I'm at the iMedia Brand Summit in sunny Florida this week. I gave a presentation yesterday, the theme of which was that web advertising is booming back to the extent that marketers are going to have to get smart with their money and optimize around smarter media buys, targeting, measurement, etc., because premium content is selling out for the first time in a long time (or ever) and CPMs are going up.

Later in the evening, I was at the conference's Super Bowl party, when I spotted Bob Garfield. I'm a big fan of Garfield, particularly as an author and co-cost of NPR's "On the Media", but he's best known for his Ad Age gig, as his NPR bio page describes: "In print, Garfield's 'Ad Review' TV-commercial criticism feature in Advertising Age has made him among the more pitifully groveled-before figures in trade-magazine history." He's here at iMedia to give a "Winners and Losers" review of last night's Super Bowl advertisers.

So, naturally I sidled up to him to engage him in conversation (no grovelling; I'm not an agency guy, after all). "It's a sign of the times that you're here at an Internet conference during the Super Bowl, the major event in the world of advertising," I said. "Well, you guys are about five minutes away from taking over the world," he replied.

Okay, just to cover my ass, since he is a big shot and co-host of a show devoted to integrity in journalism, that's what I think he said. I was already a couple of glasses of wine into the evening, and I wasn't taking notes on the conversation. He might have said "five seconds," and he might have said the Internet was about to take over something else, like the media world, but he definitely said, "You guys are five [something] away from taking over [something]," and the upshot was the world's most influential media critic thinks the Internet is the shit.

He went on to note something to the effect that there is soon coming a time when the Super Bowl will be the last major mass media event where advertisers could justify spending big bucks to reach a mass audience all seated in once place. Or something like that.

After that, he was too distracted keeping one eye on his cute little red-haired daughter running around and the other eye on his beloved Philadelphia Eagles going down in flames, so I wandered off to repeat what I thought he'd just said to everyone I knew in the room for a while.

As I type this, I'm listening to Lloyd Braun, new head of Yahoo! Media Group, formerly chairman of ABC Entertainment Television Group where he had a hand in TV hits including "The Sopranos," "Desperate Housewives," "Lost," "Alias" and many others (and, yes, a character on Seinfeld, the result of a golf bet he lost to Larry David, he explained), explaining why "if I knew then what I know now, I would have put half of my ad budget online" for ABC. Oh, and he's also big on blogs.

Comments

Posted by: steve at March 20, 2005 12:48 PM