Music Bring Out Your Dead Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times From left, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Warren Haynes of the Dead at the Gramercy Theater in Manhattan last month. NYT – New York Times By BEN RATLIFF Published: NYT April 10, 2009 I WENT to a Phil Lesh concert in New York last fall, on the third night of a 14-night run. I sat next to a man who looked informed: he listened with familiarity and good humor and a touch of impatience, as if he wanted to fast-forward through certain parts. The Dead Live On Readers are submitting their photos. Multimedia Interactive Feature The Greatest Show Ever? Related Times Topics: Grateful Dead http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/swfs/AS3Multiloader.swf http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/swfs/AS3Multiloader.swf Enlarge This Image A poster by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley for a 1966 Grateful Dead show in San Francisco. Enlarge This Image Peter Simon The Grateful Dead at its Hartford show in May 1977. From left, Phil Lesh, Donna Jean Godchaux, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia. Enlarge This Image Amalie R. Rothschild, from “Dick’s Picks, Vol. 4” From left, Jerry Garcia, Mr. Weir, Mr. Kreutzmann, Ron McKernan (called Pigpen), Mr. Lesh and Mickey Hart at the Fillmore East in 1970. Enlarge This Image Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times An exultant fan at the Gramercy concert. Enlarge This Image Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Deadheads at a show in 1970. “Seen any of the other shows?” I asked. “I’ve been to every show since 1972,” he said. “In the New York area.” His name was Jimmy . By his definition, “every show” meant every concert by the Grateful Dead, the San Francisco rock band, until the death of Jerry Garcia, its guitarist and singer in 1995, and then every subsequent show by Phil Lesh, the band’s bassist, who has led various touring bands with a sound much in the spirit of the Dead. We got to talking. I asked when he thought the Dead reached its peak, game to try out a half-formed argument for 1975, or thereabouts. “Well, I agree with the people who say it was May 8, 1977,” he said. Jimmy was jumping a level on me. There are at least five different levels to how fans talk about the Dead. The basement level concerns the band’s commercially released albums. This is how a lot of interested but inexpert people once talked about the Dead — myself included — in the early 1980s. I had a couple of skunky-sounding audience tapes, tinkling out distant brown scurf from Nassau Coliseum, but I was an unconnected kid. I listened to “Live/Dead,” “Europe ’72,” and “Anthem of the Sun” — all in the racks at Sam Goody. The next level is periods or eras, the conversation I was prepared for. There was the aggressive, noisy, color-saturated improvising from 1968 to 1970; the gentler and more streamlined songwriting and arranging of ’72 and ’73; the spooky harmonies of 1975; the further mellowing and mild grooves that lay beyond. Next comes the level of the Dead’s best night: Jimmy’s level, one based on years of close listening to noncommercial live recordings, from the band’s own engineers or radio broadcasts or audience tapers. These began circulating in the early ’70s and became commonplace by the mid-1980s, after I had wandered off the trail. After that comes particular songs within particular performances. (Some will say the “Dark Star” from Veneta, Ore., on Aug. 27, 1972, or the “Dancing in the Street” from Binghamton, N.Y., on May 2, 1970, encapsulates much of what they like about the Grateful Dead.) Beyond that is an area with much thinner air: here involving, say, audience versus soundboard tapes, the mixing biases of different engineers, techniques of customizing early cardioid microphones, and onward into the darkness of obsession. In any case, once you get to Level 3, you have a sufficiently authoritative understanding of the Dead. Or so I thought. The Grateful Dead was a 30-year ramble of touring. It continued after Garcia’s death in a kind of post-history: first as the Other Ones, and later simply as the Dead (no “Grateful”), which is the name it will tour under this year. (The band now includes the original members Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, as well as the guitarist Warren Haynes and the keyboardist Jeff Chimenti; the tour begins today at the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina.) It was also an intellectual proposition, in how the band brought new information and states of mind to a century of American music: bluegrass, folk, blues, Motown, Bakersfield country and so on. For me it often works best intellectually; I confess I hear shortcomings even in a lot of good Dead shows — intonation problems, weak singing, calamitous rhythm. I would say I’m more interested in the question of its best night ever than the answer. But that may not be the right question anymore. THE GRATEFUL DEAD’S live recordings represent a special order of surfeit. Nearly 2,200 Dead shows exist on tape, of the 2,350 or so that the group played. Most of those are available online — either for free streaming on Web sites like archive.org and nugs.net, or for download on iTunes, like the “Dick’s Picks” series and the more recent “Road Trips” archival series, which uses master-tape audio sources. The obvious solution to this terrifying situation, one would imagine, is to delimit the options: to narrow that number down to a very small canon of the best. The canon of great Dead shows was built over 20-something years of the band’s existence, and is still developing. It was first created by word of mouth — from the demons who started the cult of Dead tape trading in the early ’70s — and later by fanzines and books like “The Deadhead’s Taping Compendium,” three volumes of concert-tape reviews and essays on minutiae. There are also 12 published volumes of “Deadbase,” full notations of Dead performances; much of this information is available online at deadbase.com. Because of the culture of taping and collecting around the concerts, the audience developed a kind of intellectual equity in the band. And as the fans traded more and more tapes, in the nonmonetary currency of mind-blow, a kind of Darwinian principle set in: the most-passed-around tapes were almost quantifiably the best. If a tape wasn’t that good, its momentum sputtered, and it became obscure. Deadheads have often been polled about their favorite show, through fanzines and Web sites. The answers have stayed fairly consistent. May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, Cornell University. The pairing of Feb. 13 and 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York — perhaps the first widely traded shows. The Veneta and Binghamton shows. You’d think the canon would have been displaced as more and more information came along, but it hasn’t, really; it has only widened. I have spoken to young Deadheads who, surprisingly, respect the ancient judgments. “I’ll stick with May 8 because of its historical importance,” said Yona Koch-Feinberg, an 18-year-old from Manhattan. “That’s almost as important as the musical ability of the evening.” DAVID LEMIEUX has been the tape archivist and CD producer for the Grateful Dead’s official archival releases since 1999. Mr. Lemieux said he has listened to the Cornell concert “virtually weekly” since the late ’80s. What’s so great about that show? I asked him. The group had just finished making the studio album “Terrapin Station,” which included a long and intricate suite sharing the album’s title; it was well practiced. Garcia had just completed editing of “The Grateful Dead Movie,” a concert documentary of sorts, and a long and costly ordeal. Perhaps the members felt unburdened and retrospective: the set list made an even sweep of the band’s career up to that point, from the early-repertory “Morning Dew,” with its cathartic but carefully paced five-minute solo by Garcia, to the up-to-date “Estimated Prophet.” (Much has also been made, by those who were there, about the Fátima-esque appearance of snow on that May evening.) Mr. Lemieux characterizes the recording as the Dead concert one would likely want to pass on to the most people: it pleases the most tastes. But the Cornell tape also reached a critical number of people at a critical moment. Almost 10 years after the concert, a cache of soundboard tapes made by Betty Cantor-Jackson, the Dead’s live recording engineer, were scattered far and wide when her house in Nicasio, Calif., went into foreclosure and her possessions were sold at public auction. The sound quality of the “Betty Boards,” which began circulating in 1987, was exceptional: so good that for the initiates, it nearly reinvented listening. She made her own stereo mix on a separate feed from the house P.A. mix, strictly for posterity, and she considered the mixes from 1977 among her best. (“I want you to be inside the music,” she once said of her audio ideal. “I don’t want stereos playing at you, I want you to be in there, I want it around you.”) The Cornell show was the first widely circulated tape to sound that good. Also in 1987 the Dead had a hit single, “Touch of Grey.” Suddenly the band was so popular that it could sell out Giants Stadium in July and return in September for a five-night run at Madison Square Garden. A new excitement about the band, its present and its past, recharged its fan base and grew it enormously. But the standards by which we judge the Grateful Dead have changed since then. Over the past several years it has become possible to know entire periods with the same detail and definition with which we once saw individual concerts. In some sense we’re rolling back the microscope to get a closer view. In the late ’80s information access was limited. You had to work for your collection. It wasn’t all online. In 1987 the ability to point to a certain show — a Cornell ’77 or a Fillmore East 1970 — indicated great knowledge. But we can also now say that it indicated a kind of lack of knowledge. Because more and more of us now know, from better and better audio evidence, how the band sounded in the weeks and months around those famous nights. For example the Dead played a concert 20 days after Cornell, in Hartford, that some, including Gary Lambert, a host of the Grateful Dead Radio show “Tales From the Golden Road” on Sirius XM, consider just as good. (That show, taken from the master tapes engineered by Ms. Cantor-Jackson, has just been released by Rhino in heretofore unbeatable audio as “To Terrapin: Hartford ’77.”) And it played a show in Buffalo one night later, on May 9, which Mr. Lemieux prefers. “To me the question is: Does Cornell stand up to the rest of the tour?” said Dan Levy, a longtime fan of the band. (He wrote the liner notes for “Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 1,” a recent archival release of some 1990 performances.) “And then, since you can listen to a dozen shows from April and May of ’77, you realize that the next question is: How does one tour compare to another? This is where there’s some new motion in how the band is considered. The kinds of e-mails I’m getting now are saying things like, ‘We really should reconsider 1980.’ ” IF you ask the elder members of the Grateful Dead’s touring retinue, the best-show question becomes quickly irrelevant. Owsley Stanley, known as Bear, the early LSD chemist and sound engineer for the Dead in the ’60s and ’70s, reacted with a kind of combative pluralism. “All the shows of my era were good,” he said in an e-mail message. “ ‘Best’ is a value judgment reserved for each person.” Then he moved on to received wisdom about shows that he knew intimately, having recorded them himself: “The Fillmore East shows in February of 1970 are seen by many as very special.” Ms. Cantor-Jackson answered with similar indirectness. “Rumor has it,” she said by e-mail, “the fans’ favorite is a ’77 Cornell gig.” But she also wrote of a performance from July 16, 1970, at the Euphoria Ballroom in San Rafael, Calif., when the Dead was joined by Janis Joplin for the song “Turn On Your Lovelight.” That show receives a dismal rating in the “Compendium.” But: Ms. Cantor-Jackson was there; San Rafael is her hometown; and Joplin had become important, and would be dead a few months later. Why shouldn’t her memory attach special value to that concert? This is an example of valuing the experience over the artifact: a way of appreciating the Dead that’s slipping away from us, gradually being replaced by a way that’s far less sentimental, far more critical, but curiously, inclusive rather than narrow. Original members of the band seem interested by the best-show question, but aren’t inclined to think that simplistically. Having lived the 5,000 or 6,000 onstage hours in real time, they tend naturally toward the wide-view mode that the rest of us are only starting to know. I asked Mickey Hart, the drummer, what he thought about Veneta ’72, a winner in a best-show poll on the concert-recording site Lossless Legs, at shnflac.net. (It’s also — ahem — one of my favorites.) “I don’t remember it,” he said. (To be fair, he was on a hiatus at the time.) He remembers periods, he explained. And bad gigs — Woodstock, for instance. A few free shows in the ’60s and ’70s, when playing felt like an act of generosity. And the band’s all-consuming, six- to eight-hour practice sessions of the mid-’60s, when it was pushing beyond blues and pop. Since Mr. Hart obviously sees his time with the Dead as a journey, what does he say when someone starts asking him about the specifics of a single night, brandishing dates and concert-hall names? “I say ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “I always say ‘Yes.’ ” Mr. Lesh said he thinks along remarkably similar lines. He remembers the free shows, the early years, ’75 to ’77, parts of the late ’80s. He doesn’t remember Cornell ’77. “I haven’t listened to Cornell for a long time,” he said in a telephone interview. Was there any sense of immediate recognition, I asked, right after the band finished a great show? “We may have walked off and looked at each other and said, ‘Whoa,’ ” he said. “But generally there wasn’t a lot of that. Performing takes a lot out of you. Physical and mental energy. When it’s been a good show, you’re kind of drained. ” And what does he say to the pinpointers, the best-show-ever-ists? “I appreciate it, and honor it, and, you know, wail on,” he said. “But it’s an individual thing. Maybe they were there. A lot of people gravitate to the shows that they had seen. Since Jerry’s death I get the feeling that a lot of the Heads need to confirm for themselves that it was as good as they thought it was.” Maybe that’s the best one can do at the highest level of engagement. Not to try to listen for the best night ever; not even to listen for the best period ever. But to try to figure out why we’re listening at all. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: April 11, 2009 A picture caption on Page 21 this weekend with the continuation of the cover article about the Grateful Dead misstates the date of the concert shown. The show in Hartford took place in May 1977, not 2007.

8 Hours a Day Spent on Screens, Study Finds NYT Advertising – Media & Advertising By BRIAN STELTER Published: March 26, 2009 IN a world with grocery store television screens, digitally delivered movie libraries and cellphone video clips, the average American is exposed to 61 minutes of TV ads and promotions a day. Some people may think that amount seems excessive. But “people don’t seem to be getting up and running away,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting. In fact, adults are exposed to screens — TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices — for about 8.5 hours on any given day, according to a study released by the Council for Research Excellence on Thursday. TV remains the dominant medium for media consumption and advertising, the study found. The data suggests that computer usage has supplanted radio as the second most common media activity. (Print ranks fourth.) The council was created by the Nielsen Company but has an independent board. The $3.5 million study, paid for by Nielsen, sought, in part, to determine whether media companies needed to address new forms of media measurement. Researchers at Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, who conducted the study for the council, say it is the largest observational look at media usage ever conducted. Rather than relying on what people remembered watching, researchers captured the actions in real time by shadowing 350 subjects — most of whom were former members of the Nielsen television ratings panel — and recording each person’s behavior in 10-second increments. The researchers say they recorded 952 days of behavior. People under 18 were not included in the study. The results of the video consumer study may intrigue advertising clients ahead of the upfront season for ad sales. The researchers found that the number of minutes with media is almost identical for every age group. Mr. Wakshlag called the amount of time “amazingly consistent across the age groups.” Except, that is, for 45-to-54-year-olds, who spend on average an extra hour in front of screens each day, the study found. “It flies in the face of conventional wisdom, of course, which tells us that the younger cohorts apparently spend more time with screen-based media,” said Michael Bloxham, a director of the center at Ball State. Among other surprises, the research found that young people aren’t the only ones dividing their attention among multiple screens and machines; people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and early 50s essentially multitask for the same amount of time. People over 55 are markedly less likely to be multitasking. “That’s where the generation gap, if there is one, may exist,” Mr. Bloxham said. Although the researchers emphasized that the study did not set out to prove any specific points about media consumption, much of the data is “actually quite comforting” for the television industry, Mr. Wakshlag said. The data reaffirms much of what Nielsen has found in past studies, namely that television remains by far the dominant medium for video viewing. The Ball State study found that the average American adult was exposed to five hours and nine minutes of live TV each day, almost 15 minutes of TV via a DVR device and 2.4 minutes of video on the computer. “Even though people have the opportunity to watch video on their computers and cellphones, TV accounts for 99 percent of all video consumed in 2008,” Mr. Bloxham said. “Even among the 18-to-24-year-olds, it was 98 percent.” Among younger audiences, there are some leading indicators that the Web is affecting media usage. The data shows that 18-to-24-year-olds — generally college students and new entrants into the work force — watch the smallest amount of live TV of any age group (three and a half hours a day), spend the most time text messaging (29 minutes a day) and watch the most online video (5.5 minutes a day). Slightly older viewers, those ages 25 to 34, spend the most time of any group watching DVD or VCR videos. People ages 35 to 44 spend more time on the Web than other groups, 74 minutes a day on average. The next demographic, 45 to 54 years old, spends the most time on e-mail. Consumers over the age of 65 watch the most live TV, according to the research. The researchers found that television and video games attract the most undivided attention, while other actions (like listening to music) often occur while people are doing other things. More than 30 percent of households now own digital video recorders, allowing them to time-shift their viewing and potentially fast-forward past advertisements. The study found that the average American watches almost 15 minutes of TV using a DVR each day. Mr. Wakshlag said that newer owners of DVRs “are using them for less time-shifted viewing than the ones who bought them a while back.” Mr. Bloxham noted that more people were receiving DVRs as part of a cable company upgrade, instead of buying them on their own. While the study’s findings mostly align with the ratings that Nielsen and other companies report on a daily and monthly basis, the researchers did find that people remembered watching less TV than they actually did. When subjects in the study were asked to recall their behaviors, “people underestimated the amount of time they spent with TV by a substantial amount,” about 25 percent on average, Mr. Wakshlag said. The same people tended to overestimate their use of other media. For some people, there is a “social stigma” attached to high levels of TV watching, Mr. Bloxham said. When some people are asked to estimate their TV viewing, he said, some of them may not “want to tell you five or six hours, because that may slip into the couch potato category,” he said. For others, he said, “there is no stigma because being able to talk about last night’s reality show or last night’s ball game is social currency.”

Set 1 Little Martha (Just Oteil) Mountain Jam Trouble No More Midnight Rider 44 Blues w/Danny Louis Wasted Words Gambler’s Roll Ain’t Wasting Time No More Mountain Jam Set 2 Melissa Leave My Bues At Home No One Left To Run With Key To The Highway w/Eric Clapton Stormy Monday w/Eric Dreams w/Eric Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad w/Eric Little Wing w/Eric In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed w/Eric Encore – Layla w/Eric and Danny

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#art #ENVISIONTheLifeCube #blackrockcity #artprojectatburningman #artburningman #artatburningman

Facebook’s New Advertising Strategy Is Brilliant and Unexpected October 03, 2011 by Todd Wasserman Facebook and Google get compared a lot these days, but with its new advertising strategy, Facebook is adapting Google’s ad strategy to its social media. Improving advertising on the popular social network is not a new or particularly innovative idea. Still the transition from advertising as a message-delivering medium to a platform for social sharing is a radical departure for Facebook. It could be the Facebook advertising solution that turns advertising partners (brands) into better social media communicators and gets Facebook members to start recommending and sharing advertisers as much as they do they latest cat video. As for the Google comparison. Recall that in the early days, Google had a choice: Take money from advertisers for higher search rankings or ignore such offers and focus on making its search engine the best it could be. Google at first didn’t know how it would make money. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured that if they built a better mousetrap, the money would eventually flow. And it did. Like Google, Facebook didn’t invent a category, it refined it. Friendster and MySpace predated Facebook just like Yahoo and Alta Vista came before Google. Like Google, Facebook figured that if it got enough people on board and continually improved its social network, eventually it would figure out a way to make money. Facebook’s overtures at first were clumsy. Beacon, the advertising platform Facebook introduced in 2007, informed all your friends when you made potentially embarrassing purchases or rentals on Blockbuster and other retail partners — and was eventually shuttered. Since then, Facebook seems content cashing in on its huge user base via display advertising. SEE ALSO: The History of Advertising on Facebook [INFOGRAPHIC] http://mashable.com/2011/06/28/facebook-advertising-infographic/ Now, however, Facebook’s ad strategy is becoming clear. And it’s not only brilliant, it’s unexpected. Facebook’s strategy, like Google’s, is to not only improve its network and experience, but improve the advertising as well. Now, that’s not so clever, admittedly. The really interesting part is the way Facebook plans to improve it: by making brand Pages better. Why? Facebook doesn’t make a dime on any of the Pages set up by advertisers. As a marketer, you could do quite well for yourself by running a brand Page and never buying a single ad. But you could only do so well. The reason you will have to buy ads on Facebook goes to the heart of why you need to advertise in the first place. A few years ago, I wrote a story about the marketing for Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith the last movie (by release date, not chronologically) in the Star Wars franchise. I was genuinely baffled as to why Lucasfilm was putting such a heavy advertising push behind the movie. I mean, after all, didn’t everyone who cared already know that the movie was coming out? Jim Ward, Lucasfilm’s vice president of marketing at the time, though, told me the stakes were huge for that movie. If the studio did absolutely no advertising, it would likely lose $110 million or so in box office returns. “What we need to do is go beyond the core audience, not only from a box office perspective but from a brand-management perspective,” he told me at the time. In other words: You don’t need to let Star Wars fans know that a Star Wars movie is coming out, but you do need to target all those millions of people who are on the fence about Star Wars or are too young to remember it. The same is true for any brand that really wants to grow. You will get only so far keeping your base happy. What you need to do is reach beyond them. It turns out that approaching friends of that base may be the best way to do this. Why? Think back to the last time a friend convinced you to take a flyer on a new product or maybe made you think of an old brand in a new way. For instance, I have a friend who is a total Mac-head who surprised me last year when he said that Windows 7 was as good as the Mac OS. Movies are another good example. Have you ever written off a new movie only to be completely turned around when a friend told you it was actually really good? (Of course, this cuts the other way, too.) That’s the thinking behind two new announcements Facebook is making this week. One is a new ad unit. The other is a set of metrics that will help administrators create better brand Pages. The combination of the two reveals where Facebook’s thinking is going. Facebook is putting pressure on advertisers to create better content for their brand Pages. If they do, those brands will have a better chance of winning over friends of fans either by advertising or by creating something viral. It’s a cycle that has the potential to redefine the way we interact with brands. From now on, brands will be friends or friends of friends rather than spammers trying to bombard your consciousness. Social media is still new, but so was search once. While figuring out how to make money off of search seems obvious in retrospect, it clearly wasn’t at the time. In the same way, someday we’ll look back at how Facebook invented social media advertising and wonder why no one thought of it sooner. posted by a friend from her Washington Post Reader, original source Mashable (I refused to subscribe to the App on Facebook). #myspace #starwars #google #Twitter #socialmedia #brand #Facebook #beacon #socialmedia #friendster #branding #advertising

Corner Office This interview with Gary E. McCullough, president and chief executive of the Career Education Corporation, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. The Lesson of the 38 Candy Bars (Published NYT: August 8, 2009) Gary McCullough Every Sunday, Adam Bryant (NYT) talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing. Q. What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned? A. The biggest one I learned, and I learned it early on in my tenure in the Army, is the importance of small gestures. As you become more senior, those small gestures and little things become sometimes more important than the grand ones. Little things like saying “please” and “thank you” — just the basic respect that people are due, or sending personal notes. I spend a lot of time sending personal notes. I’ll never forget one of the interactions we had with my commanding general of the division in which I was a platoon leader. We were at Fort Bragg, N.C. We had miserable weather. It was February and not as warm as you would think it would be in North Carolina. It had been raining for about a week, and the commanding general came around to review some of the platoons in the field. He went to one of my vehicle drivers and he asked him what he thought of the exercise we were on. To which the young private said, “Sir, it stinks.” I saw my short career flash before my eyes at that point. He asked why, and the private said: “There are people who think this is great weather for doing infantry operations. I personally think 75 and partly cloudy is better.” And so the commanding general said, “What can I do to make it better for you?” And the private said, “Sir, I sure could use a Snickers bar.” So a couple days later we were still moving through some really lousy weather, and a box showed up for the private. And that box was filled with 38 Snickers bars, which is the number of people in my platoon. And there was a handwritten note from the commanding general of our division that said, “I can’t do anything about the weather, but I hope this makes your day a bit brighter, and please share these with your buddies.” And on that day, at that time, we would’ve followed that general anywhere. It was a very small thing, and he didn’t need to do it, but it impressed upon me that small gestures are hugely important. Q. What’s the best career advice someone ever gave you? A. I believed early in my career that if I just worked hard, put my head down and did my job, everyone would notice and good things would happen. And in fact, that’s not true, necessarily. You can do your job and you can toil along in anonymity without anybody noticing for a real long time. I was among the last people in my class who came into Procter & Gamble to be promoted to brand manager, and I would attribute part of that to the fact that I just wasn’t very savvy politically. A mentor taught me that no one could micromanage my own career better than me. And so I won’t say that I became more demanding, but I certainly began to have more of a plan around things that I felt I needed to do to grow, and I was more overt stating what I wanted or what I needed. I think it’s an implied contract. You know, when you work at a company, you owe them a good day’s work. The company owes you a fair salary and growth opportunities. I was giving my best effort but I didn’t think I was getting, in some cases, all the return. So I started asking for it, not in a rude way, but in a way that it implied a quid pro quo, so to speak. Q. Talk about how you’ve handled failure. A. There was a point in time in my career where I was told point blank that I wasn’t going to be promoted, that I didn’t have the skills to go on to the next level. And when you’re faced with a situation like that, there’s two ways you can respond to it: You can accept it and you can move on, which I think would’ve been the easy thing to do, or you could seek to find out why people had that belief and convince them that you can do the work. I chose the latter. I think when you’re faced with that, everybody has to dig in to look at themselves and say, “Am I here to make something happen, or am I going to believe this to be the case?” There are some things that are within your control and that you’ve got to drive to make happen. And there are some things that are outside your control that you can’t. When they said I wouldn’t be promoted, I basically said, “Tell me what I need to do.” And I focused like a laser beam on those things and I delivered those. Q. What has surprised you most about the top job? A. One is the breadth of topics or issues that you’re confronted with on a daily basis, and you have to be able to go from one thing to another to another, and sometimes it feels like they’re completely unrelated. In some cases it’s a snap decision. It’s got to be, “This is how we’re going to proceed, move forward” versus taking time to really contemplate the question. So if you’re not comfortable with dealing in gray areas or you’re not comfortable with deciding with 75 or 80 percent of the data you would want to have, then this is not a job that people should aspire to. I think the other piece is just the demands of the various constituents. You know, you have employee demands, I’ve got a board of directors that has demands. There are investors, there are analysts and shareholders and so on and so forth, and they all require time and attention. So marshaling enough time so that you don’t feel like you’re giving everybody short shrift is really tough to do. The other piece is the fishbowl nature of the job. It’s relentless to some degree, in that respect. Q. How do you make sure you’ve got the energy to do all that? A. I think part of it’s just genes and disposition. I’ve always been an early-morning riser. I like to get up early. I like to get a workout in because that gets the blood pumping to face the day. So a couple times a week, I’m up at 4:45 or 5 at the latest. Q. How do you hire? A. When I’m hiring, particularly at the senior levels, I’m looking for a couple of things. One is demonstrated leadership — has somebody shown that they have mastered the work, that they can lead people and lead organizations? I look for intelligence — business intelligence — and I’m not talking book intelligence. I’m rarely swayed by people who were 4.0 students at the best colleges and universities. I’m just talking about basic smarts. You do recruit for raw intelligence because if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. You either do or you don’t. But I’m also looking for some street savviness. I’m looking for the ability to work with other people. Teamwork’s important to me. I grew up playing on teams. I’m not a fan of people who are “lone wolves” at the tops of organizations, because they don’t do a good job of working with me and with the organization in many cases. So I ask them to tell me about a time when they were in, say, a leadership situation where something simply would not have happened had they not been there, and what they did to influence the action. Questions like that tend to be pretty open-ended. Q. It’s hard to test for those intangibles up front. A. Yes it is, which is why I want to spend time with people. At the levels I’m hiring for, I want to have a meal with you. I want to meet your spouse. They should want to do the same thing with me and with my spouse, because you get a sense for who people are when you get them out of the business environment. I’ll tell you another quick story. There was a woman named Rosemary who long ago retired from Procter & Gamble. Rosemary was a cafeteria worker, and at the time at P. & G., we actually had a cart that would come around at 7, 7:30 in the morning. They would ring a bell and you’d go get a cup of coffee and a doughnut or a bagel or something to start off your day. And Rosemary had an uncanny ability to discern who was going to make it and who wasn’t going to make it. And I remember, when I was probably almost a year into the organization, she told me I was going to be O.K. But she also told me some of my classmates who were with the company weren’t going to make it. And she was more accurate than the H.R. organization was. When I talked to her, I said, “How’d you know?” She could tell just by the way they treated people. In her mind, everybody was going to drop the ball at some point, and then she said: “You know you’re going to drop the ball at some point, and I see that you’re good with people and people like you and you treat them right. They’re going to pick up the ball for you, and they’re going to run and they’re going to score a touchdown for you. But if they don’t like you, they’re going to let that ball lie there and you’re going to get in trouble.” Again, I think it’s those intangible things. I had taken the time to get to know Rosemary and know that her husband’s name was Floyd and know the thing that they did in their off-time was bowling. So, it is all those little intangible things that you see, not when you’re sitting around a table in a conference room, but what you see in other ways. Q. What’s your approach to time management? A. When people ask me for time, they generally don’t need the time that they ask for. So my assistant asks people, “How much time do you need?” and, “What are the outcomes?” If they say an hour, we cut it in half. If they say 30 minutes, we cut it to 15, because it forces people to be clearer and more concise. By doing that, I’m able to cram a number of things into the day and move people in and out more effectively and more efficiently. Sometimes there are things that people come in to discuss because they want face time, or because they’re unsure, or they want me to make a decision so they can say that I made the decision and hide behind that. And so those things don’t work very well. Q. Are you a gadget person? A. I live by my BlackBerry, as most of us do. I do make it a point on Friday night to turn it off and I don’t turn it on again until Sunday morning. I do that for a couple of reasons. One is, you have to try to separate at some point during the week. Anybody who needs me, whether it’s a board member or one of my leaders, they know how to reach me if something comes up that’s a crisis. The other reason I turn it off is because when things come in, if I respond, then I’ve got people in the organization who would see that I’ve responded on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. And the next thing I know, I have a response to my response at 8:15 and so it goes. And I want people to have a life. Q. How do you find out now in your position what people throughout the company are thinking? A. The more senior you get, the harder it is to really keep a pulse on things. I tell people that coming to my office is like going to the principal’s office. Nobody wants to make that walk if they can avoid it, for the most part. I call people and say, “Hey, can you come talk to me?” They bring all their staff books and things, and I literally want to have a conversation. So I walk around and I ask questions. I think the best way to do it, to figure out what’s really going on, is to travel to the other company locations that are away from the corporate headquarters and have town hall-style meetings. I send out on at least a quarterly basis, sometimes more frequently, e-mails to all employees. I help them understand what our results were, as an organization, what some of the issues are, what some of our priorities should be. I’ve gotten responses back, sometimes from only 50 employees, sometimes from as many as 200 or 300. And I do my best over the course of a couple of days to respond to every one of those e-mails. So I’ve actually got people in the organization who I’ve established dialogues with over the course of the last couple of years, who will send me notes that will say, “You know, have you thought about this?” or, “You should know this is going on in our company or in our location.” And I treat every one of those pieces of information with a great deal of respect. I protect their anonymity, and it gives me a good picture of some things that are going on that I otherwise wouldn’t know. Q. What do you think business schools should teach more of, or less of? A. Having gone to business school — this is going to sound terrible but I’m going to say it anyway — I didn’t learn that much at business school. It was a great way for me to transition from the military to the private sector, and I learned basic things, like buy low and sell high. I learned that sometimes it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And I made some lifelong friends, which was all good. I think I’d ask them to be mindful of teaching about leadership. If I was going to teach a course, that’s what I would teach, about leadership, about playing nicely in the sandbox with others, about being more collaborative, and I would ask them to teach or to impress upon people that when they graduate, it does take a little while to get a job like mine. I can’t tell you the number of young people who think that they’re going to end up with a job like mine after a year or five years. It just doesn’t work that way, and I think if people could come out of business schools with a more realistic sense of how things really operate in organizations, and that there is a bit of dues-paying that has to happen, we’d all be better off. So managing expectations is something that I’d ask those people to really think through. Q. What’s your two-minute commencement speech? A. I would tell people that the race ultimately doesn’t go to the fast. It goes to the strong. It goes to the resilient and it goes to the people who are well prepared. I have my own kids, and I tell them that when I walk into a room of more than five or seven people, I know that I am not the smartest guy in the room and I’m very, very comfortable with that fact. There are people who are off-the-charts smart, and that’s great. That’s good for them. I like to surround myself with really smart people, as I said before. I will outwork, and have over the course of my career, about anybody. If you’re clear about what you want, if you’re strong, if you’re resilient, if you’re well prepared and you’re willing to work — I mean really work — then good things can happen. I’m a guy who never planned to be in an office like this, and that was not my goal coming out of business school, believe it or not. And so, it surprises me that I’m in this role and in this job. I think when you’re too focused on the top job, you can get derailed somewhere along the way. A version of this article appeared in print on August 9, 2009, on page BU2 of the New York edition.

INAUGURATION – Obama’s Inaugural Address: The Full Text Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009 My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition. Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents. So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans. That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights. Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction. This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do. Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government. Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good. As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort — even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace. To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it. As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all. For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate. Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed — why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath. So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: "Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]." America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

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#

Sent this to one of the CEOs running a company I’m on Board of ..  LESSON:  You have to touch the customer! IN THE LEAD By CAROL HYMOWITZ CEOs Are Spending More Quality Time With Their Customers WSJ May 14, 2007; Page B1 When Intel made a bid to become the microprocessor supplier for Apple’s new Apple TV, Chief Executive Paul Otellini told his top engineers they needed to make some swift design changes. Intel’s microprocessors, which the company had begun supplying for Apple computers in 2005, met performance specifications but their traditional packaging had to be thinner and smaller to fit Apple’s small set-top box that connects TV sets to a computer or the Web. He heard grumblings that this change wasn’t possible — at least not anytime soon — but Mr. Otellini pushed ahead. "Instead of saying no, we can’t, let’s say yes and figure out how," he recalls telling his senior team members. He won them over and soon had a new packaging design to show Apple, which chose Intel as its supplier. It was a lesson in change and in how to approach customers, he says. "We’re adjusting and tailoring products for them and moving much more quickly," explains Mr. Otellini, who came up through the sales and marketing ranks. Top executives like Mr. Otellini find they are working more closely than ever with their customers, and listening and responding to their requests for product customization or service and training. They are becoming involved even in the nitty-gritty of contract negotiations. "Ten years ago, a sales executive would have given a pitch, but today big customers want the CEO’s commitment that if they buy from you, you’re forming a partnership with them and will deliver exactly what you promised," says Ed Peters, chief executive of OpenConnect, a Dallas company that makes software that uncovers business-process inefficiencies. "And if you don’t, your failure will be broadcast on the Internet and quash possible deals with other customers." Mr. Peters says he spends at least 60% of his time on the road meeting with customers. Last week, he sat in on a sales presentation with a large global customer. His managers knew the client’s business processes inside and out. But his customer wanted to hear from him how they would save on costs. Next, he’ll meet with the client’s top executives to give them more information. Having the CEO make a "ceremonial visit" to only the biggest customers to tell them, "You’re important to us," isn’t cutting it anymore, says Kevin Coyne, a Harvard Business School professor. "They’re getting substantively involved in the biggest deals, showing up for key parts of a negotiation," he says. And they’re following up to make sure employees deliver what they’ve promised. At a time of product proliferation, they’re thinking about customers around the globe, he adds. Nike CEO Mark Parker recently met in Shanghai with 50 Chinese artists, fashion and industrial designers, and photographers who gave him "insights I wouldn’t get reading an article about China," he says. "The message that came through was they want their own voice" and were concerned about being overwhelmed by Western products, he says. He hopes Nike’s concept of personalization appeals to them. The company has Web sites that allow anyone to customize a pair of shoes with different colors, trims or team names. "I enjoy connecting with people" who influence the taste and cultural trends, adds Mr. Parker, who was named CEO last year. He says it is critical for all business leaders to connect with customers. Clients today, he says, are "highly individualized, want products that excite them — and have more choices than ever." For Mr. Parker and other CEOs, the must-see list is growing in number and variety. Nike has long used team sponsorships and star athlete endorsements to market its products and sought advice from athletes for its designs. But he also spends time with musicians, graffiti artists and other creative talent. "I meet regularly with our biggest retail customers but I also go off the beaten path where I can stimulate the right side of my brain — and discover new tastes in music, fashion, cuisine," he says. At Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy maintains a list of 50 large customers. His relationships with some of them have spanned his whole tenure at the company he founded, although he is now chairman, not CEO. "I have 25-year relationships with a lot of these people," he says. Since stepping down as CEO last year, he has created a new job for himself circling the globe to keep in touch with his customers. Just this past Saturday, he had plans to fly to Japan to meet with clients, and to do the same in India and Germany before returning to the U.S. He estimates he does about eight or 10 events each day when he’s traveling: scheduling lunch or dinner with scores of people, plus some one-on-one conversations with others. Company CEO Jonathan Schwartz gets reports daily from Mr. McNealy about what happens in those meetings. Even so, Mr. Schwartz also spends time with the customers. "But unlike Jonathan, I don’t have 15 direct reports who each want a piece of my mind, and I don’t have to come back jet-lagged and run a staff meeting," says Mr. McNealy.

I moderated a panel yesterday about Hype-targeting called " The Advertising & Commerce Platform, Hypertargeting: Ad Networks, Serving & Targeting" and was happy to use this article as  a keystone to the questions asked of the speakers.  (http://digitalhollywood.com/08BBlocks/BBlocks08-Tues9.html) .  Below is the articla from the WSJ. Wall Street Journal – ADVERTISING Targeted-Ad Initiative Is Crucial for MySpace Questions Multiply On Site’s Potential to Turn a Big Profit By AMOL SHARMA and EMILY STEEL, August 4, 2008; Page B1 When News Corp. reports its fiscal 2008 earnings Tuesday, investors will scrutinize the company’s plans to generate more advertising revenue from the enormous amount of traffic on its MySpace social-networking Web site. One initiative that could be critical to MySpace’s success, according to media buyers and industry analysts, is a system that lets marketers aim their ads at particular groups of users. As part of this "hypertargeting" system, MySpace has analyzed the profiles of its users to gauge their interests and then categorized them into more than 1,000 "buckets," including rodeo watchers, scrapbook enthusiasts and "Dancing With the Stars" viewers. The marketing service was launched last fall, and feedback from some early advertisers has been positive. Concert promoter Live Nation Inc. got a good bump in traffic on its Coldplay summer-tour page after buying display ads on MySpace that were directed at fans of Coldplay and those of bands with overlapping audiences, like Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie. "The closer you get to the audience you want, the better you get in terms of clicks or sales of the product," says Sean Muzzy, senior partner and media director at digital ad agency Neo@Ogilvy, owned by WPP Group PLC. Mr. Muzzy has managed several hypertargeting campaigns, including the one for Live Nation. James Kiernan, a media buyer at Publicis Groupe SA’s Starcom MediaVest who has handled hypertargeting campaigns on MySpace for a dozen or so Procter & Gamble Co. brands, says he has seen the approach yield a 25% to 30% increase in consumer response compared with regular ad purchases. Other big brands testing the targeting service include Adidas, which aimed a recent campaign at MySpace soccer fans. MySpace, which has cheap advertising rates, like other social networks — only a few dollars, at most, for 1,000 displays of an ad, compared with the $50 or $60 per thousand charged by some niche sites — says it can charge roughly double those rates by offering targeting. But it’s far from clear that the ad-targeting service will address growing concerns about the business prospects of MySpace and other online social networks. Because a significant number of MySpace user profiles contain suggestive or otherwise edgy photos or language, many big marketers still worry that their ads could end up alongside inappropriate material. No one is committing huge sums yet, media buyers say. The biggest concern among marketers is that social-network users simply aren’t in the mood to pay attention to ads — regardless of how well-targeted they are — while they are exchanging messages with friends or looking at photos. Privacy concerns about online ad targeting are also an issue. MySpace rival Facebook faced a wave of complaints from consumers when it unveiled a new advertising feature last year that updated users’ friends about online purchases the users had made. On Friday, a congressional committee asked 33 technology companies, including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., to provide information about their ad-targeting policies. The stakes are high for MySpace and News Corp., which acquired the site three years ago for $580 million just as MySpace was becoming a Web phenomenon. The site has become one of the Web’s biggest destinations, with nearly 118 million unique monthly visitors, according to Internet tracking firm comScore Inc. But questions are growing about News Corp.’s ability to turn that huge audience into big profits. Earlier this year, the company said its Fox Interactive Media division, which includes MySpace, would miss its $1 billion revenue target for fiscal 2008. Research firm eMarketer expects MySpace, which accounts for most of the division’s revenue, to bring in about $755 million this year. MySpace says it doesn’t comment on revenue forecasts. (News Corp. also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.) Much of MySpace’s revenue is coming from splashy ads on the MySpace home page, such as a recent campaign to promote the latest Batman film, "The Dark Knight." But there is a limit to how many of those kinds of ads MySpace can sell because the homepage has only one spot for ads. Another big source of revenue is Google, which agreed to make payments to MySpace totaling a minimum of $900 million over three years for the right to broker sponsored links on the site. But that deal may be running into some problems. A Fox Interactive executive acknowledged that consumer response to the ads Google brokers has been disappointing but said the two sides are working on technology to improve it. Google has said it is having trouble monetizing social networks generally, but hasn’t singled out MySpace. MySpace also isn’t the only company betting that analyzing data on users’ profiles will unlock the value of social networks. Facebook offers its own technology that marketers can use to target ads based on geography, age and interests that users have listed in their profiles. Among the tens of thousands of advertisers that have used its system, Facebook says, is a wedding-photography company that aimed its ads at women whose profiles indicated they were engaged. For some marketers, especially small ones, more generic targeting suffices. The New York Health & Racquet Club spent $5,000 on a MySpace campaign that displayed 2.3 million ads to users on the site. Though the health club could have chosen to target ads at people who say in their profiles that they enjoy rock climbing, yoga or working out, it chose instead to simply target by age and ZIP codes near its facilities. The club said it was relatively happy with the campaign, which generated roughly 1,000 clicks, a response rate of just 0.04%. Adam Bain, a Fox Interactive executive whose team created the hypertargeting technology MySpace is using, argues that the system won’t just pay off by boosting ad sales. It is also a way for marketers to glean valuable information about their target audience. If the advertiser wanted to reach scrapbooking hobbyists, for example, it could find 236,475 of them on MySpace. But the system also shows that 99% of them are female, and lists several other hobbies they tend to be interested in, including sewing, baking and watching the TV show "Grey’s Anatomy." As Mr. Bain puts it: "The beautiful thing about MySpace is that people go on every day and share with us what they’re passionate about, what their interests are."

This was sent by Joel at PT.  ONLINE PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION UNVEILS FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND ONLINE VIDEO ADVERTISING EFFECTIVENESS STUDY ———————————————– Report Provides New Insight into Effective Use of Online Video Advertising, Including the Merits of 30 Sec. Ads, Companion Ads and More NEW YORK, NY — June 6, 2007 — With the continued rise in online video popularity, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) conducted a unique study looking at the key factors driving video advertising success. Frames of Reference: Online Video Advertising, Content and Consumer Behavior exposed consumers to video content and advertising, and captured the attributes that most impact awareness, ad likability, ad relevance, and brand consideration. "With online video firmly entrenched in the mainstream, marketers need to understand what works for driving key advertising metrics," said Pam Horan, OPA president. "Frames of Reference identifies the most important factors — from ad length to the impact of adjacent content — that can improve video advertising effectiveness. In the rapidly evolving world of video, the study is an important step in laying down concrete, high impact techniques for marketers." Frames of Reference further examined how consumers are using online video and their reactions to advertising. Among the key findings are that news is the most popular online video category and that consumers are taking meaningful action in response to video ads. And with growing evidence of how heavily consumers rely on the Internet for researching and buying goods, the study also examined the relative importance of the Internet in the purchase process. The research, which was conducted in partnership with OTX, included surveying and concept testing 1,422 online video users. Ad Effectiveness Using a variety of ads — which featured everything from consumer packaged goods and financial services to airlines and pharmaceuticals — and four ad attributes, 96 combinations were tested for how they impact key advertising and brand metrics. The four ad attributes were: duration (15 v. 30 sec.); placement (pre-roll and post-roll); companion ad (with/without); and, advertising type (original online v. repurposed TV). Details on the impact of each of these attributes on online video advertising and brand metrics are included in the full report, however several of the key findings include: * 30s Top 15s. In two of the four advertising and brand metrics measured, ad length was the leading factor driving lift. And with each, 30 second ads outpaced 15s: ad relevance (30% lift using 30s) and brand consideration (23% lift using 30s). * Quality Content Halo. The study reinforced the notion of a "halo" effect from website video content affinity. If the consumer had a prior brand affinity toward an advertised brand and they liked the adjacent video content, brand consideration jumped 61%. If the consumer’s initial attitude toward the brand was neutral or negative, brand consideration still rose 21% if they liked the video content. * The Role of a Companion. The study found that static companion ads can play a valuable complimentary role. To lift brand awareness the combination of a pre-roll and a companion proved to be most effective. Video Usage and Perceptions The study looked at the most popular video content and, while humorous videos may appear to be omnipresent, Frames of Reference found that the leading video content category is news/current events (14% watch daily). Weather ranks second (11% watch daily), followed by jokes /funny clips (9% watch daily). The study also found that online video advertising is leading to concrete results, especially on media sites. Of the 80% of viewers that have watched a video ad online, 52% have taken some sort of action, whether it’s checking out a website (31%), searching for more info (22%), going into a store (15%), or actually making a purchase (12%). Importantly, visitors to media sites (magazine, newspaper, cable, broadcast and pure-play) demonstrated they were more inclined to take action upon viewing a video ad than visitors to portals and user generated content sites. The Internet & The Purchase Process The study looked at the purchase process, and the results underscored the dominant role of the Internet in every stage. Of consumers who made a purchase in the last month, 48% said the Internet drove initial awareness, 57% said they learned more using the Internet, 55% used the Internet to decide where to buy, and 56% made the final purchase decision using the Internet. Word of Mouth, which also has strong Web components, was second in importance — however the Internet outpaced all others by at least 50%. Horan said, "As consumers work their way through the purchase process, the Internet is far and away the most important media they use. With consumers buying everything from groceries to cars online, the Internet’s importance may seem obvious. But it is truly stunning to see that the Internet is leading every other media by at least 50%." Details of the Frames of Reference study are being presented on the OPA’s annual, eight-city "Eyes on the Internet Tour," which begins in Atlanta on Wednesday June 6. For more information or to register for the free event, visit http://www.online-publishers.org/eyes2007. Each presentation will be followed by a panel discussion among leading marketing, publishing and agency executives. A copy of the final report will be posted on the OPA website (www.online-publishers.org) at the end of the Tour.