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Funny how things change

Thursday, May 24, 2007

LOL - that increasingly well-thumbed acronym used by texters, IM-ers and e-mailers for “Laugh Out Loud” - was my reaction, as I reported over a year ago in THE MEDIA BEAT, to the New York Times saying that Old-Media bosses like Viacom’s Sumner Redstone and News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch were scared of “death by smiley-face”.

The familiar grinning icon was the Times’ comical label for the friendly, evidently non-commercial phenomenon of social networking that was taking the worldwide web by storm - and supposedly threatening the consumption of mainstream commercial media products. Well, now the old-style bosses don’t seem to be too worried - having learned rather effectively to board the boisterous new, jolly bandwagon themselves. News Corp, after all, is the proud owner - through spending over $580 million - of MySpace.com.

 

And anyway ... maybe Murdoch, for one, has now got a lot more to worry about elsewhere – like trying to look conventionally respectable enough to be welcomed as a suitor for the Bancroft family-owned Dow Jones Company, and so be granted his long-desired possession of the Wall Street Journal. He’s having to try hard, since at the very same time his non-respectability, as a manipulative purveyor of garbage journalism, is being highlighted afresh, even in – because it’s unavoidable – his own garbage-gusher, the New York Post.

 

The fact that his editors at the Post receive cash payments and in-kind, low-grade salacious entertainment, in return for friendly coverage in their columns, is tacky enough -- but that he himself actually dictates (I’m “shocked, shocked”, Casablanca-style) how his editors should cover sensitive subjects, like for instance China or Hillary and Bill Clinton, can only make the Journal’s current owners blench anew at the idea of him controlling their venerable paper.

 

But as for those smiley faces … the previously amiable, finance-free zone of sites devoted to social interactivity and the blithe sharing of interests … well, they seem – unsurprisingly, I guess -  to be casting off some of their innocence. The search-engine giant Google, having acquired YouTube, the video-based file-sharing service, is presiding over its adopted child’s growth into something definitely more commercial.

 

YouTube’s form of “monetizing” its operation (to use the trade’s inelegant jargon) is all-too-expectedly what THE MEDIA BEAT foreshadowed last August – video advertisements running before and after what the viewer has clicked to see. These “pre-roll” and “post-roll” ads are now being tested and will be presented fully over this summer. Sighs of resignation are as common a reaction across cyberspace as outraged huffs and puffs. The worldy-wise Mike Bloxham of Ball State University’s Center for Media Design in Indiana says testily that the development is simply “a continuation of the intrusive model of advertising” that has become so much a part of the traditional TV landscape.

 

Besides this harking back to established patterns of media advertising, there is also new, specifically web-based, marketing activity afoot at YouTube. The site is poised to start collecting more detailed demographic information about its users.

 

YouTube's Chief Marketing Officer Suzie Reider (yes, of course it has a CMO, sometimes called straightforwardly its Head of Advertising Sales and charged - according to her corporate bio - with “finding innovative ways for marketers to participate in the YouTube community”) used somewhat banal terms to tell a recent Advertising Research Foundation conference that: “There's lots you can glean from looking at who's looking at what." The idea is an industry truism of course, but as with all truisms, it's undeniably true.

 

And while Reider remained vague about her plans, her professional peers took it that, with Youtube's parent, Google, already able to minutely track a user’s search efforts, and even tie them to a specific Internet Provider address (much to the chagrin of privacy watchdogs) this new push for deep data collection could well be a prelude to offering advertisers very specific, behavior-based information about YouTube's video-searching audience, in order to draw many more clients in. For being in, of course, the company will be able to charge them accordingly.

 

Are we now – or is this just too comical a notion – witnessing that nice smiley-face transmogrify into the features of a capitalist ogre?