HOLLYWOOD, CA -- With all due respect to my West Coast friends, family and colleagues, traveling from New York to L.A. always seems a little surreal, especially when I land. It’s real alright, just
different, and I almost forgot how different until my taxi was curving its way at ultra high speed through the empty dark of the Hollywood hills last night, jutting past the eerily quiet back lot of
Warner Bros. and then by an even quieter Forrest Lawn only to emerge back into the bright lights of Hollywood central. This is where it all happens. We only sell it back east. But this is where it’s
actually made. Well, where it used to be made until the Internet made us think twice about that. It’s been a year since we examined the relationship between Silicon & Vine, er the Internet and
Hollywood, that is, and a lot has changed in the 12 months since our last OMMA Hollywood conference here. The Internet’s role has grown, as has its disintermediating effect on the entertainment and
media industries. And that’s a lot of what we’re going to be talking about the next couple of days. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s bad. Mainly, it’s just going to be different. Sort of like
the difference between New York and L.A. And maybe, just a little surreal. Apologies of I’m a little more didactic than usual, but I’m a bit groggy from a combination of JetBlue inspired sleep
depravation and some little blue pills my doctor prescribed to deal with an unfortunate ailment that hit me just before I left for the show. So if you see me wobbling around registration, or on stage
over the next 48 hours, I’ve got extra good reasons this time. The main thing I’ve been thinking on this trip, and in the months of planning leading up this show isn’t just the transformative
power of the Internet on entertainment and media, but the way it is finally unleashing the kind of micro media marketplace the pundits were touting a decade or so ago. You remember, “Guttenberg
Unbound!†Everybody and his brother was going to have the power of mass communication at his or her fingertips. Well, they’ve got it now. So now, what do they do with it? And what do we do as an
industry once they start doing it? We’ve only just begun to see. But for the incredible long tail effect of the new micro media marketplace, I was struck by something that arrived in my inbox
early this morning as I was scanning messages before heading down to registration. It was one of those trusty data dispatches from our friends at eMarketer. This one was labeled, “The Big Four Get
Bigger.†Needless to say, eMarketer was not alluding to the Big 4 broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC & Fox – which are the same ones that still seem to dominate this town. eMarketer was
referring to the Big 4 Internet portals – AOL, MSN, Yahoo & Google – which are the ones that seem to dominate parts north of here in the same state of California, but in a much bigger way, our
industry’s overall state of mind. Remarkably, the eMarketer stats show that even as the Internet busts the media marketplace up into smaller and nichier slivers, the Big 4 are aggregating a
bigger share of decidedly more sliced and diced market. There combined share of the online advertising market grew to two-thirds (67%) this year, eMarketer projects, up from 57% last year. Within
that, Google is now nearly a third (31%) of all online ad spending, up from just a quarter of the market last year. As more and more of our media content gets consumed over the Internet, these
portals will account for a bigger share of overall media consumption, that is true. But the main reason their advertising market share continues to expand – make that explode – has something more
to do with human nature. The kind of humans who reside on Madison Avenue. They still think mass – the critical kind. And as the online marketplace stretches into a longer and thinner tail, they will
increasingly depend on the players who can re-aggregate it into scalable advertising buys. Well, that’s what I think. What do you think?
