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Media and advertising are becoming digital, personal, and controllable.

At an ANA meeting last fall, Larry Light, the just-retired McDonald's CMO who turned that great institution around, said, "mass marketing equals a mass mistake." He is absolutely right.

My first job out of college was at Procter & Gamble. We were targeting women, eighteen to forty-nine, and it was all about reach and frequency -- that was a whirl, and now that era is over as all these changes accelerate.

Personalized media, the iPod, the death of the CD and podcasting.

Apple is selling five million iPods each quarter. I walk to the U.C. Berkeley campus where I teach and I swear that everybody I see has white earplugs in their ears.

What are they going to do at Clear Channel Communication, or Infinity Broadcasting? How would you like to be in the radio business today?

"It is all part of a shift from mass media to personalized media," Paul Saffo from the Institute for the Future said. And, it is going to be the death of the music CD. We know it now: the music CD is going. The record labels have to understand that people are going to have their recorded music for free. Trying to sell CDs at seventeen ninety-five is all over.

You are going to sell some downloadable music legally, but the CD is dead as a medium. And, the record labels have to understand, the profit in the future is not going to come off selling shiny discs but in public performance and merchandising. Those things plus the accoutrements of live entertainment where the money is going to be made in recorded music.

Podcasting, or my very own radio station.

Combine a small powerful media player, large storage capacity, ubiquitous broadband network connectivity, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it adds up to podcasting, and this is happening.

Apple put podcasting on iTunes. It is now ridiculously easy to subscribe to podcasts about whatever interests you.

The result? Take a look at this picture of my neighbor, Sam Curtis Coutin, in San Francisco's Marina district.

Sam Curtis Coutin records his daily sports talk show using a microphone hanging from a leather belt attached to the ceiling. The old yellow sock covering the microphone is supposed to cut down on popping noises while Coutin speaks.

Sam hosts something called The Sports Pod. He puts a sock over his microphone because he thinks it improves the sound quality. The Sports Pod has had one hundred and fifty-six thousand downloads.

According to the Pew Research & American Life Project, as of April 2005 there were six million podcast listeners.

I find that hard to believe, but I would also find five million, or four million. It seems like podcasting only came on the scene yesterday, and already it has a user base measured in the millions!

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