Yesterday Siliconalleyinsider.com reported that MediaVest is going to be moving $100 million of some Client(s) money into Cinema Advertising. Their answer to the lower TV viewership.

I don’t know what kind of butter they are putting on their popcorn or what else could make them think this a good way to spend valued Clients’ money. More critically are their Client going to fall for this?

What Brand wouldn’t want to own an environment where they are positioned between an audience and what they have paid for: a movie? A movie that is 2 hours of content designed to ideally make an audience forget what happened right before it. And please don’t start the “what about previews” argument. They are not analogous to commercials. If they were people would call them movie commercials not previews or trailers.

For years media planners have known that Cinema Advertising is a low impact media vehicle to be used only to augment a huge campaign or to show off particularly “important” creative; think the American Express/Seinfeld spots of several years ago.

A fine medium within those parameters, but not the solution to the $100 million “What to do about TV” question. Cinema Advertising doesn’t solve the loss of “must see TV”, not even close.

What it could save is budgets; justifying the production expenses associated with video. Hey if you are going to be on the big screen you need to look good right? It could save jobs; creative departments, production departments – skill sets associated with making commercials. It could give Creative Directors places to run potentially award running ads. It may even maintain Award categories. It delivers the status quo for one more year.

It won’t save Client relationships, sell products or hold back the wave of the NEW for much longer than that, but then this is the movies.

I’m fairly immune to the every day miscues of the mainstream press regarding anything to do with the Internet. But when a story that runs on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, attributes a slowing in ecommerce “to consumers experiencing Internet fatigue,” I had to take notice.

It is true ecommerce is not running at its historic annual 25% growth rate. In fact, in certain categories such as music and computer peripherals its annual growth has slowed to the single digits. But has it occurred to anyone that this may have less to do with the Internet, or consumer’s weariness with clicking on SUBMIT, and more to do with economic trends in the real world?

Let’s just put it this way: if Wal-Mart is posting 1.1% sales growth (reported in New York Times “Retailers, Consumer Companies Search For Growth” June 16, 2007) in stores open for a year, then 9% percent looks pretty sweet.

So, do these ecommerce gurus have any statistical support for their profile of the web weary consumer? After all what ecommerce interface couldn’t benefit from a little improvement, or a complete do-over? No, these guys just go for purely anecdotal comments from academics and friends. My goodness, what it takes to get on the cover The New York Times. The press must be getting research weary.

“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives.”
-Yahoo! co-founder David Filo.

Yahoo’s announcement that they will offer unlimited disk space for email accounts plays right into the hands of a new breed of pack rat: the email server storage hog.

I’m not sure if cluttering up my inbox with one line replies, semi-interesting listserv messages, or even ongoing chains trying to figure out what to get my dad for his birthday qualifies as archiving my life. An archive implies something worth going back to later, or at least something that you suspect you might want to keep around.

I’m trying to envision a future sitting around with the wife, going through our old emails and remembering the glory days: “Oh remember this, honey, when we tried to go out to dinner with Stephen and his friends, but we couldn’t find a date that worked for everyone? Those were the days.” Nope, I just don’t see it. But enjoy your extra disk space, Yahoozers.

It is a noble goal that brings these great American corporate giants (News. Corp., NBC, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!) together: “for the first time, consumers will get what they want – professional produced video delivered on the sites where they live.”

Deconstructing the hyperbole and lack of consumer insight displayed here could take pages. The real question is, can they make it happen? Five corporations that have been rivals for years, fighting hand to hand for the same ad dollars, the same consumer eyeballs are now working together. None have shown the slightest aptitude for partnership in the past (they are all legendary for their internal in-fighting); nor is there any good reason to believe they will be successful now.

Not even for their real, whispered mission: Google must die.

Not exactly a mission to build a business case on is it?

Nor can it sustain them through the negotiation-filled months ahead. The fear of Google can’t keep the various corporate self-interests at bay as they struggle to turn these press releases into real online consumer experiences and ad dollars.

A question as seemingly simple as “who gets what video first?” will determine which partner is most or least successful. Nor is the answer “everyone gets everything at once” satisfactory. In that route lies a complete dilution of value of these assets for every partner and a valueless partnership.

Then there is the advertising model with all that money to muddle through. It comes down to who sells what, how and what happens when the inventory runs out or goes soft.

It looks like some pretty tough talk ahead. All the time drawing high priced resources away from each partner’s more singular concerns: falling stock prices, re-building brand image, and other competitors.

Critically, there is no Lincoln in this story. No individual with the vision and determination to use each partner’s talents and toss the rest away. Here we see hyperbole and a great deal of misplaced energy; a true team of rivals. The folks at Google couldn’t be happier.

As marketers I feel like we have a duty to our clients, but we also have a duty to ourselves and the world around us to not just churn out message after message without understanding the implications on societal behavior.

Forbes recently had an article on how porn in advertising positions companies as “edgier” and how the fashion industry has jumped all over it. At the end of the article they ask the question “Is this smart marketing?”

They should really ask the question “Is this lazy marketing?” We all know sex sells but when marketers choose this path it always seems to me as the easy way out. Does this approach ultimately undermine our objectives as it invariably demeans the target of the marketing, whether it is perfume or beer.

Marketers, (and I speak to myself, as well) why not challenge ourselves to come up with ideas that are edgy because they celebrate intelligence and not demean it?

Everyday, we as marketers perform a balancing act of making sure we deliver material that is creative, meet’s the client’s needs and relates to the target audience. We ask ourselves:

- Will the target audience respond to this the way we want them to?
- Will the client like the work we are doing?
- Can we stay within budget and deliver on time?

But we’ve lost our sense of social responsibility in the everyday grind of getting it done. We need to add to the list of questions:

- How does this affect society? Does it harm or help?

In an ideal world we would be able to have a very clear distinction between harmful and helpful, but most often we fall into the gray zone. By just asking the question we take the first step forward and create an awareness of good intentions. We then make it possible to form habits that will help differentiate between helpful and harmful.

At the end of the day everyone wants to feel proud of the work that they do and taking the lazy way doesn’t get you there.

Something else must have been on Steve Jobs’ mind during an interview with Newsweek.com when the Apple CEO made two oddly suggestive comments about the iPod.

When asked if he was worried about the iPod not being cool anymore since it is so popular, Jobs responded with, “That’s like saying you don’t want to kiss your lover’s lips because everyone has lips.”

Uh…ok. If you say so.

Later in the interview, Jobs dismissed Microsoft’s Zune media player’s ability to share music wirelessly saying, “By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.”

Steve, dude, I just wanted to listen to some music, not make out!

“Important moments like this are a time to reflect. To remind us, sometimes, that it’s not only important what you wear, but it’s also important to be aware.”

Kenneth Cole on life post 9/11

Yesterday venturebeat.com asked an “expert” to opine on the future of online advertising. Who is that expert? Venture Capitalist Baris Kardogan. His impressive bio is light on marketing and heavy on electrical engineering, but I was willing to spend a few minutes to get an alternative view.

Who knew - he actually got some of it right:

“You don’t click on pre-roll ads because you are waiting to watch the video, and you don’t click on post-roll ads because you rarely watch a video all the way to the end.”

This has always seemed like the big hole in all these placements the media companies have all been gleefully selling at exorbitant CPMs. Not unlike Cinema Advertising, these ads are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Video and Movie viewers (some of the latter have even paid for their tickets) are not there to watch your ad (or mine for that matter). They have come for another reason and your ad is keeping them from that goal. Bad ad, actually bad media.

Thank goodness some one finally said it. Ok, he might be an expert.