TV stations have been behind the curve to leverage the local Web, but top station groups now routinely have dedicated new media executives, often with the rank of vice president or higher, according to a new survey by TV Newsday. The executives, many of whom in place for less than three years, oversee local Web sites and manage mobile and digital initiatives, such as iPhone interfaces.

Results have been promising. LIN Broadcasting, for instance, says that digital revenues now account for LIN’s gross revenue, up from 5 percent in early 2008.

Jeff Zucker, president and CEO of NBC Universal, told paidContent that NBC’s TV station Web sites have transcended the TV medium to go local in a bigger way. That’s one of the reasons they’ve been rebranded for geo-qualifiers, rather than call letters. Goodbye WNBC.com. Hello NBCNY.com.

“We really changed the way people look at local television Web sites,” said Zucker. “We want to play in the entire New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or whatever city you want to call it online media space, and we can’t do that by just limiting ourselves to the call letters of our traditional analog TV station. It’s not a promo vehicle,” he added. “We’re trying to run a business.”

TV and local social media are being integrated in “Prius Neighborhood,” a new “community-generated” TV program that will highlight the green sensibility of Toyota’s Prius hybrid. Gas pumpers will watch the program on pumpside TVs at more than 1,000 gas stations in over 100 DMAs. They can go to a Web site to submit local events and comments.

The GSTV listings are also searchable on the Web site by ZIP code and via regional Twitter pages. Users can also become fans on Facebook. GSTV programming also features ESPN sports, CBS news and entertainment, local weather and C-store promotions.

Bid4Spots, which has successfully played David vs. Google’s Goliath in working with radio stations to reverse auction off unsold airtime, is extending its service to local cable TV. The auctioneer will work with advertisers to let cable operators bid to place ads on networks. Cable systems generally have two minutes of inventory an hour.

As with radio, the reverse online auctions take place weekly on Thursday mornings for the following week’s ads. Mostly national advertisers take advantage of the reverse auctions, rather than local advertisers. Bid4Spots has appealed to radio stations because there is no revenue share beyond normal agency commissions (15 percent), the spots generally come pre-produced, and the funds are pre-cleared. More importantly, the radio stations are free to withdraw bids if they can sell the spot for a higher price.

Google has moved away from selling radio station time, where it had been frustrated by radio stations’ unwillingness to commit drivetimes and other prime inventory to its model. Instead, it is expected to reenter the market via Internet-based audio ads.

Radio and TV station executives and industry groups are seeking to get chips inserted into mobile handsets to extend the reach of their respective programming. And they may do it with federal help as a public safety issue.

Emmis Communications President and CEO Jeff Smulyan, speaking at WMS ’09 in Washington, D.C., said radio chips beat cell towers in cases of emergency communications, and can be put into every mobile phone for 50 cents or less — a message he had just been pushing in a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill. The entire installation would be just $1 to $2 per phone.

“Cell systems jam,” said Smulyan. “They’re only geared to take calls from 32 percent of the population, or something like that. But in an emergency, that goes up to 90 percent.”

The radio chip would have natural business extensions for the radio industry, in addition to providing emergency communications, added Smulyan. “It would change the perception of the [radio] industry as a dinosaur.” And it  would be in the public interest because it would defend radio’s localism. “If you hear a song on the radio [over your phone], you could download it,” he said. “That’s just one application we’re talking about.”

Radio over a mobile phone would also be more appealing than streaming over the Internet because “streaming is very expensive. You have to serve the whole world. But with a chip, you would only serve your local marketplace.”

Meanwhile, the TV folks are also itching to get a chipset onto mobile devices. Anne Schelle, executive director of the Open Mobile Video Coalition, said digital TV viewing is measurable, has unlimited capacity and costs less than a penny an hour for each viewer. It stands in stark contrast to dedicated mobile video channels, which can only handle 25 streams at a time, and have network costs of $4 an hour.

Jerry Fritz, senior vice president, Allbritton Communications, said broadcasters have the right plan, but the logistics will be a challenge. “You have to have five things go together,” he said. “You have to develop the measurement of mobile use. You have to have the manufacturer install the chip. And the broadcaster has to acquire the bandwidth.”

As more and more digital products and partnerships are introduced, a real debate is emerging whether they can be sold by a traditional media sales type who may be more focused on core product, have limited time to make his or her case (and apparently, a “C student” as well).

WMS ’09 participants in Washington, D.C., this week got their fill of the debate. Gordon Borrell of Borrell Associates is clearly of the school that Internet specialists have to be hired. “If you are developing interactive, you can’t do it without salespeople,” he said, encouraging the broadcasters in the audience to budget for more feet in the street, even in these tough times. But, he adds, “I have not seen a single case where people are selling two products,” although “a lot of people are trying to do that.”

Kelsey Group CEO Neal Polachek, however, said the issue is really how we define the idea of a “salesperson.” In this day and age, “a salesperson is not just a salesperson; he is a solution solver,” said Polachek.

“He has to go in and figure out the best way to generate [the client’s] objectives. It might be one place on the wheel, or it might be two places. To go in and say: ‘I am going to sell Gross Ratings Points to you,’ or ‘I am going to sell Internet Yellow Pages to you’ is not going to fly.”

Rob Weisbord, regional group manager and director of digital interactive, Sinclair Broadcast Group, said much of the issue is simply whether the salesperson has the mental bandwidth to handle multiple products. “There are too many C students,” he said. The current environment requires “A students” because “knowledge is the paradigm,” especially as Sinclair tries to “close the loop” of the array of ad products for three screens: TV, PC and mobile.

“They are 360-degree customer solution sellers,” says Weisbord. Consequently, “the best rep comes from a marketing background. We’re looking for athletes. They’re the most competitive.”

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “Marketing Tools Stretch Ad Dollars,” exemplifies our thinking about the evolution of the ad market. The article details how Chrysler Corp. uses fresh data on the performance of its TV commercials to tweak them to be more effective. Ad performance is measured by traffic and activity on the Chrysler Web site. This is an intriguing example of using online analytics to measure the performance of offline ad media.

Chrysler’s ad agency, Organic Inc., a unit of the ad giant Omnicom, was seeking a more accurate way to measure the effectiveness of expensive TV ads — given the reduction in media spending that has been forced on Chrysler by the current economic environment (and Chrylser’s new federal overseers).

Under Organic’s leadership, a multidisciplinary team developed a “media modeling” system to determine ad effectiveness and ad budget allocation. They essentially worked backward from Chrysler’s sales targets to figure out what performance level was necessary for its advertising. Then they used Chrysler’s Web site traffic and activity to measure that performance.

The Wall Street Journal article points out that advertisers have long used analytics and forecasting tools. However, Chrysler’s application moves this to a whole new level of sophistication and quick cycle time.

We believe advertisers — large and small — are hungry for this type of information. In our Local Commerce Monitor Survey (August 2008), SMB respondents indicated that “demonstrated media performance” was the single most important influence in making advertising media decisions. (Thirty-one percent of SMB respondents identified this as the “first biggest influence”.)

Chrysler’s future in the auto industry, whatever it may be, is not the point here. The point is that ad content development, ad performance analytics and ad budget allocation are evolving rapidly.

Broadband is at the top of the agenda for the Obama administration and the FCC, with digital TV a close No. 2, according to influential Washington lawyer Dick Wiley, who was speaking at BIA’s Winning Media Strategies.

Broadband is going to be “the big one,” with a special focus on underserved, vulnerable parts of the population, said Wiley, a pre-eminent communications lawyer in D.C. who previously served as FCC chairman 30 years ago. “Unfortunately, that isn’t clearly defined,” said Wiley, but a lot of money –$7 billion — is being thrown at it. He noted that $2.5 billion is earmarked for The Rural Utility Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with the impact of making this relatively obscure division a major player in communications policy.

The second big issue for the administration is digital TV, which is finally getting the big switchover from analog signals on June 12 after 22 years of policy development, noted Wiley. Enormous opportunities lie in wait with digital for broadcasters in business, and in regulatory relief. Broadcasters can use digital to extend their core competency in wireless communications and localism, he said. “Here is an area where being a broadcaster is a plus.”

Wiley also said that he doesn’t see the Fairness Doctrine coming back, but that there may be more restrictions on embedded advertising.

New digital technologies using ATSC-DTV standards are redefining the TV experience and enabling new business models, said Glenn Reitmeier, VP of tech standards and policy for NBC Universal, who was speaking at BIA’s Winning Media Strategies conference in Washington, D.C. “We are at a really exciting phase” akin to General Sarnoff’s use of radio receivers to redefine the radio industry.

Reitmeier said what we’re seeing is a new software-based environment that acts as “an application framework” allowing such features as conditional access, subscription pay per view, digital rights management and content downloads. When that is combined with interactive channels, a whole new world opens up, including voting, social networks, e-commerce and targeted ads.

The advances will enable broadcasters to reclaim their fundamental advantage by 2015, said Reitmeier. But it isn’t about the home TV. Fundamentally, consumers just want content on any screen. Devices such as video-enabled phones are exploding, helping achieve growth from this “very mature business.” Non-real time services are also an important part of the equation, including on demand and clipcasting, targeted ad insertion, and location-based preference codes.

Mike Bloxham, director of insight and research at the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, speaking on the same panel, continued on the same theme. Indeed, a recent study by the center quantified 65 different categories of media consumption using four types of screens: TV, computers, mobile and “other,” including GPS, in-screen navigation, etc.

While digital has added diversity at every demographic, Bloxham was quick to note that live TV still dominates and is used 318 minutes per day on average. That includes more than an hour of commercials — more time than is spent viewing news.

Pundits who have written off live TV in favor of the Internet, game consoles and digital video recorders are getting ahead of themselves, he notes. It hasn’t happened yet. Those media are used far less. “Television is a very solid business for many years to come,” says Bloxham.

At the same time, “television” now consists of a mishmash of each platform. There are no ‘TV companies’ anymore, he says. “There is ‘platform promiscuity.’ Consumers don’t care in the slightest if programs coming in via telcos, mobile whatever.”

Don’t take The Kelsey Group’s word for the fact that more marketers are switching some of their advertising dollars into the Internet. Here’s what eMarketer wrote a week ago. “In the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories.” The fact that eMarketer actually put those words into an article can only be traced to the fact that it got some hard numbers from the Society of Digital Agencies. It is no surprise that “81 percent of respondents said they plan to invest at least as much in digital marketing in 2009 as in the previous year.”

Happily, eMarketer backs up these figures with another study by Ad Media Partners. The research shows that marketing executives are planning to increase digital spending in social media marketing (77 percent), search marketing (76 percent), mobile marketing (75 percent), behavioral marketing (70 percent), lead generation (63 percent), video advertising (60 percent) and e-mail marketing (58 percent).

EMarketer sums all this up by pointing out that “the combination of accountability, conversion and the infusion of digital media into every facet of life makes the future look bright — for marketers making the move to digital.”

Anyone in the radio or television broadcasting industry who needs to understand how to best take advantage of digital media needs to be at the Winning Media Strategies conference to be held May 20-22 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C. The Kelsey Group and BIA Advisory Services have put together an event that will pay incredible dividends to those broadcasters willing to make the small investment of time and money.