That sound you hear is the brick that network TV is shitting trying to justify ad rates to Madison Ave.:

The “Yes, Dear” episode in April 2005 marked the first commercial use of a patent-pending innovation dubbed Digital Brand Integration, or DBI, developed by New York-based Marathon Ventures, and grew out of an unprecedented marketing deal with CBS.

Since then, CBS has used the technology to plug brands such as StarKist Tuna and Chevrolet on several other shows, including the hit police drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and new sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”

David Brenner, founder and president of Marathon, said his company expects to unveil a new pact soon with the Fox network, a unit of News Corp. Ltd.

Blending brand names and products into television shows, as opposed to traditional ads that run during commercial breaks, has gained greater currency in recent years as the industry faces the rising popularity of TiVo and other devices that let viewers skip commercials.

Product placement and integration (or PPI as it is referred to in the biz) has always been a long shot at best. TV advertising is an amorphous world since there is no exact way to measure just how many people saw your ad. PPI extends this voodo magic even further by causing normal people to somehow believe that they will instantly purchase product X just by seeing it integrated into their favorite character’s hands.

The last gasps of TV are going to be interesting indeed. We are just eagerly awaiting for the day that TV eliminates 30 second spots altogether to return to a live-only variety show format called the “Texaco Star Theater” starring Milton Berle. You’ve come a long way baby, full circle that is.

Sometimes you read about something so stupid it makes your brain hurt:

Earlier this week, NBC asked YouTube.com to take the video down. Web surfers wanting to see the clip yet again will have to go to NBC.com, where the network has posted a copy.

Bloggers—the ones who made the video a hit in the first place—are grumbling that “Lazy Sunday” now doesn’t play on non-Windows computers. Fortunately, NBC’s lawyers evidently don’t know about Google Video yet. Whoops.

Remember “Lazy Sunday”? The video clip from SNL that became an overnight internet sensation and was seen by more internet surfers than ever watched it on broadcast TV? Yeah, that one. Sometimes as we watch these TV executives slice open the golden goose we wonder to ourselves how much they will be kicking themselves a year from now.

Would someone please call up NBC and give them a clue?

Jeff Jarvis, the founder of entertainment weekly and seer into the internet media future, posted a slightly different take on the “small internet mice will destroy old media dinosaurs.” The renowned videoblog Rocketboom just auctioned off a single week of advertising on ebay for $40,000:

And here we have in a microcosm the explanation of why media is so horribly out of sync today: The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers. That allows a TRM to come along and snatch away an opportunity from the big, lumbering giants. That is why small is the new big. Small be nimble, small be quick, small jumped over the conglomerates.

Or let me summarize the problem in one word. Big advertisers and big agencies are chickenshit. They need to grow some balls or else they’ll find new competitors running circles around them. The explosion — the rocketboom — that has already come to newspapers, magazines, TV networks, the music industry is coming next to the ad business.

Please take this, advertisers, as a friendly kick in the pants.

Calling people “chickenshit” is a great way to get their attention but not necessarily get you to change their minds. Instead we would point out that the media dinosaurs obsessed with control should realize quite quickly that if they want “metrics,” “guarantees,” and “controls” then the internet is lightyears ahead of other media in that department.

Many of you are probably already familiar with Chris Anderson’s theory known as ”the long tail”:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

And while his theory is well researched and has some excellent evidence to back it up, a new study just released seems to shed new light:

The researchers used the Internet to create an artificial market for singles, all recorded by bands not on the current Top 40 hit parade in the United States.

They then persuaded more than 14,000 young Internet users to log onto the site and choose their favorites.

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While people do genuinely seem to like some songs better than others, their preferences change once they know what other people like, Watts and colleagues found.

“The popular things become more popular and the less-popular things get less popular,” Watts said.

People, it seems, do not entirely trust their own taste when it comes to music. The same may hold true for books and movies and may explain why the top sellers vastly outsell the rest, the researchers concluded in their report, published in the journal Science.

In Anderson’s theory the reason that we see such a large gap between hits and less successful fare has to do with marketing budgets. It appears however that he is only partly right. Instead it is a more complicated scenario: people buy what their peers tell them is “cool.” So while a marketing budget can help spread the word, the Internet will not eliminate hits, just change the way hits are marketed.

We can’t wait to see what happens with this new research…

The iTunes juggernaut takes on Cable:

“Sleeper Cell,” “Weeds” and “Fat Actress” are the initial programs included in the deal, which was announced Tuesday by Apple Computer and the CBS Corp.-owned channel. Viewers will be able to choose any or all episodes from the first episode in each series.

Despite the fact that these are from a premium cable outlet the episodes are still the magic $1.99. Say what you will about Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field but it seems to work on everybody including senior execs. Half the genius behind iTunes is that you know exactly how much you’re going to pay for anything (tracks are always 99 cents and TV episodes always $1.99).

A new age has begun to dawn: the TV networks are beginning to see the Internet as an opportunity rather than a threat. CBS just announced that they are dumping iTunes so that they can sell their own programming from their own web site:

CBS Corp. has spoken: When it comes to making its reality hit “Survivor” available for downloading, iTunes has been voted off the island.

The company announced Wednesday that it was experimenting with cutting out the Internet middlemen by offering downloads of its popular show for $1.99 an episode on its own website, CBS.com. The service is to be launched tonight, immediately after the show airs on the West Coast.

CBS would be the first broadcast network to sell its shows via its own Internet storefront. The move signals that CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves believes the network is a potent enough brand that it can go it alone — without Apple Computer Inc.’s popular iTunes software and website — and thus not have to split the spoils.

Whether or not this is a smart move remains to be seen. Just like Google admitted last week, it is awfully difficult to compete with Apple when it comes to the slickness of the iTunes video store. We applaud CBS nonetheless for their bold foray into internet TV sales.

Many in Los Angeles celebrated the announcement that city attorney Rocky Delgadillo slapped the makers of “Grand Theft Auto” with a lawsuit. But finally, in a hilarious op-ed piece in the same newspaper, the voice of reason comes out:

The city believes that parents who simply wanted to buy their boys a wholesome cop-shooting, hooker-killing, car-stealing game were unfairly duped. Because if the ratings board had known about the scene, the game probably would have been bumped up to an “Adults Only” rating (restricting it to those 18 and over) instead of “Mature” (which keeps it away from anyone under 17).

That means that all across Los Angeles, innocent 17-year-old boys with advanced computer skills were being exposed to moderately rendered, computer-animated soft-core pornography. And City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo wants to make sure someone pays for doing this to our kids. Because if these teen computer geniuses are given the opportunity to unlock a video-game sex scene, then they’ll be just one step away from breaking the code that allows them to type dirty words into Google.

Although I wish a teenage boy’s world were as full of innocence and wonder as Delgadillo does, I wondered if consensual animated sex was really the kind of thing that would offend a 17-year-old male who grew up in Los Angeles. So I tracked one down and asked him if this was the kind of thing that would warp his impressionable mind.