Ad dollars moving online

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“This year the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of Americas three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, predicts Advertising Age. It will, says the trade magazine, represent a watershed moment in the evolution of the internet as an advertising medium. A 30-second prime-time TV ad was once considered the most effectiveand the most expensiveform of advertising. But that was before the internet got going.”

— Economist.com on an article in this week’s Advertising Age. More of the same at Yahoo!

First all-podcast radio station

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“The world’s first all-podcast radio station will be launched on May 16 by Infinity Broadcasting, the radio division of Viacom. Infinity plans to convert San Francisco’s 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content. The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOURadio.”

— Wired

Internet radio “not real radio”

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David Goldberg is VP/GM for Yahoo! Music, the home of LAUNCHcast. From his keynote speech at last week’s RAIN (Radio and Internet Newsletter) Las Vegas Summit:

“We really want to replace broadcast radio for music discovery. We believe music will migrate off of terrestrial radio to the services we are offering because we can deliver the music consumers want, when they want it, where they want it,” he explained. “We don’t believe music will continue to be broadcast on analog radio. Terrestrial radio will continue as a very successful, profitable business — but it will be mostly talk (he cited the only formats growing on terrestrial radio as Talk and Hispanic),” he said. And, he explained, this goes for satellite radio as well.

Susquehanna Radio Senior VP Dan Halyburton claimed that since Yahoo! Music couldn’t bring the “personality” and “local community” like AM and FM radio, it’s “not real radio.”

Business Week: “Blogs Will Change Your Business”

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I haven’t seen it, but Doc says it’s the cover story (May 2, 2005) in Business Week. In Blogs Will Change Your Business, Stephen Baker and Heather Green offer this warning: “Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. Let’s assume that 99.9% are off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

The dot-com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and — that’s right — no bubble.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like — you guessed it — blogs.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m getting a thin spot on the top of my head from people patting and smiling when I talk about blogs. I’ve bookmarked the new blog at Business Week Online(Blogspotting.net).

Blogging NAMA

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My buddy Chuck has only been blogging for a few months but he caught on fast. This week he was at the annual meeting of the National Agri Marketing Association (NAMA) and blogged everything that moved and handed out a bunch of “You’ve been blogged by ZimmComm” T-shirts.

The folks that knew about blogging we’re impressed he was covering. Those that had never heard the term (Don’t ask me how that’s possible) will remember they heard it from him first. I kept checking the official NAMA website for news from their meeting. Yawn. The days of posting a few pix and a news release a week after the event are over. And out.

Not podcasting.

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Mark Ramsey (Radio Marketing Nexus) explains the difference between posting mp3’s for download and podcasting:

“…podcasting represents the passive movement of audio to your iPod without having to download it yourself. If you think that’s not different then consider the difference between going out to a restaurant and having your meal delivered to you at home.”

Another one of those things you have to experience to understand.

Archos PMA430

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“The new Archos PMA430 is a 30GB multimedia player (music, photos, videos), an audio and video recorder, a PDA, a wireless Web browser, and a game machine. In fact, it’s everything but a cell phone and camera. At $750 street, the PMA430 costs as much as a notebook computer. But it does just about everything you’d want a multimedia computer to do, and you can slip it into a jacket pocket.”

–PC Magazine review