I had breakfast with John Bell of Ogilvy a number of years ago. He didn’t see the value of investing limited budget, time and resources on the long tail when those treasures would better be used to woo the high-fliers, professionals, top-cows and A-listers.

That’s fair enough, and surely a common question, and a question we must address close to the beginning of every sales call we make at our agency when we propose blogger outreach to a prospective client.

The value comes from penetration, permanence, perseverance and persistence. There are only a finite number of members of every organization’s email list. Mashable and TechCrunch have a sizable but vertical (narrow) audience. When we reach out and pitch to thousands of bloggers, however small or niche, if they’re within maybe one but generally a handful of loosely defined topics, we always reach well outside of the echo chamber of a conversation that tends to get contained within the walls of a tech blog or mommy blog.

By reaching out ever further, we don’t assume that anyone outside of the five major urban centers are obsessed with the top five major papers or the top five major blogs. Doing so makes the critical mistake that if you get covered by the FT, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, you’ve got the world covered. In fact, I will use a newspaper analogy to try to illustrate my point.

The top A-list blogs and bloggers are analogous to David Gelles and the top journalists at the FT, the Times, Washington Post and the Journal. Though highly prestigious, getting your new startup covered by Mr. Gelles may very well not be enough. Outside of Chicago, New York, LA, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Boston and Miami, the United States is also a collection of regional, city, town and village daily papers as well as weeklies and newsletters and journals, both academic and professional, and email lists and Web-only news sources.

People have only a finite amount of time, so their consumption of content, information, news, reviews and alerts is limited. The closer you can get to the media organ that your target market consumes primarily and religiously, the higher the probability that content will register with the reader, will resonate with the reader, and will feel like it is intimate to the reader and his local community and experience of the world.

The Internet is such a gift. Never before has it been remotely possible to reach out to thousands of publishing platforms in one go, with just a team of five, globally or geographically, with a couple follow-ups and concierge service, with the reliable results of hundreds of posts and their associated tweets, retweets and secondary coverage. Add to this long-tail “theory of everyone” campaign a more one-to-one, relationship-based, Rolodex outreach to your most connected agents to-to list and you can have all the mentions in the rarefied air of the A-list as you can manage in the time allowed (and with what you have to pitch — sometimes the quality or sexiness isn’t there and it can be a super-tough sell, requiring horse-trading, etc.) in addition to the hundreds of earned media mentions that one can very reliably acquire — with the first posts showing up two weeks after the contract is signed and going on for another four weeks.

Building connections with the top influencers

One of the biggest issues with A-list outreaches that I experienced when I was at NMS and Edelman is that what happens when you only have a prior relationship with only a handful of top-tier semi-professional and professional bloggers and blogger networks that are germane to the topic or demographic of the client? What happens if you don’t know enough and the ones you do know aren’t interested or don’t think it’s interesting or a viable post?

There are times when you’ve been given a huge retainer by a huge client to push a “meh” product to an A-list that’s not interested and the time passes, the bell rings and you’ve rolled snake eyes. Nothing. No coverage — or very little, surely not aligned to the client’s expectation — or your boss’s.

We discovered that we were a lot less vulnerable to panic attacks when we bought insurance. At my agency, we do pursue A-listers, of course. But those relationships are real. They take time. Since we don’t have a strong vertical, we don’t know who we’re going to need to engage in the A-list at any one time. And, when we do sort out the A-list in any particular blogosphere, thanks to the help of eCairn, then we need to spend time building that connection, personally, with the top influencers. While that is happening, we task our seven blogger researchers with finding everyone else, using a very well-thought-out collection of keyword phrases. In general, we have two weeks or less before our first outreach. The clock is ticking.

Via Biznology & Socialmedia.biz & Marketing Conversation

Related articles

• How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
• Fire for effect when you can’t get a direct bead on your market (chrisabraham.com)
• We don’t need no steenking ‘Blogger Outreach’ (globalneighbourhoods.net)
• How to pitch bloggers so they’ll post about you (socialmedia.biz)
• CommentLuv Your Way to Business Prosperity (growmap.com)
• How to pitch a blogger (biznology.com)
• Blogger Outreach: 5 Tips for Connecting With Top Influencers (mashable.com)
• Bloggers and PR: Have we reached an impasse? (customscoop.com)
• Update on eCairn’s Directory of Influencers (ecairn.com)
• Real Americans don’t care much about A-list blogs (socialmedia.biz)
• The Long Tail of Blogger Outreach (biznology.com)
• How to make friends and influence bloggers (chrisabraham.com)
• How to pitch a blogger (biznology.com)
• Sometimes I get excited by something I post (chrisabraham.com)
• Build your Twitter following with a theory of everyone (chrisabraham.com)
• We don’t need no steenking ‘Blogger Outreach’ (globalneighbourhoods.net)
• CommentLuv Your Way to Business Prosperity (growmap.com)
• What Occupy Wall Street Wants: Parsing the Unofficial Demands List (curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com)
• Agencies are too afraid of bloggers to do their job (chrisabraham.com)
• Blogger Outreach: 5 Tips for Connecting With Top Influencers (mashable.com)

I stopped to look around the OMSI and also got to explore the new Narnia Exhibit that’s on now.  Then, I stopped at a sunny bench and read yesterday’s Oregonian, New York Times, and the Saturday Wall Street Journal. Bright but not really sunny though I got a lot of color

The day after I wrote the completely doting post about my Amazon Kindle 3G in graphite, Why I Love my Kindle but Not Only in My Words, I went on a long walk and stupidly took off the my leather Kindle Lighted Cover off to make it slimmer and lighter and look what happened:

The brilliant news, however, is that I found the If my Kindle is broken or damaged, how can I get a replacement? page on the FAQ support page on Amazon and called the toll free number, 1-866-321-8851 (outside the United States: 1-206-266-0927) and, on a Sunday, I got a lovely man who, within 20 minutes, assured me I would have a replacement Kindle by this Thursday and it would already be set up for me.

And, I would receive my replacement Kindle immediately and only then send back my broken unit. Bravo!  And, were it not for the Sunday before Memorial Day Monday, then I am sure it would be by Wednesday.

Mind you, the moment my Kindle broke, even before I called customer support, I ordered a Kindle Wi-Fi with “special offers and sponsored screensavers” at only $114 — a brand new model for Amazon as a way of a) collecting reader data b) directly engaging the reader c) all sorts of other stuff — because I never want to be without one in the future until even Thursday.

That said, I have been seriously curious about the whole Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers model and want to check it out personally (and I will write a review when I check it out).

Here’s something I just learned: when you subscribe to magazines, newspapers, and journals via the Amazon Kindle, your subscriptions are for only one of your devices while the books you buy are shared all over them.  So, when I get my $114 Kindle with Special Offers it won’t work with my MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times subscriptions — those are only going to work with my original “latest generation” 6″ graphite Amazon Kindle 3G.  I didn’t know that before but it is bloody good to know.

I will keep the new KwSO&SS home, maybe at my bedside, since it will only have my books on it.  I don’t plan to drop almost $60 on a leather cover with a light

though I may well get myself a novelty cover, maybe from the New Yorker or maybe in the form of a favorite book (what would you get?).  If I do buy the The New Yorker Kindle Jacket then I will surely have to switch my New Yorker subscription to the second one with the cover — and then I will probably swap my subscriptions to the MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, and The Economist as well — to keep my focused on the daily paper while I am on the 3G unit.

Mind you, I am putting way too much thought into all of this.

Cover via Amazon

I carry my Amazon Kindle 3G device everywhere.

Currently, I read MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times exclusively via my Kindle, delivered via WhisperNet.

I run through as much content as possible at the gym on the machines or maybe on walks.  Yes, I have books as well.  I can buy them too easily and on the fly.

I found a gorgeous bullet list of reasons I wish I had thought of as to why I love the physical Kindle device, with 3G Whispernet, from Robin Sloan in the form of The Kindle abroad:

• The Kindle has a web browser. It’s simple and slow, but solid enough to check Gmail and mobile.twitter.com. In fact, it works beautifully with the mobile versions of most sites.
• It’s almost miraculously connected. The browser wouldn’t mean much if Whispernet—Amazon’s set of carriage agreements with cell networks around the world—didn’t work everywhere. It does, and it’s also free. I was using Edge and 3G Whispernet reliably in remote-ish provinces and on sleepy islands. In fact, my Kindle generally got a stronger signal than my iPhone.
• It’s light and durable. There’s a big difference between older Kindles (which I’m toting) and newer ones in this regard; I’m considering snagging one of the latest simply because they’re so much smaller, slimmer and lighter. But any Kindle is more portable than any iPad, and I also felt a lot more comfortable tossing the Kindle into a bag or dragging it across the beach. (I had my iPad on this trip, too, but barely used it.)
• The Kindle works in direct sunlight. Especially when you’re traveling, this is a big deal. Standing on a busy corner or sitting on the beach, the Kindle is always totally usable. And this provides another contrast to the iPad, which always sends me scurrying to the shadows. (It really is a resolutely indoors device, isn’t it?)
• The battery lasts forever. You know this already. My Kindle was on a once-a-week charging schedule, and that’s with lots of reading and regular internet checks.
• Your Kindle is your itinerary. Using the Kindle as a virtual folder for travel documents was perhaps the biggest aha; it was my traveling companion who figured this out first. We got into the habit of forwarding tickets and reservations straight to our kindle.com addresses, which all Kindle owners have. (Oddly, this is the one part of international service that’s not free, but the price is negligible: $0.99 per megabyte for documents delivered this way.) It feels so good to have all of your information right there, in a format that’s so legible—not just to you, but to others. Once, in Turkey, I simply passed my Kindle to a ticket agent to help her understand where we were trying to go.
• Travel guides on the Kindle work great. I was a little skeptical about this—I think of the Kindle as being bad at random-access material, and a travel guide is definitely one of those books you want to be able to flip through freely. But as it turns out, we got a ton of use out of a Lonely Planet Kindle edition—purchased mid-trip, natch—and by the end of the trip, I felt like a dope for having bothered with a physical guide (which weighed in at about five Kindles).

I am going to add a few more of my own:

• The deal for using WhisperNet abroad is a bargian. When you are abroad, in whatever country, you only have to pay, I think, $4.99/week to connect all week, wirelessly, via their local 3G and once you agree to that, it will recur as long as you’re abroad.  Considering how expensive 3G can be abroad for international roaming.
• While you don’t want to do it, losing or breaking your Kindle doesn’t hurt as much as it could. I know you could read your Amazon content at the gym via your iPad or iPhone; however, losing a $114-$189 device is a lot more bearable than losing a $300-$900 device at the gym or in your travel bag or in your backpack or anywhere.  In addition, all of the content is completely replaceable.  If you lose your Kindle, disable it via your online Kindle home, order a replacement, and all your content will be there when you re-connect.  And even if it is not, you can “send” any content you have purchased to your new Kindle.
• You can afford and support more than one Kindle with mirrored content. You can buy one 3G Kindle and then a couple cheaper Kindle with Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers at just $114 each and then leave them at home, leave one near the sofa, one in the bathroom, and make sure your Kindle 3G is reserved for the road — so just leave it in your “to go” bag like I do.
• The only Kindle that sucks is the Kindle you don’t have. Be sure to either keep your Kindle, habitually, in your day pack, your work briefcase, or your purse, because there’s really no reason to have a WhisperNet-enabled Kindle unless you bring it with you.  It should not be preserved at a precious thing — it is a lot more durable and tough, even without a pretty Kindle Lighted Cover like the one I have, with integrated, Kindle-powered light.
• The official covers are the best covers for the Kindle, especially the one with the reading light. I personally use a black Kindle Lighted Cover which I use to read the Kindle on flights or in bed. Just beware that using the integrated light really sucks the power out of the device, rendering it as power-hungry as its cousins the Android tab, smartphone, the iPad, and the iPhone.  Otherwise, Robin is right, the batteries last forever!
• While it isn’t perfect, Kindle does have a sort of Social Network and Social savvy.So, this should be my official Chris Abraham Amazon Kindle Profile that you can look at and, I guess, connect to.   Also, if you have a Kindle be sure to sign up in order to be able to share what you’re reading and selected excerpts to Twitter and/or Facebook, which I do; caveat, the links aren’t friendly and only go to a promotional page and not to the free, web-accessible, page, which is pissing my friends off, even though they all probably know how to use Google to find the content if they need to and are just being lazy bastards.
• Finally, you don’t have to buy every single book you want to remember to read when you own a Kindle.Thanks you to the doctor who told me that I can add any title I think of without paying if I want to remember the books by adding them as “Try a Sample” instead of buying the whole book. Who knows if I will actually like A Game of Thrones; however, I can download a sample, which acts as a reminder, costs nothing, and also allows one to see if you like it by reading a bit, like you might do, at your leisure, while spending a lazy afternoon at Powell’s City of Books.
• I have replaced a lot of paper media with ones and zeros towards saving the earth. I can gloat here in Portland because I have replaced a lot of paper-based monthly and weekly magazines and daily papers with digital content, saving the forest and oil and the gas-emission of Mr. Postman.  Aside from the daily Oregonian and New York Times, which I receive at my door every morning, most of my weekly journals and magazines and daily newspapers  are delivered automagically via WhisperNet currently in the form of MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.  That says nothing of the hundred or so books I have downloaded to my ebook reader, both bought or downloaded for free.  And, I am pretty sure that powered by technology developed by E Ink Corp requires a lot less energy for its batteries from the mains and is better for the environment anyway, all on its own, rather than needing to be charged nightly — or several times a day for the power users — like the tablets and smartphones are.  Yes, yes, a well-used book is way more environmentally kind as is library use — unless you consider the overhead of heating, cooling, and lighting a library, that is.

Again, thank you so much to Robin Sloan of Snarkmarket in the form of The Kindle abroad for inspiring this post.

Image by Gauravonomics via Flickr

[Originally posted over at the Biznology blog] I must admit right away that I am a disciple of the seminal book on the Internet revolution and what it means for business, The Cluetrain Manifesto. The main premise of the manifesto is that markets are conversations and that no matter how ardent and impassioned the man at the lectern may be, the audience now has the power, through the Internet, to compare notes real-time, to heckle and critique without being shushed. When this was written, there was neither Twitter nor Facebook—and the blog was still in its infancy. I have been collecting all sort of quotes that I have been wanting to address and believe that I can write 95 posts just based on the Cluetrain’s 95 Theses, but for today I will just focus on number 83: We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

I returned to the book and read through it until it resonated with me as a social media marketer and digital PR executive. Here’s the theme of this post:

But, of course, the best of the people in PR are not PR Types at all. They understand that they aren’t censors, they’re the company’s best conversationalists. Their job—their craft—is to discern stories the market actually wants to hear, to help journalists write stories that tell the truth, to bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it. Indeed, already some companies are building sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the industry, including unedited material from their competitors. In the age of the Web where hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult, the real work of PR will be more important than ever.

I have benefited from all of this chaos. I am not a PR type at all, having received my degree in literature and having an early career in web application development and Linux sys admin. I am not a PR type at all and yet here I am, in social media PR and marketing.

What I know that most PR execs can’t accept is that there are 50 million and not just 50 people who write about products, services, experiences, videos, movies, television, music, and politics. Every day I see traditional PR execs re-brand themselves as digital PR execs by simply transferring the old model of reaching out, personally, to just the right reporter with a press release and favor.

Over the last decade, this model has worked in the blogosphere just as long as publicists were able to discover and groom a small cadre of highly-successful and popular bloggers to become the new journalists. These new journalists are professionals, well-versed in how PR works, and fluent in the lingua franca of public relations. Companies such as AllTop, Klout, Compete, Traackr and eCairn specialize in identifying the most influential 25-50 top bloggers and tweeters—catering to this traditional PR model that has yet to be revolutionized away from its obsession with engaging only the top influencers and recognizing that in 2011, there are 50 million potential influentials and not just 50.

In the next post, I will go into specifics as to how this is even possible. And it isn’t. It isn’t possible to engage 50 million bloggers online, but it is surely essential to try—for many reasons.

The first reason why it is essential to move past the top-50 bloggers in your industry is churn. Every 18 months, a blog dies. Blogs are hard. The A-list blogs are like athletes—they’re only eligible or viable for a little while and it is essential to scout community centers, high schools, and colleges to find the next Michael Oher well before anyone else does. Every 6-18 months a blog dies, the A-list changes, the long tail reorganizes, and the blogger you had invested in heavily suddenly decides to stop blogging. It happens all the time. Read on.

The second reason to dig deep into the long tail instead of sticking with your A-list is accessibility. A-listers are hard to access. Recently, Audi apparently gave an A8 automobile to everyone who had a Klout score above a 70. Other A-listers demand Morton steaks or nights out on the town, sponsored trips, and even payola from Izea. A-list bloggers are busy and their attention is being spent on national and international brands and agencies such as Edelman and Ogilvy. Most A-list bloggers these days are advanced amateurs; more and more are semi-pro and professional, making a lot of their living from their blogging. The reason it is such a competitive place is because these bloggers are the kings and queens of their high school and you had better be gorgeous and rich and smart and have blue eyes if you want to to gain access. Remember: it is like bidding for keywords on Google or investing like Warren Buffett: buy low, sell high; everyone’s fighting over the same keywords on Google AdWords, the same stocks on Wall Street, and the same bloggers online. If you spend some time looking a little harder, you can really find some amazing content that hasn’t been discovered yet; and, if you’re smart, you’ll help that blogger and that blog take it to the next step. And guess what? You’ll end up being the hero in that scenario. You’ll have 50 million to choose from.

The third reason to spend more time exploring the smaller, newer, less popular blogs is availability. Most bloggers start their blogs out of passion. Others, because they were hoping to get some swag. Still others started it as a way to get a job, to push their agenda forward, to make a little extra cash from Google AdSense and Amazon Associates (good luck on that), to start working towards a future as a journalist, because they hate their jobs, because they’re expressing some pent-up creativity, or because if they don’t get stuff off of their chest they’ll burst. There are a million reasons. The one thing that most of these bloggers winsomely dream is that they’ll be discovered some day. Every day, my agency discovers bloggers. Every campaign we discover several thousand and reach out to them on behalf of high-profile clients and that is generally the very first time that most of them have ever been pitched by an agency—the first time they, as a blogger, have ever been kissed.

The fifth reason to reach out to many more than just the top 50-150 bloggers is impact. No matter how successful an A-list outreach, the total number of blog posts even possible is 50-150. And we all know that even the shiniest of golden PR children don’t do 100%, so we’re talking a fraction of that. Closer to maybe 10-25, tops. When you include everyone—as many of the 50 million as possible who are germane to the campaign—you’re talking between 1,000-5,000 blogs in a typical long-tail blogger outreach, resulting in 50-400 earned media mentions—and I am only going as low as 50 because my Director of Client Services keeps on telling me we need to under-promise and over-perform. We routinely get 200-300 posts and tweets.

The sixth reason why pitching, engaging, and responding to blogs and bloggers nobody has every heard of is to be their first—and this first contact with a brand can be the experience that encourages them to continue blogging. I always use Tina Fey as my analogy because I love her. She’s amazing. But I am pretty sure she’ll never come meet me for coffee. However, if we were chums Freshman year at UVA when she was all frizzy hair, brocade vests, and bolo ties, just getting into comedy—insecure and unsure—and if I was her number one fan, helped get her gigs and exposure, and then kept encouraging her in her passion, then she would indeed be someone who might meet me for a quick joe and a muffin in the morning before work while I’m in town. Same thing with long tail bloggers. Getting pitched by a PR company early on might turn that blogger all Sally Field, “You like me, you really like me!”

The seventh reason is because hundreds of earned media blog posts effect Google differently than a couple dozen. While delivering client message to as many bloggers as possible in order to garner as many earned mentions as possible as quickly and as numerously as possible—for the impact—is always my number-one goal, I have also noticed that the secondary effect of having hundreds of independent, real, true, B-Z-list bloggers suddenly carry my clients’ news is the most powerful organic SEO benefit you can ever imagine, almost over night. White hat link-farming, if you will—primarily because none of these hundreds of posts are scripted, are paid for, are demanded, are aggregated, are blogged, or are mashed up from RSS feeds, search results, or a hive of link-farmers doing black-hatted sort of things. I mean, in order for any of this to work, the narrative needs to work, the pitch needs to work, the gift and ask need to be compelling. There’s no way to cheat on this—the outreach campaign needs to be absolutely solid, compelling, and generous for it to work, but at the end of the day, hundreds of legit blogs linking a client’s products and services and do the sort of magic that used to be merely the thing of legend.

And finally, the eighth and top reason why a long-tail blogger outreach is so worthwhile and is the future of PR: the power of the Internet is that everyone can participate and that there is zero barrier to entry. Actively ignoring everyone and only putting your attention and time and money and resources on the same old someone—journalists, celebrities, broadcasters, and A-listers—really misses the point of what The Cluetrain Manifesto has to tell us about this new thing. We were—and are currently—able to see the effect that everyone, connected and engaged, had on the the government and leadership of Tunis, Egypt, and the Middle East—and this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you think that it is amazing how a Facebook Page, a flurry of tweets, and the bravery of passionate and dedicated people can take down a 30-year dictator, think what it can do to equalize the business playing field. To be honest, The Cluetrain Manifesto was at least a decade ahead of its time.

There we have it—the nuts and bolt as to how to start this long-tail revolution are in the next installment. Thank you for being patient and for spending some time seeing why I am so passionate about the Cluetrain theory of everyone. Let me know if you would like me to spend more time in a future post discussing some of the other 94 of 95 theses.

Via the Biznology blog

It is only January 4, 2011, and I am seeing articles like this from the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Big Firms Poised to Spend Again,

“We preserved cash” over the past few years, said Jim Flaws, chief financial officer of Corning Inc. “Now we’re turning around and feeling comfortable about our outlook and spending it.”

“Big U.S. companies have cleaned up their balance sheets and, flush with cash, appear open to using it in 2011 on factories, stores and even hiring.

It looks like it will be a race between the Obama administration and the new Republican Congress to prove that the economy started healing and US companies started hiring and spending before the austerity measures and repeals that Congress has queued up start cutting into the very few public services that we have left.

As a communications professional, this will all boil down to messaging.  Will the American public even know that the largest US companies are coming out of their three year hibernation well before the Tea Party and the Republicans start slashing and burning essential public works and public health initiatives?  We’ll see.

To date, the Obama administration an the Democrats in charge has done a terrible job of keeping the passion alive.  What I should be able to say is that this is Obama’s to lose but that’s not the case — the GOP already owns this space and could probably roll through and even begin associating the return of jobs and the market with the Republican win last November.

I am kind of addicted to reading the New York Times daily on my new ‘graphite’ Amazon Kindle.

It takes about an hour to pore over all the stories and consume it all — because it keeps me focused as there are no apps and I am not constantly seduced by Angry Birds HD, e-mail, the web, or all the other stuff — the dozens of apps seducing and beckoning me from my media consumption — the siren song of the new media away from the old.

It is super easy. Each issue is pushed to my Kindle via WhisperNet on a daily basis and all I need to do it either read through each issue via page, article, or section.

It is quite wonderful and I can get through an entire paper in about a paper, skipping sports and obits.

I love the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times but I can’t get through 3 entire papers every day.

I subscribe to the WSJ and FT on my iPad but subscribe to the Times on my Kindle.
I kind of love it!

It looks like the race is still on. Senator Hillary Clinton has won Ohio and Texas primaries and is still in the race for President. Like I have always said, I respect the Clintons and would do anything to have one or more Clintons in the White House. Personally, I consider Bill Clinton to have been the best President in my lifetime. Reports via Salon, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, CNN, Fox News, and the LA Times.

The race in the Texas primary is still very tight, but MSNBC has just called it for Clinton. Right now, with 75 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton leads by slightly more than 60,000 votes.

Not all is lost for Obama, however: Because of the complex formula Texas uses to divide delegates, it’s possible for him to lose the popular count and still emerge from the state with a lead in delegates. The networks have not yet offered delegate projections.

Results from the Texas caucus, an entirely separate affair from the Texas primary, are also now streaming in. Obama is ahead in that race by more than 10 percentage points.

Update: Now CNN, too, has called the primary for Clinton.

According the the Wall Street Journal this AM, NBC Hopes Live Spot Puts Life Into Ads, “To fight the challenge posed by TiVo, NBC is borrowing a tactic from television’s early days — live commercials.” Back in April 15, 2005, I wrote an article, Product Placement on the Down Low, about how product placement and advertising needs to stop being so sneaky, so on the down low. (via Marketing Conversation)

“I love product placement because it reminds me of the radio shows of the 30s and 40s, which I love. Why should there be any shame surrounding product placement? I honestly believe that most people don’t care. Those who do, live in the urban centers and are loud and obnoxious. Ignore them.

In the radio shows, there was a level of healthy and straight forward communication that Madison Avenue no longer employs:

the price of this free entertainment is having sponsors, selling products and services (Horlicks, anyone?), promoting upcoming movies (why else would the stars be there?), and the like.”

David Letterman has been doing a lot of this on his show and I find it hilarious. I feel like I am complicit with the agenda: selling goods, having fun, leveraging our trust in Dave, and getting yet another skit, which is what we watch late night TV for anyway. Again, from Product Placement on the Down Low:

“To me, embedding products deep into the show so that they don’t glare just means the industry is becoming more sophisticated and not more covert. It is not about sneaking message so much as it about not inconveniencing the viewer. It is about giving more than you take. It is all about flow, seamlessness, mediadynamics.

I love product placement because it reminds me of the radio shows of the 30s and 40s, which I love. Why should there be any shame surrounding product placement? I honestly believe that most people don’t care. Those who do, live in the urban centers and are loud and obnoxious. Ignore them.”

At some point back in the 50s, the entire Madison Avenue “science of advertising” took the broadcasting world by storm. Instead of having an entire program sponsored by one corporate sponsor such as Horlicks, the model changed into a advertising blight of the 30-second and 60-second commercial spot. More from Product Placement on the Down Low:

“I honestly believe that someone with a lot of influence and charm has sold Madison Avenue that the only way to advertise and market is delivering client message using subliminals and NLP — the kind that is supposed to register on the subconscious level.”

The reincarnation of the sponsored program, the up-front sponsored testimonial, and the transparent product placement — the evolution towards integrated, live, transparent, and testimonial advertisements — was again heralded by radio. Again. I noticed this happening years ago, beginning with conservative and AM talk radio.

Back in April 7, 2006, I wrote an article that addressed these spots — I love them! The article, Purina ONE is Role Model for Word-Of-Mouth Marketing, discusses the aggressive and effective radio testimonial campaign that Purina One Natural Blends dog food shoe horns so elegantly and sentimentally into the radio shows of two radio shows I loved back in 2006, the Glen Beck Program and Jack Diamond Morning Show.

“I listen to both the Glen Beck Program and Jack Diamond Morning Show and one thing they both have in common is that both Jack and Glen spontaneously wax poetic about their dogs.

Then, after a while of spinning a warm, charming, yarn, they reveal that it wasn’t until Purina One that their really stopped shedding, started acting like a puppy again, started having a glow, and began to have clear and shiny doggie eyes!

It is such a fantastic testimony by each men and I love listening to each of the respective emotional break in their respective radio announcer‘s voice when they offer this heart felt Purina One testimonial. And then, we find out that we don’t have to take their word for it, we can call 888-606-BARK for a free 6.5 pound bag of Purina One Natural Blends dog food.

Do I feel betrayed? Used? No! I love it.

There is a sweet old world charm as though I were suddenly thrust into the Jack Benny Program. There is a lightness of being in their respective stories that don’t require me to care about the advertising or care about the salesmanship, it is the fact that these men are really likeable and we trust them and listen to them and hey, you have to pay the bills and we would rather enjoy their charm and warmth (and they do own dogs, after all — it isn’t a lie!) than the awful commercial breaks.

We hate these commercial breaks. We would rather our sweet DJ, our sweet host, hock the free 6.5 pound bag of Purina One Natural Blends dog food than leave it to someone we don’t know.”

I am curious as to why both broadcasters and advertisers are so ashamed of advertising and of their product. I may be a freak, but I love paging through my favorite magazines, looking at the watches, the cars, and the homes that fuel all of my obsessive work and red-hot single-minded ambition. Even more from Product Placement on the Down Low:

“I am sure it was a genius doctor of clinical psychology who did the research and discovered that there are some message delivery vehicles against which we have no protection.

And that is true, of course.

But I like ads and most of my friends watch them. Half the fun of paging through most magazines is looking at what people are selling. Investing a little in the fantasy of the glossy Rolex ad for the GMT-II Oyster Perpetual in solid gold!

Drool.”

As I wrote back in June 21, 2005 in A Return to Sponsored Programming ala Radio Shows,

“It is time to return to what works, when you can share the “inside joke” with your audience that a lot of what is going on on the show is to sppease the sponsor.

A little bit of fun on the sponsor’s expense show the viewers that the sponsor is big, funloving, harmless, and can take a joke.

That the corporate sponsor is just a regular guy.”

I think that NBC is being super smart. I don’t know if anyone has been discussing David Letterman’s playful inline product placement, but I noticed, and it made me happy and made me feel like I was in on the joke.

‘So, before everybody spends all their time going on the down low with their advertising and marketing, it is also important to explore the up and up as well. Oftentimes, stating loud and proud, “this is my product and I think you should buy it because it is better, different, cooler, newer, lighter, sturdier, more stylish, more reliable, and safer than anything else, and here’s why.”‘

Back to NBC Hopes Live Spot Puts Life Into Ads, here are some pretty telling excerpts you might want to read, after my egocentric briefing:

‘Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Tonight Show” will air a live skit promoting car satellite-navigation devices made by Garmin International. The skit will air immediately before the show goes to commercial break. There, the message will be reinforced with a taped spot for Garmin taking the first slot in the break.

Live TV ads were standard in the 1950s, when most shows aired live and the advertising message would often be delivered by the star of a program. But live-to-air spots fell out of favor over time; “The Tonight Show” last ran a live spot in 1995. NBC’s decision to try the live Garmin spot comes as networks are casting about for ways to keep viewers watching commercials, in a time when digital video recorders such as TiVo allow viewers to speed through ads while watching a program they’ve recorded earlier.

For “Tonight Show” viewers, Garmin’s ad will be hard to miss. The skit will appear shortly before the show is due to go to its second commercial break, and “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno will toss to the commercial. At that point, Mr. Leno’s announcer, John Melendez, will don a lab coat — with Garmin’s logo on it — and mock-seriously discuss the perils of “Direction Disorder” — men’s reluctance to ask for directions, according to the script for the ad.

As Mr. Melendez explains the disorder, a large video screen in the background will show a man in a car asking gas-station attendants for directions. The attendants point in opposite directions and laugh, leaving the driver “looking helplessly at the camera.” At the end of the skit, Mr. Melendez will announce: “But now there’s a cure,” as the video screen reveals the logo for a Garmin device.

“For us, it was just a way to TiVo-proof our advertising,” says Ted Gartner, media relations manager at Garmin International.

Pressure on networks to deal with TiVo and similar devices — now in 17% of U.S. homes, according to Nielsen Media Research — has ratcheted up in the past several months. Nielsen last month began releasing ratings measuring the viewership of commercial breaks, as opposed to the programs. While marketers have long worried about people skipping their ads, Nielsen’s new ratings are providing hard evidence of just how much DVRs reduce viewing of their ads.

Nielsen’s introduction of “commercial” ratings has helped delay “upfront” negotiations for next season’s ad time between networks and advertisers, which usually start after the networks present their schedules to advertisers in May. This year, the negotiations have been slow to gain traction. Some media buyers expect the deal-making to pick up steam in the next few days, however.

The Garmin deal “obviously is a reaction to the DVR issue and a reaction to commercial ratings,” says Marianne Gambelli, executive vice president, sales and marketing, for NBC Universal. Marketers are increasingly looking for these types of ad deals, she adds.

Garmin hopes to magnify its message by twinning the live spot with the conventional ad in the commercial break. In the past, when NBC has integrated a product into the story line of a show and given the marketer the first ad slot in the commercial break, research has shown advertising recall jumps by “40% to 50%,” Ms. Gambelli says.

NBC says it’s looking to expand use of the live commercials during late-night TV and sees the Garmin ad as a test. Not that they’ll appear a lot. “You want to keep it unique,” Ms. Gambelli notes.

In recent months, other networks have tried an array of other gimmicks to keep viewers watching through commercial breaks, including adding quizzes and short videos.’

The final paragraph of the Wall Street Journal article says it best:

“We have killed and mauled the golden goose of commercial breaks,” says TV historian and author Tim Brooks. “For a long time, the audience has put up with it, but now they have the ability to dodge commercial breaks, so networks can’t get away with it any more.”

Rent is too insubtle, too pedantic, too rife with hyperbole, too grotesque, too black and white. The premise is amazing, but the musical is too focused on preaching to the choir and not enough time to educate the masses of asses on sundry important social issues, for both conservatives and liberals.

Read something, even out of the Wall Street Journal or the FT to the tune of a loping, awkward, highschool musical, and it sounds like Rent.

Rent is schoolmarmish while Hair is just out there, exposed. Rent tells you what to think while Hair lets you think for yourself.

Amen to that.