As cable and other media begin to diminish the water cooler effect of television programming, is there a way for the Internet to step up and fill the bill?

If you’ve ever wondered where’s the beef when it comes to online advertising, you wouldn’t be the first.

If you ever quizzed your work cronies just how did they do that when it comes to acts of creative magic such as bringing younger incarnations of Michael Jordan to life, you would be in a rather large crowd of similar inquisitors.

If you’ve every wondered why things were never the same after Apple’s 1984 commercial, you need only look towards the famous Water Cooler Effect -- which in essence governs the very makeup of the traditional television model -- for your answer.

Television’s value proposition is very simple when it comes to big-budget, high-impact, heavy-production, value-laden commercials: When an ad is broadcast, it is likely to be seen by all of those consumers who happen to be watching a specific program at a specific time.

There’s just so much finger control that can effectively select and sort the irrelevant from the entertaining ads. And for the most part, there are enough couch potatoes out there who couldn’t be bothered. To these people, the bathroom might as well be the finish line in the New York Marathon. While some might argue as to the value of these people, Wal-Mart embraces them, and therefore so should you.

It is this reason why commercials fit in so seamlessly with programming. Everybody tunes in to see who Joe ends up selecting or who gets voted off the Island; everybody huddles together to find out if the bomb goes off in 24; everybody fixates on the screen to determine whether Rachel accepts Joey’s marriage proposal. And the commercials come along for the ride.

TiVo allows you to do some interesting exercises when it comes to playing back content. Take the Bold and the Beautiful for example (and please don’t ask me how I know this!). When commercials are stripped out of the 30-minute segment, something ridiculous like 13 to 16 minutes remain and 50% of this time is spent focused on the frozen faces of the soap-opera stars as the camera pans in and out of the scene changes. This is a best practice of programming. It is designed to keep the viewers’ eyeballs glued on the set and in doing so, to create a seamless transition from content to commerce.

And there are plenty more best practices like this. Ever watched the weather broadcasters on the nightly news? “How much snow is going to hit our area? I’ll tell you a little later in the broadcast.” Or what about the infamous entertainment programs that kick-off with the attention-grabbing call-to-action, “Coming up in the program, what really went on with Michael Jackson and Michael Bashir when the cameras were turned off?" As the first segment closes, we hear, “Coming up after the break, what really went on when the cameras were turned off in the Michael Jackson interview.” And this continues through the remaining breaks until the very last possible moment when the clip is played.

If everybody’s talking about something they saw on the Telly around the prototypical water cooler (or perhaps these days across the street in the nearest Starbucks), then chances are they’ll be exposed to the commercials that accompanied the attention-grabbing content. And in those special cases, they might even be chatting about the commercials themselves. Miller’s catfight scene would qualify in this category, as would the famous Budweiser Wassup? commercials, which certainly have the water cooler effect to thank for becoming ingrained into the very fabric of our pop-culture.

Now here comes the fly in the ointment. What will happen to the water cooler effect as Network continues to lose audience to Cable, amid a frenzy of media fragmentation?

Case in point is the final episode of Seinfeld. An estimated 76 million people tuned in to the final episode of Seinfeld, which represented 58% of in-use televisions, according to Neilsen Media Research. This may sound impressive, however it was significantly below the 77% share or 105 million viewers, garnered by M*A*S*H in its final airing in 1983.

There have not been many (if any) shows that have been able to own the corporate water cooler like Seinfeld did. Even so, in just 15 years, the share of households dropped 19%.

The fact remains that besides Television’s Triple-Crown of the Superbowl, Grammy and Oscar Ceremonies, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to assume any economies of scale associated with the water cooler effect any more.

For the week of 2/10-2/16, top-rated show CSI brought in 17.8MM households or an audience of 27.2MM (a 25 share). So does this number still justify and qualify for water cooler status? There were 137.4MM U.S. consumers employed in February 2003 according to Household Survey Data, which means essentially that CSI reaches at best, just under 20% of them.

Seems to me that with only one in five able to share in last night’s unexpected plot-twist or shock ending that the water cooler ain’t such a fun place to be around any more.

Where then, does the Internet fit into this shifting landscape? Does the Web have its own Triple Crown, with which to help spread the network effects (now I get it) associated with the dual delivery of content and advertising? Besides the Victoria Secret Webcast and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition events, have we even come close to leveraging our respective audiences – which let’s face it, truly compete with our traditional counterparts – in a water cooler type fashion?

These are all questions we should be thinking about and giving careful consideration towards. For within this discussion topic lies a ground-breaking solution – the response and perhaps the next iteration of the water cooler as we used to know it: repurposed, reinvented or refreshed in a form that harnesses the power of two-way communications, interactivity, viral marketing and the community.

I have my own thoughts about this. What are yours? Let’s meet around the water cooler to continue this conversation some time.