Nobody likes to be wrong, including the people who run media companies. That’s why you haven’t heard them say things like, “We think the advertising market is recovering!” At a time when every day might bring a fresh descent into financial hell as financial companies and automakers totter, media companies reeling from ad revenue declines are hesitant to say that they’ve hit a bottom.

But consider some of the comments that Viacom executives made during their conference call with Wall Street bean counters this morning to discuss quarterly financial results. Here they are as they appeared in the alerts we sent out on the wire:

• 08:12 30Apr2009 RTRS-VIACOM INC’S <VIAb.N> CEO SAYS NOT SEEING ANY FURTHER DETERIORATION IN THE ADVERTISING MARKET
• 08:33 30Apr2009 RTRS-VIACOM INC’S <VIAb.N> CEO SAYS CUSTOMERS ARE STARTING TO FEEL MORE CONFIDENT ABOUT A RECOVERY EMERGING LATER IN THE YEAR AND GOING INTO NEXT YEAR
• 08:34 30Apr2009 RTRS-VIACOM INC’S <VIAb.N> CEO SAYS “WE’RE FEELING CONSIDERABLY BETTER” THAN TWO OR THREE MONTHS AGO

That sounds suspiciously like optimism. It also fits in with some of the comments that we’ve heard from newspaper publishers such as USA Today owner Gannett Co Inc. Magazine publisher and local TV station owner Meredith Corp had similar thoughts about the ad outlook.

The general story is: We’re still dealing with ad declines when we look forward to the rest of the year, and we’re not saying we’re all that happy about it, but knowing the rate of decline is not worsening is a good sign… if you think about it.

So, what will Rupert Murdoch tell us when News Corp reports its results next week? Murdoch’s recent statements have been pessimistic, but maybe Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman is laying a path for Rupert to tell his employees and investors something they want to hear.

Keep an eye on

• Peter Chernin. The outgoing News Corp No. 2 might do many things after he splits, but joining Viacom isn’t one of them. (Los Angeles Times)
• Swine Flu! It might be bad for you, but it sure is good for companies that get rich from you going hog wild over trying to keep your hands clean. (The Wall Street Journal)
• Baltimore Chainsaw Massacre. Welcome to the new, leaner, meaner Baltimore Sun, courtesy of Tribune Co. The Sun’s management calls it a plan for success, not just survival. (Reuters)(The Sun)

(Photo:Reuters)

Media mogul Sumner Redstone credits fish, Grey Goose vodka and plain hard work for giving him “the health of a 20-year-old.” 

The octogenarian head of CBS Corp and Viacom Inc told CNN talk show host Larry King at the Milken Institute Global Conference that he made a “miracle recovery” from prostate cancer due to his “highly disciplined” consumption of “every antioxidant known to man” even when he doesn’t feel like it.

“My doctor says that he’s seen a lot of men slow down the aging process but I am the only man who has reversed it,” Redstone crowed at the hour-long interview that packed two conference rooms at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Wednesday in Beverly Hills.

Sumner, also repeatedly insisted, to King’s annoyance, that he is 65 years old.
   

“Suddenly you don’t look so amazing,” King retorted.

Sumner is 85.

That robust health and need for a challenge extends to every aspect of his life: “The most attractive women are married,” the recently divorced Redstone told King. “Sometimes a husband doesn’t count.”

In between tales of business, baseball and the Massachusetts General Hospital burn unit, which helped him make a miracle recovery from severe burns suffered in a hotel fire, Redstone said he keeps healthy by eating fish most days, exercising for 15 minutes and downing a shot or so of vodka and a half glass of wine each day.

He has “no intention of retiring or of dying.”

– Blog post written by Gina Keating.

There is no better way to learn about the art of product placement than to learn from the masters. Today, that means Microsoft Corp and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, both of which were the subject of articles about how they’re delivering their messages like little pills wrapped in the sugar coating of the entertainment you consume.

Ad Age:

Can Microsoft market its way out of the search basement? Probably not, but it’s going to try, entrusting [ad] agency JWT to craft a campaign for its new search engine, alternately dubbed Kumo or Project Kiev or Live Search, depending on who’s talking about it. … The service is being tested and is expected to make its debut in the summer. … Industry executives expect JWT, part of WPP, to unveil an estimated $80 million to $100 million push for the new search engine in June, with online, TV, print and radio executions. Microsoft spent $361 million on U.S. measured media in 2008, the bulk of it devoted to brand advertising and smaller chunks to other Microsoft brands such as Xbox and MSN, according to TNS Media Intelligence data.

The New York Times:

The huge [Gates] foundation, brimming with billions of dollars from Mr. Gates and Warren Buffett, is well known for its myriad projects around the world to promote health and education. It is less well known as a behind-the-scenes influencer of public attitudes toward these issues by helping to shape story lines and insert messages into popular entertainment like the television shows “ER,” “Law & Order: SVU” and “Private Practice.” The foundation’s messages on H.I.V. prevention, surgical safety and the spread of infectious diseases have found their way into these shows.

Now the Gates Foundation is set to expand its involvement and spend more money on influencing popular culture through a deal with Viacom, the parent company of MTV and its sister networks VH1, Nickelodeon and BET. It could be called “message placement”: the social or philanthropic corollary to product placement deals in which marketers pay to feature products in shows and movies. Instead of selling Coca-Cola or G.M. cars, they promote education and healthy living.

The Times story uses expert comments from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been doing this issue placement for years, and gave advice to the Gates Foundation about how to do this. One of the Kaiser officials told the Times that this “is not about planting a message.”

That’s exactly what Viacom must have been thinking when it was depositing Gates’s check.

Keep an eye on:

• Job cuts at Conde Nast and Forbes made an inordinate amount of news on Wednesday, even though they’ve already been gut-gut-gutting away. (MediaMemo at AllThingsD)
• Old media cable TV executives discuss strategies for making money when there’s less of it running around. (PaidContent)
• The Newspaper Association of America doesn’t generally crave publicity about the sad state of the business these days, but there’s an exception to every rule. Maybe that’s why the NAA got CEO John Sturm onto the Colbert report of all places. Our favorite part: Colbert suggested newspapers consider product-placement in stories, took a shot at the New York Times and asked Sturm: “If you’re serious about wanting to compete on the Internet, why don’t newspapers have a huge porn section?” (Chicago Tribune)

(Photo: Reuters)

The big highlight of the McGraw-Hill media summit in New York when NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker took a couple of shots at Jon Stewart.

But our favorite story came at the end of the day, courtesy of Viacom top dog Philippe Dauman. The background to this story was a question about Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google’s YouTube  over copyright infringement.

That led Dauman to mention that his son, Phillippe Dauman Jr., happens to work at… wait for it… Google.

Here’s the CEO’s described the chain of events that led to his son’s hiring:

“It just so happens that he was being interviewed at business school by someone at Google on the very day we sent our massive takedown notice.

So he called me up the next day, Saturday. ‘Dad you really screwed me up.’

I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I had no idea.

‘I had a great interview with Google yesterday,’ he said. ‘And they aren’t going to hire me.’

I said, ‘Oh? Well, you’re right, they probably won’t. But you’re a smart kid and you’ll get lots of offers.’

Now I give Google a lot of credit because his interviewer — who was actually a very  senior guy — called him the next week. ‘We liked you,’ he said. But he couldn’t escape who my son was because he’s, well, a junior. But he told my son they make offers on merit, and he invited him out to Mountain View and ran him through the computerized tests — and he got a job offer.

It was actually down in the end between Apple and Google, he had offers from both companies. So my son called me up. ‘I know you have this thing with Google,’ he said. ‘But I really liked Google. I told him Google’s a great company, and we have a dispute at the moment at the top, but it’s still a great company.

‘You should go there.’

The next time I saw Eric Schmidt — because I did find out they ran it up the flagpole to him because it involved my son — I said to him, ‘I admire what you did. It could have come out differently.’

And my son’s doing very well there. He loves it. But we agreed, and my son is meticulous about this, that we don’t talk about it.”

And what exactly does Philippe Dauman Jr do at Google?

“He’s in content acquisition.”

(Picture: Reuters)

Current valuations for media companies must have opened up some opportunities for dealmaking, right? It’s hard to argue that things aren’t getting cheap.

Well, two of the industry’s top dogs, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, seem to have differing views on whether the media meltdown makes for a good time to wheel and deal. Both were asked about it during presentations at the Deutsche Bank Annual Media & Telecommunications Conference.

Dauman said Viacom, owner of MTV and Paramount, wants to focus on internal growth, mentioning Nickelodeon’s international expansion and the Colors television channel in India. “I continue to believe that we are better off investing in growing our own brands than spending significant money on acquisitions,” he said “I don’t see our using huge dollars to make an acquisition anytime soon.”

Bewkes left the door slightly more ajar. He said a lot of the assets or companies out there — “you can fill in the usual suspects” — have previously been way overpriced. “Up ’til now, those things have been around at prices that just don’t provide a return,” he said.

Deals may now make more sense. “We have room for acquisitions if there are real opportunities out there that don’t represent stupid prices or acquisitions risks,” he said when asked if they were on the prowl.

Time Warner, of course, knows a thing of two about stupid prices and acquisition risks.

Speaking of which… Not surprisingly, Bewkes was asked about AOL. He provided fairly stock answers, saying he was disappointed in ad sales and would still consider a deal for the troubled web business. “We always remain open for scale combinations that put any of our businesses in a better position,” he said. “We remain open to that.”

(Photo: Reuters)

How bad is the advertising market? Pretty bad, says Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman. And it’s only going to get uglier.

“It is clear that while as cable network owners we are in a more favorable media segment than most, advertising comps are likely to get worse before they get better,” he said on a conference call today.

This comment may seem dry, but we’re totally ready to cut him some slack since it came shortly after this poetic gem: “And despite the orgy of pessimism prevalent of the late, the economic tide in our economy and our industry will rise again.”

Dauman, whose job means he oversees MTV, VH-1, Comedy Central and so on, assessed the situation this way: Advertisers who committed dollars during the upfront for the first quarter are holding solid, but are getting shaky for the second quarter.

Viacom finance whiz Tom Dooley expanded on that. “In terms of second-quarter option exercises, many of the moves have been shifting dollars from quarter-to-quarter. Some advertisers have done so but come back later in the quarter to make smaller buys in the scatter market. It is this activity combined with the overall economic trends which leads us to believe that ad market will get worse before it gets better.”

Not exactly an orgy of optimism, guys.

(Photo: Reuters)

We were talking the other day about job cuts — more specifically about who would be next to feel the axe blade. We’d seen big cuts at Viacom, Omnicom, Warner Brothers and Time Inc, and, you know, it obviously didn’t take a genius to figure more were coming.

The next day: A memo from AOL Chief Executive Randy Falco announces that the Internet unit of Time Warner will cut 700 jobs, or about 10 percent of its workforce;  Reader’s Digest says it will cut 8 percent of its staff.

And now we come to Walt Disney Co, which is cutting about 5 percent of its workforce through a combination of 200 layoffs and a job freeze on another 200 positions.

“After months of making hard decisions across our businesses to help us adjust to a weakening economy, we’re now faced with the harsh reality of having to eliminate jobs in some areas,” Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney-Media Networks and president of Disney-ABC Television, said in a memo sent to workers and obtained by Reuters.

So now it’s worth asking yet again: Who is next?

Could it be News Corp? Portfolio reports that The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom “is due to undergo another round of personnel cuts late next week. It’s unclear exactly how many employees will be affected, but two sources put the number of people being targeted at 50.”

And FishBowlNY reports that the “entire staff of Page Six Magazine will be packing up their desks on the heels of today’s announcement that the weekly New York Post insert would move to a quarterly publication schedule.”

Keep an eye on:

• Dell Inc had a team working on developing a cellphone for more than a year and is now preparing to roll one out as early as next month, sources tell The Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com) 
• Dating A Banker Anonymous (http://dabagirls.wordpress.com), a blog started by two New Yorkers, has made waves on the blogosphere this week with its tales of woe (Reuters)
• Lack of confidence among clients is hitting the Chinese advertising market, clouding the outlook for revenue growth this year, the head of Internet media firm Sina Corp said in Davos (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Don’t ask The New York Times how much its new front-page display ads cost. The paper won’t say. That didn’t stop the New York Post from asking ad buyers. Here’s the answer based on anonymous sources:

$75,000 on weekdays and $100,000 on Sundays.

Assuming that the Post counts Saturday as a weekday, and assuming no discounts or other special deals (and assuming this blog post is not written by a reporter who nearly failed at least one high school math class), this works out to $28.6 million a year: $23.4 million for 52 weeks of Monday through Saturday and $5.2 million for a year’s worth of Sundays.

Despite the TImes’s silence, the ad cost sounds about right. The Wall Street Journal charges $90,000 for its front-page ads, not counting special discounts. Other details sound similar too. Here’s the Post:

Apparently, The Times is leveraging the front page space to get advertisers to increase their ad buys.

The paper is limiting the front page to big advertisers willing to spend more on top of their existing budgets.

A new advertiser who wants access to the space has to commit to buying the ad 26 times during the year - for a total of almost $2 million, ad buyers say. The Times has previously run classifieds on the front page.

The Journal’s program is similar: limit the front-page membership to big advertisers and get them to commit. CBS’s marketing chief George Schweitzer told us that the broadcaster has committed to a number of runs throughout the year, but declined to say more than that.

The front-page ad news, which the Times announced yesterday, might have stirred up some muttering in journalism academe like it did a few years ago when the Journal started doing it because purists aren’t crazy about sacrificing prime real estate for news on the altar of dirty profit. Nowadays, folks are a little less squeamish about making the big sale, especially when considering the health of the newspaper business.

On a side note, the Post –  now a sister paper of the Journal under New York Times enemy Rupert Murdoch — story tries to have it both ways. It notes that the Times is late to the game, yet runs a caption over a picture of black-eyed Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr that says that he is “smashing the paper of record’s vaunted Chinese wall between news and advertising by peddling front-page space.”

Apparently there’s no honorable way to make a buck in journalism.

Keep an eye on

• CBS and Time Warner reach fresh broadcast deal. Now you can keep letting your brain atrophy on television. (Reuters)
• Washington Post No. 2 newsman Phil Bennett resigns, goes to work on a project about the future of news elsewhere in the Post (They must have this project around for everyone they oust. Remember Susan Glasser). That keeps the paycheck coming until he gets his next job. This happens right after post.com Web chief Jim Brady splits after chafing under a new layer of management and frustration because of ongoing print-vs-Web issues. Meanwhile, new Post editor and former Wall Street Journal top editor Marcus Brauchli might bring in former colleague Raju Narisetti, late of India’s Mint business daily. Next week on 90210! (Wall Street Journal)
• If you think that newspapers slept through technology changes in the past 50 years, you would be WRONG. Jack Shafer explains why, and does it a lot better than I’ve managed to do over countless barroom conversations with all my friends who hate newspapers. (Slate)

(Photo: “Spiderman” Alain Robert got free front-page advertising on the New York Times. Not in the paper but on the building. We recommend a different advertising strategy that won’t get you arrested. Reuters)

Who was the big winner in the Time Warner Cable-Viacom dispute? A few newspapers, it seems, since they got a little extra holiday cash when Viacom decided to take out some advertisements and take their fight with the cable operator public.

Otherwise, the outcome is what many expected: the two sides reached a deal and nobody missed a single episode of “The Hills” or “Dora the Explorer.”

Indeed, here’s what Bernstein analyst Michael Nathanson predicted on New Year’s Eve, just when the fight between Viacom and Time Warner over fees was really heating up:  “As has been the norm, we would expect a settlement — terms undisclosed — in a relatively quick manner, as both sides may not want to see if this battle results in mutually assured destruction, as Viacom loses ad dollars and Time Warner loses subscribers.”

So what happened after a buildup that included advertisements splashed across newspapers like The New York Times and LA Times, leaflets passed out in Times Square, several increasingly snarky press releases from the companies accusing one another of being stubborn?

Nothing much, frankly.

The two sides reached a deal and issued this statement and a quote from their respective CEOs. “Time Warner Cable and Viacom jointly announced this morning that they have reached an agreement in principle to renew carriage for Viacom’s MTV Networks. The companies expect to finalize the details of the agreement over the next several days.”

But all this doesn’t mean that the disagreement wasn’t a big deal. Just the opposite. That Viacom and Time Warner would go to such lengths to make their fight public indicates just how much is at stake right now — both in terms of dollars and precedent — in these deals. Expect more to come.

Keep an eye on:

• U.S. album sales slid for a seventh time in eight years in 2008 as growth in the digital arena, one of the few bright spots in the ailing music industry, slowed (Reuters)
• Newspapers have increasingly sought to mitigate  staff cuts with alliances and partnerships with former rivals (Editor & Publisher)

(Reuters photo of spectators watching as a Dora the Explorer balloon floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade)

Viacom and Time Warner Cable are doing their best to make sure that television addicts around the country get a chance to go outside and stretch their legs come New Year’s Day. Of course, the reason they’re doing their part for physical fitness has little to do with ensuring the health of their viewers.

As Reuters reports, Viacom — the company run by financially challenged media mogul Sumner Redstone — provides programming to cable networks like Time Warner Cable for a fee. Now we’re at a time when Viacom and Time Warner Cable are renegotiating the fee, a regular occurrence. Equally regular are the disputes that arise as the negotiators try to determine what a fair price is.

The ultimate loser turns out to be you, the faithful TV watcher, because the last resort of companies like Viacom is to pull their programs off the air. The idea is that sends watchers into paroxysms of rage, usually directed at the cable company that they give all their money to every month. Eventually, the idea goes, the cable company cries Uncle! and agrees to pay more money to bring you the programming. Yes, your bill goes up too, as it always does.

Here’s a sample of what will stop being broadcast on Jan. 1: Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Hills.

And here’s a sample of the pre-packaged righteous indignation that you hear at times like this from the companies:

Viacom: Time Warner Cable has dismissed our efforts at a fair compromise… As a result, we are sorry to say that for Time Warner Cable customers our networks will go dark as of 12:01 on January 1st.

Time Warner Cable, via spokesman Alex Dudley: “It just smacks of desperation from a company that is trying to make up for a failing business model on our subscribers’ backs, and we’re not going to take it.”

Don’t worry C-SPAN will continue uninterrupted.

Keep an eye on

• Speaking of cable, the 24-hour news channels got record ratings this year, though it looks like they would have made Obama race against McCain for another year, if just to keep them relevant until the financial crisis is expected to ease. (Los Angeles Times)
• The Village Voice continues to shed the names that made its name so famous. The latest axe casualty is Nat Hentoff, the influential jazz critic who started there in 1958. Sketches of Pain, anyone? (The New York Times)
• Vicki Iseman, intentionally or not, was kind enough to wait until after John McCain lost his 2008 presidential bid to sue The New York Times over its February 2008 article that the lobbyist said suggested that she and the Arizona senator were carrying on inappropriately in more ways than one. (Reuters)