The Tip of Google's Iceberg?

A Belgian court has ordered Google to stop publishing news content. Being that I work for the largest online news publisher in New Zealand, the topic of news aggregators frequently comes up at Friday drinks.

Google is our largest referrer so most of the people I work with have no problems with it. They see this notion of copyright and the grumplings from The World Association of Newspapers as nothing short of luddite. After all, people click on the content they are interested in and are transported right to the story page of the particular publisher.

However I still think Google has a case to answer. Few people seem to be looking at the long term ramifications. Yes, publishers get a great deal of traffic from Google and Google News but I think this has the potential to erode the value of a publisher's masthead.

Seen from a marketing standpoint, users will ultimately come to associate Google News with the source of the 'best' most 'up to date' and 'relevant' news content for them. This is exactly the brand position online news publishers are scrambling to grab hold of. Google links straight to the story page -ignoring the publisher's home page. This is the crux of the Belgian case against them. Essentially Google is offering up copyrighted content under its own 'masthead'. Users will go to Google to get New Zealand Herald news rather than the New Zealand Herald itself.

While I may not agree with the position taken by the Belgian publishers, I am endlessly fascinated by the implications. I would bet money that there will be several large class actions taken against the search company in the next couple of years -especially once online publishers can prove they are losing money while Google makes it.

Google should perhaps be quite concerned by this. Newspaper companies will still have a paper to put out tomorrow. Where will Google be if it has to pay to aggregate content?

Peter Jackson Chooses Napoleon Over Bilbo

Secrets are very difficult to keep in New Zealand. After months of denying it, Peter Jackson announced that his company would indeed be re-making The Dam Busters. This was quite obvious to most of us. I was in Wellington for work a few weeks ago and we drove past his converted paint factory/academy award winning production studios and there was a large airplane propellor rotating in front of a green screen in the parking lot. I certainly don't remember that chapter in The Lovely Bones.

However, he's not going to be remaking it himself. It will be directed by one of his long-haired geekwizards from Weta; Christian Rivers. I mention this because it was announced yesterday that MGM wants Peter Jackson to direct The Hobbit. Well, who doesn't?

Now we find out that the big man himself has optioned a story about a British naval officer who trains dragons to fight Napoleon. This would be what they meant when his people said he "had a full slate."

At the moment that means he has Halo, The Dam Busters, The Lovely Bones and now the Temeraire series in various stages of development, preproduction and production. Hooray for a kiwi filmmaker's success and hooray for the New Zealand Film Industry. But I have a small concern:

The Hobbit sucks.

It's basically just a gastronomic tour of Middle Earth with too much alliteration. If someone other than Peter Jackson directs it then it will likely be appallingly lame and run the risk of tainting his flawless Lord of The Rings trilogy. He somehow managed to make the absurd parts of the LOTR novels seem dramatic and realistic. Or he cut them. (Tom Bombadil.) Someone with those skills is even more important for a film adaptation of Tolkien's first Baggins story.

We've seen that he has the ability to delegate. He's EPing for Halo, he's roped a nerd into directing The Dam Busters... Delegate some more, PJ. Delegate and come back to Middle Earth. Its fate is in your hands.

Short Form Advertainment: Bugs Bunny Style

Warner Bros is creating a short-form digital advertainment company called 'Studio 2.0'. And it looks like they are going to do it right. According to Ad Age, they have hired Rich Rosenthal from Young & Rubicon to helm it.

There has been a lot of talk around the marketing water coolers about the imminent arrival of integrated content -indeed this word gets bandied about so much it's starting to lose all meaning. What is surprising about this announcement is not that it happened but that it was a Hollywood studio that did it.

It seems so rare these days in Valenti's Hollywood for a studio to have a healthy grasp of the way the industry is moving. But here's what Warner Bros Television president Bruce Rosenblum said about it: "Since advertisers were intimately involved in the first days of television, it makes sense for them to be involved in this arena, too."

Nice. Couldn't agree more. First Tom Cruise gets dumped and now this. My Golden Age is getting closer and closer.