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from MediaFile:

Race On: Will the media outpace U.S. GDP growth as Veronis forecast?

Athlete Alyson Felix in training for this year's Olympics. Will U.S. economy keep pace? (Photo: Reuters)

The world is a wonderful place if you're in the U.S. media business, according to the mid-term update from Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

The private equity firm forecasts the U.S communications industry--which includes everything from Hollywood and cable to education publishing and Yellow Pages--will grow faster than the U.S. economy in 2012. The total communications industry is project to grow by 5.6  percent compared with 4.4 percent GDP growth for the United States.

In particular the top performing segments will include what VSS calls Pure-Play Consumer Internet & Mobile Services, up 18.1 percent,  Public Relations & Word-0f-Mouth Marketing, up 14.6 percent and Broadcast TV, up 9.3 percent. Subscription TV is expected to grow by 7.7 percent while branded entertainment is forecast to grow 7.5 percent.

Unsurprisingly, those that will underperform the economy and be down frm last year include consumer magazine publishing, down 2.2 percent; newspapers, down 3.8 percent; and local consumer directories, down 5.6 percent.

from Paul Smalera:

The recession killed journalism – and saved it

Over the last few years, thanks to the global economic crisis – encapsulating everything from the 2008 housing crash to today’s ongoing euro zone sovereign-debt debacle – much ink has been spilled about the reshaping of the world’s economy, especially about the domestic job market.

Actually, scratch part of that last sentence, because less ink has been spilled, at least according to the results of a recent report by LinkedIn. The media business has been in overdrive, especially during this 2012 election season, but it’s now pushing pixels, not paper.

According to the data studied by LinkedIn, the professional social network, the newspaper industry experienced a 28.4 percent shrink rate between 2007 and 2011. The death of newspapers is not exactly a new phenomenon, so I’ll spare you yet another detailed recap of the print and economic climate that led to this broadsheet apocalypse.

But contrast newspapers’ huge drop with the gain experienced in the second-fastest-growing industry, according to the same LinkedIn data: online publishing. New-media companies posted a staggering 24.3 percent gain, coming in only behind the “Internet” overall. Look at the chart below and compare the green online publishing dot with the red newspaper dot.

In other words, reports of the media’s death are premature, at best. But more important, it’s unfair for any old-media advocate to say that the revenue model for media (or any industry moving toward digital) is broken. Yes, the companies and publications that power media look quite different than they used to, but these news organizations are still reporting the news.

And that truism is at the crux of why newspapers are in a bad spot. They have been trapped in a terrible mindset that they are in the business of selling newspapers. The leap from paper to digital may be vast, but to newspaper publishers, it seemed like vaulting to a different business entirely, one they were loathe to get into. No matter what kind of lip service newspapers paid to the digital transformation, the most prominent paywall model out there, that of the New York Times, still protects print subscriptions with a tiered digital pricing strategy – one so annoying that it motivated its former digital design director to complain publicly about the entire signup process.

from MediaFile:

Why can’t Facebook and Twitter say the A-word?

What’s the most uncool word in social media?

Advertising.

Just look at the pains the top social networking companies take to avoid uttering the dreaded term.

Twitter started the trend when it rolled out its advertising products in 2010, which it dubbed “promoted Tweets.” Chief Executive Dick Costolo (who was COO at the time) insisted that the marketing pitches coming to Twitter were not ads at all – they were simply standard Twitter messages that companies could pay to promote.

Now Facebook, which derived 85 percent of its revenue from advertising last year, has developed a similar aversion to the A word.

At a splashy marketing event in New York on Wednesday, the company introduced a new ad format that will allow big brand marketers to push information directly into users’ newsfeeds and onto other prominent on-screen real-estate. The word “advertising” was conspicuously absent from the somewhat vague name of the new ad format: “Premium on Facebook.”

Facebook executive Mike Hoefflinger (pictured, right)  even delivered a whole on-stage spiel about why Facebook’s new ads were in fact not ads, but “stories.”

from Anthony De Rosa:

Facebook brings new ad opportunities to brands

Facebook unveiled a number of new opportunities for advertising on their social network today, the biggest being the ability to post ads to mobile devices, which they had not yet been offering.

Facebook calls the new ad opportunities "Premium for Facebook" and it opens up the following placements:

• Larger ads on the side of the Facebook home page that users see when they first log in
• Ads that run inside the Facebook Newsfeed
• Ads on mobile devices
• Ads that appear when a user logs out of Facebook
• The ability to run video ads on all these placements

We were not aware of just how many folks were using Facebook on mobile until they filed for their IPO. According to the filing, there were 425 million monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile products in December 2011. This gives advertisers another opportunity to get their products in front of Facebook users. Mobile is growing at an incredible pace. eMarketer estimates Facebook’s ad rev will pass $5 billion this year, accounting for 6.5% of all online ad spending. That doesn't even factor in the new ad opportunities they've unveiled today.

Here's more on the way Facebook makes money from Reuters TV: Tech Tonic

from Emanuel Derman:

The A word

I recently ran into someone who I had always regarded as more or less compos mentis, but they told me quite seriously that the Rothschilds ran the world because they owned countries rather than corporations. Now, I'm not immune to the charms of conspiracy theories; some things in the world are so messed up that I can see how only a conspiracy could explain them. If a small cabal of invisible people ruled the world for their own profit and pleasure it very likely would turn out just the way it has, only probably a little more organized. Unless they are fiendishly clever and add the noise to make it look unplanned.

I think the real hidden conspiracy is the conspiracy of the A____'s and think they are to blame for screwing up the world, even if they are working in the service of the Rothschilds.

I refer to the Advertisers. I'm tired of anti-depressant ads. And I'm especially appalled at how advertising funds the fortunes of the giant internet companies, the manipulative G___'s and  F____'s.  I've grown to dislike advertising and the way it pays and affects so much. I particularly hate it for the fact that G___ and F____ make their money by delivering me to companies who pay for me to use it, which explains most of the bad things about G___ lately. Companies used to get paid for delivering eyeballs; now they get paid for delivering souls.

I wish people could pay their own money for what they want. There should be a law that prevents other people paying for your use of things if it compromises you, just like there's a law against bribery. Maybe having entertainment that doesn't violate you isn't impossible -- look at HBO and movies and books, still so far supported by paying customers.

I am sorry that a lot of Big Data (not all of it), a new and interesting field for quantitative people, is driven by pleasing advertisers too.

I thought of this again when I  read an article about Dwight Macdonald* in the latest NY Review of Books. (The article is behind the paywall -- hooray. If you want to read it you have to subscribe or go to a library that subscribes.) The article quotes Macdonald in the 1950s:

If the US doesn’t or cannot change its mass culture…it will lose the war against [the] USSR. Americans have been made into permanent adolescents by advertising, mass culture—uncritical, herdminded, pleasure-loving, concerned about trivia of materialistic living, scared of death, sex, old age….

from Stories I’d like to see:

A trove of stories from the Facebook IPO

Facebook’s landmark IPO filing suggests lots of meaty stories. Among them:

1. Facebook, third parties and data security:

Embedded in the typically long recitation of “risk factors” designed to shield IPO issuers from shareholder suits should things go wrong is a section of the prospectus that warns:

Our efforts to protect the information that our users have chosen to share using Facebook may be unsuccessful due to the actions of third parties ... If these third parties or Platform developers fail to adopt or adhere to adequate data security practices or fail to comply with our terms and policies, or in the event of a breach of their networks, our users’ data may be improperly accessed or disclosed. Any incidents involving unauthorized access to or improper use of the information of our users could damage our reputation and our brand and diminish our competitive position. In addition, the affected users or government authorities could initiate legal or regulatory action against us in connection with such incidents, which could cause us to incur significant expense and liability or result in orders or consent decrees forcing us to modify our business practices….

Not explained here is what protective mechanisms Facebook has to prevent these kinds of third-party security breaches and other abuses. Is the privacy and data protection of Facebook users only as strong as the weakest link among these third parties? Is there an Internet equivalent of the Gulf oil spill out there waiting to happen, after which Facebook points fingers at these third parties?

2. Facebook and the ad business:

from Breakingviews:

Facebook’s biggest risk lies in palm of your hand

By Robert Cyran The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

What’s the biggest risk facing Facebook? Hint: it may be in the palm of your hand. Half of the social network’s 845 million users now access the site through their cellphones, and that number is surging. Problem is Facebook currently receives virtually no display advertising revenue from small screens. The rapid shift to mobile Internet usage could be Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest threat - and he knows it.

In the United States, where Facebook made 56 percent of its $3.7 billion of revenue last year, sales of mobile devices outstripped those of PCs. While one of the first applications downloaded may be Facebook, the 90 million Americans who own smart phones are increasingly supplanting time spent on their computers with time on their mobiles.

That’s a problem for Facebook. Americans now spend about a quarter of their screen time in front of a computer, even though advertising dollars don’t yet reflect this shift away from television and other media. But ad sales are even further behind in the mobile environment, which is one reason Facebook reports negligible mobile ad revenue.

So far, this hasn’t retarded Facebook’s growth. It served up 42 percent more ads in 2011 at prices 18 percent higher than the year before. But Facebook’s growth has been decelerating as mobile internet usage has surged.

Advertisers will eventually become more comfortable with the mobile medium. Cellphone ads could even command a premium some day. The ability to pinpoint a customer’s location and target offers geographically should make everything from real estate to restaurant pitches more effective. But this could take a few years, leaving PC advertising-reliant Facebook in the lurch.

The bigger risk - which Facebook acknowledges in its prospectus - stems from the fact that rivals Apple and Google control the mobile operating systems powering 90 percent of smartphones sold in the United States. They’d be daft to restrict access to Facebook, given its popularity with consumers. And any hint of unfairly squelching Facebook would have antitrust regulators dusting off their Microsoft/Netscape playbooks.

from MediaFile:

Nearly every Super Bowl commercial, in one post

We are compiling all the Super Bowl commercials here so you don't have to. Once we've got most of them, we'll ask you to vote which one you think was the best. In the meantime, post what you think about the ones we have here in the comments below.

Aliens star in an ad for the Chevrolet Volt electric car

Matthew Broderick returns to his Ferris Buehler roots in this Honda commercial

Jerry Seinfeld shows up in a number of Acura ads.

Regis Philbin appears in a commercial where a Coke salesman wins free Pepsi.

Kraft will debut a new breakfast food called "belVita"

A car shopper's conscience unleashes his inner-Disco for Cars.com

from MediaFile:

Viacom chief Dauman plays down Nickelodeon ratings dip, sees more ads

Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman

Viacom Chief Executive Phillipe Dauman tried to play down the Nickelodeon surprise double-digit ratings drop in September as a Nielsen glitch which is being worked on and would not impact the upcoming quarter.

Dauman, speaking at a UBS Media and Technology investment conference, expressed his frustration at the issue but said there was little that could be done about it at this stage. He said "Nielsen is the only game in town".

He described the timing as unfortunate coming in the crucial September quarter ahead of the holiday season.

Dauman said the current quarter was looking a lot better

"The dynamics are good as we look to the  next quarter we expect to see strong ad growth. We're feeling very good about the transition from this difficult situation that we had."

from MediaFile:

As Nike sticks by a tarnished Penn St., others flee

The last 10 days have obviously tarnished the Penn State brand, and left advertisers, sponsors, and others closely associated with the university and its football program with some tough questions. Boiled down, it amounts to this: How far should you go to distance yourself from the crisis?

Fallout has already been heavy, so much so that Penn State has hired Ketchum to help the university navigate through the mess. Yet this may be one of those cases -- and there are many -- when the big PR firm is brought in too late.

"Penn St. has been incredibly tarnished, it's a huge hit to that brand," says Paul  Pierson, a partner at branding and design firm Carbone Smolan Agency. "Some of the most damaging things to the brand have already done, like the outpouring of support from the Penn State students for Paterno after the firing," he adds. "That made it look as though the school cared more about football than ethics."

Now the university is apparently considering removing its stadium's statue of Paterno, who was head coach of the Nittany Lions football team from 1966-2011. (A columnist for CBSSports.com, @greggdoyelcbs, Tweeted that Penn St. professors have told students that the statue will come down over Thanksgiving). Paterno's name has already been removed from the Big Ten's championship trophy. And all traces of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky -- the subject of the child abuse accusations -- are hurriedly being erased. (The picture at left shows artist Michael Pilato painted over the portion of his mural that showed Sandusky).

Keep in mind Paterno and the football team were once the university's best marketing tool. Just ask Nike, which has continued to stand by the university and its former coach. It has long been Penn State's footwear and uniform supplier.

How closely is Nike sticking with the school and its former coach? To the amazement of many, Nike hasn't indicated any plans to change the name of its Joe Paterno Child Development Center, a daycare facility on its Beaverton, Oregon campus.  In a statement, Nike said, "Our relationship with Penn State remains unchanged. We are deeply disturbed by the claims brought forth in the indictments. We will continue to monitor the situation closely. We have no current plans to change the name of our child care center."

Forbes writer Clare O'Connor ran all this past Prevent Child Abuse America's CEO James Hmurovich, who said the following: "What allegedly happened at Penn State should outrage our nation, and to find that a national brand will not distance itself from Penn State and Joe Paterno in this situation is equally disturbing."