Local television rises and falls on the fortunes of their network affiliation. Other than news, most local stations have zero in-house programming. Of course, they LOVE news (and reruns)…more avails to sell per break than they get with network and original syndication fodder.

As for television, the networks are going to continue to be dominant for a long time. No cable channel has anywhere near the share of viewers that any of the nets have. Most of the “event” and planned viewing still happens on the nets. While people want to buzz about the Daily Show and Colbert…both of which I love…the fact is that their viewership is a sliver of what the nets pull in those timeslots. And while that will shift some over time, it is going to be a much longer period of time than people are willing to believe.

Think about it from this perspective. I don’t have the figure handy, but if my memory (often faulty) serves me correctly, about 20% of households in the country do not have cable or satellite service. They are watching the nets (although a percentage of them do not watch anything at all) exclusively. That is a good sized chunk of eyeballs to divvy up among a small number of broadcasters.

Now, as far as social media goes, I agree that it is powerful, and will get more powerful as time goes on. But at the same time, it is also much more fractured arena to play in.

Let’s take YouTube for example. The most popular videos of the past month has 8.2 million views. Only 14 videos have more than 2 million views. While I am not going to sit an watch them all, by a quick glance it seems as if only about 5 of the 14 have any sort of marketing connection. In other words, it is very very hard to get seen and break through in this sort of way. It is very hard to get a significant number of eyeballs on any sort of marketing message on the web because there is so much content on which to run marketing through.

While younger people do use social networking to gather information, they do not do so to the exclusion of other information sources, both on the web and off. And while marketers are crazy not to exploit the power of social networking to the extent they can, they also have to make competent use of other message delivery channels which give them more ability to deliver their message than depending on the whims of viral and social marketing. Put another way, while social marketing is great, it cannot begin unless someone picks up the message and it begins to catch fire. And that message is going to almost always originate in another context. Social networking can make a smoldering fire burn hotter, but it is rarely the match and the fuel that starts the fire.

Do I think TV is still powerful? Of course. But not nearly as much as it was even 8 years ago. I think local TV will retain much more relevance than the four networks as time goes on.

Younger Americans gather, think and act upon news and information from a much more social context, and that will only increase exponentially in coming years. These are the customers – and voters – of tomorrow. It’s exciting and challenging all at the same time.

First of all, TODAY (and it’s ilk) is a very strange animal as far as the news department goes. Viewership demographics from 7AM-7:30AM is very different than you will find in the second, and especially the third, hour of the show.

Now I am going to assume this ran in the second hour, although it certainly could have been fodder for the third hour. The audience, as the show continues into the morning, becomes evermore female and ever older. I am going to assume that is who Evian wanted to reached when they pitched the story, and the placement works.

Of course there was no uptick on YouTube. No great surprise. The demographic of the audience is not going to be heavy YouTube users. But more importantly, it is very difficult to take someone from the TV set to their computer to take an action. At that point, it becomes a direct response problem and you can expect maybe a 2% follow-through rate on that…maybe. In general, how many people are likely to visit a website they hear about once or twice on TV in any situation? In almost all cases, the response rate is going to be a very low percentage of viewership.

Now is TODAY a good platform for getting news out there? Sure, for a certain audience. TODAY has about 5 million viewers every morning. That’s twice the viewership number on YouTube you posted. Now, 5 million eyeballs probably did not see the Evian story–TODAY’s ratings are heaviest in the first half hour of the show–but millions of people saw that story.

In fact, I happened to catch the TODAY story, now that I think about it, while I was in a waiting room this AM. Probably puts it at the top of the 8AM hour or the end of the 7AM. That’s a lot of eyeballs however you want to cut it. And, coming on the TODAY show, there is a lot of trust and confidence placed in the show by the audience.

Yes, the web has a lot of power. But the power of television is far from dead. Broadcast TV, used properly, moves a lot of numbers. Web/new media/social marketing/whatever can too. As for broadcast dying off? Well, it is not what it was, but it is far from dead. A day will come when broadcast TV is ineffective, but we are a long way away from that time, even with the rise of DVR’s and Hulu and whatnot.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-10-2009/end-times