His reasoning is that Yahoo (sorry, I’m not going to include the exclamation point) can be a gigantic-scale platform for developers.

Indeed, Yahoo is very big — bigger than most people realize. When I worked there two years ago, I would often shock Bay Area technorati types with basic facts about Yahoo’s position. Number one in email. Number one in news. Number one in sports. Number one overall page on the web (since eclipsed by Google.com).

Long forgotten by Sili Valley types who watched Google build an information empire and Facebook a social media kingdom, Yahoo remained and still remains a force across the world.

(Full disclosure: My wife still works there, editing their women’s site Yahoo Shine, which is itself immensely successful in reaching its core audience of young women. I also still have some very good friends who work at Yahoo.)

When I worked there, Yahoo was decidedly a company adrift. Bad news — China dissidents, the collapse of the Microsoft merger, high-profile attrition, leaked discontent — seemed to overwhelm senior management, who themselves weren’t rah-rah types conditioned to keep the rank-and-file engaged.

But in spite of the consistent ugliness, Yahoo has soldiered on and even improved some of its best assets. The new, bolder Flickr is a huge improvement for the broadband age. The home page, stocked with great editorial and optimized to the user, still makes it nearly impossible not to click on something. My Yahoo is still the default home page for millions. Yahoo News and Sports are still the very best editorially-driven experiences in those categories. Yahoo has powerful market share in many emerging and established global markets. And Yahoo’s loyal user base across mail and IM remains its greatest asset. All those properties (except Flickr) are chock full of ad units, keeping everything comfortably monetized. So there’s a lot of goodness coming out of Sunnyvale.

Is Yahoo going to be a powerful developer platform in 2015? Maybe. Maybe not. While Yahoo’s scale, neutrality, and brand trust are undeniable, the expectations of Yahoo’s user base is still significantly different in character from those of Apple or Google or RIM. And hiring the right people to do this kind of thing — building out and managing a development platform — is crazy-hard in 2010. Double-digit unemployment doesn’t apply to web and mobile technologies; just check out the job listings at any big tech company for the evidence.

It may not even matter. Yahoo never developed a serious RSS reader. Did that matter? There’s still no evidence that people will want to run custom apps on a web page, Farmville be damned. (Facebook’s value is the social graph, not the web canvas.)

Either way, Yahoo is still huge. It can be bigger. It can be better. And Sili Valley is foolish to forget it.

I’ve recently been having a lot of conversations with people about how we consume media. The transition from three broadcast networks to an era of seeing anything you want on any screen is utterly profound, and incredibly interesting to anyone who has watched TV or gone to the movies in their lifetimes.

I’m going to be blogging more about this new world that we’re all hurtling towards, but we’ll start with part one, which is the creative lead that television took over movies in the mid-2000s.

Traditionally, movies told the great stories. In the 1970s, the silver screen flashed The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, Chinatown, Annie Hall, Nashville (my favorite). Hollywood could make movies for niches, while the three-channel universe of TV tried to attain the broadest possible audience. As a result, none of the shows were really that great. The classic movies from that era are still brilliant. The classic TV shows are unwatchable for anything but nostalgia or camp. Unlike the movies of their era, few of these shows have found new audiences.

By the mid-2000s, the script flipped. With each cable network angling to air a must-see show in order to maintain their affiliate fees, the creativity on cable exploded. Meanwhile, the movies have become devoid of stories as compelling as those of Breaking Bad or The Wire.

As Mark Harris writes on EW.com (”What’s wrong with this summer’s movies?“):

Four or five years ago, it was a jaunty provocation to claim that ”TV is better than the movies” (a phrase that headed articles in TIME, Newsweek, and EW). Today, it’s just a fact. TV can be programmed for niche audiences; these days, studios only know how to spend too much money in order to lunge after too many eyeballs. TV actually tests its ideas before they air with pilots; studios just try to imagine what the poster will look like. Most significantly, TV can react quickly to a changing zeitgeist, whereas movies now take ridiculously long to respond to anything, if they even try…

As TV has surged, the risk-averse souls atop the movie studios have stopped pretending that their job is anything other than to find and greenlight renewable, easily marketed franchises for undemanding audiences on big weekends.

Is it any wonder Hollywood is charging hard into formats like 3D and IMAX? Unable to compete creatively with niche-seeking shows, movies have to compete on the screen and images.

But TV didn’t achieve its golden age via its legacy channels. The great shows are almost exclusively on cable networks. Legacy broadcast networks have gone the way of movies, weighed down with replica cop franchises and formula sitcoms. Tina Fey said upon accepting her first Emmy for 30 Rock that network television today is like vaudeville in the ’60s. The times, they have already changed.

Indeed, the broadcast networks have been forced to dial down their creative edge, as niche audiences have already migrated to cable shows. Or video games. Or the Internet. The top-rated show on TV today can only hope to get half the audience of the top show of 10 years. Put another way, 85% of Americans don’t watch the number one show. We’ve come a long way from I Love Lucy.

So what happens when YouTube, with its 2 billion daily video streams, comes to TV? That’s the next game-changer. And that’s the next blog post…

(Click to enlarge)

That’s what it looks like when a trading error and automated reactive systems drive a stock from $40 to $0.01.

Somebody got fired yesterday. And somebody else got really, really rich.

So it was no surprise when I clicked on a HuffPo link my wife IMed me today, and saw this:

HuffPo is getting into the badge universe, adopting the game techniques that Jesse Schell so eloquently detailed last February.

Of course, the problem with social currency is the same as all currencies. Issue too much, and it devalues. Scarcity, and the competition such scarcity breeds, is key to a successful social rewards strategy. All social economies thus require a “Fed” to manage the currency supply.

Official unemployment hovers dangerously close to 13%, with a real figure probably north of 20% (if you exclude the underemployed from the numerator and add back discouraged workers to the denominator). And yet Bay Area tech companies are fighting to fill thousands of open positions. What gives?

Even today, my old employer Accenture (called Andersen Consulting back when I was slogging through government IT projects for them) had posted street teams South of Market to pass out recruiting cards.

Yesterday at Google, gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner repeated that Google would have retained another $10B over its life if it were located in Nevada instead of California. One could claim that it might have never become Google at all if it were anywhere besides Sili Valley. The Bay Area is one of the most prosperous places on the planet because of the people who choose to live and work here. And if companies here can’t get the right brains and skills for its open jobs — because the schools are collapsing, because houses cost too much, or because the state government has become a giant scheme to convert taxes into pensions for its workers — then Sili Valley (including the SF tech sector) will cease to be.

We’re not there yet.  But it feels closer all the time.

The exciting part of Google TV Ads is that it truly democratizes television advertising. Just upload your video, research an audience, bid for a timeslot, and BOOM. This video really demonstrates the power.

Slate-V: How I Ran an Ad on Fox News

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Keynote: “Bringing Sexy Back to Display”

Neal Mohan, VP of Display Product Management for Google

• Challenges to display: macroeconomics, banner blindness, only 6% of display is rich media.
• But display is near a tipping point.
• Americans spend about as much time online as any other media
• Four broad themes to revolution in display:
  • (1) Fragmentation is now an opportunity because of targeting across networks
  • (2) Creativity at scale
  • (3) Measurement has advanced beyond CTR, to brand lift, effectiveness, conversion, etc.
  • (4) Web is social, catching up with life.
• Transformative: multiple data sources in real-time at scale. Now you can reach the right audience at the right time, and control your costs and minimize waste.
• More transactions per day on DoubleClick than all equity and bond transactions in the world.
• For publishers, this also opens a whole world of revenue, since they can provide real-time data on their audience to marketers.
• What display has that TV doesn’t (from a creativity standpoint): Interactivity, knowledge about viewers. Example: Volvo XC60 display ad that allowed user to play with car systems, see tweets from NY Auto Show, etc. Very engaging, great metrics.
• Example: Allowing user to choose their own pre-roll raised unaided awareness 380%.
• Example (spec): Shoot Nike billboard with Google Goggles, get info on nearby stores, promotions, build your own shoe app.
• Moving beyond the bottom of the funnel:
  • (1) Measuring brand lift by web traffic (both to your site and related sites you don’t own) and brand searches (via branded search terms). Data now lets you distinguish display lift vs. other offline efforts.
  • (2) Measuring deep-level conversions. Example: 86% of conversions attributed to a campaign without ad clicks.
  • (3) Measuring reach beyond TV. CPG example: 2.6% incremental reach for a video ad on YouTube. 25% hadn’t seen it on TV.
  • (4) Measuring offline sales. Using geographical modeling to measure offline POS.
• Social web means continuous conversations about our brands. Thus, every display campaign must be social.

Panel: “Online Advertising — Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?”

• Matt Freeman, CEO, Mediabrand
• Erin Clift, SVP Global Sales Dev, AOL
• Chang Kim, Omnicom
• Neal Mohan, Google
• Jeetil Patel, Deutsche Bank
• Marita Scarfi, COO, Organic
• Patel: 2010 is a turnaround year. Display and search should be up 10-11% this year.
• Digital media is anything with an IP address.
• Kim: Omnicom’s 4 F’s of future advertising: Fluid (experience, enagement, etc), Fast, Focused, Forecastable (the toughest one)
• Mohan: We can get all the data in the world, but advertising is still a creative medium, and we need to establish that emotional connection. Scaling creativity requires customizing creative to the audience (or the individual).
• AOL is pulling back its ad systems and building them from scratch. AOL is also a content provider now. Divorcing Time Warner will probably help with that transition; no legacy revenue to silo and protect.
• Publisher complains that the vast, vast majority of ads available for his sites are static banners. How do we encourage advertisers to produce better creative? Mohan responds: the technology is there and available.

I’ll be liveblogging the OMMA Global conference today, with nuggets of Online Media, Marketing, & Advertising goodness.

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First up: Keynote by Mark Kvamme of Sequoia.

“Mobile Wars: Will the Mobile Web Be Open or Closed?”
Moderator: Laura Marriott (here at the SF Marriott)
Panel: Tom Bedecarre, CEO, AKQA
Mark Kvamme, Partner, Sequoia Capital
Alexandre Mars, CEO Phonevalley & Head of Mobile Publicis Groupe, Phonevalley & Publicis Groupe
James Min, Managing Partner, Montgomery and Company

• Stats on worldwide smartphone penetration: 45% Nokia, 19% RIM, 13% Apple, 6% HTC
• US: 43% RIM, 25% Apple, 16% MSFT, 7% Google, but almost 50% of mobile web access is via Apple iPhone
• Show of hands, how many used a physical coupon in the last year? About 20%.
• The market for location-based promotions is probably 5x that of physical coupons.
• It’s too early for Apple to run a victory lap. Android is open, and Java devs will build a lot of momentum behind Android.
• Kvamme: iPhone is a terrible telephone — it’s not all AT&T’s fault. RIM is a great PDA.
• James Min: Platform wars are over. You need a closed platform to develop. Apple’s proved it, b/c of fragmentation.
• James Min: But… in the BRIC countries, Nokia/Symbian phones are much cheaper. If Nokia wants to make headway in the US, they have one real asset — mapping.
• Google sees 50x more mobile searches from iPhone than any other device. That’s engagement.
• Mobile marketing hasn’t exploded because the targeting and attribution to get customer to POS isn’t there yet.

Pepsi Refreshes the Brand, with Andrew Katz from Pepsi and Aaron Shapiro from HUGE.

• Pepsi was the most-remembered brand from the Super Bowl this year, but they didn’t advertise!
• Utility-driven marketing: Some of the most effective marketing helps people achieve what the brand stands for.
• What is your brand’s higher value? How do you manifest it on the web? How do you make it viral, social, and CRM’ed?
• “I’m SVP of Refreshing the World.” Groan.
• Why doesn’t Pepsi do pop culture anymore? Pop culture doesn’t exist anymore. Pop culture is whatever you’re into.
• Pepsi Refresh Project: Declare the Refresh Movement, Spark a Conversation, Make a Difference.
• People submit ideas for projects for $20MM pool, voted by users, distributed. Being part of the content, instead of advertising. Partner with media, retail, and celebrities.
• Impressive impressions — it’s a business change, not just a branding campaign.

Marketing track session: New Creative Options for Marketing with Online Video as Web Becomes ‘Lean-Back’

• VuMe demoing interactivity within ads, including a pre-roll that interacts with the adjacent display ad
• GRPs vs. iGRP. GRP (TV) is based on panels. iGRP is based on impressions and engagement.
• Branded entertainment makes sense as an element of the mix. It doesn’t change anything.
• Attribution modeling = Tracking all the ads that a user is exposed to, against eventual user actions and outcomes.
• Is the web going to be long-form “lean back”? More so, but different audiences will want different forms.
• Online industry needs to overcome advertiser objections of online video.

Marketing track session: Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Have to be a Gamble

• Social Media team at MSFT is always-on. Not in campaign mode.
• Walmart.com — Q&A for products, builds an archival asset
• How do you measure the effectiveness? Time spent on an engagement; likelihood to share; how many of those shares convert. MSFT: Measures ROI (based on reach) vs equivalent $$$ display campaign.
• MSFT got 200M free impressions week of W7 launch
• Levi’s — Content management is the great challenge for always-on social media. Solution — UGC (but do you still need to moderate?)
• Marty Collins from MSFT: retailing and augmented reality will help consolidate profiles. Will Whole Foods and the Gap have to ID you with different profiles?
• How do retailers feel about customers shopping on Facebook? Levi’s Brand Marketing VP: You gotta fish where the fish are. Huge potential if you can figure out the purchase component of the FB experience.
• The big Skittles UGC FAIL: What was their business case anyway?
• MSFT: Social media blows away TV or outdoor on cost per impression.

Keynote: People are Expecting Everything, Everywhere, Downloaded, Uploaded, In their Hands, in an Instant – Are Marketers Keeping Pace? by Laura Lang, CEO of Razorfish/Digitas/Denuo Group

• Traditional advertising and mass marketing are dead.
• “How do I join the conversation?” You’re already in it, if you have a brand. 25% of the links associated with major brands are already UGC. Better question is “What do I do now?”
• Case study: Barbie becomes human. She has profiles on all the social nets. Two billion impressions.
• Linear purchase cycle is dead. Now it’s a “purchase web” or “customer journey,” a random walk to the same outcome — purchase. Marketers need to figure out how to get into that walk, to serve the right interaction in real time.
• Campaign flights are dead. People don’t decide to turn on when you’re advertising. You need to always on, which is hard.
• GM trying to get potential customers to change their consideration of GM at purchase. Digitas serving content based on user actions on car sites.
• Hands up: How many people have heard of Chat Roulette? What? Maybe 10%???
• Social ROI is not a sufficient measure. ROI is what you need.
• Social is not a channel. It’s how we live now.

My laptop battery is crying mercy, so I’ll shut down for the day. Going to continue to follow on Twitter via mobile. Cheers.