From Advertising Age - Full story here

Google Stocks Up on Print and Outdoor Ads for Privacy-Focused Campaign

'Good to Know' Will Run in USA Today, Wall Street Journal and The Economist

‘Print Has a Pulse’: Buyers Taking a Second Look

by Steve Smith (Min Online)

While TV, Internet and (surprisingly) radio are top of mind among media buyers and planners coming in 2011, according to a new STRATA survey for the fourth quarter of 2010, print media is getting a nod. When asked which medium they are focusing most on in the coming months, 7% of buyers said print. “"Print has a pulse,” STRATA marketing chief J.D. Miller told Radio Sales Today. “It was almost nonexistent, now it has a pulse.”

Spot TV remains the most attractive venue for buyers (44%) in this survey, followed by Internet and Digital channels (21%) and spot radio (16%).

On the digital side there is surprisingly strong interest in display (80%), followed by social media (61%) and search (60%). For all of the hype around mobile, however, only 29% showed special interest. Within mobile the iPhone attracts the most interest (80%), and Blackberry (51%) is outpacing Android (45.8%). The iPad attracts interest from 31% of advertisers, up from 22% in the previous quarter. Overall, digital media actually suffered its first drop in enthusiasm. According to STRATA CEO/president John Shelton, “We see that the focus on digital has fallen off a bit. While still hot, it is used more in a solid media mix than more dollars heading its way.”

The “emerging platforms” are being met with some skepticism. STRATA found that 90% of its clients are showing no interest in the iPhone iAd, Google TV or Apple TV. Location-based advertising is not even in about 70% of plans for 2011, and most interest is going to Facebook Places, followed by Foursquare.

STRATA, a Comcast subsidiary, sells media planning and buying software.

Here is something you don't hear very often - I think the French Government might be right.

From PaidContent.org.  Full story here

French authorities have finally got some kind of ruling against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) - but it turns out to be rather toothless.

The competition watchdog, L’Autorité de la Concurrence, in an opinion expressed to the finance minister, says Google is “dominant” in search advertising (no surprise there - Google’s search share in Europe is far higher than in the U.S.).

But it did not rule Google that is abusing that dominance, instead saying: “This dominance is, of course, not wrong in itself: it is the result of a tremendous effort of innovation, backed by significant and ongoing investment. Only the abuse of such market power could be sanctioned against.”

The authority says it has reviewed the search advertising market and defined what would constitute anti-competitive acts within it. But it has stopped short of actually testing Google or anyone else against those definitions, saying: “The authority, which is acting in an advisory capacity, did not rule on the legality of such practices ... investigations are often long and complex.”

In other words, the authority’s determination in no way leads to a kind of “Google Tax” that some had been considering.

The authority’s most concrete ammunition is aimed at Google News, in defence of what it calls “the special case of the press”. Denouncing “a form of economic parasitism”, it says news publishers should be able to request exclusion of their material from Google News, separately from whether their sites are crawled by Google’s main search service. L’Autorité de la Concurrence says it is falling in with a recent Italian ruling on this.

Update: Google tells us: This has actually always been possible, and we made the process easier in December 2009 - here’s the announcement.”

It says it “welcomes” the consortium recently founded by eight French news publishers to jointly operate paid digital news kiosks - an opinion that will wipe out any notion that such collaboration might attract cartel concerns.

“The press is now facing the challenge of digital and it would not be overly serious to designate Google as the main cause of difficulties experienced by this sector,” the authority states.

Responding to the concerns of publishers, who fear Google robbing their advertising clients, the authority says the government should table amended laws that would force Google to give more disclosure on how much it pays out via AdSense, possibly via a third party.

 

Mark Cuban is right. This is why we take every opportunity in this blog to point out that newspapers and magazines need to stop giving away their content for free in the hopes that web traffic will magically result in revenue. It is not working and never will. There is too much online inventory for print pubs to ever realize a premium for their online products. The only ones benefiting are search engines and they make enough money without being subsidized by print.

Full story here

Excerpt from AdWeek:

Content aggregators and search engines are vampires, and newspapers are the chesty blondes who fall victim to their charms -- and ultimately get bitten.

That's the basic assessment of the traditional media business' approach to the Internet, according to Mark Cuban. During a keynote address today at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference, the HDNet president/CEO and famed provocateur called for newspapers and magazines to fight back against sites that link to their content.

"Everybody wants to take your content," said the Dallas Mavericks owner before a room full of media executives gathered at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York. That's not going to change, "unless you put a stake through their gosh darn hearts."

Cuban particularly called out Google as a Web giant that continues to reap benefits off of the valuable content that traditional media companies produce. "Google is a vampire, and you run scared," he said. "There is no reason to be indexed in Google."

For too long, Cuban said, newspaper and magazines have viewed traffic to their Web sites the same way that stores view customers coming through the door -- and have been fearful of turning down any opportunity for more traffic. Yet, he said, readers who find headlines via Google rarely convert to traffic, and publishers have a hard time monetizing that traffic. "You haven't gotten anything back except that you've turned into zombies," Cuban said.

Plus, in his mind, Google reaps the branding benefit of that content when consumers access it through a search or through Google News. "Whose brand do you think [users] have in their minds?" he asked.

In this excerpt from an article on Google Wave by the Newspaper Association of America, the NAA gives us just another example of how the organization continues to misunderstand how its members make the money they use to pay its dues. Google Wave does not offer any sustainable revenue stream for publications. If everyone would give away their content for free, a lot of people could come up with a cool way of displaying it too. But Wave does nothing for the publications who actually have to pay people to go out and write stories. Hard to believe that the NAA consistently misses this point, maybe they believe, as Google does, that as long as your motto says you intend to do no harm, it is ok to wrip off print publications.

Here is what they said. Full story here, if you have the stomach to read it.

As Google Wave ends its first year of existence, we have learned two things:

First, there’s no shortage of critics who are happy to argue that the Google product, which combines threaded conversations with collaborative document editing and a host of embedded interactive gadgets, may be a technology searching for a purpose.

Second, the term “beta” applied to a Google product means just that for a change—until a recent round of bug fixes, the service slowed to a crawl or crashed as soon as the number of visitors participating in a “wave” reached the kind of critical mass a media site would draw.

Does that mean newspapers should wait to begin experimenting with Wave? Not at all – especially given its potential to shape conversations both within and beyond news organizations, argue early industry dabblers in the technology.

“Think about how many newsrooms would have killed to be on top of a social media tool like Twitter four years ago, before it became as popular,” says Chris Taylor, online editor of TBO.com, who oversees converged Web operations for The Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV. “We want to make sure our newsroom is familiar with Wave so if it becomes the next great tool for media consumption, we know how to be there for our audience.”