Alphabet Inc (GOOG): The Ads Are in the Wrong Places By Jame...

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Re: BOREALIS post# 1618

Monday, 12/05/2005 1:29:55 PM

Monday, December 05, 2005 1:29:55 PM

The Ads Are in the Wrong Places
By James J. Cramer
RealMoney.com Columnist
12/5/2005 8:43 AM EST

"Come here, dad, look at this," my daughter called to me this weekend. "This is that game you got me, take a look." For the next hour I sat, transfixed, as my eldest daughter played NFL Street, an Electronic Arts (ERTS:Nasdaq) production, on her Xbox.

It wasn't just the lifelike nature of the game, where the likes of LaDainian Tomlinson and Michael Strahan square off in a football pick-up game on a parking lot, a construction site and a trash-strewn baseball diamond, that kept me glued to the television set.

It was the realization that this game, like so many other games, is the most underexploited advertising realm I have ever seen. The graffitied walls, the smashed-up trash cans, the rusty gates -- all could be adorned with abstract Mountain Dew or Gatorade ads and we'd have to watch them, take them in, almost as if they were instant-messaged into our brains.

As if to make the contrast even more stark, my daughter was TiVo'ing an episode of Pimp my Ride -- yeah, I know, this is what they watch -- while playing, making sure that she didn't have to watch commercials. She watches nothing unless it is TiVo'd because she hates commercials so much.

There, in a nutshell, as the 33rd annual UBS Global Media conference begins today, is the problem facing all of media: The ads are in the wrong darned places.

Now, all sorts of media outlets are scrambling to change that. But I think my daughter, who seems to have been born with an iPod in her ear and a special sense of hand-eye coordination -- no wonder she was a field hockey goalie with 9 straight shut-outs -- will outwit them, like so many others of her generation. They have become reverse entitled; they genuinely believe it is their job to block commercials and try to get as much programming as they can for free. To reach them, you have to be where they don't block, whether it be Coke in the green room -- now red room -- of American Idol, or on the virtual walls in an Electronic Arts game. Those who figure this out could up what they charge brand-sensitive companies. Those who don't, which includes lots of souls stuck with the traditional media, won't ever get a multiple again.

I feel bad for most of the 50-somethings who run these media companies these days. For the most part, they missed the dot-com revolution. They cared only about trying to get a stock public, not about providing a venue that is cheap and fast and logical, like Google (GOOG:Nasdaq) or even Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq) . Now they are trying to deliver their own content through various means, almost like kids saying, "I think we've got it this time," and they don't have it at all. They don't get the subversive nature of my kids' generation. Their goal is to get content for free, meaning free of ads, but if you can fool them, you win. These media execs seem to have no idea how savvy these kids are. The execs believe that they are selling to the same people who don't know how to hook up a VCR. I don't even bother to mess with the remotes or the other gizmos in my kids' rooms. They are way too complicated.

Because of this secular change -- these anti-ad, pro-tech kids out there -- there aren't a lot of winners left in the media. And the ones who are winning, such as Electronic Arts, don't even know how good they have it yet! (I probably would buy it for Action Alerts PLUS if I didn't already own GameStop (GME:NYSE) and Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq) ; diversification can't be ignored even for this great secular trend.)

The losers, they are myriad.

http://www.thestreet.com/p/_yahoo/rmoney/jamesjcramer/10255697.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=PREMIUM&....

"Growth is all that matters!" CRAMER