Two interesting posts at Advertising Age in the last 24 hours–both taking different angles on how to deal with the fracturing media and marketing markets. The first, looks at how media properties must create partnerships, specifically communication and marketing partnerships that have specific audience reach, that together can wrap and intersect across the collective audience.

This requires a well-organized set of partnerships with the collective experience to extend a brand idea across a spectrum of disciplines, audiences and media channels. And identifying the best way to strategically align all respective talent will require new ways of thinking about business integration, new ways to approach brand management and new ways to collaborate with marketing partners.

What do you think Obama did?

Political campaigns, for example, employ many strategists, each honing “brand” communications to resonate with the issues, values and social culture germane to a particular constituency. In a great collaborative effort, Barack Obama partnered with Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, to develop a web presence and better employ the social networking that helped engage younger voters and clinch the Democratic nomination. The campaign also had a very well-organized grassroots effort with first-hand knowledge of the political climate and voting protocol in each state and the expertise to resonate with local communities. The collective skills of these local partners helped the “Obama brand” connect with its audience and raise capital in record proportions.

Embedded in the article, is the notion that these partnerships might not be with expected national partners, but might be a niched interests: local partners, representatives of specific audience segments, etc.. And last but not least, technology is the major tool to support that effort.

The internet, social networking and related media technologies have introduced many new media channels that permit audiences to group according to their vertical interests and to share and react to information in real time. Marketers need to harness the same technologies to combine resources and form marketing partnerships that can develop engaging conversations with these very specific audiences and realign quickly to maintain the conversation as the target, media or subject change.

The second post is actually a three minute video podcast (did you know Advertising Age has those? I just found out!) containing reflective and future looking perspectives on the impact and opportunities of vertical advertising networks. Vertical advertising networks are a response to to the fragmenting business and advertising markets for advertisers, publishers and hey, even consumers.

Will Morrison of ThinkPanmure noted how the VAN space was already cluttering up in the last few years. “Back in 2000, 2001 there were roughly 15 to 20 ad networks. Latest count, this Spring, we have got over 300.” Morrison also noted he saw the creation of a new high end, secondary market in the form of mobile ad networks and video ad networks, making it a more complex and overwhelming market for marketers and publishers.

I won’t go back to transcribe the whole thing, but I can say, you won’t waste your three minutes watching/listening.

Jeff Jarvis announced that City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, received a $3 million matching  grant from the Tow Foundation to create a Center for Journalistic Innovation

First of all, how much fun does this sound?  Can’t wait to see what they do.  Once they’ve gotten off the ground, media organizations should look to see how to partner with them.  

Ok–this is too much.  Can’t we call monopoly? 

Update: Today’s New York Post has more details.. Here are a couple choice quotes.

But the complexity of the different scenarios being discussed - which range from a Yahoo!-AOL tie-up that would outsource search advertising to Google, to a new company spawned from Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN assets and News Corp.’s MySpace - has got Wall Street hoping for the simpler Microsoft-Yahoo! merger to prevail.

Regulatory issues are also at the forefront of any deal between Microsoft, News Corp. (which publishes The Post) and Yahoo!, but sources said figuring out a structure for the $42 billion deal is a larger concern.

Interesting pull quotes from the New York Observer’s “Where will Magazines be 10 Years From Now?”

Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter thinks in ten years we’ll be carting around a little, plastic electronic book where all our content will be beamed in.

Wired Editor Chris Anderson says no way and magazines are going to look about the same.

Although I believe that emphasizing the important tactile experience of magazines and the longer feature pieces as pros for print, I’m a little worried about how publishers could be playing the exclusive game in the future.

The point, then, is to capitalize the physical experience of reading magazines. If it’s all about textual and textural experience, then the more dear that experience becomes, the more of a luxury object it becomes.

“The correspondence between physical luxury as a subject and physical luxury as a thing,” Kurt Andersen, the former editor of New York, thought out loud. “As paper magazines become rarer, it might seem like they become a physical luxury and thereby gain. The affinity between thing and subject might be greater in 10 years.”

But there is always the tension of where you find your revenue–a continual question plaguing the progressive media. We don’t exist to “satisfy advertisers,” (see pull quote below) but to produce kick-ass journalism and media products, but must uncomfortably play the advertising game to support that work. Why uncomfortable? Because our very social mission and existence is often in antithesis to the corporate, consumerism model of the advertising world. But we must find the balance.

“If you look at recent magazines that are successful businesses, many exist to satisfy only advertisers,” said James Truman, the former editorial director of Condé Nast. “Any publisher has to look at those as successful business models and successful business models tend to be copied.

“Editors were protected a long time ago from thinking about their magazines like businesses, especially at Condé Nast, but that changed in the last 10 years,” he said. “Now editors are brand managers as much as they are editorial experts.”

Yes: In the world of the future, the editorial experts will be ad buyers and magazine buyers. And their world is becoming increasingly digitized, their expectations of time spent reading words diminishing, their capacity and taste for internalizing information in different ways—non-narrative, nonverbal—increasing. That is, the Internet won’t replace magazines, but it might replace their readers.

Hmmm. I’ve wondered about this model for a while. Spin Magazine has transferred the print version of its magazine to a digital version on MySpace. But wait. It’s not just read and scroll. It gets cooler.

“Spin Digital. In fact, the digital version is the print edition. Text and photographs are reproduced intact for online viewing, then enhanced with clickable text so that readers can listen to — and buy — the music they’re reading about as well as find out more about products they see in the ads.”

Tom Hartle, president of Spin Media says, “It could point to a way of breathing life into the magazine business — and give a boost to the embattled music industry at the same time.” Hartle said he hoped the digital version would find potential subscribers where they “live” online and persuade them that the monthly and its digital twin, which will probably be reserved for print subscribers after the yearlong trial, are a good buy.

I’m quoting liberally from this article, but I find some points fascinating (red alert: media geek on the loose!)

Early feedback from Spin Digital, which has been available in a lightly promoted “soft launch” on MySpace for three weeks, indicates that viewers are spending an unusual amount of time with it — six to seven minutes per visit, about double the time spent on a typical MySpace visit, according to Josh Brooks, vice president for marketing and content at the social network.

Renewals and new subscriptions to Spin were up 50% in January year over year, a sharp jump over previous months. Although Hartle said it was too early to say for sure, he thought some of the increase could be attributed to the digital product.

Ok–I’ve been wondering for a while why progressive print magazines haven’t taken this leap–especially with the need to reach younger audiences. I’m wondering if it’s cost prohibitive (will try to look into). I think that Spin was smart to support its natural audience of music lovers and use the digital edition to connect to music sites and songs. Why couldn’t progressive magazines do the same? Maybe not with music, but we have plenty of subjects, sources, reviews and so on.

I also think that extending the magazine and its reliable advertising base to a new platform (one that reaches additional demographics) and is interactive, is pretty smart.

Ad Age had an interesting article a couple days ago about glossy magazines going green. There is also the point that they are trying “to mitigate their environmental impact before green consumer groups begin to demand they do something about it.”

The other important point here is that certain retailers/distributors are highlighting magazines that use recycled paper. “Barnes & Noble, for one, has begun specifically promoting magazines that use recycled paper, including Shape, Fast Company, Mother Jones, ReadyMade, Nickelodeon Magazine and Body & Soul. And an advocacy group, Co-op America, calculated that if the whole North American magazine business used just 30% post-consumer recycled paper, nearly 1.7 billion pounds of greenhouse gases would not be emitted into the atmosphere.”

The recent announcement that the FCC is pushing up a vote on media ownership in local markets to mid-December has sent the media reform movement into overdrive.

A related piece from the Publish2 Blog, “The New Media Consolidation,” might explain some of the urgency of commercial media owners to grab up new outlets. It notes in part:

What Google discovered was that consolidating all of the search behavior on the web is actually a form a media consolidation. It used to be that the content and the distribution were one and the same — newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. — Google was the first media company to successfully arbitrage the separation of content from distribution.

But search is only half of the equation. Search has consolidated the allocation of attention for people who know, generally or specifically, what they are looking for. The other half of the attention allocation equation for media is people who don’t know what they are looking for — they just want to know what’s NEW. I may be interested in technology, or celebrity gossip, or foreign affairs, but I’m not looking for anything in particular. I just want the news.

This is why the online news market is heating up. This is why Google has started to develop the Google News product after letting it run on automatic pilot for so many years. This is why Digg has captured everyone’s imagination — it has the attention allocation power of search, but applied to news.

But there’s a problem with these two approaches to media consolidation — they remain separate.

In one corner you’ve got all of the capacity to create content, from traditional media brand networks to citizen media consolidators, all the way down the long tail to independent blog publishers.

In the other corner you have the aggregators, from search to audience-powered social news, increasingly dominating how attention gets allocated to all of this content.

It seems unlikely that the the big media players are going to be content with half the pie.

And so this separation is starting to dissolve, e.g. Conde Nast acquires Reddit, Google starts hosting news wire content, Forbes acquires Clipmarks, Digg hosts massive comment threads that dwarf what you find on the original content items.

This is where consolidation converges, where content creation meets attention allocation — new media companies are realizing that they have to do both.

This is why, as Jeff Chester notes in a recent Nation article, the idea the the Web can serve as an antidote to consolidation is naive at best. “The growing consolidation at the core of the digital media business, ultimately will result in a handful of companies controlling the revenues for all of online media–blogs, social networks, search engines, mobile communication and (especially) news and information sites. This should be of concern, especially to progressive idealists who hoped that the Internet could pose a challenge to the ‘old’ media monopoly.”

Here’s my point: both of these versions of consolidation are largely bypassing the progressive media sector. While individual progressive media projects have benefitted from traffic driven to them via search engines, digg, etc., legacy progressive media outlets have had limited success in either penetrating the ranks of consolidated commercial media or partnering with the digital powerbrokers. There’s work to be done.