It’s official. You can now buy TV advertising through the Google Adwords interface. Here’s how it works. There are auctions held everyday after 5 PM PST where spots are auctioned off. When you build a campaign you are basically setting a bid price for those spots and you will not believe the bargains that are available. It is a mere fraction of the cost associated with going the traditional route.

Here are a few examples: A :30 spot on The Biggest Loser this week is going for between $5 and $10.60. Another popular show Wife Swap has spots for $3.83 to $4.50. The Celebrity Apprentice has spots for $3 to $5.50.

I plan to test this platform in the near future and I’ll keep you posted with results. My guess is that it is unsold inventory and they’d rather get something than nothing. This could potentially pose a HUGE opportunity for personal injury attorneys that are or want to advertise on TV.

Here is a very interesting video about this opportunity.

The New York Times Hires Their First Ever Social Media Editor. Below is the actual email sent from the head of the newsroom to his staff at the Times regarding the new position. I loved what he said at the very end… “because of course we all need to figure this out together.”

There is no blueprint for the ever changing and evolving new media landscape and world of social media and user generated content. We are all figuring it out as we go. I happen to love that kind of an environment. Whether or not you love it as well, I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that the landscape is changing rapidly and those who fear and resist change will struggle to compete.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [...]
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:00 AM
Subject: [NYT Newsroom] From Jon Landman: Jennifer Preston to be Social Media Editor
To: [...]

To the Newsroom:

One of the bracing things about this topsy-turvy media landscape is that you can wake up one morning and find yourself actually doing something you never thought you’d even think about. Take Jennifer Preston. In 25 years in the news biz, she’s been plenty of things: Reporter (cop shop, City Hall, Albany, etc.), editor (political editor, section editor, administrative editor, etc.) and even circulation marketing manager (at New York Newsday). But still, did she ever think she’d wake up one morning as “social media editor”?

No, she didn’t but yes, she did. That morning was this one.

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

Think of Twitter. Did you know that The New York Times is No. 2 on the Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers? (Behind Ashton Kutcher but ahead of Ellen DeGeneres.) Don’t care? OK, but the point is that an awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues. So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. At the same time, more of us are using social networks to find sources, contacts and information. Like this guy.

Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond.

A big part of her job will be keeping everyone up to date with the rapid developments taking place on the social media front. She will work closely with social media whizzes in the newsroom and other departments, including Soraya Darabi in marketing, Jake Harris in software and Heather Moore in comment moderation, on how news feeds work and how best to be part of the online conversation. She will also work closely with Dawn Williamson, Derek Gottfrid and others involved in building our own social network, Times People, as we continue to use crowd-sourcing techniques to increase the reach and quality of our work. She will work with Craig Whitney and others to ask and answer the many tricky questions that arise in this context: What is the proper balance between personal and professional? What best practices should we adopt or adapt? How can we do the new stuff in a way that honors the old stuff? Etc.

In a significant way Jennifer will apply the collaborative techniques of social-networking to her own job, because of course we all need to figure this out together.

Jon

Happy New Year!  I don’t know about you but I am truly excited about 2009.    The New Year is a time that I generally focus on goals and priorities and that process tends to be invigorating.  One of the first new projects for our team in 2009 is the launch of Legal Marketing Cafe TV.  www.LegalMarketingCafe.com.  

As with most things we do at Speaker Media and Marketing, we anticipate that this project will evolve over a period of time.  Our philosophy is to kind of roll up our sleeves and test and measure as we go.  We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

I picked up the New York Times the other day and on the front page there was an article entitled “Internet Giants Vie to Snap Up Web Ad Firms.”  It talked about the race among industry power players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL to acquire small Internet advertising companies. 

NYT writer Miguel Helft states that “underlying the deals…is a transformation of the advertising world away from traditional media like television, radio and print.”  It is directly after that statement that chief executive of 360i, Bryan Wiener, makes the profound revelation that “we’ve reached a tipping point.”

How does this relate to the legal industry, and more specifically PI law?  How much time do you have?  LOL  The fact is the writing is on the wall.  Traditional mass media is experiencing diminished results with each passing month.  Replacing it in power and pervasiveness are targeted efforts to capture the vast niche audiences that turn to the Internet to assess credibility and make purchase decisions.

Bottomline:  it’s time to reallocate some of your traditional mass media advertising resources to the web.  Many opportunities exist in this arena so study it and choose your venues carefully.  Just don’t wait too long. 

USA Today had an article in yesterday’s paper that talked about the continuing decline in viewership for television.  But the statement that really grabbed me was this one: