Online Merchants Hone In on A New Demographic:  My friend Stephanie writes an article about a new audience for merchants… the imbibing consumer.  A glass of wine or beer after dinner while online shopping?  Sounds like merchants can have a lot of fun with this including potential wine pairings with individual online items.

SocialGuide unveiled their year-end look at SocialTV.  FOX is in the leadership position because of their sports & youth oriented programming.  Note however, there are 36,700 projected total socialTV related comments in December 2011, which still seems small, but can really only go up from here.

ComScore released their holidays sales numbers and showed a 16% lift last week from the same week in 2010.  Total online spending amounted to $2.83bn for the week or $36bn for the entire holiday season.

AdExchanger has their holiday reason list up on their site.  It includes industry reaction posts of major topics such as Adobe Acquiring Efficient Frontier, Mediabank-DDS Merger, and many others.  Certainly check it out if you have time to digest a lot of right (and wrong) opinions.

And lastly, a great interview with Antony Young, the new Chief Executive of Mindshare.  Why I specifically call out this interview is because he gives some good insight into his vision and needs within the media world, where many agencies seem to be undifferentiated.  As you can see after reading this, he’s striving for change and will invest and build in it.

Music/sound can play a huge role in your day, as a dimension overlaid on top of everything else.

For a while, I forgot this.

I was thinking recently while I was writing a deck on marketing technology infrastructure, “what if the brief for the deck included a soundtrack?”  Meaning, what if the tone of the deck took on the tone of a song, such as Poker Face by Lady Gaga or Save the World by Swedish House Mafia?  By doing this, it sets the expectation for how the deck should be written and visualized.

I’ve been listening to music a bit more as well – on the train during my commute and at the gym a few days a week.  It’s added a spark of creativity.

What’s your daily soundtrack?

However, when online, David watches Thomas & Friends, but it’s not the Thomas and Friends you’d expect.  There is a sizeable amount of professional content uploaded on YouTube but David prefers the custom home videos produced by kids about Thomas.  YouTube says there are about 123,000 results for “Thomas the Tank Engine.”

It’s amazing how long David will sit and watch UGC content of Thomas the train, which were created by kids and their parents.

A video called “Accidents Happen” has been viewed 13.4MM times… yes, 13.4 million.  All created by a kid and his dad for Thomas.  I’m sure David has been 50 of those views in the last 2 weeks alone.

There is also a ton of this content on YouTube, not just for Thomas & Friends but for plenty of other shows.

I almost think David prefers this kid-produced UGC over the professionally done content.

There’s something here… a hypothesis, an entrepreneurial endeavor, a marketing opportunity… just can’t put my finger on it.

You can learn a lot from your kids, be sure to keep your mind open.

We’ve brought back documentaries to BMW.  If you remember BMW Films, we’ve brought back a similar film/documentary style approach to talk about the future of mobility.  My colleague and buddy Faris has a great writeup on his blog and it’s been written about by BMW Blog and in the press here and here.  Throughout the month, you’ll be able to watch new “chapters” that are released about the future of mobility from some of the top thinkers in the world:  Astronaut Buzz Aldrin; Futurist and conceptual designer for Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron, Syd Mead; Google VP Marissa Mayer; ZipCar founderRobin Chase; Treehugger.com founder Graham Hill; Ridelust.com editor-in-chief Mike Musto; Reinventing the Automobile co-author Lawrence Burns; and Director of Environmental Affairs, Richard Mattila.

We have launched The Daily, a new operating unit of News Corporation that pushes the boundaries of digital journalism.  This has been a fun project to work on because we’ve gotten to see it from it’s very early days through yesterday’s successful launch.  When I downloaded The Daily to my home iPad last night, there were over 1200 reviews in the App Store!  There have been tons of reviews about it so if you type in “The Daily” into Google News, you’ll have your pick of reviews to read.  Here’s one by CNN.  Here’s a link to @daily twitter account if you want to sign up.

The common thread of the two of these projects:  high quality content and packaging.  While the Internet has no shortage of content, there is a vast variety of styles of content written and produced.  I think you’ll see with the two of these projects that the content stands out from most of everything else.

Related articles

• BMW Documentaries: Wherever You Want To Go (farisyakob.typepad.com)
• BWM | From Buzz Aldrin to Marissa Mayer – BMW films their take on our auto future (via @kbsp_agency ) (jreckseidler.posterous.com)
• BMW Bypasses TV To Promote New Electric Car (mashable.com)

Here’s a startup idea that I think is ripe.  Time is now.

Lets try and learn from the past and apply it to the future. Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo!, Overture, Dogpile, InfoSpace, Metacrawler, Gopher, Ask Jeeves, Webcrawler, Bing, Google (and many others) all evolved the way that we search for information.  Gone are the ways of card catalogs (I actually learned how to use one in grade school) and in are digital search boxes.

These search engines in varying degrees have been helpful to us when looking up textual based content and in some capacities, are helping us pull social, graphic, and video content.

As digital becomes less of a standalone channel and more of a backbone, I’d have to think that Video Search is going to be a huge business in the mid-future.  I don’t know the exact statistic, but X out of 10 televisions are being sold with either direct-to-Internet capabilities or STB’s that plug into a wireless routers which enables your big shiny new television as a portal to all the content on the web.  That “X” number will increase over time.

Since I find it hard to think I’m going to use my 70″ LCD TV to write Powerpoint documents from my bed, I’d have to think that the primary use will still be to view video content.

If Fred is correct, which I certainly believe, we should get together to build some beautiful video search apps for Android that will be positioned to deliver video search capabilities with potential for social interactions.

I’d have to imagine that the current big (and small) search engines were not created with video search capabilities as the technical infrastructure is fairly robust so either they will eventually come knocking.

My Tuesday morning thoughts.

Related articles

• Google Adds Season and Episode Filters to Video Search [Tv] (lifehacker.com)
• Yandex Adds Image, Video Search To Global Search Engine (searchengineland.com)
• Blinkx creator carves a niche in video search (sfgate.com)

99.9% of my books are paperback/hardcover (non-digital) and 90% of those are within business, strategy, marketing, and biography categories.  I admit I have a one track mind.

Here are some recent books I’ve read:

The Facebook Effect (David Kirkpatrick):  I really enjoyed this book.  I think I enjoyed it because it was a biography of how Facebook started, the people, and the drama.  It was less about the actual business in itself, and not at all about “social media‘ and “social” marketing.   I felt like parts of this book could be made into an HBO show… oh wait, there’s a movie coming out about Zuck.  This was a VERY fast read for me (and I’m slow!) despite it’s voluminous appearance.

Open Leadership (Charlene Li):  I totally respect Charlene Li but I found this book to be a dud.  Note:  I’m engrossed in social technologies on a daily basis but found most of this book to be very elementary to what I do and what we talk about inside of our agency.   For people who are leaders in non-marketing services organizations who are not early adopters, this book might serve them much better than it served me.

Here are some books I’ve recently ordered (but not read):

What’s Mine is Yours:  The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (Botsman, Rogers):  I got introduced to this book thru an Umair Haque tweet.  I highly respect Umair and generally follow along with his ramblings.  Once I read the description of the book, I instantly 1-click ordered it from Amazon.  Should be here later this week.

Everything I Know About Marketing, I Learned from Google (Aaron Goldman):  I actually forgot how I heard about this book but I do remember reading a review about it on someone’s blog.  I’m very curious to see what angle this book takes about Google as I think Google has failed in marketing quite a few of their projects (almost everything but Search).  The book actually arrived this past Friday and hope to start it over the coming weeks.

Are there any books I should be concentrating on?  Anyone care to share their reading list?

I’m in 3 leagues this year, which is 1 more than I’m used to.  I’ve found that 2 leagues can sometimes be bullish to manage but I may be totally in over my head with 3 leagues especially with a 22 month old and a new baby being born any second.

I’ve had a hard time this year figuring out which research I’m subscribing to:  last year I subscribed to Rotowire and The Huddle but this year, I’ve only subscribed to Rotowire.  I certainly think there is an opportunity to help people select which research they want to subscribe to as it’s all confusing to me. (que for entrepreneurs)  Back in 2008, I tried to visualize the statistics with a project I called GoalLine.tv but realized quickly that I didn’t have the time (though could easily bring it back with some Mechanical Turks – anyone want to help?)

What’s exciting me about this season is the amount of national TV advertisers that have taken to adding fantasy football into their creative strategy.  Brands are now recognizing that there are millions of fantasy sports fans and that the opportunity to bond with us is a big and often missed opportunity.

Lastly, I still don’t see enough innovation within the fantasy football space.  While there are a few more companies doing casual mini-games this year, I still don’t see the dominant players emerging.   Would love to hear about new companies tackling the space…as this is an area that I’ve been passionate about for some time.

Oh – and make sure you tune into tonight’s Minnesota/New Orleans game… the Dave Matthews Band is performing!

It’s just not fun to watch a time shifted sporting event.

Read this article in the Sports Business Journal about ESPN entitled, Industry Wonders Who Will Challenge ESPN?

Another great addition to live television is the use of social media and technology to enhance the experience.  Yes, you can use Hot Potato during an episode of The Hills, but watching a sporting event with updates via tweets/etc is much more enjoyable.  We’ve not even scratched the surface with what is avaialble here, but it’s an area I’m interested in and I’m sure we’ll see lots in the next two years.

In a recent article in Advertising Age, entitled Live TV is Alive as Ever, Boosted by Social Media, author Andrew Hampp talks about the undeniable link between social media buzz and TV ratings.

With a programming schedule dominated by live events, ESPN is in a nice position to win the television war into the next decade.

Note:  the TV war won’t just be on your beautiful 60″ LCD in your living room – it’ll be on multiple screens, including your mobile devices.

Much of these conversations are being sparked by the reports of the NY Times Online putting up some sort of paywall.

Here is what I think they should do:

Go to a pay model, but the pay model should be for the first 12 hours of any article/story.  Meaning, if the Times publishes an article about the latest angel investment I made, then for the first 12 hours of that article’s existence on the Times online, it would only be accessible by subscribers.

Why I think this works:

1. Online subscription model generates revenue for the NY Times
2. Stories go “public” after 12 hours, which allows for page consumption (and views) beyond the subscriber base thus increasing inventory for the NY Times sales force to sell against (advertising)
3. Online subscription model creates a velvet rope, less-so about actually consuming the content, but more-so about recency of consumption (all about getting it first)

What are your thoughts?  Think this can work?  I think this model can move well beyond the NY Times, no?

Some not-so-big (in terms of volume) but still important trends and predictions that appeared:  data, cloud, devices and acquisition.

Blogs/sites that I aggregated include but are not limited to Mashable, Read Write Web, Clickz, AdAge, Alley Insider, Center Networks, GigaOm, WSJ, MediaPost, CNBC, Adotas, and many, many more.

happy new year – @dherman76