New York, June 11 — Cell phones are more ubiquitous than water. About 8 in 10 people around the world have clean water but almost 9 out of 10 use a mobile phone. Lucy Hood, Executive Director of the USC Marshall School of Business says cell phone usage also trumps global access to electricity (74%) and landlines (18%), too. Hood told attendees at the Advertising Research Foundation AMS 7.0 Conference that the biggest future growth in mobile use is outside of the US and Europe — using a list of services which most domestic users might find unusual.

Five years ago, smartphones were more of a concept than a buzzword in the US. But while we have been focused on getting better, smarter phones, the rest of the world has been going mobile at rates that triple the developed world. From 2010 to 2011, cell phone growth was 12 percent worldwide compared to only 3.5 percent in developed countries. In many parts of the world, the cell phone is an easy way to leapfrog infrastructure impediments to development: it’s a lot less expensive to install cell towers than it is to run cable for landlines for phones or Internet connections. Hood projects a global market of 10 billion cell phones by 2016. She says that mobile is the largest mass medium the world has ever known. “It’s not just life enhancing, but life enabling.”

Hood’s findings are based on the 2011 USC Global Mobile Survey, a study of cell phone usage in 15 countries that tracks patterns in mobile data services. The survey includes the US and Europe (Finland, Germany, Greece), Asia (China, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan) and Australia to identify the drivers and constraints to mobile market growth.

In many parts of the world the Internet means mobile. More than half of those surveyed in Egypt, India and Kenya say that cell is their primary way to access the Internet. Egypt — a country where access to social media played an important role in regime change during the 2011 Arab Spring — 70 percent of respondents said that mobile was their primary way to get to the Internet. About 3 in 10 Egyptians say they use social media, one of the principal sources for independently reported news during last year’s uprising. The percent of Egyptians using social media increased ten points from before the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak (18 to 28 percent).

Hood says that that global social media usage differs from how it is typically used in the U.S. In developing countries, businesses will use Twitter to develop pricing strategy. For consumers, a cell phone photo can be transmitted via SMS or social media to provide access to health care professionals. And mobile’s ability to foment political change has riveted the attention of Arab, Iranian and Chinese government officials.

ABC Television wants to see you smile. Really.

In his keynote address to the Advertising Research Foundation AMS 7.0 Conference in NYC, SVP Research Charles Kennedy talked about how ABC Television is using “big data,” mobile and new technology to conduct research. Kennedy says that many research studies are like a man looking for his car keys by a street light: it’s the easiest place to look. “I would argue that the best insights are out there in the dark,” he said.

Kennedy says that Disney’s Technology Lab is helping ABC develop new metrics which take traditional TV dial tests to the next level. Instead of asking people to turn a dial when they like or dislike something they see in a video test, cameras record when participants smile in response to something they have seen. “The Disney Media Lab system uses a facial recognition system that accurately and automatically encodes facial expression.” Kennedy says smiling is the easiest and most reliable expression to capture.

Disney has created three new smile metrics. Smile velocity (how fast was that smile?), the Percent of Time Smiling and Scene Peak Analysis (where did you smile and how big was that smile?). Kennedy says smile measurement holds a lot of promise, especially when testing sitcoms. Modern Family delivered about 10 times as many smiles as a control in an ABC TV Network test. It holds particular promise for creating on-air promos: knowing which scenes and dialog will likely produce a smile, promotion producers can focus on including that content in on-air promos.

Nielsen, who has relied diaries to capture TV viewing data since the 1950’s, is poised to pick plastic over paper for local audience measurement business. Last month the ratings company announced a worldwide initiative to over a dozen different measurement devices it uses internationally with new “GTAM” units. The Global TV Audience Measurement devices will use audio watermarks to identify content on multiple viewing platforms.

The GTAM program will replace the current people meter — which Nielsen homes has been using since 1986 – with a new “Scrolling Text People Meter.” The flashing lights of the old peoplemeter will be replaced with a single line of scrolling text to prompt respondents to login and logout.  The new device can support eight different languages.

But the biggest change promises to come from the roll out of the “Code Reader,” a new plastic-encased user-installable device which respondents will place within six feet of their TV speakers. Using a built-in microphone, the Code Reader listens for inaudible low-frequency watermarks which carry program codes and timestamps. A built-in cellphone modem then transmits these codes to Nielsen. The ratings company plans to validate the Code Reader with a side by side test with current measurement techniques during 4Q 2012.

The scrolling text meter and other GTAM components are tentatively planned for production in 1Q 2014. But reading between the lines of Nielsen announcement suggests that big changes could be coming to Nielsen’s diary based reporting in the 150+ smaller markets that don’t currently have electronic measurement. Instead of mailing out paper diaries that require a bewildered respondent to note the time and channel number and live or DVR status of every channel they watch — and the identity of every person who watched — a mailable “set it and forget it” code reader meter would be a big improvement. How demographics will be determined is still yet to be disclosed: Nielsen says they will model person demographics for code reader households.

In addition to the scrollable meter and the code reader, Nielsen plans to release a GTAM meter and a GTAM-lite box, with both devices deciding what’s being watched based on audio watermarks. GTAM Lite is a standalone install for typical households with the full GTAM meter having the ability to communicate with other Nielsen metering devices in a household.

Although the industry hasn’t been clamoring for Nielsen to replace it’s current peoplemeter, the company faces another kind of pressure: the active/passive meter that Nielsen currently employs is at the end of its life cycle and components are getting hard to come by. The company plans to roll out the GTAM and GTAM Lite units by 1Q 2014. In addition to reduced installation costs for Nielsen, the company says the new GTAM meters are more energy efficient and will use less of the homeowner’s electricity.

by Gerard Broussard, Pre Meditated Media.com

May marks a time of year when advertisers, media agencies and networks crouch to their starting-block positions in anticipation of the start of TV’s upfront marketplace. Like so many years past, thoughts run the gamut from what will be the hottest new programs to which networks or agencies will set the pace for the pricing of national TV commercial inventory during the coming year. The upfront process can be thought of as the ultimate sausage- making machine with as much as 65%-80% of the ingredients (one year’s TV inventory) being squeezed through for sale over the course of a six-week period. As this annual event unfolds, it makes sense to reflect on its true purpose: to deliver entertainment to viewers while tendering marketing value for the event’s ultimate underwriter, the advertiser.

For an advertiser, committing millions of dollars to a TV campaign budget is really the final step within a much longer process that involves establishing a budget, understanding the consumer target, producing the commercials, vetting the multitudes of TV network and program offerings, evaluating synergy with non-TV media, planning and scheduling the pacing and spacing of the TV spots, then, finally, executing the plan. So, it seems fitting to think about how well the final TV buy reflects the intentions of all the preparatory steps that came before. In order to get insight into the process, let’s first take a look at the dynamics of TV audience fragmentation and its potential for enabling the targeting of a diverse U.S. population. We will then follow this with a view on the quality and impact of steps taken in today’s advertising/media planning process that lead up to the actual placement of millions of commercial spots for advertisers.

The Big Bang of TV Fragmentation
Media audience fragmentation has been a fact of life for nearly three decades. Even before the internet spawned millions of sites, social networks, search engines and blogs, a big bang of media choice was in the making. This explosion in media options manifested itself in the proliferation of TV outlets, magazine titles, radio stations and newspapers, catering to the quilt work of changing consumer tastes within a quickly diversifying U.S. population.

Focusing on TV, the seminal move towards audience fragmentation occurred in the late 1970s when cable and satellite operators presented an alternative to over-the-air TV. The wide-bandwidth transmission technology of these then-emerging platforms made it possible to provide viewers with a multitude of channels, more than they could ever receive through rabbit-ears or rooftop antennae. Premium movie networks like HBO appeared on the scene as well as a dozen or so ad-supported networks like ESPN, USA, TBS, A&E and Lifetime. Today, this forty- year-old foothold of fragmentation has morphed into smithereens of options as there are literally hundreds of networks available for those who want to watch only sports, only news, only pop entertainment, only investment advice, etc. in one sitting.

TV Fragmentation: Friend or Foe? TV audience fragmentation can be viewed as both an opportunity and a challenge when evaluating on which networks and shows to place advertising. On the plus side, advertisers have the potential to tailor communications to specific consumer segments that reflect the ever-expanding variety of lifestyles, product consumption patterns and cultural denominations that make up the population. For example, they can run commercials for golf clubs on the Golf Network, for marinades on the Food Network and vacation packages on the Travel Network. But what happens when they want to find viewers of this TV fare, or others like them, on other channels/programs? The reality is that they don’t watch just the Golf, Food or Travel networks. Or how about advertising a product like laundry detergent or toothpaste, where everyone could presumably be the target audience? In this case, how can audience fragments be amassed during the media placement process in such a way to make up the most meaningful prospective group of viewers for brands? And how can advertisers be assured that there is enough commercial weight against their target to have impact?

To gain full insight into the question of how well current industry TV placement practices address TV audience fragmentation we need to examine the process of translating TV media plan goals into the actual purchase of specific networks and programs to support the campaign. In other words, how well do the TV programs on the ad schedule deliver the target audience in terms of descriptive match and communication weight?

Understanding who the target consumer is and what he/she watches on TV is a first critical step in this process. Today, many advertisers and their agencies conduct surveys and/or trawl customer data bases to produce rich psychographic and demographic descriptions of their consumer targets. Maintaining the integrity of these consumer target profiles from the first step in the planning stage all the way to the purchase of TV commercials, however, has been a long-standing industry challenge for a number of reasons. The obstacles lie in three key areas: TV audience data limitations, setting realistic effectiveness goals and program bundling in the TV buy.

Download the rest of this white paper TV, Audience Fragmentation: Realizing the Opportunity, from Pre-Mediated Media.

Gerard Broussard is president of Pre-Meditated Media, an advertising research consulting practice which provides clients with audience measurement ROI analyses, media strategy and marketplace analysis.  Previously he was VP, Media Insights & Analytics, at Canoe Ventures.

Hi. My name is Mollie Vandor, and I’m a stalker.

No, I haven’t boiled any bunny rabbits lately. My particular brand of stalking has nothing to do with my romantic life, although it is all about passion — my passion for my career, and for the industry that I work in.

You see, I don’t stalk ex-boyfriends or old high school friends — at least not that often, and never without a few glasses of wine in me first. I do, however, regularly stalk strangers. And by strangers, I specifically mean people I consider to be mentors. Now, I’ve never met most of these mentors, and the ones I have actually met have generally been via brief handshakes against the background of a loud, crowded tech conference, which isn’t exactly prime real estate for establishing a deep, involved relationship.

Even though I’m not personally in touch with most of these mentors, I do maintain a strong personal relationship with them. Their successes are inspiration for my future successes. Their failures are lessons I learn for myself. And, their blogs, tweets and posts about these topics are the conversation that keeps me learning and growing from their example — however one-sided that conversation may be.

Celebrities — not diamonds — in the rough
For example, I’ve considered Danielle Morill a mentor ever since I met her at the Twiistup tech conference a few years ago. Danielle made her name as one of the driving forces behind the hugely successful company Twilio. When we met, she and I had a frank discussion about being young women in the tech industry, maintaining relationships and busy schedules and general tech trends and topics. I’m sure the talk meant a lot more to me than it did her, and I’m pretty sure she barely remembers it, if at all. Since then, although we haven’t talked personally, I’ve followed her on Twitter and via her blog, where she recently posted about the decision to start her own company, Referly.Her post – a timeline of the process to take her idea from conception to full-blown company creation — is a blueprint for me, not just in terms of the specific steps she took, but in terms of the way she was thinking and feeling while taking them. It’s not just about following in her footsteps, it’s about understanding how and why she decided which steps to take in the first place.

I feel the same way about my other mentors. That list — and yes, there is an actual list I maintain on Twitter as well as a list of blog and Facebook bookmarks in my browser  — includes Sheryl Sandberg,Marissa Mayer, Joel Spolsky, Leah Culver, Molly Holzschlag, Rand Fishkin , Gina Bianchini and Bethenny Frankel. Yes, Bethenny Frankel. I may not necessarily want to emulate all of my mentors’ careers. But, I do learn an awful lot from following their day-to-day thoughts and actions via Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere. In fact, that’s where most of the value of my mentorships comes from.

Small moves
Case in point: I’ve been following Gina Bianchini’s career for years, and have consistently been blown away by her ability to keep her eyes — and her hands — on multiple tech industry trends, before the rest of the world even knows they’re trending. Sure, I could simply watch her moves as they’re breathlessly reported by the industry press. But frankly, that’s not what I find interesting about her. What I find most fascinating is her Twitterstream, where she talks about everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to The Wall Street Journal‘s paywall. It’s not necessarily always about the big moves she’s making, it’s about the mosaic of little thoughts that end up informing those big moves.That’s why we love social media in general — it’s a voyeuristic look inside someone’s day to day life, a sort of Rear Window in 140 characters or less. And, it’s why social media stalking makes for such great mentorship. Not only do I get to follow what people I admire are doing. I get to follow what they’re thinking while they do it. Which, by the way, makes me feel much better about my own doubts and decisions, and helps inspire me in countless other ways as well.

Democratization and infinite possibilities
Sure, a traditional mentor might take me to lunch, check in on me once in a while, or help me out with a job recommendation. But, my social media mentors are available 24/7, providing all of their wisdom and support without even knowing it, simply by living — and sharing — their own lives. And, in fact, I’d argue that they share an awful lot more with me without ever knowing it than they would in a more traditional, formal and professional mentorship relationship.Now, some people might not call my particular brand of ‘aspirational social media stalking’ mentorship. They may say I don’t have mentors, I merely have role models. Or people to look up to. But, the dictionary defines a ‘mentor’ as “a wise and trusted counselor or teacher.” In contrast, a ‘role model’ is simply “a person regarded by others, especially younger people, as a good example to follow.”

The difference is clear. A mentor is someone who counsels and teaches, not necessarily by being a paragon of perfection as a person or professional, but simply by being someone with wisdom worth listening to. Often, the best of that wisdom comes from the moments when a mentor is being the opposite of a good example — the times they take risks that don’t work out, make decisions they regret later, or accidentally admit to something they probably shouldn’t have. That’s when I learn the most from my mentors. They’re not role models, and they’re certainly not perfect. But they are teachers. Even when they don’t know it.

Mollie Vandor is the Associate Product Manager at Cooking.com, combining her two loves – web development and food. She has also contributed to various tech, food and media blogs, including Mashable and Food Network Humor. This post was originally published on Huffington Post Women, The Levo League and MollieVandor.com.

Ad sales people and researchers are always looking for compelling stories on how advertising is effective — and something a smart marketer can’t do without. Here’s a story which proves that point to retailers — using their own words and emotional outrage.

The Village of Haverstraw, NY passed a local ordinance banning cigarette Point-Of-Sale Advertising beginning in October 2012. And the retailers and their trade groups went ballistic. Retailers and their trade groups cried foul in Big Implications for a Little Village’s Ban, a convenience store trade publication article about new regulations passed this Spring to ban tobacco advertising in convenience stores in the Lower Hudson Valley Hamlet Northwest of New York City.

If advertising didn’t work, why would they say things like…

• “The Village of Haverstraw in New York’s Rockland County sent shockwaves through the convenience store industry by passing a tobacco display ban–the first of such bans in the United States.” — Tobacco E-News on CSPnet.com, a trade publication for the convenience store industry.
• The president of the New York Association of Convenience Stores called the new law “breathtakingly absurd” and asserted that retailers have a right to advertise products to their customers on their own premises.
• “By prohibiting the display of tobacco product packages so that they are kept out of the public’s sight, the Haverstraw ordinance is, for all intents and purposes, banning the advertisement of tobacco products.” — Thomas Briant, executive director of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO)

There’s a sales expression which says “people buy on emotion  — and justify with facts.” It’s great to have a convincing research deck to set the stage for an account exec to close new business. But what could be better than an example of client’s screaming bloody murder because they *weren’t* allowed to advertise?

John Wanamaker once famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” He would be happy to know that  the tobacco retailers of New York State seem pretty damn sure they know the answer to that question.

Sources:

• Big Implications for a Little Village’s Ban, CSPnet.com. 4/23/2012
• Lung Association Praises Village of Haverstraw for Passing Landmark Law Limiting Retail Tobacco Displays, 4/17/2012
• Federal Court Rules Worcester, MA, Tobacco Ad Ban is Unconstitutional,” National Association of Tobacco Outlets 4/2/2012

See also:

• May 2011 proposed resolution from POW’R to ban tobacco advertising in Haverstraw, NY
• New York Town Bans Tobacco Displays at Retail, Convenience Store News 4/19/2012
• John Wanamaker, Wikipedia

Photo Credit: CigarettesReporter.com

Love him or hate him, fans and critics can agree on one thing: conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh makes an impression. The difference is between those who think he makes a good impression or just a lasting one.

Knowing that he’s controversial — and frequently divisive — you might be wonder why major advertisers allow their brands to be associated with the King of the Ditto Heads.

Amongst the fire storm over the comments Rush Limbaugh spoke about the Georgetown University law student, many advertisers have suspended running their commercials during his program. The list of advertisers includes AOL, ProFlowers, Carbonite, Citrix Systems, Inc., Quicken Loans, Legal Zoom, Sleep Number, and Sleep Train. Despite the flight of major advertisers, Limbaugh says he isn’t worried. “Everything is fine on the business side. Everything’s cool,” says Limbaugh in a post on RushLimbaugh.com. “There is not a thing to worry about. What you’re seeing on television about this program and sponsors and advertisers is just incorrect.”

Advertisers that advertise on radio do so for many reasons. Some of those reasons include building upon customer relationships (brand loyalty) and new product launches (extending brands). Advertisers believe that engagement is a key component to commercials that are successful. Whether the consumer “likes” or “dislikes” the commercial is irrelevant as long as they get the message.

Talk radio personalities act their part for numerous hours every given week. Advertisers seek large audiences that are most engaged especially in the ‘Mid-day’ time period (generally considered weekdays from 10a-3p) that are riveted to the speaker whether or not that person is on the right, left, conservative or liberal as long as their audience is comparatively large and loyally engaged so they stay tuned during the commercial breaks.

Advertisers believe that prime time on radio equals drive times which equate to weekdays during the mornings from 6am to 10am and afternoons from 3p-7p. The ‘Mid-day’ time period is considered a time when listeners have the radio on in the background and are doing other things and that is why stations that play music have difficulty charging their advertisers the same amount as they do during their drive time programming. Because it is believed that listeners to music are not as engaged as they are during drive times, stations that air talk programming have a higher engagement with their audiences so advertisers tend to covet these audiences.

Size does matter and talk radio whether it is Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, Imus or Mike Francesa. These charismatic hosts deliver large targeted demographic audiences that are engaged with their advertisers on these type of programs more so than with other kinds of content during these dayparts.

Shock jocks and controversial talkers thrive on pushing the envelope for their dedicated followers. Despite the fire storm that follows their controversial remarks, they often survive. Some have been forced to take a leave of absence after inappropriate comments. If they have any talent, it’s usually resilience: many have resumed their careers after controversy. Both Don Imus and Glen Beck were banished but returned to broadcast — maybe with less glory and on another platform — again. And their advertisers return because despite their controversial comments, they still can draw a big audience.

Will Rush survive? There’s only one way to know: stay tuned.

Media Research consultant Art Salisch has 30 years of experience working in advertising sales, programming, management, news and sports with radio stations, cable systems and networks and research suppliers.

Some people are Democrats. Others identify themselves as Republicans. But a recent event in Arkansas proves that some people are just sick.

The campaign manager for Arkansas Democrat Ken Aden found his cat brutalized and murdered with the word “liberal” scrawled on its dead body. The dead animal was discovered by the five-year old son of Jacob Burris, who is managing Alden’s campaign against Republican Steve Womack for Arkansas’ third congressional district.

“The family pet, an adult, mixed-breed Siamese cat, had one side of its head bashed in to the point the cat’s eyeball was barely hanging from its socket,” according to a press release sent out by the Aden campaign. The perpetrators scrawled ‘liberal’ across the cat’s body.”

A Republican did not do this — it was a twisted human being who killed an innocent animal to make a point about local politics.

Anybody who would kill a living being for any political or religious message kills only for him or herself. There is no politic and no religion that condones murder as an acceptable outlet. Politics by themselves are pure; religion by itself is noble; it is the man—the monster—that makes them ignoble and diluted.

“Trying to send a message” is not a valid excuse for a crime. “Making an impact” falls short as well. The inability of this person to think or feel is the only explanation for the fact that anyone could do this.

There is no way that a normal human being could ever do anything of the sort.

Other articles will discuss the family’s statement, the disgust and horror that Aden and Burris feel. But you, the reader, should be feeling disgust and horror. Because, yes, countless others have committed and do commit and will commit countless more crimes, some more heinous than others, and many under the guise of politics and religion. It is up to the observer to remember that politics and religion as theories do not condone murder, do not condone collateral damage, do not condone malpractice or misinterpretation. It is the men and women behind the practice of these two major facets of life who determine how politics and religion play into everyday life. And corruption is not an integral part of either politics or religion—it is men and women who corrupt.

See also:

• Democratic Operative’s Cat Slaughtered, ‘Liberal’ Painted On Corpse, Huffington Post 1/23/2012
• “Liberal” Written on Political Campaign Manager’s Dead Cat, KTXL-TV Fox40 Sacramento

There was something refreshing in the political scene Wednesday when congressional sponsors ran away, as fast as they could, from two ill-considered bills that sought to stamp out Internet piracy by more or less stamping out the Internet.

Maybe it was the bipartisanship of the online smackdown’s target. Most Americans are fed up with the never-ending electioneering between Republicans and Democrats, who seem to launch the next campaign as soon as the polls close. Last year, the two parties and the two houses of Congress could not seem to get together on anything. But legislators of both persuasions were elbow-deep in the muck of somehow trying to apply U.S. copyright laws to web sites located everywhere except inside the United States. It was fun to watch them scurry together in search of cover.

Or maybe it was the public humiliation inflicted on the nation’s two most ham-handed defenders of intellectual property, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Most of us know the RIAA for its past practice of suing teenagers, their moms and grandmothers, and dorm-dwelling college students for illegally sharing and downloading music files. Earlier, the good folks at the MPAA were behind the film industry’s attempt nearly three decades ago to squelch video cassette recorders because they feared owners would retain copies of movies that were broadcast on television. Fortunately for the film industry, it lost the Betamax case, and a profitable market for pre-recorded videos developed as a result. These days the studios seem almost deft by comparison, with their public service announcements featuring union-scale crew members who urge viewers not to download videos illegally.

Music and movie companies are not wrong to want to protect their products from theft. They just have a remarkable talent for making themselves look nasty in the process.

I think the most satisfying aspect of this week’s developments is the way the online community rose up to fight back. The most visible blow came from Wikipedia, which blacked out its English-language site for 24 hours to protest the two bills. Some of Wikipedia’s contributing editors reportedly objected to the service, which strives for impartiality in its articles, injecting itself into a public policy debate. But as a financial contributor to Wikipedia, I had no complaints. Precisely because it is non-commercial and user-supported, Wikipedia has no vested interest in the tug of war over copyrighted content, and its point of view (and vast user base) added a powerful voice to the political debate.

Still, Wikipedia could not seem to help itself from being helpful, despite the blackout. It left its articles about the two bills, the Stop Internet Piracy Act and the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act, accessible during the outage. It even told users that they could circumvent the 24-hour blockade by disabling javascript on their browsers.

Elsewhere, Google covered the logo on its home page with a black patch. Visitors who clicked on the patch or on a separately labeled link were directed to an online petition opposing the legislation. Wired.com blacked out the headlines on its home page. Popular blogging site WordPress.com censored its “Freshly Pressed” highlights page. By at least one estimate, as many as 7,000 sites may have joined the protest. The protest attracted worldwide attention, as outlets like the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper rounded up some of the more interesting screen shots.

To its credit, the Obama administration got ahead of the curve when it announced last weekend that the president would not sign the legislation in its original form. The first drafts of the bills would have demanded that U.S.-based service providers corrupt the net’s domain name service, which is the system that translates a name such as Google.com into a sequence of numbers that point to a particular data server. This would be a technical nightmare and could open all sorts of new possibilities for the thieves, hackers and other genuine black hats who prowl the online world from the most lawless corners of the globe.

But even with last-minute changes, the legislation would have allowed the U.S. attorney general to create a blacklist of foreign sites that allegedly infringed U.S. intellectual property. There would have been limited court review and even more limited avenues for appeal. Search engines would have been required to withhold results from such sites; service providers would be required to prevent American web surfers from reaching them; and payment services such as Paypal would be barred from remitting funds to them. The easiest way for U.S. residents to see the entire Internet, once such legislation is passed, would be to check into a hotel in Canada.

Though the legislation did not explicitly target U.S. providers like Google, those organizations noted that it would impose major headaches, such as vetting every site that hosts a source document or, in some cases, it would force them to lie to users by stating that no relevant search results are available. Also, the American approach to censoring foreign sites would be an invitation for other democratic governments to impose their own restrictions. Britain would likely assert its Official Secrets Act and pre-trial crime reporting restrictions against Americans. France would want to impose its hate speech limits on documents that Google indexes and archives, and Germany’s anti-Nazi laws would get extraterritorial heft. Not to mention the field day that information-restrictive countries such as Singapore would have. The United States would go from being a global role model for free speech to the global standard-bearer for cross-border censorship.

Well before night fell on Washington, the legislation’s former backers were peeling away from it. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the Senate bill “not ready for prime time,” The New York Times reported. Hatch had been one of its original sponsors.

It is tempting to say that the legislation is dead, killed by a grassroots rebellion of Internet users, but I would not bet on that. Online piracy is not the vast scourge that the old-line media companies pretend that it is when they count each free download as a lost full-price sale, but neither is the theft of American-generated content a trivial matter. Right here at Palisades Hudson, we have had some of our online content lifted and even altered without permission, and in some cases without attribution. Since we are fussy about what we say and where we say it, we take such violations seriously. Our reputation is worth a lot to us.

So the big content publishers will be back. You can sense it in the churlish tweet that RIAA executive Jonathan Lamy posted in the midst of Wednesday’s protest: “After Wikipedia blackrout (sic), somewhere, a student today is doing original research and getting his/her facts straight. Perish the thought.”

As I said, even when they have a valid point, these folks make themselves look nasty. You can’t get far in show business without having some sort of talent.

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

TV execs are twitching as they note a growing trend among subscribers to drop television but keep high-speed Internet access for watching TV programming. Although the current number of cord cutting households is low, it does appear to be a growing trend. About one in ten (11%) U.S. households do not subscribe to cable, digital or satellite TV, but do have high-speed Internet, according to GfK MRI’s Fall 2011 Survey of the American Consumer.

Nearly one-half (44%) of consumers living in Cord Cutter households also live in cell-only households. That percent has increased from 8% in the Fall 2010 Survey. Even though the vast majority of households (80%) still buy cable, digital or satellite TV, the increase in cord cutting households indicates that this is a phenomenon programmers and cable MSOs are wise to watch closely, since it may impact revenue from monthly cable subscriptions.

TV and Internet use

It seems safe to say that most, if not all, consumers living in households without TV but with high-speed Internet watch television online. Consumers who live in cord cutting households are heavy online users, indexing 163 for being in the highest Internet quintile. They also are more likely than typical adults to use the Internet for viewing movies and TV programs:

• Watched a movie online — Index 271
• Downloaded a TV program — Index 256
• Downloaded a movie — Index 250
• Watched a TV program online — Index 242

More telling, they index 297 for visiting the online video service Hulu.com in the last 30 days.

Although frugality is surely part of the impetus to become a Cord Cutter (who likes to pay for content when they can get it for free?), it may not be the whole story. Cord Cutters might also be motivated by portability and the “wow factor” of new technology. For instance, they have an index of 192 for having watched a movie, TV program or other video on their mobile phones in the last 30 days.

Who cuts the cord?

Cord Cutters are more likely than adults, as a whole, to be young, Asian, well educated, live in households with above average incomes and reside in the Pacific marketing region.

Freelance writer Joanne Zornow has been editing Gfk MRI’s client newsletter, The Source, since 1992. This story originally appeared in the Dec 2011 issue.