People With DVRs Don't Buy Them to Skip Commercials

...or so says ABC's President of Ad Sales Mike Shaw.

"I'm not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance," Shaw said. "It really is a matter of convenience--so you don't miss your favorite show. And quite frankly, we're just training a new generation of viewers to skip commercials because they can. I'm not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials. I don't fundamentally believe that. People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can't skip commercials."

While you're wiping off your monitor, I'll tell you how I came across this story. Was it my subscription to Mediapost's newsletters that led me to this story? No. It was TotalFark, which linked to the story with an "UNLIKELY" tag.

If that's not a signal that the broadcast model is about to become a lot less important, I don't know what is.

Still Struggling to Control the Message

This is a terrific example of what I mean when I advise marketers that not only do they no longer control the message, but also that any notion they had that they ever did is purely illusory. (Thanks to Beyond Madison Avenue for the wrap-up.)

Then the next morning, John wakes up to find out that his blog is down. Apparently, Paramount sent the company that hosts his blog a cease and desist order, based on a THIRD pic that John had on the blog, which they never mentioned to John as being a problem.

One of the challenges I face in pitching Conversational Marketing to clients is the notion of finding bloggers who will take up the task of blogging about the client's business. Paramount is lucky to find not one, but several. And what does it do? Piss one off to the point of getting two key ones (and probably more to follow) to boycott coverage of Paramount's upcoming Transformers flick.

And it's all because Paramount can't change its thinking regarding their level of control over the message. Marketers have to learn to embrace the notion that once content is released, their control over how it is used is pretty much nonexistant.

Here we go again. Instead of writing "atta boy" posts about marketers who have learned to let their fans be fans, I'm once again lamenting the lack of ability on the part of marketers to understand what's an asset and what's a liability, not to mention the outdated litigious nature of many large companies when lucky accidents occur.

Buh-bye AdSense

Google ads have earned me precisely $3.60 since I started running them, so Buh-bye. A while back, I received a mysterious e-mail from Google accusing me of click fraud, which was never adequately addressed by Google. They were never able to tell me what the behavior was that tripped their alarms, nor did they follow up my inquiries. Given this, the fact that I've earned pretty much diddley-squat and the fact that only select partners have even a remote idea of what their ad revenue cut is from Google, I thought it better to deep six AdSense than leave it running.

Sounds like the polar opposite of transparency, eh?

Technorati Gives Me Way More Credit Than I'm Due

Apparently, on the authority continuum, my blog lies somewhere between "Some Authority" and "A Lot of Authority," judging by the fact that the previous post appears on Technorati searches until I select "A Lot of Authority" from the drop-down. Wow.