This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. 

You may not have heard of The Daily, but it’s going to change the way you consume the news.

The Daily is an online newspaper that launched last week. The creation of news baron Rupert Murdoch, it’s designed specifically to be read on the iPad, Apple’s electronic tablet.

And it’s impressive.

The Daily is intensely visual. Brimming with photos and videos, it’s mesmerizing. There’s text, to be sure, but the experience is based more on absorbing visual information than it is on reading. Pages and sections aren’t always clearly delineated, so you’re encouraged to skip around to whatever pops up next. Ads are incorporated seamlessly into the presentation, so they’re harder to avoid– a plus for advertisers.

In a way, I think The Daily’s presentation really gives new meaning to the phrase “surfing.” When the Internet was new and people talked about surfing the Web, they were talking about jumping from one website to another. But those websites were largely text-based. So you were really surfing among opportunities to read things.

In this new format, reading is diminished. It’s less like reading and more like grazing. Nutritionists tell us that grazing is the healthiest way to eat– frequent, smaller meals are better than a few heavy ones.

But I’m not sure that grazing is the best way to absorb information. It shortchanges concentration and deep understanding. Research is already being done on the way our brains are changing as we adapt to the digital revolution in communication.

But whether The Daily is a success or not, I think it marks a turning point. I believe you’re going to see this kind of format become a standard in digital communication. For the last decade, we’ve been moving away from the print-based communication that’s been the standard for 500 years, and Murdoch’s online newspaper is a milepost in that transition. If it’s not a huge hit, others that copy it will be.

Many of us grew up in a time when people read newspapers, magazines and serious books. But I don’t think these earlier generations were more virtuous. It’s simply that those avenues were the only ones open to them.

As soon as national news coverage flourished, our grandparents inhaled stories about Babe Ruth. Movie fan magazines prospered. They listened to “The Shadow” and quiz shows on the radio.

 Now we have vastly more choices for news and entertainment– and going forward, more of them will be like The Daily. Perhaps that means we’re becoming a shallower society, but I don’t think that’s really the case. We’re not necessarily shallower than those who came before us– we just have the means to indulge our shallowness more.

Modern online marketing is less than 10 years old, and the rules are being rewritten every day. I was reminded of this at an excellent seminar in Minneapolis last week presented by the Online Marketing Connect Institute. 

For the average marketer, trying to get one’s brain wrapped around the online world can be dizzying. Should you be concerned with e-mail, social media, search engine optimization, demand generation, analytics or any of a dozen other topics?

The answer is, all of the above. Yet it’s impossible to be a specialist in all those disciplines. A lot of smart people are deeply immersed in just one area, gaining a depth of knowledge that would be difficult for a non-specialist to duplicate.

Take search engine optimization, a topic that fascinates me. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s using key words and phrases that help your website show up more prominently in search engines. Experts say that if your site doesn’t appear on the first page of search results, it’s unlikely to found at all.

If you Google “Minnesota news,” for example, MinnPost doesn’t show up on the first page of results. Try “in depth Minnesota news,” however, and it does. So, the secret to success is getting your site on the first page for your key search terms, right?

Not so fast. Just as important is the “long tail:” words and phrases that aren’t necessarily obvious, but that will attract searchers looking for more obscure information. You can use a combination of more obscure terms to generate a stream of traffic that can mitigate the absence of your site from a broad search result.

At the seminar, we heard about search engine optimization from a colorful, San Diego-based expert named Ray “Catfish” Comstock, a lean guy with a ponytail and a foot-long goatee who also plays guitar for the band “Dive Bomber.”

I could have listened to him all day, even though some of what he said was off in the weeds to me. But just as a foreign language can be learned through immersion, I’ve always thought that one can benefit greatly from immersion in new business concepts, even if the learning curve is steep at first.

And Catfish made one point that really hit home with me, helping me realize that some fundamentals of marketing apply in every venue. After half an hour of the ins and outs of metrics and strategies and testing protocols, he suddenly came back to familiar ground.

“Persuasive language– language that sells– is underused,” Catfish said. “Have a call to action. Communicate the benefits of your product rather than the features. If you use persuasive language, you will sell more.”

In other words, no matter how fancy your website is, no matter how sophisticated your methods of measuring and analyzing traffic, you still have to tell customers what you can do for them– and ask for the sale.

It’s nice to know that some things never change.

5..4..3..2..1..FINALLY!

I’ve watched every episode of NBC’s “The Office” this year on Hulu. It’s free and I can watch it whenever I want, two features that are quite accommodating for the viewer. However, there is one feature that I find pretty troubling.

I might be alone here, but I’ve been loathing the advertisements that interrupt the programming on Hulu even more so than actual television ads. “It’s a new way of watching TV and it’s a new way of loathing advertisements” – that should be Hulu’s tagline.

On TV, you know there are going to be a few minutes of ads and you know you have plenty of time to flip the channel for a couple minutes until your program resumes. On Hulu, there is only one ad, you know exactly how much time is left until your program resumes and there’s not even enough time to check a few Twitter feeds. Somehow, the former is turning out to be the preferable choice here, and I’m surprised.

On Hulu, each ad runs with a clock in the upper right hand corner, saying “your program will resume in x seconds.” As a viewer, it’s comforting to know that this darned thing won’t last all day. As a marketer, I’d be a little concerned that this ad that I’ve invested a lot of dough in has an advertisement within it promoting how little time is left until my treacherous ad is finally over.

I usually am interested to see what ads are running during what program for demographic analysis, but not on Hulu lately. The ad timer is like that childhood contest to see who can hold their breath under water the longest. ”3..2..1.. (gasp) I thought I was going to drown, man!” Only on Hulu, it’s McDonald’s, Best Buy or some other company assuring you they won’t hold your head under water until you drown.

With that point, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing when a drowning analogy can be made with your brand’s ad. I know viewership is increasing, Alec Baldwin was just in the Super Bowl spot and it seems like the popular kid in school right now, but I would be careful if I were a company buying ad time with Hulu. They’ve got to come up with something to prevent viewers, or maybe just me, from making these connotations.

An interesting idea would be to seek some consumer feedback and play with the idea that viewers are dreading the ad, watching the clock and are eager for programming to resume.

Maybe it’s an idea like a Nike ad with Olympian Usain Bolt literally racing the ad timer, seeing if he can run 300 meters before the ad is done. Maybe it’s a contest idea, where the ad challenges the viewer to visit the company’s web site, find a hidden clue, come back and type it in before the clock expires to win a gift card.

Maybe it’s something else. I’m just asking them to come up with an idea that doesn’t make me reminisce about being at the YMCA and having to beat 65 seconds underwater or make me count down those last few remaining seconds like it’s New Year’s Eve and confetti is going to come falling from my ceiling when the ad’s over.

BritneySpears.com

Some things go together. Bagels and cream cheese. Peanut butter and jelly. Pickles and corned beef. (Hey, don’t judge until you’ve tried.)

An unlikely duo? Britney Spears and TechCrunch.

This past weekend, TechCrunch found a Harvard-only job site post offering up the position of Britney Spear’s online media manager. As you can imagine, the snark and snappy comebacks flew.

Hey, it’s good to see that someone’s hiring.