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”?

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While our founder/partner Jed Simmons always is the first to give credit where credit is due for the recent Series B round of funding that allows us to stay in business a bit longer, and of course, we have our great, faithful investors to thank, I wanted to push a little love his way.

Jed’s one of the best partners someone could have (I should know, this is my second partnership with him; we first got together at Turner Broadcasting and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in the 90s), someone who’s takes his mission incredibly thoughtfully without taking himself too seriously at all. He’s smart, focused, and tenacious (you’ve gotta be to survive a start up), and he’s the first one to recognize the value of every one of the colleagues we’ve got at our place. An amazing amount of personal sacrifice is at the heart of any entrepreneurial venture, and this year we’d also have to infinite hours of gratitude to Jed’s family for helping us too.

Thanks Jed. I told you when all this started I wouldn’t take it on without you, and I’m glad we decided the ride would be fun.

I imagine the SXSW Interactive festival can look excessive, with all the blog posts, photos and videos of geeks out every night partying and having a little too much fun. But here’s an example of things that happen at SXSW which are why we all go: boarding the plane today, I ran into Pete Cashmore one last time, whose great blog Mashable had just run an insightful piece about our company a few hours before, and I was able to tell him in person I appreciated the story and let him know we’re fans.

This was just one of a hundred small but important interactions I had with people over the past week who are important to my life and work in some way, many of whom I only see once a year at gatherings like SXSW. It’s become the best opportunity to spend quality time with lots of people from across the interactive (and film and music) world in one place, and I’ve seen returns both personal and professional for every hour I’ve spent there.

The interactive conference was bookended for me by a couple of great NNN-related events that were part of both the Film and Interactive Festivals (which are separate, but feature a handful of joint panels and parties). (more…)

Congratulations to Steve and Zadi on the 100th Episode of EPIC FU (formerly JETSET). They started working with us at Next New Networks around episode 50, so that’s also getting close to a year of great episodes together. Marc Boxser from our team shot a tribute video featuring many of us from the New York office talking about our favorite EPIC FU moments of the past 100 episodes (with some great editing help from Justin and Ramon):

In the video are, in order: Marc Boxser, Jed Simmons, Steve Nelson, Liam Collins, Fred Seibert, Roy Weissman, Erik Beck and Gary, Patty DeArtega, Jared Roessler, Ramon DeSouza, Justin Johnson, Tim Shey, Corinne Leigh, Emil Rensing, Diane DeCordova, Herb Scannell, Scott Moschella, Dan Meth, Ben Ross, and Rob Czar.

You’ll notice some of the footage is messed up — maybe it’s something similar to what happened to EPIC FU’s latest episode, embedded here below. Can you figure out what’s going on? What exactly is FUnetics, and why are so many videos popping up on YouTube with the same mysterious pledge?

This year a number of us from Next New Networks will be at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, and if you’ll be there we’d love to meet you and hang out at the event.

Three of our networks will be covering the Film, Music, and Interactive portions of the Festival — Indy Mogul, ThreadBanger, and Epic Fu — with episodes both during and after the event. If you see anyone you recognize from the networks walking around, please say hi!

In addition, we’re joining with our friends at Tumblr to sponsor the most epic Rock Band party the world has ever known on Monday night. Party attendees can play Rock Band onstage (first come, first serve for signups), and SXSW Showcase bands Brenn and The Vettes will be playing to close out the night. More details on our SXSW party page, and you can RSVP on Upcoming or Facebook to make sure you get in the door.

For those of you attending the Film or Interactive portions of the festival, I’ll be moderating a Joint Film/Interactive Panel on Saturday morning at 10am called “Quit Your Day Job and Vlog,” with Lindsay Campbell from Wallstrip and the upcoming Mob Logic, Zadi Diaz from EPIC-FU, LisaNova’s Lisa Donovan and Bre Pettis of Make / Etsy fame. Please come on out and join us, and hope to see you there.

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.

We’ve been getting emails, phone calls, a stalker even barged in the office and demanded,

“WHEN ARE THE 2ND ANNUAL CHANNEL FREDERATOR AWARDS?”

Well, I’m here to tell you (on the sly, of course, there hasn’t been an “official” announcement) the CFAs are coming back.

June 4th, 2008. This year in New York City. More to come.

(We’re going to need your help, so remember all the things you wished we’d done better last year.)

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.

The sweet scent of victory. Yesterday’s Iowa Caucus was a huge one for the NNN political team. Our boy Obama won the Iowa caucus- and with her video gaining a million views in just over 24 hours, the Obama Girl herself gave her victory address this morning:

We’ll be watching out for our invitation to the inauguration. Meanwhile Veracifier had an unprecedented number of people reporting on the ground in Iowa- surely an internet first. Through our ground hounds partnership with the Uptake we posted multiple reports throughout the day, including most of the major candidate’s pre Caucus rallies:

and stories from across the state, like Hound Chuck Tomlinson’s take on the media blitz itself:

The Uptake itself streamed live video throughout the Caucus, and it was all done by the seat of our pants, with everyone surprised by both the quality and amount of reporting we were getting in from all of Iowa. Bring on New Hampshire!