Tony Schwartz, 1923-2008: his ‘daisy ad’ changed political advertising.

Even though he became famous in an era of black & white and radio, Tony Schwartz taught core lessons of communication to everyone in the media. Whether they knew it was coming from him or not.

His most famous piece was this campaign spot for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, which, lore has it, ran only once (and never even mentioned the opponent’s name) but was responsible for defeating Barry Goldwater in a landslide.

My mentor, Dale Pon, not only insisted I buy and read Tony’s book “The Responsive Chord,” but that I should meet the man himself. It was an incredible experience, and I learned more in one sitting than in any other single experience I’d had. From then on, I made the book required reading among my promotion staff.

Check it out. The things you think you know because you’re smart are probably things that Tony was smart about before we were born.

There’s a bit of a discussion raging online right now about whether the a la carte nature of online video has economics that can support an industry, prompted by a research report by Craig Moffett over the weekend called “And Now for the News…The Emperor Has No Clothes.” Mark Cuban reproduced many of the best parts and expanded on them in a blog post of his own.

What’s got everyone talking is a sobering (for some) calculation by Moffett that implies that TV producers will have to reduce their costs by nearly 90% to be profitable in the new medium (Cuban thinks it’s even more). But many of the things Moffett and Cuban are responding to are the things we built into the business model of Next New Networks. Not because we’re visionaries, or have the answers to this challenge everyone’s facing, but because it was the only sensible way to launch a new media business in this landscape.

For one, our programming costs average in the hundreds of dollars per minute, which is one tenth or less cable television’s programming costs. We launch networks with the minimum necessary programming to build an audience, which may be as little as two minutes of programming a week — with the goal to add more programming as audience and advertiser demand grows. But most importantly, we made a decision to focus on communities that will embrace our programming. If you make something people love, questions like production value and how much money you spend become less important — what matters instead is, do they love you? Do they keep coming back every week? And do advertisers see undeniable evidence that you’re creating something that speaks to the people they want to reach?

I think our co-founder Fred Seibert addressed all these concerns really well in an interview he did with Beet.TV last week. Check out the embedded video below for his take on our take, which highlights some of the creative ways we’re trying both new and tried-and-true advertising models in our programming, and what he calls “struggling optimistically forward” towards a model that can support great video online. Will it look like TV? Who knows. We always like to say it will be better than TV.

The advertising business has been increasingly taking notice of Next New Networks. Logical, since our networks have kept launching, kept growing, and gathering up more loyal viewers every day. The latest is Mediaweek, the media buyer’s bible, and Mike Shields’ astute profile of our partner Herb Scannell, and his leadership of our motley crew of nerds and misfits building a media company.

Check it out. How can you resist any article that begins, “To build a proper chain saw arm, start drinking a lot of OJ”?

(more…)

Along with what looked like a couple thousand other curious people from the online video, advertising, and marketing worlds, a group of us attended YouTube’s “Videocracy” advertiser upfront here in New York City Wednesday afternoon. A pretty massive production at NYC’s Terminal 5, it was also YouTube’s first real event of notice since the Google acquisition. YouTube pulled out all the stops, including an introduction from founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, testimonials from Tom Brady and Anderson Cooper (who showed up in person to talk about the YouTube-CNN debates), and a number of presentations about YouTube’s advertising initiatives, from their internal ad targeting and campaign creation system (called “Ginzu” — it slices, it dices…) to case studies from advertisers like HP, General Mills, and New Line, to their work with the IAB and sites like MySpace and Facebook to develop standards for video advertising. There’s a good recap on Ian Shafer’s blog. And of course — an eclectic mix of entertainment from some of YouTube’s biggest stars, including the Blendtec guy, singer Esmee Denters and Soulja Boy, who performed his ‘Crank that‘ song onstage that inspired tons of YouTube dance videos this year, which played in the background on a big screen.

YouTube set up a nice area for Rob and Corinne from ThreadBanger to meet advertisers and give demonstrations in the How-To pavilion of the event (near our friends from Make Magazine) - and incidentally, ThreadBanger’s featured on the front page of YouTube today for their special Valentine’s Day episode, so we’re appreciating two days of love.

While Rob and Corinne worked their magic (with Soulja Boy, I kid you not, crashed out on a nearby couch), we spent a good amount of time catching up with other people at the event, which included lots of agency and consumer brand contacts, execs from companies like Revision 3, Vuguru, and 60 Frames, and innovators of online video like Andrew Baron and Orrin Zucker. There was a moment when I looked around and realized the group of people standing together off to the side of the stage near me included Tay Zonday, Ian from Smosh, Lisa Nova, Michael Buckley and William Sledd — many of the individuals with the most subscribers on YouTube, standing for the moment incognito chatting together on the main floor, despite the millions who have watched their videos on the site. I thought of other upfronts I’ve attended, where the network stars would be carefully brought in and out of the crowd, and realized I’ll probably be looking back on that moment a few years from now as either the beginning, or the end, of something. Exactly which? Ask me next year.

update: Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman — whose advertising work I’m a big fan of — was at the event as well, and has posted some smart thoughts.

It’s no surprise to the followers of Next New Networks that internet television has gone mainstream; 150 million views is hardly “niche.” But it’s interesting to me how quickly the mainstream media has made the transition to covering our piece of the rock like it’s an everyday thing. Today there were two buried stories in business sections of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, mentioning internet TV as just another story to be covered. The Times trumpeted the value of the web (and YouTube in particular) for Superbowl advertisers, while the Journal bemoaned the slowness of advertisers to climb on board (hear, hear). Only a year ago the idea of launching a political campaign with an online spot was the hottest thing since sliced bread.

No big point here, but it’s fun to realize how fast the right ideas integrate themselves into our lives as if they were there all along.

Lincoln Bjorkman, EVP, Executive Creative Director, Digitas.

John McCarus is the VP, Brand Content at Digitas. He was nice enough to ask our head of media sales, George Stewart, to come by his DTOX creative conference, put on for the creative staff at this leading interactive agency. I spoke on a distinguished panel that included singer/songwriter Vanessa Carlton, videoblogger David Junior, my former colleague David Gale from MTV, and Dina Kaplan, COO/founder of Blip TV. What a wonderful event. It’s rare an agency, especially one that already specializes in digital, to want to constantly introduce themselves to outside points of view. It was an honor to be included.

John McCarus,
VP Brand Content, Digitas.

Via Business Week:

Where TV Ads Really Resonate

By Ben Levisohn

The screen may be smaller, but the payoff for broadcasters and advertisers is bigger. People who go online to watch a TV show are more engaged with the program—and its ads—than their couch-potato counterparts, says Simmons Market Research Bureau. Simmons surveyed 17,000 people to assess their involvement in the last TV show they viewed—asking, for example, how “inspiring” or interesting it was. The answers showed computer watchers to be 25% more involved than TV set viewers. “People watching online,” says John Fetto, a Simmons product manager, “are going to a Web site to find a specific program.” The online crowd was also 47% more likely to find ads “useful” than TV watchers—and more inclined to make a purchase. Web TV watchers “only click on [an ad] if they’re interested in it,” says Darcy Gerbarg, a senior fellow at the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information. “That’s more valuable to an advertiser.

If you’re a regular viewer, you may have noticed a new sponsor across many of our networks this week: Lionsgate’s new movie WAR, which hits theaters this Friday. We’re pretty excited about this campaign, not just because it’s nice to have major sponsors interested in our programming, but it’s also offered us a chance to demonstrate a number of the advertising models we think can be effective for our networks, besides standard banner advertising placements.

For instance, on Fast Lane Daily, we’ve put a 15-second spot in what we’re calling first position. It’s not quite a mid-roll, as it’s early in the show, and it’s not a pre-roll, as viewers first get an intro to the episode from the hosts, and we don’t force them to watch the ad. On Bleacher Bloggers, we’ve run a brief sponsor bumper at the top of the show, then a 15 second spot at the end. And on a couple of our networks, we went a step further.

We felt there was an opportunity, based on the audiences we have, to do something deeper. So we put out a challenge to our network managers and show producers: could we show the value of an advertiser becoming part of the programming, allowing us to set our sights higher on a few episodes. What we all agreed on: the sponsored episode needed to be authentic, credible, totally transparent, and give something to the community that watches the show.

(more…)

This post has absolutely nothing to do with the internet, or networks, or any of the stuff we do here.

I’ve been cleaning out my drawers lately which caused me to scan some of my stuff and throw it on my Flickr page. Some of it’ll eventually get linked to on my old branding agency archive, but who knows about the rest.

The picture above is from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. It’s from a random collection of photographs I found in a box at a junk shop specializing in then-uncool mid-century furniture. I couldn’t resist the hundreds of vintage prints of these amazing deco buildlings I’d really only seen in amazing stylized illustrations from the fair. I had no idea what I was going to do with the snaps –hell, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them– but they were great just to have.

###

In the late 70s I was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history. (more…)

Prior to my lengthy stint at MTV Networks, I spent about 2 years on and off working for the producers who made the commercials for the regional electronics chain, Crazy Eddie’s.

If you’re over 30 and grew up in the New York area, you’ll probably remember Jerry Carroll, the Crazy Eddie’s spokesman ranting into camera and ending each spot with “his prices are INSANE.” The spots were occasionally memorable, but totally unavoidable if you spent any time watching late-night television.

I would find myself preparing crew lists one day, and up in the studio rafters the next, dumping bushels of artificial snow on Jerry while he carried on about Christmas in July. If a take got botched, we’d all climb down, sweep up the mess and reload for the next try. When extras were needed, we were elves, Easter bunnies, or whatever the particular season required. The pay sucked, but it was the one job where I could actually turn on the TV and see something I had worked on.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the experience shaped my way of thinking about promotion. Crank ‘em out, make ‘em cheap, and make ‘em iconic and recognizable as all hell. Crazy Eddie’s was out of business by the late 80’s, but nearly 2 decades later we still remember the commercials. How crazy is that?