• by Mark Naples , February 11, 2005

"I can't help but think that having me up at this dais is akin to having someone from a buggy whip manufacturer speak at an automobile conference in about 1917," said Bob Garfield, one of the keynoters who highlighted the iMedia Summit in sunny Naples, Florida this week. It was a somewhat heady moment for those of us on the receiving end, especially coming from someone with Mr. Garfield's chops. As he continued with his evisceration of most of this year's Super Bowl ads, I looked about the room at the 300 or so in attendance and wondered how many of us feel as fortunate as I do to be in this industry at this time.

Including the longtime Advertising Age columnist, three of the more celebrated speakers who addressed the full session come from the traditional media world and two have recently become more steeped in interactive. Lloyd Braun left ABC television, where he greenlighted some of the most popular programs in television such as "Desperate Housewives," for a spot as the newly created content czar at Yahoo!. And OMD Worldwide President and CEO Joe Uva was president of Turner Entertainment Group Sales and Marketing for Turner Broadcasting Sales Inc. (TBS) prior to joining OMD, where his media spending leviathan has become the 800-pound gorilla in spending online and made Sean Finnegan a wildly popular guy among publishers. Or was it Sean that made... oh never mind.

Uva delivered a keynote directed toward what he called the media concierge, which is how he sees today's TiVo technology and similar media-distilling appliances evolving. Mr. Uva's remarks worked toward this concierge becoming so invaluable to consumers because of how it would conserve time for them, and so invaluable to marketers that the concierges themselves would become the targets. In this view, the taxonomy of the concierge would have a cookie-like relationship with the taxonomy of media servers. For the sake of argument, hold that thought.

During the conference this week, I heard many executives from branded Web sites vent their frustration about how their print parent companies remained stubbornly confident that the Web was cannibalizing their subscribers and robbing them of revenue. Some of these traditional publishing companies have even been withholding resources from their online counterparts due to this perception, which truly fascinates me.

I hate to say it, but I kept thinking about that scene in the movie "Boogie Nights" during which the big pornographer kept trying to convince his acolytes that the video cassette was going to kill the porn industry.

It's been less than a month since The Wall Street Journal reported that a majority of national advertisers have accelerated the shift of their ad budgets "faster than we realized" from print media and broadcast TV to cable TV and the Internet, according to Merrill Lynch.

The Merrill researchers went on to say that interactive will pick up half a point of U.S. ad market share during 2005. How has interactive actually managed to accelerate the pace with which it's garnering market share while traditional newspapers are losing readers and advertising dollars? There are many reasons for this. One is that Uva's media concierge already exists online: in behavioral targeting, opt-in subscriptions, and the brand protecting habits that savvy online publishers continually maintain, keeping their uniques growing while increasing session time and ad dollars with premium brands.

Many people who watch our industry see only the pop-ups and spyware and other unfortunate annoyances. Anyone who reads this space knows that I'm no Pollyanna on those topics. But, I see a media concierge of sorts already evolving with branded sites who get it and who protect their media asset - their users. These sites provide compelling, exclusive content. Some require a subscription. Most provide streaming video. None exploits their users with pop-ups, pop-unders, or other lesser tactics. In this construct, the concierge is a lens that doesn't have to be technological in theory, only in execution.

Sure, we can all expect this to happen in a broadcast idiom that combines the best of interactive with the best of broadcast (or at least cable). But for now, let's focus on the reason why some sites do so much better than others.

The media concierges of today are the gatekeepers we know as the primary media brands, along with those few companies that control our access. The problem isn't that www.yourlocalnewspaper.com is robbing your local newspaper of readers. The problem is that too many people running these traditional media outlets fail to see the opportunity presented by this change, and how the Web is leading that evolution. These folks would do well to listen to Garfield, Braun, and Uva.