InteractiveSalsa.com

CBS Interactive is doing it right by setting up an office in Silicon Vally (Menlo Park). This world has changed and Tech plays a big role. Today, people don’t need to start their morning with a newspaper, listen to the radio to/at/from work or watch the evening television newscast; although, most still do out of habit. Today and tomorrow, tech will enable media/audiences/advertising in so many ways. Compare how these technologies affected our world: printing press, transistor, AM/FM, UHF/VHF, microphone, video camera. And then consider how many new technologies have rolled out in the past 2, 5, 20 years. Many of those technologies affect information flow, and therefore cut into the role traditional media has played. And, I suppose if Tech companies can become media companies (a la Google), then the opposite can be true (if a book seller like Amazon can sell tech services to small businesses, why can’t media companies enable audiences to ____ , or at the very least, to enable media to continue to evolve). Although, I doubt CBS wants to be a Tech company; rather just enough to grow audiences, audience engagement, and revenue from subscriptions and advertising.

The CBS Interactive M&A and dealmaking team will have their eye (sorry for the pun) on these areas:

• Personalization: I want my news topics, my shows, my music, my friends, my lifestyle… my way… and advertisers’ ROI will improve as their targeted ads increasingly reach the right people (throw away that notion of “50% of my ad budget is working; I just don’t know which half”…it is aging fast, and it will create winners and losers).

• Distribution: web, email, IM, mobile, gaming, television (here comes the internet connection), in-car, digital signage, digital readers, etc.

• Engagement/participation: rating stuff, giving feedback, recommending, forwarding, remixing, watching, linking, embedding, interacting, learning, analyzing, creating, editing, deleting, etc.

Evolving on these fronts will complement CBS’s current content/product portfolio, and, its relationships with audiences and advertisers. Keep an eye (sorry, again) on the parallels between product and advertising; each of the above points has many potential plays on both sides.

Read more on the CBS Interactive move here