It’s finally happened: the Internet has become "cool."

According to
Edison Media Research and their "Internet and Multimedia 2007" study (via Mediapost), Internet has become the hostest with the mostest, officially grabbing the title of most cool and exciting medium from  TV, getting 38% of the vote, winning by just a 3% margin. TV won by the same percent margin for most essential category, with Internet coming in second. 

An interesting contradiction is that Internet also came in second for least essential medium – right after newspapers. That’s right: utterly useless, they are.

So why is this important? As the teen market
matures and gains spending power, we’re going to see another spike in
online ad effectiveness, as we reach more and more consumers. Read here about how 71% of teens connect to a social network weekly, so maybe that’s where to start. No, not maybe. Definitely:

…social networking is approaching parity with TV time among 9- to
17-year-olds. And when kids are multitasking, they’re four times more
likely to pay closer attention to whatever they’re doing online than to
whatever they’re watching on the tube.

What do you think the stat is on paying attention in school? There’s another reason we don’t put ads in the classroom.

I thought they were going low-key on this one.

Guess again. Hype is hype, and they’re damn good at it. As Jack Shafer of Slate remarks, "No drop of milk oozes from the Apple teat without a crowd of journalists gathering to swallow it up." Yum.

But I didn’t come here to talk about the ‘cultural watershed’ that is about to occur in, as you can read on this sign, T minus 4 days. (No, I do not have the countdown widget. Do you ? If so, please take this test and get back to me.) So, I came to talk about WiMax, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, but you don’t have to remember what it stands for – especially if microwave just makes you think Hot Pocket. 

Think of it as WiFi 2.0.

Wifi’s evolutionary successor.

The service that will eat WiFi’s lunch.

WiMax is broadband internet access meant for metropolitan areas; it deals better with interference avoidance and, more importantly, allows higher data rates over longer distances, which with the plethora of information whirling around nowadays at incredible speeds (are you envisioning a frog in a blender? I don’t know why I am) is a much-needed improvement on our current situation. Even in good ol’ SF, where the deal has been struck to bring citywide wi-fi access to even the most remote areas of the city – like the Bison Paddock in Golden Gate Park – the fact of the matter remains that there are still poor souls wandering around the city, searching for a free signal. A longing, wistful look in their eyes.

They might be better off getting on a plane, that is, if AKQA gets the ball rolling on their project to supply airplanes with wireless Internet services.

According to Business 2.0, though, "Hunting for a Wi-Fi hotspot may soon sound as antiquated as dialing in to CompuServe on a 2,400-baud modem." Hardy har har. Snort. (Maybe I should be taking that Nerd Test.) But wait a second, who’s got the hold on this whole WiMax thing? Somebody’s gotta have it in their greedy grip. Yup, here we go: Sprint/Nextel.

After losing 200,000 postpaid subscribers last quarter, they need this boost, and hopefully ahead of the competition – planning on blanketing Baltimore,
Chicago, and Washington with blissfully crisp and fast WiMax service by the end of 2007, and looking to cover 35 regions and 100 million
Americans by 2009.

What lovely news. The only problem with the whole experience of absorbing this article was the annoying placement of a headline link between paragraphs, which announced the arrival of the new iPhone shipments from Hong Kong. Will it ever end?

The WSJ reported on the FTC setting their gaze on the practice of behavioral targeting last week, quoting Eileen Harrington, deputy
director of the bureau of consumer protection, as saying:

We don’t want to be stepping into the marketplace to intervene because
something feels creepy or icky. If the
results of this tracking are that ad content is displayed on my
computer, I’m not really sure there is any harm in that.

I don’t know about you, but "creepy" and "icky" are not exactly what I would use to describe the feeling someone might get from gathering behavioral data. Intrusive, perhaps, especially if there was no opt-out, or if there was actual tracking of individuals rather than an anonymous browser.

Regardless, according to eMarketer via MarketingVOX, ad spend on behavioral advertising is expected to double in the next year, from $575 million to $1 billion – and hit $3.8 billion by 2011. Privacy advocates see this as a looming Big Brother that will eventually spiral out of control.

The greater dangers, says Adam Greenfield, a futurist (what?) and user experience consultant, is the ability of marketers to match data on Web
behavior with more specific individual information, such as a location (via cell
phones) or commercial transactions.

So are we going to have someone tracking our every move at the mall? Analyst Emily Riley of JupiterResearch says no way, Jose. "The picture isn’t complete until you literally plant tracking devices
inside somebody’s arm."

Now that’s creepy.

Adotas calls it "too little too late to make a difference," speaking of ousted Terry Semel’s efforts to gain ground against its competitors with the acquisition of Right Media. I call it, $450 million in exercised stock options between 2003 and 2006: who cares? Time to retire.

Not bad for a kid from Bayside, huh?

But is he abandoning a sinking ship? People seem optimistic about Panama’s results in the advertising arena. Maybe they’re finally responding to investor’s concerns. And now this latest breaking news from Mediapost about more shifting in the management ladder, with David Karnstedt, SVP of Yahoo’s Search sales business replacing CSO
Wenda Harris Millard, whose skills were apparently not "taking the business forward." David, on the other hand, has a "keen understanding of the new media landscape" and would therefore be better suited to creating integrated marketing solutions. Search + display. "Holistic approaches." I’m spinning in my grave, and I haven’t even died yet.

On a lighter note of the Yahoo story, let’s check out an old NYT article about Terry Semel:

As he looks back over his five years running Yahoo, Mr. Semel makes no
pretense of being a techno-guru, and he is often asked whether he
really understands technology. "I’m never going to be a technologist,
but I have to be conversant," he said, adding: "I was never an actor or
a director or a singer — I had to understand the process well enough to
help make decisions."

I love it. It’s like a tall girl who never played basketball, but who loves basketball players. So, she learns enough about the sport to sound like she kind of knows what she’s talking about, enough so that she can sound enthusiastic and interested when she’s snagged the preliminary attentions of a basketball boy. Conversant. Ah, yes. Let’s just hope he doesn’t ask her strategic advice on the next game. What do you think, man or zone?

Terry: Um, what?

What’s
so direct about direct email?

Sure,
reaching consumers through email appears to be a method to communicate your
message. As Anthony Braide put
it: "email is such an all pervasive communication tool that its use as
an extremely effective means of building customer relationships and selling
products and services remains un-dented." 
Yah, un-dented,
like a Honda Accord parked in the GM parking lot in Detroit.
The truth of the matter is, despite
our increased
tolerance for spam, there are a lot of things that can potentially damage
customer relationships and destroy your brand: think twice before you hit Send.

An
article in Marketing
Vox highlights some of the problems that people are encountering with their
email marketing campaigns. For example, confusion arises when the landing pages
don’t match the look and tone of the email, and will cause users to abandon the
site well before their 8-second average. I am wondering if these offending
marketers who don’t know how to "match" are perhaps also guilty of
combining stripes and plaid, or eating eggs and peanut butter together. Gross.

For
more data from the SilverPop study, click here.

NEWSFLASH:
People
use email to communicate. Duh. But if you’re gonna use this medium, better
do your homework first and make it as effective as possible, without offending
your constituency. Even Luke had to grow up a little before using the Force.

In “The Vanishing Buck”
in June 25^th’s Newsweek, Robert J. Samuelson observes that the "cashless
society" we’ve been predicting for years “has quietly arrived, or nearly
so; currency, coins and checks are receding as ways of doing everyday business;
we’ve become Plastic Nation.”

He continues on to discuss the proliferation of
the credit card and the slowing of currency production at the US Bureau of
Engraving and Printing – with only $400 billion in currency estimated to be
circulating in a $13 trillion economy, we may be witnessing the slow extinction
of the cash and check.

But is the web a more eco-friendly choice? Mark Claser of MediaShift seems
to think so. Despite the toxic impact of electronic ‘garbage’ and the electricity
consumed by vast server-farms, “the amount of energy and environmental
impact of one session on a computer pales in comparison to the impact of
reading a printed newspaper or magazine.”

So, make Al
proud. Choose green. Choose the web.

Consumer Reports State of the Net 2006 is out, and the verdict on Internet security is sobering:

Consumers paid as much $7.8 billion over two years to repair or replace computers that got infected with viruses and spyware.

One in four people "had a major, often costly problem" from viruses, with a total cost of $5.2 billion.

What’s more irritating than a virus that costs you a hundred bones to fix? Answer: SPAM. Not the nice pink meaty substance that comes in a can that experienced 15 minutes of fame here – which you should know is actually where the term comes from – but the millions of unwanted email messages that clog the mailboxes of annoyed Americans everywhere?

But apparently, we’re getting less bothered by it: according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project (February-March 2007) more people are getting more spam at more frequent intervals (More! More! More!) but in many cases, are
less bothered by it than before. Is this spam desensitivation?  The younger set appears to be affected: 32% them say spam is “just part of life on the Internet and is not that big of a deal." Translation: Chill the freak out, gramps. Delete, and move on.

But Deborah Fallows, author of the report, must be in the latter category of adults, concluding with the statement "Spam is beginning to undermine the integrity of email and degrade life online."

Next on the hitlist: spam’s friendly cousin, direct email.

Everybody’s doin’ it.

Jump off the bridge; go out and buy the new Apple iPhone, due to be released at the end of the month. Nineteen million Americans – about 9 percent of US mobile phone users – have expressed "strong interest" in purchasing the iPhone when it becomes available.

Combine this with Brandweek’s study that 46% of teens are fiercely loyal to brands – particularly Apple – with the iPod digital music player emerging as the top brand out of 47 tested that is "absolutely essential to teens." And they love their phones, don’t they.

Let’s inject some historical knowledge from Al Ries:

In the gold rush of 1849, prospectors checked their finds with Aqua Regia, a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids.

If a sample passed the acid test, it was the real thing. When Apple introduces its iPhone this month, will it pass the acid test?

In my opinion, no.

There’s nothing electric nor kool-aid about his (not-so-humble) opinion on why the iPhone will fail in his piece in Adweek  fittingly titled "Why the iPhone will Fail." Al Ries, the branding strategest and author that is best known for his (recurring) work with Jack Trout on Positioning, is going ahead and saying out loud what we’re all secretly hoping: that the iPhone will be a major disappointment (Point 1) and that when it does fail, that (Point 2) the blame will fall on an imperfect execution, rather than a faulty concept. But just as multiple parentheses does not a sophisticated writer make, a prediction of failure from a(n) (in)famous marketing professional does not an Apple Empire destroy.

What will crumble that empire, though, as paraphrased by a reliable source, is Microsoft’s heft and reach across multiple technological product types. In the end, Apple will just not be able to compete, and everyone who remains "fiercely loyal" to the brand is going to get left wondering why they’re no longer the Coolest Kid Around. Let’s face it: Bigger is Better.

Or, rather: "from the Long Beach Chronicles to the Wall Street Journal, they all know the G with the cut in his coupe, ask Bill Gates (yeah I know the Homie Snoop.)"

Hitwise just released a study that shows search engines to be the source for nearly a quarter of newspaper website traffic, reports Mediapost. In March, there were a record 59.5 million unique visitors to online news sources, possibly due to the purchase of news-related keywords or more search-engine friendly article titles.

But: red light! Due to user fragmentation, traffic to the top 10 News and Media websites – like the New York Times – is actually decreasing. Moreover, increase in traffic to alternative news sources like blogs and is not necessarily driving an increase in ad revenue.

Categories that are profiting from the change in way users are finding information include health and medical (43%), education (41%) and food and beverage (38%). More importantly, retail sites are getting 25% of their traffic from search engines, with the top ten paid search advertisers being retail or comparison shopping sites like eBay, Amazon, and Shopping.com.

Says comScore Search Solutions’ James Lamberti:

It’s clear that retail e-commerce sites are the most aggressive in using sponsored search to drive traffic to their sites. Given that retail e-commerce is now a $100 billion a year industry, it’s not surprising that top online retailers are willing to bid for premium placement at the major search engines.

What categories need to play catch-up? How about business and finance, at a lowly 14%, and computers and Internet (11%)? But – if this is because people seeking information on these topics are using more personalized methods rather than blindly typing in "pizza hut" or "girls gone wild" into an engine, all the better. Will search become more focused in other categories? If so, how will SEO firms adapt their methods? 

David Lazarus of the SF Chronicle writes today about the lead generation dilemma – the selling of personal information to a variety of marketers through "Special Offers" online, as he traces the workings of "I Want My Free Laptop." Or wait, was that "Free Apple Ipod"? We’re amused by the Google Ads ironically placed below his article. It just doesn’t get any better than that…

But save for complete AdWords control by publishers, what can, or is, being done?

From Internet Outsider: RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan’s report concerning accusations against ValueClick’s WebClients: There are ongoing investigations into companies in the incentivized lead generation space by legislative/regulatory groups, including the FTC, state Attorneys General, and the House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection… the legislative/ regulatory efforts may narrow the definition of what is acceptable, making the highly-incentivized tactics unsustainable longer-term.

But since when does the FTC come sweeping to everyone’s rescue?  And is it too much to ask for company’s to self-regulate using basic guidelines, as outlined here on ClickZ?

If you’re lost and have no idea what I’m talking about, let the Managing Director of Clearstone Venture Partners clear things up for you: see Jim Armstrong’s guest post on "The Future of Lead Gen."

He highlights the same problem as Lazarus, which is the existence of hundreds of small, highly profitable garage shop businesses that make up the majority of the lead gen market and is causing a "rapid overheating" – not to mention a lack of regulation. But he makes an interesting point that Lazarus does not address:

The rapid developments in this market have created great new
opportunities. As for instance commercial keyword price increases takes
lead generation out of the hands of the amateur arbitrage players, it
has driven marketing budgets seeking qualified customers to reach out
to professional, scale providers with entirely new, more sophisticated
processes.

There’s a niche that is waiting to be filled, someone that can be a highly-valued customer
advocate but also maintain a level of "quality,
professionalism, reporting and scale" that will fit larger marketing budgets.

Who will it be?