Mediaweek reports:

David Verklin, CEO of Aegis Group's Carat Americas, told an Advertising Week crowd at the Time Warner Center in New York today that he believes advertisers will shift some $40 billion collectively out of their TV budgets in the next three years for use in new and emerging channels of communications.

But he stressed that the shift by no means signals the end of TV advertising, or the 30-second spot.

I got a great response to my first post announcing my search for an Office Manager, and we sure got a great one in Jennifer. Now Jennifer needs help. Here's her posting:

GAL FRIDAY NEEDS A SIDEKICK.

Do you want invaluable practical experience?
Do you want experience working with a start-up venture?
Are you afraid that your good grades & extra-curricular activities won’t be enough to nail that dream job?

Be part of a dynamic duo in office administration.

YOU
Old-fashioned work ethic
Common sense
Outgoing
Organized
Play well with others
Outstanding customer service skills
MAC proficient
Unflappable
Confident
Stable, and reliable
Learns quickly
Exceptional time management & prioritization skills
Professional & friendly phone manner

THE JOB
Part time - 20 Hours/week
Position starts at $15/hour
The hours can be flexible, but must be consistent.
Contract ( No benefits/1099 eligible/ you pay taxes )
Filing
Mailings
Errands
Complex calendaring
Maintain office equipment
Other tasks as assigned
Great startup environment and chance to learn!

If you have all of the characteristics listed above & are interested in learning more, please forward your resume & cover letter to jcharette at fmpub.net.

Impressive growth from a company we're partnering with in RSS advertising, reporting, and metrics. TechCrunch has the details.

Mini-Microsoft feels like the real deal. Businessweek has a story on meeting the (anonymous) man behind the curtain.

A long time ago author David Kline contacted me to talk about blogging for a book he was writing. I spoke to him about an idea that was just formulating, which I had just decided to call FM. The book is now coming out, and David has made the chapter on FM - which reads as an interview with me - available online. From the PDF download:

I believe blogging is all about personal voice, and because of that, it is much more akin
to music or book publishing than it is to the newspaper or magazine business. Blogging
is highly personal, just like the music and book business, and it’s personal on both sides
of the equation. It’s personal because it’s the individual voice of the blogger that attracts
the audience, just like a band does. And it's personal in that the audience reacts to the
voice of the blogger much like it reacts to that of a musician. They’re fans. They’re
critics. They love you, they hate you, but they pay attention to you because of your
individual voice. The print business isn't quite like that.
....

But it's just not true that anybody can gather an influential audience, any more
than it's true that any band can generate a following influential enough to move music in
a particular direction. But what is true is that credibility and influence -- things that are
critical to motion in a society, to action in a society -- are no longer restricted to
institutional arbiters like newspapers and television or politicians. Thanks to blogging
and other forces in society, credibility and influence are now also in the hands of
ordinary people. The economy of credibility has flattened.
....
A music approach to the world asks: What are the bands that seem to be really
happening in the clubs in Seattle? And then let's go sign those bands that have an
endemic audience, that already have a voice. That's a whole different approach than
saying you want to get angry 15-18 year old boys whose family has an income of forty
to sixty thousand dollars a year. That’s the wrong approach. You say, how come all
these kids are listening to that band? Who cares? They just are. I’m going to sign ‘em.
You’re starting with the editorial as opposed to starting with the market opportunity.

Oh. My. God.

(Thanks, Techcrunch)

I was a cultural anthropology major at Cal, and I loved it. I loved reading ethnographies of isolated and fantastic cultures, and noticing how similar people are all over the world. And I always thought the "study of man" ought to be applied to journalism and media. This piece in the NY Post agrees.

It's reg only (dammit) but the first few lines give a sense of it:

September 8, 2005 -- It's a long way from Samoa to the supermarket aisles, but in a growing trend among market researchers, anthropologists trained to study isolated tribes in the South Pacific are shifting their focus to the behavior of American households.

Advertisers say the academic approach — known as ethnography — is challenging the traditional focus group to give marketers an understanding of consumer likes and dislikes.

I'd say that if marketers watch the ongoing conversational dance of blog authors and their audiences, much could be learned as well....

As we say around here all the time, blogs are conversations, and marketing in blogs requires that you engage in conversation, or at least be aware of the conversation that is going on. Interruption-based advertising - "Hey, I know you are talking about search, but let me tell you all about my hot new laptop..." is probably not going to do so well in this environment. But if you invite the audience in, if you engage them within the rules of decorum standard to most polite conversations, why, that could be something else indeed. "Hey, since you read Searchblog, you're probably interested in cutting edge technology. Would you like to help us design our next generation laptop?"

In any case, this article from ClickZ makes this point well (and gives FM a plug!). From it:

...what if we identify 10 of the most ardent, creative fans of whatever brand we're currently working on, then ask them to come up with concepts for our next online campaign? Would these smack of more authenticity than ads created by professionals? How would you turn those ideas into professional-looking ads without losing the authenticity you're striving for? Results of a project like this could be quite interesting.

These kinds of thoughts are fun... and a little scary. We're used to managing our clients' brands. That's what our clients pay us to do, after all. The idea of giving up some of that control can cause many a sleepless night, on all of our parts. The consumer is wresting that control away from us -- whether we like it or not.

It's long past time we started thinking about how we can work with our brands' customers rather than how we can simply talk atthem.

Chas has a good post on this here. And I wrote about the news earlier here....