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OMMA Hollywood 2009: Mobile Advertising Case Study - Microsoft Bar Codes Mobile Ads

This is the audio podcast of the Mobile Advertising session at the OMMA 2009 conference.

Download Mobile media session OMMA 2009

Doom or Negotiating Strategy: The San Francisco Chronicle Gets Its Two-Minute Warning

The last couple of months have seen the weaker papers in two-newspaper towns file for bankruptcy, fire their staffs & announce impending doom.  A lot of this can be written off as the natural consequences of a contracting ad market and an epically bad economy; the announcement today by Hearst that the San Francisco Chronicle is facing yet another massive & painful round of layoffs came as both a surprise and not. The gut-clencher came a little bit down in the story:

The Hearst Corp. today announced an effort to reverse the deepening
operating losses of its San Francisco Chronicle by seeking near-term
cost savings that would include "significant" cuts to both union and
non-union staff.

In a posted statement, Hearst said if the savings cannot be
accomplished "quickly" the company will seek a buyer, and if none comes
forward, it will close the Chronicle. The Chronicle lost more than $50
million in 2008 and is on a pace to lose more than that this year,
Hearst said.

Downer cow dragged off to slaughter

This has led to a flurry of stories assuming that the End is Nigh for the Chronicle. The Wall Street Journal weighed in:

Observers have been waiting to see which major U.S. city will be the
first to go without a major daily newspaper, and San Francisco is a
front-runner for the role.

Over at Content Bridges, Ken Doctor muses about the other struggling Bay Area newspapers, and wonders why a viable web-based alternative hasn't sprung up yet, in an area that's within a hurled semiconductor of Silicon Valley (hell, I can't figure that one out either). However, he gets close to what I think is the underlying story here:

Could the Chronicle indeed go away? Well, don't expect anyone to buy it. The newspaper market is, to use the kind word, illiquid. Frozen solid by two minor problems: 1) the credit meltdown, which will someday ease; 2) no one knows how to hell to value a newspaper company because no one has "visibility" in future revenue, which is a nice way to say no one likes what they see ahead.

Maybe, Hearst and MediaNews, once close, but now more distant partners, can figure out some new cost-sharing plans that will pass government review.  If not, we can now imagine the Chronicle indeed closing, if it doesn't get the "significant" cost reductions it wants. My guess given our times, is that it will get reductions, and then reduce itself in product and people to some sense of immediate sustainability. It may keep publishing, though it may scrap days like Detroit or whole sections like many of its brethren. 

My read on the threat of folding the paper is that they have run up against a wall of union contracts, and want to get around them without having to resort to Chapter 11.  The "concessions" that Hearst wants are going to be ugly - over at Newsosaur, Mutter spitballs them at nearly 50%.

At that point, mere eliminations of staff positions will not hit that target.  To eliminate half of the staff would mean that the paper quite simply would not get out. There wouldn't be enough people to run the presses, drive the trucks, or lay out the display ads from wackjob religious sects. Not to mention, report & edit news.  That means the survivors of the cuts would have to take massive pay cuts.  Maybe the newsroom staff would meekly submit to the replacement of a paycheck with a moldy roast-beef sandwich and a family pass to Hearst Castle, but those Teamsters, well, that's another story.

The other unsettling prospect is that Hearst would either sell the Chronicle to MediaNews, the Dean Singleton empire that has been similarly troubled, or perhaps even demand back all the money that Singleton owes the Hearsts (which I'm guessing he does not have), which would mean that Hearst would wind up taking MediaNews titles like the Merc-News or Contra Costa as a barter-type payoff.  Both moves have significant anti-trust problems, not to mention less than rosy implications for journalism in the Bay Area.

Some interesting thinking from Daniel Singer at Huffington Post on this one - on why the solution to a revenue crisis at big newspapers IS NOT to get bigger.

The big record labels' entire business was built around moving little plastic discs around the world, similar to how a newspaper's business was built around moving paper through a printing plant and on to you. That's about 60-70% of the cost of producing a newspaper: getting the ink on it and moving the damn thing around. Moving things from place to place--be it plastic discs or bundles of paper--is very difficult and expensive. It's the kind of business that rewards economies of scale and, as a result, allows for huge concentrations of power and money. It's the kind of business that creates five major record labels and a dozen or so major news companies (that's a generous number, actually, once you get past the first five or six you're down to small town paper chains). It's the kind of business that comes crashing down the quickest once its central complication--moving things from here to there--disappears. With the efficiencies of digital distribution, the established order is not simply threatened, it is broken.

So if size is a disadvantage in the New Media world, the teetering newspaper empires' reflex to merge and merge again is perhaps the exact wrong move at this time.  If the key to web success is that overused buzzword "community," then an amorphous conglomeration that exists mainly to cater to efficiencies in distributing an ad sales platform that grows daily less relevant, is not a move in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: San Francisco Chronicle, Hearst, newspaper, new media, iTunes

Socks the Cat: Conspiracy Theories on the Rise

Poor Socks the Cat, the puzzled feline who famously crouched on the sidewalk in front of the Clinton's house back in '93, providing the only photo op for frustrated news services in the weeks following the election ... is dead.


(h/t Tbogg)

After the euthanization, the body of Socks was deposited in Fort
Marcy Park, a federal park in Virginia where it was found by park
rangers. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) the ranking Republican on the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has vowed an
investigation into the death of Socks, coming as it has, on the eve of
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to China. According to
congressional aides, the timing of the Socks death just as his former
owner was  leaving the country is "suspicious, to say the least.
Probably criminal. Yeah. Really really criminal looking."

In related news, Regnery Publishing Inc, A Division of Eagle
Publishing, has commissioned noted author Lilian Jackson Braun to write
a tell-all book on the late Socks: The Cat Who Knew Too Fucking Much
to be published on Wednesday, February 25th. The slim tome is expected
to reach number one on the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestseller list
the following week due to massive bulk orders shipped to 214
Massachusetts Ave NE Washington DC 20002-4999, as well as a copy to be
delivered gratis to all seventy-three people who subscribe to the
Washington Times. 

I look forward to the fund-raising posts on this subject, surely already in the works, from Chief Editor Korir, and the imminent promise of a mysterious "tape" showing that Socks was in possession of crucial documents proving that President Obama was actually grown in an eerie green-tinted vat in an abandoned warehouse by the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Horn-Rimmed Glasses Man, and George Soros.  The documents were stashed beneath Socks' kitty box, and are now the subject of an international man ... er, cathunt.

Silliness aside, this photo actually fills me with a lot of nostalgia - look at how many photos there were just hanging around outside the Clinton's house, waiting for any kind of news to develop.  Think of the resources that Big Media outlets had sixteen years ago ... how they had the money in their budgets to devote to paying people just to stand around in a location in the hopes that something might happen.

While this may still happen (there were a lot of reporters hanging around the neighborhood in Chicago, trying to come up with some new angle on Obama), I think that this is going to be seen as an artifact of a vanished age.  Nobody can afford to pay a photog's salary, when all he comes up with is shots of a puzzled cat on a sidewalk.

...ask not for whom Socks the Cat meows, news industry; he meows for thee...

Ukrainian Drinks Menu

...and this is where my problems really started...



Note that in Kiev, you can get sex on the beach.  The drink, that is.

Actual sex on the beach is not recommended.

Ukrainian Version of Country & Western Tragic Love Songs

I was serenaded by this group last night on a riverboat restaurant here in Kiev.

My friends here took us out for a big traditional Ukrainian dinner, and started plying me with this deadly local concoction made of vodka, honey and hot peppers.  It's designed to hit your stomach, and warm you up in the winter.  It had just started snowing when we got here, and looking out the window, I saw huge heavy flakes floating down to disappear into the dark, slow Dnieper River.  Chunks of ice, broken free from the mass far upriver, kept floating by on their way to the Black Sea. With this music in the background, it felt somehow timeless...

So yeah, it's campy and melodramatic. But as the song goes on, you start to see the changes come over the faces of my dinner companions. I don't know what they were singing about, but it must've been heavy.

Eugen, the dean here at the Digital Future of Journalism school, explained to me that traditional Ukrainian songs are all tragedies, drawn from their long and heartbreaking history. 

"The potato harvest fails, so to support his family, the man goes off to fight in the Tsar's wars," he said. "He knows that there is small chance of him ever coming back alive, and his wife knows this is probably the last time she sees him in this world. So they sing of their love for each other, and he embraces his children goodbye. It's like Ukrainian bluegrass, or country and western. Where the man has no money, no job, his pickup truck is broke, his wife left him and his dog just died.  That kind of thing."

Anyway - enjoy.

Ukraine, music, country & western, tragic love, song

Defying Spacetime: Cheney's Former House Magically Reappears

The Vice-President's mansion is once again visible on Google Maps.

View Larger Map


Does anyone else detect the aroma of Soviet-style "Revisionist History" here?  I saw this happen first-hand when I worked as a newspaper editor in Venezuela.  It happened on a big government project that was being overseen by the terrifying secretary/concubine Blanca Ibáñez (she was alleged to be de facto ruler of the country, while dipsomania President Jaime Lusinchi floated like a Manatee in the pool at Miraflores, surrounded by half-empty bottles of Pampero rum).  It was called the John Paul II housing complex, situated in the slum of Montalban. It was supposed to be for the workers; they used the pension funds from some union workers to fund the construction.  Then, once it was partially completed, it supposedlyl "ran out of money" - even though our digging found that millions more had been allocated to build the complex than would ever logically be needed to complete.

At about that time, we started noticing that the official documents and records had been tampered with.  The photos of all the dignitaries on hand for the ground-breaking ceremonies had had several faces (known criminal acquaintances of Blanca) air-brushed out.  The names disappeared and reappeared and then disappeared from the lists of Boards of Directors & Project Managers; all, we learned, because behind the scenes, the rats were fighting each other over who would get to feast on the mountains of cash.

In the end, the complex that was supposed to provide safe, secure and stable housing for the workers who had busted their asses for a lifetime, was condemned and then sold for pennies.  To developers who quickly turned the whole thing around, finished it, and then sold it for a massive profit as high-end luxury housing.

Now THAT'S a political scandal.  Thousands of workers robbed, their money stolen by corrupt politicians in league with criminals masquerading as bankers, and good hardworking people left homeless.  Sounds familiar, eh?

Anyway - the disappearance/reappearance of entire structures reminds me of those dark days. Some of the comments over at Wonkette

A vague hologram of the mansion lingered aboveground while the actual
dwelling burrowed 666 fathoms below the earth’s crust, coming at last
to rest in a den of snakes. All you could see in aerial photos on
Google Earth was a bunch of squares and nothingness in the midst of a
normal neighborhood of houses and trees.

are beverage-on-monitor funny:

Can you still see the pentagram on the roof or did Jill have it painted over?

When mysterious doors start appearing out of nowhere, leading into
horrific hellscapes that defy the physical layout of the house,
Google’s gonna wish they kept that place hidden. You wait…

I wonder where he hid the horcruxes.

The larger issue here is, what happens when a malignant governmental entity manages to take control of "Teh Intertoobz" and sets about cleansing history & facts according to its whim?  Under the Soviet regime, when Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky or others fell out of favor, to erase the embarassing love-letters contained in the history books, it was necessary to collect all the printed materials, burn them, and replace them with brand-new propaganda extolling the virtues of the new regime.

Obviously, if a Vice President of the United States can, by fiat, declare that a piece of the Earth's crust can no longer be seen from space - or at least, that it no longer show up on maps - what does that mean for the future?  If, as the digital triumphalists hold, in the future all ink on paper volumes are replaced by the Exploding Silicon Inevitable, how fluid does reality become?  And don't give me any of that "Wayback Machine" smack.  All 1s and 0s are subject to either hacking or strong magnetic fields.

A Command of Invective

I bow & grovel in the shadow of such lovely invective as this, which appeared just yesterday on Sadly, No!

In terms of art, it ought to be said that the greatness of a Pastor
Swank, of a Mark Noonan or a John Hinderaker — the quality which raises
them above the howling roil of right-wing authoritarians, of spite
retailers, blowhards, closeted gay ministers, cranks, Bible lickers, of
nerds-gone-bad, of flag humpers, pseudo-intellectuals, chair-based
saucer investigators, of stern-bodiced rape fantasists, of
millennarians, Know-Nothings, Free Silver enthusiasts, jingoes, Oreos,
Foursquare McPhersonites, splinter Baptists, pseudo-Methodists,
Pentecostal highway parishioners, of cynical purveyors of
purpose-driven things and of AMWAY, of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable
Compound, Graham’s miracle flour, Kellogg’s abstinence-promoting Corn
Flake Cereal, or other products unevaluated by the FDA that are not
intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease; of Goldwater
idolators, ‘Scoop Jackson liberals,’ McCarthyites, Yankees fans,
Likudniks, the mean of spirit, dupes, chumps, Dartmouth grads,
shysters, four-flushers, dog-kickers, self-dealers, Professors of X at
James Madison University, wingnut welfare skillet-lickers and
beak-wetters; of wingnut welfare high-rollers, pimps, queens,
bathroom-stall fellators, and generational dependents; of certain
former or current WWF/WWE personalities and/or karate movie stars
and/or minor Baldwin brothers, convicted Watergate felons, washed-up
Red Sox pitchers, and/or 1970s Detroit-area rock musicians, as well as unnh and gaah, not to mention hunnh — isn’t solely in making up things that aren’t true, but often in fact in forgetting things that are.

Like Bluto Blutarsky at the beginning of Act 3, it doesn't make any sense, but you don't want to stop them when they're on a roll...

Seattle P-I Stares Into The Abyss While the LA Times Web Operation Actually Makes Money

Short takes, because I'm editing stories these days, as well as writing 9 of the little buggers myself.

First, there's the news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is up for sale, and that if it doesn't sell in the next two months, it'll either be liquidated & turned into a web-only brand, or taken out back & shot.

"One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print," said Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.'s newspaper division.

Well, that's pretty stark.  No chance that the Dead Tree edition will be able to sputter along for a while yet?  Damn. The ad market must really be eating it up in the Pacific Northwest ... well, at least for paper editions.  All the dweebs, nerds & propellerheads in the area (you know who you are) have long since sworn blood allegiance to information arriving over the intertubes.

Others have pointed out that, just as wolves pick off the old, sick & lame in the herd, so too do economic forces strike first at the most vulnerable. In this case, that vulnerability was that they were 1) the 2nd-place paper in a 2-daily town, and 2) a paper in a market where ad revenues were either getting tight, or moving to other platforms.

The part of the sick & lame reindeer in this metaphor will be played by the Detroit Free Press & Detroit News, and the Rocky Mountain News.

The San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times are having trouble keeping up with the rest of the herd, and the wolves are licking their chops.

The Atlantic article asserting that the New York Times could croak this spring has been pretty ferociously fisked. As has been pointed out (ad nauseum) elsewhere, the revenues that come in from the digital editions still don't add up to even 1/5 of what the paper edition brings.  Of course, people are starting to notice what the dour Norwegians did a coupla few years back - the profit is lower, but so are the costs.  I wrote about this, and the slides showing the relationships between costs & revenue are online.

Here's what Poynter (in the link above) had to say: 

But one of the most intriguing issues in considering partial or complete conversion to online is that the cuts would not be distributed equally through the enterprise. Distribution, paper and pressroom costs would be reduced dramatically or eliminated. That could leave a much higher share of the remaining budget for the smaller company to devote to newsgathering. 

 

I don't begrudge Hirschorn his meditation on a future in which print's role is minimal or disappears. I don't happen to think, as he does, that Huffington Post, with its mix of unpaid opinion blogs, news lifted from elsewhere and hype, is the model.

 

How about getting your political news from Politico, your sports news from ESPN.com, your showbiz news from EW.com, your international news from an assortment of options, and your local news from somewhere to be determined? In short, the news would come from professionally reported and edited sites with standards -- just not the single unifying standard of The New York Times or other quality publications.

 

It all may come to pass within a decade or sooner. Not, however, at The New York Times in May.

And finally, over at BuzzMachine, Jarvis is lobbing blogversation grenades, asking, "Can the LA Times turn off its presses?"

Kirk LaPointe at themediamanager.com says pretty convincingly, "Not yet." Although he does cite the expenses from lawsuits twice in his 7-point refutation of Jarvis. Apparently, legal expenses are much on this editor's mind these days.

Technorati Tags: advertising, newspaper, LA Times, monetization, content shift

HDR Photo Expermiments

The landscape up here is so beautiful, and the light has been amazing.  I've taken to experimenting with combining multiple exposures into HDR photos.

Here's a view from atop Mt. Vision. This one needs a bit more adjusting - the fog clouds look pretty good, but the highlights of the sky & clouds in the upper left need to be processed a bit better.  Still this was a beautiful, amazing scene. (This was done with the HDR functions of Adobe Photoshop CS3)




Next, here's that same scene, as handled by Photomatix:




You can clearly see the difference - in the Photomatix version, the color in the foreground pops out, without sacrificing the contrast & color in the fog banks in the background. I'll be posting a video of the fog drifting in through the trees later...

Technorati Tags: HDR photography, Marin County

AsianWeek Kills Print Edition: A Growing Trend?

First day of the new year, reading through the S.F. Chronicle, ho-hum. Governator Arnie's got a plan, despite being holed up in Sun Valley skiing, the local sports columnist wonders if Barry Bonds might make it back into the major leagues, despite facing Federal prison for allegedly lying under oath, and the fog obscured the New Year's Eve fireworks (a personal bummer, since we expended much energy to ensure we had a good view of the Bay).

What's this?

AsianWeek, an influential force politically and culturally for San
Francisco Asian Americans for 30 years, will publish its final print
edition on Friday, another victim in the shrinking newspaper industry.

AsianWeek will continue to publish online, at www.asianweek.com,
and produce special editions about Asian American business,
professional development, heritage and other issues and will still host
events, but the print edition is going away because of economic
realities, Ted Fang, editor and publisher, said in an interview
Wednesday.

Oh, great. It's a new year, and the first day in, and already I'm getting hit with more news about the newspaper crisis. I just spent the last week masticating the implications of the death of big-market dailies.  I'm editing stories over the break that are all about the moves that papers should make, tools that they should use to reinvent themselves.  And still...?

"There are fewer major newspapers, fewer newspaper readers and fewer
newspaper advertisers than ever before," Fang and his brother, James
Fang, the president of the company, write in a letter to readers
published in Friday's final edition. "A faltering economy has
accelerated the decline," they write.

This is particularly troubling for me, because on the surface, this paper would seem to have a lot of the attributes that a Print 2.0 operation going into the future should have - that is, tightly focused on a well-defined niche market that's under-served. The potential audience is affluent, and there are many local sponsors that should be anxious to reach them.  So why'd the Fangs kill it?

I'm not going to point the finger at the ownership, although many in the Bay Area are already pointing to earlier misadventures with the Examiner. Even taking that disaster into consideration, there remains the fact that the Fangs had started out with AsianWeek, and that they surely would protect the basis of their family fortune.  Having jackasses for owners has never seemed to hurt the profitability of many, many other narrowly focused niche publications. Well, unless they were criminally incompetent & kleptomaniacal.

So what was it? Was the audience too assimilated to really crave a niche publication? Was the content strategy wrong and in need of adjustment? Did the ad sales staff do its job right? Despite the announcement, the website is still accepting subscription money (and quite pricey subscriptions they are, too).



I find it interesting that they are still maintaining the web presence. So either they feel that the audience in tech-savvy San Francisco & its environs has all migrated online ... or they're just doing this as a stopgap measure while they prepare to let the paper just fade away.  Looking at their website, it's hard to imagine that they're really making a lot from it - the ads are pretty sparse and there doesn't seem to be that much inventory.  If they're preparing some master stroke, some game-changing niche multimedia play, I'd love to see it.  The columnist for the paper wrote a fiery epic about what having an independent voice dedicated to an overlooked ethnic group meant to the Asian community. 

But if that's true, then why did the paper fail?

It'll be interesting in the next couple of months to see which papers manage to survive and which decide to follow the growing lead, and kill the print edition entirely and move to the web.

Technorati Tags: newspaper, san francisco examiner, fang family, asianweek, killing print edition

Obama's an "Evil Illegal Alien"? Really?

I threw up a little in my mouth when I read this:

Southern Baptist Pastor Wiley Drake bashed Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren this week, saying “God will punish” Warren
for agreeing to give the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration next month.

“I pray He is kind to you in this punishment that is coming,” Drake wrote in a widely-released e-mail. In it, the First Southern BaptistChurch of Buena Park pastor criticizes Warren’s “recent plan to invokethe presence of almighty God on this evil illegal alien,” a referenceto Obama.

The fact that such obviously insane people are allowed to walk the streets of Our Fair Nation is the most searing indictment of the
long-term effects of the Reagan revolution on our mental-health safety net.  The minute the parishoners stop the gravy train for this lunatic is the day he begins his downward slide to wandering the streets of the South Bay area with a matted beard, visible body odor and cardboard boxes tied to his feet. 

This is some industrial-strength crazy hatin'.

In early 2008, while he was the pastor for the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Reverend Drake was a vocal supporter of Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign. He sent out a letter personally endorsing Huckabee. However, the letter was on church stationery; thus, to the Internal Revenue Service, Rev. Drake was endorsing a political candidate as a church leader and endangering his church's tax-exempt status.

Rev. Drake's violation of federal tax law was reported to the IRS by an advocacy group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU), which had warned him for endorsing Dick Mountjoy for a U.S. Senate race with a Southern Baptist Convention letterhead.Rev. Drake asked his parishioners and others to pray for revenge using an imprecatory prayer for the punishment, shame, and even deaths of AU officials.

And For. The. Win.

In October 2008, Drake, stating he was still a candidate for vice
president, announced that he had filed a lawsuit seeking to have the
Secretary of State of the State of Washington "de-certify Barack Obama
because he has refused to release proof of being a Natural Born Citizen"

Holy shit! This knucklehead is STILL buying into the unbelievably disgraced and laughably false Obama-hatin' birth certificate Nigerian Prince scam!

And now he's even attacking one of the most powerful figures in the Evangelical Christian world for his association with Obama? Damn, man.  When I saw a short notation on the screen of Fox News, talking about the Rick Warren imbroglio, I noted the short sentence, "If Democrats realized how terrified Republicans are of Obama adding Rick Warren to the team, they'd stop opposing this."

Looks like they were onto something.  This could further the fractures in the Republican base - splitting the reality-aware Evangelicals away from the batshit-crazy Evangelicals like this specimen:

We are seeing the evolution of a truly reality-divergent slice of our population.  The Obama-haters have their "grassy knoll."  It's as though the wackos with their conspiracy theories about plastique charges in the WTC or cruise missiles fired into the Pentagon, had an official spokesman.  Someone who has a radio audience and actual political power.  And who says shit like this.

Even if he were born in Hawaii, he was born to an American-citizen
mother and a British-citizen father. That’s a proven fact. According to
these fellows, the constitutional definition is no matter where you are
born, both parents have to be Americans. Even if he were born on U.S.
soil, that’s a moot point because he’s not qualified. Phil Berg’s case
says we have evidence, proof, that he was not born on American soil.
His own paternal grandmother says he was born in Kenya. That’s what got
me turned on. I’m a pastor. I have a tendency to believe people. When I
heard an elderly paternal grandmother—speaking in Swahili, if it was
interpreted right, and I think it was—say that she saw her grandson,
Barack Hussein Obama, come out of his mother here in Kenya, I can’t
imagine why she made that up. There is no motive for lying. In all
honesty, she’s just bragging on her grandson.

Man, even the citizen reporters down in the O.C are getting fired up over this fruitbat & his congregation. (h/t to CNN's excellent iReport)

Hey - here's a marketing opportunity for the paranoia-enablers - get the Wiley Drake congregation list and start spamming them with aluminum-foil "Survival Hats" necessary to protect their brains from the inevitable Taliban mind-control rays that are going to start coming outta them internet tubes after Barack Hussein takes power.

Technorati Tags: obama-haters, wiley drake, southern baptist, conspiracy theories