ColemanMedia Report

A study released by the Foundation For Needlessly Speculative Journalism last week revealed that over 6 million man hours of work in the advertising industry alone have been wasted in October by reading Mediapost and Ad Age articles about imaginary mergers and acquisitions within the media space. The articles, which focus largely on speculative mergers like those between faltering portals AOL and Yahoo!, and potential acquisitions by media giant Google, have tripled in recent weeks, according to the report. “Speculative journalism is nothing new to the ad industry,” said media watchdog Clive Biegelstein. “But this is getting ridiculous. Over 60,000 words were published yesterday about news that hasn’t even happened yet, and probably never will. It’s like professional trade media has nothing real to report on, so they just make up the news. I mean, really, people, this isn’t CNN or FOX.”

Popular Web portal and erstwhile search engine Yahoo’s $100 million, multi-platform ad campaign has netted 3 new visitors to the site since launching on September 28th, according to online audience measurement firm Hitwise.  The campaign, running in TV, print, online and outdoor, and centered around the theme “It’s You,” increased Yahoo’s monthly traffic in September to 120,000,003 unique users.  Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz is already deeming the campaign a “huge” success.  ”The goal of this campaign was to go back to the spend first, think later days of 2000 and 2001,” said Bartz.  ”And in that respect, we’re thrilled with the results.  We’ve spent a shitload of money on an entirely forgettable campaign trying to convince people that we’re cool and different.  To get three people to actually buy into that is a tremendous achievement.  Right now we’re looking into whether or not we can get three more people by spending another $100 mil.”

While the Justice Department and the rest of the online ad industry closely watch developments in the proposed merger between Yahoo! and Bing, search giant Google quietly completed its purchase of the Internet Tuesday morning, according to sources with Price Waterhouse Coopers, who brokered the deal.  Google, which already effectively owns online search and online video, went back into “acquisition mode” last week after admitting that it overpaid by approximately $1 billion for YouTube.  ”We’ve made some mistakes in the past with our acquisitions,” said Google President Sergey Brin.  ”But I think the Internet is a good buy.  Unlike the banks, we’ve got the cash, so it made sense to buy when the price was right.  We’re already in negotiations to buy Music, and we’ll probably buy Fear as well, since it’s such an effective marketing tool.”  Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

In an exclusive interview given Tuesday to popular gossip site and intellectual vacuum TMZ.com, Yahoo! revealed that its budding relationship with the much younger search engine Bing may not be as picture perfect as initially reported.  According to Yahoo!, the much more juvenile Bing is carelessly wild with its search queries, regularly leaves the toilet seat up, and watches TV into “ungodly hours” while texting its friends.  ”I’ll admit that I was attracted to Bing’s youthful energy and boyish good looks,” said the more mature search engine.  ”But the more time I spend with it the more its starting to bug the hell out of me.”  For its part, Bing fired back in the comments section of TMZ later that day, claiming that Yahoo! “nags way too much, chews its food loudly, and still won’t admit to deleting my episodes of Venture Bros.”