My latest advisory, yet still optimistic tale contribution to Advertising Age’s Digital Next is live. Hopefully it will be in the next print issue as well.

Here’s a sneak preview:

When Habits Change Faster Than Ad Models
Venture capital and big-media acquisitions can’t bankroll social media forever

Posted on 05.02.08 @ 09:32 AM

Ian Schafer Ian Schafer also blogs at IanSchafer.com.
Technology is a funny thing. It enables humans to be capable of so much. It raises our potential to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

But so much of technology is hidden from plain view because it doesn’t make money. Financial gain is arguably the most important aspect of technological innovation, because without it, all but the most altruistic of reasons cease to exist.

We are living in a time in which the media we consume are undergoing the most rapid technological transformation since the advent of TV. Back then, there was a lot for companies to gain by having a TV in every home in America. It gave advertisers the ability to pitch their wares to TV’s captive audience. And over the years, those advertisers have shelled out billions upon billions of dollars continuing to do so because it was perhaps the best-performing media, but one that delivered a passive audience.

We are now witnessing a migration of ad dollars from lesser-performing media to online’s active audience.

Even within a rapidly growing medium such as the web, there is a still more-quickly growing form of online media that we call social media. This includes social networks, blogs, virtual worlds, widgets, applications, communities and any other format where the individuals who use it create or distribute the majority of the content.

Read the rest over at AdAge.com by clicking here.

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It’s been a while, but SXSW finally got my 2008 panel titled Blogs, Buzz, and Buddy Lists posted online.

Here’s the description:

Blogs, Buzz, and Buddy Lists

SXSW Interactive PodcastsUse the Internet before the Internet uses you. Thanks to blogs, web-video, and social networking sites, the online universe is a valuable (but no less intimidating) landscape for artists. How do you get the best out of blogs and other sites, to maximize your potential for an audience. Or, how do you get yourself introduced to the booming industry of online journalism and video sharing? These experts dig deep into these ever-changing trends.

Paul Harrill Lovell Films

Karina Longworth Film Blogger, Spout.com

Alison Willmore IFC

Ian Schafer CEO, Deep Focus

Victor Pineiro Writer/Producer, Second Skin

Listen to the panel here! It was most definitely a good one.

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The onset of digital media has enabled communication, information, and news to flow quicker than ever before. The sheer velocity of information has had devastating effects on the newspaper industry (at least the printed elements) and consumers have changed their behavior to adapt.

No longer do we have to wait until the 11pm local newscast to find out what happened in our city. We don’t even have to respect the anchorperson’s request to stay tuned until after the commercial break to hear about a news story. We can just go to any number of websites to get that news before that brief break is over.

When an online news source breaks some piece of information (with our without fact-checking), blogs swoop in to comment, and news aggregator (i.e. Digg) users vote stories up, and they become ‘the news’. And the more news becomes endorsed by the people reading it, the more ‘true’ it feels. Fact-checked or not.

I recently saw a panel at SXSW on the online behavior of teens and tweens, and when a few of the teenaged panelists mentioned that they got their news from Digg, it made me shudder. As great of a tool as Digg is for finding interesting pieces of online content, it’s not a news source. Just an ‘interesting content’ recommendation engine.

But even journalists and professional bloggers use recommendation engines. They’re out there; techmeme is an example. And sometimes those recommendation engines are other journalists and bloggers. In this new era of online journalism, these recommendations have become known as ‘memes’. Wikipedia defines a ‘meme’ as consisting of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.

While memes often reflect important topics, they also have the potential to create stagnant monologues that doesn’t necessarily get us anywhere — eventually just turning what should be solution-deriving conversations, into noise. That’s when memes make the leap from becoming units of cultural information and legitimate conversation to being momentum-generated waves of propaganda. Or, as I will business cliche-ify, memeoganda.

What used to be called ‘trend pieces’ are now being ripped from the headlines of blogs and even other publications. The biggest culprits tend to be traditional (especially print) media, and overzealous bloggers (in fact, I randomly stumbled upon this post by Mark Evans on the topic of blog topics via Techmeme) looking to capitalize on popular conversations/memes.

When journalists in traditional publications stop having original things to say, or just have the same ruminations on existing problems without offering up solutions, we get classic memeoganda. Lately, I’ve seen examples of memoganda regarding the ad industry ranging from the ‘death of ad networks’ to ‘facebook’s demise’ to ‘google click volume’ to ‘the death of the music industry’ to even the state of the economy/recession.

These trend pieces get written so quickly and so close to each other, that while they may raise awareness of important topics, they water down the depth of the coverage, and result in a stream of ‘also-ran’ stories.

I started writing this blog post last night, and right on cue, this morning Techcrunch tells us about a new startup called Publish2 that will make memoganda even easier by providing journalists and newsrooms with their own Digg-like resource for finding out what’s hot.

You know, maybe it’s just me, but I yearn for the days when journalists broke hot stories rather than write about stories that are already hot. Memeoganda is sucking the life out of investigative journalism and seems to be more about finding new and exciting ways to conjure up ad inventory than to publish content with depth and meaning. And while stories that yield more ad inventory (read: linkbaiting) can be good bottom-line revenue band-aid, they are not the solution to mainstream journalism’s woes.

The long-term answer is to strive to be the best at what you do. Break the news that matters. Investigate the broken news deeper. Don’t fall prey to the easiness of spreading memeoganda.

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AgencySpy asked:

“Hey, Ian? What’s the mission statement for Deep Focus when approaching social media? The definition of social media and its associated technology is always being debated, so what are you defining that as? What are you offering clients and what are you working on right now?”

And I responded with a diatribe that started with:

“We believe that Social Media is actually a medium within a medium. Social Media is not search, nor is it direct response, nor is it ‘branding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a medium where most of, if not all content is created by the people that use it. It is involvement. Passion. Influence. Passive and active recommendations. Connectivity. Collaboration. Our simplest definition of Social Media is any area of a digital experience where a majority of the content is either created or influenced by users. There is a very different set of consumer behaviors that occur when reading, writing, or responding to a blog post, or sharing thoughts, actions, and experiences via social networks. Social media is dificult-to-control participatory media, which makes it an environment that makes advertisers uncomfortable.

And you know what? Good.

Uncomfortable situations have the potential to bring out the best in us. They can keep us on our toes. They can sharpen our communication skills. They can improve our relationships by understanding what got us into those awkward relationships to begin with. Advertisers that can accept that they are in an uncomfortable relationship with their customers (and want to improve those relationships) are the ones that are most ready for a foray into Social Media.”

Want a good look under the hood at Deep Focus? Read the rest by clicking here.

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Lots of folks are blogging about Friendfeed today.

While I do see that there could be a niche for a feed/update/sharing aggregator, this just feels a tad overwhelming. It’s a bit like being in a room full of people where there are hundreds of conversations going on, and I can’t pay attention to just one.

As a professional, I need something that’s easier on the eyes, more compact. Not a long list of things that I have to sort through. This just doesn’t do it for me. In its current state, it feels a bit like TMI (too much information). Maybe it’s not for me, per se. Maybe it’s more for students and kids. Time will tell.

With that said, it does have potential. Perhaps an open API, or some clever uses of its RSS feeds could make this more useful. It just seems like a collector right now. What I think it needs is to get smart. I’d want it to prioritize my closest friends’ feeds for me. Show me the ones that are most important. Learn from my clicks.

Those are my two cents.

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I love when good people get noticed not just for being good, but for being smart. And witty.

Check out AgencySpy’s coverage of MediaPost’s coverage of Adweek reporter Brian Morrissey’s use of Twitter. I wish every journalist gave us a window into themselves like this. It makes you want to follow them more (and not just in the Twitter-sense).

“Still amazes me that when I ask flacks, what’s noteworthy about this, they often don’t have an answer.”

And not only does he use Twitter effectively, he also blogs well as well.

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Newsgroper, one of the funniest sites on the intertubes, has just launched ad critic Bob Garfield’s official blog.

I don’t know who’s going to be writing it, but stay tuned kids. It’s probably going to be REALLY good.

And all you journalists out there? Make sure you pay attention to News Groper’s new tagline of “THESE BLOGS ARE NOT REAL”. Apparently, that wasn’t obvious enough before they changed it from “NEWS ANALYSIS BY NEWSMAKERS”. MSNBC was oblivious to it, and apparently Jack Thompson (the anti-video game one that didn’t run for president) was too, with humorous results.

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Rachel Marsden’s blog post here, discusses what she sees as a ‘broken’ model for blog advertising, and how it perhaps is contributing to alarmingly low levels of online political ad spending.

Well, two things here.

First, the vast majority of blogs run some form of cost-per-click advertising like Google’s AdWords. And yes. A blogger will only get paid if people click on the ads, which means they don’t get rewarded for pageviews. But there are ways around this. There are networks like BlogAds that sell ads based upon a CPM. But the blogs that will appeal most to advertisers are going to be the most popular blogs on particular subject matters. That leaves blogs that may attract the 300 most influential people on the internet out of luck. I wish there was a way to measure individual reader value, but unfortunately, there just isn’t. The only hope is to get ‘recognized’ by an advertiser and to work with them directly. That’s what happened with TechCrunch, and they’ve been able to parlay that into a pretty good business.

The other thing is worth spending some time on. MediaPost reports that only $20 million out of $5 billion in political ad spending will go online. And half of that $20 million is going to search.

Half going to search?

This is a classic case of advertisers giving way too much credit to ‘the last click’. There are many factors that get people to search for terms in the first place. Display advertising is one of them. There are millions of undecided voters out there, and they are doing more than ’searching’ for candidates and issues. They are dedicated and loyal readers of blogs, members of communities, and creators of content. Odds are, they are spending more time reading than searching. Why spend so much capturing the low hanging fruit (search) when you can be influencing what the searches are for (display)?

I love search as much as the next guy — especially when it’s about making some kind of sale. And while politics may be the ultimate sales job, there’s just more at stake to me than the sell. There are ideals. Ideas. Our future. Somehow limiting a political message to a few lines of 17 characters seems less like a political statement and more like a political haiku. Politics should be more brand positioning and less direct response. The political message is just too complicated.

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I’ll be taking a little vacation next week, but that doesn’t mean that IanSchafer.com will get any less riveting.

In my stead will be two of the most brilliant people I know, Nick Braccia and Dana Deskiewicz, both of whom are Creative Directors here at Deep Focus. These guys have been tearing up the internal Deep Focus blog, and I figured unleashing them on y’all couldn’t hurt. They’ve got not only an amazing understanding of creative and technology, but also of media, communications, sociology, anthropology, and anime.

Plus, the pressure’s on them and they know they have to impress me. So get ready to get some serious knowledge dropped upon you by two gents who I’m sure will want to look really good by keeping my blog interesting for a week.

Good luck Nick and Dana. We’re all counting on you.

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Keith Richman is a guy that really gets it. Up until a few months ago, that was only evident in the success of Break.com. Now, Break’s got a slew of sites, targeted to men, like CagePotato, HolyTaco, and Chickipedia.

Watch Rafat Ali’s (PaidContent) interview with Keith at NATPE, where if I had a doppelganger, would be where I would be right now.

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