The tables have been turned on the ratings business.

Predicting that “Nielsen should score big audience ratings on Wall Street,” the NYT thinks the private equity team which took the former VNU company private four years ago has done a good job — and will be rewarded with a successful IPO of up to $1.75 billion. Nielsen’s SEC filing says they plan to use the proceeds to reduce its $8.6 billion debt and “general corporate purposes.”

Here’s the “by the numbers” analysis of Nielsen’s numbers:

• Nielsen takes in about $4.8 billion in revenue each year from nearly 100 countries.
• In 2006,  former GE Exec David Calhoun and a group of private investment firms including Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bought Nielsen from VNU for about $10 billion.
• Calhoun and company injected another $3 billion in capital into the business, buying up new properties like IAG, mobile measurement firm Telephia and video analytics company GlanceGuide. They also shed non-core assets like Nielsen EDI (sold to Rentrak) and a long list of venerable publications, closing Radio & Records and Editor & Publisher and selling Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter to e5 Global Media. According to the WSJ, Nielsen also cut 10% of their staff after the buyout.
• Nielsen earned about $1.3 billion last year compared to $879 million four years ago.

Where the NYT is bullish on Nielsen’s IPO prospects, a skeptical WSJ calls “bullsh1t.” Noting that Nielsen was acquired in a pre-Twitter and Facebook(-dominant) world where they now trail comScore in Internet measurement, the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Corkery blogs that “anytime savvy investors – such as KKR, Blackstone and Carlyle Group – are selling out in a volatile stock market — potential investors should be asking themselves why.”

At the end of the day, Van Morrison may have the last word on the success of Nielsen’s planned IPO.

In the song “Wild Night,” Morrison writes “…and all the girls walk by dressed up for each other.” If you substitute private equity firms for girls you get some insight into how The Street views Nielsen’s IPO. “An initial offering that comes close to doubling their money would also help dispel criticism that buyout firms are nothing more than undertaxed financial engineers,” says the New York Times.

If anyone has a reality show treatment called “Pimp My Ratings Company” in the works, this would be a great time to do some lunches.

The ways people are consuming content on new video platforms remind me of how I sometimes eat one of my favorite foods – shrimp fried rice.

Traditional linear TV is consumed the way fried rice is intended to be eaten.  The rice, the veggies and the shrimp or chicken or whatever meat is at hand are consumed together.  However, online clips and on-demand video in general tend to promote a bit of cheating.  It’s like those occasions when I’m not all that hungry, and after a few bites I find myself starting to skip over the vegetables and rice, seeking out the shrimp and just eating those.

Think YouTube, and here we are hunting out a clip of one particular segment we like from a TV show, the rest of which didn’t impress us.  And we certainly don’t want to see all of those commercials that ran in the program.  So we go online and find a clip of what we want.  Yum, tasty shrimp!

Even if we watch a full episode of a program on cable on-demand or on Hulu or a network website, we’re still enjoying a distilled version with few, if any, commercials.  An hour long show often magically becomes a 45-minute experience.  And if the streaming software allows it, we may skip around in that and watch only the program segments that particularly interest us.  It’s not just the cable or broadcast network ads that vanish.  Those couple of minutes or more from each hour that the cable systems sell to local advertisers are gone, along with the local inserts in broadcast shows sold by your local affiliated stations.

Lots of people make their living selling these local availabilities.  You can hardly blame them if they feel threatened by digital technology.  There are new revenue opportunities, but there may be periods of starvation before we can develop them to the point of company and personal profit.  For example, “dynamic” on-the-fly commercial insertion in on-demand TV offerings at either the network or local level is still more a promise than reality.  And we haven’t even touched on the effects of DVRs in the viewing mix.

Meanwhile, audiences are learning to skim the cream and pitch out the skim milk.  Pass the shrimp.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

At the 1964 World’s Fair, AT&T introduced a new product that combined the telephone and television into a surefire hit for businesses and consumers. Three million Picturephones were predicted to be in use by the 1980’s. Instead of Picturephones, we now remember the 80’s by a different cultural failure: disco music.

AT&T is estimated to have spent up to $500 million developing the Picturephone. Why wouldn’t you want to see the person to whom you were speaking? If facial expressions weren’t important, why did those thoughtful Internet pioneers invent all of those emoticons to express what words alone couldn’t do? AT&T failed partially because they charged $21 a minute for the bandwidth hungry picture phone in a pre-fiber, barely satellite communications age. Today we can do it for free via iChat or Skype — but even free hasn’t made consumers want to be heard and be seen.

Last week Google announced a new service which will join two commonly used communications technologies. Google TV will marry TV with search to improve the consumer experience and, in Google’s words, “change the future of television.” Anyone who has ever tried to use a remote control to text search a TV interactive program guide can see the possibilities of searching “all of your channels, recorded shows,  YouTube and other Websites” in one place.

Long before the industry anointed  “convergence” as the holy grail of media synergy, AT&T learned that consumers can be a fickle bunch. Google, a dominant communications company of the 21st century, might want to take a history lesson from AT&T, which was the largest communications company of the 20th century.

Google and their technology partners hope to sell new TVs (from Sony) or new HDMI-connectible set top boxes (from Logitech) to merge your desktop and set top digital words. Google TV Product Lead Rishi Chandra says Google TV will let viewers use the voice search feature of Android phones to query Google TV. NewTeeVee.com provided a play-by-play of the new service as demoed at the Google I/O conference. First, Chandra searched for live TV content and scheduled TV programming to program a DVR.

Then he searched for House, and Google TV returned search results Hulu, Fox.com and Amazon. Clicking on the Amazon search result led to the website of Amazon’s VOD service. The search bar can also be used to directly input urls and search saved bookmarks. “It’s just as easy to go to any site on the web as it is to go to any channel on your television,” says Chandra.

Google’s business model is to make money by bringing search to TV and extending the reach of advertising through Adwords. In an interview on the Fox Business Channel, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that because Google TV seamlessly combines TV and computers, “we know a lot more about what people are doing and can make more relevant television advertising  — which should be worth alot of money.”

Will Google succeed where AT&T once failed and Apple TV and Microsoft’s Media Center have stalled? There’s only one way to end an article that talks about almost 50 years of TV and technology: Stay tuned.

Sources: DavidZondy.com, Porticus.org, Google TV, NewTeeVee.com, Digital Daily, Fox Business Channel, BobLucky.com

See Also: Engadget, timeline.com, BusinessInsider.com

Saturday’s October 3, 2009 headline “Palin Holds Own In VP Debate” in the BattleCreek Enquirer tells all you need to know about how Alaska’s Sarah Plain when she went mano a mano with Joe Biden on October 3. The article, which Google News featured prominently at 7a, was at the top of the list of “related” Friday articles about Palin’s chances in 2012.

Only problem is that the BattleCreekEnquirer was a year too late.

A closer read of the story shows that it should have been filed with a dateline of October 3, 2008 — not 2009. The error was amplified by Google’s news-bot-algorithm-thingee when this retro story was grouped with recent comments by former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt said a 2012 Palin nomination would be catastrophic for the party.

Web publishers use CMS (content management systems) to manage stories, dates, bylines and ad placement. Obviously something snafu-ed in Battle Creek followed by the clueless electronic editor-in-chief-bot at Google (There’s no truth to the rumor that the new Google News slogan is “All The Dated News That’s Fit We Publish.”).

One of the funnier quips about this slip out belongs to GeeWizard, a comment poster on the BattleCreekEnquirer website.

I’m excited to see Palin, a fresh face in politics. I’ll bet she’ll be sad to quit her position as Governor of Alaska once the American people unanimously vote her into the White House. She’s not like other slimy politicians who are only interested in self-promotion and million dollar book deals. She loves her state and would stay with it forever if she could. GO PALIN!!

Wait….what year is this?

Damn computers. Can’t live with em. Can’t sue ‘em when they screw up something stupid, either. But I bet there will be hell to pay at the editor’s desk in Battle Creek come Monday morning.

Sources: Battle Creek Enquirer, October 3, 2009, The Atlantic, CNN VP Debate Transcript

Journalists are taught to write in an inverted pyramid getting the most important who, what, when, where and why facts into the first few sentences. PR peeps embrace a similar philosophy, however their idea of the most important info always includes the client’s name and company, eventually getting around to whatever the press release might be about. Consequently, every press release gets rewritten by any journalist worth their salt.

It’s particularly ironic considering how many PR people started their careers as journalists, probably cursing the PR people for how lazy they are and how poorly they wrote. (Does this just prove that what goes around, comes around?)

At one time, the journalists were the sole gate keepers of public opinion. Today things are different. If public relations people can’t place a story on the front page of the Times, you can still blog, tweet and comment your way to viral nirvana.

Unfortunately, the PR peeps need to talk about their client doesn’t trump consumers’ need to speed read what they want. And make decisions in a fraction of a second about what’s interesting and clickable. The online paradigm — where only a headline or the first sentence of a press release is exposed in a news reader for a RSS feed — probably won’t engage the reader before the space is exhausted.

Here are some examples:

New City, NY – County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef, Gordon Wren, Jr., Director of the County’s Office of Fire & Emergency Services, and members of the County’s volunteer firefighters’ community today unveiled…

or…

Clear Channel Airports introduced exciting changes to Oakland International Airport with
a new advertising program featured in both terminals.

or…

Privately held Noble Investment Group (“Noble”), a leading sponsor of private equity real estate funds and an integrated lodging and hospitality operating and development organization,
today announced…

Still awake? (Probably not.) The point is that EVEN if flacks succeed in getting their release into your newsreader the chances are slim and none that consumers will click. Unless you are the competition to the company sending out the release.

Recently, someone new to the PR business asked my advice about creating effective press releases. I cited the public communications gospel of Neil Greenberger, the press guy for Montgomery County, MD and a former Washington Post sports writer. “Rule #1 is make it easy for journalists,” says Greenberger. Write a good lead in your press release and make the story interesting. If it engages the journalist, they will eventually read down to the second paragraph to find out more about your client.

If more public relations people followed this rule, the Web would be a better place. Or at least a more interesting read.

Dave Zornow is editor of MediaNewsAndViews and co-publisher of NyackNewsAndViews, a hyper-local community news site in Nyack, NY.

A man sits down to read a politically provocative novel on his electronic reader only to find that the book has vanished. Without warning, his purchase price has been refunded and the book he’d hoped to peruse has been deleted.

You might think this is from George Orwell’s famous anti-utopian adventure 1984, but it is in fact a scene that played out earlier this month in real living rooms and commuter trains across the country. Ironically, the disappearing book was 1984.

The deletion occurred after Amazon discovered that it was distributing 1984 and other books, including Animal Farm, without the proper permissions. Amazon’s Kindle devices come equipped with digital rights management software that enables the company to do something with ebooks that it cannot do with traditional print copies, which is to step into the customer’s home and take back what has been sold.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, apologized for the incident, saying Amazon’s “‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

In spite of Bezos’s promise to “make better decisions going forward,” the incident provides plenty of reasons to be uneasy about technology that could potentially be used to monitor and to censor what we read. In this case, Amazon’s electronic recall had nothing to do with the content of the erased books, but, in the future, governments or other powerful entities could conceivably ask (or force) Amazon to use its powers for less benign purposes.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the book, The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It commented to The New York Times that, eventually, digital rights management software might be used “like a line item veto for content.” He went on to suggest that “It could happen first in jurisdictions like the United Kingdom, where there isn’t as rich a First Amendment tradition and where libel suits happen much more frequently.”

In spite of Amazon’s efforts to make reading a book on the Kindle as much like reading a paper and ink book as possible, events like this remind us that electronic content distribution keeps us discreetly tethered to our suppliers. This is true not only of Amazon, but also of Apple’s iTunes store and cable companies that supply us with set-top boxes. What if the National Football League’s license agreement allowed it to demand that blown calls, wardrobe malfunctions and other embarrassments be electronically deleted from our DVRs?

The First Amendment gives Americans some of the strongest protections for free expression the world has ever seen. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are not universally respected or even admired. Amazon goofed when it deleted the electronic books it had sold, but it also did us a favor by reminding us that today’s powerful information technologies work in both directions.

Come to think of it, this blog is available to Kindle users for the modest fee of $1.99 a month. If you downloaded this post on your Kindle, I hope you get the chance to read it.

We can bring the bookseller into our homes. The question now is: Can we also keep it out?

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

It’s the stuff from which Sci Fi is made. The Web Search-opoly, which has shook the bedrock of the advertising world, has invested in a company that can cause earthquakes. (Sort of. The investment is real, the earthquakes are a possibility)

What’s best is that Rule #6 of Google’s corporate philosophy is “you can make money without doing evil.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin, meet Lex Luthor and Dr. No.

It’s also about energy and using the heat of the earth to produce clean power without greenhouse gases or fragile geopolitical alliances. Google has invested $6.25 million in AltaRock Energy which plans to drill two miles below the surface to tap geothermal energy in a place about two hours north of San Francisco.

AltaRock hopes to use engineered geothermal systems to pump cold water below the surface to fracture rocks and create fissures. The water, heated under intense pressure, returns to the surface as steam used to turn electrical turbines.

However, the NYT did a little digging (I couldn’t resist) and found that a similar venture in Basel, Switzerland was shut down after it triggered man-made earthquakes which persisted for months after the drilling stopped. AltaRock says they aren’t sure that the Basel project caused the Swiss quakes although local officials in Switzerland are sure that they did.

Regarding geothermal energy, Google says we need “more aggressive government policies to help catch up to other nations, including expanded R&D funding, a national renewable portfolio standard, and reliable tax incentives.”

Here’s the pitch: Corporate greed vs. community need by do global gooders gone bad  at the cross roads of good intentions and the San Andreas fault. Wannabe script writers for History and Discovery Channels — are you listening?

Source: NYT, XConomy, GreenTechMedia, Earthetech

“Up to half of all Web users delete their cookies at least once a month,” says John Lovett, a senior analyst at Forrestter Research. Although Forrester’s results are at the high end of several studies, the 30 percent estimate at the low end of syndicated study results still troubles researchers and advertisers.

Lovett says that 21 percent of users delete cookies for no particular reason. And 55 percent kill their cookies because they mistakenly believe that keeping cookies will slow down their PC’s behavior (please tell your Aunt Gladys the truth: deleting cookies won’t make your 386 Windows 3.1 PC run any faster).

But deleting cookies does affect publishers’ unique visit counts and calculated conversion rates. For advertisers, it distorts reach estimates and frequency capping algorithms.

Gian Flgoni Chairman of comScore, cites different estimates, but agrees with the trend the frequency of monthly deletion is increasing.

Fewer persistent cookies — and the inability to identify the same user on multiple computers or platforms — inflates unique visitor counts. Doubleclick Product Manager Sean Harvey says his company models these data to adjust for deletions. The IAB has worked to address this industry issue through education and best practices guidelines.

Concerned that cookies are becoming an endangered species — whose life and death affects advertising — panelists urged researchers to write their representatives in Congress about the value of cookies and offer a tutorial on their benefits.

An old battle cry is new again in the world wild Web. In 1999 — when the sun first shined on the ad supported web — a few visionary voices predicted a dim future for publishers unless they found a way to move beyond cost per click into a branding. Ten years later, Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank said it again at the Advertising Research Foundation’s AM 4.0 conference in New York.

“Web publishers need to send less inventory to ad networks,”  at abysmally low CPMs, says Burbank the former P&G executive.  Burbank says, the current practivce isn’t sustainable and sites need to find a way to make branding work.

Burbank illustrated the staying power of brand advertising on televsision by flashing a picture of Mr. Whipple, the legendary character identified with the Charmin toilet tissue. Although the brand hasn’t been active for about 20 years, most of the attendees could identify the character unaided and also remember the memorable tag line, “please don’t squeeze the Charmin.”

It’s not that advertisers aren’t trying to do brand advertising — is just that it has been mostly hit and miss up to now. Burbank cited campaigns by Kleenize and Puffs to do TV-style branding via web advertising. The results were less than memorable.

“Really boring CPG products need time to tell stories,” says Burbank, noting that it’s alot harder to brand uninspiring products like toilet paper than iPhones. “You need to have time. The ad has to persist.” Both Yahoo and the New York Times — working with advertisers like Microsoft’s BING search engine and Apple — have found ways to make it work. Burbank cited the recent Apple campaign for the PC and Mac guys which used a banner that covered the NYT’s legendary masthead incorporated with two synchronized skyscaper ads on the left and the right.

Burbank says good brand advertising needs to answer four questions:

• Did I reach my target? “Demos are a good start, but information about offline consumer behavior is better,” he says.
• Was my ad delivered to the target — did the audience spend quality time with the ad? Did the brand have an opportunity to tell its story?
• Did the ad change how people feel about my brand?
• Did the ad sell more product?

“The current business models won’t support the web,” Burbank says. “The current economic environment and its focus on ROI.gives publishers a unique opportunity to  set a new standard for brand advertising on the Web.”

See also: Primary Impact, “Deja Vu All Over Again”

Navic positions Admira as an “end-to-end solution for dynamically buying television media…providing aggregated, anonymous set-top viewership data to place ads based on audience segmentation and target criteria” offering planning, inventory management and accountability features. Microsoft Advertising Scott Ferris says it’s non-disruptive and offers premium advertising. That means it isn’t an auction (like Google or eBay’s TV offerings) and has offers buyers more than just remnant advertising.

Sources: WSJ, Navic, MediaPost