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So: what comes after Google, in an online cosmos where online bookmarking and tagging and rating are booming, scaling up almost faster than we can comprehend...and where the visual is the new king?
This week Thomson/Reuters announced a hint of what’s to come: a “cloud” search result for all text relationships to reportage of a given news event.
Thomson Reuters has partnered with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society to launch the Media Cloud, a set of research tools for tracking online media coverage. The joint effort is meant to bring some clarity to the vast tangle of news and information on the Web, attempting to answer questions about what types of stories are covered by which media sources, where stories begin, and how blogosphere coverage compares to that of the mainstream media.
As reported in Mediapost.com, TR and the Berkman media wonks at Harvard set themselves an interesting problem: which “drives” news, the blogosphere or the mainstream media? And how best to visualize the results?
Well, fellow doughheads, take a gander for yourself at the Mediacloud website. TR's Big Heads realized a graphical representation of the momentum of a story is far more valuable to grasping what’s actually happening than a simple Google-based hierarchical “blue-underlined” page result, the PageRank result we all know and love.
That’s relevance. That’s engagement.
At Fresh Baked, we’re convinced that relevance is everything in creating engaging content. We spend a fair bit of our time not only in building relationships with our clients and assembling new comedy strategies but also in parsing what our clients are really telling us.
Here’s one HUGE client-side message: how is the audience going to find your work for us?
Google is failing, incrementally, in answering this question. Why? Because although Google is “aware” of a Milky Way’s worth of URLs [over a trillion now, and counting] but the algorithms stand literally zero chance of actually indexing this supernova of information.
Ladies and gentlemen, social network analysis is the Next Big Enchilada: analysis of the network of networks of people who are totally connected to each other.
To understand what this means is not only to understand the meaning of search post-Google but to grasp the very guts of marketing itself.
Why, you ask? Because, just like search—the science of information retrieval on the web—marketing is all about cognitive psychology, language, statistics and relevance, relevance, relevance.
Problem is, web search was never conceived for the commercial and visual medium the web now indisputably is.
Tapping graphically into the “search wisdom of crowds”—just as ThomsonReuters/Berkman’s MediaCloud has done—is to begin to understand how web search must evolve new “tools of engagement,” without which the new signals we humans are sending one another—the online multi-voice dialogue around user-generated content, from photo-sharing to video—the web will be so much…noise.
Point is, Fresh Baked thinks the future of marketing on the web isn’t so much about clicks…but about cliques.
More on that next time, doughheads. Meantime, want some great further reading?
Download The Economist's superb insight about marketing strategies in These Difficult Times. Now: it's terrific.
Be well.

Divorce, American style

Marketing is all about relationships.

And in this current economy, boyoboy, do we ever have a lotta marketing relationships on the rocks. While some strong and proven marketing marriages are as strong as ever, after a scan of the trades, sure feels to me like there were a slew of dysfunctional marriages out there in marketingland, with all too few therapeutic moments.

And now, with the economy in retrograde, as the astrologers say, we’re learning some very hard lessons indeed about marketing value and ROI…and the future of every advertising model under the sun.

To say print budgets have cavitated is putting the case mildly. They’re vanishing at warp speed; Condé Nast, home to Vanity Fair and the king of NY magazine houses, has shuttered or sliced circ throughout its lineup; Portfolio has halved its frequency. Even Vogue, mere months after its annual monster September issue hit the newsstands, has the feel of a mailbox brochure. It flops rather than thuds when you drop the sucker: that’s the sound of advertising revenues fleeing the jurisdiction.

Will Google, as scuttlebutt has it, buy The New York Times? The grand old lady of newspapers just closed a fat refinancing loan with a Mexican billionaire at 14% interest, ladies and gentlemen—and that, the street has it, is simply to cover interest payments on existing debt, the "deck chairs on the Titanic scenario;" flagship American newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Philadelphia Inquirer are toast.

And today, on the New York Times’ media blog, contribs pose the $64,000 question: do we still need network TV?

As somebody who worked for years in the trenches Canadian TV, I really think the jury’s out. CanWestGlobal looks like another cripple at the back of the flock, waiting to be picked off; south of the border, the executive suites are sweating bullets about the very future of network entertainment, with the exception of TNT’s push, new dramatic material rare as hen’s teeth. (HBO’s gone stale, you ask me. Damages and Mad Men are solid stuff but with little of the operatic highs and lows of The Wire or The Sopranos.)

As if the writers’ strike and the 2008 collapse of the US autumn pre-buy ad cycle wasn’t enough, advertising’s vanishing before the network brass’s eyes. People aren’t actually watching net less TV—they’re just shattering the broadcast timeslot model and moving away from the ads that feed the TV beast.

How, we’re asking around The Bakery, do you keep the ads following the video? And what strategies keep that video close to the cash register?

Let's back up.

Does anyone honestly believe that a greater ratio of ads per broadcast half hour is going to do anything but drive people farther away from primetime—especially via DVRs—except for sports and talent/reality shows? How how do you market in a black hole? At Fresh Baked, we’re convinced that advertising and marketing messaging without an engagement premium—we think it’s laughter and learning—is a non-starter.

Here’s what Ad Age has to say about the imperiled broadcast model’s equally vulnerable cousin, cable TV:

Both the networks and cable operators have a lot to lose if the subscription model breaks down, but the networks are particularly vulnerable. For the last two decades, cable has dined out on broadcast ad dollars, moving from 20% of their revenue from advertising to 50% today. But the salad days are over; TV advertising is flat, and operators such as Viacom have sustained themselves with subscriber revenue in the midst of flat or declining advertising…

[snip]

….one cable network executive said including those who watch online could increase a show's TV rating by as much as 10%. "In a flat-is-the-new-up universe, 10% is a big gain. Until you start to put it in those terms, you're not going to move dollars from TV to online," he said.

Absent that, US network TV has every appearance of a creative race to the bottom. And if you believe Jay Leno at 10pm is going to revive the creative state of the network nation, I got this bridge in Brooklyn—she needs a new owner. Crap TV will drive out the good, increasingly.

There’s no going back. HULU and its timeshifting online kin are the bridge technology, because without fresh hits, HULU is in danger too. And who’d gonna pay for the content that drives the system? Pirate film sites like [insert pirate site URL here] only amplify the argument that copyright—and thus the impetus to create new work for network TV—is doomed.

Back in the early 1950s, when the Hollywood studio system finally shattered with TV’s rise, cinema didn’t die. I don’t expect broadcast TV will die entirely either, even in the face of the web’s vast potential to dominate distribution without regard to time constraints.

But like so much about the American experience today, the days of the broadcast empire—just like the days of Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn half a century ago—are numbered too.