By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — Internet search giant Google (GOOG) ushered in the biggest revolution in advertising since the dawn of television when it popularized online ads that run near Web search results. For the first time, advertisers had to pay only if someone viewed an ad.
Now, Google wants to bring its targeted-advertising system to old media: radio, magazines and newspapers, even TV eventually. (Related: Stock plunges on report search growth is slowing).

"When I watch TV today, it seems that all sports fans are only interested in beer," Google CEO Eric Schmidt told USA TODAY. "We think there's a better way."

Google hasn't talked much publicly about its TV ambitions, but television is clearly part of the company's long-term strategy to expand its ad kingdom beyond the Internet. Nearly all of Google's $1.4 billion in 2005 earnings came from ad sales.

The once-invincible search giant stumbled recently when it missed Wall Street's first-quarter financial estimates. Its high-flying stock has fallen nearly 100 points. (The stock opened at $85 in 2004 and now sells for $390.) Escalating its advertising strategy is one way to try to keep up the growth.

How Google is attempting to stretch ad sales:

•Print. In April, ads based on Google's auction-style pricing will appear in some 26 magazines, including Martha Stewart Living, Car and Driver and PC World. How it works: Google buys ad space directly from publishers and auctions the space to its clients. Google profits if advertisers offer more than Google paid. The first auction closed Friday. Google will announce the winning bidders, via e-mail, this Friday.

News Corp. grabbing new media by horns

By Dianne Mermigas
CHICAGO -- Just when you have mustered enough courage to look the new-media beast straight in the eyes, it starts growing two other heads.

That's the way any person or company involved in media, entertainment and information has to be feeling these days as they wrestle with the new rules of play in digital broadband interactivity only to find that there is more new media where that came from.

Just ahead are such things as WiMax (wireless Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), Internet2 (a kind of advanced Internet on steroids developed by universities), 3G (the third generation of digital wireless on cell phones) and critical mass VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) -- each with their own technological characteristics, economics, consumption patterns, challenges and opportunities.

So it takes a lot of guts to jump into the new-media abyss, as News Corp. has done, most recently with the announcement of its My Network TV: an obvious name play on its MySpace social-networking Web site and its Fox-branded broadcast and cable program networks.

Of course, if News Corp. is smart -- and it is -- the new program service will not be anything like the latter.

YouTube is not a real business - The Jason Calacanis Weblog

I know this a few days old, but there's been so much discussion about it, and i have just gotten caught up. This is one of those great 'jason' moments where he says something that people are saying, quietly - but he puts it in writing.

The thing i'd ad is that YouTube proves that people are willing to both post and watch video on the web in a big way. And that the sharing is part of a new viral sharing experience that is taking root. What i think is likely to happen next is that you'll see that copyright owners will become more protective, and UGC creators will become more creative and prolific. The question is - will people share 'discovered' video with as much energy and drive as they do so-called 'bootleg' video. I'd say the answer is yes. It's about the sharing, not about an SNL skit. Hey, it wasn't even that funny.

has anyone but me noticed that Rita Cosby's show on MSNBC is named "Live and Direct"?

Broadcasting & Cable: The Business of Television

Google To Put National Archives Films Online

By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/24/2006 12:33:00 PM

Google announced Friday that it is teaming with independent federal agency the National Archives to launch a pilot program that will make holdings of the National Archives, including digitized video of historic films, available for free online.

This non-exclusive agreement will enable researchers and the general public to access historic movies, documentaries and other films from the National Archives through Google Video, as well as the National Archives Web site.

The pilot program undertaken by the National Archives and Google features 103 films from the audiovisual collections preserved at the Archives, including the 1894 film Carmencita - Spanish Dance, the earliest film in the Archives collection; a selection of U.S. government newsreels documenting World War II; documentaries produced by NASA on the history of the spaceflight program; and motion picture films, primarily from the 1930s, that document the history and establishment of a nationwide system of national and state parks.

The National Archives and Google are also considering expanding the on-line film collection and making the Archives’ extensive textual holdings available on the Internet.

"This is an important step for the National Archives to achieve its goal of becoming an archive without walls," said Archivist of the United States Professor Allen Weinstein.

And this year it feels to me that the Environmental issues the planet is facing are hard to ignore.

Certainly Al Gore's talk was among the most powerful, disturbing, and relentless i've ever heard or seen. Gore seemed to set the goal of making sure that no one left the hall able to say that Global Warming isn't an immediate, urgent, desperate concern.

In typical Al style, the presentation was deeply academic - but he seems to have learned (maybe from his work with Current) that pictures and stories have an extraordinary impact.

So Gore set out to show Global Warming as both a scientific and a visceral reality. You could feel the room. First there was alot of shaking heads in agreement. Hmmm... yes, Al. It's bad. But then... as he told personal stories of his journey under the polar ice cap, or showed slide after slide of what used to be frozen and snow covered landscapes that are now turning green, you could feel the room shift uncomfortably in their seats. Ok, we get it. It's bad. Can we go on to talk about Nano Tech or even bird flu... please. But no. Al had the stage, and he had a room full of important intelcts, and he wasn't going to let up. More slides. More pictures. More images from Nasa. More - more - more. It was a remarkable, passionate, disturbing talk.

Gore didn't offer any pat answers or top down solutions... which was brilliant. He created a vivid picture of a planet in trouble, and suggested that scientists have told him that we have 10 years to turn things around before we cross the line of no return.

I arrived at TED thinking about Global Warming as a problem that might be immediate, but that the weather catastrophes in the past year may have been cyclical. After Al's talk it's clear that the weather events of the past year are not anomalies - they are a canary in a coal mine. And Gore convinced me of that.

I've been part of this march toward citizen journalism for 10+ years... empowerment, tools, access, etc. But it's always made me a bit uneasy. Why?

Because at some level citizen journalist is like amateur surgeon or volunteer astronaut or part-time President. Ok, bad example.

But you get the idea. "Journalist" means a storyteller operating within a set of rules. AT CBS the rules may read one way, at Car and Driver another, and at the local community newspaper differnt still. But there are rules. And while the various journalistic organizations don't publish them... you know they exist.

Now - add in Citizen. Great word. Powerful. An individual who's engaged in some sort of civic expression... exploring issues, sharing opinions, exploding mythes, revealing personal truths. All important (perhaps even essential) to the evolution of the society. But it's not Journalism. And that's a good thing. There is freedom in this emerging form - a freedom to speak in the first person, to get angry, to take a stand, to take on big and powerful interest. But there's also the freedom to be tiny, talk about your world, share your fears and dreams... and simple write what's on your mind.

This is storytelling at it's essence. Critical, personal, and subjective. Journalism - by and large - is not subjective (at least that's what the rule book says).

So I'm trying a new word. Citizen Storyteller. The world story is by it's nature personal. It also ends the debate over the line between fact and opinion. Citizen Storytellers are empowered to tell a story at any scale, and with more of a concern for honesty than for balance.

Citizen Storytellers are volunteers by definition. They're not obliged to 'report' nor are they held to any branded format or rule-book. They also don't replace existing and trusted brands that play by a time honored set of rules.

Citizen Storytellers are essential. They are the voice of the emerging digital democracy. They are amplified by others - so stories that are engaging find themselves moving from the edges of the network to the top... pushed their by peer review and audience engagement.

... to be continued....

After the mind-bending experience we had at TED Oxford, i'm back. This time, to Monterey for the annual gathering of TEDsters. The list of speakers and presenters is amazing - (www.TED.com) - A wild mix with Burt Rutan, Tony Robbins, Al Gore, Peter Gabriel, Jahane Noujaim, Nicholas Negroponte and Thomas Dolby - and that's just a few..

i'll blog what i can - and take notes as well. should be an exciting few days...

sandbox films: NBC sends YouTube Take-Down Notice for SNL Lazy Sunday

YouTube received a take-down notice from NBC regarding the SNL Lazy Sunday video. That was sure a long time coming. Here's what YouTube says on their blog:

NBC recently contacted YouTube and asked us to remove Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" video for free on NBC's website.
This response from YouTube must be firmly tongue-in-cheek. They "respect the rights of copyright holders"?! Give me a break. There's tons of infringing content all over YouTube. There's no way they could possibly plead ignorance here (they even hired the brother of one of the SNL sketch writers to be their "director of community" soon after they struck gold with this clip)... its clear that the video was infringing from the moment it was posted onto the site. Its an entire clip from SNL, not an excerpt, and certainly not fair use. Its got an NBC watermark on it.

At what point was YouTube given permission to re-broadcast this video to millions of viewers through their website? Its not like this was file sharing amongst a few friends, this was re-broadcasted on a video portal site to millions of viewers. This is like CBS recording Saturday Night Live and then airing it the next day... and everyday after that for weeks. YouTube quite obviously benefits from video plaigarism of this sort all the time... but then again they're not alone.

This clip was all over the internet. It was also on CollegeHumor.com, and yanked from there by Google Video (obvious from the CollegeHumor watermark, so its a copy of a copy on Google). It was probably on several other video hosting sites and portals (there's a lot of them out there now), as well as on several personal websites.

NBC later released the clip as a free download on iTunes (its now $1.99), and they offer it for free viewing on their website (only for PC users with Internet Explorer).

Of course, some people think that YouTube should be congratulated for their copyright infringing practices. Here's what Xeni Jardin says about it on BoingBoing:

This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere
Sorry, Xeni, that's completely wrong. In the same blog entry where YouTube responds to the take-down notice they also say:

YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month
So how exactly are they different from a TV network? How are they exempt from the laws and standard practices of the industry?

Two New TV Series Are Liberal and Proud

By FELICIA R. LEE
The filmmaker Robert Greenwald and others on the political left say real-life stories dealing with issues like gay rights, racial profiling and environmental pollution are needed in an era of conservative political leadership. To that end, Mr. Greenwald has helped the Sierra Club and the American Civil Liberties Union create their own television series. The two liberal groups see this as only the beginning of more such shows to get their messages out.

"The Sierra Club Chronicles" is a monthly series consisting of seven half-hour episodes on topics like the lingering effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and how air pollution affected workers at ground zero in New York City. It had its national premiere on the Link TV satellite channel last month; a new episode will be broadcast Sunday night on that network.

Both Court TV and Link are now showing "The ACLU Freedom Files," a series of 10 30-minute episodes featuring real cases like that of Lindsay Earls, the Oklahoma high school student who ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court to challenge mandatory drug testing by schools. The next new episode will be broadcast on Court TV on March 11. Link will show two "Files" episodes tonight at 10. The series is also shown on Zilo TV, a college education network that provides programming to more than 5.5 million students across the country.

I've watched ton's of coverage of hurricane katrina... but somehow this is the most dramatic i've seen.

hurricane katrina video from inside the Beau Rivage - Google Video

(thanks to UNMEDIATED for this post)

The thousands of camcorders owned by people across the state represent a huge untapped capacity to produce a unique public record of Pennsylvania’s democracy during what might be one of the most interesting political seasons in recent memory.
If you own a miniDV or hi8 camcorder you can be a part of history by volunteering to become a citizen-journalist and documenting the 2006 elections in your community.
Video shot by PEP volunteer field correspondents will be posted to this Web site and to the PEP video podcast on the Apple iTunes Music Store to create a living record of Pennsylvania's 2006 elections over the course the year.
Select video contributions may also be used in a documentary on the 2006 elections now in production by Arbour Media, the primary sponsor of the Pennsylvania Election Project.

More - LINK:

The Pennsylvania Election Project 2006

There's this open question about real people and their interest in exploring content in a less filtered way. Mainstream media's pushback is always that the large majority of people want their media packaged, polished, and organized.

Well - seven days ago we began a quiet experiment to test that, and see just want kind of different relationship we could have with viewers.

This is the story of Google Video. Back when I Directed "7 Days In September" we began to gather a large collection of video. Now the 9/11 Archive is substantial, and it's sitting on drives. We know that people want to see the images of 9/11, so i wondered if there was a secure way to share them without risking piracy. I found the Google Video interface to be simple, understandable, and with a number of filmmaker friendly features.

Among them - you can allow viewers to see the clips without downloading them. This provided a great deal of comfort in thwarting piracy. At the same time, you can control sharing and even a Pay Per View solution.

So how did it work? Well, the clips have been up for just 7 days. There's been no advertising or promotion. Just word of mouth, search results, and a small mention on the google blog. The results are kind of staggering. More than 79,000 views in a week. Who are these people? What are they looking for? Would they choose finished films rather than clips if they had that option? We won't know for a while.

But it's got me thinking about how filmmaking is changing - and how 500 pieces of a theme can act as points of entry, introductions if you will, into a piece of finished content.

I'm directing the click throughs to our film "7 Days" right now, but maybe there are other kinds of media that people would like. Collections of footage? Single Subject docs? We've got a lot to learn about how people want to explore ideas in video... it's pretty remarkable.

More: -

I should tell you a bit more about the mechanics of the whole thing. The folks at Google are very engaged in learning about video, and the whole media landscape. I found them to be smart, responsive, and honest about what the current software does - and doesn't - do.

That said - it's early days. And for example metadata is hard to modify. That means that once you've loaded your clips on their server there's a rather time consuming process of going in and hand coding each clip with appropriate info about producer, rights, etc. Now there is a way to do a 'bulk' upload to them via a spreadsheet, but it is a manual process. I would expect that future releases will include global search and replace and a more robust solution for transcription and meta tags. But for a 1.0 product it's actually pretty remarkable.

Video from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Narrated by Murray, age 8.

In the normal course of events, having a film that you've invested in take home the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance should be cause for celebration. But it is now unclear where the funds CameraPlanet invested went.

"To be very clear, we remain confident that Christoper Quinn and Molly Bradford were likely victims, as was their film" said Steven Rosenbaum, CameraPlanet's CEO. "We support the filmmaker and his attempt to clear the title to his film, and think that the misrepresentations of Foreground Films and its principals have caused the film a terrible injustice at a time when the film should be enjoying both critical and commercial success."

At issue is whether Foreground Films - an entity established by Tommy Walker, had any authorization to solicit or receive funds on behalf of Lost Boys of Sudan, Inc (LBI), the partnership that produced the film. CameraPlanet's investment was made in Foreground Films, at the explicit direction of Mr. Walker and CameraPlanet then COO Stephen Carlis.

Said CameraPlanet CEO StevenRosenbaum:

"This is a pretty straight foreword matter. If the filmmakers determine that the funds we provided to Foreground Films were used for legitimate purposes on the movie, then we'll expect that they'll honor the terms of our investment. If the funds were diverted, misused, or can't be accounted for, by Foreground Films then this is clearly fraud."

This matter came to light after CameraPlanet dismissed then CameraPlanet COO Stephen Carlis and discovered significant financial and corporate irregularities. Documents discovered after his dismissal create a paper trail that leads directly Foreground Films.

TV Week

February 6, 2006
IFC Banking on User-Made Films

Net Solicits Shorts to Offer for Download; Will Televise the Top Submissions
By Jon Lafayette
In a move designed to provide both programming and promotion, Independent Film Channel is soliciting short films from viewers.
Story continues below...

IFC is commercial-free, but its project, called the Media Lab, is the latest for which the network has found a presenting sponsor-in this case Aquafina, the water brand marketed by PepsiCo.

The films will be streamed largely unedited on IFC's Web site. Users will be able to view the films, vote on them and send them to friends. The films that get the most votes will be used in a show that will run monthly on IFC beginning in April.

User-generated content is becoming an industry catchphrase as video equipment becomes more available, more sophisticated and less expensive. IFC executives believe the trend is natural for IFC's film-savvy viewers and that it reinforces the network's "uncut" branding.

"User-generated content obviously is something our audience embraces, particularly people who have a passion for filmmaking," said Jenny Caserta, senior VP of marketing for IFC. The site opened for contributions Jan. 26 and about 400 films have already been posted. Films have been streamed 36,000 times and the site has attracted 3,000 registered users.

"We're amazed with the amount of community that's already been built around it," Ms. Caserta said.

Evan Fleischer, director of marketing and promotions for IFC, said the films are screened to filter out X-rated material and snuff films, but otherwise, anything goes. "One of our core missions is to provide filmmakers with a place where they can express themselves unedited and uncut. That's the way we run it on the network and the way we run it online," Mr. Fleischer said.

When a filmmaker submits a film to the site, IFC gets the right to run it, but its rights are non-exclusive, Mr. Fleischer said.

The site already gives users the ability to forward films to friends. Over the next few months, IFC plans to add filmmaker blogs, message boards and other community-building tools, Mr. Fleischer said.

Judging the films' quality is left to the audience, rather than to network executives. In fact, Mr. Fleischer said, he's already put films up on the site that he thinks are terrible.

"Not only is it user-generated content, but it's also democratic programming in that we're going to post what our audience likes the best," he said. And that democracy will spill over onto IFC's cable channel. "How cool is it to be able to turn on the network and you have this monthly short film festival that you had a hand in programming?"

In addition to the monthly special, IFC will use the best user-generated films as interstitials and promos on the network as a way to promote the Media Lab.

The network also expects filmmakers to promote the Media Lab by asking friends to log on and vote for their films. While they're doing that they'll find other films and get other people to register as well. "It's incredibly viral and organic," Ms. Caserta said.

Even though the user-generated content is cheap, she vows it will never take over IFC. "We'll always have our films and we always have our originals," Ms. Caserta said. "It will never be all Media Lab, I promise."

Aquafina has been marketing its products at film festivals, starting with Sundance last year, to reach a "sophisticated upscale consumer," said Michael Hammer, senior brand manager for Aquafina. "As it started to take hold, we said, 'How can we extend this into media and bigger partnerships?' and that's when we started having conversations with IFC."

Mr. Hammer declined to say how much Aquafina paid for the sponsorship but called the investment "substantial."

While Pepsi is a traditional advertiser, "The fact that we couldn't put our 30- or 60-second commercials on there didn't scare us away," he said. "We're looking at more alternative or unique ways to complement the other media that we have."

Aquafina will present some highlighted films on the IFC Web site, and when the specials run they will open and close with what Ms. Caserta called "a co-branded experience that will be quickly identified with Aquafina."

IFC has created similar films to introduce features sponsored by advertisers such as Heineken. Those films are designed to fit with IFC's noncommercial attitude. "It doesn't get in the way. It only enhances the experience," she said.

The Media Lab should also benefit cable operators that carry the channel.

"This is all about high speed and broadband," Ms. Caserta said. At the same time, IFC is collecting information about filmmakers and film enthusiasts. One way that information could be used is to collect films from one area and create local film festivals on video-on-demand, she said.

Hi there. Welcome.

The worlds of fact and fiction were in stark contrast this week.

Maybe its just me... but i find myself thinking a lot about the word that Steven Colbert revealed a few weeks back "Truthiness".

Just so you don't think this is a world that is relegated to the world of late night cable comedy... the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart;

Here are the events of the past week that lead me to think about truthiness as it relates to user-generated content.

First- James Frey and his book a million little pieces. But that's just the start.
Then - the front page NY Times story on New York Gubernatorial candidate William Weld. Weld - you may know - put up a bunch of newspaper articles on his web site about his campaign. Only he edited out anything negative, and put it under the newspapers masthead and reporters byline just the same.

And then - on the flip side - we have the two women, a democrat and a republican both arrested moments before the State of the Union speech for wearing t-shirts with slogan's on them. One supported the war, one in protest of it.

Which brings me to Truthiness.

The thing about the whole "million little pieces" controversy isn't how it ended, it was how the publisher responded when "the smoking gun" first revealed the fact that the facts of the book didn't add up.

Basically, they said "everyone knows that memoirs aren't really entirely true." Ok, noted. I didn't know that. I thought that publishers had fact checkers. And facts were facts. and fiction was -well - fiction.

Clearly it took the wrath of Oprah to scare everyone back into 'fact' mode. Too late. Publisher, Author, and even Oprah all slimed.

Next - William Weld. When confronted with the fact that he'd doctored newspaper articles before putting them up on his web site, a spokesman said - in effect - everyone does it. Truly - he compared doctoring newspaper articles to what the Hollywood Studios do when they take reviews out of context and use "Excellent" when the actual sentence reads: the film could have been Excellent. Sidebar, i now freeze my tivo and read the SOURCE of the boldface quotes in fast moving film adds. If it's some no-name reviewer like "Entertainment Joe" or "Sam's Movie Notes" i know that the film couldn't get real critics to say anything nice.

My point is that the whole trend away from fact vs. fiction toward a world of 'truthiness' is teaching the audience a critical message.

All media comes from a point of view. So user-generated content, which has an author, and pov, and authenticity, starts to move into the mainstream.

Think about how you read blogs. You engage in voices.

So don't fear the current trend of 'truthiness' from publishers, politicians, or movie studios.

Instead, think of it as the coming of an era of authenticity.

Oprah may be pissed off... but she's not alone.

We want to know who's making our media - so that we can make personal judgments about the media we choose to engage.

I'm going to watch Rocketboom on my Tivo. See you later.

Ben Ratliff in todays NY Times seems genuinly perplexed about YouTube and it's impact on the world. In today's article he writes a glowing music lovers profile of the start up video sharing service. And of course he's right. Having amazing old video like funkadelic pulled from the dust bin's of history - and brought back into public view is a good thing. But then - ah ha - he talking to creative folks and copyright owners. And they tell a story of trying without success to keep control of their work in this new era. This is a place where Ratliff would have done well to talk to Larry Lessig. Creative Commons has been saying for some time, the real issue has to do with view of property rights that doesn't mesh with the evolution of ideas. And YouTube sits squarely in the center of that.

So this conversation is just beginning. The uptake numbers on YouTube (which launched in December) are in and of themselves quite remarkable.

@ SIIA Info Industry Summit: Esther Dyson; on user-content (from Paidcontent.com)
: Updated:Safe to say Esther Dyson spoke some truth to power about users and control, telling attendees that not all user contributions are equal and not all users deserve equal consideration. She said too many companies are rushing in, not realizing how difficult building and operating community can be. She added, "The best check on bad behavior is identity." Meeting with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, he told her: "The most important thing we do is set the rules."
-- On a different front, asked by interviewer David Kirkpatrick to identify the most interesting platform, she responded: "The most interesting platform isn’t the internet; it's the cellphone." Kirkpatrick followed by asking if that was the same thing as saying the internet on a cellphone? Dyson: "The intertnet connects all this stuff. The internet is kind of the metaplatform but beyond that the cellphone is probably going to the mediating devuice in many markets." Rich media needs aren't likely to be served as well on a cell phone but real-time information is another story.
-- Asked about Google, Dyson said Yahoo gets "short shrift" and desrerves to be mentioned with Google. (She owns some friend-and-family shares in Google but has invested in two companies -- flickr and del-icio.us -- sold to Yahoo.) Her take: Yahoo is "intelligent design"; Google is "blind evolution." I had this backwards at first; thanks John and Jane for setting me straight. I finally had time to listen to the audio so here's a more detailed version: "Google is blind evolution. They have this ... users-in-charge, bubble-up philosophy. Their employees can come up with ideas. There's this kind of Darwinian internal selection process. … They have a very clear vision; they’re not quite north to the North Pole. They're going west, they're going forward but they're blind evolution; they don't really see where they're going. Neither do we … Yahoo, on the other hand, is intelligent design. They have the vision of what they're trying to build … . Two very, very different models. The other thing that's really different is Google sees communication as a medium for the distribution of information. … whereas Yahoo, they see information as a medium of communication among people. They get people. They get communities and individuals in a way that Google really doesn't. Google is blindingly clever. … You have very, very different models of the world. I like them both, and think they will both persist."

TV Week

January 31, 2006'Flight 93' Breaks A&E RecordsBy James HibberdA&E's 9/11 movie "Flight 93" broke network ratings records Sunday night to become the most-watched program in the channel's history. According to Nielsen Media Research, the movie was seen by 5.9 million viewers (2.7 million, adults 18 to 49). The previous record-holder was 2004's "Ike Countdown to D-Day" starring Tom Selleck, which was seen by 5.5 million viewers.

From Cory Treffiletti....

User Generated

User-Generated Content Is A Viable Ad Medium

IN MY 2006 PREDICTIONS I mentioned that this year we'd see an increase in the usefulness and quality of user-generated content (UGC). I want to take this week's column to explain a little about what's going on in this category and why I'm so focused on it right now. First off, the fundamental truth of the Web is that it opens the doors to anyone with an idea and a little bit of time to publish for the world to see. The Web consists of trillions of pages, 99 percent of which are not created by any corporate or legal business entity. These pages are created by people all over the globe with a computer and Internet access. In fact, the Web is almost 100 percent UGC, and advertisers have been supporting that content for years through affiliate programs and network ad buys, and most recently with the contextual search products from Google and Yahoo. It's money from advertisers that supports the prospect that the Web can provide an outlet for a new idea or a new business, which keeps the system growing unto itself. Even last year's hottest topic (blogs) are just another form of UGC, and one that advertisers have started to notice.

The next wave, which we are currently seeing embraced by many mainstream publishers, is user-generated video content. I've already mentioned sites like Sharkle and YouTube, but now MTV and VH1 have shows dedicated to "Web junk," as VH1 calls it. These shows take some of the funniest UGC content and republish it on traditional cable television for the rest of the world to see, feeding people back online to find and view more of this new addiction (and trust me, it can truly be called an addiction since you'll find that you've just wasted hours of your time before you even know it).

I consistently hear advertisers state they're wary of supporting user-generated video content for fear that they cannot control the context of where their ads may be shown--and to this fear, I respond that the lesson has been learned and the model has already been proven. Advertising in user-generated video content is absolutely no different from advertising in an ad network or an affiliate program, both of which are models that every smart interactive marketer has taken advantage of. How many ad networks release to you their full list of sites? How many of you have combed through your affiliate program with a fine-toothed comb and reviewed the content of each site's pages on a regular basis to ensure they haven't updated with content that you'd find detrimental to your brand? Probably none of you have reviewed the entirety of either of these, but you trust the systems that are in place to ensure that your brand will be managed to the best extent possible. You trust that your vendors will watch out for you to the best of their ability, and they do. Nothing is guaranteed, and to be honest it can't be in as dynamic a medium as this.

Which brings me to my final point. The fact of the matter is, that once your brand has made it into the public domain, it belongs to the consumer.

Brand Democratization is a topic that I've dealt with before, and it is undoubtedly true. It is the concept that the consumer is in control of your brand once you've put it out into the marketplace and your responsibility is to listen and ensure that the promise of your brand (your brand message) coincides with the experience of your brand. If it does, then you've done your job well.

If it doesn't, then you need to react and respond to your consumers. If you place your brand in an ad unit in any form of media, then you must trust your consumer to let you know when they come across your brand in an environment they feel is inappropriate or incorrect. They are vocal, and if they like your brand, and if you've provided them with a sense of ownership for your brand, then they will respond and take action. They will let you know, and they will trust that you did not mean any association to be intentional. If you are listening, they will accept it and move on, but if you are ignoring them and have not engaged them in a dialogue, they will expose your brand and create an environment detrimental to your brand. This is the wave of the future, and this is the promise of Brand Democratization.

So you can see why I am as hot on the concept of USG as a viable ad medium, and even as a means of creating messaging that brands will find useful and that will possibly resonate more with the consumer. If you're interested in finding out more about the topic, or you have any ideas you'd like to pass on, check out my new blog at http://usergenerated.blogspot.com.

And pay attention in 2006; everything is evolving right before your very eyes.

IN MY 2006 PREDICTIONS I mentioned that this year we'd see an increase in the usefulness and quality of user-generated content (UGC). I want to take this week's column to explain a little about what's going on in this category and why I'm so focused on it right now. First off, the fundamental truth of the Web is that it opens the doors to anyone with an idea and a little bit of time to publish for the world to see.