Well, it’s that time of year again. A little after Wimbledon and just before the MLB pennant races heat up, a lot of people with foreign wear spandex and race bicycles crazy fast up and down mountains in a far away land we love to visit almost as much as Fox News loves to criticize. Beginning today in Rotterdam and ending three weeks later in Paris, it’s the Tour de France.

Over the next three weeks, we’ll be writing race commentary, explanation and interpretation of both the race and the ratings. Don’t know a “domestique” from a demo rating? Stick with us to learn about the race — and its media and marketing impact.

Whitey Chapin offers this preview of what to expect when the race’s first 9 km stage kicks off in Rotterdam on Saturday:

Saturday July 3, 2010 –Lance Armstrong has certainly created even more drama with his recent announcement that this year’s Tour de France would be his last. Winning the Tour one more time has been Lance’s goal over the past year. From daily training to racing in competitions ranging from the Tour of Luxembourg to the Tour of Switzerland, Lance Armstrong devotes 12 months a year to being on the podium in Paris.

Armstrong’s influence dominates the Versus cable network, which signed on for cycling coverage years ago based primarily on Lance’s popularity. Similarly, RadioShack created and sponsored a full cycling team solely for Lance Armstrong’s pursuit of another Tour de France title.

RadioShack’s new team was formed a year ago after Armstrong’s one-year association with Team Astana. Lance had returned to cycling after several years off following his record 7 victories at the Tour de France. Team Astana signed Lance on, but there was immediate conflict with teammate Alberto Contador. Last year at the Tour, Contador won the race (his second title), as Armstrong finished 3^rd in his return. The team was divided as Contador rode away from the pack for the victory against the team’s directions on how the race should proceed.

Versus achieved superlative results in last year’s Tour with Armstrong versus the year before without him. TV delivery was up 134%, and online impressions were up 117%. RadioShack stated publicly that their goal in sponsoring Lance’s cycling team was to both launch a new creative platform and to further support cancer causes and Lance’s Livestrong charity.

So here we are in 2010 with the reputations of Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, Versus and Radio Shack ready to be recast again. Ratings are sure to go up again. From a marketing perspective, while there are 198 riders who will race in the Tour, there are only two who matter.

Nielsen’s 2009 revenue was flat — albeit $4.8 billion worldwide. Operating income fell dropped 72 percent to $116 million from $421 million in 2008 mostly due to restructuring and accounting charges.

During 2009 Nielsen sold it’s EDI movie measurement service to Rentrak and a handful of B-to-B magazines in the entertainment business including Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews, Hollywood Reporter and Billboard. Additionally, Nielsen pulled the plug on radio industry bible Radio And Records last June.

In March 2009, the company announced plans to cut 1600 jobs or about five percent of its headcount.

Sources: Crain’s NY, 3/30/2009, Yahoo News, Mediabistro, 6/4/2009, NY Times 12/10/2009

Apple’s iPad, a supersized iPhone tablet computer, has inspired hope and fear from print publishers as well as ample discussion about how this latest innovation will save or slay magazines and newspapers. Here’s a 2005 flashback that presaged today’s announcement.

While relaxing with a good book and my iPod this weekend, I drifted off to sleep. And I had an amazing dream.

It was one of those dreams that spring from your last conscious thought. I had been thinking about the new video iPod and what a holiday great gift it would make. I’d also just read about the Washington Post posting their video podcasts on the iTunes Web site. I mused about how you could now get almost any conceivable content from almost any media online….

In my dream it was all true. Even magazines, the mother lode of great content, were now available in iTunes. I dreamed that I could get editorial content packaged like cable – buying a tier of 100 titles for a reasonable $30 a month which included “gotta have” books bundled with “might be nice to read ones,” too. It was all there to read online, on a PDA, a notebook or a video iPod.

In my dream, magazines publishers decided to work together because they found a rising tide of incremental revenue really did lift all boats. And by looking beyond the covers, newsstands sales, circulation and glossy pages by which they have traditionally defined themselves, they had created a new revenue stream that didn’t cannibalize their current subscriber base. Furthermore, these media visionaries had kindled* a new reading boom in America by stealing an idea from amazon.com. By including “people like you have also read” recommendations in their online iTunes storefront, magazine publishers had increased customer satisfaction, reduced churn and extended their brands into a new space. The first mass media was reborn, iTuning into new audiences while simultaneously lowering production and distribution costs. Ad sales profited too, as targeted banner ads, based on the interests I demonstrated in previous editorial selections, were included alongside the online copy.

I suddenly awoke and realized it was all just a dream. I rubbed my eyes and smiled recalling my short-lived editorial adventure. Then I turned my attention back to the book I had been reading before falling asleep, “The Gilded Dinosaur.”

Dave Zornow is president of TNG Research, a media research and applications development company that works with media sellers and research providers.  This story was originally published in the Cynopsis:Weekender newsletter, 11/3/05

* Editor’s note: I believe the use of the word “kindle-d” in this Nov, 2005 article about making magazine content more mobile was random. But it is funny how things turn out!

By Peter M. Gordon

The first thing I remember about that summer was the endless rain. Days and days of it left streams swollen and mud everywhere. The sun barely peeped through the clouds the entire month of August. Then I remember the refugees clogging the roads, hungry, buying food when they could, begging when they couldn’t. The entire county felt like it had been visited by a plague of soggy locusts with tie-dyed shirts and jeans. Abandoned cars blocked the shoulder for miles up and down the highways and back roads, as the pilgrims grimly trudged on.

The media coverage in Sullivan County was akin to that of a major disaster. I remember reports of starving, malnourished bodies rushed to emergency rooms, and wild uncorroborated stories of bulldozers trying to move immense piles of garbage running over teenagers in sleeping bags. Tales of violence rape, and drug abuse abounded. It seemed like hell on earth. That’s how I remember Woodstock.

During the summer of ’69 my family stayed, as we did for several years before and after, at B & K bungalow colony on old Route 17 on the outskirts of Monticello, New York. Sullivan County in the Catskills was still a prime vacation destination for New York residents. It contained resorts from grand hotels like the Concord and Grossingers to low end motels where air conditioning was still considered a novelty. In those days, in our colony, wives either didn’t have a job or worked for the school system so they could take the summer off. Fathers worked in the city, drove up on the weekends to spend time with the family, get drunk on Saturday night, and go back to the city.

Our colony sat on a piece of land facing Old Route 17, a two lane road that was once the main drag through the Catskills resort area. On the other side of the colony was the elevated span of the Quickway, the new route 17 New York State had built just a few years ago. Both those roads ran directly to Bethel, home of Woodstock. We could hike from our colony to the border of Bethel in 15 minutes.

I don’t remember hearing anything about the music festival a few miles down the road earlier in the summer. I was only 12 at the time and much more interested in the fortunes of the Mets, who were playing great baseball for the first time in my life. Even so, when the first hippies started driving by on Route 17, occasionally stopping to buy milk or bread at our colony’s store, I made sure I saw them. Mom and Dad had warned me about these cowards who were afraid to fight for their country like Dad did during World War II. They didn’t look that dangerous to me with their long hair (boys and girls) and colorful outfits. I thought they were cool.

Suddenly one day in August there were thousands of them, all going to Woodstock. Parents kept a close watch on their kids, particularly the older ones, for fear the hippies would seduce them with drugs and free sex. Some of the teenage counselors that stayed there during the summer did get permission to go and set out in a blue station wagon with sleeping bags and a cooler. They came back a few hours later. They gave up. It was just too hard to get close to the music. I thought Woodstock was a big bust – the joke was on all those poor hungry hippies. Imagine my surprise when I learned it defined a generation.

I’ve read a lot of media tributes to Woodstock during this 40th Anniversary Year. I wish I had a dollar for every news anchor that said, “if you remember the sixties you probably weren’t there.” . If you were there, you were probably muddy, cold and hungry for most of it; if you didn’t make it you spent the weekend living in your car.

After Woodstock the hippies went back to their college, jobs, and families and lived their lives. Unfortunately, we did not see the great outpouring of peace and love that Woodstock supposedly promised. The real lesson of Woodstock was that music festivals could attract big crowds. Better organized promoters who planned for large crowds could make a lot of money. Bonaroo, Burning Man, and even the Warp Tour are the real legacies of Woodstock today.

Woodstock was really the end of an era. The gentle smoke of pot was giving way to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. The bungalow colony era was ending, too. Mothers were getting full time jobs, and couldn’t afford to spend the summer away from work. With two incomes, families could afford more exotic vacations, and pretty soon the Catskill resorts became ghost towns, waiting for the miracle of casino gambling or other schemes to revive them.

Woodstock is probably the best known example of the sixties’ generation penchant for self-absorption. I plan to celebrate 1969 by remembering the Mets triumph and man’s landing on the moon.

Peter M. Gordon is a writer, public speaker, and media consultant.

“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.

Producing a newspaper must be a humbling experience these days.  Struggling to stay afloat while watching your classifieds section dwindle to something thin enough to use as a cheese slicer can’t be fun.  The newspaper business has never been this bad, right?  Wrong, very wrong.

It depends on the point in history you pick to make your comparison.  We like to compare to the decades since WW II, the glory days when the big metro dailies have been licenses to print money and their owners counted the profits by the hundreds of millions of bucks.  Despite first radio, then television and finally the internet having the advantage for breaking news, newspapers still dominated local media markets.

This period of great riches was the exception.  To appreciate what the newspaper business has been for most of its history, warp back a hundred years or so.  Today’s papers look prosperous compared to the publications of the 1890s.  There was no competition yet from electronic media, but most newspapers were pathetic looking beasts.

I found this out while doing some historical research involving early papers in my hometown in Virginia.  Despite having had a population of only about 10,000, library-preserved copies and newspaper directories revealed that during the 1890’s the town had six newspapers – two dailies and four weeklies.  I suspect that none of them were profitable on a steady basis.  By 1900 all six had faded away and been replaced by more aggressive papers that invaded from nearby larger towns.

As to the purists who are shocked that some newspapers are selling ad space on the front page, be aware that many early papers sold all or nearly all of the front in small card ads.  Particularly popular were pitches for patent medicines and miracle healing machines that used magnetic rays to cure everything from fatigue to lumbago (whatever lumbago is.  It sounds like some sort of ballroom dance.)

Newspapers of a century ago had to be scrappy.  Only the most scrappy, ingenious and energetic survived.  Maybe the industry could use some of those publishers, editors and writers now.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

Imagine that on your next trip to the supermarket all organization of goods has been lost.  Everything is in piles on the floor with no particular order.  Fresh bananas are next to canned peach halves, while sliced peaches are over on the other side of the store next to laundry detergent.

Now imagine that you’re in the food business, and your canned chili is stacked between cat food and toothpaste.  Take one more mental leap and imagine that you’re in the business of producing original Web series, and your webisodes are trying to grab shoppers in a marketplace as disorganized as our imaginary supermarket from Hades.

That last wrinkle wasn’t too hard to imagine because that’s pretty much the way things are.  And you thought trying to promote audience growth for a new cable network in a 500-plus channel universe was a tough job.  At least with cable and satellite there is a functioning program guide.  The search and guide options for the Web are useful mostly to people who already know what they’re looking for.

It’s the chicken-and-egg challenge that the major cable nets suffered in their early days.  Without promotion you can’t get an audience.  Without a significant audience you can’t get advertisers.  Without advertisers’ bucks, you can’t afford to promote.  And the venture capital folks aren’t exactly salivating to give your risky venture lots of backing.

I keep seeing reports of clever Web series that launch with great audience levels for their initial episodes, followed by sharp audience drop-offs.  Without promotion and some sort of reasonable program guide/gatekeeper function, the audience that stumbled across the first episodes or came by word-of-mouth soon drifts away to the next attractive pile of merchandise on the supermarket floor.

There is tremendous creative potential for original entertainment material produced for the Web.  The laurels will go to whoever can organize and promote this jumble of content riches and make it a business.

Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.

If you are old enough to remember the Cold War, The Man From Uncle, Get Smart and Dr. Strangelove, you probably also remember Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. If you aren’t old enough, think Burn Report with a Sci-Fi / surreal edge.

To promote its new interpretation of the original series later this year, AMC is putting all 17 episodes of the original 1967-68 series online at amctv.com. The site includes episode summaries and a behind the scenes photo gallery, too.

Visit  amctv.com to get your retro-fill of spy era suspense and cool Brit accents.

Source: amctv.com, IMDB

My money is on Colbert, TDS or The Onion. But don’t count out The Daily News or the New York Post either. In any event, you *read* it here first…

And the winners are:

• The NY Daily News
  
• Now Public
• New Orleans Times-Picayune
• …and many, many others…

It’s the first time an Internet provider has been called out by regulators on the issue of the issue of Net Neutrality. “The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers’ access to the internet,” says FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Comcast’s Internet throttling was detailed in a November 2007 report from The Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzing Comcast’s Internet traffic interference activities suggesting that the MSO was using packet-forging to disrupt peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing on their network.

Wired magazine reports that Comcast has also tampered with public access to officials.

Comcast faced further public outrage after it admitted to paying people off the street to sit at a public hearing at Harvard, while members of the public were prevented from attending. At the time, Comcast claimed it merely paid people to save spots at the hearing for Comcast employees, but the event’s organizer disputed that claim.

Sources: Wired Magazine, ArsTechnia, TorrentFreak, FCC Commisioner McDowell in the Washington Post