Burst Media CEO: Will Google + DoubleClick Fit?

SCOTT FULTON, BetaNews: We've talked about the fact that there are too many people who expect or want, or feel more comfortable with, a broadcast media approach to interpreting the industry. I'm wondering...is this due to the fact that the media industry as it has been defined in this country is founded on the root principles of print and broadcast?

This is where people have been schooled, it's where their careers have been made, and even if they learned the online industry first, as they climbed the top of the mountain, they are the top of a broadcast/print mountain which has some Internet media interests, and because of that, there proliferates an old-school, 20th century approach to speaking about this industry...

The more and more years we continue to embrace this old school, the more difficult it becomes for us as an Internet industry to evolve, to shed that mantle, and to start truly targeting.

JARVIS COFFIN, CEO, Burst Media: The first part of your description is dead-on. But we can be more hopeful than that. See also the history of cable television. In 1979, they were just wiring the Upper East Side of New York for cable. We were still getting used to having remote controls and VCRs in our living rooms and in our parlors. So somewhere around 20 years after the commercial dawn, if you will, of cable television, cable finally surpassed broadcast in total ads spent. And that's my touchstone. When we sit around our table at Burst Media and we think about, "How long is it going to take, and what do we get when we get there?" we look at cable.

You could look at FM radio. Heck, you could look at television versus radio. It's fairly legendary, it's part of the legend and lore of the TV industry that it took Procter & Gamble eight years after the introduction of television to spend its first dollar on TV. Advertisers, yes. The people who are sitting in the corner offices with charge over the million-dollar advertising budgets are not saying, "Here, let's take 20% and assign it to cable or the Internet." "Not on my watch." They haven't grown up with it, they don't know what it is, their job is simply to see sales increase 5% year-over-year, and for as long as they're in those corner offices.

So the industry has baked into it this sort of...it depends on your perspective, it either is a good thing in that the industry is protected from these abrupt kinds of lurches back and forth, or it's a bad thing in that it's slow to recognize and slow to change. And the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

SCOTT FULTON: As you noted with your analogy with New York cable television, the viewership base changed practically overnight.

JARVIS COFFIN: Absolutely, as it did online.

SCOTT FULTON: And yet there was a much slower trend in recognizing that fact.

JARVIS COFFIN: Absolutely. Again, that's the irony of our business, marketing. Think of all the energy and all the wisdom that pours into understanding consumer sentiment, and we're real good at detecting changes and shifts in consumer attitudes towards our goods and products. Why we don't respond equally to consumer changes in attitudes to new media, I have no idea.

SCOTT FULTON: Is it kind of an amortization problem? The industry has so much invested in old media, in television as an asset.

JARVIS COFFIN: Entrenched power is a big deal here.

SCOTT FULTON: It has to find a way to monetize on that, even if it's winding down.

JARVIS COFFIN: And the good news is, if you look at the history of media, TV was going to put radio out of business. Didn't happen. Cable was going to put broadcast out of business. Didn't happen. Consumers sop up media. We love media. We use the medium to dial in on our particular interests. I sit around the parlor with my family to watch whatever drivel is coming across the airwaves, but it's a community event. It's sharing time, and we all share in that programming. And it becomes more personal from there on out such that, when I'm sitting in front of the computer screen, at that point, it's about me. It's about me and the moment, and that's what I sell.

...I think that shift is starting to take place, and I think if we go back and look at cable 20 years, we're slightly over halfway there, and just about on schedule, wouldn't you know, big companies like Google and Yahoo and AOL and Microsoft - the marketplace generally, take them out of it - is starting to align itself with that sort of future. That's why it's buying these tools.

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