For example, the charmers at my hometown paper, the Las Vegas Review Journal, saw an increase in circulation this year by 6.6%. Which is awesome! Except: strange. Because Vegas' economy is in the toilet, having been crippled by foreclosures and joblessness. Why wouldn't these people just go online and get that shit for free? Funny you'd ask, because weekday sales dropped by 12,000 copies.

So. About that increase in circulation. Is the mob fixing numbers in Vegas again, or what? So old-school. Here's how this works: back in April, the Audit Bureau of Circulations changed their rules to let numbers look better to people who look at circulation rates, like ad buyers (and media reporters). The standard-change was bad. Like, disingenuous. Which is how the Review-Journal went up in circulation this year.

The change happened because the price the newspaper was charging for the online replica — it costs print customers an extra 50 cents per week — hadn't been high enough to qualify as paid circulation until the ABC's April change. That let newspapers define their paying readers as anyone who spends at least a penny for a copy. Previously, a newspaper copy had to sell for at least 25 percent of the basic price to qualify as paid circulation.

Right, so, by that logic, $1 could potentially equal 100 copies, and $100 equals 10,000 copies. Here's where I'd write that that's five times the amount of copies of the LVRJ distributed in Vegas, but I can't, because we have no idea how many copies are actually distributed! Fun. How do advertisers feel about this runaround? Raging mad, right? Um, kind of. One advertiser thinks the numbers are "less credible."

You really have to do your homework now and ask newspapers about how much double counting is going on,'' said Allison Howald, U.S. director of print investment at PHD Media.

The rage doesn't come across quite like I was expecting it to.

Hopefully, "less credible" is a kind euphemism for "complete bullshit," or some advertisers are going to wake up one day and start asking questions about why the 200,000 eyes they were promised on their quarter-page actually only amounts to a third-grade arts class making paper machete hats. You'd think these sketchy practices are limited to sleazy gambling towns like Vegas, though, right? WRONG again. Wall Street Journal, you guys will be transparent, right?

Nope. WSJ spokesman Robert Christie wouldn't respond to the AP's questions for quote on the new rules, including whether or not their numbers included digital subscriptions.

Including the print side, the Journal's total circulation edged up by just 0.6 percent to 2.02 million. ''We followed the ABC's rules and methodology,'' Christie said

Right, so, newspapers: more fucked than previously statistically "proven."

I'm forgetting where I read about the guy who used to steal ATM receipts of trashcans to impress dates with his huge bank account. This reminds me of that.

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)

The AdMob deal announced today is the third largest acquisition in Google's history, behind only DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.7 billion). But no one's really been talking about the mobile advertising network or its early-thirtysomething founder Omar Hamoui until now. Hamoui is downright anonymous.

Here's what we've learned about him based on his low internet profile and scant press clippings:

• Has all of 441 followers on Twitter. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, who sold his weblogging company for less than 1/20th as much, has 77,000 followers.
  
• 32 years old as of May.
  
• Earned a bachelor's in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles and dropped out of the MBA program at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
  
• Ran computer programming company Vertical Blue for almost four years.
  
• Senior program manager at Sony Pictures Digital, about two years.
  
• COO of startup called GoPix.
  
• Started HerBabyShower.com.
  
• Started FotoChatter, for sharing pictures between cell phones, but left the venture behind after becoming frustrated with the inefficiency of advertising his site to mobile users.
  
• Came up with AdMob as a solution to the FotoChatter advertising headaches while at Wharton, at age 28.
  
• In 2007, Bill Gates personally asked Omar Hamoui to speak at Microsoft's annual gathering of journalists, according to a July 207 Ad Age article. Gates had just bought one of Hamoui's competitors.
  
• Last year, toured Kara Swisher of All Things D through his cramped headquarters in San Mateo, a town on the San Francisco Peninsula not exactly famous as a startup hotbed. (See below).
  
• Google bought AdMob after attempting to launch a mobile ad network of its own (AdSense Mobile).

(Pic: Hamoui by Rodrigo SEPÚLVEDA SCHULZ )

The funniest thing so far today is the fact that Page Six reported this item with the "Won't Somebody Please Think of the Noble Press?" angle instead of the "Look at these whining, babied reporters" angle.

It was business as usual — all messed up — for six journalists from such upscale magazines as Forbes Life, Manhattan, and Prestige who were invited to experience the new luxury seats designed exclusively for first-class travel on Swissair. The junketeering journos found themselves booked into less luxurious business class both to and from Switzerland last week. Maybe the airline felt so many people are flying first-class these days, it didn't really need the press

I guess it's up to us, then? Hey everyone, look at these whining, babied reporters.


The Week is guaranteeing advertisers that their ads will test highly in consumer recall, or the magazine will keep running the ads for free until they do test well enough. This means, I think, The Week has plenty of extra ad space just lying around.


If you were waiting impatiently for the arrival of Esquire's latest bleepy technology doo-dad thingy, in the magazine, good news: It's here. Go look at it if you want, or not.


Conde Nast is planning to launch more of its titles in China, where the print magazine business is not such a god damn train wreck. We cannot mock them for this sound strategic move.

Business Insider did the (wet) nose to the ground investigation. See the original video:

And the new ad.

The verdict?

The spot features said bulldog scrabbling across what appears to be Armstrong's Artesian Classics Color Wash in Birch Natural. (No, we're not flooring experts; the Armstrong website tells us this is what the spot features.) In the commercial, the dog is referred to as "Charlie," but we thought his body and skating style all indicate that he may indeed be Tillman.

Guess what? He totally is Tillman. A rep for BBDO, New York, confirmed this afternoon

BRO. Bark Burnquist over here is cashing in. Glad to know ad agencies are spending scrilla giving the people The Real McCoy instead of some fake-ass wanna be ruff ridin' pooch. Still complaining about not being able to get a job? This dog's got hustle and—possibly—a slick backwards-manual-to-fakie-ollie. The job market needs skillz. If Tillman teaches us anything, it's that they're out there. Dogg.

"While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the company decided to make this change," the statement read. "We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E that the cereal offers."

THANKS KELLOG CO.
[Ad Age]

Breitbart launched his news aggregator site as a way to monetize traffic generated by the Drudge Report. Why send all those ravenous Drudge readers to newspapers by linking to commodity-news stories when Breitbart could subscribe to newswires himself, start up a site, host the stories on them, and—as Matt Drudge's understudy—send that traffic to his own site? It's a smart idea. Another smart idea is to charge a company like Reuters for linking to their stories, which is what Breitbart started doing in October 2005, according to Beato.

Instead of charging Breitbart for the right to host their stories—an arrangement Breitbart has with the Associated Press and a variety of other wire services—Reuters started paying him to post headlines and summaries of Reuters stories with links to the Reuters web site. The downside is that Breitbart loses potential ad revenue when a reader clicks through to the Reuters stories, because they see ads served by Reuters. The upside is he gets paid.

All of which is an interesting business story, one that neither Reuters nor Breitbart would comment on. But Beato engaged in some internet forensics, and was able to draw the Drudge Report into Breitbart's little arrangement. It turns out that all the Reuters links on Breitbart's site carry the same bit of code in the URL—either RPC=22 or RPC=23. The only thing a Reuters spokesman deigned to confirm to Beato was that those codes are "a parameter that enables [Reuters] to track clicks from URLs on our newsletters, from/to partner sites, etc." So a Reuters story with a URL containing either of those codes, Beato deduces, is one that Breitbart gets paid for linking to. So do any Reuters stories linked directly from the Drudge Report contain the magic money code?

In 2006, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 1888 times. At this point, it trailed only Breitbart.com as the Drudge Report's favorite destination. Meanwhile, 1852 of those links, or 98% of them, contained the RPC strings that Reuters was presumably using to keep track of how much traffic Breitbart was sending it.

Interesting! Of course, as Beato notes, there's nothing particularly nefarious about the way such an arrangement might affect Drudge's, or Breitbart's, news judgment. Reuters is a purveyor of breaking and commodity news, and their stories are usually just as useful as the AP's or any other wire's. So the fact that, when Breitbart is at the helm of the Drudge Report, he gets a nickel for linking to a Reuters story about, say, a hurricane doesn't necessarily mean there's an ethical issue at stake. Still, it's...interesting.

And it doesn't really matter anymore, because Breitbart quit his side-gig as Drudge's alter ego more than a year ago—at least if you trust what you read on Gawker. Indeed, the URL to the Reuters story currently linked as the lead item on the Drudge Report doesn't contain the RPC code that's going to put Breitbart's kids through college.

Beato sources his information about the Reuters deal to "documents generated in a 2005 legal dispute between Breitbart and two other parties," which turns out to be a federal lawsuit that two of Breitbart's former partners in an advertising venture filed against him. In 2005, Breitbart got together with Bradley Hillstrom and Brian Cartmell, the producers of Michael Moore Hates America, to form GenAds, a company that was to exclusively sell ads for Breitbart.com. When Breitbart struck the Reuters deal, he cut GenAds out of the picture on the theory that the paid links were a content deal, rather than advertising. Cartmell and Hillstrom sued, and the case was settled in 2006.

We looked through the court documents, and here's the reason the trio thought GenAds would be a good idea—Hillstrom personally knew the folks in charge of the massive ad budgets at the National Rifle Association, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.:

And here's an account of the night that the deal to create GenAds was sealed:

So, in case you were wondering, no—there is no vast right-wing conspiracy. Just a series of dinners with powerful GOP politicians at which ideas to make people like Andrew Breitbart wealthy beyond imagination are discussed. Move along.

At some point while we weren't looking, Ad Age reports, Mountain Dew apparently let you, the consumer, come up with three new flavors for it? "Distortion, Whiteout and Typhoon?" Which are undoubtedly terrible? Anyhow, now they're also letting you, the con-Dew-mer, go online and pick the ad agency to make the campaign for these terrifying "flavors," all in the name of connecting the consumer public with the brand image interactivity category extension dialogue Twitter Facebook engagement crowd-sourcing.

And here it is, the future of advertising: 12-second user-generated brand worship clips, at no cost to PepsiCo. You finally got what you asked for, America. YOU'RE A STAR.
[Pic via]

The brilliant graphic illustration above is a very scientific illustration of just how to turn watchable televison programming into fast-food shilling drivel. Here's the technical explanation of just what's going on above:

In one embodiment, as shown in FIG. 1, a conventional advertisement 10 shown during televisin program's commercial break promotes a new product 12 of, for example, a fast-food establishment. The advertisement 10 is attempting to sell the particular product 12. A program-advancing element 16, such as the knife in this particular example, is introduced into the advertisement 10 to form a program-integrated advertisement 14. The program-advancing element relates to the television program and can be a program-promoting element, i.e., a viewer associates the knife with the program. Additionally, the two characters dealing with the knife in the program-integrated advertisement 14 may themseves be program-advancing elements, if they are characters in the program.

We came across this technological marvel via The Hollywood Reporter's legal blog, THR, esq which wrote about what must be one of the most amazing lawsuits of all time. This legalistic rabbit hole's silliness is so profound that it makes us think that it might be time to throw the entire judicial system out the window and muddle by on mob rule for a few decades.

THR writes:

Delaware-based ad agency Denizen is suing media agency Mindshare for stealing an idea to integrate a brand of Vaseline into a Lifetime miniseries called "Maneater."

In the complaint, Denizen says that TV networks face the problem of viewers not paying attention to ads in between segments of a show and claims to have "created the concept of 'program integrated advertisement' in order to entice viewers to pay attention to advertisements in various media, including, but not limited to, television, radio, and the Internet.

Denizen isn't actually suing for stealing the idea of product placement, but they are accusing Mindshare of making off with trade secrets about how to implement world class product placement that the Denizen folks supposedly let them in on during a meeting between the two companies.

But Denizen isn't just claiming spuriously, "yeah, we thought of that first"; they actually filed a patent on product placement, which they call "Program Integrated Commercials." Denizen's patent must rank as one of the most amazing legal documents ever produced, demonstrating the legal system's ability to absorb any level of ridiculousness and turn it into mind-numbing deadly serious jargon.

The patent starts out bemoaning the desperate state of advertising, noting the wreckage TiVo has wrecked and the failures of basically every attempt to get people excited about watching ads, what with these ungrateful viewers changing channels and fast forwarding and all.

The patent then claims, "The present invention comprises a method and system for incorporating thematic content from a particular television program into product or service advertisements (commercials) for a sponsor or the program or network."

Actually, when one gets into it the invention is far more sinister than merely sticking some products into a TV show wrapped around cockamamie plot points, but involves an attempt to take the characters out of the show and stick them into the actual ads based on cockamamie plot points, making the audience have to watch the ads themselves to be able to follow the plot of the show.

The verbal contortions in which the patent goes to explain this are fairly breathtaking. The following graph, for instance, attempts to codify this breakthrough in the science of forcing products into people's brains: "The program-advancing element is specific to a program or is associated with a program element such that it is capable of being recognized by a viewer. This includes, but is not limited to, character actions, setting descriptions, objects, sound recognition, and character dialogue, etc."

That's right, Denizen thunk that up! Take that Sterling Cooper!

You can browse this entire historic document by clicking one of the thumbnails below.

We miss you, Chris. Thanks for doing it.

Uh. You're welcome?

With the December issue of Esquire, all you do is fire up your computer, turn on the webcam, turn to the part of the magazine with those strange little black-and-white box-looking things, in ads or whatever, and point it at the webcam, and you will witness, right there on your screen, an uninteresting video. Says the WSJ:

A fashion spread about dressing in layers, for example, shows actor Jeremy Renner shedding a coat and sweater as the weather turns from rainy to sunny. Turning the magazine triggers a snow flurry, and Mr. Renner puts on more clothes and throws snowballs. Esquire says there are several minutes of video footage in the magazine

The ability to watch a moving-picture on your computer? The future is now. George Lois would be proud.