Carol Bartz is coming to terms with the Internet’s past and future

Carol Bartz is making a pretty quick study of the Internet’s past (and future?). In quotes that appeared in Ad Age and Paid Content, no-nonsense Bartz acknowledged that the Internet had over-sold itself to advertisers at the outset.

Ad Age captured it this way:

Ms. Bartz told analysts the challenge ahead for the iconic web portal is not to compete with Google or Microsoft but to compete for the biggest pot of ad dollars, which is currently in broadcast and cable TV. Ad dollars have not flowed online as audiences have, she said, in part because the promise of online advertising was oversold to marketers at the outset “and did not deliver.”

In Paid Content, Bartz was quoted as follows:

Asked about the disparity between online media usage and internet ad spending at UBS Media Week, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz said that the gap was in part because internet advertising had initially over-sold itself: “I think internet advertising oversold itself at the beginning, over-promised preciseness.” That, however, she said, was beginning to change. “Things are looking up. We’re seeing marketers engage.”

It is a simple statement that is true. The Internet over-promised “preciseness,” which really means it over-promised what might result from preciseness.

Preciseness surely exists online. It is a world of niches. By itself, however, we’ve demonstrated that preciseness does not equate to one-to-one. One-to-one is a trust thing, not one of our strong suits online. As a result, consumers have not altered how they respond to advertising, or been abundant in praise of its value.

But, Bartz seems to be working on that problem, cleaning up the Yahoo! environment and communicating her respect for the audience. May that sort of leadership continue, and may the medium start to matter as much as the message.

Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google continue feeling their way around the room.

Many times over recent years as the competition has played out between Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google (and AOL, I suppose) I’ve thought of a line from Henry Kissinger’s book, “The White House Years” describing the duel between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The line goes like this:

“The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.”

It’s always seemed such an apt description of the exertions of the “superpowers” online and, especially, their affect on the room. This week’s announcement of the Yahoo! and Microsoft search deal brings it to mind again, though the deal is relatively benign in relation to it’s affect  on the overall Internet advertising market. Search happens on a mountaintop these days. It’s only scary when the companies living at that altitude climb down off the mountain to carouse in the streets of the Internet community swinging their clubs at each other, blindfolded.

Maybe the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal announced this week will keep them all confined to the mountain for a while, which should be fine with the rest of us.

Content Becomes a Pauper

MediaPost’s “Around The Net” wrap-up alerts us to this lament by Douglas A. McIntyre at Time.com: “Content, Once King, becomes a Pauper.” The upshot is that the recession, but mostly the changing circumstances of digital media economy, have eroded the value of branded media content to such a low level that it may never recover. Even the accountants are piling on, insisting that major media companies write-down their content assets to reflect diminished value.

Yes, it’s true. The value of Time’s content and other mainstream media companies has been seriously diminished by the recession and the steady advance of the digital media economy. But it always strikes me how self-absorbed these expositors are, as if in the absence of value at Time Magazine, the value of content itself shall cease to exist.

In truth, content has always wanted to be free and has largely been free for some time now. Michael Kinsley, who thinks and writes about this issue as well as anyone, did so again this week in the New York Times where he observed that, “Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc.”

It is time to see the value of content differently, and not as Time or many newspaper publishers would want to. The economics of content don’t support the industrial media mills of yesterday – or, frankly, the online portals of today (see also: the history of Yahoo!). The value of content today is in its ability to proliferate and find success in small numbers where advertising can comfortably support the cost to sustain a profitable business.