FastCompany.com has a nice story on the new platform coming out next week called Online Campaign Ratings, or OCR for short.

In one sense, OCR sounds like a major improvement over the Nielsen box, a measurement tool I have always questioned (BTW, how many people do you know with a Nielsen box? How about people using Facebook?). There is no doubt that adding demographic data to digital media planning and tracking tools will be extremely valuable. And yes, translating the Web measurement into a metric that “old school” media planners understand will likely help move some small amount of large branding media budgets from TV to the Web (specifically digital video).

However, the folks over at Digiday are asking if applying a traditional media measurement tool is actually a good thing for the world of digital media? This is a very valid question, and one I think about a lot. Specifically, is the GRP the best way to measure media reach, or the best available tool to measure traditional media at the time it was developed?

The question we need to be asking is whether the online GRP, or OCR in this case, will make digital media planning more effective for advertisers and improve the business of digital publishing?

Thanks to Facebook, I’m now like that friend that everyone has – the one that remembers everyone’s birthdays. Whenever I log into Facebook I get those oh-so-handy reminders of my xxx friends current and upcoming birthdays.

Even better, I can just write “Happy Birthday” on their wall and be done with this. No more feeling guilty about not buying a birthday card at the supermarket (not that I ever did that before, again, except for my significant other, mom, etc.).

But again, I know a lot of people who would send birthday cards to everyone (especially to all the kids in the family). Will there be any people like this in the future when millennials grow up?

That’s a fascinating question – one that will determine the future of an entire industry. While thinking about this, I did a search and came across an article about Hallmark and their bullishness in light of these big social media-driven changes. The article mentions that Hallmark is definitely incorporating technology into their business model, but paper greeting cards sales continue to be the biggest source of revenue for the company.

My take is two-fold:

1) the people who remember everyone’s birthdays and send cards to everyone will not go away (if anything, they’ll grow with tools like Facebook to help remind them of all their friends’ birthday) – their behavior simply evolve based on technology.

2) the greeting card “product” will need to evolve to remain relevant to new consumer behavior and modes of communication

Seems like a perfect opening for a new disruptive product/service to address the core value proposition / benefit derived from paper greeting cards.

On the other hand, I think about the incredible complexity of the digital strategy world and the trend towards specialization and wonder if merging the Planner and Digital Strategist is feasible? For instance, with the rise of unique digital areas of specialty / expertise such as information architecture, user experience planning, analytics and social media, the role of digital strategist appears to to be too much of a simplification and generalist position out of sync with the rapid changes in digital communications?

What do you think?

This same shift is taking place in the Hispanic advertising world. I just wrote an article for MediaPost looking more closely at this big change in how we develop advertising programs aimed at Hispanics. What do you think?

Jose Villa

The question arises, is this a sign of a trend away from online advertising to other media or is it just the result of the overall ad spend pie decreasing so much that online was unable to escape it’s effects?

I say the latter.

More than anything, it was the result of one of the most irrational pull-backs in media ad spend in advertising history, more a result of an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety than a concern about the ROI of digital advertising. 

Check out this LA Times piece discussing the news and my quotes on the news.

An interesting thing happened on February 20, 2009 – KLSX’s owner, CBS radio, shifted the station to the less expensive Top 40 format and in effect cancelled the popular Adam Carolla show. Just another victim of the recession and the downturn in the media and advertising industry, right?

Instead of just riding off into the radio sunset, Adam Carolla decided to continue his popular show and just move it to a different format – a Podcast. On February 23, 2009, Adam began a daily podcast at www.carollaradio.com. In the initial 24 hours, the first Adam Carolla podcast was downloaded over 250,000 times and, as of the third podcast, it was the number one podcast on iTunes in both the U.S. and Canada. During the debut week, the Adam Carolla podcast recorded 1.6 million downloads. In the second week it recorded 2.4 million downloads. 

I just started listening to the Podcast yesterday, one of about 15 Podcasts I listen to when I’m on the Metro train heading home. However, after listening to Adam Carolla’s Podcast on the train, I decided to continue listening to it on the short 10 min drive from the train station to my house.  Interestingly enough, I was listening to Adam’s interview the Sports Guy Bill Simmons, and Adam asked him what he thought the future of radio and Podcasts was. Simmons’ answer was that Podcasts and Internet radio , would kill satellite radio. He spared terrestial radio in his futurecast.

I tend to agree with Bill Simmons. Internet-enabled cars are only a few years away. In fact, the technology is already here.  Moreover, formats like Podcasts provide consumers with same on-demand abilities they have come to know and love from their TIVOs. There is no doubt that the rapid success of Adam Carolla’s Podcast is a sign of the future of the media business. Radio beware.

Jose Villa