My wife and I have been long-time fans of this show and wish it the fullest of success on TV. Honestly, I could just as easily see folks swarming to it as I could see people not getting it and quickly moving on. Being so far detached from the culture of television at this point, I am not sure if I understand the medium enough anymore to be able to make a valid prediction. Still, I cannot express how happy I am to see a TV network willing to take a chance on something well worth it. As Ira Glass has made very clear, the radio show is not going away – the two will exist together. My hope is that some of the progressive methods that public radio and This American Life have instituted – free podcasts, audio downloads of programs, etc. – will be brought into the Showtime program as well. I know that one person cannot change a whole industry, and a very established industry at that. Still, my hope is that a little bit of public radio will rub off on this one show. Perhaps TV execs will then notice that fans react well to the attitude public radio fosters – you know, putting the priority of distributing the medium to the wide audience possible over pulling in the highest profit. I guess we will see…

According to this article, Google is planning on making $11 billion in ad sales – not too shabby. It is not a secret that Adsense is a success from many different standpoints. I would definitely like to see online advertising go even further in its usefulness and site-by-site basis, but I recognize how large of a leap Adsense made to online advertising. Old media advertising could definitely use a shot in the arm at this point – and who better to go it than one of the best success-stories in new media. Still, it will be interesting if new media ideas still work in a different medium. Old media definitely will be eventually making the slow transition to new media – perhaps that evolution will take care of the problem on its own.

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With a few small websites, a couple flash drives containing MP3 files, and a whole boat-load of creativity, this viral campaign has caught fire – with three articles hitting the front page of Digg and tons of buzz generated elsewhere (online and offline). The Year Zero viral campaign has definitely succeeded and continues to draw attention much longer than the usual “marketing spikes” do. From my view, this is a major score for the media 2.0 corner. With the media/advertising blitz of the Super Bowl still resonating I thought it would be interesting to see how the marketing campaigns of media 1.0′s Goliath compared to the Nine Inch Nails viral project.

Below are Alexa’s traffic results for NIN.com versus four companies that advertised during the Super Bowl:

The NIN viral campaign beats all of them out and seems to have greater staying power than all four of the competitors as well. I am well aware that, to a certain extent, this is comparing apples to oranges. Most of these companies do not rely heavily on their website for success and their ads were offline to begin with. It is asking a lot of an individual to go to a website through a TV ad – no doubt about it. All that being said, I would expect a lot if I spent $2.5 million for 30 seconds or airtime. As can be seen from the chart above, just like those 30 seconds, the public’s attention came and went very quickly. Unlike a 30 second ad, an online presence is always available and can be constantly updated.

I thought it would only be fair to throw a dot-com into the equation:

As for a dot-com versus dot-com comparison, SalesGenie.com spent $3.7 million for their Super Bowl advertisements and obviously got a big spike. However, from the diagram below, that spike did not last too long and it appears as though the NIN campaign could pass it up in the next few days. It really does beg the question if a couple of 30 second spots will continue to make sense versus a creative, sustained and continually evolving bridge between the advertiser and its target audience.

With the net generation watching less TV, will these ridiculously expensive ads finally be seen for what they really are – ridiculous? We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to full-fledged creative online marketing campaigns. I have no illusions that many will be as fun and generous as the NIN campaign, but these sorts of results from a very off-mainstream viral theme for a relatively niche band is pretty amazing. I personally have found this entire sequence of events absolutely fascinating and makes me very excited to see how things will continue into the future.