near-certain adoption of the WiMax standard in the next couple of years. Our mobile devices are going to be connected at 700megs/sec, all over, seamless service, replacing all wired, fibered, satellite or twisted-pair alternatives. It's going to be the great big game-changing move that finally delivers on the promise of "every piece of content ever produced, everywhere, all the time."

Well, today in TechCrunch, comes a rather more textured view of the Big Fat Deal announced this week.

As I said before, this is a disaster waiting to happen. Sprint and Clearwire need the deal to try to salvage the billions they’ve already sunk into their money-losing WiMax networks. But putting more cooks into the kitchen with different WiMax aspirations is not going to help. Google wants more wireless broadband alternatives for its planned mobile apps and advertising. Whereas the cable companies want a way to compete against mobile phone operators encroaching on their turf.

I have to agree. This many players all fighting for the reins means that this stagecoach is headed off the cliff, pronto. The whole "don't be evil" philosophy of Google, when it comes up against the philosophy of U.S. cellphone companies ... well, that's a clash of cultures like a partnership between a hippie day-care center and Visigoth torturers.

Meanwhile, it appears that some very, very basic pieces of the technology just AREN'T in place:

2. WiMax hasn’t proven itself elsewhere either. Even in Korea, which has had WiMax for two years and is supposed to be a broadband paradise, consumers are not clamoring for WiMax. There are only about 150,000 WiMax subscribers in Korea, well below initial expectations.

3. Before you can turn Wimax into a mobile broadband service, you need mobile WiMax equipment. Cell phones, laptops, and other devices with WiMax chips in them are a long way away. Intel is ready to sell those chips, but device makers are not going to put them in their gadgets until enough consumers want them. And most consumers are going to wait for a WiMax network to show up that they can access both where they live and when they travel. So there’s a chicken and egg problem there.

(snip - and most compellingly)

6. WiMax is not a global standard. Here in the U.S., WiMax is built on 2.5 GHz spectrum. Overseas, it is built on 3.5 GHz spectrum. That makes it harder for equipment manufacturers to achieve the scale they need to make money from WiMax devices and network equipment.

I keep coming back to a very basic problem - the promise of WiMax is that it allows the signal to go 30 klicks, meaning that even out in the boonies, you can get fatpipe internet. OK, fine. The signal from the tower to your device will probably get through.

But howinhell is a measly little handheld phone or laptop computer going to push a signal from you out to that big 200-foot high transmission tower? Huh? Riddle me that.

I had one of the very first cellphones ever commercially made. It was a Kenwood. It came in a backpack-like format, weighed about 10 pounds. Had a detachable handset and a 8-inch high, 1/2 inch thick, plastic-coated antenna. We rented those back in the day, used them to check in while we were hunting celebs & news thru the Hollywood Hills. The salesmen used to caution that "You want to keep that antenna as far from your head as possible when making a call."

See, the thing is, the 1st Generation cellphone towers, those old analog ones that we put in starting in the late 80s, they were made to push and receive signals from phones transmitting at 3 watts or so. At 3-watt signal will travel a couple of miles, depending on the terrain and other interference.

The salesmen told me a dire tale I've never forgotten - they cell companies had made a handheld "brick" phone that put out about 6 watts, and gave it to a Fire Department in Indiana to test. After a fire, the Fire Captain was talking for a long time (I think it was half an hour, but not sure) on the newfangled phone. At the end of his call - ZOOOOPP! - his vision irised to black.

The high wattage of the phone had cooked his retinas.

Using a cellphone is like sticking your head into a low-power microwave oven. Current phones transmit at about .5 watts. That's why we've had to build the cell towers all over the landscape - the lower transmission power means the signal only carries a couple of blocks, not a couple of miles.

So getting back to WiMax.

How hot of a microwave signal do the devices have to put out before they can connect? Does this mean that having your laptop, you know, on your lap, is going to cook your harbls?

And man, the differing global standard is right there a deal-killer for me. I have seen how tech that only works in the U.S. is not viable in a global economy. And trying to establish a new, costly standard in the world that is incompatible with what is still the biggest market? Non-starter.

Maybe there's some compelling reason that hasn't yet been made clear to the rest of us civvies, but this deal sounds like a real dog, one that could strangle potentially interesting technology in its cradle. Which would suck, because as much as I hate the cellphone companies, I am REALLY hating on the cable/DSL service providers.

Technorati Tags: WiMax, cell phones, Google, internet, ISP, web, wireless

Heads

Heads
Originally uploaded by Wordyeti

The expression on the guy to the far right - I think it's Socrates - pretty much sums up how I feel today.

This Makes Me Want to Move to a Small Town and Run a Local Paper

...and considering my early career experiences with small papers, that takes a lot of doing.

Alex Brooks, editor of the Eastwick Press, in rural upstate New York, wrote a very moving and insightful piece about his experiences starting up a small paper. This paper, tiny in size but big in impact (at least in its circulation area) is an example of the power of good old local (since dubbed "hyper-local") news.

The letter/editorial was reprinted at the Greylocknews blog - I excerpt a few bits here:

When big-media Cassandras come to our conventions and
prognosticate about the future of journalism being interactive and
hyper-local, we just grin at them, because that's what we've been doing
all along. Sure, we're moving more of our activities on-line, but
that's not the key thing. The key thing is that people are engaged with
what we're doing. The high school kids are interested in our paper
because they and their friends are in it all the time. When I write an
article about something people are interested in, I know I'm going to
hear from a lot of people. Some will e-mail, some will write letters,
some will chat me up at the local diner, and some will telephone the
office. Most of these people I already know, some may be just joining
the civic conversation.



My challenge is to find ways to have all these
people be heard in some way. Sometimes they are quite articulate and
can write a letter to the editor for publication. Others are not too
good with language. When they have legitimate concerns and insights,
it's my job to find a way to give them a voice.“It's
a noble calling, and it can make a huge difference in the civic life of
the community. It's a lot of hard work and the pay isn't always
munificent, but you can make a good living at it and you get to call
the shots editorially, answering to no one but your readers

This really resonates for me. The lessons I first started picking up four years ago, when I was doing the piece on how The Point Reyes Light was saved from bankruptcy, because it was so relevant to its community that the people refused to let it die ... they all keep making more and more sense to me.

I don't know what this means, yet. I'll admit that. The crystal ball is cloudy - ask again later. Maybe what we'll wind up with is a few mega-media outlets doing all the national and international news, watchdogged by a constellation of niche interest bloggers and citizen journalists acting like Digital Minutemen when something in their sphere of interest is getting harmed/extolled/mentioned/successful. That would leave a significant gap in the ecosystem in the middle - in all those places where there have been fat cash cows, i.e. the mid-size dailies that Gannet and its ilk snarfed up and retooled back in the 80s.

I do know this. Nature abhors a vacuum, and people need and want good, solid, factual news about their neighborhood, town, county and state. Whether or not they get it on a dead-tree edition delivered to their doorstop every day is not up to me or anyone else. The internet and the many-to-many communication it has enabled is a macroeconomic force that has gathered enough momentum so that only an Alien Space Bat charged particle-beam weapon can fry it out of existence. If the mid-size papers go under, as all the folks at AdAge seem to feel is inevitable, something will eventually arise out of the evolutionary muck to replace them.

News Flash to Military: The Media is NOT Your Enemy

All the shallow thinkers seemed to draw from Vietnam was that the brave military could have "won" that war, had not the craven, cowardly, hate-America-first media not stabbed them in the back.

So in our most recent misadventure in Iraq, the military set out from the outset to muzzle, coerce, co-opt and neuter the media. That was Job One, and they spent billions of dollars and millions of man-hours making sure that their talking points were crammed down the throats of any media outlet.  The recent NY Times investigation revealed just how much all the "analysts" were being fed useless, false and ultimately harmful propaganda.  In a recent Miami Herald article, Ed Wasserman convincingly argues that the media is going to have to self-police to rid itself of hacks disguised as objective, independent observers:

Some of the analysts confessed that to avoid displeasing their Pentagon patrons they choked back misgivings they had about administration claims of steady military gains.

One Fox News analyst came back from a trip and told his viewers, ''You can't believe
the progress.'' Actually, he told The Times, ``I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south.''

The report is based on 8,000 pages of documents that the administration spent two years fighting demands to disclose. It describes a cozy arrangement involving more than 75 retired military who consulted for Fox News, NBC, CNN and other networks with round-the-clock cable operations. Few of those operations made much effort to find out whether their analysts were benefiting from the policies they zealously defended.

It's true, as Glenn Greenwald wrote on Salon, that ``news organizations were hardly unaware that these retired generals were mindlessly reciting the administration
line on the war and related matters. To the contrary, that's precisely
why our news organizations turned to them in the first place.''

Here's a line of thinking - I hesitate to use the word "fact," since the Pentagon and the current administration have so discredited even the concept of "facts" - that I hope some of the brighter minds in the military arrive at:  all the relentless bright & happy talk, the insistence on "progress is being made," the demands to blindly support our troops, the devotion to this vision of the U.S. military as an "Ever-Victorious Army," wreathed in golden glory, incapable of making a mistake ...

...all that propaganda and denial of tough examination of exactly what was going on, where we were headed ...

... that effort to castrate the media and control the message is what is going to ultimately going to be responsible for the disaster in Iraq.  I talked last night to a formerly wild-eyed right-winger, who works with/for/in the military, and he admitted that it's just a matter of time before we have the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, just like Saigon in '75.  

If the military had acknowledged in the years 2003-2006 that perhaps things were not quite going exactly according to plan, that there were flaws in the Great Sacred Rumsfeld's Master Plan, then perhaps, hmmm, I dunno, adjustments could have been made to that plan.  Adjustments that have since been made. 

Adjustments that would have saved American lives. Adjustments that would have stemmed or even reversed the disintegration of Iraqi society that has led us to the dead end where we now find ourselves.

Truthful reports in the media would have put pressure on the politicians above to change the plan rather than the insistence on "staying the course" despite the (OK, I'll say it) fact that course was heading right straight off the cliff.

Here's a last quote, ringing out from the lessons that should have been learned - were learned by Colin Powell, since he was in Vietnam, ignored by Cheney and Bush since they were not:

The armed forces contributed to their own defeat in Vietnam ''by fighting the war they wanted to fight rather than the one at hand.''

(snip)

In the end it all boils down to one question: Could we have won a military victory in Vietnam? Record's answer is: Yes, but not at any price even remotely acceptable to the American people.

One thoughtful former infantry battalion commander told me he had reflected long and
hard about what would have resulted from unlimited war, including an invasion of North Vietnam: ''We could have won a military victory without question. But today my sons and yours would still be garrisoning Vietnam and fighting and dying in an unending guerrilla
war.'' The war was ours to lose, and we did; it was for the South Vietnamese to win, and they could not.

Copycat Front Page Design - I Remember

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

In Hollywood, they say "Cash is the sincerest form of flattery."  Well, here's a couple of money shots.
The Roanoke Times, a paper that I use in a lot of my presentations, has a cover that is a near-perfect duplicate of the Apr. 4 Memphis Commercial Appeal.

First, the front page commemorating the anniversary of MLK's assassination:

Great stuff - stark image, in keeping with the somber nature of the day. 

Next up, the Roanoke Times, one the first anniversary of the VT school shootings:

I know, I know. Whaddaya gonna do with this subject? You gotta go minimalist here, and there are only so many ways to express the "It's time to think about a past bad event and feel bad about it" meme.  And, most likely, the graphic designers at the Times never saw the front page of the Commercial Appeal before they put up their big commemorative edition. And just for the record, I do like both designs. 

Still, it's a freaky coinkydink, no?

TiVo-Proof Ads?

Once again, a sort-of "back to the future" approach is tried.

If you've ever seen archival footage of TV shows from the 50s, you know that it was nothing extraordinary for a news anchor to smoothly transition from the latest Sputnik sighting to a pitch for Ballantyne's Ale or Schaefer, "the beer to have, when you're having more than one."

ABC has mined that meme to come up with a strategy to try to defeat the growing numbers of TiVo-esque DVRs; starting in May, on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the commercials will be live skits that are (somehow?) integrated into the rest of the show. Damnifyknow how the directors are going to work around this one - it's going to be a difficult trick to try to keep the show from coming to a screeching halt and poisoning the tone, when the host has to look into the camera and ask the late-night viewers if their legs are feeling a little twitchy right now, and perhaps they could use a nice restless leg potion from Bristol-Myers-Squibb, blah blahditty blah...

(snip)

...now live spots are seen as a way to standout, just as the
official yardstick for measuring ads on network TV has shifted to
commercial ratings. Advertisers also believe live ads may be one
way to beat the DVR by integrating the product into the content of
the show. Last May Garmin, maker of car navigational systems, aired
the first live commercial on the Tonight Show With Jay Leno
in 14 years.


"Probably most people had no idea they were being pitched a
commercial," said Steve Lovell, media sponsorship marketing manager
at Garmin and the architect of the spot. "It looked like a skit."
He said that post-telecast research showed that effectiveness and
awareness levels for the live spot were significantly higher than
for many of the company's traditional 30-second spots. Garmin is
planning another live spot on the Tonight Show in the second
quarter of this year.

At least TV advertising is trying to address the erosion of audience attention and the effects of ad-skipping technology before it reaches a total crisis/meltdown mode. I think that we're going to see a lot more of the types of ad insertion models that online video is using - takeovers, frames, side-by-sides, etc. The CNN crawl has acccustomed people to having two or more information flows on the screen at all times, so the audience (particularly the younger, more nimble-minded amongst us) perhaps won't be freaked and overwhelmed.

Still, I think the sweet spot advertisers should be aiming at is not to figure out better means of jamming in intrusive ads, but better means of letting viewers choose opt-in ads. If the audience is actually interested in the product being touted, well, it's not intrusive, it's informative. Example: I'm in the market to lease a new car. Car ads are all of a sudden a helluva lot more interesting to me than they were before. Given a choice, I'd look at a few of them, rather than ads for new cellphones, since I'm married to the iPhone for at least the next two years.

The biggest hurdle to making the opt-in approach work is that it requires that I give up some of my privacy to the ad server(s) so that they know what kind of content they should be shipping me, and the last 25 years of relentless telemarketers/spammers has made us all wary of giving any marketer any means by which to contact us, because we know where that leads.

The ad agency that can clear that obstacle in a way that lets me choose without having to endure endless ads for "V1@gr@" and "Tex@s H0ld'em P0ker T0urn@mentz" will be Teh Winnar.