Tongues are wagging about NAB keynoter and self-styled “ad contrarian” Bob Hoffman’s profanity-laced critique of online advertising. Wagging for all the wrong reasons. See, Bob conveniently chose convenient facts and then conveniently wrapped those facts with absurd conclusions. On Online Advertising Says Bob: “the advertising industry has become the web’s lapdog – irresponsibly exaggerating the effectiveness of online advertising and social media, ignoring the abominable res

What’s the difference between a media brand and an individual with 50 million YouTube views? Nothing! Andrea Russett is a YouTube phenomenon. She has amassed over 700K Twitter followers, 1 million YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Instagram followers, and 50 million YouTube views. Speaking with me at hivio 2014 with her manager Phil Becker, here are some of the questions that Andrea and Phil answered: How did you become a YouTube Star? How do you grow that kind of attention? W

It’s shaping up to be perhaps the most diverse gathering of professionals in the audio information and entertainment space ever. Just take a look at this word cloud version of all the company names present in the room: From broadcasters to podcasters, from commercial radio to public radio, from startups to established players, from digital innovators to traditional radio stalwarts, from U.S. to International. It’s a full house for hivio 2014, the audio future festival, set fo

The title of the piece in USA Today says it all:  “YouTube spends $100 million to redefine TV.” Beginning this month, YouTube is gambling $100 million that by seeding professional production firms such as Young Hollywood — whose slate of YouTube-only programming premieres Monday — it will draw more eyeballs for longer viewing sessions. YouTube is a massive distribution channel, but not a creator of content.  So what to do?  How about invest in content creation!  And so they a

Every great brand – just like every great culture – has its origin story. Here’s one from entrepreneur Chad Hurley: We were having a party in San Francisco in the pre-YouTube era.  We’d shot a lot of great videos of our guests, which we wanted to load onto the Internet to share with our friends and family.  But uploading was time-consuming and complicated, and the net result looked like garbage.  It shot our enthusiasm and the fun of the moment was lost. Anyone in that situat

From the Wall Street Journal: The first phase of Google's music service is expected to be a Web store where users can buy and download tracks, music industry insiders said. It will be tied directly to Google's search engine, so that people using Google.com to look for a particular group or song will be served a link to the company's music store, according to people familiar with the talks. Sounds innocuous enough, right?  But wait, there's more… These people also said the dow