ChasNote

Last Friday at Butler Shine’s Influx Ideas conference, Jonah Bloom presented his take on the future of advertising. One point in particular resonated for me (among many, many interesting points): A generation ago, there was no such thing as an industry serving our personal storage needs. In 2006, storing the stuff we don’t use is a $23 billion business in the US alone.

There are two ways to make sense of this development. One, an extrapolation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in Nickel and Dimed, would be that housing costs have inflated more quickly than the rest of the stuff that goes in the house — so we all have more stuff than house to keep it in. Or two, Bloom’s perspective, is that our material needs in this country are more than fulfilled, we literally have more goods than we need or use. (I’m guessing both would agree that the non-material needs of the US population — say affordable health care or good public schools — are yet a long way from fulfillment for most.)

To an audience of marketers and agency folks, Bloom’s message was pointed. Successful brands need to move beyond pitching their products and services as goods to fulfill existing customer needs — the rational, direct-response side of marketing. They need to move into the emotional arena of creating “wants” that their brands fulfill. The desire, say, to be seen as hip or fashionable or smart or innovative. In West Coast media circles, this demand-creation concept is often dismissed as irrational, and the people who encourage it (brand marketing departments, agency execs, publishers and, of course, New Yorkers) as the “friction” that technology should eliminate.

I wonder what Starbucks, with their $4 lattes, and Porsche, with VW parts hiding beneath a premium brand and price tag, would say to a future of advertising based on rational thinking?

Dave McClure asked his “Facebook As A Platform” panelists — SocialMedia’s Seth Goldstein, iLike’s Ali Partovi, Slide’s Keith Rabois, and RockYou’s Lance Tokuda — to comment on Kara Swisher’s suggestion that all the Facebook apps are useless. At her site today, she says “To these folks, ’silly, useless and time-wasting’ is apparently a business model.”

Some persuasive evidence by the panelists that a business model is developing fast:

Slide’s Rabois reminded us that several other useless and time-wasting industries — music, movies, TV and watching sports — add up to about a trillion dollars in revenues, if taken together.

iLike’s Partovi said his company’s music app for Facebook, just four months into its existence, currently drives more traffic to iTunes than any other source and is the #3 traffic source for Ticketmaster. Gotta be some money there.

I had dinner last night with another Facebook apps player, Graffiti Wall’s Mark Kantor. Graffiti has 8 million users so far, and FM works with them to explore advertiser interest. So far, so good. Yesterday HP’s Imaging and Printing Group announced the launch of a new a partnership with Graffiti. Others have already signed contracts; I won’t share names since the campaigns haven’t yet launched. We teamed up with Graffiti less than a month ago, though, it’s my guess that they’ll be a profitable company starting next month.

I was on a panel this morning with Mary Hodder of Dabble and Susan Bratton of Personal Life Media, discussing revenue models for online video and audio. Stat from Mary: Each day 300,000 new video files are uploaded to the web. Stat from Ask A Ninja’s Kent Nichols: In August 07, there were 9.7 billion searches and 9.1 billion video views. Wow, that’s something to think about. Someone asked me how much money we’re all talking about; I said we should start by taking that $5 billion (3% of $162 billion in US TV spend) that Nielsen just announced is wasted because no one is watching. After that, we should take a look at the other $157 billion. Hey, maybe Nielsen is being generous to the networks.

From Ad Age:

“Initial commercial-ratings data, released for the first time by Nielsen Media Research today, reveal total viewership for commercial breaks on the five broadcast networks is on average 3% lower than it is for live viewing of programs those ads support.”

Call it $162 billion invested in US TV advertising each year. That’s $4,860,000,000 spent on viewers who didn’t see your ad. Oops.

I like to see so many FM partners on PC Magazine’s list of Favorite 100 Blogs: Ars Technica, Boing Boing, The Bargainist, Core77, Dethroner, GigaOM, Make, Mashable, NewTeeVee, OhGizmo, Parent Hacks, TechCrunch, UberGizmo, Uncrate, We Make Money Not Art, and Web Worker Daily.

All of us at FM are feeling the benefits of conversational marketing more directly as of today: As part of a broader sponsorship deal, Rackspace has offered discounted hosting services to all FM sites, including our own blog!

Morgan Webb’s daily tech and gaming news program WebbAlert launched on Rackspace back in August, and Battelle’s Searchblog is moving over shortly as well.

This doesn’t mean every FM site is required to change its hosting solution, if its current situation is working. It means that Rackspace understands the “federated” model, and it’s giving leading, independent authors the opportunity to tap enterprise-grade IT services (and pricing terms), even though they’re not yet giant enterprises.

Thanks, Rackspace!

My colleague James Gross put together a great program that paired Diggnation with Ask.com. From James:

“Ask.com wanted to engage with the ‘cultural antennas’ that can be found at Digg by driving consideration for their search engine by showing off their new, rich interface. (One of those cultural antennas, Morgan Webb, apparently watches Diggnation.) By working with Diggnation’s rock stars (check out the video, they really are) Ask.com was able to give the Diggnation community bonus video of backstage footage from the Diggnation London launch. The sponsorship video went live on Friday night and within 3 hours it had over 200 diggs [now over 300, ed.] and was on the home page of Digg.com

.

“The only way to see the video was to go to Ask.com and type in Diggnation (here’s the Ask.com results page). This allowed Ask to show off some of the new features of their search engine, including their rich media interface that differentiates their services in many ways from their competitors.

“During the sponsored episode Kevin and Alex show off Ask.com’s new features around blogs, smart search, media, news and more.”

Video of the sponsor steps can be seen here.

And he launched a blog — called My Free HP Blackbird 002, nice win for HP if Cannis builds a following — to tell the world how he learned about HP’s marketing campaign and the Blackbird give-away. He promises to share photos soon.

“I’m a computer geek, I spend all of my days working with routers, and firewalls, and hotspot captive portals, and I go home and I fool around with routers, firewalls, hotspot captive portals, and World of Warcraft. So there I am sitting on my arse watching some episodes of Diggnation that I had missed and browsing http://digg.com/, when I notice a small video in the upper right hand corner of the Digg interface. The clip grabbed my attention because it’s highlight frame was a Gnome Mage just chillin and it looked like he was going to do something cool.”

It sounds like Blackbird 002 landed in capable hands!

Boing Boing TV topped the Today’s Top Podcast list for the tech category, meaning — I think — that Boing Boing TV added more new iTunes subscribers today than any other tech program. (I love to see Diggnation and WebbAlert helping to fill out the top ten!)

The press, too, seems to like what they’re seeing.

The Chicago Tribune:

“As a kind of unbound catalog showcasing what’s ingenious, ignoble or otherwise provocative on the Net, Boing Boing is one of the few sites that deserves to be a fixture in the Bookmarks Toolbar…. Despite the confines of the conventional anchor-and-clip format, it still comes close to being the same loose-limbed feat of curation that the blog has been. Now, however, the emphasis is on what can be shown rather than described, on the image rather than the link….. Boing Boing TV is already a winning effort. But given its pedigree and the rich store of material to draw from, expect it to move closer to must-see as it ventures outside of the studio and into new experiments with content generated by site devotees — and as its makers get a better handle on what can and should be done in the confines of a daily Web video segment.”

The LA Times:

“The show … brings an arty, tech-savvy intellectualism to the online TV realm. Seven-year-old BoingBoing has gained its hipster cred by culling from the vast pool of ephemera on the Web the oddest bits that reflect the Internet zeitgeist. Readers flood the e-mail in-boxes of BoingBoing’s co-editors with URLs and ideas, hoping to prompt a post, and each contributor is credited. The video site will eventually incorporate reader input as well.”

The NY Times (reg required):

“Boing Boing is, by some definitions, one of the leading media sites for young technologically aware folks. And that’s a lot of folks. Since going online in 2000 — it began as a paper ‘zine conceived by Mr. Frauenfelder in 1989 — Boing Boing has become one of the five most visited blogs on the Web, according to Comscore, with a monthly traffic of about 7.5 million page views a month. According to Google, more than 600,000 sites link to the site, making it a maypole for technologists around the world…. None of this necessarily spells doom for established media brands, some of which, when you think about it, have done very well on the Web, including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC. But as platforms become less important and a new audience raised on broadband comes together, seemingly goofy little enterprises like Boing Boing could end up playing very large for their size.”

Someone who’s enjoying the JCPenney-sponsored Fall Shopping Guide added it to social-bookmarking site StumbleUpon, and 500 StumbleUpon members paid a visit to the Guide. I have to admit, I don’t know much about StumbleUpon or the usage patterns of the self-reported base of nearly 3.6 million users. But if one-tenth of a percentage of them click through to the sites listed on a given day, that says 500,000 StumbleUpon users were exposed today to a free promotion for the Guide. Maybe a full percentage of StumbleUpon users click through, which would say 50,000 of them saw a link to the Guide. Either case, thanks for the love, Stumblers!