YE-BYETHENET’S precision accountabilitywill kill not only traditional advertising, but its parasite, Sig Media.Sniff.By Randall RothenbergIt was as luminous as LA gets at eight in the morning. Studiochiefs. Production company heads. Bernard Weinraub, enter-tainment reporter for The New York Times. Peter Bart, editorof Variety. Burt Manning, chair of the J. Walter Thompsonadvertising agency, had flown his bearded self in from La CoteDroite. The only person missing, it seemed, was Merv Griffin.But his picture was everywhere. He owned the hotel where thesehundreds of mediarati were juicing and schmoozing.They’d come this May morning in 1995 to bear witness as themost formidable of their number - Michael Ovitz of Creative ArtistsAgency; former CBS head Howard Stringer; and Ray Smith, IvanSeidenberg, and Phil Quigley - of Bell Atlantic, Nynex, and PacificTelesis, respectively - announced the formation of a US$300 millionjoint venture in interactive television, which they dubbed Tele-TV.The air was thick with anticipation. Eighteen months earlier,Nynex had sunk $1 billion-plus into Viacom. The result: nothing.Time’s prediction of a “brave new world” of interactive multimediawas already a year old. But Stringer - beloved for his hard-timesstewardship of the greatest of broadcast networks, and the highest-profile deserter to new media - was exultant. Media, marketing,and interactivity were about to unite.“You are no longer restrainedby the constraints of time!” he rejoiced, his accent a refreshing mixof Wales, Oxford, and New York. “Time as you know it is gone.”Today, Stringer is gone - as are most of his partners. Havingsucceeded in their various real goals (a large finder’s fee, a desper-ately needed new job, scaring competitors away), they’ve foundbetter things to do: for Ovitz, the brief presidency of (and $100million buyout from) the Walt Disney Company, a conventionalmedia conglomerate; for Stringer, the presidency of Sony, a con-ventional entertainment company; and for Smith, Seidenberg, andQuigley, a merger focused on conventional telephony.One doesn’t have to be a genius to detect the self-interest thathas lurked beneath the development of new media. And from theday Absolut put a URL on a NoHo billboard to signal its hipness toNew York’s downtowners, advertisers and their agencies have beenfeeding the hype and then exploiting the buzz of the Web.Were it not for the fact that the media world knows no shame,the shamelessness of it all would be astonishing. Last year, I heardJupiter Communications head Gene DeRose guess that Web adver-tising would hit $4 billion to $6 billion by 2000 - a mere 400 to600 percent jump in four years. Not to be outdone, Mark Kvammeof the CKS Group, the most successful of the interactive-advertis-ing start-ups, estimated that it could reach $100 billion. “That’smadness,”a Wall Street analyst sitting next to me whispered.Madness with a mission. Soon after CKS completed its auspiciousinitial public offering, it acquired an established agency that spe-cializes in - guess what? - old-fashioned print and broadcast adver-tising. A marketing executive at a large broadcasting company oncetold me that his Web site’s profitability was based entirely on usingthe promise of front-page banner placement to lure advertisers intobuying more commercials on his network.Marketing in the information age is, in short, a form of games-manship. Playing on advertisers’ valid fear that conventionalprint and electronic media have exhausted their ability to attractconsumers, ad agencies, research firms, trade publications, andthe digital dominion have been willing new media into existence,building it upon a foundation of swagger and fabrication.But here’s the beauty of it: they are stitching together a Frank-enstein that will, that must, inevitably destroy them all.To understand the coming disintegration of Big Media -the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, 60Minutes and 20/20, Howard and Rush, Glamour andSlate - you’ve got to grasp the Knowability Paradox.It was not a foregone conclusion that advertisingwould become the dominant force in the development of-_-.-.-.-_-.-_-.-_-_-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.~.-.-.-.-.~Randall Rothenberg ([email protected]) is a former editor,media reporter, and columnist for The New York Times and Esquireand the author of Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story.NIRED JANUARY 199802I?American media. In Europe, royal support, state sponsorship, andpolitical-party assistance helped guarantee the primacy of specificmanufacturers and certain media institutions well up to the present.But in the US, starting in the early 19th century, something curi-ous happened: the media abandoned the Old World models andwrapped itself - contextually as well as financially - around adver-tising. The move was driven partly by mass manufacturers’ needto brand commodity goods, partly by the vastness of our continen-tal marketplace, and partly by a presumption of class mobility thatmade us want to sell, earn, acquire, and display.A newfound “objectivity” in news reporting arose from publish-ers’ desire to draw the largest audience with the least offense. Whathistorian Daniel Boorstin has labeled pseudo-events - news confer-ences, press releases, and stunts that “someone has planned, plant-ed, or incited” -were concocted to fill the print space and broadcasttime that increased year by year as advertisers sought to satiate agrowing middle class. For the three decades between commercialradio’s first appearance in Pittsburgh and the TV quiz show scan-dals of the ’50s advertising agencies produced not only the ads,but also the programs themselves.But this massive edifice has always been undergirded by a con-tradiction: no one understands how, or even if, advertising works.Because the system of production, distribution, sales, and commu-nications is so large and complex, attempting to isolate the effec-tiveness of a single element - advertising content - is all butimpossible.Advertising agencies exploited this confusion by urging clientsto buy more pages, more spots, more billboards. The agenciesbecame more profitable, which in turn led to the creation of moremedia. But to forestall uncomfortable scrutiny by a business cul-ture addicted to scientism and certitude, agencies were always onthe lookout for new services. Copywriting, market research, psy-chological research, sales promotion, public relations, even the