• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, September 25, 2007

Mark Serianne, CEO of Northlich was one of four speakers at the NAD annual conference as part of Advertising Week in New York. Â The broader issue was self-regulation, and he set the stage with a couple of personal anecdotes: first, the day he walked into his office and learned that his secretary, with whom he shared an interest in politics, had learned, online, not only that he'd given money to a certain candidate, but had learned how much, to the dollar, through a link on Huffington Post.

The other moment was at a local gas station, where he saw several buddies talking,  not to eachother, but  with different digital devices.  "These are very interesting moment of what the landscape is like today.  I don't want to belabor the obvious, but we  have been talking abut the news media. Because we have to navigate regulation and self regulation with that backdrop,"  he said, recalling how easy it was to  be a PR guy for the Army in Saigon during the Vietnam War, at least as far as controlling certain elements of the news.

"Fast forward: Â now we have real-time feedback and absolutely no room for error. Â Consider the current demonstrations in Burma," Â he said. "The media was banned from covering the event but it was all over the TV, because of people taking photos and videos and putting them on the Web.

As I write this, I am a case in point for his argument that blogs, raw footage and the like is making news immediate. "Today, the appetite is never ending.  The appetite for programming is huge.  And the news is being shaped in real time. Not just delivered, but shaped.  So in that environment  think recalls,  Vioxx, product tampering.  Think about the challenging situation toy manufacturing must have now getting ready for Christmas.  We live in a constant state of catch up."