To many, the absolute collapse of the magazine industry in 2009 may seem stunning.  What is stunning to me is that the industry didn’t see it coming and take steps to avert this collapse.  Once again, another industry can only see a year ahead and thinks that a down year – 2008 – would be followed by a flat or up year. Historically in the advertising business that has been the career experience of the senior executives, so why not look to the past for reassurance?

The Big Three auto companies had an insular culture that didn’t pay attention to outside forces.  They only focused on the fact that they could make $1,500-2,000 profit per SUV and pick-up trucks, so they just kept making them hoping – not thinking that is for sure – it would all continue.  We know where that led.

Conde Nast took pride in its’ high level extravagant culture.  Bright and shiny and expensive always worked in the past, so hey, we’ll be ok in the future.   Whoops! It looks like we have to shut down some new and iconic titles as they are no longer viable businesses.

Business Week, one of the iconic business publications of the last half century was sold for $5 million.  Sounds like what was a good revenue week three years ago.  Who bought them?  The well diversified, global, multi-media, multi-revenue stream Bloomberg.  Just think about an on-line and video, global weekly news and feature product called Business Week, served up on consoles and …

We have all lived through a lifetime of technology changing the media and content landscape.  Satellites allowed cable television and later satellite television to erode and then eviscerate the traditional broadcast network business model.  Then the analog to digital transition eliminated the physicality of the product in the music industry.  Then the universal, immediate and free availability of news and information on the Internet has pushed news magazines and newspapers to the edge of the abyss.

It is now cable television’s turn to face the disintermediating power of the Internet and technology.  This is a trend I have forecast for the past two years.

Cable television has long had a strangle hold on the American household as it has been the “last 30 feet” of connectivity into the home.  Owning this connection has allowed cable television MSOs and operators to control a great deal of the media access to the home and, in many cases such as customer service and pricing, act as a monopoly.  First was the connectivity to the world of cable television.  This was followed by …

We are coming to an end of the greatest financial age of sports in history.  The twelve years between 1996 and 2008 were years when the money around sports exploded beyond any precedent era.  This also means that, going forward, the economics around sports in general will decline, at least for the next 5-8 years if not longer.

The bookends for these 12 years of explosive financial growth are the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and the Beijing Olympics of 2008.  The Atlanta Olympics were the first post-cold war Olympics and, being held in the U.S. created a huge marketing platform.  The Beijing Olympics was the coming out party for the most populous country in the world and gave  recognition to China as a major player on the world’s geopolitical and financial stages.

In 1996 cable television had become a dominant media force in the U.S.  ESPN, and all of its networks, was beginning to take its’ place as the behemoth of sports television.  Regional sports networks, TBS and TNT soon joined the party and it seemed that sports were everywhere on TV.  The broadcast networks and all of these cable entities competed for the rights of all major sports.  The fees paid to the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and the college football conferences exploded.  This led to dramatically increased player salaries, advertising rates and, for the consumer, rapidly increasing cable bills.  Of course it also led to much lower ratings as nothing was special any more.  Even though Monday Night Football on …

We are now in the transition from the Information Age to the Shift Age.  In recent columns I have positioned the recent financial melt down and global economic collapse as the beginning of a painful transitional restructuring between ages.  Just as the 1970s with all its stagflation and unprecedented turmoil was the transitional period between the Industrial Age and the Information Age, so is this time a transitional period between the Information Age and the Shift Age.

The election of Barack Obama, predicted by this observer over a year ago, is the political manifestation of this transition to the Shift Age.  In just one week, there has been a palpable shift in America.  On several deeply significant levels there is the beginning of a sense of something new taking root across the country.  The immediate point, made universally by all observers, and most poignantly represented by the tears streaming down the face of Jesse Jackson- who witnessed Dr. King’s death – in Grant Park on election night, was that a black man has just been elected President. [As someone who attended Dr. King's funeral, and actually marched part of the way to the cemetery with Bobby Kennedy and for whom Dr. King was a great hero, I too wept at this triumph begun more than 40 years ago in the South] Maybe, just maybe America, after more than two centuries of racial trauma is beginning to move on as we move into this new century and this new Age.  That in …

Last week the Internationale Funkausstellung was held in Berlin.  This is the largest consumer electronics convention in Europe, equaling and perhaps surpassing the CES show that occurs every January in Las Vegas.  One of the central themes behind major new product launches was the Internet and the central role it is now beginning to play in the wirelessly networked home.

This has been something that has interested me for years and a subject about which I have written here and here in this blog.  As recently as five years ago, the topic of convergence was a speculative, hot one in media and technology circles.  The convergence discussed then was would there be convergence of the computer and the television?  Would people ever fully accept viewing television content on the computer?   Well we now have the answer to that loud and clear:  yes! Even Steven Jobs doubted this would happen.  He famously said that the profound difference between computers and televisions was that people leaned forward when interacting with computers and leaned back when watching television and that therefore this content convergence would not happen.  Well it did.

Now this convergence is combining with wireless connectivity to begin to change the connection of technology in the home.  The long predicted vision of technologists and futurists of the home of the future where everything is connected and can be monitored and controlled is now beginning.

Sony introduced plug-in adapters to allow some of its Bravia television sets to connect wirelessly to the …