Chilling with advertising guru George Lois for two hours is probably the most fun I’ve ever had with my clothes on.

Lois, the renowned ad executive, art director and designer, recently gave me a personal tour of his exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art titled, “George Lois: The Esquire Covers,” which runs through March 30, 2009. The museum has prints of 31 of the 92 covers Lois created for the magazine from 1962 through 1972.

I was a bit nervous at the prospect of interviewing a living legend. But Lois immediately put me at ease, providing lots of laughs (about working with Andy Warhol and dealing with the Nixonites, for example) and every now and again lightly poking me in the shoulder, as if to say, “Pay attention! This is important stuff.”

And it is. The exhibit is a veritable history of the 1960s. In a simple yet compelling fashion, the covers tackle the issues that gripped the country during that momentous decade: the onset of the civil-rights movement, feminism, hippiedom, the generation gap.

Nor do the covers shy away from all the violence that engulfed the 1960s: the assassinations, the Vietnam War, the rioting between police and protestors during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. To the contrary, the covers make one confront these issues that, for many Americans, continue to resonate.

Yet plenty of the covers display Lois’ unique brand of pranksterism, including Norman Mailer as King Kong holding Germaine Greer (as Ann Darrow) to portray the verbal fisticuffs the two writers had back in the day and the famed TV host Ed Sullivan wearing a Beatles mop-top wig. (The Beatles first made waves in the States appearing on Sullivan’s show in 1964.)

Whatever the decade, Lois has been able to capture the Zeitgeist. It goes back to when he was a wunderkind with the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), the agency that gave birth to Big Idea Thinking. Lois’ first agency, Papert Koenig Lois, created memorable campaigns for Aunt Jemima, National Airlines and Xerox (a chimpanzee easily using a photocopier). Those campaigns led to the gig doing covers for Esquire, where he would revolutionize magazine design.

In addition to the iconic Esquire covers Lois created the concept and name for the low-calorie Stouffer’s product Lean Cuisine (1979) and created the “I want my MTV” campaign (1982). During a cab ride downtown I asked Lois about the MTV campaign and he responded, somewhat sheepishly, “Yeah, I destroyed the culture.” Nah. More like chronicling the culture — for the last 40-plus years. Not an easy thing to do.

Call him the Buddha of Madison Avenue. Aware, enlightened and oh so kind. And at 77, he’s still going strong, currently running the boutique ad agency Good Karma Creative, with his son Luke.

This piece marks the maiden voyage of From Print to Digital: On Location.

Enjoy.

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A respect for journalistic integrity. Check. A progressive strategy for building out online media. Check. A long-term perspective on growth (rather than plans to flip the company within the next three-to-five years). Check. A commitment to stay out of the way. Check. For Rafat Ali, founder and editor of paidcontent.org, all the constellations are properly aligned regarding the sale of his Web site to U.K.-based Guardian Media Group.

Guardian late last week acquired paidContent.org for an undisclosed sum (although one report pegged the price at $30 million). Ali could not comment on the sale price but, as one of the toughest editors covering the online-media beat, he could hardly blame us for asking.

Ali was quite candid about other aspects of the deal, namely the ability of paidContent.org to expand its presence in the U.S., U.K. and India and ramp up its social-media tools. He said the deal will also give paidContent.org the ability to launch new verticals that dovetail with the Web site’s media and marketing coverage. The deal is not expected to have an adverse affect on paidContent.org’s content partnerships (The New York Times, Forbes, et al.) and, if anything, will probably give Ali the resources to expand such relationships.

PaidContent.org is now part of Guardian Media Group, the news media division of Guardian Media Group, which is owned by the Scott Trust.

Ali said being owned, ultimately, by a Trust gives him a great deal of comfort. To wit, he knows the new owner is in it for the long haul (and that he doesn’t have to chase numbers for an owner with a more short-term outlook). So he’ll continue to do what he does best: chase stories about all of the changes that are engulfing media.

Fulll disclosure: paidContent.org is a customer of ScribeMedia.org’s media-services division.

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With the average tenure of a marketing director in a large company being 20 months, even in good times, the prospect of a recession or stagnancy induces paralysis in many marketeers; Is it my customer? Is it one of my agencies? Was it the last campaign? Should I pull the next campaign? Why isn´t research giving me any answers? Where am I gonna work next? Who´d have me? etcetera…

The typical client response in the age of traditional media was pretty simple. Slow spending. As the gears start to slow, the obvious candidates for marketing budget cuts are the big expensive “pay and spray” media channels; TV, press, outdoor, radio and cinema. The problem with these channels has always been their lack of accountability. Measurement tools and methodologies tend to be platform specific, audience samples of varying quality and consistency, and each data silo resists being integrated with other data silos. What gets measured are primarily media outputs rather than audience outcomes.

Sure enough, TV, press, outdoor, radio and cinema suffered the deepest downward adjustment in client budgets since Q1 2006 according to the Bellwether report. What came next was more interesting. Direct Marketing took a heavy hit, with budgets revised down for the fifth year running.

Odd when you consider that DM has for the longest time been one of the most accountable ways of reaching a target group. Not so odd when you scratch at the surface a little and see that what´s really happening in DM is simply a continuation of the long migration out of print based postal campaigns and into email.

PR, events and market research budgets all saw small gains in marketing budgets, reflecting their current position as three marketing channels which can deliver enormous value, particularly in B2B and which should be able to migrate successfully to digital formats. However there remains a huge disparity between the leaders and laggards to the extent that they´ve retooled their businesses for the web.

The truth is that media all over is becoming fuzzy at the edges. In B2C marketing, channels are bleeding into each other via common direct response mechanisms. There are the expected losers that everybody knows about - national newspapers, but there are also unexpected winners - local TV and radio, boosted by advances in geo-targeted marketing analytics.

In B2B it´s all about trusted sources of information. A 2006 survey by Marketing Sherpa & CNET found that the top three most effective marketing tactics to “directly influence a technology or services purchase decision” were all offline, and none of them were vendor-originated (at least not directly).

• Word-of-mouth - 48.3%
• Conferences and trade shows - 41.9%
• Print magazines - 40.6

What this says to me is that PR is overtaking marketing and acting as a kind of currency across a whole range of newly converged channels. Events promote public relations, PR promotes events.

Whilst flaks are very much in their comfort zones turning out an elegant well timed press release, planning a piece of web video tends to be a stretch too far. There´s a skills gap opening up which is as much a chasm as it is an opportunity because the kind of skills traditionally recruited by PR agencies, - basic journalism, account management skills - generally don´t adapt easily to creating, for example, a piece of viral media or a 10 minute in-depth film on the latest controversy in immunology.

Equally, the traditional skills of B2B video producers - mainly technical and logistics skills - doesn´t equip them to create compelling content that meets a brands strategic or tactical communications objectives.

The answer I think is in the rise of new kinds of communications companies (such as ScribeMedia, which is part software development company, part media production company, part new media strategy and consulting firm) which are predicated on providing media solutions that are also interwoven with subject-matter expertise.

How long it will take for this kind of approach to be common is anyone´s guess. It could take a generation, given the current silos that exist in the teaching of media in some parts of Europe and the US.

Hey, that´s an opportunity right?

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How can business-information companies better serve their advertisers online? And what are advertisers looking for from business publishers to enhance advertisers’ sales tools on the Internet? We’ll get insight from both sides of the table: Gordon Hughes, president-CEO of American Business Media, will be joined by Barbara Bacci Mirque, Executive VP, Communications and Best Practices, Association of National Advertisers. Tune in for what we’re sure will be an illuminating discussion.

Register now for the next live WebTV episode of From Print to Digital

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Scott Peters, a managing director with media investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group Inc., provides some fresh insight on JEGI’s first half M&A overview (that we originally reported on last week).

Peters offers a bird’s-eye view on why deal value took such an enormous hit in the first half compared with the same period in 2007 (down 65%); why the Online Media & Technology sector seems to be inoculated from such a lousy economy and what may be in store, acquisition-wise, for online advertising networks, which are proliferating at a rapid clip.

As the chart below indicates, Media M&A deal value was down significantly in the first half of 2008 from the second half of 2007.

As the grid below shows, online media and technology was the only media sector to show gains in both deal value and number of deals in the first half of 2008, compared with the same period in 2007.

(Please excuse a brain freeze on my part during the interview; twice I referred to the “first quarter” report when I meant to say “first half.”)

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In Episode Three of “Naked Media” we have fun trying new things: a not-altogether-serious opening essay, some man-on-the street interviews (including Russell Simmons — “Twitter?…”), and not one but two guests sitting down with Dorian. Digital strategists Erin Byrne of Burson-Marsteller and Ben Ezrick of Ogilvy explain what the heck a “digital strategist” is, try to make sense of a fake JC Penney ad that went viral, and talk in detail of how they handle work in traditional and social media for clients such as the Treasury Department, Hellman’s and Hormel.

Hosted by award-winning journalist and media veteran Dorian Benkoil, Naked Media is a monthly live webcast that cuts through the bloviation, challenges the conventional wisdom and gets at real issues. Whether in one-on-one interviews or panel discussions, Naked Media explores a wealth of issues, from making money using the latest ad technologies to the privacy issues surrounding behavioral targeting.

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A statistical snapshot of women in the workplace leaves a lot to be desired.

In 2007, women made up 46% of the labor force and 50% of managerial positions, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization that focuses on professional women. However, among Fortune 500 companies women accounted for 15.4% of corporate officers, down from 15.6% in 2006. In 2007, women held 14.8% of board seats in Fortune 500 companies, essentially flat from the previous year. Indeed, a recent article in Condé Nast Portfolio states that after years of progress, women’s gains in the workplace appear to be slowing down or stalling.

It’s against this backdrop that professional women recently gathered in New York for The Feminine Mystique: The Status of Women in Marketing, Advertising & Media — and its Impact on the Bottom Line. The event, presented by The ADVERTISING Club, featured a panel that explored why there is such a dearth of women in the top ranks of corporate America.

Before everyone sat down for lunch I got the opportunity to talk with the panelists about the challenges women face trying to shatter the so-called “glass ceiling” and why, nearly a decade into the 21st century, we’re still having to talk about the “mommy track.”

In order, I spoke to: Dr. Bob Deutsch, cognitive anthropologist and founder of Brain Sells, a marketing services firm (Deutsch was the opening speaker); Trudy Hardy, Marketing Manager of MINI USA; Tim Armstrong, President of Advertising and Commerce, North America, Google (I asked Armstrong whether he could talk about the recently announced Google-Yahoo deal and he declined); Sheri Baron, President of Gotham, a full-service ad agency, and Perry Yeatman, senior VP-Corporate Affairs, Kraft Foods, and co-author of “Get Ahead by Going Abroad: A Woman’s Guide to Fast Track Career Success.”

Woman have made significant gains in the workplace, but the consensus among the panelists is that there are still miles to go.

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Lose the editorial calendar. That’s one piece of advice InfoWorld.com Editor in Chief Eric Knorr has for publishing executives who fold their print product(s) and shift the content to the Internet. Knorr should know. Last April InfoWorld shuttered its print edition and put the content strictly online. Knorr says publishing exclusively online doesn’t lend itself to following an editorial calendar because where print is rigid the Web is flexible. What’s more, with an online-only publication reporters and editors have to be cognizant of things like search-engine optimization and audience segmentation — two areas they don’t have to worry about when writing for a print product. Still, despite dramatic differences between delivering content online and in print, some things about journalism never go out of style (read: solid reporting and good writing). In the third installment of ‘From Print to Digital,’ Knorr addresses myriad issues related to having an online-only publication. While he misses the long-form journalism that print affords, he says the move to the Web has overall been liberating.

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But business publishers’ record at leveraging their data into new business has been decidedly mixed. Because most b-to-b media companies still rely on an advertising model they tend to leave a lot of money on the table when it comes to repackaging their information. For every $10,000 small companies spend on advertising, they spend $5,400 on market research, according to research and advisory firm Outsell Inc. For every $10,000 large companies spend on advertising, they spend $7,900 on market research, per Outsell. At a recent forum sponsored by American Business Media b-to-b media executives discussed how they can boost their companies’ value (and profits) through rich data.

But it’s not easy, as business publishers need to change decades-long business practices to respond to the growing demands from customers for more digital opportunities.

One solution: acquire marketing services companies outright rather than use existing resources. For other ways in which b-to-b media companies can monetize their surveys and market research, I spoke to Chuck Richard, VP-lead analyst of Outsell and a veteran of b-to-b media. As Richard explains, the move among business publishers to bank on data is another indication that the entire nature of business publishing is changing — and fast.

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Register for the next episode of Naked Media, the live WebTV show that explores the nexus of content, advertising and technology.

In this episode of of Naked Media, we cage two digital strategy ninjas - Erin Byrne, digital strategist from Marsteller, and Ben Ezrick, who handles digital strategy for advertising agency Ogilvy - and see what happens.

PR? Advertising? Marketing?

PR is advertising and advertising is PR. PR and ad agencies are reshaping themselves to stay ahead in the digital world while sometimes pitching themselves similarly to clients. (Who should manage a social media campaign, and how? Where does advertising end, and marketing or PR begin?)

In a free-wheeling discussion, we’ll ask our guests where they think things are headed, specific questions about their campaigns, and any questions you may have.

Erin Byrne is a digital strategist from Marsteller who calls for openness from inside one of the world’s biggest PR firms, and is very open herself about everything from her interest in sports to her constant airplane travels.

Ben Ezrick handles digital strategy for advertising agency Ogilvy. He works on campaigns for the third (and fourth and fifth) screens, such as mobile phones, but writes that TV is just fine, thank you. And why would a 27-year-old with such an exalted title be using an old technology — PDFs! — to get his ideas to the world?

Register now for Naked Media.

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