Finally, a term for what happens in the real MediaVerse: The Pinball Effect. That’s what Nielsen CMO John Burbank used to talk about the way online and TV interrelate to spur consumption of the other. His example: The Katie Couric-Sarah Palin intterview gets six million viewers. That’s cut into clips, each of which is viewed three million times. Viewership of Saturday Night Live (with their parody of the interview) spikes to 9.5 million viewers and 25 million people watch the skits on the Web and THEN a record 70 million people on 11 TV networks watch the vice presidential debate. That, Burbank said at the <a href=”http://www.mediaandmoneyconference.com/”>Media and Money Conference</a> that concluded today in New York is how audiences build over time due to the effect, on “word of mouth.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean anyone’s making money on it, a point Burbank also raised.

Oddly, though, he said there has been “little impact” of citizen journalism, no breakout viral video clips from a cellphone, despite the many opportunities of Joe Biden speaking many places every day. (I might counter that there’s a lot of influential blog and Twitter discussion, and that any Swift Boating might occur online, especially via email. Video is not the only place to look for influence. Not to mention Obama’s in-game ads.)

More <a href=”http://www.scribemedia.org/2008/10/15/media-money-conference-%E2%80%98the-sky-is-falling%E2%80%99-unless/”>coverage here</a>, with other links.

Keys to making money in Web video:

1. keeping your production costs low
2. marketing marketing and marketing — and thinking of marketing in a very traditional test, rinse, repeat kind of way
3. having something else to sell besides the video. IE, your services as a live performer

These from Jennie Bourne, author, Taking Your Video to the Web, at the Web 2.0 conference at Pace University. She gave a few examples. She talked about the success of the Coke/Mentos video (currently at more than 7 million views on YouTube, and more on other platforms). “What’s behind that is some very careful thinking about marketing, and the audience they were trying to reach. They studied everything that’s successful on the Web to come up with and create a successful viral video .They looked at what the content was, whether it had physical action. Whether it was elaborately produced. Whether it had more than one camera. And step by step they put it together … They did it hundreds of times to get it right.”

To make money from it they put it on Revver, which shares revenues with producers, and also used it as a way to promote their live act, which ultimately is paying them more than the video ever did, she says. Added moderator Dave Burstein of DSL Prime: “They went from semi-employed circus performers to more work than they could handle, at Vegas and elsewhere.”

A counter example Bourne gave is from the producers of “The All for Nots.” They had a show called “The Burg,” which got sponsorship. They then raised their production values, increasing the cost of the show, but when they lost sponsorship were unable to continue it, because it cost them too much. The current site site is begging for more viewers to try to get sponsorship.

Dorian Benkoil is principal at Teeming Media, a New York-based digital media business and editorial consultancy.

In spite of all the new ability to measure. digital media also present new challenges in figuring out what works. This thought gelled for me during a Naked Media discussion with Erin Byrne and Ben Ezrick, both leading digital strategists, he for Ogilvy, she for Burson-Marsteller. We watched the Bronze Lion-winning but fake JC Penney ad that has finally been removed from YouTube after getting hundreds of thousands of views. The commercial was since withdrawn from the awards, apparently.The video shows two teenagers “Speed Dressing,” timing themselves as they put on their clothes after undressing to “get away with it” in the girl’s basement — a message a Penney marketing manager has said the company would never condone. But the company has also gotten a lot of notice for the ad, which, as The Wall Street Journal points out , may curry favor with more urban teens, especially on the coasts. So, for a mass brand like Penney, they condemn the ad. But they, perhaps, reap the benefits of the branding in a measurable way — hundreds of thousand saw the video before it was pulled, and it’s now available on other sites. Ezrick, in the Naked Media segment, points out that neither Penney nor its ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, have yet completely explained how the ad got to be entered in the Cannes awards contest, nor how or whether exactly how people affiliated with them were involved in producing the video.Both Ezrick and Byrne point out that Penney can’t have it both ways: If they genuinely don’t condone the video, they need to investigate and reveal how it came to be to the best of their knowledge. If they had something to do with it, they must say so, and, if need be, apologize honestly for any discomfort or harm they may have caused. But what they can’t do is reap the benefits of the video going viral and also be upset while they gain brand awareness. You also can’t, in a digital age, segment audiences as you could in a previous era, showing one ad to the coasts, say, and another to “Middle America.” Perhaps digital media means everything is outed, eventually. And that means we have to be more honest, or at least more consistent.Dorian Benkoil is the founder of Teeming Media, and the host of Naked Media, produced in partnership with Scribe Media.

Distributed content, yes. ways of getting people to import and export without having to go through any specific website, sure. But widgets, per se? Nah. That’s in a sense what VC Fred Wilson (above) thinks. Fred talked about a “river” of content, in a stream, as on his Tumblr, without any sidebars, or widgets that disrupt and are disjointed and can easily be ignored in sidebars, not to mention greatly slow the loading of the page. Event organizer Matthew Finley told me privately that maybe widgets aren’t the right thing to hang this conference on, that maybe next year (the second, which he hopes will make a profit), they’ll expand or better position it to include the larger message of what this is.

I like the idea that someone can get only what they want — perhaps Fred’s musings on financials, without his musical selections. Different tastes, and the ultimate “widgetization” of content, to where I can say give me this of this person and that of that blog, and assemble it for me as I want. Maybe I WANT to be able to ignore something most days, but know it’s there when I want to glance.

Fred calls this “The Implicit Web,” and it’s something you don’t have to even ask for. A user’s action and behaviors “should inform the browser as to what services to call up.”I should have a different experience when he comes to his blog than you, and should be what the Web collectively knows about me, vs. you.

I interviewed Fred and Stowe Boyd on tape, and hope to have it soon. Also, Fred’s keynote. One striking thing Fred said: “A friend named Darren whom I’ve never met” who did a widget mashup for him. One of the striking things he didn’t talk about: money. For a VC, he seems rather unconcerned with making revenues from this stuff.

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Dorian Benkoil is SVP and Editorial Director of Teeming Media.

<span style=”font-weight:bold;”>UPDATE</span>: A carrier exec<a href=”http://mediaflect.blogspot.com/2008/06/mobile-carrier-responds.html”> gives a rebuttal.</a>= = = = = Spend almost any time with people in the mobile (meaning mobile phone) content, advertising or applications industry, and you’ll surely hear something about how the cell phone carriers are making life more difficult for them. At the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York today: Rene Rodriguez of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.: “We still often don’t even know who our users are … Targeting our users in arena, our fans, and I have no access to that information” because the carriers refuse to share it. Gene Keenan, VP, Mobile Strategies, Isobar (ad agency holding company): “In some instances we can’t target as well on the mobile phone as online [because demographic information such as age] is held pretty closely” by the carriers. And, he says, he isn’t allowed to give content away, even though many brands want to, as part of a marketing or branding campaign. Tom Daly, Group Manager, Strategy & Planning, Global Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company: Carriers are making it tough to bring content to consumers for free (because they see it as competition to premium content. “We created 20,000 songs, 15,000 artists in Europe … We created a great platform for everybody … You share it with us, we’ll share with the world. The artist wins, the consumer wins. We hope some of that love wears off on Coca Cola.” But it’s not easily done. And on and on, like at a recent iBreakfast where Randy Haldeman of Apptera says that mobile so far is about 99% spam free, because the carriers block it, but they’re responsible for whatever spam there is. The arguments I’ve heard in favor of the carriers are:

*They can’t just enable everything on their networks, make it an Internet-like free-for-all, because they need to protect the golden goose: voice communication. They can’t let a bazillion people sending rich ads and video and pictures clog or freeze the network and endanger their biggest most important task. They’ve invested a lot to build their networks, which are not government-initiated with multiple agnostic redundancies, as is/was the Internet, and also have to recoup that investment.* When I said content creators are complaining about the amount carriers charge for their content, one carrier exec said to me that there is no real reason content makers should be able to charge for the same content multiple times on different platforms. Not sure I understand the argument, but it is what he said. 

Regardless of the arguments, though, the tide is, I think, turning away from the restrictive nature of carriers, their locked phones and their plans. Not only is Google Android coming, which will create open standards for cellphones on new network bandwidth (if I understand correctly), but the Supreme Court has allowed a case to go through that will challenge restrictions on unlocking phones. Add all the voices of the Mobile Marketing Association and friends, and you’ve got quite a clamor for more openness and fewer restrictions. Government policy here in the U.S. allowed cellphone networks to develop as competitive fiefdoms, rather than a blanket network with a single standard, and we’re paying the price for that today, with all the restrictiveness, confusion (quick, tell me the rules of your mobile plan, in detail), plethora of mismatched services and devices, and the U.S. lag in many ways behind other countries.