Advance.net's Jeff Jarvis described consumer-generated media beyond blogs at February's iMedia Brand Summit.

Jeff Jarvis is president and creative director for Advance.Net, which oversees the internet vision and strategy for Advance Publications, Inc. Products include CondéNet and Advance Internet. Over the past five years, CondéNet, working with the magazines of Condé Nast, has created national brands including concierge.com, epicurious.com and style.com. During this same period, Advance Internet, working with Advance Publications' newspapers, has developed local brands including nj.com, cleveland.com and OregonLive.com.

Jarvis enlightened the audience at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Springs in February about the growing importance of, what he calls, "Citizen's Media." Read the first third of his speech here. Today: Beyond blogs.

Jeff Jarvis: So, what do you do about blogs? Embrace them. First, rather than putting them off and saying, “Oh no, they’re new little competitors.” They’re not. You have a relationship with them. Embrace them. The first step is, read them. Get editors to read them; make new stars; involve -- it’s a relationship. 

Two is, interact with the bloggers. They know about your products; they know about our publications; they know about our sites. We should interact with them and involve them in the conversation. 

The third is, underwrite them. Advertise on them. That will make them happy. I talked to an advertiser a few minutes ago who said, “Well, we’re afraid of advertising on them because it will seem like we’re trying to buy them.” No, you are helping them. And, they’ve got to deal with the same issues of church and state that we all deal with in media, but they’ll deal with it. 

And, then, finally, maybe you can start blogs and join the conversation. But, realize this isn’t to be owned and taken over by big media, this is the people’s medium.

Okay, that’s it for Citizens’ Media. Two other topics -- real quickly -- then, we’ll get to questions.

Sell-side advertising is a wacky idea, that’s why I’m bringing it up. It started with a conversation among blogs. I blogged about how we need to measure influence. Ross Mayfield,  who started a wiki company whose name I’m suddenly forgetting, blogged back, “Yeah, we need to do more than that. We need to stop measuring impressions and start measuring the impressed.” Nice line, but what he really meant was there are new ways to look at this relationship. 

Then, John Battelle, who you remember from various media ventures who’s now writing a book about search, came back in and this conversation yielded something called sell-side advertising. We’ll just play with this for a second. The idea here is that, what if the publishers picked the ads that ran on their sites? In a performance perfect world where you are held accountable for your performance, why shouldn’t you be the best to say what you’d want on your site? You only get paid for performance. So, what if an advertiser put out ads there and then said, “Okay, anybody can take them. Put them on your site, but you’ll only get paid for performance?" The ads have to be smart. They have to have a budget, and they have to dwindle down, but I’ve seen that happening. I’ve seen coupons for Dell that expire after five thousand uses. That exists today. So, what about a world where suddenly, you pick the ads that appear on your site? It’s a different way to look at it, but again in a performance-based world it starts to make a lot of sense. 

So, that conversation went on, we called it sell-side advertising. John wrote a column in the last issue of MIT Technology Review, he called it Publisher-Driven Advertising to make it friendly to this group. I don’t like that name because it’s not just about publishers, it’s about a lot more control than that.

Now, go the next step. If you are responsible for performance; you are only paid on performance; if you get to pick the ad, shouldn’t you also have something to do with the creative? The problem we’ve had from the beginning of pay-per-click, right? So, look at what’s happening with advertising. We have the VW ad this week (or this month), the Polo exploding car. Yeah, sure VW wasn’t happy about it, but it sure got them a lot of publicity. Or, there have been iPod ads created by the people.

Or, take this one: [Nick] Denton, when he started Jalopnik, his new auto-blog, with Audi -- mind you, does branding advertising work online? Yes, it does, because Audi bought into a product that had no traffic, that didn’t even exist yet. But, they bought into it because they said, “We want to be associated with this new, cool, thing that Denton is doing.” So, anyway, as he’s going along Denton tried to create new units. And, Denton thinks like this. He thinks cheap. He thinks new. And, he said, “Well, I’m going to go off and find good things people are saying about Audi in the forums and blogs.” And then he created them, brought those over and just put them in an ad unit with links to those things. That’s the ad unit. The consumers created the content of the ad. The consumers created the creative. Who better to sell your product than consumers? And, Denton helped Audi get there.

Next, step further. Why shouldn’t consumers be allowed to control their targeting? “I’m sorry I’m not in the market for a car right now. Save your money, don’t buy my eyeballs.” “I am in the market for a car right now -- bring it on!” Right? Why shouldn’t we turn to that model where you can do that? All right, so that’s a little riff on sell-side advertising -- it’s out there. Is it going to happen? I don’t know. But, that’s the kind of conversation you will find about marketing, about our business, in blogs.

But now, go one step further. We all assume that media is about a centralized marketplace. This is a decentralized world. It is a distributed world. Craig’s List has burned up, according to one study, sixty-five million dollars on classified revenue, just in the San Francisco market.  He didn’t move it. He destroyed it. Craig is having more impact on the news business than anybody. But, Craig is nothing but a cheaper marketplace, right? People went from the newspaper to Craig. 

But, where it’s really going to go is beyond Craig. Craig is just a way station. What’s really happening now is that my resume can be online with the right tags on it; a job can be online with the right tags on it; and, there are now search engines that are out there to put those two together. Buyer and seller meet, with no centralized marketplace. It’s all distributed. It’s all decentralized. How you make money on that, I have no idea. And, that should kind of scare us all about how that operates. 

But, we’re going to a world where things are distributed. You can’t go buy it all. You can’t bring it all in under your tent. You have got to find a way to create new networks and get yourself out there. That’s why you advertise in the top hundred gadget blogs or food blogs. That’s why you help underwrite them. That’s why you involve them. You don’t go try to create them yourself. It costs too much money. Think distributed.

Okay, last topic: exploding TV. It’s the power of the network that no one owns. There are various means of creating new video, right now. (Fear not, you will not hear sound on this.) This is created with a tool called Visual Communicator, in my basement, with green plastic behind me and a tool that allows me to simply (and it’s really cruddy and it’s really awful, but bear with me for a second), the tool costs 90 dollars -- 99 dollars -- the camera costs 90 bucks. It gives you a teleprompter on the screen so now I can have something to say. It allows me to put in drag and drop insertions of lower thirds, audio/video, whatever, onto the script, so as I speak, it’s recorded. There is no post-production. So, now you can create video. You can be Andy Rooney, or something better, in your basement. You can act like you are in front of the White House. You can do whatever. Video is going to explode. 

There are various tools to do this. Vlogs (remember we make up obnoxious words for things?), “vlogs” are video web logs. BitTorrent is a means of distributing video without bandwidth cost. Podcasting. Anybody here heard of “podcasting?” Okay. Good. Podcasting, for those who don’t know, is really, as Doc Searls says, “the prototype for the media distribution of the future.”

People are downloading (don’t we know). AdAge wrote about it last week, that iPods are having a big effect on radio. Well, now the people are creating content to be downloaded on those iPods. It’s a prototype because it’s going to go to the phone. It’s going to go to the point where I’ll get whatever I want whenever I want it. That means the TV gets distributed. It works because there are now four legs of the stool in place. There’s cheap equipment. There are new easy tools -- like Visual Communicator and Macintoshes. There’s marketing. 

How do you find this stuff? Well, you don’t need to market it, you have blogs -- links -- right? When James Wolcott started his blog at Vanity Fair, I helped him do it, and I just asked, “Let me announce it.” So, I put up one post that said, “Wolcott -- big brand -- is blogging.” People picked it up like crazy and he had traffic that day. Not because I had any power, because the network had power. And, there’s open distribution now. When John Stewart went on "Crossfire" and bless his heart, killed it, that got, what five hundred thousand people on the show? (Less. less, says the man who knows.) Well, it’s gotten at least five million now on the network that no one owns -- through iFilm and through BitTorrent. That network is more powerful than CNN. That means something to all of us who think, “centralized.”

So, my second law of media is: lowering the cost of production and distribution in the media, inevitably leads to “nichification.” If you lower it enough, you’ll get an unlimited supply of people making content. This is a scarcity killer.

So, finally (the end of the thing), how do you think when you come out of this medium? How do you think when you start to put on the Blog Boy uniform everyday, and you get involved in it? Well, first and foremost you think consumer control. How are the ways I can give the people control? Because they’re going to like it; they’re going to use it. It’s going to put me in a good position. Bose tried it with the music industry. Let’s NOT let them have any control! Look what’s happened to them. 

Two, think relationships. Be human. Level with people. Talk to them. Have a relationship with them -- that’s what matters here. 

Three, think “niches.” Everything’s going to the niche. Mass market is dead. Massive niches take its place. 

Four -- the only way you can make this work is by creating networks of niches and putting them together. 

And, finally, think distributed media. It doesn’t all have to happen under our roof. It doesn’t all have to happen in the things that we own, that we create, that we control. It’s going to happen out there no matter what we do. So, how do we get involved with the people out there? How do we read them and make them stars? How do we underwrite them? How do we get involved in the conversation with them? How do we respect them? And, if we can do that, we will still be the centralized marketplace.

I went out and talked to the online news association a while ago, and I asked on my blog, “What should I say to these big 'mockers'?” And, one guy came in and he said, “Tell them that an online newspaper should no longer think of itself as a thing. It should start to think of itself as a place. It’s a place where people come together and do neat things, and we manage to make that happen.”

So, finally, if I can be of any help, I’m not selling anything, except the wonders of this new medium as Blog Boy, right? If I can help anybody, let me know. Because it’s a wonderful new medium, it changes the way you think about media, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

Tomorrow: Jeff Jarvis answers tough questions.