BuzzMachine

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is appearing on Jon Stewart’s show Tuesday night. Even Stewart seems amazed. Is it because Stewart is a worldwide media kingmaker? Is it because Musharraf plans to announce where bin Laden has been hiding. Is it because even sympathetic dictators have a sense of humor? No, it’s because he’s plugging a book.

Gabe Rivera has created a new kind of advertising for TechMeme, which he explains here and here.

Simply put: He takes feeds of the latest posts from sponsors’ blogs and puts that in an ad box on Techmeme. That’s their ad. It’s brilliantly simple: dynamic advertising controlled by the advertisers, who will make their ads — their content — relevant to the readers who see their feeds on Techmeme.

I talked with Gabe about this at a conference months ago; he has put a lot of careful thought into the idea. I like it. It’s relevant; it’s human and not automated; it’s appropriate to the form. And it pays. Gabe is charging $4,500, $3,500, and $3,000 respectively for the three month-long spots (I’ll save you the cipherin’… that’s $132,000 per year). For the advertiser, that works out to a $5-8 CPM, which is good. I’m not sure there’s much difference in the first versus third position. And I think there is an opportunity to put more advertisers in the box (cookie me and show me different advertisers’ blog posts on different visits). But I think this works and I’ll be eager to hear the sponsors’ experience.

I’d love to have a such a unit here.

The Journal writes a good primer on marketing online via blogs and search and such. Buried in there is a gem of an anecdote that shows why newspapers and yellow pages are in deep trouble with local advertising — unless they find new ways to serve them and compete with Google:

It’s hard to engage in any public relations, of course, if the public doesn’t know you exist. In early 2004, Kenny Kormendy says he was on welfare and struggling to make ends meet as a taxi driver in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. He had tried to reach the public through typical means, such as ads in the telephone book or handing out cards at the airport, but says there “were so few calls, it was unreal.”

Mr. Kormendy was decent on computers, he says, and so he built a rough Web site for his company, Gopher State Taxi, figuring travelers coming to town might locate him when searching for transportation. But he never popped up front and center in search-engine results until he stumbled upon Google’s AdWords service, a cost-per-click advertising program that rotates advertisements on the right side of Google’s search page based on the specific keywords a user types. He decided to give it a shot.

It paid off. In recent months, Gopher State Taxi has routinely popped first on Google’s sponsored link for core keywords, including: “Minneapolis, airport, taxi.” Mr. Kormendy says his business has grown to a network of nearly three dozen cabs and he is off welfare. He estimates his total payout to Google is about $175 to $205 monthly, based on how many clicks his ads get. “People with cellphones on planes can find me,” he says. “Almost every time I ask someone, they tell me it was on the Internet. And nine times out of 10 it’s from Google. I don’t have $50,000 to compete with [bigger taxi companies]. But with what I create off the Internet, I can blow them away.”

Increasingly people turn to the Internet instead of phone books or newspapers to find restaurants, office-supply vendors or any kind of service. In addition to advertising opportunities, companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit are tailoring their search products to include maps, narrowed neighborhood searches and storefront images to court small businesses with local audiences.

I just called into the Stern show to read Mainelli’s rants from the comments below and to compliment Steve Lanford’s reporting. If you’re here looking for them, see the comments on this post; also here and here. And beware the Opiates.

Papers in the area have been giving away copies lately, covered in a wrapper from Rutgers University sports (which troubles me and makes me wonder whether we are spending our tax dollars to support this sweat or whether this is money that should be going into educating our state… but I digress). In New York, they’ve been giving away copies of one of the tabs — but I see most people passing by, not wanting it. And in New Jersey, they’ve been throwing free copies of the statewide paper onto driveways with that Rutgers wrapper. This morning as I went on what I charitably call my run, I saw house after house — six in a row on one block — with days-old free copies of that paper still sitting on the driveway, getting wet and run over. People won’t pick them up even when they’re delivered and free.

Peter Preston writes in the Observer:

. . . Professor Jeremy Tunstall has just written a successor to his magisterial 1977 study, The Media Are American. It is called The Media Were American.

Tunstall’s thesis is simple, but jolting. Of course America still floods the world with movies, music and TV shows. And, of course, their combined value climbs higher and higher. But if we’re talking something different - market share - then the US is in headlong decline, and has been for nearly 50 years. Discount around 100 annual hours of bigbudget movies and the residue is a pitiful, shrivelled thing.

India, China, Brazil and Japan (to name but four) have media exports of their own that equal or outstrip any imports. China, with 1.3 billion people, relies overwhelmingly on home production in local languages. So, with a bow to Bollywood, does India. Egypt looks after the Middle East.

The bigger Latin American countries make most of their own popular media now - and export lurid soaps to Spanish-speaking channels everywhere, including the US.

So at last we can stop being accused of ruining the world with our tawdry entertainment.