For the first time that I've noticed it anyway, I've had a video ad for Dove show up on my blog today. Depending on where you are, you may or may not see it (it's showing up in that AdSense box below the mesh ad, over in the C column on the right). Fascinating to see the growth of Google's move into display and video ads really start to ramp. A taste of things to come, I'd say.

(posted by blackberry)

Well, not really, but my Wife and I did spend last week recording our radio listening habits for the latest round of Toronto BBM (Bureau of Broadcast Measurement) ratings. You know, those things that the stations use to figure out who's listening, and advertisers use to figure what stations to buy to reach what audience. We hadn't done it before, and given I have an, um, more-than-passing interest in media and advertising, we figured what-the-heck.

While filling out a little booklet was fine and dandy, what was most interesting to me in the process was realizing how little radio I listen to anymore. It was really surprising. Not that I am not listening to anything, but that it's not radio. For instance, we went away as a family so the music was kid's tunes on the iPod. Then, it was me in the car, listening to CDs, music and podcasts. On the subway? All iPod, all-the-time. Home? Same. Kid's music and iPod tunes and podcasts.

I also found it interesting that the BBM people don't seem to be interested in knowing that I am listening to my iPod, or CDs for that matter - although, you'd think that they'd want to know what is happening around substitution. Oh, wait, right, they *don't* want to know.

Tags: BBM, tags, radio, ratings

We all have our little pleasures, I guess. Some people eat ice cream, some curl up with a good book. Me? I read The Economist. In many ways, it's like trying to get drunk on Guinness: it tastes great, but man is it heavy after awhile. I subscribed at one point, but mostly ended up feeling guilty about not reading it most weeks. So now, it's an occasional purchase before a trip or what have you. But I still love it.

So will you pardon me tooting my horn by mentioning how neat it feels (yes, geeky lame-o neat, I admit) that I am the lead in a story in this week's edition? Turns out that this blog post about watching the World Cup on the train via WiFi caught the eye of a writer working on a story on that very topic, and it went from there.

The story is here.

Tags: wifi, the economist

Jeff has a tremendous post here. Long, but worth it.

Lines up with my view of the world, big time - as anyone who has been listening to me for the past, oh, two years, and has been playing any sort of follow-the-money already knows.

The good people at the Globe and Mail have taken it upon themselves to do a feature on me in this Thursday's edition of their new Report on [small] Business Magazine. It's the second time they are putting it out, and in keeping with their main and respected Report on Business Magazine, they are devoting the last page to something called "Exit Strategy". The people they featured last time were Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr, who sold to Yahoo! This time? It's me.

Now, I don't know what they are going to say (Simon Avery is the author, and a photog followed me around for 3 hours a few weeks back) so I guess we will all learn together on Thursday. All that I will say is that if it is good, it's true. And if it is not, it's clearly all out of context :-)

UPDATE: I am yet to see the paper version since I was travelling, but here is the link. For clarity, contrary to the facts layed out in the piece, I didn't calculate airline yield as a child - I was older than that. And, I didn't move to Seattle to work for USA Networks, but for Expedia, Inc., although Diller had bought us by that point. Also that was in 2003 not 2004. And, I didn't actually bring Signature Vacations online - I was about 6 months into that project when I moved on to Expedia.

Tags: globeandmail, reportonbusiness

Heading to Ottawa for a CIRA meeting, watching Argentina vs. Netherlands on the 'puter via wifi and a slingbox. 24:13 in. Both teams playing well.

Feed sorta dodgy, but on the whole...man, this ROCKS.

ps: If you applied for a spot on the CIRA Board, we are meeting to discuss who we will put forward tomorrow.

GO HOLLAND!

Update: here's a sample of the quality of the picture. Not bad, for wifi on a moving train.

Update 2: Ended in a 0-0 tie. Caught the last bit here in the Ottawa train station. Is this the future of media? Well, something like this sure feels likely...

Tags: slingbox, worldcup, train

Seems that's what a bunch of the studios are saying. Their US$150m investment in Movielink, the jointly owned movie download site, hasn't gone anywhere and they are looking to get out. Business Week reports that they have been shopping it, to little avail, and that they have one year of cash left.

It all sounds a little like what happens when you get competitors trying to figure out how to work together and keep a Genie in a bottle, all at the same time. Goat rodeo. And who loses? The potential customer, and category adoption overall.

Now, I get that infighting and arrogance on the part of the studios may well be a big part of the problem here (as Carlo at Techdirt says), and their seeming inability to move beyond just allowing people to watch on their computer screens is a biggee. But - and maybe it's just me - given this brave new broadband planet we are living on, where convergence is just really starting to start and new forms of media are only now starting to pay their own way as money follows the audience, could it be that now might not be the best time to be getting out of the movie download business?

Maybe, say, fixing it might be an idea?

See also Tim Lee's blog.

Tags: movielink

Amazing how abuzz the mainstream media is today with the WestJet apology story. There's lots, lots more out there if you care to look. All the usual suspects are in with their $0.02. Heck, I don't know if I should feel badly or happy for poor Jacques Kavafian. He just can't seem to shake being the go-to Quote Boy for all things aviation, no matter where he goes. Which means, his services are less in demand of late, so this flurry must feel like old times. And that leads to the key message for me in all this coverage:

The business media really, really misses the  bad-old-days of Canadian aviation.

I mean, there was so much material! First there was AC privatization, then there were the years of AC/CP dogfights, charter airline collapses, the CP acquisition - with it's headline-friendly Quebec-vs.-The West overtones - then more charter airline collapses, some start-ups, some shut-downs, the odd bankruptcy, more start-ups, a little spying, more collapses, a few labour crises...

Phew! What a journalistic buffet! Pages and pages of copy, jillions and jillions of pixels. High fives all round the newsroom, the industry is a complete mess. Yippee!

Not to mention all of the personality stuff. Beddoes vs. Milton to be sure, but there have been plenty of other odd ducks along the way. Anyone remember LeBlanc at Intair and Royal? Obadia at Nationair? Deluce at Air Ontario and Canada 3000 (still in the picture with *yet another* start-up to-be. Sigh)? Kinnear at Canada 3000? What is it about aviation that attracts these folks? And of course there's the general sexiness of the business and the romance of travel that adds an allure. Let's face it: for years, the airline biz was the news story gift that kept on giving.

But now? How sad. Biz is relatively stable. AC is stronger than they have been in a long while, Uncle Miltie is about to ride off into the sunset (complete with Reguly's "gosh, I'm sorry I called you a knob all those years, I really think you're a great guy, now you take care" story ($) a while back), WS continues to do it's golly-we're-nice thing, and we haven't had a major failure in, well, months. In fact, there hasn't been much until this little redux of the already-told spying story fell from the sky to fill a whack of column inches. Call it a quick reminder of remember-when. Fuel prices are a pain of course and AC is still doing stuff to tick people off, but broadly things are pretty good.

Man, those reporters must be pissed.

Update: Further evidence of this in today's Globe and Mail, where reporter Brent Jang has a front page non-story about Clive Beddoes. Why non-story? Well, the premise is to discuss Beddoes' future plans, but given that he tried to exit his role as President in 1999 with the disastrous hiring of multi-former-AC-role-boy Steve Smith, the idea that Clive wants to move on is not exactly news. But hey, he was in town and it fills a nice news hole, so my call is that this week's spying-redux flurry has reminded them of that. Maybe airline news is going to be the New Black. Again.

Tags: aircanada, westjet, spying

For the past 50 or more years, advertising has been based on one basic concept: yelling at people via the television, works. You could get enough of them in one place, nice and passive, and if you delivered the right message enough times you could create awareness. From that (and I simplify) awareness led to trial, trial led to preference, preference led to loyalty. At the heart of this process were the assumptions that (a) you could get enough people in one place to allow for scale and (b) the message was for the marketer to control.

Fast forward to 2006, and that past starts to feel like a trip to Never-never Land. Companies are spending 50% or more of their ad dollars on things like paid search, the money that's left is being cast across extremely fragmented markets, PVRs and Tivo are at long last making commercial-skipping "Me TV" a reality in a way that VCRs never really did.

Clearly, for marketers with a job to do and agencies and networks who would like to keep their jobs, this is a challenge of the first order. So what is the answer?

As we sit here today, I don't think anybody knows. People talk about micro-tactics and multiple small efforts, but how does that work when you need to reach tens-of-millions of people? This is not clear. You hear about "conversations" being important, but how do you control your message in that environment? Feels to me that you just don't. And on top of that, you have an agency and broadcast community that seems to want to wish these changes away and keep doing what they have always done. I've seen *that* movie: travel industry in around 1998, anyone?

At mesh we are tackling these topics with some of the smartest people in the field, and today Mathew, Rob, Mark are joining the discussion, too. I have a bit of a different take on the mesh blog, and Mike has a good post about how we are putting these principles to work promoting the conference.

If you care about this topic, you can't afford not to be at mesh. Register today.

Tags: marketing, media, mesh06tags, web2.0

I spent the afternoon with a few hundred other Canadian digi-types at the first-ever  Sympatico-msn Digital Ad Summit. First off, props to those mesh-sponsoring msn kids for pulling off a very strong event (nice work, Patrick - and thanks for the invite) and for attracting a very tech-savvy crowd. As a co-founder of mesh, and other big events in past lives, I have a deep appreciation of the, um, challenges of event production and this one came off very well.

Also kudos for presenting a very strong line-up, though I must say that Bob Garfield was a disappointment. I was actually really looking forward to hearing the whole Chaos Theory he espouses (and I subscribe to) regarding the implications of the turmoil in mass media, broadcasting and advertising. Unfortunately, he likely should have been stopped at the border. His talk, while rich in good stuff, was overshadowed by a condescending tone, out-of-touch Canada vs. US quips and punch lines which fell tortilla-flat. He seemed tremendously out of touch with the fact that his audience were among the most tech with-it folks in Canada. As opposed to those in, oh I don't know, North Korea, who might have been more likely to marvel at his digi-smart pronouncements. Shame.

That said, Steve Rubel kicked it (he's back in 2 weeks at mesh) as did Jeff Cole (whom my wife and I will have the pleasure of dining with tomorrow night. Oh boy, talking 'net future with the man presiding over all that data, while enjoying a nice bottle of Rioja? I'm like a kid with candy :-)). The gentleman from France who discussed mobile and media was fascinating, and while they are clearly miles ahead over there, I still can't get past thinking that we are at least three years away from it really taking off here.

Mark was there with me and shares his thoughts on Cole's talk. In all,  it was a great and thought-provoking event.

Tags: msn, sympatico, steverubel, jeffcole, bobgarfield, mesh06tags

One of the things we will be exploring at mesh is the impact that social media and the interaction that web 2.0 is enabling is having on politics and society.

In the US, for instance, political blogs have almost become mainstream, with some sporting weekly reach and unique visitors numbers which exceed all but a handful of major newspapers. The Huffington Post, Captain's Quarters...the list goes on and on, and the influence grows.

Not to mention the role that the web has played in political party politics Stateside. Dean for America, (now Democracy for America) Howard Dean's site during his last, ill-fated run for the Democratic nomination, has become viewed as the model for how to use the web efficiently for engagement and fund-raising. At it's peak, people were *paying*  to watch Dean eat a hotdog. Yup, really.

Canada is far away from that. In fact, you could say that there is huge evidence that Canadian political parties, steeped in senior back-room leadership who still might well have people print their emails for heaven's sake, are far out of that loop, despite superficial attempts to look like they aren't. Personally, I think unless that changes, they will have their communal butts handed to them online within two years.

In any event, politics and society is up for discussion at mesh. I have a post up on the mesh blog, and Rob Hyndman who is running that stream has some thoughts here. Mark and Mathew  also chime in. Mike just added a nice post about how his Dad is prime for taking his political thoughts online.

Hope to continue the conversation with you at mesh.

Tags: mesh06tags, politics, web2.0, blogging

I just wrote the following over on the mesh blog. I sort of liked it, so I thought I'd add it here, too:

Lots of talk today about whether money can be made from blogging, with the WSJ publishing a story on it (just the type of story to get the often-inward-looking blogosphere fired into a navel gazing frenzy. But I digress :-)).

I guess it sort of depends on who and how you ask, right? I mean, if you were to ask many of the folks coming to speak at mesh, who happen to blog, whether "blogging makes money" many of them would likely say "Not directly, but indirectly? You better believe it."

I mean, think of the untold millions spent on traditional advertising and PR to create just the type of profile and voice that some people have built for themselves and their businesses via blogging and social media. How can you tally the value of creating your own soapbox? In traditional media, I guess overall marketing efficiency metrics are viewed as the most important gauge of the effectveness of spend, but can one really say, categorically, that traditional PR "makes money"? It's tough. But when put in that context? Wow, blogging "makes money" in spades.

Does it do so directly? Not often. Just like only PR practicitioners, by a tight definition, are the only ones who directly "make money" from PR. But indirectly? Bloggers, their organizations and PR firms Clients, without question.

That's the way to look at it, I think.

Dave Winer comments here, mesh speaker Paul Kedrosky here, and mesh speaker Scott Karp here. Mark thinks aloud here, Mathew has some great points here.

Certainly food for discussion in the marketing and PR streams at mesh.

Technorati tags: blogging, wsj, web2.0, mesh06links

This is something I want to get into more deeply, but for now Steve Rubel has a great wrap-up on a session he attended this morning with a bunch of US broadcasting, advertising and marketing execs. The gist? In the US, some of the biggest TV execs still can't wrap their heads around the idea of micro-markets - not really, anyway - and some big marketers are getting ready to take a leap.

All by way of putting the challenge that all these media changes are creating for those who need to deliver a message and those who, historically, have been paid to do that in quantity into yet more perspective.

Hopefully this is something we will dive into more deeply when Steve joins me on-stage 1:1 at mesh on May 15th and 16th in Toronto.

Technorati tags: marketing, media, web2.0