It’s undoubtedly hard to leave any industry unscathed after you are annointed as messianic. For Crispin’s Alex Bogusky, his departure was akin to an ascension, but the reasons for pulling the corporate ripcord were less than clear.

Via Fast Company: [W]hen news broke that after a mere five months into Bogusky’s new gig, The One was abruptly quitting MDC, the odds of Crispin staying on top got a bit slimmer. “The problem with the Jesus model is it’s hard to institutionalize,” a former executive of an MDC agency told me. “Alex has created a cult of Alex. It’s all about what does Alex think of this? and the how much time do I get with Alex model. Now Jesus is off skiing.”

From the standpoint of losing talent as it graduates from a client-service world to a how-can-I-engage-directly, Alex “The One” Bogusky - the love child of Mad Men’s Don Draper - has staged his exit with a few independent pursuits.   

Annual compensation for CEOs is nearly always a thorny question. Not so ironically, every CEO wants to land on Forbes’ “Billionaire List,” but mention of annual salaries for public companies brings a corporate chorus of no comments or quick stage lefts - helicopter waiting depending on the benefits package.

Via WSJ (including the graphic): Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of software maker Oracle Corp., topped the list of best-paid executives of public companies during the past decade, receiving $1.84 billion in compensation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of CEO pay. Coming in No. 2 on the compensation list was Barry Diller, who received roughly $1.14 billion from IAC/InterActive and Expedia.com, the online travel site IAC spun off in 2005, where he remains chairman. Following Mr. Diller [was] Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs with $749 million.

Over the past decade, Ellison has held strong in the face of  Diller and Jobs, who’s comp is mostly in his stock and does not include Pixar/Disney transaction gains. Steve Jobs still remains the largest individual shareholder of Disney, which sums up what a superb brand strategist he is: Apple, then Pixar leading into Disney.

Via Barbieri’s Facebook feed - great take on the entrepreneurial flow chart:

Complicating Demand Media, Yahoo!/Associated Content and potentially Aol/Seed’s algorithms and content milling plans, Google has a patent in play to harvest users’ searches for publishers.

Via FT: Google obtained a patent this year for a system that would help it identify “inadequate content” on the internet, based on comparisons of what people search for and what they find, executives who have reviewed the filing, said. The filing said data from the Google system could be sold to online publishers or given away for free[.]

Two amazing visual feasts from the upcoming World Cup sports brands. Nike’s “Write the Future” which is an otherworldly transmedia snapshot from the football (okay, soccer) world of fame with surreal pull-outs of all of the stars. Brilliant diversity of camera work and video storytelling hyperbole.

From the guys who brought you search, here’s the “Virgin Airlines” pre-flight animatic on Google TV - yes, their official two minute introductory video. This hardware/software jawdropper potentially open sources your TV, freeing you from multi-devices and esoteric program guides.

Plus, it kills the Apple TV and puts a general hurt on all set-top devices including indie notables like Boxee. I think Google has figured out TV - separate from their early Dishnet advertising beginnings - now to see what the ad ratios and overlays look like on your HD tv (those screenshots are thankfully not animated…yet).  

Back to the basics of the the Ten Spot - quick, relevant New Medici reads with an exact dose of interpretation.

1. For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point - NYT DealBook

The transparency brought about by Google search and Facebook community/beacon/(end of) privacy has created a slew of startups who cater to ripping open the social graph and letting everyone peek in, follow and link to your daily activities and habits.

From the likes of DailyBooth.com, Blippy.com and Groupon.com, the concept of “socially challenging” others to share interests in online creation and consumption is trending. The next logical step will be a return to a new and improved Facebook Beacon that extends the group mentality while providing multi-level marketing incentives to the individuals who create interest in new items, i.e., transactions (think ThisNext.com meets Groupon). This allows group rewards and either revshare or ranking points for the individual curators or arbiters of taste.

Blippy, which opened last fall, was the first site to introduce the notion of publishing credit card and other purchases. Last month it attracted around 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from venture capitalists. It hopes to one day to make money by, among other things, taking a commission when people are inspired to imitate their friends’ purchases posted on the site.

To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.

2. Mac & the iPad

Steve Jobs defies the odds (recovering Apple), the gods (surviving cancer) and yet his consumer design “sculpting” and management fearlessness are really the two definitions he will be known by. In this above must-read link, an insider opens up about the mindset and fearset of the leading Designer CEO out there.

From secrecy to ordering the best-of-the-brainstorms (in terms of his managed teams), Jobs is building a line of devices that separate the chaos, the noise and the hacks of more open systems to bring its users a little hardware clarity (and style)…  

This is not our logo. Repeat: this is not our logo…

We’re launching our “Lifestyle Innovation Network” - an innovation blog network - in the next few months.

We’re happy to announce another new channel celebrating the voices of the era: “Zeitguest”. After attending Google’s exclusive Zeitgeist conference three years in a row, and hearing top leaders talk about innovation, I felt it was time to open-source the voices of our generation (and the next-gen).

Zeitguest.com - “Your First-Class Ticket to the Era.” Full access to the Zeitgeist – intelligent voices in culture, intellect, ethics, spirituality and the political climate of our era.

Pulling from these diverse disciplines, we’ll  headline essays from top innovators, artists, politicians, world leaders and changemakers you probably have never heard of yet.

Are we the anti-TED? No, we’re the TED plus.

While you stay tuned for Zeitguest’s launch, send us your logo ideas, we’ll be selecting one shortly…

Is super-sizing your funds a way to create venture runway to steer past or through the downturn and stay competitive in the global market? Many startups - like Mahalo, Ning and LinkedIn - pride themselves on raising enough funding to survive the nuclear winter of late 2008 and basically all of 2009. Facebook decided to add runway and incent its employees through a follow-on $100 million passive investment from DST, Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies group, who also put $180 million into Zynga in December.

Last Tuesday, Intel Capital and 24 VC firms set to put $3.5 billion over two years into US startups to bump up America’s competitive edge. Intel Capital is earmarking $200 million individually.

Via the NYT: in a program called the Invest in America Alliance, Cisco, Intel, Google and Microsoft, among other big tech employers, are hiring 10,500 US college tech grads to regain international ground lost. Per Intel’s Paul Otellini:

Unfortunately, long-term investments in education, research, digital technology and human capital have been steadily declining in the U.S. So, too, has the commitment to policies that made us such an entrepreneurial powerhouse for more than a century.

As many VCs raise more to create investment mines in nascent countries such as India and China, the market seems to be correcting in trending tides: first startups who squirreled away cash, Angel capital/investment groups who are finding High Wealth Individuals (HWIs) looking for early discounts, tech companies seeing their international talent and US competitive edges decreasing, and now VCs who see value in creating big funds.  

With the new Apple iPad receiving an iHype or iYawn from the tech and media communities, a former colleague and Applephile, Patrick Kearney, suggested that Apple was crazy not to just acquire Adobe and own/integrate Flash. I counterpointed via the socialnet, that Adobe would be more integral to Google’s apps and offer a serious checkmate on Steve Jobs’ ability to close out his Apple hardware and software ecosystem.

The Google Value in Owning Adobe:

1. Keeps Google intrinsic to Apple, especially if Bing replaces Google Search across Safari, iPhone, iPad browsers and devices.
2. Adobe owns Omniture, an online marketing, data mining and analytics company, which it picked up in September 2009. Like Google’s acquisition of Urchin which became an invite-only Google Analytics and is now free for anyone. Omniture could be the premium or pro solution for big brands that need the stepabove solution, and of course crave CRM. It’s more behavioral, offers paid SEO across all search platforms, so it fits accretively.
3. Launch Google lite version of Photoshop and Dreamweaver (and…?) for its Google Apps. Many people are moving over to Gimp, an open source Photoshop design app, from outdated versions of Adobe’s Photoshop. This would democratize the products, while still offering premium versions that require a monthly subscription to remove the contextual ads and continue to innovate the product features for power-users before they go mainstream and free. Think of it as R&D for the premium, paying crowd who want the full version, and then as features become common, they go to the open, Google app public. This model of lite versus full versions is working well for the Apple Apps Store, and could move to an online subscription model to avoid distribution fulfillment and other retail packaging costs.
4. Ownership of Flash enhances YouTube’s dominance in online video. Pretty clear, Google labs up Flash internally and figures out ways to make it pay out more for its slowly monetizing video flagship. YouTube’s choice advertisers get premium Flash benefits; innovations trickle down to other top UGC performers.
5. Google Phones benefit from mobile improvements to Flash. The Android and Nexus One become more marketable, and Google licenses Flash to the Blackberries and other mobile players.
6. And, of course, the obvious: every media-savvy site uses Flash and it rolls up 75% of online video, plus marketers like flashy display banners, so Google owns more of the food chain - from media co’s to video players to brands and their agencies looking to stand out in a very noisy internet environment.

If the social or virtual goods market is exploding, expect it to also affect content online. Find a way to commoditize virtual content. So forget the Zygna virtual goodsvilles for a second, and start seeing 2010 as the  year of ubiquitous “content farming” - where all of the serious digital publishers start long-term planning. Writers and journalists will be told by their editors to create articles that - unless tabloid topical in nature - hold future or lifetime value. I.e., articles that stand the test of time, they don’t rest after a week, but gain continued readings  culminating in a heady 50,000 and up read count. Writers will be paid on ultimates: initial viewings, repeat viewings, sharing via social outlets,

The value of these lifetime posts? Well, to a Demand Media/Studios, AOL, Mahalo or similar, it’s a matter of quality (and quantity), think of it as quality based on what people are organically searching on Google, and quantity in terms of creating enough of a base of content that the YouTube’s of the world treat you as regulars. As YouTube’s video search is becoming a natural extension of text search, the ability to create posts in text and video is rapidly changing the landscape of content consumption. Users will start with the 10-step best of written articles, then graduate to video tutorials leading eventually to the user referring the post to others, include religious comment reading and the potential original user comment.

Sites like Huffington Post, the Gawker Network and other blog networks (blog nets) have been built on aggregated editorials - e.g., taking original posts from other relatively well funded or traditional media outlets and adding a little personal spin. That approach, while it’s worked out to a recent $300M valuation for Gawker’s templated Movable Type-hacked sites, may be changing as advertisers and publishers start jumping on the long tailed horse.  

A new take on the Nike Plus (Nike +) physical tracking device has finally gone into fulfillment on its pre-orders. I am playing with confirming my pre-order within the week - right in time for CES, but had to wait a very long while for the pre-order to commit.

As a media + lifestyle company, New Medici tracks innovation that crosses between media consumption and lifestyle products, so when we put in our pre-order a year ago, we - like many others - were not impressed that they ran nearly a year late on deployment without reaching out to the interested buying audience.

Now the pre-order confirmation has arrived, but that confirmation hiatus makes the transaction seem a little risky, even for a startup competing with Nike/Apple and Philips.

However, the Fitbit dashboard, the sleep-tracking and exercise analytics - we like that one of the reviews below called it “Google Analytics for the body” - make it something new and entrepreneurial, plus the product design and wireless connections are pretty unique.

A screenshot, but if this truly tracks our every step, bite and snore it will be worth the c-note ($100) price tag amortized over your health across several years.

A must-view from the Monaco Media Forum: Arianna Huffington from Huffington Post debating with Axel Spring AG CEO Mathias Dopfner, who runs one of the largest newspaper publishing companies in Europe. A very sophisticated debate on traditional publishing versus internet/aggregated or citizen journalism; plus, Arianna’s key quote on “traditional media versus digital media: ADD versus OCD.”

Meet Dave’s head may be big, but his paydays are getting smaller… The NYT recently took on an ongoing trend story that New Medici has brought up in relation to the talent agencies: the downward spiral of A-list (with grade inflation forcing some B-listing) talent compensation. It’s definitely a “starpower brownout” in terms of how talent is being relegated to the coach seats of the Hollywood pay-or-play bus. Star vehicles, aka films, from the likes of A-listers Jim Carrey, Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, John Travolta and even Denzel Washington have fallen in audience regard. Studios while not necessarily going “indie” in terms of concept, are definitely benching high-end talent in favor of niche and sometimes, ensemble casting. Witness the JJ Abrams, Judd Apatow (minus his latest), Quentin Tarantino, Michael Bay’s successes of late. Yes, Inglourious Basterds (Acterds?) leveraged Pitt’s name, but people went for Tarantino’s take on WWII. Bay’s career has been resuscitated via Hasbro and one assumes some behind-the-scenes’ producing from Spielberg. Abrams’ Cloverdale and Apatow’s use of young, gross-out talent is assuredly making studios and talent agencies rethink their strategies.  

Woke up this am, and found the excellent SXSW PanelPicker via @ischafer (Ian Schafer from Deep Focus) recommending the PanelPicker conference scheduling site. Now here’’s a topic that would engage me!

Multi-Picture Your Media: Marketing & Distribution in a Multi-Platform World

Description:
With the film and tv markets feeling the struggle of lowered DVD expectations, less foreign money and tighter windows in marketing and distribution, how can a filmmaker make a creative dent, much less drive a theatrical release? We’ll discuss the traditional “multi-picture” play with an eye to creating a definitive niche, an aggregated audience and a release schedule that exhibitors, film buyers and studios have to pay attention to. From Robert Rodriguez’s “El Mariachi” to Peter Jackson produced “District 9″ - an interactive-focused walkthru on how to attract publicity, marketing and distribution using multi-platform next-generation practices.  

Via the NYT’s The Weinsteins Scramble to Regain a Golden Touch in Hollywood story, there’s more personality restructuring going on within the Weinstein Company: talk of the relatively new “newco” being stretched too thin in creating a “Barry Diller-style conglomerate” with the 2005 $1 billion in private equity from Goldman Sachs, which Joe Ravitch set up. Ravitch is now working with William Morris Endeavor. A few directors “made” by the Weinsteins, via Miramax/Disney days, impart that the guerilla-style of old, indie studio days needs to return. Kevin Smith, following “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” suggests that the brothers succeeded when they were hungry, but now are “starving and desperate.” Harsh but perhaps realistic.  

While the luxury industry has not been as hard hit as most enterprises, the crisis has had it’s impact. Some luxury goods manufactures have spotted the opportunity to slug it out by not reducing their skilled labor force but freezing hiring in most other areas. Luxury buyers in Russia and Eastern Europe have been the hardest to drive to the stores, yet declines in most segments have only been in the order of 10-15% in the region. According to CPP Management Consultants, the period February-May showed the decreases in key areas being as low as 5%. Asia has held steady. In fact, analysts believe most of the growth ahead will come from the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). According to Bain and Co. Brazil and China will be the two fastest growing markets through 2010.  

Mogul stalking is the way of the “Bizzerazzi” - journos covering the prestigious Allen & Co.  Sun Valley Media Summit. Below, a roll call on current attendees and missed attendees. The general lesson: difficult year to run a media co, potential need for further consolidation (a la Weinstein Co and potential Liberty Media investment) and spin-outs (a la Time Warner/AOL), Twitter-”It”-is yet need for paid online subscriptions for content, and much less access for journalists.

Who’s Who 2009 @ Sun Valley - Name (Company):

Lebron James (Cavaliers’ small forward), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Sergey Brin, Larry Page + Eric Schmidt (Google), Rupert + James and Lachlan Murdoch (News Corp.), Bob Iger (Disney), Sir Howard Stringer (Sony), Jeffrey Immelt (GE), Leslie Moonves + Quincy Smith (CBS), Owen Van Natta (MySpace), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Chase Carey (Fox), John Malone + Greg Maffei (Liberty), Rob Wiesenthal (Sony), Evan Williams (Twitter, “Sun Valley It-Boy”), Tom Freston (Firefly3; advising OWN/Oprah net), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Rich Rosenblatt (Demand Media), Peter Chernin (former News Corp.), Steve Burke (Comcast), Brad Grey (Paramount), Jean-Bernard Levy (Vivendi), Bobby Kotick (Activision), Hank Vigil (Microsoft), Barry Diller (IAC), Marc Andreessen + Gina Bianchini (Ning, Andreessen Horowitz $300M fund).  More after the jump…

UPDATED: Ryan Seacrest just received $15 million in 3 year contract with CKX, parent of 19 Entertainment/”Idol” Producer. (7/13/09) It’s not a bad time to be the “bad boy” of American Idol, or better the “British invasion of blunt taste,” i.e., Simon Cowell. With a recession-proof request to re-up at Idol - from Cowell’s current $36 million per year (we’re assuming little if any individual merchandising tied to the show) to $144 million a year, and a newco deal with Sir Philip Green, a UK retail magnate, in Greenwell Entertainment, Cowell seems poised to take advantage of a struggling tv, talent and reality marketplace. Similar to what the falling fallen music business is doing, media studios are presumably locking in 360-degree deals with their talent, whereby the economics become all-inclusive and hedged beyond a single property.

Per Silicon Alley Insider, by way of the New York Post:

While $36 million may seem like a lot of money for five months worth of snarky comments and eye-rolls, it’s only a fraction of the estimated $900 million that “Idol” rakes in a year. As the lynchpin of the show — without him there would be no one to hate and no dramatic tension with Paula Abdul — Cowell believes he’s due for a raise.

Credit goes to Simon and Sir Philip for seeing an opportunity. Cowell brings contrast to Idol - among other spectacles - and really shines a light on the US celeb fascination. While everyone else fawns, he weaves in hyper criticism to the aspiring young singers (and Abdul and Seacrest).

Leave it up to the NYT’s to create somewhat of a sensationalistic forum on the agency aftermath of the William Morris + Endeavor merger takeover. Under the headline “Mogul Ascends With Old Hollywood Clout,” the Times serves up little more than innuendo around golf games with outside investors, anonymous Hollywood insiders fearing both Ari and Rahm Emanuels, and finally, musical chairs or board seats with Ari on the Live Nation board. From Silicon Alley Insider - our preferred business read although they ditched their Entertainment blog “The Biz” somewhat quietly - made mention of the Ari Gold Ascendency of Emanuel, but both articles seem to only paint Ari as a hard ball player on the rise with a brother in the Obama Chief of Staff hot seat. One wonders how that fraternal conflict of interest can be of any use to either brother outside of easy sleepovers at the White House.