eMarketer: YouTube will decide presidential election

Now that we're nearing the 4th month of the not-so-new year, take a look back at eMarketer's predictions for 2008 and decide for yourself.
Anticipating the recession that we appear to be in, eMarketer made 10 predictions, casting forth possibly the most interesting oracle: YouTube will decide the presidential election.
Here's how they put it: "YouTube attracts the most online traffic and is consistently rated the favorite social media site by US Internet users.
"YouTube will play a decisive role in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election by either airing a user-submitted clip that embarrasses a leading candidate or setting the tone of the campaign through its series of sponsored debates."
YouTube certainly has brought down numerous other public figures (including one notable shock jock) with user-edited and submitted videos. When the election is over some seven months hence, wonder if we'll see new tomes toting how public figures need to have a specific YouTube strategy in achieving their objectives.
In case you're interested, here is a list of eMarketer's complete predictions for online behavior (commentary in parentheses):

1) Online ads remain resilient (and nearly recession proof)
2) Video surge slows. (bandwidth issues - or will people continue to accept garage-level rough-cut production?)
3) Social network advertising hits $1.6 billion (Facebook is now running political ads!)
4) Networking goes beyond MySpace and Facebook (links to mulitple sites and more of the proposed Web 3.0 will start appearing)
5) YouTube decides the election (still waiting on this one)
6) Beijing Olympics pumps up ad spending (the Olympic Torch/Tibey gaffee is playing in here)
7) Buy online, pick-up in-store becomes expected feature (this could be the resurrection of the original virtual shopping pieces that everyone expected back during the dotcom fizzled revolution)
8) Movie downloading hits the mainstream (One of our clients, Smithville, is rolling out Fiber-to-the-Home with fiber speeds up to an astonishing 100 mbps - that's industrial strength broadband - with movie downloads that take like 40 seconds for a two-hour movie; with that kind of connectivity, why would you ever want to burn up $4 gallon gas to drive to Blockbuster?)
9) Music marketers roll out new business models (as the CD continues to die, watch for more advertising-supported Web sites that offer free or subsidized/subscription downloads)
10) Dynamic ads heighten gaming revenue potential (gazillion-dollar product placement and related games for the upcoming Iron Man movie kind of sums this one up)

More and more, it's an online world!

What Value Fame?

Occasionally we may get caught up with this disturbing thought: what will people think about us when we're gone? Will our name, achievements, accomplishments endure?

In the late 1880s, one American author addressed this distressing concept through the viewpoint of an extended European trip. Here's his view, which is most salient for those of us today chasing fleeting fame:

"After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiae, of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame.

"Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name.

"Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things?

"A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong) -- no history, no tradition, no poetry--nothing that can give it even a passing interest.

[With this as a backdrop] "What may be left of General [Ulysses] Grant's [then a very popular figure in the national news after the U.S. Civil War] great name forty centuries hence? This -- in the Encyclopedia for A.D. 5868, possibly:

"URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT -- popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan War instead of before it. He wrote 'Rock me to Sleep, Mother.'"

"These thoughts sadden me. I will go to bed."

The author? Mark Twain (Samuel Clements), writing in The Innocents Abroad (1869). Perhaps some considerable food for thought in both everyday life and in the midst of a presidential campaign.

Fortuna favet fortibus.

The "Raw Bra" and Inside Indiana Business

It's rare when one is present for epoch-making journalism. Such was today on the set of Inside Indiana Business, when those of us in the WFYI Green Room were treated to host Gerry Dick struggling to keep a straight face as he made on-air inquiry about the distribution strategy of the "Rah Bra."
I am not making this up.
Business coverage has a new meaning, one might think.
For you non-believers, go to http://www.companywear.com/rahbra/.
Good grief.