Several people, including Larry L sent this to me while I was (attempting) to climb Mt Rainier. Now, the Clicking Is to Watch the Ads, Not Skip Them, By STUART ELLIOTT:  NYT Advertising – Published: August 17, 2007 FOR generations, advertising interrupted the entertainment that Americans wanted to read, hear or watch. Now, in a turnabout, advertising is increasingly being presented as entertainment — and surprisingly, the idea of all ads, all the time, is gaining some favor. Didja.com plans to have ads as the main attraction, joining other sites. One reason is the proliferation of broadband Internet connections, which make it easier for computer users to watch or download video clips. That is enabling media companies, agencies and advertisers to create Web sites devoted to commercials and other forms of advertising for amusement, rather than hard-core huckstering. Oddly, the trend runs counter to another powerful impulse among consumers: the growing desire to avoid advertising. TV viewers, for instance, are spending billions of dollars a year for TiVo and other digital video recorders that help them zip through or zap commercials, and click-through rates for banner Web ads are declining. The difference between “watching a commercial on a Web site and in your living room,” said Michael Jacobs, executive vice president and executive creative director at MRM Worldwide in New York, is that online is “an opt-in audience; you’re choosing to be there.” “It’s the nature of the Web to offer a destination you know you can go to and know what you’re going to see,” said Mr. Jacobs, whose agency is part of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. “There’s certainly an audience for entertainment as part of the offering,” he added. “The numbers seem to support it.” For example, veryfunnyads.com, a broadband Web site operated by the TBS cable network, has delivered more than 63 million video clip views since its introduction last August. “It’s a very straightforward premise: You’re going to have a funny experience, and you’re going to have it every 30 seconds,” said Ken Schwab, senior vice president for programming at the TBS and TNT networks, parts of the Turner Broadcasting System division of Time Warner. The funny-ad Web site is part of a rebranding campaign for the TBS network, which carries the theme “Very funny.” The goal is to cultivate an identity for TBS as a home for sitcoms and humorous movies. “A lot of people talk about zipping through commercials because the average break doesn’t hold the promise of being entertaining,” Mr. Schwab said. By contrast, he said, “we have a very clear consumer proposition, on the site and in our shows.” The concept of veryfunnyads.com has been expanded onto TBS, Mr. Schwab said, as the network will “call out” some commercials as “very funny ads” in hopes of keeping viewers from changing channels. “I’m in the industry, and I’ll fast-forward through the ads most of the time,” said David Droga, creative chairman at the Droga5 agency in New York. “But I’ll stop for the good ones.” “You put choice on the table, you change the whole game,” Mr. Droga said, adding: “Everything is about control. If an ad is interesting to you, you’ll have the conversation with the brand. If it’s not, it’s a waste of time.” In about a month, Mr. Droga plans to test his theory with the trial introduction by Droga5 and its partner, the Publicis Groupe, of a Web site named honeyshed.com. Mr. Droga described the concept as “MTV meets QVC,” offering consumers in the intended audience of ages 18 to 30 product information in the form of entertaining video clips rather than traditional commercials. The clips are to run two to three minutes apiece, he added, and be presented by hosts considered authorities in categories like cars, clothing or computers. “The only reason we have any chance of being successful is transparency,” Mr. Droga said — that is, “if people know they’re being sold to, you can celebrate the sell.” The USA Network unit of NBC Universal, part of General Electric, also intends to climb aboard the pitch wagon celebrating advertising as entertainment with an online effort centered on brand-centric content. Plans call for a Web site next year that would include commercials and movie trailers as well as features like social networking and tools that would let visitors make ads of their own. The site is tentatively named didja.com, as in “Didja see that?” “It’s all about relevance,” said Chris McCumber, senior vice president for marketing and brand strategy at USA Network. “Consumers want to be entertained on their own time, on their own terms.” “If a spot is not relevant, you’re going to want to tune it out,” he added. “This will be a platform for consumers to experience their favorite commercials or find out more information about a product.” The proliferation of portals dedicated to advertising as entertainment could mean the trend is already peaking, just as cover articles in magazines about a stock market boom are often followed by plunging indexes. “I don’t think it is so much about putting entertaining commercials on the Web as it is about brands providing immersive experiences for consumers of which entertainment is a component,” said Mr. Jacobs of MRM, whose agency recently won praise for musical Webisodes for Intel, directed by the humorist Christopher Guest, which are appearing on Web sites like youtube.com and itgetseasier.com. The responses to a survey this week on the Adweek Web site (adweek.com) suggest that advertising as entertainment is still a work in progress. As of yesterday afternoon, 13 percent of respondents agreed the portals were “great fits for the current pop culture,” while 43 percent called them “too limited and doomed to fail.” The remaining respondents, 44 percent, agreed with a statement that they are “complete wild cards; let’s wait and see.”

I was out of the country but heard about the recent article.  I had the honor of working with Steve Waldman and John McIlwraith of the Blue Chip Ventures.  This is a great story about smart people investing in people with the passion to succeed. TALKING BUSINESS; Keeping Faith In a Venture Built on Faith By JOE NOCERA Published: May 5, 2007 ”I found the Chapter 11 period exhilarating,” Steven Waldman was saying the other day. Mr. Waldman, 44, was sitting in his mildly shabby office in Manhattan, smiling from ear to ear. Atop a bookcase next to his desk stood a brand-new Ellie, that oddly shaped trophy that symbolizes a National Magazine Award, which Mr. Waldman’s Web site, beliefnet.com, had won Tuesday night in the General Excellence Online category. This small, independent voice of religion and spirituality, which had been a finalist three times before, had beaten out better-known brands including ESPN, People.com, businessweek.com and Slate. Beliefnet calls itself a ”multi-faith” site, meaning it has sections devoted to every religion, from Buddhism to fundamentalist Christian. It also has areas devoted to health, relationships, inspiration and so on. It produces daily e-mail newsletters and offers a place where like-minded people can create communities. One of the most powerful such communities, for instance, was begun by a mother whose child died in his early 20s; she wanted to create a place where other parents who had suffered the same awful pain could find support and comfort. Beliefnet is an editorially rich site, with diverse voices, and a nice mix of high-brow thinking and low-brow entertainment. Advertisers have warmed to it. ”It is hard to be both ecumenical and ambitious and aggressive at the same time,” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, who has a strong interest in religion and whose magazine once had a business relationship with beliefnet. ”Steve has succeeded in that.” Indeed he has. Mr. Waldman, a former magazine writer and editor, conceived beliefnet in the late 1990s, and has been its guiding light and editor ever since. In March 2002, he also became its chief executive. And in that latter fact lies the story I want to tell this morning. Born during the dot-com boom, beliefnet is a company that by all rights should have died with all the other failed ventures when the bubble burst. That it is still here — and is now thriving — has a lot to do with the fact that Mr. Waldman isn’t just a good editor. He has turned out to be an awfully good businessman as well. THOUGH I’m not a regular visitor to the site, I’ve been following the beliefnet story for years, largely because the company’s other co-founder, a consultant and a longtime magazine executive named Robert Nylen, is an old friend and colleague of mine. (I’ve also known Mr. Waldman for years, though not nearly as well.) Mr. Waldman had been working at U.S. News & World Report during the brief editorship of James Fallows. He had long had an interest in spirituality and religion and had noticed, both at U.S. News and at Newsweek, where he’d been a writer, that religion covers always did well. (”The old joke was that if you could put the Jesus diet on the cover, you’d have your best newsstand seller,” Mr. Meacham told me.) When Mr. Fallows was axed in 1998 by U.S. News’s owner, Mort Zuckerman, Mr. Waldman decided it was time to pursue his dream: a magazine about religion, which he planned to call Belief. But as he and Mr. Nylen, who was going to be the magazine’s publisher, made the rounds of venture capitalists, they heard the same refrain: ”If you ever decide to turn it into a Web site, give us a call.” Needless to say, they decided to turn it into a Web site. That decision gave them two things. The first was money; from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2000, they raised $26 million. And, as Mr. Waldman soon realized, it also gave them more editorial flexibility than they would have had with a magazine. ”One of the iron laws of magazines is that you have to have a voice,” Mr. Waldman said. But beliefnet needed many different voices, which was much easier to do online. It could offer interactivity and community. And it could allow people to explore other faiths — or dig deep into their own religion. What that decision didn’t give them was a business model. It was not obvious back then that advertising was going to be the engine that drove Internet profits. So while beliefnet had ad-supported editorial content, it also had a Web hosting service, an e-commerce division and a number of other businesses. None of them generated much revenue, though the company’s backers didn’t seem to care. ”The V.C.s kept saying, ‘There’s a new paradigm,’ ” recalled Elizabeth Sams, beliefnet’s executive editor. The point, everyone believed, was to get big fast, to plant the flag as the dominant site in the category. You know the next part of the story, right? Boom turns to bust, and all the backers who didn’t care about revenue suddenly care about nothing but revenue. They stop handing over checks. Beliefnet goes through several rounds of painful belt-tightening. First go the free lunches and short-lived masseuse, the only two dot-com perks the company ever had. Then the layoffs begin. By March 2002, the company is bankrupt. There were those on the company’s board who wanted beliefnet to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy — to liquidate, in other words. ”We were a bankrupt dot-com with content, which wasn’t cool, about spirituality, which was thought to be non-monetizeable,” said Mr. Waldman. But he was determined not to give up on his idea. ”It was six months after 9/11. I thought, ‘This is not a time for a multifaith religious Web site to go away.” During a contentious climactic board meeting, he argued that the site had one million unique visitors a month, and some steady advertisers, mainly in the dieting and dating category. The board finally agreed to let him take the company into Chapter 11 instead, where it would be protected from creditors while it reorganized, and would at least have a fighting chance. Here’s what Mr. Waldman did next. He laid off everybody except a core group of five people, including Ms. Sams, and he offered them the following deal. If they would work for minimum wage, he would give them equity in the company to make up for the huge cut in pay they were taking. (Once the company filed for bankruptcy, of course, the original backers lost all their equity.) They all agreed. As Mr. Waldman notes now: ”The people who were left were the ones who really wanted to be there and totally believed in it.” They then sold most of the company’s furniture, and even canceled its contract with its cleaning crew. The beliefnet executives cleaned the bathrooms themselves. Here’s a surprising truth: if Mr. Waldman had succeeded in his original desire to start a magazine, it would surely have gone bust. The fact that beliefnet was a Web site had a lot to do with why it stayed alive. The ”pay for performance” ad model, which largely doesn’t exist offline, meant that it didn’t matter to advertisers that beliefnet was in Chapter 11, or even whether it would stay in business: If they ran an ad and viewers clicked on it, that’s all they cared about. And the site never went dark, not for a day. There was one venture capitalist, John C. McIlwraith of the Blue Chip Venture Company, who also still believed. Though his firm had lost $5 million on beliefnet during the bubble, he put in another $250,000 at a time when the company desperately needed the money. By the time Beliefnet emerged from bankruptcy six months later, cash flow was positive and growing. And Mr. Waldman and his small staff had learned an enormous amount about their business. ”It was in that period that we realized that vitamin ads did well for us, and we realized that health is a big category for us,” he said. So he began doing more health coverage, and soliciting more health-oriented ads. Ms. Sams recalls the period after bankruptcy as a time when ”we had the luxury of limited choices.” What she means is that with money tight, the company had to focus its efforts on what made the most sense; it could no longer throw business models against the wall to see what would work. In the subsequent four years, beliefnet’s revenue has grown by at least 50 percent annually. Last year, it had $12.6 million in revenue. Its advertisers include giants like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Disney. And in 2005, it could finally breathe a little: Softbank made a $6.5 million investment. (Softbank and Blue Chip Venture together own a little more than 40 percent of the company; Mr. Waldman and the employees own the rest.) Mr. Waldman did not use the money to get fancier offices. He used it to upgrade the company’s technology. Someday, beliefnet will probably be sold to a larger company; as Mr. Waldman concedes, Softbank is going to want to cash in with ”a liquidity event.” He told me he was fine with that, and why wouldn’t he be? If beliefnet were sold tomorrow, my guess is that it would get somewhere in the range of $100 million. At which point, Mr. Waldman will probably give up the title of chief executive and go back to being a full-time editor. Which is a shame, in a way. Mr. Nylen, who remains on the beliefnet board, said one thing that most impressed him about Mr. Waldman was his calm nerve. ”He’s a skinny, frail-looking intellectual who turns out have a steel heart and gut. He’s the best entrepreneur I know.” Ms. Sams described him as ”a very understated leader; he’s not a rah-rah cheerleader.” But, she added, his passion is palpable, and in both good times and bad, he never lost sight of his mission. As I was preparing to leave his office, Mr. Waldman took me down a flight of stairs and into a conference room, where he showed me some hideous orange chairs. ”We had these chairs in the old days,” he said with a wry smile. ”They’re so ugly that when we were selling the furniture nobody would buy them. We kept them and they became an emblem. They remind us to remain humble.” Everyone should have a boss like that.

Dateline August 14 2007 in Boulder Colorado.  Had dinner with friend Pete E at Flagstaff House Restaurant.  The dinner was terrific, but the keystone of the night (besides a killer view from the corner table) was the wine — Sine Qua Non, Papa 2003.  I am a huge fan of this hard to get winery produced by Elaine and Manfred Krankl in Venture California.  What they have managed to do to obtain the most spectacular flavors from a grape is just out of this world.  The wine was a substitute to the Midnight Oil we had selected but somehow disappeared from the wine cellar. It was served by Paige Bodine who after sharing a glass had a terrific smile.

That’s why they call it beta … 19 months after a flashy debut for the Google Video Store at CES, Google Video is dropping paid video completely. Not only that, users are being told that videos they have purchased through the service will not be accessible after August 15. Rented and purchased videos had to be viewed through the Google Video player and aren’t portable. A Google spokesman tells AP : ""The current change is a reaffirmation of our commitment to building out our ad-supported…models for video." He wouldn’t say how many people bought videos through the service. The AP says Google Video’s pay model was doomed by "the proliferation of free clips on other Web sites" including the one it acquired for $1.76 billion: YouTube. That’s tempting—but, despite the efforts of some very talented people, Google Video as an all-in-one video destination just didn’t work. The launch didn’t happen for several days after the huge burst of publicity and what little premium content the store offered—CBS, Charlie Rose, ITN, NBA—was hard to find. At the same time, YouTube gained steam as a user-gen destination, networks started to offer broadband streams of their shows as well as download-to-own, iTunes caught on for video purchases/downloads—and Google’s own efforts in online video advertising gathered steam. AP sees this as an example of Google’s willingness to close something that isn’t working. It’s also another example of Google’s fallibility. — NewTeeVee  has the email, which offers Google Checkout coupons as compensation.

Can you say "sushi delicious"? This place rocks. Most people who know me, know that LA is not my type of town. I have finally found a really good restaurant in LA (I think Santa Monica is part of LA?!) Its located by the airport – or should I say in the buildings that abut the airport. This is an amazing find! I was greeted by Melanie, and sat at the sushi bar. Ken, who hails from a small town 100 miles west of Tokyo, was the head sushi chef. We put our faith in him. The only thing I ordered was the shitso peppers (I can’t get them in NY or SF). From there, it was his call. I may have missed a few, but here’s what I think I had: Hamacci and Kampachi slices paper thin (from the back of the fish). The Hamachi was amazing – melt in your mouth with a nice tang. Scallop, Japanese red snapper, and blue fin tuna. Sweet shrimp live and jumping. I saw hiim slice the tails of and while I was eating, the heads were moving on the plate. Then the heads were taken away – one fried (better than I ever had), the other made into a soup! Fabulous, simply fabulous. Then a small piece of Kobe beef seared with a propane torch, sliced thin with garlic chips. Though this was amazing in the presentation, I really could have skipped this. The final course was sushi (all the above was sashimi). Tuna, Spanish mackerel, crab, live octopus, sea urchin, and hamachi. All in, a feast!

Yesterday, it was news of Hi5, which my friend Steven Comfort was involved with.  Today, Dave at Tacoda looks to be having a very good day!  Congrats. AOL Gets Its Ad Network, Too Michael Arrington The deal size, which we haven’t had confirmed, is likely far smaller than Microsoft’s $6 billion for aQuantive, Yahoo’s $680 million for RightMedia, or Google’s $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. The price might be low enough that it isn’t being disclosed at all. AOL acquired AdTech, a big international ad-serving company, earlier this year.

Two interesting posts regard to Google’s push into in-game advertising.  I spoke with them about VAG, and will see if it makes sense instead of doing deals with Massive, Double Fusion, or Eyeblaster. What Google is, and isn’t, doing in video games Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog Source: Todd Bishop, P-I reporter Google’s appearance on the agenda at the Casual Connect game convention in Seattle this week no doubt made people wonder about the extent of the company’s plans in the industry. So Google’s Bernie Stolar, a video-game veteran, addressed that question at the outset of the company’s session today. "I’m going to be very clear right now," Stolar said. "Google is involved in in-game advertising. I’m going to say it one more time, in case there’s any misconceptions here: in-game advertising. This is an area that Google believes will have tremendous growth over the next number of years. …" "No Gbox, Bernie?" asked Google’s Greg Schaffer, playing along. Nope, no plans for a console, Stolar said. And no "Google Live," no video-game portal, and no video-game search, he said. Later, Stolar reiterated, "We are not going to be a publisher or a developer or a portal for games, at all. That’s the jobs of everybody here. That’s why we want to partner with you." OK, we get the message. But what Google is doing in video games is still pretty interesting. Among other things, it gives Microsoft and its team from Massive some serious company in the video-game advertising market. Specifically, Google outlined plans for "AdSense for Games," applying concepts from its existing AdSense program to video games. That means game publishers will be able to use the Google system to put advertising in their games, and advertisers will be able to work through the Google system to buy ad space within games. Schaffer said it will start with ads in Web-based games, with plans to move into PC and console games later on. During the public session, the Google team didn’t show examples of what the ads will look like, telling the attendees to contact the company individually. Later, Google product marketing representative Eva Woo said the ads will be both video and text-based. Asked when the system will be rolled out, Schaffer said, "soon." Although the Wednesday session provided new details about Google’s plans, the company’s intentions to enter the market have been apparent since its acquisition earlier this year of AdScape Media, where Schaffer was vice president of sales and Stolar was chairman. Posted by Todd Bishop at July 18, 2007 3:14 p.m. Categories: Google, Video Games, Windows Live, MSN & Internet Services ————————————— Google’s got game, casual game that is Written by Wagner James Au Source: http://gigaom.com/2007/07/21/googles-got-game-casual-game-that-is/ Saturday, July 21, 2007 at 5:47 PM PT Whatever tumbles its stock is taking, one thing is clear: the search giant is dead serious about casual games. That’s the gist from their "AdSense for Games" presentation at last week’s Casual Connect conference in Seattle, and if the specifics are still sketchy, the salient point is that Google is actively optimizing AdSense to work with Web-based casual games. If they deliver the goods, this is revolutionary news for game development, and the Net in general. The AdSense for Games initiative is co-led by game industry veteran Bernie Stolar, whose experience is mainly in consoles, but the initial focus, according to a report from the presentation, is "ads in Web-based games, with plans to move into PC and console games later on." Why is this revolutionary? Well, let’s run with a specific example: when I profiled the creator of the enormously popular Desktop Tower Defense, he told me his Flash game was generating 20 million page views a month. At the time, his main revenue source was AdSense, and if it was a normal website, that would likely translate into tens of thousands in ad dollars monthly. But as it turned out, he was only making high four figures per month- great for a one-man development team, but not enough to build a larger business on. The problem was that few players clicked through his AdSense strip, because it couldn’t be ideally integrated into the game’s Flash panel. An AdSense optimized to Flash and other game-centric platforms would mean more revenue, would mean more companies jumping into this space, would mean tremendous shifts toward an audience of casual gamers which is (as the presentation noted), upwards of 200 million. The size of this audience cannot be understated: 1 in 4 of all Web users visit gaming sites, primarily to play casual titles. So a system which monetized this usage better wouldn’t just influence the game industry, but the development and direction of the Web in general. But once again, details remain vague, with Adsense for Games’ rollout planned "soon". So whether it changes the Internet business or just enhances it remains to be seen.

After over 2 years, I am happy to announce that Dimestore Media has been sold to Knowledge Networks, a $40+ million market research company based in New York City. Knowledge Networks Acquires Dimestore, Will Integrate Surveys Into Online Ads – http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=114870#

#art #LifeCubeCityInstallations #TheLifeCube #ENVISIONTheLifeCube #BM2013 #LifeCubeurbaninstalllations #artatburningman #PlayatotheRealWorld #wishcube #skeeter #blackrockcity #artprojectatburningman #artburningman

In trying to be helpful, a friend of the project apparently made multiple donations in a manner that triggered an automatic KickStarter alert.   We are sorry for any inconvenience or distraction resulting from the suspension, and are advocating for reinstatement, or barring that, will endeavor to set up an alternate fund-raising vehicle post haste. Thanks for your patience and support of ENVISION: The Life Cube… and stay tuned! skeeter Artist, The Life Cube Project #Cubelifecubelifecubeprojectlifecubelifecubeproject #fundraising #TheLifeCube

Justin, a local Las Vegas artist recently posted a story in slate about creativity and creative thinking from Slate and thought of this panel that was created by Julio for the 2nd Life Cube back in 2012. #creativity #Burningman #brc #LasVegas #lifecubeproject #dtlv #creativethinking #lifecube #lifecube #BurningMan

The Life Cube V2 Possible Design #TheLifeCube #burningmanburningman #artatburningman #skeeter #BM2012 #burningman2012 #lifecube #artatburningman #bm2011 #burningman2011